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Blankets of rain seed the important information of the day. Massive zeros invade my mind. A machined white cloud dangles in a black sky. Wagon tracks through a green field stretch to the horizon. No wagon in sight. A gray weathered house cradles tortured dreams inside the bell of a tortured mind. Tortured by the work in the grocery store. The round wheel or belt, the scanning, the bagging, the boring music above the ears, the incessant complaining of our guests… He holds his head together as he sits on the edge of a bed in a small room with one window. He wears a wife-beater T-shirt, his body sags inside. He sips on a sweaty glass of lemonade and then screams.

After a rough dinner of porridge and pudding, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette. This other dimension haunts him. It’s so placid yet so full of nervous vibration. Humming glass, that ever-present black sky and mangled cloud. There’s a light breeze carrying voices from the forest. He looks toward the place where the trees begin, and he shivers. The gods have always told him to not go into the forest because there were things there that he would never understand. He wasn’t fit for the edicts and the strange ways of the ones that lived there. His gray hair and his drawn face would be an anomaly. His weakness of spirit and aged limbs would not be welcomed. He was unaware that grandma bones dangled from the muscular trees.

He heard a door inside slam, and it made his head contort so that it nearly broke his neck. And then he thought it was only his imagination, had to be, for he lived all alone. Who could be slamming doors? He tossed his burned-out cigarette to the claws of dusk and carefully crept inside the house.

The floor creaked as he stepped. “Hello?” he called out. “Is there anybody in here, or am I just losing my mind?”

 Someone bellowed “Cauldron!” and he quickly ducked back outside and looked up.

A kaleidoscopic nunnery sat atop a lonely dark hill at dusk, high brush blackened without light ring the reception yard. A haunted Ferris spins doldrums at the cross peak of the industrial alleyway. A sheepskin heart flutters in the wind, the man has electrode hands, and the blue juice is gyrating. He fires at humanity, melts the stupidity and hate. He fires at inhumanity, skeletal ricochets, harnessed bombardments, yellow notebooks for the lost minds to scribble in. The rubber walls reveal his incoherent poems and charms. Then he’s there on a hilltop in Germany. Looking out he sees a chain of snow-capped mountains, jagged, ancient, holding secrets. The sky is a late-day blue, an ocean blue curled with bruise-colored dew. He starts a fire and wanders through the flames. He hears the deep chanting, the haunting mechanical music. He is alone in a big place, the air is chilled, and it feels like the coming of winter.