u/UnalloyedSaintTrina

As above.

Normally, I try to just let this shit go - price of doing business and all that - but there's something particularly heinous about their use of AI. Really grinds my fucking gears.

Not sure that there's much to do about it, but if anyone has ideas, would love to hear them.

I took one look at the nameless thing, lying statue-still in the bassinet with its pearly-white smile, and said: 

“That ain’t mine.” 

“Oh, just give it a second,” Darlene shouted from the other room, “I’m sure you’ll start to see the resemblance.” 

I leaned in. 

To her credit, the kid and I shared a subtle likeness, and the more I looked, the more similarities I seemed to appreciate. That didn’t prove anything. Both Darlene and I were born in this backwater town, each dredged up from the same Floridian genepool. Statistically speaking, any child of hers was bound to look a little like me, but I sure as shit didn't pop out of the womb bearing teeth.

The kid's jaw was nearly the size of her cranium.

Her head had the proportions of a barbell - thin in the middle, rounded and heavy at the ends. 

Her lips wouldn’t stay closed. She could force them over her front teeth, yes, but it was a strain. Looked painful, though she didn’t seem to mind. She just stared up at me, quiet as a church mouse, eyes wide, mouth overflowing. 

“What’d the docs have to say about her teeth?” I asked, entering the kitchen. 

Darlene was by the stovetop, tending to a skillet sizzling with fresh peppers. Steam caressed her slender frame. Long chestnut curls bounced against the back of her tank top.

She looked… great.

Better than great, actually. For someone who’d recently been pregnant, she looked stunning. I hadn’t seen Darlene in about a year, and though I welcomed the break from our decades-long, on-and-off fling, romantic distance was against her nature. 

“Uhh…congenital something-or-other. She’ll need a dentist, but otherwise, nothing to do about it.”

Darlene flipped her head around and shot me a look. 

That look. 

“Breast-feedin’ is probably off the menu, though,” she remarked, chuckling. 

I felt heat.

This is how it always starts - I reminded myself.

She ropes you in with the promise of a few sleepless nights, and before you know it, you’re back in her bed, under her goddamned thumb…

“I’m headin’ out, Darlene,” I said, pacing through the mobile home with a peculiar sort of urgency. She shouted something about making me dinner. I pretended not to hear her.

“If you really deadset on thinkin’ that kid’s mine,” I called out, “I’ll have my blood tested or - “ 

Before my hand reached the knob, the front door swung open. 

I found myself face-to-face with a wiry old man. Despite the darkness, I could tell that he appeared catastrophically unwell. 

His cheeks were sunken so deep that it made his skull look deflated. 

His eyes were bone-dry and as yellow as bile. 

If he’d been any other stranger, I would’ve thrown a punch - Darlene’s nearest neighbor lives on the complete opposite side of the marsh - but his deathly appearance left me dazed. 

Darlene’s squeaky voice yipped over my shoulder:

“There you are, Daddy! This is Jacob. The Jacob.” 

The man gradually lifted his arm and placed an open palm in front of me, propositioning a handshake. Thick tendons visibly struggled to keep the trembling limb upright. Weathered tattoos ran the length of each finger, spirals and crescents and teardrops. A mummified rabbit's paw hung loosely from a bit of frayed twine wrapped around his wrist. 

“Jeez, I don't think I ever told you: Daddy’s been livin’ here ever since he learned how bad I wanted to make a kid. It was good timing, what with his church needin’ to relocate after…well, you know, whatever happened to ‘freedom of religion’, that’s all I’ll say… ” 

Darlene’s soft hand drifted onto my shoulder. 

“Jacob’s gonna join the baby and us for dinner.” 

I rolled my shoulder, bucking her touch. 

“No, I ain’t.”

I stomped out of the mobile home, sliding past Darlene’s father. The walking corpse was still offering me his wizened palm. I mumbled “Nice to meet you, sir,” and kept moving. The land squished under my boot heel, switchgrass licking at my ankles. I hopped into my car and turned it on. Headlights washed over the property. They were both still in the open doorway, watching me. I shook off the discomfort and lay on the accelerator, kicking up mud as I jerked onto the nearby dirt road. 

“Last fuckin' time I answer one of Darlene’s texts,” I whispered. 

My eyes flickered to something aside the road. A structure I didn’t recognize, nestled between a few evergreens. 

It was small, couldn’t have been much bigger than a college dorm room, but the shape was peculiar: boxy with a pyramid-shaped roof that gradually narrowed as it projected into the canopy. The bottom of a tool shed spliced with the top of a chapel. It blinked by, and I gave it no more thought. 

That was my first mistake. 

As I coasted off to sleep that night, whiskey kindling a campfire in my stomach, I prayed to the powers that be. Asked the Almighty if He could kindly point Darlene in a different direction. An impossible request, even for God. When she wants something, she never backs down, and she wanted a kid. Specifically, my kid. Back in 2024, I caught her covertly poking a sewing needle through my condoms. A few weeks later, I underwent a clandestine vasectomy. I know what you’re thinking: wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just…not have sex with her? Of course. But I know myself, and I know Darlene. She always finds a way to suck me back into her orbit. So, the only safe choice was to remove the option entirely. A little preemptive scrotal de-fanging…

A feverish buzzing ripped me from sleep. 

Vision swimming, groggy as all hell, I reached under a nearby pillow, pulled out my phone, and flicked the screen on.

Nine missed calls and thirty-two unread texts glared back at me. 

Darlene <3 XOXO (11:09 PM): “I promise, she’s yours. A mother knows. If you spend more time with her, you’ll see that.”

Darlene <3 XOXO (1:01 AM): “Come back. She’s crying for you."

Darlene <3 XOXO (3:46 AM): “I miss you. If you’re here within the hour, I’ll [ insert the lewdest series of words you can imagine ] “ 

I groaned and put the phone down. 

I was going to need that paternity test.

Lurching upright, my bleary eyes fixed on an old rucksack in the corner of my bedroom. I gave the tattered thing a weak grin. Hadn’t thought about it in a long while. 

I lumbered over and inspected the contents. Boots. Flannels. An old hunting rifle and a dirty wad of cash. Everything I’d need to just up and leave.

Well, almost everything.

The only thing missing was a bit of willpower.

I told myself: one day, it’ll be there, a spark in your chest, a determination to escape, and when that day comes, the most dangerous thing you can do is slow down. When it's time, you won't hesitate. You’ll pick up the bag, jump in your car, and you’ll drive.

That was fifteen years ago. 

I held the rucksack’s drawstring in the palm of my hand. Took a nice, deep breath. 

And felt nothing. 

I pulled it shut, stood, and kicked the bag back into the corner. 

Maybe after another fifteen years, I’ll finally be ready - I thought. 

Until then, there are bills to be paid. 

The pub was unusually quiet that afternoon. Empty. Not a soul to be seen. Elbows planted on the sticky bartop, I pulled up Google and started to research. Nearest commercial paternity testing center was near Tampa. The out-of-pocket cost wasn’t pretty. Even worse, I’d need to procure a DNA sample from the kid. I plodded over to the tap and poured myself a lager. Chugged half immediately. 

Will I even be able to fit the cheek swab into her mouth with those godforsaken chompers?

I chuckled.

Nearby, my phone screen lit up.

My chuckle morphed into a scowl.

It’d been hours since I last received something unhinged from Darlene. In a sense, I was overdue. I cracked my neck, threw back another swig, and grabbed the phone. 

EMERGENCY ALERT: Flash flood warning for this area until 12:30 AM EST. Please exercise extreme caution and avoid driving unless absolutely necessary…

“Huh,” I muttered. Didn’t know a storm was coming. 

My ears perked. 

A faint sound was floating through the pub. 

A clicking. Mechanical, maybe. 

I set my phone on the bartop and bent over, but no, wasn’t the cooling unit or the ice maker. I stilled for a moment, head under the bar, focused on recognizing the sound. I couldn’t place it, but I was beginning to hear it more clearly. It was a thin, quivering tap, like a centipede skittering across marble, legs striking the polished stone. 

I stood. 

A violent heartbeat shuddered through my body. 

The bar door was cracked, just slightly, and multiple eyes were peeking through the slit. 

I couldn’t tell how many, but I could tell they were staring at me, and I could tell that’s where the noise was coming from. 

The door slammed shut.

“Hey! The hell you doin’?” I screamed, launching myself over the bartop. I ran across the pub and threw my weight against the door, heaving it open. A sharp wind battered my face. I practically fell onto the curb. 

Breathing heavy, I looked left. 

I looked right. 

No sign of whoever had been peeking through the door.

No sign of anyone, actually.

Main Street was vacant, though that wasn’t completely out of the norm; destitution had stripped the once thriving marketplace of life. Potholes of varying depths littered the asphalt. Monsterous weeds sprang through the fractured sidewalk. Most of the storefronts were derelict, boarded up and hollowed out, the graffiti-stained carcasses of long-dead ambitions. The only businesses left standing were the pub and the dollar store, and judging by their darkened windows, they’d closed early for the day. 

The clicking noise curled into my ear. It was closer. 

Right behind me. 

I flipped around. 

Shadow-cast figures were disappearing into the alleyway. 

They rounded a corner, and then they were gone. 

I couldn’t move. 

I stood frozen, staring down the narrow, trash-laden alleyway, listening to the wind rush and whisper, until a boom of thunder broke my stupor. 

I closed the pub without calling my boss and bolted to my car. 

Rain pelted the windshield in furious sheets. I careened down the highway, my mind that panicked kind of empty, my foot a lead brick against the accelerator. As the minutes ticked by, however, my fear began to wane, and a numbing rationality crept in. 

What was I so afraid of? - I asked myself. 

Strung-out teenagers making strange noises through the pub door? A baby with a terrible deformity? Darlene, a flawed but beautiful woman - another casualty of this dead end place?

I calmed.

My foot eased off the pedal.

I breathed, deep as I could manage, and I pulled off the highway, arriving home a few minutes later. By then, I'd settled. As my headlights clicked off and my dilapidated, single-story home became lost in the darkness, I did not feel better, but I felt steady, even-keeled.

My phone vibrated against my thigh. 

A single unread text message illuminated the interior of my sedan. 

Darlene <3 XOXO (11:05 PM): Last chance, Jacob. Come over. Now.

Heat swelled behind my eyes. 

I began ferociously typing back. 

Me (11:06 PM): This is insane. U need to get a fucking grip

I felt something. Unfamiliar, but pleasurable. A spark fluttering inside my chest. 

I grinned. 

Me (11:08 PM): listen up Darlene. Im getting a paternity test. I’ll be over tmrw to swab that kids cheek. Ill mail you the results whenever i get them. After that im done

Me (11:14 PM): for real this time

I sat in my car a while, watching the screen, skin tingling with nervous electricity, but five minutes passed, then ten, then twenty, and still, no response. 

That was unlike Darlene. 

I scoffed and rolled my eyes, portraying false bravado - a show for no one but myself - and stepped out onto the driveway. I paced through the downpour. Shut the front door and deadbolted it behind me. I peered through the door’s frosted glass window and thought I saw something. Shapes navigating the blackness, darting through the evergreens that encircled my home. 

That was my last chance, I think. 

I needed to run. 

I did not.

Instead, I scolded myself. 

Convinced myself I was imagining things. 

I splashed some liquor into an unwashed mug, drank it all in a single gulp, and collapsed onto my bed. 

Sleep came quickly. It was thick and dreamless.

I awoke in a panic, bounding upright, gasping for air. 

My eyes scanned the darkness.

I searched for the danger, for whatever had set my nerves on fire. The storm had slowed to drizzle, gently pitter-pattering against the shingles. The bedroom was still. The night outside my window was murky and impenetrable, and I reminded myself that was normal; no neighbors meant no ambient light. Everything was fine.

And yet, my heart continued to pound. 

There was this sensation I couldn’t shake. A pressure. A feeling of being watched. 

My eyes drifted back to the rain-streaked window. 

I squinted. 

There was something odd at its center. 

A small puff of condensation, fading, then expanding, fading, then expanding. 

I slipped out from the covers and planted my feet on the floor, phone in hand. 

It was probably nothing. No, it had to be nothing. But I needed to be sure. 

I approached. 

Inches from the glass, I still couldn’t see anything, but I struggled to shine my phone at window, dread surging up my spine.

Lightning split the sky.

A brilliant flash illuminated the figures looming outside.

Darlene’s baby, face pressed to the window, eyes bloodshot and trained on me. Hot breath spilled through the slits in their perfect teeth, fogging the glass. Someone was behind the child, holding them by the armpits with gloved hands and extended arms. They wore a mask made of rough burlap, loosely fitted over their head and neck, with no slits for their eyes or mouth. 

No one moved. 

The flash quickly dissipated. 

A quiet darkness descended around me. 

For a moment, I felt detached, outside myself, a passive observer to the obscene circumstances, and that’s when it hit me: the baby...it had changed, grown, tripled in size, don’t think I would’ve recognized it if it weren’t for the teeth, and it didn’t look like a girl. 

It looked like a boy. 

There was a noise: the moan of a floorboard. 

I began to turn. 

Something firm collided with my jaw. My mandible veered to one side, shooting violently out of line with my hard palette, shredding muscle and ligament. I thrashed, stumbled, screamed. One hand flailed in the darkness, the other gripped my cheek. Another blow landed on the small of my back. A repulsive crunch filled my ears. I buckled. The taste of blood flickered across my tongue as I fell to my knees. My attacker stomped on my calves, pinning me down. They laced something underneath my nostrils and yanked it taut around my scalp. Felt like a ribbon thin enough for air to move through. I took a sharp, ragged inhale. A pungent aroma glided into my skull, intensely floral and sickly sweet. 

An unnatural calm began to infiltrate my body. 

My muscles relaxed. 

My vision narrowed, growing dimmer, and dimmer, and dimmer. 

I wasn’t asleep, nor was I unconscious. 

It was like my mind departed from its usual spot behind my eyes, went somewhere out of my reach, and it only returned when I was given instruction, which it obliged without question. 

“Stand.” - a hoarse voice commanded me. 

I stood. 

I faded away. 

“Get in the trunk.” 

I entered the cramped compartment. The lid slammed shut.

I faded away. 

“Divest two fingers.” 

I was sitting in Darlene’s kitchen. The lights were off. Candles shimmered around me. Someone slid a butcher’s knife across the table. I picked it up. I did not send it crashing down. I carefully rested the rust-speckled edge atop my ring and pinky finger. Then, without hesitation or fanfare, I gripped the handle and began to push. 

I faded away. 

“Open your mouth. No matter what, keep it open.”

I did. 

When I came to, when the aromatic intoxicant had finally left my system, I was kneeling alone in an absolute dark. The air was suffocatingly damp. Pain was everywhere: my jaw, my back, my calves, even my gumline seemed to throb with hurt. I scrambled to get upright, but the wet metal around my wrists and ankles held me back. I was chained to the wall. I sensed a dull ache across the knuckles of my left hand, and I wiggled my fingers: five on the right, three on the left. 

I screamed.

Time passed. 

At some point, a glimmer of light appeared in front of me, a few feet ahead. 

I steadied myself. 

Fought through the pain and the horror and peered up. 

The light was coming from a hole in the roof, and the moon was directly overhead, granting meager visibility. I examined what I could. The roof was wooden. Curved. It spiraled high into the atmosphere. Dozens of pearly eggs adorned the inside of that spiral, each hanging from what looked like twine. 

In a moment of terrible realization, I understood where I was. 

I was trapped in the structure I passed leaving Darlene’s the night before: the shed-like chapel. 

I flirted with hope.

I was near a road. 

“HELP! PLEASE, SOMEONE, HELP ME!” 

My futile pleas would’ve continued for God knows how long, had I not heard something. A croaking noise, sapped of warmth, drained of meaning. A quiet, ghastly echo.

“Heh-lep. Plee-se, som-on, heh-lep me”

I wasn’t alone in there.

I shut my eyes.

Told myself this wasn’t happening. 

There was silence, then a familiar sound emanated from the blackness. 

Clicking. 

I listened, petrified. 

It was clearer than before, and it wasn’t really clicking. 

It was chattering. 

Like teeth. 

Tiny footfalls thumped against the grass. 

Then, in the central moonlight, a face appeared. 

A school-aged boy. 

His pale lips rose like broken window blinds, warbling and disjointed, unveiling a perfect set of jittering, pearly-white teeth. 

He stared at me, unblinking. 

Then, he brought his thumb to his cheek, 

and he began pushing. 

The flesh molded like Play-Doh to his touch, audibly squelching as it shifted. The bones snapped with seemingly little pressure, contorting with nauseating ease. 

When he was done, satisfied with the alterations, he put his thumb down, 

and he looked just a little bit more like me. 

The boy scuttled away. 

I lost him in the darkness. 

What followed was nothing short of hell. 

The boy would go silent for what felt like hours. Then, there’d be a sound. A distant chatter. A nearby squelch. A slow exhale right next to my ear. I was never sure if it was him or my imagination. Sometimes I’d become so terrified that I couldn’t help but emit a muffled shriek. Inevitably, that shriek would be reflected back at me from somewhere in the chamber. I waited for the pounce. I imagined the ungodly child biting into my neck, ripping meat from bone with its flawless teeth. The anticipation was torture; it broke me, killed my spirit, stripped everything from me until I was just an animal, shivering, out of my mind, helpless. 

But the bite never came. 

Sunlight started dripping in through the hole in the roof. 

And, eventually, a door swung open. 

I cowered, shielding my eyes from the light. 

When I could finally look, I saw a figure wearing the burlap mask. They were standing in front of the boy, slowly dragging their thumb across his scalp, over and over. After a few minutes, the figure pulled off their mask. Darlene’s father stared vacantly at me. Then, he turned toward the exit and nodded.

“Apologies about all the commotion, sweetheart.” 

Darlene walked through the door. 

“Time was of the essence, you know? Things had to happen, and you weren’t cooperating with the timeline, but hey, no sweat - Junior’s all good. Fully, fully imprinted. The spitting image of his old man.” 

She sauntered forward. 

I compressed myself into a ball, as tight as my shackles would allow. 

Darlene knelt down, procured something from her pocket, and held it up in front of me. 

A key. 

“Now, Jacob, I know you got that procedure. The vasectomy. Horrible, just horrible. Rendered yourself impotent behind my back and thought I wouldn’t find out. Broke my heart, ripped it right in two.” 

She lowered her voice to a whisper. 

“But you ain’t gonna disrespect me again. You’re gonna listen. You’re gonna be around if I need you, and, hell, I might need you - I haven’t decided whether I want another, a sibling for our boy.” She gestured towards the pearly eggs hanging from the spiral. 

“So, Daddy made me this: a leash. A tool to keep you reigned in.” 

She pulled something out from under her shirt; a profane talisman dangling from a new necklace. 

My excised fingers.

They were grayish blue and laminated with some sort of jellied varnish.

She pulled them up to her mouth. They’d been hollowed out; I could see her pink lips through the circular holes. 

Then, she blew through them. 

My teeth erupted with pain. 

Blinding, impossible suffering. 

A searing, twisting, ripping sort of agony, burrowing into my gums, into my skull, into my brain. 

Darlene lowered my hollowed fingers. 

The pain ceased. 

She smiled, stood, and then lobbed the key at me. It hit my face before falling to the dirt. 

“Listen up: no matter where you run, no matter how far you go, this leash will hurt you. Tonight, I’m gonna make that crystal clear. I'll be miles and miles away, and when I use it, you’ll still feel it. So go home. Go home, sit quietly, and wait.”

Darlene clasped her child’s hand. 

“Let’s go, Junior.” 

The boy waved at me. A jerking, uneasy movement. He turned, and the three of them walked out the door, leaving me finally, mercifully alone. 

I unshackled myself. 

Took me two hours to walk to the highway. Hitchhiked the rest of the way.

Once I was home, I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, and I forced a smile.

My previously cigarette-stained teeth were a perfect, pearly white, and they looked slightly bigger. They’d been replaced. Or some sort of liquid veneer had been applied over my old set. I’m still not sure, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter: it won’t come off, no matter how sharp the knife is, no matter how hard I scrape.

Thankfully, I knew what had to happen next.

I paced into my bedroom.

I grabbed my rucksack, walked to the garage, and threw it into my garbage can. 

From there, I returned inside.

Poured myself a stiff drink and typed all this up. 

Now, I’m sitting quietly in my recliner. 

In a moment, I’ll close my eyes.

The pain is coming, and Darlene told me to wait. 

So, 

I’ll wait. 

Simon got the call around midnight. I rolled closer to him, draped my arm across his chest, and listened by the receiver. It was the penitentiary. A guard had discovered Celeste sprawled out on the floor of her cell, cold, pulseless. His mother was dead.

I smiled.

She finally got what she deserved.

When Simon was young, Celeste trapped him in the cellar of his childhood home. 

Confined him to a windowless room with only a mattress, a bucket, and a record player, and every day was identical: listening to the same record on an endless loop, dawn till dusk, from the moment he woke up to the moment he fell asleep. Celeste melted the vinyl before the police could get their hands on it, so only Simon knows what it sounded like. He doesn’t like to talk about it, though, and I love him to death, so I don’t pry.

When the call was over, he threw his feet over the edge of our bed and put his head in his hands. Honestly, I expected indifference. Or joy. Something vaguely positive.

Simon, though…he wept.

Fat tears and convulsive sobs, well into the early morning. I held onto him, silent and warm. Didn’t ask questions. There’d be time for questions later.

Then, the package arrived.

I found it lying on our front stoop. The return address was Simon’s childhood home. Holding the small brown envelope felt like molding a snowball without gloves: a burning cold, phantom needles digging into my palm. I tore it open and pulled out its contents. There was no letter; just an antique cassette player, shaped like a shoebox with sleek gray plastic and a little handlebar below the buttons. I popped the cassette compartment.

Empty.

I slid the player under my armpit and marched over to the garbage can. Simon had endured enough. This thing, whatever it represented, would surely reopen old wounds. I lifted the lid and held the player over the hole, but my fingers refused to let go.

Was this right?

Could I really make this decision for him?

The woman never hurt Simon. Not physically, at least. When the police rescued him, he was healthy. Scared and vitamin D deficient, yes, but well-nourished, hydrated, and intact. Celeste’s public defender argued that Simon could have escaped any time because she kept the door unlocked. Maybe she had been a loving mother, despite her delusions; I had no idea, and I suppose that’s the point. Only Simon and Celeste knew what transpired in that windowless room, but apparently, there’d been enough love to shed tears over.

I sighed, slid the player back under my armpit, and brought the hellish totem into our home.

“So, what is it? I mean, I know what it is, but why do you think she had it sent…” Simon asked, carefully setting it onto his desk.

“Couldn’t tell you. Whoever’s managing her affairs didn’t send an explanation, or maybe it’s just coming separately - “

He pressed play.

A snap echoed through the room, followed by the mechanical whirring of the flywheels spinning without a tape.

Simon’s demeanor shifted.

He shot upright, rigid, flushed. His expression was a disturbing mixture of elation and terror, a sharp grin with bulging eyes.

“What’s that?” he shouted.

I jumped in place, heart spasming.

“I…I didn’t say anything.”

His gaze darted between the cassette player and me, pupils dilated, spreading over the whites of his eyes like an oil spill.

“I’ll just…” I started, reaching out, “…store this in the attic for now…”

“No!” he screamed, snatching the machine and clutching it against his breastbone, nostrils flaring. The whirring meshed seamlessly with his labored breathing; I couldn’t distinguish the two.

Confusion suddenly clouded his features.

“Sorry, Kat. I’m feeling a bit off.”

He loosened his grip on the machine, but only slightly.

“But…uh…I’ll hold on to this. For now.”

I nodded.

Forced what I can only imagine was the world’s flimsiest smile.

“Yeah, okay. Just…just let me know what you need.” I said, stepping out of his office.

There was a pause, and then he said:

“Right, right. That makes sense.”

He was staring at the cassette player, cradling it in his arms like a newborn.

The next few days, I was nervous. Constantly, incessantly nervous. Simon works from home doing graphic design, but I work nine-to-five at an accounting firm, so every evening I’d be a wreck driving home, terrified about what could be waiting beyond our front door.

But every night, he was normal.

Cooking. Cleaning. Laughing.

Acting like his usual self.

Slowly, with caution, I began to unwind.

Felt like I had my best friend back.

It was nice.

But it was fake.

And with each passing moment, the truth became harder and harder to deny.

Something was wrong.

The changes were small at first, small enough that my conscious mind couldn’t grasp them, but the oldest bits of my nervous system, the prehistoric holdovers, they could sense the danger swelling around me, even if they couldn’t give the danger a name. It wasn’t just Simon, either; the entire house was different. Polluted. Mutating.

Then, one night, I was lying in bed, eyes fluttering, thoughts loose, and a question popped into my brain.

Where the hell was the cassette player?

My eyes burst open.

I looked over. Simon was turned away, motionless.

“It’s around,” he groaned.

“…what?”

“The cassette player - it’s around.”

I struggled to breathe. Dread dripped through my lungs like hot tar.

I hadn’t said a damn thing.

“You know, just…don’t worry about it.”

He yawned, shifted, and stilled. I stared at his back, at Simon, this dark statue resting in the blackness, and I wondered:

was he actually sleeping, or was he just pretending?

Were his eyes wide open?

I didn’t check. I couldn’t. I lay awake and listened to him breathe, convincing myself that everything was fine.

Simon wasn’t changing; he was grieving.

I must have asked where the cassette player was out loud.

There wasn’t a soft whirring in the walls. It wasn’t beneath the floorboards, or coming from inside our closet, or radiating from my husband’s skin.

I was just hearing things.

The following morning, I was a mess. I couldn’t think straight. My movements were bipolar: restless and twitchy when the anxiety flared, deadened and lurching when the sleep deprivation took hold. I stumbled through my routine. I reached toward my wardrobe but missed the handle. I nearly killed myself on my way to breakfast, lost in a haze while stepping a little too far forward, the ball of my foot just catching the stair’s edge.

But the strangest part?

The trip from our bedroom to the kitchen felt longer.

I’ve lived in this house since I was a kid, inherited it from my parents when they passed. I know the layout. My body has internalized every inch of that place, and I’m telling you, it was longer.

When I got downstairs, he was at the table, stirring a cup of coffee, staring out into space.

“Where is it, Simon?” 

He turned his head and smiled. Revulsion dug its fingers into my heart.

My husband was…different.

His lips were too thin. His usually hooked nose was slightly blunted. His green eyes were unnaturally bright, a synthetic hue, neon and piercing.

“Where’s what? Are you alright, Kat? You don’t look - “

“Cut the shit.”

His smile ballooned.

“It’s right there.”

I scoffed, preparing to really lay into him, but then he gestured toward the center of the table, and dear Christ, there it was, whirring, spinning, and empty.

It hadn’t been there a second ago, right?

“You…we need to get rid of that thing, Simon.”

I walked across the kitchen, knelt beside my husband, and placed a delicate hand on his shoulder. Immediately, his demeanor shifted. Arrogant and malicious to scared and harmless in the blink of an eye. Even his facial features reverted to something akin to normal. His body was trembling. I slipped my hand up his neck and pivoted his chin, pulling him toward me. I talked slowly.

“I’m going to take this…thing…away from us.”

He shook his head. His voice was shivering like a lapdog in the snow.

“No, no, no, you can’t do that, I have to listen so we stay together, you can’t throw it away…”

I felt my composure slipping, but I focused. 

“Okay…well…I’ll hide it.” I said, stroking his cheek. 

“Hide it?”

“Yes. I won’t throw it away. I’ll just…put it somewhere safe.”

My hand crept towards the cassette player. He tracked the movement, but I pressed my hand into his jaw, guiding his attention back to me.

“I’ve always wanted what’s best for you, right?”

As soon as I touched the machine, a jolt of static flooded through my arm, crawling along my bones. 

I did not let go.

“Trust me, love.”

His trembling slowed.

“I won’t throw it away. I promise.”

A lie, but a necessary one.

Gradually, he nodded.

“Yeah…yeah, okay.”

I took a deep breath. 

It was now or never. 

I grabbed the cassette player and headed for the front door, determined to get the machine away from our home.

The thump of Simon shooting upright caused my spine to twist. 

Before I could speed up, he brushed past me and stood at the door, positioning his body between me and the exit. 

I recalibrated. 

Took a sharp right turn and began climbing the stairs, gesturing for him to stay put. Thankfully, he obliged. I ascended quickly; the terror was slipping through. By the time I reached our bedroom, I was hyperventilating. 

Where could I hide it? 

I bolted across the room, dropped to my knees, and ripped a small lockbox out from beneath our bed. The player just barely fit inside. I secured the lock and shoved the box back under. A burst of dizziness hit me like a tidal wave. I rested my head on the comforter, letting the sensation run its course.

The lockbox was only a temporary solution, if it could even be considered a solution at all. 

A permanent fix would require incapacitating Simon.

I scrambled to my feet, the fragments of an idea crystallizing in my mind. I pulled my nightstand drawer open and dug through the clutter until I found a bottle of prescription-grade sleeping pills. The label was worn, eroded to the point where I couldn’t read the name of the drug, but I gave it a quick shake and the contents rattled. Plenty left. I unscrewed the cap and dropped the key to the lockbox inside the bottle. 

When I returned downstairs, Simon was still standing at the door. I attempted to focus on the task at hand; he’d only lower his guard if I acted normal. 

Still, I felt my thoughts drifting. I couldn’t help it. 

My mind kept replaying the two trips: from the foyer to the bedroom, and from the bedroom back down to the foyer.

They were different.

The second trip was much, much longer. 

The upstairs hallway seemed to expand along with my movements, unfurling before my eyes, silently adding more doors and floorboards with each step, as if the invading presence had become tired of hiding or no longer felt it necessary. I’ve never experienced fear like that before. It was primal. All-consuming. But when I finally made it back to the foyer, I saw Simon, and I swallowed the fear.

I would not let it take him.

So, I forced a smile, declared I’d be calling out sick from work, took his hand, and pulled him into the living room. 

We spent the day watching old spy thrillers on the couch. During that time, I noticed that contact had a sort of grounding effect on Simon. As long as I was touching him, he seemed to remain normal, his eyes their regular greenish hue. I was his anchor. 

But the measure was just a stopgap. 

As soon as I let go, his body would begin to distort, and the breathless whirring of the cassette player would resume, swirling around us like invisible smoke.

Dusk came faster than I expected. 

The pills were burning a hole in my pocket. 

I needed to act before it was too late.

I excused myself and began walking toward the kitchen, fast but not hurried, carefully maintaining the veneer of normality. I peeked over my shoulder. He was already changing. His lips were visibly thinning. Deep wrinkles accumulated across his face, clawing through his skin. He didn’t move from the couch, but he kept his bright eyes glued to me. Once out of sight, my pace turned frantic. I rushed over to our liquor cabinet and threw it open.

I staggered back, gripping my chest, disbelief surging through my veins.

The cabinet was empty, and it was dark.

The inside seemed to go on for miles.

A musty stench slinked from the crevice, and if I squinted, if I really concentrated, I could appreciate something distant in the darkness, dragging itself closer -

I slammed it shut.

“You alright in there?” he called out.

“Y-yes!” I shouted, beating back the nausea.

I stood before a massive wall of small doors that shouldn’t have been able to fit in my kitchen. The cabinets were multiplying. The house was changing. I looked up. The ceiling hadn’t grown to accommodate the changes, but when I looked back at the wall, it somehow appeared even larger than before. I couldn’t understand. I keeled over, clutching my temple. My brain was boiling. I fought the urge to tear at my skin. 

Footsteps began emanating from the living room, thunderous but languid. The overhead lights flickered. Bulbs sizzled and popped, but they did not dim; their exposed nerves kept firing, battering me with harsh phosphorescence.

“You alright in there, Kat?” His voice was twenty octaves too low.

I grunted, steeling myself, ripping open cabinet after cabinet, discovering only darkness, hole after hole, a bevy of black pores defiling my childhood home.

Simon was closing in. 

His footsteps had become deafening. 

I opened what felt like the hundredth door.

And I lucked out.

I grabbed a half-filled whiskey bottle by its neck.

“Are you suuuuure you’re alright in there, Kat?”

Simon began to round the corner.

I didn’t look.

I didn’t hesitate.

I aimed the bottle where I imagined his head was about to be, and I swung.

A sickening crash echoed through the air,

and everything stopped.

Simon collapsed.

The kitchen was plunged into darkness.

Lines of sticky warmth drizzled across my wrist.

I let go. The shattered bottle clattered against the tiled floor. 

I looked around. The cabinets were normal. The lights had quieted. And my husband lay in front of me, motionless, his hair slick, glistening with blood and booze.

Muted sobs bubbled up my throat. I knelt down. His breathing was shallow, but it was there.

Stepping over him was agonizing.

I couldn’t stop, though.

This was my chance.

I bolted through the foyer and up the stairs, dialing 911 on my cell as I ran. The dispatcher’s voice crackled through the receiver. I screamed that my husband needed an ambulance as I barreled down the second-floor hallway.

What was I going to do with the accursed thing?

I tore the lockbox from its hiding place and threw it onto the bed.

Bury it?

Burn it?

Hand it to a priest?

I ripped the pill bottle from my pocket and unscrewed the cap, dumping its contents into my shaking hands. Tablets ricocheted off my damp palm, then the key. I jammed it into the lockbox.

Right now, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need a plan. I’ll figure it out once I’ve gotten the machine away from Simon.

The lid creaked open.

There was nothing inside. 

“Mom said you’d try to do that.”

Simon loomed in the doorway, naked as the day he was born, dried blood staining his cheeks. The cassette player was resting against his sternum. He had his arms wrapped tightly around the machine, which was still empty, playing nothing, whirring ceaselessly, whispering terrible things I couldn’t hear.  

“I didn’t want to believe her.” He sniffled. His eyes were glassy and burning bright green.

“I said: 'YOU don’t know Kat. She wouldn’t lie to me.'” 

He uncrossed his arms. The machine did not fall. It did not move an inch. Moonlight streamed from a nearby window, illuminating him. 

The cassette player was fused to his chest. 

Thin red vessels swam through mounds of cauterized skin, adjoining flesh and plastic, stitching it all together.

“But here you are, dead set on throwing her away, when you promised me you wouldn’t.”

“Simon…I…”

“Don’t even say it!” he screamed.

I crept forward, reaching out. Contact had brought him back before.

“I can still fix this…” I whimpered.

He retreated through the doorway, backpedaling with small, scurrying movements, never breaking eye contact, never blinking.

I followed, gaining speed.

“Simon! Please, God, wait!”

Halfway down the hall, he twisted his arm behind his back and clasped the handle of a tiny linen closet. My legs pumped wildly. My heart struck a desperate message against my rib cage. 

I was his anchor. 

I could bring him back.

I just needed to get to him. 

The door creaked open. He squeezed inside.

I angled my outstretched hand, grasping for Simon.

My fingers grazed the handle’s cold metal. 

The door shut.

I threw it back open.

I should’ve seen my husband, contorted into a space no larger than a high school locker.

Instead, I saw stairs. 

They were faintly visible in the hallway’s moonlight. The silver outlines of wooden planks descending into darkness, accompanied by a splinter-infested handrail. A cool draft seeped from the opening. The air smelled of mud and rot. I knew what I was looking at. Implicitly, I understood what was beyond the door.

A cellar.

If I entered the darkness, if I worked my way down these stairs, I’d surely find a windowless room at the bottom.

A honey-sweet noise emanated from deep within, so quiet that it was nearly imperceptible. It coaxed me over the partition. My head couldn’t have been more than a few centimeters over the edge, but that was enough, I heard the music so clearly, and I saw her, a wide-eyed face etched into the blackness, brimming with a gentleness that could easily be confused for cruelty. 

Celeste began to race up the stairs. 

I reflexively jerked back and slammed the door shut.

I stood there for a moment, frozen, entangled in a perfect silence. 

Slowly, I opened the door.

All I saw were a few stacks of neatly folded pillowcases.

The whirring was gone.

Simon was gone.

Some time later, sirens blared in the distance. 

The ambulance had finally arrived.

- - - - -

When the medics asked where my husband was, I didn’t have the willpower to lie. I just pointed to the front door and then sat back down on the curb. 

So, they searched the house. 

Didn’t find anyone, of course. 

Simon’s blood was still in the kitchen, but it wasn’t fresh; it looked like an old stain, something that’d occurred months or even years before that night. I assumed that stain would get me arrested for Simon’s murder. It was still his blood, after all.

But then they asked me one simple question:

“What’d you say your husband’s name was, ma’am?”

“It’s - “

I paused.

I tried again. 

“His name is - “

Nothing.

I racked my brain. Scoured my memories.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t come up with his name. 

I can see his face, clear as day, but his name? 

It’s gone. 

Vanished along with him, his mother, and any proof he ever existed to begin with. I have no photographs of him. His side of the closet is empty. “Simon” is just a placeholder; the label eases the pain. Whatever his name was, all I have left of him is a stain and some memories. The memories of our lives together. Of a pitch-black cellar. Of a song oozing from the darkness. I only heard a second of it, but the song is indescribably beautiful. Imagine the sound of your child taking their first breath, multiply that joy by a thousand, and maybe you’ll scratch the surface of what I experienced. 

I can still hear it, too. 

The song drifts through my vacant home, curling around the ruins of my life, taunting me, testing my limits, but I will not fail him, not again.

So, every night, I stand in front of the linen closet, terrified and penitent. 

I beg.

I open the door.

I shut it.

I wait. 

I beg.

I open the door.

I shut it.

And I know one day, they’ll take me. I just have to be patient.

So, please, Simon, Celeste, whoever you both are,

have mercy,

don’t leave me alone up here.

Simon got the call around midnight. I rolled closer to him, draped my arm across his chest, and listened by the receiver. It was the penitentiary. A guard had discovered Celeste sprawled out on the floor of her cell, cold, pulseless. His mother was dead.

I smiled.

She finally got what she deserved.

When Simon was young, Celeste trapped him in the cellar of his childhood home. 

Confined him to a windowless room with only a mattress, a bucket, and a record player, and every day was identical: listening to the same record on an endless loop, dawn till dusk, from the moment he woke up to the moment he fell asleep. Celeste melted the vinyl before the police could get their hands on it, so only Simon knows what it sounded like. He doesn’t like to talk about it, though, and I love him to death, so I don’t pry.

When the call was over, he threw his feet over the edge of our bed and put his head in his hands. Honestly, I expected indifference. Or joy. Something vaguely positive.

Simon, though…he wept.

Fat tears and convulsive sobs, well into the early morning. I held onto him, silent and warm. Didn’t ask questions. There’d be time for questions later.

Then, the package arrived.

I found it lying on our front stoop. The return address was Simon’s childhood home. Holding the small brown envelope felt like molding a snowball without gloves: a burning cold, phantom needles digging into my palm. I tore it open and pulled out its contents. There was no letter; just an antique cassette player, shaped like a shoebox with sleek gray plastic and a little handlebar below the buttons. I popped the cassette compartment.

Empty.

I slid the player under my armpit and marched over to the garbage can. Simon had endured enough. This thing, whatever it represented, would surely reopen old wounds. I lifted the lid and held the player over the hole, but my fingers refused to let go.

Was this right?

Could I really make this decision for him?

The woman never hurt Simon. Not physically, at least. When the police rescued him, he was healthy. Scared and vitamin D deficient, yes, but well-nourished, hydrated, and intact. Celeste’s public defender argued that Simon could have escaped any time because she kept the door unlocked. Maybe she had been a loving mother, despite her delusions; I had no idea, and I suppose that’s the point. Only Simon and Celeste knew what transpired in that windowless room, but apparently, there’d been enough love to shed tears over.

I sighed, slid the player back under my armpit, and brought the hellish totem into our home.

“So, what is it? I mean, I know what it is, but why do you think she had it sent…” Simon asked, carefully setting it onto his desk.

“Couldn’t tell you. Whoever’s managing her affairs didn’t send an explanation, or maybe it’s just coming separately - “

He pressed play.

A snap echoed through the room, followed by the mechanical whirring of the flywheels spinning without a tape.

Simon’s demeanor shifted.

He shot upright, rigid, flushed. His expression was a disturbing mixture of elation and terror, a sharp grin with bulging eyes.

“What’s that?” he shouted.

I jumped in place, heart spasming.

“I…I didn’t say anything.”

His gaze darted between the cassette player and me, pupils dilating, spreading over the whites of his eyes like an oil spill.

