Author's Note: For some goddamn reason, the site's screwed up the formatting for the last three lines. They should be right-justified, but this place must be having an aneurism or something. Oh well.

This story was originally intended to have an underlying meaning, but as I got more involved with what I was writing, I realized that it didn't necessarily need one--not to mention the fact that I kind of lost myself in what I was writing, so any message I had intended got muddled and fogged. Then as I went back and tried to edit it (which I did, took a few pages out, but then second-guessed myself and put them back in), I realized that if I tried to edit the beast at all I'd never be finished. The process would turn into an infinite causality loop of guessing and second-guessing, occasionally followed by incessant writing that gets needlessly destroyed over the fear that I'm doing more damage to the story than progression.

So in the end, here it stands: a testament to my indecision. Read it as you please--all it costs is time.

The Pallor of Persephone and Jonah

It was a cold darkness. The single shaft of light came from a mostly-papered over window high on the wall—two square feet in area if the paper that clothed it would have been torn asunder—the shaft of light descended like an angel into the abyss—dust plumed and wavered and smoldered and whirled like sand in a windstorm—water at the bottom of the ocean. Water dripped someplace nearby—there was a rustling also, and a constant whine—similar to the sound of starvation—and a hiss there resounded ever so often from the corner far from the angel’s path.

Everything hurt. She understood she was tied, but it took her well over five minutes before she realized that it was her wrists and ankles which were bound—and another five full minutes to recognize the musty scent of ages-old dust & mildew.

It sounded like there were people moving around above her head. The creaking sound of old wood accompanied muffled voices, thumps accompanied clacks and clangs—a door opened directly above her head. She felt speckles of dirt or sand fall on her hair and slide into her shirt. A series of heavy bangs descended a stairway directly to her left. There still wasn’t any light until—

“Well, look who’s awake!”

If it hadn’t been for the bindings, she would have jumped right out of the chair. Her eyes opened wide with momentary fright, before clamping shut a microsecond afterwards—the light had been turned on directly in front of her face—in her shock she banged her head on the back of the chair—more pain for her headache.

“Samantha, please, Sam, I didn’t mean to startle you.” The masculine voice sounded like it was a lot higher than he wanted it to be. Every word was enunciated carefully, with a tone that tried to suggest some deeper menace beneath its surface, but really only conveyed a hack attempt at psychosis—similar to a little boy pretending to be Clayton Moore after watching Lone Ranger reruns on TV Land.

Slowly, carefully, she opened her eyes. The light bulb that had been shoved in her face earlier dangled from the ceiling about six feet away. The man—boy—male teenager—wore dark black eye shadow around his eyes just like Malcolm MacDowell did in A Clockwork Orange.

Beside him was a flimsy table. Various power tools adorned the top. Behind him was a furnace, and to the left of that was a washer and dryer combo next to a sink. On the other side of the furnace was a dirty fish tank with a multitude of squirming mice crawling all over each other, and beside that was a cage with a snake that looked comatose.

To her left were the stairs he descended from, positioned so that the door was above her head, and he had to walk completely around the steps in order to establish eye contact.

“What,” she started, “the fuck,” she continued, “—what is this?”

The teenager looked around. His wrinkled green shirt had more stains on it than his shorts. He had no shoes or socks.

“This is my basement,” he said. His blonde hair was greasy and clumped together as he ran a freckled hand through it. “And now it’s where you are.” He looked at her and mustered a corkscrew grin. “Samantha.” It looked more like a retarded person’s smile.

She looked at him with a face akin to disgust, befuddlement, & disbelief.

“What—” she started.

“What are you doing here?” he finished for her. He tried his best to be suave as he approached her—and he tripped on a bump in the shag carpet—recovered quickly, pretended like it didn’t happen.

“Well,” he tried to continue, “I have a few things,” he picked up a DeWalt power drill, “that I want to—shit!” As he depressed the trigger, the light bulb that hung nearby flickered and went out—the furnace ceased blowing—a loud click resounded from the far side of the room.

“Shit! Goddamnit!” His curses were loud and his voice increased in pitch. She heard him stumble away. There was another click and the power returned. “Fucking piece of fucking shit!” he screamed. “Fuck!” She watched him through the planks of wood as he slammed the door to the circuit breaker box that hung on the wall beside the staircase. “Everything turns to shit when I want to have fun! I swear to fucking cocksucking Christ!”

