Response to "Swetlana"

Her last letter.

I am very sorry to hear about the death of your dear parents. If only their deaths were compensated by being run off the road into a cotton candy factory. Then, my dear, your loss would become a noble and mighty gain.

Well, my life was pretty uneventful. I, like you, never had parents. Both parents died the night of my birth in a mysterious fire. I was raised by a distant relation. I was locked in a dark basement for the majority of my childhood, and still have problems controlling my bowels, etc. These things weigh on me. Sometimes I wake, in the dark, and discover myself caked with my own excrement and with a scream upon my lips.

Having been raised in isolation, I never gained the ability to speak or see in light. My eyes are very bad, and voices make no sense to me.

When I escaped my dark cavern, I fled to the wilderness and broke into a library. There, I taught myself the rudiments of civilization and literature. Oh how I escaped into the worlds of my favorite authors. I would curl up in the basement, next to the boiler, and read in the pitch black of a long winter's night.

One day the janitor discovered me. I could do nothing but bludgeon the poor man to death and dispose of him in the furnace. Yes, I wept, for I had recently discovered the works of St. Augustine and De Sade, and knew my actions to be irredeemably evil.

I decided, upon stuffing the last limb into the roaring fire, that I should live my life as a good man. A decent man.

I fled once again to the most distant and inhospitable clime known to man: Ohio. There I became a godly man, respected in his community, prize of the economy. I revolutionized the manufacture of buttons. People sought me for my wisdom.

Then a goddamn filthy whore ruined it all. It's still hard to speak about.

The last few years I have been lonely but for the innocent flesh of young hitchhikers. I and my Econoline van wander the country, stopping only to loose my bowels and dispose of meat.

Are you my future wife? Or are you a Chemus Witch?