“I’ll just…” I started, reaching out, “…store this in the attic for now…”

“No!” he screamed, snatching the machine and clutching it against his breastbone, nostrils flaring. The whirring meshed seamlessly with his labored breathing; I couldn’t distinguish the two.

Confusion suddenly clouded his features.

“Sorry, Kat. I’m feeling a bit off.”

He loosened his grip on the machine, but only slightly.

“But…uh…I’ll hold on to this. For now.”

I nodded.

Forced what I can only imagine was the world’s flimsiest smile.

“Yeah, okay. Just…just let me know what you need.” I said, stepping out of his office.

There was a pause, and then he said:

“Right, right. That makes sense.”

He was staring at the cassette player, cradling it in his arms like a newborn.

The next few days, I was nervous. Constantly, incessantly nervous. Simon works from home doing graphic design, but I work nine-to-five at an accounting firm, so every evening I’d be a wreck driving home, terrified about what could be waiting beyond our front door.

But every night, he was normal.

Cooking. Cleaning. Laughing.

Acting like his usual self.

Slowly, with caution, I began to unwind.

Felt like I had my best friend back.

It was nice.

But it was fake.

And with each passing moment, the truth became harder and harder to deny.

Something was wrong.

The changes were small at first, small enough that my conscious mind couldn’t grasp them, but the oldest bits of my nervous system, the prehistoric holdovers, they could sense the danger swelling around me, even if they couldn’t give the danger a name. It wasn’t just Simon, either; the entire house was different. Polluted. Mutating.

Then, one night, I was lying in bed, eyes fluttering, thoughts loose, and a question popped into my brain.

Where the hell was the cassette player?

My eyes burst open.

I looked over. Simon was turned away, motionless.

“It’s around,” he groaned.

“…what?”

“The cassette player - it’s around.”

I struggled to breathe. Dread dripped through my lungs like hot tar.

I hadn’t said a damn thing.

“You know, just…don’t worry about it.”

He yawned, shifted, and stilled. I stared at his back, at Simon, this dark statue resting in the blackness, and I wondered:

was he actually sleeping, or was he just pretending?

Were his eyes wide open?

I didn’t check. I couldn’t. I lay awake and listened to him breathe, convincing myself that everything was fine.

Simon wasn’t changing; he was grieving.

I must have asked where the cassette player was out loud.

There wasn’t a soft whirring in the walls. It wasn’t beneath the floorboards, or coming from inside our closet, or radiating from my husband’s skin.

I was just hearing things.

The following morning, I was a mess. I couldn’t think straight. My movements were bipolar: restless and twitchy when the anxiety flared, deadened and lurching when the sleep deprivation took hold. I stumbled through my routine. I reached toward my wardrobe but missed the handle. I nearly killed myself on my way to breakfast, lost in a haze while stepping a little too far forward, the ball of my foot just catching the stair’s edge.

But the strangest part?

The trip from our bedroom to the kitchen felt longer.

I’ve lived in this house since I was a kid, inherited it from my parents when they passed. I know the layout. My body has internalized every inch of that place, and I’m telling you, it was longer.

When I got downstairs, he was at the table, stirring a cup of coffee, staring out into space.

“Where is it, Simon?” 

He turned his head and smiled. Revulsion dug its fingers into my heart.

My husband was…different.

His lips were too thin. His usually hooked nose was slightly blunted. His green eyes were unnaturally bright, a synthetic hue, neon and piercing.

“Where’s what? Are you alright, Kat? You don’t look - “

“Cut the shit.”

His smile ballooned.

“It’s right there.”

I scoffed, preparing to really lay into him, but then he gestured toward the center of the table, and dear Christ, there it was, whirring, spinning, and empty.

It hadn’t been there a second ago, right?

“You…we need to get rid of that thing, Simon.”

I walked across the kitchen, knelt beside my husband, and placed a delicate hand on his shoulder. Immediately, his demeanor shifted. Arrogant and malicious to scared and harmless in the blink of an eye. Even his facial features reverted to something akin to normal. His body was trembling. I slipped my hand up his neck and pivoted his chin, pulling him toward me. I talked slowly.

“I’m going to take this…thing…away from us.”

He shook his head. His voice was shivering like a lapdog in the snow.

“No, no, no, you can’t do that, I have to listen so we stay together, you can’t throw it away…”

I felt my composure slipping, but I focused. 

“Okay…well…I’ll hide it.” I said, stroking his cheek. 

“Hide it?”

“Yes. I won’t throw it away. I’ll just…put it somewhere safe.”

My hand crept towards the cassette player. He tracked the movement, but I pressed my other hand into his jaw, guiding his attention back to me.

“I’ve always wanted what’s best for you, right?”

As soon as I touched the machine, a jolt of static flooded through my arm, crawling along my bones. 

I did not let go.

“Trust me, love.”

His trembling slowed.

“I won’t throw it away. I promise.”

A lie, but a necessary one.

Gradually, he nodded.

“Yeah…yeah, okay.”

I took a deep breath. 

It was now or never. 

I grabbed the cassette player and headed for the front door, determined to get the machine away from our home.

The thump of Simon shooting upright caused my spine to twist. 

Before I could speed up, he brushed past me and stood at the door, positioning his body between me and the exit. 

I recalibrated. 

Took a sharp right turn and began climbing the stairs, gesturing for him to stay put. Thankfully, he obliged. I ascended quickly; the terror was slipping through. By the time I reached our bedroom, I was hyperventilating. 

Where could I hide it? 

I bolted across the room, dropped to my knees, and ripped a small lockbox out from beneath our bed. The player just barely fit inside. I secured the lock and shoved the box back under. A burst of dizziness hit me like a tidal wave. I rested my head on the comforter, letting the sensation run its course.

The lockbox was only a temporary solution, if it could even be considered a solution at all. 

A permanent fix would require incapacitating Simon.

I scrambled to my feet, the fragments of an idea crystallizing in my mind. I pulled my nightstand drawer open and dug through the clutter until I found a bottle of prescription-grade sleeping pills. The label was worn, eroded to the point where I couldn’t read the name of the drug, but I gave it a quick shake and the contents rattled. Plenty left. I unscrewed the cap and dropped the key to the lockbox inside the bottle. 

When I returned downstairs, Simon was still standing at the door. I attempted to focus on the task at hand; he’d only lower his guard if I acted normal. 

Still, I felt my thoughts drifting. I couldn’t help it. 

My mind kept replaying the two trips: from the foyer to the bedroom, and from the bedroom back down to the foyer.

They were different.

The second trip was much, much longer. 

The upstairs hallway seemed to expand along with my movements, unfurling before my eyes, silently adding more doors and floorboards with each step, as if the invading presence had become tired of hiding or no longer felt it necessary. I’ve never experienced fear like that before. It was primal. All-consuming. But when I finally made it back to the foyer, I saw Simon, and I swallowed the fear.

I would not let it take him.

So, I forced a smile, declared I’d be calling out sick from work, took his hand, and pulled him into the living room. 

We spent the day watching old spy thrillers on the couch. During that time, I noticed that contact had a sort of grounding effect on Simon. As long as I was touching him, he seemed to remain normal, his eyes their regular greenish hue. I was his anchor. 

But the measure was just a stopgap. 

As soon as I let go, his body would begin to distort, and the breathless whirring of the cassette player would resume, swirling around us like invisible smoke.

Dusk came faster than I expected. 

The pills were burning a hole in my pocket. 

I needed to act before it was too late.

I excused myself and began walking toward the kitchen, fast but not hurried, carefully maintaining the veneer of normality. I peeked over my shoulder. He was already changing. His lips were visibly thinning. Deep wrinkles accumulated across his face, clawing through his skin. He didn’t move from the couch, but he kept his bright eyes glued to me. Once out of sight, my pace turned frantic. I rushed over to our liquor cabinet and threw it open.

I staggered back, gripping my chest, disbelief surging through my veins.

The cabinet was empty, and it was dark.

The inside seemed to go on for miles.

A musty stench slinked from the crevice, and if I squinted, if I really concentrated, I could appreciate something distant in the darkness, dragging itself closer -

I slammed it shut.

“You alright in there?” he called out.

“Y-yes!” I shouted, beating back the nausea.

I stood before a massive wall of small doors that shouldn’t have been able to fit in my kitchen. The cabinets were multiplying. The house was changing. I looked up. The ceiling hadn’t grown to accommodate the changes, but when I looked back at the wall, it somehow appeared even larger than before. I couldn’t understand. I keeled over, clutching my temple. My brain was boiling. I fought the urge to tear at my skin. 

Footsteps began emanating from the living room, thunderous but languid. The overhead lights flickered. Bulbs sizzled and popped, but they did not dim; their exposed nerves kept firing, battering me with harsh phosphorescence.

“You alright in there, Kat?” His voice was twenty octaves too low.

I grunted, steeling myself, ripping open cabinet after cabinet, discovering only darkness, hole after hole, a bevy of black pores defiling my childhood home.

Simon was closing in. 

His footsteps had become deafening. 

I opened what felt like the hundredth door.

And I lucked out.

I grabbed a half-filled whiskey bottle by its neck.

“Are you suuuuure you’re alright in there, Kat?”

Simon began to round the corner.

I didn’t look.

I didn’t hesitate.

I aimed the bottle where I imagined his head was about to be, and I swung.

A sickening crash echoed through the air,

and everything stopped.

Simon collapsed.

The kitchen was plunged into darkness.

Lines of sticky warmth drizzled across my wrist.

I let go. The shattered bottle clattered against the tiled floor. 

I looked around. The cabinets were normal. The lights had quieted. And my husband lay in front of me, motionless, his hair slick, glistening with blood and booze.

Muted sobs bubbled up my throat. I knelt down. His breathing was shallow, but it was there.

Stepping over him was agonizing.

I couldn’t stop, though.

This was my chance.

I bolted through the foyer and up the stairs, dialing 911 on my cell as I ran. The dispatcher’s voice crackled through the receiver. I screamed that my husband needed an ambulance as I barreled down the second-floor hallway.

What was I going to do with the accursed thing?

I tore the lockbox from its hiding place and threw it onto the bed.

Bury it?

Burn it?

Hand it to a priest?

I ripped the pill bottle from my pocket and unscrewed the cap, dumping its contents into my shaking hands. Tablets ricocheted off my damp palm, then the key. I jammed it into the lockbox.

Right now, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need a plan. I’ll figure it out once I’ve gotten the machine away from Simon.

The lid creaked open.

There was nothing inside. 

“Mom said you’d try to do that.”

Simon loomed in the doorway, naked as the day he was born, dried blood staining his cheeks. The cassette player was resting against his sternum. He had his arms wrapped tightly around the machine, which was still empty, playing nothing, whirring ceaselessly, whispering terrible things I couldn’t hear.  

“I didn’t want to believe her.” He sniffled. His eyes were glassy and burning bright green.

“I said: 'YOU don’t know Kat. She wouldn’t lie to me.'” 

He uncrossed his arms. The machine did not fall. It did not move an inch. Moonlight streamed from a nearby window, illuminating him. 

The cassette player was fused to his chest. 

Thin red vessels swam through mounds of cauterized skin, adjoining flesh and plastic, stitching it all together.

“But here you are, dead set on throwing her away, when you promised me you wouldn’t.”

“Simon…I…”

“Don’t even say it!” he screamed.

I crept forward, reaching out. Contact had brought him back before.

“I can still fix this…” I whimpered.

He retreated through the doorway, backpedaling with small, scurrying movements, never breaking eye contact, never blinking.

I followed, gaining speed.

“Simon! Please, God, wait!”

Halfway down the hall, he twisted his arm behind his back and clasped the handle of a tiny linen closet. My legs pumped wildly. My heart struck a desperate message against my rib cage. 

I was his anchor. 

I could bring him back.

I just needed to get to him. 

The door creaked open. He squeezed inside.

I angled my outstretched hand, grasping for Simon.

My fingers grazed the handle’s cold metal. 

The door shut.

I threw it back open.

I should’ve seen my husband, contorted into a space no larger than a high school locker.

Instead, I saw stairs. 

They were faintly visible in the hallway’s moonlight. The silver outlines of wooden planks descending into darkness, accompanied by a splinter-infested handrail. A cool draft seeped from the opening. The air smelled of mud and rot. I knew what I was looking at. Implicitly, I understood what was beyond the door.

A cellar.

If I entered the darkness, if I worked my way down these stairs, I’d surely find a windowless room at the bottom.

A honey-sweet noise emanated from deep within, so quiet that it was nearly imperceptible. It coaxed me over the partition. My head couldn’t have been more than a few centimeters over the edge, but that was enough, I heard the music so clearly, and I saw her, a wide-eyed face etched into the blackness, brimming with a gentleness that could easily be confused for cruelty. 

Celeste began to race up the stairs. 

I reflexively jerked back and slammed the door shut.

I stood there for a moment, frozen, entangled in a perfect silence. 

Slowly, I opened the door.

All I saw were a few stacks of neatly folded pillowcases.

The whirring was gone.

Simon was gone.

Some time later, sirens blared in the distance. 

The ambulance had finally arrived.

- - - - -

When the medics asked where my husband was, I didn’t have the willpower to lie. I just pointed to the front door and then sat back down on the curb. 

So, they searched the house. 

Didn’t find anyone, of course. 

Simon’s blood was still in the kitchen, but it wasn’t fresh; it looked like an old stain, something that’d occurred months or even years before that night. I assumed that stain would get me arrested for Simon’s murder. It was still his blood, after all.

But then they asked me one simple question:

“What’d you say your husband’s name was, ma’am?”

“It’s - “

I paused.

I tried again. 

“His name is - “

Nothing.

I racked my brain. Scoured my memories.

No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn’t come up with his name. 

I can see his face, clear as day, but his name? 

It’s gone. 

Vanished along with him, his mother, and any proof he ever existed to begin with. I have no photographs of him. His side of the closet is empty. “Simon” is just a placeholder; the label eases the pain. Whatever his name was, all I have left of him is a stain and some memories. The memories of our lives together. Of a pitch-black cellar. Of a song oozing from the darkness. I only heard a second of it, but the song is indescribably beautiful. Imagine the sound of your child taking their first breath, multiply that joy by a thousand, and maybe you’ll scratch the surface of what I experienced. 

I can still hear it, too. 

The song drifts through my vacant home, curling around the ruins of my life, taunting me, testing my limits, but I will not fail him, not again.

So, every night, I stand in front of the linen closet, terrified and penitent. 

I beg.

I open the door.

I shut it.

I wait. 

I beg.

I open the door.

I shut it.

And I know one day, they’ll take me. I just have to be patient.

So, please, Simon, Celeste, whoever you both are,

have mercy,

don’t leave me alone up here.

Vorn shot me a look of fearful confusion; I savored it.  

“…So, I get to choose?” 

The question slurred from his overstuffed mouth. 

Must be from the Rulshik province, I mused. The irradiation in that area is strangely particular; nearly always affects the enamel. For his kind, the most cancerous teeth usually edge out the remainder, cluttering the airway, making speech a hurdle. 

Hideous. 

Fucking hideous. 

I forced a grin. 

“That’s right!”

I leaned back, tapping the tip of a pen against my wristwatch, watching the felon closely. If any excess saliva dripped from his fetid maw onto my hand-knotted rug, I was going to end his life, right then and there. As the High Praetor, such is my prerogative. These interviews are much the same. I don’t have to conduct them - it’s far beneath my post - but I want to. The variance in punishment selection is fascinating, and I deserve a little joy in my life, don’t I?

He shifted nervously. 

“The Road. I choose The Road.” 

I clucked my tongue. 

“Are you quite sure, Vorn? You don’t know what that is.” 

“I know it ain’t a bullet or a cage.” 

“Do you now?” 

He shrugged. 

“Well, alright then. You’re the boss.” 

I shot up and marched across my chambers, making sure to step on the chain connected to his neck collar as I passed, yanking him lower by his spine. 

“Inquisitor Darst - “ I called out, “ - please ready the coach. We’re taking a trip to the lowlands.” 

“You’re coming, too?” he asked, eyes downcast, appropriately prostrated with the encouragement my boot heel was providing, pressing hard on his shackles. 

I smiled. 

That time, it was genuine. 

“Yes, of course. It’s my duty and my pleasure to see you off.” 

- - - - - 

We departed from the central encampment with the midday sun beating our backs. 

Well, mostly Vorn’s back, who trudged alongside the coach, while I remained cool and comfortable within, though I braced myself for the inevitable corruption as we proceeded down the hill. In the wake of everything, altitude had become our most precious resource, though it was visually bland when compared to the lowlands. The organized whites and grays of civilization versus the wild iridescence of rot. Reds, and pinks, and greens, 

and it was giving me a fucking headache. 

I slipped on my visor before that headache converted into a grand mal seizure and closed my eyes. 

“Darst!” I yelled, “Wake me up when we’re close.” 

Some time later, I was jostled awake. The inquisitor was leaning over me, his mid-born foot inside my personal cab, polluting it. 

That was strike one. 

I stepped outside. We were parked at the precipice of a massive crater. 

That was strike two. 

Graciously, I provided strike three. 

The back of my hand crashed into Darst’s jaw. 

“When we get back, look up the difference between close and here.” 

I always enjoyed watching a criminal’s face contort as we approached The Road. Darst ruined that. I tried not to let it ruin my whole day. 

Thankfully, The Road never fails to cheer me up. 

It was an unmarred stretch of asphalt that ran along the belly of an old impact site. The thing is, it’s always been blemishless, but it wasn’t built after the impact; it predates the calamity. The bombs didn’t touch it. That’s how I knew it was special. 

I turned from the crater and nodded at Darst, who, despite looking like a wounded puppy, followed my order and trained his rifle on Vorn. Then, I did the honors. I paced over to Vorn and unlocked his neck collar. 

“What do I do now?” he slurred.

“You walk, but if you deviate from the asphalt, my associate here will put one through your brainstem. Once you get to the end of The Road, you’re free.”

Skepticism washed over Vorn. He wasn’t as witless as his bulbous teeth made him look.

I slapped him on the back. 

“Now…get walking.” 

Vorn limped away, carefully negotiating the edge, sitting down and slowly planting his bare feet onto The Road’s incline. Before long, though, he did what they all did. 

His pace quickened. 

Limping, to walking, to jogging, to running, to sprinting. 

I fantasized about how lucky he must have felt, like he’d snaked his way through a crack in the system, like he’d won the lottery, like he was truly free. 

Then, 

poof. 

Vorn disappeared.

But he wasn’t gone. 

I pulled out my thermal imaging camera and pointed it at The Road. 

I could see him, as well as everyone who came before him. Vorn was frozen mid-stride. His heat signature still looked human. It would continue to look human for a while, but gradually, it would stretch. After a few years, he’d become a thin line of dim warmth, elongating down The Road, invisibly reaching out for salvation.

Through the lens, I saw them all laid out before me, every degenerate who’d walked The Road. 

I took a deep, glorious breath. 

There was something perfect in the stretching. It reminded me of the ancestral inquisitions, how they’d strap heretics to the rack and stretch them until they broke. 

Like I was a real crusader. 

- - - - - 

“So, Klun, here are your choices - “ 

I paused for effect. 

“Prison, the gun, or - “ 

Darst burst into my chambers. 

“Inquisitor! What the hell are you doing?!”

“They’re here, High Praetor.” 

“Who?”

“Those who’ve walked The Road." 

Fear detonated in my gut. 

"Vorn found the end. He led them out, and they’re all here, in one form or another.” 

My eyes darted around the room. 

An arsenal of different weapons hung on my walls, but they were decorative. I had no martial training. 

“I’ll pull the coach around.” 

“What…what do you mean?”

“For our trip to the lowlands, Sir.” 

He smiled, the bruise on his jaw flaring a fiery purple. 

“Vorn is going to show you The Road.” 

1999:

I stared up at the stranger, marveling at his tattered blue suit and the deep black craters hanging beneath his bloodshot eyes.

“Ready to go, Sofia?” he asked. 

A sweating, wide-eyed Ms. Rosa nodded at me.

“Go with David, sweetheart. I promise it’s OK.” 

So, slowly, I nodded too. 

The TV always said I should never go anywhere with a stranger, but didn’t it also say that teachers were a trustworthy type of adult? What should I do? Which rule should I trust? 

But therein lies the central conceit of childhood, the devilish caveats that the TV never bothered to mention:

Life has no absolute rules, 

and trust is a weapon.

I waved to my teacher as we left the classroom. She didn’t wave back, though I could sense her eyes on me as she helped another student at the table farthest from the door. I used to carry a lot of resentment against that woman, but nowadays, I just hope Ms. Rosa spent David’s bribe before the police cuffed her - bought some coke, rode a jet ski, did something fun - talk about a waste if she didn’t. Sold me off and shattered my reality for nothing, nothing at all. 

“It’s bright out,” he said as we walked through the gymnasium, “you have your sunglasses?” 

The question surprised me; sometimes Mom would even forget to ask. 

I smiled and tapped my jeans pocket.

I could trust David if he knew me, right? Because clearly, he knew me. He knew my name. He knew I liked to leave through the gym because it was vacant in the early afternoon, which meant fewer kids gawking at my albino skin. He even knew my albinism affected my eyes. In normal people, eye pigment is a barrier, but I’m not normal, so I needed my sunglasses. 

I slipped on my Ray-Bans and followed him outside. 

A luxury Sedan with tinted windows idled beneath the school’s flagpole. I hopped in the back and nestled my bag into an empty car seat. Five short minutes later, we were on the interstate, going in the wrong direction, but I couldn’t tell, not at first, not until the Blue Ridge Mountains began growing on the horizon. 

I pressed my face into the window and thought: 

Weren’t they supposed to shrink as I got closer to home?

Embers crackled in my chest. Reflexively, I imagined Kermit the Frog saying, “Please, Sofia, be patient”, and I felt those embers cool. I had a history of impatient outbursts, losing my shit when subjected to situations my young mind couldn’t grasp. Thus, my mom had gotten into the habit of saying that Kermit would be thoroughly disappointed in me if I wasn’t patient, which worked wonders for my “behavior”. Eventually, though, as the mountains began to loom directly overhead, that bit of childhood programming gave way to the inescapable realization that something was wrong. 

Without warning, I went absolutely ballistic. 

I unbuckled myself and leaped up. Shrieked like a tiny banshee. Slammed my fists into David’s neck, demanding my mother. Startled, he jerked the wheel. The car slid halfway into another lane. I lost my footing. My temple cracked against the window. 

Blurry stars swam through my vision.

I slumped down.

- - - - -

2026:

It was faint at first. A spark tracking along the underside of my forearm, running from my wrist to my elbow and back again. I pretended like I didn’t feel it, like it was nothing, but then the tissue itself began visibly writhing, and I could no longer pretend. 

My mark had begun pulsing. 

I asked Eric point-blank to inspect the limb and tell me if anything looked wrong. He’d never been able to see the mounds of violeacous flesh before, so I don’t know why I expected a different result.

“Looks like my wife’s arm.” 

He smiled weakly. 

“You alright, Sofia?”

I suppressed the pain and the terror, the wriggling sensation, the feeling of a snake burrowing through my muscles. 

“Yeah - why wouldn’t I be?”

From there, I suffered the realization that I was alone in my predicament.

But I wouldn’t be alone for long. 

I could see his black comet in the night sky without a telescope. 

I could hear his thrumming, bottomless and terrible.

Twenty-seven years later, 

the stranger was coming back for me. 

- - - - -

1999:

I woke up lying flat across the back seats, staring at the roof, calves draped uncomfortably over the car seat. David’s wispy sobs drifted around me like ghosts in the dark. I swung upright. We were parked along a desolate stretch of road. The moonless sky was embroidered with bright stars. 

My hand crawled along cold leather until it found the door handle. I pulled it, gently, slowly. 

A faint clack emanated from the locked door.

David lifted his forehead from the wheel. 

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. 

Terror dug its teeth into my heart. His shoulder-length hair was wild. His sunken cheeks glistened with fresh tears. He looked insane. Prone to violence. I compressed my body into the corner, ripping at the handle, hoping against hope that one more vigorous tug would set me free.

He leaned over his seat, took a mammoth inhale, and then, 

the man started pleading.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

The way I understood it, kids begged adults for help, not the other way around, and yet, there he was, beseeching my help like I had the power to say no. His speech was manic and disjointed, jumping from wild claims to rambling apologies to convoluted anecdotes about faraway stars and back again. I struggled to internalize every little thing exploding from his mouth, but I got the gist of his plea. Something scary was coming, something he called the stranger, and without my protection, the stranger would take him. 

A brief silence washed over us. 

Then, he whispered:

“Will you help me?” 

I took a moment to earnestly consider the request and David as a whole. His puffy eyes oozed desperation. His trembling lips betrayed honest fear. For better or worse, I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt bad for him, and I suppose that’s the fragile beauty of childhood. The man had committed a heinous crime and was undeserving of empathy, but I wasn’t preoccupied with what he did or didn’t deserve. I just saw him for what he was. Sad, scared, and broken.

“…okay. I’ll help you, as long as you promise to take me home afterward.” 

Something illuminated behind his tired eyes. After thanking me profusely, he leaned over the console and began digging through the glove compartment. He pulled out a small black box, which beeped like my family’s old microwave as he typed something into it. Then, he handed it to me. Six red numbers pierced the darkness. 

18:53:03

18:53:02

18:53:01

“Once that reaches zero, one of us will call the police to pick you up. If I’m still here, I’ll do it myself, and if I’m not…” he trailed off, gazing out the windshield at the stars burning their bright white holes in the firmament. 

“You know how to use a phone, right?”

“Yeah.” 

“Great.” 

He pressed the keys into the ignition. The engine roared to life. With a thump, we slid out of the ditch and continued down that deserted road. 

As we traveled, it dawned on me how alone we truly were. There were no people driving in the opposite direction, no gas stations dotting the roadside, no signs of civilization whatsoever. It was just him and me. 

My eyes drifted to the car seat, ominously empty. 

Panic swelled. Each thunderous heartbeat made my ribs tremble.

I lifted the timer from my lap.

18:05:21

I took a deep breath. 

Eighteen hours, five minutes, and twenty-one seconds left; then I get to go home. 

The sedan growled as we started up an incline, curling around a mountainside road with a concerning lack of guardrails. The estate stood at the small mountain’s apex, looming at the edge of a plateau that overlooked the interstate. The architecture was sleek and avant-garde, a conglomeration of chrome rectangles stuck together in the vague shape of a house. A large cylinder stood in front, angled towards the sky. The property was encircled by an imposing steel picket fence. Circular bulbs adorned the barrier, casting sickly light that struggled to beat back the darkness. 

David pulled up to the gate, rolled down the window, and tapped his wallet against a sensor. The entrance slid apart. I surveyed the grounds. It looked like some bizarre mixture of modern art and a war zone. An assortment of standing mirrors lay strewn across the lawn. At least a hundred, maybe more. They were positioned equally apart from one another, and nearly all of them were shattered. Fine glass shards blanketed the grass like hail that refused to melt. 

“I…uh…tried some different solutions before I realized I needed - “ he paused, clicking his tongue “ - someone special, like you, to keep the stranger away.” 

Fear tightened my throat. 

“Will the stranger break me, too?”

“No! No, of course not.” 

We approached the estate. The car began rumbling over cobblestone.

“It’s going to be different for you, trust me.” 

The brakes squealed. David parked his sedan next to the large cylinder. He walked around and opened the back doors. I slid out. My skin prickled. The air outside was unseasonably cold, almost icy. 

“First things first: do you know how to use a telescope?”

“Yeah, I think so.” 

“Perfect.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “Take a look and tell me what you see.” 

Shivering, I jogged across the cobblestone and bent over, placing my eye on the lens. 

“It’s just…black.” I lifted my head. “Am I supposed to see something?”

A few feet away, David was rifling through the pocket of his suit jacket. He shook his head. 

“Not yet.” 

I heard a whispered “aha!” as he pulled out a small pill bottle. 

“Hungry?”

My stomach grumbled. I nodded. 

He unscrewed the bottle, brought the rim to his mouth, and threw it back like a tequila shot. 

“Me too,” he rasped, “I got some leftover mac N’ cheese in the fridge.” 

He offered me his hand. 

I clasped it, and he guided me into the estate. 

Our footsteps echoed through the narrow front hallway, which opened into a cavernous vestibule illuminated by a gargantuan electric chandelier. A cathode ray television sat alone at the center of the massive room. The rest of the furniture was stacked carelessly against the walls. Half-filled book shelves, ornate armories, luxury sofas, red satin chairs, and fully stocked bar carts, all moved out of the way to create space for a single, bargain-bin TV. 

David grabbed a comforter from a nearby closet and laid it in front of the TV. 

“Take a seat.” 

Hesistantly, I began walking. A strange smell lingered in the air, harsh and metallic, like burnt gunpowder or welding fumes. I plopped down on the comforter and set the timer next to me. Then, I looked up at the man, waiting for my next instruction. Exhaustion had made me pliable; I just wanted it all to be over. 

A nervous smile spread across his face.

“The next two days are going to fly by. We’re just gonna relax and have ourselves a movie marathon - my personal recuts of the classics.” A sputtering chuckle poured from his lips. The pained laughter reverberated through the seemingly empty estate, and all the while, he stared at me with unblinking eyes, clenching and unclenching his sweat-caked palms. 

His mouth gradually closed. 

After what felt like decades of stasis, he said:

“Don’t ever leave this room without my permission. Got it?” 

I nodded.

“Great. Be back with the mac N’ cheese in a jiff.” 

He turned and staggered away, slamming his body into one of the vestibule’s many doors. 

I thought I heard something while he was gone. 

Whispers behind the walls. Airy, breathless noises. Was it his family? Did he have other kids trapped here, too? I considered squeezing through the heaps of furniture and pressing my ear to the wall, but before any bravery could crystallize, David burst into the room, carrying two things: a bowl of macaroni and a stack of VHS tapes tucked in his armpit. 

The meal wasn’t gourmet, but it was palatable, and trauma tends to work up an appetite. As I inhaled hot spoonfuls of store-bought pasta, David carefully placed the tapes onto the comforter. They had no identifying labels. Instead, each bore a crudely scribbled number between the reels. One through eight. A sequence. 

He inserted tape 1 into the machine and pressed play. 

The Walt Disney logo twinkled across the screen, a cheery melody galloping over random pops of static, followed by previews, and eventually, Mulan. 

As we watched, a sudden wave of feverish euphoria surged through my veins. My heart raced. I became enraptured with the movie, talking David’s ear off about every little detail. He grinned, nodding along. I shouldn’t have been smiling, but I was; I couldn’t control it. 

Then, during the tail end of A Girl Worth Fighting For, something strange happened. 

The tape seemed to skip. The movie froze on the image of a snowy mountaintop. It was a blip - couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second - but during that time, my body went haywire. Pressure exploded behind my eyes. My limbs were on fire, but my chest was seized by an aching chill. A thrumming noise swirled around me, like the beating of helicopter blades pitched down ten octaves, so deafening that I couldn’t hear anything else. I sucked in a sharp gulp of air, but just as soon as I did - 

it all stopped. 

The movie continued. 

My body settled. 

The thrumming vanished. 

“You OK, Sofia?” David asked, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turned to him and thought for a moment. The experience was so fleeting, so bizarre and inexplicable, I had no idea what to say other than: 

“Yeah, I’m OK…could I have some more mac N’ cheese?” 

He tussled my hair. 

“Coming right up.” 

As he paced away, David snickered and whispered something under his breath: a double entendre that I wouldn’t understand until much later. 

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down…”

- - - - -

2026:

I always knew this day would come. 

My nebulous contingency plan had been slowly taking shape for years. Arrangements had been made. Pieces were in place. I was terrified, but I was ready. 

I snuck downstairs around midnight. The estate, whatever was left of it, was a ten-minute drive away. I’d stayed close for a reason. 

As I loaded the car, a loose thread nagged at me. 

I wondered how much time I had left. 

Days? Weeks? Months? 

I couldn’t be sure, and I had no one to ask. I’d learned a lot about David in the last twenty-seven years, but how he calculated when the stranger would arrive was the one thing I could never suss out. 

So, unlike before, I wouldn’t have the luxury of a countdown. 

I sighed, swallowed some aspirin, and placed my shovel into the trunk.

- - - - -

1999:

Tape 2 was Hercules. 

Tape 3 was The Sandlot. 

Then Home Alone, Hocus Pocus, The Iron Giant, so on and so on. 

Sleep never came for me.  I felt violently awake and frantically happy. Night turned to morning, though the room was windowless, so I only realized when David brought in a plate of eggs and bacon. 

With each film in the sequence, the skips were evolving. 

Mulan had one. 

Hocus Pocus had dozens. 

My reactions intensified - more pressure, sharper pain - and just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, I saw something in the skip. A black and white diagram of wavy, concentric circles, sort of like a fingerprint. It flashed for only a moment, but I felt it inside me, like I’d been branded, like the design had become a part of who I was. Then, a release. The kind of soothing pleasure you get after popping a stubborn zit. I looked over to David. 

My mind went blank. 

His face. 

God, his face. 

Thick cords of bloated scar tissue split it diagonally, squirming like a trio of oversized leeches ferociously draining their fill. 

I scrambled to my feet. The comforter slid across the wooden floor, making my already frenzied movements even more clumsy. David shot up. The violet-colored cords seemed to react to his concern, squirming harder, faster. 

“Wait!! Sofia, I can explain!” 

I didn’t stop, I didn’t slow, I bolted through that hellish room with wild abandon, sprinting down the narrow hallway, wheezing from exertion, reaching towards the door. 

A pair of arms wrapped around my stomach. 

They lifted me up, pulling me away. 

I thrashed. Kicked. Elbowed. Screamed. 

“Sofia - please - relax!” he grunted. 

I barely heard him, and I certainly didn’t relax. I was done relaxing. 

“Let me go! Let me go! Take me home!” 

David’s hold loosened. His forearm slid up my chest, close enough for me to bite. I opened wide, threw my head down, and dug my teeth into his wrist. He howled like a wounded animal. Sticky warmth trickled onto my tongue. He twisted his body to one side, then rapidly to the other while letting go, launching me into the air. I thumped against the floor and tumbled across the comforter, dazed, hurting, broken. The fight in me gave out like a bad knee. I pressed my face into the blanket, slammed my eyes shut, and let the tears flow. 

It’s all I had left. 

“You think I’m enjoying this?”  

Frazzled groans and restless stomps filled my ears. I pushed my head into the comforter, but I couldn’t drown him out. 

“I made one - ONE - mistake. I never should’ve contacted him, the empty eye at the back of space. I thought he’d get the message and come help us, save us, give us the tools to fix ourselves, but no. The stranger doesn’t give. He takes!”

The crash of toppling furniture reverberated through the vestibule. 

“My partner the first year - “ 

CRASH. 

“My wife the next - “ 

CRASH. 

“Then my son, my only child, gone, but he’s not gonna take me, goddamnit!“ 

CRASH. CRASH. CRASH. 

He thundered back over to me. The vibrations rattled my small body. He wedged his foot beneath my torso and rolled his ankle, flipping me onto my back, but I would not look at him. 

“So I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry you’re here. I’m sorry for forcing your deep eye open. I’m sorry you can see my mark - “ 

Fingertips slammed into my eyebrows and sinuses. He yanked at my eyelids. 

“LOOK. AT. ME.” 

David was bent over, inches from my face. Damp, brutish exhales caressed my cheeks. He lowered the volume of his voice, but it wasn’t any gentler. Malice dripped from every syllable. 

“You realize you’re in danger, right?” 

His marks throbbed. Face-to-face, I could hear them pulse, wet and sloshing. 

“Not from me - I’d never hurt you - but the stranger? He would. He will. If you can see these - “ he paused, pointing a trembling finger at his marks, “- that means he can see you, and his comet is very, very close. How close?” 

He grabbed the timer and slammed it into my face. 

“Three hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty seconds away.” 

David arched the device over his shoulder and smashed it into the floor right above my head, grazing my scalp. 

"Want to go home? Well, either we both make it out of here, or neither of us does, so pay attention.”

He stood up, stepped away, grasped the edge of the comforter, and heaved it out from under me. I landed chest-first onto the floor. The scent of burnt gunpowder stung my nostrils. I lifted my head. A patch of wavy, concentric circles had been carved into the wood. The design was identical to what I’d seen on the tape, but with strange white ash caked into the grooves. 

“Sit there, stare at the doorway, and wait.” 

I pushed up, sat on the design, and stared forward. 

David paced into view. 

“Got it?” 

I thought for a moment. 

“Yeah. I understand.” 

- - - - -

2026:

The mountainside plateau was thick with overgrowth. As I trudged through the dense thicket, there was little sign of the ungodly things David’s wealth had built. 

No avant-garde estate. 

No high-powered telescope. 

No shattered mirrors. 

Only scattered remnants of a fractured gate, rusted and vine-strangled.

Took me until dawn to find the right spot. My shoulders were aching, my palms were raw, but they were there, buried at the foot of a sugar maple, all eight of them. I brushed off dirt and debris. Under the weathered plastic wrap, I could faintly see the number one looking back at me. 

I prayed the tapes would still work. 

- - - - -

1999:

Everything was still. 

The front door hung ajar, propped open by a heavy ceramic vase.

White starshine rained down from the cloudless night sky, glinting against the broken mirrors visible from my place at the center of the room. A low, relentless thrumming vibrated through the estate, louder with each passing second.  

00:01:11

00:01:10

00:01:09

David was somewhere behind me, but I could not look back; it was against his two rules. 

Stare forward, 

and never close your eyes. 

I shouldn’t be worried, he said. I was special; my albino skin was a gift and a barrier. It would confuse the stranger, repelling his advance, reflecting him back into the void. If I listened to him, if I followed my captor’s instructions to the letter, I would be safe; I would be set free. 

00:00:24

00:00:23

The thrumming grew monstrous; it beat against my flesh, rattling my bones. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:16

00:00:15

The sky came alive. The atmosphere rippled, throbbed, contorted, as if something were behind the inky darkness, trying to rip its way through. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:02

00:00:01

Silence. 

I could no longer see outside the door. It wasn’t an earthly darkness, like a shadow. A shadow would’ve spilled over the doorframe. A shadow implies distant light. This was a black curtain draped over our only exit, and it carried no light. 

This wasn’t darkness; it was absence. 

Then, movement. 

A slow, steady expansion over the doorframe. It looked human, but only in the vaguest sense, like seeing a stick-figure drawing and deciding the artist was trying to depict a person; it looked human because my brain gave it that label. It was featureless, save for its margins, which were teeming with flittering black splinters. Still, I could tell it was staring at me. Inspecting me with a cruel curiosity. A burning sensation washed over the surface of my eyes, like they were being pressed against a hot grill, but it was pleasurable; the liberating bliss of consumption. As the stranger skulked closer, poised to take me, I thought of David, the liar, the manipulator, the man I could never trust, 

and I did not close my eyes. 

But I turned around. 

The moment I stopped watching it, the stranger flew by me and proceeded towards David, who was cowering at the very back of the room. He screamed as it made contact. That scream started as a shrill, bloodcurdling noise, but deepened into a low, rumbling howl, gradually dissipating into nothingness. 

The stranger retracted. 

A searing pain flared along my forearm as he passed. As he dragged his black splinters against my bare skin, I felt a piece of him infiltrating my mind, relaying a simple promise. 

Someday, he’d be back for me.

The black curtain receded. 

My mark pulsed, and the thrumming resumed in tandem, deafening at first, but it grew quieter, and the pulsing grew sluggish, and eventually everything was still. 

I lurched to my feet and limped towards one of the doors at the back of the room. One of them had to have a phone. 

As I approached, I saw what remained of David: a smudge of white ash in the vague shape of a person. I found other similar smudges while searching for a phone. Old ones, with ash that was gray and flaking. Three in total. Two were about the size of David, and one was much, much smaller. 

I found a working phone in the kitchen. Nearby, there was a stack of unopened letters. Bills that David never paid, by the looks of it. I calmly read the address off one of them to the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

The police were on their way. 

I raced through the vestibule, finally about to leave that godforsaken estate, but something caught my eye. 

David’s movies, scattered across the floor. 

I looked at my scar, the stranger’s promise, then back to the tapes. 

I returned to the kitchen and located a steel ladle and some plastic wrap. 

As dawn crested over the horizon and sirens wailed in the distance, I placed the last tape into a shallow hole at the foot of a sugar maple.

I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. 