A voice descended from the ceiling—“Peter!” it said, “What have I told you about taking the Good Lord’s name in vain?!”—nasal and female, verging on the repugnant, it was old and withered and dry of hope or meaning.

“Mooommmm!” Peter’s roar sounded more like a crying child whose betrayal lay in his mother’s refusal to buy him the newest doll plush toy. “I’ll fucking say whateverthefuck I WANT TO!” he screamed at the ceiling.

“Peter Albert Hamelton! You show respect for your parents and you do NOT curse the Lord’s name!” The nasally resonance was more effective with volume. “He died for your sins, Peter.”

“Fuck him and fuck my sins! He died because he was fucking stupid! Fucking Jews did it!” Peter kicked one of the support beams for the staircase. His mother, either satisfied or unwilling to take it further, left it at that. Dust fell from the ceiling as weights shifted around above them.

“Fuck you, mom.” Samantha could hear him halfheartedly mumble that last part as he groped the various power tools. “All you ever do is fuck with my life. I never asked to be born anyway.”

He sulked in silence for a little while, the tips of his fingers running up and down the silvery blades of the various knives he had assembled near the power tools. “I just wanna—I just wanna—” he huffed and mumbled as his fingers slid over the tarnished surfaces.

“What the fuck?”

At her utterance, Peter shot a glance at her. “What’re you lookin at?”

She almost said, “I’m looking at a pathetic little dope fiend wearing dirty soiled clothing,” or “I’m looking at a spoiled little pubescent brat that mouths off to his white trash mother,” but she couldn’t find it in her to come up with a really biting response. So instead she just gave him that look that says “you’re just a retarded scumbag that isn’t worth my time”. She was good at giving people that look.

He turned his attention back to the table, then to the animal cages. Thinking nothing of it, he reached into the aquarium housing the multitude of mice and picked one up by the tail. It squealed as he tossed it into the adjacent snake pit. He turned out the light before he had to watch the snake eat the rodent and glumly marched upstairs.

Samantha was left with only herself in the darkness beneath the stairs. The single shaft of daylight peeped through the papered window, and the squeal of the rodents overpowered the hum of the furnace. On the other side of the room, one of those mice was being squeezed by a snake in a cage. Its cries were indistinguishable from those of its brethren in the adjacent aquarium.

---

Dream:

A man with orange glasses carved in stone made his way down a mountain side. He is Elvis Costello, a clone from the 25th Century, traveled back across the eons to relay to me his story. He tells me that by his time, the oceans of the world have given way to monsters made of salt, and that volcanoes and stone babies have driven mankind underground, into caves under the mountains. Here, he tells of great scientific achievements that has made his existence possible. Ouroboros is his symbol and guide through the various realities he encounters.

He hands me a copy of White Light/White Heat and places a fig leaf on my brow. Tomorrow it will rain severed hands and feet, and the stars will churn with motor oil. I am alive in my ignorance, immortal in my feverish haze. He touches my wrist with the stem of a rose, and I bleed.

---

Time passed. Samantha believed she flowed in and out of various states of consciousness while in the dark, mostly unaware of whether or not she was even awake at all. The only assurance that none of this had been some bizarre Freudian nightmare was the ache making itself apparent in her upper arms, where her shoulders were stretched wide to accommodate her wrists tied behind the back of the chair.

Eventually she heard a door swing open over her head, and some foot falls echo their way down the staircase. She was vaguely aware of the figure that moved in front of the furnace and altered the noise the machine as it blew warm air into the dusty chasm.

The light switched on, and the darkness fled to the perimeter of her spot. A woman in her late forties gave her a glum smile.

“Hello, dear.” Her blue dress had white dots of various sizes. It was several sizes too large for her thin and boney frame.

Samantha didn’t know what to say.

The woman’s smile faltered a bit when Samantha didn’t respond, but it reappeared as she set a plate of hot chocolate chip cookies on the table. Steam and scent wafted off of them like pheromones from a bitch in heat.

“I made some cookies,” the woman said. “I hope you like them. Most of Peter’s friends don’t stay long enough for cookies. It’s been a long time since I’ve had any guests, you see.” She rubbed the palms of her hands against her blue-and-white-dotted-skirt thighs and looked around. “Goodness, this area of the house certainly has fallen into disrepair, hasn’t it? I’ll have to get Jesus to fix it for me.”

