There’s a window open to the night sky. I’m surprised to see it naked, no drapes. The glass is crystal clear, and stars twinkle in the distance. The moon is bright enough to cast a shadow, and I see her moving in the room. I think she’s smiling, at least it sounds like she is when she says my name. I don’t want to listen, but I turn towards her anyway, my ears perked and primed. I know she won’t use this room in the daytime. There’s no hiding from the sunshine here.

Our lips meet and I want to forget, but I can’t. In the darkness, I imagine it’s her. My mind knows it’s not, but in the dark, the senses can lie. Her hair brushes over my chest as we kiss and I’m there. Mexico ten years ago. With the one, I’ll never forget. I’ve forgotten everything, but I’ll never forget her.

Her eyes glow red and I become lost in her black endless center. I’m hypnotized. She never blinks, burning a hole into my soul until I submit. She begins piercing my lip with a tiny nibble, until a bead of blood forms around her tooth. She is hungry, but she is careful not to ruin her meal and she takes her time with me and then I submit. I get lost in Mexico again to ignore the pain. You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I am not. I long for my Samantha and I wonder where she has gone since I was taken.

***

They usually forget. Everything. But this one, he holds on to something as if it will restore to him the life I have usurped. The first time I bit him, I was just hungry. I wasn’t even going to keep him, just drain him and go. But there was something there, as I watched the light vanish from his eyes. Something I wanted to see again. And I stopped, which is something I never do. I have been accused time and again of having zero control. Which, of course, is hilarious to me. They brought me into their fold for my uniqueness, thinking that would help their cause. Then for centuries, they cursed me for not adding to their ranks, only depleting their prey. Yet they never asked me if I wanted to join them. Not that I asked Seren. But he is grateful for his new life, I think.

***

I’m lost on the winds of a Gulf beach, and I know the stinging of sand across my bare skin is a stand-in for the pinch of pain from this monster’s meal. Will today be the day she lets me drift into the dark forever? Am I going to be cursed to walk the world next to her, never to know the warmth of an ocean sunrise again? Part of me hopes for oblivion while wishing for the curse of her gift. My instincts to live any life I can rage against my despair and I surrender completely. My hopes don’t matter; I am food. I am completely hers.

Unbelievably, I am content. I open my eyes and the moon stares at us in our dark embrace. And she’s smiling at me. It isn’t the evil smile of a predator gorging on its prey. It’s the smile of someone who’s genuinely curious. There’s a strange interest I can’t put my finger on.

“Do you know what this is?” She asks. I shake my head slowly.

“Do you know what I am?” Her words are breathed out with a smoldering fire.

“Yes,” I say softly.

“Would you like to be one?”

I was weak. Her question perplexed me and my limbs were frozen in place. She held me up while I took the time to find my feet under me again. Then I found my voice.

“Be, Like you?”

She tilted her head back and licked her lips from the rest of me draining from of the corners of her mouth, but never took her eyes off me. Her mouth didn’t move but she still spoke to me inside my mind.

“Yes, do you want to live forever?” She began smiling.

“Do you want me to erase her from your mind?”

She reached up with one finger and ran it across my lips smearing the now cold and drying blood across them.

“You could love me, like you love her, you know?”

***

I don’t know how it was that I knew that light in his eyes was a woman. I guess the stirrings of so much human blood coursing through me over the years has sensitized in some way I don’t understand. But in that moment, that one tiny moment of an infinite life, I ached for someone to think of me that way as they die. And maybe that’s the power of the immortals my peers were always antagonizing me about. Maybe that’s the pull they feel as they create the new undead so loyal to them and this new life. So dependent on them for the foundation of their path forward. But is that love or a superiority complex?

***

To be a dead thing, imitating life. To be a dead thing, moved on to the next world. Why can’t my choice be to be left alone? But I know I’ll never walk free. An absence of a fence isn’t freedom. To see the horizon and know that I can’t approach it without a chain of regret pulling me back is almost enough to make me break. My will to live wanes, but refuses to snap. Is it weaker to wither, or to rot? Which is which?

“My love for her was never a choice. It just was. You can make me love you, but I’ll never choose it.”

“Choose life or choose death,” she whispers in my mind.

