Jack Follman

Plastered on the milk carton was a picture of what I recognized as me at an age so young my internal memory never ventured back there, probably about two years old, maybe three. The picture was tucked beneath the word MISSING and surrounded by information that was utterly foreign to me, including the name of the missing boy who looked exactly like me.

She must have been hiding the thing in a box of jewelry tucked into the back of a closet in the guest room of her house. A damn good hiding place, but not good enough to thwart a thief as desperate as me.

There are lots of kinds of bad people in this world. There are some that may have been born good but turned evil due to circumstance.

Damian was a cyclops. Yes, a real live cyclops. I watched tears trickle out of his single eye as he hung his head of floppy brown hair and cried.

I have never told anyone about this… but it’s time to get something off my chest. I need to push the darkness of the one horrifying day of my childhood off of my chest like a bench press or the weight of it is going to eventually slip down and choke me to death.

I need your help.

This island was started by the government in the 70s. Back then, there was this cult, the Sistines, they lived up in the mountains a ways outside of Seattle. No one really knew that their beliefs were, but after the Manson Family thing happened in California, the state freaked out and sent a bunch of Marshals and cops up to their camp.

It’s the sorority houses that are supposed to be haunted, not the fraternity houses. Regardless of stereotype, the Theta Chi house in Morgantown, West Virginia was haunted as shit. I found this out one when I lived a college boy’s cloudy dream that slipped into sweaty nightmare on the hot nights of my 21st summer.

My story was about “Zombie,” a new drug that had hit the streets of Detroit, but was still so underground only those heavily entrenched in the world of hard drugs and law enforcement knew about it.

I was a bully. There’s no other way to say it. I was the kid who made you scared to hear the recess bell. I was the kid you avoided after school. I was the kid who made you cry to yourself at night after your mom had shut off the light.

It made me feel terrible, especially as I got older.

I upgraded my life in a short amount of time. I went from working part-time as a waitress and part-time as a background extra in TV and living in a dirty, cramped environment, to working full-time with a job that gave me certifiable future skills and let me live in a lush dream of fresh air and freedom. There is no other way to put it other than to say the change was simply good for my soul.

It was another poor choice. The path I had chosen was steeply uphill and I quickly lost steam.