---

What is wrong with me, I wonder. There is this desert of thought. Dry sand blown by the wind tossed about all whimsical and deceitful. It moves like purple gravy in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. I think I may have forgotten how to write in cursive. No one uses it anymore. Everything is pressed. So many lost arts. Like typing on a typewriter, and I had a dream about that just the other night. Tap, tap, tap… Smack, smack, smack… The keys smack against the paper. The letters work their way through the carbon paper. That’s how we made copies. A bell rings, tap a silver bar. Onto the next line.

So many lost thoughts. Now, here, go. Anxious as a fire ant on a hot hill beneath a magnifying glass. What is this desire to burn life? Everyone is looking at me. I don’t want to be judged. I just want to be liked. I don’t want to be punished. I don’t want to suffer. I hate suffering. I’ve spent much of my life suffering. But so have we!

Orange sky fence big round sun. I’m feeling sloppy and unkempt. It’s okay to be whatever I want to be. Time sure does slip away. Why, it seems just like yesterday I was in a summer alley in that Wisconsin town, and it stretched all the way down to the lake. And there, sitting off to the right, is the big blue house where the cigarette lady lived. Mrs. Ruppert. She had wrinkles and a strangled voice. I’m sure she died a long time ago.

I remember there being crystal bowls atop polished tables and the bowls were always filled with candy. “Go on, take some,” she would say to us. Then she smiled a funny smile. She lived alone. Her husband had died. The children had all moved away to Milwaukee or Chicago.

She had us follow her upstairs to her bedroom. She had us lie down on the bed. There was me, my best friend, and his sister between us. The cigarette lady would pull up a chair and look at us, smile, clap her hands. “Are you ready for a story?” she would ask. She told us about times when there was war and great poverty. Her stories were all about when she was younger. She told us about a time she got caught sneaking into a movie theater and the manager threw her and her friends out. The man had pushed her extra hard and she fell to the sidewalk, scraped her elbow. She had cussed him, she told us.

“I called him a shit face,” she recalled, and then she laughed. I wasn’t sure if I should be listening to such talk.

She would go on and on and on and most times we fell asleep because it became so boring. When we woke up, the bedroom door was closed. We went to open it and tumbled out. Old Mrs. Ruppert was downstairs in the kitchen frying up pork chops and cooking potatoes. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she’d call out. We’d never stay and sneak out the front door. She’d come to the porch and wave as we ran off. “Goodbye kids,” she would say. “Be careful out there… It’s a cruel world.”

But it never was. Until now.