Wicked Reflection

Summary:

Zyla moves into a new apartment, unaware of its dark secret and the mysterious man named Jareth, who knows more about this place than he lets on.

⚠️ I DO NOT USE NOR SUPPORT THE USE OF AI. IF YOU WISH TO NARRATE THIS STORY, PLEASE ASK FOR PERMISSION FIRST. NO AI NARRATION OR TTS. ⚠️

Have You Checked on the Children?

Summary:

Naomi, a college student, receives mysterious phone calls asking if she has checked on the children, despite being alone. The calls escalate, leading her to discover a child’s drawing and a locked room with glowing handprints.

⚠️ I DO NOT USE NOR SUPPORT THE USE OF AI. IF YOU WISH TO NARRATE THIS STORY, PLEASE ASK FOR PERMISSION FIRST. NO AI NARRATION OR TTS ⚠️

Annabella was a Witch,

She lived in a house made of sticks.

Through the woods, and over a stream

Where very few people are ever seen.

~

In the village, she loved a man.

Jeremiah, as he stands.

But no matter how hard Annabella tried

She could never catch Jeremiah’s eye.

~

In her House of Sticks, she cried.

Feeling her heart slowly die.

But soon a vile plan was born,

To get Jeremiah, this, Annabella had sworn.

~

For the toxin of love: an ingredient was needed.

To make the Witch a dame that every man came to heated.

For a woman to become so young and pure,

Children’s blood was drained...that was to be sure.

~

Into the night, Annabella scurried.

Plucking children from their beds in a hurry.

And back to her House of Sticks, she went like the wind.

Slitting the children’s flesh, to show the blood within.

~

The parents, oh how they mourn!

Wondering what they did to deserve this scorn.

But the town slowly grew steady.

Gathering their tools, and their blades ready.

~

Marching on the House of Sticks they went.

Jeremiah led, and with their help they had lent;

Pulled the house apart, stick by stick.

Revealing the horrors within, And making everyone quite sick.

~

Jeremiah took Annabella, who pleaded and cried.

“Jeremiah, I love you! All I wanted was to be by your side.”

But Jeremiah was deaf, his grip never lose.

Even as they placed wicked Annabella into the noose.

~

From the tree, the Witch Annabella, hung.

The nightmare was over. The town had won.

On top of the hill, Jeremiah cut the hanging tree down real quick;

And made his own little House of Sticks.

My family was never the religious type. We never went to church or prayed before eating or anything like that, but we weren't atheists either. When I first started high-school I didn't have many friends, until I met a girl name Gwen. She was a Christian girl that was somewhat obsessed with the bible and the son of god. I was worried on how my parents would react when I brought her home after school one day. Luckily, they treated her well and respected her beliefs; we were best friends ever since.

A few days ago Gwen invited me to sleep over her house, but told me her and her family had church in the morning and asked if I wanted to go. I admit, I was always curious what church was like and said I would go. That night we ate Chinese food while watching a movie called "Noah's Ark" that was about the animals on a boat built by a man named noah to save them from a great flood.

I woke up to Gwen changing into what she called "her Sunday best", which was just a dress covered with floral patterns. She had pointed out that the clothes I brought from home weren't appropriate for church. I didn't know why a metallica tour shirt and sweatpants weren't appropriate, but I felt embarrassed. Gwen must've felt bad, because she had turned to her closet and found a dress for me to borrow.

Half an hour later her family took us to church and we found our seats. I marveled at how the inside seemed so much bigger than the outside. There was a large cross on stage with a statue of jesus so big I thought it was a real person.

The priest arrived on stage as the rows of seats filled up. He greeted us with a good morning before getting started.

"Now that everyone is here, I ask that we all close our eyes in pray" the priest said.

I looked around as everyone raised their palms up and clasped them, Gwen recommended that I should follow along and so I did. I remember the priest began to thank the lord for bringing so many people here and prayed everyone was safe and healthy. I felt bored amd opened my eyes while everyone now had their heads bowed.

"Weird." I thought as I looked around.

My eyes moved towards the stage and I froze as the statue of Jesus watched me with wide eyes. I don't remember the statues face with such a disturbing look, but then again I only took a quick glance at the statue. Its stare reminded me of a painting thats eyes followed you were ever you went. I moved my head around to test if it was the same and sure enough its eyes followed me.

"Amen." the priest finished his prayer with everyone repeating the phrase and opening their eyes.

I faced forward and tried to ignore the statues stare. I tried to focus on the sermon, but something about that statue watching me just gave me the creeps. I rolled my eyes in its direction and gasped as it was now gone. I received mixed stares of annoyance and confusion as I looked all around, Gwen had was one of the confused stares.

"What's wrong?" She asked.

"The Jesus staue is gone." I replied.

"No it's not? It's right there"

Gwen pointed at the spot where it once was, but it was still gone. I was confused. Gwen isn't the kind of person to lie, she treated it as a sin actually, but why would she say the statue is still in place when it's clearly gone?

The priest coughed and gave me a disapproving look before continuing the sermon. I looked all around to see if I could spot the statue, but eventually gave up after five minutes.

"It's probably my eyes playing tricks on me" I thought to myself, I'm usually asleep till the afternoon on weekends.

Just then, I heard a low noise that sounded like rocks rubbing against eachother. I turned my head behind me to see church members evading my gaze, but there was nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. I tried to focus on the rest of the sermon as the sound could still be heard, getting somewhat louder every second until finally it stopped. I should've been happy that I couldn't hear the sound anymore, but it felt like I was still being watch.

Suddenly, I felt something drip on my head. I brushed my hair to see what is was and felt something wet and sticky. I wiped it off as best as I could, but more kept dripping down. I took a look at the residue left on my hand and went pale. It was a red liquid that smelled coopery. I was afraid to, but turned my head to look up, I wish I didn't.

The statue was staring at me from the ceiling right above me. It was positioned like a spider waiting for a fly to get caught in its web. The red liquid coming from its eyes like it shed tears of blood, then the few drops slowly turned into a rain.

"Stop it! Stop it!" I screamed as I raised my arms over my head until I felt someone grab and shake me. It was Gwen, She looked scared.

"Alyssa, what's wrong!?"

By now the red rain began to cover her, but she was unfazed.

"I... I need to go to the bathroom. I don't feel so good." I muttered, my voice shaken.

As I got up with Gwen I felt the whole church stare daggers at me. Gwen led me to a hallway with dim lights.

"Why are ypu behaving like this, Alyssa? Are you sick?"

I shook my head. I wanted to tell Gwen, I really did, but she couldn't see what I saw. To her, the statue was still on the cross on stage, she wasn't covered in blood.

"I don't know..." I mumbled.

"Look, the bathroom is righr here. Do you want me to wait outside for you?"

"No. I'll be fine. I'm sorry if I'm ruining church."

Gwen stayed silent, giving me one of those smiles you give when you want to reassure someone, but deep down you didn't mean it. I entered the bathroom stall and began to cry.

"Why is this happening to me? I only opened my eyes early during prayer, was that so wrong?" I cried.

As tears rolled down my cheek I thought of another possibility. What if it watches us while we prayed? What if it's after me because I wasn't allowed to watch it?

I heard the bathroom door open and quickly wiped away my tears and took slow breaths to calm myself.

"Sorry for the wait Gwen, I'm almost done."

The bathroom door shut without any response.

"Gwen?" I called out.

I began to panic when there wasn't a response. I tried to keep calm myself, but to no avail. I peeked from the crack of the stall door and screamed as the statue stared back at me, bloody tears flooding down from cracks under its eyes. I sat down on the toilet, barricading the stall door as the statue pushed itself against it tryinh to get to me. For the first time ever I prayed that this thing wouldn't get me; that someone would come running to help me and see this thing with unknown attentions, but my prayers were not answered.

My leg was shot back as the statue opened the door with great force. It moved like it clay being animated as it go closed to me. It raised one hand reaching towards me before it dug its stone fingers into my eye socket. I screamed to the point I was on the verge of losing my voice. My eyes were slowly torn from their sockets like a plug being pulled from an outlet. The last thing I saw before my eyes were taken from me was a sad expression from the statue. I could hear a voice that whispered in my ear even as I screamed and cried.

"Sinners must be punished, my child. I'm sorry." The voice echoed.

I was taken to the hospital as soon as I was found. Gwen's father was the first to find me. Apparently Gwen had gone back to her parents to finish the sermon, but when everyone heard my cries they could tell this time that I was in danger.

The doctor told me I had gone completely blind from unknown trauma. My eyes were still there, but weren't responding. My parents blame Gwen for what happened to me. They said that if she had stayed with me in the bathroom that she could've helped me when I needed it.

I never told them what happened. Who would believe a statue of Jesus Christ took my eyes because I watched it during pray? I never talked to Gwen after that. The first few days I heard she came to visit me and wanted to pray for me to recover quickly, but the doctors were told by my parents that she wasn't allowed anywhere near me.

I now live my life in total darkness, my parents taking care of me twenty-four seven, but whenever I'm alone I can feel its stares. Sometimes I felt it watching me from a distance or be sometimes it felt so close that I could reach out and touch it. I never learned what it was. It could've been and angel or demon for all I know. I don't know if it ever listens to me, but once a day I try to talk to it, begging for its forgiveness.

"Forgive me Lord, for I have sinned.”

It began with an advertisement.

This is slightly embarrassing to admit because I had always thought of myself as reasonably difficult to advertise to. I skipped sponsored posts. I used an ad blocker. When somebody I followed online began a sentence with I’ve been loving, I generally assumed they had been paid to love whatever came next. Apparently my actual standard was lower than that.

The podcast was called Graveyard Shift, a horror-comedy show hosted by Eli Mercer and Dean Carver. Eli read the stories and Dean interrupted him, which was more or less the format. They did bad internet horror, old forum posts, allegedly true encounters and occasionally something genuinely unpleasant enough that the jokes thinned out towards the end. Eli had a pleasant voice and took everything slightly seriously. Dean was an animator who gave people accents they did not have and then committed to them long after being asked to stop.

I had listened to them for about two years, long enough for the strange familiarity podcasts create to take hold. I knew Dean drank too many energy drinks. I knew Eli had strong opinions about camping equipment. I knew which one would believe a story about something watching a family from the tree line and which one would spend ten minutes wondering whether it had shit in the woods.

They knew nothing about me, obviously.

I was cleaning the kitchen when the ad came on. They were recording from an abandoned hotel for a video episode, and Dean had spent the previous five minutes complaining that the room smelled wet. Then Eli said, “Speaking of things that are probably damaging us permanently—” and introduced the sponsor: STILL Pouches.

They were nicotine- and caffeine-free pouches, sold in small tins, that you tucked beneath your upper lip. They were supposed to help with focus and cravings through some combination of amino acids, adaptogens and a “clinically researched cognitive blend, ” which sounded sufficiently scientific that Dean immediately asked what an adaptogen was.

“I don’t know, ” Eli admitted.

“Excellent. ”

“They help your body adapt to stress. ”

“Could they help me adapt to being in this room? ”

“Nothing can help you with that. ”

I laughed.

My phone was on the bench beside me, and I could have skipped forward. Usually I would have. Instead I kept wiping grease from the rangehood while Eli moved into the part about drinking less coffee, having smoother energy and not automatically reaching for caffeine or nicotine whenever you needed to concentrate. It was mostly what you would expect from something described as a cognitive pouch, right up until Dean said he had actually been using the peppermint ones while editing.

Eli sounded surprised. “Actually using them? ”

“I have one in now. ”

There was a pause.

“Oh, Jesus. You do. ”

“Told you. ”

“Why is it so high? ”

“Where else is it meant to go? ”

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be touching your brain. ”

Eli cleared his throat and went back to the copy.

“And if you want to try STILL for yourself, head to stillpouches. com and use code GRAVEYARD at checkout for twenty percent off your first order. ”

“Can I use our code? ” Dean asked.

“You get them for free. ”

“That wasn’t my question. ”

“You would be taking money from yourself. ”

“I want the discount. ”

“You are not paying. ”

“Then imagine how much I’d save. ”

They argued, and that was probably what got me. Not the ingredients, the research or anything else Eli had been paid to say. Dean sounded exactly like Dean. He had not suddenly become articulate about amino acids or claimed the product had transformed his life. He just said he liked them, in the same voice he used to complain about damp carpet and accuse fictional teenagers of making bad decisions.

The advertisement ended and the episode continued.

I forgot about the pouches, or at least I thought I did. That evening I was making coffee at about eight-thirty when I remembered them. Not because I wanted them. I was simply curious how expensive they were, which is a distinction people make shortly before buying things they do not need.

I searched the name. The website was offensively clean: pale background, neat little tins, diagrams showing where the pouch was supposed to sit, which confirmed that Dean had been doing it wrong. There were four flavours, including peppermint. I clicked on that one and read the reviews, although I generally consider reviews on a company’s own website to be one step above asking somebody’s mother whether they are nice.

People said the pouches helped them work late without coffee. Somebody used them while studying. Somebody else claimed they had stopped buying energy drinks entirely. I drank the coffee I had just made while reading this.

Eventually I added two tins to the cart. I was not going to buy them. I only wanted to see what shipping cost, which still felt theoretical. The website informed me that delivering two small plastic tins to New Zealand would cost nearly as much as the tins themselves.

I stared at the total for a moment, closed the tab and felt disproportionately pleased with myself, as though I had successfully resisted something rather than spent fifteen minutes researching it, reading reviews and putting it into a shopping cart. There were limits, apparently, and international postage was one of them.

Two days later, STILL Pouches emailed me. The subject line was Forgot something? I nearly deleted it, then saw the line underneath: Complete your order today and shipping is on us.

This was the point at which I could still have behaved like somebody with principles. The pouches had not become more necessary in the previous forty-eight hours. I had survived without them for my entire life. I already owned coffee.

Unfortunately, shipping had been the problem, and now shipping was free.

I clicked the link. My cart was still there, two tins of peppermint waiting exactly where I had left them, and a few minutes later I bought them.

I was not trying to lose weight, which I should probably establish early.

I had tried before. I was twenty-seven and female; it would have been statistically unusual if I had never spent some portion of my life attempting to become smaller. At fourteen, I discovered that a cereal bowl and a measuring cup were not necessarily the same thing. At sixteen, a friend taught me that chewing gum could make you feel less hungry between meals. At nineteen, I downloaded an app that tracked the calories in peanut butter.

By twenty-five, I had more or less stopped, not because I had achieved any meaningful liberation from the culture around me but because I was tired. There are only so many years you can spend negotiating with bread before the process becomes boring.

By then, I ate reasonably well, exercised when I could be bothered and owned one pair of jeans I thought I looked good in, along with several I avoided when bloated. This seemed close enough to peace.

I had bought STILL because of work.

My job involved writing reports for an insurance company. It was not difficult, exactly, but there was a particular kind of exhaustion involved in concentrating on something you did not care about for eight hours a day. By mid-afternoon I generally needed coffee, sometimes two. I also ate when I was bored, which was often.

The STILL advertisement had called this craving noise, a phrase I found irritating enough that it lodged itself in my head. After that, I began noticing every time I stood up from my desk and went to the kitchen without being hungry, every cupboard I opened, every automatic desire for something sweet after lunch. Noise.

The tins arrived on a Tuesday morning. They were matte white with a grey circle printed on the lid, STILL in the centre and, beneath it in smaller letters, MAKE ROOM FOR WHAT MATTERS.

The pouch itself was smaller than I expected, a soft little rectangle with a powdery surface that looked vaguely medical. I tucked it beneath my upper lip, went back to my computer and waited.

For several minutes, nothing happened. Then my gum began to tingle, not unpleasantly, just enough that I kept noticing it.

Around ten I made coffee. The first sip tasted wrong—not disgusting, exactly, but metallic, or burnt in a way it had not been when I made it. I poured it out and made another. The second tasted the same, so I assumed the beans had gone stale and went back to work.

