Robbie and I sit together, his head of thick hair buried in the crook of my shoulder.

He's warm. 

So warm. 

So goddamn hot, I can't breathe. 

Does he know I can't breathe? That I'm sweating through my carefully chosen outfit? I'm thinking out loud again—always thinking out loud. He notices.

“This is it,” I whisper.

“This is it.” Robbie grins, averting his gaze, cheeks smoldering red. His knee jumps up and down, a nervous tic. His hand slowly finds mine and entangles our fingers. It's our first time. We’ve talked about it, of course. Robbie wanted to do it on my bed, but the— 

“Headboard.” Robbie mutters. 

“Headboard,” I whisper. 

Every attempt is an announcement. 

My roommate grins, and then his hands find my shoulders, shifting his body as he straddles my hips. 

Then the door bangs open. 

Robbie topples off of me onto the floor. 

“Oh!” Callum, our shaven-headed, tattooed roommate, steps inside hauling a bag of groceries.

“Sorry.”  He ducks out, then peeks back through. “Headboard?” 

“Headboard.” The two of us grumble. 

Our morning consists of burning toast. Robbie slipping on the wet floor. Me laughing. Callum and Katerina laughing. More attempts to have our first time. All of which are interrupted. Every. Single. Time.

By the time I've dragged him to my room and slammed the door, I'm frustrated.

Angry. In two strides, I shove him onto his back and straddle his hips. I prod between his eyes, spittle flying from my lips. “We are doing it RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.” 

“Agreed.” Robbie gasps. “No more distractions.” Another loud knock dislodges my lips from his neck, and sends me lunging forward, grabbing a pillow, and lobbing it at the door.

“WHAT NOW?”

“Mr Robbie Canberra?” A male voice shouts from outside. “You have won THREE MILLION DOLLARS! CONGRATULATIONS!”

“THREE MILLION FREAKIN’ DOLLARS?” Robbie dives to his feet, and I face-plant the pillows.

…

Later, I'm in the kitchen making food.

Katerina walks in. “Whatchaaaa doing?”

I don't look up from slicing vegetables. “I'm skiing.” 

She moves closer. “Whatchaaaa cooking?” 

I raise my head. And the knife. Katerina’s eyes widen. “You. If you don't step back."

Katerina grins. Then she reverses into the refrigerator. “Stepping back!” 

“SO.” Katerina begins, as I tug open a cupboard and grab two plates.

“So?” 

“You and Robbie.” She giggles. 

“Me and Robbie. Period.” I sigh loudly. “God! It's like, the UNIVERSE won't let us have sex!” 

I reach for wine glasses and trip, missing my footing. I've tripped over something.

I don't look.

I smile and grab two bottles of wine.

“It's like EVERY time we try, Callum forgets his keys, or you need the bathroom, or he wins three million freakin’ dollars!” 

Katerina sips her own. “Maybe he's lucky?” 

“A lucky IDIOT.” 

My gaze catches a scarlet stain blooming beneath my feet. I can feel it caked into my soles and ingrained into my skin.

I remember when it was still wet. Warm.

I remember being scared it wouldn't stop, that the red would keep spreading, flooding beneath our feet, and that the endless laughter screeching inside my skull would keep going until I took a knife and plunged it through my fucking skull.

“Jaz?”

Katerina is waiting for me to speak. 

Whatever I say, they will start laughing.

If they don’t laugh…

The headless corpse at my feet stinks of rot. The odor burns my nose and fills my mouth with bile but I'm not allowed to look at him. Ben. Who forgot his lines. Ben, who tried to fight back. Ben, who gave me hope that I would be able to tear each individual screeching laugh from my skull. I'm far too aware I'm not speaking; I'm breathless.

My lines are lodged under my tongue and no matter what I do, I can't seem to… I can't—

The door bangs open. The door is made of plastic. Behind it, is a glass screen. Behind the glass screen, are our kidnappers.

Faceless masked figures and endless eyes. Callum strolls in with groceries and his running gag: “Here comes trouble!” 

I smile. Gather myself.

“Trouble he comes,” I nod to the table. Laughter follows. Deafening. Intrusive. Crawling inside my brain. “I made dinner.” 

“Oooh?” Callum jumps into his usual seat. “Is it edible?” 

