u/PossibilityMaster232

Rank	Story	Votes
🥇 1st	Nost	5
🥈 2nd	Theriad	4
🥉 T-3rd	From One Bird to Another	2
🥉 T-3rd	The Gods Are Great	2
T-5th	The Darkness Becomes Me	1
T-5th	DIANA	1

The chorus in Ruthlessness, when they say "Poseidon," is talking about the Greek god of the ocean. Not Nergal, the Mesopotamian underworld god

"I will do it for you," says the magical gnome, making out with him crazy style.

Thor is, in fact, not in Epic the Musical, despite concerns.

This is mostly because it is based on a Greek myth, not a Norse one.

"You shouldn't have done that," says Bobo the Mesopotamian ball-snatching demon disguised as a soap.

This is a shoutout to the absolute top posts of the Subreddit for the past month!

First place is u/AffectionateLeave677 with ROAD HEAD!

Second place is u/Lime-Time-Live with Roam, Arkansas!

And third place is u/PETmyPUPPIES with Roadkill!

Congratulations to this month's winners! See you all on September 8th! Go give these amazing authors some love!

The fun Ancient Gods challenge has officially closed! Results of the following will be posted around the 12th or so!

There is an old adage about death. They say that you die once when your heart stops, and another when you are forgotten.

For older people, both are sadly true simultaneously most of the time.

Families have a habit of moving out and leaving grandma, mommy, daddy, or an uncle to fend for themselves.

Alone.

In a house.

Or apartment.

Or shitty condo.

I have been in many scenes where grandma was forgotten about and ended up dying, usually from a heart attack, and left to rot by a forgetful, neglectful family.

However… sometimes it’s even more fucked up.

Let me tell you about my most haunting, stomach-turning case of an older woman being left to die.

I got the call sometime around eleven in the morning.

Unattended death.

Female.

Sixty-six.

Possible decomposition.

Those were pretty much the only details we got.

I was working with a guy named Mike that day. He'd been with the company longer than I had and was one of those dudes who could eat a gas-station burrito twenty minutes after scraping brain matter off drywall.

Good guy.

Horrible fucking eating habits.

The address took us into one of those gated fifty-five-and-over communities that Arizona has everywhere.

You know the type.

Rows of nearly identical beige houses. Little Southwestern decorations nailed beside the garage. Decorative rocks instead of lawns because grass has the unfortunate habit of dying when God sets the thermostat to 110.

Everything was meticulously maintained.

HOA territory.

One of those neighborhoods where your Karen mom doesn't have any kids to scream at anymore, so she spends Tuesday afternoon measuring her neighbor's hedges and calling somebody because their recycling bin is still outside at 6:03 p.m.

The place was almost unnaturally neat.

Trimmed bushes.

Clean sidewalks.

Golf carts parked beneath little awnings.

American flags hanging beside front doors.

Some old guy wearing a sun hat was watering a cactus when we drove past, which seemed a little redundant to me, but whatever.

Then we reached her house.

You could tell which one it was before seeing the address.

Everything around it looked cared for.

Hers didn't.

The house itself wasn't creepy. That's something people get wrong when they imagine these stories.

There wasn't some condemned Victorian mansion sitting at the end of the street with ravens on the roof.

It was a completely ordinary one-story stucco home.

Tan walls.

Brown tile roof.

Two-car garage.

White trim around the windows.

There was a little ceramic sun hanging beside the front door with a smiling face painted onto it.

The kind of thing your grandmother buys at HomeGoods because she thinks it's cute.

Someone had planted flowers along the walkway.

Petunias, I think.

I'm not a fucking botanist.

Whatever they were, most of them were dead.

A few dry brown stalks leaned over the edge of the flower bed, and the surviving ones had shriveled down into wrinkled little patches of purple.

Three newspapers were sitting near the front door.

One had turned yellow from sitting in the sun.

There were also a couple pieces of mail sticking halfway out of the box.

Then there was the police tape.

Most of it had already been pulled down, but a strip was still tied around one of the porch posts. It fluttered weakly whenever the wind picked up.

The cops had obviously been there for a while.

So had the family.

There were maybe seven or eight people standing outside.

One woman was sitting on the curb sobbing into her hands. Another was pacing around with a phone pressed against her ear. A middle-aged man kept staring at the house like he expected it to explain itself.

You see that a lot.

People looking at the building.

The ambulance.

The police.

You.

Anything except each other.

As Mike and I started unloading equipment, I heard the woman on the curb say something.

"I should have checked on her."

Nobody answered.

She said it again.

"I should have fucking checked on her."

Then the man said, "We all should have."

Damn right you should have, I thought.

But no.

You left her to die.

Then you left her to rot.

I didn't say anything.

Wasn't my place.

No matter how angry you are at somebody, screaming at a grieving family in the front yard isn't exactly professional conduct.

We weren't cleared to start cleaning yet anyway.

The coroner's people were still inside.

We'd arrived early because unattended deaths could turn into enormous jobs, and our supervisor wanted somebody there to figure out how much flooring, drywall, furniture, and God-knows-what-else might need to be removed once the scene was released.

So Mike and I suited up enough to go inside and take a look.

Gloves.

Boot covers.

Respirator.

The whole glamorous uniform.

A deputy at the door told us where not to step, his face green. Poor guy looked ready to lose his lunch.

Then he opened it.

The smell hit immediately.

You've probably heard people describe decomposition as sweet.

That's true. It is.

But "sweet" makes it sound almost pleasant.

It isn't.

It's sweet in the same way spoiled fruit sitting in the bottom of a garbage can is sweet.

There's something sugary underneath it that your brain recognizes for half a second before everything else catches up.

Rot.

Shit.

Old piss.

That bitter chemical stink decomposition has.

And something sour that crawls straight down your throat.

All together.

My respirator helped.

Didn't fucking matter.

You can have filters strapped over your face and still know exactly what you're standing in.

The house was warm, too.

The air conditioner was running, thankfully, but apparently the family had turned it down after they arrived. Before that, nobody knew what she'd kept it at.

The smell had already gotten into everything.

Carpet.

Curtains.

Furniture.

The walls themselves seemed to have absorbed it.

I remember looking into the living room first.

There were framed pictures everywhere.

Her kids.

Grandkids.

Christmas photos.

A wedding.

One picture showed the woman whose house we were standing in holding a little boy beside a birthday cake.

She was smiling.

Big glasses.

Short gray hair.

Bright blue shirt.

Normal grandmother.

Then I looked toward the kitchen.

And there she was.

Or what was left of her.

Her name was Margaret.

I learned that from one of the cops.

She'd had a hip replacement not long before she died.

Recovery from those surgeries usually involves getting people moving again fairly quickly, often with a walker or cane for support.

Margaret apparently wasn't recovering particularly well.

According to her daughter, she'd still been having trouble walking.

There was a walker lying on its side maybe six feet from the body.

The cops figured she'd gone into the kitchen for something, lost her balance, and fallen.

Maybe she tried grabbing the counter.

Maybe the walker rolled away.

Maybe her leg just gave out.

Nobody knew.

What mattered was that she hit the floor and couldn't get back up.

Her phone was sitting on the kitchen counter.

I could see it from where I stood.

Maybe eight feet away.

Eight feet.

That's nothing.

I could cross eight feet in two steps.

To Margaret, lying on a tile floor with a bad hip, it might as well have been eight miles.

There were marks on the floor where she'd tried moving.

That part got me.

You could see them.

Her slippers weren't on her feet anymore.

One was near the refrigerator.

The other was beneath the kitchen table.

There were faint streaks through the dust and old grime on the tile where her legs or clothes had dragged.

She had tried to get somewhere.

Phone.

Front door.

Sink.

Who knows?

She just never made it.

There were empty water bottles sitting on the counter.

A mug in the sink.

Food in the refrigerator.

Everything she needed was within twenty feet of her.

She couldn't reach any of it.

The coroner thought she'd probably survived the fall itself.

Nothing immediately obvious suggested that she smashed her skull or broke her neck.

She just couldn't get up.

And eventually, dehydration did what dehydration does.

Your kidneys start getting fucked.

Your blood volume drops.

Your blood pressure follows.

You get weaker.

More confused.

More tired.

Until there isn't enough left for your body to keep doing its job.

Severe dehydration can kill you through things like kidney failure or low-volume shock, and older adults are particularly vulnerable to it.

From what they could reconstruct, Margaret had probably been alive on that floor for several days.

Then she'd been dead for weeks.

And believe me.

Weeks leave evidence.

She was lying mostly on her right side, twisted slightly onto her back.

At least, I think that was how she'd originally fallen.

Decomposition had changed the shape of her enough that it was difficult to tell.

You lose the person surprisingly fast.

That's one of the strangest things about this job.

A face is such a huge part of how we recognize somebody.

Take away the normal color.

Add swelling.

Then collapse.

Darken the skin.

Loosen it.

Let the eyes sink and the lips pull away.

Pretty soon you're looking at something your brain has trouble connecting to the smiling woman in the picture fifteen feet away.

Margaret's skin had gone dark greenish-brown over much of her face and torso, nearly black in some places.

Parts of it had dried.

Other parts hadn't.

The skin along one arm had loosened enough that sections had peeled away from what was underneath.

Her face was swollen and distorted, especially around the cheeks and mouth.

Her eyes were gone.

I don't mean somebody removed them.

Decomposition just isn't kind to soft tissue.

Her lips had shrunk back from her teeth.

Her stomach had probably bloated badly earlier on, but by the time we arrived, much of that gas had escaped.

She looked partially deflated.

Collapsed.

Like someone had inflated a person, left them sitting there for weeks, then slowly let the air out.

There was dark fluid beneath her head and torso.

Some had dried.

Some hadn't.

It had seeped into the grout between the tiles and spread beneath her like an ugly brown-black shadow.

That's decomposition fluid.

Once you've smelled enough of it, you never forget it.

Imagine leaving meat juice in a hot garbage disposal for a month.

Now add feces.

Then imagine somebody boiled that mixture down into syrup.

You're getting close.

There were flies near the kitchen window.

Not many adults anymore.

Most of the activity had moved onto the body.

I'm going to spare you a detailed description of that because I'm assuming at least some of you are eating while reading this.

You're welcome.

Her clothes were ruined.

She'd been wearing a nightshirt and underwear when she fell.

The shirt had ridden up around her stomach.

The underwear was stained almost completely brown.

There was shit beneath her.

A lot of it.

Some of it had dried onto her thighs and the tile.

Some had mixed with the fluids released after death.

Urine had spread farther.

You could see old yellow-brown staining reaching outward from where her pelvis rested, dried along the grout lines.

And here's the part that really fucked with me.

Some of that happened while she was alive.

Think about that.

She had been lying there long enough that she couldn't control her bladder anymore.

Long enough that she shit herself.

Long enough for the piss around her to dry while she was still lying in it.

She couldn't clean herself.

Couldn't change.

Couldn't stand up.

Couldn't shower.

Couldn't reach the phone.

Couldn't even move far enough to get away from her own waste.

Just lying there.

Waiting.

I looked back toward the living room.

Pictures of her family covered an entire shelf.

Dozens of them.

Kids.

Grandkids.

Birthdays.

Christmases.

Graduations.

A whole fucking life.

Then I looked at Margaret.

Her family was twenty feet away outside.

Crying.

They were finally there.

Little late.

Mike didn't say anything for a while.

Neither did I.

You become pretty good at silence in this profession.

Eventually one of the coroner's guys crouched beside her and started preparing the body for removal.

Even they had trouble with it.

A badly decomposed body doesn't behave like the person-shaped thing you imagine carrying into a bag.

The skin can tear.

Fluids move.

Parts shift.

You have to support everything.

Nobody wants somebody's mother coming apart while you're trying to move her.

They slid material beneath her first, working slowly.

When they lifted her, the smell got worse.

A lot worse.

Moving an old body releases pockets of odor that have been trapped between it and the floor.

It's like picking up a wet bathmat.

Except the bathmat has been dead for three weeks.

One of the newer deputies immediately walked out of the room.

I didn't blame him.

Margaret came away from the floor with a sound I still remember.

A wet peeling noise.

Like tape being pulled off something damp.

Some skin stayed behind.

So did hair.

The tile beneath her was almost black.

There was a perfect outline where she'd been lying.

Head.

Shoulders.

Torso.

Hip.

Like a disgusting chalk outline drawn by the body itself.

That was going to be our problem.

The grout was fucked.

Probably the cabinets too, depending on how far the contamination had traveled underneath them.

Maybe the baseboards.

We'd have to test everything.

Remove what couldn't be cleaned.

Treat what could.

The usual.

I was standing there thinking about labor hours and square footage when somebody outside started screaming.

Not angry screaming.

Grief.

The daughter.

I guess she'd seen the body bag come out.

"I should have been here!"

Over and over again.

"I should have been here!"