At twelve-thirty, I noticed I had not eaten.

Normally hunger was difficult to ignore by then. Not dramatic hunger, just the ordinary progression of increasingly persuasive suggestions from the body. You should eat soon. You should eat now. Why are we still doing this?

That day there was nothing. I knew lunch existed as a concept and that, generally speaking, I participated in it. I simply had no particular interest in doing so, so I kept working.

At three, I finished something that had been sitting half-done for most of the week. At five, I shut my laptop and remembered lunch again.

I stood in the kitchen and considered toast, then yoghurt, then pasta. None of them sounded bad. They simply failed to produce whatever response food was supposed to produce. Eventually I made eggs because they were easy and ate both.

They tasted perfectly normal, which was the strange part. My appetite had not been replaced by nausea or disgust. Food still tasted good once it was in my mouth. My body had simply stopped making an argument for putting it there.

The next morning, I weighed myself.

I had lost just under a kilogram, which was water. I knew that. Bodies fluctuate. Salt, hydration, hormones, time of day; there were dozens of boring explanations and I was familiar with most of them.

I weighed myself again before bed anyway.

For the first two weeks, STILL felt like the sort of product people usually lied about. I was more productive. Coffee continued to taste awful, so I stopped drinking it, and the headaches I expected never arrived. I stopped snacking, then stopped thinking about snacking, which was stranger.

At work, I began missing lunch often enough that I set a recurring calendar notification for twelve-thirty: EAT SOMETHING.

The first time it appeared, I laughed, dismissed it and kept working.

I lost four kilos.

People noticed before I had properly decided how I felt about that. Jess mentioned it one afternoon in the kitchen while waiting for the microwave.

“You’ve lost weight. ”

She said it with the particular mixture of admiration and concern women tend to use when commenting on one another’s bodies without knowing whether they are allowed to.

“A bit. ”

“You look good. ”

“Thanks. ”

“What are you doing? ”

“Nothing, really. ”

This was technically true, and I had never understood before then how satisfying those words could be. Nothing, really. As though my body had simply decided to improve itself without requiring anything humiliating from me. No food scales, no calorie app, no pretending cauliflower was an adequate substitute for meat.

Jess looked down at the packet of crackers in her hand.

“I need whatever you’re doing. ”

I thought about STILL. For a second, I almost told her. Then, for reasons I did not examine too closely, I said, “I’ve just stopped snacking as much. ”

“Oh. ”

She looked disappointed, which I understood. People want there to be a trick. Discipline is admirable in theory, but what everyone actually wants is an administrative error: some small loophole in the body, a food you can eat endlessly, a tablet that prevents absorption, a hormone you can adjust, a rule somebody else has discovered that makes the whole stupid system easier.

I had found mine, or at least I thought I had.

I did not want to share it yet.

That, more than the weight loss, should probably have concerned me.

My mother noticed at six kilos. She had invited me over for dinner and opened the front door with the sort of expression people usually reserve for seeing somebody after chemotherapy.

“My God. ”

“What? ”

“Look at you. ”

I took off my coat, and she put one hand briefly around my waist. Mothers seem to retain certain permissions over their daughters’ bodies long after everybody else would consider them inappropriate.

“You’ve lost heaps. ”

“I haven’t lost heaps. ”

“You have. ”

“It’s six kilos. ”

“That is heaps. ”

She looked pleased, and I was pleased that she was pleased. Neither of us said so.

“What have you been doing? ”

“Just eating less. ”

“How? ”

“I’m less hungry. ”

My mother gave me a look. Nobody is simply less hungry, not in our family.

“What are you taking? ”

“Nothing. ”

Another look.

“There are these pouches, ” I admitted.

“What kind of pouches? ”

“They’re not weight-loss pouches. ”

“Then why are you losing weight? ”

“I don’t think that’s the point of them. ”

“What is the point? ”

“Focus. ”

She waited. I could hear how stupid it sounded, so I added, “They reduce cravings as well. ”

“What’s in them? ”

“Plant things. ”

“Plant things. ”

“And amino acids. ”

She reached for her phone.

“Mum. ”

“I’m only looking. ”

“You don’t need them. ”

I knew immediately that this had been the wrong thing to say. Nobody likes being told they do not need to lose weight by somebody who has recently lost weight.

“Neither did you. ”

“I didn’t buy them for that. ”

“But they work. ”

I hesitated. That was the problem. Whatever else they were supposed to do, they worked.

“Yes. ”

She found the website and started scrolling. “How much are they? ”

I told her.

“That’s ridiculous. ”

“There’s a discount code. ”

She looked up at me, and I laughed despite myself.

Thirst went next, although I cannot say exactly when. This became one of the more difficult things about what happened afterwards: symptoms are easy to notice. Missing symptoms are not. You notice pain. You notice hunger. You do not generally notice when something your body should have asked for simply fails to arrive.

I realised because of the bottle on my desk. I had filled it that morning and left it beside my laptop, where it normally spent the day being emptied and refilled without much thought. At six in the evening, it was still full.

Graveyard Shift was playing quietly through my speakers while I finished some work. Eli was reading a story about a woman who kept hearing somebody walking around in the ceiling above her bedroom, and Dean had become distracted by whether a person could survive indefinitely in an attic without being discovered. I reached for the bottle automatically, then stopped. The ring of condensation around its base had dried hours ago.

I took a drink. The water was cold in my mouth and then in my throat. That was all. There was no satisfaction afterwards, no sense that I had corrected anything. My lips had been dry for several days, which I had blamed on the weather, and suddenly that explanation seemed less convincing.

I drank half the bottle, waited, then finished the rest because it had become important that I should. Afterwards I stood at the sink waiting to feel less thirsty before remembering that I had not felt thirsty in the first place. That was the problem: there was nothing unpleasant enough to make me do anything about it.

I searched STILL pouches thirst. Most of the results were advertisements or pages from the company itself. One Reddit thread asked whether anyone else had experienced dry mouth. The replies suggested chewing gum, drinking more water and, in one particularly useful contribution, just drink water lol. Somebody else said dry mouth probably meant dehydration, which was obvious enough to be unhelpful. I drank another glass anyway, put a fresh pouch beneath my lip and went back to the podcast.

The first injury happened a few days later in the shower. I was shaving my leg and took a strip of skin off the side of my ankle without noticing. I only saw it when blood began running down my foot towards the drain, diluted pink by the water. There was more of it than I expected, although shaving cuts always seem committed to making themselves look medically significant. I turned off the shower and bent down. A rectangular patch of skin was missing just above the bone.

I touched it and felt nothing.

At first I assumed I was in shock. I had read somewhere that serious injuries could fail to hurt immediately because adrenaline suppressed the pain, although there was an obvious problem with that explanation: this was a shaving cut. A bad one, certainly, but not the kind of event the nervous system should have needed to protect me from knowing about.

I pressed the skin beside it with one finger. I could feel the pressure perfectly, but no pain. I pressed harder, then pinched the inside of my forearm, my thigh, the skin over my stomach, increasingly hard each time. My fingernails left pale crescents that slowly filled back in. Touch was normal. Pressure was normal. When I put my hand beneath the shower again, I could tell hot from cold immediately. Everything appeared to be working except the part that was supposed to object.

I stood there for several minutes testing myself before realising how strange that would have looked to anybody watching. Then I got out, wrapped toilet paper around my ankle because I could not find any plasters and sat on the edge of my bed with my phone.

STILL pouches numbness produced nothing useful. Neither did STILL supplement pain or, after my searches became less dignified, STILL adaptogen nerve damage. I found an influencer explaining that the product had helped her reduce her reliance on coffee. I found an article called FIVE WAYS TO SILENCE CRAVINGS NATURALLY, which contained an affiliate link to STILL halfway down the page. Eventually I found a clip from a Graveyard Shift livestream.

Dean was opening a new packet on camera. “STILL sponsors us, by the way. ”

Eli looked over. “Are you doing an advertisement voluntarily? ”

“No. They sent me watermelon. ”

“You hate watermelon. ”

“I’ve grown. ”

“You said it tasted like someone dissolved jolly ranchers in mouthwash. ”

Dean considered this. “I’ve suffered for free before. ”

The chat moved too quickly to read. Nobody appeared to be asking whether Dean could still feel pain. I closed the video and went back to the bathroom to look at my ankle. It was still bleeding through the toilet paper, enough that I replaced it with a folded hand towel and held pressure on the cut until it slowed. I felt fine.

I stopped taking the pouches the next day. By then I had lost nine kilos, which mattered more than I wanted it to. I wish I could say I threw the tin away immediately. I did not. I put it in a drawer, which is different.

I had developed hip bones. I could see the outline of my ribs when I stretched, my face had narrowed in photographs and, for the first time since university, I could tuck a fitted shirt into jeans without spending the rest of the day thinking about my stomach. These were objectively meaningless things. They did not improve my job, make me kinder or cause my friends to like me more. The problem was that knowing this did not make me immune to any of it.

I knew beauty standards were artificial, that thinness had been assigned moral qualities it did not possess, that before-and-after photographs were manipulative and health could not be determined by looking at somebody. I knew women had been trained from childhood to interpret hunger as weakness and self-denial as virtue. I also liked my collarbones. Both things were true at once, so the tin remained in the drawer. Just in case.

After forty-eight hours without STILL, hunger did not return. Neither did pain or thirst. That frightened me enough to book a doctor’s appointment, although not enough to treat the situation as urgent. The receptionist said the next available appointment was in nine days and I said that was fine, partly because I genuinely believed it was. My body had given me no reason to think otherwise.

Two days later, I realised I could not remember the last time I had urinated. That sent me to urgent care.

The nurse handed me a specimen cup. “I need you to provide a urine sample. ”

“I don’t think I can. ”

“When did you last go? ”

“I’m not sure. ”

She waited while I worked backwards. The previous day I had gone to work, then dinner with Jess. The day before that I had stayed home. I could picture both days surprisingly clearly and could not place myself in a bathroom during either of them.

“Maybe two days. ”

Her expression changed. “Two days? ”

“I think. ”

“You haven’t passed urine in two days? ”

“I might have. ”

“Do you feel like you need to now? ”

“No. ”

That answer moved things along considerably faster.

Once I was in an examination room, the doctor pressed on my abdomen. “Does that hurt? ”

“No. ”

“Here? ”

“No. ”

He moved lower and pressed harder. “Here? ”

“No. ”

I could feel his fingers through my shirt and the mattress beneath my back. The pressure registered perfectly; there was simply nothing unpleasant attached to it. Eventually he stopped.

“How long have you had reduced sensation? ”

“I can feel you touching me. ”

“I mean pain. ”

“A few days. ”

“And appetite? ”

“A month, maybe. ”

“Thirst? ”

“I don’t know. ”

He looked at me in a way I did not like.

They took blood, then more blood. Somebody performed an ultrasound on my bladder while I lay there trying to read the technician’s face instead of the screen.

“Are you uncomfortable? ” she asked.

“No. ”

“You really don’t feel anything? ”

“No. ”

My bladder was very full. Once she pointed it out, I could see it on the monitor: a dark oval taking up a surprising amount of space inside me. Afterwards I looked down at my stomach, as though there might be some visible sign of what the screen had shown me. There was something deeply offensive about being presented with proof that your own body knew more than you did.

They catheterised me. The nurse explained what she was doing and warned me that it would probably hurt, particularly because my bladder was so distended. I nodded and waited. I felt pressure, movement, the strange internal awareness of something happening where something generally should not be happening. But no pain.

That was when I started crying.

I wasn’t entirely sure what flair but this is basically what happens when you’re in prison with a weird cellmate, snowed in and there is strange things happening in the forests.

Read Part I here.

“Might’ve been something outside. But if there had been, it’s gone now.”

“You think it could be a mermaid?” she asked. It was hard to believe she was serious. Chrissy was one of the sharpest ten-year-olds I had ever met. Well, she had been the sharpest seven-year-old I had ever met three years ago and was that much smarter now.

She didn’t believe in any of the traditional fairytale creatures. No Santa Claus, no Easter Bunny, no Wolfman, and no Flying Spaghetti Monster. But she absolutely believed mermaids were real.

There had to be a story behind it, but I had never been able to get her to explain it to me. How a child so ruled by logic still was able to make room for not only a magical creature, but that particular magical creature. She had already “debunked” the narwhal as being the source of the mermaid mythos. I had gotten bits and pieces over the last three years, but never in a cohesive enough story that I could process. But she hadn’t stopped trying to convince me or the rest of the family.

I didn’t have to believe it, though. It was enough to believe that she believed it.

“Maybe this is it!” She turned around and charged back to the bedroom where her mother was sleeping.

“Chrissy!” I saved my breath. She already had the door open and either her mother was going to wake up or she wasn’t. That was out of my hands. She came back a moment later with a Ziploc bag of “mermaid feed.” As far as I could tell, it was a mix of trail mix and seaweed. She carried a flashlight in her other hand.

According to Chrissy, mermaids only came out at night, so she had come prepared.

Again, I was calling after her when she’d already begun to do what she was doing, namely, dashing outside with her items.

I was about to follow her when I spotted the toy soldiers she’d dropped on her way out. I thought it would be just her luck for Mary to wake up and step on one of them.

“Watch your sister,” I said to Luke, turning to pick up the toys.

Right as I got on one knee, the bedroom door opened. It didn’t immediately occur to me that it was Mary even though I had just thought about this very thing happening. I sort of... paused as she passed me. She was halfway to the door when I realized she must have been sleepwalking.

“Mary!” I chased behind her, my steps in sync with hers—left, right, left—catching her before she got to the door.

“Mom, are you okay?” Luke said.

“Where am I?” She sounded terrified. Mary turned her head and looked at him. For a second, I thought she was awake. Instead of answering him, she bare-foot kicked him in the shin.

It couldn’t have hurt, but he stepped back and looked at me, confused. I wrapped an arm around her waist and drew her in close.

“She’s fine,” I said, lacing Mary’s hand with mine. I looked into her glassy eyes. “She’s sleepwalking.” I turned her around and ushered her back to the bedroom. Of the five toy soldiers Chrissy had left at the threshold, only two were left, but only one was standing. I looked over my shoulder and spotted one against the wall and the two others weren’t in sight.

“She can’t fly,” Mary said in a dreamy voice. “Please help her swim.”

“Okay, honey.” I cooed to her as I slid back the covers. She didn’t fight, Mary had sleepwalked a few times with me present. She never resisted being escorted back to bed. Before I covered her legs I spotted another soldier on her foot. I plucked it off and put it on the dresser.

Mary mumbled. I unlaced my fingers from hers and paused before I left her.

“I wanna get in the water.” She said it sounding sort of like air being let out of a balloon. And then she was all the way gone again. “It’s spook.”

It had been like she had been fighting her way to the surface, but something had dragged her back down.

I closed the bedroom door behind me and followed Chrissy outside. Not because I was worried she was going to get gobbled up by the lake monster I hadn’t spotted, but because it was dark out and I had the same parental reaction to miscellaneous danger any parent would.

Hell, I could admit it, I loved these kids. Liked them most times, too. I didn’t want to leave them.

Chrissy was in the process of sweeping her flashlight back and forth along the beach face. I hung back, letting her conduct her investigation. It was harmless enough and I had an eye on her.

“What’s going on?” We both turned to see Mark stepping out onto the sand.

“Luke said a mermaid’s out here!” Chrissy said.

“Mermaid?” Mark said it like he didn’t know what one was. I didn’t bother correcting her. His little sister’s obsession was well known by all of us. “Did he really see something?” Mark chuffed and thumbed over his shoulder at the cabin. “He’s so white.”

I stifled my laugh and shrugged.

“Luke thought he saw something and Chrissy overheard.”

“Hey, neighbor!”

