On a seething summer night, I sometimes look out my bedroom window and stare at the dark sky.

The emptiness, a void that swallows me, cuts me in half, and I face the swirling future that merges with the broken now, and with a slight turn of my head, I see the monstrous past that melted long ago in the unforgiving heat.

My skull, anointed with existential conundrums, swings back and forth like Poe’s pendulum above the ominous pit and soon, Janus appears, a phantom boy from far away.

“I remember you,” I mutter to the chimerical young man, a flimsy, diaphanous blur I barely recognize.

But I smell his sin, the foul, ferocious odor of boiled flesh, crushed bones, and gushing blood.

His ghostly voice is still soft and silky, and as sweet as Mother’s homemade apple pie with a swirl of whipped cream.

“Mother hasn’t come to see me,” he whispers interminably, oblivious of his angel dust saturated past and a cornucopia of overflowing psychosis.

His melodious voice is as velvety as the psithurism of the leaves.

He sits inside a cell in Bellevue and can’t recall how he hurled boiling water in Mother’s face, battered her head with a killer bat, and flung her out the window.

He waits for Mother in his eternal room of oblivion, while I hold the horrific memories, on a seething summer night like this, when I stare at the dark sky, and taste the toxic emptiness, and plummet into the void.