When Samantha found her voice, she said, “What?”

“Oh, the floor’s sagging a little above your head, but it’s nothing a decent carpenter can’t handle.” The woman gave her another one of her smiles. “Don’t you fret. None of us upstairs weigh enough to bring the house on you. Have some cookies.”

“I’m… I’m tied up.”

“Oh, that’s no real problem.” The woman brought the cookie plate up to Samantha’s face. They smelled really good. “My name’s Phyllis, by the way.”

Samantha eyed the dish of cooked dough and melted chocolate. “Couldn’t you just, like, untie me? Wouldn’t that be easier than trying to—”

“Oh no, dear,” Phyllis chuckled. “I couldn’t do that. Just take a bite!” Her smile was wide and her cheeks rosy.

---

“I am listening to the sound of Japanese people dying.”

When I leave, do let my body take its course around behind the riverrun.
A hole defined by one so small is more than one defined by all;
To be refined into our CHON is to be purified, not charmed.
Latch the bitter teeth to bear and grind against this box of pine.
Leave neither marker nor a token here, I drift on to roam threadbare.
Under here you’ll find me not, for I’ll not simmer like a pot.
Will I rot in swamps so fair and empty of this entropy?
Methinks this stone protest too much, though still it provides a company.

“What the hell does that mean?”

---

The silence was disturbed again by another set of footfalls descending the staircase. A deeply-tanned man with a beard and a hammer rounded his way toward Samantha’s chair. Her shoulders and chest ferociously ached.

“Oh,” he said, suddenly noticing her. “Uh, what are you doing here?”

Samantha glared at him. His shoulder-length brown hair wavered in the air currents produced by the furnace behind him. “I’m tied up, asshole.”

He frowned. “I see that.” He looked around, as if trying to spot hidden cameras. “I need to fix the sagging ceiling.” He motioned toward the blanks above her head. “Let me help you, um, move.”

He effortlessly slid her chair to the side.

“Hey!” She yelled, sick of being manhandled about. This was at least the third person to ignore her state of distress. “Can’t you just untie me?!”

“Uh, well, yeah…” the man nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, I mean, I could, but I need to fix this ceiling first. You can wait a little bit, right?”

Samantha rolled her eyes and sneered.

Silence returned as he cleared the flimsy table of bladed objects and slid it into position. After hoisting himself on top, he stood straight and stared at the ceiling. A few minutes passed like this, before he reached into his pocket and pulled out several nails. He proceeded to hammer them into the timber above their heads. Dust and noise prevailed.

And then Samantha finally realized that he was wearing a robe, and—she presumed—nothing underneath. Black hairs pricked his bare shins like thorns. His toenails were yellowed but not unhealthy-looking. They were placed haphazardly on rotting sandals.

“Why are you wearing a bathrobe?” She asked.

Startled—“Ah!”—he dropped one of the nails he held in his hand. It clattered off the table and fell to the concrete floor. The table wobbled as his body spasmed. “Shit,” he cursed, grabbing his jackhammering heart, squatting down on his perch. “Bathrobe, bathrobe, bathrobe,” he mumbled, picking at his wardrobe. “I suppose it is a bathrobe, now that you say that.”

Her stare was deadpan.

“As for why…” he shifted his position so that he was sitting on the table, his hammer beside him, his legs dangling off. “I guess it’s just because it feels natural for me,” he explained. “I mean, take you, for instance. Why are you tied up?”

“Because I’m a hostage.”

“Ah, but you don’t have to view it that way.” His reply was accompanied by a radiation of delight across his features. “You could instead imagine that you are a beautiful maiden, held captive by a lecherous mad scientist—and somewhere, there’s a brave Sir Lancelot in the process of investigating your disappearance just like Philip Marlowe or Mike Hammer would.”

Her stare was again deadpan. “That still makes me a hostage.”

“Oh, ah, right…” He frowned. “Well, what else do you know about your situation? Let’s brainstorm on this for awhile—I’ve got nothing better to do.”

“How about you just untie me so I can leave?”