Turns out, I was on the precipice of kidney failure, partially from the large quantity of stimulants discovered in my blood, but mostly from critical dehydration. With fluids, the damage resolved quickly, but there was one other problem, something that wasn’t as easy to reconcile. 

My mark. 

I screamed at the staff, begging them to bandage it or cut it off, because I couldn’t stand to look at it, and all they saw was a normal, healthy arm. Eventually, I got with the program. If they couldn’t see it, there was no point in complaining. I pretended like it wasn’t there - that tactic got me out of the hospital and through most of my adult life without issue. 

The day before I was due to go home, one of my doctors noticed something, a subtle abnormality. A grayish discoloration in the whites of my eyes. Mom reminded the doctor of my albinism, but they said it was different. An ophthalmologist examined me that afternoon. They applied special drops that allowed them to visualize the inside of my eye with a microscope. 

I heard them gasp. 

They did it a second time. 

Then, they called in a handful of colleagues, who all took turns wordlessly examining my eyes, rendered speechless by what they’d discovered. 

Both of my optic nerves looked incinerated - the type of injury they’d see in someone who’d sustained serious facial burns. Finally, the lead doctor just said it in plain English. I watched the words leave his lips with perfect acuity. 

“You’re blind.” 

Obviously, that wasn’t true, or the truth was more complicated. 

My nerves may have been burned to a crisp,

but my deep eye was wide open. 

- - - - -

2026:

The morning after retrieving the tapes, I told my husband we needed to talk. Shame swept over his face. I suppose he’d been dreading this conversation. 

“After everything…I don’t know; I guess I’m struggling to accept what you did, Eric.” 

His eyes became glassy.

“I understand.”

“Hey ! It’s not the end of the world. I think I just need a little space - could you spend the weekend at your parents'?”

He nodded. 

“Yeah. I’ll start packing a bag.” 

Truthfully, I didn’t care that he’d cheated. It barely fazed me. But recognizing the opportunity, I pretended to be devastated. It was an investment. Something I could capitalize on down the road. 

Once he was gone, I started to prepare. 

I pulled the old VHS player out of the attic and connected it to the TV in our foyer. 

I grabbed some chalk from the garage and sketched the deep eye on the floor. All these years later, I remember the pattern - couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. Those concentric circles are graffitied on the inside of my skull.

When I was done, I concealed it, sliding a rug over the design. 

The thrumming was getting louder. My mark was pulsing quicker.

I would not end up like David, a white smudge of ash sprayed across the floor. 

So, I steadied myself. 

Then, I walked over to the stairs and called for my son. 

My husband was always on the fence about kids, but I made sure it happened, one way or another. 

Jeremy arrived at the banister, smiling. 

“Go get your sisters.” 

“Why, what’s up?” 

“Nothing bad - no one’s in trouble.”

I forced a grin. 

I think it was convincing. 

“I want to show you all some of my favorite movies."

1999:

I stared up at the stranger, marveling at his tattered blue suit and the deep black craters hanging beneath his bloodshot eyes.

“Ready to go, Sofia?” he asked. 

A sweating, wide-eyed Ms. Rosa nodded at me.

“Go with David, sweetheart. I promise it’s OK.” 

So, slowly, I nodded too. 

The TV always said I should never go anywhere with a stranger, but didn’t it also say that teachers were a trustworthy type of adult? What should I do? Which rule should I trust? 

But therein lies the central conceit of childhood, the devilish caveats that the TV never bothered to mention:

Life has no absolute rules, 

and trust is a weapon.

I waved to my teacher as we left the classroom. She didn’t wave back, though I could sense her eyes on me as she helped another student at the table farthest from the door. I used to carry a lot of resentment against that woman, but nowadays, I just hope Ms. Rosa spent David’s bribe before the police cuffed her - bought some coke, rode a jet ski, did something fun - talk about a waste if she didn’t. Sold me off and shattered my reality for nothing, nothing at all. 

“It’s bright out,” he said as we walked through the gymnasium, “you have your sunglasses?” 

The question surprised me; sometimes Mom would even forget to ask. 

I smiled and tapped my jeans pocket.

I could trust David if he knew me, right? Because clearly, he knew me. He knew my name. He knew I liked to leave through the gym because it was vacant in the early afternoon, which meant fewer kids gawking at my albino skin. He even knew my albinism affected my eyes. In normal people, eye pigment is a barrier, but I’m not normal, so I needed my sunglasses. 

I slipped on my Ray-Bans and followed him outside. 

A luxury Sedan with tinted windows idled beneath the school’s flagpole. I hopped in the back and nestled my bag into an empty car seat. Five short minutes later, we were on the interstate, going in the wrong direction, but I couldn’t tell, not at first, not until the Blue Ridge Mountains began growing on the horizon. 

I pressed my face into the window and thought: 

Weren’t they supposed to shrink as I got closer to home?

Embers crackled in my chest. Reflexively, I imagined Kermit the Frog saying, “Please, Sofia, be patient”, and I felt those embers cool. I had a history of impatient outbursts, losing my shit when subjected to situations my young mind couldn’t grasp. Thus, my mom had gotten into the habit of saying that Kermit would be thoroughly disappointed in me if I wasn’t patient, which worked wonders for my “behavior”. Eventually, though, as the mountains began to loom directly overhead, that bit of childhood programming gave way to the inescapable realization that something was wrong. 

Without warning, I went absolutely ballistic. 

I unbuckled myself and leaped up. Shrieked like a tiny banshee. Slammed my fists into David’s neck, demanding my mother. Startled, he jerked the wheel. The car slid halfway into another lane. I lost my footing. My temple cracked against the window. 

Blurry stars swam through my vision.

I slumped down.

- - - - -

2026:

It was faint at first. A spark tracking along the underside of my forearm, running from my wrist to my elbow and back again. I pretended like I didn’t feel it, like it was nothing, but then the tissue itself began visibly writhing, and I could no longer pretend. 

My mark had begun pulsing. 

I asked Eric point-blank to inspect the limb and tell me if anything looked wrong. He’d never been able to see the mounds of violeacous flesh before, so I don’t know why I expected a different result.

“Looks like my wife’s arm.” 

He smiled weakly. 

“You alright, Sofia?”

I suppressed the pain and the terror, the wriggling sensation, the feeling of a snake burrowing through my muscles. 

“Yeah - why wouldn’t I be?”

From there, I suffered the realization that I was alone in my predicament.

But I wouldn’t be alone for long. 

I could see his black comet in the night sky without a telescope. 

I could hear his thrumming, bottomless and terrible.

Twenty-seven years later, 

the stranger was coming back for me. 

- - - - -

1999:

I woke up lying flat across the back seats, staring at the roof, calves draped uncomfortably over the car seat. David’s wispy sobs drifted around me like ghosts in the dark. I swung upright. We were parked along a desolate stretch of road. The moonless sky was embroidered with bright stars. 

My hand crawled along cold leather until it found the door handle. I pulled it, gently, slowly. 

A faint clack emanated from the locked door.

David lifted his forehead from the wheel. 

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. 

Terror dug its teeth into my heart. His shoulder-length hair was wild. His sunken cheeks glistened with fresh tears. He looked insane. Prone to violence. I compressed my body into the corner, ripping at the handle, hoping against hope that one more vigorous tug would set me free.

He leaned over his seat, took a mammoth inhale, and then, 

the man started pleading.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

The way I understood it, kids begged adults for help, not the other way around, and yet, there he was, beseeching my help like I had the power to say no. His speech was manic and disjointed, jumping from wild claims to rambling apologies to convoluted anecdotes about faraway stars and back again. I struggled to internalize every little thing exploding from his mouth, but I got the gist of his plea. Something scary was coming, something he called the stranger, and without my protection, the stranger would take him. 

A brief silence washed over us. 

Then, he whispered:

“Will you help me?” 

I took a moment to earnestly consider the request and David as a whole. His puffy eyes oozed desperation. His trembling lips betrayed honest fear. For better or worse, I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt bad for him, and I suppose that’s the fragile beauty of childhood. The man had committed a heinous crime and was undeserving of empathy, but I wasn’t preoccupied with what he did or didn’t deserve. I just saw him for what he was. Sad, scared, and broken.

“…okay. I’ll help you, as long as you promise to take me home afterward.” 

Something illuminated behind his tired eyes. After thanking me profusely, he leaned over the console and began digging through the glove compartment. He pulled out a small black box, which beeped like my family’s old microwave as he typed something into it. Then, he handed it to me. Six red numbers pierced the darkness. 

18:53:03

18:53:02

18:53:01

“Once that reaches zero, one of us will call the police to pick you up. If I’m still here, I’ll do it myself, and if I’m not…” he trailed off, gazing out the windshield at the stars burning their bright white holes in the firmament. 

“You know how to use a phone, right?”

“Yeah.” 

“Great.” 

He pressed the keys into the ignition. The engine roared to life. With a thump, we slid out of the ditch and continued down that deserted road. 

As we traveled, it dawned on me how alone we truly were. There were no people driving in the opposite direction, no gas stations dotting the roadside, no signs of civilization whatsoever. It was just him and me. 

My eyes drifted to the car seat, ominously empty. 

Panic swelled. Each thunderous heartbeat made my ribs tremble.

I lifted the timer from my lap.

18:05:21

I took a deep breath. 

Eighteen hours, five minutes, and twenty-one seconds left; then I get to go home. 

The engine growled as we started up an incline, curling around a mountainside road with a concerning lack of guardrails. The estate stood at the small mountain’s apex, looming at the edge of a plateau that overlooked the interstate. The architecture was sleek and avant-garde, a conglomeration of chrome rectangles stuck together in the vague shape of a house. A large cylinder stood in front, angled towards the sky. The property was encircled by an imposing steel picket fence. Circular bulbs adorned the barrier, casting sickly light that struggled to beat back the darkness. 

David pulled up to the gate, rolled down the window, and tapped his wallet against a sensor. The entrance slid apart. I surveyed the grounds. It looked like some bizarre mixture of modern art and a war zone. An assortment of standing mirrors lay strewn across the lawn. At least a hundred, maybe more. They were positioned equally apart from one another, and nearly all of them were shattered. Fine glass shards blanketed the grass like hail that refused to melt. 

“I…uh…tried some different solutions before I realized I needed - “ he paused, clicking his tongue “ - someone special, like you, to keep the stranger away.” 

Fear tightened my throat. 

“Will the stranger break me, too?”

“No! No, of course not.” 

We approached the estate. The car began rumbling over cobblestone.

“It’s going to be different for you, trust me.” 

The brakes squealed. David parked his sedan next to the large cylinder. He walked around and opened the back doors. I slid out. My skin prickled. The air outside was unseasonably cold, almost icy. 

“First things first: do you know how to use a telescope?”

“Yeah, I think so.” 

“Perfect.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “Take a look and tell me what you see.” 

Shivering, I jogged across the cobblestone and bent over, placing my eye on the lens. 

“It’s just…black.” I lifted my head. “Am I supposed to see something?”

A few feet away, David was rifling through the pocket of his suit jacket. He shook his head. 

“Not yet.” 

I heard a whispered “aha!” as he pulled out a small pill bottle. 

“Hungry?”

My stomach grumbled. I nodded. 

He unscrewed the bottle, brought the rim to his mouth, and threw it back like a tequila shot. 

“Me too,” he rasped, “I got some leftover mac N’ cheese in the fridge.” 

He offered me his hand. 

I clasped it, and he guided me into the estate. 

Our footsteps echoed through the front narrow hallway, which opened into a cavernous vestibule illuminated by a gargantuan electric chandelier. A cathode ray television sat alone at the center of the massive room. The rest of the furniture was stacked carelessly against the walls. Half-filled book shelves, ornate armories, luxury sofas, red satin chairs, and fully stocked bar carts, all moved out of the way to create space for a single, bargain-bin TV. 

David grabbed a comforter from a nearby closet and laid it in front of the TV. 

“Take a seat.” 

Hesistantly, I began walking. A strange smell lingered in the air, harsh and metallic, like burnt gunpowder or welding fumes. I plopped down on the comforter and set the timer next to me. Then, I looked up at the man, waiting for my next instruction. Exhaustion had made me pliable; I just wanted it all to be over. 

A nervous smile spread across his face.

“The next two days are going to fly by. We’re just gonna relax and have ourselves a movie marathon - my personal recuts of the classics.” A sputtering chuckle poured from his lips. The pained laughter reverberated through the seemingly empty estate, and all the while, he stared at me with unblinking eyes, clenching and unclenching his sweat-caked palms. 

His mouth gradually closed. 

After what felt like decades of stasis, he said:

“Don’t ever leave this room without my permission. Got it?” 

I nodded.

“Great. Be back with the mac N’ cheese in a jiff.” 

He turned and staggered away, slamming his body into one of the vestibule’s many doors. 

I thought I heard something while he was gone. 

Whispers behind the walls. Airy, breathless noises. Was it his family? Did he have other kids trapped here, too? I considered squeezing through the heaps of furniture and pressing my ear to the wall, but before any bravery could crystallize, David burst into the room, carrying two things: a bowl of macaroni and a stack of VHS tapes tucked in his armpit. 

The meal wasn’t gourmet, but it was palatable, and trauma tends to work up an appetite. As I inhaled hot spoonfuls of store-bought pasta, David carefully placed the tapes onto the comforter. They had no identifying labels. Instead, each bore a crudely scribbled number between the reels. One through eight. A sequence. 

He inserted tape 1 into the machine and pressed play. 

The Walt Disney logo twinkled across the screen, a cheery melody galloping over random pops of static, followed by previews, and eventually, Mulan. 

As we watched, a sudden wave of feverish euphoria surged through my veins. My heart raced. I became enraptured with the movie, talking David’s ear off about every little detail. He grinned, nodding along. I shouldn’t have been smiling, but I was; I couldn’t control it. 

Then, during the tail end of A Girl Worth Fighting For, something strange happened. 

The tape seemed to skip. The movie froze on the image of a snowy mountaintop. It was a blip - couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second - but during that time, my body went haywire. Pressure exploded behind my eyes. My limbs were on fire, but my chest was seized by an aching chill. A thrumming noise swirled around me, like the beating of helicopter blades pitched down ten octaves, so deafening that I couldn’t hear anything else. I sucked in a sharp gulp of air, but just as soon as I did - 

it all stopped. 

The movie continued. 

My body settled. 

The thrumming vanished. 

“You OK, Sofia?” David asked, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turned to him and thought for a moment. The experience was so fleeting, so bizarre and inexplicable, I had no idea what to say other than: 

“Yeah, I’m OK…could I have some more mac N’ cheese?” 

He tussled my hair. 

“Coming right up.” 

As he paced away, David snickered and whispered something under his breath: a double entendre that I wouldn’t understand until much later. 

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down…”

- - - - -

2026:

I always knew this day would come. 

My nebulous contingency plan had been slowly taking shape for years. Arrangements had been made. Pieces were in place. I was terrified, but I was ready. 

I snuck downstairs around midnight. The estate, whatever was left of it, was a ten-minute drive away. I’d stayed close for a reason. 

As I loaded the car, a loose thread nagged at me. 

I wondered how much time I had left. 

Days? Weeks? Months? 

I couldn’t be sure, and I had no one to ask. I’d learned a lot about David in the last twenty-seven years, but how he calculated when the stranger would arrive was the one thing I could never suss out. 

So, unlike before, I wouldn’t have the luxury of a countdown. 

I sighed, swallowed some aspirin, and placed my shovel into the trunk.

- - - - -

1999:

Tape 2 was Hercules. 

Tape 3 was The Sandlot. 

Then Home Alone, Hocus Pocus, The Iron Giant, so on and so on. 

Sleep never came for me.  I felt violently awake and frantically happy. Night turned to morning, though the room was windowless, so I only realized when David brought in a plate of eggs and bacon. 

With each film in the sequence, the skips were evolving. 

Mulan had one. 

Hocus Pocus had dozens. 

My reactions intensified - more pressure, sharper pain - and just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, I saw something in the skip. A black and white diagram of wavy, concentric circles, sort of like a fingerprint. It flashed for only a moment, but I felt it inside me, like I’d been branded, like the design had become a part of who I was. Then, a release. The kind of soothing pleasure you get after popping a stubborn zit. I looked over to David. 

My mind went blank. 

His face. 

God, his face. 

Thick cords of bloated scar tissue split it diagonally, squirming like a trio of oversized leeches ferociously draining their fill. 

I scrambled to my feet. The comforter slid across the wooden floor, making my already frenzied movements even more clumsy. David shot up. The violet-colored cords seemed to react to his concern, squirming harder, faster. 

“Wait!! Sofia, I can explain!” 

I didn’t stop, I didn’t slow, I bolted through that hellish room with wild abandon, sprinting down the narrow hallway, wheezing from exertion, reaching towards the door. 

A pair of arms wrapped around my stomach. 

They lifted me up, pulling me away. 

I thrashed. Kicked. Elbowed. Screamed. 

“Sofia - please - relax!” he grunted. 

I barely heard him, and I certainly didn’t relax. I was done relaxing. 

“Let me go! Let me go! Take me home!” 

David’s hold loosened. His forearm slid up my chest, close enough for me to bite. I opened wide, threw my head down, and dug my teeth into his wrist. He howled like a wounded animal. Sticky warmth trickled onto my tongue. He twisted his body to one side, then rapidly to the other while letting go, launching me into the air. I thumped against the floor and tumbled across the comforter, dazed, hurting, broken. The fight in me gave out like a bad knee. I pressed my face into the blanket, slammed my eyes shut, and let the tears flow. 

It’s all I had left. 

“You think I’m enjoying this?”  

Frazzled groans and restless stomps filled my ears. I pushed my head into the comforter, but I couldn’t drown him out. 

“I made one - ONE - mistake. I never should’ve contacted him, the empty eye at the back of space. I thought he’d get the message and come help us, save us, give us the tools to fix ourselves, but no. The stranger doesn’t give. He takes!”

The crash of toppling furniture reverberated through the vestibule. 

“My partner the first year - “ 

CRASH. 

“My wife the next - “ 

CRASH. 

“Then my son, my only child, gone, but he’s not gonna take me, goddamnit!“ 

CRASH. CRASH. CRASH. 

He thundered back over to me. The vibrations rattled my small body. He wedged his foot beneath my torso and rolled his ankle, flipping me onto my back, but I would not look at him. 

“So I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry you’re here. I’m sorry for forcing your deep eye open. I’m sorry you can see my mark - “ 

Fingertips slammed into my eyebrows and sinuses. He yanked at my eyelids. 

“LOOK. AT. ME.” 

David was bent over, inches from my face. Damp, brutish exhales caressed my cheeks. He lowered the volume of his voice, but it wasn’t any gentler. Malice dripped from every syllable. 

“You realize you’re in danger, right?” 

His marks throbbed. Face-to-face, I could hear them pulse, wet and sloshing. 

“Not from me - I’d never hurt you - but the stranger? He would. He will. If you can see these - “ he paused, pointing a trembling finger at his marks, “- that means he can see you, and his comet is very, very close. How close?” 

He grabbed the timer and slammed it into my face. 

“Three hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty seconds away.” 

David arched the device over his head and smashed it into the floor right above my head, grazing my scalp. 

"Want to go home? Well, either we both make it out of here, or neither of us does, so pay attention.”

He stood up, stepped away, grasped the edge of the comforter, and heaved it out from under me. I landed chest-first onto the floor. The scent of burnt gunpowder stung my nostrils. I lifted my head. A patch of wavy, concentric circles had been carved into the wood. The design was identical to what I’d seen on the tape, but with strange white ash caked into the grooves. 

“Sit there, stare at the doorway, and wait.” 

I pushed up, sat on the design, and stared forward. 

David paced into view. 

“Got it?” 

I thought for a moment. 

“Yeah. I understand.” 

- - - - -

2026:

The mountainside plateau was thick with overgrowth. As I trudged through the dense thicket, there was little sign of the ungodly things David’s wealth had built. 

No avant-garde estate. 

No high-powered telescope. 

No shattered mirrors. 

Only scattered remnants of a fractured gate, rusted and vine-strangled.

Took me until dawn to find the right spot. My shoulders were aching, my palms were raw, but they were there, buried at the foot of a sugar maple, all eight of them. I brushed off dirt and debris. Under the weathered plastic wrap, I could faintly see the number one looking back at me. 

I prayed the tapes would still work. 

- - - - -

1999:

Everything was still. 

The front door hung ajar, propped open by a heavy ceramic vase.

White starshine rained down from the cloudless night sky, glinting against the broken mirrors visible from my place at the center of the room. A low, relentless thrumming vibrated through the estate, louder with each passing second.  

00:01:11

00:01:10

00:01:09

David was somewhere behind me, but I could not look back; it was against his two rules. 

Stare forward, 

and never close your eyes. 

I shouldn’t be worried, he said. I was special; my albino skin was a gift and a barrier. It would confuse the stranger, repelling his advance, reflecting him back into the void. If I listened to him, if I followed my captor’s instructions to the letter, I would be safe; I would be set free. 

00:00:24

00:00:23

The thrumming grew monstrous; it beat against my flesh, rattling my bones. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:16

00:00:15

The sky came alive. The atmosphere rippled, throbbed, contorted, as if something were behind the inky darkness, trying to rip its way through. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:02

00:00:01

Silence. 

I could no longer see outside the door. It wasn’t an earthly darkness, like a shadow. A shadow would’ve spilled over the doorframe. A shadow implies distant light. This was a black curtain draped over our only exit, and it carried no light. 

This wasn’t darkness; it was absence. 

Then, movement. 

A slow, steady expansion over the doorframe. It looked human, but only in the vaguest sense, like seeing a stick-figure drawing and deciding the artist was trying to depict a person; it looked human because my brain gave it that label. It was featureless, save for its margins, which were teeming with flittering black splinters. Still, I could tell it was staring at me. Inspecting me with a cruel curiosity. A burning sensation washed over the surface of my eyes, like they were being pressed against a hot grill, but it was pleasurable; the liberating bliss of consumption. As the stranger skulked closer, poised to take me, I thought of David, the liar, the manipulator, the man I could never trust, 

and I did not close my eyes. 

But I turned around. 

The moment I stopped watching it, the stranger flew by me and proceeded towards David, who was cowering at the very back of the room. He screamed as it made contact. That scream started as a shrill, bloodcurdling noise, but deepened into a low, rumbling howl, gradually dissipating into nothingness. 

The stranger retracted. 

A searing pain flared along my forearm as he passed. As he dragged his black splinters against my bare skin, I felt a piece of him infiltrating my mind, relaying a simple promise. 

Someday, he’d be back for me.

The black curtain receded. 

My mark pulsed, and the thrumming resumed in tandem, deafening at first, but it grew quieter, and the pulsing grew sluggish, and eventually everything was still. 

I lurched to my feet and limped towards one of the doors at the back of the room. One of them had to have a phone. 

As I approached, I saw what remained of David: a smudge of white ash in the vague shape of a person. I found other similar smudges while searching for a phone. Old ones, with ash that was gray and flaking. Three in total. Two were about the size of David, and one was much, much smaller. 

I found a working phone in the kitchen. Nearby, there was a stack of unopened letters. Bills that David never paid, by the looks of it. I calmly read the address off one of them to the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

The police were on their way. 

I raced through the vestibule, finally about to leave that godforsaken estate, but something caught my eye. 

David’s movies, scattered across the floor. 

I looked at my scar, the stranger’s promise, then back to the tapes. 

I returned to the kitchen and located a steel ladle and some plastic wrap. 

As dawn crested over the horizon and sirens wailed in the distance, I placed the last tape into a shallow hole at the foot of a sugar maple.

I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. 

Turns out, I was on the precipice of kidney failure, partially from the large quantity of stimulants discovered in my blood, but mostly from critical dehydration. With fluids, the damage resolved quickly, but there was one other problem, something that wasn’t as easy to reconcile. 

My mark. 

I screamed at the staff, begging them to bandage it or cut it off, because I couldn’t stand to look at it, and all they saw was a normal, healthy arm. Eventually, I got with the program. If they couldn’t see it, there was no point in complaining. I pretended like it wasn’t there - that tactic got me out of the hospital and through most of my adult life without issue. 

The day before I was due to go home, one of my doctors noticed something, a subtle abnormality. A grayish discoloration in the whites of my eyes. Mom reminded the doctor of my albinism, but they said it was different. An ophthalmologist examined me that afternoon. They applied special drops that allowed them to visualize the inside of my eye with a microscope. 

I heard them gasp. 

They did it a second time. 

Then, they called in a handful of colleagues, who all took turns wordlessly examining my eyes, rendered speechless by what they’d discovered. 

Both of my optic nerves looked incinerated - the type of injury they’d see in someone who’d sustained serious facial burns. Finally, the lead doctor just said it. I watched the words leave his lips with perfect acuity. 

“You’re blind.” 

Obviously, that wasn’t true, or the truth was more complicated. 

My nerves may have been burned to a crisp, destroying them completely,

but my deep eye was wide open. 

- - - - -

2026:

The morning after retrieving the tapes, I told my husband we needed to talk. Shame swept over his face. I suppose he’d been dreading this conversation. 

“After everything…I don’t know; I guess I’m struggling to accept what you did, Eric.” 

His eyes became glassy.

“I understand.”

“Hey ! It’s not the end of the world. I think I just need a little space - could you spend the weekend at your parents'?”

He nodded. 

“Yeah. I’ll start packing a bag.” 

Truthfully, I didn’t care that he’d cheated. It barely fazed me. But recognizing the opportunity, I pretended to be devastated. It was an investment. Something I could capitalize on down the road. 

Once he was gone, I started to prepare. 

I pulled the old VHS player out of the attic and connected it to the TV in our foyer. 

I grabbed some chalk from the garage and sketched the deep eye on the floor. All these years later, I remember the pattern - couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. Those concentric circles are graffitied on the inside of my skull.

When I was done, I concealed it, sliding a rug over the design. 

The thrumming was getting louder. My mark was pulsing quicker.

I would not end up like David, a white smudge of ash sprayed across the floor. 

So, I steadied myself. 

Then, I walked over to the stairs and called for my son. 

My husband was always on the fence about kids, but I made sure it happened, one way or another. 

Jeremy arrived at the banister, smiling. 

“Go get your sisters.” 

“Why, what’s up?” 

“Nothing bad - no one’s in trouble.”

I forced a grin. 

I think it was convincing. 

“I want to show you all some of my favorite movies. "

1999:

I stared up at the stranger, marveling at his tattered blue suit and the deep black craters hanging beneath his bloodshot eyes.

“Ready to go, Sofia?” he asked. 

A sweating, wide-eyed Ms. Rosa nodded at me.

“Go with David, sweetheart. I promise it’s OK.” 

So, slowly, I nodded too. 

The TV always said I should never go anywhere with a stranger, but didn’t it also say that teachers were a trustworthy type of adult? What should I do? Which rule should I trust? 

But therein lies the central conceit of childhood, the devilish caveats that the TV never bothered to mention:

Life has no absolute rules, 

and trust is a weapon.

I waved to my teacher as we left the classroom. She didn’t wave back, though I could sense her eyes on me as she helped another student at the table farthest from the door. I used to carry a lot of resentment against that woman, but nowadays, I just hope Ms. Rosa spent David’s bribe before the police cuffed her - bought some coke, rode a jet ski, did something fun - talk about a waste if she didn’t. Sold me off and shattered my reality for nothing, nothing at all. 

“It’s bright out,” he said as we walked through the gymnasium, “you have your sunglasses?” 

The question surprised me; sometimes Mom would even forget to ask. 

I smiled and tapped my jeans pocket.

I could trust David if he knew me, right? Because clearly, he knew me. He knew my name. He knew I liked to leave through the gym because it was vacant in the early afternoon, which meant fewer kids gawking at my albino skin. He even knew my albinism affected my eyes. In normal people, eye pigment is a barrier, but I’m not normal, so I needed my sunglasses. 

I slipped on my Ray-Bans and followed him outside. 

A luxury Sedan with tinted windows idled beneath the school’s flagpole. I hopped in the back and nestled my bag into an empty car seat. Five short minutes later, we were on the interstate, going in the wrong direction, but I couldn’t tell, not at first, not until the Blue Ridge Mountains began growing on the horizon. 

I pressed my face into the window and thought: 

Weren’t they supposed to shrink as I got closer to home?

Embers crackled in my chest. Reflexively, I imagined Kermit the Frog saying, “Please, Sofia, be patient”, and I felt those embers cool. I had a history of impatient outbursts, losing my shit when subjected to situations my young mind couldn’t grasp. Thus, my mom had gotten into the habit of saying that Kermit would be thoroughly disappointed in me if I wasn’t patient, which worked wonders for my “behavior”. Eventually, though, as the mountains began to loom directly overhead, that bit of childhood programming gave way to the inescapable realization that something was wrong. 

Without warning, I went absolutely ballistic. 

I unbuckled myself and leaped up. Shrieked like a tiny banshee. Slammed my fists into David’s neck, demanding my mother. Startled, he jerked the wheel. The car slid halfway into another lane. I lost my footing. My temple cracked against the window. 

Blurry stars swam through my vision.

I slumped down.

- - - - -

2026:

It was faint at first. A spark tracking along the underside of my forearm, running from my wrist to my elbow and back again. I pretended like I didn’t feel it, like it was nothing, but then the tissue itself began visibly writhing, and I could no longer pretend. 

My mark had begun pulsing. 

I asked Eric point-blank to inspect the limb and tell me if anything looked wrong. He’d never been able to see the mounds of violeacous flesh before, so I don’t know why I expected a different result.

“Looks like my wife’s arm.” 

He smiled weakly. 

“You alright, Sofia?”

I suppressed the pain and the terror, the wriggling sensation, the feeling of a snake burrowing through my muscles. 

“Yeah - why wouldn’t I be?”

From there, I suffered the realization that I was alone in my predicament.

But I wouldn’t be alone for long. 

I could see his black comet in the night sky without a telescope. 

I could hear his thrumming, bottomless and terrible.

Twenty-seven years later, 

the stranger was coming back for me. 

- - - - -

1999:

I woke up lying flat across the back seats, staring at the roof, calves draped uncomfortably over the car seat. David’s wispy sobs drifted around me like ghosts in the dark. I swung upright. We were parked along a desolate stretch of road. The moonless sky was embroidered with bright stars. 

My hand crawled along cold leather until it found the door handle. I pulled it, gently, slowly. 

A faint clack emanated from the locked door.

David lifted his forehead from the wheel. 

Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. 

Terror dug its teeth into my heart. His shoulder-length hair was wild. His sunken cheeks glistened with fresh tears. He looked insane. Prone to violence. I compressed my body into the corner, ripping at the handle, hoping against hope that one more vigorous tug would set me free.

He leaned over his seat, took a mammoth inhale, and then, 

the man started pleading.

I stared at him, dumbfounded. 

The way I understood it, kids begged adults for help, not the other way around, and yet, there he was, beseeching my help like I had the power to say no. His speech was manic and disjointed, jumping from wild claims to rambling apologies to convoluted anecdotes about faraway stars and back again. I struggled to internalize every little thing exploding from his mouth, but I got the gist of his plea. Something scary was coming, something he called the stranger, and without my protection, the stranger would take him. 

A brief silence washed over us. 

Then, he whispered:

“Will you help me?” 

I took a moment to earnestly consider the request and David as a whole. His puffy eyes oozed desperation. His trembling lips betrayed honest fear. For better or worse, I wasn’t frightened anymore. I felt bad for him, and I suppose that’s the fragile beauty of childhood. The man had committed a heinous crime and was undeserving of empathy, but I wasn’t preoccupied with what he did or didn’t deserve. I just saw him for what he was. Sad, scared, and broken.

“…okay. I’ll help you, as long as you promise to take me home afterward.” 

Something illuminated behind his tired eyes. After thanking me profusely, he leaned over the console and began digging through the glove compartment. He pulled out a small black box, which beeped like my family’s old microwave as he typed something into it. Then, he handed it to me. Six red numbers pierced the darkness. 

18:53:03

18:53:02

18:53:01

“Once that reaches zero, one of us will call the police to pick you up. If I’m still here, I’ll do it myself, and if I’m not…” he trailed off, gazing out the windshield at the stars burning their bright white holes in the firmament. 

“You know how to use a phone, right?”

“Yeah.” 

“Great.” 

He pressed the keys into the ignition. The engine roared to life. With a thump, we slid out of the ditch and continued down that deserted road. 

As we traveled, it dawned on me how alone we truly were. There were no people driving in the opposite direction, no gas stations dotting the roadside, no signs of civilization whatsoever. It was just him and me. 

My eyes drifted to the car seat, ominously empty. 

Panic swelled. Each thunderous heartbeat made my ribs tremble.

I lifted the timer from my lap.

18:05:21

I took a deep breath. 

Eighteen hours, five minutes, and twenty-one seconds left; then I get to go home. 

The sedan growled as we started up an incline, curling around a mountainside road with a concerning lack of guardrails. The estate stood at the small mountain’s apex, looming at the edge of a plateau that overlooked the interstate. The architecture was sleek and avant-garde, a conglomeration of chrome rectangles stuck together in the vague shape of a house. A large cylinder stood in front, angled towards the sky. The property was encircled by an imposing steel picket fence. Circular bulbs adorned the barrier, casting sickly light that struggled to beat back the darkness. 

David pulled up to the gate, rolled down the window, and tapped his wallet against a sensor. The entrance slid apart. I surveyed the grounds. It looked like some bizarre mixture of modern art and a war zone. An assortment of standing mirrors lay strewn across the lawn. At least a hundred, maybe more. They were positioned equally apart from one another, and nearly all of them were shattered. Fine glass shards blanketed the grass like hail that refused to melt. 

“I…uh…tried some different solutions before I realized I needed - “ he paused, clicking his tongue “ - someone special, like you, to keep the stranger away.” 

Fear tightened my throat. 

“Will the stranger break me, too?”

“No! No, of course not.” 

We approached the estate. The car began rumbling over cobblestone.

“It’s going to be different for you, trust me.” 

The brakes squealed. David parked his sedan next to the large cylinder. He walked around and opened the back doors. I slid out. My skin prickled. The air outside was unseasonably cold, almost icy. 

“First things first: do you know how to use a telescope?”

“Yeah, I think so.” 

“Perfect.” He gestured towards the cylinder. “Take a look and tell me what you see.” 

Shivering, I jogged across the cobblestone and bent over, placing my eye on the lens. 

“It’s just…black.” I lifted my head. “Am I supposed to see something?”

A few feet away, David was rifling through the pocket of his suit jacket. He shook his head. 

“Not yet.” 

I heard a whispered “aha!” as he pulled out a small pill bottle. 

“Hungry?”

My stomach grumbled. I nodded. 

He unscrewed the bottle, brought the rim to his mouth, and threw it back like a tequila shot. 

“Me too,” he rasped, “I got some leftover mac N’ cheese in the fridge.” 

He offered me his hand. 

I clasped it, and he guided me into the estate. 

Our footsteps echoed through the narrow front hallway, which opened into a cavernous vestibule illuminated by a gargantuan electric chandelier. A cathode ray television sat alone at the center of the massive room. The rest of the furniture was stacked carelessly against the walls. Half-filled book shelves, ornate armories, luxury sofas, red satin chairs, and fully stocked bar carts, all moved out of the way to create space for a single, bargain-bin TV. 

David grabbed a comforter from a nearby closet and laid it in front of the TV. 

“Take a seat.” 

Hesistantly, I began walking. A strange smell lingered in the air, harsh and metallic, like burnt gunpowder or welding fumes. I plopped down on the comforter and set the timer next to me. Then, I looked up at the man, waiting for my next instruction. Exhaustion had made me pliable; I just wanted it all to be over. 

A nervous smile spread across his face.

“The next two days are going to fly by. We’re just gonna relax and have ourselves a movie marathon - my personal recuts of the classics.” A sputtering chuckle poured from his lips. The pained laughter reverberated through the seemingly empty estate, and all the while, he stared at me with unblinking eyes, clenching and unclenching his sweat-caked palms. 

His mouth gradually closed. 

After what felt like decades of stasis, he said:

“Don’t ever leave this room without my permission. Got it?” 

I nodded.

“Great. Be back with the mac N’ cheese in a jiff.” 

He turned and staggered away, slamming his body into one of the vestibule’s many doors. 

I thought I heard something while he was gone. 

Whispers behind the walls. Airy, breathless noises. Was it his family? Did he have other kids trapped here, too? I considered squeezing through the heaps of furniture and pressing my ear to the wall, but before any bravery could crystallize, David burst into the room, carrying two things: a bowl of macaroni and a stack of VHS tapes tucked in his armpit. 

The meal wasn’t gourmet, but it was palatable, and trauma tends to work up an appetite. As I inhaled hot spoonfuls of store-bought pasta, David carefully placed the tapes onto the comforter. They had no identifying labels. Instead, each bore a crudely scribbled number between the reels. One through eight. A sequence. 

He inserted tape 1 into the machine and pressed play. 

The Walt Disney logo twinkled across the screen, a cheery melody galloping over random pops of static, followed by previews, and eventually, Mulan. 

As we watched, a sudden wave of feverish euphoria surged through my veins. My heart raced. I became enraptured with the movie, talking David’s ear off about every little detail. He grinned, nodding along. I shouldn’t have been smiling, but I was; I couldn’t control it. 

Then, during the tail end of A Girl Worth Fighting For, something strange happened. 

The tape seemed to skip. The movie froze on the image of a snowy mountaintop. It was a blip - couldn’t have lasted more than a tenth of a second - but during that time, my body went haywire. Pressure exploded behind my eyes. My limbs were on fire, but my chest was seized by an aching chill. A thrumming noise swirled around me, like the beating of helicopter blades pitched down ten octaves, so deafening that I couldn’t hear anything else. I sucked in a sharp gulp of air, but just as soon as I did - 

it all stopped. 

The movie continued. 

My body settled. 

The thrumming vanished. 

“You OK, Sofia?” David asked, laying a gentle hand on my shoulder. I turned to him and thought for a moment. The experience was so fleeting, so bizarre and inexplicable, I had no idea what to say other than: 

“Yeah, I’m OK…could I have some more mac N’ cheese?” 

He tussled my hair. 

“Coming right up.” 

As he paced away, David snickered and whispered something under his breath: a double entendre that I wouldn’t understand until much later. 

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down…”

- - - - -

2026:

I always knew this day would come. 

My nebulous contingency plan had been slowly taking shape for years. Arrangements had been made. Pieces were in place. I was terrified, but I was ready. 

I snuck downstairs around midnight. The estate, whatever was left of it, was a ten-minute drive away. I’d stayed close for a reason. 

As I loaded the car, a loose thread nagged at me. 

I wondered how much time I had left. 

Days? Weeks? Months? 

I couldn’t be sure, and I had no one to ask. I’d learned a lot about David in the last twenty-seven years, but how he calculated when the stranger would arrive was the one thing I could never suss out. 

So, unlike before, I wouldn’t have the luxury of a countdown. 

I sighed, swallowed some aspirin, and placed my shovel into the trunk.

- - - - -

1999:

Tape 2 was Hercules. 

Tape 3 was The Sandlot. 

Then Home Alone, Hocus Pocus, The Iron Giant, so on and so on. 

Sleep never came for me.  I felt violently awake and frantically happy. Night turned to morning, though the room was windowless, so I only realized when David brought in a plate of eggs and bacon. 

With each film in the sequence, the skips were evolving. 

Mulan had one. 

Hocus Pocus had dozens. 

My reactions intensified - more pressure, sharper pain - and just when I thought I couldn’t take any more, I saw something in the skip. A black and white diagram of wavy, concentric circles, sort of like a fingerprint. It flashed for only a moment, but I felt it inside me, like I’d been branded, like the design had become a part of who I was. Then, a release. The kind of soothing pleasure you get after popping a stubborn zit. I looked over to David. 

My mind went blank. 

His face. 

God, his face. 

Thick cords of bloated scar tissue split it diagonally, squirming like a trio of oversized leeches ferociously draining their fill. 

I scrambled to my feet. The comforter slid across the wooden floor, making my already frenzied movements even more clumsy. David shot up. The violet-colored cords seemed to react to his concern, squirming harder, faster. 

“Wait!! Sofia, I can explain!” 

I didn’t stop, I didn’t slow, I bolted through that hellish room with wild abandon, sprinting down the narrow hallway, wheezing from exertion, reaching towards the door. 

A pair of arms wrapped around my stomach. 

They lifted me up, pulling me away. 

I thrashed. Kicked. Elbowed. Screamed. 

“Sofia - please - relax!” he grunted. 

