This was one of those October stories that I enjoy writing so much, and this one scared me quite a bit. What's most disturbing is how easily that Mantra came to me... almost as if Rhiannon herself had whispered it in my ear. One of the fun little inspirations for this story came from when I was an apartment manager years ago. A woman had stabbed her husband in the chest, she was taken to prison and he to hospital, while their two young children were sent to CPS. Eventually, if you can imagine, I evicted them. They left all their shit in the apartment and what we found was truly disturbing. The place was absolutely filthy. The children's doors were locked and there were human feces and urine on the floor of their bedrooms. In the master bedroom we found a pile of pornographic magazines on the floor, sex toys and hundreds of photos taken. The most disturbing thing was what we found in the downstairs closet, which was absolutely nothing except a pull cord light and a dead bulb. When I changed the light bulb, I found the walls covered in red crayon reading "Amy is ugly on the inside." This simple phrase has always haunted me. So, in Mantra I asked Rhiannon to write her "truth" on the closet wall. Creeping