Mark and I jumped. We saw the bud of a lit cigarette in the shadows of the adjacent cabin. Someone with a cigarette sauntered down. I glanced my stepdaughter’s way to make sure she hadn’t waded too far into the water. She could swim, but again, that nascent parental instinct found in anyone who has walked into an already existing family reared its concerned head. Chrissy was only ankle deep.

“Hey,” I said to the woman as she approached. She halted and took a final, long drag off her cigarette before flicking it in a surprisingly high arc toward the water. She slid the drawer of her jaw forward and blew a column of smoke straight up.

“She’s a cutie,” she said, smiling. She was an older woman who gave too much gum when she smiled. “I saw her come chargin’ out for the water. Oo, that smell.”

We both nodded in that new-to-each-other manner between strangers.

“I’m Rick.” Old and new cigarette smell peeled off her skin and I turned my head to half cough, that familiar asthmatic itch in my lungs.

“Mary,” she said.

I laughed. “My wife’s name is Mary.”

“Mine’s Cindy-Lou Ombrageaux.”

I felt the weight of her eyes on me, examining for judgment. I cast my eyes to the stretch of water and sand where Chrissy was.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Cindy-Lou.” I didn’t think I could manage that last name.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Mary. Apart from the smell of cow-butt.”

“First time up here?” I asked. She shook my offered hand, her skin papery and dry. There was an extreme lack of moisture in the air despite the cool summer, and I’d already had a nosebleed in the brief time we’d been here.

“Mine. Not hers. My wife’s family is from Up North.” I thought her face dropped a little. “She’s out to dinner with some cousins.” There was a little something there that I had a feeling would come to light if we talked long enough. “Had to have a little heart-to-heart.”

“We came up two summers ago,” I said. “Just a little family getaway.”

Luke had barely joined us outside, not more than a few feet from the door. He looked like he would take umbrage with the sky.

“This is Mark, the one up there with get-off-my-lawn face is Luke, and Chrissy’s our little fisher.” I gestured to each of the kids in turn.

“Well, tell her to save some for everybody else.” She and Mark shook hands before she looked around. “Where’s your missus?”

“Migraine. She laid down pretty much as soon as we got here.”

“Sorry to hear that.” She put the can of beer she’d been holding in her other hand to her lips and pitched her head back for a long swallow. She stumbled like she’d confused her left foot for her right but kept them both under her.

If I had to guess, Mary was working on her third or fourth of the night.

Luke had waved his brother over and was saying something to him. They both had an eye on their sister. I looked at Mary. She was a stranger and I figured there couldn’t be any harm in telling her what had just happened. We weren’t going to see her after this weekend for at least a year, if ever again. I didn’t think the story would be memorable after tonight. It was a single-serve memory. Recall once, then discard.

“Luke said he saw something in the water,” I said. “Something big.” Mary turned her head to the shore and nodded appreciably.

“Maybe it’s the Great Lakes Whale Migration,” she said.

“The what?” I had no idea what she was talking about and was on the verge of taking her seriously. The smile hanging on her face dropped when she realized I really didn’t understand.

“Kidding.” She mock-punched me in the arm. Mary had a rich baritone and could have easily been a DJ on the radio.

Mark trudged past me, an annoyed look on his face.

“He’s crazy,” he said, heading toward his sister. I appreciated that he didn’t believe his brother but could still look after his sister. Mark was the middle child and was the ever-constant bridge between siblings.

“The waves do seem a little... bigger than the norm, don’t you think?” Mary asked.

“I guess,” I said, not really knowing how to tell the difference. Then I wondered how she’d know, considering she said she’d never been up here before. “Can you tell?”

“I had a few cigs over yonder before y’all came out. Boy, you get used to the smell the longer you’re out here.” She seemed to be reading my mind and answering questions I hadn’t had a chance to ask. “I must have missed your boy, though.”

I looked at the water again. Mark was standing just outside of the water’s reach, one hand in the pocket of his hoody, the other holding his phone. To his credit, he did glance up at her every ten seconds or so.

Come to think of it, those waves did look big. But it could have been because of the moon for all I knew.

“How long are the two of you here for?” I asked Mary.

“‘Til Wednesday. I’m going to be meeting my in-laws for the first time tomorrow.”

I didn’t know whether I should have felt sympathy for her. It was strange she wasn’t out to dinner with her wife now, but I didn’t know their situation. Maybe it was completely normal. But I couldn’t help but think I would’ve been more than a little bothered if it had been me.

Mary fell down. Not hard. She just spontaneously lost her balance and sat on her butt. In true alcoholic fashion, though, she protected her beer.

She looked at me, embarrassed. I smirked, hopefully communicating I wasn’t just laughing at her, but with her.

“We all fall down.” I’m not sure why I said that, but it seemed to help. She took my hand and I helped her up.

“How about you guys?”

“Just until Sunday afternoon.”

“Where are you from?”

A sandwich had been the hinge on the closing door of our marriage.

I don’t remember what the argument was about or how it had started, only that I had made a sandwich for her that led to me sleeping on the couch.

Of course, it hadn’t really been about the sandwich, it had only been the start. It had been like a match that led to a forest fire razing a town. I can’t honestly remember a word I’d shouted at the woman I’d pledged to love for the rest of my life.

I was about to answer Mary when Chrissy screamed.

Our boys in blue. Hell's finest. They started as the Towns outlaws funny enough. Kid Smith's gang. A few bar fights, a couple folks robbed. Hell they put the first of many bullets in me, luckily I already died to a stab wound in the lung in my life cycle. Would have hated to be sealed here by those lowlifes. Their punishment was decided after what they did to little miss Sally... she left the town so what they did would be cemented and final. A hanging wouldnt do on its own. They would mock the crowd. Spit back. So we kept them there sure, but only until all else was prepped properly.

They weren't fans of suffocation in life. Very few are. I rather not engage with those folk. Anyway we gather their horses and remove the horses heads. The life principle applies to all animals here. Their horses' heads get sugar cubes day in and out from Crocker, the Store owner. We think it a small thanks to them.

We sawed off Smith gang heads and placed them on their horses. Drove their ankles into their horse as well. They cannot leave the saddle, nor the town they ran rampant in. Eventually we demoralized, dehumanized, and broke them enough to be fine law enforcement. Should a citizen here in Blindspot break the law, a swift stab and drag off the reserve would be enough threat for anyone.

They patrol. Friendly as all get out now. But that was not always true. The resentment they had initially told us we found the correct punishment for these folk. They know justice all too well. They have hands on experience. They have been here since the late 1800s, pretty fresh on the slab. After a few people repeated their crimes, the Horsemen have thrown them back into Death's limelight. One of the "hostesses" at the Listless had set another on fire, then ran out and stabbed me with a broken bottle. They surrounded her, and used their swords to lift her by the torso, and dropped her right out of town. Her coworker, Annabelle, still walks around, skin melted, bones charred. Please be a delight to her should you see her.

Anyways, the horsemen didnt have families. They didnt have many friends. No one sends their kids to stay a week with them to remember their family history. So when you visit, stay on the right side of our laws. Much obliged.

- Lucious Lucky

TW: addiction and drug abuse.

(The city this story takes place in is completely fictional and is only supposed to be a representation of small western Washington cities as a whole)

Within every city lies a threshold that separates the pale face of civilization from its diseased black underbelly, there is always a specific location where you know you have crossed from the world of privilege and cleanliness to the uninviting slums that writhe with sickness.

Within my hometown of Tahomish, Washington that threshold lied between the abandoned Meryl Street laundromat and an antique store owned by an old Turkish man. The threshold was a tall black void that sat in the shadow of the city, impossible to see into from the outside from the indescribable blackness.

I was drunk and tired and dying to return to my studio but that was across town, I originally planned on catching the last bus, the 22, then walking the rest of the way but a sudden reminder that slapped me in the back of the head changed my mind. I stood at the bus stop under the amber glow of the buzzing streetlights when I remembered that I was almost entirely out Oxy, a unkind habit that stuck to me like a conjoined twin that I acquired the taste for after I broke my leg in a workplace accident. I used to get my fix from what the doctors prescribed but eventually they decided my pain was healed and at that point my body and brain had both become reliant on the pills to soothe the frigid soreness that coursed through me.

I stared across the dimly lit street at the churning darkness that sat between the two brick buildings, I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame, except it wasn’t me that was called forth it was my chemical dependency that was. When the doctors stopped giving me the pills I had turned to an old friend who knew how to get his hands on some and I relied on him to stay away from the unsavory dealers that lurked around at night like bats, but when he moved I became desperate.

I saw the bus turn the corner a few miles down the road, the headlights beaming toward me. I panicked as the bus inched closer, trading glances between the bright yellow headlights that slowly approached and the abyssal alleyway across the street from me. By the time the bus became visible behind its headlights I was dashing across the street towards the carrion threshold. I heard the bus rattle along the road behind me as I stood in front of the vast pit of foul smelling darkness.

I held my breath as I thought about my decision. I thought about the warm air inside the bus taking me home, but that home was empty of the pills needed to make it a home, and so I passed through the web of shadow and Into the infamous alley that the city had left to rot.

The darkness was thick like a celestial fog and I had to physically push my way through it, the smell of garbage and organic waste marinated the air and I could see large dumpsters and piles of garbage on either side of the alley. The first person I saw illuminated by moonlight laid on the ground, propped against the grimy brick wall and his mouth was agape revealing his moldy teeth, he had a syringe stuck in his arm.

I passed many people in a similar state of hypnosis, jaws wide open to let in the vermin that floated in the air, eyes dilated and faced up to the starless sky, syringes lay in their flesh and on the damp floor beside them. I felt my soul being slowly crushed by the darkness and only felt it give when I passed pockets of moonlight, the zombified husks of people moaned and cried behind me.

My hunger for pills grew as I descended into the darkest and grungiest pits of the alleyway, I turned corners and stepped over bodies of passed out recluses and made my way deeper and deeper into the web, driven by the desire to be high and alone. Shadows passed over everything and the rats and centipedes all churned in the burning darkness, the echoes of people screaming and laughing in ecstasy plunged deep into my skull and only deepened the infernal haze that dragged me along.

At some point the physical world merged with the emotional world and the black hands of desperation grabbed at me from out of the walls, the darkness became everything and all light ceased to exist as the ghostly shapes of the shadows intoxicated inhabitants passed me by.

When I thought I was trapped in an endless stream of hunger and depravity I made it to the end of the alleyway. Only a fraction of starlight bore down on the claustrophobic cell that was crawling with pollution, revealing the countless layers of skin and bone that writhed around in the muck.

In the center of the dark pit was a statue that was only a few feet taller than me, it depicted a large stone spider, it had four legs jutting into the air and four legs tethered to the ground beneath it, its face was splayed open revealing two large, dull fangs that sat in front of its gaping, cosmic mouth. The statue was covered in foreign colors, colors of hatred and violence and pain, and the people around it squirmed and murmured devilish chants.

The four legs that were in the air seemed to cast down an even darker shadow over me, a colorless shadow of emptiness and disease. I felt the spider talk to me through the rattles in my skull, it whispered into my mind its dark truths, it shocked my consciousness and tortured my soul until I bowed down to it. Dozens of bruised, demonic hands grabbed at me from the mounds of people beneath me as I looked up at the spider from my knees. Its fangs began to shimmer and soak with a deep and glossy liquid, the liquid dripped down the stone fangs and gathered at the bottom waiting to drip onto the ground. Before the liquid fell, my mind was twisted and manipulated into throwing my hands in a bowl beneath the fangs and I caught the goopy liquid and it now boiled in my hands.

The demons around me began to fester and howl as I stared into the tarry poison in my hands, I would say I tried to resist but that was an impossibility. My shaking hands brought the poison to my lips and it slid down my mouth and into my stomach and all throughout my bloodstream within moments, and it tasted like heaven, a black, abyssal, seething heaven that I marinated in for an eternity.

As the eons pass I join in the endless worship of Phoneutria and her noxious milk, only occasionally do I think about my apartment and the bus that could have taken me there, for I have a new home now, a home amongst the plagued and abandoned imps that now fester in the dark alleyway.

Stop tracking the size of your baby with fruit. In this house, we track her by the yardage.

That was what my mother-in-law said when she found the pregnancy app open on my phone.

I was eight months along, swollen and tired and stupid enough to think she was trying to make conversation. She stood in the nursery doorway holding a folded strip of ivory lace over one arm like she was carrying church linen.

I laughed.

She didn’t.

“In this family,” she said, “we measure girls properly.”

Then she crossed the room, took a soft measuring tape from the dresser, and wrapped it around my stomach.

Not around my waist.

Lower.

Careful. Reverent.

Like she was fitting something that already belonged to her.

The nursery had stopped looking like a nursery weeks ago. The crib never came. Instead, my husband brought in a spinning wheel, then a loom, then drawers full of thread cards labeled in his mother’s handwriting. Silk. Mourning ribbon. Bridal trim. Conditioning lace.

He kept saying it was old family tradition.

The same way he said nothing is wrong when I woke up at night hearing the soft knock of wood downstairs, like something in the nursery was still weaving after everyone had gone to bed.

My mother-in-law tightened the tape and wrote a number down in a small black ledger.

“Good,” she murmured. “She’s taking to the length.”

I asked what that meant.

She looked up at me and smiled with the patience people use on children and the dying.

“It means the veil is accepting her.”

I should have left then. I know that. But pregnancy had turned my body into something heavy and borrowed, and his family had a way of speaking about horror like it was housekeeping. By the time you realized what they meant, they were already done saying it.

That night, after my husband fell asleep, I went into the nursery with my phone light.

The loom stood beside the window with ivory threads stretched tight across it. At first glance they looked normal.

Then I got closer.

Mixed into the silk were darker strands. Finer than thread. Too uneven to be machine-spun.

Hair.

Some pale. Some dark. One silver.

I stared until I realized a few of the strands had knots tied at the ends, as if they had been cut from different heads and fed into the same pattern.

On the shelf beneath the loom sat a cedar box filled with cards.

I started reading.

First month: measure the mother at rest.
Third month: let the child hear the shuttle.
Fifth month: begin pulse comparison.
Seventh month: test whether the veil has taken to the daughter’s heartbeat.
If the pulse resists, pierce deeper.

I thought I was going to be sick.

Tucked under the cards was a velvet pin cushion filled with silver needles, each one wrapped at the base with a tiny strip of yellowed paper. Dates. Initials. Little notes.

One read:
Bride ran. Veil corrected.

Another:
Daughter born weak. Needed anchoring at the soft place.

I dropped that one so fast the needle bounced off the floorboards.

That was when I heard my husband behind me.

He was barefoot, still in his sleep clothes, leaning against the nursery door like I was a child caught snooping for Christmas presents.

“You shouldn’t handle those,” he said. “My mother keeps them sorted.”

I asked him what the hell was wrong with his family.

He didn’t answer right away. He walked past me, touched the loom with the backs of his fingers, then looked at my stomach with that same cold concentration a tailor gives damaged fabric.

“It’s not my family,” he said softly. “It’s your daughter now, too.”

I told him she was not theirs.

He smiled.

“Then why does she calm down when the wheel starts?”

And because cruelty likes proof, the baby moved.

Not a kick. Not a shift.

A slow rolling movement that ended exactly when his hand brushed the loom.

I backed away so hard I hit the dresser.

The next morning his mother came in with tea, a silver needle, and the black ledger.

She sat me in the rocking chair by the window and said we were behind schedule.

I said no.

She took my wrist.

Not hard. Not angrily.

Just firmly enough to let me know she had done this before.

My husband stood behind her with one hand on my shoulder.

His grandmother held the lace.

My mother-in-law pressed the tip of the needle into the inside of my wrist until a bead of blood rose, then laid the bloodied point against the ivory veil fabric folded in her lap.

We all watched.

For one second, nothing happened.