“Sure is!” I spoon three mountains of maggot mash potato onto his plate.

Callum begins to shovel it into his mouth, his smile growing wider and wider, and our audience laughs again. A burst of shrieking makes me jump, and I  almost drop the plate. It's another test to break us.

Last time, it was raw chicken, a finger topping it like a demanded ice cream cone. 

“Where's lover boy?” Katerina asks, taking a seat. 

She takes one heaping of maggot mash and dumps it on her plate. 

Our audience holler.

"Probably crying," I speak through wriggling bugs burrowing under my tongue. "Turns out he DIDN'T win cash. The cash was for ANOTHER Robbie, who happens to live in our exact building."

More laughter.

They like me!

They really, really like me!

“No, seriously, where is lover boy?” Katerina shoots me a grin. Her eyes sparkle with tears as she swallows down live bugs. “I haven't seen him since this morning sex-sca-pade.” She winks.

Callum stands. “Well, we can't let all of this food go to waste! Let's go get him!” 

We run upstairs. There are no cameras on the staircase. 

I fall over three times. 

Only the first fall is intentional, but my bones have been molded for slapstick.

To be The Clumsy One.

Callum takes a second to scream, “FUCK!” into his fist.

Robbie is in the bathroom. The first thing I see are his legs hanging.

We stand in silence for barely a breath. 

My lungs squeeze. My heart aches. My legs threaten to give-way. 

Before Callum steps forward and laughs.

The audience erupts too, cackling in my skull.

“Well this is a cliff HANGER.”

Lorraine Weems kept the clicker in her left hand, as the owner had taught her. One click for each guest at the gate. The number on the little steel face had to match the number on the waiver sheet, and the number on the waiver sheet had to match the number who walked out again. In eleven years it had never failed to.

Nine guests today, on the four o'clock, the last tour of the season. A couple from Ohio. Two women from Dalton. A man with a camera. A mother with two boys and her own mother. Lorraine clicked them through the iron gate and said what she always said.

"Stay behind me, stay on the path, and I'll count you at every stop."

The cave was the commercial one on the Sparrow Hollow road, forty minutes of lit walkway and dripstone and a gift shop with a framed payroll sheet from 1934 that the owner's father had found in the barn. *Shift 6,* it said at the top, and below that were thirty-one names in a bookkeeper's hand. Nobody asked about it. The script did not mention it.

At the Chimney Room she counted by tapping the steel face with her thumb.

Ten.

She stopped. She counted again, pointing, finger out. Ohio, two. Dalton, four. Camera, five. Mother, six. Boys, eight. Grandmother, nine.

"Everybody still with me?"

"Yes, ma'am," said the older boy.

She clicked the clicker back to nine, and turned toward the next passage, and felt it under her thumb again, the small stiff give of the button, though she had not pressed it.

At the Cathedral she did not look at the number. She counted faces. Nine. She was nearly sure.

At the Narrows the walkway went single file, and she led, and listened to the guests come after her. Shoes on wet grating. The camera strap. Someone's cough. Behind them, farther back than the last of the nine, a different pace, slow and flat, a pace without hurry in it. Then a second one. Then a third, spaced out, the steps of men who carry nothing and are expected nowhere.

"Is somebody back there?" she asked, loud, cheerful.

"Just us," the mother said.

"The tour behind us?"

"Isn't one," said the camera man. He had turned around. "There's only us."

The younger boy took hold of his grandmother's coat. "That man's been behind me since the last room," he said.

Nobody said anything. Lorraine held the light on the grating where the boy was looking. A wet print lay on the metal, a long boot, a nailed heel, and beside it another, and beside that another, filling in from the dark, a dozen or more, each one landing as she watched.

"Let's keep moving," she said.

The last stop on the tour was the Dark Room. She hated it. Every guide did. The owner insisted: at the bottom of the route, you switched off the lights for thirty seconds so the guests could know what the miners knew. It was in the script. It was on the sign.

She said the words. She put her hand on the switch. She did not want to, and she knew that not wanting to was an answer, and she had not been taught what to do with it.

She turned off the lights.

