I hunt ghosts for a living but I’ll hunt anyone for the right price, and I say that any demons born in hell should stay there. The house has belonged to me for years, and I have the right. The bundle of sticks is mine. When I’m in the coliseum with my flashlight purple thunders down from the heavens. I make people angry. And I’m late for dinner. It was at that dinner party when I took the hammer to marble in broad daylight and you watched that I knew. Not a word. Cold and lifeless. Something in me knew at that point. pH strips blinked carmine red, the salt circle was broken, I felt the cold every night, telltale sign, but I’m an optimist. I gave you the Benefit of the doubt. and you did benefit. Turned me upside down and hit me on my back until I coughed everything up. Pills at breakfast lunch and dinner. I hope the purple strikes me when I think about it.
I am standing on the spinning plate on a stage and all I can think about is making someone else hurt. I want to make you feel this. UV flashlight is standard in every toolkit but yours I suppose. Can you see how every word is coated in that green-blue sheen of poison, encased in the resin, full of bugs, spiders inside spiders? you’re the first moth in the first computer. Employed me as the operator of the switchboard. I key keyboard keys and compose something that imprints in the brain and tangles it in thorns and brambles and squeezes it, key my name in the constellations so nobody can deny how they couldn’t be enough. Feel inadequate the way I do. Gladiators always pick the window seat. If you’re born in hell you never learn how to listen, they just talk. I’ll never forget those dead ghost eyes. Infuriatingly still when I want more than anything to move. You can’t pull a tree that stubborn out from the ground. I wasted my time trying.
I’ll have to start over with a new block of marble, but I’m going to make something beautiful this time. Something no one’s ever see before. People will come from all over the city, the country, the south and the west and the east, from the whole world to see what I made. I didn’t make anything. You could hear her yelling for help and I cut away the stone to let her out. She was born in hell too, but she is an angel. I’m turning in my badge this morning because I’m done hunting for people that don’t exist. I'm sick of chasing stories that pull back the harder you try to nail them down. I’m driving off into the bay with her and it will be quiet and still. Or maybe I’ll change my mind and pick up my brush again and try painting what I feel. To her: thank you. With twice as many people we can paint twice as fast. Is that how it works?