#mouse <3

Yesterday a woman walked into a Moscow subway with explosives taped to her chest and blew herself and forty others to pieces. There was a spark and then, like someone had folded the station in half, they were gone. Her first name meant paradise though it sounded more like doesn’t it. You can find paradise anywhere. I love names. I whisper them when I want a cigarette: Hemingway, Dostoyevsky and Levis, Bruce and Jane, Paradise. One of my coworkers enjoyed branding my arm with a burning metal spoon. His name was Scott, so plain and American- sounding, so abbreviated, though Scott analyzed Foucault and rolled his own cigarettes and played electric bass. In high school he sold acid to the same football players who'd beat him up outside of McDonald’s. After turning their eyeballs inside out for thirteen hours straight they never touched him again. We will do crazy things. Sometimes I would wait inside my apartment lobby with the lights turned off so I could scare the manager out of his skeleton. He and I were like Clouseau and Kato, attacking each other for months at odd hours of the night. One of my neighbors loved pissing on his wife and another worshipped the smell of manure and licked envelopes until her tongue bled. I discovered paradise while smoking pot in a minivan, until my friend mistook a Buick Skylark for a cop car, shoved my head down into the lighter and burned off my eyebrows. At his last public viewing Abraham Lincoln’s eyebrows had also disintegrated. This is the picture his enemies would have loved to keep in the breast pocket of their tuxedos while floating down the river on a Sternwheeler. My ideas about paradise have changed. I feel better knowing now that my friend who seared my eyebrows weighs over four hundred pounds. Her paradise sizzles at the all-you-can-eat Mongolian grill. You can find yours anywhere. Paradise in the aisle next to the grapefruit and the cough medicine. Paradise sucking another man’s toes over sheets of tattoo flash. In the light saber and the dinosaur, in your three-year-old singing Wayne Newton through the child monitor, Paradise entering the station alone, kneeling down and opening her jacket.