Self-inflicted. What I heard the night it rained so hard and that first night you IM’d me from California saying that your father was a dick, your mother crying over the simple secrets held and how you drove the hours home through the valley to your apartment, to that bottle of Jack Daniels waiting on your desk still half full. Between Scylla and Charybdis.

Echoes of “liar, liar...” echoing from the embers of children’s mouths two floors down.

And when I left the computer to have a cigarette, I came back to a screen cluttered with “Did I lose you?” “Are you gone?”

Bio: C. C. Russell