I remember standing in Margaret's kitchen and staring at that phone on the counter.

Eight feet away.

Then I looked at the dried streaks on the floor where she'd tried to crawl toward it.

Yeah.

You should have.

I don't know exactly how long Margaret's family had gone without visiting.

I've forgotten the number.

A month?

Month and a half?

Something like that.

Long enough.

They called her occasionally.

Apparently when she stopped answering, everyone assumed somebody else had spoken to her.

Her daughter thought her son had checked.

Her son thought the daughter had checked.

Someone assumed Margaret was angry with them.

Someone else thought she'd gone to stay with a friend.

Nobody drove over.

Nobody knocked.

Nobody asked a neighbor.

Meanwhile, the newspapers kept piling up.

The flowers died.

The mail stopped being collected.

And Margaret lay on her kitchen floor eight feet away from a telephone.

Eventually a neighbor noticed the smell.

That's who found her.

Not her children.

A neighbor.

Some seventy-something-year-old guy who lived three houses down noticed that Margaret hadn't been outside in weeks and finally walked over.

He smelled the house before he even opened the door.

Called 911.

The family arrived afterward.

Sometimes I wonder how long she'd been calling for help.

Hours?

A day?

Two days?

Your voice dries out when you're severely dehydrated.

Eventually you get too weak to shout.

Maybe someone walked their dog past the house while she was inside.

Maybe a neighbor got their mail.

Maybe one of her kids called while the phone sat ringing eight feet away.

I don't know.

I don't think I'd want to know.

We spent two days cleaning Margaret's house.

The kitchen flooring had to come out.

So did sections of the baseboard.

Some contamination had worked underneath the cabinets, so part of those had to be removed too.

The smell took longer.

It usually does.

People think cleaning decomposition is about removing the visible mess.

That's the easy part.

The smell gets everywhere.

Porous materials suck it up.

Wood.

Drywall.

Fabric.

Insulation.

You can scrub until your hands cramp and still walk in the next morning and smell death waiting for you.

Eventually, though, we got it.

The kitchen became a kitchen again.

No black stain.

No shit.

No rotten tissue.

No Margaret.

Just tile missing from part of the floor and a family trying to figure out what to do with a house that suddenly belonged to them.

I've cleaned murders that bothered me less than that one.

At least with murder, somebody actively does something horrible.

There's a person you can blame.

Margaret died because everybody did nothing.

Nobody checked.

Nobody drove over.

Nobody knocked on the fucking door.

That's all it would have taken.

One person.

One visit.

One phone call followed by, "That's weird. Mom isn't answering. I'm going over there."

She might still have died.

Maybe the fall itself would have done her in eventually.

I don't know.

But she wouldn't have spent her last days lying in piss and shit on a kitchen floor wondering why nobody was coming.

Yeah.

Being abandoned is some of the saddest shit you ever saw.

Nothing pisses me off more than seeing someone get abandoned by the ones they loved most, reduced to a rotted corpse on the tile.

How can you be so heartless?

So consider this a PSA.

Don't abandon your mom or dad in a home.

Don't convince yourself that because they're stubborn and independent, they'll be fine forever.

And if they're going to live alone past a certain age, fucking visit them.

Call.

Knock on the door.

Bring them groceries.

Annoy them.

Let them complain that you check on them too much.

Because I promise you, you'd rather have your mother roll her eyes and tell you to leave her alone than someday stand outside her house crying while two strangers carry what's left of her out in a bag.

Don't just leave.

There is an old adage about death. They say that you die once when your heart stops, and another when you are forgotten.

For older people, both are sadly true simultaneously most of the time.

Families have a habit of moving out and leaving grandma, mommy, daddy, or an uncle to fend for themselves.

Alone.

In a house.

Or apartment.

Or shitty condo.

I have been in many scenes where grandma was forgotten about and ended up dying, usually from a heart attack, and left to rot by a forgetful, neglectful family.

However… sometimes it’s even more fucked up.

Let me tell you about my most haunting, stomach-turning case of an older woman being left to die.

I got the call sometime around eleven in the morning.

Unattended death.

Female.

Sixty-six.

Possible decomposition.

Those were pretty much the only details we got.

I was working with a guy named Mike that day. He'd been with the company longer than I had and was one of those dudes who could eat a gas-station burrito twenty minutes after scraping brain matter off drywall.

Good guy.

Horrible fucking eating habits.

The address took us into one of those gated fifty-five-and-over communities that Arizona has everywhere.

You know the type.

Rows of nearly identical beige houses. Little Southwestern decorations nailed beside the garage. Decorative rocks instead of lawns because grass has the unfortunate habit of dying when God sets the thermostat to 110.

Everything was meticulously maintained.

HOA territory.

One of those neighborhoods where your Karen mom doesn't have any kids to scream at anymore, so she spends Tuesday afternoon measuring her neighbor's hedges and calling somebody because their recycling bin is still outside at 6:03 p.m.

The place was almost unnaturally neat.

Trimmed bushes.

Clean sidewalks.

Golf carts parked beneath little awnings.

American flags hanging beside front doors.

Some old guy wearing a sun hat was watering a cactus when we drove past, which seemed a little redundant to me, but whatever.

Then we reached her house.

You could tell which one it was before seeing the address.

Everything around it looked cared for.

Hers didn't.

The house itself wasn't creepy. That's something people get wrong when they imagine these stories.

There wasn't some condemned Victorian mansion sitting at the end of the street with ravens on the roof.

It was a completely ordinary one-story stucco home.

Tan walls.

Brown tile roof.

Two-car garage.

White trim around the windows.

There was a little ceramic sun hanging beside the front door with a smiling face painted onto it.

The kind of thing your grandmother buys at HomeGoods because she thinks it's cute.

Someone had planted flowers along the walkway.

Petunias, I think.

I'm not a fucking botanist.

Whatever they were, most of them were dead.

A few dry brown stalks leaned over the edge of the flower bed, and the surviving ones had shriveled down into wrinkled little patches of purple.

Three newspapers were sitting near the front door.

One had turned yellow from sitting in the sun.

There were also a couple pieces of mail sticking halfway out of the box.

Then there was the police tape.

Most of it had already been pulled down, but a strip was still tied around one of the porch posts. It fluttered weakly whenever the wind picked up.

The cops had obviously been there for a while.

So had the family.

There were maybe seven or eight people standing outside.

One woman was sitting on the curb sobbing into her hands. Another was pacing around with a phone pressed against her ear. A middle-aged man kept staring at the house like he expected it to explain itself.

You see that a lot.

People looking at the building.

The ambulance.

The police.

You.

Anything except each other.

As Mike and I started unloading equipment, I heard the woman on the curb say something.

"I should have checked on her."

Nobody answered.

She said it again.

"I should have fucking checked on her."

Then the man said, "We all should have."

Damn right you should have, I thought.

But no.

You left her to die.

Then you left her to rot.

I didn't say anything.

Wasn't my place.

No matter how angry you are at somebody, screaming at a grieving family in the front yard isn't exactly professional conduct.

We weren't cleared to start cleaning yet anyway.

The coroner's people were still inside.

We'd arrived early because unattended deaths could turn into enormous jobs, and our supervisor wanted somebody there to figure out how much flooring, drywall, furniture, and God-knows-what-else might need to be removed once the scene was released.

So Mike and I suited up enough to go inside and take a look.

Gloves.

Boot covers.

Respirator.

The whole glamorous uniform.

A deputy at the door told us where not to step, his face green. Poor guy looked ready to lose his lunch.

Then he opened it.

The smell hit immediately.

You've probably heard people describe decomposition as sweet.

That's true. It is.

But "sweet" makes it sound almost pleasant.

It isn't.

It's sweet in the same way spoiled fruit sitting in the bottom of a garbage can is sweet.

There's something sugary underneath it that your brain recognizes for half a second before everything else catches up.

Rot.

Shit.

Old piss.

That bitter chemical stink decomposition has.

And something sour that crawls straight down your throat.

All together.

My respirator helped.

Didn't fucking matter.

You can have filters strapped over your face and still know exactly what you're standing in.

The house was warm, too.

The air conditioner was running, thankfully, but apparently the family had turned it down after they arrived. Before that, nobody knew what she'd kept it at.

The smell had already gotten into everything.

Carpet.

Curtains.

Furniture.

The walls themselves seemed to have absorbed it.

I remember looking into the living room first.

There were framed pictures everywhere.

Her kids.

Grandkids.

Christmas photos.

A wedding.

One picture showed the woman whose house we were standing in holding a little boy beside a birthday cake.

She was smiling.

Big glasses.

Short gray hair.

Bright blue shirt.

Normal grandmother.

Then I looked toward the kitchen.

And there she was.

Or what was left of her.

Her name was Margaret.

I learned that from one of the cops.

She'd had a hip replacement not long before she died.

Recovery from those surgeries usually involves getting people moving again fairly quickly, often with a walker or cane for support.

Margaret apparently wasn't recovering particularly well.

According to her daughter, she'd still been having trouble walking.

There was a walker lying on its side maybe six feet from the body.

The cops figured she'd gone into the kitchen for something, lost her balance, and fallen.

Maybe she tried grabbing the counter.

Maybe the walker rolled away.

Maybe her leg just gave out.

Nobody knew.

What mattered was that she hit the floor and couldn't get back up.

Her phone was sitting on the kitchen counter.

I could see it from where I stood.

Maybe eight feet away.

Eight feet.

That's nothing.

I could cross eight feet in two steps.

To Margaret, lying on a tile floor with a bad hip, it might as well have been eight miles.

There were marks on the floor where she'd tried moving.

That part got me.

You could see them.

Her slippers weren't on her feet anymore.

One was near the refrigerator.

The other was beneath the kitchen table.

There were faint streaks through the dust and old grime on the tile where her legs or clothes had dragged.

She had tried to get somewhere.

Phone.

Front door.

Sink.

Who knows?

She just never made it.

There were empty water bottles sitting on the counter.

A mug in the sink.

Food in the refrigerator.

Everything she needed was within twenty feet of her.

She couldn't reach any of it.

The coroner thought she'd probably survived the fall itself.

Nothing immediately obvious suggested that she smashed her skull or broke her neck.

She just couldn't get up.

And eventually, dehydration did what dehydration does.

Your kidneys start getting fucked.

Your blood volume drops.

Your blood pressure follows.

You get weaker.

More confused.

More tired.

Until there isn't enough left for your body to keep doing its job.

Severe dehydration can kill you through things like kidney failure or low-volume shock, and older adults are particularly vulnerable to it.

From what they could reconstruct, Margaret had probably been alive on that floor for several days.

Then she'd been dead for weeks.

And believe me.

Weeks leave evidence.

She was lying mostly on her right side, twisted slightly onto her back.

At least, I think that was how she'd originally fallen.

Decomposition had changed the shape of her enough that it was difficult to tell.

You lose the person surprisingly fast.

That's one of the strangest things about this job.

A face is such a huge part of how we recognize somebody.

Take away the normal color.

Add swelling.

Then collapse.

Darken the skin.

Loosen it.

Let the eyes sink and the lips pull away.

Pretty soon you're looking at something your brain has trouble connecting to the smiling woman in the picture fifteen feet away.

Margaret's skin had gone dark greenish-brown over much of her face and torso, nearly black in some places.

Parts of it had dried.

Other parts hadn't.

The skin along one arm had loosened enough that sections had peeled away from what was underneath.

Her face was swollen and distorted, especially around the cheeks and mouth.

Her eyes were gone.

I don't mean somebody removed them.

Decomposition just isn't kind to soft tissue.

Her lips had shrunk back from her teeth.

Her stomach had probably bloated badly earlier on, but by the time we arrived, much of that gas had escaped.

She looked partially deflated.

Collapsed.

Like someone had inflated a person, left them sitting there for weeks, then slowly let the air out.

There was dark fluid beneath her head and torso.

Some had dried.

Some hadn't.

It had seeped into the grout between the tiles and spread beneath her like an ugly brown-black shadow.

That's decomposition fluid.

Once you've smelled enough of it, you never forget it.

Imagine leaving meat juice in a hot garbage disposal for a month.

Now add feces.

Then imagine somebody boiled that mixture down into syrup.

You're getting close.

There were flies near the kitchen window.

Not many adults anymore.

Most of the activity had moved onto the body.

I'm going to spare you a detailed description of that because I'm assuming at least some of you are eating while reading this.

You're welcome.

Her clothes were ruined.

She'd been wearing a nightshirt and underwear when she fell.

The shirt had ridden up around her stomach.

The underwear was stained almost completely brown.

There was shit beneath her.

A lot of it.

Some of it had dried onto her thighs and the tile.

Some had mixed with the fluids released after death.

Urine had spread farther.

You could see old yellow-brown staining reaching outward from where her pelvis rested, dried along the grout lines.

And here's the part that really fucked with me.

