—ONE MORE FOR THE ROAD, AND LORD, LET IT BE THE LAST 

 

Deepfake

 

I keep losing marbles from the jar, as we all do, but my car only knows reverse, back to the trailer with the shysters and succubi, bedrooms turned into torture chambers, where the screams were always stifled by a hairy paw, or a spatula stuck down the throat, and then, out of the blue, last Thursday, my therapist deepfaked into my mother, wearing a blood-splattered blonde wig, her hands gripped on a notebook as if it was the neck of my favorite chicken just before she’d bring the butcher knife down, Dad floating into the room like another atrocity deepfake, the two of them staring at me for years, waiting to hear some fake confession I could never muster.