It’s cold, it’s fuzzy; it’s pain. My head hurts. Though that’d be an understatement.

  Whole body hurts. But the head especially. It simmers — shrills — echoes — through — and through.

  I contempte opening my burning eyes. Maybe the darkness will extinguish the fmes. Marriage, really?

  I’m just too zy for marriage, and I know it’s not a dream since I never see dreams.

  Yeah, right, I’ll just y here motionlessly and pretend I’m dead asleep, and the problems will wash away from my lone isnd, from my self-imposed tomb, somewhat. I’ll pretend what I once considered a fantasy remains a fantasy somehow.

  Peace gets disrupted when I hear something. Someone scurrying around my clothes.

  Then I hear the crinkling sound of corrugated cardboard. What can it be but the pizza box I ordered yet was too zy to even open and preferred to just starve yesterday?

  “Mmm~ mm~ mm~” the instigator muses, then munches, gobbles the pepperoni down like a megalosaurus on shrooms.

  Then a gulp.

  Then silence.

  Then:

  “WHAT CHEESE THIS?” the perpetrator shouts in all caps, makes sure to follow with a typo, “THIS IS THE BEST! THE BEST I’VE TASTED IN MI LIFE!”

  Fuck my life.

  This is not happening for real now, is it? I hope I have gone mad.

  Without a shadow of doubt, it must be that that I’m that mad, and not that what this is!

  She eats like an animal, chirps, croaks and ribbids. Oh but it becomes worse.

  I hear slurps and swallows, the ones one would hear on an orange site.

  I stand. Parting my eyes, I face the windows.

  Me a robot, I open up the curtains and happily let the bare sunlight blind me. What a good day it is today. Only if I could unhear things too.

  I run my eyes through the almost carless road and a few two-three-floor apartments id across the very street, consumed in forestry. The road curves and descends along the hill, at the bottom of which is a rundown school building.

  There, many children of many colors and varying ages py in student uniforms. Though not that many. After all, this is but a rural area of a rural city. Worcester. Not the Worcester of Engnd, no, but the Worcester of Massachusetts, America.

  I part the double windows and let the breeze wipe the depravity out. It’s kind of cold despite the month. Not jacket weather, but not exactly shirt weather either.

  I’m fine, I guess. It’s kind of easy to get used to shitty weather when everything else is shitty also. And so I wait till the starving abomination finishes on her delicacy.

  And she does, with a st monstrous gulp and a long ahh of relief, surprisingly fast at that.

  At the time it’d take me to eat half of the half, she's devoured it all. Like all all, hasn’t she?

  Hel impressive, considering her short frame from my vague memories.

  Then she burps, belches, burps. She’s not going to throw up in my room, is she?

  Anything but that. I am not a picky person. So please.

  …I watch the birds loiter in the cloudy skies. An eagle passes above the faraway hills and mountains carpeted in maples, pines, oaks, and hemlocks, beyond which a city lies.

  Water falls like a waterfall.

  Right. No shit. Water does that.

  The drops are rge and drizzly, the drips rexing on the mind, dizzying.

  I lift my bck pants up and fix the sleeves of my bck shirt. I sigh. Then again.

  Then again, the time to face reality has come.

  I turn, forcing a kind smile, my best attempt at concealing the fact that I’m dead inside.

  I gaze at her dead figure lying on the swarm of tissues I’ve accumuted through weeks.

  The first thing catching my attention are her menacingly red eyes with an orange tint.

  They, her wide eyes, stare at my favorite ceiling, focusless.

  Saliva drools down from her small mouth to her pointy chin.

  I can’t believe with that gigantic head of hers, she couldn’t predict so much cheese at once would impale her.

  Judging from her ginormous roundy ears with pink centers and white corners and her talent for stealing my food and dying in my room, she seems to be a half-mouse half-human?

  A ratgirl? A rat? A rat.

  Stepping closer, I bend and brush the silvery strands away, checking her pulse on her thin, pale little neck.

  She breathes shallowly through her celestial nose. Alive, somewhat.

  If she dies, she dies. There’s no saving a person who chokes on pizza like it’s a sacrament. How ridiculous.

  Speaking of… it’d be pretty awkward if she wakes up to this whole mess. A general cleaning, huh.

  Let’s make the best possible first impression on my ratwife.

  Since, well, I remember divorce means death. Though I doubt this shorty can as much as lift a finger on me.

  However, looking at the pendant with a pinkish heart crystal hanging above her ft chest and at her bizarre white uniform with golden paddings, she is as magical as one can imagine.

  So I imagine she can pretty much turn me into an insect and eat me like the rat she is.

  Finally, I gnce at her exposed, shuddering legs, sighing to myself. I grasp my giant cottony bnket and y it on her after rolling her up with a light push like wrapping a burrito.

  Then I begin with cleaning. Wraps, tissues, socks, wear, underwear, cartons, food, containers, hair, receipts, bottles, notes; crumbs, lint, whatever.

  About ten minutes ter, my small room is cleaned well enough.

  It still stinks. But I did my best. What’s left is vacuuming and some mopping.

  I sit on my bed, waiting for her to wake so I can negotiate a divorce.

  While at that, I glimpse at my working desk, at many books on the shelves and the dusted notebook. My room is just that simple.

  Some people idolize celebrities or nonexistent anime characters and pster their images on the walls. I ck any of that grandeur.

  Of any peculiarities, there’s a guitar beside my dresser that I haven’t touched in a while.

  By its side is a stained mirror. My dark bearishly brownish-bckish hair is just as messy as always, the strands flinging everywhere dancing dancing in the mellow breeze fluting in from out the wild.

  The face is ft and somewhat fat. Though the chin is sharp and the hazel eyes are handsome, or at least that’s what I’ve been told.

  Body's in okay shape, albeit the muscles are gone from all the passivity.

  I breathe deeply, in and out. Have a grab at my gsses lying on the stool beside the bed.

  “I know you’re awake,” I say. I poke her tummy with a toe. “What’s the point?”

  She flinches, winces, widens her eyes, smiling motherfuckingly.

  She points at me sharp from under my feet. “I’ll give you a seventi!”

  The fuck that supposed to mean? Did she just… Amazing.

  Amazing how I’m getting reviews after twenti minutes of marriage.