Halfway to the crisis bed, after he’d already convinced himself that the driver was an alien and his support person had been duped into helping him be kidnapped, he made his first attempt at escape, only to be thwarted by the automatic child-safety locks. 

He pounded on the window once or twice, but not hard enough to break it, remembering the gash and the subsequent sutures his last such action had netted him.

He was pretty sure he’d starve to death before they’d consider…

All the rats say it’s not a race, though it’s hard to tell, what with all of them doing their best to out-rat each other, jacking up their prices precipitously overnight almost every night, regardless of any theories of supply and demand.

And it’s even more difficult to figure out how they remain so successful when every morning the streets are littered with dozens of corpses and near-corpses, all fallen victim to the same tired endorsements of a proven poison, each one a shriveled…

He goes to Sweet Scoops over on the green because he believes that the ice cream is colder there than over at Tim & Doug’s by The Pick And Shovel, and it must be that others believe it, too, because the business there is always brisk, the lines twice as long, even on rainy days, even on Tuesdays or days it’s just too damned hot to give a second thought about where the ice cream comes from as long as it’s frozen and sweet.

 It never occurs to him that maybe people go there just…

There’s little to be done that isn’t already being done to help him, so everybody just keeps doing what they’ve been doing and he just goes right on being crazy. He keeps telling them he knows who’s dying; who’s going to die soon, who’s going to linger, and how they’re all going to go. He tells them this with such certainty that, this time, even those who have known him for years, who have heard his forecasts over and over again since he was just a crazy child, begin to believe him; begin to…

No matter what he points to, asking his kid what it is, the answer’s always the same.

 “What’s this?” he asks.

 “Pee dog,” says the son.

 “I think you’re a pee dog,” he teases, after his son says pee dog for about the millionth time.

 Later, when it’s time for lunch, they unpack a stack of pee dog sandwiches and a thermos full of pee dog soup, open up a couple pee dog Snapples and have at it in real pee dog style, munching and slurping…

He gets drunk and climbs onto the back of a four-wheeler, flies through the air after the thing flips end-over-end into a cowpond, delivers him onto its rocky edge with a shattered kneecap peeking through deeply gashed flesh. Two days later he's headed for surgery, badly infected, the doctors suspecting that flesh-eating bacteria might consume the leg, pump itself through his system, ruining what's left of his meager life.

He tells Admitting what they already know: he's an alcoholic.…