He cocked his head and gave her a pitiful expression. “You know I can’t do that—”

“No!” she cried out. “No, I don’t know what you can’t do that! No one seems to be able to untie me! And no one tells me why they can’t untie me! So they just leave me down here and go away or upstairs or wherever else! I’m still tied up and hungry and thirsty and dehydrated and angry and I’ve pissed myself a few times and it just makes me so—so—” she made a few inhuman noises while the carpenter observed her in silence. “I’m lonely and dirty and I have a headache and I feel like I’m wasting away.” She pouted. “And no one will help me.”

He regarded her in silence.

“I didn’t really mind being a carpenter, you know.” The man said.

Her eyes were red and watered. Tears cut tracks through the grime on her face.

“My father was a carpenter, and before him, his father was as well,” he continued. “I kind of liked fixing things that made sense to me. Tables make sense to me, for instance. Chairs, carts, houses—those all make sense. Not people.” He shook his head as he stared at the furnace. “People don’t make any sense to me.”

He sighed and continued staring at the furnace. Samantha sniffled and huffed.

The man opened his mouth to say more, but was cut off by a cry from above.

“GAAAH! Ow, shit! Fuck! Motherfucker! Jezus cocksucking elephant fuck!” Weight shifted around upstairs, dust drifted down. Samantha and the carpenter stared at the ceiling. “Who the fuck hammers nails up into a linoleum fucking floor?! Mother piss drinking chocolate gorilla! Goddamnit! Fuck! Right through my foot! Gaaoww!”

“That’s my exit cue,” the man said, jumping off the table and walking toward the window.

“Hey, wait!” Samantha called hoarsely. “Take me with you, please! Just at least untie me! Please!” Her eyes watered and her throat tensed in the dust.

He looked back as he unlatched the window. “Sorry.” He hoisted himself through the small opening and his legs wriggled about as he slithered through it.

The window clattered shut behind him, and she was alone again.

---

What the guy was basically saying was, basically, was that telling people to be happy—or like, better yet—giving people—presenting people with different ways in which they can be happy, right?, is sort of like all of these continual reissues of Stooges’ Raw Power- and post-Raw Power-era tracks. It’s sort of, you know, reached the point of total redundancy. By now, we’re just culling tracks from LPs and CDs that have been in existence for—shit—like the most recent release of previously unreleased Raw Power Stooges stuff came out in the eighties, right?, so that’d make every release since simply a rehash and recompilation of tracks off those dozen or so discs that had come before.

As it is, most of these tracks were all recorded sometime between what, nineteen-seventy—uh—two, I suppose, and like, seventy-four. At the latest. Maybe seventy-five. Either way, that’s only like three years of extremely fertile stuff that we’ve reissued and repackaged countless different ways with different varieties of material on each, uh, variation. That’s how it is. They keep making a few bucks off of each—not as much as they’d probably like, admittedly, but still.

That’s all, sort of, that’s all what it’s come down to, now. That’s where everybody’s at.

And uh, that’s it. That’s all I got to say.

---

She heard voices that roused her from unconsciousness.

“Look at her.”

“Dude, what the—”

“Look!”

“Man, this is… this is wack, man. Even for you.”

“But no! See how she’s even tied up! We could do anything we wanted and no one would ever know!”

She opened her eyes. The scent of dirty laundry lingered in the air, and the bright orange, torn, paint-spackled sport jersey said hello to her eyeballs. Peter apparently considered her to be part of his exhibition. His friend stared disinterestedly at the cell phone he held in his hands.

“Pete, come on. I don’t want to do anything to her,” he said, tapping a few buttons on the phone’s face. “I just wanted to see how the new Madden game was ‘fore I bought it.”

“Yeah, we’ll get there. But first look at her, man!”

“Dude! Who gives a fuck?! I don’t care!” His tone carried a bit more emphasis than the first time.

“What’s your problem, man? I just wanted you to see—”

“Yeah! Okay! I see her! She’s tied up and looks pitiful! Is that what you wanted to hear?” He gave Peter an impatient glare. “Now let’s go. This is—this is stupid!”

“But don’t you want to—”

“—What I want to do involves a high-def renderin’ of a little dude with a ball!”

“You don’t want to—to—”

“To what?!”

“To like, y’know, beat her up or something?” Pete’s voice lost some of its vigor.

“Beat her—what the f—why would I want to beat her up? I don’t care enough about her to beat her up—I don’t even know her for chrissake!” He waved his arms about. “God, you’re so fucking stupid sometimes. Grow the fuck up!”

They were silent for a few moments while they exchanged glares.