Some of that happened while she was alive.

Think about that.

She had been lying there long enough that she couldn't control her bladder anymore.

Long enough that she shit herself.

Long enough for the piss around her to dry while she was still lying in it.

She couldn't clean herself.

Couldn't change.

Couldn't stand up.

Couldn't shower.

Couldn't reach the phone.

Couldn't even move far enough to get away from her own waste.

Just lying there.

Waiting.

I looked back toward the living room.

Pictures of her family covered an entire shelf.

Dozens of them.

Kids.

Grandkids.

Birthdays.

Christmases.

Graduations.

A whole fucking life.

Then I looked at Margaret.

Her family was twenty feet away outside.

Crying.

They were finally there.

Little late.

Mike didn't say anything for a while.

Neither did I.

You become pretty good at silence in this profession.

Eventually one of the coroner's guys crouched beside her and started preparing the body for removal.

Even they had trouble with it.

A badly decomposed body doesn't behave like the person-shaped thing you imagine carrying into a bag.

The skin can tear.

Fluids move.

Parts shift.

You have to support everything.

Nobody wants somebody's mother coming apart while you're trying to move her.

They slid material beneath her first, working slowly.

When they lifted her, the smell got worse.

A lot worse.

Moving an old body releases pockets of odor that have been trapped between it and the floor.

It's like picking up a wet bathmat.

Except the bathmat has been dead for three weeks.

One of the newer deputies immediately walked out of the room.

I didn't blame him.

Margaret came away from the floor with a sound I still remember.

A wet peeling noise.

Like tape being pulled off something damp.

Some skin stayed behind.

So did hair.

The tile beneath her was almost black.

There was a perfect outline where she'd been lying.

Head.

Shoulders.

Torso.

Hip.

Like a disgusting chalk outline drawn by the body itself.

That was going to be our problem.

The grout was fucked.

Probably the cabinets too, depending on how far the contamination had traveled underneath them.

Maybe the baseboards.

We'd have to test everything.

Remove what couldn't be cleaned.

Treat what could.

The usual.

I was standing there thinking about labor hours and square footage when somebody outside started screaming.

Not angry screaming.

Grief.

The daughter.

I guess she'd seen the body bag come out.

"I should have been here!"

Over and over again.

"I should have been here!"

I remember standing in Margaret's kitchen and staring at that phone on the counter.

Eight feet away.

Then I looked at the dried streaks on the floor where she'd tried to crawl toward it.

Yeah.

You should have.

I don't know exactly how long Margaret's family had gone without visiting.

I've forgotten the number.

A month?

Month and a half?

Something like that.

Long enough.

They called her occasionally.

Apparently when she stopped answering, everyone assumed somebody else had spoken to her.

Her daughter thought her son had checked.

Her son thought the daughter had checked.

Someone assumed Margaret was angry with them.

Someone else thought she'd gone to stay with a friend.

Nobody drove over.

Nobody knocked.

Nobody asked a neighbor.

Meanwhile, the newspapers kept piling up.

The flowers died.

The mail stopped being collected.

And Margaret lay on her kitchen floor eight feet away from a telephone.

Eventually a neighbor noticed the smell.

That's who found her.

Not her children.

A neighbor.

Some seventy-something-year-old guy who lived three houses down noticed that Margaret hadn't been outside in weeks and finally walked over.

He smelled the house before he even opened the door.

Called 911.

The family arrived afterward.

Sometimes I wonder how long she'd been calling for help.

Hours?

A day?

Two days?

Your voice dries out when you're severely dehydrated.

Eventually you get too weak to shout.

Maybe someone walked their dog past the house while she was inside.

Maybe a neighbor got their mail.

Maybe one of her kids called while the phone sat ringing eight feet away.

I don't know.

I don't think I'd want to know.

We spent two days cleaning Margaret's house.

The kitchen flooring had to come out.

So did sections of the baseboard.

Some contamination had worked underneath the cabinets, so part of those had to be removed too.

The smell took longer.

It usually does.

People think cleaning decomposition is about removing the visible mess.

That's the easy part.

The smell gets everywhere.

Porous materials suck it up.

Wood.

Drywall.

Fabric.

Insulation.

You can scrub until your hands cramp and still walk in the next morning and smell death waiting for you.

Eventually, though, we got it.

The kitchen became a kitchen again.

No black stain.

No shit.

No rotten tissue.

No Margaret.

Just tile missing from part of the floor and a family trying to figure out what to do with a house that suddenly belonged to them.

I've cleaned murders that bothered me less than that one.

At least with murder, somebody actively does something horrible.

There's a person you can blame.

Margaret died because everybody did nothing.

Nobody checked.

Nobody drove over.

Nobody knocked on the fucking door.

That's all it would have taken.

One person.

One visit.

One phone call followed by, "That's weird. Mom isn't answering. I'm going over there."

She might still have died.

Maybe the fall itself would have done her in eventually.

I don't know.

But she wouldn't have spent her last days lying in piss and shit on a kitchen floor wondering why nobody was coming.

Yeah.

Being abandoned is some of the saddest shit you ever saw.

Nothing pisses me off more than seeing someone get abandoned by the ones they loved most, reduced to a rotted corpse on the tile.

How can you be so heartless?

So consider this a PSA.

Don't abandon your mom or dad in a home.

Don't convince yourself that because they're stubborn and independent, they'll be fine forever.

And if they're going to live alone past a certain age, fucking visit them.

Call.

Knock on the door.

Bring them groceries.

Annoy them.

Let them complain that you check on them too much.

Because I promise you, you'd rather have your mother roll her eyes and tell you to leave her alone than someday stand outside her house crying while two strangers carry what's left of her out in a bag.

Don't just leave.

I was then shot 27 times by the fairy who ruins days.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

I guess to preserve my sanity? Record my ramblings before they stop making sense as I age or forget things?

My therapist recommended journaling in the hope that it would help me “cope with my trauma,” as if putting everything down in a notebook is going to erase it.

But whatever.

I’m Henry, and for ten years, I worked for a private crime-scene cleaning business in Arizona.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll understand why eventually.

What my job came down to was going into houses where someone had died, either purposefully or accidentally, and cleaning up the mess they left behind when they left the earth.

Usually, it was a healthy mix of piss, shit, blood, and vomit. Some of it came from the person who died. Some came from the unfortunate bastard who found them.

To most people, that description alone would be enough to scare them from the profession. The thought of cleaning up the macabre aftermath of a suicide or murder is enough to make their stomachs turn.

They’ll turn tail and run. But not me.

When I was a kid, around eleven, I had the misfortune of experiencing the aftermath of a death firsthand.

It changed me forever.

My older brother, Daniel, struggled a lot with mental health problems. Depression and bipolar disorder really screwed him up. He could spend days in bed, barely eating, speaking, or moving.

Our parents were no help because they had the traditional mindset of “praying the sickness away.”

Instead of getting him any treatment or support, they blamed him. They claimed he wasn’t believing in his recovery hard enough.

“God will provide all the support you need,” they would assure him whenever he begged them to take him to a therapist.

“This is a test,” they said when he stayed in bed for days on end, unmoving.

Apparently, God was testing him.

Our parents certainly weren’t helping him study.

It was late August, so school wasn’t in session. I remember being so hyped because Diablo II had come out two months earlier, and I had finally saved enough money to buy it from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

As a kid, you really have a one-track mind when you want something. You genuinely forget about everything and everyone around you, convinced that this arbitrary item you “need” is as important as air itself.

That weekend, our parents were away at some church retreat.

I had spent Friday night and most of Saturday at a friend’s house. Daniel stayed home. That wasn’t unusual. By then, he rarely wanted to go anywhere. Not even to the bathroom. Many days, my parents caught him with a piss jug in his room when he was too “lazy” to get up.

I came home Sunday afternoon, game in hand, and shoved the disc into my computer’s CD-ROM drive.

The installation crawled along at a sluggish pace, much to my eleven-year-old self’s annoyance, so I got up to find myself a snack.

That’s when I smelled it.

A foul, sickly sweet smell.

I remember thinking it smelled almost identical to a package of expired meat we had thrown away a few days earlier. Figuring that was the source,

I checked the trash can. Nothing except paper towels and a few orange peels.

I checked the fridge. Clean as a whistle, just a couple of Daniel's energy drinks, eggs, and one of my dad's beers.

I stood there, confused, as each place I checked did not explain.

What else would be rotting?

I huffed and followed the smell, pausing as I approached the hallway, where it grew stronger with each step.

My first thought?

Why would someone leave rotting meat in the hallway?

I wasn’t too bright. Then again, I was also eleven. What can you do?

Or maybe some part of me already knew something was wrong and was working overtime to keep the rest of me from figuring it out.

I didn’t follow the smell right away. I just stood there, as if I, too, were trying to download over a bad internet connection like Diablo II was currently doing.

Slow and lagging, with drifting thoughts that Daniel must have forgotten to throw away some food. I remember the annoyance, anger. He stunk up the whole house?

I walked down the hallway slowly, following the smell farther and farther.

Sweat dripped down my back and face as the house seemed to get hotter with every step.

Our house didn’t have central air. We had old window units in the bedrooms, the kind with manual dials you had to twist yourself. Daniel’s rattled so loudly that he always turned it off before he went to sleep.

Once it was off, it stayed off until someone turned it back on.

And Daniel hadn’t been able to do that.

Of course, I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was that it was a hundred-and-fuck degrees outside and my brother hadn’t turned on his AC.

“Lazy fuck,” I muttered.

I figured that after I took out whatever garbage he had left in his room, I would turn it on myself.

Then I stopped.

At the end of the hallway, Daniel’s door was cracked open.

The smell was stronger than ever. It was coming from inside his room.

“What the hell?” I said aloud.

Had he, for some godforsaken reason, kept rotting meat in there?

Even at eleven, that didn’t seem right.

I approached the door.

The smell thickened until I could almost taste it. It sat on the back of my tongue and filled my throat every time I breathed.

I pushed the door open.

Daniel was lying on the bed.

There were red chunks splattered across the wall and headboard behind him.

I remember my first thought was:

Why did he throw spaghetti sauce on the wall?

That thought lasted about two seconds.

I would kill to find that level of innocence again…

The rest of the room came into focus, everything clicking all at once. I let out a horrified, strangled scream.

Daniel’s lower jaw and much of the side of his head were gone.

Blood covered the sheets beneath him. A dark spray marked the wall and headboard, mixed with strands of tissue and small, pale fragments that had stuck to the paint. Droplets had reached the door, the floor, and even the motionless blades of the ceiling fan.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside the bed.

No exaggeration… There was blood everywhere.

Not the bright, clean red you see in movies. It was dark in some places and nearly black in others. Parts of it had dried against the wall. The blood soaking his shirt and sheets was thicker, almost syrupy from the heat.

His Metallica shirt was stained from the collar down.

One of his eyes was still visible, the other atomized on the wall behind him.

It was open but glazed over, like the plastic eye of a doll.

Now, as I said, the AC wasn’t on, and we were in peak heat season in Arizona.

Daniel had been alone in that room for nearly two days.

The heat had allowed everything to bake.

The blood.

The sheets.

My brother.

When I say the smell was unbearable, I mean it.

Have you ever farted in a hot shower?

I know that sounds like a stupid comparison, but bear with me.

The smell doesn’t leave right away. The heat and steam make it ranker than it normally would be. It hangs around you. Clings to you.

Turns out, the same logic applies to corpses.

Except a corpse is worse.

Much worse.

The smell didn’t just enter my nose. It coated the inside of my mouth. Every time I tried to breathe, I could taste something rotten and sweet at the back of my throat.

I stumbled backward into the hallway and fell on my ass.

I kept screaming for Daniel.

I don’t know why.

He was obviously dead. Even an eleven-year-old could see that. A toddler could see that. There was no possible world in which he could sit up and tell me he was fine.

But I kept saying his name anyway. I didn't want to accept it.

“Daniel?”

Then louder.

“Daniel!”

As if shouting hard enough might force the remaining pieces of him back together; as if it would cast a spell that would let me take that gun out of his mouth before he did it.

I don't remember much after that.

I don’t even remember calling the police.

I know I did because I was the only person in the house, but most of what happened after I opened the door exists in scattered pieces.

I remember sitting on the floor outside.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether Daniel was breathing.

I remember staring through the open doorway at what was left of his head and not knowing how to answer.

I remember a police officer pulling me away from the hallway.

I remember vomiting onto his shoes.

I felt like a robot going through familiar, logical motions, but I had no sentience to discern what it was I was doing clearly.

The police came first.

Then the paramedics, although there wasn’t anything for them to do except give sympathies.

Then the coroner.

Our parents returned sometime that evening, their car screeching as they parked in the driveway.

I had only told them something happened to Daniel. I couldn't say the words.

My mother screamed when she saw the police cars.