“You don’t offer life. You offer shadows of living.”

“Choose the shadows, or choose the fire. I’ll not force you.”

In the end, my will isn’t strong enough for oblivion, so I choose damnation.

"I choose you,” and my tears mix with my blood.

And she smiles and puts her teeth in my neck again, but this time it’s more kiss than bite. And she pricks her finger with a tooth and lets the blood trickle into the bite wound and she kisses again. Rather than the kiss of life, it’s the kiss of the undead. And it went on for what seemed like an eternity. When she backed away, I felt regret and longing. A deep dark longing. A hole in my gut, in my very soul. A hole through my entire being.

“You should have killed me,” I said.

“I said the same thing.” There was a great sadness in her voice. “I’m sorry.”

She walks away toward the open window, disappearing in and out of the shadows until she reaches the sill. One side of her shifts in the light and she absorbs the brilliance of the night. Her hair drapes down her shoulder and covers her chest and her long black robe blends her into the darkness of the room.

“You will never love me the same, will you?”

She looks down at the ground seeming disappointed.

“I was a fool to think it was possible.”

***

There are two sides to one bite. They equal a different forever. I pause at the artery and listen as if his blood holds secrets. Does his blood hold secrets? There was a tell in his eyes, the way they shone, there was a taste, reverberating through the blood I’ve ingested over the years that spoke of that shine. So elusive, so interesting.

But is he interesting? I am starting to think he is not. Evoking a feeling of weakness, there is no room for that in my…life. I am starting to think he is just desperate. Or am I projecting? What happens to a mind after so many years of eternal life? Does it begin to…degrade? Is this what is happening? Am I allowing these humans to demoralize me and warp me into a sensibility and desire for intimacy I never had? I position myself for the final bite.

***

The ritual is complete, she leaves me, and my body is wracked with the pain of a million dying cells. I think it’s over, and the pain begins again with a million cells being reborn. My skin is on fire and the sound of silence is a white noise hiding a thousand creaks and groans of wood and nails. I smell the iron of the hammers that drove the nails and I smell my rusted, spilled blood covering them.

I notice no heartbeats because heartbeats belong to food.

I hear her watching me in the Moonshadow.

I scream until I am raw, but I’m not breathless.

I do not breathe.

I can’t forget what it’s like to live, because this pain is a reminder.

I gasp out of habit, collapsed, curled, waiting for the agony to subside. Still, she watches.

I sense the sunrise nearing the window, and I wait for her to take me by the hand.

I consider gripping her when she reaches for me, holding her like the lover she pretends to be, while we burn.

I decide to wait.

I’ve forgotten how to live, but I still know how to die.

When the time is right, I’ll remind her of what it means to do both.

This week's writing prompt was inspired by the Italian movie poster shown on the above cover, "Dimentica Tutto."

Written in order by @Ferryman, @Ledlevee, @ChrisSadhill, and @Meejong.

He only left his house once a week. At first when I had finally caught onto the pattern, I could forgive it because of the pandemic. "He's just being cautious." I'd think, reminding myself not to be so judgmental. That invisible illnesses are illnesses, and I wasn't in a place to judge. If anything, I should find his dedication to precaution admirable, respectable. I could learn something from a man like that.

We lived diagonal from one another. If I look out of my living room window, I can see into his living room at an angle. He left his curtains open all year round so I could see his pale-yellow walls and his floral blue couch. I could see the mail piling up on the end table next to his recliner, torn envelopes in one pile, content in the next. I could see the pile shrink and start over every Sunday. The piles being the only thing amiss about what I could see of his home. The light always turned on at sundown, the TV always turning on at exactly 9pm.

I know you think I'm nosy, which is fair enough. But I've lived across the street and one house down from that man my entire life, aside from a brief few years I spent going to college. As a child, I would glance from my own TV to his. I knew that if it was off, I still had time before I had to go to bed. As soon as I saw his TV turn onto the evening news, I knew my mother wasn't far behind. It wasn't until I came home from school that I noticed how oddly it was timed. It took me another year before I noticed the pattern.

Sunday, his end table was cleaned, ready for mail to stack up again.

Monday, he was off to the shops.

