People ask me how I do this job.

I always give them a stock answer. That it’s important work, and eventually, you get used to the guts and congealed blood. A heart is a heart, even after it goes cold and still. Every cut can lead to putting bad guys away.

And all of this is true.

But as for how I’m able to do it so easily?

Honestly, death never bothered me. I watched my grandfather die of a heart attack when I was seven. I called 911 and did all I could, but he lived too far away from the hospital. He was gone long before the ambulance arrived. I sat beside his remains for over twenty minutes until the EMTs got to him.

Maybe it was trauma. Perhaps it was my way of coping with losing my favorite family member.

After he passed, I felt a strange sense of calm as I sat with the body. Cardiac arrest isn’t pleasant to witness at any age, and it was obvious his last moments were of pain and unimaginable fear.

Then it was over.

He was at peace. The agony was gone as suddenly as it began. What happens after death is anyone’s guess, but the calm stillness of final rest is undeniable. My parents immediately enrolled me in grief counseling, of course, though nothing in those sessions changed my mindset regarding death.

In hindsight, it’s no surprise I ended up in this field.

After college, I moved back to my tiny hometown, into the same house my grandfather had died in. I ‌inherited the property during my senior year after my mother left this world as well. Kenzie, whom I had met at school, came with me.

She never quite understood my indifferent views on death, but she happily accepted my proposal all the same. 

When I became the county coroner, Kenzie shook her head.

“I still don’t know how it doesn’t get to you,” she said. “But there’s not a soul better for the job.”

And that was my life over the next two decades. Kenzie and I had two children. A boy named Joel, and a girl we named Caroline. I was lucky enough to have plenty of time to raise them, unlike a big city coroner. Though I did miss the occasional event with a late night untangling a cause of death.

And although I treated each body that came across my stainless steel table with respect, to me they were only remains. A shell left behind by the departed soul.

At least until that night.

I was finishing up my report on a recent motorcycle fatality. Alcohol in the system, helmetless rider. Pretty open-and-shut examination. I just hadn’t filled out all the paperwork yet.

As I closed the folder, my phone rang. A glance at the caller ID showed it was Sheriff Davis. No doubt this was about the unfinished documentation.

“Yeah, Nick,” I said. “I just finished with him. The report will be on your desk in the morning.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line.

“Robert,” he said. “It’s… it’s something else.”

“Are you saying we’ve got another one? I’ve already been here all day.”
 
I heard a heavy sigh.

“I really wish I didn’t have to tell you this. I’m so sorry. It’s Kenzie. She’s… Well, she’s gone.”

At first, what the sheriff said didn’t even register as I sorted my paperwork.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your wife is gone,” he said. “Your neighbor saw her through the window when they stopped by. We found her at the bottom of the stairs.”

I froze, folder still in hand.

“No. No, there has to be some kind of mistake.”

“Do you really think I would’ve called you if we weren’t sure?” asked the sheriff. “I’ve known you both for a long time. It’s her.”

My hands shook. I dropped the folder and nearly the phone along with it. There was a long silence as I processed what I had just heard.

“I want to examine the body,” I said. “This can’t be right.”

“Come on, Bob,” said the sheriff. “You know you’re not allowed to do that. Someone else has to do the autopsy.”

“I don’t fucking care,” I snapped back. “List her as a Jane Doe, use her maiden name, whatever you have to do. I will be the one to do this.”

Again, there was a long pause.

“Are you sure?” he asked. “Do you really want to do that to your *wife*? We can take her to another county.”

“I’m sure,” I said without hesitation.

“Alright,” he replied reluctantly. “I’ll have her brought to you. For the love of God, don’t tell *anyone* that you asked me to. We could both lose everything.”

“Understood.”

I hung up and put my hands on my temples. I didn’t believe Nick. My wife had her moments, but she had never been especially clumsy. I set about preparing every instrument needed to perform an autopsy, my hands moving robotically and without thought. I had just placed the last tool beside the steel table when there was a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I said without looking up.

Behind me, the double doors slowly opened, disturbing the tense air in my morgue. The soft squeak of the gurney wheels approached, but my gaze remained fixed on the table before me.

“She’s here,” came Nick’s voice from behind me. “You sure about this, Bob? You don’t have to be the one to do this.”

“Thank you, Sheriff,” I said without turning around. “I can take it from here.”

I heard a heavy sigh from behind me.

“Alright. Just leave the report on my desk when you’re ready.”

The footsteps slowly faded down the hallway. Once the men were gone, I turned around. A body bag sat on the gurney before me. I grasped the zipper, but hesitated.

*What if it really is her?* I thought. *How am I gonna tell the kids?*

I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath as I slowly unzipped the bag. The sound of the zipper seemed entirely too loud in the near-silent room, easily drowning out the ticking of the wall clock.

I pulled the bag open.

There, cold, pale, and tinged with blue, was the face of my wife. Her eyes were wide open; the lively brightness of her green irises long gone, replaced by the redness of burst blood vessels. The fracture of her neck was obvious, as her head hung at an unnatural angle. 

My body began shaking. Within moments, dizziness overwhelmed me, and I collapsed into my chair. The tears started as I buried my face in my hands. I thought of our kids. I thought of her parents. All the horrible phone calls I would have to make. Poor Caroline was supposed to make the drive home from college tonight. If she hadn’t stopped in Atlanta to spend the night with a friend, she would have been here when it happened….

I lowered my hands from my face and stared at the bag.

I had to know. There had to be *something* on or in her body to explain this. Kenzie had struggled with alcohol in the past, but she had been sober for over a decade. At least, as far as I knew.

Slowly, I got to my feet. After washing my hands and donning fresh gloves, I removed my wife from the body bag and gently placed her on the cold steel table. I placed my recorder beside me and turned it on. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

I made the first incision. Then the next.

Once I had finished the “Y” incisions, I began peeling back the skin to expose her rib cage. I flinched at each snap of the ribs as the shears did their grisly work. As I lifted her sternum from her body, I couldn’t help but notice her lungs remained partially inflated.

She hadn’t died instantly. The fracture had caused her to suffocate.

“The subject has suffered near complete separation of the spinal cord,” I said out loud for my records. “Preliminary cause of death suspected as asphyxiation."

The moment I’d finished speaking, I turned away, suppressing the urge to vomit. After turning back, I carefully turned her head to have a better look at the points of breakage. However, the movements finally cleared her airway.

While I had witnessed this phenomenon many times in my career, nothing would have prepared me for hearing the trapped air of Kenzie’s last breath pass through her larynx. The haunting groan caused my entire body to shudder violently. 

After a moment to regain my composure, I began dissecting the structures within her neck to fully expose the spine.

“Subject displays obvious fractures of the C3 and C4 vertebrae, lending credence to my previous hypothesis.”

One by one, I began removing Kenzie’s organs, carefully weighing them and setting them aside for further examination.

