She liked to lay on her bed with her head hanging off the mattress and down towards the floor. She liked to look at the ceiling and imagine another world or way of living in the same room. She wondered what the windows, doors, archways and lighting fixtures and fans would look like if it was all reversed if she was up there walking around in that world. Then she would count the ceiling tiles. Always twenty-three because of the corner where the wall stuck out and the tile had been cut to fit the space.

When it rained and was gray or as the dusk spread its wings, she liked to stare at the patterns on the wallpaper. She always could see strange faces in the soft lamp light. Never anyone she knew though. Always sinister, ancient and somehow diabolical. Like they could see deep inside of you to find the best ways to fuck with you to make you go insane before they killed you. But she did nothing to invoke them into her world and so, there they remained, leaving her to scratch the depths of her mind wondering what pandoras they existed in. Why, one even appeared to be smoking like the zig zag man but with a bemused smirk on its face but with cold intentions in its pits of hell eyes. This she did on Saturdays after seven P.M.

Sometimes she liked to draw superheroes and cartoon figures on old notebook paper she kept in an old shoebox under her desk. While she drew, she would count. A piece of paper has one, two, three four sides. She would look around as she drew at objects in her room. My clock on the stand has one, two, three sides. My tv has one, two, three, four sides. My wooden jewelry box has one, two, three four, five, six sides.

When she masturbated, she had to rub herself, her oyster button, she called it, 666 times to get off. She didn't blame it on the OCD. She thought it was fun to count that high when she was horny. On the two shelves hidden in the back of the closet she had her secret vices. She called them her coping machines. The top shelf had thirteen various bongs and pipes of unusual colors and sizes to fit her mood and taste. On the second shelf also depending on her moods and tastes sat thirteen dildos and vibrators of assorted sizes and colors. On the floor of the same closet sat a huge dildo that looked like a bong and next to it sat a huge bong that looked like a dildo. Either way, they both tickled her in the best way. Because when she was sexually frustrated, she could go into the closet, take off her clothes and perch on either one, rubbing her vagina or her ass on either one loving the hardness and pressure, fantasizing that the devil himself was about to enter her and fuck her speechless. This always made her wetter and climax harder as she pictured the bad red one slamming into her cunt and asshole, harder and deeper, like a jackhammer. The man was huge. These sex toys and the wild stuff in her head blew her gaskets more than any sex with a living person. She had a vibrator with a speed knob. With a pillow under her ass and her legs spread open wide she entered herself squeezing and pulling her nipples simultaneously. It filled her completely and after a few first initial strokes she sunk it deep within quickly jacking the speed to overdrive. The head was a motorized propelled demon that thumped her hard, mean, and deep till loud groans and panting erupted out of the side of her mouth. It took sixty-nine times because she had counted what it took for her to have in her mind, great fucking sex.

She wore thirteen bracelets, all silver and jangly on her left wrist and thirteen beach like stone and shell types on her right. She also had thirteen bracelets to coincide with the holidays, each with their own charm. Like bangles with turkeys, rabbits, shamrocks, Santa’s, firecrackers and pumpkins. Even ones to go with the weather, seasons and Solstices, like in winter snowflakes, spring flowers, summer suns and autumn leaves.

This is what Fifi did in her room when she wasn't at work. She hadn't been to work in thirty-three days. She worked in the morgue. She was late. But no one had come for her to find out why she was late. And the phone had not rung. But today she would go to work as she stood locking the seventeen locks on her door. She went down the hallway counting the red colored patches in the carpet design as she walked.

Tammy Higgins has been published in Amulet, Atlantic Pacific Press, Conceit, Iconoclast, The International Library of Poetry, Noble House, Out in the Mountains, Ultimate Writer, Samhain Secrets of Irish Horse Anthologies, 2019 Best New Emerging Poets of New Hampshire, Trajectory, and won a contest sponsored by The Oak magazine among others. She was included in the Dear Loneliness Project linktr.ee/dearloneliness, the longest letter to fight loneliness, 290 meters, three football fields or almost 1,000 sheets of A4 paper. Also she had three photos in The Connected World 2020 Los Angeles Center ofPhotography. She’s 54 and has MS. Born in Northern NY in the Adirondacks, she currently lives in southern Peterborough, New Hampshire.