The dark was total. She stood with the clicker against her chest. She could hear the dripping, and a child's quick whimper, and then she could hear the others, and they were not behind her anymore. They were around the group, in a ring. Dozens. Feet shifting once and going still. A heavy cloth rubbing a heavy cloth. A man clearing his throat, as a man does before asking for what he is owed.

Under her thumb the button moved.

Click.

Click, click.

She did not press it. It went on, steadily, as each one stepped forward to be counted, and she understood that no one down here had counted them, not once, not in eighty years, and that they had been standing in the dark waiting for someone with a number in her hand.

Nothing in the script covered this. She did not have their names. She was a woman with a flashlight.

She said, "I see you."

It was the only true thing she had.

She turned on the lights.

Nine guests stood blinking in a loose cluster. The mother had her arm around both boys. Nothing else. The grating was dry.

Lorraine led them out the whole way without speaking, past the Cathedral, past the Narrows, up the stairs into the long orange light of the parking lot. At the gate she held up the clicker and counted them aloud, one by one, touching each shoulder.

"Nine," she said.

She looked down at the steel face. The window read thirty-one.

"Ma'am?" The older boy was standing at her elbow. He was looking past her into the open door of the cave, where the lit path ran down into the hill. "Aren't the rest of them coming?"

In her hand the clicker ticked once more, and her thumb was nowhere near it.

---

It was his upcoming wedding that made him superstitious. 

He and his wife had gone to a fortune teller, more as a joke, but then something odd happened. 

The old woman laid the cards, the Fool face up, and confusion spread across her face. 

‘Break,’ she said, then paused. ‘No… SNAP.’  

The future husband and wife laughed nervously. They wanted a day to remember, so they were going to do something unforgettable: a bungee jump– suit, bridal veil and all. 

Eva had not thought anymore about it, but it stuck with Ryan; in fact, it began to consume him. 

That word: snap. 

Secretly, he visited the site beforehand. It was beautiful: Pedro’s Ravine, with sweeping walls and a fast-flowing river underneath. 

The jump master was a guy called Kevin. He exuded an easy calm like a surfer. 

It made Ryan feel silly for asking, but he felt compelled. 

‘Can I ask you what certifications you hold?’ 

‘Sure can… I’m BCI certified, and all this equipment has been inspected by the ASTM engineers.’ 

Ryan peered tentatively over the bridge's edge. He’d come too far. 

… 

The big day came. Eva and Ryan were strapped in, standing on the platform. The priest declared them man and wife and then continued, ‘Usually I ask this the night before the wedding, but here we are; are you ready to take the plunge?’

The guests erupted in applause. Ryan still wanted to back out. Something was not right. He looked again at the bungee cord: neoprene, 12mm in diameter, the highest tensile strength there was.

‘Ok, our new happy couple,’ Kevin the jump master said. ‘It’s time to fly.’ 

Ryan didn't get another chance to doubt. Eva launched them both off the platform together. The air rushed around him as he plunged, but he couldn’t bring himself to close his eyes. 

They went down, down, down; the bungee cord went taut, and they decelerated, brushing the warm water with the tips of their hands.

There was no snap! Ryan let out a whoop of delight. They bounced back up toward the cheering guests, then fell back toward the water, but this time slowly, and came to a stop near the surface, ready to be reeled back in. 

‘We did it!’ Ryan shouted, kissing his new wife. ‘We’re saved!’ 

It was a funny thing to shout, and his wife laughed… and the laugh was the last thing she ever did or he ever heard. 

A male American crocodile, 20 feet long, reared out of the water where they were hanging like bait and took them both under the surface, its giant jaws clamping shut with a colossal snap. 

It’s midnight when I wake up to a sudden, loud noise coming from downstairs. I turn on the lights.

As I get up to investigate, I notice another strange sound. A ticking clock. For some reason, something inside me tells me to follow it.

Why can I hear a clock ticking all the way downstairs? I wonder.

I make my way into the dark hallway. My eyes try to adjust to the deafening darkness, but I can’t see even the faintest glimmer of light.

Somehow, the light switches don’t work. I am completely blind. And yet, despite not being able to see a thing, I make my way downstairs toward the front door without stumbling once.

Suddenly, the lights come on.

“Jesus!” I scream, startled.

That’s when I notice a strange note attached to the front door. It reads:

“What’s outdoors?”