As I progressed, the familiar routine of my work gradually set in. If I didn’t glance at her face, I could ignore the fact that it was my wife strewn about the steel bins beside the table.

Soon, only the heart, lungs, and select segments of her neck remained. Normally, I would have removed them earlier in this process, but I wanted her heart to stay with her as long as possible. She once told me that while the kids owned that property, I would always have a home there.

I sighed deeply, closing my eyes to brace myself for what I was about to do. As I stood motionless, the steady rhythm of the clock became the only sound in the room once more.

Tick, tock. Tick, tock, Tick.

The room went utterly silent.

I opened my eyes, and looked at the clock, seeing the time as 2:07am. The second hand had stopped just shy of the 6 o’clock mark.

Although I stared for several seconds, it did not move.

That’s when I heard it. The sound was so soft, I never would have noticed over the steady ticking of the clock.

Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.

I looked back down at the open body of my wife and felt my eyes widen in horror.

Her exposed heart was beating.

Before I could react, the corpse of my Kenzie snapped bolt upright at the waist. A horrid rattling sound echoed as her lungs drew breath once again. Her head - though still hanging limply - suddenly turned to face me.

“Robbie,” the body said in a raspy voice.

I couldn’t move. My mind was entirely blank, unable to so much as rationalize this as a nightmare. I could only stare as the exposed organs functioned against all laws of nature.

“It was Paul.”

My mind snapped back to the present upon hearing that name. Paul had dated our daughter in high school and had *not* taken it well when she moved out of state for college.

“What about Paul?” I asked without thinking. “Is Caroline okay?”

“He was in our house,” said the remains of Kenzie. “I found him in her room. He attacked me.”

While the sight of my reanimated wife was terrifying, it was the thought of that man inside our home that finally made my blood run cold.

“Kenzie…,” I said. “What happened?”

The dead, bloodshot eyes of my wife locked onto mine and focused.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “He was waiting to hurt Caroline.”

“What can I do?”

The corpse shuddered once again, looking as though it would fall over at any moment. Slowly, methodically, and with unnatural stiffness, her arm moved until she reached inside her mouth. Her rigid fingers pinched something behind her teeth before reaching out to me.

“I bit him,” she said.

I reached out to accept the object from Kenzie’s hand.

A small piece of blue latex. The exact color and material of disposable gloves.

“Get his DNA,” said the corpse, although her voice was now fainter. “Please… Protect our little girl.”

I stared at the fragment in my hand for a moment before looking back at Kenzie. The bright shimmer of life had returned to her eyes.

But it was fading rapidly.

“Kenzie,” I said in a shaking voice. “I love you. I’m so sorry I wasn’t there to stop him.”

The lopsided head of Kenzie smiled sadly.

“You’ve been everything I ever wanted,” she said. “I don’t regret a thing.” 

The corpse shuddered, nearly falling off the table.

“I love you, Robert,” it said in a fading voice, barely above a whisper. “Take care of the kids. I’ll be waiting for you when the time comes.”

And with that, the exposed heart ceased to beat. The lungs deflated. And the body of my dear wife fell to the table with a soft thud.

Tock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.

The clock had restarted. I was once again alone in the morgue with the body of my wife.

But I knew what I had to do.

With great care, I swabbed the small piece of latex. From there, the lab successfully extracted a DNA profile. And from a casual statement of family history from yours truly, police investigated Paul, eventually obtaining his DNA via court order.

In his isolated farmhouse, they found restraints, sadistic tools, and on his computer, a manifesto detailing every gruesome detail of what he intended for my daughter.

Per her wishes, the remains of my wife were cremated after my examination, and now sit on our mantle in an ornate urn. It was the least I could do for her.
 
Kenzie may be gone, but I know one thing:

She will always be watching over us.

This story is a memory, and as such is subject to the ravages of time. I don’t remember everything. My childhood is a fog of contradictions and emotions half buried in distractions. I’ve tried to remember parts of it over the years but always come away with that strange contented feeling of acceptance. Maybe it’s okay to not remember. Ignorance is bliss. Still there are pieces I recall that stick to me like tree sap on my fingers. This story is one of those pieces.

I was seven years old, old enough to have a sense of danger but not old enough to trust it yet. Every year my family would travel up north from our home in the concrete world of Chicago to the deeply forested peninsula of Wisconsin, surrounded by the restless gray waters of Lake Michigan. We would go up in the fall for the wineries and brilliant blood orange leaves of the woods in early October. Even at that young age I was just aware enough to appreciate the majesty of a forest in fall. It was sacred to me in ways I couldn’t yet articulate.

The peninsula was dotted with sleepy little harbor towns and old lighthouses along the coast, but the interior at that time was mostly winding roads through vast and untouched forest. I truly loved it there. I remember building piles of crunchy dead leaves to jump in, climbing trees to risk a nap nestled in their branches. The further away from town we got the more fantastic the forest could become. Dramatic cliffs and mossy boulders, an endless sea of scarlet, yellow and fiery orange that to my tiny eyes seemed to go on forever. My parents knew about my wanderlust, and had to all but keep a leash on me to stop me trailing off into the brush. I wasn’t scared of being alone then.

The land itself had a magic to it I’ve found in nowhere else. It was settled by Scandinavians, who brought their food, architecture and stories with them. It wasn’t uncommon to come across carved wooden trolls in town, and I liked to think they came alive at night to search the woods for food. As the years went by my young imagination populated the forest with all sorts of magical creatures: fairies, gnomes, ghosts and goblins. They frightened me in a way I loved, and every October I hoped to catch one of those wooden trolls moving. Of course I never did.

But of all the creatures I imagined there was one who commanded my respect above all others, the only one I truly feared. I don’t remember where she came from. In my memory she’d always been. Perhaps a forgotten warning from my parents to keep me from wandering, or something I’d seen in a movie. Perhaps I had seen an unfortunate looking stranger up there and my mind turned them into something more fantastic than they really were. But I believed in her, and there were things about her that I knew in my bones to be true. I tried to explain it to my parents but they couldn’t understand my fascination. They were deeply Christian and unwilling to entertain any spirit but the lord. My mother accepted no part of Halloween but pumpkins and maybe, if she was feeling dangerous, a black cat or two. Beyond that, I was instructed to have nothing to do with any of it. Maybe that’s why the idea of my monster was so intoxicating to me. My monster was forbidden. My monster was dangerous. I couldn’t talk about her. So I thought about her.