I barely heard him, and I certainly didn’t relax. I was done relaxing. 

“Let me go! Let me go! Take me home!” 

David’s hold loosened. His forearm slid up my chest, close enough for me to bite. I opened wide, threw my head down, and dug my teeth into his wrist. He howled like a wounded animal. Sticky warmth trickled onto my tongue. He twisted his body to one side, then rapidly to the other while letting go, launching me into the air. I thumped against the floor and tumbled across the comforter, dazed, hurting, broken. The fight in me gave out like a bad knee. I pressed my face into the blanket, slammed my eyes shut, and let the tears flow. 

It’s all I had left. 

“You think I’m enjoying this?”  

Frazzled groans and restless stomps filled my ears. I pushed my head into the comforter, but I couldn’t drown him out. 

“I made one - ONE - mistake. I never should’ve contacted him, the empty eye at the back of space. I thought he’d get the message and come help us, save us, give us the tools to fix ourselves, but no. The stranger doesn’t give. He takes!”

The crash of toppling furniture reverberated through the vestibule. 

“My partner the first year - “ 

CRASH. 

“My wife the next - “ 

CRASH. 

“Then my son, my only child, gone, but he’s not gonna take me, goddamnit!“ 

CRASH. CRASH. CRASH. 

He thundered back over to me. The vibrations rattled my small body. He wedged his foot beneath my torso and rolled his ankle, flipping me onto my back, but I would not look at him. 

“So I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry you’re here. I’m sorry for forcing your deep eye open. I’m sorry you can see my mark - “ 

Fingertips slammed into my eyebrows and sinuses. He yanked at my eyelids. 

“LOOK. AT. ME.” 

David was bent over, inches from my face. Damp, brutish exhales caressed my cheeks. He lowered the volume of his voice, but it wasn’t any gentler. Malice dripped from every syllable. 

“You realize you’re in danger, right?” 

His marks throbbed. Face-to-face, I could hear them pulse, wet and sloshing. 

“Not from me - I’d never hurt you - but the stranger? He would. He will. If you can see these - “ he paused, pointing a trembling finger at his marks, “- that means he can see you, and his comet is very, very close. How close?” 

He grabbed the timer and slammed it into my face. 

“Three hours, sixteen minutes, and thirty seconds away.” 

David arched the device over his shoulder and smashed it into the floor right above my head, grazing my scalp. 

"Want to go home? Well, either we both make it out of here, or neither of us does, so pay attention.”

He stood up, stepped away, grasped the edge of the comforter, and heaved it out from under me. I landed chest-first onto the floor. The scent of burnt gunpowder stung my nostrils. I lifted my head. A patch of wavy, concentric circles had been carved into the wood. The design was identical to what I’d seen on the tape, but with strange white ash caked into the grooves. 

“Sit there, stare at the doorway, and wait.” 

I pushed up, sat on the design, and stared forward. 

David paced into view. 

“Got it?” 

I thought for a moment. 

“Yeah. I understand.” 

- - - - -

2026:

The mountainside plateau was thick with overgrowth. As I trudged through the dense thicket, there was little sign of the ungodly things David’s wealth had built. 

No avant-garde estate. 

No high-powered telescope. 

No shattered mirrors. 

Only scattered remnants of a fractured gate, rusted and vine-strangled.

Took me until dawn to find the right spot. My shoulders were aching, my palms were raw, but they were there, buried at the foot of a sugar maple, all eight of them. I brushed off dirt and debris. Under the weathered plastic wrap, I could faintly see the number one looking back at me. 

I prayed the tapes would still work. 

- - - - -

1999:

Everything was still. 

The front door hung ajar, propped open by a heavy ceramic vase.

White starshine rained down from the cloudless night sky, glinting against the broken mirrors visible from my place at the center of the room. A low, relentless thrumming vibrated through the estate, louder with each passing second.  

00:01:11

00:01:10

00:01:09

David was somewhere behind me, but I could not look back; it was against his two rules. 

Stare forward, 

and never close your eyes. 

I shouldn’t be worried, he said. I was special; my albino skin was a gift and a barrier. It would confuse the stranger, repelling his advance, reflecting him back into the void. If I listened to him, if I followed my captor’s instructions to the letter, I would be safe; I would be set free. 

00:00:24

00:00:23

The thrumming grew monstrous; it beat against my flesh, rattling my bones. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:16

00:00:15

The sky came alive. The atmosphere rippled, throbbed, contorted, as if something were behind the inky darkness, trying to rip its way through. 

I stared forward. 

I did not close my eyes. 

00:00:02

00:00:01

Silence. 

I could no longer see outside the door. It wasn’t an earthly darkness, like a shadow. A shadow would’ve spilled over the doorframe. A shadow implies distant light. This was a black curtain draped over our only exit, and it carried no light. 

This wasn’t darkness; it was absence. 

Then, movement. 

A slow, steady expansion over the doorframe. It looked human, but only in the vaguest sense, like seeing a stick-figure drawing and deciding the artist was trying to depict a person; it looked human because my brain gave it that label. It was featureless, save for its margins, which were teeming with flittering black splinters. Still, I could tell it was staring at me. Inspecting me with a cruel curiosity. A burning sensation washed over the surface of my eyes, like they were being pressed against a hot grill, but it was pleasurable; the liberating bliss of consumption. As the stranger skulked closer, poised to take me, I thought of David, the liar, the manipulator, the man I could never trust, 

and I did not close my eyes. 

But I turned around. 

The moment I stopped watching it, the stranger flew by me and proceeded towards David, who was cowering at the very back of the room. He screamed as it made contact. That scream started as a shrill, bloodcurdling noise, but deepened into a low, rumbling howl, gradually dissipating into nothingness. 

The stranger retracted. 

A searing pain flared along my forearm as he passed. As he dragged his black splinters against my bare skin, I felt a piece of him infiltrating my mind, relaying a simple promise. 

Someday, he’d be back for me.

The black curtain receded. 

My mark pulsed, and the thrumming resumed in tandem, deafening at first, but it grew quieter, and the pulsing grew sluggish, and eventually everything was still. 

I lurched to my feet and limped towards one of the doors at the back of the room. One of them had to have a phone. 

As I approached, I saw what remained of David: a smudge of white ash in the vague shape of a person. I found other similar smudges while searching for a phone. Old ones, with ash that was gray and flaking. Three in total. Two were about the size of David, and one was much, much smaller. 

I found a working phone in the kitchen. Nearby, there was a stack of unopened letters. Bills that David never paid, by the looks of it. I calmly read the address off one of them to the 9-1-1 dispatcher.

The police were on their way. 

I raced through the vestibule, finally about to leave that godforsaken estate, but something caught my eye. 

David’s movies, scattered across the floor. 

I looked at my scar, the stranger’s promise, then back to the tapes. 

I returned to the kitchen and located a steel ladle and some plastic wrap. 

As dawn crested over the horizon and sirens wailed in the distance, I placed the last tape into a shallow hole at the foot of a sugar maple.

I spent the next two weeks in the hospital. 

Turns out, I was on the precipice of kidney failure, partially from the large quantity of stimulants discovered in my blood, but mostly from critical dehydration. With fluids, the damage resolved quickly, but there was one other problem, something that wasn’t as easy to reconcile. 

My mark. 

I screamed at the staff, begging them to bandage it or cut it off, because I couldn’t stand to look at it, and all they saw was a normal, healthy arm. Eventually, I got with the program. If they couldn’t see it, there was no point in complaining. I pretended like it wasn’t there - that tactic got me out of the hospital and through most of my adult life without issue. 

The day before I was due to go home, one of my doctors noticed something, a subtle abnormality. A grayish discoloration in the whites of my eyes. Mom reminded the doctor of my albinism, but they said it was different. An ophthalmologist examined me that afternoon. They applied special drops that allowed them to visualize the inside of my eye with a microscope. 

I heard them gasp. 

They did it a second time. 

Then, they called in a handful of colleagues, who all took turns wordlessly examining my eyes, rendered speechless by what they’d discovered. 

Both of my optic nerves looked incinerated - the type of injury they’d see in someone who’d sustained serious facial burns. Finally, the lead doctor just said it in plain English. I watched the words leave his lips with perfect acuity. 

“You’re blind.” 

Obviously, that wasn’t true, or the truth was more complicated. 

My nerves may have been burned to a crisp,

but my deep eye was wide open. 

- - - - -

2026:

The morning after retrieving the tapes, I told my husband we needed to talk. Shame swept over his face. I suppose he’d been dreading this conversation. 

“After everything…I don’t know; I guess I’m struggling to accept what you did, Eric.” 

His eyes became glassy.

“I understand.”

“Hey ! It’s not the end of the world. I think I just need a little space - could you spend the weekend at your parents'?”

He nodded. 

“Yeah. I’ll start packing a bag.” 

Truthfully, I didn’t care that he’d cheated. It barely fazed me. But recognizing the opportunity, I pretended to be devastated. It was an investment. Something I could capitalize on down the road. 

Once he was gone, I started to prepare. 

I pulled the old VHS player out of the attic and connected it to the TV in our foyer. 

I grabbed some chalk from the garage and sketched the deep eye on the floor. All these years later, I remember the pattern - couldn’t forget it even if I wanted to. Those concentric circles are graffitied on the inside of my skull.

When I was done, I concealed it, sliding a rug over the design. 

The thrumming was getting louder. My mark was pulsing quicker.

I would not end up like David, a white smudge of ash sprayed across the floor. 

So, I steadied myself. 

Then, I walked over to the stairs and called for my son. 

My husband was always on the fence about kids, but I made sure it happened, one way or another. 

Jeremy arrived at the banister, smiling. 

“Go get your sisters.” 

“Why, what’s up?” 

“Nothing bad - no one’s in trouble.”

I forced a grin. 

I think it was convincing. 

“I want to show you all some of my favorite movies. "

Today marks the anniversary of Mickey’s death, and I can't hold it all inside anymore. I need to come clean. Not just about what happened that night, but about everything: every unconfessed mistake and every bitter failure. That’s why it's tormenting me, after all. The shape in the sky is drawn to my guilt. Every night, it's there, hovering past my bedroom window or swirling in the darkness above the treetops, begging me to acknowledge the heartless shit I've done, and finally, here I am.

I'm ready to confess.

Fresh out of high school, I scrapped my college plans and got hired as a night security guard. The job didn’t pay well, and it certainly didn’t make my parents proud, but it was low-stress and that’s all I cared about. There was never any trouble. What sane person would leave a warm bed to break into a rubber factory?

Mickey, a burly Irishman about ten years my senior, onboarded me. For how much time we spent together, it was astonishing how little we knew about each other. The man wasn’t a born conversationalist. If he hadn’t come back from his honeymoon with a vicious, lobster-red sunburn, I doubt he would have told me about the wedding. Honestly, I was happy with the professional distance. Mickey was a laid-back guy who didn't expect much from me. No expectations meant no pressure. God knows I don't work well under pressure.

Our last night together was certainly no exception. 

It was after midnight. We were doing our rounds, strolling through the dimly lit parking lot. Mickey was lagging a few feet behind me, chowing down on an oversized gas station hoagie. Crickets chirped in the pines that surrounded the factory. There was a sudden clack. The hazy beam from his flashlight stopped bobbing along the asphalt. Took me a few seconds to realize something was wrong. 

I turned around. 

He was wobbling in place, clawing at his neck and chest, skin paler than the moon, lips tinted this nightmarish blue-gray. The half-eaten sandwich lay scattered at his feet. He was choking. I knew he was choking, and I’d been taught what to do: get behind him, wrap my arms around his belly, and thrust. Just as I was about to help, a familiar dread began crawling across my skin, and my brain erupted with fitful static. 

The specter of doubt was creeping in.

Was I sure I knew what to do? What if I made a mistake? Should I thrust in and up or just in? Did I remember all the steps? Was I supposed to reach into his mouth and try to remove the blockage first? And while those asinine questions left me paralyzed, I just stared at the dying man. Fear was making a mess of his face. Bulging eyes. Sharp creases. Quiet, contorted terror. 

The light left him. 

His body hit the asphalt with a rich, splintering thud. 

I didn’t move. 

Couldn’t tell you exactly how much time passed. It was more than enough to save him, I know that much. 

Eventually, autopilot kicked in. My legs started dragging me towards the factory. By the time my mind caught up to my muscles, I was already inside, dialing 9-1-1 on the break room’s rotary telephone. The dispatcher claimed we were lucky; an ambulance happened to be passing by our otherwise remote location at that very moment. As I sprinted back outside, I told myself everything was going to be OK. Mickey and I were the only people there. The cameras shouldn’t have recorded his death; we’d been too far from the building when he started choking. I could sell them any story I wanted to. No one had to know how badly I fucked up.

Red lights flickered on the horizon. I was so captivated by relief that I nearly tripped over his corpse, looking down with just enough time to skid to a stop. That’s when I noticed it: something on his wrist was glinting against the approaching light. I bent over. It was the silver strap of some cheap watch. Tiny flecks of glass were scattered around where the watch face had been pulverized between his wrist and the asphalt. I perked my ears. I heard a distant siren, but no ticking. 

“No, no, no…” I whispered, furiously rotating the strap. The broken watch read 12:31 AM; Mickey’s time of death immortalized. I checked my own watch. 

My heart plummeted.

1:22 AM. 

I could practically hear the police officer asking, “What kind of person waits a whole fifty minutes before phoning for help?”

The wailing of the sirens grew louder.

The flashing lights were closing in. 

Instinct took over. 

I ripped the watch from his wrist and shoved it into my pocket. 

The ambulance screeched to a halt. EMS leaped from the vehicle, asking what happened as they attempted to resuscitate the long-dead Mickey, and I played my part. I told them he choked and that I’d done everything I could. They lifted the cadaver onto a gurney, carted him into the waiting ambulance, and sped away. 

A few seconds later, I bolted to my car. 

I rolled down the windows and floored the accelerator. Wind tore through the vehicle as I shot onto the interstate, cold air stinging me awake. I weighed my options. I could bury the watch, or keep it, or toss it into one of Missouri’s endless landfills. In the end, though, I knew exactly where it belonged.

It belonged at the bottom of the reservoir my Grandpa had built behind his mansion, with all the other broken things. 

Years had passed since I’d last set foot on the property. I parked along a ditch. A single paved footpath connected the dirt road to the boarded-up estate. Painful energy seemed to radiate from the dilapidated structure; felt like I had a migraine coming on as I walked along the edge of the property, navigating the cluttered mass of pines and white oaks, until I reached a clearing and the musty stench of decaying algae confirmed I’d arrived. I lit a cigarette and sucked in some thick gulps of smoke, trying to repress the old fear bubbling beneath my skin. 

In my family, I’ve always been the odd-one-out. The runt of the litter. My older brother is a Nobel laureate. My twin sister is an Olympian. Both my parents were successful lawyers and my Grandpa earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam. And I'm just...me. Not dumb, but chronically scatterbrained. Not weak, but incredibly clumsy. And anxious. God, I was anxious about everything as a kid. Put it all together, and the diagnosis became clear: I was defective. My parents figured if anyone could fix me, it’d be Grandpa, the familial patriarch, the so-called perfect man, the one who'd made our fortune from nothing. I spent most summers at Grandpa’s estate. They were nothing short of hell, but you want to know the real fucked up part? 

I can feel the toll those summers took on me, but I don’t remember most of them.

There were physical drills. Mental exercises. Prayer. Hikes that seemed to take weeks to complete. But the specifics of all that? Couldn’t tell you. The memories are a hazy, soupy mess. The only events I remember with clarity were the punishment ceremonies. You see, if I ever made a “mistake” - the parameters of which were subjectively defined by Grandpa - I’d be taken out to the reservoir after sunset. He’d hand me something I loved. A toy. An item of clothing. A framed picture. Then, he’d command that I make amends.

“Each mistake is a debt, Lucas. A debt to ourselves and to the gracious heart of the universe. It’s time to pay up. A broken offering to counterbalance what you broke today.” 

I’d snap the toy. Tear at the clothing. Crush the frame beneath my bare foot. Then, I’d throw it into the reservoir and watch that tiny piece of me sink. All the while, Grandpa would be on his knees, shaking clasped hands at the sky, earnestly begging something for forgiveness. I always assumed he was pleading with God: between furious bouts of Vietnamese, he’d repeat the words “no hell” in English, over and over again. Although he was very particular about what went into the reservoir, he was significantly more particular about keeping my broken things sunk. One night, Grandpa caught me attempting to dredge up the fractured remains of my favorite action figure with a bit of fishing line. He didn’t mince words. 

“If you ever defile these gracious waters again, I’ll kill you, child. Or worse.” As a someone that's always been riddled with anxiety, none of this improved my performance; it only made me more skittish, more impulsive, and more dysfunctional, so I can’t say I was upset when the old coot died; drowned in his own damn reservoir. Bon voyage, asshole.

I took the final drag of my cigarette, pulled the broken watch from my pocket, and lobbed both of them into the reservoir. They sank with a dull plop. I expected solace. Much as the punishment ceremonies terrorified me, I did recall feeling a gentle warmth flooding through my body when broken things drifted beneath the surface. That night, though, I experienced no warmth. Instead, a strange apprehension started crackling down my spine. 

Then, from behind me: 

“What're you doing on my property and what the hell did you just throw in there?” 

I shot around. There was a man at the edge of the clearing. The barrel of a rifle gleamed in the moonlight. 

“I’m so sorry…I used to live here…or not me exactly, my family did…a-a-and I thought the property was abandoned, so I d-didn’t think it was trespassing...” 

“You know what? Save it for the cops.”

"What?! No, please, I’ll leave, I need to go, please…” I continued to stutter out a meek appeal, but I didn’t get the sense that the man was still listening.

To this day, I don’t know what came over me. The possibility of my fuck-up being discovered, of having to explain why I’d stolen Mickey’s watch in the first place, turned me into an animal. It wasn’t rational. It’s just what happened. 

There was a soft crunch in the woods. 

He peered over his shoulder.

I grabbed a rock off the ground and launched myself across the clearing. 

The man snapped forward. There was a click. I flinched, but nothing happened. The rifle was jammed. I sped up. More hollow clicks emanated through the clearing, rapid and fearful. 

clickclickclickclickclick

I was nearly on top of him. A cloud passed over the moon. The clearing darkened. I never got a good look at his intact face, and I suppose I'm thankful for that. 

He started to say something. 

I arced the rock over my head,

and I brought it down. 

- - - - -

Vanishing was a simpler process back in the 90s. 

Wasn’t much to it, really. I drove until the scenery looked different. Stayed low and kept my eyes on the news, anxiously awaiting the nationwide manhunt. No such manhunt ever came to be. Far as I could tell, at least - it wasn’t the easiest thing to keep track of. I didn’t know who I killed; I just knew where’d they’d report find his body. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized they may never discover that poor man: Grandpa’s estate wasn’t exactly prone to foot traffic. 

The night after Mickey’s death, I was on my way to Omaha. I planned on driving into the morning, but heavy snowfall forced me to stop. The five-room, single-story motel I stayed at was memorably heinous. 

I jammed the rusty key into the lock and jerked the door open. A battalion of cockroaches skittered into the walls as the hazy lamps clicked on. The frizzy brown carpet had enough splotches and stains to resemble leopard print, and the bathroom reeked of ancient, untamed feculence; the type of caked-in, all-consuming shit-stench that requires decades upon decades of intentional neglect to manifest. Not that any of that mattered, really. Even if I were lodging at the most bougie five-star resort imaginable, swaddled in a Persian silk comforter, I don’t think sleep would've come easy. 

It happened a little after midnight. 

The room was silent. I was lying on top of the bed’s ratty blanket, staring at the ceiling, mentally reviewing my laundry list of fuck-ups, when I finally began to feel drowsy. I let myself drift. I was nearly asleep. 

Movement jolted my eyes wide open. 

Strange shadows danced quietly along the wall. 

I shot upright and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, but nothing changed. Dark blobs ballooned and shrank across the surface with fluid motion, like I was staring into a lava lamp with pitch-black plasma. I traced the shadows to their origin: the room’s large, front-facing window. 

I knew I shouldn’t push aside the blinds and look. With complete and utter certainty, I knew that. But I also knew how to help someone who’s choking, and I knew that murder is an unforgivable transgression, so what difference did knowing really make?

I crept across the room, put my face to the blinds, and peeked through a slit.

The small parking lot was blanketed with undisturbed snow. There were no cars on the road. A soft wind brushed bits of white from here to there, but the dead trees around the motel did not waver. The world looked still. 

Then, I saw it. 

I thought it was a cloud at first, but it was too low, and it was moving too quickly through the sky, casting shadows as it drifted in the moonlight. No part of it made sense. The shape was larger than an SUV but it was thin as a ribbon, and it rippled through the atmosphere like an eel. I pressed my face into the cold glass, mesmerized. It was alien, bizarre, almost beautiful. All of a sudden, there was a change. It was no longer drifting. It seemed to be expanding, stretching like plastic wrap, but I was mistaken, and once I realized what it was actually doing, I rocketed from the window, heart convulsing against the back of my throat.

The shape wasn’t stretching. 

It was getting closer. 

I rushed past the bed and down the narrow bathroom hallway. The shadows deepened. I threw myself into the cramped space between the closet and the broken minifridge. Through shuddering breaths, I peered around the edge. I could barely see; the room had been swallowed by an eclipse.

The shape was right outside the window. 

A muted clicking pierced the silence. It was scarcely audible but violently alive, pulsing with frantic energy: a noise somewhere between the tapping of a pinball machine and the clattering of rat teeth. Unnatural. Inhuman. Continuous.

It only receded when the sun began to rise. 

I packed my meager belongings and left, but I was no longer going to Omaha. I had no plan. No destination. I was just driving away. By sunset, I was entering a hotel in Des Moines, two hundred miles from where I’d started. The night was quiet. The sky was clear. I thought I was safe. 

Then, around 4 A.M., right as I was drifting off, I heard it. 

The clicking.

I didn’t look outside. Not that time.  

From there, every day was the same.

I spent the six months evading whatever was following me. I’d start driving around dawn, careening down the highway, deadset on creating as much distance as I could from the shape. The farther I got, the longer it seemed to take to catch up with me, but no matter how many miles I traveled, I never went a full night without hearing it. It wasn’t a sustainable life. I was barely sleeping. My cash was dwindling. 

Then, one night, the unthinkable happened. 

My car died. 

I was stranded on a deserted stretch of road, miles from the nearest city, and the sun was already sinking. I did what I could to protect my sanity, frantically taping newspapers and fast-food wrappers over the windows, barricading myself from the inevitable. 

Then, a little after midnight, it came. 

It began as a black speck on the windshield, but, silently, it grew, and it grew, and by the time it was hovering inches above my car, that black speck had transformed into a monstrous penumbra, submerging me in hungry darkness. I curled into a ball and clamped my hands over my ears, but it was futile. I couldn’t escape the clicking, and the more I listened, the more I began to hear language in the discord. It was hard to make out, but it sounded like a single, repeating name. 

Noel. 

Was that his name? - I wondered. 

Was the man I killed named Noel? That would explain it. I’d escaped arrest, sure, but could I really escape judgment? Maybe the shape was sent from God to torment me. Maybe this was my punishment. Maybe this is what I deserved. 

I knew I could step outside and face it. I came close. 

But, ultimately, I didn’t. 

The following morning, I stumbled out of my car and started down the road. I was in tatters by the time I reached Portland: body aching, mind frayed, desperate for somewhere to rest. I settled on the first place I saw, a kitschy little hole-in-the-wall bread and breakfast named: 

“Honey’s Hoodoo and Hostel”

Best decision I ever made. 

Inside, the place looked more like an apothecary than a hostel. Bright plants dangled from dusty pots, and the walls were crowded with animal skulls and dream catchers. I shuffled through a maze of narrow aisles to the front desk, where a slender woman with toffee-colored eyes glanced up from a dog-eared crossword book. I tried to speak, but she shushed me, spun around, and rummaged through a cabinet. Too tired to protest, I just waited. A minute later, she slid a key and a vial of clear liquid across the counter.

“Drink it. We’ll figure out reimbursement once you get some sleep. Room 3.” 

I slept for an uninterrupted sixteen hours. Blissfully deep, dreamless rest. In the morning, I profusely thanked my soon-to-be wife.

Honey turned out to be a real miracle worker, though the medicine she gave wasn’t anything magical; it was a sleep aid. Melatonin, Valerian root, with a splash of bottom-shelf vodka for a bit of kick. Sleep was a godsend, but it didn't fix everything. I still saw it. The shape. Hovering above me, skulking through the night sky, blending in with the clouds. It was always there. I didn’t understand why it'd begun keeping its distance, but I didn’t dwell on it, either. 

Time passed. 

I didn’t tell her much until our son was born. 

Looking down the barrel of fatherhood, I came clean to Honey. I told her about Mickey’s death and how I could have saved him. About my cold family and my strange, dogmatic grandfather. I even told her about the thing in the sky, though I downplayed some of the insanity. 

I told her about everything except Noel. 

I could never tell her about the man I killed. 

To her credit, she didn’t judge me, though she didn’t grant me clemency, either. All she said was: 

“The deepest hells are usually the ones we dig with our own two hands, Lucas.” 

Things were quiet for a long while. I buried the rest of my guilt and my shame in order to focus on my family. That seemed to do the trick until a few years ago. When my son turned nineteen - the same age I was when Mickey died - there was a change. 

Out of nowhere, something began waking me up in the middle of the night. 

It was sporadic at first. Once a month, maybe less. Without warning, I’d bolt upright in bed, like I’d been physically ripped from sleep, the same way you’d wake up to a smoke alarm blaring, but there’d never be any noise. No clicking. No shadows at my window. Nothing at all. I doubled up on Honey’s special sleep aid and tried to ignore it. Slowly, though, the frequency increased. Once a month to every other week. Then every week. Every few days. Every night. I tripled the dose of my sleep aid. Quadrupled it. Added more Vodka. Nothing helped.

Then, last week, it happened. 

Once again, I bolted upright, but the room wasn't silent. A faint noise curled into my ear. Similar to the clicking, but not frantic. It was organized, controlled, rhythmic. I shut my eyes and listened. 

A sinking dread crawled through my body.

The noise wasn’t coming from the window. 

It was coming from right next to me. 

I opened my eyes and turned to face Honey. She was sleeping soundly. I leaned in. 

Closer.

Close enough that my ear was resting on the front of her neck, and I felt something. 

There was something hard beneath her skin. Not bone. Not cartilage. It was too broad, too flat, and up close, the sound was unmistakable.

It wasn’t a click.

It was a tick. 

Like from a watch. 

I lifted my head and looked at her. 

Honey’s eyelids were closed, but to my horror, I could see her eyes glowing dully beneath them, a pearly light shining through the translucent membrane, fixed right on me.

Staring at me. 

Judging me. 

That night, I left my family behind. I got in my car and drove south.

And overhead, the shape followed.

- - - - -

Locating Mickey’s widow was surprisingly easy. 

She lived in a single-story ranchero on the outskirts of my hometown. The lawn was dense and unkempt. Neglected Christmas decorations lay strewn about, plastic elves and tangles of string lights peeking out of the overgrowth. The roof had holes big enough to be visible from the sidewalk. I breathed deep and began pacing up to the front door, trying not to ruminate on how the disrepair was likely downstream of my failure to act all those years ago. 

Jagged wood bit into my skin as I knocked. A stout woman with a gray ponytail and bits of red lipstick on her front teeth answered. 

Without preamble, I asked her if she was Mickey’s widow. 

She nodded. 

The drive had given me ample time to plan out a concise, remorseful confession. But in the moment, all of that got thrown out the window. 

I barged into the woman’s house and just started talking. Told her everything. 

I used to work alongside her husband.

I was there the night he choked.

I could have saved his life.

I skipped town the day night he died. Never looked back. 

And I was so goddamned sorry.

When I was done, I waited for her to speak. I expected anger. Revulsion. Violence. Instead, all I got was confusion. 

“You never heard, did you?”

I cocked my head. 

“They did an autopsy on Mickey...and...well, he died of a massive heart attack. The coroner said there was nothing anyone could’ve done to save him.” 

My vision blurred. 

Nausea hit me fast and hard. 

The guilt, the shame, the boundless, unrelenting anxiety. 

It was all for nothing. 

I killed that man for nothing. 

- - - - - 

As I drive, I find myself dwelling on what Honey said all those years ago. 

The deepest hells are usually the ones we dig with our own two hands…

You know what that makes me think about? Something my Grandpa dug with his own two hands. 

The reservoir. The stagnant water. The broken things. 

The punishment ceremonies. 

The old man on his knees, chanting unintelligible Vietnamese prayers and repeating a two-word phrase in English...

That's when it hit me. 

If I couldn’t save Mickey, then I never made a mistake. 

If I never made a mistake, I shouldn’t have thrown his broken watch into the reservoir. 

The shape wasn't saying Noel, it was repeating the phrase "No Hell".

It's him, I think. 

I’m on route to my Grandfather’s now. Hoping to get there before the sun sets. 

This all started with that broken watch.

If I dredge it from the reservoir, maybe it’ll stop. Maybe I can finally be free.

Or, more likely, everything will just get much, much worse, and that’s OK. 

All things considered, I deserve that, 

don’t I? 

Today marks the anniversary of Mickey’s death, and I can't hold it all inside anymore. I need to come clean. Not just about what happened that night, but about everything: every unconfessed mistake and every bitter failure. That’s why it's tormenting me, after all. The shape in the sky is drawn to my guilt. Every night, it's there, hovering past my bedroom window or swirling in the darkness above the treetops, begging me to acknowledge the heartless shit I've done, and finally, here I am.

I'm ready to confess.

Fresh out of high school, I scrapped my college plans and got hired as a night security guard. The job didn’t pay well, and it certainly didn’t make my parents proud, but it was low-stress and that’s all I cared about. There was never any trouble. What sane person would leave a warm bed to break into a rubber factory?

Mickey, a burly Irishman about ten years my senior, onboarded me. For how much time we spent together, it was astonishing how little we knew about each other. The man wasn’t a born conversationalist. If he hadn’t come back from his honeymoon with a vicious, lobster-red sunburn, I doubt he would have told me about the wedding. Honestly, I was happy with the professional distance. Mickey was a laid-back guy who didn't expect much from me. No expectations meant no pressure. God knows I don't work well under pressure.

Our last night together was certainly no exception. 

It was after midnight. We were doing our rounds, strolling through the dimly lit parking lot. Mickey was lagging a few feet behind me, chowing down on an oversized gas station hoagie. Crickets chirped in the pines that surrounded the factory. There was a sudden clack. The hazy beam from his flashlight stopped bobbing along the asphalt. Took me a few seconds to realize something was wrong. 

I turned around. 

He was wobbling in place, clawing at his neck and chest, skin paler than the moon, lips tinted this nightmarish blue-gray. The half-eaten sandwich lay scattered at his feet. He was choking. I knew he was choking, and I’d been taught what to do: get behind him, wrap my arms around his belly, and thrust. Just as I was about to help, a familiar dread began crawling across my skin, and my brain erupted with fitful static. 

The specter of doubt was creeping in.

Was I sure I knew what to do? What if I made a mistake? Should I thrust in and up or just in? Did I remember all the steps? Was I supposed to reach into his mouth and try to remove the blockage first? And while those asinine questions left me paralyzed, I just stared at the dying man. Fear was making a mess of his face. Bulging eyes. Sharp creases. Quiet, contorted terror. 

The light left him. 

His body hit the asphalt with a rich, splintering thud. 

I didn’t move. 

Couldn’t tell you exactly how much time passed. It was more than enough to save him, I know that much. 

Eventually, autopilot kicked in. My legs started dragging me towards the factory. By the time my mind caught up to my muscles, I was already inside, dialing 9-1-1 on the break room’s rotary telephone. The dispatcher claimed we were lucky; an ambulance happened to be passing by our otherwise remote location at that very moment. As I sprinted back outside, I told myself everything was going to be OK. Mickey and I were the only people there. The cameras shouldn’t have recorded his death; we’d been too far from the building when he started choking. I could sell them any story I wanted to. No one had to know how badly I fucked up.

Red lights flickered on the horizon. I was so captivated by relief that I nearly tripped over his corpse, looking down with just enough time to skid to a stop. That’s when I noticed it: something on his wrist was glinting against the approaching light. I bent over. It was the silver strap of some cheap watch. Tiny flecks of glass were scattered around where the watch face had been pulverized between his wrist and the asphalt. I perked my ears. I heard a distant siren, but no ticking. 

“No, no, no…” I whispered, furiously rotating the strap. The broken watch read 12:31 AM; Mickey’s time of death immortalized. I checked my own watch. 

My heart plummeted.

1:22 AM. 

I could practically hear the police officer asking, “What kind of person waits a whole fifty minutes before phoning for help?”

The wailing of the sirens grew louder.

The flashing lights were closing in. 

Instinct took over. 

I ripped the watch from his wrist and shoved it into my pocket. 

The ambulance screeched to a halt. EMS leaped from the vehicle, asking what happened as they attempted to resuscitate the long-dead Mickey, and I played my part. I told them he choked and that I’d done everything I could. They lifted the cadaver onto a gurney, carted him into the waiting ambulance, and sped away. 

A few seconds later, I bolted to my car. 

I rolled down the windows and floored the accelerator. Wind tore through the vehicle as I shot onto the interstate, cold air stinging me awake. I weighed my options. I could bury the watch, or keep it, or toss it into one of Missouri’s endless landfills. In the end, though, I knew exactly where it belonged.

It belonged at the bottom of the reservoir my Grandpa had built behind his mansion, with all the other broken things. 

Years had passed since I’d last set foot on the property. I parked along a ditch. A single paved footpath connected the dirt road to the boarded-up estate. Painful energy seemed to radiate from the dilapidated structure; felt like I had a migraine coming on as I walked along the edge of the property, navigating the cluttered mass of pines and white oaks, until I reached a clearing and the musty stench of decaying algae confirmed I’d arrived. I lit a cigarette and sucked in some thick gulps of smoke, trying to repress the old fear bubbling beneath my skin. 

In my family, I’ve always been the odd-one-out. The runt of the litter. My older brother is a Nobel laureate. My twin sister is an Olympian. Both my parents were successful lawyers and my Grandpa earned a Purple Heart in Vietnam. And I'm just...me. Not dumb, but chronically scatterbrained. Not weak, but incredibly clumsy. And anxious. God, I was anxious about everything as a kid. Put it all together, and the diagnosis became clear: I was defective. My parents figured if anyone could fix me, it’d be Grandpa, the familial patriarch, the so-called perfect man, the one who'd made our fortune from nothing. I spent most summers at Grandpa’s estate. They were nothing short of hell, but you want to know the real fucked up part? 

I can feel the toll those summers took on me, but I don’t remember most of them.

There were physical drills. Mental exercises. Prayer. Hikes that seemed to take weeks to complete. But the specifics of all that? Couldn’t tell you. The memories are a hazy, soupy mess. The only events I remember with clarity were the punishment ceremonies. You see, if I ever made a “mistake” - the parameters of which were subjectively defined by Grandpa - I’d be taken out to the reservoir after sunset. He’d hand me something I loved. A toy. An item of clothing. A framed picture. Then, he’d command that I make amends.

“Each mistake is a debt, Lucas. A debt to ourselves and to the gracious heart of the universe. It’s time to pay up. A broken offering to counterbalance what you broke today.” 

I’d snap the toy. Tear at the clothing. Crush the frame beneath my bare foot. Then, I’d throw it into the reservoir and watch that tiny piece of me sink. All the while, Grandpa would be on his knees, shaking clasped hands at the sky, earnestly begging something for forgiveness. I always assumed he was pleading with God: between furious bouts of Vietnamese, he’d repeat the words “no hell” in English, over and over again. Although he was very particular about what went into the reservoir, he was significantly more particular about keeping my broken things sunk. One night, Grandpa caught me attempting to dredge up the fractured remains of my favorite action figure with a bit of fishing line. He didn’t mince words. 

“If you ever defile these gracious waters again, I’ll kill you, child. Or worse.” As a someone that's always been riddled with anxiety, none of this improved my performance; it only made me more skittish, more impulsive, and more dysfunctional, so I can’t say I was upset when the old coot died; drowned in his own damn reservoir. Bon voyage, asshole.

I took the final drag of my cigarette, pulled the broken watch from my pocket, and lobbed both of them into the reservoir. They sank with a dull plop. I expected solace. Much as the punishment ceremonies terrorified me, I did recall feeling a gentle warmth flooding through my body when broken things drifted beneath the surface. That night, though, I experienced no warmth. Instead, a strange apprehension started crackling down my spine. 

Then, from behind me: 

“What're you doing on my property and what the hell did you just throw in there?” 

I shot around. There was a man at the edge of the clearing. The barrel of a rifle gleamed in the moonlight. 

“I’m so sorry…I used to live here…or not me exactly, my family did…a-a-and I thought the property was abandoned, so I d-didn’t think it was trespassing...” 

“You know what? Save it for the cops.”

"What?! No, please, I’ll leave, I need to go, please…” I continued to stutter out a meek appeal, but I didn’t get the sense that the man was still listening.

To this day, I don’t know what came over me. The possibility of my fuck-up being discovered, of having to explain why I’d stolen Mickey’s watch in the first place, turned me into an animal. It wasn’t rational. It’s just what happened. 

There was a soft crunch in the woods. 

He peered over his shoulder.

I grabbed a rock off the ground and launched myself across the clearing. 

The man snapped forward. There was a click. I flinched, but nothing happened. The rifle was jammed. I sped up. More hollow clicks emanated through the clearing, rapid and fearful. 

clickclickclickclickclick

I was nearly on top of him. A cloud passed over the moon. The clearing darkened. I never got a good look at his intact face, and I suppose I'm thankful for that. 

He started to say something. 

I arced the rock over my head,

and I brought it down. 

- - - - -

Vanishing was a simpler process back in the 90s. 

Wasn’t much to it, really. I drove until the scenery looked different. Stayed low and kept my eyes on the news, anxiously awaiting the nationwide manhunt. No such manhunt ever came to be. Far as I could tell, at least - it wasn’t the easiest thing to keep track of. I didn’t know who I killed; I just knew where’d they’d report finding his body. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized they may never discover that poor man: Grandpa’s estate wasn’t exactly prone to foot traffic. 

The night after Mickey’s death, I was on my way to Omaha. I planned on driving into the morning, but heavy snowfall forced me to stop. The five-room, single-story motel I stayed at was memorably heinous. 

I jammed the rusty key into the lock and jerked the door open. A battalion of cockroaches skittered into the walls as the hazy lamps clicked on. The frizzy brown carpet had enough splotches and stains to resemble leopard print, and the bathroom reeked of ancient, untamed feculence; the type of caked-in, all-consuming shit-stench that requires decades upon decades of intentional neglect to manifest. Not that any of that mattered, really. Even if I were lodging at the most bougie five-star resort imaginable, swaddled in a Persian silk comforter, I don’t think sleep would've come easy. 

It happened a little after midnight. 

The room was silent. I was lying on top of the bed’s ratty blanket, staring at the ceiling, mentally reviewing my laundry list of fuck-ups, when I finally began to feel drowsy. I let myself drift. I was nearly asleep. 

Movement jolted my eyes wide open. 

Strange shadows danced quietly along the wall. 

I shot upright and rubbed the sleep from my eyes, but nothing changed. Dark blobs ballooned and shrank across the surface with fluid motion, like I was staring into a lava lamp with pitch-black plasma. I traced the shadows to their origin: the room’s large, front-facing window. 

I knew I shouldn’t push aside the blinds and look. With complete and utter certainty, I knew that. But I also knew how to help someone who’s choking, and I knew that murder is an unforgivable transgression, so what difference did knowing really make?

I crept across the room, put my face to the blinds, and peeked through a slit.

The small parking lot was blanketed with undisturbed snow. There were no cars on the road. A soft wind brushed bits of white from here to there, but the dead trees around the motel did not waver. The world looked still. 

Then, I saw it. 

I thought it was a cloud at first, but it was too low, and it was moving too quickly through the sky, casting shadows as it drifted in the moonlight. No part of it made sense. The shape was larger than an SUV but it was thin as a ribbon, and it rippled through the atmosphere like an eel. I pressed my face into the cold glass, mesmerized. It was alien, bizarre, almost beautiful. All of a sudden, there was a change. It was no longer drifting. It seemed to be expanding, stretching like plastic wrap, but I was mistaken, and once I realized what it was actually doing, I rocketed from the window, heart convulsing against the back of my throat.

