By Dean Marshall Tuck

I fell into a vat of acid at the chemical plant.
I got stung by the wrong wasp in Indonesia.
From a glacial crevasse I was rescued by an Indigenous tribe and nursed in an ice cave for forty days
           and nights, in which time I was administered a daily regimen of a strange concoction of
           organic material I could not describe.
My father was a boxer, my mother was a trapeze artist, they were murdered, and then avenged by a
           tyrannical man who had me adopt his cynical worldview where human kindness is
           concerned.
I discovered ancient alien tech in my backyard when digging a hole to bury a time capsule that was
           filled with prayers scribbled onto tiny fortune cookie scrolls. I became more machine than
           man that day.
A sinister archeologist orchestrated the smuggling of an Indian jewel from a traveling exhibit and the
           implanting of the fabled stone into my chest cavity somewhere.
A meteorite zipped through our roof, into the living room, and down through the floor; I touched it
           before it had finished cooling, while it still pulsed its bright purple light; it singed away my
           fingerprints; when I cooled them in the bathroom sink, I looked to the mirror, only to find,
           the thing you see before you now.
I volunteered for an experimental electroshock treatment that would build walls around certain
           memories, but instead did the opposite and more.
I wasn’t always this way.

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Dean Marshall Tuck is a writer living in eastern North Carolina with his wife and daughters. His novel Twinless Twin (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) was chosen by Jason Mott as the winner of AWP’s 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. Recent poetry can be found in Rattle, Witness Magazine, Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, and Tar River Poetry. His work can be found at www.deanmarshalltuck.com.