A grim smile spreads across my lips.  Humidity has found its way back into 
the sweet Georgian air.  I felt like walking tonight.  All I do is drive, and it seemed 
quaint to take a stroll this evening and watch the sun set without the distraction of 
taillights and people who got their driver’s licenses from the K-Mart photo-mat.  
From time to time I like to slow the pace down.  It's very rare for me to enjoy a 
few moments in quiet contemplation of nothing.  Aaaaaaaaaaah, a left turn, and I'm 
home.  I'm not ready yet.  I think I'll stroll down the train tracks for a bit.  I move 
my wallet from my back pocket to my shirt pocket...can’t be too careful.  The real 
crime of this nation’s state is that you can never escape fear.  If there are a lot of 
people around, you have to keep an eye out for the pickpocket meshing with the 
crowd and sliding his greasy fingers in your wool trousers and molesting your 
money clip.  In the solitude of an empty field, or an Athens train track you have to 
keep an eye out for toughs pouncing on you from the wooded perimeters.  They 
won’t just take your money.... no, that’s the least of your worries if you are caught 
alone in this country.  Even a peaceful stroll to purge the days surging tidal waves 
of information can be met by an assault you’d wouldn’t admit to your own mother.  

	The hum of life is overwhelming.  The insect drone overwhelms the noises 
of industry, automobiles and people endlessly flapping their gums trying to 
communicate to one another.  I'm the type of guy that always wears shoes.  Even 
in the house, I prefer to have my feet covered.  It's a psychological comfort.  I 
have an intense hatred of filth.  You could say I'm a bit obsessive-compulsive, but 
that’s not entirely accurate.  I'm just a bit more paranoid than the average Joe, and 
while I don’t necessarily fear dirt and all of earth’s precarious enemies of 
cleanliness, I don’t make a habit of taking chances.  In this day and age a mosquito 
bite will put you in your mausoleum, and you’ll most likely bring everyone within a 
thirty-mile radius with you.  Today, I want to contradict myself.  Take a new path.  
They say the grass is greener on the other side, so I'm going to take an in-depth 
look.  As I slip my socks and shoes off I realize I am sitting four inches from an 
anthill.  See this is what I'm talking about.  Once you slow down and focus, you 
realize that the intrusion of other life forms is a constant and incessant reality.  I 
combat my disgust and stand.  The grass along the tracks is cool and comforting 
between my toes...this isn’t so bad.  I understand the hippies.  I just don’t agree 
with them.  Nature has its good points, but the intrinsic evils and filth of this ball of 
dirt we inhabit far outweigh any isolated pleasure.  A dog barks in the distance.  
It's a loud, vicious warning, more like a starving, depraved, junkyard dog than 
man’s best friend.  The barking seems to get closer.  Shit.  A bit further up the line 
I pass a chain-link fence.  Behind the fence is a large yard strewn with metallic 
waste; the cliché automobile parts, a refrigerator, and the remnants of what may 
have been a thriving scrap metal hobby.  In the center of the yard lies a shabby 
wooden cube, seemingly uninhabitable.  Then again, in this town “inhabitable” 
means an outhouse, and a place to stash your hound dog.  In Athens you can rent a 
two-bedroom place for 200$ a month...and that’s all it’s worth.  A screen hangs on 
one hinge from an open doorway.  It is pitch black inside the house, and from my 
position on the other side of the fence there is no sign of life.  There is a rustling in 
the yard...blades of grass being smashed into the earth...labored breath of hatred 
and hunger...demented obsession with destruction.  I scan the yard hoping to 
pinpoint the source and a flash of black across my peripheral vision sends me 
leaping backwards, landing in a large pool of stagnant water and mud.  A hound of 
roman mythological proportions lunges against the fence, bowing it two feet.  My 
adrenaline rushes to heart attack status as our eyes meet.  White, dense foam 
collects around the fangs of this beast and his solid, black eyes lust after the blood 
coursing through my veins.  His roar is deafening.  I stand up and place my face 
inches from the canine’s, perhaps to prove to myself that this creature is my 
inferior, trapped by a chain link fence, no thumbs to climb, no thought process to 
find a way through the fence.  I laugh internally at its ignorance.  “Nice puppy.  
Now go back over there and eat your own shit okay?”  My tone is mocking and 
drenched with superiority.  I pick up my hat and coat and continue up the line 
drenched to the bone in the filth of the stagnant pool.  Just goes to show ‘ya, when 
you try something new it bites you in ass, gnarling razor teeth ripping at the flesh 
of comfort.

	“It's time to head home.” I think to myself.  I cut through the trees, and 
down the side of someone’s house, and emerge on Cleveland Ave.  I slip the old 
feet back into their protective sheaths and trek the two blocks back to my house.  

“Damn, I should have left the porch light on.”  I fumble for my keys, and poke at 
the lock with the key, desperately trying to make a connection.  “Yes, thank 
you...fucking bastard.”  A pull of the string, and the living room is illuminated with 
weak yellow light.  I plop down on the couch and light a cigarette.  Time for a 
shot.  I pull a silver flask from my coat pocket and slide a belt of gin down the old 
gullet.  The image of the guard dog dances through my mind again, and I laugh 
internally at its ignorant viciousness.  I finish my cigarette and put it out in a 
textured crystal ashtray.