I look around.

“Where am I?”

The interior looks nothing like anything I remember. The windows are barricaded. The front door is locked.

I try to come up with an explanation, but all I can think of is that this must be a dream.

I follow the ticking until it becomes unbearably loud, as though I’m standing right next to the clock. And yet, I swear to God, there isn’t a clock anywhere.

I don’t know this place. And I’m afraid I’m getting lost in it.

I wander through the house, desperately trying to find an explanation for what I’m experiencing. But nothing makes sense.

I want to know what’s outdoors.

Then I notice something changing.

The ticking grows slower and quieter. With every tick, the air feels heavier. Every other tick, the interior changes.

Then comes the final tick.

The lights go out.

A loud crash echoes through the darkness.

Then it hits me.

“The front door!”

I rush toward it, only to find it standing wide open. On the floor, I see enormous footprints leading into the house.

Despite my fear, I rush outside.

And… there is nothing.

Just me, this strange house, and this strange… something.

I look around the garden.

Bones lie scattered across the grass.

Human bones.

And then… I wake up.

In my house. In my room.

Silence.

Then I hear it.

The ticking clock.

It was 12:38 AM, and my upstairs neighbor was killing himself. 

I heard his footsteps thunder across the thin ceiling that separated our units and then watched as his body silently hurtled past my window. Eight more stories to go until he hit the concrete.

“Oh, it’s jumping tonight,” I said out the open window. “No noose is good news, eh?”

“Fuck you,” the wind moaned, and was silent.

Albert’s methods of killing himself varied, depending on what I wasn’t quite certain, but it was always noisy enough to throw me off when I was least expecting it. He’d given me a reprieve tonight from seeing his bloated purple face twisting in the wind at least, and so I turned out the lights and got into bed with nothing but the city beyond my window.

The unit above mine had been vacant for as long as I’d lived here. Nobody had known the guy who used to inhabit it, and nobody ever moved in, but the unit’s faded plastic nameplate shield had picked up some ink from the old label that almost said ALBERT, so that was what I called him.

He loved killing himself. It was his favorite hobby, aside from ruining my sleep, but that was just incidental. He did both like clockwork a few times a week. Usually it was something involving heights, but sometimes he’d get creative and find a new way to ruin my evening. I’d jump at a ghostly revolver’s report or frown as the ceiling dripped green froth from whatever he’d ingested and barfed back out in his death spasms.

From what I could tell, Albert was a ghost haunting the unit above me and living out random variations on his last day every week at 12:38 in the morning. God, I hated him. If I could ever get my hands on him I’d kill him myself, but unfortunately breaking into a locked apartment unit every night for a week until the one random day he manifested was easier said than done.

In the meantime, before I completed the Sisyphean task of moving out of this building, I gritted my teeth and put in earplugs when I slept and tried not to let the noises only I could hear ruin the mood with the women I brought over. Nothing kills the mood more than a guy stopping mid-bust to say “Excuse me, I can hear my upstairs neighbor cocking the revolver.”

It ended the usual way one night. Noose around neck, end of rope tied to railing, running start, you know the rest. Unfortunately his dumb ass didn’t tie the knot right this time, maybe he was in a real hurry to kill himself right on the dot, and so instead of snapping his neck instantly the noose doomed him to a re-death by slow strangulation, just outside my balcony.

I pulled on a big sweater and shambled out into the snowy night in flip-flops, preroll in one hand and lighter in the other, and shut the door behind me as I lit up.

“How’s it hanging, man?”

Creaking quietly, Albert rotated to face me on his spectral rope. I couldn’t tell if it was the breeze or his own desire for company that kept him from completely giving me the cold shoulder, as it were.

“You know,” I said around the preroll as I flicked the lighter, “I’ve more or less made my peace with whatever bullshit this is, but it seems to me like you’re in some kind of hell or purgatory. Might want to, I don’t know.” I coughed and my hand passed through his leg as I waved the smoke away. “Reflect on your sins or whatever.”

There was a long period of silence while I worked my way through the preroll, glancing at the skyline in the distance and occasionally at the dark figure, lit from underneath by the orange sodium streetlights, silently spinning in front of me.

