I'm still trying to find a way out of the world which is inside my uncle's head or my uncle's head is the world. If the latter is the case...then there is no stepping off and all auricle glass doors [locked but capable of being remotely decoded with sticky fingers] will only lead to endless blank or less. You blic? You bleak? It all started even though nothing really starts at all, just habits and empty gestures to simulate depth and spatial perception, around the time that I and my stepfather were growing too far away in the corners in our little brown house by a cardboard colored bay not as in hay is for horses. He was worried that I wasn't seeing straight or my eyes my precious eyes were made of one-way glass or that I had disowned my name without so much as a blush or that I was too late to crawl and later to walk. Rote it. Around the time that the doctors pronounced me as leaning too far this way or that, or my arm waving at night was encouraging voices from the ground, something we all tried to ignore like cherry pits and smelly graves under the nearest hill. It kept revolving around us. Mother had already flipped her wig and became a bald spirit according to the books. Still, I always wished to be rocked to sleep. So after the last doctor said "I don't believe in labels but the boy needs to put on some weight," my uncle, a veteran of some apocalyptic tangerine war kidnapped me as an act of courtesy and took me to his house with windows that only looked out. Or as Uncle liked to say "AURBERE" which could taste like OVER HERE. And one day, Uncle was lecturing me again and again about the foggy mentality of war and how we are all victims in a mist, he took an army issued revolver and aimed it inside his mouth. He said "You will now be master of the house which is everything." The blast made him transparent and ever since I've been looking at the world through the windows of his house which are now mine but I'm afraid of unlocking doors and stepping outside because since I've inherited everything how can I walk away from it as if it were never mein? See? sic. Say something.

Alessandra Hogan, "a glimpse," charcoal.            

Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been published in Elimae, Smokelong Quarterly, This Zine Will Change Your Life, Blaze Vox, Matchbook, and elsewhere. His latest collection of poetry/prose is Future Wars from Another New Calligraphy. He loves 50s Sci-Fi movies, manga comics, and pre-punk garage bands of the 60s. This is his third Chrome Bairn, after bairns 21 and 40.