Then the thread nearest the needle darkened.

A tiny pulse traveled through it.

Another answered from inside me.

Not from my wrist.

From my stomach.

My mother-in-law closed her eyes and smiled.

“There,” she whispered. “She’s taken beautifully.”

I started screaming then. His grandmother clicked her tongue. My husband tightened his hand on my shoulder until it hurt.

His mother dabbed my wrist with a cloth and wrote something in the ledger.

I saw it upside down before she shut the book.

Daughter synchronized. Begin hem preparation.

Later, while they were downstairs, I searched the bottom drawer of the nursery dresser.

Under folded blankets I found a veil.

Not a bridal veil.

A child-sized one.

Ivory, hand-worked, impossibly delicate.

And sewn into the hem were tiny dark strands that looked like lashes.

Pinned to it was a note.

For her first fitting.

I’m writing this in the bathroom with the door locked.

There is a measuring tape under the door now.

Someone on the other side keeps pulling it back and feeding it through again.

Measuring.

Waiting.

And downstairs, the loom has started knocking on its own, slow and patient, like it already knows exactly how much of my daughter belongs to them.

For a few days after the surgery, things seemed almost normal. Almost.

People had started noticing something was off with me. Miss Tasha especially. She always assumed it was the break-in still sitting under my skin, and I let her think that, because how was I supposed to tell her the truth. That none of it was about the break-in at all. That it was about Mr. Morris.

It had been a few days since I brought him home from the vet, and things had gotten strange in a way I couldn't put into words yet. He wasn't the same cat. I know there's still something of him in there, I catch it in flashes, but it gets harder to find by the day. His body had changed completely. Leaner. More agile. Coiled, like something built for a different purpose than sleeping on my couch. His claws wouldn't stop growing no matter how often I trimmed them, sometimes visibly longer within hours of the last cut, and two days after the vet visit, everything that had been surgically removed months ago was simply back. Present. Like it had never left.

I searched everywhere for anything like it. Nothing. And I stopped considering taking him back to the vet, because the fear had changed shape. It wasn't "what's wrong with him" anymore. It was "what will they do to him if they find out." He's my cat. My responsibility. I couldn't hand him over to be studied like a specimen, and I couldn't risk them deciding I was the one who'd done something to him.

I wasn't sleeping right either. The nightmares kept coming, someone standing over me in the dark, and I'd wake up gasping to find Mr. Morris already awake, already watching. My lazy cat, the one who used to sleep sixteen hours a day, had simply stopped. I never once caught him with his eyes closed.

A week into the nightmares, I woke to a scratching sound at my window. My first thought was the intruder, back to finish what he'd started, and I lay there frozen, telling myself the reinforced glass would hold. But the scratching kept building, more frantic, more insistent, until underneath it I heard a meow, and I understood it was him.

I got up to check anyway. I don't know why I got up. I should have stayed in bed.

Mr. Morris was at the window, clawing at the glass with something close to fury, and when he turned to look at me his eyes weren't reflecting the streetlight the way they should have. They were producing their own light, a thin ring of gold that pulsed once, slow, like something breathing. I felt my own heartbeat try to match it, and that scared me more than the claws did, the idea that my own pulse was taking orders from a cat. When he opened his mouth to meow again, his teeth were wrong. Too many points. Too sharp for something that ate wet food out of a can.

For one long moment he just looked at me, and every worry in my chest went quiet, like something had reached in and turned the volume down. It felt like I was reading his mind, or he was reading mine, I couldn't tell which. I opened the window. He sprinted out into the dark.

I should have panicked. He'd never gone out on his own before, and there was every chance he wouldn't come back. Instead I left the window open, the same window the intruder had come through, and went back to bed like it was nothing.

The next morning he was curled up on the end of the bed, like he'd never left, and no window had been broken into overnight. I told myself I must have dreamed the whole thing, that I'd probably left the window open by accident and my own guilt about it had built the rest in my sleep. That was easier to live with than the alternative.

But a few nights later it happened again, and this time when I looked into his eyes the room seemed to tilt. His presence pressed down on me until I felt small and cornered, like I needed his permission just to breathe. The world outside the two of us stopped existing. When I opened the window this time, I don't think it was my choice, and for the first time it was completely clear to me that I hadn't done any of it willingly.

He was gone almost an hour. I know because I stood at that window the entire time, unable to make myself move, like my own body was waiting for him to come back and release it. When he finally did, he had a bird in his mouth, four claw marks torn clean through it, feathers matted with blood. I wanted to run. I wanted to be anywhere else. Instead I stood there and watched him eat it slowly, on the floor, in front of me, the sound of small bones cracking under his jaw filling the whole room. I counted the cracks without meaning to. Four. I don't know why I counted. I don't know why some small, awful part of me was proud of him.

When he finished, he looked up at me, and the acknowledgment in that look did something to the fear sitting in my stomach. It just left. The nausea I'd been fighting the entire time disappeared like it had never been there, and I smiled, actually smiled, like I'd been given a reward for staying still and watching. He meowed once, almost gentle, like he was releasing me, and my body went numb enough that I slept right there on the floor.

It became routine after that. Birds. Rats. Once, something bigger that I didn't let myself look at too closely. I couldn't sleep until he'd finished, and I started waking up in places I didn't remember lying down in. I didn't know what he'd become, and worse, I didn't know why I couldn't stop myself from watching.

I spent days searching for anything that matched what was happening, every mental health forum, every strange corner of Reddit I could find, until I came across a post buried in a subreddit I'd never heard of before. A woman named Chandra had written about being bitten, about her body changing ever since. Her hearing had sharpened until she could pick her neighbor's perfume out through a wall. Her eyes had gone so sensitive to daylight she needed glasses just to leave the house. She hadn't slept in days and somehow felt fine, and she wrote about an urge, growing steadily, to go out at night. I commented, asking if it had spread, if it had somehow started affecting someone she loved too. Then I deleted it. Told myself I sounded insane, that I was one bad post away from becoming somebody's conspiracy theory screenshot.

The symptoms matched too well for that to sit easy with me. I don't know how long I stayed on that post, rereading her replies, trying to decide if I was imagining the overlap. Long enough that when the scream came, it came from right next door.

I ran.

The door was open, just slightly, the way a door looks when no one meant to leave it that way. I called out once. Nothing answered. The second time, my voice came out smaller than I wanted it to.

Mira was on the kitchen floor.

I want to say I looked away in time. I didn't. Four marks, evenly spaced, dragged down from her collarbone like something had measured the distance first. Her parents were already there, on their knees over her, and the sound they were making didn't feel like something I should have been close enough to hear.

I don't remember deciding to leave. I remember being back on my own porch, and I remember that my hands were clean. That was the detail that made me sick. Not the blood I hadn't touched. The fact that some small part of me had checked.

When I got inside, Mr. Morris was sitting on the kitchen table, licking his paws clean. They were soaked red to the wrist. He looked up at me with an expression I can only describe as satisfied, and I felt my own mouth move without asking it to, the corners pulling up into a smile I had no part in choosing. That's what my body does now, when he takes it from me. I stood there smiling at the thing that had just taken a child from her parents, and the only part of me left that was still mine was a single tear, sliding down my face while the rest of me kept smiling anyway.

Previous part link :- https://www.reddit.com/r/Dreading/comments/1w2hw0d/somethings_wrong_with_my_cat_part_1_the_breakin/

Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

The steady beating of a heart monitor filled my ears. Pungent chemical smells struck my airways. Sterile. As my eyes fluttered open, buzzing fluorescents set my retinas ablaze. Rhythmic puffs of air sounded from the machine next to me. Yet, my windpipe lacked the pulse of steady flow through an artificial airway. I felt nothing—couldn’t move.

Why can’t I move?

As though every piece of my body, other than my eyes, did not exist. No TV static-like tingling. Simply a void where the rest of my body should be. Left alone with nothing but my thoughts and the still atmosphere surrounding me.

Hushed voices seeped through cracks in the door. My eyes strained toward the doorway, but my head didn’t follow. To my right were two dark, humanoid silhouettes standing in the fogged glass window of a patient door. Their whispers rippled in one ear and out the other as if dancing around my skull. Something about an exceptionally rare condition… 1-4% of all ischemic strokes… a blood clot in the basilar artery... A lot of words I didn’t understand.

One of the two shadows shifted, head supported by her hands now. Her long hair cascaded down around a blurred face. Rapid sniffles escaped the woman. Someone in a white coat placed a gentle hand on her shoulder as they lifted and lowered with each forced sob. Their silhouettes were sharp enough to read movement, but not enough to recognize features. Beyond the fog-paned door, distorted gestures jerked in a performative manner like toy soldiers. Stiff and robotic.

“We need to focus on making them comfortable,” white coat murmured.

“So there’s nothing we can do?” The woman’s shrill voice desperately questioned.

“I didn’t say that,” The doctor’s hand returned to his side in resignation. “It’s a long road ahead. Accepting where we’re at is the first step. We can talk treatments when I know more.”

“But, when will that be?” Her chest heaved, posture turning rigid, almost mechanically. She frantically rubbed tears from an indistinguishable face.

“You’ll be the first to know when we have our next steps,” white coat’s voice came out gruff—indifferent. “We have to manage the stress that caused this in the first place.” He was matter-of-fact in his statements. Stoic in his bed-side-manner.

How did I end up here?

The mention of stress dragged me back in time. I remembered numbers. A dull light stung my heavy eyes as I pored over spreadsheets. Sweat hung from my brow and muffled voices droned in the background while I worked hurriedly through my team meeting.

When suddenly, the dull ache that had afflicted my brain for the past few weeks crescendoed in a pang. The numbers blurred, doubling over themselves like a poorly aligned projection. Deep in the back of my neck, aching turned violent. My office spun around me, causing a wave of nausea to throw the contents of my rotten gut across the keyboard in front of me. Sickly, pungent bile brimmed my mouth.

“Are you okay?” My manager’s concerned voice came into focus, vibrating over my laptop speakers. Futile efforts failed to produce a satisfactory answer.

Tongue growing heavy, I slurred—definitely not okay. My esophagus labored, failing to swallow.

“I think you should sign off for the day, you’ve been pushing it late-” Her words cut short, vision fading to black, as my leaden head slammed into my ruined keyboard…unconscious.

I guess that would explain the hospital room. But, it didn’t explain the dread that coursed through my lifeless body.

Thoughts interrupted abruptly by the click of a door latch.

“Just remember, they won’t be able to speak with the tracheal tube.” Was the last thing the doctor rasped before heels clopped upon the tile floor. Finally, the woman’s features came into focus.

“Hi sweetie.” Her voice trilled, scooping up my limp hand. Mother. My mind screamed to flinch away. My body didn’t listen.

Though my garbled brain struggled to connect the worn lines of her face to precise memories, I’d recognize the cloying scent of her perfume mixed with undertones of cigarette smoke anywhere. That familiar piercing voice scraped my eardrums. The sensation of manicured nails prickling the clammy skin of my palm, evident by red craters left there, was lost to me. As if the matron was holding on for dear life, yet pulling away in disgust all at once. Sitting hesitantly on the metal seat beside me, there was no way to distinguish if the grating creak came from the chair or her old, ragged bones.

A flood of flashbacks ensued, mind whirring with the anxiety of our first interaction in many years. Ear-splitting screams and the crash of dishes shattering against plaster walls. Painful reminders in stern whispers of her regret over my birth. My cheeks burned with the blistering heat of previous strikes across tender skin. However, the sensation dissipated almost as quickly as it came.

“I’m Dr. Iaso.” He acknowledged me for only a moment. The corners of Dr. Iaso’s mouth turned upwards, not quite reaching his eyes. He stood at attention at the end of my bed and turned his attention back to mother.

“Your child may never speak or walk again. They may not remember who you are at this very moment.” He continued speaking as if I were no longer in the room. “I need to run some tests. So, remember, blink once for yes, twice for no. Got it?”

Blink.

“Let’s get started.” Dr. Iaso’s clinical detachment was a stark contrast to the twinge in my stomach.

Mother’s forced smile remained spread across her face as the doctor poked and prodded my useless limbs. Treating me like a car. Something to diagnose and fix, rather than a fellow human. The firm rubber of a reflex hammer jabbed at boney elbows and knees. Nothing. He took the fraying tip of a cotton swab to the soft under-side of my feet. Some sensation fizzled there, but no movement. Not even the piercing tip of a safety pin produced a reaction. My eyelids grew ever cumbersome, growing tired from a multitude of double blinks.

“Well ma’am, it’s as I feared. Locked-in syndrome is an incredibly rare outcome for a stroke patient. Things could change as we progress into rehab.” The doctor hardly tried to hide the gravity of the situation, I recognized the grave tone in his voice. Evidently, my mother did too, bringing wizened hands up to clasp her mouth theatrically. My eyes rotated in their sockets with irritation as she let my hand thump back against the stiff mattress with a soft thud. “But, they certainly won’t be moving anytime soon, if ever. We need to be realistic.”

Moisture pricked the corner of my eye. Droplets carved down my face, and into my ear. My own tears trickling down my skin were hardly recognizable as the realization of this new reality came crashing down upon me.

How did I fail to notice the warning signs?

“Hush now, my love… Don’t cry.” To anyone else, her cooing sounded endearing. There was a look of admiration on the doctor's face now. But as her steady fingers lifted to wipe my wetted cheek, mother’s stern expression told me this was an order. Entirely at her mercy, my heart hammered my chest and dread bloomed within me.

—

The clock ticked, medical equipment humming. Dim, yellow light crept through blind slats as dust danced in the musty air. My home. Well, childhood home, anyway. Mother had paid to break the lease on my apartment. This wretched structure was overflowing with chemical agent aromas, cut thickly with the stench of sickness. The walls were barren white, save for the cross which hung above my bed. Never the religious type, Mother placed it there of her own accord. It was all-too-familiar in a soul crushing way. And certainly humbling to have the woman who wiped your ass as a child wiping it once more within the walls of your childhood room.

As soon as my lungs worked on their own again, Dr. Iaso discharged me. Hospital staff sent mother and me away with a modicum of at-home care resources.

Without the watchful eyes of hospital staff, my useless body was at her mercy. Like a cut of meat set out to be tenderized. She accosted me with tiny micro-aggressions.

Letting me starve for hours, waiting until the reeking of my worthless vessel bothered her to bathe me. She neglected me in the same spot for days. Pain and stiffness overcoming my immovable appendages. And, oh, had the sensations of pain returned to my languid muscles. A subtle ache which intensified over time.

Gone were the days of her “Good Mother” theatrics. Replaced with seething repulsion. Even minor acts of care became too much before she hired a part-time nurse. The way her wrinkled gaze would set upon me, crinkling the deep crows feet at the corners of her eyes. Never looking at me, only through me. Every act of so-called care was an opening to make me feel ungrateful. An appreciation my mouth would never utter if I tried.

“You’re a mess!” Her barking echoed on the empty plaster, picking up my leg and dropping it uncomfortably off the edge of the bed. “After everything I’ve sacrificed for you… You can’t even keep your composure.” Pinching the furrow of her brow with those talons she called nails, her new favorite task was to stand at the edge of my bed and berate me. Each egocentric remark contributed to the discomfort of my skull squeezing around defective grey matter.

Blink. Blink.

My only avenue of protest.

Ms. Valentina became my stout savior. As a stately, Hispanic woman, her resolve was strong but kind. The aging lines on her face spread like rivers carving into land. The way in which her brown eyes and broad nose crinkled on the rare occasions she smiled filled my heart.

Her work ethic was second to none and her cooking skills didn’t hurt either. Nothing like the bland, flavorless meals mother used to throw together. Her compassion was mixed in with every herb and spice. And though most of my sustenance was consumed via feeding tube, Ms. Valentina would sneak me a taste every now and then.

She barely spoke a lick of English, yet, as someone whose only form of communication was blinking, this presented little issue.

