Instead of cleaning out filing cabinets or pretending to look busy—all the things that usually fill an ordinary week—everyone from the Children’s Division of Crawford & Hicks Publishing is forced to dress up like various punctuation marks, in all the colours of the rainbow: a period, a comma, a hyphen, a colon and semicolon. Even quotation marks, as conjoined twins: the “66 Sisters” and “99 Brothers.” Out of the deep sleep of autumn, everyone must conjure good cheer, climb aboard the “Punctuation Bus!” and spend the week driving from one school to another. This is how, in her thirtieth year, immediately following a breakup and a demotion from the department of real, adult literature—in what the boss is now calling “the shuffle”—Shana ends up dressed as an exclamation point. As if she were Gumby’s uptight relative, her body is encased in a block of green foam from her knees to well above her head. Only her face, arms and black-spandex calves poke out of the costume.
