It’s me Paul.

I made the best tuna salad today. I diced red onions and Vlasic dill pickles. Lotsa garlic, lotsa mustard, lots of mayonnaise. Celery. Maybe some mild green peppers, maybe some paprika or cayenne. There’s other things I can’t tell you, like when to squeeze the lemon or maybe you should consider lime and mint with a sweet relish and a whiskey mustard. Cilantro? Capers baby. Barbecue rub? Tuna is the ultimate white meat. Any and all greens must be crunchy fresh. Either way, use chewey bread. The high fiber kind or rye. It’s about the texture. Ground pepper.

Toast it fer fuck’s sake.

Cheese, yep. Swiss if it’s decent. Otherwise, it’s a quality of life issue. Bring on the Velveeta.

I had a couple cold tall boy Cheladas. They went down smooth.

Mom called, I told her of my recent successes. We talked about the Democrats and how Dad is doing.

I don’t have a fence but I know where my property ends. There are markers. Sticks with faded ribbons. My backyard is the desert and I like that. I wake up at three a.m. and put on my slippers. Next thing I’m eating a Ding Dong a couple hundred yards from my back door. The wind helps me to imagine rain.

It never comes.

The moon lights the desert like it’s a sister.

The county tries to make me put up a fence that will blow down. They ask me if I don’t want to be protected and I tell them fences don’t stop bugs or snakes and fences blow down.

Other than that, it’s not so bad.

I’m in what you would call a modest house. Living and dining area with an open kitchen. Seperate living room with a gas fireplace. One and a half baths. One bedroom. I got some sort of wood laminate on the floor in the kitchen and a nice dark tile in the entry and around the dining area. A nice cream colored carpet that hides the dirt pretty well everywhere else but the bathrooms.

I like to vacuum.

Behind the water heater in the garage. There’s a door but it’s very narrow. When I first noticed it my mind pictured the word ‘slim’.

I like to sweep. I like gathering the soil into the pan. I like looking at what I’ve collected. I found some sort of shrimp once. Must have come from a Cup O’ Noodles. It’s the only possible explanation.

That’s what it was, a skinny door. Took me three or four months to realize it was even there. Even after I first clocked it, weeks went by.
I thought about it quite a lot. I dreamt of it. Then I forgot about it.

It came back around. This last Saturday afternoon I turned the knob.

My name is Paul.