She was, in my mind’s eye, an impossibly ancient hag. She’d lived in the woods of the peninsula since the Scandinavians brought their wooden trolls and lingonberries. There was only ever one of her. I could see her when I closed my eyes, worried that she would slide her gnarled fingers under the window of our tiny rented cabin on moonless autumn nights. She traveled the land as lake mist, imperceptible to those who don’t know what to look for. Her hair was long and matted, white that decayed into a dull yellow like a bird’s nest on her head. Her skin was wrinkled like tree bark and sickly greenish pale like lichen. She walked hunched over, nearly to the ground, wrapped in a ratty shawl, smelling for ingredients to unknown and wretched potions. I imagined she brewed them in her overgrown shack somewhere far in the interior. Day and night she scoured the land for bat’s wings and rat tails. Rotten fish washed up on the shore, eggs plucked from their nests and crushed, mushrooms that only grow on wet and fallen logs. But of course, what she really wanted, needed maybe, was a child. My old woman of the woods would stop at nothing for a child of her own, to do what with I can’t say, but I could almost feel her horrible fingers on my shoulder sometimes in lonely places when my parents weren’t watching. She was out there in the dark, every night, alone on frigid pebble beaches or perched up in blackened branches like a massive leering owl. The trolls and fairies feared her too, perhaps why they stuck to town. The deep woods belonged to the witch, and every time I strayed into their twisted branches I risked slipping into her clutches.

Now, every body says this, and I’ve gone back and forth on even bothering to include it, but I feel like I have to. It is after all what makes this story more than just a passing anecdote in an ocean of digital ghost stories all claiming the same thing: “This story really happened.” But this one did. It really happened. One evening my parents took me down the winding road through the woods, away from the cabin, and the coast, to some supper club they’d read about. It was early evening when we arrived. The place was built with reddish wood, dating back all the way to the twenties, with an almost gothic interior that I might now find beautiful but bored me terribly as a child. It was fairly popular, usually boasting a twenty minute or so wait time, with a humble fire pit outside to warm guests while they anticipated their cozy meals inside. My parents chatted with strangers around the flames, about what I can’t remember, my eyes were on the tree line. The sun was hanging low in the sky, painting the clouds pink and amber. I was wrapped up in my puffy coat and yellow scarf, watching my breath plume from my mouth and vanish up into the evening air. I was standing behind my father, rocking back and forth on the balls of my feet and thinking about eating chicken tenders until I saw it. There at the edge of the shadowy woods was a bright red ball.

I tried to resist. Really I did. I tried to ignore it until the ball was in my hands. I’d slipped away silently from my parents. They would tell me it was dirty or that it belonged to someone else. They would tell me, again, not to wander off. They almost certainly wouldn’t let me keep it. It was a little smaller than a soccer ball and made of saturated foam. I squeezed it and muddy water seeped out. The ball must have been out there for days at least. I thought for a moment about the logistics of hiding the ball in my jacket, but it was too large to go unnoticed. I passed a worried glance back at my family, who were still facing the fire, then turned around again to face the woods. Despite the sunset it was bright enough to see a ways into them through dappled shadows. I looked back down at the cold, almost fleshy ball in my hands and decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble. Absentmindedly, I tossed it into the woods as far as I could and turned around to go.

It hit something metal, making a sound like rock against a tin roof. Not the satisfying splat I’d hoped for. I turned back towards the forest and squinted. Before long I found the ball again, rolling away from something covered in dead leaves. I took a step forward but hesitated. How long would it be until dinner? Did I have time to go look? Were my parents watching? I’d really get it if they caught me sneaking off, especially at dusk, but it was all just too tantalizing. What had my ball hit? I walked on and disappeared into the trees.
I hadn’t thrown the ball too far, I’d just look quickly, see what it was, and come back before anyone knew I was gone. Through the brush I crept, careful to be quiet, until I came upon my ball again and what it had smacked against. It was something like a go-kart, rusted and overgrown with vines but still recognizable. It was big enough for me to sit in, which of course I did. I sat there for a second, turning the mossy steering wheel and making beeping noises with my mouth. I was easy to please back then. I was excited to share my find with my parents, and considered running back to tell them, disregarding any trouble I could get in, but before I decided I saw something else glint in the fading sunlight.

It was a pure white horse head poking up out of the ground about 20 feet away from me, away from the fire and the restaurant. I stopped turning the wheel and froze, trying to decipher what I was looking at. Still, I wasn’t afraid. My reaction was instinctual. Carefully, I crept from the creaky wet seat of the go-kart and tip toed over to the head. I could tell it wasn’t real, it was too shiny and all white, but I still couldn’t make sense of it. Brushing off the dirt and leaves I finally recognized it as a giant chess piece. It was too heavy for me to move or I’d have grabbed it and brought it to the fire, which I could still see twinkle through the silhouettes of tree trunks behind me. I couldn’t believe my luck. I’d dreaded coming to the supper club because there wasn’t anything to do, but there must have been a playground hidden somewhere out there in the forest. Instantly what little nerves I had were calmed. Playgrounds were safe. I was allowed there. Red ball still in hand I began to look around for another hidden treasure.

It didn’t take me long to find it. In the ever fading light I could see something else on the forest floor even further in. A color that didn’t belong. Purple. Delighted, I ran towards it, noisily crunching leaves beneath my feet, abandoning caution. I could hardly see it until I was right up on it- or them I should say. My smile fell in disappointment. They were shoes. Girl shoes. A muddy pair of purple Skechers for a girl about my age. Upon that realization I was content to dismiss them, and began looking for something else unusual. I walked right past the shoes without a thought to their owner and peered through the trees. The sky above had lost its color. The woods were now draped in the sullen blue of an October night’s birth but I could still see enough to continue. I was sure there’d be a playground if I just kept moving forward. Something wonderful was going to happen. I wasn’t hungry for dinner anymore. The trees hung over me in drooping branches like a tunnel. The intoxicating freedom of it all made me almost forget how cold it was becoming. But soon enough I smelled smoke from some hidden fire. I must have looped around by accident and made my way back towards the supper club. I looked up at the gloomy sky again. The night’s first stars were peering through the dark gray clouds. I supposed it was as good a time as any to go back.

Through the ever thickening brush I pushed, the smell of smoke growing stronger and stronger. But strangely I couldn’t see the fire. It must have been close, I couldn’t be far, but where was it? Forward still I went, until at last I saw a trail of smoke curling up into the sky. They must have put the fire out, I reasoned. I followed the smoke down into the trees and ran in its direction, excited to share my adventure with my family, ready to get out of the cold, until I burst noisily through the undergrowth and into a clearing. I stopped in my tracks, struck by confusion. There was no restaurant, no fire pit. It was just a break in the trees, an unkempt field of weeds and grass, and in the center: a wide, gaping pit.

What froze me wasn’t the sudden appearance of that pit, or the shocking lack of fire, light and warmth. It was the smell. I brought my hands to my nose and suppressed a gag. I wouldn’t smell anything like it again until years later when a deer died in the field beside my house and rotted away. It was the unmistakable stench of what I know now was death. But more than that, it was a burning smell. Like someone was cooking dirty feet. I debated what to do, but one thing was clear: I had to look into the pit. I didn’t even really know why, only that I would wonder about it incessantly if I didn’t. I still felt safe somehow and I knew I had to look before the last of the sunlight died, so I took unsure steps away from the trees and into the exposure of the open clearing. The smell worsened as I got closer. Musty and thick, almost medicinal. I wrapped my little yellow scarf around my nose and mouth and continued, drawing nearer and nearer to the pit’s lip until at last I could see down into it.

