I was about six or seven, out at a campground in eastern Kansas. And I was running from a psychopath. I don't know what he wanted to do to me. There was an old man with a wiry beard and silver ponytail who helped me up into an abandoned cabin. He gave me old rye bread and a tiny bottle of water. Then he tucked me into a sleeping bag on an old, worn cot. I wrapped it around my feet and over my head when he left, certain there were rats and huge hairy spiders. But I slept.

In the morning, I woke to the sound of the psycho walking near, calling out to someone. I huddled, freezing, then finally peeked out. He was standing down the hill, on a gravel road in front of another abandoned cabin. In his hand was the head of the old man who'd helped me. Gore dripped from the neck, and his dead eyes stared right at me. I panicked, and ran.

There wasn't anywhere to hide again. I couldn't hear him, and didn't know if he was even following me. The forest felt empty - not just threatening, but dead.

I woke up, fell back into the dream, woke up again, and started thinking about politics. It amuses me now that I used politics to distract myself from a nightmare. I used to use Superman.

I just finished the first chapter of Strange Maid.

This thing scares me. It's not grounded in anything but me, and this crazy twelve-hundred-year-old poem.

But I get to write things like

They ate his face first.

which I love for its simplicity, and

Secrets danced in the clicking teeth and squirming insects.

which is maybe the theme.