Daniel liked things without wounds.

Things unblemished, unscarred, and uninjured brought relief for his teenage mind. They were the things on which he spent precious time—not in an attempt to understand or dissect them, but for the sole purpose of escape.

The wind pulled at the seeds on the stalk of grass he held in his hand. He sat cross-legged in the middle of a vacant lot between Litchfield's only drug store on one side and the town's only law office on the other. Both buildings were owned by Attorney Canton S. Louis, Daniel's father.

Litchfield offered little for a teenager to do during the summer and Daniel's dad wasn't about to let him go off during those empty months. Frankly, the town offered little for anyone to do during any time of the year. His dad often complained of the lack of business that translated to the lack of people occupying this tiny town in the middle of nowhere. Mr. Louis swore the town started down the chute of obscurity some twenty years earlier over a number of problems that ended with the town's occupants clawing for each other's jugulars. Daniel asked his dad to tell him about it a number of times at the kitchen table, but each time his dad would just mumble something and change the subject. Mr. Louis typically followed those times with half a bottle of Jim Beam.

Daniel shifted his legs into a more comfortable position in the dirt. Pulled low over his eyes, his hoodie blocked out the sky and surroundings leaving him to focus on the seeds clinging to the end of the stalk. He yearned to reach out and touch the dormant capsules of life, but the fear of tainting them held him back.

"New life," he thought, "clean and perfect. Well, almost."

Just on the edge of the grass stalk's physical existence, woven into its essence, he could see a creeping shade of gray that wanted to be black. It had taken him two years of therapy to realize that only he could see that extra substance. He'd still be listening to those fine-talking doctors with their file folders and clipboards if he hadn't learned the value of lying, but then he could see that they too, had learned several dirty values.

Daniel could see it on everything, a taint in varied shades from off-white to black. He figured that it was something separate from whatever object it covered. But he sensed too that the creeping filth and the object were somehow one, somehow linked—though maybe not originally. He'd finally come to the sad conclusion that neither could exist outside the other. He named the extra essence "creep."

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