The weekend seems to last forever. I wonder briefly if it's winter break, but that isn't for another couple of weeks. As I sit on the sofa downstairs, drawing hundreds of tiny circles, I periodically make glances out the window. What am I looking for? For snow, I guess. It should have snowed at least once by now.

My uncle is away all of Sunday and won't be back until next weekend. That's fine. It just means I get the house to myself. I can do whatever I want. I can sit up in the attic, looking out the window every thirty seconds while drawing thousands of triangles. What a fun, safe way to spend a day.

I decide to call up Frankie to tell her that everything's been sorted out and that I'm perfectly fine now. After all, that's the truth. I scavenge my cell phone, dial her number, and wait without breathing until it goes to voicemail. I hang up, dial again, and leave a message. I sit for a couple minutes, trying to remember the message I just left. I decide it was probably perfectly articulate and go back to drawing.

Creak. This is an old house. It makes a lot of noise because that's what old houses do.

Creak. Funny thing: when the temperature drops suddenly, all the boards that makes up a house contract, producing creaking and bumping sounds. Oftentimes, we perceive these as someone sneaking through a house.

Bump. How many triangles am I on? This is the kind of challenge you do just for the sake of a challenge. When you have a concrete, simple goal, it becomes easy to work very diligently at it.

Bump. I wonder what Frankie's up to? She probably can't enjoy herself too much, worrying about me. Hopefully my message will clear things up. What's the difference between crocodiles and alligators again? I don't know why I just thought of this, but it's something that's always bugged me.

Bump. I don't want to die.

I jump to my feet and make a mad dash for the unused furniture in the corner, scrabbling behind it and curling up into the smallest ball I can.

I wait and listen. As he gets closer, the bumps and thumps grow louder and louder, as though from a monster much larger than Bloo. I flinch as the door swings open.

"Don't even try, Mac." I bare my teeth at the sound of his voice. "I know exactly where you are. I can see you. Get up."

I slowly rise, studying him carefully. As I feared, he's as good as new.

"You're the monster here, you know that?" He puts his hands on his hips and begins to move towards me. "I killed your parents by accident, and now you kill me on purpose? Do you really think that's justified? Do you really think you're the good guy here?"

I want to answer him, but I'm not sure he'd be able to hear me over the inexplicable sound of discordant violins now filling the room. "I was your closest friend in the world," he went on, "and you killed me. How fucked in the head do you have to be to do a thing like that?"

"I killed you," I repeat hollowly. "You're supposed to be dead."

He makes a big show of rotating and examining his arms while twisting around to look at his back. "I seem to be perfectly fine."

"Then how do I kill you?!"

He laughs. "Oh, what a great question! Let me just give you detailed instructions on how to permanently erase me from existence, since we're such good friends like that. It's only fair for me to tell you, now, isn't it?"

Without warning, I double over and begin to vomit. He laughs even harder than before.

"Seriously, though." As he begins drifting towards me, the violin noises grow louder. "When you killed me, I shrunk to a single point in space and time. Everything suddenly made sense, all at once. I could see my entire mind, all the points of connection to that tiny spark of life inside me—and I could see your mind, Mac. I know what I am, and I know what you are."

For a moment, it seems like he's circling me. Then I realize it's not him, but the room which is spinning. Everything behind him fades to near-complete darkness, unimportant abstractions of wherever it is we're supposed to be.

"Do you want to know what _really_ happened to your parents, Mac?"

"You're just going to lie like you always do."

"A lie would mean showing you more mercy than you deserve. Try to think. I saw what you saw of that day—me lifting that latch and the mess of steel cable knocking your parents into the sea. There's one crucial detail you missed, though."

The spinning stops and a glistening layer of bright black spread across the entire attic. I slide backwards on the frictionless floor, hoping desperately to distance myself from Bloo, but I can still hear his voice.

"Opening the latch made a little sound which your parents would have noticed. That alone doesn't mean anything until you realize that there were two latches. Do you understand what that means, Mac?"

I slither down the stairs, taking in the disorienting sight of paintings and photos melting and trickling down the walls as the direction of gravity steadily rotates. Bloo drifts down from the ceiling, his eyes alight with the fires of Hell.

"I'll tell you what it means. It means you killed them just as much as I did. What's more, you went for one latch at exactly the same time I went for the other. We only had a second to act and we both did the same thing."

I don't want to believe him, but in a flash, I remember it all exactly as he described. Surely this has to be yet another part of my hallucination, a trick to make me fall into despair—as though I'm not already there.

"You tricked me," I say through a mouth that keeps bouncing all over the room. "You wanted them dead right from the start."

"If that's true, then so did you. I still haven't told you the worst part."

My stomach sinks. In the shadows, I think I see flashes of monsters: a tall, slender red one; a huge purple one with giant gnashing teeth and horns; one with wild green hair and a long, crooked beak. They chant softly but make no moves towards me.