“Fuck this, man. I’ll just rent Madden. Damn.” Pete’s friend turned to go up the stairs. “Christ, if I’d known I was gonna be escorted through some mundane Atrocity Exhibition I woulda just done that t’begin with.”

Samantha wanted to say something, but found herself without anything to say.

---

I do not know for how long I fell, but when I awoke I was disoriented and cold. The Void was the only presence known to me—language was my only foundation; beneath my feet, it flirted with tangibility and mocked my attempts to find a solid place to put my grasp. My thoughts fell out of my head like porridge even as I tried to gather them up. Ideas poured out of my eyeballs and oozed out of my genitals. Lucidity was vague as I grappled with my perceptions of reality.

Tartaras was cold and barren, and I was caught in the clutches of its misbegotten son.

---

As it turns out, there was a door leading to the outside of the house just in front of the tank filled with mice. The door, however, was locked and old and made of rotting wood, and looked like it hadn’t been opened in quite awhile.

It was from behind this door that Samantha thought she heard muffled voices emanating. She couldn’t make out too much of what was being said—in part due to the rotted wood and cinderblocks between her position and theirs, and also due to the fact that she was extremely exhausted and slipping in and out of various states of consciousness. She hadn’t the awareness yet to recognize whether these voices were simply hallucinations of her sleep-deprived, starving state, or if there actually were people on the other side of that door.

Only a single part of the unseen conversation caught her full attention.

“Alley-oop!”

That was when the door shattered into various sized splinters and the hinges fell off the walls.

“Jezus, Steve. I thought these things were supposed to leave the door intact.” A lean man in his late twenties strolled through the door, observing the chunks of wood that now decorated the dusty cement floor.

A portly man set a cylindrical object with handles on its ends down beside the wall. “Mighta been the quality of the door. I blame shoddy construction,” the man, Steve, said. “And time. I blame time also.”

“Time wears all things,” the lean man agreed. He sniffed and coughed as he waved his hand to clear some of the dust their entrance stirred.

“Now, Zach. To business.” Steve was the first to assert himself. Zach followed quickly, pacing the length of the room and looked around, observing the things and their places, until he stood beneath the window covered in newspaper, directly on the spot where the needling shaft of light leaked down and hit the floor. His suede shoes were bathed in this single spot of sunlight.

“This won’t do,” Zach said, biting his lower lip. “I don’t think this’ll do very well.”

Samantha squinted her eyes as she observed Steve’s position against one of the stair braces. “Why?” Steve asked.

“Well,” Zach began. “It isn’t the location that bothers me, really. I mean—don’t get me wrong, the neighborhood’s great, and it could need something like what I’m planning, but like…” his lips peeled back, and his teeth were revealed like baleen from the mouth of some great whale. He let air out slowly through the cracks as he did this. “It’s just, I like having a shop that people go downstairs for and all, I think that’s all very cool,” he continued.

Steve nodded. “Right, but?”

“But it’s just, well, I guess that furnace and everything.” Zach sighed. “It’s like this is someone’s basement.” He paused as he caught himself. “I mean, it is someone’s basement, but if it’s going to be my shop as well, I don’t want it to look like someone’s basement.”

Steve nodded again in understanding. “I got ya,” he said. “That can all be fixed, though. I mean, this place has been abandoned for, what?, ahh—” He pulled a piece of paper out of his pants pocket and unfolded it. “Deed says somewhere ‘round five years now.”

“Deed says that?” Zach asked, approaching him.

“A scribble here in the margin notes the latest date it was sold,” Steve clarified, pointing haphazardly at something Samantha couldn’t see. “Sure looks like no one’s done anything to the property since then, though. Had a contractor check this place out awhile back, but he never returned my calls. Really peculiar guy, walked around in a bathrobe.”

Zach sighed, frowned, scratched his head in thought. “Yeah,” he began, “I think I remember who you’re talking about. Scraggly faced, dirty, really big beard, raved on about the end of the world?”

Steve nodded.

“He was a contractor?” Zach asked. “I thought he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Wasn’t he being treated at that place—ah, whatzitcalled, the place up the road from here, with the old windows and imposing exterior?” He stretched his hands out to emphasize the importance of the building.

Steve shrugged and tried not to say anything. “He said he could fix things, so I just gave him a hammer,” he mumbled. “Told him where this place was, and off he went.”

