Another Piece of the Puzzle
When I was young, I lived in a mobile home park. It was a wonderful place not unlike Disneyland, that is, if you replaced the cute cartoon characters with meth and the rides with arsons. It was a fascinating little social bubble, where nearly every married couple consisted of a morbidly obese wife and a skinny, geeky husband. This is a phenomenon that I have labeled "Jack Sprat Syndrome." Our home life there was interesting. Possums would sometimes run into the house through some sort of crawlspace, the location of which I was never able to ascertain. My sister used to tell me that the ghost of an old woman would visit her at night, sitting on the edge of her bed and talking to her. I never saw any ghosts, but the walls of my room were laden with toxic mold. My lungs are still haunted by those abundant spores. One Sunday morning, my mother went to go get the newspaper, leaving my sister and I home alone for a few minutes. I was about
