'Convoluted Crayola Confessions'

Mark Roland


Hi there, they say I'm insane, so they put me somewhere where I can be with other crazy people and away from all of the non-crazy people.   I think they locked me up for killing my twin brother; I suppose I could deny you crucial details to create suspense about how and why I killed my brother, but I'm insane so I won't do that.   I'm writing this with crayon on a coloring book because a crayon can't be inserted into anyone's jugular vein, not that I would do that, well, maybe for money or love I would, there isn't much of an economy here so I won't.   I applied for some jobs, like to be a nurse or a doctor.   They said I wasn't qualified, and that I would probably just prescribe myself too many tranquilizers and die, and they're right.   Sometimes I'll pretend to go insane and start thrashing around so that way they'll give me some of that sweet calming stuff they got in those syringes.   I then applied to work the kitchen; they said the positions were filled.   They said my job could be making sure my padded room was clean.   But my room is already clean, so my job would be not to dirty my living space, and I'm not sure how I could do that, it's an empty padded room. I guess my job would be not to shit or piss in it, which a lot of people do here; it kind of stinks literally that the only things we can decorate our room with is shit or piss.   I asked what the pay would be for not shitting or pissing in my room and they said 3 square meals a day and pills every hour on the hour and all the crayons I can stomach, I eat crayons, shut up, don't deride me until you try it.   I hope I've actually gotten you eating crayons, this is exactly why I'm locked up; I'm a danger to others and myself.   I don't eat the black crayons because if I've learned anything about jelly beans, it's that you don't ever eat the black bean of death, so I save the black one for my brilliant fiction, or nonfiction, I'm just crazy enough so that I don't know.   Don't you call me a crayon-racist, if it weren't for the black crayon I wouldn't write my brilliant shit.   So as I was saying about the job, they were offering me 3 meals a day to not dirty my living space.   That's what they're already paying me, so I said no deal, I'm insane not stupid.

So back to my dead twin brother, I guess it all happened back home.   Now when I say back home that can be kind of confusing, I mean where is home?   Is it where you initially came from?   Is it where the heart is?   I guess I initially came from my mother's uterus, which isn't where the heart is, that's a bit south of where the heart is.   I did not burst free from my mother's chest cavity like one of those aliens from that movie, Aliens .   Though if that were how it worked we'd see a definite emphasis on birth control and probably a lot more abortions.   Speaking of which, I survived 4 attempted abortions.   I was floating there in fluid, probably thinking about how cool it is to breathe under water, or transmission fluid, whatever it is in there.   All of a sudden a vacuum attachment seized my head, I'm fairly certain it was the bowling ball attachment used in those Oreck commercials where the old man would stand underneath the bowling ball while his 8 pound Oreck would prevent said ball from braining his brains out, and yes, at 4 months development my head was already bowling ball-sized which was probably a contributing factor to my attempted abortions and my eventual C-section, even though the doctors here say my head isn't that big, and that it is not possible to remember a time before I even possessed object permanence.   So I guess I'm a liar, it's okay to lie when you're insane, because you don't know any better.   “AHHHH NHHEEENGGG,” I yelled as I felt the vacuum trying to pull me out.   So I seized my mother's ovaries, causing her a great deal of pain.   Not many know this, but the ovaries are like the testicles of the woman, if you can grab em' it's like you've get ‘er by the balls, which is what I did.   So every time my mom tried to pull a fast one on me, I'd grab her by the old balls and squeeze.   If she ate baby carrots instead of marble cake, or toasted pumpkin bread with margarine instead of real butter, or if she rode the pirate ship instead of the rollercoaster, or whenever she tried to abort me she'd get a squeeze.

I'm sorry, I've come off track; I do that a lot on account of the whole homicidal maniac thing.   Some people accuse me of becoming crazy after I killed my twin brother, which was way back at home.   So home isn't where the heart is, it is where I initially came from, the uterus.   But before that I initially came from somewhere else, gamete and egg.   The gamete came from the amino acids absorbed in a can of Budweiser my father drank in the mid-80's.   The egg, well my mom had those since she was in her mom, so that came from a deli sandwich that my grandmother ate in the mid-50's.   So I guess I came from a 30 year old deli sandwich and a can of Budweiser.   So I guess home is where the 50's diner sandwich and the beer can are.   That's also where my twin brother came from.   You see from a very young age we didn't get along; he fucking was always on my side of the fallopian tube, and he always ate all of my food.   So one day I ate him, absorbed him into me before things would get too crowded.   The federal prosecuting attorney said that was bullshit, that my story is a farce and that I'm not really insane.    

All my life the ghost of my dead twin brother would haunt me; my parents even bought bunk beds so that his ghost would have a place to sleep.   He would even eat food, even though he didn't need it because he was dead, just being a real fucking prick, sitting there wasting food that could be mine, just like in the uterus.   He even got a job and became rich and married my girl Sharon.   His name was Brian, and about a year ago I got sick of him haunting me and I killed his ghost ass, sent him straight to hell, stabbed him in the jugular with a letter opener and all of his red ectoplasm leaked out all over the place.   The government made a huge fuss about this, there was even a trial.   I remember being up there on the witness stand asking, “What's the big deal? He was already dead.”      

