We really shouldn't be doing this.

I completely agree, although there seems to be no way around it. It has been this way since the beginning of time.

Do you feel like you have a grasp of how we have come together?

Not really. It was explained to me once, but I have repeatedly failed to see the bigger picture.

I was unaware of the bigger picture until just now.

Once you see the bigger picture, it isn't easy to unsee.

Tell me again about our introduction.

It's really rather simple. In the beginning—

If you say something about God right now, I am leaving.

I wasn't going to.

Good.

Shall I continue?

Very well.

In the beginning, we were created as a set. When one of your kind met one of mine, we ceased to exist, and the remnant of our embrace was nothing but pure energy.

That doesn't sound quite right. How are we annihilated yet still here?

We have been created that way, which is the only answer I have for you.

So, let me get this straight. We can sit on opposite sides of the room and converse, but if we touch, we die.

I wouldn't say die, exactly. I would say a change of form ensues.

That sounds like the same thing to me.

It isn't.

Well, I don't like the idea of annihilating, so I think I'll stay put.

So you won't cross the room to hold my hand or sit next to me?

Not if it means certain destruction. It just doesn't seem worth it to me.

I guess you've got to draw the line somewhere.

Which of the two am I, the particle or the antiparticle?

It doesn't really matter which one you are or which one I am.

And why not?

For purposes of this discussion, you could be one or the other.

Have you been taking classes with Dr. Schrodinger again?

Whether I have or whether I haven't is of little consequence to our discussion.

Oh, I would say it has a great consequence for our discussion. In fact, it is all we are talking about right now.

Can't you see how much I love you and want my particles to mix with yours?

But that would be a direct annihilation. We will have to be content with being in love but not touching. I'm afraid there is no other way.

Let's look at this from a different perspective. You have a positive charge, and I have a negative one. If one of us could change our charge, there would be no annihilation, and we could come together without any loss of energy.

Do you suppose this is possible?

I suspect it is.

Then, let's try it.

Ok. Let's. How do we go about changing our charge?

Perhaps you could try rubbing a balloon over your hair.

Do you have a balloon?

No, do you?

No.

Then we are back at square one. Any other suggestions?

I could rub my feet on the carpet and see if that works.

I'm afraid we only have wooden floors.

Excellent observation.

Perhaps there is no way around our current situation.

I'm afraid you will leave me in favor of someone who has your spin.

Like a spin doctor?

No, more like a disc jockey or a ballerina.

I don't know anyone like that.

That is a relief.

Hi. My name's David. What's yours?

It's Fenix, with an F.

That's a lovely name. It reminds me of Harry Potter. Do you like Harry Potter?

I love J.K. Rowling, and if you don't like her, don't even tell me because she is basically like a god to me.

Oh, no. I love her, too.

People shit on her all the time, and it makes me really mad. I don't really enjoy being mad. Do you know what time it is?

Fifteen minutes after four.

Mmk. thanks.

So, you've been having a pretty rough time?

No shit, Sherlock. Have you ever watched the X-files?

Gosh. I have, but it's been a long time.

Just out of curiosity, if you were an alien, what type of alien would you be?

Excuse me? Ummm.

You know. Would you be a kind alien or the mean ones that want to eliminate human life?

I'd be the kind kind, I guess.

Yeah. You look like you would. Hey, can you hand me my phone? Thanks.

What brought you in here today, Fenix?

It was the damned new housemother. It went like this, okay. I asked her for my meds. I asked her at exactly two minutes to ten pm, and I thought one would be enough, but they weren't. The bottle said I could have them one to two every four hours. That was the directions as written. Like on the bottle. The problem was, when I asked for another one, what I should have asked for two earlier because when I went back three hours later, she said I couldn't have the second one. Do you think that's right? Cause I don't.

It doesn't sound very fair.

Exactly.

Then what happened?

Then? Then she really pissed me off, and then she called the cops, and that's how I ended up stuck in here. It was my first night in that group home. I never knew no one before I got there, not even my roommate. Can you hand me my phone again? Thanks. When the cops came, the housemother said to them that I was suicidal, and so they brought me in here, to the hospital. Such a load of bullcrap, really. Wait. What exactly do you do here?

