A TRAIL OF DIRTY ERASER SHAVINGS

Everything he saw, he tried to erase. He bought over five hundred erasers every year. All of his allowance money went into erasers. Once he even tried to erase his allowance but then he realized that he wouldn't be able to continue erasing things if he didn't have any money because his mother refused to "feed his habit." When he repeated this and she said he was "a precocious little handful" he tried to erase her. He ran up to her leg and started rubbing the eraser on her blue jeans. She sent him to his room where he tried to erase his Hans Solo action figure out of existence. He erased at his face for hours until he was nothing but a blank faced nobody. Then he turned the eraser on himself and tried to erase his elbow. When he was left with nothing but a raw, red patch on his arm, he decided that he would erase everything in the world except for his allowance and his own skin. Everything else was fair game but some things just wouldn't diminish under the rubber of the eraser. He once tried to erase a hamburger at McDonald's when his parents weren't looking. He mashed it into a colorful mashed potato substance. They took the eraser from him and that's when he passed out. He felt a hand within him reaching up to snatch his consciousness. And he was out. They never took his erasers away from him again but he did have to see a therapist every week. The man behind a pair of very large glasses asked him why he felt compelled to erase things and that's when he made up the story of his grandfather falling into a giant cauldron at the eraser factory. While he told this story he imagined erasing the glasses off the therapist's face. He imagined all the pink eraser shavings piling up on the therapist's shoulders like dandruff. He imagined the whole world buried beneath heaps of pink. He... He... Well actually it was me. I erased everything I saw when I was a kid. I still erase things. It's been twenty years and I really want to stop. Keep it in the past tense. This is a purge. I'm trying to fess up in order to stop but all these words might be gone very soon.

Ehren Salazar