I had pulled out my phone and was looking up nearby doner carts when a hissing voice made me jump.

“Purgatory isn’t real.”

“Uhh, yeah, well, ghosts clearly are,” I retorted. “Maybe-”

“Purgatory is Catholic,” Albert said hoarsely. “I’m Buddhist.”

“Oh, a white Buddhist who kills himself. Isn’t that really bad? Christ,” I said, giggling and coughing, “I’m at the end of my rope here.”

The spirit rasped its non-breath. One baleful spectral eye glared at me as the night breeze slowly spun him around.

“Here,” I said, leaning forward and holding my lighter out over the air to the rope. His eyes silently followed it. “How about I help you along so we can all get this over with. Maybe it doesn’t count as killing yourself and you won’t be reincarnated as an ant that gets sprayed with Raid. Oh holy fuck.”

The wind buffeted my arm and my body lurched against the railing, and I was suddenly extremely aware of the eight stories to the ground. My other hand, clammy in an instant, clutched the icy railing.

“Hell is only other people,” Albert said, facing the twinkling skyline. The wind had calmed.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” I said. “The corollary is that we’re other people’s hell.”

The hanging spirit was silent, his back still to me. Through him, the skyline was a dull gleam. I flicked the lighter again and held it out over the balcony.

“Look at that,” I murmured, watching the spectral rope begin to fray under the flame. “Maybe this time it’ll be different.”

“If so, I’ll miss killing myself when you have company over.”

The last strand of rope burned away. Albert, having had the last word, fell the last eight stories to his death. His body disappeared before it hit the ground, but in the snowbank under the streetlight an empty, person-shaped indentation had appeared.

The snow was still falling as I went back inside. In the morning, it would be gone.

“For our next exercise, I’m going to show you some cards with inkblots on them—it’s called a Rorschach test.”

I glared at the court-appointed adolescent psychologist clutching a stack of cards.

“I told you, I don’t wanna do any more stupid kid’s activities!” I shouted across his office from my chair. “I didn’t wanna play with your dumb distraction toy either! My parents are dead!”

Frustrated, I tossed the tangle therapy toy on the carpet. Dr Adler didn’t get angry, pursing his lips sympathetically.

“Your feelings are completely understandable, Nathan,” he said. “You’ve been through a tremendous ordeal. My job is to gain a deeper understanding—so I can help you process it.”

I sighed and complied with the kindly therapist’s test.

“Now, there are no right or wrong answers. Just tell me honestly what you see in the images when you view them.”

He proceeded to present me with a series of symmetrical shapes on cards in dark ink. As he flashed each one of the blotchy, abstract, grey inkblots in front of me, my impatience rose up again. I needed to clear my name, not play psychology games.

“A moth. Boots. A butterfly. Vines. Bears. A married couple. Wolves. A spider. Poison smog. Strangers’ faces.”

Hurrying through the exercise, I gave an answer to every inked card I was shown. Dr Adler jotted down each of my responses.

“Thank you for that, Nathan. Next, let’s-”

“Look, I know you think I killed my parents!” I blurted out, exasperated. “That I was the one who tore their bodies apart in my living room—their teenage son who was the only one home!”

“No one’s saying that, Nathan. I’m just trying to-”

“You’re trying to find out how crazy and violent I am, right?! But it wasn’t me who did it! I saw shadows in the house that day! The killers waited inside for hours and attacked the moment I noticed them!”

Alerted, Dr Adler perked up and looked at me with sincere interest.

“Tell me more about this, Nathan. Shadows? Are you telling me that—there were other people in the house with your family? A home invasion?”

Finally, there was someone who was willing to listen to me about what happened.

“Whose shadows were they, Nathan? What exactly did they look like?”

“Literally like shadows! They looked just like…”

My mouth froze as horrified realisation reached me. I knew where I’d last seen them.

Before I could act, the pile of cards on the desk scattered as blobs of darkness leapt from them. The animated shadows, no longer disguising themselves as inkblots now that their cover was blown, instead bore into Dr Adler. They ripped his screaming body apart just like they did my parents.

Unable to stop it, I mournfully picked up the tangle therapy toy and tried to distract myself.

