by Dan Dillard
*****
They say first degree murder is a tough charge to beat. I confess I didn’t even try. Everyone else is gone now so there is no reason to fight it. I stay medicated most of the time here in the ward. They let me write but only as long as I’m supervised. Ever since I tried to stick that pencil in my neck they’ll only give me crayons. They are sufficient to tell my story. The jury would’ve let me off. They all sided with me, but all I want to do now is kill myself and others. I want to share this pain.
On some strange level, I can’t help but feel sorry for Jeanette, but she is off the hook and I am left to do the time. At least she is dead, but she visits me. They all visit me, the Martin twins, Mattie and Nattie. We sing together.
..ooOOoo..
THE TRASH MENAGERIE
Inner demons may spawn outer demons, the kind with fangs and horns and bad intentions. They’re both tough to defeat.
HOARDING IS WHAT my friends call it. What friends I have left. There are shows on television about people like me. It’s a disease they all say. They all say something is wrong with my brain, that I’m either lazy, stupid, afraid to let go or a combination of the three. At first, I agreed and thought I must have been crazy, but now I know better. These are my collections and I find them beautiful. I could be more organized, sure, but I’m not diseased.
I don’t know how or when it started because I wasn’t always like this. There was a time when I was clean, almost sterile in my daily life. I bathed, I washed dishes and I did my own laundry. My house was orderly. Everything had its place and there was—you guessed it—a place for everything. I owned a normal number and variety of things. I was married. We had no children, but my husband and I owned a cat and a dog. They were still here, the cat and dog, until recently.
Then one day, as I rolled the trash barrel to the corner, I panicked. My chest stopped working, lungs and heart, and I stood there, clutching my robe together at my neck and stared at that spot where the can would sit until the truck came and took away my trash, my things, my…
What if there’s something there that I need?
I couldn’t shake the feeling. Something had shifted in my head and I just couldn’t bring myself to leave the trash without double checking. I rolled it back to the garage and dumped it on the floor so I could see everything and from there, I organized all like items into piles. Now I separate everything into piles. My piles. My way.