For every sour moment in a quicksand year, the Tyrant who runs this rudderless ship of a place masquerades as the tenant whose name is on the lease and we are but temporary roommates. The Tyrant takes every whimpered plea for less prevarication and more timely rental payments as an admission of more misery to come. That is the Tyrant’s function, to twist pleas into admissions, to contort earnest efforts at connection into static silence, and to conjure out of thin air a manic need to fill this hole with empty calories.

It is not a homely place, this premises.

Outside gray blasts of warm wind strip the leaves off trees and make the residue of corn husks pirouette in the air. Vulnerability is this mound of snow reduced to a shuddering puddle. It was months ago that we got the crops out of the fields and still the deer pick through it under a quarter moon and wispy nighttime nimbus clouds. Inside it is either too cold or too hot, and the units that would calibrate sit downstairs in the basement always running in conflict with the directive I give them, turning the thermostat.

In my memory, a coffee pot is always on, and the tv plays the price is right or old green acres episodes. That was a different era and a different geography but it all sits here, memories piled up on top of each room’s slightly less than rectangular contour. Tonight the screen is clamped shut, a photograph somewhere in there eager to be exposed.

The Tyrant wears an eye patch and has a hideously precise soul patch that frames his thin pink lips. He lunges up the stairs, skipping a step and closing the distance on whatever chore he is half-assing. He bloviates about sinfulness. Is it fear or habit that makes us declaim about all this in cloying whispers? There is nothing like unqualified false assertion delivered in dulcet half-hearted tones to make obvious a contradiction. You may! You are now free to obey! That sort of thing. Exhausting choice-adherence.

Knowing where the skeletons are is not the same as feeling comfortable cleaning out closets. Somewhere I learned a spell of how to summon ascendancy from the pet cemetery, how to make a sculpture out of this Walmart of thwarted acquisition. We are equipped to make do. The pizza place is *6 on speed dial. Avoidance is all the rage. Pity the fool who pins a notice to quit on this door. Pity the snow and the corn and the clouds.