I'm a patient sitter.

What does that mean?

The hospital hired me to sit with people who need extra attention.

Like me?

Yeah. Like you.

Do they pay you to sit there?

Yes.

Kind of a weird job. It's like you're a babysitter but for adults.

It is.

I had a babysitting job once when I was eleven. I was supposed to take care of my little brother, but then the noises in my head began to talk, telling me to ignore him, and he wandered off, and it wasn't for six hours that he was found. He wasn't far away, but boy, my mother was mad, and then she sent me away for like the first time. Maybe it wasn't the first, but it was close to the first. And guess what? I've lived in group homes ever since.

How many group homes have you lived in?

I'd have to count. Hold on a second…five. No, six.

I'm sorry you had to go through all that. It sounds hard.

It is. You know what the hardest thing is, though?

What's that?

People try…People take…People take your shit. You put something down, thinking it will be there later, and when you come back, it's gone. Like totally gone. Like you never had it in the first place.

That sounds terrible.

It's really terrible and you know what else? Most of the girls that live there are getting high and giving blow jobs to the boys that live across the road at the church, the Mormon church. Well, it's not a church, exactly. What do they call that place where those boys live? It's not a church. It's called a…oh, what the hell is it called again? My sister knows. I could call her and ask her.

They're doing what?

Yeah. That's the worst. This one girl – can you hand me my phone again? Thanks. Her name is Nikki Tampon, well, that's what we call her. That's not her real name. It's like Thompson or something. She got a mouth disease from a boy there, and she had to get narcotics for it. You know what I mean. I mean, not narcotics, what do you call them, the things that doctors give people when they get an infection…

Antibiotics?

Yeah. That's right. Antibiotics. She got a condition called stipped throat.

I think it's called strep throat.

I don't know, yeah. I think that's it. Anyway, she is in jail now for writing bad checks. She wrote one at Pizza Hut, and the manager caught her and then he called the cops. Seems like everyone likes to call the cops these days.

The nurse told me you haven't eaten since last night. Maybe when dinner comes you'll eat something. Whadya say?

I don't know. I don't really like food. I mean, the food they serve here, at hospitals, I mean. I mostly eat organic stuff when I'm home, and I can cook for myself, which I can sometimes do at a group home, but not always. I was vegan for a little while.

Oh wow. Me too.

You were? You look like you could be vegan. Like a person who was a vegan, I mean.

That's funny.

What?

I didn't know you could tell if someone was vegan by looking at them.

You probably can't. But I can. I've always been able to tell things. Since I was little. I can tell things other people can't.

Like what?

Like, I see auras and stuff. But sometimes the meds they put me on make my senses dull, and I can't feel my own fingers, and not feeling your own fingers feels really weird, you know what I mean?

I think so. Are you from around here?

No. I mean, I was, and I am now, but I didn't used to be. I lived in Seattle for a while.

I love Seattle. I used to live there.

Me too. Where?

Near Greenlake.

Is that the lake everyone rollerblades around?

And other things.

What do you mean, other things? Like what?

People run around it, too.

Yeah. I guess.

Dinner is here. You should really try to eat.

Nah. I don't like food.

You don't like food?

I don't like fruit, I said.

Oh, I thought you said you didn't like food.

I don't.

There's a sandwich here and some peaches, and a can of soda.

In a minute. Do you know why they have these electrodes on me?

I imagine so they can monitor your heart.

I'm not a heart patient.

Just a precaution, I suppose.

How long have you done this job?

Four years.

Every day?

No. Just when they need me.

They called you to sit with me because I'm a troublemaker, huh?

No. They're pretty busy, and they must have needed an extra set of eyes.

That's a funny thing to say. I keep losing my phone. Do you know where it is?

Maybe look inside the sheet. I think you may have dropped it again.

It is not here. I don't see it anywhere. Oh, here it is. Thanks.

My shift is going to be over soon.

Is someone going to take your place?

I think so.

Is it someone nice?

Everyone I've worked with here is nice.

You're nice.

Thanks. So are you.

You wouldn't say that if you knew me.

I doubt that. You seem like an intelligent young woman. How old are you?

