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Oz didn’t really like TV, he thought it was mostly a waste of time. Plus, it meant that you had to be inside the house, which was torture.

But he liked The Lone Ranger .

He liked the purity of it.

Oz liked purity. He liked perfect heroes and scandalous villains. He liked always knowing right from wrong. He liked the idea of the hero in the pristine White Hat riding after the train robbers to save the beautiful damsel in distress.

He liked order.

For the briefest of moments… Oz w as that hero, and the squalor which surrounded him was forgotten. He was more than trash. He was someone important. Someone… special. Extraordinary.

Someone alive .

A moment later, Oz’s uncle nonchalantly switched the channel, and the real world once more returned.

Oz’s uncle set up a metal folding chair— the couch still occupied by the precious plastic containers which his uncle seemingly had no intention of ever moving— and sat down in it to watch the static-y news, without even acknowledging that Oz was currently watching another program.

For the briefest of instants, Oz imagined himself grabbing the channel-switching pliers from his uncle and using them to stab the man in the throat, while screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs and crying hysterically.

But as quick as the horrifying image appeared, it vanished.

Oz was pretty sure that normal people didn’t think such things though, even if only in an idle way.

Because Oz was evil. Everyone said. And one day soon, he’d become a monster.

Bad blood would out and there seemed little chance that Oz wouldn’t follow in his father and brother’s footsteps.

On the screen, the reporter was looking at the camera with a serious expression.

“…for comment.” She finished, then the angle switched, showing a little icon of a prison next to her head.

“Officials at Sutherland Prison said the execution was carried out at 5:30 today, with no difficulties. This marks the third execution in the last four years.” The image switched again, this time showing a booking photo of the inmate in question.

“Henry Arthur Dimico was convicted of the murder of seventeen people inside a Mega-Burger in…”

The rest of the story was interrupted by Oz’s uncle’s applause.

“’Bout time they gassed that asshole.” He took a celebratory drink of beer from his broken ceramic mug, which appeared to have been a desk accessory in its previous life.

“Too bad they couldn’t do it more than once.

” He let out a hacking laugh of sheer delight. “They killed him on Thanksgiving! HA!”

Oz’s aunt came into the room to watch the broadcast, casually tossing aside the bowl she’d used in eating her pizza. “Wish I could have been there to see him piss himself in fear as they pulled the switch.”

Oz’s attention was stuck on the bowl, as the burned yellow cheese slowly oozed out onto a pile of newspaper ads from the 4 th of July.

But like the plastic jugs, the newspapers would one day supposedly be recycled for wealth unimagined. As soon as his aunt and uncle had “read all of the articles they’d missed,” anyway.

His silent observations of the oily horror which was cheese and shag carpeting, were interrupted by his aunt, who seemed to want to make this a learning opportunity for him.

“You see?” She pointed at the screen. “See what happens when you live the kind of life you’re living?

” She put her hands on her hips, her fingertips leaving greasy smudges on her lilac stretch pants, which were at least fifteen years old and had been rescued from a stranger’s trash.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Oz turned back to the screen, where an image of his parents was just disappearing, to be replaced by a weather forecast.

He tried to conceive of a thought, if not something he actually felt, then at the very least some feigned emotion which would make his aunt happy. But… but he just didn’t feel anything.

The Oz who had known those people was long gone now.

He barely remembered them. And in the abstract, he missed the life they represented.

He missed the version of Oz they knew and the people that Oz thought they were.

But at the moment… he was really more concerned about what would happen once the pizza cheese fully melted into the carpet and the rats in the wall discovered it.

“May I just go to bed?” He finally asked, not really caring about the answer.

His aunt rolled her eyes and heaved a disgusted sigh, interpreting his retreat from the room as his being obstinate and refusing to leave his evil lifestyle behind.

“Soulless little freak.” His uncle mumbled under his breath to his aunt. “Gonna kill his-self before he’s a teenager, you can tell.”

Oz didn’t wait for a further reply, and made his way down the narrow hallway to his room.

The walk was made more difficult by the piles of “perfectly good shoeboxes” which his uncle had brought home two years ago, and which he still hadn’t found the perfect use for.

One day though, the tattered cardboard was certain to bring hope to mankind and the inconveniences they caused Oz each and every day would be worth it.

Inside his room, Oz noted with no real surprise that the dividing line on the floor had been moved again, so that now Hooch had about 80% of the space and Oz no longer even had enough room to sit on the bed with his feet on the floor.

But Oz didn’t care.

He flopped down into the bedsheets, which his aunt and uncle had bought at a garage sale.

They were emblazoned with dancing images of Strawberry Shortcake .

But Oz didn’t care about that either. He routinely used a good portion of his meager savings to take the old sheets to the laundromat five blocks away.

They were Strawberry Shortcake and they were so old they had holes in them, but they were clean. They were the one thing in the house that was. There wasn’t a speck of dirt marring Strawberry Shortcake’s fading red hair. And Oz took an inordinate amount of pride in that.

He fell asleep, brushing the occasional roach from his exposed arms and listening to the rats move around in the thin walls.

In his dreams, the world had a perfect order…