Zach deflated and shook his head. “Where the hell do you find these contractors?” he whispered, more to himself. “Anything else I should know about in regards to this uh,” he gestured to the furnace as it rumbled to life. “This residence?”

And then his eyes fell on Samantha.

“Who the hell is that?” he remarked, quite obviously shocked.

Steve spun around, facing her decrepit corner of the world. “Uh—I uh—I’m not sure.” He shot his gaze back to the deed with its notes in the margins.

“So who are you, girl?” Zach asked her. “And why are you all tie—?”

A door on the first floor creaked open and slammed. All attention in the room shot to the moaning floorboards above their heads. Dust drifted down.

“I correct myself,” Zach whispered, shooting a glare at Steve. “Who the hell is that?” he seethed, pointing a finger to the heavens.

Steve was pale. “I—it’s—” he stuttered and grasped for words.

“I thought you said this place was abandoned!” Zach grabbed Steve’s collar and shook him violently as he whispered as angrily as he could express.

“It is!” Steve whispered back. “It was!—it—I don’t fucking know! Let’s just get out of here!”

Samantha watched as Zach released his partner and despondently frowned. “Agreed,” he whispered, and Steve ran toward the stairs. Zach followed, stopping at the corner where the cinderblock wall ended to shoot a glare at her.

“You didn’t see us.” His words were hissed through baleen.

She didn’t have the energy to cry out. She didn’t have the energy left to really care.

Their footsteps retreated up what must have been stairs beyond her vision, just as the door above her head cracked open and a different set of feet descended the wooden case. Dust got in her dry, red eyes.

Peter came around the corner of the banister and immediately stopped. His eyes grew wider than the sun as he surveyed the mess of wooden splinters and the battering ram that had been left by the exit.

He screamed. “What the fuck happened to my door?!”

---

I stood behind a line of penguins, each waddling to a march I could not hear. Flippers were perfectly in sync, and the monotonous undulation of their wobbling made me sea sick.

“Zu spät! Zu spät!”

These were the words these penguins barked out their orange little beaks. Their eyes accosted me accusingly, their fish-gobbling mouths forming the words again and again.

“Zu spät! Zu spät!” They nudged me along as they belittled my sense of purpose. “Zu spät!”

I was shackled and chained by these penguins, and made to stand before their great demon god, Cyborg Poseidon, and it was he who cursed me with these industrial tendrils of circuitry and wire.

“Zu spät!” the crowd of penguin followers barked in unison. “Zu spät!”

And I cried upon the surgical table when the organs came free, only to be replaced by cold mechanical interfaces and electromagnetic logic machines, as a pulse was reduced to sine waves, a brain confined to a manufactured motherboard, a soul refined into logarithmic fluctuations and harmonic submatrices.

“Zu spät!” the penguin surgeons barked in unison. “Zu spät!”

And Cyborg Poseidon’s flesh shook with raucous, sinister laughter as my body was torn apart.

“Zu spät!”

---

“Jezus.”

A voice returned her to reality—or some variant thereof. An African American man with a tube connected to a tin canister by a hose entered the basement through the debris of what used to be a door.

“Someone oughta fix that door, huh?” He looked toward Samantha as he stepped over the splinters of wood. “Place could get robbed way it is, an’ that’s not even mentionin’ the wasted en’rgy comin’ outta this hole.” He nodded and held the canister a little higher. “Hi, miss. I’m here f’the pest control. Called last week, said I’d be makin’ the rounds today.” When all he got was a blink in response, he clarified; “We spoke on the phone.”

“Help me,” she whispered hoarsely.

“Maybe we didn’ speak on the phone, then,” he sighed. “Well, I’m gonna spray around the edges of the walls and the corners and joints, so I’ll mostly be outta your way.”

“You have to help me,” she pleaded weakly. “They’ve tied me up and left me to die.”

“Aw, now don’t say that,” the man said as he meandered over to the far wall and sprayed his poison along the edge of the floor. “I’m sure they ’ad perfectly good reasons for doin’ this.” Noticing the cage full of mice, he said, “Sheeyit, that there’s gonna cause some problems inna future.” He lowered the nozzle into the glass cage and sprayed five or six times. “That ain’t gonna be enough,” he mumbled. “I’ll hafta come back with some proper poison for vermin a little later. Lemme just sweep around the house first with this, tho’.”