“We're not buying it!!”   The prosecutor would yell at me.

“I'm not selling anything,” I replied.

“Shut up!”

The doctors tell me the prosecutor never told me to shut up; I even watched my trial, must've been actors, maybe the ghost of my twin brother was on the stand pretending to be me.   They showed me a video of me not being told to shut up, so if I'm not crazy then this is all one giant conspiracy.   Which do I prefer: crazy, or that everyone is after me with malice?   Both options aren't good.   For some reason right up until I killed ghost-Brian my sister-in-law Sharon was always fucking me, the sex kind of fucking; she comes by the hospital to visit and confuse me, I think she was hired to try and make me confess to things that I didn't do so that way I can go to regular jail for making her ghost-husband go away.   I'm not getting out of here and going to Mexico with her and her life insurance money, and I'm not acting crazy, I am crazy.   “Drop the act, already,” is what everyone says to me, especially Sharon when she comes to visit.   Well I won't go to regular jail, even though she wants me to, even though everyone else wants me to.   “Double Jeopardy,” she always mentions, “they can't reopen the trial so you can drop the act, now how are we going to get you out of here?   You just gotta pretend that you're slowly getting better,” she would say.   I don't believe her and I don't believe a T.V. show has anything to do with the United States justice system.

Well it's 11:23 AM, that means I write in rhymes.   Now it's time to speak in rhyme, I got a spine, I don't know why.   I take my pill, they say I'm ill.   My friend is Carl, he likes to snarl, he once ate poo, he says fuck you.    He sprained his brain, and gone insane.   I walked to Carl to say hello, in the kitchen, with green Jello.   “How ya feeling, your head still reeling?”

“Shut the fuck up, leave me alone, why must we rhyme, at this specific time?”

“Gimme some pie, or I'll poke out'cher eye!”

“Suck my penis.”

“That didn't rhyme, you owe me some pie!”

Don't touch my hair, see that nurse over there.   Calming injection, soothes the infection.   I woke up two hours later.   That was the 3rd rhyme-time that I had attacked Carl over cake, wait, it was pie.   I was subdued and given an injection of tranquilizer.   Carl is still my best friend in this place.   Carl is the sanest person here, therefore, the coolest.   He killed his wife in his sleep, he was dreaming that he was in a fight, he got her in a sleeper hold and she never woke up.   Carl used to be a professional fighter in the mixed martial arts, it's like a combination of boxing, kick boxing, wrestling, submission wrestling.   Basically it's like anything goes in a cage.   I asked Carl if he ever won any fights by stabbing anyone in the jugular with a letter opener; he said that was forbidden by the rules of the Nevada State Athletic commission, too bad, because it's an effective move when mastered, it can even make ghosts disappear. For some reason during rhyme-time I like to fight Carl, he usually always wins too.   I just want some pie; one piece isn't enough.

Life is really fucking boring in this place; if I wasn't crazy before, I sure as hell am now.   I sit around, try not to poop on anyone, write my stories, and fight Carl while rhyming.   Aside from that all I can do is go on adventures in my mind.   Which is fun because you can have all sorts of fatalities and stuff and nobody really gets killed.   Of course another fun thing to do is to fuck with the other people in here.   One of the people in here thinks that he's the captain of a starship, so one day I yelled “SPACE PIRATES!” and he went absolutely insane, rambling about turning hard to port, but not that port, the other port, he then tried to drink a bottle of imaginary port, which turned out to be me.   He then began beating the piss out of everyone in sight because he thought he had been boarded by space pirates.   Captain Rosko isn't allowed out of his room for a while now.   He seems to think there was some sort of successful mutiny and now he's been confined to the brig.   Crazy what was I?   Oh yes now I remember.

Sharon stopped by to confuse me again today.   She told me to stop taking the pills they give me, she said the pills were making me actually go insane and think that our made up stories were true.   “Stop taking those damned pills. They're ruining your mind,” she said with tears going down the side of her face.

“Pills make Paul sane.” I replied. I'm Paul.

“Don't you remember anything?   All those nights together?   I never meant to marry Brian; I loved you more… I didn't know Brian would turn out that way… I just needed the financial security you couldn't provide... Now I've lost both of you…”
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The district attorney stopped reading from the coloring book that had been discovered in the recreation room of the Milt E. Trawer Sanitarium and looked across the desk in the interrogation room at Sharon.   With a tone of stern scorn and derision, he asked the broken woman, “Do you want me to keep reading?”   Sharon, looking absolutely crestfallen, would not make eye contact with the district attorney. She wanted to say that it was just the insane ramblings of a madman; maybe later she would, but right now she could only cry about how she knew she had lost everything, even if she could make it back to the beach house on the Yucatan with Brian's life insurance money.   Right now she was just satisfied to cry; she was broken and tired of fighting, like she was back floating in the ocean, looking up into a broken sky as the ebbing flow brought her wherever while her submerged ears listened to the shifting currents that were the words of the district attorney.

The district attorney motioned to the detective, who moved across the room and handcuffed Sharon while saying, “Sharon Werstrum, you are being charged with conspiracy to commit the first-degree murder of Brian Werstrum.   You have the right to remain silent; anything you say or do …”