All was dark. All was quiet, save for distant night birds and wind whorling the desert-dust floor. Far, far away, past years of time, was a seed awaiting life. Frog sensed it so many thousands of miles away, in a place so remote he could never hope to find it, and without it, all would be forever obscure. In this velvet absence of light and sound, he knew only the black, the solitude, and the vexation of being lost.

Softness brushed frog's fingertips. This was not air around him. This was eternity. His eternity. And he was alone.

Pressure. Within, pressure began to rise, coming from his inability to know the seed of life he could not see, could not grow, for he had drunk up all the waters and none were left to grow this seed, the minute bit of life glowing somewhere he could not reach, could not know. All was so dark, so quiet, save for distant night birds and wind whorling the desert-dust floor.

Frog closed into himself, a dark flower retracting its unfurled folioles. Taking all. Never seeking, never finding. Never knowing.

The drought worsened. The distant night birds ceased crying. The wind whorling the desert-dust floor ceased blowing. This darkness was now lifeless, as well.

"He must be made to laugh," called the deep-bellied voice of the rainbow serpent. "He must be made to laugh. Only then will he open his eyes, open his mouth, let the waters bring back life."

A mere several days of living outside his parents' house had passed, and Will was doing all right. He hadn't told his parents where he was going. In fact, he'd done nothing at all to let them know he was leaving. He figured that even if they did notice he wasn't coming home at night (which was unlikely), they wouldn't much care. Sure, they thought he had psychological issues which couldn't remedy themselves, and that was the main reason they gave for holding him back by allowing him to mooch off them for years, but he knew that all they wanted was for him to make the move on his own, and then whether or not he floundered was off their consciences. They just wanted him to take responsibility so they could then rest easy, knowing that anything that went wrong with him was not their fault; if his life went awry, they'd be able to say that they'd done their best—it was all his problem. He knew they wouldn't do anything to come find him. They'd relish in the fact that he was gone. Perhaps if it ever became beneficial for them to locate him, they'd do so, but for now, he was free of their suffocating support.

For the most part, everything about the apartment had gone as planned. He was left alone; Mark and Derek didn't bother him at all, and that was what he wanted. All three of them came and went at different times, so Will rarely ran into either of them. He did as he'd planned to do when first moving in and came and went through the back door, so even when the others did happen to be home, he was able to steer clear of them. Randomly, he'd seen them when going to use the bathroom or when stepping into the hall, but no more than a few words had passed between either. That was how he wanted it. His hours at the grocery kept him busy enough, and he usually grabbed something easy to eat without cooking so that, when he did get back to the apartment, he wouldn't even have to go into the kitchen. As odd as the arrangement might have seemed for someone else, it was ideal for Will. His desire for roommates had nothing to do with companionship and everything to do with convenience.

Will had seen Mark only once since moving in, and that had been in the hallway. The guy had said hello to Will, but the redhead had merely nodded and looked to the floor in response. Mark struck Will as someone who wasn't worth holding a decent conversation with; he was someone who focused on homework and women and sports and beer; he was like every other male twenty-something out there, and for that reason alone, Will found no use for him. The guy was a total bore. The other roommate, on the other hand—Derek—mildly unnerved Will. Although he'd seen Derek twice (and only for a few seconds) since moving in, he couldn't help but get a bit of an upset stomach when he sensed the guy was around. There was something odd about Derek. Will guessed there was some drug use (heavy drug use) involved; the way Derek spoke was slow and a bit . . . off. Will couldn't quite put his finger on what Derek's deal was, but there was definitely something strange going on with him. Fortunately, though, Will had had little contact with either roommate for the duration of his stay, and so he had much to be pleased about. He'd been virtually alone in his living arrangements, and without television or internet or video games to distract him (his roommates had all of those things, but he was loath to touch their belongings), his mind had begun to run rampant and unchecked.

