You have to be at least twenty-one to get a license to open carry in Texas so I became twenty-one. I live in Kirbyville, Texas and this is my true life. Kirbyville has a population of 2000 and was placed on the border with Louisiana. I was born here but I won’t die here because I’ll die somewhere in Broward County, Florida. I’ve driven to Florida and back three times in the last two years. My name is Buddy Mold.

Just yesterday on the beach I saw a shirtless guy in jean cut-offs steal a girl’s phone and purse from her towel where she was suntanning. She hardly even got up or yelled when it happened because she was stunned. I wasn’t stunned at all but I felt bad for both of them. He went down the beach so fast like an animalon one of those ultra slow-mo shots on Animal Planet where you can see each individual muscle working. It was like that.

I saw his face tattoo of a planet on fire and I could’ve told her so she could tell the police and they could find him but I was just thinking about how hot she was in the sun. I never set my phone down.

I usually live with my mom, she’s thirty-eight. Our house has two paper shell pecan trees, one large active and one inactive pecan tree, as well as a fig tree and a pear tree. We have a storm cellar and a water well from 1930. My mom has twenty-seven outstanding felony charges and next week is her court date but I won’t be there to help her. She hasn’t spoken to her public defender in two weeks. She usually takes two days to prep for court. She’s going to have to walk to court because I’m not there to drive her.

My mom’s life got much worse after they found her younger sister’s torso in a box. Her name was Diane. I didn’t cry but lots of other people did. My mom had to identify her by her big belt buckle that had two horse heads on it criss-crossed. She pawned the buckle soon after because it was actually really nice. I wasn’t thinking about my aunt at the time that much because I was thinking about the movie I am writing for the actress Mia Goth.

The box was on a hill in the woods forty miles outside of Kirbyville across state lines in Louisiana. This is funny because she worked boxing things at the Amazon warehouse. I used to joke that she probably died because someone forgot to sign for the package. But that still wouldn’t explain the fact that she didn’t have a head and even then the joke doesn’t make sense. It was a tough crime to solve for the police but I couldn’t and wouldn’t help them. I’ve had a deep distaste for law enforcement and the federal government ever since I learned about Waco in 2010. I really like David Koresh and I know he’s still alive but not in the country. Like Koresh, I was raised in Texas by a single mother. The police asked me everything I knew about my aunt and I said, “she was nice.”

“Don’t you want to help catch the guy who did this?” they said. “Don't you want to help your mother?” The detective smelled like whiskey and tobacco and I hated his face and everything about him. “Buddy, we’re trying to help—just tell us what you remember from the last time you saw your aunt.”

“I remember Waco,” I told them. I’m not sure if they did.

As if the murder wasn’t enough, the whole fiasco with the missing head really upset my mom. She was a mess. She asked me for her old dealer’s number because she had deleted it one of the times she was trying to kick. Sometimes she makes me save them in case of an emergency but this time I didn’t have it. She went through all of dad’s old papers trying to find the number and eventually did. The dealer’s name is Patty “Chrome” Bankhead which I assume is all a fake name so I don’t know why he needs a nickname. I call him Patty Chromosome.

They never found my aunt’s legs or arms even after they found the guy who did it. They did find her head though. I didn’t get to see it even though I asked. The guy who killed her was Robert Fisher (no relation to the chess grandmaster Bobby Fisher)and he was my high school physics teacher. I knew him before he became morbidly obsessed with my aunt. My mom testified in court but I didn’t. She never missed an appointment or a court date and there were a lot of them. Sometimes she went high but never too high. My mom can’t legally own a firearm because she’s a felon but I can so I carry for both of us, it’s the cross I bear. My aunt also owned a gun, legally too, and she open-carried like me. Robert’s wife Sandy didn’t know he was obsessed with my aunt and Sandy cried a lot in court but she knew Robert was guilty. I didn’t know what eHarmony was until I learned that my aunt Janine met Robert on there. The serpent's root is strong and touches many lives.

I’m writing a horror movie called Total Abuse for Mia Goth. She’d play Sarah Pender, a felon convicted on two counts of murder. Pender, like Goth, has tangerine-tinted light-brown hair so the casting is only natural. In 2008 Pender broke out of Rockville Correctional Facility in Parkville County, Indiana. She was on America’s Most Wanted list for over a year. Eventually she was caught at some random house in Chicago. She was wearing this oversized tan Purdue hoodie when they arrested her.

Everyone knew she didn’t do it alone. Her escape was successful due to the assistance of a prison guard named Scott Spitler who literally drove her out of the facility. He was sentenced to seven years. He and Pender had a sexual and entrepreneurial relationship. He would bring her contraband and she and her friends would sell it. Marion County Deputy Prosecutor Larry Sells called Pender a “Female Charles Manson” because of her ability to manipulate and charm. In my version of the story, Pender escapes prison and is never caught. She continues to charm and moves to Florida.

In 2015 Goth posed for a Miu Miu campaign. In it she lies semi-reclined on a bed. The pictures were taken through a slightly ajar door, giving them a certain voyeuristic, taboo feeling. The ads were banned for being “irresponsible” by the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority. But Goth thought they were fine. She didn’t see anything wrong with them. When she filmed The Survivalist she didn’t shower for six weeks. “Life is quite poetic and there is a bigger reason for that than we know,” she said once.

I am writing this in Florida in the backyard pool of a guy I met on the beach in Fort Lauderdale. I recently developed this habit of eating sunscreen and I just finished a bottle of Banana Boat. I kick my boots into the water and jump in after them.