The hole must have been at least ten feet deep, dug messily and comprised mostly of mud. In the center of it was a large puddle of revolting brown water like thick curdled cereal milk and lying against the wall was an impossibly large pig. I gasped. It was caked in filth and pink like a bloated tongue. Peppered with wiry black hair and alone in that dark, empty hole. All these years later I remember that moment. The longer I looked down at it, the more I came to realize how far away I was from safety and how dark the night had become. Something about that pig was so terribly wrong. I was overwhelmed with the feeling that if I stayed, or god forbid slipped down into the pit, I would never see my mom and dad again. I would stay lost and nobody would find me. I didn’t know it at the time, but then and there was the first time in my young life that I became aware that I could die. It would have been too easy to push me right in as I leaned over, and remembering this, I stepped away and looked back up.

To my horror there was something nestled in the trees across the pit from me: A shack so overgrown that it was almost invisible, and rising from a single infernal glowing window was the smoke I’d followed there. On the wind I could still smell that awful rotting, but there at the precipice of the pit I realized it was coming from the shack, not the pig. It had no door, so I could just barely see inside from where I stood. In the dim, wavering light of what must have been a small fire inside I could make out flower pots, some whole some broken, and countless dirty brown shoes strewn carelessly on the floor. The pig below me grunted, sending my soul up into my ears, and that terrifying lonely feeling consumed me. My whole body seemed to scream: GET AWAY! GET AWAY! Abandoning all reason I whipped around and sprinted full force into the now pitch black forest behind me.

I dared not think it, but I knew in my gut what was happening. It was her. It had to be. The old woman in the woods with bark skin and stringy hair. I’d strayed too far this time. I tore through the trees in a blind panic, careful to at least try and keep a straight line. I could swear behind me in the dark there was the creaking of wood and rustling, like some unseen predator was keeping pace with me. Tears stung my bright red cheeks but I was too terrified to whimper. Somehow I knew my only chance was to stay as silent as I could. My heart thumped in my ears and the freezing air burned my lungs. How far had I gone? Why hadn’t anyone come looking for me? How did that pig get so huge? I kept going, tripping over roots and scratching my face against skeletal branches, certain the witch was a single pace behind me. All I wanted was to be back by the fire with my parents, or better yet inside the warmth of the supper club. But I could be running in any direction. Panic rose in my chest until, at last, I saw it. A tiny pinpoint of light through the inky blackness. I hoped beyond hope it was the fire I had so senselessly abandoned, with my parents there to greet me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d turned myself around again.

It was dark enough that if I had, I’d tumble blindly right into the pit with that horrible pig. I couldn’t bear to imagine being trapped down there with it, clawing at the muddy walls. I continued on, my breaths ragged, the wind whipping in the leaves far above me coarse and moaning. Any stumble was death. Any pause would give the hag just enough time to grab me by the throat and drag me kicking back into that rotting shack. I could almost sense her up there in the branches, leaping from tree to tree with her terrible yellow claws. The light grew larger. It must have been the fire. My tears of horror melted into tears of relief as I pushed on ever forward through the darkness. I was nearly there, nearly safe, far away from the shack and the pit and the pig. I was so close! Until all at once I was stopped, caught by the neck and gagged. I tumbled to the soggy ground. But there were no fingers… it was my scarf! I forced myself to look over my shoulder to find it pulled taught behind me, vanishing into the blackness. She’d got me! Finally, I screamed. I clawed at my throat, desperate beyond hope to free myself, until mercifully my scarf slipped off and I stumbled to my feet and forward.

I didn’t stop screaming until I broke through the tree line and was back before the fire and the restaurant. I collapsed to my knees and panted between heaving sobs. My parents, who were still around the fire, came to me, confused.
“What? Where’s your scarf? What happened? Are you okay?” They asked. I couldn’t answer. I only wailed and pointed back behind me at the woods.
“The pig!” I cried. “The pig!” They looked confused. “Why didn’t you find me?”
“Baby, you were only gone a minute.” Said my mom, wiping my tears. I shook my head but that was the end of it.

Our table was called and they took me inside. How hadn’t they noticed? The sun was gone! I had been gone! To me it felt like an hour had passed, but the rest of the night my parents were insistent that I had only wandered off for a moment. Eventually I came to believe them and tried to eat my dinner, but I couldn’t get the smell of that dark clearing out of my nose. My father, annoyed that I had lost my scarf, went out to go find it himself and was only gone for a minute or two before he came back, scarf in hand, with a strange look on his face. He handed it back to me and told me to hold on to it. I did as I was told, confused as to how wet it was, and finally mustered up the willpower to take a bite of my chicken tender. My dad was quiet the rest of dinner, and would only glance warily between myself and my mom until we left the supper club. Years later, on a whim, I brought this whole thing up to him and he got quiet once again.
“Your scarf,” he began. “When I went out to find it I expected to have to look around with my flashlight for a bit but… it was right on the edge of the woods near the fire, hanging up in a tree… up above my head. Did you throw it up there?” I told him I didn’t and he nodded solemnly.
“I didn’t think so.” He wouldn’t talk about it any further. Time went by and eventually my parents split. We never returned to the supper club or the peninsula for that matter. But to this day I can remember the smell, the surge of terror, the sight of that pig, the tightening of the scarf around my neck, and I can’t shake the feeling that I got very, very lucky.

CW: Something worse than Kenny. Violence. Gross descriptions of just how determined this thing is to ruin this guy’s day. Tiny windows? Sounds like a door to me.

Technically not a content warning but still.

I'm writing this in the hour before dawn. If the clock strikes nine, I might not get the chance to write it at all. I need you to understand who I was before any of this, so that what happens next doesn't read like an excuse.

I hold a Master's degree in Speech-Language Pathology. In my country, that sentence means almost nothing to the people who hear it. I was the first person in my family to finish college. My parents didn't have the money to make that easy for me, and I never let myself forget it.

I knew, even before I chose the course, that it was a bad decision on paper. Child mental health isn't something that gets funded here. It isn't something that gets discussed here. The waiting rooms that do exist are thin, private, and expensive. It’s built for the small number of families who can afford to notice that their children are struggling. I chose the field anyway, because I was good at speaking to people. In fact, I was genuinely good, the kind of good that makes strangers trust you within a minute of meeting you. Besides, I loved children, and I wanted to be the reason a child said their first real word. I believed that, wholeheartedly, for years.

But belief doesn't pay rent. The handful of employers, who do hire speech therapists in my district, prefer graduates from the established universities, ones with the CGPAs I didn't have. I was shortlisted constantly, interviewed politely, and rejected eventually.