The shape wasn’t stretching. 

It was getting closer. 

I rushed past the bed and down the narrow bathroom hallway. The shadows deepened. I threw myself into the cramped space between the closet and the broken minifridge. Through shuddering breaths, I peered around the edge. I could barely see; the room had been swallowed by an eclipse.

The shape was right outside the window. 

A muted clicking pierced the silence. It was scarcely audible but violently alive, pulsing with frantic energy: a noise somewhere between the tapping of a pinball machine and the clattering of rat teeth. Unnatural. Inhuman. Continuous.

It only receded when the sun began to rise. 

I packed my meager belongings and left, but I was no longer going to Omaha. I had no plan. No destination. I was just driving away. By sunset, I was entering a hotel in Des Moines, two hundred miles from where I’d started. The night was quiet. The sky was clear. I thought I was safe. 

Then, around 4 A.M., right as I was drifting off, I heard it. 

The clicking.

I didn’t look outside. Not that time.  

From there, every day was the same.

I spent the six months evading whatever was following me. I’d start driving around dawn, careening down the highway, deadset on creating as much distance as I could from the shape. The farther I got, the longer it seemed to take to catch up with me, but no matter how many miles I traveled, I never went a full night without hearing it. It wasn’t a sustainable life. I was barely sleeping. My cash was dwindling. 

Then, one night, the unthinkable happened. 

My car died. 

I was stranded on a deserted stretch of road, miles from the nearest city, and the sun was already sinking. I did what I could to protect my sanity, frantically taping newspapers and fast-food wrappers over the windows, barricading myself from the inevitable. 

Then, a little after midnight, it came. 

It began as a black speck on the windshield, but, silently, it grew, and it grew, and by the time it was hovering inches above my car, that black speck had transformed into a monstrous penumbra, submerging me in hungry darkness. I curled into a ball and clamped my hands over my ears, but it was futile. I couldn’t escape the clicking, and the more I listened, the more I began to hear language in the discord. It was hard to make out, but it sounded like a single, repeating name. 

Noel. 

Was that his name? - I wondered. 

Was the man I killed named Noel? That would explain it. I’d escaped arrest, sure, but could I really escape judgment? Maybe the shape was sent from God to torment me. Maybe this was my punishment. Maybe this is what I deserved. 

I knew I could step outside and face it. I came close. 

But, ultimately, I didn’t. 

The following morning, I stumbled out of my car and started down the road. I was in tatters by the time I reached Portland: body aching, mind frayed, desperate for somewhere to rest. I settled on the first place I saw, a kitschy little hole-in-the-wall bed and breakfast named: 

“Honey’s Hoodoo and Hostel”

Best decision I ever made. 

Inside, the place looked more like an apothecary than a hostel. Bright plants dangled from dusty pots, and the walls were crowded with animal skulls and dream catchers. I shuffled through a maze of narrow aisles to the front desk, where a slender woman with toffee-colored eyes glanced up from a dog-eared crossword book. I tried to speak, but she shushed me, spun around, and rummaged through a cabinet. Too tired to protest, I just waited. A minute later, she slid a key and a vial of clear liquid across the counter.

“Drink it. We’ll figure out reimbursement once you get some sleep. Room 3.” 

I slept for an uninterrupted sixteen hours. Blissfully deep, dreamless rest. In the morning, I profusely thanked my soon-to-be wife.

Honey turned out to be a real miracle worker, though the medicine she gave wasn’t anything magical; it was a sleep aid. Melatonin, Valerian root, with a splash of bottom-shelf vodka for a bit of kick. Sleep was a godsend, but it didn't fix everything. I still saw it. The shape. Hovering above me, skulking through the night sky, blending in with the clouds. It was always there. I didn’t understand why it'd begun keeping its distance, but I didn’t dwell on it, either. 

Time passed. 

I didn’t tell her much until our son was born. 

Looking down the barrel of fatherhood, I came clean to Honey. I told her about Mickey’s death and how I could have saved him. About my cold family and my strange, dogmatic grandfather. I even told her about the thing in the sky, though I downplayed some of the insanity. 

I told her about everything except Noel. 

I could never tell her about the man I killed. 

To her credit, she didn’t judge me, though she didn’t grant me clemency, either. All she said was: 

“The deepest hells are usually the ones we dig with our own two hands, Lucas.” 

Things were quiet for a long while. I buried the rest of my guilt and my shame in order to focus on my family. That seemed to do the trick until a few years ago. When my son turned nineteen - the same age I was when Mickey died - there was a change. 

Out of nowhere, something began waking me up in the middle of the night. 

It was sporadic at first. Once a month, maybe less. Without warning, I’d bolt upright in bed, like I’d been physically ripped from sleep, the same way you’d wake up to a smoke alarm blaring, but there’d never be any noise. No clicking. No shadows at my window. Nothing at all. I doubled up on Honey’s special sleep aid and tried to ignore it. Slowly, though, the frequency increased. Once a month to every other week. Then every week. Every few days. Every night. I tripled the dose of my sleep aid. Quadrupled it. Added more Vodka. Nothing helped.

Then, last week, it happened. 

Once again, I bolted upright, but the room wasn't silent. A faint noise curled into my ear. Similar to the clicking, but not frantic. It was organized, controlled, rhythmic. I shut my eyes and listened. 

A sinking dread crawled through my body.

The noise wasn’t coming from the window. 

It was coming from right next to me. 

I opened my eyes and turned to face Honey. She was sleeping soundly. I leaned in. 

Closer.

Close enough that my ear was resting on the front of her neck, and I felt something. 

There was something hard beneath her skin. Not bone. Not cartilage. It was too broad, too flat, and up close, the sound was unmistakable.

It wasn’t a click.

It was a tick. 

Like from a watch. 

I lifted my head and looked at her. 

Honey’s eyelids were closed, but to my horror, I could see her eyes glowing dully beneath them, a pearly light shining through the translucent membrane, fixed right on me.

Staring at me. 

Judging me. 

That night, I left my family behind. I got in my car and drove south.

And overhead, the shape followed.

- - - - -

Locating Mickey’s widow was surprisingly easy. 

She lived in a single-story ranchero on the outskirts of my hometown. The lawn was dense and unkempt. Neglected Christmas decorations lay strewn about, plastic elves and tangles of string lights peeking out of the overgrowth. The roof had holes big enough to be visible from the sidewalk. I breathed deep and began pacing up to the front door, trying not to ruminate on how the disrepair was likely downstream of my failure to act all those years ago. 

Jagged wood bit into my skin as I knocked. A stout woman with a gray ponytail and bits of red lipstick on her front teeth answered. 

Without preamble, I asked her if she was Mickey’s widow. 

She nodded. 

The drive had given me ample time to plan out a concise, remorseful confession. But in the moment, all of that got thrown out the window. 

I barged into the woman’s house and just started talking. Told her everything. 

I used to work alongside her husband.

I was there the night he choked.

I could have saved his life.

I skipped town the day night he died. Never looked back. 

And I was so goddamned sorry.

When I was done, I waited for her to speak. I expected anger. Revulsion. Violence. Instead, all I got was confusion. 

“You never heard, did you?”

I cocked my head. 

“They did an autopsy on Mickey...and...well, he died of a massive heart attack. The coroner said there was nothing anyone could’ve done to save him.” 

My vision blurred. 

Nausea hit me fast and hard. 

The guilt, the shame, the boundless, unrelenting anxiety. 

It was all for nothing. 

I killed that man for nothing. 

- - - - - 

As I drive, I find myself dwelling on what Honey said all those years ago. 

The deepest hells are usually the ones we dig with our own two hands…

You know what that makes me think about? Something my Grandpa dug with his own two hands. 

The reservoir. The stagnant water. The broken things. 

The punishment ceremonies. 

The old man on his knees, chanting unintelligible Vietnamese prayers and repeating a two-word phrase in English...

That's when it hit me. 

If I couldn’t save Mickey, then I never made a mistake. 

If I never made a mistake, I shouldn’t have thrown his broken watch into the reservoir. 

The shape wasn't saying Noel, it was repeating the phrase "No Hell".

It's him, I think. 

I’m on route to my Grandfather’s now. Hoping to get there before the sun sets. 

This all started with that broken watch.

If I dredge it from the reservoir, maybe it’ll stop. Maybe I can finally be free.

Or, more likely, everything will just get much, much worse, and that’s OK. 

All things considered, I deserve that, 

don’t I? 

Picture it.

Place the image in your head and hold it there for as long as you can. 

A bulbous, maggot-like body, slick and sulfurous. 

A pair of slender, thorny vines jutting from its back; two tangles of barbed wire positioned like wings.

And at its apex, a hand with ten fingers, radiating in a crescent above an open palm, reaching towards you. 

Got it?

Thank you. 

Please continue, 

and know we appreciate your patronage. 

- - - - -

When America landed on the moon, normal people were celebrating. They were popping champagne. Hugging their kids. Breaking out their special fireworks, the dangerous ones hidden in the garage that burned white-hot and really lit up the sky. 

I, on the other hand, was working a shift at Falling Leaves Behavioral Health Hospital.

While Armstrong bounced along that final frontier, I was helping administer electroconvulsive therapy to a young man with terminal depression. I remember everything about him (they say you never forget your first ECT). He had dull blue eyes, greasy blonde hair, and scars all along the length of his left arm; they were deep and neatly organized like tally marks. Sometimes I dream I’m trapped in the moment where he began seizing, avoiding his vacant stare by focusing on his homemade T-shirt, reading the words “Apollo 11: Portal to the Stars” over and over again until I finally wake up. 

Hard to believe that was fifty-six years ago. 

Since then, I’ve seen it all. Every flavor of delusion, disorder, and disturbance imaginable.  From Agorophobia all the way down to Trichotillomania (the psychiatric textbook floating around the unit doesn’t list any conditions that start with a letter lower on the alphabet than “T”, though it's old enough to have an entire chapter dedicated to menstrual hysteria, so if my turn of phrase is invalidated by a novel, Z-lettered diagnosis, I beg your pardon). In all that time, you want to know what I’ve learned? 

When some people heard that mental illness was a disease, they took that shit way too literally. 

Back in the 90s, I watched a mother refuse to embrace her crying daughter because she was afraid of contracting bipolar disorder from her tears. We swallowed our disgust and offered her “protection”. Gloves, goggles, and a gown, basically a whole goddamned hazmat suit. Still, she couldn’t even enter her kid’s room. The risk was unacceptably high. That woman wasn’t a one-off, either. I have hundreds of stories just like that. Recent ones, too. Some people still think you can catch psychosis the same way you could catch COVID. Iliterate, backwater dipshits, stoking the flames of discrimination just for the hell of it. Mental illness isn’t an infection. Insanity isn’t catching. 

That's what I used to think, anyway. As much as it terrifies me to admit it, I've seen an exception to that rule. I've witnessed psychosis spread like a virus. It started with a woman and her paper dolls. 

Out of respect for the deceased, let’s call her “Red”.  

Red was as normal as they come. Mid-thirties. Mother of two. Worked as a mechanic at a mom-and-pop gas station at the edge of the city. No history of psychiatric hospitalization, no criminal record, no drug use (the woman didn’t even have aspirin in her purse). Nothing that would put her at risk for a psychotic break. 

She clocked in at the gas station one morning, on time as usual, and began working on her first repair. Per her boss, Red was completely lucid, if not a little groggy, so he walked off to the break room to brew a pot of coffee for both of them. When he returned to the garage, not only was Red gone, but the car she was working on - a silver ’66 Chevy Corvette - was gone too. He did some frantic laps around the parking lot, but the car wasn’t there, either. Red had seemingly driven off with the antique vehicle. The boss sprinted back inside and phoned the cops. After that, he pulled up the day’s repair itinerary to determine who the expensive Corvette belonged to, dreading how they would react to the news. He scanned the list - once, twice, three times. 

There was no Corvette scheduled for repairs. Not that day, not the day before, not anytime in the next month.

The boss has no clue where the car came from, and he was confident it didn’t belong to Red. 

That’s when he really started to feel like something was wrong. 

The police arrived a short time later, and the boss pivoted his story. Told them she was abducted (a bit of a leap if you ask me, but I suppose it wasn’t completely out of left field, especially when they found Red’s beat-up van still in its parking spot). The cops were skeptical. That skepticism festered once they saw a picture of her. She dressed like a punk, and I mean that literally: Dead Kennedys crop-top, leather choker around her neck, and a crimson streak in her blonde undercut. A single mother with no dad in the picture, working a decisively unladylike job, and she disappeared looking like that? 

According to the cops, the explanation for her disappearance was drugs until proven otherwise. 

Three days later, and there was still no sign of her. Red’s parents were worried sick. After enough pestering, the police finally stopped dragging their feet and put out an APB on that 66’ Corvette.

About an hour later, they got a call from the local TV station, and promptly cancelled that APB.

An intern had been searching through a cluttered storage closet, rifling through a pile of spare cables, when his hand unexpectedly grazed damp skin. He squinted in the dim light of the closet and discovered Red’s bloodshot eyes gleaming back at him. No one knows why she broke in or what she planning on doing there.

She resisted apprehension violently, clawing and biting at the police, but she did so silently. Didn’t make so much as a peep on her ambulance ride over to Falling Leaves Behavioral Health Hospital. The quiet provided the situation an air of calm, but her face betrayed fury. A clenched jaw. Eyes bulging. Veins throbbing down her temple, pushing bursts of hot blood into her already flushed cheeks. 

I was on shift when she arrived.

It was a little after one in the morning. Up until that point, the night had been peaceful, which is never a good omen. A relaxed shift is one thing, but complete serenity is a harbinger; it's a sign that the universe is winding up a haymaker. After enough punches, you learn to brace yourself before those cosmic knuckles collide with your skull and snap your nose in half. 

I greeted the ambulance crew at the door.

Red was wheeled in. EMS was holding onto her gurney lightly and with the tips of their fingers, like they were hesitant to put any part of themselves close to Red, even though she was strapped down twenty ways to Sunday. The other night-shift nurses and I took over. We pulled her into the massive patient elevator and pressed “5”. I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes at EMS when I saw their fear, assuming they were easily spooked and green as hell. But in those silent three minutes up to the psychosis unit, as my skin became slick with sweat and my heart began to pound, I backpedaled on that judgment. 

Red was incredibly unnerving.

As the elevator creaked open, I was relieved to see the slim outline of Dr. Balor in the unit's pale light, waiting for us. She was the youngest clinical director in the hospital’s history. In other words, she didn’t need to work like a normal physician; she easily could have chosen to hole up in some swanky high-rise office building and make seven figures without so much as touching her stethoscope. That was never her, though. She was a boots-on-ground, do-the-hard-shit-herself type. We respected her for that. 

She paced over and began examining Red. 

“Did the emergency department take labs?” 

“No ma’am,” I replied. 

“Figures. Let’s pull a CBC, CMP, ethanol level, beta-HCG, and a urine tox screen. Think we’ll need to catheterize for the urine? ” She leaned over the bed and flashed a pen light between her eyes. Red clacked her teeth together like a snapping turtle. 

“Yeah. Can’t imagine she’s feeling generous with her fluids right now.” 

Dr. Balor nodded, and we got to work. 

The next few hours proceeded as usual. Took some elbow grease and a surprisingly large amount of tranquilizer, but we transitioned Red into a hospital gown. A blizzard of strange paper dolls fell from her clothes in the process. They were overflowing from the pockets of her jeans. Some were peeking out from under the soles of her sneakers. Hell, we think she may have been holding a few in her mouth: she spat globs of soggy, half-disintegrated paper at us while we drew her blood. 

Once she was settled, I picked one up and studied it. Reminded me of those kindergarten arts-and-crafts projects kids would do right before Thanksgiving; the one where they’d trace their hand on paper and the shape they’d cut out was supposed to look like a turkey. But Red’s were incredibly intricate. The artistry was borderline surgical. They depicted some sort of pillbug with spikey wings and a ten-fingered human hand sewn on top. Each finger was as narrow as a toothpick; they wavered in the unit’s air conditioning like dandelions in a gentle breeze. I wondered how the hell anyonecould even cut that precisely. 

I threw them all in the trash and clocked out for the night. 

After a few hours of dreamless sleep, I returned to Falling Leaves for another shift. 

There hadn’t been much movement in Red’s case. She was still cryptically mute and savagely aggressive. Her blood work had finished cooking. All her organs appeared to be functioning well. The tox screen was normal. There was only one abnormality: her beta-HCG was elevated. 

Red was pregnant. 

I tried not to think about it. Halfway through my shift, I was focused on some charting when I heard a soft rattling growing louder behind me. I sighed, aware of who was approaching. Jay was a new hire, fresh out of nursing school. The perpetually half-empty adderall bottle he kept in his scrubs pocket made him into a human Macarena.

“Frank - you gotta check this out.” 

An oddly-shaped slip of paper drifted onto my knuckles. 

One of Red’s dolls. 

I ripped my hands off the keyboard and spun around. 

“What the hell, man?”

Jay stepped back and put his palms up. His loose manbun teetered like a hairy antenna. 

“Uhh…I’m sorry. The unit’s been a little gloomy today. Just tryin’ to brighten the mood, ya know?”

I glared at the kid. There was an irritating sincerity glinting in his doopy eyes: a puppy excited to play fetch right after pissing on the rug. I relented slightly, tensed shoulders creaking down a few notches. I shook the doll at him. 

“Jay, why in God’s name would you dumpster dive for this abomination?” 

He cocked his head. 

“I didn’t dumpster dive for nothing: there’s a stack of these weird fuckers in the nurse’s lounge.”

My heart turned to concrete and plummeted through my guts. I threw myself upright, pushed past Jay,  stomped into the nurse’s lounge, and there they were: a neat pile of paper idols looming on a small end table next to the vending machine. They weren’t the ones I’d confiscated. They weren’t crinkled, damaged, or soggy. 

These were new. 

I grabbed them, crumpled them into a ball, and threw them into my backpack. When I got home that morning, I used them as kindling for my chimney. I sipped whiskey by the fire until I passed out in my recliner. 

Things seemed to settle from there. The days trudged by, and I didn’t find any more of Red’s DIY totems lurking around the unit. Red herself appeared to be on the mend as well. She hadn’t spoken yet, but her features had softened (no more silent rage boiling under her skin). Her pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. It was sad, but given her bizarre and persistent psychosis, maybe not the worst thing that could happen. 

Eventually, though, I started to experience this cold, creeping dread whenever I was at work. I attempted to ignore the feeling, but it expanded through my veins like a mold. A slow but interminable march. 

Then, it hit me. 

The unit was getting progressively quieter. 

Red’s enigmatic vow of silence was spreading. 

From there, I never let her out of my sight. Never saw her doing anything nefarious, either. She’d sit on her bed and stare at the wall from dusk till dawn, only blinking once every ten minutes or so. Dr. Baylor had deemed her safe, so she was unrestrained. Although I wanted to strap her down, there was no medically justifiable reason to do so, even as the eerie quiet began to spread between units. 

I heard from one of my buddies on the fourth floor that their bipolar patients had abruptly begun going silent. 

When I brought my concerns up to Dr. Baylor, she seemed thoroughly nonplussed. 

“If being a poor conversationalist is a sign of psychological danger, maybe you should be admitted, Frank.” 

No one else seemed bothered, either. Everyone I appealed to just shrugged. 

So, one morning, I stayed late. Snuck into the floor’s security room while the guard was on break, and watched Red from the monitor. 

And, finally, I caught her. 

After five minutes of complete inaction, she sprang up, walked into the hallway, and entered another patient’s room. He was an older man with a scraggly gray beard and the kind of parkinson’s that can result in hallucinations. The cameras didn’t have audio, and the feed was grainy, but I can tell the man was pleading with Red. He gestured for her to leave. When she didn’t, he tried to stay away. Backed himself into a corner, arms wrapped defensively around his head like she was about to pummel his skull with a golf club. Red tore his arms away like it was nothing and slapped her hand onto his face. 

The man went limp. She removed his hand; I think there were specks of blood on her palm. I thought he was dead. But a second later, he surged to life. His body writhed along the floor, violent like a seizure but coordinated like a dance. His thrashing slowed. Red helped him up. 

This was it, I thought.

This was the proof. 

I was about to sprint to Dr. Baylor’s office when something occurred to me. 

Nurses had been walking by the old man’s room the entire time, and they did nothing to intervene. 

My vision swam. My lungs burned. 

Whatever Red was doing, they were in on it. 

I stumbled out of the security office. I lurched towards the elevator, feigning normality. Jay caught the doors with his hand at the last second and took the elevator down with me. He spouted off about sports betting as the tired machine groaned from floor to the floor. I nodded along, sweating as if I’d just run a 5K. 

Then, in a low, raspy whisper, he said:

“You okay, buddy?” 

The elevator doors wobbled open. I bolted into the hallway. I don’t know for certain, but I swear he started reaching for my face as I left.  

I called Dr. Baylor multiple times that morning. After my ninth call went to voicemail, I turned to the internet. Figured the paper dolls were the linchpin to the whole, fucked-up mess. I googled “Maggot with barbed wire wings and ten-fingered hand” but found nothing, so I switched up the language. 

“Leech with thin, spiked appendages and ten-fingered hand.”

“Grub with long, serrated limbs and ten-fingered hand.”

Every attempt was the same. No results. All the while, the minutes were ticking down to my next shift. I asked myself, was I really going to return to that godforsaken place? Appropriately, my gut response was something to the tune of “absolutely fucking not”. The more I considered it, though, the more I felt like I needed to return. Whether I was going to warn the unaffected or burn the place to the ground remained to be seen. And as I drove down the interstate, the sun setting overhead, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was returning for an altogether different reason. 

Maybe Red was summoning me back. 

When I stepped into the lobby, an oppressive silence throttled me like an avalanche. Nobody at the front desk. No one in the waiting area. The parking lot was full, but the place seemed empty. 

I entered the elevator and pressed “2”. The carriage jolted, then began to ascend. After a few seconds, the doors creaked open. 

The adolescent unit, our busiest ward, was vacant. The lights were on. Coffee cups, coloring books, and half-eaten bags of chips littered every surface. With an agonizing sluggishness, the doors pushed closed. I didn’t bother to check the other units. 

I pressed “5”. 

I grit my teeth. Adrenaline exploded through my system. My pulse accelerated. Spastic arteries slammed against the back of my eyes. 

The doors opened. 

I’ll never forget what I saw. 

They were all there. Every employee. Every patient. Every square inch of the unit was occupied. They were motionless, facing away from the elevator, elbow to elbow with each other. There was a massive heap of paper dolls at the head of the crowd. Red was sitting at the top. Blood gushed from the two stumps where her hands had been. Behind her, there was a mural. An insectoid frame scribbled across the wall in blood. Long, slender wings created from excised tendons, with sharp fragments of white bone protruding like thorns. And at its apex, Red’s hands, advancing from the wall like the image was about to come alive, sewn together at her thumbs. 

No one was moving. 

No one was speaking. 

It felt like I was the only one breathing. 

My trembling finger pressed the “lobby” button. 

The doors began to close. 

Red’s jaw went slack. Her head shot backward. A deep, cavernous gurgling emanated from her gaping mouth. Ten fingers began to rise from her throat. 

Then, the doors shut. 

Slowly, I descended. 

Five. 

Four. 

Three. 

Two. 

One. 

I staggered out of the elevator, sprinted through the lobby, and pushed through the front doors into the night. 

Someone lunged at me.

They wrapped their arms around my abdomen. I felt myself tipping over. My car keys flew from my pocket and rolled across the asphalt. My body thudded against the ground. Wind erupted from my diaphragm. I steadied myself and looked up at my assailant. Dr. Baylor was straddling me, pinning down my neck with one hand and stretching her palm towards my face with the other. It nearly connected. Her skin smelled intensely musty and sickly sweet, like a swarm of crickets coated in rotting pork. I launched my elbow into her stomach. She sputtered. I bucked her off. Reeling, I pushed myself upright and searched for my keys, wading through savage waves of nausea and vertigo. Moonlight glinted off a small shred of metal. I stepped over Dr. Baylor and grabbed the keys, furiously clicking the lock button to identify my vehicle in the darkness. The beep wasn’t right. I must have picked up her keys. I flipped around. More people were spilling from the hospital. I turned forward and lurched across the pavement until I found Dr. Baylor’s car. I hopped into a silver ’66 Chevy Corvette, slammed on the accelerator, and sped away…

So - is that a satisfying ending? 

Would you like to believe that I got away, even if my escape felt a little too easy?

Alternatively, would you prefer to believe that I was captured by the cult, and I was forced to witness their new God crawl from Red’s esophagus? 

The truth of what transpired is somewhere in the middle of those two endings, but the truth isn’t the point.

You know the phrase “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down”? That’s the point. The story is the sugar, and He is the medicine. 

How do you think He spread through Falling Leaves Behavioral Health Hospital so quickly?

He is a creature of belief. 

Every time you think of Him, He becomes a little more real. 

Every time you imagine Him, He digs a little further inside you. 

Dr. Baylor found Red, His first vessel. But there will be more. More hospitable wombs. More glorious rebirths (i’ve never been more horrified and more elated). This story has no particular ending, because all that matters if that you thought of Him.

You thought of Him many, many times.

So, do you see Him? 

Can you sense Him? 

Can you feel Him growing inside yourself? 

I know you can.

So, once again, thank you. 

We appreciate

your patronage. 

The disorientation was mind-breaking. Sixteen years of memories, gone. Vanished without a trace. One second, I was me - whoever the fuck that was, I still don’t really know - and the next, I was no one. It was like being born standing up.

The sun was blinding. There was a slight tremor in the ground, but I could only feel the vibrations in my left heel. I scoured my surroundings, hunting for a shred of familiarity, a buoy to keep my head above water. I saw thick pine trees. A sprawling but ancient two-story home. A red barn with no animals. Prepubescent kids inching closer, palms out, pupils dilated, concerned but fearful. I could label it all, but it was all unfamiliar. None of it was mine. 

I crumbled. 

By the time I'd collapsed onto the dirt, the small earthquake had subsided. I curled into the fetal position. That only made things worse. My own touch felt cold and alien. Most of the kids were running around like mad, hollering for “Ms. McDaniel”. The only one standing still was a short boy with a shaved head and jaundiced skin. He glared at me, clenching and unclenching his hands, spit building at the corners of his mouth as he whispered to himself.

At first, the panic was manageable. That changed when I realized I couldn’t feel damp earth against my right calf. 

I reached down. From the thigh on, all I felt was plastic. I slammed my eyes shut and feverishly tried to remember.

Who was I?

Where am I?

How had I lost half of my goddamned leg?

But there was just nothing. 

Finally, I screamed.  

Things become blurry from there.  I remember bits and pieces. The flashing lights of an ambulance, the metallic odor of a cramped triage room, the bite of an IV entering my arm, and then, eventually, a doctor. 

Someone who could help. 

“The tests were normal. All of them. Probably best to just move on.” 

Silence. 

Ms. McDaniel placed a gentle hand on my shoulder, but I bucked my alleged foster mother off and yelled: 

“That’s it**?”** 

The man in the coffee-stained lab coat narrowed his wrinkled eyes. He scoffed. 

“Yup, that’s it, young lady.” My vision swam. Panic dragged its hot barbs against my skin. He paced towards the door, twisting the proverbial knife as he threw it open. 

“Must be other, cheaper ways to garner some attention, no?” 

It was a long, painful drive “home”. 

When we got back, I planted myself in the living room and patiently waited for this fever dream to abate. I commanded myself to wake up.

Ms. McDaniel sat down next to me.

“Memory is a fickle machine, Ally; sometimes it just breaks down, and that’s all there is to it.” 

She slid closer. The rusted springs within the antique sofa groaned like a pig in heat. Up close, the old woman smelled equally of butterscotch and manure. 

“Well, uhm… would you like something to eat?” 

I didn’t respond, didn’t move a muscle; just stared straight ahead, tracing a “S” shaped crack in the wall with my eyes, up and down, up and down, until I noticed that same boy spying on us from the top of the stairs, his shaved head squeezed between the banister’s splintered posts. One of the widow’s many other fosters, I figured.

My head whipped towards him. 

We locked eyes; his were mud-brown with sickly yellow sclera, and they seemed too big for his face.  A ring of jagged pink scar tissue encircled the top of his shaved head, like a crown had been pressed into his scalp until it bled. He appeared intensely angry at first. But after a second, he smiled. His gums were red and empty. Completely, utterly toothless. 

“What the hell you looking at, kid?“ 

I leaped from the couch, but only felt my left heel connect with the floor. I toppled over. My torso thudded against the hardwood. 

“Oh, Ally…” Ms. McDaniel shuffled to a nearby closet and swung it open. She yanked a metal pull string. A small mountain of sneakers flickered in the dim light. I fought back tears as she rustled through the pile. 

“I know you hate it, but you need it, poppyseed.” 

The thing is, I didn’t hate my prosthetic; I just forgot I took it off. 

I did hate the nickname, though. 

Ms. McDaniel was remarkably spry for her age. She knelt beside me, rolling a beige sock over my stump with one hand and snapping the prosthetic into place with the other.

I peered up at the stairs.

The boy was gone, but he didn’t feel gone. 

Felt like he was just watching me from somewhere else. 

- - - - -

I went to bed that night hoping something would be different in the morning. If my memories had departed spontaneously, I figured they could return in a similar fashion. 

I woke up disappointed. 

Disappointed, anxious, and painfully hollow. 

Muted thumps and giggles reverberated through the floor. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, threw my left leg over the bedframe, and strapped on my prosthetic. Ms. McDaniel had offered to teach me how it worked, but I told her that wasn’t necessary; I still knew how. My muscles did, anyway. That was the most vexing aspect of the whole damn thing: the memories I’d lost seemed unnaturally specific. Just my identity and my personal history, but nothing more. 

The fragrant crackle of cooking bacon enveloped me as I stepped out of my bedroom. I paced down the hallway, following the smell, marveling at the strangeness of the house's design. The second floor of that farmhouse seemed more like a barracks than a foster home. I counted fifteen small bedrooms: seven doors on each side, and a single room at the very end. My room was the last room to the left, and naturally, the odd one out belonged to the strange boy. I caught him peeking at me from his doorway as I descended the rickety stairs. 

Breakfast was good, but chaotic.

The fosters outnumbered Ms. McDaniel twelve to one. I looked to be the oldest. The youngest was still in diapers.  There was a definite recklessness to the arrangement, but as long as child protective services found Ms. McDaniel’s orphan armada well-fed, clothed, and happy, I suppose they hadn’t preoccupied themselves imagining what could go wrong. 

The strange boy tiptoed into the kitchen, plopped himself in a corner, and began drawing weird little shapes on the floor in chalk.

He never ate with the rest of us. Ms. McDaniel didn’t appear to mind, or she didn’t notice. I figured he was embarrassed to be seen mashing his food with those red, toothless gums. 

Over the next few days, I learned about my life. 

It’s assumed that both my parents were killed in the Northridge Earthquake of ‘94.

I was found on the streets of L.A., dust-caked, dehydrated, missing my right leg from the knee down, but otherwise intact. The Red Cross worker didn’t hear me crawling up behind them. Apparently, I damn near gave the poor sap a coronary when I tugged on their pant leg in the dead of night. 

I told them my name: Ally.

They asked about my family, where I’d grown up, and who they could call to claim me, but I didn’t answer their questions. They figured I was concussed and couldn’t remember, because if I knew, why wouldn’t I tell them? Weeks passed. The damage was tallied, and the city was rebuilt. I was never reported missing. No family ever came looking for me. They estimated me to be “ten-ish” years old, but that’s all it was: an estimation. My entire existence was a fucking estimation. 

Ms. McDaniel began fostering me in the spring of ‘95, back when Mr. McDaniel was still alive. 

“What’d he die of?” I asked. We were lounging on the porch, watching the others play tag in the nearby field. She stopped rocking in her chair. A pang of regret squeezed my heart.

Why would I ask something like that?

My head fell into my hands. 

“Sorry, sorry…God, was I always like this?” 

I was relieved to hear her laugh. It was a warm, tinny cackle. A real beautiful noise.

“Yes, you’ve always been sort of…indelicate. I think that’s the first time I ever heard you apologize for it, though.”

She paused. A cold wind whistled through the field. 

“Technically, Mr. McDaniel passed from hypothermia, but it was the Alzheimer’s that caused him to wander into the woods in the middle of winter. Like I said: memory is a fickle machine. Easy come, easy go.” 

I ran my finger along the crease where my stump met its prosthetic. 

“Can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do to get mine working again.” 

“Be patient. Who knows what tomorrow will - “ A high-pitched sob interrupted her. One of the kids was on the ground, clutching their arm against their chest, while another stood above them, shrugging in Ms. McDaniel’s direction. She began pacing towards the ruckus.

“Well, don’t just stand there, Jacob: help your sister up!” 

I rested my head on the chair’s handle and watched the mayhem unfold. It was nice. A bittersweet grin slinked across my lips. 

Without warning, goosebumps exploded across my skin. 

Then, a voice, slurred and breathy.

“pssssst. Hey! Ally, come here!” 

I flipped around. Nausea slithered up my throat. The strange boy was crouching behind the front door with his upper lip lying on the door’s edge. Saliva was streaming from his mouth and down the frame, cascading around the copper latch bolt like a boulder in a river being pummeled by rapids. I launched myself from the chair. 

Landed on two feet that time. 

“What is wrong with you!?” 

His upper lip slowly curled into a fleshy smile. He ripped his mouth from the frame and scuttled backward on all fours. 

“I heard what you said,” he yelled from inside, “and I can help! I can help you remember!” 

Night was falling overhead. I stared into the shadowcast doorway, seething with a rage I couldn’t begin to comprehend. My gut pleaded for me to stay away. God, I should’ve listened. 

Instead, I charged into the farmhouse. 

Silence greeted me. 

I scoured the muddy darkness for the strange boy, but couldn’t locate him. My heart raced. I took a step back. The front door creaked shut of its own accord. A sharp whisper cleaved through the silence. 

“You want to remember? I can bring you through The Wanting Well. It’s the only way.” 

My gaze darted to the top of the staircase. Yellowed eyes shone in the blackness, with a glassy luster that made them glimmer like Christmas ornaments. 

“You want to remember, right? This only works if you want it.” 

Air caught in my throat. A barrage of defiance rolled across my tongue, but the insults dissolved before they arrived at my lips. Against all logic, I knew he was right. I knew I needed his help. I can’t explain how. The feeling was deep and inseparable. The truth seemed baked into my genetics. 

Reluctantly, I nodded. 

“Well, c’mon then.” 

The yellow eyes vanished. Scuttling movement reverberated through the walls, a stampede of erratic taps and thumps. Then, a click. Hazy light spilled into the second-floor hallway. I steeled myself with a long, shuddering breath and started up the dimly lit stairs. Sweat poured down my legs, collecting in the space between my thigh and the prosthetic. I grit my teeth; my stump was chaffing by the time I reached the landing. I peered around the corner. 

The light was leaking from my open bedroom door. 

I crept down the hall and entered with unnecessary caution, sliding my prosthetic over the frame and quickly jerking it out, expecting to spring a trap or ambush. I stepped inside. The boy was sitting cross-legged in the corner below the windowsill. He was bent over, sketching strange insignias on the floor with white chalk. 

“You can come closer,” he said, patting my bed without looking away from his work, “takes a little patience and some elbow grease to attract The Wanting Well.” 

I lurched forward. A harsh chill surged through my body. My room was twenty times colder than the hallway, and the air was suffocatingly damp. Felt like I was inhaling slush.

The boy dropped his chalk and stared gleefully at his tableau - a crosshatch of elliptical lines, intersecting with each other at random, crooked angles. Just looked like a haphazard pile of ivory-colored worms to me, but he seemed quite proud. 

His head shot up. 

“Hey! You know what? We’ve never gotten time like this before.” He reached into his pocket and rolled a handful of thin, black needles onto the chalk design. 

“W-what do you mean?” I asked, teeth rattling from the otherworldly cold. 

He licked his lips, dragging his wet tongue around the perimeter with a deliberate sluggishness. 

“I meeeeaaaan we don’t get to talk much. Anything you want to ask me?” 

I felt my rage building again.

What the fuck was he expecting me to ask?

“Uh…how old are you?” 

His brow furrowed, causing his halo-like scar to dance. 

“I’d say six-ish.” 

Without warning, his hand rocketed up and onto the wall behind him. He slammed his palm onto the design, keeping his hand cupped. A muted buzzing emanated from within. Then, with a precision that bordered on elegant, he quickly lifted the cupped hand while his other flew down and skewered a beetle with one of the thin, black needles, nailing it to the floor. The sorry thing thrashed, jerking its legs, twisting its thorax, but it was futile. The needle had pierced the insect right where its head met its wings with enough force to drive it a half-inch into the hardwood. 

“Anything else?”

My heart stuttered. I thought about begging him to stop. 

He brought down another needle with a vicious THUMP. 

And another.

A fourth.

A fixth.

“Don’t got much time left here, Ally. I can feel it getting closer.” 

His assault didn’t waver. Not for an instant. He just kept bringing the needles down, in different places, at different angles, but never through the head; he needed it alive, just barely alive. 

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. 

“Why…why do you know how to do this?” 

“Because ten-ish years ago, I arrived here in-between, so I can see the in-betweens - like The Wanting Well. Found out how to use it. I had to in order to live.”

The insect-turned-pincushion wasn't struggling anymore. He took a deep breath and placed his fingertips on the rounded ends.

“In-betweens don’t get to live. Not unless they’re willing to figure out how to extract some life for themselves.” 

He began delicately manipulating the needles, pushing some away, pulling others closer. The movements were tiny and exquisite, like he was playing a noiseless instrument. Reality bent to his flow. He expanded his fingers; the temperature surged, icy to scorching in an instant. I stumbled back. Pressure built in my skull. He pulled his fingers to the right; the walls bowed inward, as if a black hole had materialized in the center of my bedroom. I fell forward. My chest came crashing into the floor, knocking the air from my lungs. I flipped onto my back and peered up at him. His scar was pulsing. The arteries in his yellow-tinged eyes were burning bright red. He crawled over the impaled beetle, towards me. I heard the front door open. Distant chatter graced my ears. I tried to scream for Ms. McDaniel. Nothing came out. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. His head appeared over mine. His toothless mouth was wide open. Hot saliva dripped onto my paralyzed face; it smelled like rot. 

“My name would’ve been Alfie, by the way. Very rude not to ask.” 

He scampered out of the room and slammed my door shut. I heard his door open and close in turn. 

My eyelids grew heavy. Rabid fear couldn’t even keep them up. The world blackened. 

I drifted off, but not to sleep: to somewhere else. 

Somewhere in-between.

- - - - -

There’s a whoosh*, like water rushing through a pipe, louder, and louder, a deafening swell, and then,*

unseen fingers rip my eyes open. 

I’m still lying on the floor, in the dark, but there’s something above me, something that can’t be there. A circle of stone with a wooden arch and a deep, black pit at its center. 

A well is jutting from the ceiling. 

I should be afraid. There’s plenty to be afraid of. The stone is squishing against itself, quivering like an intestine. The whoosh is reverberating from inside the well. A hand is beginning to descend from the black pit, stretching to an inhuman length in order to reach me. 

But I’m not afraid.

I feel blissful. Or numb. It’s hard to tell the difference. 

I smile, because I know the answers are in there. My answers. 

Who I am.

Where I came from.

What happened to my leg. 

Everything I want is in the well. 

My arm feels weak, but I’m able to lift my hand off the floor. The hand from the pit is only inches away. 

I hear something. My smile falters. 

It’s Ms. McDaniel’s voice.

She’s not saying anything; her voice is just floating through the atmosphere, humming like the wind. 

My numbness melts; unparalleled horror takes its place.

The well convulses. The hand becomes violent, swatting the air, grasping for my neck. 

I don’t want to know. 

Not like this. 

The whoosh fades. 

- - - - -

I sprang up, clutching my chest, gasping like I haven’t inhaled for hours. 

It was dawn. 

I surveyed my room.

The impaled bug was missing, but a fine layer of white dust coated the floor below my windowsill. The pattern had been smeared into obscurity. It was still proof, though. 

None of what happened the night before was a dream. 

I latched on my prosthetic and stormed into the hallway. I wasn’t thinking. I had no plan. Blind fury guided me forward. I battered “Alfie’s” door. Pummeled it until my fists began to ache. I twisted the knob, but it was locked. I threw my hands over my head in frustration. The faraway clatter of breakfast curled into my ear.

