How to Be a Protagonist in a Story Kafka Never Wrote

Try to drive through a green light in St. Louis, Missouri. Get broad sided by a driver speeding without car insurance. End up at a hospital, where you lie on a stretcher in a hallway for a few hours. You’re covered with bruises, but otherwise you’re physically OK. Psychologically is a different story entirely. And of course your car is a crushed beer can.

Eleven days after your car accident, your uncle dies and leaves you his house. So you’re distraught, thinking more about your uncle than about becoming a homeowner. The house is in Kansas, and you’re in Missouri. You continue living in your little apartment in St. Louis. Eventually, you get a new car.

Afterwards, you gradually receive bills you believe are the hospital bills. A few months later, you get mysterious messages on your answering machine, people who don’t identify themselves or their business but leave a phone number. After this happens for about a week, on a daily basis, you suspect it’s bill collectors, so you make sure all your bills are paid off, and they are. You continue to receive these inexplicable messages anyway.

Meanwhile, new neighbors move in. They are loud. Their stereos are turned up so loud that the music shakes your apartment windows. One morning, you wake up, wander into the living room, and smell cigarette smoke. When you…