My father kept asking what happened, even after three different people told him.

When he finally understood, he dropped to his knees in the front yard and started praying.

I remember watching him and bitterly thinking:

Now you pray?

I didn’t say it aloud, but fuck, I wish I had. I wish I had laid into them and screamed how this was their fault. How much I hated them for letting this happen to my brother.

But I couldn't. I was in shock. In pain. Grieving.

The police removed Daniel’s body, but they didn’t clean the room.

A lot of people don’t know that.

They think the police handle everything. The body disappears, someone wipes up the blood, and the family returns to a house that looks more or less normal.

That isn’t how it works.

The police collect evidence.

The coroner collects the body.

Everything else belongs to whoever owns the house.

The blood.

The tissue.

The smell.

Daniel’s room stayed closed for another day while my parents argued about what to do.

My mother wanted to burn everything.

My father wanted to clean it himself because he didn’t trust strangers in the house.

That idea lasted until he opened the bedroom door.

He made it three steps inside before running to the bathroom.

Eventually, they called a private trauma-cleaning company.

Three people arrived in an unmarked van.

They wore white protective suits, thick gloves, respirators, and shoe covers. They carried plastic containers, sprayers, scrapers, and rolls of heavy black bags into Daniel’s room.

They didn’t look horrified.

They didn’t pray.

They didn’t stand in the hallway whispering about what a tragedy it was.

They just worked.

They stripped the bed.

They removed part of the carpet.

They cut out sections of drywall that couldn’t be cleaned.

They took apart the ceiling fan.

They searched places I would never have thought to look because blood and tissue had found their way into cracks, vents, and spaces beneath the furniture.

One of them noticed me watching from the end of the hallway.

He was an older man with gray hair visible beneath the hood of his suit.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” he told me.

“I already saw it,” I said quietly, my voice raspy from screams.

He didn’t have a response to that.

They stayed for hours, and when they finally left, the smell was weaker.

The stained carpet was gone. Part of the wall had been removed. The mattress had disappeared into the back of their van.

The room looked hollowed out, as if the soul had been ripped from it.

No. Not the soul. A soul. Daniel.

But it no longer looked like a place where my brother had blown his head apart. Small victories, I guess...

Daniel was still dead, but the room had already begun pretending he had never existed.

He didn't even leave a note, you know? No reasoning, no apologies, just gone like a leaf in the autumn wind.

For years, I told myself that finding him was what drove me into crime-scene cleaning.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Finding him was only the beginning.

What stayed with me was what those cleaners had done after everyone else left. They took him away, and he would never be back.

To me, who grew up with him, that wasn't some fourteen-year-old corpse or clumps of mess.

That was Daniel.

My brother.

My best friend.

They couldn’t bring Daniel back.

They couldn’t make my parents better people.

They couldn’t stop me from seeing his body every time I closed my eyes.

But they could enter the worst room in someone’s life and make it possible to open the door again.

There was something almost merciful about that. Beautiful. They were the angels that took the nightmare away and made things okay again.

Well... okay is relative. They took the nightmare away, but I don't think I've ever been okay.

So when I was old enough, I entered the profession myself.

For ten years, I cleaned up after suicides, murders, accidents, unattended deaths, and things that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Most of the jobs were simply sad.

Some were disgusting.

A few were so absurd that all you could do was laugh.

And then there were the others.

The jobs I still think about.

The houses that didn’t feel empty after the bodies were removed.

The stains that returned after we scrubbed them away.

The rooms that were larger on the inside than they had any right to be.

The sounds that came from sealed walls.

The things my coworkers and I agreed never to include in our reports.

Those are the stories I’m going to write down.

They won’t necessarily be in order. Trauma doesn’t work like that, and neither does memory.

Maybe my therapist was right.

Maybe getting everything onto paper will finally help me move past it.

Or maybe, when I’m finished, someone will understand why I quit and why I’m certain that at least one of the things we cleaned up followed me home.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

I guess to preserve my sanity? Record my ramblings before they stop making sense as I age or forget things?

My therapist recommended journaling in the hope that it would help me “cope with my trauma,” as if putting everything down in a notebook is going to erase it.

But whatever.

I’m Henry, and for ten years, I worked for a private crime-scene cleaning business in Arizona.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll understand why eventually.

What my job came down to was going into houses where someone had died, either purposefully or accidentally, and cleaning up the mess they left behind when they left the earth.

Usually, it was a healthy mix of piss, shit, blood, and vomit. Some of it came from the person who died. Some came from the unfortunate bastard who found them.

To most people, that description alone would be enough to scare them from the profession. The thought of cleaning up the macabre aftermath of a suicide or murder is enough to make their stomachs turn.

They’ll turn tail and run. But not me.

When I was a kid, around eleven, I had the misfortune of experiencing the aftermath of a death firsthand.

It changed me forever.

My older brother, Daniel, struggled a lot with mental health problems. Depression and bipolar disorder really screwed him up. He could spend days in bed, barely eating, speaking, or moving.

Our parents were no help because they had the traditional mindset of “praying the sickness away.”

Instead of getting him any treatment or support, they blamed him. They claimed he wasn’t believing in his recovery hard enough.

“God will provide all the support you need,” they would assure him whenever he begged them to take him to a therapist.

“This is a test,” they said when he stayed in bed for days on end, unmoving.

Apparently, God was testing him.

Our parents certainly weren’t helping him study.

It was late August, so school wasn’t in session. I remember being so hyped because Diablo II had come out two months earlier, and I had finally saved enough money to buy it from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

As a kid, you really have a one-track mind when you want something. You genuinely forget about everything and everyone around you, convinced that this arbitrary item you “need” is as important as air itself.

That weekend, our parents were away at some church retreat.

I had spent Friday night and most of Saturday at a friend’s house. Daniel stayed home. That wasn’t unusual. By then, he rarely wanted to go anywhere. Not even to the bathroom. Many days, my parents caught him with a piss jug in his room when he was too “lazy” to get up.

I came home Sunday afternoon, game in hand, and shoved the disc into my computer’s CD-ROM drive.

The installation crawled along at a sluggish pace, much to my eleven-year-old self’s annoyance, so I got up to find myself a snack.

That’s when I smelled it.

A foul, sickly sweet smell.

I remember thinking it smelled almost identical to a package of expired meat we had thrown away a few days earlier. Figuring that was the source,

I checked the trash can. Nothing except paper towels and a few orange peels.

I checked the fridge. Clean as a whistle, just a couple of Daniel's energy drinks, eggs, and one of my dad's beers.

I stood there, confused, as each place I checked did not explain.

What else would be rotting?

I huffed and followed the smell, pausing as I approached the hallway, where it grew stronger with each step.

My first thought?

Why would someone leave rotting meat in the hallway?

I wasn’t too bright. Then again, I was also eleven. What can you do?

Or maybe some part of me already knew something was wrong and was working overtime to keep the rest of me from figuring it out.

I didn’t follow the smell right away. I just stood there, as if I, too, were trying to download over a bad internet connection like Diablo II was currently doing.

Slow and lagging, with drifting thoughts that Daniel must have forgotten to throw away some food. I remember the annoyance, anger. He stunk up the whole house?

I walked down the hallway slowly, following the smell farther and farther.

Sweat dripped down my back and face as the house seemed to get hotter with every step.

Our house didn’t have central air. We had old window units in the bedrooms, the kind with manual dials you had to twist yourself. Daniel’s rattled so loudly that he always turned it off before he went to sleep.

Once it was off, it stayed off until someone turned it back on.

And Daniel hadn’t been able to do that.

Of course, I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was that it was a hundred-and-fuck degrees outside and my brother hadn’t turned on his AC.

“Lazy fuck,” I muttered.

I figured that after I took out whatever garbage he had left in his room, I would turn it on myself.

Then I stopped.

At the end of the hallway, Daniel’s door was cracked open.

The smell was stronger than ever. It was coming from inside his room.

“What the hell?” I said aloud.

Had he, for some godforsaken reason, kept rotting meat in there?

Even at eleven, that didn’t seem right.

I approached the door.

The smell thickened until I could almost taste it. It sat on the back of my tongue and filled my throat every time I breathed.

I pushed the door open.

Daniel was lying on the bed.

There were red chunks splattered across the wall and headboard behind him.

I remember my first thought was:

Why did he throw spaghetti sauce on the wall?

That thought lasted about two seconds.

I would kill to find that level of innocence again…

The rest of the room came into focus, everything clicking all at once. I let out a horrified, strangled scream.

Daniel’s lower jaw and much of the side of his head were gone.

Blood covered the sheets beneath him. A dark spray marked the wall and headboard, mixed with strands of tissue and small, pale fragments that had stuck to the paint. Droplets had reached the door, the floor, and even the motionless blades of the ceiling fan.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside the bed.

No exaggeration… There was blood everywhere.

Not the bright, clean red you see in movies. It was dark in some places and nearly black in others. Parts of it had dried against the wall. The blood soaking his shirt and sheets was thicker, almost syrupy from the heat.

His Metallica shirt was stained from the collar down.

One of his eyes was still visible, the other atomized on the wall behind him.

It was open but glazed over, like the plastic eye of a doll.

Now, as I said, the AC wasn’t on, and we were in peak heat season in Arizona.

Daniel had been alone in that room for nearly two days.

The heat had allowed everything to bake.

The blood.

The sheets.

My brother.

When I say the smell was unbearable, I mean it.

Have you ever farted in a hot shower?

I know that sounds like a stupid comparison, but bear with me.

The smell doesn’t leave right away. The heat and steam make it ranker than it normally would be. It hangs around you. Clings to you.

Turns out, the same logic applies to corpses.

Except a corpse is worse.

Much worse.

The smell didn’t just enter my nose. It coated the inside of my mouth. Every time I tried to breathe, I could taste something rotten and sweet at the back of my throat.

I stumbled backward into the hallway and fell on my ass.

I kept screaming for Daniel.

I don’t know why.

He was obviously dead. Even an eleven-year-old could see that. A toddler could see that. There was no possible world in which he could sit up and tell me he was fine.

But I kept saying his name anyway. I didn't want to accept it.

“Daniel?”

Then louder.

“Daniel!”

As if shouting hard enough might force the remaining pieces of him back together; as if it would cast a spell that would let me take that gun out of his mouth before he did it.

I don't remember much after that.

I don’t even remember calling the police.

I know I did because I was the only person in the house, but most of what happened after I opened the door exists in scattered pieces.

I remember sitting on the floor outside.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether Daniel was breathing.

I remember staring through the open doorway at what was left of his head and not knowing how to answer.

I remember a police officer pulling me away from the hallway.

I remember vomiting onto his shoes.

I felt like a robot going through familiar, logical motions, but I had no sentience to discern what it was I was doing clearly.

The police came first.

Then the paramedics, although there wasn’t anything for them to do except give sympathies.

Then the coroner.

Our parents returned sometime that evening, their car screeching as they parked in the driveway.

I had only told them something happened to Daniel. I couldn't say the words.

My mother screamed when she saw the police cars.

My father kept asking what happened, even after three different people told him.

When he finally understood, he dropped to his knees in the front yard and started praying.

I remember watching him and bitterly thinking:

Now you pray?

I didn’t say it aloud, but fuck, I wish I had. I wish I had laid into them and screamed how this was their fault. How much I hated them for letting this happen to my brother.

But I couldn't. I was in shock. In pain. Grieving.

The police removed Daniel’s body, but they didn’t clean the room.

A lot of people don’t know that.

They think the police handle everything. The body disappears, someone wipes up the blood, and the family returns to a house that looks more or less normal.

That isn’t how it works.

The police collect evidence.

The coroner collects the body.

Everything else belongs to whoever owns the house.

The blood.

The tissue.

The smell.

Daniel’s room stayed closed for another day while my parents argued about what to do.

My mother wanted to burn everything.

My father wanted to clean it himself because he didn’t trust strangers in the house.

That idea lasted until he opened the bedroom door.

He made it three steps inside before running to the bathroom.

Eventually, they called a private trauma-cleaning company.

Three people arrived in an unmarked van.

They wore white protective suits, thick gloves, respirators, and shoe covers. They carried plastic containers, sprayers, scrapers, and rolls of heavy black bags into Daniel’s room.

They didn’t look horrified.

They didn’t pray.

They didn’t stand in the hallway whispering about what a tragedy it was.

They just worked.

They stripped the bed.

They removed part of the carpet.

They cut out sections of drywall that couldn’t be cleaned.

They took apart the ceiling fan.

They searched places I would never have thought to look because blood and tissue had found their way into cracks, vents, and spaces beneath the furniture.

One of them noticed me watching from the end of the hallway.

He was an older man with gray hair visible beneath the hood of his suit.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” he told me.

“I already saw it,” I said quietly, my voice raspy from screams.

He didn’t have a response to that.