	“Much, much better.”  A hot shower seems to always cure whatever ails 
me.  It, in the very least, turns the dial one setting closer to ‘happy.’  As I towel 
off, I glance in the mirror.  My flesh seems lighter today, paler in color, translucent 
somehow.  Fucking fluorescent lights play tricks on my eyes all the time.  I feel a 
million times better after washing the muck and filth from my body.  “Landing in 
that stagnant puddle was truly a work of incredible dexterity,” I think to myself, 
wallowing in my sea of sarcasm, “nicely done henry, nicely done.”  
Scratchscratchscratch...my flesh feels like it is crawling.  A shudder runs through 
my body, as I think of that pool of filth...disgusting.  As I walk out of the 
bathroom, I am confronted by the obnoxious ring of the telephone, sounding its 
warning bells, “BEWARE BEWARE SOMEONE WANTS SOMETHING FROM 
YOU!!!!!.”  I resolve, as always, not to answer it.  If it’s important, they’ll leave a 
message.  If they don’t leave a message, I probably didn’t want to talk to them in 
the first place.  I plop down on the couch again and take another shot from the 
flask.  Gin...lovelylovely substance.  Christ!  I itch all over my body.  I dig my nails 
into my arms and back and through my trousers giving the temporary relief that a 
properly applied fingernail can, but as soon as I scratch somewhere else, the itch 
returns in the forgotten area.  Damn, I think that water gave me the horrors.  After 
all, that’s how you get filthy conditions like tapeworms, and other vile parasitic 
nightmares.  Wee bastards just set up camp in your body oozing their way in 
through your pores molesting the gentle balance of you entire organic system.  
Feels like something’s crawling around under my skin.  The flesh just below the 
surface of my skin burns white-hot and insatiable, as if it was slowly being 
dissolved by an acidic agent.  I envision a fly regurgitating o its meal, dissolving it 
into fluid to be sucked into its belly.  I can’t distract my mind; the burning is 
intensifying and spreading.  I wonder if I have any calamine lotion around here...

I leap to my feet in disbelief.  Did I just see the skin on my forearm ripple?  Out of 
the corner of my eye I see it again, a wave of flesh originating at my bicep and 
rolling down to my hand and disappearing.  Then I see it on my left arm.  Then 
both arms...then my leg...waves of my flesh racing each other up and down my 
arms and disappearing.  I tear my clothes off and run into the bathroom.  My chest 
and neck and face are alive with movement.  I can see the dark bodies of the 
invaders just under the surface of my skin, like a colony of leeches using my flesh 
as a subway system traversing my body up and down back and forth.  My knees 
buckle under the shock of what I see, and the burning drives me to the floor 
convulsion in agonizing crimson pain.  I howl as a lycanthrope bays at the moon 
that transforms its very cellular structure.  Paralysis has me in its grip, locked in the 
fetal position screaming at the sensation of hundreds of these creatures devouring 
the deep layers of my epidermis growing gradually, painfully closer to the surface.  
They are chewing their way to freedom.  Dissolving my flesh as they climbed 
toward the outside world.  My adrenal glands pull my comatose mind from its 
advanced state of shock and I begin digging at the creatures ripping large red 
stripes in my flesh.  The creatures are undeterred and simply glide around my 
prodding fingers and go about their destructive dance.  As a last ditch effort to 
hold onto sanity I begin kneading my flesh, corralling these beasts.  Starting 
around my chest, forcing them to my arms, and lower--lower, pressing their soft, 
malleable, slug-like bodies into my hands.  They're trapped now.  My fingertips dig 
into my flesh guiding the parasite slowly, agonizingly through the surface of my 
skin.  I knead my skin with such force that the creature is forced up and out 
shredding my flesh like latex paper mache`.  Magnificent, crimson streams gush 
from the penetration--splashing my face and chest, marking the walls and the 
couch.  I come face to face with this creature.  Its three-inch body looks as if the 
creature could be directly related to a leech, but it’s rapidity of movement and 
agility reeks of sea creature origination.  The creature has no visible ocular 
faculties, but twists its body, struggling against my grip.  Struggling to defend its 
parasitic life from being violently purged from its newfound host.  My grip on the 
creature grows--

--tighter--tighter--tighter--

Veins bulge against the white blood-soaked surface of my arm.  The creature 
bursts oozing its black essence like a jelly filled condom.  One after the other, at 
times two or three simultaneously, I rupture their gelatinous forms, bursting their 
outer covering, releasing their entrails in repulsive, splattering, explosions.  
Overandoverandoverandover until the last of them is gone.  A gasp escapes my 
lips, my last expression of energy.  My glazed, thoughtless, lobotomized eyes 
peruse the shredded wasteland of my flesh.   Ribbons of tissue dangle from bone 
and muscle clinging by threads of half-coagulated blood and tendons to my body.  
The dim light of the living room begins to fade.  I feel no pain.  I am far beyond the 
sensation of pain.  My nervous system lies bare, stinging unprotected nerves, and 
all I feel is bliss.  Glorious release, free-floating release from the mangled flesh 
splayed across the floor hanging loosely from my body.  A grim smile spreads 
across my lips again.  I drift of into death comforted by insanity and the opiate of 
shock.




                          “I got all of them...
                                   I got all of them...
                                           I got all of them...
                                                  I got all of them...
    

                                                                                 I got all of them....”