In his small room, Will had a disgusting futon he'd picked up from another renter in the building who'd been moving out when he'd been moving in, his suitcase full of clothes and the few personal artifacts he'd packed in his rush to move out, and the sculptures he'd stolen from his father. Those two sculptures were the only attractive things in the room, which was otherwise easily mistakable for a junk closet. Two of the four walls in Will's little room were windows, because the area was actually a built-in sun-porch. Each of the windows had a sill that was about a foot in width, therefore offering space for placing plants, decorations, or anything else that would fit. Will had put nothing on those sills except for the two sculptures, which he'd put next to one another in the windows across the wall with the back door in it. They barely fit: each was about two feet in height and nearly ten square inches at the base. With the blinds raised a bit, Will was able to perch them just so on the sill without giving them the leeway to fall off. When the sun came into the room in the morning, the red, gold, and dark silver colors of the jagged-glass-shaped metal pieces glittered like jewels in the light. Because he had so much time most mornings before going to work, Will would awaken early to wait and watch the progression of the highlights as the sun moved higher into the sky. He'd listen to Mark get ready for classes (Mark was unnecessarily loud) and just stare at the sculptures. He'd never seen such beauty as he found in them. There was some indifference in the works—some cold persistence—that he wished he could mimic inside himself. He wanted to be as harsh and exanimate as they were, but for some reason, Will had a difficult time distancing himself from the world around him. Instead of being able to feel indifferent toward everything, he almost always found himself detesting what he was attempting to ignore, and that in turn produced deep feelings of animosity in him. He knew that in order to truly free himself from the anger he so often felt, he'd have to become indifferent and cold, like those sculptures—but for some reason, he couldn't do it. His sensitivities consumed him, and because he let himself feel such bitterness, his hatred always ended up aimed inward, at his own self.

Such things as his own vicious, inescapable cycle of frustration and resentment had been at the forefront of his thoughts since moving out of his parents'. With no distractions, his thoughts had been circulating dangerously. He'd actually asked his boss at work to up his hours; he had the time (and now needed the income more) to add some shifts to his schedule. Work, however, did little to ease his mind. In fact, since Simon had begun to work with him, Will had felt less in control. Although he did his best to avoid the high-school kid, there were occasions when he had to ask him a question or even walk by him in the break room, and at those moments, Will became uncharacteristically nervous.

But he didn't want to think about Simon right now. It was about two, and he had to go to work soon enough, where he'd have to focus his attention on avoiding that tall, gangly, odd-looking kid. While Will was still familiarizing himself with his roommates' daily routines, he knew enough to know that Mark was out of the picture until the evening. Mark went to class early and stayed away most of the day; sometimes he wouldn't even be home when Will came back from his night shift. Derek, though, was more unpredictable. The one time Will had had a decent conversation with him (right before he moved in), he'd gotten the impression that the guy worked a random assortment of jobs, none of them very lucrative or regular. Also, Derek was quiet. Sometimes, Will would begin to leave his room with the notion that no one was around, and then he'd catch sight of Derek leaving his room, or he'd see a light on underneath the bathroom door, and he'd move quickly but quietly back into the sanctuary of his sun porch. Whereas Mark created enough noise in the apartment to wake the neighbors above, below, and across the hall, Derek never even caused the floorboards to creak. It was as if he was a ghost, silently hovering from room to room. His anomalous movements were arbitrary and yet, in some odd way, graceful. How exactly they exhibited grace, Will couldn't say; it was more an intuition he had. There was something in his mousy features and delicate movements that exemplified grace. Will's uncertainty about why he felt this way was what made him so uncomfortable about Derek.

Will was fairly certain that he was alone in the apartment, at present. It was a weekday, so Mark was definitely gone, and he thought he'd heard the soft clunk and click of someone (presumably Derek) shutting and locking the front door. He decided that it was safe to venture out and into the bathroom.

About fifteen minutes later, Will had finished showering, brushing his teeth, and tending to his other minimalist hygienic needs. He didn't like to spend much time on his looks, and he especially didn't like to be around mirrors. Even when he caught his reflection in passing, he'd never look himself in the eyes. There was something he feared about looking into his own eyes; he didn't want to really know his appearance in detail, anyhow. Besides, his roommates weren't the cleanest people, so Will wanted to get out of the bathroom as quickly as possible. There was mold in the tub and up the walls that had to have been festering for months, and the bathmat was dirtier than the floor, which needed a good scrubbing to get the bits of mildew out of the tiles. Around the sink were little hairs that seemed congregated around the base of one of the guys' electric shavers, intermingling with the unidentifiable bits of dirt and dust that had collected there. There were rust-colored water marks around the faucet and the drain of the sink, and the bowl itself was flecked with old toothpaste that someone had been too lazy to wash out. The toilet was the worst of all—but Will had made a purpose of not looking into it when he had to use it. There was no doubt that his parents had been far neater and much more sanitary than the two men Will now lived with, but he couldn't complain. At some point, he sensed that he'd cave in and clean the bathroom (out of fear of catching some disgusting disease more than any sense of duty), but it wasn't going to be today. His roommates had every right to their gross lack of cleanliness, as he was paying less than half of what they were in order to live there.