Some unseen force sucks away at the edges of my peripheral vision, draining them away until I can only look straight ahead. I can't move at all. Suddenly the mirror is in front of me and my stomach tries to jump out through my mouth. The tape slowly unwinds, revealing a little bit of glass at a time, slithering away. Suddenly I see it all, clear and terrible.

There, in the mirror before me, stands Bloo.

"The worst part, Mac, is that I'm you. I always have been."

My skin feels rubbery and diseased, crawling with foreign bodies. My teeth feel like shards of glass stuck in my gums and my eyes seem to weigh a hundred pounds each.

"I'm the part of you that killed your parents, but I'm also so much more. I'm all the little things, like when you're riding in a car with a small animal and you get the urge to throw it out the window. When you're holding something heavy and blunt and you feel this sudden itch telling you to smash someone's skull with it, that's me."

Everything in the mirror is blurred and rippling except for Bloo. As his mouth moves, I can feel my own copying it exactly. "You remember when you were fourteen and you added that girl on Facebook just so you could jack off to the pictures she took in a bikini? What about when you were eleven and you first figured out how to masturbate? I dined like a king on your shame. Everything wrong you've ever done fed into me—every lie, everyone you've ever hurt, everything you did that hurt you. I'm all of your insecurities, your fears, your secret desires, and all of your hatred wrapped up in one little blue bundle."

My face felt numb and a burning, tingling sensation spread across the rest of my body. "I want to go back," I say without meaning to.

"Back where?"

"I don't know." Everything is static and white noise. I think I hear screaming from somewhere very far away but I can't be sure.

"I'll tell you where. You want to go back to the womb. You never had a chance to grow out of your emotional dependence on your parents because you killed them, and now you want nothing more than to crawl back up into your mother's womb."

I shake my head even as my lips form the words. "You know it's true just the same as I do. If I'm a monster, than so are you. Frankie has only the slightest idea of how sick you are and she still won't want to see you again. She acted nice because she didn't want you to get pissed off and attack her, but now that she's away from you, she'll make up any excuse to keep you away. So you know what? Don't even bother trying to fix yourself. Don't think you can ever be normal. Just run away and go back."

The weight is lifted and I shoot up to a standing position. There is color and light again, but everything is still imaginary and twisted. I wrench my gaze from the mirror and dash towards the door, swinging it open so hard it crashes against the doorstop.

I keep running, not looking back, not thinking about where I just was or what just happened. The house may not be safe, but I can go to the shed. There are cobwebs everywhere, spiders crawling across my face, but I can't tell which ones are imaginary and which ones keep biting me so I don't bother brushing them off.

I stumble through branches, twisting and jerking around, dimly aware of small cuts forming on my limbs as push through thorns. Something small and bark-covered slaps my face; everything is a blur of sound and motion as I keep going anywhere but back. I know I'll get there if I just keep moving.

How long do I wander the brush? Hours, days, years, seconds. It must be getting dark by now but this is no obstacle. The air warps and I burst out into the world of light, radiant infrared shooting from every surface, shooting through my eyes and into my brain. The fringes of the clearing are filled with twisted, gnarled branches. Everything is curved.

I hopscotch across tiny, precariously dim patches of light on the ground, the absolute quantum collapse of infinite possibilities and total resolution of cause and effect, at least with regard to where my feet will touch the ground. I almost fall in my disoriented state but I don't because I wasn't going to.

I am shocked and violently alarmed as something big and flat smacks my face. I have just run headlong into the wall of the shed. Broken glass cuts me. I get splinters but those are part of me now so I have to love them. The sky twists and groans like a dying animal, purplish and sickly. My hands touch the wall of the shed and the whole thing ripples like cool water. I balance myself carefully, moving left, left, left—there's the corner! Around, find the wall again, left, left, left… there is a lot of blood now but it is glistening rainbow colors so that's probably okay.

Soon I am inside and it is time for the stairs. I scream and scramble towards them. Where is Bloo? I can't think about him. Stop. I move up the stairs, crawling, my mouth open as I taste the stale, dusty air. The ground becomes flat (albeit rough and splintery) and I am in an all black flashing room where I roll up into a ball and shake on the ground for a few years.

My stomach informs me that the elevator has stopped even though I'm not on an elevator. Angrily, I lunge for the box that has the snake in it. I scream as I open and it see a snake hissing at me. I was not expecting that. My eyes roll up into my head and I go blind as the snake's scales fuse to my skin, my spine jerking from side to side like a trout. I am a trout. I swim downstream.

The trail rescues me and tugs me along. There is a rope tied around my ankles and I can't move because I weigh a million pounds, but I'm in a hurry so I run as fast as I possibly can. Two seconds later I am out of the forest, I think, though "forest" means "bright colors, dust, light, sneeze" and those words mean nothing because I made them up, just now. Therefore I can't be sure I'm out of the forest, even though I know I am.

I drive down the street using my legs as a car. Soon I roll up to the doctor, which is great, because for the love of God I am bleeding everywhere right now. Also, the snake keeps hissing and wriggling around, which sucks.

