Nothing quite fits as snugly as a marriage band or a noose. The only difference between the two is who’s putting it on you. (At least at the outset.)

Most honorable Reverend Andrew Rohamn, who in the dreary solitude of the white page has patiently endured my unforgiving polemic, the dire time is upon us, the moment where after taking a stab in the dark we exclaim “How now! a rat?” and realize we’ve killed Polonius behind the curtain.

In my short and undignified existence I have learned one thing about literature: it is always about death. For if love is the springboard of desire, and desire what curtails inaction, then they both dovetail with the void. And the void on its surface quivers with possibility, like self-annihilating virtual particles emerging from a zone of quantum fluctuation, or a field of hatchling Ministresses of Tasks preparing to burst from their oozing eggsacks like Alien facehuggers. The void is abundant with perturbation; it is alive and empty at the same time. It is that dark, liminal space between two impossibility sincere actions, like the footsteps of doubled Brittanys and Julies on opposite office floors.

But I digress.

My friend, there are only two things left after we are done with our thoroughgoing murder of everything insincere in this world. The one is a mirror image of the other, calling into existence its twin, that mustachioed evil Spock, that Tokyo Rose, that seducing siren…