You can’t write? How long has it been? A year. What’s that? An empty dullness is all you feel? You tried that writing prompt generator everyone talks about, right? “10,000 words of a dead soulless winter?” LSD therapy and cranial magic massages can work wonders. Pea leaf mixed with mustard seed? Eating Coney Island funnel cake for eight days straight? I don’t want to say, but if you insist. I see. You insist. There’s a creature who goes by the name Yahtzee. He only comes when you beg—really, really beg. He won’t come for just anyone. He demands knowledge, ritual, carnal blessing, and a key to Gramercy Park. Open the gate, and, with a butter knife, carve  Y A H T Z E E  into the wet earth of the park’s northwest corner. The letters must tear through the mud canvas and expose the ruddy underbelly of roots to the heavens in a wanting offer. It only works under a dank, pre-dawn, spring sky. In juxtaposition, the cement nebulae will electrify the park greenery so much so that the canopy trees will flash chartreuse and the tangled rose stems will glow unnervingly. Eat a slice of banana cream pie, wear a yellow raincoat with yellow rain boots, and watch the sunrise with dirt still caked underneath your fingernails, your hair natural and face clean. You need to get to the abandoned 18th Street station on the 6 line. There are two ways. One, hop on the tracks at 23rd and venture blindly into the dark, the subway tunnel eerie as Van Gogh’s Roadway Underpass in the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. Watch for the screeching rats fucking, fighting, and fleeing the rumble of an oncoming train. Walk with your back against the corridor wall. Imagine your body is pressing against Yahtzee’s fleshy form. Don’t look at him, just sidle along, your body leaving a smear through the subway’s oiled exhaust. Two, find the hatch by the CVS on the corner and climb down the ladder, undisturbed. I can tell you neither which corner nor which CVS. Be desperate. You need to need him. He needs to be needed. You must need nothing else. The station stairs lead to a sealed-off exit, secure as a pharaoh’s tomb. Listen to his breath echo, raspy among the disregarded arcade columns. Follow it, pull yourself up to the platform, let the soot sink into your skin. Take out the butter knife. Lick the dirt clean and take it to your bicep. You must be quick, hard, and deep. Saw yourself diagonally until irritated, until raw skin bubbles into blood. Reticular dermis is thick and stringy, but Yahtzee needs more, so take the tip of the butter knife and dig through the fat, flicking globs on the floor. Mind the arteries and veins. No one wants you dead. Fascia’s glorious coils will shimmer like gold chains that hang in the windows on Canal Street. Tough it through the muscle. You only need a piece the size of a quarter. Slap the meat on the first step and return the way you came. At home, you may sit at your desk for days and nights, awaiting seeds of creation for you to sow. But all in good time. Yahtzee knows a drought often leads to a cataract. Shower every night. Power down your electronics by 10 pm. Sleep with them stowed in another room and the butter knife under your pillow. 

Close your eyes. Listen for the patter of steps. The swish of skin against skin. The flop of meat against meat. Has an enormous presence filled your room? Swish. Swish. Flop. Flop. Swish near your head. Behold Yahtzee. Bits of flesh compose his form, the shape of McDonald’s Grimace. The rotting flesh wiggles as he bows his head, eyes align with your eyes. Keep them wide as you unsheath the butter knife from your pillow. Offer it to him. Yahtzee will place it against your bicep. He needs consent. Take it away, you say. He saws into your nearly-healed skin as a familiar, gnawing throb radiates through your nervous system, punctuated by sharp pain, hot as radiator steam. Yahtzee’s clumpy hand fumbles over your desk until he feels the transparent purple stapler you’ve owned since college. He staples your flesh under his eye among the layers of fragmented skin at different stages of rot, admiring the addition in your vanity mirror. You wretch, then vomit in your mouth. Swallow it. Force the acid back down your esophagus and let it ignite the pit that makes you you, because if you startle Yahtzee, he will swivel his neck so his eyes can fix back onto yours. A sheet of blackened green flesh slides off the side of his head and onto your faded paisley Ruggable. The scent is so putrid it assaults every sense. You hear it, see it, feel it, taste it. Yahtzee is sensitive about his looks, and you need to write because you haven’t in a year, so you rise out of bed and cup Yahtzee’s chin with your open palm. Where is he underneath the layers of sacrifice? Hold your breath and take his mouth in yours. At his wheeze, your body seizes in revulsion, but you have wanted this your whole life. Tongue his sandy tongue until he believes you. He’s a prude and hardly gets to second base before stepping away. Smiles politely. He returns the way he came, a quick shimmy out the window and down the fire escape. In the bathroom, you heave until you can’t heave anymore. Back in your room, morning light captures dust particles suspended midair. It’s beautiful. You hold your nose as you spray Yahtzee’s shed skin with a homemade mixture of vinegar, lavender, and water, then pick it up with a tissue. Before you flush it down the toilet, you open the tissue and sniff. Your story begins at the mouth of a tunnel. Your heroine steps into the abyss.