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revealing a nasty-edged piece of wire, which once freed, I could bend with only a little amount of force.
    It would take very little effort to rake my arm from wrist to elbow, dragging the metal through tissue and vessels to end it once and for all. At least once a day I found myself on the ground, staring at it. The metal represented a release, a way out. It was an alternative I could choose to take, or not.
    Yet the more time passed, the less I looked at it. The more I immersed myself into the lives of fictional soldiers and contemplated the reality that there were real aliens out to get us, the more I wanted to live. It was extraordinary that the threat of an alien invasion could do what all the counseling and consulting had failed to do.
    That is, of course, if I believed lock, stock, and barrel what TF OMBRA was telling me.
    My thoughts slipped to my Aunt Nancy, who was as fond of conspiracy theories as she was of her gin. I could still see her, sitting at the Formica table in her tiny kitchen in Hackettstown, New Jersey, drinking gin and juice and smoking cigarettes like she was a major stockholder in a tobacco company. She’d wave her hand around, making miniature tornadoes as she turned the news of the day into something conspiratorial.
    If a plane crashed, it was the government trying to cover something up. Her favorite theory was that every single plane that crashed was the result of a UFO encounter and it was our government’s secret treaty with the aliens that made them kill their own people. If there was a train wreck, it was to cover up some release of energy/noxious gas/alien technology/fill in the blank from whatever Top Secret government facility was nearest the crash site.
    Then, of course, there was the weather. Major disasters were the result of the government’s weaponized weather machine spinning out of control. She’d theorized that the machine was located somewhere in the Midwest, which was the reason states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas were always hit the hardest.
    When once asked about hurricanes, she’d laughed, explaining how the Soviet Union had put their own weaponized weather device into the hands of Fidel Castro. All one had to do was look at a map and see that all the hurricanes came from around Cuba as proof.
    I’d developed my love for listening to the Night Stalker on late night radio from her. No matter how extraordinary her theories, the Night Stalker’s conspiracies were even crazier. Except that listening to his cold, velvet voice on the late night airwaves, I couldn’t help but believe in what he had to say.
    My Aunt Nancy loved him. Often three sheets to the wind, she’d listen and provide a constant commentary about whatever the topic of the evening was.
    Even into her sixties she’d dressed like a House and Garden housewife from the early nineteen-sixties. She always wore old fashioned party dresses and high heels. She was never seen without pearls. She wore her hair high on her head, the curls under tight control, until the day wore on and the New Jersey humidity took its toll. About the time the gin started to make her wobble, her curls would fall loose over her eyes. Sometimes she’d pause in mid-sentence to toss her head and get them out of her way, but more often than not she’d use the same hand she used to hold her ever-present cigarette, its red hot tip coming within millimeters of igniting the layers of hairspray.
    As a kid, me and my cousins would watch her talk and wait for the inevitable. It was funny and we couldn’t wait, sometimes running into the yard and twisting as if we were in flames, burning, burning, burning. I used to find it funny, those memories of my Aunt Nancy. But when I saw D’Ambrosio do his own burning dance on a road in Iraq one fine evening, I lost all appreciation for those kid games. He bounced twice off the Bradley after being sprayed with the contents of an exploding Corolla’s fuel tank, as if the twenty-seven tons of metal