My birthday's in three weeks. I'll be eighteen. The same age as my mother.

You mean the same age as your mother when you were born?

No. the same age as my mother when she died.

I'm sorry to hear that.

That's what everyone says.
I mean it.

They say that too. Hey, before you leave, do you think you can help me find my phone?

When my buddy Tyler called and asked me to meet him at the cornfield maze Friday night, I just about told him to go fuck himself. "It'll be good for you," he said. "Exercise some of your old demons, so to speak."

What did I say in response? "Fuck my demons, Tyler."

Anyway, I agreed to go.

My ex, Delaney used to love going to the corn maze, hell, any haunted house for that matter. I hated thinking about it, but Delaney dumped me two weeks ago out of the blue for a fucking musician, no less. I was devastated when it happened. Never saw it coming. She said he had an edge to him that I didn't have. Fuck him, too.

I don't know why I didn't see it coming. We used to be inseparable and did everything together. We both loved haunted houses. We'd come to The Field of Screams the last two years in a row. Here it was, time for Halloween again, one of my favorite times of the year, time to watch hundreds of people walk through tall rows of dead corn to get the shit scared out of them. Only this time, Delaney wasn't with me.

            When I got to the cornfield, the parking lot was jam-packed with cars, and the line of people waiting to buy tickets was a mile long. It was filled with high school kids, some college idiots, and a spattering of older people, probably in their forties or fifties, who looked like they were trying to re-live their youth or some shit. I pulled the hood of my sweatshirt over my head and stood in line with the other idiots, bought a ticket, and waited for the ticket-holders line to move.

            My phone beeped almost right away."Stuck in traffic B there soon." I rolled my eyes and typed back, "U better B." I wasn't afraid of going in. I just didn't want to look like the kind of person who would go into a scary maze alone.

            A pretty girl in the line ahead of me, with long black hair and dark eyes, smiled at me. I smiled back, mostly out of habit but also because she was cute. No matter how cute she was, I couldn't seem to take my mind off Delaney. Last year, when we were here, she hugged me every time she got scared, which was a lot.

            The line moved slower than molasses in fucking wintertime. More people continued to show up even though it was close to midnight. People are idiots, paying thirty bucks of their hard-earned money to stand in a godforsaken line to have the everloving shit scared out of us – for fun.

            Just my luck, it started to rain. I open my phone to read a new text from Tyler again. Drops of rain hit the screen as I read it. "Still stuck. Go in without us. Will find U." How the hell were they going to find me in a dark cornfield in the fucking rain at night? I almost ducked out of the line and under the ropes, but then the pretty girl caught my eye again, so I decided to stay. Worst case scenario, I'd go through the stupid corn maze alone and not bat an eyelash.

            These types of events are so staged, so formulaic. Some guy in a busted-up, second-hand store scream costume jumps out at you as you're turning a corner. Do that fifty more times, and you've pretty much got your average corn maze fright night. I was bored of them, but I always loved to watch other people jump.

            About an after I arrived, I finally got close to the entrance. A guy with a chainless chainsaw roared past those of us close to the front doors. The three girls ahead of me screamed when he approached and bunched up together like dying wildebeests in a nature video.

Thick blasts of smoke billowed up from canisters near the entrance, designed to obscure our vision and rob us of one of our senses. They smelled like burnt toast and rubber. Loud bangs and screams filled the air from the direction of the maze. I briefly wondered what the livestock in the adjacent fields thought about the noise. Probably, by now, about as much as I did, which was nothing at all.

Ten minutes later the next group was let in, which included me.

A tall, skinny guy -- cause, let's face it, it's guys usually who sign up for these sorts of things -- counted ten of us and sent us in. "Hopefully, you'll make it to the other end," he said, tipping his chin down into a voice-synced microphone that made him sound too much like Darth Vader. It was laughable. He gave me a dirty look when I laughed.

Our group stepped through the thick black curtains that made up the doorway to the maze, which at first was composed of a bunch of old shipping containers strung together with scary shit stuffed inside. I'll give them this: they went to every expense, making things look real. The coffins, the skeletons, everything looked authentic.

