I'm getting weak from not eating—half my food seems rotten or corrupted, but I know I have to keep my strength up. I don't want to appear too frail. This morning I think there were the start of webs across my face and chest when I woke up. I don’t want the spider thinking it is getting time to collect me and carry me down into some dark and terrible hole.

I wrote this to remind myself to not give in. To not be crazy. To find a way to fix whatever that bitch broke in my brain. I know it can be done, because just yesterday I read about how Elliot Stoffel had made a miraculous recovery and was going to return to teaching in the spring.

She has to fix me too.

But for now I need to get up. I lost track of the spider and then I realized he's moved to the wall behind me. He's waiting for something, but I don't understand what.

I hope I don't find out.

They took my eyes

I was driving across Virginia last month when I stopped in a town named Sutter’s Mill. The reason for my travels is largely unimportant—I work for a large publishing house planning and prepping sites for book signings and readings for several of their big authors when they have book tours in the eastern half of the United States. I’ve been doing it for five years now, which means I’ve logged a lot of hours on the road. And I thought I had seen just about every small town between the Mississippi and the Atlantic, but I was wrong.

The only reason I even took the road that led me to Sutter’s Mill is because of a bad highway detour combined with my GPS crapping out for a good fifty miles. As afternoon began turning into evening, I found myself desperate for a place to stay or at least get gas and some food. So I was relieved when I saw the weather-beaten sign proclaiming I was entering the Town of Sutter’s Mill.

It wasn’t a bad-looking town as far as small towns go. Like many small, Southern towns I had visited, it leaned heavily on old antebellum mansions and a town square that looked like it got ten times the care and attention of the streets and buildings just two blocks over. Yet whatever aspirations the people of Sutter’s Mill might have had toward tourism, my first impression was that they were out of luck.