I was ashamed to be at the store that day. It was the first time since coming home that I'd needed to buy a box of condoms. In the medical supply Isle, I'd contemplated the number of things I'd have to buy to seem a little less like the person wearing the condoms was at home waiting for me. Then he rounded the corner.

I recognized him immediately, but I didn't acknowledge it - both because despite what I knew about him I didn't know him at all and because I was holding a box of condoms in front of a man who's home I'd walked past to get to kindergarten all those years ago. I turned my head away from him. I wasn't sure that he'd recognize me, but I didn't want to take the chance. He grabbed several items, tossing them haphazardly on top of several cans of bright colored cat food and a dull-in-comparison birthday cake.

Baby oil, adult diapers, baby powder, gauze-- I tear my eyes away, my cheeks flaring. Outwardly, I didn't want to see him, inwardly, I was ecstatic for my neighbor. He'd been alone all the years I'd known of him, and he'd never had a pet, let alone a friend over. in one fell swoop, it seemed as if he'd acquired both, even in his later years. As a 20something it gave me hope to see that it was never too late to live.

"Mr. P Has a friend!" I wrote in my journal that night, next to a doodle of a birthday cake and a cat attempting to swat at it's candles.

That night, when the clock hit nine, I glanced over to his TV as a force of habit. I Smiled, as he was watching the same thing I was. The news anchor spoke over flashes of pictures of happy looking people in a sorrowful voice. I changed the channel, feeling very adult for being up passed my bedtime, watching the same things that the most adult person I knew watched-- but not so adult as to commit to something as boring as the News.

I watched his window more frequently, waiting to catch a glimpse of the cat. I knew from my own cat, Molly, that cats spent most of their time perched in the window. The kitty never came, even after weeks of watching. I watched him come home with the same cans of colorful cat food every single week, I heard them, empty, clank around in his garbage bags when he came out.

Then, about a year later, he came home with a birthday cake. I smiled. maybe I'd gotten it wrong the year before. Maybe he was celebrating his own birthday. Even if he was alone I was comforted by the idea that he was with his cat. So comforted, in fact, that I decided to buy him a "Catio" For his window. I wanted to see the cat, and I also wanted him to know that someone, somewhere cared enough for him to buy him a present for him and his best friend on his birthday.

This was what caused the pit in my gut to begin to fester. I watched from my living room, with my phone in my hand as the delivery driver pulled in front of his house and left the package, my phone chirping happily at the package I'd ordered being delivered. I watched him open the door, confused. He carried it inside and placed it on top of his mail piles and opened the gift. Instead of smiling, instead of putting it up right away, he gathered it up, held it close to his chest and began scanning the neighborhood frantically. I looked down at my phone, bewildered, making sure I got the address right, that the item I ordered was, in fact, the item I intended.

By the time I looked up, his curtains were closed for the first time I could remember.

The next time I saw him with a grocery bag in his hands, it was filled with brightly colored.... dog food cans. No, that can't be right. Poor man must be getting senile in his old age. The poor cat. I begin to wonder who keeps up with the-

My heart drops.

Who keeps up with the litter box? Had I ever seen litter being discarded? A litter box, even? Had I ever seen a carrier, a cat tree, a cat at all?

By this time, it'd been over years since I'd found out about his cat. I go back into my old journal and read.

"Mr. P made a friend!" The drawing and messy scrawl written under August 8th. I check back into my order history, and see that my initial purchase order for the catio was also August 8th of a year later. The same day I saw him come home with a birthday cake. I make a note in my phone to watch him on August 8th of the next year.

He throws away his empty cans and the catio right on schedule. I watch him bring home dog food cans without ever seeing any sign of a dog. I never see his cat. I wait for August 8th. I google him, his name, our town, and I find nothing.

But I know there's something. I know it in the same way I know he doesn't have a dog. I know it in the same way I know he thinks someone is onto him as he keeps his curtains partially drawn now. In the same way I know he will being home a birthday cake on August 8th of next year.

He does. For the next 3 years, he brings home cans of pet food every week and a birthday cake every August 8th.

The birthday cake has stopped bothering me, I'm more concerned about the invisible pets. I call animal control a couple of times, telling them about my concerns that seem to be central to me.