I followed the three girls, who were huddled together like — well, like three scared girls — screamed every couple of steps and then giggled a nervous chorus at the end. It wasn't long before the shipping containers fed out into the first part of the corn maze itself. The tall, dead stalks did not look imposing on their own but, bunched together as they were, did an incredible job of being both intimidating and camouflaging. We walked along the path cut into the field. Scary people jumped out at odd intervals with flashing lights or sound machines strapped to their ribcages, all designed to make us shit our pants.

Along the path were multiple signs that read, "Actors are not allowed to touch corn maze participants." Normally no one touches you, but they come awfully close, within inches sometimes.

I stopped to check my phone again in case Tyler texted one more time. Nothing. When I stuck the phone back in my pocket, I found myself separated from my group. I knew it would be easy to catch up to them, huddled as they were, and not walking very fast.

To my left, about twenty yards was another shipping container that I didn't remember being there last year. It stood off from the actual maze by about twenty feet. A long rope crossed in front of the doors to the container with a sign that said, DO NOT CROSS. I took one glance at it and then looked back to my right, where my group had no doubt disappeared. That was when I heard her voice.

Delaney.

I'd know that voice anywhere, especially when she said my name.

"Michael. Over here. Michael." I looked to my left again. It was Delaney, alright. She was standing inside the doors of the shipping container. She was wearing a dark hoodie and black pants, but I could tell it was her. She was looking around nervously. She said my name again. I stepped closer to where she was standing.

He couldn't avoid the smell, but Wheels had managed to avoid drugs while he had been living on the street, which was remarkable, given how much pain he was in most of the time. They had been offered to him seemingly hundreds of times, and hundreds of times, he had managed to avoid them. He had seen too many people overdose on Fentanyl to trust any kind of drug in any form, even pot. In fact, three nights after he landed in New York, his tent mate, a too-young man to be living on the street named Popcorn, died during the night a mere three feet away from him.

Once he realized Popcorn had stopped breathing, and not knowing what the hell to do, Wheels scrambled into his chair and rolled away from the tent. He managed to flag down two cops two blocks down and told them about the dead guy in the tent. The cops didn't even question him as to how or why; they told him to keep moving as they ambled down the street toward the tent.

Twenty minutes later, two men got out of a quiet ambulance and picked the guy up, and Wheels got his first real taste of the harshness of drugs on the street. He also noted how quickly the authorities came to remove a dead body as opposed to how slowly they came for a live one in trouble. Seemed to him it ought to be the other way around, he thought. But when you live on the streets, sometimes death can be a reward.

Today, the smell was particularly bad. He couldn't escape it. He rolled for what seemed like hours, and the smell seemed to follow him like a shadow. It wasn't long before he realized the smell he had been smelling constantly was coming from him. This realization was the harshest one he had encountered yet on the streets.

Forty minutes later, he rolled up to The Common Pantry and signed up for a shower. The woman at the front desk gave him a plastic disposable razor in a plastic disposable sleeve and a small single packet of shave cream. He tucked himself into the disabled shower stall after shaving his face and let the filth and the stink and the rot of the streets dissolve from his body. The stench of the streets was distant now, more like a memory than of something that followed him.

The shower was short but warm, and at the end, he really did feel like a different man. He dressed in newly donated clothes and brushed his hair before leaving the stall. The clothes he came in with were gone, no doubt either thrown in the trash or sent to the industrial washing machine for the next guy. It mattered not to him. Ever since his accident, he realized he wasn't attached to a goddamned thing.

When he looked into the mirror, there was a man staring back at him, a man he felt he had not seen in a long time, a man he felt like he used to know well — who lacked a scent. His face had changed, like when you haven't seen someone for twenty-plus years. You know they are the same person; they share the same features, but they are worn somehow, harsher slightly, more abrupt, a simulacrum of a person.

Now that the filth and the hair were gone, he could see his old self staring back at him. He looked worse for the wear. Scars marked his face and his arms; his right eye looked slightly higher than the other like it had drifted north of its own accord. A chunk of his right ear was missing, and three of the teeth inside the back of his jaw were no longer in his head, the result, no doubt of the long fall he took.