Ms. McDaniel - she’d give me answers. 

I stomped downstairs. In my haste, I tripped on a loose nail. Skipped the last few steps and landed nose-first onto the dirt-caked entry mat. There was a visceral snap. Blood poured down the back of my throat. The floorboards shook as everyone came to investigate the commotion. 

“Ally! Oh my God, are you alright?” Ms. McDaniel tried to help me up, but I slapped her hand away and scrambled to my feet, panting like an animal. 

“Who the fuck is Alfie?” I growled. The other fosters took a step back, cowering. Ms. McDaniel cocked her head. 

“…Alfie?” 

“YES! He's one of your fosters, you senile bitch. Scar around his head? Toothless? Sleeps in the room at the very end of the hall, the one after mine? Lord help us, how could you possibly forget him?” 

Her brow furrowed. 

“The room at the end of the hall?” 

I nodded furiously. My posture loosened. Silent tears dripped down my cheeks. The pain in my sinuses was ramping up quickly. 

Ms. McDaniel instructed the others to wait in the kitchen. Then, slowly, with patience and warmth, she approached and pulled me into a hug. I sobbed into her shoulder until it hurt too much to cry. She tilted my head up and inspected the injury. 

“Well, I think we gotta return to the hospital. I’ll give Betty a call; she’ll come look after the others. While we wait for her to drive over from church, can I show you something outside?” 

I nodded. 

Ms. McDaniel led me around to the back of the farmhouse.

“Which window is yours, poppyseed?”

I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and pointed. 

My mouth went dry. 

She didn’t say anything else. She didn't have to. I imagine the realization was written all over my pale, mangled face. 

My window was at the very edge of the second floor. 

There wasn’t enough space for a room at the end of the hall. 

- - - - -

That second trip to the hospital reshaped my life for the better. 

The doctor who examined my nose wasn’t some surly, holier-than-thou chauvinist. He was a young man overflowing with nervous energy. Talked like a machine gun. Zipped around the exam table like a coked-out housefly. He was certainly odd, but he got the job done and then some. My nose wasn’t broken, thankfully. We were about to leave when the doctor started digging into what exactly caused me to trip in the first place. I hesitated, but his slapstick quirkiness was disarming. I trusted him. 

So, I told him everything.

The memory loss. The Wanting Well. Alfie. He listened intently. So much so that he didn’t say a word throughout the whole, protracted explanation. After I was done, he admitted me to the inpatient floor to run additional tests. 

Turns out, I’d been suffering from atypical seizures.

It didn’t completely explain the memory loss and complex hallucinations aren’t usually the sole manifestation of a seizure disorder, but the evidence was undeniable. The young doctor showed me the electrogram findings. My brain waves looked like a radio frequency gone haywire. I was sent home with anti-seizure meds. Whenever Ms. McDaniel asked, I told her things were improving. My memories hadn’t resurfaced, but I felt much better, and I wasn’t seeing Alfie anymore. 

That was only a partial truth. 

First off, I didn’t feel great. I was pretty depressed. Day by day, the emptiness I experienced seemed to fester. Made life taste like ash, but I think I hid my misery pretty well. That said, I never stopped seeing the door at the end of the hall. It was blurry, but it was there. Sometimes I thought I heard whispering behind it. Incensed muttering that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I tried to ignore it. 

More importantly, though, Alfie did seem to be gone.

There were a few occasions where I could’ve sworn I glimpsed his glassy, yellow eyes in the darkness of my bedroom, but it would end up being headlights from a passing car reflecting through my window. 

Time marched on.

I rebuilt myself the best I could, but it was an act. A show I put on for Ms. McDaniel. She was such a kind, generous, beautiful person. She deserved to die believing I had recovered. It was the least I could do. 

She passed six years after I lost my memories. Cancer. Metastatic - in her bones, her lungs, and her brain. She seemed happy to know she wouldn’t burden her fosters for too long. It took her quickly and without fanfare. Per her request, I scattered her ashes in the woods around the farmhouse. She became fixated on the state of Mr. McDaniel’s soul at the very end, worried that, even in death, he was still wandering the forest, lost and alone. She said she’d show him the way home. If anyone could, it’d be her. 

My grief was crippling.

Ms. McDaniel was my rock. My anchor to the world. Losing her felt like losing my memories a second time. Without her, I was no one. I had relationships with the other fosters, yes, but it wasn’t the same. Not by a long shot. 

So, with no prospects and nothing better to do, I gave the whole “apathetic mid-twenties death spiral” thing a try. If you’ve seen a movie in the last two decades, you probably know the drill. Whiskey with breakfast, harder drugs with dinner, sex with dodgy strangers to facilitate sleep, rinse and repeat. Whatever it took to distract myself from the terrible emptiness. One day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t taken my anti-seizure meds in months. 

Far as I could tell, nothing changed. 

That was pretty amusing. For about thirty seconds.

Then, it was back to the status quo, but it was becoming harder to disregard the emptiness.

My timeworn tricks weren’t fixing the problem. What’s more, I began to believe my memories weren’t lost, because I could feel them inside my head. Sequestered, but not truly gone, and for a moment, there was this minuscule glimmer of hope. 

That hope swiftly mutated into a constant, unrelenting itch. 

An itch that I couldn’t possibly scratch.

Sleep was the first thing to go. I’d toss and turn all night, trying my damndest to ignore the itch, the feeling of an earthworm burrowing through my scalp. No booze was strong enough. No drug was potent enough. The memories were entombed somewhere deep in my skull, begging for release. It was the purest form of torture imaginable. 

Then, like a gift from the divine, an ad popped up on my phone’s internet browser. 

“AMNESTIC BACKTRACKING - CLINICAL TRIAL IN THE REVERSAL OF MEMORY LOSS. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS”

I was ecstatic to learn that the physician running the trial could see me that afternoon. 

“Please - just call me Richter. I don’t love the doctor title. Always felt vain to me.” 

We shook hands. Heat gathered in my cheeks. Bashful wasn’t ever my default setting, but the man was undeniably handsome. Broad shoulders with a thickset jaw and chestnut colored eyes. He motioned for me to sit. I smiled and set myself down, buttoning up my flannel in the process. The A/C in his office seemed to be working overtime. 

“How does this go, exactly?” 

He smirked. 

“It’s all fairly straightforward; even more so in your case. Normally, the study requires certain blood tests and brain imaging as a baseline before we can initiate the experimental therapy, but I’ve reviewed your electronic record, and you’ve already had all the prerequisite tests. In other words, we can begin the amnestic backtracking today. In patients who’ve responded, we’ve seen positive results within hours, and because this clinical study is hurting for participants, it’ll all be free of charge.” 

My jaw dropped. I was floored; engrossed in a state of euphoric disbelief. I surveyed his office. It was sparse and unadorned, just a desk and a few chairs. No futuristic machines or vials of medicine. 

“So, is it something you send to my pharmacy, or…?”

He leaned over his desk, chuckling. 

“No, Ally. Amnestic backtracking is more of an in-house therapy.” 

Richter stood and gestured to a nearby door. 

“If you feel ready, if you want our help, go on ahead - I’ll meet you in there.” 

I used the edge of his desk as a fulcrum, pushed myself upright, and paced over to the door, beaming with hope. My hand hovered over the knob. Apprehension crackled down my spine. A laundry list of red flags began accumulating in my brain.

Richter looked exceptionally similar to the young doctor who diagnosed my seizures, someone I trusted. 

The air in this room was cold and damp, and I could barely feel the itch in my skull. 

He chuckled with taut lips, like he didn’t want me to see inside his mouth. 

My body trembled. I closed my eyes, and I heard something. A horrible noise; a desperate, animalistic wail. It wasn’t growing louder. It wasn’t getting closer. It’d been there the whole time, but I couldn’t appreciate it until now. It'd been concealed.

I glanced over my shoulder. 

There was a small, bloodied deer writhing in the corner. A bouquet of long, black needles had been driven through its torso. Its movements were twitchy, sporadic, and languid; it was nearly dead, but not quite. An incomprehensible mass of chalk lines besieged the sacrifice from every direction: the floor, the walls, the ceiling. 

I think I could’ve run. 

But I didn’t. 

What would be the point? 

I had nothing to run back to. 

I placed my hand on the knob, twisted it, rammed my shoulder into the door, and plunged myself into the patient darkness lying in wait on the other side.  

- - - - -

WHOOSH. 

Unseen fingers rip my eyes open. 

The air smells of blood and smoke. I can hear the faint tapping of rubble falling around me. A cracked lightbulb flickers overhead; weak bursts of golden static outline the devastation. 

A woman, crushed down the middle bisected by a massive wooden support beam. 

A man, buried beneath chimney bricks, his dead hand peeking out from the debris, immortalized in the shape of a claw, fingernails digging into the dusty rug. 

And a young girl missing the bottom half of her right leg. She’s alive, but for some reason, she’s not moving. She’s sitting upright, still as a statue. 

This is it. Me, as a child. My mother. My father. The Northridge Earthquake of ‘94. 

This is my history. 

My answers. 

Everything starts moving, ghostly and autonomous. Shattered picture frames converge and hang themselves neatly on the wall. A mahogany armoire rebuilds itself, piece by piece. The bulb's light becomes brighter. Other bulbs reform completely. 

The damage is reversing. 

I’m backtracking through memory. 

Suddenly, the younger me tilts backward and begins convulsing. Her skin ripples. Thousands of narrow, white threads seep from her pores. Once the last one is out, her spasms stop. The threads congregate above her in a tangled cluster. They jettison through the room like the tentacles of a man o’ war jellyfish drifting through the ocean. The beam that killed my mother begins to shake. Blood soaks into her body. Her flattened bones crack and expand. As the beam rises, the white threads reenter my mother, and she takes shape. 

I clutch my chest. My throat tightens. I grasp at a tiny fragment of understanding. 

Her belly is round. It protrudes far from her waist. 

My mother was pregnant.

She was about to give birth before she died. 

I feel my eyes become magnetized to one of the reformed pictures on the wall, a black and white ultrasound image with a small, handwritten label at the bottom of the frame:

“Alfie”

He arrived here in between. 

Dead and alive. 

I remembered what he said at the farmhouse:

“In-betweens don’t get to live. Not unless they’re willing to figure out how to extract some life for themselves.” 

When my mother died, my unborn brother invaded me. Commandeered my body. Stole my life. That day at Ms. McDaniel’s farmhouse, he lost control, took his hands off the wheel, and I regained my sovereignty. But he's still locked inside of me, and, somehow, he’s concealed my memories. He’s been using them as a bargaining chip. Leverage. 

A way to take back control. 

The chimney bricks covering my father begin to rumble. Just like the rest of the debris, they rebuild themselves, but they build something new. A circle of bricks with a black pit at its center. 

The Wanting Well. 

One by one, I watch them climb in. My father, then my mother, then young me. I can’t see any of their faces clearly. They’re crackling with static. 

I walk across the small, quaint home and peer over the side of the well, into the black depths. Everything I’ve wanted, all the memories that I’ve pined so desperately for, they’re in there. My palm grips the edge. It feels like flesh, wet and squelching, pulsing faintly. 

Something stopped me from throwing myself into the well before, right? Yes. It was Ms. McDaniel’s voice. 

I perk my ears, listening for her tender hum. 

But there’s nothing. 

It’s deathly silent. 

Because she’s gone, dead and buried, no longer with me. I’m nobody.

Who I am is in the well. 

I have no choice. 

I prepare to descend, lifting my prosthetic and resting it on the edge of the well, 

but I pause. 

It’s all a lie, isn’t it?

Knowing the truth won’t make me whole.

And even if she’s not with me, I’m still somebody. 

I pull my prosthetic away from the pit and turn; on the opposite wall, the door I entered through is still there. I force myself to move. The gravity around me becomes weaponized, resisting me, pushing me back. I fight forward. I need to leave, not for Ms. McDaniel, not for anyone: for myself. 

The knob is warm to the touch. 

“What the hell are you doing?” 

I glance over my shoulder. Alfie’s looming near the well, horribly amalgamated. One arm is a newborn’s, the other is Richter’s. His skull is bulging, uneven, cancerous. An umbilical cord the width of a fire hose droops from his stomach, wrapping around his feet and into the Wanting Well.

“I’m offering you everything. A perfect catalogue of your life. Who you were before I took the wheel, who you parents were, how you lost your leg - all of it. Hell, I can even give you your real name. You realize Ally is just placeholder, right? You can hide inside those memories until our body finally gives out.” 

He points into the black pit with his adult arm. 

“Now, get in*.”* 

He’s attempting to look threatening, but his resolve is faltering. His amalgamated body is trembling. 

“It was never supposed to be like this. I was distracted for a second - one second - and you spring up like a goddamn weed.” 

Tears are welling in his jaundiced eyes. 

“I’m sorry, Alfie.” 

I turn and twist the knob. He screams with twenty seperate voices and begins sprinting towards me. I can feel him grasping for me. I slam myself into the door. 

My body collapses into an abandoned office. 

I see chalk dust and blood stains in one of the corners,

but the dying deer is gone. 

- - - - -

I resumed my anti-seizure medication the next morning. Things have been quieter since, but I know he’s still there, waiting patiently, watching my every move, vying for control. 

There might come a day where Alfie overtakes me. A day where I’m forced into the Wanting Well. 

But until that day comes, I refuse to exist in between. 

I've given myself a name, and for the first time in my life, 

I will 

live. 

-Poppy. 

The disorientation was mind-breaking. Sixteen years of memories, gone. Vanished without a trace. One second, I was me - whoever the fuck that was, I still don’t really know - and the next, I was no one. It was like being born standing up.

The sun was blinding. There was a slight tremor in the ground, but I could only feel the vibrations in my left heel. I scoured my surroundings, hunting for a shred of familiarity, a buoy to keep my head above water. I saw thick pine trees. A sprawling but ancient two-story home. A red barn with no animals. Prepubescent kids inching closer, palms out, pupils dilated, concerned but fearful. I could label it all, but it was all unfamiliar. None of it was mine. 

I crumbled. 

By the time I'd collapsed onto the dirt, the small earthquake had subsided. I curled into the fetal position. That only made things worse. My own touch felt cold and alien. Most of the kids were running around like mad, hollering for “Ms. McDaniel”. The only one standing still was a short boy with a shaved head and jaundiced skin. He glared at me, clenching and unclenching his hands, spit building at the corners of his mouth as he whispered to himself.

At first, the panic was manageable. That changed when I realized I couldn’t feel damp earth against my right calf. 

I reached down. From the thigh on, all I felt was plastic. I slammed my eyes shut and feverishly tried to remember.

Who was I?

Where am I?

How had I lost half of my goddamned leg?

But there was just nothing. 

Finally, I screamed.  

Things become blurry from there.  I remember bits and pieces. The flashing lights of an ambulance, the metallic odor of a cramped triage room, the bite of an IV entering my arm, and then, eventually, a doctor. 

Someone who could help. 

“The tests were normal. All of them. Probably best to just move on.” 

Silence. 

Ms. McDaniel placed a gentle hand on my shoulder, but I bucked my alleged foster mother off and yelled: 

“That’s it?” 

The man in the coffee-stained lab coat narrowed his wrinkled eyes. He scoffed. 

“Yup, that’s it, young lady.” My vision swam. Panic dragged its hot barbs against my skin. He paced towards the door, twisting the proverbial knife as he threw it open. 

“Must be other, cheaper ways to garner some attention, no?” 

It was a long, painful drive “home”. 

When we got back, I planted myself in the living room and patiently waited for this fever dream to abate. I commanded myself to wake up.

Ms. McDaniel sat down next to me.

“Memory is a fickle machine, Ally; sometimes it just breaks down, and that’s all there is to it.” 

She slid closer. The rusted springs within the antique sofa groaned like a pig in heat. Up close, the old woman smelled equally of butterscotch and manure. 

“Well, uhm… would you like something to eat?” 

I didn’t respond, didn’t move a muscle; just stared straight ahead, tracing a “S” shaped crack in the wall with my eyes, up and down, up and down, until I noticed that same boy spying on us from the top of the stairs, his shaved head squeezed between the banister’s splintered posts. One of the widow’s many other fosters, I figured.

My head whipped towards him. 

We locked eyes; his were mud-brown with sickly yellow sclera, and they seemed too big for his face.  A ring of jagged pink scar tissue encircled the top of his shaved head, like a crown had been pressed into his scalp until it bled. He appeared intensely angry at first. But after a second, he smiled. His gums were red and empty. Completely, utterly toothless. 

“What the hell you looking at, kid?“ 

I leaped from the couch, but only felt my left heel connect with the floor. I toppled over. My torso thudded against the hardwood. 

“Oh, Ally…” Ms. McDaniel shuffled to a nearby closet and swung it open. She yanked a metal pull string. A small mountain of sneakers flickered in the dim light. I fought back tears as she rustled through the pile. 

“I know you hate it, but you need it, poppyseed.” 

The thing is, I didn’t hate my prosthetic; I just forgot I took it off. 

I did hate the nickname, though. 

Ms. McDaniel was remarkably spry for her age. She knelt beside me, rolling a beige sock over my stump with one hand and snapping the prosthetic into place with the other.

I peered up at the stairs.

The boy was gone, but he didn’t feel gone. 

Felt like he was just watching me from somewhere else. 

- - - - -

I went to bed that night hoping something would be different in the morning. If my memories had departed spontaneously, I figured they could return in a similar fashion. 

I woke up disappointed. 

Disappointed, anxious, and painfully hollow. 

Muted thumps and giggles reverberated through the floor. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, threw my left leg over the bedframe, and strapped on my prosthetic. Ms. McDaniel had offered to teach me how it worked, but I told her that wasn’t necessary; I still knew how. My muscles did, anyway. That was the most vexing aspect of the whole damn thing: the memories I’d lost seemed unnaturally specific. Just my identity and my personal history, but nothing more. 

The fragrant crackle of cooking bacon enveloped me as I stepped out of my bedroom. I paced down the hallway, following the smell, marveling at the strangeness of the house's design. The second floor of that farmhouse seemed more like a barracks than a foster home. I counted fifteen small bedrooms: seven doors on each side, and a single room at the very end. My room was the last room to the left, and naturally, the odd one out belonged to the strange boy. I caught him peeking at me from his doorway as I descended the rickety stairs. 

Breakfast was good, but chaotic.

The fosters outnumbered Ms. McDaniel twelve to one. I looked to be the oldest. The youngest was still in diapers.  There was a definite recklessness to the arrangement, but as long as child protective services found Ms. McDaniel’s orphan armada well-fed, clothed, and happy, I suppose they hadn’t preoccupied themselves imagining what could go wrong. 

The strange boy tiptoed into the kitchen, plopped himself in a corner, and began drawing weird little shapes on the floor in chalk.

He never ate with the rest of us. Ms. McDaniel didn’t appear to mind, or she didn’t notice. I figured he was embarrassed to be seen mashing his food with those red, toothless gums. 

Over the next few days, I learned about my life. 

It’s assumed that both my parents were killed in the Northridge Earthquake of ‘94.

I was found on the streets of L.A., dust-caked, dehydrated, missing my right leg from the knee down, but otherwise intact. The Red Cross worker didn’t hear me crawling up behind them. Apparently, I damn near gave the poor sap a coronary when I tugged on their pant leg in the dead of night. 

I told them my name: Ally.

They asked about my family, where I’d grown up, and who they could call to claim me, but I didn’t answer their questions. They figured I was concussed and couldn’t remember, because if I knew, why wouldn’t I tell them? Weeks passed. The damage was tallied, and the city was rebuilt. I was never reported missing. No family ever came looking for me. They estimated me to be “ten-ish” years old, but that’s all it was: an estimation. My entire existence was a fucking estimation. 

Ms. McDaniel began fostering me in the spring of ‘95, back when Mr. McDaniel was still alive. 

“What’d he die of?” I asked. We were lounging on the porch, watching the others play tag in the nearby field. She stopped rocking in her chair. A pang of regret squeezed my heart.

Why would I ask something like that?

My head fell into my hands. 

“Sorry, sorry…God, was I always like this?” 

I was relieved to hear her laugh. It was a warm, tinny cackle. A real beautiful noise.

“Yes, you’ve always been sort of…indelicate. I think that’s the first time I ever heard you apologize for it, though.”

She paused. A cold wind whistled through the field. 

“Technically, Mr. McDaniel passed from hypothermia, but it was the Alzheimer’s that caused him to wander into the woods in the middle of winter. Like I said: memory is a fickle machine. Easy come, easy go.” 

I ran my finger along the crease where my stump met its prosthetic. 

“Can’t think of anything I wouldn’t do to get mine working again.” 

“Be patient. Who knows what tomorrow will - “ A high-pitched sob interrupted her. One of the kids was on the ground, clutching their arm against their chest, while another stood above them, shrugging in Ms. McDaniel’s direction. She began pacing towards the ruckus.

“Well, don’t just stand there, Jacob: help your sister up!” 

I rested my head on the chair’s handle and watched the mayhem unfold. It was nice. A bittersweet grin slinked across my lips. 

Without warning, goosebumps exploded across my skin. 

Then, a voice, slurred and breathy.

“pssssst. Hey! Ally, come here!” 

I flipped around. Nausea slithered up my throat. The strange boy was crouching behind the front door with his upper lip lying on the door’s edge. Saliva was streaming from his mouth and down the frame, cascading around the copper latch bolt like a boulder in a river being pummeled by rapids. I launched myself from the chair. 

Landed on two feet that time. 

“What is wrong with you!?” 

His upper lip slowly curled into a fleshy smile. He ripped his mouth from the frame and scuttled backward on all fours. 

“I heard what you said,” he yelled from inside, “and I can help! I can help you remember!” 

Night was falling overhead. I stared into the shadowcast doorway, seething with a rage I couldn’t begin to comprehend. My gut pleaded for me to stay away. God, I should’ve listened. 

Instead, I charged into the farmhouse. 

Silence greeted me. 

I scoured the muddy darkness for the strange boy, but couldn’t locate him. My heart raced. I took a step back. The front door creaked shut of its own accord. A sharp whisper cleaved through the silence. 

“You want to remember? I can bring you through The Wanting Well. It’s the only way.” 

My gaze darted to the top of the staircase. Yellowed eyes shone in the blackness, with a glassy luster that made them glimmer like Christmas ornaments. 

“You want to remember, right? This only works if you want it.” 

Air caught in my throat. A barrage of defiance rolled across my tongue, but the insults dissolved before they arrived at my lips. Against all logic, I knew he was right. I knew I needed his help. I can’t explain how. The feeling was deep and inseparable. The truth seemed baked into my genetics. 

Reluctantly, I nodded. 

“Well, c’mon then.” 

The yellow eyes vanished. Scuttling movement reverberated through the walls, a stampede of erratic taps and thumps. Then, a click. Hazy light spilled into the second-floor hallway. I steeled myself with a long, shuddering breath and started up the dimly lit stairs. Sweat poured down my legs, collecting in the space between my thigh and the prosthetic. I grit my teeth; my stump was chaffing by the time I reached the landing. I peered around the corner. 

The light was leaking from my open bedroom door. 

I crept down the hall and entered with unnecessary caution, sliding my prosthetic over the frame and quickly jerking it out, expecting to spring a trap or ambush. I stepped inside. The boy was sitting cross-legged in the corner below the windowsill. He was bent over, sketching strange insignias on the floor with white chalk. 

“You can come closer,” he said, patting my bed without looking away from his work, “takes a little patience and some elbow grease to attract The Wanting Well.” 

I lurched forward. A harsh chill surged through my body. My room was twenty times colder than the hallway, and the air was suffocatingly damp. Felt like I was inhaling slush.

The boy dropped his chalk and stared gleefully at his tableau - a crosshatch of elliptical lines, intersecting with each other at random, crooked angles. Just looked like a haphazard pile of ivory-colored worms to me, but he seemed quite proud. 

His head shot up. 

“Hey! You know what? We’ve never gotten time like this before.” He reached into his pocket and rolled a handful of thin, black needles onto the chalk design. 

“W-what do you mean?” I asked, teeth rattling from the otherworldly cold. 

He licked his lips, dragging his wet tongue around the perimeter with a deliberate sluggishness. 

“I meeeeaaaan we don’t get to talk much. Anything you want to ask me?” 

I felt my rage building again.

What the fuck was he expecting me to ask?

“Uh…how old are you?” 

His brow furrowed, causing his halo-like scar to dance. 

“I’d say six-ish.” 

Without warning, his hand rocketed up and onto the wall behind him. He slammed his palm onto the design, keeping his hand cupped. A muted buzzing emanated from within. Then, with a precision that bordered on elegant, he quickly lifted the cupped hand while his other flew down and skewered a beetle with one of the thin, black needles, nailing it to the floor. The sorry thing thrashed, jerking its legs, twisting its thorax, but it was futile. The needle had pierced the insect right where its head met its wings with enough force to drive it a half-inch into the hardwood. 

“Anything else?”

My heart stuttered. I thought about begging him to stop. 

He brought down another needle with a vicious THUMP. 

And another.

A fourth.

A fixth.

“Don’t got much time left here, Ally. I can feel it getting closer.” 

His assault didn’t waver. Not for an instant. He just kept bringing the needles down, in different places, at different angles, but never through the head; he needed it alive, just barely alive. 

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. 

“Why…why do you know how to do this?” 

“Because ten-ish years ago, I arrived here in-between, so I can see the in-betweens - like The Wanting Well. Found out how to use it. I had to in order to live.”

The insect-turned-pincushion wasn't struggling anymore. He took a deep breath and placed his fingertips on the rounded ends.

“In-betweens don’t get to live. Not unless they’re willing to figure out how to extract some life for themselves.” 

He began delicately manipulating the needles, pushing some away, pulling others closer. The movements were tiny and exquisite, like he was playing a noiseless instrument. Reality bent to his flow. He expanded his fingers; the temperature surged, icy to scorching in an instant. I stumbled back. Pressure built in my skull. He pulled his fingers to the right; the walls bowed inward, as if a black hole had materialized in the center of my bedroom. I fell forward. My chest came crashing into the floor, knocking the air from my lungs. I flipped onto my back and peered up at him. His scar was pulsing. The arteries in his yellow-tinged eyes were burning bright red. He crawled over the impaled beetle, towards me. I heard the front door open. Distant chatter graced my ears. I tried to scream for Ms. McDaniel. Nothing came out. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t move. His head appeared over mine. His toothless mouth was wide open. Hot saliva dripped onto my paralyzed face; it smelled like rot. 

“My name would’ve been Alfie, by the way. Very rude not to ask.” 

He scampered out of the room and slammed my door shut. I heard his door open and close in turn. 

My eyelids grew heavy. Rabid fear couldn’t even keep them up. The world blackened. 

I drifted off, but not to sleep: to somewhere else. 

Somewhere in-between.

- - - - -

There’s a whoosh, like water rushing through a pipe, louder, and louder, a deafening swell, and then,

unseen fingers rip my eyes open. 

I’m still lying on the floor, in the dark, but there’s something above me, something that can’t be there. A circle of stone with a wooden arch and a deep, black pit at its center. 

A well is jutting from the ceiling. 

I should be afraid. There’s plenty to be afraid of. The stone is squishing against itself, quivering like an intestine. The whoosh is reverberating from inside the well. A hand is beginning to descend from the black pit, stretching to an inhuman length in order to reach me. 

But I’m not afraid.

I feel blissful. Or numb. It’s hard to tell the difference. 

I smile, because I know the answers are in there. My answers. 

Who I am.

Where I came from.

What happened to my leg. 

Everything I want is in the well. 

My arm feels weak, but I’m able to lift my hand off the floor. The hand from the pit is only inches away. 

I hear something. My smile falters. 

It’s Ms. McDaniel’s voice.

She’s not saying anything; her voice is just floating through the atmosphere, humming like the wind. 

My numbness melts; unparalleled horror takes its place.

The well convulses. The hand becomes violent, swatting the air, grasping for my neck. 

I don’t want to know. 

Not like this. 

The whoosh fades. 

- - - - -

I sprang up, clutching my chest, gasping like I haven’t inhaled for hours. 

It was dawn. 

I surveyed my room.

The impaled bug was missing, but a fine layer of white dust coated the floor below my windowsill. The pattern had been smeared into obscurity. It was still proof, though. 

None of what happened the night before was a dream. 

I latched on my prosthetic and stormed into the hallway. I wasn’t thinking. I had no plan. Blind fury guided me forward. I battered “Alfie’s” door. Pummeled it until my fists began to ache. I twisted the knob, but it was locked. I threw my hands over my head in frustration. The faraway clatter of breakfast curled into my ear.

Ms. McDaniel - she’d give me answers. 

I stomped downstairs. In my haste, I tripped on a loose nail. Skipped the last few steps and landed nose-first onto the dirt-caked entry mat. There was a visceral snap. Blood poured down the back of my throat. The floorboards shook as everyone came to investigate the commotion. 

“Ally! Oh my God, are you alright?” Ms. McDaniel tried to help me up, but I slapped her hand away and scrambled to my feet, panting like an animal. 

“Who the fuck is Alfie?” I growled. The other fosters took a step back, cowering. Ms. McDaniel cocked her head. 

“…Alfie?” 

“YES! He's one of your fosters, you senile bitch. Scar around his head? Toothless? Sleeps in the room at the very end of the hall, the one after mine? Lord help us, how could you possibly forget him?” 

Her brow furrowed. 

“The room at the end of the hall?” 

I nodded furiously. My posture loosened. Silent tears dripped down my cheeks. The pain in my sinuses was ramping up quickly. 

Ms. McDaniel instructed the others to wait in the kitchen. Then, slowly, with patience and warmth, she approached and pulled me into a hug. I sobbed into her shoulder until it hurt too much to cry. She tilted my head up and inspected the injury. 

“Well, I think we gotta return to the hospital. I’ll give Betty a call; she’ll come look after the others. While we wait for her to drive over from church, can I show you something outside?” 

I nodded. 

Ms. McDaniel led me around to the back of the farmhouse.

“Which window is yours, poppyseed?”

I put my hand up to shield my eyes from the sun and pointed. 

My mouth went dry. 

She didn’t say anything else. She didn't have to. I imagine the realization was written all over my pale, mangled face. 

My window was at the very edge of the second floor. 

There wasn’t enough space for a room at the end of the hall. 

- - - - -

That second trip to the hospital reshaped my life for the better. 

The doctor who examined my nose wasn’t some surly, holier-than-thou chauvinist. He was a young man overflowing with nervous energy. Talked like a machine gun. Zipped around the exam table like a coked-out housefly. He was certainly odd, but he got the job done and then some. My nose wasn’t broken, thankfully. We were about to leave when the doctor started digging into what exactly caused me to trip in the first place. I hesitated, but his slapstick quirkiness was disarming. I trusted him. 

So, I told him everything.

The memory loss. The Wanting Well. Alfie. He listened intently. So much so that he didn’t say a word throughout the whole, protracted explanation. After I was done, he admitted me to the inpatient floor to run additional tests. 

Turns out, I’d been suffering from atypical seizures.

It didn’t completely explain the memory loss and complex hallucinations aren’t usually the sole manifestation of a seizure disorder, but the evidence was undeniable. The young doctor showed me the electrogram findings. My brain waves looked like a radio frequency gone haywire. I was sent home with anti-seizure meds. Whenever Ms. McDaniel asked, I told her things were improving. My memories hadn’t resurfaced, but I felt much better, and I wasn’t seeing Alfie anymore. 

That was only a partial truth. 

First off, I didn’t feel great. I was pretty depressed. Day by day, the emptiness I experienced seemed to fester. Made life taste like ash, but I think I hid my misery pretty well. That said, I never stopped seeing the door at the end of the hall. It was blurry, but it was there. Sometimes I thought I heard whispering behind it. Incensed muttering that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I tried to ignore it. 

More importantly, though, Alfie did seem to be gone.

There were a few occasions where I could’ve sworn I glimpsed his glassy, yellow eyes in the darkness of my bedroom, but it would end up being headlights from a passing car reflecting through my window. 

Time marched on.

I rebuilt myself the best I could, but it was an act. A show I put on for Ms. McDaniel. She was such a kind, generous, beautiful person. She deserved to die believing I had recovered. It was the least I could do. 

She passed six years after I lost my memories. Cancer. Metastatic - in her bones, her lungs, and her brain. She seemed happy to know she wouldn’t burden her fosters for too long. It took her quickly and without fanfare. Per her request, I scattered her ashes in the woods around the farmhouse. She became fixated on the state of Mr. McDaniel’s soul at the very end, worried that, even in death, he was still wandering the forest, lost and alone. She said she’d show him the way home. If anyone could, it’d be her. 

My grief was crippling.

Ms. McDaniel was my rock. My anchor to the world. Losing her felt like losing my memories a second time. Without her, I was no one. I had relationships with the other fosters, yes, but it wasn’t the same. Not by a long shot. 

So, with no prospects and nothing better to do, I gave the whole “apathetic mid-twenties death spiral” thing a try. If you’ve seen a movie in the last two decades, you probably know the drill. Whiskey with breakfast, harder drugs with dinner, sex with dodgy strangers to facilitate sleep, rinse and repeat. Whatever it took to distract myself from the terrible emptiness. One day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t taken my anti-seizure meds in months. 

Far as I could tell, nothing changed. 

That was pretty amusing. For about thirty seconds.

Then, it was back to the status quo, but it was becoming harder to disregard the emptiness.

My timeworn tricks weren’t fixing the problem. What’s more, I began to believe my memories weren’t lost, because I could feel them inside my head. Sequestered, but not truly gone, and for a moment, there was this minuscule glimmer of hope. 

That hope swiftly mutated into a constant, unrelenting itch. 

An itch that I couldn’t possibly scratch.

Sleep was the first thing to go. I’d toss and turn all night, trying my damndest to ignore the itch, the feeling of an earthworm burrowing through my scalp. No booze was strong enough. No drug was potent enough. The memories were entombed somewhere deep in my skull, begging for release. It was the purest form of torture imaginable. 

Then, like a gift from the divine, an ad popped up on my phone’s internet browser. 

“AMNESTIC BACKTRACKING - CLINICAL TRIAL IN THE REVERSAL OF MEMORY LOSS. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS”

I was ecstatic to learn that the physician running the trial could see me that afternoon. 

“Please - just call me Richter. I don’t love the doctor title. Always felt vain to me.” 

We shook hands. Heat gathered in my cheeks. Bashful wasn’t ever my default setting, but the man was undeniably handsome. Broad shoulders with a thickset jaw and chestnut colored eyes. He motioned for me to sit. I smiled and set myself down, buttoning up my flannel in the process. The A/C in his office seemed to be working overtime. 

“How does this go, exactly?” 

He smirked. 

“It’s all fairly straightforward; even more so in your case. Normally, the study requires certain blood tests and brain imaging as a baseline before we can initiate the experimental therapy, but I’ve reviewed your electronic record, and you’ve already had all the prerequisite tests. In other words, we can begin the amnestic backtracking today. In patients who’ve responded, we’ve seen positive results within hours, and because this clinical study is hurting for participants, it’ll all be free of charge.” 

My jaw dropped. I was floored; engrossed in a state of euphoric disbelief. I surveyed his office. It was sparse and unadorned, just a desk and a few chairs. No futuristic machines or vials of medicine. 

“So, is it something you send to my pharmacy, or…?”

He leaned over his desk, chuckling. 

“No, Ally. Amnestic backtracking is more of an in-house therapy.” 

Richter stood and gestured to a nearby door. 

“If you feel ready, if you want our help, go on ahead - I’ll meet you in there.” 

I used the edge of his desk as a fulcrum, pushed myself upright, and paced over to the door, beaming with hope. My hand hovered over the knob. Apprehension crackled down my spine. A laundry list of red flags began accumulating in my brain.

Richter looked exceptionally similar to the young doctor who diagnosed my seizures, someone I trusted. 

The air in this room was cold and damp, and I could barely feel the itch in my skull. 

He chuckled with taut lips, like he didn’t want me to see inside his mouth. 

My body trembled. I closed my eyes, and I heard something. A horrible noise; a desperate, animalistic wail. It wasn’t growing louder. It wasn’t getting closer. It’d been there the whole time, but I couldn’t appreciate it until now. It'd been concealed.

I glanced over my shoulder. 

There was a small, bloodied deer writhing in the corner. A bouquet of long, black needles had been driven through its torso. Its movements were twitchy, sporadic, and languid; it was nearly dead, but not quite. An incomprehensible mass of chalk lines besieged the sacrifice from every direction: the floor, the walls, the ceiling. 

I think I could’ve run. 

But I didn’t. 

What would be the point? 

I had nothing to run back to. 

I placed my hand on the knob, twisted it, rammed my shoulder into the door, and plunged myself into the patient darkness lying in wait on the other side.  

- - - - -

WHOOSH. 

Unseen fingers rip my eyes open. 

The air smells of blood and smoke. I can hear the faint tapping of rubble falling around me. A cracked lightbulb flickers overhead; weak bursts of golden static outline the devastation. 

A woman, crushed down the middle bisected by a massive wooden support beam. 

A man, buried beneath chimney bricks, his dead hand peeking out from the debris, immortalized in the shape of a claw, fingernails digging into the dusty rug. 

And a young girl missing the bottom half of her right leg. She’s alive, but for some reason, she’s not moving. She’s sitting upright, still as a statue. 

This is it. Me, as a child. My mother. My father. The Northridge Earthquake of ‘94. 

This is my history. 

My answers. 

Everything starts moving, ghostly and autonomous. Shattered picture frames converge and hang themselves neatly on the wall. A mahogany armoire rebuilds itself, piece by piece. The bulb's light becomes brighter. Other bulbs reform completely. 

The damage is reversing. 

I’m backtracking through memory. 

Suddenly, the younger me tilts backward and begins convulsing. Her skin ripples. Thousands of narrow, white threads seep from her pores. Once the last one is out, her spasms stop. The threads congregate above her in a tangled cluster. They jettison through the room like the tentacles of a man o’ war jellyfish drifting through the ocean. The beam that killed my mother begins to shake. Blood soaks into her body. Her flattened bones crack and expand. As the beam rises, the white threads reenter my mother, and she takes shape. 

I clutch my chest. My throat tightens. I grasp at a tiny fragment of understanding. 

Her belly is round. It protrudes far from her waist. 

My mother was pregnant.

She was about to give birth before she died. 

I feel my eyes become magnetized to one of the reformed pictures on the wall, a black and white ultrasound image with a small, handwritten label at the bottom of the frame:

“Alfie”

He arrived here in between. 

Dead and alive. 

I remembered what he said at the farmhouse:

“In-betweens don’t get to live. Not unless they’re willing to figure out how to extract some life for themselves.” 

When my mother died, my unborn brother invaded me. Commandeered my body. Stole my life. That day at Ms. McDaniel’s farmhouse, he lost control, took his hands off the wheel, and I regained my sovereignty. But he's still locked inside of me, and, somehow, he’s concealed my memories. He’s been using them as a bargaining chip. Leverage. 

A way to take back control. 

The chimney bricks covering my father begin to rumble. Just like the rest of the debris, they rebuild themselves, but they build something new. A circle of bricks with a black pit at its center. 

The Wanting Well. 

One by one, I watch them climb in. My father, then my mother, then young me. I can’t see any of their faces clearly. They’re crackling with static. 

I walk across the small, quaint home and peer over the side of the well, into the black depths. Everything I’ve wanted, all the memories that I’ve pined so desperately for, they’re in there. My palm grips the edge. It feels like flesh, wet and squelching, pulsing faintly. 

Something stopped me from throwing myself into the well before, right? Yes. It was Ms. McDaniel’s voice. 

I perk my ears, listening for her tender hum. 

But there’s nothing. 

It’s deathly silent. 

Because she’s gone, dead and buried, no longer with me. I’m nobody.

Who I am is in the well. 

I have no choice. 

I prepare to descend, lifting my prosthetic and resting it on the edge of the well, 

but I pause. 

It’s all a lie, isn’t it?

Knowing the truth won’t make me whole.

And even if she’s not with me, I’m still somebody. 

I pull my prosthetic away from the pit and turn; on the opposite wall, the door I entered through is still there. I force myself to move. The gravity around me becomes weaponized, resisting me, pushing me back. I fight forward. I need to leave, not for Ms. McDaniel, not for anyone: for myself. 

The knob is warm to the touch. 

“What the hell are you doing?” 