"Unless there is inarguable evidence of neglect of an animal, we can't waste resources. You said you've never seen a cat?"

On August 9th, Three years after the Catio incident. I'm coming home from work and My street is blocked off by shining emergency vehicles. They don't need to tell me who they're here for, but I ask anyway when the officer makes me roll down my window.

I can see Mr. P's window over the officer's shoulder, I can see flashes of a large camera. Of course the officer doesn't answer me, telling me to turn around. I tell him where I live point out the house.

"Do you know Thomas Preston?" I shake my head but say "I grew up walking past him to school."

The man nods, "Stay home, be prepared to answer a few questions."

Inside, I take my usual spot in my living room. Watching as Mr. P is taken in handcuffs by a screaming police car.

All of the vehicle's flashing lights turn off. I watch as every man in sight disappers into different cars, and all women enter the home and exit with a frail middle aged woman huddled up between them.

That night, I watch in horror as my neighbor, Thomas Preston's face fills the screen.

"Awful story tonight as breaking news reveals a local man is being charged with multiple counts of unlawful imprisonment, assault, assault of a child under the age of three, and murder. 75-Year-old Thomas Preston allegedly chained his own daughter in his basement for the last 40 years following the disappearance and suspected murder of his wife, Eileen Preston in the year 1983. Eileen would have been 64 just two days ago on August 8th."

He was a quiet man with a basset hound that would not shut up. Which was why I stood on his doorstep at two a.m. the night before he was arrested asking him once again to please bring the dog inside. Humphrey, the soft-spoken man, answered (like he always did), listened to my polite pleas, murmured something about bones and then gingerly closed his evergreen door like it was a friend of his. As many would, I deduced from the pleasant interaction that he would be tossing a bone to the basset hound to quiet it as soon as I walked away. However, in retrospect, it was naïve of me; out of the dozens of times I had dropped by since he moved in a year ago, that dog never stopped wailing because I asked nicely.

So, perhaps it was my own fault for expecting anything different. Fifteen minutes passed, and my Monday evening was still being invaded by the sound of deep howls like a mother weeping. Feeling duped, I tugged my slippers back onto my feet and stomped outside, decidedly weary from the recent nights I’d had no rest, but also fueled by three cups of black coffee. Humphrey was not going to do this to me again; I’d make sure of it.

His backyard was predominantly covered in the shadow of a large willow tree, despite the spotlights of neighboring houses tickling its edges. I crept up on the left side of the wooden fence and peeked over without pretense. Immediately below me, the hound was howling, a lost spirit in a storm at my fence. I wanted to squeeze his lungs through his nostrils.

But I didn’t. Instead, I brought out the turkey bone I had dug out of my garbage can and held it over the fence, a few feet above his reverberating skull. The cries continued underneath me, until I banged the bone against the cedar like a dinner bell. With this, he acknowledged me, snatching the bone from my grip and lying down where he was to chomp silently. I smiled, and dumped several more scraps from dinner beside him to keep him occupied long enough for me to fall asleep. I paused only to observe the dozens of bones that were left scattered and unchewed about Humphrey’s yard. I thought it was strange, but then again, Humphrey and his dog were not normal.

Returning to my home, I went right to bed. I thought no more of Humphrey, his hound, or the bone graveyard, falling asleep as soon as I lied down to rest. However, sometime an hour later, the dog must have finished his meal, because the wails began once again shriller and (if I was not mistaken) angrier than earlier. I screamed into my pillow like a lunatic and trekked back outside without shoes on my feet.

The hound was howling back at the bottom of my fence, the remnants of the leftovers I gave him strewn on the moist grass. I couldn’t tell for sure, but they seemed unfinished. Empty-handed and desperate for a conclusion, I rapped on the inside of the fence again, hoping to draw his attention. He turned to look up at me, his mouth closed and quiet.

And the howls continued. From under where I was standing.

I ran then. Not because I was a coward, but because, to put it plainly, I thought I might be hallucinating. It was easier to blame the nights of sleeplessness than to believe a person was truly imprisoned underneath my feet. Nonetheless, I had every intention of returning and getting the police examine the spot in the ground eventually. First, however, I just needed to get away from there.