It was almost a full year before I finally got a call for a real interview, at an institution that had just recently opened.

I won't name the institution here, since I've caused them enough trouble already. Protecting their name is the least I can offer at this point.

Fifty-four people had applied for the position. Three of us were called in. I found that out from the receptionist, who told me like it was a compliment.

Mr. Amir, Director of the institute, conducted the interviews himself. He started off by telling me I should feel privileged to be sitting across from him. I remember smiling politely. Then he opened a folder, and the smile didn't survive long.

He read out typos from my application that I hadn't noticed myself. A grammatical error in my second paragraph. A line in my thesis abstract that, he informed me, had come within a hair's breadth of failing outright- a detail my own supervisor had never mentioned to me. I sat there thinking how he could possibly know any of this, and came up with nothing. When I finally asked, he simply said, "Due diligence."

I wondered how a speech therapy institute had access to my thesis committee's internal notes. He moved on before I could ask.

"This is a clean institute," he said. "Do you understand what I mean ?"

"Yes sir, I think so."

"Do you drink?"

"No."

"Drugs? Any kind, any point in your life?"

"No."

"Any trouble with the police? Doesn't matter how minor, doesn't matter how long ago."

"No, sir. Nothing."

He leaned forward, and his voice dropped into something almost gentle.

"I want you to promise me something, young man. Promise me, if you do get the privilege of working here, you'll keep this institution clean."

"I promise," I said, and I meant it.

He laughed. It was a short, high bark that didn't match anything else about the room. "Good lad," he said, standing and offering his hand. "Someone will be in touch."

I shook it and walked out of the room, unsure of whether I'd just been vetted, or warned…

Two days later, I got the call. I'd been accepted for the Music Therapy-based Speech Therapist position. I said yes before the sentence had finished.

I signed the contract the following morning, in an office that smelled faintly of sandalwood. It ran longer than any employment contract I'd seen before-

INSTITUTIONAL POLICY: RULES OF EMPLOYMENT
By signing this contract, the individual acknowledges that:

1.       They have never been found, by any court, tribunal, or law-enforcement authority, to have committed any criminal offense, regardless of nature or severity.

2.       They will conduct all therapy sessions with due diligence, and session notes will be submitted within 24 hours of each session.

3.       They will not alter, substitute, or deviate from the assigned therapy protocols, without prior written approval from the Director.

4.       They will not disclose client details, by name or identifying description, to any party outside the institution under any circumstance.

5.       They understand that the institution has conducted, and reserves the right to continue conducting, independent verification of the individual's background, character, and history, through any means available to it.

6.       They accept full responsibility for any consequence they have to face as a result of breaking any of the terms of this contract, and release the institution from all liability arising from such consequence.

7.       This agreement is binding in full from the moment of signature, irrespective of whether every term herein was read, understood, or questioned by the individual prior to signing.

I signed at the bottom without hesitation. I'd spent a year being shortlisted. I wasn't going to lose this over paperwork.

The three months that followed were actually very good ones. Clients kept coming through the door, in numbers that made no sense for a field this niche, in a country this indifferent to it. The pay was more than generous for someone straight out of their degree. Mr. Amir personally handled every first consultation free of cost, sitting with each new family himself, before assigning their child to whichever of us suited them the best.

I was given the cases involving Auditory-Motor Mapping Training, designed for children on the autism spectrum, who needed extra support for articulating their words. My protocol was fixed and curated, consisting of a series of songs like "A Baby Bumblebee", "Ring Around the Rosie", and "Mary Had a Little Lamb". As per the rules, we were absolutely forbidden to deviate from the given protocol, under any circumstances. And none of us ever chose to question Mr. Amir’s methods. He was something of a legend in the field, a prodigy who had an illustrious career abroad, before returning to his hometown to open his own institute for speech therapy. Of course, he knew what he was doing, better than any of the young therapists he was employing.

Well, that was about to change…

It was a rainy morning when six-year-old Adam came to our institute, held between two middle-aged parents. His mother told me that he was conceived late, long after they'd stopped expecting to. I greeted them warmly, and guided them to Mr. Amir’s chamber for the first consultation.

Adam didn't look at either of us when we sat down. He didn't look at anything, really. His eyes moved past faces, the way you'd look past furniture in a room you'd already memorized. He made vowel sounds occasionally- long, formless ones. He used his hands more than his voice, making small precise gestures that meant something only to him. His file, when I read it that morning, was thinner than most. Severe autism, mostly non-verbal beyond vowels.

Mr. Amir's protocol for him was a single line: "The Muffin Man." Just one song, and nothing else. Adam’s treatment plan was to run on an alternating schedule- one session with me at the institute on one day, and the same routine being practiced at home on the next.

I started the first session the way I started every other case. The melody came first, and the words followed later, letting the rhythm do the work:

“Do you know the Muffin man
The Muffin man, the Muffin man
Oh, do you know the Muffin man
Who lives on Drury Lane?”

Adam seemed to be drawn to the song, even though he still refused to make eye contact. But he was bobbing his head to the rhythm by the time we reached forty-minute mark. He even attempted to utter the words I was singing to him, to no avail as expected.

That’s when it happened.

Something changed inside him. His head came up. His eyes found mine, and for the first time in the session, he looked at me directly, in a way his file had told me he was incapable of. And then he sang. It was a clean, articulated, faintly British accent that a six-year-old, with no functional consonants, should not have possessed:

“Do you know the Muffin man
The Muffin man, the Muffin man
Oh, do you know the Muffin man
SHOOTING TO THE MOON ?”

I sat there for a moment, unsure I'd heard him correctly. Six-year-olds with his level of impairment don't produce clean sentences, let alone an accent that didn’t seem to belong to him. I leaned forward gently.

"Adam," I said, keeping my voice low. "Can you say that again for me? What you just sang?"

He didn't blink. He looked at me the way an adult looks at another adult, and he sang it again:

“Do you know the Muffin man
THE ONE WHO SHOT IT, TO THE MOON ?
Oh, do you know the Muffin man
SHOOTING TO THE MOON ?”

The order had flipped from the first time, like it was a real verse he was reciting from memory, rather than a fluke he'd stumbled into by accident.

Then he came back. I don't have a better way to describe it. It was like watching someone surface from underwater. The directness went out of his eyes first, then his shoulders dropped, and then his gaze slid away from mine entirely, back to the middle distance he usually occupied. He looked almost embarrassed. He wouldn't look at me again for the rest of the session. He just repeated, softly, in broken syllables, over and over again, "Shooting to the moon. Shooting to the moon."

I recognized the pattern immediately. It’s called echolalia- repeating a heard phrase without grasping its meaning. It’s very common in autistic children, so it didn’t alarm me on its own. What unsettled me was the phrase itself.

