in a rage. I took the knife and stabbed the man over and over and over again but he wouldn’t react. He just laid there. By now, the rats had stopped moving in the wall. I stopped after a few moments with the knife still inside the man’s chest. I began to pray to God but He didn’t hear me so I told him to go fuck himself and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed and then, something in the air began to laugh. I screamed and it screamed along with me. I took the knife out of the dead man and took a piece of his hair and cut it off.

            I tossed it in the air and the hair fell into pieces in front of me. The laughter in the air continued though I had stopped. I couldn’t stop the laughter so I started my boisterous yelling along with it. The louder I was, the louder it was and the louder we both were, the more my hair sweated, a mouse came out, I

picked it up, it bit me, I threw it against the wall and then I saw rats no more. The laughter became so loud that I began cutting the air with the knife in an effort to try to stop it but I only cut myself. It felt good to cut myself so I began cutting myself all over until I was standing in a pool of blood.

I fainted then. The laughter became a quiet guttering sound. It whispered, played, tickled, shouted, sniggled and giggled at me. I lay down next to the dead man. My thumbs were not bleeding; I was told to suck on them to comfort me. I

was told to pee in my pants. I was told to chew on my fingers and rub them against the wall, back and forth until they hurt me. Something told me to knife off a piece of the mouse’s tail.

I did what it told me to do:

That night, I was cold and the mice were quietly creeping along the wall. I

needed to get out of there. The only thing that comforted me was the moonlight and the voice. I told it that I was cold. It said that I always had the matches in my pocket. The body was already dead. We were both almost still.