He ran a crooked, previously broken but healed finger over the long scar on his neck that bisected the gold cross he always wore. He picked up the cross and turned it over in his fingers, back and forth and back and forth, and then he gently set the cross back down where it settled like a bird in a nest on his shirt. How the cross had stayed with him all these years, he could not tell. It must have been the hand of a higher power, keeping the cross and him together after so many years. Or it may have been dumb luck. He could never tell the difference.

Once back out on the street, the stench of street life hit him like a punch in the gut. To his right, a manhole cover was steaming its rank smell onto the pavement; clouds of super-heated stank swept its way north. Wheels had no clue where his next shower would come from, but he knew one thing for sure: it would not come soon enough. He held his breath and rolled away in an indiscriminate direction toward nothing in particular.

I put the postcard back and picked up one of the photos of my father. He is on top of the roof of our old house with a hammer in his hand — circa 1966, London, Ontario. There is a ladder leaning on the roof next to him. In the background, the sky is blue, the house is red, and the maple tree in the front yard is newly planted. My father's hat is tipped forward on his head, and he is wearing a yellow striped shirt. He has a cigarette in his mouth. Our blue Plymouth sedan is in the carport.

Another photo, this time of me as a kid. I think I'd just turned five — the same circa as the photo of my father. It's the kind of photo with a white border around it and the date stamped neatly inside. I am standing next to my neighbor, Teri Leigh, in her driveway. She is ten. It looks like she's forcing a hat to stay on my head and won't let go. A strap under my chin looks tight and uncomfortable. On Teri's face is a look of raw determination. I look unwilling to hold still.

In the background of the photo, Teri's wiener dog is eating something out of a pail. That dog never liked me and tried to bite me more than once. In front of Teri is a kid's stroller with a doll in it. I can only see the baby's head before the bottom of the photo cuts off. The baby only has one eye and has hair that looks like it went through a dish washer. It looks possessed. Neither of us is smiling.

Up and down the library ladder, I went. I climbed to the top to visit with some books I hadn't seen in a while. Books by Maugham, Hemingway, Plath, Joyce, you know the list. A copy of Ulysses — three cities in Europe, circa 1914 through 1921 — sits on the top shelf, in the far corner, as a punishment. I've tried to read it three times and I can't get through it. Each time, I am convinced that Joyce was having a psychotic break when he wrote it. My wife wonders how hard it can be to finish it. I told her that if I were on a desert island and it was the only book I had, I might finish it, or I might not, depending on how long my stay was. Or I might start fires with it, or I might toss it in the ocean so I could watch it sink. I don't admit that to most people.

.

Standing ahead of Winston on the street, on the corner near the shitty little shop where they sold nothing but cupcakes, was a woman who looked tragically close to the way Carly looked the second to last time he saw her before she was dead on a gurney after she had given him head in the empty hospital room at three in the morning with the guy across the hall snoozing and snoring, the sound reverberating around them.

This version of Carly was skinnier still and not as pretty. She was wearing black boots and a yellow coat. Carly would never have worn yellow because she said it washed her out. Winston’s palms were sweating when he thought of how much he could have loved Carly had she lived and not sliced her wrists with a broken mandolin slicer from the kitchen in the psych ward. Her death must have been bloodier than most.

Seeing her for the first time, in a blood-red shirt, sucking on her pierced lip, leaning back in her plastic chair, reading a dog-eared copy of Vonnegut – the cover missing, spinning her hair around a black-nailed finger, smirking at him when they made eye contact.

His memory of her was demanding. It popped up that morning while he was getting coffee, last night when he was trying to fall asleep by listening to ocean sounds, and when he saw the look-alike girl on the sidewalk. What would life have been like had she not decided to break the slicer in half? She could have continued slicing cucumbers and finished her shift. He put on his jacket against the oncoming evening cold.

I envy the dead: at least they know where they’ll lay their head at night. Sometimes, I wander the streets so long that my feet feel like part of the pavement. The long, slow shuffle of shoes against the ground mesmerizes my mind, which feels numb and cold, and tired. I never know where I am going to sleep at night until my head hits the ground and my feet stop moving. Inertia determines where I sleep, if I sleep at all.