I sprinted and then walked for several miles, until halting at a twenty-four hour diner where I ordered more coffee and a plate of banana chocolate chip pancakes. By the time I finished, the sun had risen, and the morning rush was arriving. With a belly full of nerve, I decided to trudge back to my house and reexamine the patch of dirt by my fence, possibly to alert the authorities if needed. Yet, the earth was silent, so I decided I must have been delirious, and walked into my home to prepare for another workday.

Twelve minutes after five p.m. I pulled back into my driveway, the memory of the night before truly feeling like a dream. However, as soon as I saw the police outside Humphrey’s house, dragging him out in handcuffs, I remembered. A team of white jumpsuits scurried through his backyard, clustered near the back right of the dirt-covered yard around a dilapidated shed I barely noticed. I rubbed my eyes as they appeared to disappear into a doorway in the soil underneath it.

I ambled past the neighbors gathered around on the sidewalk and parts of my front lawn like flies, whispering their speculations and a few buzzing in my ear. I shooed them away, leaving them to their shock and confusion, and for the rest of the evening I sat on my side stoop watching the investigation. A few of the white spacemen put some of the hound’s bones in evidence bags, chatting (rather loudly) about how the man’s shallow basement made it so the bones could not be buried. Eventually, I also started hearing thumping from under my fence, presumably when the spacemen walked far enough into Humphrey’s hidden basement.

The thumps continued further than I expected, however, leading right beside me beneath my humble garden of zucchinis and sunflowers. I shivered, realizing in that moment why the howls of Humphrey’s ‘dog’ always seemed so deafening to me.

As the dusk embraced the sky above the neighborhood, Humphrey’s yard was lit for the first time in the darkness by portable lamps the police had arranged around the perimeter. A detective came to visit me around then and asked me a handful of generic questions. I told him who I was, and I told him it was all quite surprising. And when asked if I knew anything about the woman, the one Humphrey had been holding for weeks underneath my fence, I shook my head grimly and solemnly.

The following morning, instead of rushing out the door to my job, I lingered in my kitchen scanning the news on my cellphone. It didn’t take long to find the headline about the quiet man and the six women he had taken since his wife died last winter, yet there was only one woman I cared about: Lina Tafani. She was his final victim, dying just a few hours before the police raided his home. No family was left behind, but a photo has been used of her smiling with a young man looking happy. The police say she likely fought Humphrey and almost escaped, judging by the fresh scratches on Humphrey’s skin and the lump on his forehead.

However, they are not certain, because the struggle probably would have made quite a racket, and apparently, no one heard a thing that evening.

One sweltering day in August, a family of five moved into our village in a clunker truck that squealed as it gripped the road and purred as it slowed, carrying a stained mattress and a refrigerator.

Nobody took much interest as the family busied themselves, unloading and carrying the things they could bring into the house facing ours.

The family worked silently, reserved to themselves, and never uttered a word of greeting. This was fine for the rest of the villagers, for we neither offered a helping hand.

Their youngest son, named Samuel, was somewhere around twelve years old. We later presumed he was the only boy in the village who didn’t kick balls or beg his parents for ice cream.

Once in a while, in those meager times when he kept his curtains open, I could observe him from my bedroom window. From what I could tell, he was no more than a bony stick figure with distinctly outlined collarbones and shoulder blades poking underneath his shirt. The village was poor, and not everyone had enough to eat, but Samuel? He looked nothing better than a punished stray dog.

Some time passed, and the family adjusted well enough on their own.

Samuel’s mother purchased eggs and butter from the supermarket every Thursday morning, sober enough to apologize when she bumped into passersby, and smoke rose from the chimney every evening, signifying dinner preparation.

Soon enough, the neighbors lost the little interest they scarcely had from the beginning, and I wasn’t inquisitive in poking my nose into other people’s businesses either.

Besides, we had our own lives to live, which were demanding and depressing enough on their own. I was getting older every day, and I had to start preparing for my future, or so they say.

When things started to slide off, nobody noticed.

One autumn day, Samuel was swinging alone in an empty playground, wearing a handkerchief across his face pirate-style. Perhaps he was trying to look brave, but the purple and yellow edges of a bruise spilling out from his left eye were unmistakable.