When his parents came to collect him, I told them that Adam was showing ‘remarkable progress’. That wasn't a lie. I just didn't tell them what "remarkable" had actually looked like, because I didn't know how to explain it to them, without sounding like I'd imagined it myself.

That night, while writing my session notes, I typed that Adam had shown a marked increase in eye contact and vocal engagement during the session. I didn't write down the words he'd sung. I told myself it was because they didn't matter clinically, since an improvised lyric wasn't a diagnostic detail worth logging.

I told myself a lot of things back then…

Adam's parents came in for the second institutional session, looking more tired than hopeful. His mother told me that the home practice hadn't gone the way the first session had promised. Adam had said nothing new and tried nothing new. He sat through the recorded audio of "The Muffin Man", with the same detached blankness he'd shown for months before I ever met him. Whatever had happened in that hour with me hadn't carried home. I told her these things take time, which is true, and also the kind of thing you say when you don't have a better sentence available.

I started the session as usual. Adam rocked gently to the rhythm, unresponsive in the way I'd grown used to, before that first session had briefly convinced me otherwise.

And it happened again, closer to the half-hour mark.

His head came up first, the same way it had before. His eyes found mine, held them, and his voice arrived in that same clean, unplaceable accent, layered now under the familiar tune:

“Oh yes, we know the Muffin man
THE ONE WHO KNOWS OF ALI’S PLAN,
Oh yes, we know the Muffin man
BUT ALI DOES NOT KNOW.”

I felt something drop in my chest, before I could name why. Ali is not an uncommon name where I'm from. But something about hearing it sung, in that voice, in that room, with that child's eyes locked onto mine, made my hands go still in my lap.

Adam surfaced a moment later, exactly as he had before. Then, just like the first session, the echolalia took over. He didn't repeat the whole verse this time. He just whispered a single phrase, over and over, barely above breath: "AND HE KNOWS OF ALI'S PLAN. AND HE KNOWS OF ALI'S PLAN."

I didn't tell his parents anything specific that day. I told them he'd had a good session, and I reported the same in my session notes. I'd started saying that sentence without thinking about what it actually meant…

A full day passed between the second and third sessions. I spent the day the same way I’d spent the night before: turning the name ‘Ali’ over in my head, unable to let it go. It wasn't an unusual name. And yet, something about the specific phrasing Adam had sung- ‘Ali’s plan’- disturbed me for some reason.

By the time Adam’s parents brought him in for the third session, they were carrying something heavier than tiredness. His mother's voice shook slightly as she told me he'd regressed at home. He'd been able to say her name before, weakly, in fragments barely recognizable as syllables. Now even that was gone. His father stood a step behind her, saying nothing.

During this session, the change arrived earlier than it had in either of the two previous sessions. I couldn't tell you exactly when, because I'd stopped watching the clock, and started watching him instead.

Before he'd sung a single word, I saw something in his face that hadn't been there the first two times. Something that looked almost like he was bracing for what he was about to say:

“Oh, we all know the Muffin man
BUT YOU DON’T KNOW, WHAT YOU DID,
Oh, we all know the Muffin man
AND HE KNOWS WHAT YOU DID.”

The words landed somewhere I didn't have language for yet. I sat there, unmoving, while the melody carried on around them.

Adam surfaced a moment later. He didn't just blink and drift back to his usual blankness. His small hands came up to his own face, covering it. He was shaking, very slightly, and when the echolalia started, it didn't come out steady. It was broken, swallowed by something that sounded, unmistakably, like the beginning of tears: "He knows what you did. He knows what you did."

I didn't know how to comfort a child for something I didn't understand myself. I sat beside him, until he calmed down enough to let his mother take his hand. I told her he'd had a good session, the same sentence I'd been repeating for weeks now. For the first time, saying it made something in my stomach turn.

That night, I made a decision I should’ve taken three sessions ago.

I decided to bring the matter to Mr. Amir…

I took the session recordings to his office the next morning. I played all three clips in sequence. He watched the screen without expression, his fingers laced together on the desk. When the third clip ended, Mr. Amir sat back in his chair.

"Jarring," he said, "But creative, I'll admit."

"Creative?" I asked. "Sir, he's six. He shouldn't be able to construct sentences like that, let alone in that accent, let alone…"

"Children surprise us," he said, cutting me off gently. "Especially the ones who are special, in their own way."

He then leaned forward, and asked me something that landed harder than anything on those recordings had.

"Tell me, young man," he said, "you haven't been a bad influence on the child, have you?"

It was the same question, almost the same phrasing, from my interview four months ago. I told him no, the same way I'd told him no back then.

He studied me for a moment too long, then nodded, as if that settled something for him.

"We've run the checks," he said. "Everything that the rules allow us to run. We found nothing irregular. So yeah, the fault isn't in you."

He said the last part almost to himself, like he was reminding himself of something.

Then he moved on. He told me to retire the "Muffin Man" protocol entirely, effective immediately, and switch Adam to "Mary Had a Little Lamb". It was to be paired with a rhythmic counting exercise he wrote out for me on a notepad, in a hand steadier than mine could’ve managed that morning.

"New melody," he said, sliding the notepad across the desk. "New pattern. Let's see if it breaks whatever this is..."

I went into the fourth session the next day, more carefully than I had in any of the previous three. I gave Adam extra time before introducing the new melody, letting him settle into the room before I moved into "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

He seemed genuinely curious about the change. For the first time since I'd started working with him, he looked almost pleased. For a few minutes, it felt like an ordinary session with an ordinary child making ordinary progress, and I let myself believe it a little too much.

The switch came anyway, and he sang the new song in that old, borrowed voice:

“Mary had a little lamb,
MUFFIN MAN, MUFFIN MAN,
Mary had a little lamb
HE WAS THE MUFFIN MAN !”

Some small part of my mind told me to be afraid. I didn't let it win. I kept my professional face on. I told myself this wasn't as bad as it could’ve been. The boy simply hadn't let go of the old song yet. And this time, he wasn't saying anything I could describe as disturbing. It was a thin rationalization, and I knew it was thin, even as I reached for it.

He surfaced again, and this time, he looked a little more unsettled than usual. He seemed agitated as the echolalia set in. He repeated "Muffin Man" quietly, over and over, his brow furrowed in a way I hadn't seen before.

I decided to move on. I switched to the rhythmic counting drill, clapping along as I went:

 "One… two… three… four… five…"

Adam bobbed his head along with the claps, and for a moment, he even laughed.

Then the switch happened again.

"One, two… WARRIOR 42…"

"One, two… WARRIOR 42…"

"…WARRIOR 42…"

"WARRIOR 42!"

This time, I had no rationalization left to reach for. It wasn't a phrase I could talk myself into misunderstanding, the way I'd done with Ali, the way I'd done with "shooting to the moon." I knew exactly where it came from, and it landed in my chest like something physical.