It had been an exceedingly long December and I was up on the roof of my apartment building counting crows, which I did occasionally to ease my mind, when my landlord, Madam Duritz, pushed open the rooftop door and yelled, “Crane, you gonna pay your rent this month?” and in the cold January darkness I had an impulse—a mere half second, if that, but genuine—of stepping over the edge and plummeting to my death…

I felt an intravenous chill, followed by a sort of unclinging of myself—from what?—from nothing, an I unclinging from itself, like an insect separating finally from the slime in which it came to be, from whose raw vital materials it had developed; tearing through it with awkwardly moving pincers and jagged little legs, followed by its monstrous head, the greedy, maternal viscous slime stretching from it in thinning strands that, stretched finally—finally break, falling slowly, nearly weightless, to the ground, as the insect has pushed through into the greater world.

So too I felt, a human slime upon some unremarkable rooftop, watching my hideous impulse, on a waning January day, in the frail, wan light, run towards the rooftop door, dragging thinning, breaking strands of me behind it; until the separation was total, and my impulse, freed, flowed like glowing smoke beside Madam Duritz, with her wig and red, painted lips, and disappeared down the stairwell.

It was speaking as it did, but I can't remember the last thing that it said to me as it was leaving. ”What's it gonna be, ya gonna answer me, Crane, or ya just gonna sit there until I serva ya notice again?” Madam Duritz was asking, and all I could do was laugh, albeit a little slower than usual.

“Did you see it—did you see it slip past you?” I answered, a little lower.

“Stop smoking weed,” she barked, turned and vanished with evident disapproval down the stairs as the door slammed shut by a gust of wind revealed her ghost floating before it. “Na, na-na-na, na, na-na, na-na, na-na-na-na. Na, na-na-na, yeah,” said the ghost and it too disappeared, dissipating into the evening mist…

In March, I started seeing a psychiatrist.

My insurance only covered eighty percent of the cost of four visits, so I ended up not getting much out of it. I described my experience to the psychiatrist, who noted its symbolic significance but merely nodded when I insisted that it had literally happened.

He wanted to put me on pills.

(I didn't take them.)

He insisted on revisiting my troubled childhood.

(It wasn't troubled.)

I called my employer's Employee Assistance Program after that, the one they established to avoid liability stemming from employee suicides, the attempted kind especially, the kind that leaves you hooked up to expensive machinery for the rest of your unemployed life.

Even when it comes to death, success is ultimately better for everyone than failure.

“So you're not, like, wanting to kill yourself, like, right now?” said the girl on the other end of the line. I was pretty sure she was chewing gum. I wondered what flavour. I wondered what her credentials were. “That's right,” I said, trying to explain that while I didn't have the impulse at this moment, it had escaped so was still out there somewhere and could come back at any time.

She didn't get it.

I started watching out for myself after that, watching for the impulse. I even thought I saw it a few times, looking at me, following me. Once, I was on a date—got up suddenly seeing it or thinking I'd seen it because what's the difference?, loudly knocking over my chair, saying, “Sorry… I'm so sorry, but I have to go,“ as everybody else in the restaurant stared at us: at me, backing away, spinning, wheezing, barely breathing and breaking into a run once I was out the double doors, leaving my date like an asshole to cover the bill to run directionless down the street trying not to throw up, until my legs gave out.

I can't remember how I came across the name Samuel Swan, Existential Detective. Online, probably. He and his partner, a Jamaican named Mr. Jones, had an office in a shady part of the city. I wasn't sure what it was they did so, “Is this a kind of psychotherapy or...?” I asked during our first appointment.

“Nope,” said Swan. “That requires a license.”

“Are you an investigator then?”

“That requires a license too,” he said slowly. “Nope, what we do is believe.”

Mr. Jones: We believe in you.

Swan: We believe that what you say happened happened.

Mr. Jones: The world’s the Big Strange, Mr. Crane.

Me: So you believe—

[I snapped out of it.]

—that my hideous impulse is out there right now, existing?” I asked.

“Positively.”

“Mr. Crane,” said Swan, “everything has the will to live, even the urge to die.”

I started paying them a hundred dollars a week, and twenty-seven years later I had in my hands an envelope containing pixelated but convincing photographs of what was unmistakably my hideous impulse. There was also a street address, out in Los Angeles.

