it's a tomb. Here:

I once wrote a story for a writing challenge.
According to a framed 1099 statement, at the time I had secured employment on a salmon fishing boat off the Kootenai Peninsula in Alaska. All must have gone well, because I am currently in reasonable health, except for three useless toes on my right foot, which a doctor friend tells me were probably brought low by frostbite. Alaska can be cold he informs me.

There is a sepia-toned image in my memory of one of my shipmates, a German called Swede (the result of a vague resemblance to Liv Uhlman), lying on a bunk, his wireless laptop on the galley table. Swede has a bandage wrapped around his head, a wadded ball of which covers his left eye. His hand is gripping a bottle of aqua vitae. In a mirror on the wall next to his bunk I see my face. I am looking in my eyes for guidance. The next solid image is of pornography containing a woman and a pig, then nothing, then the words That Special Place next to a pulsing cursor. Im sure I thanked Swede for the loan of his computer. I vow to replace it one day.

On the label of a chipped floppy disk taped to the inside of my canvas backpack is written That Special Place/1000 words it says. A nice round number, that.

The place neednt be physical says the piece of paper containing the rules in which the disk is swathed, It can exist in your dreams, your hopes, your desires. Had I held fast to a very solid rule of my own, I would have avoided writing anything approaching the disturbing romanticism suggested by the title, but at the time there must have been compelling need to give voice to a voice I thought long dead.

Further down the paper it indicates the challenge had been held at an online, 3D graphics site called Renderosity, home to a people concerned with creating instances, worlds, and women with whom they will never have contact. Im not sure how I came to visit such a place, but, again, the a voice I thought long dead thing sounds plausible.

In my wallet is a letter from the moderators of the contest stating that I had come in third in the challenge. I see I was bested by 2 poems of the dumped chick/dead baby strain. My That Special Place received 8 votes for best. That warms me all over.

Except for those three toes.