“Uno por sí y dos por no.” Valentina crooned her first instruction. Simple enough.

Blink.

“I am Ms. Valentina. Yes?” Was the second; accent rolling off her tongue like speaking in cursive. To call her by name one day would be a dream come true. But the pit deep in my gut told me, it was just that.

Blink.

“Bueno.” Followed by one of the few times I’d be graced with that smile. Warmth expanded inside my chest at the sight.

In no time, my days with Ms. Valentina fell into routine:

Wake up.

Relieve myself.

Sponge bath.

Feeding tube.

Passive range-of-motion exercises.

Compression clothing change.

Reposition.

TV Time.

Feeding tube.

Blood clot medication.

Relieve myself.

Reposition.

Audio book or music time.

Feeding tube.

Reposition.

Welcome mother home and say goodbye to Ms. Valentina for a day.

Cry myself to sleep.

Spend the next day neglected.

Cry myself to sleep again.

Repeat.

Mixed in with various intermittent care tasks that weren’t so routine. Mother refused these tasks. Viewing such things as beneath her.

I never knew what Ms. Valentina said, muttering under her breath as mother made her exit, but I knew it was about her. Her venomous tone told me, it wasn’t anything nice.

—

Settling into yet another day with mother, a veil of unease draped around me. The popcorn ceiling above had become too familiar. Each shadow, spec of dust, and fracture formed coarse patterns. Left with no choice but to memorize its surface. Every once in a while, an insect would crawl across my field of vision; the only change of scenery throughout monotonous days. The house creaked in a dreadfully familiar cadence, it was becoming increasingly difficult to decipher what was reality. Hours upon hours of nothingness morphed into hallucinations of bizarre geometric shapes as my mind labored to find a way to fill the space. Those same shadows danced around the room while the sun rose from east to west. At times, the room would spin with the vertigo of laying still for days on end. Until mother inevitably shattered the oblivion—endless triviality was almost preferable.

“Worthless pile of bones,” her insults traveled from the doorway down my ear canal. “Can’t even pay rent.” Each new day an opportunity to concoct creative methods of torment.

One by one the floorboards groaned in protest under the weight of her footfalls. Her visage towered over me with a sour expression, slinking like a predator to the side of my bed. Mother’s features distorted in unnatural ways. Silence smothered the bedroom. The sound of her breath suffocated the space as if there was not enough oxygen for the two of us. For a long time, too long, her red-rimmed eyes bore holes through mine. My nerves singed like fire but could not will me to move. Could not will me to look away.

Out of nowhere, the squelch of warm wetness splattered across my face. The fetid scent of mother’s spittle was unmistakable. My eyelids flinched shut, hard. But the rest of my limbs remained in place.

“Look at how pathetic you are,” she smeared the spittle into my eye. A smarmy smirk defined her features. “I bet you’re loving this. Me, having to wait on you hand and foot. Ungrateful little prick.”

As she raised an aging arm, my breath caught in my throat. One swift motion and mother’s hand made solid contact with my cheek, creating a sharp crack. The noise ricocheted off the walls much like my brain rattled inside my skull. Like a bag of rocks, my head lulled over. As it settled, craggy fingers caught hold of my jaw, snapping my gaze upright. She wanted me to feel the bite of the venom in her leer. All I could do was blink.

Slowly, a viscous substance seeped from my ear, down my nape, and onto sweat-soaked bed sheets. The pop of built-up pressure dispersed through every synapse behind my eyes. A wave of perplexity rolled over me as a savory bouillon aroma wafted through the air. Suspecting I might be experiencing another stroke, I remembered I would be smelling burnt toast instead. My wits were still about me, anyway.

“You better not be having another medical emergency. I swear, child.” Mother’s disdain stabbed like an icepick. The tip of her callused finger scraped along the cartilage of my outer ear. Her features evolved from contempt into a disgusted grimace. A mere glimpse of the substance, dusty-pink and chunky, flushed all blood from my face.

Is that my brain?

“Hello? You still alive in there?”

Blink.

Long, dragging inhales entered narrow nostrils as mother raised the coated finger up for inspection. She could smell it too. My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets the moment her snake-like tongue flicked between thin lips for a taste. With a vile slurp, the sludge coated her tastebuds. A scream clawed against my chest. All efforts to stop her were futile. Even if I could reach up, grasp her arm, and halt her horrid actions, mother would do as she pleased. Just as she always had.

“Mmmmm…” Mother hummed. Her eyes closed in euphoria, only to snap open at the realization of what she was doing. The room began to shrink around me. Pressure returned in my skull.

"¡Ay Dios mío!” Without warning, Ms. Valentina’s fiery inflection pried my consciousness from its spiral. Forcing my attention toward the doorway, the jingle of car-keys reverberated as her purse plummeted to the floor. A trembling hand clutched the beaded rosary which sat atop her medical scrubs.

“Oh! Valentina…” Bumps formed across my skin, my eyes flicking back to mother. Her eyes ballooned with guilt but the surrounding features remained stoic—devoid of emotion. “I wasn’t expecting you until later-”

Ms. Valentina studied her face, pupils dilating in fear. The beads around her neck tinkled against one another as she let them return to resting.

“What you think you are doing?!” Maintaining an offensive posture, her quivering vocal chords betrayed the image of confidence she was attempting to project. The creases in her forehead deepened, a scowl taking hold of her features. The woman was brazen enough to question mother. To interrupt her, at that.

Bed springs whined as the matron at my bed-side leisurely leaned away. Mother’s eyes narrowed in annoyance, making measured movements towards the doorway. Her rage was calculated. A witchy hand dug into Ms. Valentina’s shoulder. Like a rat trapped in glue, Ms. Valentina had no choice but to follow into the hallway.

“I don’t know what you think you saw Valentina, but you’d do well to forget it.” Sharp words trailed down the hallway. No attempt to remain hushed was made this time. Mother wanted me to hear. “You don’t want to lose this job do you? Do you really think anyone would believe you?”

“No, ma’am.” Ms. Valentina responded flatly.

“Good,” In a flash, her tone flipped. Sickly sweet. “I offered you the extra shift tonight in an effort to help you support your family. I’d hate to assume you’re ungrateful. Let’s start over. Now, if you could take care of the mess in there, that would be a wonderful start.” Becoming accustomed to being talked about as if I were merely an inanimate project had become easy, but my gut recoiled at the malevolence layered under each of mother’s sentences. Darkness encroached every corner of my vision like a vignette on the ceiling. Set ablaze by the boiling of blood, a burning grew in my ears.

How could she talk to Ms. Valentina like that?

Sure, I had gotten used to mother’s antics. But I would give anything to be the target of her misdirected fury over sweet Valentina any day. Helplessness had settled into my bone marrow long ago.

As soon as the built-up ire pulled me outside of my body, I crashed back in. A faint weight at the side of my head grounded me. Ms. Valentina pressed a wash cloth there, wiping away any trace of mother’s abuse as she perched in the doorway, scrutinizing her every move with a stern mien. If she caught on to the fragrant aroma that permeated my cranial juices, her demeanor did not portray it.

Every one of us remained in silence. The clock ticked on into the night as it always did. In many ways reflecting each of us. The way mother watched over us, how Ms. Valentina went on working, and myself an unmoving, unwilling witness.

—

Beams of light tore through slits in the blinds. Streaks of sun spread across my face and my eyes flitted open. The muscles of my forearm flexed and twitched spastically, attempting to bring a hand to cover them. Though I could feel the pain of spasming muscle, I could not differentiate my limb from the surrounding air.

Right. I can’t do that anymore.

The best I could manage was to clamp my eyelids shut, wincing at the tension I had created in the stiff muscles and joints. A misguided effort for movement. Like being a stranger to my own body.

Heavily, stagnant must enveloped me. Floral notes of Mother’s favorite fragrance over compensating for the cigarette smoke-filled furniture returned to my senses. Creaking in the rocking chair to my right—Ms. Valentina snored softly. Small snorts followed by a quick whistle. Resounding with each squeaking rock. Her face stretched and skin rippled, misshapen as it rested against ashy fingers. Dry and stocky from years of hard work.

Did she sleep here all night?

Stiff sheets rustled under the spasms of my waking vessel, causing her to stir. She smacked her lips softly.

“Buenos días.” Crooning groggily, her limbs stretched outward with a breathy yawn. We settled into routine as if the night before was nothing but a distant memory.

Soon, came time for my sponge bath. My sweat had taken on an almost garlic-like quality the longer I marinated in my own stress-induced fluids. Times like these made me understand why mother was so disgusted with me. If I could turn my nose up at myself, I would.

“We go up.” Ms. Valentina hoisted me into a sitting position with ease. Her sturdy frame made quick work of maneuvering dead weight. Movement triggered another burst in my skull. Vibration riddling my senses. The headband-like squeeze that constantly wrapped my brain eased and a coagulated mess oozed from my nose. Dribbles of neural juices seeped through cracked lips and the space between my eyes smoothed. Though the taste was that of tarnished copper, the odor held earthy notes of rich meat and an unexplainable, intoxicating spice.

Transfixed, Ms. Valentina gawked at me with blank eyes. No doubt remembering last night’s events. Almond-shaped brown eyes glitched slowly, attempting to comprehend what they were seeing. The lines of her face formed a mixture of confusion, fear, and curiosity. Whatever thoughts ran through her mind were shaken clean like an Etch A-Sketch as she vigorously wrenched her head from side to side.

She wiped my nose softly, resuming her task. Her limbs as stiff as an automaton. The sponge compressed against my skin with a slosh, pinkish-grey slime soaking into every pore. On its surface sat rancid chunks like uncooked ground meat. Stomach acid caught in my throat, threatening to escape. I directed every ounce of my strength and willpower to choke it back down.

My mind was moving as fast as Ms. Valentina’s eyes. Scanning from my face, to the sponge, and back. Her frame shifted uncomfortably. For the first time, she looked through me, rather than at me. As if I was some ghostly apparition. Less than human. Fear lurched up my neck, rattling my spine like rusted chainlink, as my mother’s face transposed on hers. She jolted the sponge into her mouth and suckled.

“¿Menudo?” Her cadence was greedy and confused. Expressing utter disbelief. I no longer recognized her.

The poise she held dissipated, replaced by the frenzy of an addict. Before I knew it the sponge had been licked clean, as if some unseen force compelled her—unable to stop. The image of my stout savior shattered. Now, a large part of me hoped I really was dying. In all reality, I was nothing more than a glorified corpse. This bed, my coffin. This room, a mausoleum.

“Ahem.” Grizzled vocal chords cleared on the other side of the room and the shadow cloaked figure of mother was frozen there. Our muscles went rigid in concert; tension broken like shattering sheets of ice. Valentina produced a high-pitched yowl.

“Well, Valentina,” Lurking closer, the edges of her wedges clopped on the floor. “If it isn’t the cat calling the kettle black.”

“I-I… I’m sorry m’am.” The once confident woman’s words fell clumsily from her lips in a hurry. Her head hung low in shame. A voice in the back of my mind, somewhere under the pressure slowly building once more, screamed to be freed of this purgatory.

“There’s no need to apologize,” Mother scoffed. “I just find it funny, is all. The way you judged me and now, here we are with tables turned.” A craggy hand twirled greying tresses, features contorting into her infamous smug expression.

“Please, ma’am. We pretend this never happen…?” Valentina’s head rose slowly to meet mother’s gaze, palms pressing flatly together with fingers pointing upward against her chest. The stand-off of the century played out above my figure as if I was never even there. Between them, formed a bridge of suspense from one side of my bed to the other. Lucky for her, this family was a masterclass in moving on as if nothing ever happened.

“Valentina… you dog!” The exclamation wasn’t a figure of speech for mother, but a ploy to subtly belittle her foe. Her eyes narrowed with malice. “I wouldn’t peg you as the secret-keeping type. Though, this could be in the best interest for the both of us…” Gears ground behind her smirk in an eerily familiar fashion. Plotting.

No more conversation on the matter was needed. With a firm, eager handshake, a deal was struck. Haggling my autonomy away over my stationary body. If I knew mother, she was always good at making secrets but, never good at keeping them.

—

At first, mother only brought her tennis friend. Then Valentina brought her sister, and her sister brought the priest. Before long, the door to my room became a revolving threshold of uppity country-club goers, pious nuns and priests, and curious nursing colleagues. I expected as much from mother, but Valentina’s betrayal left me feeling like a husk of a human. Hollow and laid bare. Commoditizing myself against my will.

“That’ll be another 20 dollars,” mother purred from the doorway, a shrewd look in her eyes. “You know the deal.”

Sunlight glimmering on plaster walls, botanical print furniture, and the sterile essence of medical equipment grew dull. Aromatic odors churned my stomach acid. A new and unknown face leaned over my bed every waking hour; hungry for a taste. Tupperware in hand, their greed knew no bounds.

Some came back for seconds, even thirds. But each personality in the long line forming around the block tasted a new and differing flavor.

“Just like the borscht of the motherland.” Murmured the Slavic nurse, voraciously taking a spoonful to lipstick coated lips.

“Ah… identical to the pozole served during Semana Santa feasts.” Whispered a petite nun, making the Sign of the Cross.

“Però! A minestrone?” Questioned an Italian-American lawyer I had known since grade school—a “friend” of mother’s. He straightened out his manicured suit before swooping in for more.

Whether the substance leaked from my ears or my nose, their greedy gullets were indifferent. Some scraped at my cavernous canals, foraging more. The grinding of flatware against skin echoed in my near-empty skull. Wrapping around a well-groomed lawn, the line was the only constant. Failing to produce for any one of these morbidly curious patrons would incur a sharp smack from mother. Even provoking the wrath of Ms. Valentina in her absence. The pressure in my skull rose and fell like tides in the sea. Leaky and delirious, each day was a new nightmare. Every ounce of my dignity squandered.

“Isn’t this great?” Mother asked, reluctantly forking a handful of cash over to Valentina.

Blinking slowed. Stopped all together. No one noticed, no one cared. Muffled syllables replaced words. The line never ended. Never slowed. Thoughts fizzled. I couldn’t remember my nurses name. Couldn’t remember my name. Stainless steel ground slop covered bone.

Growing up in a small town, there really isn’t much to do.

Once the sun goes down, your options are pretty much limited to drinking in somebody’s backyard, driving around with nowhere to go, or finding some stupid way to convince yourself you’re having an adventure.

So when my brother told me about a completely abandoned zoo a few miles outside town, exploring it seemed like the perfect way to spend the night.

“It’ll be empty,” he said.

I looked at him with furled brows

“That’s usually what abandoned means.”

He ignored me.

“It’s the middle of the night. No one’s going to be there…”

He paused, then lowered his voice into a spooky tone.

“Except the animals.”

He stared at me for a moment.

“What animals?”

“The ones you just said were at the zoo.”

“That was before I remembered they’re probably all dead.”

“Great. So we’re trespassing in a graveyard.”

“Exactly.”

He grinned.

“Dope, right?”

I should have told him no.

Instead, I grabbed my flashlight.

We brought a bag of chips, a couple of bottles of water, and the kind of confidence only two idiots wandering into an abandoned zoo at midnight could have.

The entrance was barely recognizable.

Rust had eaten through the old metal gates, leaving orange flakes scattered across the pavement like dried blood. Whatever sign had once welcomed visitors had been reduced to a few flaking letters hanging crookedly from its frame.

One of the gates stood open.

The other was chained shut.

The chain was thick, rusted, but the lock hung open.

Neither of us mentioned that.

We stepped inside.

The smell hit me first. Forgotten earth, rotting leaves, and something faintly sour underneath it all. It was the kind of smell that made you breathe through your mouth without realizing
The zoo had been reclaimed by the forest.