As Will was about to leave the restroom, he caught sight of a newspaper that had fallen to the side of the sink and was curled between the cabinet and the wall. For some reason, he stooped to pick it up before flipping the light off and stepping into the hall; he wasn't sure why he'd felt compelled to grab the paper, but when he saw in the dimness of the hallway the article which the paper had been folded to highlight, he lowered his brow in consternation and had a strange compulsion to read it. For the first time since moving in, Will wandered up into the living room at the front of the apartment, not really knowing what he was even doing because he was absorbed in reading. The article was small and something that one would have to have known to look for in order to find; it was mixed in with a menagerie of movie and adult entertainment advertisements and would definitely be missed by anyone reading the paper for informative purposes, but it was also something no one seeking casual romantic encounters would think twice about reading. Will himself wouldn't have thought twice about it except for the title, which, though small, clearly read "An Ugly Reflection."

Had he not moments before been avoiding his own face, perhaps he may not have felt any immediate connection to it and would not have even glanced at the text, but when Will started to read the article, a string of elation at its relevance to his own thoughts seemed to tie a knot to his heart at one end, leave his body, and begin seeking the author of the piece in order to attach its other end to such a like-minded individual.

Those with whom I so frequently find myself in company, read a portion of the piece, seem such a different breed from what I have familiarized myself with as human that I often wonder if, whether Darwin was alive and studying the human race as an evolutionary creature today, we as a species would be found to have diversified into branches and adapted in strange ways to the exact same environment, just as the finches of the Galapagos Islands. What calls my attention and pulls me to love and live seem so far removed from most others I encounter that I cannot help but believe they are viewing our identical environment through eyes which have transmogrified to see everything in a way I cannot.

Maybe you do not know what I'm talking about, but all one has to do to understand is pay attention to what is playing on a television, blaring out of the radio, screaming down at you from a billboard, or even being communicated to you through a fellow human. You will find a sharp, cold ugliness everywhere you turn—a deteriorating sense of decency in dress, in language, in visual stimulation, in entertainment, and in every other aspect of human living. It is not a stylistic sharpness or a beautiful, artistic, indifferent coldness; it is the pang of hunger in the belly of a starving wolf.

Will could feel his heart beating. He was devouring these words as if his own mind had produced them and wanted to gobble them back up in fear of allowing their escape. His eyes skimmed the article to a later portion.

Why do people desire ugliness? Simply put, we desire it because it has attained value, and in our society, what glitters as possessing value is as a light to blind moths. The penalty for a moth failing to join the other winged insects at a bulb is similar to that of a person refusing to accept valued norms: being left in the solitary night. Failing to revert to crude language with every utterance may cause others to view you as prudish, and neglecting to laugh at crass humor will give others occasion to deem you a snob. But attraction to ugliness comes at a price, for the moth, when daring to fly too close, loses sense and can be easily deceived into being attracted by a bug zapper . . . I suppose, reader, you can decipher the metaphor.

Flustered, Will frowned; there seemed gaps in the piece, and yet he still was impressed with a strange feeling that he'd written the words himself. He continued reading, coming to the end and final sentence of the article:

Perhaps, then, if we have diversified to the point of splitting our species, I am left behind as a member of the weaker, the dying, while my fellow humans have evolved into an advanced creature, for in this present environment, I am the one unsuited and unwilling to fight for survival. I am the one left in the darkness of confusion. Maybe in the end, it is better to be ignorant of and deceived by your surroundings than it is to perceive what is ugly and be left alone in the dark.

Will turned the paper over and flipped through its pages. He was looking for more, even though he knew that the article had come to an end. A sudden weakness overcame him and he had to sit down on the couch. His skin felt odd, as if it was expanding away from his muscles and bones. It was all tingly and cool, and he was lightheaded enough that he had to close his eyes momentarily to keep from feeling too dizzy. Where the strange sensations came from, he couldn't quite say, but he knew that it had to do with what he'd just read. There was nothing particularly earth-shattering in its words; it was more the uncanny sense that whoever had written them had taken his views from Will but been able to say them in a more beautiful manner. If the person responsible for such thoughts had been able to produce such a simplistic yet moving piece, he or she had to possess insights into other subjects that concerned Will. Although he'd never believed it worth his time to hold intellectual discourse with others, Will felt a quickly increasing inclination to figure out who the author of the piece was and contact him or her.

He stopped flipping pages and looked back to the top of the article. He hadn't noticed before, but there was a tiny name typed under the bold-printed title: Gwendolyn Newsham.

Newsham . . . Will raked his mind. "Derek," he said quietly aloud. His roommate. Something clicked. It would make sense if this Gwendolyn was related to Derek—the guy had probably obtained the newspaper and had it open to this particular page for that reason. Was it his mother, maybe? An aunt? Will couldn't say. He hadn't any idea. "Gwendolyn" could even be a pen name, for all he knew. In spite of his self-promise to avoid his roommates, Will made the decision that he'd have to bring himself to ask Derek about this. He just couldn't let it go.

