Touch me. Touch me like you didn't touch me last night.

         “Bored,” said Sir Reginald to nobody in particular as he threw a fifty peso coin across the room. It ricocheted off of a bronze statue of JFK, which yelped in pain.

         “Bored,” he repeated, throwing another coin at the Stone of Unyielding Sorrow, which hung from the ceiling by a rope. He missed, and the coin instead landed in the bucket under it, the one that collects the tears and blood that slowly leech out of the stone.

         “Bored,” he said a bit louder and flicked another coin at the back of Willy, the ghost that lived in Sir Reginald’s house in exchange for assistance with matters that only a ghost can assist with. His name wasn't actually Willy, but Reginald liked that better than its real name. The coin flew through the ectoplasm and landed in a tank of fetid water that may or may not have had a very tiny coelacanth in it.

         “Right, I was fine with ignoring you, but now that you’ve started violating my rights as—”

         “Oh dear, here comes the whinging…” interrupted Reginald.

         “—a spectral entity with free will and emotions,” continued Willy, “I am going to go elsewhere. You need to understand that just because I cannot feel…” he said, passing his hand through a nearby table.

         “Doesn’t mean you can’t feeeeeeel…” said Sir Reginald, clasping his hands across his heart and fluttering his eyelashes.

         “Fuck you,” said Willy and headed out the side wall into the garden.

         “Don’t scare off my butterflies, you…you…GAH!” screamed Reginald as he failed to come up with an insult of any merit.

         Deciding a scotch and scotch was in order, Reginald laboriously stood up and made his way to the sideboard. After pouring himself a triple-double, he sighed loud enough for the neighbors to hear and took a large drink.

         The rat in front of him giggled.

         “Fuh…psht!” sputtered Reginald, spraying a fine mist across every bottle and glass. “Where the shit did you come from? Are you the little bastard that’s been chewing through my boxes of steel-cut oats? Perhaps more importantly, you just giggled, didn’t you?”

         “I did,” said the rat in an impressive baritone, looking at Reginald with tiny human eyes.

         “That’s really disgusting,” said Reginald.

         “After all you’ve seen, is a talking rat with the eyes of a man really—”

         “I’m talking about the fact that you might have been leaving rat hairs in my rocks glasses, or even…if you’ve shat in my little dish of cashews—”

         “Silence, sorcerer!” shouted the rodent, rattling the bottles around it.

         “Okay, sure.”

         “Too long have I waited for this moment, Reginald.”

         “You know my name?”

         “I should. It was you who vanquished me decades ago, when I came so very close to conquering this dimension.”

         “Telling me that I vanquished you while you were trying to conquer this dimension only narrows my choices to a few hundred, you know.”

         “Orpath! Orpath, the Mighty of Soul!” thundered the rat.

         “Ah. Orpath. I never understood your nickname. What does ‘mighty of soul’ mean, anyway? What can you do with…oh. Possess a rat, I should wager, after I’ve had your body cut into tiny bits?”

         The rat smiled, which was the most disconcerting thing Reginald had seen in weeks.

         “For years I sought your home, trapped in this loathsome body, in hopes of finding something within these walls that could bring me my freedom. Now, after two years of drinking from the Stone of Unyielding Sorrow, my power is nigh at its apex.”

         “You’ve been drinking from the blood and tears of the Stone and Unyielding Sorrow? That couldn’t have been pleasant.”

         “The years of burning pain were worth it, you tiny man! In a few moments, when I am finally free of this rat’s body, I will—”

         Reginald knocked back his scotch and brought the glass down hard on the rodent, nearly splitting it in half. Its eyes bulged out of its head and its intestines spilled out across the smooth mahogany surface it had been sitting on.

         “Never tell somebody that you’re still a few moments away from getting your true form and power back.”

         Reginald looked down at the his poor array of drinks and glasses; they were covered in scotch, rat blood, rat hair, and other bits of rat. Reginald used a small towel to wipe his hands and made his way across the room to a mini-fridge. He pulled out two six packs of Modelo Especial and went back to his chair.

         After popping open two cans, he fished around in his pocket and pulled out another fifty peso coin.

         “Bored,” he said as he drew back his arm.

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