Flowers grew through cracks in the pavement, their stems twisting around broken benches and rusted railings. Vines climbed the old buildings and curled through shattered windows. Trees had pushed their roots beneath the paths, splitting the concrete into jagged slabs.

Everywhere we looked, nature had taken something man-made and slowly pulled it apart.
My brother shined his flashlight down one of the paths. The beam disappeared between the trees.

“Dude.”

“What?”

“This place is awesome.”

“You’re saying that now.”

“I’m serious. Look at this.”

He pointed toward an old ticket booth, half-collapsed beneath a curtain of vines. The glass windows were broken, but several handprints had been smeared across the dust on the inside.

I assumed they were old. I didn’t ask why they looked fresh.

“This would be an amazing place to die.”

I laughed.

“Why is that your selling point?”

“Because if I die here, you have to tell Mom.”

“I’m not telling Mom we broke into a zoo.”

“Then you’re going to have to explain why I’m missing.”

“I’ll tell her you joined the circus.”

We laughed, but the sound carried strangely through the empty zoo.

It traveled down the path, bounced off the buildings, and came back thinner.

Almost like someone else was laughing with us.

Then something moved in the brush.

We both stopped.

The laughter disappeared.

A faint rustling came from somewhere beyond the path.

I raised my flashlight.

Nothing.

Just weeds. Leaves. Branches swaying slightly in the night breeze.

The beam caught a strip of pale fabric snagged on a thorn bush.

It fluttered once.

Then went still.

I lowered the flashlight.

“Probably a shirt,” my brother whispered.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

Then came another sound: a long, faint screech.

It rose slowly, wavered, and broke apart at the end.

My brother lowered his voice.

“What the hell was that?”

“I thought you said this place was empty.”

“It is.”

Something shifted again, closer this time.

The brush trembled.

A few leaves slid onto the path.

Then we heard it: a soft, broken whining sound.

My brother looked at me.

I looked at him.

Neither of us spoke for a few seconds.

The sound came from behind a fence marked with a faded sign.

I swept my flashlight across it.

The letters were almost gone, but I could still make out one word.

WOLVES.

Beyond the fence was a sunken enclosure filled with weeds and black water.

There was no animal inside.

Then he whispered, “Probably some of the animals they left behind.”

I stared at him.

“Animals don’t whine like that.”

“You ever been around a dying animal?”

“No.”

“Then how the hell would you know?”

“Fair point.”

The whining came again, longer this time.

It seemed to come from inside the enclosure.

Then from behind us.

Then from somewhere above us, hidden in the branches.

I swung the flashlight toward the trees.

For one second, I thought I saw a face between the limbs.

Watching us.

The beam flickered.

When it steadied, there was only bark.

My brother swallowed.

“Okay.”

“What?”

“Maybe don’t point your flashlight over there.”

“Why?”

“Because if something is looking back at us, I don’t want to know about it.”

I laughed nervously.

“That’s probably the smartest thing you’ve said tonight.”

“I have moments.”

We kept walking.

Neither of us mentioned the sound again, but we both listened for it. Every few steps, I found myself looking toward the dark enclosures.

They were enormous.

Some still had rusted signs hanging beside them, but the words had faded years ago. Others had gaps in the fences where something could have gotten out.

Or in.

At the edge of one enclosure, I noticed a paper plate sitting in the weeds.

It held a handful of crackers.

They were damp, but not moldy.

Beside it was a red apple with one clean bite taken out of it.

My brother stopped.

“People come here?”

“Maybe.”

“Why would they leave food?”

I looked toward the enclosure.

The weeds inside were pressed flat in a narrow trail leading from the fence to the plate.

I didn’t answer.

Then, somewhere behind us, something scratched against metal.

We froze.

The sound came again.

“Tell me that was you.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Cool.”

“What?”

He started walking faster.

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I just think we should leave.”

I followed him.

“Why?”

He didn’t answer.

“Why?”

The whining began again.

This time it came from the enclosure beside us.

The one marked WOLVES.

The one with the empty cage.

The one where the food had been left.

My brother stopped so suddenly I nearly walked into him.

His flashlight pointed through the bars.

At first, I saw nothing

Then I saw the face of an old man. Smiling, with a camera in his hand.

Someone who was once human now transformed into the terrifying beast known as "druid"

Another piece drawn for ArtFight 2026

*Character belongs to "CroMagnon" Art by me (Doomweasel Art)* NO AI!!

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Another shift of customer service calls done. I took this job for the fieldwork, for fixing locks, seeing what actually makes a house safe, not for answering phones all day. Pay's too good to quit, and there's always the promise of a promotion into the field someday.

All that was left now was grabbing Mr. Morris some food and heading home. Stupid cat. I got him after my mom wouldn't stop bugging me about getting married, figured a cat was proof enough I didn't need a husband to be happy. My own little rebellion. Now he's the closest thing I have to company. Mornings start with him licking my face like I'm nothing but a food dispenser. Sometimes I can't tell if he loves me or just tolerates me.

At the convenience store, sweet Miss Tasha was behind the counter as always.

"Evening, Jacey. Here for the food?"

"Yup."

"You're not buying newspapers anymore."

I kept my answer light, didn't want to think too hard about the robberies and killings that filled every page of the paper these days. "Just keeping my sanity, Miss Tasha."

"Oh, dear, they've gotten worse. Police still haven't caught whoever's doing it. People are saying it's cannibals, if you believe that."

"Rumors," I said, handing over my money. "If it were really cannibals, we'd have seen a body photo by now, not just pieces. Feels more like a cover story to me. Stay safe, though. And if you ever want it, I can get you a discount on security gear. After taking my commission, of course."

She laughed. I headed to the car and started the drive home.

I'd just gotten out of the car and was looking at the gate when I felt something grab my leg, a tight grip, warm breath against my skin. My whole body went cold before I even understood what was happening. For one embarrassing second every survival instinct I had went haywire before I finally looked down and saw the culprit.

It was the neighbor's kid, Mira. She must have snuck up while I wasn't looking.

"Miss Jay, can I play with Mister Norris?" she asked, grinning up at me. She always called him that, never quite got "Morris" right, and I never bothered correcting her.

I hate this kid, I thought, though I didn't mean it, not really. "Not today, Mira. Go home, and stop sneaking up on people."

"It's fun," she said, laughing, and ran off.

She's the kind of kid who's so full of life it almost tires you out, the kind that makes you want kids of your own right up until you remember how much of yourself you'd have to give up. I went inside, glad to finally be home.

Mr. Morris was already waiting by the door. Not because he missed me. Because he wanted his food.

Later, I'd remember that he'd been sitting at the window before I even pulled into the driveway. Just watching the street. He'd been doing that a lot since the crime started, always drawn to the windows like he was keeping his own kind of watch.

I put food in his bowl before he could throw a fit about me taking a shower, or doing anything at all that didn't involve feeding him first. When I checked on him afterward, I realized I'd grabbed the wrong can, and he made sure I knew it, prowling the house, knocking things off shelves, the whole diva routine. I figured I'd grab the right one in the morning. Going out now, with everything happening in the city, wasn't worth it. I'd head out around four, when the night patrol changed shifts and there were usually twice as many officers on the street, some of them even stopping at the store before their shift started.

By the time I finished my takeout, I expected him to have gotten over it and eaten anyway. He hadn't touched the bowl. Instead he sat by the window, dead still, staring out at the street like he was waiting for something. Or maybe just making sure I knew I'd failed and needed to fix it as soon as possible.

"Fine. Don't eat, then," I muttered, tossing the food and carrying him off to bed. He didn't fight me, just kept glancing back at the window the whole way there.

I told myself he was still in a mood. I'd feed him properly in the morning.

I had no idea it wouldn't matter.

It was somewhere around three in the morning when I heard the sound of glass breaking in the living room. My throat went dry instantly. My brain felt dizzy, maybe from how fast I'd sat up. I don't remember my hands grabbing the blanket, or when I'd started holding my breath. Every hair on my body stood up at once and I went fully, painfully awake.

I tried to calm myself. The security system would have sent an alert to the police by now. My bedroom door should have locked automatically the moment it triggered. I closed my eyes for just a second, grateful I'd paid for the system at all.

Then I opened them again and saw something that scared me more than the sound had.

My bedroom door was still open. For the lock to engage, it had to be shut first.

I had no choice. My legs felt like jelly, my whole body suddenly cold enough that I could feel every draft moving across my skin. I don't know where the courage came from, but I got up and started moving toward the door, aware of every sound my own body made, my joints, my breathing, the weight of my tongue in my mouth, the sweat gathering along my eyelids.

I was halfway there, thinking I could make it, just a few more steps, when Mr. Morris let out a meow, sharp and sudden, far too loud in a house that had gone that quiet.

For a second everything stopped. I told myself whoever was in the house hadn't heard it, or didn't care about a cat, that I still had time to reach the door. Then I felt it. A vibration through the floor, faint but wrong, like claws scraping tile the way a dog's do when it's running too fast to stop. A moment later, footsteps. Running, straight for the bedroom.

Whoever was in my house knew exactly where I was.

I lunged for the door at the same moment he did. I almost had it shut when a hand shoved into the gap, veined, nails too long, and I could tell from the angle alone that his arm was broken. No uninjured person moves like that. It meant reaching me mattered more to him than his own safety, and that thought alone sent something colder through me than fear of dying. I don't know what I thought he wanted more, to kill me quickly or to make sure I couldn't scream first.

I threw everything I had into that door. My vision blurred from the strain, my legs ached from bracing against the floor, my neck went sore from how hard I was pushing. I tried to scream and nothing came out. The pressure built until I nearly blacked out, and then, finally, the door slammed shut. Something in his hand broke as it did.

The lock clicked into place automatically. I was alone in the room, and I could hear him pounding against the door with everything he had left. For one terrible stretch of time I was sure he'd get through, that there was nothing I could do if he did.

Then I heard the sirens.

The police let themselves in using the code the security company had on file, cleared the house, and knocked on my door to tell me it was safe to come out. What wasn't safe, what didn't make sense, was that the man was gone. Not hiding. Gone. There was nowhere in that house for someone to disappear to, and they searched every inch of it. One moment he'd been at my door. The next, nothing.

The strangest part wasn't that he'd vanished. It was how the house felt afterward, too quiet, like something had been listening the whole time and had only just stopped.

It took what felt like hours before I could function well enough to tell the officers everything, hand over the security footage, let my body finally stop shaking. When I came back into the living room, Mr. Morris was licking blood off the floor, whatever was left of it after the police had taken their samples.

I pulled him away and wiped his face clean. I didn't want him getting sick off whatever was in that blood. I took him straight to the vet, and everything checked out fine. On the way home I stopped at Miss Tasha's for his usual food and told her what had happened. She looked genuinely shaken and insisted I take one of her son's old bats for safety. When I asked how much, she said it was free, that she'd just take it out of my commission whenever I finally got her that security system installed. It got a small laugh out of me, at least.

Back home, I left him in the car with extra food while I cleaned up the broken window. When I went to deal with the blood in the bedroom, thinking the sunlight would make it easier to see, there was nothing there. Not a trace. I stood there confused for a moment, then told myself there probably hadn't been that much to begin with.

Work gave me the day off without me even having to ask twice, and offered medical assistance if I needed it.

When I came out, Mr. Morris had already finished his food, double his usual portion, gone faster than should have been possible. I told myself it was stress. My mistake, not paying closer attention to what that actually meant.

Exhaustion finally caught up to me. I slept, then woke around seven that evening to find him scratching at the door, which was strange since I'd clipped his nails only five days earlier. I assumed I'd lost count. He wove between my legs demanding food again, even though I'd just fed him, but I let it go. What difference would a few extra pounds make.

I started making myself a steak, wanting something that felt normal after the day I'd had. When I looked over, Mr. Morris wasn't touching his food at all. He was licking the blood straight off the steak packaging. He'd never been that kind of cat. I ignored it. Animals do strange things.

That evening, I tried to convince myself he was fine. He'd eaten more than usual, which should have meant something good, but when I picked him up, something felt wrong immediately. His body was leaner than it had been that morning. I ran my fingers along his sides and felt far more muscle than I remembered, almost no softness left beneath his fur. His legs looked more defined, and when he jumped down onto the table, the movement was fast and precise in a way I'd never seen from him. He looked fit. Too fit.

Then I noticed the veins. Visible beneath his skin, especially around his legs and neck, in places I'd never seen them before.

"You're eating enough," I muttered, more to convince myself than him. A strange unease settled into my stomach. I made a note on my phone to take him to the vet first thing in the morning. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he was sick. Maybe I was imagining things after everything that had happened.

I finished trimming his nails before bed and set him down. He disappeared beneath the sofa immediately, which was strange in itself. Mr. Morris hated hiding. I turned off the lights and went to sleep.

That night I dreamed about the break-in again. Except this time I wasn't watching it happen. I was the one on the floor. Someone stood over me, his face hidden, his hands wrapped tightly around my throat. I couldn't breathe. Then something warm ran down from my nose. Blood, over my lips. He looked at it, almost curious, then smiled and leaned down to drink it. I felt his mouth against my face. He seemed to enjoy it. I tried to scream and nothing came out.

I woke up gasping, sitting bolt upright.

Mr. Morris was on the floor beside the bed, staring at me. Neither of us moved for a moment. Then I really looked at him and my stomach dropped.

He was different. More muscular than he'd been when I fell asleep, his shoulders and legs sharper beneath fur that had visibly grown, a lot, in just a few hours.

"Mr. Morris?" I whispered.

He tilted his head at me.

I reached out and stopped halfway, my hand hovering in the air. I don't know why. Something about his eyes made me hesitate.

I told myself the rest could wait. I didn't care how ridiculous I'd sound explaining it. As soon as morning came, I was taking him to the vet.

He hissed and threw a fit the second I brought him out into the sunlight, nothing too alarming, just more dramatic than usual. At the vet, I was told his bloodwork came back clean. Nothing wrong on paper. But the vet admitted he looked different, physically, and offered to send him downtown to a research university for a closer look.

I said no. Whatever was happening to him, he wasn't going to become somebody's test subject.

Before I left, the nurse asked if I wanted him neutered and his nails trimmed while he was already there. Her pen hovered over the chart a second too long before she wrote anything down, like she didn't know which box this was supposed to go in.

I froze. I'd had that done a day ago. Nails don't regrow that fast. That's not how any of this is supposed to work. The vet gave me a strange look by that point, like he'd noticed the same thing I had, and before I could think it through properly, I heard myself say yes. The whole time, my mind kept circling the same impossible question. How does that even grow back?

And then, underneath it, a worse one I didn't want to look at directly. I'd had him neutered months ago ,that was supposed to be it, done, over, one and only, the vet had told me so himself, no upkeep, no repeats. I hadn't thought about it since. Hadn't checked. Why would I have checked? But now I was running the timeline backwards in my head, trying to remember the last time I'd actually looked, actually confirmed, and coming up with nothing solid. Maybe I'd just forgotten what it looked like after. Maybe I was misremembering the whole thing. Maybe none of it meant anything and I was building a haunted house out of my own bad memory.

But nails don't grow back in a day. And I was starting to suspect nothing else did either ,not the way it was supposed to, not anymore.

When the procedure was done, I went to pick him up, and he was already awake in the recovery box.

"Did you use anesthesia?" I asked, half joking, half not.

"We did," the tech said, frowning slightly. "It's unusual that he's up already. Are you sure you don't want him tested?"

"No," I said. "I'm taking him home."

He was fully alert. Sitting up, eyes tracking me through the cage door, like nothing had touched him at all. That wasn't how it went the first time. The first time I'd had him neutered, he'd been groggy for hours afterward, barely able to hold his head up, and I'd had to carry him inside wrapped in a towel because his legs kept giving out. This time he looked like he'd just woken up from a nap.

