The network’s lawyer sharpens his sword. I see nothing through this black hood. Hands bound behind my back, bent on my knees.

Two dozen witnesses surround me in the conference room: the showrunners, department heads, the rest of the cast.

At a restaurant last night, I told my wife I won the part of Cherry-Dingle in the upcoming television adaptation of the Realms of the Withertop Dragon Guild novels. I whispered to her the names of the actors cast to play Turkle-Dink the Grim and Lady Snorcrungle. Convinced no one could hear, I told her the series was making some changes from the source material, including the addition of a new swine-goblin character named Porky-Winkle the Stout, and that the battle between Lundle-Bink the Brown and Wise Witch Goofenpiss would now take place in the Trundle-Nutt Forest. I told her that I was most excited for the climactic reveal that Old Wizard Bingle-Smoke is not, in fact, a member of the Bibble-Dee-Gum-Gum Order, but is secretly working for Skimcrug Brandysnot of the Crumdungle Brigade.

My wife told me the show sounded like an unbearable embarrassment and I should try to back out. But before I knew it, the network’s men were on me, punching my ribs and tying my hands and taping my mouth shut.

The lawyer raises his blade over my neck. My wife, in the room, wails. “Shame on you. Shame on you all.”

In a neat blow, the lawyer severs my head.

The witnesses gasp. They have learned their lesson. Cherry-Dingle will be recast, and they will not speak the news. For you can never be certain who among the cast and crew of the Realms of the Withertop Dragon Guild may be secretly working for Skimcrug Brandysnot of the Crumdungle Brigade.

“You look like you’re jacking off,” mouths John, the thick fifteen-year-old who lives across the street.

I set my hand-sprayer down on the lawn and take one earbud out. “What?”

“You look like you’re jacking off,” he shouts, then demonstrates masturbating, his red, acne-plagued face pinching as he rolls his eyes back so he’s staring up at his Mountain Dew baseball cap.

I look at my manual-pump one-gallon sprayer, filled with water and the weed-killer concentrate I buy to save money.

“Dude, it’s August,” he shouts at me as an elderly couple from the neighborhood walks their dog between us. “That crabgrass has you by the nutsack and is annihilating your ass. There’s no point in even trying to kill it now. You should’ve laid out pre-emergent the weekend fucking Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull came out, pal.”

I do the math. “That was fourteen years ago.”

“You’re probably better off just killing yourself. Dad says the homeowners’ association is doing their walkthrough next week and they’ll fine you so hard for those weeds they’ll ship your flat ass to a penal colony.” He slaps the side of the 600-gallon green tank on one of his father’s Weed Pro trucks in the driveway. “Maybe you can take out a loan and hire the big boys.”

*

I don’t sleep that night. Peeking through the blinds from my bedroom window, I look at John’s family’s lawn, tastefully illuminated by hidden solar lights. Neat, dark green, weed-free. Those Weed Pro chemicals work, but $250 a month is too much.

The truck holds 600 gallons of the cure. And it sits there in the driveway, unprotected.

*

At the office I get no work done. I’m researching how to pierce steel tanks, how to siphon liquids, how to mix a concoction the same weight as the Weed Pro chemicals to refill the tank without disturbing the truck’s sensor.

A notice from John’s mother on the neighborhood Facebook page: John’s birthday party is tomorrow. Thirty boys and girls from his school will attend, and now that he’s sixteen, John’s father will allow John to spray the Weed Pro chemicals himself for the first time, a baptism into the business.

*

Midnight strikes and I cross the street in shadow, the obnoxiously large tank shielding me from John’s family’s security cameras. My diamond-tipped tool punches two holes in the tank. One spills the pungent weed-killer into my empty barrel, while the other receives an equal-weighted intake of simple syrup. My barrel fills and I pull in another, and another, until the tank’s drained of the good stuff and refilled with sugar. I patch the holes on the tank and leave a bag — my birthday gift for John — in the driveway. I drag the barrels into my garage and close the door.

