In the den’s squalor and lightlessness was the pale ghost of Arthur Canary. He sat there in the product of basement’s botched contracting what left no windows for him to see the spring’s sun, the lawn trimmed and primmed each clockwork week by a contracted crew of swarthy laborers, the anarchic kingdom of writhing worms and other monsters what crawled over each other, devoured each other in the long damp dark beneath the impressive green. The flowerbeds, too.  Rich plots of all the domestic suburban classics – peonies pink as pussies, begonias glossy with virile yellow, the virgin skirt fringe of pollinated daisies, these plots glowing in many colors like the spatter of a proper dissection and all of them maintained as well by the swarthy. Mother had tried but they withered and died. Same as the flowerbeds, real estate signs, all of them foreclosures processed by Lucho Lending, were planted by the curb and constructed in typical real estate fashion with the gallows stock of the driven post and the hangedman board bit swinging with information – the binary display what could only comprehend being sold or wanting to be sold. This is the dead suburb of Pontus Place. It is a graveyard of forsaken homes vacated by the penniless and marked with official signs of repossession like the damning red daub of crucifix on old plagued doors.
	All throughout Pontus there wasn’t even one rubberstamped and sold to promise new blood flowing back into a neighborhood what had been letted of so much through a husband’s joblessness, a family destroyed by infidelity or boredom, and more than a few resentful souls saying sayonara to the house of profligates and their parties what made sleep impossible and sent proselytes rollicking up and down the street singing songs and urinating on anything what would just stand still long enough. Rapture somehow bribed itself past the gates and its uplifting vaporization swept through all of Pontus, its crannied cul-de-sacs and neighbored nooks, only to stop short at the last hilltop mansion, the last raised and the last peopled, and not let the Canaries fly away along with heaven’s newest nude battalion.
	These were the days in wake of his high school graduation and Rapture had once again played choosy pentecostal on Art Canary by withholding the euphoria what seemed to have seized all the others what looked to be wearing the same caps, the same gowns. The valedictorian’s words were far-away shell-shocked nonsense as they thought of endless summer with old friends underneath nighttime skies drinking while their desired futures arranged themselves without a hitch in the constellations. Three months of liminal profligacy for all before shipping off to college paid on fantasy dime where, on whatever campus each landed, acreage great or small, there was sure to be a wealth of new men new women new everything.
	Art didn’t have much hope for Millersville University – Go Bonobos. In a little over three months he’d begin studying economics at their nationally-rated program of the same name, nationally-rated in the extreme triple digits read the brochure’s fine print, but in a little under six months there would be total global economic collapse. There was no consensus for this yet but Art had seen it – numbers plummeting faster than leaping businessman in Hong Kong, London, New York and all of it so severe even the mattress cash had disappeared – and soon there would be consensus, courses at Millersville teaching Advanced Looting, Gaining an Edge in the 21st Century: Proper Shiv Fashioning and You, The Joy of Eating Rat. This was something Art felt everyone but the televised intuited. That a day was coming and coming soon. That Earth’s roundness was a woman’s and she was ready to pop.
	Even before the gangs had been given the run of cities California to Carolina to the point where they could be considered neighboring nations, Art had seen himself at a red light with his guard slipped that day listening to a song or thinking of ways to better soundproof his little hermitage and the stranger stopped in the next lane or behind him or across the way looking at Art’s head as no different from the black downrange silhouette’s, shooting him because maybe Richard seduced the man’s wife, which Richard could have, every pretty girl in the state had been his or not by a coin flip, or the shooter’s company finally found him like the child’s claw machine in this quarter’s savage cuts, sliced him up according to the Donner recipe to keep the whole alive and the Rippers from suffering disruptions to accustomed lifestyles – the six-figure car, the boat bought to impress college girls over the internet, four walls and a roof on diamond-colored sand. Or maybe there was no reason at all besides him being a bastard bringing savagery to a place where there was a school and a nun-run home for old ladies, a dog park and a doctor’s, killing good folk according to an old discarded religion full of violence what all the rest had forgotten but whose texts and holy unctions he yet possessed, what rites he remembered and followed. Art tried to channel this imagination towards something positive, him winning the lottery perhaps, but all he saw coming of that was the gas station clerk remembering he had sold the winning ticket and tracking down the boy with the easily-wrung neck.
	In his free time locked in the basement – which is all he had, no business to run like Richard or business to run him like Father or Mother herself a business, a walking six foot billboard for her own luxury product – Art envisioned catastrophes visiting upon himself, his community, the world at large, and these visions, more vivid than high-definition news broadcasts, always sent a spurt of rich red dripping out a nostril or both nostrils if it was an augury of some horror done by the marauding ghoul Captain Kearns. Art saw freak bong malfunctions spitting out fireballs at the drapes, a partygoer struggling in the morning to raise herself to a sitting position and light the day’s first smoke but passing out because consciousness was just a momentary stay for her and letting the lighted thing roll out onto flooring reeking as a palmed rag to send the last house on Pontus up. One would notice how unseasonably toasty it was even accounting for Missouri’s bipolar nature or how this morning’s smoke was not the sweet vesper trails or big inhaled-exhaled billow clouds white as the eyes weren’t of last night’s temple incense and thinking to herself that it perhaps was the same, not outlandish for a repeat from those still assembled, and it was only herself notched more so towards sobriety with the loneliness what only comes when awake in a room stiller than death and reflecting on the person she allowed herself to be. Scenes of it returning now and surrounded by people who only hours ago had been friends, comrades really, united in purpose yet in this light she saw every one of them put to the midnight transfiguration and she not only not wanting to see any of these dreamless brutes with faces beer-bloated from drowning three days in rivers of the stuff but hoping it was sleep none of them woke from thinking all this before a cheeky tongue of flame licked the porcelain arch of her bare foot. There were so many of them beyond Art’s locked, blocked up door and he knew there would be no way out for him if an alarm human or machine went off what managed to wake them. All of them packed tight side to side in the intimate camaraderie of chattel carrack cargo and slow-minded, heavy-footed from their evening that it would take divine intervention just to get these schmucks ambulant let alone to form an orderly procession out of the death trap hot and tight as Moloch’s maw, to find the exit with bleary stonelidded doubleseeing eyes, to not trample the small boy just trying to not die with the rest of them.