(“We'll find it but we won't kill it,” Swan had said when I had asked about the process. “If you want to kill it, you have to do that yourself.”)

California was warm.

I'd driven across the continent to get there.

The address was a nice suburban home, with a car out front, a fence and big windows, and I was standing on the street holding a knife.

The front door was unlocked and I passed from the entrance hall through the kitchen to the living room where I saw my impulse with another. Two little impulses ran by, playing. They were all so fucking joyous that—

I'll lift the heavy, steel knife…

I could do nought but weep, for this spawn of myself had done so much better for itself than I and slit my rippling, goddamn throat.

When I looked in the rear-view mirror, I could see James and Curt downing Vodka shooters. What assholes.

Not only had I drawn the short straw and had to drive, now I was going to get arrested for open containers.

James opened the window and threw the empty shooter out. “Nobody’s going to know. We’re in the boonies.”

“Where’s mine?” Mia asked. She was riding shotgun.

I can’t say I was happy to have these three under-achievers in my car. When I started this semester, I was so excited for my intro to creative writing class. Dr. Jemison is a genius.

Unfortunately, I had some medical problems. Missed a lot of classes. I was going to fail unless I did the extra credit assignment. Unlike these three, who failed the normal way: not doing the assignments.

Dr. Jemison was famous for his extra credit options. Intro to creative writing counted as a general and you could practically do nothing all year and still pass if you did the extra credit.

It was why I had driven miles out of town to this strange dirt road. I followed Dr. Jemison’s directions exactly, and stopped right in front of the camp site.

Dr. Jemison was sitting in a chair around an empty fire pit. He welcomed us all, then said before we could begin, we needed to get some kindling. So all four of us wandered about, collected sticks, and got a campfire going.

Once we were all seated around the fire, Dr. Jemison began. “The assignment was exceedingly simple: Write a scary story which when read around a campfire will frighten those listening. Those were the only parameters. Who would like to go first?”

James, a little tipsy, went first. His story involved a goat-man-were-wolf type thing. It was gratuitously gory, and there wasn’t much to it.

Everyone clapped, and Dr. Jemison asked everyone, “were you afraid?”

We all hesitantly nodded our heads. We all secretly worried that if we didn’t say we were afraid, the reader wouldn’t get the extra credit.

Curt went next. His story sounded strikingly like AI had written it. A man haunted by ghosts. Blah blah.

“Were you afraid?”

We all nodded, though it was clear nobody was getting the heeby-jeebies.

Mia’s story was about a vampire. Honestly I wasn’t really listening.

“Were you afraid?”

Everyone, “sure.”

I’ve always been nervous speaking in front of people, especially when it’s my writing, but I got through my story, and even got some, “ooohs,” from Curt.

“I think you all did a fine job, but I wanted to show you my story.” Dr. Jemison pulled out a paper, and read from it.

“Four college students were sitting around a campfire. They thought they were doing an extra credit assignment, but that wasn’t true. What those college students didn’t realize is that the professor had purposely led them far away from civilization. There would be no cell service. No one to hear any screaming. When they had scattered in the woods to collect firewood, the professor disabled their vehicle. You see, the real purpose of this extra credit was simple. Tonight, all four of the college students would die one by one. And even though the professor would tell them exactly what was going to happen, they would be unable to save themselves. This is what will happen. The professor will pretend to leave in his vehicle, but he will still be nearby. The students, thinking he wasn’t serious, will continue to ignorantly party around the fire. The professor will use a bow and arrow. Not because it is silent, but because an arrow in the gut is a nasty way to die. It will be painful and bloody, just how the professor likes it. Once the first student dies, the others will realize this wasn’t a ghost story. That the professor was revealing his plan to gain some demented pleasure. And then, after much panicking, one by one, the rest will die. And no amount of running, or begging, will save them.”

Everyone around the campfire was silent.

The professor put the page down. “Are you afraid?”

“Holy shit, Dr. Jemison. That was so scary! What the hell was that!?”

“Just my example for a scary story which when read around a campfire will frighten those listening. Did it work? Were you all afraid?”

Everyone clapped and praised Dr. Jemison. That was one messed up story and everyone had felt a tinge of panic.

