The Tour(ette's) Guide

This is my sixteenth glass of orange juice, and the sixteenth glass that has shattered before I can lift it to my mouth. These dry and quivering lips have grown impatient and are threatening to spew expletives in Portuguese.

I am of course naked, my skin sticky sweet and matted with pulp. The walls are on fire, as they should be, my frustration turning dragon. There is a woman in here- I am never alone- but she is fully clothed in Detroit Derby Dolls gear and stands at a modest seven inches tall.

I turn to her and sigh, “Are you the one doing this to me?”

She cackles like a demon, her bellow cutting through the smoke. “Who the fuck do you think I am? That chick from The Hunger Games? Legolas? Cupid? Any old coot with a bow and arrow?”

“I think you are some kind of evil bitch, and I would appreciate it if you crawled up my ass now.”

She languidly sits at the edge of the coffee table and dangles her bruised legs in a violently playful rhythm. “Hmmm,” she muses. “Back where I came from?”

“Back where you came from,” I hiss, nodding imperceptibly.

The South wall crumbles from the flames, thousands of neon embers billowing up and settling into constellations above us. I find myself standing, with a new glass of juice in one hand, the other one flailing behind me, trying to grab her. She is suddenly normal size, no bigger than that, a freakish giant, squatting behind me and working her forearm into my anus.

A disturbingly unreal scream escapes me in the form of a cacophony of cuckoo clocks chiming all at once. . . underwater. The glass again shatters and I use both hands in a poor attempt to extract her from inside me.

Her voice smashes into my earholes: “HOW FAR WE HAVE COME, HOW FAR WE CAN GO, I'M IN THIS SHIT, UP TO MY ELBOW.”

And she's in. The world feels perfect again, clean, delineated by straight lines and Febreeze.

I'm sitting on the couch, watching the fireplace and thinking that maybe this was the most symmetrical and pleasing wood stacking job I've ever accomplished. The fire seems content with its balance. The pictures of my eight children smile back at me, so evenly spaced, so full of goodness. I resist the urge to rearrange them in alphabetical order. The first week of the month is always by age, the second by melatonin concentration, the third by income, and not until next week do they line up by name.

I slowly swallow the orange juice, wishing I had a straw to protect my teeth from the acid. When I belch, it's her laughing. She wants me to check the lock on the door. She wants me to shout random words. She wants me to blink and blink and blink and blink. She wants me to execute the tic where I rub my eyebrows until they bleed.

“COCKSUCKER! TERRIFIC PIZZA! COCKSUCKER!” I yell, jumping from the couch to the rug. I know that she's satisfied, somewhere in there. She's satisfied as hell and she has a cool grip on my thalamus.