I have an evil homunculus. He lives with me. He has powers. He uses them whenever he can.

I've never seen him, but I feel him, and sometimes hear his sour-milk voice. I can detect his workings.

He has odd, misshapen teeth. In the morning, before I shower, he runs into the bathroom and gnaws on the soap, turning the nice symmetrical bar into a lumpen, raggedy thing that falls apart in my hands. When I bend over to myopically pick up the slippery pieces, he directs a jabbing spray of water right at my asshole. I yelp, and I hear his tiny laughter.

While I'm drying off, he runs back to the nightstand and repositions my glasses to ensure that I will pick them up by the lenses instead of the temples.

When I walk to work, he's with me. He rides, clutching the small of my back with one hand while reaching down with the other to slowly, stealthily, inexorably pull my boxers up into the crack of my ass.

He has this thing about my ass.

When he tires of that, he scampers down my leg and pulls my socks down to my ankles. I pretend it's just the socks, and I scold them loudly. "Quitters!" I yell at them as I pull them up again and again, "You socks are fucking quitters."

He has a prism that he carries with him, pure and transparent as winter ice. When the mood strikes him, he climbs onto my shoulders and plays it across my field of vision. It is then when an ordinary sign reading "PISTON & RING SHOP" transforms in my mind to read "PIMPIN' RING SHOP," and I wonder for a moment what sane person could possibly have opened a jewelry store for pimps. The homunculus' laughter echoes inside my head moments later.

He flits about my desk at work. On my lunch break, when I am searching for airfares to Europe, he is inside the wires, riding the luminous ether of the Internet, and fouling the messages back to my monitor. My airfares repeatedly display staggering, idiotic figures like "$739 per person," over and over, while I know full well that the airlines are all mad with fear because their profits are Greg Louganising all across the board; people everywhere are getting plush plane rides across the Atlantic for fifty bucks a head, and that's with a gourmet lobster dinner and an enthusiastic handjob from a pneumatic stewardess thrown in to boot, both ways. I stare at my horrible, obviously fictional airfare quotes and I silently curse the homunculus.

The homunculus dashes downstairs to the deli, right before me, and throws all the bagels into the dumpster before I can get there. All except the onion bagels.

When I stop for a drink on the way home, the homunculus does not rest. He is the one who scampers to the jukebox and evilly preprograms the selections. I will hear only Bob Marley and Santana on this visit, and every other. The twenty-year old fake hippies all bob their heads along with the rhythms, as if in thrall, but I know that they are pawns of the homunculus, mindless and obedient. They will ask me for cigarettes before I leave, and the homunculus will jab me violently in the asshole with his sharp little thumbnail if I refuse them.

When I get home, he deviously manipulates the cable channels. Tonight, every channel was either playing Pootie Tang, M*A*S*H reruns, or hockey. All three hundred channels. Pay-per-view would only offer America's Greatest Tumor Biopsies.

Before bed, I retire to the bathroom, and the toilet seat is clammy and searingly cold; my startled flesh screams and tries to contract all at once, causing my posterior to sort of sieze up on itself; a spasmodic, hypothermic clench that will only ebb after a few minutes of sluggish bloodflow. I sit patiently and wait for abatement, and again I hear the chittering of the homunculus in my ears. I know he is with me forever.

I wish he'd leave my ass alone, just once.