She stretched on the bed and reached with her long leg and placed her foot on his desk, before him, on the notebook he was writing in.

“Wow,” she said. “Your place is so small, like a box of matches. And so empty. So lonely. Why don’t you ever have anyone over? I never see or hear you talking to people. Why must you be like that?”

“I don’t like people,” he said.

“Why?”

“Don’t ask silly questions. For the same reason I don’t like hotdogs. I just don’t like them.”

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Would you like me to leave?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know a lot of things, boy. I came to you because… I wanted to have a place from which I’d be missed if I left. I thought the heart of someone as lonely as you would be that special place for me. Turns out you’re not lonely at all. You’re just alone.”

“I guess,” he said.

She removed her foot from his notebook and turned facing the wall and began to sob.

“Hey, don’t be like that,” he said. “I might not be missing you if you go, but…”

“But what!?”

“Well, you still remain my least detestable hallucination. I like your legs, with all their ten joints. I like your crimson eyes, all eight of them. Your fangs, your horns, the scaled wings, everything. I really think you’re…”

“Yeah? You think I’m what?”

“You’re… what I need in my life right now. So don’t leave just yet, okay?”

“Hah! I knew you love me.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Shut up, you don’t know it yet. But you love me. Come to bed, you silly oaf! Let’s sleep and dream together. Something colorful, vibrant. A spider web full of butterflies. Shaking in the wind. Come.”

He closed his notebook and went to bed.

***

Bogdan Dragos works as a dispatcher for a Romanian gambling company (supervising casinos) and that implies spending twelve hours alone in the office (where he daydreams and writes poetry that he emails to himself). He is the author of Pour the Whiskey Over My Heart and Set it On Fire.