It was late that night, when Will returned from a waste-of-his-life shift at the grocery store, that he had the opportunity to ask Derek about the article. When he entered the apartment from the back door, he heard voices conversing in the front room and figured both his roommates were home. Because he had hardly ever approached them—least of all in the late hours of the night—they turned shocked expressions to him when he stepped out of the gloom of the hallway and into the ugly ring of light let off by the naked overhead bulb hanging from the ceiling. Mark was sitting on the couch with some other guy Will didn't recognize, and two unfamiliar girls were sharing the stuffed chair next to it. Derek himself was on the floor, leaning against the furnace, which hadn't been turned on that day because the evenings had been growing steadily warmer. Will was taken aback and stood for a moment feeling awkward and unsure what to say. His brain fast scrutinized the guests his roommates had over, though it felt as if he was caught out of place for an aching amount of time. Mark, pug-faced and wearing a backwards baseball cap (one of the true signs of an idiot, in Will's opinion) was staring at him oddly, as if he'd never seen the boarder that lived in the back closet, and in his hand was something resembling a cigarette, though Will thought it looked too loose to contain any nicotine. The guy next to Mark was incredibly beautiful, resembling the redhead's childhood images of what the Greek Gods would have looked like: youthful, tanned, golden- and curly-haired. He, too, held paper in his hands, though it was flat and bedecked with rows of white powder. Will immediately understood, and he felt both disgusted and embarrassed. The two girls on the chair were grinning at him. One was on the other's lap, four legs splayed across each other, one in a short skirt and barefoot, the other in some ripped leggings and converse. Their eyes were blackened with liner and they both had the faces of a hundred other unrecognizable females that haunted the apartments, hipster bars, and basements of the city.

He turned to Derek, shutting out the others more to feel secure than for anything else. Derek, mousy-haired, resembling a rodent of some sort that had crawled out of a hole in the wall, was smoking weed, pulling the role from his mouth and exhaling as he stared calmly at Will.

It was actually Derek who spoke first, causing Will to resent him the moment he'd done it. "You want a smoke?" he asked slowly but placidly, obviously feeling affected. He smiled affably, but Will didn't want anything to do with them.

"I have to ask you a question," he said, keeping his exterior complacent though his interior was flooding with discontent.

The rest of the room had paused in all action and conversation, making Will feel foolish. But he held his ground.

"Yeah," Derek replied, making no movement, stating rather than asking anything, as if he'd suspected Will had a question for him.

The others were listening, watching, waiting for Will's purpose to come out. He didn't want to humor them, but he also sensed that trying to pull Derek away from them to ask his question in private would appear peculiar. He decided the best thing to do was get his question out and leave as quick as he could. "Do you know a Gwendolyn Newsham? I was reading an article today. That was the author of it. Thought you might be related—having the same last name."

Derek grinned wider, pushed his head back against the furnace and laughed, draping his arms across his knees. Something odd sparked in his black, beetle-like eyes. Turning to Mark, Derek said, "Gwen, you know?" And Mark nodded in understanding. The guy next to him remained non-descript, an anomaly in his incandescence, and the girls began to giggle between themselves, whispering things in one another's ears and casting looks at Derek.

Looking back to Will, Derek responded, "That's my sister."

Will's chest throbbed. Some progress. A sister was better than an aunt or mother or cousin—a sister would probably come visit.

"She's a real bitch, man," Derek added, his grin maintaining its plastic status on his face. "I never seen her since I moved to the city."

Not wanting to ask anything else for fear of sounding as if he cared too much, Will nodded. "Oh. Just thought it was an interesting article."

"Yeah, that's why I read it. But it was all just crap, man. Just crap. I didn't even understand it. It was like, all about Darwin, and moths . . . and, like, ugly people."

"What the hell are you talking about?" snorted Mark. "Moths and shit." His question broke the quiet in the room and both he and Derek began to laugh. The girls squirmed around and asked if there was any wine in the apartment, one saying she'd settle for vodka shots. The beautiful guy on the couch stared down at the table, where he'd placed the powder-covered paper, as if his eyes were glass marbles. He was the only one, besides Will, that seemed tired of the situation. Knowing nothing else was going to come from this moment, and desiring with a volatile intensity to get away from these people, Will turned and retreated down the hall, feeling a bizarre mix of bewilderment and elation as he shut the door of his room behind him and locked, it, blocking himself from the mess of ignorance only a few rooms away.