The truck crashed rhythmically above him and reminded him why he had to become all. Over and over and over and over again, a looped hell with no escape. No purpose save for antagonism.

Birch trees grew out of the cab and the engine block and three of the tires were attached but rotted from atavistic exposure. Dead minnows from the planned inundation were floating in the bed begging for count from apostles. The door was strewed a pace from the rest of the truck and, engraved in the metal, resisting the oxidation of lesser elements, the transient could read his dead name– William Hagstrom. The name of another he had once known. The red lights of a distant cellphone tower flashed as he sat on the decrepit, rusted frame of the truck. He stabbed the dead with his whittled arm and as he ate the rot the truck crashed rhythmically above him and reminded him why he had to become all. Over and over and over and over again, a looped hell with no escape.

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He once had a daughter. She was his all but he treated her like she was less. He hated her mother and her mother hated him more. They had met in St. Paul, in a foster home, with supposed parents who rationed how many cans of tuna they would give their supposed children. He had been kidnapped in a department store as a toddler but ran away after a month and was found in a warehouse in Kalamazoo, wrapped in trauma blankets and babbling a forgotten language.

The mother of his daughter was seven years older than him. After the police gave him to the parasites she took care of him, and retaught him all the words he had forgotten, and let him remember his name. Her own birthright was Sally Hernandez. The abuse the parents wrought on their conservators was unremarkable and otherwise standard for that time period. General starvation, occasional slaps, occasional whippings with electrical cords; general neglect. The abuse the other conservators wrought on young William was more than he could take and he would run into the arms of Sally, and she would stroke his head and comfort him, and punish those who bullied the lost youth.

Seasons changed and years passed faster than William could keep up and on March 8th, 1970, six years, two months, and eleven days after he was found, Sally left the home. William could do nothing that day but sit under his favorite tamarack tree in Stevens Park, put a baseball cap over his head, and cry. He drifted for two weeks, getting antagonized and whupped by the other conservators, not telling his junior high teachers why he was so bruised all the time, until a custodian called him out of class and gave him a brown parcel that had his name on it but was addressed to the school. It was written in Sally's sloppy cursive.

The principal would not allow him to open it privately. Before he took it out he reached in and felt the textured contours, the dry claws, confirming his suspicion of what it was, what advertisement he had pointed out to Sally in the paper a month before she left. Despite his protestations the principal made him take it out, and when his hand was forced to be drawn from the flimsy envelope, clutched in his chubby fingers was a dead, baby alligator, and his sorrow was increased, because the advertisement guaranteed that it would be alive.

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Two years passed without Sally and his soul was hardened. He dealt pain onto lessers and smoked rancid cigarettes in the bathroom with other orphans. Soldiers had brought heroin over from a ridged, humid land and William tried it and decided that he preferred it to being conscious. As he was in a daze from the opiates on the longest day of the year, the window of the room that he shared with two others was lifted and long arms reminiscent of forgotten ancestors broke the hymen of the indoors, and Sally climbed in.

She wore black, frayed pants and a motorcycle jacket with nothing underneath. Dark semi circles were under her eyes and her scalp was patchy and had exposed rashes. She was missing a couple fingernails.

William didn't get up for her. She came to him and embraced him, and he felt the constant happiness of his injection. She sorrowed over his skinniness and ill health without recognizing her own, and lifted his feeble frame out of the window and into the back of a truck she had stolen from a funeral home. She drove a night and a day, inhaling saturated energy from a cotton ball and a paper grocery bag, siphoning gas from sedans in forgotten and untroubled towns. William emerged from his daze and was irritable and told her to stop, that he needed his pain reliever, but she used a garden hose to tie him to the seat frame and wouldn't let him out of the truck even to relieve himself.

She stopped driving when they reached the end of the continent. The western ocean was splayed before them, grey and imperiling in the storm, a pod of whales a crow's mile to the west, hidden in the maelstrom. Sally untied him and opened the door.

" You can leave if you want". William looked around. He didn't know where he would go.

" You can stay, too. I know a place". Sally was sitting on the hood, her face clasped in her hands, barely awake. In her dark clothes, with the rain soaking her hands and the wind battering her hair and making the strands fly like a Greek depiction of Medusa, she looked like an angel of death.

" Why did you take me?" Sally didn't have to respond. Much like how William was lost without Sally, Sally had no purpose without William. He opened the door and climbed in the passenger seat and Sally drove to a plot of land that her dead parents had left her, with leased graves and a cabin with no water.

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She introduced him to amphetamines and eventually he liked them more than heroin. He would stay up for days with her, welding artwork, engraving his signature, sometimes hers. He melted part of the doorframe of the truck she stole and engraved both their names on it on impulse. They would build aluminum fires over the graves with the welding equipment and dance naked then commit debauchery upon each other. She became pregnant six times but almost everyone turned into a miscarriage.

The voices became louder during his seventeenth year. They told him of his imprisonment by the one who supposedly loved him. Reminded him of how she had taken him, kept him in the plots of death. Patches of her hair fell from her scalp and some of her teeth as well and images of her frightened his waking hours and his slumber.

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The daughter she bore for him had no chance to be anything but defective. She was born under a waning moon on March 8th, 1977, surrounded by peeling walls and the smoke of heavy metals. William held her before Sally and was so startled by the singular hand jutting from her shoulder that he dropped her on the floor.

