Mr. White

The night seeps through the window in a steamy charcoal soup. Mr. White sits in a black easy chair and strokes his mustache while the television flickers things gone wrong. A lot has gone wrong, so there is a lot of flickering. He turns off the television, revealing floating ghosts with names like Gracie, Blue, and Dingo, each draped in red satin to conceal canine teeth.

"God," he says, "at least send a woman to haunt me."

But God is busy with His iPod, singing "When you call My Name, it's like a little prayer, I'm down on My Knees, I want to take you there," recalling the time He and Madonna hung out and considering jacking off and deciding not to because that causes a hurricane. At best.

So there will be no lady ghost for Mr. White. This fits. The only people he's ever loved have been dogs.

Mr. White gently rocks in the overstuffed chair, lacking the energy to pound the bed pillows into submission for the years of anguish, the lost beauty (he was beautiful once), and most of all the words upon words, the files upon files, the folders upon folders in his computer -- unshared.

For Mr. White, there have been brighter days, days of genius, days of sunny weather and cotton ball skies. Days spent on the roof, doing a joint, doing another joint, and watching the college girls pass by and almost talking to them, but giggling instead, then gratifying himself through physical and emotional voyeurism on the Internet.

Now there are just dog-ghosts and tremors, the distant shadows of heartache.