The doctor and I spend a few days getting to know each other by screaming repeatedly. I'm in a hurry, though, so I ask him to fix me up. Unfortunately, it comes out as "Oh God what happened to you?"

I try to drop the snake so I can drive this crazy guy to the hospital without getting shot, but as I fumble with the intense chemical knots between my hands and the scaly snakeskin, there is a sudden, loud crack like a car backfiring, and the snake jerks mightily, knocking me backwards a few steps. The doctor yawns and lies down. What the hell? I think. Is he taking a nap on the job?

He sighs contentedly from the asphalt. Rainbows flow from his supine form, trickling along the rough little contours of the road. "Thank you so much," he says with a smile. "I love you."

I try to tell him to get his ass up so he can help me, but my words come out as "Oh god, I'm hallucinating and I think I know what just happened and I'm so sorry." How did I bungle up the sentence that badly? What does that even mean? I shrug it off.

Something tells me the bad colors are coming, so I run through the good colors (which I think are green and red, maybe) back into the thing that I identified a forest earlier. Now, however, it's starting to look more like a carnival where all the games are tentacles and all the people are spiders. Millions and millions of spiders crawl all over my body, carrying me back towards the shed, dragging me through broken glass. I really need to clean that up at some point.

I stumble weakly inside, surrounded by a sublime glow that pervades the universe but is more visible here than anywhere else. My whole body shakes as I fall to my knees, causing an earthquake. Dust swirls around me, the nature of reality unfolds and flattens like a cardboard box, God shoots beams through my eyes and I become everything.

Suddenly I hear the cruel laughter of angels, angels who see Hell's prisoners climbing massive black spires which reach into heaven, and knock them back down. They laugh at me as Bloo laughs at me, they laugh at the civilizations plastered on the walls of the shed cascading down in avalanches of dust. Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. A beam of light descends from reality's center and reaches into my soul; my eyes light up as vibrating waves in space and time coalesce into two figures standing before me.

"You've grown so much." I weep with joy as I look into the smiling faces of my mother and father, perfect and unblemished by death. All around us, twelve foot tall angels with hollow eye sockets weep blood and dance in slow circles.

"It's so beautiful here in Heaven," adds my father. I hear bells from somewhere very far away. "We're so proud of you."

"But…" I swallow, and gravity wobbles unsteadily. "…but I killed you."

My mother shakes her head. "Bloo killed us. It was his fault all along."

"But Bloo is me."

"No, he isn't. You have an immortal soul, wonderful and pure, incapable of evil. It's a part of you that will always be, a part that Bloo can never touch. That soul is the _real_ you."

Everything is spinning, or maybe it was always spinning and now it feels like it's spinning because it's standing perfectly still. Suddenly my mother stands over me and I realize how tall she is. She leans down, lifts me up, and embraces me. I'm a child again. "I miss you both so much," I say.

"We miss you too, son," says my father. "Heaven isn't Haven without you."

"Come to Heaven with us," adds my mother.

Tears flow freely down my face, falling down a bottomless pit that opens out into parallel universes. Their love spills out into space, melting away the hard edges of matter. Dense life vibrates throughout my being. Infinite truth is contained within this moment. This is the time for me to know my purpose. "Is that really what you both want?" I ask. They look at one another and then back at me. They nod.

Suddenly, everything is draining away, my blood slipping into cracks between strange sideways directions. I hear a high whistling sound, a forlorn song sung from the Garden of Eden as the last human eyes to see it fade to grey. The spinning is too much. I feel an icy hot rush numbing my head as my parents whisper their final goodbye for now:

"Please hurry."

Everything collapses. I dive headlong into blackness.

I'm lying on the ground in the fetal position. The world is real, the room is real, I am real. Everything stands out so clearly that I could almost believe I'm in Heaven. The walls clean and crisp, high definition. My vision goes beyond 20/20, into layers of absolute meaning, folds of divine truth secreted between wrinkles in the air. Liquid light trickles outward across every surface, shimmering and perfect, like the tears of angels spreading over all of creation. Even though my clothes are soaked in blood I'm and in intense, shooting pain all over, even though I think I probably shot someone, I feel better than I've ever felt. I'm on my way.

I know it won't last. I have to act soon, before Bloo returns to drag me back down to Hell.

As I move through space, I marvel at the fluidity of my stride. I can smell the atoms of my body vibrating, separated by great spans of nothing. Everything is clarity and light. Every mote of dust in the shed is true; every inch of the floor has been, is, and will be. I arrive at the place where I know the gun is—which is to say the place arrives at me.

As I pull it down, it is not a snake, but a gun. A gun is a thing; it has a shape; it performs a function; it is what it is by any name. The idea and the thing are one, and they are both very real.

I move to the chair. The chair is a chair is a chair. This is not a place for uncertainty. Everything is everything. I exist. Heaven exists. I sit down.

I know I can't hesitate, so I don't. The barrel of the gun goes in my mouth. Outside, birds sing to celebrate whatever time of day it is. My hand trembles as I reach down, feeling for the trigger. I close my eyes, picture my parents' smiling faces, and pull.

I'll see you soon.