Jeremy was standing outside of Joe's Liquor, leaning against the brick wall in his baggy coat and pants. He was woozy against that wall, with his yellow skin and his flat, long hair soaking in the burnt orange streetlight just like a sponge.

First he asked me whether I had a cigarette, then, disappointed, whether I'd like to go to his house with him. His words came out stumbling, burdened with alcohol and hushed with hopelessness. He was withered and non-threatening, a skinny, weak thing cringing from the snowy night in his big, ill fitting clothes. And so I went.

It was a short walk, south a few blocks to where the homes slid down into the dirt on their hundred year old frames. He led me beyond a worm eaten fence, through a dark hall and down a flight of red painted concrete stairs. We sat on a squalid mattress in a tiny basement corner, penned in tight by a rusty boiler and a maze of dull aluminum duct work. There was a single yellow bulb there, humming dim, heavy light that painted shadows on every wall.

Jeremy told me about his fifty-four year old girlfriend. She was twenty years older than him, but he loved her something fierce even though they fought sometimes. She would be out of jail next Thursday. He told me about his hat collection, and even showed me a few of his newest additions.

When his mom screamed hot venom down the red painted stairs, he said we'd move outside into the shed where no one would bother us. Her screaming was relentless. As we trudged upstairs she begged Jeremy to be a man instead of the pathetic failure that he was, and she cursed me for disturbing an old woman in her home.

She shooed us outside in a hysteric sort of frenzy as if we were two ugly rats. And as she corralled us past a hall that opened into a dingy sitting room, I caught a glimpse of Jeremy's small father. He was walking back and forth in great, thudding strides behind the couch, wrapped up tight in glittering leg braces and a black-stained undershirt. He was muttering incomprehensibly.

Jeremy and his mother exchanged curses at the back door. She accused him of poisoning her home with the liquor, screamed raucously to the thud, thud, thudding rhythm of Jeremy's father reverberating in the room beyond. Jeremy's yellow, slinking demeanor reared up then, wrinkled, callous and hateful like some sort of cornered rodent.

You murdered Jenny! He yelled suddenly, exploding like a geyser with the spittle and the hot breath coming out ugly and strong. Her face went gray, her lips snapped shut in a trembling paralysis, and the tears welled up heavy in her eyes.

Murdered her! My sweet baby sister, Ma.

Jeremy kicked the back door ferociously once then twice. His face writhed in a panic and his lips worked convulsively. His words came out like hot oil, then.

Don't you talk to me about poison, you witch.

And then we tromped across the cold, dead back yard. The dry grass and raw, patchy earth were tucked submissively beneath a blanket of soft white snow. Yellow moonlight came down through scraggly trees, falling in crippled, broken little shapes against the frozen earth.

Jeremy arranged two folding chairs in the leaning wooden shed in the yard. It was a strange, cramped space, filled with all kinds of children's toys and stuffed animals wrapped up tight in cellophane. In one corner was a giant, white rabbit, at least three feet tall. Its black button eyes and synthetic white fur were compressed in that suffocating, clear plastic wrap. In another corner was a child's bed, all made up and adorned with little pillows and bears. It was wrapped in plastic, too.

Jeremy looked at me quietly with his all-black eyes, and then up at the moon. The shed was a place he came to think, sometimes, he said. So we sat down and I waited, wondering if the bitterness would leave him.