They stayed for hours, and when they finally left, the smell was weaker.

The stained carpet was gone. Part of the wall had been removed. The mattress had disappeared into the back of their van.

The room looked hollowed out, as if the soul had been ripped from it.

No. Not the soul. A soul. Daniel.

But it no longer looked like a place where my brother had blown his head apart. Small victories, I guess...

Daniel was still dead, but the room had already begun pretending he had never existed.

He didn't even leave a note, you know? No reasoning, no apologies, just gone like a leaf in the autumn wind.

For years, I told myself that finding him was what drove me into crime-scene cleaning.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Finding him was only the beginning.

What stayed with me was what those cleaners had done after everyone else left. They took him away, and he would never be back.

To me, who grew up with him, that wasn't some fourteen-year-old corpse or clumps of mess.

That was Daniel.

My brother.

My best friend.

They couldn’t bring Daniel back.

They couldn’t make my parents better people.

They couldn’t stop me from seeing his body every time I closed my eyes.

But they could enter the worst room in someone’s life and make it possible to open the door again.

There was something almost merciful about that. Beautiful. They were the angels that took the nightmare away and made things okay again.

Well... okay is relative. They took the nightmare away, but I don't think I've ever been okay.

So when I was old enough, I entered the profession myself.

For ten years, I cleaned up after suicides, murders, accidents, unattended deaths, and things that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Most of the jobs were simply sad.

Some were disgusting.

A few were so absurd that all you could do was laugh.

And then there were the others.

The jobs I still think about.

The houses that didn’t feel empty after the bodies were removed.

The stains that returned after we scrubbed them away.

The rooms that were larger on the inside than they had any right to be.

The sounds that came from sealed walls.

The things my coworkers and I agreed never to include in our reports.

Those are the stories I’m going to write down.

They won’t necessarily be in order. Trauma doesn’t work like that, and neither does memory.

Maybe my therapist was right.

Maybe getting everything onto paper will finally help me move past it.

Or maybe, when I’m finished, someone will understand why I quit and why I’m certain that at least one of the things we cleaned up followed me home.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

I guess to preserve my sanity? Record my ramblings before they stop making sense as I age or forget things?

My therapist recommended journaling in the hope that it would help me “cope with my trauma,” as if putting everything down in a notebook is going to erase it.

But whatever.

I’m Henry, and for ten years, I worked for a private crime-scene cleaning business in Arizona.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll understand why eventually.

What my job came down to was going into houses where someone had died, either purposefully or accidentally, and cleaning up the mess they left behind when they left the earth.

Usually, it was a healthy mix of piss, shit, blood, and vomit. Some of it came from the person who died. Some came from the unfortunate bastard who found them.

To most people, that description alone would be enough to scare them from the profession. The thought of cleaning up the macabre aftermath of a suicide or murder is enough to make their stomachs turn.

They’ll turn tail and run. But not me.

When I was a kid, around eleven, I had the misfortune of experiencing the aftermath of a death firsthand.

It changed me forever.

My older brother, Daniel, struggled a lot with mental health problems. Depression and bipolar disorder really screwed him up. He could spend days in bed, barely eating, speaking, or moving.

Our parents were no help because they had the traditional mindset of “praying the sickness away.”

Instead of getting him any treatment or support, they blamed him. They claimed he wasn’t believing in his recovery hard enough.

“God will provide all the support you need,” they would assure him whenever he begged them to take him to a therapist.

“This is a test,” they said when he stayed in bed for days on end, unmoving.

Apparently, God was testing him.

Our parents certainly weren’t helping him study.

It was late August, so school wasn’t in session. I remember being so hyped because Diablo II had come out two months earlier, and I had finally saved enough money to buy it from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

As a kid, you really have a one-track mind when you want something. You genuinely forget about everything and everyone around you, convinced that this arbitrary item you “need” is as important as air itself.

That weekend, our parents were away at some church retreat.

I had spent Friday night and most of Saturday at a friend’s house. Daniel stayed home. That wasn’t unusual. By then, he rarely wanted to go anywhere. Not even to the bathroom. Many days, my parents caught him with a piss jug in his room when he was too “lazy” to get up.

I came home Sunday afternoon, game in hand, and shoved the disc into my computer’s CD-ROM drive.

The installation crawled along at a sluggish pace, much to my eleven-year-old self’s annoyance, so I got up to find myself a snack.

That’s when I smelled it.

A foul, sickly sweet smell.

I remember thinking it smelled almost identical to a package of expired meat we had thrown away a few days earlier. Figuring that was the source,

I checked the trash can. Nothing except paper towels and a few orange peels.

I checked the fridge. Clean as a whistle, just a couple of Daniel's energy drinks, eggs, and one of my dad's beers.

I stood there, confused, as each place I checked did not explain.

What else would be rotting?

I huffed and followed the smell, pausing as I approached the hallway, where it grew stronger with each step.

My first thought?

Why would someone leave rotting meat in the hallway?

I wasn’t too bright. Then again, I was also eleven. What can you do?

Or maybe some part of me already knew something was wrong and was working overtime to keep the rest of me from figuring it out.

I didn’t follow the smell right away. I just stood there, as if I, too, were trying to download over a bad internet connection like Diablo II was currently doing.

Slow and lagging, with drifting thoughts that Daniel must have forgotten to throw away some food. I remember the annoyance, anger. He stunk up the whole house?

I walked down the hallway slowly, following the smell farther and farther.

Sweat dripped down my back and face as the house seemed to get hotter with every step.

Our house didn’t have central air. We had old window units in the bedrooms, the kind with manual dials you had to twist yourself. Daniel’s rattled so loudly that he always turned it off before he went to sleep.

Once it was off, it stayed off until someone turned it back on.

And Daniel hadn’t been able to do that.

Of course, I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was that it was a hundred-and-fuck degrees outside and my brother hadn’t turned on his AC.

“Lazy fuck,” I muttered.

I figured that after I took out whatever garbage he had left in his room, I would turn it on myself.

Then I stopped.

At the end of the hallway, Daniel’s door was cracked open.

The smell was stronger than ever. It was coming from inside his room.

“What the hell?” I said aloud.

Had he, for some godforsaken reason, kept rotting meat in there?

Even at eleven, that didn’t seem right.

I approached the door.

The smell thickened until I could almost taste it. It sat on the back of my tongue and filled my throat every time I breathed.

I pushed the door open.

Daniel was lying on the bed.

There were red chunks splattered across the wall and headboard behind him.

I remember my first thought was:

Why did he throw spaghetti sauce on the wall?

That thought lasted about two seconds.

I would kill to find that level of innocence again…

The rest of the room came into focus, everything clicking all at once. I let out a horrified, strangled scream.

Daniel’s lower jaw and much of the side of his head were gone.

Blood covered the sheets beneath him. A dark spray marked the wall and headboard, mixed with strands of tissue and small, pale fragments that had stuck to the paint. Droplets had reached the door, the floor, and even the motionless blades of the ceiling fan.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside the bed.

No exaggeration… There was blood everywhere.

Not the bright, clean red you see in movies. It was dark in some places and nearly black in others. Parts of it had dried against the wall. The blood soaking his shirt and sheets was thicker, almost syrupy from the heat.

His Metallica shirt was stained from the collar down.

One of his eyes was still visible, the other atomized on the wall behind him.

It was open but glazed over, like the plastic eye of a doll.

Now, as I said, the AC wasn’t on, and we were in peak heat season in Arizona.

Daniel had been alone in that room for nearly two days.

The heat had allowed everything to bake.

The blood.

The sheets.

My brother.

When I say the smell was unbearable, I mean it.

Have you ever farted in a hot shower?

I know that sounds like a stupid comparison, but bear with me.

The smell doesn’t leave right away. The heat and steam make it ranker than it normally would be. It hangs around you. Clings to you.

Turns out, the same logic applies to corpses.

Except a corpse is worse.

Much worse.

The smell didn’t just enter my nose. It coated the inside of my mouth. Every time I tried to breathe, I could taste something rotten and sweet at the back of my throat.

I stumbled backward into the hallway and fell on my ass.

I kept screaming for Daniel.

I don’t know why.

He was obviously dead. Even an eleven-year-old could see that. A toddler could see that. There was no possible world in which he could sit up and tell me he was fine.

But I kept saying his name anyway. I didn't want to accept it.

“Daniel?”

Then louder.

“Daniel!”

As if shouting hard enough might force the remaining pieces of him back together; as if it would cast a spell that would let me take that gun out of his mouth before he did it.

I don't remember much after that.

I don’t even remember calling the police.

I know I did because I was the only person in the house, but most of what happened after I opened the door exists in scattered pieces.

I remember sitting on the floor outside.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether Daniel was breathing.

I remember staring through the open doorway at what was left of his head and not knowing how to answer.

I remember a police officer pulling me away from the hallway.

I remember vomiting onto his shoes.

I felt like a robot going through familiar, logical motions, but I had no sentience to discern what it was I was doing clearly.

The police came first.

Then the paramedics, although there wasn’t anything for them to do except give sympathies.

Then the coroner.

Our parents returned sometime that evening, their car screeching as they parked in the driveway.

I had only told them something happened to Daniel. I couldn't say the words.

My mother screamed when she saw the police cars.

My father kept asking what happened, even after three different people told him.

When he finally understood, he dropped to his knees in the front yard and started praying.

I remember watching him and bitterly thinking:

Now you pray?

I didn’t say it aloud, but fuck, I wish I had. I wish I had laid into them and screamed how this was their fault. How much I hated them for letting this happen to my brother.

But I couldn't. I was in shock. In pain. Grieving.

The police removed Daniel’s body, but they didn’t clean the room.

A lot of people don’t know that.

They think the police handle everything. The body disappears, someone wipes up the blood, and the family returns to a house that looks more or less normal.

That isn’t how it works.

The police collect evidence.

The coroner collects the body.

Everything else belongs to whoever owns the house.

The blood.

The tissue.

The smell.

Daniel’s room stayed closed for another day while my parents argued about what to do.

My mother wanted to burn everything.

My father wanted to clean it himself because he didn’t trust strangers in the house.

That idea lasted until he opened the bedroom door.

He made it three steps inside before running to the bathroom.

Eventually, they called a private trauma-cleaning company.

Three people arrived in an unmarked van.

They wore white protective suits, thick gloves, respirators, and shoe covers. They carried plastic containers, sprayers, scrapers, and rolls of heavy black bags into Daniel’s room.

They didn’t look horrified.

They didn’t pray.

They didn’t stand in the hallway whispering about what a tragedy it was.

They just worked.

They stripped the bed.

They removed part of the carpet.

They cut out sections of drywall that couldn’t be cleaned.

They took apart the ceiling fan.

They searched places I would never have thought to look because blood and tissue had found their way into cracks, vents, and spaces beneath the furniture.

One of them noticed me watching from the end of the hallway.

He was an older man with gray hair visible beneath the hood of his suit.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” he told me.

“I already saw it,” I said quietly, my voice raspy from screams.

He didn’t have a response to that.

They stayed for hours, and when they finally left, the smell was weaker.

The stained carpet was gone. Part of the wall had been removed. The mattress had disappeared into the back of their van.

The room looked hollowed out, as if the soul had been ripped from it.

No. Not the soul. A soul. Daniel.

But it no longer looked like a place where my brother had blown his head apart. Small victories, I guess...

Daniel was still dead, but the room had already begun pretending he had never existed.

He didn't even leave a note, you know? No reasoning, no apologies, just gone like a leaf in the autumn wind.

For years, I told myself that finding him was what drove me into crime-scene cleaning.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Finding him was only the beginning.

What stayed with me was what those cleaners had done after everyone else left. They took him away, and he would never be back.

To me, who grew up with him, that wasn't some fourteen-year-old corpse or clumps of mess.

That was Daniel.

My brother.

My best friend.

They couldn’t bring Daniel back.

They couldn’t make my parents better people.

They couldn’t stop me from seeing his body every time I closed my eyes.

But they could enter the worst room in someone’s life and make it possible to open the door again.

There was something almost merciful about that. Beautiful. They were the angels that took the nightmare away and made things okay again.

Well... okay is relative. They took the nightmare away, but I don't think I've ever been okay.

So when I was old enough, I entered the profession myself.

For ten years, I cleaned up after suicides, murders, accidents, unattended deaths, and things that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Most of the jobs were simply sad.

Some were disgusting.

A few were so absurd that all you could do was laugh.

And then there were the others.

The jobs I still think about.

The houses that didn’t feel empty after the bodies were removed.

The stains that returned after we scrubbed them away.

The rooms that were larger on the inside than they had any right to be.

The sounds that came from sealed walls.

The things my coworkers and I agreed never to include in our reports.

Those are the stories I’m going to write down.

They won’t necessarily be in order. Trauma doesn’t work like that, and neither does memory.

Maybe my therapist was right.