“What are you—” she started, coughing through a dry throat, “Are you crazy or something?” She hoarsely mumbled. “Is everyone crazy? I’ve been trapped here for days and no one seems to care.” The whisper caused her unimaginable pain.

He stopped spraying around the furnace to cast another look back at the cage of mice. “Y’know, I think I’ll jus’ get that poison right now. I’ll be right back, so don’ go anywhere.” He set his canister down on the floor and walked outside.

Her torment was plainly obvious at this point—she was too exhausted to do anything but stare blankly; tears had ceased coming long ago, and the lack of substantial food or sunlight had resulted in the grey-paleness of her skin. Deep black bags held themselves underneath her eyes, and her gums were bright red and bleeding.

The man returned with a box full of pellets. He dumped a few into the mice cage and put the box in his pocket. “That oughtta do it fine,” he said to himself. “That oughta take carea the rodent problem for a little while, at least.”

He picked up the canister again and started for the wooden stairway. “I’m goin’ upstairs now,” he said. “I needta spray all around the walls and whatnot, so…”

Weight shifted around upstairs as he crossed the threshold. Dust fell from the ceiling. Samantha coughed.

She couldn’t measure the time between his departure and return to the basement. When he did return, he was carrying some sort of computer console under one arm. Its cables trailed behind it like the tails of a chimera. His other hand held a bag that jingled quietly as he walked. He disappeared outside, and she didn’t bother asking him what he was doing.

When he came back, it was to retrieve his spray canister and to check on the mice.

“Please, you have to listen to me!” She tried one more time. “I’m not crazy—”

“They never are,” the man replied ambivalently. “None of us ever is. We’re all crazy, we’re never crazy—it’s all the same. The only certain thing is that we’re all suffering from varyin’ degrees of ineptitude. Sheeyit, I know I am.” He looked down at her bruised, dirty, tied form. “Sure as hell looks like you are, too.”

He started up the stairs beyond the splintered remnants of the door. “I left my bill onna table upstairs,” he said. Then he was gone.

---

Dream:

I am a house made of weak timber. My doors all open inwards. My windows are all shut. I can see everything that happens inside this house, and although I may not fully understand the significance of the events that transpire, I believe that they are attempts to rationalize my current existence as a house made of weak timber.

There is only one room in this house, and it lies underground. The rest of this house is barren and empty, and though I see it, I cannot focus on these other rooms.

There are no characters here, only vague personalities that have abstract names and hidden faces. Their voices are interchangeable and indifferent. Their eyes are only different molds of the same mask. When they speak, their words are meaningless.

---

“Someone stole my fucking X-Box,” Peter mumbled dejectedly. The kid with the cell phone was back, and the both of them were on the other side of the room. She make out Peter’s form leaning against the dryer. His friend must have been the one sitting on the wooden steps.

“That sucks,” the other boy said. “I know you played the hell outta that thing.”

“Yeah, and my fucking mom won’t let me get a new one.” He kicked the dryer.

“Serious?” His friend’s shadow moved. “Can I have that new Madden game, then? I never got the chance to rent it.”

She could see Peter roll his eyes. “Whatever.”

“Hey, what happened to those mice you had?” Peter’s friend suddenly interjected.

“Mice?” Her captor looked over toward the glass cages. All of the mice were dead. “Oh yeah, I dunno.” He shrugged dejectedly again. “I just came home and all of them were like that. I don’t know why.”

“Oh shit,” Peter’s friend on the steps uttered. “What about the snake? How’dju feed it without the mice?”

“I just let it go.”

They were both silent for a little while. Samantha waited until unconsciousness took her again.

“Let’s go do something.”

---

I dropped a match into a bowl
That ­held these grains of sand.
It throbbed in tact before it grew
To blaze above my charring hand.

Blisters bubbled, burst, and singed
And dripped between these fingers raw;
With caution did I peer into the universe
Reflected in this gaping fleshy maw.

We are blisters singeing black
To burst in vernal twilight.
We are burning ever brightly
Like our tigers in the night.

---

“Oh God, thank you,” she cried on the policeman’s shoulder. They were tears of joy she didn’t know she still possessed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you…”

He set her down on the grass outside, far enough away from the inferno that the burning embers couldn’t touch her exposed skin.

“It’s no problem, really,” he said to her, trying to be as reassuring as he could. “I’m a policeman. It’s my job.”