Do Not Read Random Minds

She left him with a hole in his head—a suicide lump on the bathroom floor, bathed in blood.

She jerks like a severed limb in the middle of things. It’s disturbing to people around her but she pretends to be unaware of her condition.

She saves her shame deep inside her—stores it up like a dark family secret (mama is my sister, too). She’ll save it until it’s time to explode.

Her sister told her she hated her ‘cause she’d fucked her man on her floor.

“I’ll never talk to you again,” her sister said as she pushed her out the door.

Four hours later a jetliner didn’t make it off the runway and her sister was sloughed in half by a hot sheet of metal from the plane tearing through her house.

“She’ll never talk to me again.”

She sometimes talks to her hand or a doll. She’ll make one right now for her special secret need.

She tells her hand, “You’re bad.” And in sing-song sweet she threatens to cut it off, or burn it, or eat it.

She’s burned her dolls before—oh yes!—in blazing tribute to her father’s attempt at burning his family into hell with him. He succeeded in burning himself into a jelly-bump under the sheets of a hospital bed, alive because her mother claims to be able to communicate with him by reading the filmy blood bubbles that seep from his ever-working charcoal-flayed lip-nubs.

Her mother says they are the words of God and so her father’s raw mass stays plugged into the hospital wall. Nurses and aides coat him in petroleum jelly every few hours. She sometimes swipes a finger across his open wounds and licks the petroleum skin off while she reads from her diary to her daddy.

The last time she burned her dolls they screamed in agony and still haven’t stopped.

She walks in front of busses. She’s stared down the grills of three so far, and only been injured by one.

She takes her cat to the laundromat.

No matter how many scratches and scars she gets and no matter how many quarters she pumps into those dryers, the cat always finds his way back to her door. She named him Ruprect because she knows he will never be able to pronounce that. When she sees him with other cats she laughs about his inability to introduce himself.

She mumbles so he can’t hear her about the day she’ll finally eat him and he just watches her until she jerks and then he runs away.

She touches her eyeballs on video at any dating service she can con her way into.

She props her feet upon a mailbox, sitting on the hood of her car. She counts the words she knows for pussy then shouts them toward the house before her while masturbating, using the name on the mailbox if its written to where she can read it in between fuck my cunt, you fucking fuckers.

She plucked her nipples from her body one night with rusted tin-snips after comparing them to her mother’s and finding them unattractive. She kept them in a jar beside her mom’s for a while, but grew ashamed of their deformity in comparison, and hid them under the floorboards in the pantry. She looks at them now and then, when she’s getting some flour, or chicken feet. They want out of their jar, but she’ll never let them go.

She never shops on weekdays and weekends she tries to stay in and spy on her neighbors. He used to do the shopping, anyway.

She’s had trouble finding food lately.

And she jerks.