Satan Burger - By Mellick Carlton Page 0,2

always took my parents for hippies for naming me Leaf.

I would respond: "No, take them for idiots."

I would not capitalize my name if I hadn’t been named Leaf. My personality calls for a spelling in all lowercase letters, like mike or bobby or stephen or joey. Spelling your name like this shows that you feel inferior to the rest of the world, as I certainly do.

But if I were to spell my name leaf, then someone might suspect that I really am the vegetation that grows on trees and plants instead of a person. Maybe even God would believe that. And during autumn, when all the leaves crumple and fall from their branches to die, I too would curl into a crispy ball and drop from the surface of the planet, to suffocate in the breathless areas of the universe.

I’m not very good at talking either. I am utterly confused, sometimes. This is because I took too many drugs when I was in high school. Actually, I wasn’t in high school during this period. I was dropped out. When I say something like "back when I was in high school," I usually mean: "back when I was supposed to be in high school."

Anyway, I did a lot of Felix back then, and snoopies and cucumber seeds and slur corn – this was back when I had the money for such high society drugs – I also did a lot of opie, but that was usually free from friends. Nobody really sells Opie thinking there’s a market for the stuff. It’s basically dirt, the chemical version of Groo.

After my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cable, figured out — it did take them a while to figure anything out — that I replaced doing homework with doing expensive, mind-altering drugs, they decided it would be best for their selves to not have a child anymore.

So I left my parents, off on my own, working at corner shops and thinking they’d miss me. But they didn’t, and to hell with them.

One day, I called up Mrs. Cable (mother) to ask if she missed me. After I asked, there was a long pause. I’m sure she was just staring at her wall, shrugging. So I never called again.

After I was on my own, I resorted to drugs that were easier to come by. Actually, I can’t relate them to real drugs. They were just chemicals, household products that you can buy in any/every store. Air-fresh was the first product I tried. It was invigorating, like taking a bubble bath with your brain. Cough-away was good too, but your vision strobe-battered and made you sick. Later, I experimented/gambled with anything that had toxic ingredients inside. Some things made me gorefully sick. Some things could have killed me.

I hate to think back on those days.

About fifteen months after I left home, I found myself

permanently deranged by these drugs. And I haven’t been cured.

Because of my drugging experiments, I can no longer communicate like the rest of the world can. My mind is locked away from reality somewhere; the thinking is perfect/straight, but my voice doesn’t come out right when I speak my thoughts. I have a stutter, and it takes time for my thoughts to process into words people can understand. Maybe that is my problem, I think in thoughts instead of in words.

I have a bad attention span too.

Speaking eventually became so difficult to me that I gave it up, almost entirely, and I have loads and loads of free time to think now, which I actually enjoy. Who needs a voice anyway? I stay silent during the whiles, usually talking in my head, speaking only to my best good friend and those who are blessed with patience. I do partake in conversations with people, in a way, but my opinions are only expressed to myself, within my brain, and nobody gets to hear them.

I do have friends, plenty of friends. This is an odd thing, now that I think about it, since I’m so antisocial and mind-screwed and all. They think I’m funny for being the way I am, the silent character of the group. Every group has one. I guess. Somebody has to be in the back of the crowd, following. They say I appear and disappear without any of them noticing. Sometimes they say I’m a ghost. Sometimes they say I have magic powers.

Since I don’t speak so much, I write words on my shirts to express myself to the world. I wrote