Dear Frank Sauce,

This is my secret. This is my new life.

I paint dogs. I paint oceans.

Even after you became a wave and I painted all those cows, I hope you're well.

Much love,

Lorena Pugh

Hello Frank,

This is my secret. This is my new life.

I paint dogs. I paint oceans.

Even after you became a wave and I painted all those cows, I hope you're well.

Much love,

Lorena Pugh

I was supposed to be asleep, but then I knew I should be at work.

So I work.

There were flies and all their babies were inside me while I was at work. I was typing on a type writer and the letters were being sent into a machine that I couldn't see and I'm pretty sure the machine couldn't see me. My co-worker was cheating, but I didn't know her and she eventually turned into a him as I kept typing. I had a deadline. Everytime I hit a key the machine gulped in another room, but there were no other rooms. We were in a cloud that was floating through the sky. We were in a cube of glass, my co-worker and I. The boss came in and the machine was still gulping and I was still typing, but didn't know what exactly I was typing, but I could feel the characters turn into words inside the machine. It knew each word, it wasn't machining 0's and 1's. The boss stared over my shoulder at my fingers hitting the keys and he started to smile, or I felt him smiling, even though I stared at the window at the ants who crawled down the cube and fell off into the blue sky. There was no gravity so they floated past us. The cube would sometimes squash the ants and I could feel their deaths as their exosketleton seemed to implode. The boss was still looking at my fingers and out of the corner of my eye I could see that my co-worker was changing again into woman, a masculine woman and I was turning into a feminine man and the boss kept smiling as we raced through clouds inside a glass cube within another cloud.

The flies began to swarm around the boss's head and I typed and watch the ants and thought about sleeping and how it has been so long since I slept. I wasn't tired, because the boss was there smiling with a thousand flies around his head and my co-worker turned into a man again. He stood there and stared at the boss like the boss was naked and attractive.

I type more characters into the machine and it gulps and creates more words. The boss stops smiling and starts to laugh. My co-worker laughs, too. I begin to smile.

I have been doing this job for a long time. The flies' babies are still inside me.

I eat bugs: box beetle bugs. I have a lot of boxes.

Most of the boxes are filled with books. I collect books. I seldom have the courage to read them. Since I feel guilty for not reading them, I go out and buy more books. I'm also a collector of authors. I keep lists of all the authors, their bibiliographies and their books I own and their books that I don't own, each in their own column. That is, one column for authors, one column for their books I have in boxes and one column of their other books that I need to have in boxes.

Yes, the box beetle that I live on lives in the boxes and books. The knowledge that the books I've bought and the boxes I've borrowed, which hold the books and are home to the beetles I eat, gives me the blues.

~end~