Agent Maus! Agent Maus! I can’t wait to see what delights you will produce now that you’ve got your voice back.

Agent Richard, I’m stunned and saddened by your story, and offer you a consolatory pie. I am so glad to see that you have staged a dramatic comeback!

Agent Rocket. My goodness! What an amazing and incredible life you lead! We shall have such wonderful adventures together, you and I.

For the next ten years I would serve them and their beastly children, without more than a few moments for myself. Under cover of night, I took to stealing dusty, unused tomes from the threadbare household library, continuing my education with whatever I could snatch and fit beneath my apron. My cousins, Angela (5) and Markum (9) called me “Ratty,” because I roomed with the rodents in the basement and because I cared for and fed the twitchy scurrying things. My favorite, the largest rat, lacked a right paw; I named it Prudence, because she did not nibble on my treasured books as her kin did, but sat upon them waiting for me to come, all beady, expectant eyes and musty fur.

On my tenth year with the family, I turned seventeen. My uncle had taken to gazing at me with glittering, intent eyes. My aunt had taken to thrashing me daily, and let the children take turns with the strap. They seemed to enjoy my pain; I do not now know if they had regrets or tender feelings, for these I did not witness. My aunt seemed to take great pleasure in telling me how my mother had hung by noose in prison, hung by fellow inmates. Her sharp tongue had been cut out and fed to her.

I escaped through imagination and lived a secret life in the books I had stolen. If not for these treasures, I would have buckled and broken. I confess, I often tamped down thoughts of anger, revenge, tantalising blood fantasies, but these were mitigated by Dickens and Hawthorne and Shakespeare. These stories assured me that I was the hero of my tale. My aunt, uncle and cousins were the villains, and in time, I would overcome. These Gods of Books wore their names on the covers, and I revered them and prayed to them daily. I could no more imagine being a writer of books than a fish dreams of being the Queen.

One fall evening, after a long day of work and of dodging my uncle’s increasingly malodorous appetites, I hurried down the creaking basement stairs, and was stopped by laughter and the scent of smoke … and something even more terrible that I could not name.

There, near my sleeping corner, were Cousins Angela, and Markum. My heart stuttered and then seized when, between their hunched shoulders, I found Prudence, atop a book stack, stabbed through with a silver letter opener, which they had pegged her to the floor with. The books were splayed, with curled and blackened pages, the precious words unreadable ashes. Prudence’s fur had been scorched away–her wrinkled skin oozed, and her beady eyes had been put out.

I retain no further memory of this day, nothing of the bloodletting reported on by the newspapers, not the grisly details of my aunt (found with the familiar lash stuffed down her throat), nor my uncle (his member severed). The papers refused to describe the murder of the “innocent children,” and would only say a silver letter opener had been involved.

I’m told that I screeched and clawed day and night, until my throat bled, and that they placed a mask upon on my face, for they could not bear the sight of my wordless mouth cursing them, blasting the world and everything upon it. I was sent to Arkham Asylum, where I spent ten years in absolute silence. As if to silence my tongueless, betrayed mother and the years with my aunt and uncle, I communicated with no one. Slowly, painfully, I recovered my senses, and came to understand something nearly unbearable: according to law, and all the literature I had read, I was not the hero. I was the villain.

I now regarded my writing gods as villains for creating stories that came to charitable ends, for fooling me into believing the world was a fair place, and most of all, for making me love them.

My doctor was patient. She encouraged my recovery, gave me pen, paper, taught me to write. She gave me a voice, and write I did–but nothing from the imagination. Only what was real.

And now I have come to the end of my stay in Arkham. It is an over-crowded misery here, so many more wanting entrance, none ready to venture out into that outside world. But I must go, because they say I am ready; I am reformed. I must now confess that I have taken recently to fiction. Indeed, my letter of apology was written with such poignant beauty, only a monster could read it and not weep. I myself wept at the disguised truths within it, and at understanding the power and beauty of fiction, and found I did not hate words any longer.

I was silenced by tragedy, by pain, by my past, and by wrong beliefs (in myself and others). My gods are dead, but I am not. I hold a pen in my hand. I hope it is enough.

Also, I’m kinda lazy. *Shrug*