At the crack of dawn, his father cussing at his clunker to get it moving was so loud that it woke me from my sleep across the street, and I could often hear his sauntering footsteps returning home late after darkness pervaded.

His father was a walking zombie during the day and a violent beast during the evening. A cold shiver ran down my spine from the frequent racket of dishes crashing onto the floor and leather belts being swung.

It continued that way for several months, then one day, in the glow of daylight, I watched Samuel’s mother leaving the house and crossing the sidewalks with a suitcase dangling behind her. She was dragging one foot behind the other.

When I searched her eyes for a sense of pain or regret, I couldn’t find any. Her expression was blank and empty, devoid of emotions.

As if following by example, as the seasons changed, his siblings began to leave one by one as early as they could manage. And soon, Samuel, aged fourteen, was alone in that dark house with his father.

The violence has never been so severe. Once, an old lady knocked on his door and asked what was happening. Samuel’s father waved her off, telling her that he was only correcting his son’s bad attitude and it was none of her business.

Sometime later, cops were summoned to the scene with a child abuse report. They banged on the door and announced they were not going away before Samuel’s father opened it. His father opened the door alright, well-dressed and shaved for the first time in weeks, offering coffee to the officers. In his gentle humor, he said his son had been misbehaving, and he was giving him a few spanks. The officer, hearing this, nodded and drove away.

Then there were other things happening in the village. A miscarriage, a wedding, a cheating scandal, triplets born. There were other things to gossip about, other things for people’s minds to be occupied with.

Samuel never came outside.

Like fading vapor, he was forgotten.

Years passed. I was accepted to a university in a different state and worked hard to get a degree in botany. My efforts paid off, and my dream came true. I got married, had two beautiful children, and got a job as an agriculture engineer, with not much but a satisfactory salary, enough to support my family and me.

It had been a long time since my mind had erased that little boy named Samuel.

Then one day, after receiving a one-week vacation, I decided to visit the village I grew up in. After driving miles after miles of vast landscapes that stretched on forever, doubting whether I was taking the right route a dozen times, I eventually managed to find myself at my destination.

The village was the same, as if time had frozen in this place. The flickering streetlamps and the hideous graffiti sprayed on the concrete walls, the little playground with peeling paint, and a truly intoxicating aroma rising from the bakery with freshly-baked buns in the display.

It was wonderful.

I rented a motel for two days.

I managed to hang out with the people I knew, socialize, make new acquaintances at the pub, and everything was peaceful until the day of departure. Around ten in the morning, I was awakened by sirens blaring, tearing open my eardrums.

“What the—” I shuffled out of bed and peered out of the dusty window. Below the motel were two officers hand-cuffing a man in his mid-twenties. The blue and red lights of the sirens flashed in all directions as if this was the devil’s party.

I furrowed my eyebrows. I had a long day ahead, and this was obviously not the best way to begin. I shook off the troubling thought of lousy luck awaiting me and went downstairs to the lobby to check out.

“Have you heard?” The woman by the counter asked as she counted the bills. She was a plump woman with graying hair and rectangle spectacles. “About the murder?”

I scratched my head and sort of nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m afraid it’s going to drop land prices,” she said, massaging her knitted eyebrows.

“Yeah… I hope it doesn’t.” I said, hoping to sound as sincere and apologetic as I could manage.

She handed me the receipt with hardly visible ink and heaved a sigh as if the world was tumbling down. “That man killed his own father,” she said. “Samuel Tomson, a disgraceful bastard.”

I’m stunned, standing in silence. My usefulness a non-entity in this room of pain, blood, birth, and beginnings. It’s beautiful, but terrifying. I hold her hand, tell her it’s alright, tell her that I love her, and that it’ll be over soon. Empty promises escaping my mouth like cold-calculating prisoners. I don’t know what’s happening. There are doctors whispering amongst each other, their faces unreadable. But although she’s sweating, swearing, and writhe with pain, she’s beautiful. Her body a cathedral and from it a blessing. I hold my girl and hear Paul Simon singing he sees angels in the architecture.