The voices made him yearn for escape. The first time he tied Sally to the dresser and stole the truck. It ran out of gas a mile down the road. Then he wandered along the coast for two months, catching and eating gulls, throwing rocks at cars. A white van pulled up to him and he ran, but the demons were faster, and they strapped him to a rigid bed and drove him to hell where he was force fed red pills, and could sleep, and lost the voices, and lost part of him with them.

They kept him institutionalized for a year. He spent his time in the mental ward playing chess with other schizophrenics, talking with counselors and eating, placid and lost. He never told them about his illegitimate family. As days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months he realized his errors and wanted to return, make things right with the woman who loved him and the child she bore for him. He regretted fearing Sally, and not caring for his daughter. Now that he didn't have them he realized they were all he had. Now he was nothing.

The state ran out of funding for him so they released him with what he came with and a prescription. He spent three days hitchhiking to the graveyard, picking flowers and clovers for her along the way. When he opened the door to the shack Sally was folding laundry and his daughter was crawling on the concrete floor. Sally didn't seem surprised at his return. She invited him in, and went to the kitchen to get him crackers. When she returned she was carrying a revolver.

" Stay the hell away from us". He tried apologizing, and explaining that he was better now, that he had had undiagnosed schizophrenia but it was now under control, but Sally, like almost every mother, would not risk her child on the regrets of a dangerous man. She cocked the revolver and told him to leave, and despite his longings he was not foolhardy enough to do anything else but what she said.

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She had spent two days tied to the dresser. During that time she went through amphetamine withdrawal and her unnamed daughter had almost died of thirst because she was out of reach of her. As she watched her child dying, and felt herself dying, she promised God that if he let her go and kept her and her daughter alive that her child would never know danger again. Then the rope came loose.

She tried to be faithful to her promise but was human. She would stay off amphetamines for days, then binge. They made her into a better mother. When she was off them her skin would itch, and she would sleep fourteen hours at a time, and when she wasn't sleeping all she could think about were the drugs. Without them she was a void, a molted shell drifting in ocean tides. With them she was something.

She had named her daughter in the interim of William's absence after a skin disease that she had confused for a flower. Lupus refused to learn how to form words, and seldom reacted to pain or rewards. When Sally took her outside she would crawl on her three limbs (and her one protruding hand) between the graves, occasionally feeling the cold sandstone. As her body grew dark circles were visible under her eyes, reminiscent of her mother.

Sally had just taken a low dose of D-amphetamine when William strode in. He had grown fatter, and his hair was tidy, and his clothes were freshly laundered and as a result weren't covered in the mud and food stains that once pervaded them. She told him to set the flowers on the table then went into the kitchen.

She almost let him stay. He looked better, and she knew all he had been through in the midwest, and she knew that she was the one who had to comfort him, who had to bathe him and massage his scalp, who had to rescue him from the parasites of the world. She was the one who had been tasked with caring for him, but had failed, and turned him into shattered voices. She had a daughter now. She couldn't fail her the same way that she had failed William, and let her stay with a man who had almost killed them both.

" Stay the hell away from us". Then he left, and there was a brief month where she was able to stay off amphetamines and take care of Lupus, and she only felt pity towards William, not love nor hate.

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Before he ran the second time, he threw whatever pills the doctors had prescribed him into the Ocean and decided to throw Sally in as well. He walked the six miles to the graveyard and arrived at the witching hour. He didn't feel his knuckles being slashed open by the window glass, only the pain from all the spells his demon had concocted to keep him away from his daughter. Before she could grab the gun he grabbed her, and her eyes had the hatred he had always known, and he knew she was the cause of the pain, and the cause of all the men who stalked him and strapped him to boards and lied to him and told him what he heard was false and gave him edible lies that made him feel false. He grabbed a lamp on the bedside and hit her once with it, and her patchy scalp split open, and she was on the ground motionless.

His daughter didn't protest as she was carried. She didn't slam her fists into his back or kick her legs into his chest. He heard movement in Sally's bedroom and hastened his stride, for although he had decided to drown her he knew she had a gun. The tires of the truck sputtered in the mud and he saw his demon standing in the doorframe. Dazed yet still full of hatred. The buried rose around her and he drove faster.

All he wanted was sleep. He had been driving for two hours and had come to the valley, and the hum of the truck was lulling him into peace. It was warm inside, and he had escaped his demon and her slaves and rescued his daughter from her, and his eyelids were getting heavy, and he would just close them for a second.

The bang of the crash and the coldness of the water woke him and briefly made his mind clear. His body was twisted and there was glass in his hair. He felt pain in his right arm so he looked at it and couldn't find it. He looked down at his feet and saw it, resting on his engraved name, tendons wrapped around the locking mechanism of the severed door. Water was climbing up the cab and he was scared to look behind him. He finally did and saw nothing. Then he looked at the windshield, and saw his daughter splattered on it, her frail innards blocking the glow of the digital clock.

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He never slept again until he drowned. He took whatever pill he could find, whatever needle he could stick in himself to stay awake. In so doing he lost his perspective and became all. Every truth, every falseness. Every moment, every loss, every demon. In so doing he became nothing.

He walked to the door and read his dead name again. William Hagstrom. Read the name of the one who was once his demon. Sally Hernandez. No testament to the existence of what they had created. The truck crashed rhythmically above him and reminded him why he had to become all. Over and over and over and over again, a looped hell with no escape. No purpose save for antagonism.