Maybe getting everything onto paper will finally help me move past it.

Or maybe, when I’m finished, someone will understand why I quit and why I’m certain that at least one of the things we cleaned up followed me home.

I don’t know why I’m writing this.

I guess to preserve my sanity? Record my ramblings before they stop making sense as I age or forget things?

My therapist recommended journaling in the hope that it would help me “cope with my trauma,” as if putting everything down in a notebook is going to erase it.

But whatever.

I’m Henry, and for ten years, I worked for a private crime-scene cleaning business in Arizona.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll understand why eventually.

What my job came down to was going into houses where someone had died, either purposefully or accidentally, and cleaning up the mess they left behind when they left the earth.

Usually, it was a healthy mix of piss, shit, blood, and vomit. Some of it came from the person who died. Some came from the unfortunate bastard who found them.

To most people, that description alone would be enough to scare them from the profession. The thought of cleaning up the macabre aftermath of a suicide or murder is enough to make their stomachs turn.

They’ll turn tail and run. But not me.

When I was a kid, around eleven, I had the misfortune of experiencing the aftermath of a death firsthand.

It changed me forever.

My older brother, Daniel, struggled a lot with mental health problems. Depression and bipolar disorder really screwed him up. He could spend days in bed, barely eating, speaking, or moving.

Our parents were no help because they had the traditional mindset of “praying the sickness away.”

Instead of getting him any sort of treatment or support, they blamed him. They claimed he just wasn’t believing in his recovery hard enough.

“God will provide all the support you need,” they would assure him whenever he begged them to take him to a therapist.

“This is a test,” they said when he stayed in bed for days on end, unmoving.

Apparently, God was testing him.

Our parents certainly weren’t helping him study.

It was late August, so school wasn’t in session. I remember being so hyped because Diablo II had come out two months earlier, and I had finally saved enough money to buy it from Bookmans Entertainment Exchange.

As a kid, you really have a one-track mind when you want something. You genuinely forget about everything and everyone around you, convinced that this arbitrary item you “need” is as important as air itself.

That weekend, our parents were away at some church retreat.

I had spent Friday night and most of Saturday at a friend’s house. Daniel stayed home. That wasn’t unusual. By then, he rarely wanted to go anywhere. Not even to the bathroom. Many days, my parents caught him with a piss jug in his room when he was too “lazy” to get up.

I came home Sunday afternoon, game in hand, and shoved the disc into my computer’s CD-ROM drive.

The installation crawled along at a sluggish pace, much to my eleven-year-old self’s annoyance, so I got up to find myself a snack.

That’s when I smelled it.

A foul, sickly sweet smell.

I remember thinking it smelled almost identical to a package of expired meat we had thrown away a few days earlier. Figuring that was the source,

I checked the trash can. Nothing except paper towels and a few orange peels.

I checked the fridge. Clean as a whistle, just a couple of Daniel's energy drinks, eggs, and one of my dad's beers.

I stood there, confused, as each place I checked offered no explanation.

What else would be rotting?

I huffed and followed the smell, pausing as I approached the hallway, where it grew stronger with each step.

My first thought?

Why would someone leave rotting meat in the hallway?

I wasn’t too bright. Then again, I was also eleven. What can you do?

Or maybe some part of me already knew something was wrong and was working overtime to keep the rest of me from figuring it out.

I didn’t follow the smell right away. I just stood there, as if I, too, were trying to download over a bad internet connection like Diablo II was currently doing.

Slow and lagging, with drifting thoughts that Daniel must have forgotten to throw away some food. I remember the annoyance, anger. He stunk up the whole house?

I walked down the hallway slowly, following the smell farther and farther.

Sweat dripped down my back and face as the house seemed to get hotter with every step.

Our house didn’t have central air. We had old window units in the bedrooms, the kind with manual dials you had to twist yourself. Daniel’s rattled so loudly that he always turned it off before he went to sleep.

Once it was off, it stayed off until someone turned it back on.

And Daniel hadn’t been able to do that.

Of course, I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was that it was a hundred-and-fuck degrees outside and my brother hadn’t turned on his AC.

“Lazy fuck,” I muttered.

I figured that after I took out whatever garbage he had left in his room, I would turn it on myself.

Then I stopped.

At the end of the hallway, Daniel’s door was cracked open.

The smell was stronger than ever. It was coming from inside his room.

“What the hell?” I said aloud.

Had he, for some godforsaken reason, kept rotting meat in there?

Even at eleven, that didn’t seem right.

I approached the door.

The smell thickened until I could almost taste it. It sat on the back of my tongue and filled my throat every time I breathed.

I pushed the door open.

Daniel was lying on the bed.

There were red chunks splattered across the wall and headboard behind him.

I remember my first thought was:

Why did he throw spaghetti sauce on the wall?

That thought lasted about two seconds.

I would kill to find that level of innocence again…

The rest of the room came into focus, everything clicking all at once. I let out a horrified, strangled scream.

Daniel’s lower jaw and much of the side of his head were gone.

Blood covered the sheets beneath him. A dark spray marked the wall and headboard, mixed with strands of tissue and small, pale fragments that had stuck to the paint. Droplets had reached the door, the floor, and even the motionless blades of the ceiling fan.

The shotgun lay on the floor beside the bed.

No exaggeration… There was blood everywhere.

Not the bright, clean red you see in movies. It was dark in some places and nearly black in others. Parts of it had dried against the wall. The blood soaking his shirt and sheets was thicker, almost syrupy from the heat.

His Metallica shirt was stained from the collar down.

One of his eyes was still visible, the other atomized on the wall behind him.

It was open but glazed over, like the plastic eye of a doll.

Now, as I said, the AC wasn’t on, and we were in peak heat season in Arizona.

Daniel had been alone in that room for nearly two days.

The heat had allowed everything to bake.

The blood.

The sheets.

My brother.

When I say the smell was unbearable, I mean it.

Have you ever farted in a hot shower?

I know that sounds like a stupid comparison, but bear with me.

The smell doesn’t leave right away. The heat and steam make it ranker than it normally would be. It hangs around you. Clings to you.

Turns out, the same logic applies to corpses.

Except a corpse is worse.

Much worse.

The smell didn’t just enter my nose. It coated the inside of my mouth. Every time I tried to breathe, I could taste something rotten and sweet at the back of my throat.

I stumbled backward into the hallway and fell on my ass.

I kept screaming for Daniel.

I don’t know why.

He was obviously dead. Even an eleven-year-old could see that. A toddler could see that. There was no possible world in which he could sit up and tell me he was fine.

But I kept saying his name anyway. I didn't want to accept it.

“Daniel?”

Then louder.

“Daniel!”

As if shouting hard enough might force the remaining pieces of him back together; as if it would cast a spell that would let me take that gun out of his mouth before he did it.

I don't remember much after that.

I don’t even remember calling the police.

I know I did because I was the only person in the house, but most of what happened after I opened the door exists in scattered pieces.

I remember sitting on the floor outside.

I remember the dispatcher asking whether Daniel was breathing.

I remember staring through the open doorway at what was left of his head and not knowing how to answer.

I remember a police officer pulling me away from the hallway.

I remember vomiting onto his shoes.

I felt like a robot going through familiar, logical motions, but I had no sentience to clearly discern what it was I was doing.

The police came first.

Then the paramedics, although there wasn’t anything for them to do except give sympathies.

Then the coroner.

Our parents returned sometime that evening, their car screeching as they parked in the driveway.

I had only told them something happened to Daniel. I couldn't say the words.

My mother screamed when she saw the police cars.

My father kept asking what happened, even after three different people told him.

When he finally understood, he dropped to his knees in the front yard and started praying.

I remember watching him and bitterly thinking:

Now you pray?

I didn’t say it aloud, but fuck, I wish I had. I wish I had laid into them and screamed how this was their fault. How much I hated them for letting this happen to my brother.

But I couldn't. I was in shock. In pain. Grieving.

The police removed Daniel’s body, but they didn’t clean the room.

A lot of people don’t know that.

They think the police handle everything. The body disappears, someone wipes up the blood, and the family returns to a house that looks more or less normal.

That isn’t how it works.

The police collect evidence.

The coroner collects the body.

Everything else belongs to whoever owns the house.

The blood.

The tissue.

The smell.

Daniel’s room stayed closed for another day while my parents argued about what to do.

My mother wanted to burn everything.

My father wanted to clean it himself because he didn’t trust strangers in the house.

That idea lasted until he opened the bedroom door.

He made it three steps inside before running to the bathroom.

Eventually, they called a private trauma-cleaning company.

Three people arrived in an unmarked van.

They wore white protective suits, thick gloves, respirators, and shoe covers. They carried plastic containers, sprayers, scrapers, and rolls of heavy black bags into Daniel’s room.

They didn’t look horrified.

They didn’t pray.

They didn’t stand in the hallway whispering about what a tragedy it was.

They just worked.

They stripped the bed.

They removed part of the carpet.

They cut out sections of drywall that couldn’t be cleaned.

They took apart the ceiling fan.

They searched places I would never have thought to look because blood and tissue had found their way into cracks, vents, and spaces beneath the furniture.

One of them noticed me watching from the end of the hallway.

He was an older man with gray hair visible beneath the hood of his suit.

“You shouldn’t be looking at this,” he told me.

“I already saw it,” I said quietly, my voice raspy from screams.

He didn’t have a response to that.

They stayed for hours, and when they finally left, the smell was weaker.

The stained carpet was gone. Part of the wall had been removed. The mattress had disappeared into the back of their van.

The room looked hollowed out, as if the soul had been ripped from it.

No. Not the soul. A soul. Daniel.

But it no longer looked like a place where my brother had blown his head apart. Small victories, I guess...

Daniel was still dead, but the room had already begun pretending he had never existed.

He didn't even leave a note, you know? No reasoning, no apologies, just gone like a leaf in the autumn wind.

For years, I told myself that finding him was what drove me into crime-scene cleaning.

That wasn’t entirely true.

Finding him was only the beginning.

What stayed with me was what those cleaners had done after everyone else left. They took him away, and he would never be back.

To me, who grew up with him, that wasn't some fourteen-year-old corpse or clumps of mess.

That was Daniel.

My brother.

My best friend.

They couldn’t bring Daniel back.

They couldn’t make my parents better people.

They couldn’t stop me from seeing his body every time I closed my eyes.

But they could enter the worst room in someone’s life and make it possible to open the door again.

There was something almost merciful about that. Beautiful. They were the angels that took the nightmare away and made things okay again.

Well... okay is relative. They took the nightmare away, but I don't think I've ever been okay.

So when I was old enough, I entered the profession myself.

For ten years, I cleaned up after suicides, murders, accidents, unattended deaths, and things that didn’t fit neatly into any of those categories.

Most of the jobs were simply sad.

Some were disgusting.

A few were so absurd that all you could do was laugh.

And then there were the others.

The jobs I still think about.

The houses that didn’t feel empty after the bodies were removed.

The stains that returned after we scrubbed them away.

The rooms that were larger on the inside than they had any right to be.

The sounds that came from sealed walls.

The things my coworkers and I agreed never to include in our reports.

Those are the stories I’m going to write down.

They won’t necessarily be in order. Trauma doesn’t work like that, and neither does memory.

Maybe my therapist was right.

Maybe getting everything onto paper will finally help me move past it.

Or maybe, when I’m finished, someone will understand why I quit.

And why I’m certain that at least one of the things we cleaned up followed me home.

This post is distinctly different from the writing contests. This is strictly for fun, and if people want to participate. Winning will only get you a shoutout at the end on the Subreddit, no podcast mention.

Hello Pillers!

Do you have a horror story that includes a god? An unfathomable deity? This is your chance to show them off!

RULES:

- Any pantheon/god is allowed! Even original characters, aka gods that you make up.

- "Deity" is an umbrella term for any sentient or otherwise overarching entity that has immense power over a domain or situation. Cults worshipping a deity that commit attrocities do not count; the deity has to show up or exert their power in some way.

- The deity does not have to be named, as long as you make it clear it is, in fact, a deity.

- No word count. This is just for fun! :)

- If you have a story you already posted that you want to submit, that works too!

HOW TO ENTER?

Post your story on the AnxietyPilled Subreddit with [ANCIENT GODS] in the title!

End Date: The contest ends on 08/07/2026 at 11:59 PM, after which judges will review stories and select 3 winners. Expect the results by 08/10/2026.

This post is distinctly different from the writing contests. This is strictly for fun and if people want to participate, there is no winner.

Cthulhu.

Azathoth.

Yog-Sothoth.

Zeus.

Ra.

We want to see your best stories about gods! Give us some deity horror! Any pantheon or universe is welcome as long as it features gods(or God)!

