• The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘The Fugue’ ii. One night, I lay on the couch reading – just as I’d done many other nights. Wolf was curled in the chair opposite me, just as she usually was. Then the thought popped in my head to kill her. I saw it clearly: I’d rip her head off. The thought was beyond reprehensible, beyond unconscionable, beyond anything I’d known before, and it terrified me to think that I could be capable of thinking it. I sat up, told myself there was no way I was going to do that, but the violence and aberration of the thought remained, washed over me in a way that I couldn’t…

  • The Other Me

    The Other Me

    ‘The Fugue’ i. When I seriously began writing, I just as seriously believed that by the age of thirty I would’ve made it. I didn’t have the same pretensions (or delusions) I had as a kid that I would have had a best-seller, but I thought writing would’ve forged a career for me. I never imagined I would still be living in my parents’ house, living in a carefully maintained safe environment, and not having accomplished very much. They say with puppies never to discipline them by smacking them on the muzzle because they become ‘hand shy’, and when you go to pat them on the head they’ll shy away…