Savage Love by Douglas Glover

though twice he tripped and impaled himself inadvertently. His shrieks went unanswered. His body was a star map of scars and punctures. He remained terrified of his father, a man now broken in health and feeble from the strain of defending himself against his son’s accusations. His father had moved into an extended care facility , but Tobin’s mother refused to tell him the address.
    â€œHaven’t you done enough?” she said.
    There had been a restraining order, at least once. Every day, when he left for work, he would knock on his mother’s door, give her a peck on the cheek, and say, “I love you, Mom.” Each time, she seemed to shrink from him, shuddering, growing into herself, frail and sickly.
    He tried to have his name legally changed from Thorn to Pillow. He went around introducing himself as Martin Pillow even though everyone knew him as Tobin Thorn. The house had fallen into ruin. Tobin sometimes borrowed the backhoe from the cemetery. He had undercut the foundation and knocked over the summer kitchen. One day Tobin’s mother, no doubt consumed with jealousy over his hard-won success and happiness, packed an overnight bag and ran away with a man named Reggie Wemyss whom she had met when he came to the door selling vinyl replacement windows. She wrote in soap on the bathroom mirror: Free At Last! She did not leave a forwarding address. Tobin’s new girl had roses tattooed on her breasts, a crown of thorns on her back, and a skein of barbed wire inked around her neck.
    â€œNobody can touch me,” she said.
    â€œNo need to explain,” he said.
    They had met during grief therapy. She idolized Kurt Cobain. She called Tobin Martin Pillow because that was how he introduced himself. She was overweight, with large, unmanageable breasts, lank black hair turning to grey. She seemed alarmingly familiar, like every other woman in his life, but none the worse for having spent the last thirty years underground in the backyard.
    â€œI thought you were dead,” said Tobin. “Murdered.”
    â€œI don’ t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “But you’ve got me intrigued.”
    The new girl reminded Tobin of a kite come to earth, crumpled, broken, but still buffeted by the winds of desire. She showed him her paint-by-numbers Colonial America collection. She wore a cardigan sweater with deep pockets. She set the alarm clock at night and made him get up to pee. She taught him to play cribbage. They did jigsaw puzzles together. He took evening classes in power shovels and earth movers. They started a retirement account at the local credit union, bought a time-share in Boca Raton and joined the End Times Church of Christ the Reanimate, run out of a Trim-n-Buff nail salon in the mall. In his spare time Tobin began to write a self-help guide for abused children. Nights, he dreamed of being buried alive and premature ejaculation. Tobin told his therapist that his life was shadowed by forgotten things.
    â€œLike what?” asked the therapist.
    â€œI’ve forgotten,” said Tobin.
    He said he believed his parents had undergone plastic surgery and moved into the house next door under the names Mr. and Mrs. Kirpal Singh, an insidious couple with a small child named Parvati. Their cats came into his yard and did their business in the excavations. He had notified the police on several occasions. He and his new girl moved around the house in synchronized patterns like automata. At night he could hear her weeping behind locked doors. Aside from the violent rages, intermittent catatonia, nightmares, sleepwalking, chronic priapism, nervous hair-pulling, delusions of grandeur, deathly boredom, spiritual emptiness and sleep apnea, he felt that life had never been better.
    One day, Tobin spotted Aganetha in the street. It was as though he had entered the Land of the Dead. There were gods everywhere. All of life had been a promise. His iguana brain