I glance over my shoulder. Alfie’s looming near the well, horribly amalgamated. One arm is a newborn’s, the other is Richter’s. His skull is bulging, uneven, cancerous. An umbilical cord the width of a fire hose droops from his stomach, wrapping around his feet and into the Wanting Well.

“I’m offering you everything. A perfect catalogue of your life. Who you were before I took the wheel, who you parents were, how you lost your leg - all of it. Hell, I can even give you your real name. You realize Ally is just placeholder, right? You can hide inside those memories until our body finally gives out.” 

He points into the black pit with his adult arm. 

“Now, get in*.”* 

He’s attempting to look threatening, but his resolve is faltering. His amalgamated body is trembling. 

“It was never supposed to be like this. I was distracted for a second - one second - and you spring up like a goddamn weed.” 

Tears are welling in his jaundiced eyes. 

“I’m sorry, Alfie.” 

I turn and twist the knob. He screams with twenty seperate voices and begins sprinting towards me. I can feel him grasping for me. I slam myself into the door. 

My body collapses into an abandoned office. 

I see chalk dust and blood stains in one of the corners,

but the dying deer is gone. 

- - - - -

I resumed my anti-seizure medication the next morning. Things have been quieter since, but I know he’s still there, waiting patiently, watching my every move, vying for control. 

There might come a day where Alfie overtakes me. A day where I’m forced into the Wanting Well. 

But until that day comes, I refuse to exist in between. 

I've given myself a name, and for the first time in my life, 

I will 

live. 

-Poppy. 

Cold fingers crept across Judah’s thigh. A damp exhale settled along the nape of his neck like a rolling fog. He shuddered. The Boy had spent months denying his predicament, pretending like it wasn’t real, but it was real; he was trapped, and he could no longer deny, pretend, evade, or stall.

Sex was imminent. 

Tiffany smiled at him. 

She was going to ask again this weekend. The Boy had no excuses left. No escape plan. No way out. 

This was bad. 

The van lurched in and out of a pothole, jostling its many occupants, none more so than the couple in the back. Marcus twisted over the driver’s seat to apologize to his fellow high-school graduates. His hand drifted. They veered into another lane on the interstate. The haphazard collection of illegally procured spirits clinked like wind chimes in a hurricane as they tumbled over each other in the trunk. Tiffany released her grip and pointed a long, glitter-streaked nail at Marcus, demanding he pass the goddamned blunt to someone else before he got them all killed. 

Judah sighed. 

He squeezed himself further into the corner and tilted his body clockwise as far as the seat belt would allow him; a defensive position to combat his girlfriend’s unrelenting offense. 

He stared at Tiffany as she chatted with the others.

A pleasurable warmth simmered in his groin. 

She really was radiant. Vibrant, moss-colored eyes. Wavy, sun-kissed hair. Tall like a war goddess and thoughtfully slender, with pockets of excess where it mattered most. He marveled at the whole of her. Her confidence, her powerful elegance, the way her wet tongue danced over her plump lips, the misty sweat dappling her exposed midriff, the fluid grace of her bountiful hips and - 

Shame dug its talons deep into his gut. 

What would Pastor Louis say? 

Desire is impurity; drops of poison in love’s drinking well. 

In the fiery haze of adolescence, where everything feels confusing by design and viscously indefinite, there was one thing he did know for certain.

He loved Tiffany. 

The Boy turned away from her and pressed his face into the window. White-roofed bungalows and surfshack bodegas whizzed by. His pleasurable warmth remained, but it was souring. From soothing and carnal to buzzing and inflamed; confined wasps becoming angrier with each passing second. It was painful and confusing and disgusting and he hated it nearly as much as he hated himself. 

The old engine gurgled as Marcus laid on the gas. The coastal town gave way to the perfect blue Atlantic. The van careened onto the bridge and began sputtering up the incline, towards the island known as De La Cosse. 

And Judah watched it all pass him by with a forced indifference. 

Senior week was shaping up to be hell. 

- - - - -

De La Cosse was an ideal party spot for many reasons.  

There were the reasons they listed off to their parents. The beautiful scenery: shining white sand like God had made the beach with granulated marble; lush foliage; towering cliffsides with immaculate vistas, et cetera, et cetera. The extremely cheap motel lodging. The kitschy charm of the island’s signature souvenir, the “etched moons”, which were foot-long, crescentic seashells with an iridescent sheen and fingerprint-like markings. They were allegedly unique to the island, as well as the basis for its name. In French, De La Cosse roughly translates to of the husk. 

Then, of course, there were the real reasons. 

It was secluded. Nearest police station was ten miles inland. In the past forty years, not a single graduate had been charged with underage drinking on De La Cosse. The etched moons were also a selling point, but not for their value as commemorative knickknacks. Tradition dictated that the prom king and queen drink a ceremonial shot from one of the seashells on the last day of the trip, bookending the revelry; all etched moons had a single, puckered hole leading to a narrow inner cavity. Most claimed it made the already caustic liquor more unbearable, tacking on a sulfurous aftertaste that wasn’t quickly extinguished with an orange juice chaser. 

As dusk quieted the sky, Judah and the others pulled up to the infamous Fountainhead Motel. It was a U-shaped, two-story lodge painted a glossy bubblegum pink. Tiffany squealed. Judah felt his mouth go dry. 

The festivities had already begun. 

Stumbling teens littered the courtyard. A caravan of poorly maintained beaters with honk if you’re horny bumper stickers surrounded the so-called Fountainhead, which was a massive, dilapidated water feature with three tiers of rising, concentric circles narrowing to an ornamental sculpture at its apex. Small jets lined each circle, but most were either rusted shut or outright broken. No one had ever witnessed the fountain work. Not that it mattered. The motel was a stone’s throw away from the ocean. It was so needlessly redundant, but the absurdity was a major part of the charm. That and the strangeness of its apical sculpture; a grinning face with a bevy of tiny cylinders jutting out the back. It was like the centerpiece of some urban legend that no one knew of. A perfect blend of kitschy and unnerving to set the mood.

The van came to a screeching halt. Everyone but Tiffany and Judah jumped out and began mingling. 

Tiffany grasped Judah’s hand. They locked eyes. She did her best to reassure him; this was going to be fun, and he had nothing to be afraid of. Besides, with everything going on at home - the scandal, Pastor Louis’ arrest, the upcoming trial - he deserved a night to relax. Some time to just exist. A chance to act his age. 

She smiled. 

He smiled back at her.

It was a hollow expression, a reflex. 

Her words arrived at his ears, but they went no further. His mind was much too cluttered. He kept repeating the same flagellating thought, over and over again, attempting to lash his grotesque impurities into submission. 

Don’t think about sex. 

Don’t think about sex. 

Don’t think about sex. 

Judah stepped out of the van. The air was thick with brine and marijuana smoke. Bell Biv Devoe’s Poison blared through a boombox positioned on the fountain, directly below the grinning face. 

His ears perked to something else, though. 

Human voices humming an organized melody, prim and proper, restrained and baroque. Some hymn or psalm. A lovely noise. He spun around, but couldn’t identify the source. It hung in the atmosphere like pollen after an explosive bloom, omnipresent but ethereal. 

Tiffany wrapped her arms around Judah and dragged him forward.

- - - - -

The moon shone pale silver over De La Cosse. 

Judah watched from the sidelines as his friends danced in the faint light, bobbing in and out of the corroded fountain, laughing with abandon, staining the auburn metal with the sugary cocktails spilling from their overfilled cups. A swarm of happy shadows cavorting in the night. 

The scene was hypnotic. The chaos was a strange sort of beauty. He was afraid to let himself like it, but slowly, gradually, Judah let his guard down. 

Tiffany stumbled over and offered him a drink. She was loose and glassy-eyed. A wave of realization trickled across her face. She slurred out an apology, qualifying the offer, reminding Judah that he didn’t have to take anything he didn’t want; it was completely his choice. 

Judah examined the dark liquid sloshing around the ceramic mug. Did he want it? He wasn’t sure. 

Normally, his own thoughts were buried under deafening layers of crosstalk, angry voices preaching the differences between right and wrong. But in that moment, surrounded by reckless joy, he experienced an unfamiliar clarity. 

Yes. 

He did want it. 

He smiled, thanked Tiffany, and took a sip. 

The night opened wide for Judah. He danced, he laughed, he drank, and did it all of his own volition. He allowed the saturnalia to consume him, but only on his terms, with his express permission, and he felt free. 

Then, he kissed her. 

Passionately, pressing her slender body into the pink wall of the motel under the curious but impartial gaze of the moon. It was everything each of them had craved. 

She felt special, worshipped, and loved. 

He felt natural, pure, and loved. 

Their embrace was ferocious and sublime. A pinnacle of adolescence. The type of moment one could spend the rest of their life trying to recreate. 

Then, gently, her hand cradled his manhood. 

A jolt of lightning rocketed up his spine. 

Judah leaped back. His clarity wilted. Should he want this? Was he allowed to?

Desire is impurity.

She apologized feverishly. His body proved traitorous. The blood in his crotch seemed to coagulate, turning to sludge, engorging his cock to the point of rupture. 

Desire is impurity.

His drunken feet couldn’t seem to find purchase in the shifting sand. She reached for him, but he slapped her hand away. 

Desire is impurity.

All of a sudden, he heard it again. The humming voices. The organized melody. The lovely noise. 

It was coming from behind him. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you, okay?”

Judah paused. 

“Let’s just go inside.”

Something cancerous in his brain commanded him to run. 

The Boy listened. 

Judah turned and sprinted towards the ocean, towards the lovely noise. 

Tiffany attempted to give chase. She slipped. Her head collided with the trunk of a palm tree. There was a harsh snap. 

Judah didn’t hear the splintering impact.  

His lungs heaved as he pushed through the dense forestation. He wasn’t sure what he was doing or why he was doing it. Alcohol and nerves and terrible memories had made him into a confused machine. 

The lovely noise grew louder, grander, more orchestral. 

He broke through the trees. 

A single campfire dotted the shoreline. 

Three silhouettes sat around the fire, their smiling faces flickering red, singing and playing their instruments. A Young Woman with a flute. A Child with a drum. An Old Man with a nylon-string guitar. 

Darkness swelled, obscuring the rest of the landscape. 

The moon refused to touch the southern edge of De La Cosse. 

Judah approached, unsure but compelled by the perceived safety of the lovely noise. His feet burned. The sand felt like hot coals raking against his heels. When he inhaled, Judah thought he could see the darkness entering him, black clouds swimming between his teeth and down his throat. 

He stood over the fire, anticipating embrace. 

The silhouettes did not greet him. 

The music started to change. It became discordant. Arrhythmic. The melody lurched, as if it were in pain. The Boy looked to their instruments, but the silhouettes weren’t holding any. The Young Woman pressed a bone to her lips, not a flute. The Old Man robotically strummed the empty air.  The Child tapped his wrinkled hands against a hollow skull. 

Judah began to stumble back. 

There was silence, followed by the lapping of waves against the shore and the quiet whistle of a seabreeze. 

The Old Man sprang upright. His body was unnaturally thin; it wavered in the breeze like a ribbon held to a fan. He abruptly fell backward and disappeared behind the crackling fire. 

Judah’s heart fluttered. 

A loathsome dread churned in his gut. 

The Boy had a final moment of clarity and appreciated the grim tragedy of his faultlessness. 

A blur of frantic motion surged from behind the fire. It was fast and low to the ground. It appeared like The Old Man was being carried across the sand by a horde of miniature people, but as he got closer, Judah saw the truth. His backside, the part that’d been tactfully concealed within the darkness, was covered in thousands of thin, skittering legs.

 A nightmarish millipede with the facade of a person painted on its back. 

Judah bolted up the shoreline. 

His feet thudded against the burning sand. He could hear The Old Man drawing nearer, nearer, the savage discord of his movement crescendoing, a deafening chorus of shrill clicks, like piano wire being gradually crushed by a hydraulic press. 

Judah reached for the forest.

The Old Man pounced. The legs on the backside of his head pierced Judah’s calf. He tripped forward and slammed his face into the sand, screaming as the skittering limbs tangled themselves into his muscle, gnawing into him like barbed wire. The Boy attempted to free himself, but it was futile. The Old Man was burrowed too deep. He dragged him towards the water. Scorching heat engulfed Judah’s leg. His eyes bulged. His nerves could barely process the pain. He swallowed sand, choking as he wailed. Judah’s leg ballooned. His skin stretched to its absolute limit. As he was dragged past the campfire, the limb burst, erupting with a fountain of black bile. The Young Girl and The Child bent backward and skittered over to the steaming fluid; they drank of Judah gratefully. The Old Man pulled his prey under the tide. 

He was not done with him. 

He would not be done with The Boy until he’d been drunk clean. 

And he planned on taking his time.

He was going to savor every last drop. 

- - - - -

As spring turned to summer, excited graduates arrived at the Fountainhead Motel. It was a smaller group than usual. Many students thought it would be bad luck to return to De La Cosse so soon, given what’d transpired the year before. 

The mood was quite somber until they noticed Judah had washed up on the shore.

They couldn’t believe their fortune. 

An etched moon? 

So early in the season? 

They partied for seven days, and on the last day of the celebration, they drank from Judah. 

He sensed the liquor entering him. 

He tasted their lips against his. 

He could’ve moved, wiggled a little bit in their grasp, but he didn’t. 

Why would he? There was no need. 

The Boy was content.

He gleamed triumphantly in the afternoon sun, 

iridescent, 

empty, 

and pure. 

There was no warning. No deafening noise. No brilliant flash of light. They all just appeared - hunched over, emaciated, and covered in translucent, pale red skin. Only those who stayed indoors lived to see the desert sun rise.  

We call it the deadtide. I was sixteen when it first rolled into White Rock. 

I dream about that night a lot. 

Mom had just pulled into the driveway. Twilight faded overhead, drip by golden drip. Dad waved at her through the foyer window. She smiled, shut the trunk, gathered the groceries, and began walking towards the front door.  

She was so close. Just a few steps away.

The sun fully set. 

Instantly, they were there. 

Men. Women. Even children. I witnessed at least a dozen of them blink into existence on my street, but they had materialized all over town.

Dad mumbled some meaningless half-words. I placed my trembling hand on the window. The glass was cold but alive, crackling with the phantom caress of static. 

The closest one stood motionless in the middle of the street. Ribs jutted from his clay-colored chest. The oily brown hair blanketing his upper back was tangled like a thorn bush.  His eyes were gray and downcast, perpetually fixed on the sand between his gaunt feet. Then, while the rest of him stayed perfectly still, the first two fingers of his right hand began suddenly elongating, launching across the asphalt with impossible speed. 

Mom dropped the groceries and started to run.

My pulse grew wild. Each frantic heartbeat seemed to rattle my teeth. I beckoned to her, wailed for her to run faster, but she wasn’t looking, she couldn’t seem to hear me. The fingers coiled up her back, curved around her neck, and latched onto her cheek, pinching her skin between a pair of long, jaundiced fingernails; the sickly fangs of a hellish viper. 

Her expression twisted into something feral. A raw, animalistic contortion of lips and creases. Her gaping mouth rippled, but I heard no scream. 

Then, like a fishing line being reeled in, the fingers retracted. 

The force ripped her off her feet. She was briefly airborne. 

Her hip crashed against the sidewalk, but I heard no painful THUMP, no shattering of bone, nothing at all.

Because the silence never wavers once the sun sets. That's how we came up with its name. It's an invisible current that surges through our town, swallowing everything in its path, silencing anything caught under its swell. 

A deadtide. 

Mom was dragged with such reckless effort, her body skidding across the road, and yet, her skin never broke. No, her cheek stretched. Once at his side, she hung from the man’s grasp like a burlap sack, her cheek skin stretching almost a foot above her jawbone. Her eyes vanished within the tented skin, leaving a pair of black eyeholes that made her face look like an empty mask. Being caught in the tide changes a person. Their skin becomes elastic, and they can’t seem to bleed, no matter how roughly they’re handled. 

Tears streamed down my cheek.  

The way she thrashed, the helpless ferocity of it all, it was just too much.

I burst from the window and bolted towards the front door.

Dad was too quick. 

He dashed ahead of me and barricaded the door with his body. I battered him. Screamed at him to do something while slamming clenched fists into his stomach. Begged him to let me through. Eventually, exhaustion set in. I slumped to the floor and fell asleep in his arms.

And while I slept, the deadtide rolled on. 

Dad stayed awake and watched it unfold. 

The pale red bodies dragged their writhing victims due south under the moonlight. They lurched together in perfect lock-step. A silent, synchronized convoy disappearing into the horizon with its human cargo. 

Dawn arrived. 

Sound made an unceremonious return; a strong wind howled across the vacant streets, lifting coils of sand from the asphalt.

Far as anyone could tell, they were gone.

The town was still. 

Everyone was desperate to leave, but no one was brave enough to be the first. 

Our neighbor’s door slowly creaked open. 

Lily inched over the threshold, glassy-eyed, still in her pajamas, the navy blue ones with the cartoon circus lions on them. A few strands of frizzy brown hair hung in the air like someone had just rubbed a balloon against her head. She called out to her parents, who were both long gone by then. Jim and Denise were Mom’s best friends, and Lily was a sweet, energetic girl. We knew them all very well. 

Everyone watched as she trudged across the asphalt, alone, confused, frightened, but unharmed. The deadtide hadn’t hesitated to take children the night before. 

That was enough proof. 

Like someone had fired a starter pistol, people exploded from their homes all at once. Wild-eyed parents ushered startled toddlers into vans. The more religiously inclined fell to their knees in the street and offered clasped hands to the sky, pleading for mercy, apologizing for whatever transgression had warranted such a biblical massacre. Dad sprang into action. He leaped out the door, pushed through the mob, scooped Lily into his arms, brought her inside, and told me to keep an eye on her. We watched TV on the couch while he went back out and tried to control the hysteria. 

“We can’t just leave - “ I heard him shout. 

“There have to be others like Lily. Kids, old people, the sick. Not everyone can get out of town right this second, and nobody knows for sure that they’re not coming back.” 

Some listened, but most of those who could leave were leaving, come hell or high water, though they promised to send help when they reached Tucson. 

When all was said and done, only a quarter of the town remained. 

As the sun dipped in the sky, we fortified our locked doors with bookcases and heavy tables. A futile measure, but it gave us something to do.

Right as the sun fully set, the deadtide rolled in. 

The red bodies materialized and lurched silently through the streets. They migrated south exactly as they had the night before, eyes at their feet, never looking up, never attempting to gain entry to anyone’s home. Dad’s relief was palpable, but short-lived. Although I’m thankful for his attention to detail, his discovery was devastating. Some small part of me wishes he had never noticed. 

The procession was slightly larger. 

They were there. All of them. Everyone who had evacuated earlier that day was now walking amongst them, clay-skinned, starved, and hollow.

But Mom was nowhere to be seen. 

- - - - -

The following morning, I woke up to find Dad on the couch.

He was staring out the window, gently rubbing the back of a snoring Lily. I approached him carefully; there was a cold emptiness in his bloodshot eyes that set me on edge. 

“Glad you’re up,” he said, gaze still anchored to the glass. “I’ll be leaving in a bit to organize a meeting. You’ll stay here and look after Lily.” 

“What? No! No. I can help. I need to help.”

His shoulders tensed, but he did not respond. 

Heat collected in the pit of my stomach.

“Why the hell would I stay? Just for her? She’s not…” 

His head snapped towards me. The coldness melted away, revealing something truly volcanic. 

“She’s not what Adam?” 

I considered keeping my mouth shut. 

I didn’t. 

“She’s…she’s not ours*!*” I shouted.

The proclamation echoed through our home. 

Movement drew my attention away from Dad. A single blue eye peeked out from the kid’s chestnut curls. She sniffled. My stomach twisted. The couch leather squeaked as she rotated herself away. Lily nestled against the cushion, pushing her face into the back of the couch like she was attempting to burrow inside the fabric. 

Dad sighed. He stood, tucking the fleece blanket around her before turning back to me. 

“Listen…there is no ours and yours, there’s just us. We’re all one big, unified thing. Caring for her is just another way of caring for all of us.”

I nodded. 

A bitter smile crept across his lips. He was about to pass by, but he paused. His breaths were heavy. 

“You know what? I think Mom taught me that.” 

- - - - -

Dad and the other survivors convened in a small amphitheater where stage plays had been performed before the tide. 

After some deliberation, everyone agreed that the most logical next step was to involve some outside authorities. We’d lost our chief of police that first night, as well as a sizable chunk of our officers, but the few who remained knew the proper channels to contact the Tucson PD. 

“I mean, who knows? Might end up being overkill. Someone outside of White Rock must have noticed people are missing.” There was a brightness in his voice, a tenuous optimism. I clung to it. 

The sun set. 

The tide rolled in. 

For a while, the night was silent.

I woke up to a series of piercing screams erupting from the guest bedroom. 

Lily was having a night terror; the first of many. I threw a pillow over my head, but it barely muffled her shrieks. Fear gnawed at my chest; lacerating throbs of pain, like my heart was pumping fiberglass instead of blood. 

Would the noise alert them? 

I imagined those fingers bursting into my bedroom and dragging me away with those sickly yellow nails. I considered what it might feel like to have my skin stretch like rubber, expanding until I eventually disappeared inside myself. 

But they never came. 

And with Dad’s help, Lily settled. 

The following afternoon, Detective Wilms arrived at our doorstep. 

He was a thick man with a shit attitude and bagel crumbs adorning his unkempt mutton chops. Given his level head, it was determined that Dad would speak to the detective. He vastly undersold the circumstances, of course. All he said was that Mom and “a few” others had gone missing. From there, he just had to keep Wilms preoccupied until sunset. 

Nobody was sure what would happen after Wilms saw the deadtide. 

For all we knew, reports of the preternatural threat would rise through the ranks of the FBI, and White Rock would be swiftly nuked off the face of the earth in the name of containment. Even that seemed better than doing nothing, though. 

But Wilms proved difficult to pin down. 

He seemed firmly uninterested in the situation. Eyes glazed over, expression vacant, memory worse than a concussed goldfish. Despite reiterating our cover story multiple times, he kept asking questions like: 

“Wait, so...who went missing?” 

The sky darkened. 

The scent of vanilla and burnt wood hung heavy in the foyer. Dad and Wilms stood by the window, debating who should be drafted to the Arizona Cardinals over tumblers of expensive scotch. 

The sun finally set. 

The tide rolled in. 

Sweat beaded on Dad’s forehead. Silence descended around us like an avalanche. Wilms stared into the blackness, a blackness littered with shambling red corpses. 

We waited.

And then, he smiled.

He patted his bulging gut and said:

“Well, I should probably ship off. Thanks for the drink.”

The color dissolved from Dad’s shellshocked face. 

Wilms couldn’t see the tide. 

And before Dad even realized the danger, Wilms already had his hand on the knob. 

He flung the front door open. The smell of a storm wafted in from the night, dense and electric. 

Dad leaped back, throwing his arms up defensively, expecting an onslaught. 

But nothing came through the door. 

Halfway through the threshold, Wilms paused, cocking his head. 

“I’ll uh…I’ll get back to you about…”

He thought for a moment, eyes darting around the room. 

“What we…uh…discussed today.”

The door slammed shut. 

Wilms stumbled to his car, got in, and drove off. He almost hit one of the red bodies, but at the last possible moment, they launched back, flattened themselves onto the road and narrowed their frame. The car sped right over them. A second later, they jerked upright and continued trudging south. 

We never saw Wilms again. 

- - - - -

Time, much like the tide, proved relentless and indifferent. Despite feeling frozen at the epicenter of some quiet apocalypse, the minutes still ticked forward. Day turned to night, night turned to day. Life went on.

So, eventually, we did too.

Lily moved in with us and became my unofficial stepsister. Dad continued to help coordinate survival efforts, and the town as a whole abandoned the notion that anyone on the outside could help us.

Dad spoke with Wilms on the phone a few days after his visit. He had no recollection of White Rock. None at all. And when he finally convinced Wilms to come back a second time, the detective claimed he couldn’t “figure out how to get there”. Dad pleaded for him to elaborate, but he got flustered and hung up. 

Friends and relatives were much the same. We could reach them by telephone. They’d remember us, but that memory would quickly turn out to be both vague and fleeting. One minute they’d understand who they were talking to, the next they’d have no fucking clue, and more often than not, that amnesia evoked some disturbing rage. Calls would frequently end with the person on the other line blaring profanities, sobbing uncontrollably, or screaming like a banshee. It was like we were on the precipice of complete erasure, but we hadn’t yet been pushed over the edge, and that “in-between-ness” seemed to incite a primal fear for those outside of White Rock. 

A strange new normal developed while we waited for the tide to finally pass.

Lily and I grew close. Memories were made: peaceful dinners with weak laughter, pleasant soccer games under the Arizona sun, movie nights with blinds hanging low on every window. 

Things certainly weren’t perfect. The tide wore on everyone’s psyche differently. 

Some freely gave themselves it. Left their homes in the night, silently and usually without warning, never to be seen again. Didn’t happen often, but it happened enough times to earn a slang term. It was a clumsy euphemism, but most felt it was more appropriate for polite conversation than stating the blunt truth of the matter. 

“Oh, you haven’t heard about Marie? Couldn’t take it anymore. She got sunk*…”* 

Lily’s night terrors became progressively more intense. Sometimes they’d last for hours. Other times, she’d make these bizarre noises; rhythmic clicks and grunts that would turn her cheeks red from how vigorously she would vocalize. 

Hundreds of nights came and went without incident.

There was never any siege, and as long as people remained inside, nobody was harmed. Call me naive, but the phenomenon started to seem more like a natural disaster than an apocalypse. We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time and got swept up into something we could never understand. 

Two years later, and we’re still here. Not much has really changed. 

Until tonight.

- - - - -

Dad was lounging on the couch with a book. Lily tends to get a little stir-crazy before bed, so I was doing my best to wear her down. 

She loves playing the flying trapeze.

“Okay - now across the tight rope!” I called out. 

She tiptoed across a line of ties I’d laid on the floor, wobbling, feigning nervousness. Being the rambunctious little goblin she is, Lily pretended to slip from the tight rope, and she came crashing to the floor. After I tended to her fake injuries, she deemed herself ready to “return to circus life”, which involved her doing manic cartwheels around the living room. 

I smiled, cheering her on. 

There was a rush of motion behind me. Dad leaned over and whispered something in my ear. 

“Get your sister upstairs - now.” 

I turned to him. A familiar emptiness had hollowed out his bloodshot eyes, but he wasn’t looking at me.

Nausea skittered up the back of my throat.

Despite the painful apprehension, I followed his gaze. 

He was staring out the window. 

The red bodies were marching due south in perfect lockstep, same as they had every other night, but with one key difference. 

Their eyes weren’t fixed on the ground. Their heads were upright, and they were shifting side-to-side, still in absolute synchrony with each other,

left to right, 

right to left,

left to right.

Air fled violently from my lungs. 

“Jesus Christ…” I muttered. 

“Don’t think about it. Just go, and try to act calm. I’ll start barricading the doors.” 

I staggered to my feet. 

“A-alright kiddo, time for bed.” 

Lily tumbled out of a cartwheel, panting from exertion. 

“Did you…did you see how many I did?” 

I nodded, grabbed her hand, and guided her up the stairs, careful to keep her pointed away from the window. 

Much as I tried not to look, I could still see them in the corners of my vision.

Their starved red bodies marched down the street, but their ravenous gray pupils followed Lily’s every movement. Even when she was upstairs, away from any windows. 

And if you looked really, really closely. 

You could see their fingers, 

vibrating in the moonlight. 

- - - - -

We’re not gone.

We’re all 

still out here, 

and the tide’s

shifting. 

Please, for the love of God,

remember us.

A few hours before the news became plastered across every TV screen in Missouri, I got the call. A man named Ajax rasped through my office phone. Said he was with the FBI. Claimed I’d be well compensated for my expertise at a developing crime scene out in the Ozarks. 

I cut him off there.

“I’m sorry Ajax from the FBI, let me see if I got this right: seven hundred an hour for my “expertise”? In anthropology? Seriously? Give me a fucking break.” I slammed the phone down. Figured they were just some bitter student channeling their pent-up frustration over a failing grade into a very strange, very bad prank. 

Then, the story broke. 

Every station in a hundred-mile radius was scrambling to report the grisly details. Articles flooded my feed. Kids whispered about it in the halls. There was a new serial killer to sate our morbid fixations, and by the looks of it, they’d been busy. 

It was the largest single-day discovery of unidentified remains in Missouri’s history. Not bodies, mind you - remains. 

No bones, no blood, no viscera. 

Just skin. 

I raced back to my office, praying I hadn’t squandered the opportunity. It wasn’t just about the money. My area of study was the history of the occult; if they were calling me, something truly bizarre had transpired out in the deep woods. Whatever it was, I wanted to see it. 

I wanted that more than anything.

Ajax answered on the first ring. They hadn’t found anyone else to fill my niche in the meantime. I asked him what I’d need to do, and he provided an address. 

I canceled my afternoon classes and got on the road. 

The drive was torture. Minutes ticked down on my GPS with a slowness that felt almost vindictive. The sun was low and gold when I finally pulled off the interstate. Smooth asphalt abruptly transitioned to craggy dirt. My sedan jostled in and out of potholes. I hoped my suspension would hold. If it broke, God only knows if I’d be able to get help out there - the only building I passed on the way to the crime scene was a small gas station with a single rusted pump. 

Parked police cruisers began dotting the roadside. The white oaks flanking the road grew more menacing with each passing mile, twisted and overgrown, gnarled branches reaching out like giant arthritic fingers about to pluck me from the car. Despite the doom crawling under my skin, though, I couldn’t seem to turn back. Curiosity really is a stubborn god.  

Then, my GPS chirped a single word: Arrived. 

The forest peeled away to reveal a sprawling hillside swarming with police. A single paved footpath connected the dirt road to the two-story farmhouse at the top of the slope. The grounds were tidy and well-kept. The place itself had a Little House on the Prairie sort of rustic charm about it. 

This was the epicenter of some sort of ritualistic carnage? 

I pulled to a checkpoint, rolled down my window, and explained to the officer that I was an outside consultant. 

Ajax wasn’t what I expected. 

He was a tall, middle-aged man with wiry arms and a chest that dipped in slightly at its center. His slacks were wrinkled, and his coffee-stained polo was this odd shade of blue-gray, a glacial color that seemed paradoxically bright and dull at the same time. He looked innocuous. Toothless, even. But as he led me up the footpath, my assessment slowly started to change. Maybe it was the fact that he never seemed to blink. Or maybe it was something about his body language - every movement was rigid and precise, almost robotic. I’m not sure what set off my intuition, but the message was loud and clear: his appearance was a trick. Camouflage. A facade designed to disarm. I suppose the Ajax and the farmhouse were similar in that way: savage things hidden neatly beneath harmless exteriors. 

He paused under the shade of the farmhouse. Looked up at it for a moment, then bowed his head. 

“You squemish, Rob?” 

“…Not particularly, no.” 

A smile coiled along his jaw. He lifted his head. 

“Alright. Fair warning, though: if you feel that opinion changing in the next few minutes, I’d recommend staying clear of the backyard. That’s where the…uh…mess was. We’ve cleaned most of it, but still.” 

Up close, the house’s age became more apparent. Mint green paint flaked from the rafters. The windows were small and opaque, caked with thick layers of dust. Splintered floorboards audibly shifted as we walked across the porch. A trio of pale-faced individuals with FORENSICS printed on their jackets burst from the front door. They paced past us silently. Ajax caught the lip of the door and gestured for me to step inside…

Been staring at the text cursor blink for about an hour now. I don’t know where to start with this next part. Don’t know that I can do it justice, either. Stay with me and keep an open mind. 

I walked in. My heart began thrashing. Adrenaline gnawed at the back of my eyes. 

That place wasn’t a house; hadn’t been for a long while. No rooms. No division of space. Someone had stripped the inside to form a single cavernous chamber. Some vestiges of the house it used to be were still apparent. Part of the floor was tile. Another part was lined with carpet. Ten feet up, jagged shards of wood jutted from the walls; all at the same height. The remnants of a second floor, maybe. 

On one side, there was a giant metal box. The top of it nearly touched the ceiling. The outside was smooth and featureless, save for the side that faced the mural, which had a large window. 

Ajax slapped a hand on my shoulder. 

“So here’s what you need to know. The gardener found the remains. He’s been maintaining the grounds for at least a decade, never met his employer, never got a whiff of anything suspicious transpiring within these walls.” He wrapped his arm around me and began pulling me forward.

“This morning, obviously, was different. He walks into the backyard, and there it all is. Heaps of dry skin, clearly human and cut thin like leather, strewn about sort of haphazardly. Naturally, he calls the cops. They tell us the man was real fixated on the landscape itself. Like he couldn’t understand why someone would cut down a bunch of innocent trees to make room for something so ghoulish. Anyway. One thing leads to another, and we arrive to find…”

He positioned me in front of the mural. 

“…this.”

It depicted a group of people lying in a field. They were naked. Androgynous. Mannequin-like, but with just enough detail to look distinctly alive. Their legs were broken backwards. The limbs curled over their spine, ankles contorting so that their heels rested on their shoulders. No faces were drawn, but each had a physical coin suspended where a face should be, hung with twine from nails in the wall. Each coin was the same - silver with the profile of a man who appeared too young to have done anything important enough to warrant being immortalized on currency.

“We’re assuming the mangled ones are their victims, and that could be a surrogate for the killer themselves,” he said, pointing towards the rafters. I followed his finger. There was a nebulous black shape in the top right corner. The edges were dim and pearl-colored. Looked like the sun was being eclipsed by a massive hovering Rorschach test. 

“But, hey, what do we know? That’s why you’re here. The mural, the imagery, the flaying - it all feels ritualistic, though this particular flavor isn’t something we’ve encountered before, so we’re at a loss for motive.” 

Sweat dripped down my fingers. The metallic aroma of oil-based paint lingered around the mural, but otherwise, the air didn’t smell like anything. Why did that bother me? 

“Got any questions?” he asked. 

“How many…?” I choked out, eyes darting between the broken, wheel-like bodies. 

Ajax let out a harsh sigh. 

“How many dead? Shoot…well…at least thirty. According to the medical examiner, an average set of adult skin weighs eight pounds, and we’ve collected about two hundred and fifty so far, so…yeah, thirty at a minimum, but that’s a crude estimate.” 

My brain felt swollen. I couldn’t think over the sound of that number ringing in my head. 

Thirty. 

Thirty. 

Thirty. 

“Hey - you need a minute?” 

I shook my head and turned towards the giant metal box.

“What’s in there?” 

Ajax clicked his tongue. 

“Nothing, absolutely nothing…” He walked over to the box and stood in front of its single window. 

“See anything strange, Rob?”

Cautiously, I approached.

There wasn’t much to see - the inside was dark. I squinted. There was something wrong with his reflection. Was it blurry? I moved closer. No, his reflection wasn’t blurry; there were two separate reflections. The second was smaller and displaced from the first, shifted a few degrees clockwise. 

The realization hit me like a sucker punch.

“Wait…is that wall a mirror?” 

“Not just that wall - every wall. And the floor. And the ceiling. Every surface inside this box is a mirror, and this window is one-way. There’s a door on the opposite side, too. A door with a lock.” He bent over and flipped a small switch below the mirror. Dim backlights clicked on inside the box. The doubling of Ajax’s reflection became clearer. His expression was effortlessly stoic, save his eyes - they were just a little too wide. 

The box scared him.

“I’ve been inside. It’s completely soundproofed, all you can see is a faint reflection of yourself in every direction, and the glass? It’s scratched to hell and back.”

I knew what he was about to say.

Still, hearing him say it cemented the brutality.

Made it real.

“We think that's where they held their victims.” 

- - - - -

Didn’t even attempt to sleep when I got home. 

I grabbed a legal pad, started the coffee pot, and sat at my desk. Ajax’s parting instructions were simple: “Mull over what you saw and keep your mouth shut.” So, that’s what I did. I kept replaying it all in my head. The farmhouse. The mural. The box. The coins. The wheels. The mirrors. Hours passed. Dawn arrived in what felt like a heartbeat. I never wrote anything down. Never poured a cup of coffee, either. I was too lost in thought, desperate to uncover some semblance of meaning within the macabre design, and I felt close to a revelation; something important was on the tip of my tongue. 

What the hell did it all remind me of? 

I spent the rest of the day in my study, tearing through my collection of musty, dog-eared textbooks. Drawing Down the Moon by Adler. The Black Arts: A Concise History of Witchcraft by Cavendish. Greek and Roman Necromancy by Ogden. Page after page after page - alchemy, tarot, numerology, hoodoo, psychometry, ritual sacrifice, black masses, thaumaturgy - none of it was fucking right. 

I leaped from my chair, threw my arms down, and swept the books off the side of my desk. A shuffling clamor erupted around me. I glared at the resulting pile, breathing heavy, heat pulsing across my skin, silence slowly creeping back into my empty home. 

This was it… - I thought

A glimpse of something real, something preternatural, and I’m blowing it. It’s slipping through my goddamned fingers. 

My eyes landed on something at the bottom of the pile. A purple square peeking out from my ragged copy of Foucault’s Pendulum. My breathing slowed. The heat simmered and died. I rolled my shoulders. The weathered joints clicked and cracked; years of hunching over a laptop had molded the ligaments into unnatural, painful shapes. 

I took a seat on the floor and pulled the purple note out of the book. It was something I’d believed lost for a while. I unfolded it carefully. My chest fluttered at the sight of her flowery cursive. 

Annie and I were so in love, back then. 

It was puppy love, that one-of-a-kind infatuation of youth, explosive, ravenous, and terminal. She had her pursuits. I had mine. Neither of us would compromise, and that was that. College ended. We each moved on. I couldn’t abandon my path. Studying the occult was the only thing that seemed to keep the memories at bay. It made what happened to me as a child seem smaller. Explainable. Clinical. It sterilized the trauma. And for a time, that was enough. I felt full. Knowledge was a barrier. More recently, though, I’d noticed a change. For the first time in years, the memories felt alive, and with that came a familiar magnetism. Knowing wasn’t enough anymore; I wanted to feel the preternatural. I wanted to sense it pressing through the slits in my teeth, taste it rolling over my tongue and dragging down my throat…

Suddenly, my ears perked. 

My head practically rocketed from my spine.

The noise was faint. Faint enough that I could almost convince myself it wasn’t there, because it shouldn’t be there. I lived alone; my closest neighbor was three miles down the road. But again and again, I heard it. 

There was a muted wheeze coming from somewhere in my home. 

The note slipped from my trembling fingers, and I stumbled to my feet. It was clearer in the hall. High-pitched, labored squeaks interspersed with dry, hacking coughs. The shrill melody of suffocation. 

It was coming from the garage. 

I twisted the knob and gradually creaked the door open.

The garage was impenetrably dark, but I could hear it perfectly. The noise was coming from somewhere in the blackness. Just a few feet ahead. My fingers groped the wall until they landed on the light switch. I flicked it. Nothing. Flicked it again. Nothing. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, and turned on its flashlight. Hazy light spilled onto the concrete.

They were tucked in the narrow space between my car and the far wall. I could see their body squirming along the floor.

I inched forward, heart thundering, sickness heaving up my throat. The air was hot and wet. The atmosphere boiled along my skin. 

I peered around the edge of my sedan and pointed my light at the figure.

I tried to look away, but I couldn’t. I clamped my hands over my ears to drown them out, but I could still hear them choking. 

Naked. Broken. Propped up, leaning against my tool bench like a human inner tube. Their legs were snapped backward, arching over the spine, fragments of splintered bone projected from bleeding skin at violent angles. The skin of their heel oozed over the shoulder, bubbling, cauterized. Thick beige sludge seeped from every orifice. Their flaring nose. Their gaping mouth. It dribbled down their cheeks like tears. Ran over their eyes like melting wax. 

Unlike the ones in the mural, they had a face. 

My face.

There was someone else behind them. Standing upright. They were holding a bundle of frayed rope. I didn’t get a good look, but something they were wearing glinted in the light, and they were unnervingly tall. 

I screamed. 

The sound exploded from the broken man's congested mouth,

not from my own. 

- - - - -

I shot up, gasping. A small puddle of drool stained the page I'd fallen asleep on. Silence enveloped me. There was no wheezing. 

It was all just some fucked dream. 

My thigh buzzed. I pulled my phone from my pocket, glancing at the time before I answered the call: 4:32 AM. 

“H-hello..?” 

