I was in a madhouse once, or was it a sanatorium? Either way, I was in a place where people wore white smocks and pens around their necks on string. The plants in my sanctuary, this windowless enclave, are dieing, or rather I am murdering them. I am a flora assassin, a slayer of greenery. I tried spitting on them but they recoiled in horror, one small aspidistra weeping uncontrollable, which, one would think, would have hydrated it, which it didn’t, and like the others it died a withering death. I tried wearing a white smock and a pen around my neck on a string, thinking it might help encourage me to do better things, to help make my plants lives’ that much the better. When I did this, the orderly, who was very disorderly and unshaven, pulled me aside, tethered me with a jacket, tweed, or was it gabardine, and set me in the corner to think over what I had done. I am in the selfsame corner now, my nose pressed into the brick, into a seam of caulking and mortar, writing this in my thoughts, in a sanatorium, so they tell me, but I tend to disbelieve them.
