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a little bit of August. So long ago. Decades ago, I think, though I'm not sure if I'd be right or wrong.
    "I'd swallow him whole and he wouldn't even know it," she said. "What a life this is!" which I didn't understand, either. I understood so damned little, then, and she knew it.
    Perhaps I understand even less, now, in this little house in the dim woods. But maybe that's stupid. How could I understand less after so long? I'd have to be a damned fool.
    Maybe I am a damned fool. Of course I am. Phyllis said so, and she was never wrong (in those first few unforgettable months).
    And this dense fog of departed humanity that surrounds me in this little house in the dim woods is made up of fools, too, because they tell themselves their stuck here, but they aren't, and they know it (I believe), and they won't do anything about it because, shit, they're in a place they recognize—not my little house in the dim woods (How could they recognize that?), but the Earth itself, where they spilled from their mothers, grew into confused adults, then had lives of pain and joy and disappointment, enjoyed too little sex, or not enough, growled at the neighborhood kids, pet their little dogs, made chicken soup when influenza struck.
    Sometimes, in my little house, I scream at them, "You're not stuck here, Goddammit! So go away!" And they grumble and groan and moan and make their bizarre noises, burp, and devise non-sequiturs (“My knee is bleeding! Look at my knee!” and, "Maxwell has a silver hammer," and, "Get thee behind me, sputum!” and, "My asshole has legs in it!”) but mostly they seem, in theiroddly intrusive way, to ignore me, as if I am not much more to them than elevator music.
    ~ * ~
August 6
     
    Another portrait shows only the face—which hugs the frame—of a woman with wild red hair who's looking seductively at the camera, even though she's sticking her tongue out. The woman's cheeks are very thin and a thick blue vein is prominent in her forehead. Her tight skin is as lacking in color as the belly of a fish and her nose is straight and very narrow. I've named this woman Irene Chutter, which sounds, I know, like the name of a fat woman. I've named her Irene Chutter after a woman I knew in Bangor, when I was quite young—barely into my teens—who always looked out her window at me as I walked home from school. Sometimes she smiled, or smiled and waved, and I always smiled and waved back, because I'd been taught to be polite. Late in my thirteenth year, she appeared at her front door and invited me in, said she had pies; "I have good pies, young man. You like pies, don't you?"
    "Yes, Ma'am, I do," I said.
    And I went in.
    ~ * ~
6:07 PM
     
    Not long ago, I said to the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary, "Sam, do I have a face?" and I got no answer after a few moments, so I repeated the question; "Sam, do I have a face?" I waited a moment, and added, "I mean, to you. Do you see my face, or am I as nondescript to you as you are to me?" and still I got no answer, so I took a step forward, toward the shadow I assumed to be Sam Feary (which stood at the window it had stood at for days; beyond that window, the late afternoon sun cast shards of bright yellow light onto the forest floor), and I reached out for him, for the shadow I supposed was Sam Feary, and felt, from behind, a strong hand on my shoulder: I froze. A voice no more substantial than air said, "Be careful, my friend. That is not what you think it is."
    I inhaled deeply, held it.
    The voice said, "Breathe, you fool."
    I breathed.
    The strong hand tightened its grip. I winced.
    The voice said, "I don't have a lot of time, so listen. Not long ago, you believed in something you called love. It's possible you still believe in it, more's the pity. And you believed in passion, too. You believed it was a part of love." I heard a quick, hollow chuckle, then: "What a wonderful thing--passion. So full of heat! And that's something we don't have much of over here, my friend.