that monster there...

           “It’s okay,” her saying it making it so, her leaning against him, nudging him with each careful dab of the cotton swab, so familiar, forgiving, allowing him to breathe, speak.             “I don’t know what happened, I must have slipped…”             “You cut your head on the door,” said Babe gently, “when you passed out.”             “Think of it,” his heart tipped, “I came to ask if you needed help. Me!”             He wiped more vomit from the face-down side of him and spoke through the side of his mouth without the bruise. Once he started talking he couldn’t stop. He told her what he’d seen, told her how awkward he felt, how awkward he was and had always been, in fact, how uneasy he was with simply being alive.             “It’s not that I am afraid of life, it is just that I am uncomfortable with being alive, always have been. There’s been a mistake - this can’t be mine, this life.”             It ran out over his lips and onto the floor. He did it with bitter pride. H

            It took the rest of the night, diligence on all sides, to get the whole thing stuck in order. In fact, there was more order than expected, more than could have possibly been dreamed of. An extraordinary batter of festering neuroses, desperate fantasies, depraved aesthetics and simple bad luck went into creating this particularly deadly delicacy. A heartless putty of sweet dissimilitude came together that night and it was nothing less than a perfect sum of parts that pushed the dawn, belching grey and beaten dim, into the early morning sky that following day.             Index finger from chin to buzzer - two-feet? and a half? Really, how long is it shoulder to wrist? Watching it traverse the short distance gave him the hiccups. Watching the sick crescent of chewed nail across the top of it bob and weave along a miniature horizon gave him gas, on the spot, hot farts, burps like lesions.             He’d shoveled himself across the hall where history and future collided there