*

Dozens of BMWs and Teslas driven by John’s wealthy teenage friends clog the neighborhood streets in the afternoon. I watch from my bedroom window as the boys and girls gather around the Weed Pro tank to witness John’s father handing John the sprayer and inducting him into the family business. John grins, his doughy red face oozing sweat and sebum, and he pulls the trigger to spray the grass. He struts back and forth across the lawn, unknowingly coating it in my syrup while hamming it up with dance moves to a Bruno Mars song as his friends cheer him on. After a minute, John’s father sniffs the air, tells John to stop. John continues, insisting he’s a man now. But ants swarm his sneakers, and the party guests begin to notice, kids shrieking at the tens of thousands of ants sloshing across the lawn like black waves. Then it’s the flies and the bees and the hornets and wasps, buzzing clouds of furious insects attacking the partygoers, sending them ducking under cars.

John panics, failing to scrape the bugs off him, and I knock on my window. He looks up at me and I mouth, “By the door,” pointing down. He turns and finds my gift, a can of bug spray.

John sprays it, but nothing comes out because it’s empty. He sprays again as hornets sting the three most popular girls on the lips. John apologizes to them and begins shaking the can, hard, and I open the window.

“Hey,” I shout, and the group looks up at me. “He looks like he’s jacking off.”

They’re not sure what I’m talking about, and John’s too focused and scared to hear. He shakes the can again.

“Him. John. Right now. Look, it’s like he’s jacking off.”

The girls and boys turn and catch John in the act, pumping the can furiously at crotch-level. A pause, and then the three swollen girls snicker, igniting a thunderclap of laughter with the force of a head-on car crash, mad howling from John’s classmates, losing their minds cackling in John’s face so hysterically they forget they’re being eaten alive by insects.

“No,” John screams. “Stop.” But they keep laughing as the ants devour the syrup dripping down his legs and crawl up over his shorts until he falls back, cracking his head on the brick side of the house, and he collapses onto the driveway where the ants chew through his skin and flab and gristle, gnawing veins and muscle in search of that sweet syrup until the bugs have chomped John down to the bone and nothing but a skeleton and a Mountain Dew baseball cap remains.

*

The chemicals work and the HOA commends me on my weed-free lawn.

Each element in a park landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted exists with purpose and reason. Tall oak and pine trees frame the visitor’s view; pink and violet blooms sit deliberately like dabs of oil paint. Paths of dirt or stone reach over the meadow at delicate angles crafted to fill the visitor with vim and delight as he turns a corner and enters a new realm, where he finds himself standing at the top of The Hill, the centerpiece of Olmsted’s Darien Park in St. Louis. Olmsted hauled in one-hundred-and-eighty carloads of dirt by train from New Jersey to construct the gorgeous spectacle, reaching ninety-seven feet into the sky. From the precipice, the visitor enjoys a stunning view of the park, the city, and the Mississippi River, but not, notably, of the edge of The Hill. Exactingly designed at a clifflike 85-degree angle, The Hill’s garden of tall switchgrass and feathertop misleads the visitor into believing there is more ground than there is. Before he is aware of what’s happened, the path abruptly ends but the visitor takes one more step, tumbling over the side of The Hill and falling like a stone. His flailing body smashes into the calculated path, steep as a wall, and picks up speed as he slams against its Italian quarrystones over and over, rolling through The Hill’s purposeful nadir before momentum carries his body up the sloped grass ramp at sixty-miles an hour and he shoots like a cannonball, screaming for help, over the neat beds of verbena and indigo and milkweed, finally cracking against a docked steamship, breaking his ribs and legs and arms before sinking to the bottom of the Mississippi. Sketched in a mad rush late one night after Olmsted had been double-charged for a bowl of porridge by a café owner who frequented Darien Park, critics hailed The Hill as Olmsted’s most savage and full-throated work to date, praising his unrivaled ability to bring passion and fury to the staid world of landscape architecture.