I break free around five thirty. The platypus had given me his keys several hours ago. I left a note on his door: “Thanks for the car, hit me up if you ever swing through Mexico.” I exit the building, and walk briskly through the autumn winds, out past the football field, then the soccer field. All the way to the parking lot. I find the car with the Colorado license plate, unlock it, and throw my bags in the back. I pop the trunk. A host of exotic beers reveal their gilded bottle caps. I push the boxes of alcohol aside and open the spare tire well. I take his small bag of poisonous plant bud and the twisted piece of glass used to inject smoke into human lungs and throw them in my backpack. He wanted that stuff back in his room, before I took off for the weekend. I turn on the car. These damn hybrids. No soul. No purr.

I escape the parking lot and drive back to the building. I walk back inside with the backpack. I do what needs to be done, and leave a second note on his door: “Snug items, in the top drawer.” I leave the building a second time. It’s Friday. People are getting ready to go out. People ask me where I’m off to. All I can do is shrug.

I drive off again, circling around the roadways of the convoluted town. I end up in front of a pale yellow castle. I slow as I see the wolf. He picks up his stuff, and hops in. His friend comes along too. He needs a ride to his car. I take him there. Then the wolf and I are off. We hit the interstate running, jazz pulsing through the grainy speakers, sucking on the embers of cancer.

The road moves quickly. Soon it has almost taken us home. I didn’t tell my parents I was coming, and I can’t say exactly why. I even made plans to not use my debit card on the brief trip, so I couldn’t be tracked.

As we creep through our hometown, the engine buzzing like an insect, I try to think of anyone I might want to see here. No names come up. No faces. The moon, however, shines on like a lone flower petal, whether anyone wanted to see it or not. I couldn’t tell what it was, at first. I thought that it couldn’t be the moon. It was too wide and daring and not as white as it used to be. What made the moon so orange, this night? Pollution? Bad tidings? Or the same thing that makes me so tired and nostalgic?

And what are you doing here? Why do you always end up in this rusty landfill of a village? Lord and Savior in Heaven, whose idea was this? Whose idea was I?

I think I’m writing this because I want to remember it all. Recently everything I remember has been like some worthless movie that has no moral to its story. One of the ones you come out of the theater after and you think that it was pretty weird but there were some memorable lines and some damn good acting but fucking hell I should have used that nine dollars for a couple gallons of gas or something. Just a movie. I even think up soundtracks for all the scenes. The scenes I can remember anyway. I can barely remember anything. My memory is like that milk you spilled on the floor and you don’t want to wipe it up, but if you don’t it will smell like death in your living room in a matter of hours. Trying to remember sections of my life is like bobbing for apples. It’s all one story, one sloppy amalgam of everything that’s happened bubbling in a leaking black cauldron.  Last night I was lying in bed, and I gave my mind specific instructions to find and review one scene, and one scene only, from not so long ago, and before I knew it I was drowning in the past, my memories using me as a punching bag, coming back in short painful bursts: left jab, right jab…

Roundhouse.

I couldn’t do it any longer and I needed to fall asleep. And I must have, at some point, because soon after that I woke up.

My memories seem kinder to me in the mornings, and kinder to me on paper. But in the end, no softer. It’s the difference between being beaten by a club or punctured by a needle. Call me a bastard, but I choose the needle, on the rare occasions when I am given the choice.

Just a quick shot, and it will all be over, my friends. A lethal injection. What’s in it? What does the murder? Just a little more of what you’ve already got.