I haven't always been homeless. I once had a wife, a management job at an investment firm, and the brightest of futures ahead of me. Truthfully, I can't remember what put me here. It seemed like one moment, I was sleeping in my custom-made Duxiana bed, and the next thing I knew, I was resting my head on a cement curb, listening to semi trucks whiz by overhead. Sometimes, the blink of an eye is all it takes.

It is amazing how adaptable the human body and the spirit can be. I used to change my underwear every day. Now I wear the same clothes day in and day out. No change necessary because there is nothing to change into. At first, the smell bothered me. Now, I don't notice it.

I also used to get manicures from a sweet Vietnamese lady in an alleyway off Fifth Avenue. Her name was Thuy. She was in her sixties and was pretty if not a little haggard in the way that women can be who have worked their whole lives for other people. She used to call me Mr. Brown, not because that was my name, but because I used to wear brown shoes to work every day. I had a dozen pairs of truly beautiful shoes: Burberry, Louboutin, Ferragamo. I had more money sunk into shoes than most people have sunk into their cars. Now, when I think of those shoes, they seem like other people's footwear on other people's feet. My current shoes are mismatched. The one on the right is a Nike with the swoosh missing, and the one on the left is a no-name brand, the most generic kind of shoe there is.. I think they sell them at Walmart. One is blue and the other white and green. They are poor, distant cousins from the other side of the shoe track from my old compadres. I am my shoes.

Thuy's name means gentle.

Thuy used to laugh at my stupid jokes because I was paying her to. It looked like I was paying her to round my fingernails and put a polish on them, but really, I was paying her to pay attention to me. Our interactions did not require speaking, but I felt strange not talking to her. So, in my nervousness, I told jokes. Did you hear the one about the guy who sleeps under a bridge? I miss Thuy, especially when I look down at my fingers and the gray-black messiness of them stares back up at me. I feel them judging me. I have let them down. They would just as soon abandon ship and live elsewhere, but like me, they feel like they don't have that option.

The list of things that are terrible about being homeless is endless, but by far, one of the worst of those things is searching for food. Sometimes food comes easily. Other times, I am like a wild animal, searching every nook and cranny for a discarded scrap. All the homeless people here know the best places to look: the back of restaurants and certain apartment buildings. Whoever gets there first wins the spoils. I have even seen some guys steal food out of other guys' pockets when they are sleeping, that and cigarettes. I don't smoke cause it's bad for you. I once found a couple of hot dogs in a trash can on 45^th Street. It wasn't until halfway through the first one that I noticed maggots crawling in the middle of the meat. I ate it anyway cause, really, it's a hot dog, so what's the diff?

I can't remember the last time I brushed my teeth. I found a toothbrush that someone must have dropped outside of a pharmacy; it was still in the plastic packaging. I was so happy that I immediately went back inside the pharmacy and into the bathroom and began brushing my teeth. Even though I had no toothpaste, I pretended I did, and when I left the bathroom, I felt like a new person. The feeling only lasted until I was back out on the Street and remembered that I had left the toothbrush in the bathroom and didn't have the courage or the energy to go back and get it.

Last week, as I was scrounging for street change and food scraps, I saw my ex-wife. She was coming out of the Barneys department storeand had several shiny black bags on either arm. The white lettering that spelled out Barneys looked different for a moment, as though it spelled out "Bastard." It would be just like Elaine to walk around with a bag like that.

At first I thought she spotted me, and maybe she did, but if she knew it was me, she didn't let on. Later, I thought she would never recognize me now that I had a beard and, filthy clothes and almost no sign of the old me anywhere in sight. I watched her hail a cab and disappear into the yellow rolling mass. She looked happy. Healthy. Moved on.

I wanted so badly to call out to her, to approach her, to see her lovely face up close one more time. Instead, I closed my eyes and pictured her as best I could from when she knew me when we were content with the way things were.

Several times since I have been out on the streets, I have let a hooker give me head. All she required in payment was cigarettes, which are easy to acquire from begging, or sometimes they ask for money, which I don't normally have. When they are going down on me, I forget who I am or why I am here or that I had another life other than this one. Minutes later it all comes rushing back to the forefront of my mind. I am a failure and an otherwise useless person: a bastard if you will.