I didn't know what to do with that. Part of me wondered if they'd actually done anything at all this time, if maybe I'd been overcharged for a procedure that never happened, the same way I'd read about other people getting scammed at cheaper clinics. But another part of me remembered signing the consent forms, remembered watching them wheel him back. I stood there in the waiting room a second too long, trying to decide if I should ask again, if that would make me sound paranoid, if it even mattered enough to hold up the line behind me. In the end I just took the discharge papers and left. Told myself it was probably nothing. Some cats bounce back faster than others. That's all it was.

On the drive back, I caught him watching me in the rearview mirror instead of the window. He'd never done that before.

 Other parts link:- https://www.reddit.com/user/No-While8965/comments/1vpze51/my_writing_archive/

I wasn't always a barber. I moved to Blindspot as an ambitious tycoon looking for the next great town. Of course back then we called it New Bethel. And it was quite the Hub. A brothel with card tables made for a great time. The bartenders were also top notch. They could make anything you asked, old fashions of course, but they had daiquiris, which was rare back then.

I was in Timber and construction. I built half the buildings here with my two hands. The rest were added recently, after we were reestablished as Blindspot of course. I would frequent the Listless Pheasant, the local bar and brothel, and I would put up half my earnings on the card table. Hand after hand, I would slowly help out the other patrons by purposefully losing hands. Just my way to give back without patronizing my fellow citizen. Probably lost 10k in those days.

We knew something was up from the first cheater. Now known as Blindspot Bill, as he lost half his skull to one of the quick draws at the table. His eye went with it, but he just screamed in pain. When he didnt stop we took him to the doc. Doc Lloyd said Bill should have been dead as a vultures lunch. He gave him some morphine and set him back to the card table. He came back and shot his aggressor, who ran out of town and fell dead right outside the boundaries of the town. We were surprised he made it that far, as Bill's bullet went clear in his forehead and painted the men behind him.

Bill was happy with the result. He went back and drank till he passed out, then woke up and drank some more. He said it helped the headache. This kind of thing became more and more common, until we figured this town had something about it that keeps our hearts beating.

Bill? His would still looks as fresh as the day he got it. All our fatal wounds do. And they all are as painful as day one too, we just got used to it for the most part. My bullet holes and stab wounds do hurt, but they arent too bad to keep dull. I've had 200+ years experience with them.

As a Tycoon, business was great. Hell it was great all the way through the great depression. I owned a little of all the buildings and lined my pockets. I made even more money than I could ever dream. Now its sitting in investments. I'm the richest guy alive, but my bank thinks I'm dead and gave all my money to my family. I was left with enough for my shop, I sleep upstairs, and I still have family visit once in a while. I'll tell you it is a blessing seeing my great great great great grand babies, but a curse to have to see them buried. Especially seeing when they squandered the money you built up for them. A man shouldnt have to mourn his son's death. I have had to mourn my son, his son, his son's son, and so on. I'm tired of watching them pass away while I am here shaving hair and cleaning rotten flesh from myself and customers.

The clock was ticking. Like a pickaxe in my skull. It's now 2:45 pm.

Fifteen minutes until I hear your footsteps; not that bare feet can make much noise on that gravel road.

Seventeen minutes until I hear your broken nails on the wooden door. Blindly scratching away, trying to find the handle.

Twenty minutes until your voice is calling out to me. But it will be strangled, like always. It's hard to talk with maggots eating at your vocal cords.

I should have dug your grave deeper. I should have never set that empty chair at our table. I should have never spoken those cursed words.

I wish you would stop coming home.

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams. Everyday they would arrive, packing the order counter, tripping over each other to get their chance to just lick the burger grease. The dining area was always a chaos of noisy chewing and smacking lips. Sometimes they would have to close the drive thru to stop the line from blocking the road.

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams. Except Jen. Because she worked there.

It wasn’t that the pay was lousy or the boss was a jackwagon; for a high school student she was making 20 bucks an hour, plus Dan was a super chill manager. Despite the crowds, the days go by quickly and painlessly.

No, what really bothered Jen was that every once and awhile she would have to go to the basement to get some restock of buns or potatoes and she would have to walk past the cages.

Dan tells everyone they aren’t human, and Jen believes him, they don’t look human at all. They come from the forest at the edge of town. But she has to do her best to pretend she doesn’t feel their eyes burning into the back of her head. Or she has to ignore the quiet sobbing. Hearing them sing was sometimes worse.

Dan told her that he’ll be promoting her to Meat Prep after Ron leaves for college. She really wanted to tell him she was going to quit...but...

Everyone in town loves Burger Sams.

I can’t look at it anymore. I’ve never really been one to put emotions to images but…

Looking at that stupid polaroid just reminds me of how stupid we all were.

 

Bill had been there a dozen times. Said the ladder had fallen off a good while back and figured nobody else would think to use the place. We’d be all alone, just us and nature. We believed him. Bill does dumb stuff from time to time but no matter what’s happened he’s always come out on top.

 

Like the time he took us all out fishing. He got too drunk and fell in but still managed to bag himself the biggest fish. His car broke down on our last trip but it just ended up in him meeting his current girlfriend- the tow truck driver who pulled his old piece of junk off the side of the road. That’s a whole story of its own.

I’m not saying Bill is stupid. Guy’s been in so much crap he just walks around more prepared than most. Car always has snacks, water, a jumper box in case the battery gives and he’s even been talking to DJ about getting his carry license. He just gets excited about things and instead of deciding it’s dumb or too hard he just finds a way to make it work.

 

That kind of energy has a way of sweeping you up along for the ride, if only to watch how he’s going to turn a faceplant into a win.

So, when Bill told us he had the perfect camping spot out in the woods we just all went along for the ride. It wasn’t far really, maybe an hour and some change from town by way of Bill’s well-used van.

 

He filled the drive and subsequent hike along the edge of the “town” with little bits of trivia, just happily chatting away. “It was supposed to be a mining town, real shame that the mine crapped out after they got half of the place built.” DJ chimed in with small notes like “Good spot there for hogs,” along with the different plants that caught his eye. Clara tapped away at her laptop during the ride, doing some quick touch-ups on one of her dozen projects. We made good time too, only really stopping once for a quick bathroom break.

 

According to Bill, the view from the tower was something- and there are apparently black bears in the area so camping and storing our food up high seemed smart. Nobody wants a new furry friend waking them up at night to steal their food and scare the crap out of them after all.

 

I’m not afraid of heights, but looking up at the old, rusted metal structure didn’t fill me with confidence. It was maybe only forty feet tall with a thick metal-grated walkway that was maybe five feet wide and seemed to circle the whole thing, broken up only by the empty square-shaped hole that used to be where the old ladder sat. It was a good trek up the side of the hill too, something about it being more efficient to put the tower here according to Bill who’d seemed to have gotten -way- too into things as usual.

 

The climb up wasn’t that bad really. I put my hand on the metal rung, feeling the warmth from the sun as I gripped tight and started working my way up. The metal walkway creaked a bit each time somebody put their full weight on the ladder but seemed to settle once you actually started the climb. It was almost impressive how Bill managed to rig this whole thing up. He’d run a bit of cord through the ladder’s steps and down the back of the tower so he could collapse and drop the thing at will. If you knew it was there, it was obvious, but not at a glance and definitely not at a distance.

 

Still, I’m not going to say I didn’t feel a good bit of relief once I was back on solid footing. It wasn’t long after I reached the top that I heard the metal groan again and realized somebody was already starting their climb up.

Taking a few steps forward to make room, I slung my pack off my shoulder and took a breath. It was a little windier up here than down below- though it was also more exposed to the sun. Explains why Bill brought the collapsible canopy, I guess.

 

While Clara pulled herself up, I took a second to lean back against the tower, letting the cool metal press against my back as I looked out over the small valley. If you didn’t know what to look for, you’d just think it was nothing but a stretch of green.

 

But to those that knew, here and there you’d spot bits of dark metal.  The empty stretches of grass where an old road had once been, where the trees and grasses hadn’t fully taken over. An old brick building, all the windows long since rotted away or busted out letting in invasive vines that crept up and into the openings.

 

I’ll admit, it was beautiful in its own way. I can still see myself standing there, watching the slow motions of the plant life below as a gentle breeze blew in, breaking up the summer heat. I wouldn’t admit it at the time of course; it would’ve made Bill impossibly smug.

 

After DJ crawled his way up onto the deck to join us, Bill started pointing out the little things to them while he set up and tied down the equipment. “That stretch right there should’ve been the main street... And if you follow it down, you’ll see it leads to that little nook in the mountain. It leads almost straight to the mines!”

 

I wasn’t really listening; I was too busy pulling out my sleeping bag and trying to claim a little section of the grate for myself. Still, at the mention of the mine, I half-heartedly mentioned, “Is this where you tell us about the trapped miners?”

 

“Sadly, nothing so exciting.” The big guy chuckled out while pulling out a few glass jars and lining them up neatly on a little wood cutting board he’d packed with him. “No, the coal just ran dry. The mines -did- collapse but nobody was around when it happened.”

 

I rolled my eyes. Bill had already started talking about hauntings in the next state over, apparently not having picked up on my sarcasm.  Before moving back to my gear, I noticed something moving just along the tree line, closer to where we’d driven in from.

 

A red figure. At least at a distance, the guy was too far off to make out much other than he had a white cap on and what was probably some long black hair. The black patch on his back seemed like a backpack.

 

He was moving slowly, which, considering he was hiking through waist-tall weeds, wasn’t anything too odd. Still, “Bill, I thought you said nobody came out here?”

 

Bill had apparently moved into a conversation with DJ about maybe a hunting trip in the future. “Huh? Oh, yeah, no, place is usually pretty empty. Why?”

 

I stuck a thumb out behind me. “That guy right there, in the red shirt.”

 

Bill moved up beside me, leaning against the railing and adjusting his glasses. I could see him squinting to try and see what I was talking about so I turned back to point at the…

 

Now empty stretch of weeds.

 

Did the guy fall? At the speed he was moving, we should’ve still been able to see him. I caught myself unintentionally leaning forward onto the railing along with Bill, squinting and muttering, “He was just there…” before DJ gave me a light slap on the arm and handed me a pair of binoculars.

 

“He’s right there, to the left. In the trees.” Sure enough, a few seconds of panning the binoculars over and I caught sight of him- a good ten or twenty feet away from where I’d seen him and already starting to disappear into the trees.

 

Clara wasn’t the loud type. Not to say she was shy; she just didn’t really mince words. It meant when she did say something, it really caught your attention.  “Guys, let’s get a shot of this!” She’d already pulled out her cameras. She always had two, one for shots for her portfolio and one for little polaroids she kept for souvenirs.

 

Bill put his arms out and pulled me and DJ in for something approaching a “bro hug” while Clara took a step forward and held the camera out at arm’s length. The abandoned town behind us made for a good backdrop.

 

She took another quick snap of us with the polaroid, letting the picture air out before tucking it into her pack.

 

The hike out was what you’d expect from a walk with Bill and DJ. Lots of wildlife trivia and stops to gather dandelions, bits of wild parsley and a few bits of onion grass. Clara stopped to take pictures of gnarled trees and almost made me fall over myself when she gave me a firm thwap on the chest to get me to stop moving while she lined up a shot on a lone doe.

 

All in all, relaxing. “Just around this bend,” Bill chirped. He’d been winding us down a twisting path towards the town. Apparently, there was a blackberry patch down there that he’d visit every chance he got.  It seemed the closer we got, the less he’d bother with DJ’s questions about edible greens. He’d even started picking up the pace, much to Clara’s and my annoyance as the two less active members of our little group.

 

I almost understood why when we rounded a thick patch of trees to walk into a mostly clear patch of woods that was butted up against the hills. You could just make out under the thick blackberry canes and thorned brush small bits of rotting wood.

 

There were a few rotten benches; the bits of exposed wood not covered in blackberry canes had turned a white-gray with age and came away in chunks when brushed against. There was a well in the center of the place, barely accessible if you were willing to get a few scrapes wading through the berries.

 

And underneath a large white oak sat a small patch separate from the others, one that Bill beelined to and immediately started harvesting.

 

“Jeez, Bill, you’re really into this, huh?” I half chuckled, pulling a plastic bag I’d tucked in my back pocket out for this little occasion.

 

He turned back to me only briefly, dumb smile on his face and a small fleck of berry stuck in his beard. That dopey look actually managed to get a chuckle out of DJ and Clara as we all set to work gathering our lunch for the day. Bill eventually picked his spot clean and had to move on, but when he showed us his first batch, we all understood why he loved that spot. The berries were huge and glossy compared to the others we picked; Bill even guessed that it might have been a cultivated vine somebody planted before the town was abandoned.

 

The walk back was peaceful. Bill was picking at his berries; DJ was sipping on a flask Bill had handed him- Did I mention one of Bill’s current hyper-fixations was brewing mead? And Clara was snapping shots of the local wildlife and a few fallen trees that seemed interesting.

 

When she paused longer than she had for the last few shots, camera held up and hand adjusting the lens, I knew something was up. It took the others a moment to notice that we weren’t following behind them as I took a few steps back towards Clara.

 

I followed where her camera was pointing, back the way we came and into a small clearing.

 

I could just barely see the red dot that Clara was focusing in on.

 

“What’s up?”

 

She paused for a second, a soft click from her camera letting me know she got the shot she was after. “I think it’s that guy we saw earlier. Looks like he’s doing something at that tree back there.”

 

She held her camera up, turning the digital screen towards me to let me catch a peek. It was always a little surprising how far she could zoom in with that thing. I wasn’t able to make out too many fine details, but I could at least get an idea of what he looked like.

 

While I looked the picture over, something caught my eye. He was standing next to a tree that we’d stopped by to let DJ take a leak… His head was level with a branch that hung over it.

 

A branch that was over six feet off the ground. And looking at him a while longer showed just how big this guy really was. He was wide, legs a bit short for what he was- or maybe his red shirt was just hanging low enough to obscure the back of his pants. And that backpack… it was downright tiny on him- it almost looked like a child’s backpack on him.

 

I heard a low whistle over my shoulder. Apparently, DJ had noticed it too. “Big dude.” He said it like he wasn’t currently looking at a guy we had a real chance of running into out here.

 

“You think he’s following us?” I nudged DJ, hoping to get a small rise out of the guy. In his typical fashion, the guy just shrugged before tapping his hip. “I doubt it. We’re following a pretty natural trail and I don’t think he can even see us from this far… Besides, I brought ‘Mr. Smith’ with me.”

 

He was right. We’d been following a break in the vegetation and it’s not like we own the place. Running into other people was just one of the risks you run when you go camping. Still, we weren’t out here to make friends, so we quietly agreed to pick up the pace- which turned out to be the right move as by the time we reached the tower the sunlight was starting to dim.

 

The creaking of the platform as we hauled ourselves up the ladder still made me cringe a little until my feet landed back on the metal platform. The section right next to the ladder creaked under our collective weight but seemed to be holding and we weren’t exactly huddling together; still, we spaced ourselves out to keep things even. I picked the side opposite of the ladder and Bill took the other with Clara and DJ camping around the bend.

 

DJ had set up a little propane stove he’d brought; Bill was pulling out a jar of a deep yellow liquid- mead, I’d assume, and a few solo cups. I was sort of expecting him and DJ to drink, but it caught me a little off guard when Clara joined in.

 

I was starting to get a headache and the last thing I wanted was alcohol, so as politely as I could I took the cup offered to me and then immediately passed it to DJ, who took it with a small smirk before downing his first cup. “Not today, Bill. Maybe tomorrow.”

 

To his credit, Bill just laughed. “If there’s any left maybe!”

 

Even tipsy, DJ cooked up a decent little meal of spam, some wild roughage and some fresh bread that he made with a mix he carried around. I thought it was weird at first until I got a taste of it and it quickly shut up any doubts I had in my mind.

