On the way to kick the football from under Lucy's index finger, Charlie Brown decided enough was enough. Not wanting ever again to throw his leg out, connect with naught, and have everyone laugh at his backside landing, he aimed his foot instead at the self-assured, Lancelot-clipped ball of a head that overcharged for consultations and berated Schroeder's indifference.

She went down hard, but his foot felt fine. Much better, in fact, than when he missed the ball and sailed through laughter and derision. He watched her clutch the posterior portion of her left mandible before he screamed, "Come look what I did!"

From somewhere the tinkle of Beethoven died and a boy appeared beside Charlie Brown. "Save some for me," the pianist told the bald guy, and bending over Lucy's writhing young frame raised both fists before considering his precious ten digits and instead head-butted her tiny round nose.

One by one the cartoonish kids trickled in: Peppermint Patty spat in the self-anointed Queen Mum's eyes; Pig Pen stirred up a dustbowl around her spread-eagled body, the filth causing cough and gag; Monroe heckled her a racist misanthrope; Linus picked a spot on her thigh and with smart-bomb accuracy towel-whipped it with a corner of his water-dipped blanket; Woodstock flew sorties from a nearby bough, loosing little white salvos spreading splendid as napalm.

From his perch on the doghouse, Snoopy typed notes he planned to turn into a book once the melee was over. Right now, he wanted to record the details while still fresh in his mind. Writers, he knew, like other sentient creatures, could forget things, too.

In the back of his mind, however, he weighed genre and point of view. At first an epic poem appeared, an intricate anapestic hexameter, abcbaccab rhyme scheme, the truth in terza rima told slant.

Or maybe a creative nonfiction affair, an oeuvre so boldly raw that readers afterward would file away In Cold Blood as comedy compared to the daytime revenge on a nationally renowned egomaniacal ingrate.

Alternatively, maybe a novel, beginning with "It was a dark and stormy mid-afternoon...," the plot veering this way and that, the characters forced into moral reflection, the archetypal imagery suggesting theme.

Even, perhaps, a combination of the latter two, a memoir a la James Frey, events imagined when reality let him down.

For now, however, the compiler was content to observe. He'd be the last one to Lassie the chaos, chase down an adult to interfere with history. Today, at this moment, he needed Lucy for inspiration, her agony helping him paint pity in verse, prose, whatever would best tell, in time, the particulars of her assault and battery.

Kicking back, he continued to render what he saw, heard, smelled, tasted and felt, the clicking keys splashing black figures onto a vast white sea, intent, somehow, of getting it all down just exactly right.

Richard Holinger teaches English at Marmion Academy, in Aurora, Illinois. Recipient of three Pushcart Prize nominations, his poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and book reviews have appeared in the likes of The Texas Review, The Iowa Review, Witness, Midwest Quarterly, The Southern Review, Boulevard, and Another Chicago Magazine. He writes the column "View from Geneva" for his weekly hometown newspaper, The Geneva Sun, and has facilitated many writing workshops in northern Illinois. He lives in Geneva with his perfectly nuclear family of four, plus dog.