Hello, how do you do? Have we met?

My name’s Pandora. My name’s Schrödinger. My name’s Pavel, Einstein, Stalin and Khan.

Do you have a minute? It’s been months since I’ve seen another human being.

I’ve been living in this speck of a town since I can remember, in the little white house on the street corner that’s boiling, dusty hot in the summer and ninth circle of hell in the winter. A sandblasted white house that sits, flecked and pocked with white paint chips, a pot hole in the street that’s been there since uncle Kim drove his 1998 Ford pickup by and gouged my mind. My brother’s in town. He’s always in town, my town, the infernal wheat field of–

“Son! Getcho ass back in here ya know the world’s a scary place ya don’t want ta be kidnapped or stoled or drag-ged back ta some basement do yeh?”

Bullshit.

Last summer I practically lived at the dark house down the street with no lights, around the corner from Frank’s discount grocery and past the only failed art store in town. A quaint brown set up, bricked and neglected, a quiet unnerving place that screams “Gentry!” with the voice of a dying decrepit old hag wrinkled and radiant from experience. Sixty years ago, or so it was said, Harry Truman spent an evening in this house and offered this queer little town a “nuclear solution” because of an ivory skeleton in his closet with whom he just couldn’t reconcile. I love this brown quiet space, I like the dusty kitchen floor, I enjoy the little tunes and ditties playing from the basement. This mansion has a voice, she’s a comfortable place that my compatriots and I have named: “The Morgue.”

Let’s pause for a moment. You may be confused. You see, I speak in detail. I cling to the closeness in a sprig of lamb’s ear, soft and delicate. Years from now, you’ll find me on a street corner in Brooklyn, writing-writing-pounding away at a little black book (poetry and feeling and words, oh my!). I hope to use this creativity engine running in my head to describe an object so acutely that everybody ever will know just what it is like to immolate overnight on the sun.

Or at least, that’s what Hemingway said.

I walk across the threshold, I nod to the bats and wave to the cats that have taken up residence in my home, The Morgue. My roommates aren’t home, funny, they haven’t been back in years. They’re supposed to bring food, real food, not just stale chips and half drunk soda cans that appear spontaneously around the house.

A ghost lives here in the morgue, but he’s always genial. Frank smokes his cigarettes in the threshold between the bedroom and the front door. He likes to keep an eye on things to make sure that things don’t change. He’s a wallflower like that, always pasted blatantly on the flower embroidered wallpaper. And hey – he’s not all bad, he stopped tripping me as I paced the house months ago and he’s been bringing me chips and soda since I can remember. He’s given me advice and he’s told me twice, he’s helpful and affordable.

People call me crazy, they say I’m the wolf boy who lives in that secret space underneath the stairs. People say I’ve got a bug, that I’ve been possessed by some poetic bastard, wasting away in an ocean of diction. They call me names and figures, they tell me things my fingers won’t repeat. I forgive them, they just don’t understand. They don’t know where I live and who I talk to and what I experience. They will, one day.

They’ll all know, one day.