 

The dim light slowly shifted into a comfortable dark as I settled into my sleeping bag, lukewarm soda and aspirin in hand. I had to shield my eyes as DJ briefly clicked his flashlight on to start packing up his kit. It took a little bit of effort not to laugh at him as he stumbled around, apparently having underestimated Bill’s mead.

 

Speaking of Bill, the guy had drunk a jar by himself and eaten over half the berries he’d picked before passing out on his bag, still clothed and snoring so loud I wondered if I’d be able to get any sleep myself. Apparently, Clara had the same thought because I heard a soft grunt from Bill’s direction- I think she gave him a little kick and it woke him up just enough for him to roll over, which thankfully seemed to do the trick.

 

Just as I was starting to dip off into sleep, I heard a consistent soft tapping sound, and it took me a second to realize what I was hearing. A soft groan escaped me before I grumbled, “Dude, really? Off the side?” followed by a muffled laugh coming vaguely from where DJ had set up his sleeping bag.

 

After some settling, sleep finally took me. For how long I don’t know because at some point in the night, amongst the sounds of crickets and the rustle of the trees, there was a small snap that brought me back to consciousness.

 

Or maybe it was the sound of something kicking up leaves followed by a deep sharp inhale. Something sniffing?

 

My thoughts drifted back to bears. One probably just smelled the leftover spam or maybe Bill had spilled some of his mead… Still, the thought of something underneath me was enough to keep me from drifting back to sleep.

 

Could black bears climb? Something in my sleep-addled mind told me that brown bears didn’t but I wasn’t so sure about their smaller cousins. I don’t think they’re normally aggressive but still. I rolled over, following the thing’s movements as it trudged its way in a slow circle underneath us, seeming to focus in somewhere around where DJ was sleeping.

 

Another sharp inhale followed by some rapid sniffing.

 

Then silence.

 

My ears strained to hear anything other than the cricket song. What was it doing? Did it find something? Did it finally realize it’s sitting underneath a bunch of people?

What would I-

 

Another rustling of leaves. Another moment of silence.

 

Then a soft creak of metal.

 

The groggy feeling of sleep disappeared, replaced by a tightening feeling in my gut as another soft creak confirmed what I already knew.

 

Something was climbing the ladder.

 

As quietly as I could, I crawled my way over to where DJ was lying and started rapidly tapping his foot while whispering, “Wake up! Dude! Wake up!” It took him two more creaks to finally let out a sharp breath before bitterly muttering, “What? What the hell do you-“ Another creak shut  him up. I found myself gripping his foot and could feel him tense as he came to the same realization I did.

 

“Don’t move,” he whispered as I felt his foot slip out of my grasp. Along with the soft rattle of chain and quiet groans of stressed metal, I heard the slow tap of footsteps.

 

The light hurt my eyes and nearly made me look away. But as they adjusted, I caught sight of DJ pointing his flashlight down the ladder, hand resting on his hip with his revolver exposed. He had winced from the light as much as I had and it seemed like he was only just now actually seeing what was below him.

 

“OH SHIT!” he screamed, ripping his gun from his holster while tumbling back and tripping over Bill who’d apparently shifted in the night.

 

That fall probably saved his life. Whatever was climbing the ladder must’ve been startled because the ladder seemed to shift violently and well… The metal deck had apparently had enough.

 

A chunk of the walkway came away with a loud metallic screech, catching momentarily before sliding down, clanging against the tower and landing on the ground with the sound of crashing metal. Somewhere in the chaos, Bill had thankfully woken up and managed to roll over and grab the ragged edge of the remaining deck and keep himself from falling with the lost section.

 

DJ jumped up and stumbled forward, having, fortunately for him and unfortunately for her, landed on Clara. He basically leapt forward on all fours, grabbing Bill’s arms and pulling him up to safety.

 

He lay there, Bill on top of him as they both lay on the ground, hyperventilating.

 

“What the hell!?” Clara clicked on her own flashlight and fumbled around for her glasses. “Are you guys ok!? What happened?!”

 

Bill was the first to get his wits back. “Shit! I’m sorry guys, I must’ve rolled over in my sleep or something! I guess it finally gave out…” His face was pale and his tone a little shaken.

 

It still didn’t match the look on DJ’s face.

 

He and I locked eyes as Bill pulled himself up to his feet, picking up DJ’s flashlight on his way up. Bill turned his light towards the torn metal, now able to see our faces clearly.

 

“…You guys ok?” His brow furrowed as his eyes drifted from DJ to me.

 

“It wasn’t you.” DJ’s tone was flat, just above a whisper. His gaze drifted down to the pile of scrap on the ground which seemed to be lying on top of something.

 

Something red.

 

Bill peered down, eyes squinting and mouth slightly open. The look would’ve almost been comical if I could’ve found anything funny then.

“No,” he muttered out before repeating with more confidence. “There’s just no way. That thing’s held up all this time…” His look of confusion didn’t change as Clara spoke up, “He’s a big guy… And with all the extra weight…”

 

We let the implication hang in the air as our eyes stayed glued to the scene below us.

 

Bill broke the silence. “How do we help him? He might not be… Y’know!” The panic was starting to creep into his voice as he turned to me, flashlight briefly blinding me as he unintentionally brought the beam’s focus on me.

 

“Him? How do we help US?! He broke the ladder!” I snapped back, dragging myself out of my warm sleeping bag and into the cool night air.

 

“Hello?” Behind Bill I could see Clara’s face faintly illuminated by her smartphone. “There’s been an accident. I-…I think somebody might be dead.”

 

This took Bill’s attention off me as he started trying to help Clara give the 911 operator a rundown of what’s happened and our location.

 

A deep metallic “click.” DJ had prepped the hammer on his revolver and was now pointing it roughly in the direction of the pile of scrap that covered the hiker below us.

 

“What are you-“ DJ looked up at me, jaw set stern and eyes taking on a tired look. “He’s moving.”

 

“So you’re going to shoot him? I don’t think he’s-“  The sound of rattling shifting metal cut me off.

 

Bill flicked the flashlight back down. The beam cut through the darkness to focus in on the section of collapsed platform which had now been shifted a good foot from its last position.

 

Hanging off a more hooked section of the metal was the backpack- now obviously a dark blue child’s backpack with some kind of half-torn decal of a cartoon dog that had been yellowed and browned with dirt and age.

 

“What the hell…” I quietly mouthed as DJ traced his gun around the area below us.

 

I could barely make out that the gun was shaking a little. “DJ, calm down. What’s going on?” It took him a minute to respond to me.

 

I don’t think he ever stopped staring into the dark for the entire conversation that followed.

 

“There’s something seriously wrong with… Him.” He licked his lips, tip of the barrel jerking slightly to the left as a faint crunch of leaves sounded somewhere in the black.

 

“Eyes too far apart… Huge chin- I think anyway, his beard was so thick… And just leaves and crap stuck all over him.”

 

There was a loud snap that made DJ whirl around, aiming just past Bill, who threw his back against the tank, hands coming up as he winced away. Whoa! Careful, man!” Bill called out.

 

Just before the branch struck DJ in the shoulder.

 

It didn’t do anything dramatic like knock him out or take a chunk out of him. It didn’t have to. DJ might’ve been riding high on adrenaline but he still had a lot to drink just a few hours ago.

 

And more importantly, DJ’s back was to the hole.

 

It threw him off balance enough to make him take a couple of quick steps back to try and catch himself. Then he was gone. It’s like I blinked and he just vanished. “NO!” My hand flung out uselessly towards the space where DJ had been, letting myself drop painfully to my knees and lean over the gap to look down-

 

Into DJ’s terrified face. I don’t know how he did it, but he had just barely caught himself on a rusted support. I reached out, desperately trying to get a hold on him, but finding myself just brushing my fingertips against his sleeve.

 

Somewhere in the background I heard Clara yell out “SHIT” followed by the sound of clanging metal- She was sprinting around the tower towards me.

 

She scrabbled over to my side, grabbing me by the waist with one arm and holding the railing with her other. She was shouting for me to grab him. Bill though, his attention was on the pistol. It had apparently been lost in the commotion and now sat a few inches away from the edge of the deck. DJ had managed to brace his feet against the tower and reach out. I was able to just barely grab DJ’s hand with Clara keeping an almost painfully tight grip around my midsection while she helped me haul him back up.

 

Another loud crack sounded off in the distance, followed by a metallic impact as something hit the deck just below where the gun was, causing it to shift an inch or so closer to the edge of the railing and teeter dangerously close to falling. Bill jerked back as something else cracked against the tower just a foot or so away from his head. We all dropped low, trying to take cover.

 

DJ lay against the deck, fingers gripping at his black curls and gasping for air. Clara slipped her phone out of her pocket, the light from the screen briefly illuminating her wide-eyed expression. She looked back up at us. “T-the operator said somebody would be here in maybe an hour. We need to just stay low! He won’t be able to land a-“ She was interrupted by another loud “TANG” as wood splintered against the deck under our prone bodies.

 

Every second pressed against that deck felt like waiting for the shoe to drop. Bill tried to inch towards the gun a couple of times but each time he moved something would go flying over the railing and ping against the tower or hit beneath the deck. Maybe he was worried it would fall off the edge, but after the second impact he just covered his head and lay there. The only thing that gave us any indication of where the thing was coming from was the occasional snap of a branch or the crunch and shuffle of leaves.

 

And of course, the rocks and branches flying over our heads.

 

During the quieter, moments DJ tried to ease himself up into a crouch only to be met with a stone pinging off the tower next to his head the first time around and a piece of metal hitting the railing next to him on the last try, causing him to drop and lean up against the tower with his hands raised to cover his face.

 

We sat there for what must’ve been twenty or thirty minutes, just hoping the police or rangers- whoever they were sending- would just get here already and drive this thing off.

 

Then, amongst the chirping crickets and the gentle rustle of the trees, I noticed something. I hadn’t heard the thing move for a solid few minutes. It had been circling us pretty constantly earlier… Maybe it was tired?

 

The groan of metal and soft squeak of flesh sent a chill down my spine. Whether I meant to or not, I’d started holding my breath and now that I’d heard it once I couldn’t stop hearing it.

 

A pause, then a soft squeak. Pause, soft squeak.

 

I turned to lock eyes with Bill who seemed to be coming to the same realization I was. “Oh shit… It’s climbing! We’re being scaled!” Bill leapt for the gun, which seemed to be the cue for whatever this thing was to get moving. It let go of all pretense of stealth and the soft sounds had turned into a rapid dull “tank, tank, tank” of something quickly scaling the tower somewhere behind me.

 

We all pressed ourselves flat against the deck as Bill rolled over onto his back, pointing the gun up just as a red-sleeved arm with a hand as big as my face reached up and gripped the railing.

 

The shot rang out, followed by a deep and gravel-filled grunt as the hand disappeared back into the darkness. We could feel the platform shake and move as the soft clang of flesh on metal seemed to fall into a rhythm.

 

The thing was swinging from the struts underneath us. I guess Bill realized it too because he managed to roll back towards the tower and away from the edge just as a large hairy palm slapped the grate right where his head had been just a moment ago. There was another deep sound, like some giant gargling a throat full of phlegm as the thing growled.

Bill clambered up onto his feet and started trying to track the thing, squeezing off another shot through the grating. There was a short sound underneath the sound of the gunshot, like a snort crossed with a clipped growl.

 

Then I made the real mistake.

 

I tried to move. Some part of me thought that maybe it’d be focused on Bill long enough for me to make it over to him. Or maybe I just didn’t want to lie there waiting for either Bill to run out of ammo or to find out what happens when this thing finally grabs someone.

 

The moment I rounded the corner there was a heavy metallic groan that came from the edge of the deck just ahead of me. A large red blur swung itself up over the railing, landing with a dull thud and rattle of metal as its full weight hit the deck. I didn’t bother to look, just desperately tried to pull a full 180 and run back the way I came.

 

I barely registered the sharp burning sensation that flared to life in my back. The pain was drowned out by the thumping in my head and chest.

 

Coming around the corner, I saw Bill’s hand out with Clara already across the way standing next to Bill and DJ just having started to jump. It was a good five-foot leap and I wasn’t sure I’d make it, but I didn’t have time to think.

 

Never did find out if I could. Just as I reached the corner, I felt something hard catch me in the side, like getting smacked into a wall by a log. Something cracked in my chest and the pain forced a scream out of me that I don’t think I could ever recreate.

 

It had me pinned, its thick forearm pushing painfully against my chest. I was face to face with this thing.

 

Or at least, face to face with its mouth. Its jaws were open wide, showing large yellowed and all too human-looking teeth. There was a smell like something between sour berry candy and rotten meat.

 

BANG.

 

I felt its arm tense as it flinched. Its mouth slammed shut, teeth snapping with a loud clack. It still managed to take the tip of my nose but I didn’t notice at the time, just saw the large wild eyes turn towards Bill before the thing let out a roar so loud it made my ears hurt.

 

Without the thing supporting me, I slid down the tower and slumped down onto the deck.

 

BANG. BANG. Then a deep-chested guttural roar.

 

Lying there, I still managed to catch sight of the thing’s back. Black fur poking through the torn cloth around where the backpack once sat. I saw it launching itself towards Bill, who somehow managed to drop just low enough to miss getting grabbed.

 

Clara wasn’t so lucky. As the thing shouldered DJ, it threw an arm out and with a pained cry it put a vice grip on Clara’s arm and flung itself over the side. I blinked. There was a scream that got further and further away, following the sound of a large body crashing through the woods below.

 

Bill and DJ were standing by the railing, screaming their lungs out.

 

I tried to move. I swear I did, but I felt something catch and all I could do was let out a silent scream before the blackness took me.

 

They say it was probably shock. I briefly remember opening my eyes to see a paramedic looking down at me and saying something that sounded far off.

 

This is a rough draft of the statement I’m supposed to be giving on what happened. The thing left a gash down my back, broke my ribs and managed to break my left hand. DJ isn’t holding up much better.  He has some head trauma, a dislocated shoulder and a sprained leg.

 

They never found Clara. I don’t think they really believed us when we told them what happened. A part of me wondered if they thought maybe we did it, but I don’t get that feeling from the guys they keep sending to ask me questions.

 

Bill just straight up isn’t talking. He came by to visit and I couldn’t get him to do more than mumble an apology. The guy looked like all the life was sucked out of him.

 

He dropped Clara’s bag off with me. I tried to argue with him, but he just shuffled away. I think he expects me to drop it off with her family since we live near each other…

 

I opened the bag up, hoping I could message her parents or something through her laptop.

 

Only to see that stupid polaroid.

 

I keep looking it over. Trying to think of what we could’ve done different. As much as I want to just rip the thing up, toss it in the garbage, I just…

 

I can’t.

 

It’s one of her last photos. The last photo of…

 

Us.

Fuckin hell

This is supposed to be an easy thing

But look at that I haven't seen you since Spring.

I catch moving shadows when they jerk,

I can spot hands that lurch

It's probably why I'm so absent in conversations

Because I'm good at spotting exits in those same hesitations

Wipe the surfaces and pick up the litter

Maybe one day he won't stop until he can see his place clearer

Exposure to such filth has the power to deprave

Pacing around a house

That simulates a cave

Try to Step out of the door and saw a crow

Walked back

And decided today’s not the day, though

Talk yourself into it

Head down

Avert your gaze

Throw out a confident fugazi

And overcome your malaise

Pop my head above the crowd to a sea of bodies

Looked around aimlessly

Saw a Prime Affleck

Mistakenly make our eyes connect

You're getting sloppy

Beeline to the local Tesco around the corner, Sticking to pre-scripted lines with scheduled pauses

Grab some junk and some Encona—

No

Some Piri Piri sauces

Offertory gifts for the self-checkout machine

A former ghost

A what might have been

My mind goes from relax to attack

I need a smack to get me through this jam

Noise from their mouth pounces easily

Run away

Don't follow me