You are at guitar center standing between two racks of guitar strings and plastic capos. I sit before you like a burnt slug. I am antibiotic resistant bacteria. I am pockmarked like the moon. A greasy ponytail lays draped across my back. Thin strands of hair still pepper my frontal hairline, clinging desperately to my scalp. a few of them stand — plucked from their root in the sparseness — betraying the yellowing hairbands age. Knotted balls of dead strands have collected around the band, cementing it in place. My fat, permanently wet fingers traipse across the fret board with great effort. I am playing 1 of 5 blues riffs I know. I play them repeatedly. I fuck up roughly every 3rd or so time. My eyes dart from the guitar to you and back again, longing for approval. finally, I stop. I smile at you with gaped yellow Chiclet teeth. I push my fat little arm into my belly retrieving the end of my threadbare Phish shirt. I peel it up over my distended gut to reveal 3 of my young nestled into my folds. They blink their dull soulless eyes — reacting painfully to the retail grade lighting. They quickly calm and I stroke them as they coo. They look like me in every way — but smaller and without limbs. They are pupae covered in viscous slime. Now my eyes are rolling back in my skull as I dry heave. I am beginning to pump up from my bowels partially digested hunks of the Burger King I ate 2 hours ago. Gibbering, grubbing, panicked, my young writhe against one another in competition for the food dribbling down my soft underbelly. They know only one of them will survive to adulthood and though they are, for now, mindless parasitic creatures, they each possess one third of a soul and this knowledge is stored there.