This is the beginning of my story as it is the beginning of my memory.
My lips tasted of ocean salt when I awoke seven moons ago in the studio apartment which I now call my home. To my recollection, I breathed for the first time around four o'clock in the morning. Whispers of agony burned my chest, it was as if I had been holding my breath all my life.
What little I held in mind could be boiled down to the following facts:
For the unacquainted, Bushwick is a neighborhood in the North of Brooklyn, a prominant neighborhood in the Greater Metropolitan area of New York City. Bushwick was initially dubbed Boswijck, which means "neighborhood in the woods" in Dutch. Though sparcely wooded, it does hold all the trappings of a proper forest: phantoms, fairys, freaks and fiends, goblins, ghouls, gumberoos and glawackus', sirens, serpents, squonks and snallygasters.
I research constantly to stay prepared, though no public library keeps factual documentation of these creatures. Fortunately the humble studio apartment I call my home is rich with volumes about fantastical fauna. Who built this collection I know not, but there was no recognizable organizational system, so my first order of business was to make sense of it all. But then I got hungry.