I had once been married to the sea, however I now sought a divorce. To escape the abuse those waves had inflicted upon me. Taking all my brothers and my men, bonded eternally to her depth and cruelty.

The wildwood now my refuge, greeting me as a foreign invader, falling silent with every step I take against the softened moss and snapping twig. Yet the calling of my name still flows along the smooth wind, pulling me along as an animal on a leash. If I had known the Siren dwelled in pond water, I would have never come here.

In my memory, while sightseeing, I stopped in a bar for lunch where I made friends with the workers. A friend of theirs invited me to his restaurant for dinner to try some typical Valencian food. I accepted, got the address and left.

In my memory, the meal was delicious. Afterwards, he escorted me– to keep me safe on the night streets.

In reality, I don’t remember the meal and I woke up in an alley, clothes ripped, bloody, bruised.

In reality, I still have a scar where he carved his initials, though I have no memory of his name.

She squinted through her glasses at his quiet, studied form, taking tiny but significant steps across the garden. It didn’t take long to get to him. A polite cough chirped out to catch his attention but he didn’t look up and over at her.

Despite the cloud of smoke over his bent head, like a grey halo, she sat a few feet away. Ten seconds later, she shimmied the skirt of her long dress with her across the length of the oak bench, even closer.

He breathed a deeply impatient sigh, and eventually looked her way.

“Hi again”, she whispered.

My mom and dad took full advantage of the debauchery of the 1970's. In fact, I was told that my mom took acid with my dad at an Emerson, Lake, and Palmer concert and a week later she found out she was 8 weeks pregnant will little ol' me. Which explains the bad trip I had in kindergarten (The cow on the Elmer's Glue Paste called me the Walrus. Goo goo g'joob). It also explains my random ability to smell sounds and hear colors.

Some people are born with a legacy. They may have grandpa's ears, mom's smile, and dad's lack of penile length and girth. My legacy? I was born on probation, had a training wheels case of sclerosis, and a copy of, "My First AA Handbook" clutched in my little fist. This was the less than auspicious beginning to my life.

I was raised in a chaotic haze of neglect, meth fumes, and counting the days until the welfare check showed up. Somehow I managed to buck my family's preoccupation with burning out instead of fading away. I did well in school, avoided the criminal justice system, and since I didn't become a connoisseur of meth, I kept a full head of teeth.

Still, you can educate the trailer trash boy and take the trailer trash boy out of the trailer park, but you can never take the trailer trash out of the boy. As such, I have never met a psychotropic medication I didn't have an appropriate diagnosis for. I can still tell you the SNAP benefit (that's food stamps to those who grew up in a nurturing environment where parents had jobs and/or put the needs of their kiddos first) to meth exchange rate. I can tell you the horrors involved in trying to digest gov'ment cheese. If you call it, "Government Cheese" you're either too young to remember this colon blocking government handout or had parents who understood that the refrigerator was for more than Stroh's Lite beer and ketchup packets. Finally, like all my family members, I am extremely fertile meaning that before I had myself neutered for the good of humanity my love lava could impregnate with extreme ease. This fertility can be directly linked to the sad fact (and example of Ma Nature's sick sense of humor) that the least capable humans can crank out kids faster than China can crank out knock-off electronics. Ultimately, this insures that CPS social workers, the welfare department, drug dealers, and those employed in the criminal justice system have total job security. It's our humble gift to you and the economy.

In short, cut me off, take the last donut, or STEAL MY ENERGY DRINK FROM THE BREAKROOM FRIDGE and I will make it my mission to insure that my children both date and procreate with your children. Hope you like Lynyrd Skynyrd, because their music will be featured heavily at your kids and my cum fruit's weddin'! Everybody fucking sing! IF I LEAVE HERE TOMORRRRRROWWWW...

This hill was steep as fuck, and it'd been five years since I last climbed. The path wound in a spiral to the edge of the cliff: The Craigs, they called them. As I neared the summit, a peace settled over me. This was it. This is where I belong. I stepped to the edge and closed my eyes. I breathed in the scent of heather and dew, rumbling of the pages of history screaming welcome home beloved one. Welcome home. The ground shook underfoot and the world spun faster in the wake of my return.

And then, I fell.