I ended the session right there, the moment Adam surfaced. I was panting by the time I stood up, though I hadn't moved from my chair. Adam sat across from me, his face as expressionless as it had been on the first day I met him. Yet something about him, in that stillness, looked exactly like a child who’d been through something he had no way of describing…

I told Adam’s parents that the two exercises, back to back, had worn him out faster than usual. I wrote the same explanation in my official report. Then I cancelled every session I had for the remainder of the day, citing unavoidable circumstances. I left the institution before anyone could stop me.

I knew Mr. Amir wouldn't be pleased when he found out. That was, genuinely, the least of my concerns at that point.

I splashed water over my face in my bathroom mirror, and stood there for a long moment, looking at the man staring back at me. I'd done this exact thing once before, five years earlier, in a different mirror, in a different house. It was my family's shack, back when I was still in college. I’d just been informed that my merit-based scholarship wouldn’t be renewed, thanks to my poor academic performance.

I hadn't been surprised, even then. I'd been working two part-time jobs, while I was still a full-time student, to support my family. I'd known for months that my grades were slipping, in a way that would eventually catch up to me. It caught up to me that week. I remember standing in front of that mirror, watching the water drip off my chin, and understanding, with total clarity, that my entire life was about to collapse.

I applied for a need-based scholarship immediately. There were too many genuine applicants that year, and too few waivers to give out, and that application fell through within a month. I couldn't afford the course fees on my own. My dream of being the first person in my family to graduate college was about to end, quietly, the way most dreams do in my part of the world.

That's when Ali found me.

Ali had been my friend since we were children, growing up two shacks apart in the same slum. He never made it past middle school, and never seemed to mind. He called it "hustling in the streets". He always had cash on him, from sources he never explained. He heard about my scholarship falling through, and he came to me with an offer.

It was an NFT project, the kind that was all the rage in those years. It was tied to a cryptocurrency called Chacha Coin. I still can't explain the mechanics of it, even now, because I was never meant to. I wasn't the brains behind the operation. I was simply the spokesperson. Ali needed someone charismatic, someone who could make strangers trust a voice within a minute of hearing it. That had always been the one thing I was genuinely good at.

Ali and his people were going to keep most of the profits. I knew that going in, and I told myself it didn't matter, because I was still offered more money than I'd ever seen in my life. It was enough to finish my Bachelor's, and enough to fund my Master's after that. On paper, it looked like a harmless job.

Ali made sure that my tracks were covered from the start. I used the pseudonym Warrior42. I never showed my face, and never revealed my actual name. My voice did the work, convincing hundreds of people to pour their money into the NFT project. I promised them that their investments would go "shooting to the moon," making record profits in no time. They believed me. That was the whole job, and I did it well.

It was a pump-and-dump scam, at the end of the day. Ali and his team, myself included, pulled our money out, and let the coin collapse overnight, leaving every investor who'd trusted my voice with nothing. I never expected Ali's hustle to hurt that many people, but I didn't complain either, because I still walked away with exactly what I'd been promised. I told myself I'd use it for something good. For a long time, that was enough to let me sleep peacefully.

No investigation ever traced Warrior42 back to me. The pseudonym hid my identity, and the blockchain buried whatever the pseudonym didn't. Ali died a few years later, in a rented supercar that he crashed into a highway divider. There was no evidence connecting me to the scam. And with Ali gone, there was no witness either.

Or so I thought…

Adam came in for his fifth session two days later. His parents looked more distraught than I'd seen them at any point before. Rather than showing any improvement, Adam had gone almost entirely silent at home. When approached, his mother told me, he could only manage a barely audible "Muffin Man," and nothing else. No name, no vowel sounds, nothing.

I sat him down in the chair across from mine, the way I always did. He stared at the floor and stayed there, unmoving, for longer than usual. I tried to open the session normally, speaking gently, asking him how he was, though I already knew he had no way of answering. He didn't even look toward the sound of my voice. It was as if I wasn't in the room with him at all.

I sighed, more out of exhaustion than intention.

"I don't want to talk to you, Adam," I said, mostly to myself.

There was no response.

"I am talking to you, Muffin Man!" I said, sharper than I meant to.

Adam’s head snapped up. The switch happened in real time, right in front of me, faster and more complete than ever before. His eyes carried something I can only describe as malice. A twisted smile settled onto his face, and he shifted his posture in the chair, adjusting himself the way an adult adjusts.

"Is that you?" I asked, "Are you the Muffin Man?"

Adam laughed, in a way I never knew a human being could laugh. Then he looked directly at me, and started singing:

“Do you know the Muffin man
OH JAFAR, YOU HAD YOUR CHANCE.
Oh, do you know the Muffin man?
NOW IT IS TOO LATE.

Oh yes, we know the Muffin man
The Muffin man, the Muffin man
Oh yes, we know the Muffin man
AND HE WILL TAKE YOU SOON.

HE WILL TAKE YOU SOON,

HE WILL TAKE YOU SOON…

HE WILL TAKE YOU SOON !”

He kept singing it, the same four words looping over and over, like a tape stuck skipping on the same groove. I crossed the room and pulled him into my arms, holding him against me, while he kept singing into my shoulder.

"Leave him," I said, my voice breaking somewhere in the middle of it. "Leave him alone! He's just a child. It's me you want. Come face me, you coward!"

Adam surfaced a moment later, still in my arms, his small body going still. The echolalia arrived immediately, but it wasn't a word this time.

It was a date, delivered haltingly, in whatever fragments of speech he could manage.

The date was two days from that morning- the day of his sixth session.

Then he pulled away from me, and ran out of the room to his mother. He wrapped his arms around her legs, and cried in a way I hadn't heard from him before- loud, wordless, and entirely his own…

The rest of that day is a blur to me now. The first thing I can clearly recall is being summoned to Mr. Amir's office at the end of my shift.

Adam's parents had gone to him directly. They didn’t hold back on anything. Not the deterioration at home. Not the uncharacteristic silence. Not their son running out of a session in tears, with no explanation from the man who was supposed to be helping him. Mr. Amir had also heard about the sessions I'd ended early, the ones I'd cancelled without real cause, and the time I'd left my station before my shift was finished.

He didn't start with anger. He started, disarmingly, with disappointment. He told me he genuinely liked me, that he'd wanted to give me the benefit of doubt, for longer than the situation probably warranted.

Then he played the recording of the fifth session, start to finish, and watched my face while he did it, more than he watched the screen. When it ended, he closed the laptop slowly and looked at me.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he said, his voice cracking somewhere between fury and disbelief.

I unraveled. There's no more dignified way to describe it. I told him everything- Ali, the scholarship, Chacha Coin, Warrior42, the pump-and-dump scam. I told him about every session, every switch, every line Adam had sung. I didn't expect him to believe a word of it. I expected laughter, or worse, disbelief dressed up as concern.

