Life was strange when I met Victor, even stranger after. I imagine most wouldn’t have believed the life I lived before that fated week, with all it’s buroke charms and cast of tresspasciarial troubadours, the thousands of unwritten misadventures of Folk Villains. I lived the kind of life that could be slotted in between toothpaste adds every second midnight of every second thursday on public access television in some far off town that no one has ever mentioned to anyone. The light flickers and through the static I’d see my own face. My room was filled with wasps. I let them in, left the windows wide open. Heat lightning struck inside the clouds above the house, it churned- unrelenting it churned and crashed. A constant droning- the thunder like waves on the beach but far above me in the midnight sky.

A wolf’s howl echos through the forest and lands on the chipped white paint of my window shutters. The bent rain catchers on my roof sway in the wind as they dangle from the roof. Useless decorations, just the same as the dandelions in the over grown lawn, decorations that celebrate the lie that’s been going about. They think no body lives here. They thought I was dead and they should have been right about that. It wouldn’t rain. It still won’t. I wasp crawled over my lip as I stared at the ceiling. Deep, deep in the back roads, where the animals scream at night. Deep and deeper still between the pines and a dirt drive way. Hidden away in the shade of a mountain with a power line spurting loud fire just across from that old empty home. Hidden deep in electric fuzz on the screen.

There I was. There I looked into my empty refrigerator. The ceiling fan wiggled loosely as its blades tilted like a spinning top. Then all this ambient, slow moving energy got murdered. It never came back. It got a blade in it’s throat and a bullet through it’s temple. Victor crashed through my living room window. His car turned over in my yard. I screamed as wasps and mice activated around the breaking glass. I heard a wolf howl, a nightjar tweet. I look down to see blood and blond hair on my coach and I know you don’t believe it but lightning struck my house in that very instant. I fell away from the world. I had a long dream that I’ll never remember.