hen the factories that have me hedged in sound the most musical, I find myself wanting to write letters to people that have long since died or fled to their own peculiar elsewheres.

I feel like I’ve been chained to this desk for long black years, grudgingly befriended by a black arachnid of a typewriter and a bottomless bottle of scotch. Each day, each page is the same story, the same newspaper just damp enough to make you uncomfortable handling it, given to me each morning only with the date changed to reflect our terminal passage.

I receive the newspaper along with my food which together get passed to me under the door. I hear the footsteps come up the hall, the sharp exclamation of silverware and porcelain, and then the protracted hush as it the tray moves along the rich carpet. I’ve never heard them speak whoever it is who brings me food or comes once a month to take my rent (again from under the door). I’ve never really heard anything except the hum of the factories and the occasional ophidian chatter of the typewriter as I try and find sleep in the dust beneath the bed.

I’d like to think that this was my beginning, the time when I actually sit down to begin writing the letters, but it cannot be a beginning if there hadn’t yet been an ending of something and, although I was wrong, at the time I was convinced that something had ended, that I had completed what it was I had set out to do no matter how disappointed I was in that completion but no, really, no, it wasn’t done at all. Am I disappointed now? I’m not sure. I don’t think that sort of thing really figures into it any longer. One cannot honestly harvest disappointment when you’ve been given no real choice or chance at all.

So the factories have me surrounded. They have been inching in ever closer in a way that suggests to me they don’t know that I know—but how could I not know? It is at times like this, the times when they sound the most musical, that I slip my fingers into her petrified geometry of black veins, snapping teeth, and pure white headcrushing fantasy.

I begin again what had never been completed; I begin again what will never see its own end until the autumn supernova destroys us all.