The Sensitivity Reader ran his bony fingers through his salt-and-pepper mohawk. He’d been under duress these past days. Locked down inside his 30 SQM apartment, staring only at whitewashed walls.

The Reader’s eyes were dry and blood red and felt as if they’d been filled with sand. His body felt like a block of wood ... A peaty taste of whiskey burbling up in his burps...

“I was the best sensitivity reader in the business! I fucking read for AGENTED, PUBLISHED authors like Adele Holmes! ADELE. FUCKING. HOLMES!!!!!!!!”

The Sensitivity Reader’s was a case study in isolation. But his vow of silence had been dwindling, devolving into a diatribe far worse than Dave Chappelle’s 8:46.

And it was getting worse than a Michael Richards’ set of stand-up comedy.

Here and there, The Reader’s internal dialog, his solitude, his accumulation of time and flesh would be interrupted by ghosts. Unfriendly ghosts of companions long gone ... Demons...

Like his ex-wife. The woman of exotic darkness. The woman damasked with dismay. The waif who’d been popping in, here and there, walking through walls. The waif with sullen cheeks, bony arches under her eyes ... The waif reeking of shit. Her visits as welcome as an unflushed toilet.

The Sensitivity Reader had known feathery lightness in her hair. Her heavenly scents ... Her silky skin soft as a flower soaked by rain.

But these days the waif just stank of shit. And looked like shit too. The waif in her striped pajamas. The waif emaciated, rail-thin, looking as if she’d escaped from a concentration camp in Xinjiang. Her crown of shiny hair just a slim wave. She’d once been so winsome ... The waif with perfect facial structure, a doll’s face. A face worthy of being painted.

At times, the waif had been fogging in, appearing in oil-painting poses ... The waif stretching for badminton ... The waif supine. Air drumming with chopsticks. Her waist-length hair spilling over the edge of the bed like a tomato-red waterfall. The waif levitating, suspended in air, stuck like a light to the ceiling.

“It was her!” The Reader would strain, neck veins popping out, shouting at no one. “IT WAS HER!!!”

To him, her skeletal face was as distinct as a dead president on a blood-stained banknote ... The waif’s snickering. Her summoning swarms of hornets...

“She was fucking here, man, she was fucking here!!!” The Sensitivity Reader would argue with the wall, wash the demon away with whiskey and gales of hysterical laughter. But even the wall knew the waif lived in the air...

The Sensitivity Reader slept with a sledgehammer next to his bed. He’d go down swinging if his ex-wife, nude but for her pink Von Dutch mesh hat, ever exploded out of the closet again, attacked him with garden shears. If she ever again insulted his pasta sauce, attempted to amputate his penis.

Or if she ever again handcuffed him to the bed, blasted “I Don’t Feel Like Dancing” or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication on repeat. The waif leaving him in agony as she hooted and hollered, in the next room, at trashy reality TV. The waif, off her meds again, watching reruns of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie making fun of poor people.

The Reader was ready, too, if that cockroach the size of a crocodile ever came back ... Oh yes, The Sensitivity Reader knew all about psychic pain, picky eaters, earworms, infestations and sharp objects...

But The Sensitivity Reader had only seen the waif once in the last few days. It was in the shower. She’d slid in through the steam with a straight razor blade, was smiling with black gaps in between her teeth while carving five stars into her shaven pussy mound. Bloody red rivulets running down her chicken legs ... The shower water suddenly smelling of unwashed ass...

“Psychic spies from China!!!!” The Sensitivity Reader cursed at the rain shower as light red water, the color of a wine cooler, circled his feet and the clean scent of soap returned.

Dead! She was dead. Dead! The Reader struggled to remind the deepest recesses of his being. After all, she should be vaporous.

After the divorce, she’d been in a gruesome, spectacular accident. In a subway car, in Beijing, that’d flooded with sewage ... He’d imagined his rage had festered into blood magic. That she’d died a horrid death on his account. The waif swallowing columns, choking on mouthfuls of brown wastewater. The bitch literally eating shit and dying, just as he’d often commanded...