There was a long, vacuous pause. Static hissed into my ear. 

Finally, Ajax spoke.

“You need to come back.” 

“What? Now? It’s the middle of the goddamned night.” 

The static swelled into a roar. 

I was barely able to hear him say:

“If you truly want to witness something divine, get here before dawn.” 

He hung up. 

Silence returned. 

I briefly stared at my phone before sliding it back into my pocket. 

Before I could think, decades-old memories burst to the forefront of my mind. 

I failed to suppress them. They frothed like a wound teeming with sepsis. I felt the whips. I heard the songs. I tasted the meat. Panic gripped me. Then, that familiar magnetism. The merciless allure of the preternatural. 

I launched myself from my desk, pulled my keys from the hook, and threw myself into the car. 

As I accelerated, my panic began to cool. 

I missed something important that night. A crucial discrepancy. An omen of sorts. A sobering detail that maybe could’ve derailed my rabid hurdle into madness. 

I didn’t need to open the door when I bolted into the garage. 

It had already been open. 

- - - - -

I pulled off the interstate half an hour before dawn. 

My body was restless. I jittered in my seat, shifting my back, stretching my arms, trying to find an ounce of comfort. The serrated outline of the tree tops sharpened in the faint blue illumination of early morning. I slammed my foot on the gas. 

I was running out of time. 

As I throttled down the dirt road, exhaustion began to take its toll. I couldn’t focus. My mind wandered. I thought about the strange dream. Beyond the visceral terror of it all, something nagged at me. The tall figure was holding rope. Why were they holding rope? 

Recognition battered me like an avalanche. 

I remembered what ritual the farmhouse reminded me of. 

The Rope Maiden. 

It's a Japanese urban legend. A young girl would be selected to spend their entire life in a windowless room, deprived of all stimulation. A blinding mask would be nailed into her skull. Her caretakers would not touch her, nor would they speak to her, only giving her sips of water and a few grains white rice when absolutely necessary. Then, once she was old enough, she’d be led to a shrine and sacrificed. Five ropes, five knots - one for each limb and one for her neck - all pulled in different directions until the poor girl was torn apart. The deprivation and the sacrifice was said to harness spiritual purity. It’s not a perfect fit, but maybe the giant metal box served a similar purpose…

A series of deafening POPS erupted from under my car.

I clutched the wheel, struggling to maintain control. I skidded into a ditch. Came to an abrupt halt with a vicious THUMP. 

Dizzy but intact, I pulled myself from the wreck and examined the vehicle. Both front tires were completely deflated. 

“What the hell…” 

I spun around, and I couldn’t believe my luck. The gas station was the single rusted pump was visible in the distance, and it appeared to be open. 

I burst into the shop, breathless. A young man with weary eyes and cigarette stained teeth stood behind the register, flipping through a magazine, unfazed. Didn’t even bother to look up when I entered. 

“My car…I crashed, down the road…is there - “ 

“Owner’s a mechanic, should be here in ten,” he muttered.

Relief washed across my spine. 

“If you’re gonna linger, though, you gotta buy something.” 

I nodded and started pacing through the dusty, half-filled aisles. All the while, my mind continued to race. 

Spirtual purity… - I thought. 

Something about that feels right. 

I walked to the beverage section in the back, unable to remember the last time I had something to drink. I rested my forehead on the chilled glass and closed my eyes. There was this flicker of peace. I felt unburdened. Empty.

Then, it happened. 

Primal, earth-shattering fear radiated through my body. I didn’t understand, but I listened to my gut and ducked down, hiding myself. I peered up. There was a circular, wide-angled mirror hanging above the groaning soda machine, turned so I could see the entrance. The station’s door clicked open. Two figures strolled in, holding hands. 

There was an emaciated child. They were barefoot. A massive, tattered T-shirt hung loosely over their skeletal frame. Their head was concealed within a compact, metal box. The person holding their hand needed to hunch over to enter. No part of them was visible. They were completely covered in this smooth, reflective material with an iridescent sheen. The suit was bulbous and loose fitting, obscuring their body contours. A small, golden key hung around their neck. 

The cashier stuttered out some meager threat. 

The tall figure grasped the golden key and inserted it into a slit in the box. The side facing the cashier gradually opened. 

Instinctively, I diverted my eyes. 

A guttural wail erupted from the child. An impossible sound. An animalistic scream conjured from a place of fathomless terror. Everything in the fridge shook from the force.

A deafening gurgle superseded the wail. 

Finally, 

everything around me began to change. 

“Really? You’ve never heard of no-take-backsies?” Damien asked, stamping his smoldering cigarette into the sidewalk. Lily stifled a laugh. 

Bryan shook his head. He stumbled off his bike, knee-first onto the lawn. It would’ve been easier to disembark on the sidewalk, but there were too many cracks. It was safer to fall. Safety was paramount. 

Damien paused. He racked his brain. Lily was watching. He needed something clever, or at the very least, entertaining. 

“Well…you go to church, right?” 

“Yeah, ‘course.” 

“Oh, weird! You must have missed that sermon. It’s super important, though.” Behind him, Lily whispered you’re such a dick through the cracks in her teeth. Damien felt pleasurable heat drizzle through his gut. He didn’t look, but he could tell she was smiling. 

Bryan crossed his legs and peered up at the teen. 

“Is take-backsies some kinda game?” 

“Sort of. It’s more of a rule than a game. Let’s start with this: you know why God made people?” 

“Because he loves us?”

“Nope! He made us ‘cause he was bored. Been around so long, he needed something new to play with. We’re like toys. God’s action figures. That’s why no-take-backsies is so important.”

Bryan cocked his head; he wasn’t following. 

“God’s seen’t it all, right? So to keep him entertained, everything we do has to be new. Something we haven’t done before. For example - “ 

Damien bent over and flicked Bryan’s glasses at the hinge. They flew off and landed on the sidewalk. 

“Never done that; now I have, and you shouldn’t do the same back to me, because God’s already seen’t it, so it’ll make him bored, which will make him mad. Get it? No-take-backsies.” 

Bryan fumbled across the lawn, on all fours, searching through an astigmatic haze for his glasses. Damien sauntered over to where his glasses landed and kicked them a little farther away. 

“W-what happens if you break the rule?”

“Really, really bad stuff. The worst stuff. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, though, ‘cause you’re busy…” 

Damien ran over to Lily, grabbed her hand, and they began jogging away. Once out of earshot, they slowed.  

“The kid doesn’t know you’re moving in the morning, does he?”

“Can’t imagine why he’d know that.” 

“Damien! That’s so mean!” She said, giggling. 

“It ain’t mean! It’s a lesson. Kid still believes stepping on a crack will break his momma’s back, for Christ’s sake. He gotta learn: people are out to fuck with him.” 

Twilight dimmed, threatening night. 

And Bryan, rife with panic, continued to search for his glasses. 

- - - - -

Damien lived his life as best he knew how. 

Learned plenty in the process. 

Learned about romance, politics, existential terror, climate change, mortality, morality, drugs, STDs, taxes, real estate, sex, desire, prestige, heart attacks, dementia, the value of a life and the weight of death, and he learned it all safely, with training wheels and second chances, because he had good teachers, people who cared, people who were invested, people who wanted to see him grow. He secured a well-paying job. First marriage didn’t work out, but the second went much better, up until his last night. 

The house was warm. The kids were sleeping. His wife was taking a bath. 

Damien lumbered down the front hallway, yawning, stretching, content, when he glimpsed something in the yard, getting closer to the porch. 

He figured it was an animal by the way it was moving - erratic skips and leaps on all fours. 

But it was pretty big, wasn’t it? 

A face glimmered in the porch light. 

Bryan lived his life as best he knew how, but he didn’t know much. 

A week after Damien moved to college, his mom died in a car crash. T-boned by a drunk driver in the early morning. The impact snapped her spine cleanly in two. Bryan didn’t have anyone else. No one to tell him his mother’s death wasn’t his fault. No one to let him know stepping on a crack didn’t do a damn thing and that no-take-backsies wasn’t real. But he didn’t have anything else, so those were the rules he lived by. It was infinitely better than nothing. Unfortunately for Damien, Bryan was convinced that he had run out of new things to do, and although he didn’t understand his anger, it had been festering for quite some time. 

The front door wasn’t locked. 

Bryan’s glasses were old, but he could see the knob well enough. 

He burst through. 

Their reunion wasn’t planned. Damien had moved back to his hometown on a whim. Bryan had selected a house at random. When Bryan pounced on Damien, they didn’t even recognize each other. Wouldn’t really mattered if they had. Bryan didn’t allow himself to speak, because that would require him to repeat words he’d already said. Even if he could, no-take-backsies wouldn’t have meant anything to Damien. He’d forgotten about it a long time ago. The interaction had been wholly inconsequential to him. A microscopic blip.  

There was biting, 

there was tearing, 

there was screaming and snapping, 

but most importantly, 

it was perfectly new for both of them. 

The sanctity of no-take-backsies remained firmly intact, and for the first time in a long, long while,

God was very, 

very,

entertained. 

In the fourteen years we’d worked at that goddamned sweatshop, Silvia never missed a shift, so when she didn’t show up one winter morning, a sour dread swept through my gut. I called her. The line didn’t even ring. Something was wrong. I left without permission and began sprinting across the city, slipping across patches of ice concealed beneath the snowfall, frigid air biting at my lungs.

She’d spoken oddly on the phone the night before, slurring her words, gushing about the beautiful truths we could discover about Mom within the mangrove forests of Ecuador; all I had to do was finally agree to take the trip with her. She claimed it would be a pilgrimage, a means of healing through communion with our mother’s birth country. If we could connect with her, if we could comprehend the tiniest sliver of why she abandoned us, maybe we could forgive her, maybe we could move on. It was ridiculous. Borderline delusional. There was nothing for us in Ecuador. Besides, what could the mangroves teach us about Mom that we hadn’t already learned the day she discarded us - her only children - on the streets of Chicago?

I kept my mouth shut, though. Silvia worked hard to salvage our lives. Putting my calloused soul on display felt like spitting in her face. Instead, I rolled my eyes, assumed her drunk, and choked out my annual refrain. 

“We’ll go next year, I promise.” 

I never had any intention of saying yes.

I had plenty of chances to change my mind, but year after year, I coldly withstood her heartfelt pleas. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience a similar longing, a yearning for answers that would sometimes keep me up at night, but I suppressed it, forced it down deep. Visiting her country was a symbol, an act of forgiveness. My mother did not deserve forgiveness. Fuck her, and fuck the putrid soil that supported her miserable feet. I would not go to that place. Not even for Silvia. 

And yet, despite the belief that my stubbornness was completely justified, all I could think about as I raced through the snowfall was the cruel deceit of those six little words. 

“We’ll go next year, I promise...” 

I arrived at Silvia’s a little after dawn. Dense overcast stained her towering apartment complex an ashen gray. I slammed into the fire exit with the broken lock and began bolting up the stairs. Cockroaches skittered from my aching heels. Before long, I was in front of apartment 602, fumbling with my spare key, praying I was wrong, praying my bleak intuition was wildly off the mark.

The door jerked open. 

Hazy light from the hallway trickled into her jet-black apartment. 

I felt my body go numb.

She was on the floor. Face down, sprawled out, transfixed and rigid. Her corpse harbored this strange brightness. Her skin seemed to glow in the darkness, shimmering a dull crimson like molten metal that’d begun to cool. 

Carbon monoxide can do that, apparently. 

The coroner detailed the pathology to me with a tone-deaf excitement, shaking his wrinkled hands, talking himself breathless. Carbon monoxide is greedy, he said. The odorless gas hijacks your blood. That piracy alters the blood cells, displacing precious oxygen and brightening them in the process. That’s why the corpses flush: suffocation makes them shine like a dying star. 

The whole thing tore me apart. I couldn’t swallow the raw brutality of it. Silvia died alone, completely without ceremony; a quick and meaningless end to a hard-fought life. When we were abandoned, Chicago was bursting at the seams with strays. The city wouldn’t have saved us. If social services didn’t have enough resources to rescue their own children, what chance did a pair of non-natives have? 

My sister refused to just lie down and die, though. 

She found a job. The man running the sweatshop wouldn’t allow a five-year-old to hang around the factory floor, so while Silvia toiled away in front of a sewing machine, I hid in the alleyway behind the factory. Tucked myself snugly behind this massive, battleship-of-a-dumpster at the crack of dawn, and I wouldn’t come out until I heard Silvia knocking a code into the rusted metal, usually well after the sun had set. The hiding spot required painful contortion. Some nights, my leg spasms were so violent that she’d have to carry me to whatever underpass we were currently calling home. Before winter, though, Silvia had earned enough money. We moved what little we had to a tiny apartment in the projects. 

Once I was old enough, she got me a job at the factory, too. 

The sweatshop was a marginal improvement over the dumpster. The smell inside was slightly less foul, and my calves had a little more wiggle room, though I couldn’t seem to escape the gaze of this lanky boy with pale blue eyes and a cleft upper lip. It took him a few months to work up the nerve to talk to me. We quickly became inseparable. A decade later, Ryan and I welcomed our daughter into the world. 

Elisa was about to turn six when Silvia died. 

“I don’t want a party this year,”

She was sulking at the table, stirring a bowl of leathery slush that had once been Cheerios. I barely registered what she had said. I was standing at the sink, staring at the wall, pretending to wash dishes. The near-scalding water felt good on my hands. 

“Why’s that, sweetheart?” Ryan chirped. 

“Well… Auntie Sil isn’t getting one… so…” Elisa stood, trudged across the kitchen, and dumped the disintegrated cereal into the basin. 

“It’s not fair,” she continued. “None of it seems fair.” 

“Life isn’t fucking fair.”

The caustic response spilled from my lips like a quiet exhale, automatic, thoughtless. When I realized what I’d said, I shifted towards Elisa. She was studying me with wide, unblinking eyes. Her grimace betrayed a painful confusion. This was her first brush with death; painful confusion had been her default setting for weeks. 

Her eyes became glassy. I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but all that came out was hot air. Ryan scooped her into his arms and forced a smile. 

“Mommy’s not mad, okay? She’s just really tired. Want to go watch some TV?” 

She pressed her face into his chest and nodded. As he paced out of the kitchen, Ryan shot me a look. That look. Mommy may not have been mad, but Daddy sure was. There was a distant click. The muffled pandemonium of Saturday morning cartoons started echoing through our small home. I sighed and turned off the faucet. Much as I’d been enjoying the hurt, the scalding water had reddened my hands. The sight of flushed skin made me want to vomit.

Ryan marched back into the kitchen, broad feet slapping against the hardwood. I stuck my hands into my pockets, closed my eyes, and braced myself. 

“The hell was that?” he hissed.

I shrugged. 

“What, you disagree? You think what happened to Sil is fair?” 

“My God, that is not the point.” 

My blood ignited. I spun around to face him. 

“Oh! I’m sorry; I had no idea there was a fucking point. Please, Ryan, enlighten me.” He glanced towards the living room. 

“Keep your voice down…”

I stomped up to him and spat out a single word.

“Why?”

I glared at him. There was another distant click, followed by a high-pitched, muted sob. I heard Elisa too, but I would not yield. I wanted him to fight back. His jaw tightened, but abruptly went slack. He looked away from me, a reaction more damaging than any insult. 

“Jesus…where are you right now, Carmen?” 

I cocked my head, but he didn’t elaborate. He walked off to attend to Elisa, leaving me in the kitchen to puzzle over what the hell he meant. In retrospect, I think I understand: he was asking me to get a fucking grip. Begging me to divest my selfish wrath and realize what’s important. The question’s effect on me, however, was much more literal than Ryan intended. 

Where was I? Chicago. 

But was that where I should be? 

I couldn’t get that question out of my head. It kept repeating, incessant and deafening. Then, it hit me. 

I figured out where I should be. 

I took a clandestine trip to a nearby pawn shop. My engagement ring wasn’t worth much - the stone was only a half-carat, after all - but it was enough: eight hundred would cover the plane tickets and a few nights in a hostel. I know how it sounds, but I had a plan. Silvia wasn’t the only one who died from the gas leak, so there were talks of a class action lawsuit against the landlord. As if anything in this world can be considered a guarantee, I convinced myself that those earnings would surely buy the ring back, someday.

I started to leave around midnight.  

Our home was silent, save for my husband’s wispy snores and the soft hum of the TV. I slung my backpack over my shoulders and tiptoed into the living room. They had fallen asleep together on the sofa. I stared at Ryan for a while, watching the TV bejewel his closed eyelids with its opaline flicker. He was going to be furious, but I would never come to terms with her death until I did this. It was my way of making amends. I stuck the post-it note onto his cell phone before slipping out into the cold, moonless night. 

“Flying to Ecuador. Back in two days. Will text to let you know I’m safe.”

Then, on the adhesive side, a last-minute addition: 

“Tell Elisa I love her.” 

- - - - -

I landed in Quito at noon. 

Exiting onto the tarmac, I was struck by an intense disorientation. The flight crew warned us that we might experience altitude sickness - Quito is nearly ten thousand feet above sea level - but I had no idea how immediate and debilitating it would be. The sun was blinding. My head pounded. Every breath was a struggle. Compared to Chicago’s thin ozone, the thick tropical air felt like inhaling jelly. Hesitation festered in those breathless moments, but I squashed it. I couldn’t turn back. 

I needed to see this through. 

I collapsed onto a bench outside the airport, took as deep a breath as I could manage, and switched my phone off airplane mode. A flurry of texts and missed calls flooded the screen, notification after notification; the device was practically convulsing. I sent “Landed, I’m OK” to Ryan without letting my eyes linger on the twenty unread texts above it. Then, I called for a cab. Once they arrived, I returned the device to airplane mode. Quito is at the center of Ecuador, but my destination was closer to the coastline. 

That’s where the mangroves bloom. 

Whenever she’d try to sell me on this pilgrimage, Silvia always harped on the fucking mangroves. I never asked why, though I suspect she was channeling some fragment of Mom, some piece of her that I had forgotten. Silvia was twelve when we were abandoned; I was five. She actually had some memories of the woman. Maybe Mom harped on them, too. Maybe the mangroves made her nostalgic for home. All things considered, a nature reserve seemed as good a spot as any for a healing communion with the land. It wasn’t hard to narrow down which I’d visit. A few miles north of Pedernales, there was a small park that just seemed right. I didn’t know much about it, but, for whatever reason, I couldn’t see myself going anywhere else. 

Luckily, it was beautiful. 

I was reluctant to acknowledge the beauty at first, but as I stood on the shoreline, basking in the grandeur of what was effectively a tropical swamp, I felt my reluctance melt away. 

Mangrove roots rose in tangled clusters from the saltwater, ornate yet chaotic, spiraling closer and closer together until they unified as a single trunk. Their canopy was fiercely animated. Small monkeys with slender arms and pot bellies swung through the brush in chains. Exotic birds zipped between the branches, vibrant blurs of color swirling together to manifest a shifting kaleidoscope made with golds and violets and deep, deep reds. 

I dipped my toes in the water and stared at the forest, and I felt…full. Buoyant. Happy, even. 

Then, with a single thought, I crumbled. 

Silvia should have been here, too. 

I’d been such an asshole. 

I stewed on the shore for a long while, marinating in an acidic mixture of self-loathing and melancholy, until something odd caught my attention. A man, lurking in my peripheral vision. His head was peeking out of the river, wet eyes leering at me through thick strands of soggy gray hair. 

My eyes snapped forward. 

There was a stone bobbing on the surface of the river, but no spying man. 

I whispered the word idiot as I turned to leave the reserve. 

It was an hour-and-a-half walk to the nearest hostel. I had enough money to afford another cab, but I didn’t call one. I didn’t deserve the luxury. I lurched along the roadside, head low, bare shoulders baking in the afternoon sun, becoming more despondent with each miserable step. The lush, rolling countryside was exceptionally quiet, a farcry from the ceaseless bluster of Chicago. Under different circumstances, I would’ve welcomed the tranquility. In the moment, though, the empty air only made the voice in my head seem louder. Why was I here? What did I expect to gain? Insight? Absolution? Levity? Stupid. It was all so stupid, so short-sighted, so goddamned pointless… 

All of a sudden, my ears perked. There was a soft, steady crunching a few yards back: the sound of dry grass being crushed under a boot heel. 

Was someone following me? 

I paused. The crunching stopped. I balled my hand into a fist, took a deep breath, and whipped my head around. 

But there was no one. 

Just the winding road and the sleepy hills. 

My heart rate slowed. When I started walking, the crunching resumed. I peered over my shoulder: still, nothing behind me. I did my best to ignore the unsettling phenomenon, but by the time I arrived at the hostel, the sun was setting, my calves were screaming, and my mind was ragged. 

In other words, I was ready for a drink. 

- - - - -

My memories of that night are disturbingly incomplete.

Here's what I do remember.

It begins with me at the back of this dimly lit dive bar. I’m brooding, throwing back liquor at a reckless pace, when I’m suddenly approached by a well-dressed man. He’s sporting an indigo blazer and black chinos, overdressed for the stifling heat. Up close, he smells like brine. The table wobbles when he leans on it, one leg shorter than the others. He steadies my glass with two fingers so it doesn’t fall. A small wave of brandy laps at his gaunt fingertips. He takes his hand out of my glass and sits down. I can't remember whether he introduced himself or just sat down and started talking. Called himself Michael. Maykel? Mikal? Something like that. Over and over, he apologizes. I ask him:

What for? 

He claims I already know, but I make him spell it out: For Silvia, he says. For the way she asphyxiated on perfectly good air. For the way the gas toyed with her mind. For the terror of her last moments, hallucinating alone in a lightless apartment. For everything, really.

Wait, did I tell you all this? - I ask. 

He says I probably did, then he keeps talking. I’m not sure what about; I’m distracted by the whites of his eyes. There’s movement. Pinpoints appear, enlarge, and then dissolve, sort of like film grain. The rhythm is hypnotic. I’m comfortably spellbound until he says something that catches my attention:

Would you like to commune with your sister? 

Slowly, with apprehension, I nod. From there, my recollection really fragments. There are breaks, skips in time, pieces I’ve lost. I follow him out of the bar, stumbling. I slip on the edge of the door frame, plunge forward, and close my eyes, preparing myself for the impact, but there’s nothing, no collision, no shattering bones, just a clean emptiness, a starving void. When I open my eyes, we’re in a van. Michael’s driving. I don’t see anyone else, but there’s laughter, so much laughter, thousands of shrill, squeaking cackles coming from the driver’s seat, an excruciating cacophony, enraged wasps probing my eardrums. 

Welcome home, little leech. Don’t be afraid. Your baptism is overdue, but it’ll be over before you know it - he says.

We’re accelerating; I can tell by how the darkened countryside is passing by, faster and faster. I plead for him to stop the car, but I can’t even hear the words leaving my mouth, and Michael’s not even watching the road anymore; he’s twisted over the seat, leering at me, pinpoints dancing across the whites of his eyes, and then,

quiet, 

in an instant, the laughter’s gone. 

Salty air scrapes my tongue. 

A bird trills far overhead. 

I look around. I’m sitting at the front of a small rowboat, floating down a narrow river hemmed in by gnarled webs of mangrove roots. Moonlight drapes a faint silver membrane over the otherwise shadow-swelled landscape. Behind me, I hear someone rowing. I know it’s Michael, but I don’t dare turn around and check. 

Do you see her? - he whispers.

I squint, carefully searching the rootbeds. My heart is stammering. My thoughts are frantic. How the fuck did I get here? What the hell is going on? 

Do you see your sister, Carmen? - he moans. 

The blackness is nearly impenetrable, but I look closer, because I desperately want her to be there, because I need to tell Silvia that I love her, and that I’m sorry. I knew something was wrong the night she died, but I didn’t act. I could hear it in her voice when we spoke on the phone, but I chose to ignore it, because the way she talked about mom made me so goddamned angry. 

I could have saved her like she saved me.

But I didn't.

My eyes widen. I think I see something downstream; I convince myself something’s there. A nebulous shape looming within the palisade of mangroves. My body’s drifting forward, over the lip of the boat.

I murmur my sister’s name. 

Silvia? 

I wait. 

A hand streaked with crimson skin erupts from the brackish river. Bloated fingers wrap around my wrist and pull. I don’t have time to scream. I lose my balance and topple over the side of the boat, dragged under by the flushed red hand. Water surges into my chest when I attempt to breathe. Mud seeps into my stomach, causing it to spasm. I thrash, but it does nothing to slow my descent. My fingers hunt for something to anchor onto. I can’t determine if my eyes are open or closed; the darkness is all-consuming. I feel myself slipping away. Suddenly, something cold and sturdy grazes my palm. I use my remaining energy to squeeze it. The surface is smooth like metal. It’s round, and it fits nicely in my palm. Reflexively, I turn my wrist. There’s a creak. My foot drifts forward and somehow finds solid ground. 

I’m…stepping into my home. 

The door slams shut behind me. Ryan is racing down the hallway. I double over, coughing, hacking like there’s something stuck in my lungs. 

And my vision is dappled with tiny, pulsing dots. 

- - - - -

“You don’t remember anything about how you got home?” The park bench squeaked as Ryan slid closer. He was sweating. His eyes darted between me and Elisa, who was pedaling her bicycle along a nearby footpath. I massaged his stone shoulders.

“I…no, I really don’t. I was at the bar top, drinking. Some guy came up and bothered me, said some strange shit, but…he was harmless. Then, twenty-four hours later, I’m home.” I pause, preparing another lie.  

“But in between? Nothing, nothing at all…“ 

“ELISA - what’d I say? Stay where I can see you!” Startled, Elisa wobbled, then tumbled off her bike, landing knees-first onto the pavement. 

“Come here, love!” I called out. 

Elisa pulled herself together, stood, and then began plodding over to us, dragging her bike by the handlebars. Fresh blood glistened across her kneecaps. I stopped the massage and started rifling through my purse; never went anywhere without a few Band-Aids and Neosporin since we took off her training wheels. She slumped on the grass next to me, bleary-eyed. 

“Can I try to fix it?” 

Her lips cracked into a delicate smile. I bent over and began smearing the antiseptic on her abraded skin. 

“And the guy you mentioned - the one in the suit - you don’t think he…you know…took advantage of the situation?” 

“What?” I ask, lifting my head and throwing it over my shoulder. Ryan’s pale blue eyes were wide and damp. Took me a second to realize what he was dancing around. For whatever reason, that was the farthest thing from my mind. 

“Oh! No, I don’t think that freak did anything…pornographic.” Relief flooded over him. His shoulders seemed the slightest bit looser as he blotted a few tears with his shirt collar.

“Thank God.” 

“That said…maybe he spiked my drink? Not with roofies, with…I don’t know…a hallucinogen, something that could explain the amnesia. Can’t say why anyone would dose a complete stranger, but…” my voice trailed off. Out of nowhere, every cell in my body began to buzz, and my attention was drawn to a man limping past us. 

His name was Mateo. 

He was well known in the neighborhood as a sweet but self-destructive man. Uncontrolled diabetes had ravaged his body: he couldn’t see well, couldn’t feel much below the waist, and, worst of all, there was his foot, or what was left of it. From the shin down, the appendage was gangrenous, black like a cannonball and as cold as sleet, with a stench that could likely be appreciated from the upper atmosphere. When the tissue first went tits-up, Mateo refused to get it amputated. We all assumed his days were numbered, and yet, years later, here he was, see-sawing his way around, panhandling like usual. The necrotic tissue just never got infected, even though it absolutely should have; a perverse and sadistic miracle. 

Today, though, something was different. 

The flesh was…moving. Churning. The blackened skin peeking out from his dirt-caked sneaker snapped and bubbled like boiling tar, surreal and revolting. I looked to his face. He wasn’t in pain, he wasn’t in distress - he wore the hollow smile and the vacant eyes of a lifelong scavenger, same as he always did. Nausea clawed at the back of my throat. I told myself it wasn’t real. I tried to tear my eyes away, but, God, I couldn’t. There was something bewitching about the way his flesh churned. A pattern. Meaning concealed within its beats and cadences. Something that needed to be felt to be completely understood; a tactile language like Braille. The tips of my fingers began throbbing. Bizarre notions took root in my mind. The way his flesh moved, something about it reminded me of Silvia’s voice.

No, I thought. That's absurd.

But…was it absurd?

Speech is just a series of vibrations, right? Vibrations that could just as easily swim through dead meat as they could living vocal cords?

No. I needed to get a fucking grip.

There was another explanation.  I was exhausted. I was still under the effect of some hallucinogen. I was sick. No matter what I threw at it, though, the notion persisted; some part of her was in that dead flesh. It was a paradox: the notion made no sense, and yet, I’d never felt so sure of something, and all I had to do to know for certain was feel it move. I needed to touch Mateo’s whispering foot, needed to burrow my fingertips into the rot until I heard what she was saying…

“Ah, Mommy!” 

Elisa’s screech brought me back to reality. My lungs ached. I exhaled for what felt like the first time in minutes. 

“Sorry, love, here it is.” I ripped the paper tabs from the Band-Aid and stuck it on her knee, only half paying attention, keeping Mateo fixed in my peripheral vision until he was well and truly out of sight. It was agonizing to let him go. Like allowing free heroin to slip from your grasp when you’re in seething withdrawal. I turned to Ryan. He was looking in Mateo’s direction, too, but his expression was flat, unbothered. 

He couldn’t see what I could. 

As we left the park, Ryan made me promise to see a physician this week to address the amnesia, and a therapist within the month to address everything else: his conditions for forgiving my impulsive excursion abroad. I promised I would. That said, my mind was elsewhere. Michael, whoever he was, claimed he was granting me the ability to commune with Silvia. Was this it? Did communion require some sort of medium, flesh as the interface between the living and the dead? Had I missed my opportunity? 

I could only answer the last of those three questions. 

I hadn’t missed my opportunity. 

Because I knew which alleyway Mateo slept in at night. 

- - - - -

The next morning, I returned to the factory for the first time since Silvia’s death. It was a strange and lonely homecoming. Not only was Silvia gone, but Ryan was absent as well. The flu had been doing the rounds at Elisa’s school; it was only a matter of time until she contracted it. He implored me to call out and take care of her, but I told him that was a bad idea. Although our workplace was much less exploitive than it had been when we initially signed on, it was still run by a merciless organization whose patience could only be tested so much. Since he had continued to work while I was out on the few days of bereavement my manager would afford me, it was important that I show my face. 

It was nicer than I anticipated.

There was a blissful normality to the labor. The droning hum of the many sewing machines, the repetitive movements, the familiarity and the routine. The comfort, however, was fleeting. Before long, my fingertips began to throb. I thought of Mateo’s whispering foot. 

Then, my manager approached. 

Grace was a large woman with patchy gray hair and close-set eyes that seemed equally devoid of color. She stood over my station, tapping her foot as if she were waiting for me to do something, though I couldn’t say what. Without warning, she started berating me. In essence, she was accusing Ryan and me of some sort of conspiracy, an attempt to defraud them. Why had there been only one of us present at any given time? What exactly were we trying to pull? Something to that effect. I don’t remember precisely what she said. I couldn’t focus on her paranoid rant - I was too distracted by her tongue. 

The flesh was whispering to me. 

Silvia’s voice - it was in there. I could tell by the way the wet muscle vibrated. 

I’d do anything to speak to my sister again, right? 

Yes.

I would.

I leaped from my chair, hand outstretched, reaching for her mouth. The suddenness of my outburst caught Grace off guard. She yelled “GET BACK YOU - “ before my fingers interrupted her. I cradled her tongue in my palm and pressed my fingertips into the warm, wriggling flesh. A panicked scream reverberated through the small bones in my wrist. I could feel Silvia. I could almost hear her, too. She was trying to tell me something, but her voice was muffled, coarse with static like a call with a shoddy connection. As Grace’s teeth began to clamp down, I dragged my fingertips across her tongue, arranging them into various configurations, trying to locate the pattern that would amplify this divine signal…

Pain exploded across the back of my hand. 

I launched my arm back and ripped my hand from her mouth. Strips of skin peeled away under the pressure of her front teeth. The force caused Grace to fall backward onto the floor. I stared at the traumatized woman. Blood trickled from her trembling lips. Her eyes were bulging, ripe with shock and fear. People were gathering around us. No one was exactly sure what happened. I shoved my injured hand into my pants pocket and pushed through the crowd. 

You’d think I’d have left the factory horrified and ashamed, but I walked home with a smile pinned to my jaw. I felt incredible. Waves of euphoria rushed through my body and collected in my fingertips.  

I was close. 

I was so very close. 

- - - - -

The police didn’t come knocking that night. 

I was thankful, but not entirely surprised. Maybe I mangled Grace’s tongue and she couldn’t speak. Maybe she didn’t want the law snooping around the factory. The reason didn’t matter. All that mattered was what I planned on doing next. 

Ryan was exhausted and turned in early. Elisa had been a handful, apparently. Again, I was thankful, and I didn’t bother asking questions. It felt like the world was paving the way, removing every barrier, keeping me on a certain course, a path that could be easily confused for fate. 

Once I was sure my family was asleep, I left to find Mateo.  

The city was eerily quiet. I jogged from block to block without the urban white noise I was accustomed to, the blaring sirens and the distant music and the drunken chatter of passerbys. The night was silent and black, like the river in the mangrove forest I may have drowned in. It was unnerving, but not enough to send me home, not even enough to slow me down. The euphoria I’d experienced earlier had completely disappeared. The throbbing in my fingertips resurfaced, worse than ever. The pain was severe enough that I needed to cover my mouth with my uninjured hand and muffle a wail: I was approaching Mateo’s alley, and I didn’t want the noise to scare him off. 

My wail gradually died down, and the pain briefly subsided, but as I pulled my palm away, I caught a glimpse of fingertips in the murky glow of a streetlamp. They were swollen. Pockets of clear fluid stretched the skin to its absolute limit in some places, surpassing it in others, creating paper-cut-sized slits that leaked blood-tinged fluid.

What the hell was happening to me? 

Better yet, where the fuck was my head? I was skulking through the city in the dead of night, presumably unemployed, with a sick kid at home to…what? Commune with Silvia through the flesh of some poor man?

Yes, a voice in my mind said. 

That’s exactly what I was going to do. 

That voice grew louder, and the impulse grew stronger, and eventually, my legs began moving again. I wasn’t jogging anymore; I was sprinting. Angry drivers blasted their horns as I raced across busy streets. I could’ve been hit, but I didn’t care. I was focused. I was close. Mateo lived behind a local coffee shop. My heart sang when I saw their sign at the end of the block. I slowed my pace, steadied my breathing, and crept into the alleyway. A figure lay motionless atop a heated vent. Steam rose from beneath them, caressing their outline, giving them a shape in the inky darkness. His foot is necrotic, I reminded myself. Dead tissue means dead nerves. I might frighten him, but he won’t feel any pain. 

I knelt down beside him, mesmerized by the vibrations radiating across his naked shin. 

I plunged my swollen fingertips into his flesh. 

There was resistance, much more than I anticipated, then warmth licking my fingertips and a high-pitched, guttural scream, not the scream of an old man. The figure scrambled away from me. I caught a glimpse of their face in the moonlight. It was a young man with long hair and a deep scar transecting one of their eyebrows. They bolted from me, and I didn’t give chase. The mistake was sobering. I terrorized and maimed a stranger for nothing, absolutely nothing. My stomach heaved. I stumbled to my feet and fled from the alleyway. Salty tears stung my eyes. My mind seemed irreparably fractured. As I bolted home, it kept flipping back and forth between two opposing conclusions. 

I was broken, lost, and completely insane. 

No, that’s not it - I was given a gift, baptized in secret waters, I could commune with Silvia, I could tell her I loved her, tell her I was sorry, and I was close, I just needed to keep trying… 

When I slinked through the front door, nothing had changed; no winner had been decided. It felt like I was being torn apart from the inside out. I staggered through our home, gripping my head with both hands like my skull would fall apart if I didn’t hold it together. I pushed open our bedroom door and stepped through. Ryan was snoring, sound asleep. He’d help me. I’d wake him up, show him my fingers, tell him about Michael, beg for his forgiveness, and - 

I stopped at the side of our bed and stood still. 

His entire body appeared to be vibrating. Every inch of visible skin was churning, silently swaying, undulating with Silvia’s voice, especially his eyelids, which rippled like the tide before a storm, graceful and treacherous. 

I reached both hands out. 

I hovered a thumb over each eyelid. 

She’s in there. 

Silvia’s in his flesh, too. 

My mind demanded my muscles press down, not hard enough to kill him, just hard enough to sunder his naked flesh, to rip him open and baptize his viscera.

DO IT, a voice inside me screamed.  

My thumbs shook. 

I was about to give in, I could practically feel the greenlit impulse flying down my nervous system, but before it arrived at my thumbs, my eyes landed on my empty ring finger. 

The memory of pawning my engagement ring flashed through my mind.

Disbelief surged through my body - why the fuck would I do something so cruel? That’s not who I am. That’s not how Silvia raised me to be. 

My muscles relaxed. 

I moved my hands away. My mind felt clear for the first time in weeks, and I came to a realization. 

There’s something dangerous living inside me. 

And it came from Ecuador. 

- - - - -

Night gradually turned to dawn. 

I remained in control, sipping stale coffee at the kitchen table, determining what to do next. The emergency room seemed like a safe choice, but some part of me resisted. They won’t understand. They’ll think I’m insane. They’ll lock me away. 

Of course, the question became: 

Is that really what I think?

Or is that a suggestion from the thing inside me? A way to prevent me from getting help...

A shrill noise erupted from my cell phone.

I nearly jumped out of my skin, dropping my mug in the process. It shattered on the kitchen tile, launching ceramic shrapnel in every direction. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” I whispered, pulling the device from my pocket. Based on the sound, I assumed it was an amber alert. It wasn’t.

The notification read: 

EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM: CONTAGIOUS DISEASE WARNING FOR YOUR AREA UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. REMAIN INDOORS. CLICK HERE OR TURN TO CHANNEL 8 FOR DETAILS. 

A sour dread swept through my gut. 

I raced into the living room, turned on the television, and flipped to channel 8. There was a series of photographs on screen, squeezed between the news anchor and a banner that read “OUTBREAK OF UNKNOWN CONTAGION; VICTIMS ASSAULTED OTHERS BEFORE DISEASE PROVED FATAL”. To my profound horror, I saw a man with a scar across his eyebrow and a large woman with gray hair and close-set eyes. There were four other pictures, but I didn’t recognize any of them. 

I scrambled to unmute the television. 

“Originally thought to be under the influence due to their erratic behavior, health officials are now reporting that the perpetrators were likely suffering from some novel, rabies-like infection, though they refused to provide additional details for the time being…”

I felt someone tugging at my shirt sleeve. I spun around, heart pounding, relieved to just see a groggy Elisa rubbing the sleep from her eyes. 

“When did we leave the park, mommy?” 

I asked her to repeat herself, but the question didn’t change. 

“I said, when did we leave the park? We were there, now we’re here, it doesn’t make much sense, I don’t remember the in-betweens…”

My heart fell through the floor. 

She didn’t recall the previous twenty-four hours. 

She had amnesia. 

My eyes slowly drifted to the Band-Aid on her knee. I reached out a damp, trembling hand and peeled it off. There was a small, crescent-shaped trench over her kneecap. I carefully hovered my swollen finger above it.

A perfect fit. 

I’m starting to believe my Mom abandoned Silvia and me for a very specific reason. I think she was creating distance, keeping us away from Ecuador and from herself. Because I’m infected with something from my mother’s country. Something that wants to spread. Something that infiltrates your mind. Something that would’ve said anything to convince me to plunge my diseased fingers into other people’s flesh. Worst of all, I’ve given it to my daughter, too. Compared to my manager and the man in the alley, we seem to react differently to whatever this infection is. For whatever reason, it doesn't kill us. I suspect the truth is hidden in our bloodline. 

God, Elisa’s a smart kid. Empathic, too. She picked up on my distress almost immediately, even if she didn’t understand it. She hugged my leg, peered up at me with her pale blue eyes, and asked:

“So…what now?” 

I swallowed my despair and forced a smile. 

“I don’t…I don’t know, love.” 

The pain in my fingertips was worsening. I was terrified for Elisa. The pain was coming for her, too.  

“All I know is…whatever we do, we’ll do it together.” 

I picked her up and started walking towards the door. 

“And I won’t leave your side again, okay?”

“Promise?”

My smile grew. 

For the first time since Silvia’s death, it was real. 

“Yes, Elisa. I promise.”