~ Lead Pharmacist PossibilityMaster

Hello.
I am Dr. Henry Hill, a professor of archaeobotany at the University of Sheffield. My area of study is how past human civilizations utilized plants, whether for medicine, decoration, or agriculture, so, needless to say, I stumble across some fascinating phenomena.
For example, did you know that the first civilization (Ancient Sumeria, or Mesopotamia) used Opium Poppies? Sumerians cultivated it to harvest its sap for use as an analgesic (painkiller) and sedative. My students always find that to be amusing, imagining these ancient civilizations getting high off their asses when in horrible pain. Morbidly, I can see the humor in it.
Growing up, I always knew something was different about me. At age five, I would be out in my mother's gardens, picking weeds and asking her a million different questions about them. I didn't really enjoy socializing, opting instead to stay out in the fields at recess and pick strange flowers I found, always choosing the most beautiful, pristine little field daisies to take home and stare at with a longing, analytical gaze.
Or as analytical as a little kid can get, anyway. Which pretty much led to forcing my mom to help me learn about them, what they were, and forcing her to research it for me.
At age 7, I gather she had had enough of my many, many, many questions and of being forced to be an amateur researcher for her tiny, annoying kid, because she got me a little field guide to local UK plants for my birthday so I could read it myself. And read it I did. I vividly remember going through that thing at least a thousand times, usually during class or when I was supposed to be doing something else. Looking back with a modern lens, I am about 80% sure I was on the spectrum or at least had ADHD, but that's neither here nor there.
But I am not here to recount my life in any more detail than what is necessary. I am here to share the knowledge of a discovery that left me stripped of all certifications and forced to live out of my car for the past few weeks.
This recounting begins about 5 months ago with one of my best students, Liam Wo, a very bright young man who majored in Forensic Archaeology and intended to move to the United States to join law enforcement. He is... or, well, was, a prodigy in his field, and has been by far my favorite student.
Liam was also diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he had to be home at the very strict time of 4:32 PM down to the second, or he would fall into an intense panic attack, convinced he was going to be in serious trouble with someone named "Amelia" if he was even a microsecond late.
I never did figure out who that was or why he needed to please this mysterious figure named Amelia. Still, I'm a professor, not a clinical psychiatrist, so I never inquired. I just knew he would bolt out of class about ten minutes before its scheduled time like a bat out of hell and take off to get home.
I remember the day with such vividness that every subsequent night terror makes me feel as if it only just happened mere moments ago.
I was grading that year's final essays on "Uses of Micro-Organisms in Medicine" and was on about essay number ten about mold. Call me finicky, but I remember being annoyed, as I wanted more creativity than the well-known story of penicillin.
I had begun to feel sleepy, so I stood up, rubbing my drooping lids with my hands, and headed to the lounge to make myself a cup of coffee. I looked at the clock on the wall, and it read 8:30 PM.
"Damn it," I mumbled to no one in particular. I had a bad habit of losing all sense of time and space when I was in the zone on a monotonous, repetitive task, whether I liked it or not.
I walked down the empty hallways, looking around at just how liminal the entire place looked. The droning hum of the cheap lights filled my ears, accompanied only by the slow clacking of my black loafers against the tan linoleum floors.
It would appear I was the only man dumb enough to stay so late, as all night classes had long since concluded and my colleagues had all gone home. I think I remember my longtime co-worker Lydia, a professor of ethics, coming in to say goodbye, but I couldn’t really remember.

I walked into the lounge with a deep sigh, the motion-detecting lights clicking on as I did so. On the dark mahogany table sat an abandoned coffee mug, an open pink donut box with long stale donuts from this morning, and some poor sod's black lunchbox.

I went over to the shitty little Keurig, popped a pod in, and was about to put a mug underneath it when I heard a sound that made me yell out in fright, almost making me shatter my favorite mug on the ground.

A cough.

Not just a normal cough, but it was wet, guttural, and absolutely disgusting. Is that heartless to say? That I was more disgusted than worried?

It was nearby, but not close enough for me to discern exactly where it was coming from. However, that soon changed as it let out another violent, disgusting hack that was much louder.

Or, rather, closer.

I found myself begging mentally for them not to be headed this way, but of course, I wasn't that lucky.

The door of the lounge opened with no preamble, and what I saw there turned my disgusted annoyance into pure confusion, shock, and horror.

Liam was standing in front of me, wheezing breaths coming from his chapped, cracked lips. He wore a disheveled blue-collared shirt covered in black spots; his black pants were stained with dust and dirt; and his hair was in complete disarray, matted with leaves, sticks, and other debris.

His face was beet red, and there were these dark raised bumps covering him. It was like a million small blisters, but they leaked a green-and-purple mixture that looked like pus, and I don't even know what. There were also black specks that matched what was on his shirt, but coating his face like the darkest of freckles.

He walked forward, his steps sloppy and nearly causing him to fall as if he were heavily intoxicated or had just learned to walk a day ago.

I had seen Liam not even four hours ago, and he did not look even remotely sick. He had been perfectly healthy, had spoken up in class, and had even chatted with me about his summer plans.

I went through a whole variety of different emotions, but one dominated the rest: terror with a healthy mixture of worry.

"Liam..." I say, my voice so meek I barely recognized it. "What the hell happened?"

He did not reply, looking at me with those yellow eyes. By yellow, you probably assume glaucoma or liver failure, but no. What used to be a natural white was now almost gold, or at least trying to be.

Imagine a little kid mixing watercolors and trying to make gold. It won't be perfect, but you can tell what color it is trying to be. That's what it looked like: gold, but made with various other colors.

He lets out another wheezing breath, opens and closes his mouth a few times to(I assume) gather enough saliva to speak, and finally groans out: "Host." In a strained, struggling voice as if that one word was hard to get out.

It sniffed the air, stepping a bit closer, legs shakily moving it closer to me.

Sniff. Sniff sniff.

I backed into the counter, then started to walk out into the office, my steps quickening.

"Host," I heard it whisper, quieter this time as if contemplative.

Before I could say a word, I heard quickened footsteps come at me from the direction of the lounge. Before I could react, he, nay, it, burst out of the door, now on all fours and starting to gallop toward me like some sickly antelope, his previous walking difficulties seemingly forgotton.

I am not afraid to admit that I screamed in terror and took off down the hall, the sound of hands slapping off the tile close behind me as Liam gave chase. He let out a yell that sounded more like a war cry, the sound alien coming from such a timid student like Liam. This only steadied my decision to keep running, now knowing without a doubt that he had completely lost his damn mind.

I run, and I run, and I run as I slam into the back door, aiming to get to the other side of the university where the parking garage was; where my car was.

Loud and feverish panting got closer as it seemed to realize my plan to escape, now picking up speed to the point I could feel flecks of saliva and its hot breath against my leg. It tried to swipe at my legs, but by the grace of what I have to assume is divine intervention, it missed and lost its balance for a moment, allowing me to get ahead.

I could see the blue-and-white sign that read "parking garage" in the distance. 200 feet. 190 feet. 180 feet.

It was pissed now; I could hear its breathing quicken and get heavier as what I could only parse was rage at being tripped. I made the mistake of turning around and saw its golden eyes now glowed in the darkness with eldritch bioilluminescence.

I lost my footing for a moment and felt a sharp, burning pain in my calf as it bit into my flesh. I let out a loud, agonized scream, then a horrified one as I realized it wasn't letting go. The black specks on its face began to squirm and writh, thin black lines starting to come from them.

No. Not lines. Worms...

Wriggling, needle-thin worms started to emerge from its face and toward my leg. In pure adrenaline-filled horror, I ripped my leg from its mouth with a loud, wet tearing, shooting more torment through my body.

I thank whatever creator for adrenaline's numbing effects because I was able to take off running once again, warmth flooding my socks and shoes as blood escaped through the chunk missing in my leg.

I could see it now; the parking garage was so close, and thankfully, my car was as well. As I said, the school was empty, so my red sedan stuck out like a sore thumb.

From behind me, I heard only silence, but I did not break my stride, digging through my pockets for my keys.

With no hesitation, I sloppily yanked them out, pressed the unlock button, and kept on limp-running to my vehicle. I had reached it. Safety.

I threw my driver's-side door open, got inside, locked it, and started the car, the headlights illuminating the dark parking garage.

It also illuminated what used to be Liam.

He was still on all fours, squatted down in front of my car about 20 feet away. Its body heaved up and down as it panted, the wriggling worms in its face beginning to retract back into its cheeks. It said nothing, glowing eyes staring forward at me.

For what felt like an eternity, we continued that standoff, both of us panting from the effort of the chase, staring at one another. But as soon as it began, "Liam" finally turned away from my car and scuttled away into the night.

Hello.
I am Dr. Henry Hill, a professor of archaeobotany at the University of Sheffield. My area of study is how past human civilizations utilized plants, whether for medicine, decoration, or agriculture, so, needless to say, I stumble across some fascinating phenomena.
For example, did you know that the first civilization (Ancient Sumeria, or Mesopotamia) used Opium Poppies? Sumerians cultivated it to harvest its sap for use as an analgesic (painkiller) and sedative. My students always find that to be amusing, imagining these ancient civilizations getting high off their asses when in horrible pain. Morbidly, I can see the humor in it.
Growing up, I always knew something was different about me. At age five, I would be out in my mother's gardens, picking weeds and asking her a million different questions about them. I didn't really enjoy socializing, opting instead to stay out in the fields at recess and pick strange flowers I found, always choosing the most beautiful, pristine little field daisies to take home and stare at with a longing, analytical gaze.
Or as analytical as a little kid can get, anyway. Which pretty much led to forcing my mom to help me learn about them, what they were, and forcing her to research it for me.
At age 7, I gather she had had enough of my many, many, many questions and of being forced to be an amateur researcher for her tiny, annoying kid, because she got me a little field guide to local UK plants for my birthday so I could read it myself. And read it I did. I vividly remember going through that thing at least a thousand times, usually during class or when I was supposed to be doing something else. Looking back with a modern lens, I am about 80% sure I was on the spectrum or at least had ADHD, but that's neither here nor there.
But I am not here to recount my life in any more detail than what is necessary. I am here to share the knowledge of a discovery that left me stripped of all certifications and forced to live out of my car for the past few weeks.
This recounting begins about 5 months ago with one of my best students, Liam Wo, a very bright young man who majored in Forensic Archaeology and intended to move to the United States to join law enforcement. He is... or, well, was, a prodigy in his field, and has been by far my favorite student.
Liam was also diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he had to be home at the very strict time of 4:32 PM down to the second, or he would fall into an intense panic attack, convinced he was going to be in serious trouble with someone named "Amelia" if he was even a microsecond late.
I never did figure out who that was or why he needed to please this mysterious figure named Amelia. Still, I'm a professor, not a clinical psychiatrist, so I never inquired. I just knew he would bolt out of class about ten minutes before its scheduled time like a bat out of hell and take off to get home.
I remember the day with such vividness that every subsequent night terror makes me feel as if it only just happened mere moments ago.
I was grading that year's final essays on "Uses of Micro-Organisms in Medicine" and was on about essay number ten about mold. Call me finicky, but I remember being annoyed, as I wanted more creativity than the well-known story of penicillin.
I had begun to feel sleepy, so I stood up, rubbing my drooping lids with my hands, and headed to the lounge to make myself a cup of coffee. I looked at the clock on the wall, and it read 8:30 PM.
"Damn it," I mumbled to no one in particular. I had a bad habit of losing all sense of time and space when I was in the zone on a monotonous, repetitive task, whether I liked it or not.
I walked down the empty hallways, looking around at just how liminal the entire place looked. The droning hum of the cheap lights filled my ears, accompanied only by the slow clacking of my black loafers against the tan linoleum floors.
It would appear I was the only man dumb enough to stay so late, as all night classes had long since concluded and my colleagues had all gone home. I think I remember my longtime co-worker Lydia, a professor of ethics, coming in to say goodbye, but I couldn’t really remember.

I walked into the lounge with a deep sigh, the motion-detecting lights clicking on as I did so. On the dark mahogany table sat an abandoned coffee mug, an open pink donut box with long stale donuts from this morning, and some poor sod's black lunchbox.

I went over to the shitty little Keurig, popped a pod in, and was about to put a mug underneath it when I heard a sound that made me yell out in fright, almost making me shatter my favorite mug on the ground.

A cough.

Not just a normal cough, but it was wet, guttural, and absolutely disgusting. Is that heartless to say? That I was more disgusted than worried?

It was nearby, but not close enough for me to discern exactly where it was coming from. However, that soon changed as it let out another violent, disgusting hack that was much louder.

Or, rather, closer.

I found myself begging mentally for them not to be headed this way, but of course, I wasn't that lucky.

The door of the lounge opened with no preamble, and what I saw there turned my disgusted annoyance into pure confusion, shock, and horror.

Liam was standing in front of me, wheezing breaths coming from his chapped, cracked lips. He wore a disheveled blue-collared shirt covered in black spots; his black pants were stained with dust and dirt; and his hair was in complete disarray, matted with leaves, sticks, and other debris.