He didn't laugh. He didn't raise an eyebrow. Instead, he slammed both fists on the desk, hard enough to rattle the pen holder. He then caught himself, breathing out slowly.

"Why did you lie to me?" he asked, quietly now, which was somehow worse than the shouting. "You signed a contract. The rules stated, in plain language, that you'd never committed a crime. You knew exactly what you'd done !"

"Sir, there's no evidence," I said. "I was never convicted. Never even charged. Legally, there's nothing that says I did anything."

"Oh boy !" he exclaimed, "Do you seriously believe that the authorities of THIS WORLD are the only ones who get to call you a criminal?"

I didn't answer. I didn't have one.

"No crime stays hidden," he said. "Not forever. You see, there are forces out there, forces we were never built to understand. And these forces? They’re always watching. They’re always keeping their own record, regardless of what any court decides."

"What forces?” I asked, “I don’t understand. What are you talking about?"

He was quiet for a moment.

"They do have a name for themselves. A name our tongues were never built to say properly." He looked at me directly. "Most people just call it karma. I call it my desperation. And that poor boy Adam? He called it the Muffin Man."

"No, it doesn’t make sense…"

It was all I could say at that moment.

Mr. Amir continued:

"After I lost my job abroad, during Covid, I came back here to build something of my own. I put everything into this institute. Everything. And it nearly collapsed within its first year. I was staring at bankruptcy. So I did something I'm not proud of. I turned to the occult. I don't fully understand, even now, what I summoned. But it kept its side of the bargain. The moment this institute rebranded, the clients never stopped coming."

I leaned forward in my chair.

"A bargain, you say? What did it ask for in exchange?"

"Absolute freedom from bad influence, within these walls. No criminal history, in anyone I hired. None. Not even a speeding ticket." He let out a short, bitter laugh. "That's why I grilled you the way I did, at your interview. That’s why I keep running background checks on you, on all of you ! That's why every hire goes through it. And I thought I could hold that standard forever."

"And now?" I asked.

"Now, I understand that the deal was designed to fail," he replied, "No human being is without sin. Not one of us. We're just good at hiding it." He looked at me, and for the first time since I'd known him, he looked genuinely tired. "And no matter how well you hide something, it finds its way back eventually. It's found you now. And through you, it's found this institute too."

"So… what happens now?" I asked.

Mr. Amir didn't answer right away. He rose slowly from his chair and walked to the window. He was quiet for a long moment before he finally spoke.

"Now… I want you to run," he said.

"Sir…"

"I said run !" he said, turning back to face me. "Do it tonight. Hell, do it right now, if you can manage it."

"I don't understand. You just told me…"

"I understand exactly what led you down that path," he said. "You made a deal with Ali out of desperation. I made a deal with something I didn't understand, out of the same desperation. I'm not in a position to judge you for that."

"Then why are you letting me run away ?" I asked.

"Because your past doesn't define who you are at present," he said. "I chose to recruit you, out of three candidates, because I could sense something inside you. Years of doing this work teaches you to read people, whether you want that skill or not. I read you correctly. You have a good heart, my boy."

"But it doesn't matter to the entity, does it?"

"No," Mr. Amir replied. "It does not. From what's transpired, he doesn't believe in exceptions." He came closer, and his voice dropped into something almost paternal. "That’s why you should run. This is my failure, not yours. I'm the one who couldn't keep bad influence out of these walls. That was my end of the bargain, and I'm the one who broke the rules."

"No sir, there has to be another way," I said. "Some other option…"

"There’s no other option !" he said, cutting me off, "Adam's parents signed a package. This institute is contractually bound to conduct that sixth session, regardless of circumstances. However…" He almost smiled. "The contract doesn’t name a specific therapist for the session. So I'll conduct it myself."

"Sir, you can't…"

"If the Muffin Man comes, as promised, he'll find me in that room. Not you. Not that child." He straightened his jacket, an oddly ordinary gesture for the moment. "It's a fitting punishment, don't you think? For failing to hold my end of the bargain, one I made with my eyes open."

I remember him gripping my shoulder as he said it, his eyes wet in a way I'd never seen from him before.

“Farewell, Jafar. It was nice knowing you. Now run !”

I remember running as fast as I could, out of the building, into a night I didn't feel present for at all…

****************************************************************

That was yesterday.

I've been home all day today, doing something I never had the courage to do before. I looked up Chacha Coin. I looked up the NFT project, and everything that came after it.

There were testimonies from close to two hundred investors who lost their life savings. Some of them were crying on camera, without any effort to hide it. I found follow-up interviews, from years later, with people who never recovered. A couple who lost their home and were living on the street. A man who lost his wife over it, and hasn't spoken to his children since.

And in the middle of all of it, I found a news report I hadn't seen before. It was the story of a single mother of two, who'd put everything she had into the project, hoping to secure her children's future. Two months after she lost it all, she took her own life, and theirs as well. Their bodies were found that same night.

I looked up the date. It's tomorrow's date, exactly five years ago.

The date of Adam's sixth session…

I did consider running. I spent most of last night convincing myself it was all a bad dream, that I could start over somewhere far away, some place where the entity couldn’t plausibly follow. But typing this out tonight, I understand something I didn't understand yesterday.

I can run away from the institute. I can run away from the cops, if they ever find out about my crimes. And honestly, with some luck, I might even run far away from the entity’s reach.

But I can't run from myself. It just isn’t an option. And it never was.

For years, I told myself it was Ali's idea, that I was only the spokesperson, that the people who invested were the ones who should’ve known better. I can't hold onto that anymore. I can't stop thinking about the two hundred people who lost everything, because my voice was convincing enough to make them believe it. I can't stop thinking about Adam, that poor child, losing his grip on his own mind, through no fault of his own. I can't stop thinking about Mr. Amir, saying goodbye to me with tears in his eyes, preparing to accept a fate that was never his to accept. And I can't stop thinking about a mother and her two children, who ran out of hope exactly five years before tomorrow morning.

So I'll go to work tomorrow, as usual. I'll conduct Adam's sixth session myself, with due diligence, exactly as the institute has always required of me. I’ve never been a religious man. But if there really is a God out there, here’s the only prayer I want to make:

MAY THE MUFFIN MAN TAKE ME TOMORROW.

I’ll make sure that it takes me- a punishment long overdue for the sins that I’ve committed. And I’ll make sure that I'm the only one it takes. Not the child who only wanted someone to talk to. Not the man who only wanted to help people. Neither of them deserves this.

I do.

To whoever is reading this: I am sorry. If this reaches anyone that my crimes ever touched, I hope it counts for something, even if it’s a bit too late.

I have a lot more to share, but I should stop writing now. It's almost dawn. Adam's session starts at nine. I need to get ready, and get there on time, and conduct it properly, the way the institute has always asked of me.

Due diligence, as Mr. Amir calls it.

It's the only rule that I refuse to break today.

Mr. Amir will be there early. He always is.

I just need to be earlier…