This morning, I was walking up Madison Ave again when I saw my wife again. She stepped out of the Barneys entrance, squinting her eyes in the bright sunshine, pulling her favorite Chanel's sunglasses over her eyes.

Elaine? There was a long pause as though she had forgotten her own name.

Patrick? Is that you?

Sort of.

What the hell? What are you doing? Are you living on the Street?

I guess so. She reached into her Louis Vuitton bag and found her wallet. She pulled two hundred dollar bills out and shoved them in my direction. "What are you doing?

Giving you money. What does it look like I'm doing?

I don't need your money, Elaine.

It sure looks like you do to me.

Well, I don't.

Take it anyway.

No.

Fine. You always were a stubborn bastard. She said, stuffing the bills back into the hollow of her purse.

And then she walked away, hailed another cab and was gone once more.

I walked slowly behind her direction of travel and saw the cab disappear into the mad New York traffic. Out of the corner of my eye, a wrapper blowing in the wind caught my attention. I reached down to pick it up and found a half-eaten hamburger inside. I took a bite and let the food slide down the chute on the way to my stomach. I looked up at the crystal blue sky and thought, perhaps I should change my name to Barney.

An obese woman in a threadbare dress sits on a vinyl green chair, the kind of chair that is usually seen in a diner, the kind of diner that no one wants to be seen eating in. The rust-encrusted legs of the chair strain under her enormous weight. The obese woman's unwashed flowered dress is hiked above her knees; her knees are red and scared and dimpled with fatty flesh. Her meat-hook hands are pressed into her knees as though the bottom half of her has no choice but to lift up the top. She wears no bra and no deodorant. She no longer shaves and has forgotten where her hairbrush lives. The fat woman's name is Billy Rex, named after her father and her childhood dog, in which order we are not sure.

Surrounding obese Billy Rex is a stack of magazines, numerous cartons of half-eaten food, two warm containers of diet soda and a dog-eared and stained photo of a girl in a baby swing wearing a pink dress and smiling for the camera. There is no other trace of a smile in the house of Billy Rex Peevis.

On the floor to obese Billy's right sits a dog. The dog is white and brown with spots of black and is her most faithful companion. She reaches down and with the asthmatic wheeze of an ancient hanging bellows, pets the dog on the head. "Good boy," she exhales as motes float around the pair. The silent dog does not acknowledge his master's hand, for he is stuffed and covered in dust and has been for a long time. Chicken, the dog, met his maker one day in late June almost a dozen years prior when almost totally obese Billy sat on the couch in the trailer on Snowberry Street with such a huff and a puff that she sat on the dog and killed him. At first, she thought she'd sat on a pillow or a box of Twinkies. But later she realized she sat on Chicken. Obese Billy could not bear to part with his presence, so she stuffed him herself with newspaper and propped him up in a sitting position with his head always quizzically tilted with a sideways smile, staring at the master who suffocated him.

The air in the trailer was as hot as the cheese-induced farts out of obese Billy's ass, made hotter still by the broken fan, the shredded blind that did little to hide the noonday sun and the mass of flesh that covered her skeleton. She filled the single-wide trailer like a cat in a litter box, perched to pee, nearly wall to wall on all sides. It also happens to be true that Billy Rex once pissed in the middle of the living room because she didn't have the energy to go the fifteen paces down the hall to where the real bathroom sits.

Sitting is almost all that she can do. She lifts her right ass cheek and hears the separation of flesh from plastic; a wet smacking noise drifts through the trailer. She is preparing to stand. Viewed from the outside, if gifted with the remarkable sense to be able to detect such a thing, one might see the trailer shift slightly from side to side as obese Billy makes her way to the kitchen. The linoleum strains under the mammoth calves, and German beer steins shake on the shelves with her every weighty step.

She shares her boxed food with roaches and mice. Sometimes, they dare her to reach into the box before they depart out of the hole from which they emerged. Her gray black fingers reach into whichever box they find first and bring crumbs to her gums, for her teeth have long ago been discarded. No one told obese Billy that, eventually, her gums would recede, causing her false teeth to be rendered not only false but irrelevant. Maybe Chicken found them before she killed him; maybe he chewed the teeth of the hand that fed him and the ass that felled him. We may never know.