His face was beet red, and there were these dark raised bumps covering him. It was like a million small blisters, but they leaked a green-and-purple mixture that looked like pus, and I don't even know what. There were also black specks that matched what was on his shirt, but coating his face like the darkest of freckles.

He walked forward, his steps sloppy and nearly causing him to fall as if he were heavily intoxicated or had just learned to walk a day ago.

I had seen Liam not even four hours ago, and he did not look even remotely sick. He had been perfectly healthy, spoke up in class, and even chatted with me about his summer plans.

I went through a whole variety of different emotions, but one dominated the rest: terror with a healthy mixture of worry.

"Liam..." I say, my voice so meek I barely recognized it. "What the hell happened?"

He did not reply, looking at me with those yellow eyes. By yellow, you probably assume glaucoma or liver failure, but no. What used to be a natural white was now almost gold, or at least trying to be.

Imagine a little kid mixing watercolors and trying to make gold. It won't be perfect, but you can tell what color it is trying to be. That's what it looked like: gold, but made with various other colors.

He lets out another wheezing breath, opens and closes his mouth a few times to(I assume) gather enough saliva to speak, and finally groans out: "Host." In a strained, struggling voice as if that one word was hard to get out.

It sniffed the air, stepping a bit closer, legs shakily moving it closer to me.

Sniff. Sniff sniff.

I backed into the counter, then started to walk out into the office, my steps quickening.

"Host," I heard it whisper, quieter this time as if contemplative.

Before I could say a word, I heard quickened footsteps come at me from the direction of the lounge. Before I could react, he, nay, it, burst out of the door, now on all fours and starting to gallop toward me like some sickly antelope, his previous walking difficulties seemingly forgotton.

I am not afraid to admit that I screamed in terror and took off down the hall, the sound of hands slapping off the tile close behind me as Liam gave chase. He let out a yell that sounded more like a war cry, the sound alien coming from such a timid student like Liam. This only steadied my decision to keep running, now knowing without a doubt that he had completely lost his damn mind.

I run, and I run, and I run as I slam into the back door, aiming to get to the other side of the university where the parking garage was; where my car was.

Loud and feverish panting got closer as it seemed to realize my plan to escape, now picking up speed to the point I could feel flecks of saliva and its hot breath against my leg. It tried to swipe at my legs, but by the grace of what I have to assume is divine intervention, it missed and lost its balance for a moment, allowing me to get ahead.

I could see the blue-and-white sign that read "parking garage" in the distance. 200 feet. 190 feet. 180 feet.

It was pissed now; I could hear its breathing quicken and get heavier as what I could only parse was rage at being tripped. I made the mistake of turning around and saw its golden eyes now glowed in the darkness with eldritch bioilluminescence.

I lose my footing for a moment and feel a sharp, burning pain in my calf as it bites into my flesh. I let out a loud, agonized scream, then a horrified one as I realized it wasn't letting go. The black specks on its face began to squirm and writh, thin black lines starting to come from them.

No. Not lines. Worms...

Wriggling, needle-thin worms started to emerge from its face and toward my leg. In pure adrenaline-filled horror, I ripped my leg from its mouth with a loud, wet tearing, shooting more torment through my body.

I thank whatever creator for adrenaline's numbing effects because I was able to take off running once again, warmth flooding my socks and shoes as blood escaped through the chunk missing in my leg.

I could see it now; the parking garage was so close, and thankfully, my car was as well. As I said, the school was empty, so my red sedan stuck out like a sore thumb.

From behind me, I heard only silence, but I did not break my stride, digging through my pockets for my keys.

With no hesitation, I sloppily yanked them out, pressed the unlock button, and kept on limp-running to my vehicle. I had reached it. Safety.

I threw my driver's-side door open, got inside, locked it, and started the car, the headlights illuminating the dark parking garage.

It also illuminated what used to be Liam.

He was still on all fours, squatted down in front of my car about 20 feet away. Its body heaved up and down as it panted, the wriggling worms in its face beginning to retract back into its cheeks. It said nothing, glowing eyes staring forward at me.

For what felt like an eternity, we continued that standoff, both of us panting from the effort of the chase, staring at one another. But as soon as it began, "Liam" finally turned away from my car and scuttled away into the night.

Hello.
I am Dr. Henry Hill, a professor of archaeobotany at the University of Sheffield. My area of study is how past human civilizations utilized plants, whether for medicine, decoration, or agriculture, so, needless to say, I stumble across some fascinating phenomena.
For example, did you know that the first civilization (Ancient Sumeria, or Mesopotamia) used Opium Poppies? Sumerians cultivated it to harvest its sap for use as an analgesic (painkiller) and sedative. My students always find that to be amusing, imagining these ancient civilizations getting high off their asses when in horrible pain. Morbidly, I can see the humor in it.
Growing up, I always knew something was different about me. At age five, I would be out in my mother's gardens, picking weeds and asking her a million different questions about them. I didn't really enjoy socializing, opting instead to stay out in the fields at recess and pick strange flowers I found, always choosing the most beautiful, pristine little field daisies to take home and stare at with a longing, analytical gaze.
Or as analytical as a little kid can get, anyway. Which pretty much led to forcing my mom to help me learn about them, what they were, and forcing her to research it for me.
At age 7, I gather she had had enough of my many, many, many questions and of being forced to be an amateur researcher for her tiny, annoying kid, because she got me a little field guide to local UK plants for my birthday so I could read it myself. And read it I did. I vividly remember going through that thing at least a thousand times, usually during class or when I was supposed to be doing something else. Looking back with a modern lens, I am about 80% sure I was on the spectrum or at least had ADHD, but that's neither here nor there.
But I am not here to recount my life in any more detail than what is necessary. I am here to share the knowledge of a discovery that left me stripped of all certifications and forced to live out of my car for the past few weeks.
This recounting begins about 5 months ago with one of my best students, Liam Wo, a very bright young man who majored in Forensic Archaeology and intended to move to the United States to join law enforcement. He is... or, well, was, a prodigy in his field, and has been by far my favorite student.
Liam was also diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and he had to be home at the very strict time of 4:32 PM down to the second, or he would fall into an intense panic attack, convinced he was going to be in serious trouble with someone named "Amelia" if he was even a microsecond late.
I never did figure out who that was or why he needed to please this mysterious figure named Amelia. Still, I'm a professor, not a clinical psychiatrist, so I never inquired. I just knew he would bolt out of class about ten minutes before its scheduled time like a bat out of hell and take off to get home.
I remember the day with such vividness that every subsequent night terror makes me feel as if it only just happened mere moments ago.
I was grading that year's final essays on "Uses of Micro-Organisms in Medicine" and was on about essay number ten about mold. Call me finicky, but I remember being annoyed, as I wanted more creativity than the well-known story of penicillin.
I had begun to feel sleepy, so I stood up, rubbing my drooping lids with my hands, and headed to the lounge to make myself a cup of coffee. I looked at the clock on the wall, and it read 8:30 PM.
"Damn it," I mumbled to no one in particular. I had a bad habit of losing all sense of time and space when I was in the zone on a monotonous, repetitive task, whether I liked it or not.
I walked down the empty hallways, looking around at just how liminal the entire place looked. The droning hum of the cheap lights filled my ears, accompanied only by the slow clacking of my black loafers against the tan linoleum floors.
It would appear I was the only man dumb enough to stay so late, as all night classes had long since concluded and my colleagues had all gone home. I think I remember my longtime co-worker Lydia, a professor of ethics, coming in to say goodbye, but I couldn’t really remember.

I walked into the lounge with a deep sigh, the motion-detecting lights clicking on as I did so. On the dark mahogany table sat an abandoned coffee mug, an open pink donut box with long stale donuts from this morning, and some poor sod's black lunchbox.

I went over to the shitty little Keurig, popped a pod in, and was about to put a mug underneath it when I heard a sound that made me yell out in fright, almost making me shatter my favorite mug on the ground.

A cough.

Not just a normal cough, but it was wet, guttural, and absolutely disgusting. Is that heartless to say? That I was more disgusted than worried?

It was nearby, but not close enough for me to discern exactly where it was coming from. However, that soon changed as it let out another violent, disgusting hack that was much louder.

Or, rather, closer.

I found myself begging mentally for them not to be headed this way, but of course, I wasn't that lucky.

The door of the lounge opened with no preamble, and what I saw there turned my disgusted annoyance into pure confusion, shock, and horror.

Liam was standing in front of me, wheezing breaths coming from his chapped, cracked lips. He wore a disheveled blue-collared shirt covered in black spots; his black pants were stained with dust and dirt; and his hair was in complete disarray, matted with leaves, sticks, and other debris.

His face was beet red, and there were these dark raised bumps covering him. It was like a million small blisters, but they leaked a green-and-purple mixture that looked like pus, and I don't even know what. There were also black specks that matched what was on his shirt, but coating his face like the darkest of freckles.

He walked forward, his steps sloppy and nearly causing him to fall as if he were heavily intoxicated or had just learned to walk a day ago.

I had seen Liam not even four hours ago, and he did not look even remotely sick. He had been perfectly healthy, spoke up in class, and even chatted with me about his summer plans.

I went through a whole variety of different emotions, but one dominated the rest: terror with a healthy mixture of worry.

"Liam..." I say, my voice so meek I barely recognized it. "What the hell happened?"

He did not reply, looking at me with those yellow eyes. By yellow, you probably assume glaucoma or liver failure, but no. What used to be a natural white was now almost gold, or at least trying to be.

Imagine a little kid mixing watercolors and trying to make gold. It won't be perfect, but you can tell what color it is trying to be. That's what it looked like: gold, but made with various other colors.

He lets out another wheezing breath, opens and closes his mouth a few times to(I assume) gather enough saliva to speak, and finally groans out: "Host." In a strained, struggling voice as if that one word was hard to get out.

It sniffed the air, stepping a bit closer, legs shakily moving it closer to me.

Sniff. Sniff sniff.

I backed into the counter, then started to walk out into the office, my steps quickening.

"Host," I heard it whisper, quieter this time as if contemplative.

Before I could say a word, I heard quickened footsteps come at me from the direction of the lounge. Before I could react, he, nay, it, burst out of the door, now on all fours and starting to gallop toward me like some sickly antelope, his previous walking difficulties seemingly forgotton.

I am not afraid to admit that I screamed in terror and took off down the hall, the sound of hands slapping off the tile close behind me as Liam gave chase. He let out a yell that sounded more like a war cry, the sound alien coming from such a timid student like Liam. This only steadied my decision to keep running, now knowing without a doubt that he had completely lost his damn mind.

I run, and I run, and I run as I slam into the back door, aiming to get to the other side of the university where the parking garage was; where my car was.

Loud and feverish panting got closer as it seemed to realize my plan to escape, now picking up speed to the point I could feel flecks of saliva and its hot breath against my leg. It tried to swipe at my legs, but by the grace of what I have to assume is divine intervention, it missed and lost its balance for a moment, allowing me to get ahead.

I could see the blue-and-white sign that read "parking garage" in the distance. 200 feet. 190 feet. 180 feet.

It was pissed now; I could hear its breathing quicken and get heavier as what I could only parse was rage at being tripped. I made the mistake of turning around and saw its golden eyes now glowed in the darkness with eldritch bioilluminescence.

I lose my footing for a moment and feel a sharp, burning pain in my calf as it bites into my flesh. I let out a loud, agonized scream, then a horrified one as I realized it wasn't letting go. The black specks on its face began to squirm and writh, thin black lines starting to come from them.

No. Not lines. Worms...

Wriggling, needle-thin worms started to emerge from its face and toward my leg. In pure adrenaline-filled horror, I ripped my leg from its mouth with a loud, wet tearing, shooting more torment through my body.

I thank whatever creator for adrenaline's numbing effects because I was able to take off running once again, warmth flooding my socks and shoes as blood escaped through the chunk missing in my leg.

I could see it now; the parking garage was so close, and thankfully, my car was as well. As I said, the school was empty, so my red sedan stuck out like a sore thumb.

From behind me, I heard only silence, but I did not break my stride, digging through my pockets for my keys.

With no hesitation, I sloppily yanked them out, pressed the unlock button, and kept on limp-running to my vehicle. I had reached it. Safety.

I threw my driver's-side door open, got inside, locked it, and started the car, the headlights illuminating the dark parking garage.

It also illuminated what used to be Liam.

He was still on all fours, squatted down in front of my car about 20 feet away. Its body heaved up and down as it panted, the wriggling worms in its face beginning to retract back into its cheeks. It said nothing, glowing eyes staring forward at me.

For what felt like an eternity, we continued that standoff, both of us panting from the effort of the chase, staring at one another. But as soon as it began, "Liam" finally turned away from my car and scuttled away into the night.