Here's to

by Judas Sylvester

I write best at night when I'm really tired. When it's 2am and I haven't slept and my eyes keep closing. Scenes pour through my eyelids like I plunged my head underwater. But maybe I'm just crazy and call it fiction. But if I'm crazy then those stories should be locked up in big white rooms, bound and wrapped in straight jackets. The characters should be strapped down to their beds, guarded by orderlies and not allowed to wander the soft grey halls of my mind in their bare feet with their staring eyes and uncut hair. Doctors should stack pills down their throats and make them comply. Who unleashed them? Who sent them dancing across papers in bottles of ink, drunk on speed? Who gave them permission to enter here banging pots and pans and then exit just as loudly clacking keyboards? Who told them that it was ok?