I must have got mixed up. I must have got on the wrong bus, went home with the wrong girl, put on someone else’s clothes. I didn’t sleep for too long, I couldn’t sleep, was afraid of sleep, and saw all these icons on my desktop and each time I clicked on one I saw these paragraphs someone else had written, pretending to be me, mocking my style, or else it would be a picture of me with my eyes digitally scratched out and word bubbles reading I’M A FUCK coming out of my mouth. Many of these icons were for programs or documents I regularly used, so that I became afraid to click on anything, because I didn’t want to see these mock-files anymore. Worse yet, I went to read old email and found they had been edited and rearranged by someone else, this false-self. I started writing letters to people but the words that I typed were not the words that showed up on the screen. I swallowed a rock, and could feel it in my stomach, and heard it hit other things in my stomach, a piece of a beer can, a half of a pencil, a marble. I pulled up my fingernails, peeled back the skin of my arms, in search of this other person hidden in my body, but I couldn’t find anything. The sunlight is too bright now, I’ve been awake for too long, and I nail a quilt over the window and tape the edges so as to keep out all light, maintaining my crackhouse decor. Two cousins looking to milk what little money is left in the Iowa education budget put me in the back of a pickup and drive me around to elementary schools as a cautionary lesson as to the evils of inattention, poor hygiene and moral turpitude. I open my mouth to show them my black tongue and the children gasp, look away. I must have done some horrible thing when I was asleep, strangled some photogenic children or upscale young blonde girls, the sort of thing that makes CNN, loops of home video footage of Christmas parties and talent shows where the anchor makes sure to say my first, middle and last name each time he refers to me. I’m autographing last known photos by the side of a blacktop highway while the scabs on my scalp spontaneously open and my hair becomes matted, sticking to my head. No one was there to pick me up when they let me out and I had to move to the only three-block area that was more than two hundred yards from a school, where the man in the next room drives a screwdriver through the wall between his room and mine at night, hoping I’ll be on the other side and he can claim it was an accident. When I sleep dead people enter into my body and tell me about all the things they’ll never get to do — I’ll never get to spend the insurance money, they say, or I’ll never get to see the season finale of ER, or I’ll never get revenge on all the people who didn’t go to my funeral. I have new friends who have never looked another person in the eye and keep their hands over their genitals at all times, just in case. There is no door on the bathroom, so I have taken to taping up the same quilt I cover over the window to cover over the door, only sometimes when I get out of the shower the quilt is gone, and I have to go door to door, and that can be dangerous, so now I don’t take showers. There are protesters on the sidewalk outside the building most weekends and sometimes during the week, depending on what’s happening on the news. The man on the other side of the wall cut off a little piece of his finger, which he put on a bent paperclip he’s using as a hook, and having made a line from unwound yarn he fishes for stray cats and squirrels. Every morning I wake up with bruises, the sheets too tight around me, instantly alert and on my feet. Fat satan girls mock-worship me and tell me they’re trying to get pregnant so that they can sacrifice their babies to me, only nobody will fuck them. One morning I woke up and there were bugs crawling on my skin, actual real physical bugs, but I didn’t do anything because I was sure as soon as I went to scratch them away they would disappear and I would be the world’s worst stereotype. I must have made a mistake somewhere. I must have got on the wrong bus.
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