Strange things keep happening to me and I'm beginning to question my mental health. The letter "b" in books, magazines, newspapers, and on the web keeps expanding and contracting like the distended belly of a Biafran child, or a pregnant woman in a pre-natal clinic. I rub my eyes to see whether there's something in it like an eyelash resting like an aligator along the shore of my lower lid. Still the exaggerated "b" mocks me. My first wife's name began with this haunting letter, a ghostly remnant of a failed marriage. We might have had a child, but she chose to become a beauty pageant participant instead. Perhaps, I'll up my dose of Xanax, which reads the same backwards and forwards, and makes me feel safe any way I read it.