It's been a couple of years now since I lost my other half.

I thought things were going okay until last night.

I'd moved in with my steady girlfriend, Micheala. She had a coupla kids, and though they were kinda wary of me at first, we got to where we bonded. Over movies, sports, whatever was on the tube. It felt good sitting around the couch at night, eating dinner, goofing off—our whole, little family. And things were pretty good with Mich, most of the time. When she wasn't drinking and stacking her prescription pills. I couldn't keep track of all the different places she was getting them. I finally gave up on trying to stop her from buying them. She swore—after the last time she'd punched the snot out of me—that she'd quit taking them, and especially quit drinking with them.

I know I've done some bad things in my life-especially when me and my other half were together—but I wasn't the type to hit a broad. But when she started in on her Substance Abuse Combo #5, she had a way of pushing my buttons. Sometimes, I had to shove her to get her off me.

It happened again that night, somewhere between her tenth and eleventh Bud Light. The beer and the pills started interacting in her system, and she started raging about everything. Friends, neighbors, coworkers….and finally, the kids and me. I promised myself I'd keep my cool this time. I just sat there in Tthe lawn chair on the balcony, nursing my second beer, trying to figure out a way to calm her down.

Finally, I went back up to our bedroom with what seemed like a brilliant idea.

"Honey," I said. "You've got to chill out. The neighbors are going to call the cops."

This led directly into another tirade which I had trouble following. Something about me always wanting to leave her and go to the neighbors. Something about the old guy next door always trying to poke her. Something about how I was a no-good, dirty rotten bum.

Okay, so I'm toning down the language. She called me a lot worse than a bum.

Then, she started hitting me.

First it was just slapping me in the face. Then she chased me down the stairs, dealing haphazard blows to my head. For all the fighting experience she claimed to have, she sure wasn't any good at beating up a bum like me.

Then she found my photo album.

I hadn't told Michaela too much about my past, trying to seem as normal as possible. But she knew about Ann, my ex-wife. She knew that Ann had jumped out of a building and killed herself.

Why she decided it was a good idea to smash my framed photo of Ann, I'll never know.

I held Mich down on the floor by her shoulders, screaming in her face. "Do you know what you've done, you psycho?!" That was when her oldest boy—about fifteen I guess—smashed my head with a rake. I stumbled around, breaking things in half rage, half confusion. That was when Mich shoved me off the second story balcony.

If there hadn't been an open dumpster below, filled with nice, scratchy insulation to break my fall, the tumble might have been a lot worse.

I don't know how long it was before I came to. I gotta tell you—when you got nothing and no one in the world who loves you, and just a part time job with no insurance-crawling down a dark street in a bad neighborhood with blood streaming from your noggin is a depressing proposition.

For months, I had thought my other half was dead. The relationship we shared was probably a good six times more toxic than the one I had with Mich. Even so, at that moment, I was never so relieved in my life to find out that the alien creature that Parker had brought back from space—was alive and kicking.

You might not think of the feeling of black slime covering your body, oozing in through your pores, your eyes, your ears and mouth—you might not think of that as a good feeling.

For me, it was like the mother I'd never known was swaddling me in a blanket.

And then true madness—the kind that Micheala's abusive brain would have balked at—awakened.