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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