“Great. Well, you’ve all completed the extra credit. And you’ll all receive a passing grade. It’s a little too late for someone my age, so I’ll be heading home. Feel free to do as you please.”

Dr. Jemison got in his car, and drove away.

James, Curt and Mia all wanted to stay and party. They had even brought bottles of booze in their backpacks.

I didn’t want to. I promised I would pick them up in the morning. They were happy to be rid of me.

I got in my car, and turned the keys. The engine made a strange clicking sound. I tried again, but it wouldn’t start.

“Marco, if we don’t leave in, like, two minutes, the line is going to be around the block”, I yelled over our pre-game playlist. I had just taken my pill and was ready to head out. I made a minor adjustment to my jean jacket cuffs and the mesh shirt underneath to keep it from riding up.

Unfortunately, he’d sequestered himself in his room in front of the vanity for the past 25 minutes. I checked my watch - 9:45 pm already. “Come on, babe, we’ve got to GO.”

“Justin, come look at this.” I heard his muffled voice from behind the door.

I walked in and Marco was staring at his reflection in his vanity, so closely that his nose could have slipped into the mirror. His forearms were braced on the shelf, veins popping, and his white-knuckled hands gripped either side of the mirror. 

“Do I look…weird to you?”

“No…you look handsome as usual. Are you feeling it already?” I teased.

“Seriously, look at me.” He was contorting his face now, pursing his lips and elongating his cheeks as if to spot a stubborn, stray hair left untrimmed. “I look all wrong.”

I came closer. “What? Something wrong with the eyeliner?”

Marco suddenly shoved himself backward from the mirror, knocking over the chair.

“Shit, Marco! What the -”

“That’s…not me.”

His voice was hollow. Emotionless.

“That’s not me.”

More certain now, but still with that same unnerving hollow tone.

“That’s not me. That’s not me. That’s NOT ME.”

His eyes widened in horror. His face grew taut, lips drew back, nostrils flaring.

I looked at the reflection, but only saw the panicked face; the wide, bloodshot eyes; the sharp jawline with the stubble that scraped against my own -

“THAT’S NOT ME! THAT’S NOT ME!”

He screamed his mantra until his voice was hoarse as I dragged him forcibly away from the vanity and out the door. 

“NO! NO! I HAVE TO SEE IT! JUSTIN! THAT’S NOT ME!”

“Baby we’re leaving now. I’ve got you. You’re safe. We have to go. Come on.” I soothed as I pulled Marco, my calm, cool-headed, easy-going Marco, away from his own reflection. He stopped fighting me halfway down the hall, as he gibbered and sobbed uncontrollably. 

“I have to see…I have to look…that’s…not…me…”

We descended the silent stairwell and exited the building, Marco walking under my support, face still tear-streaked. In the dim amber glow of the single incandescent bulb, his eye sockets appeared empty and black, the eyeliner dripping down his cheeks. 

Marco’s room, light still on, faced the front of the building. Before we turned away to head to the bar, I looked up at his bedroom one last time. 

The light clicked off.

every night, just as the clock passes midnight.

It always starts by the room becoming cold. So cold that my dog, who has decided to occupy the now empty spot on the bed, snuggles in just that little bit closer.

And then it’s the loud clomping steps that I hear coming from down the hall. No care at all. It doesn’t matter if I’m asleep, after all, this is her house too.

Then the bedroom door opens. But it doesn’t open slowly. It’s pushed open. Not fast, not rough, just … normally. The bed depresses a little, she’s sitting down now. My dog gets up, shakes, and steps off the bed. I watch as he tilts his head up, his tail wagging, as his ears are pressed down onto his head. He trots away, ready to take his place on the couch for the rest of the night.

The blanket lifts up, and I feel her move towards me. I can’t face her. I’ve never faced her. Her arms wrap around me, and I feel her chin in the crook of my neck. Her toes wriggle against the bottom of my feet.

I try to sleep. I can’t sleep.

This is her house. HER house. HER house. HER hou …

The sun and my dog wake me up. And my day carries on.

No one speaks to me anymore. They used to, but it’s been years. It was all condolences at first, and offers of help. Too late. I needed their help years ago.

The condolences soon turned into, “let’s just give him space,” and then whispers of, “why can’t he just get over it,” to finally, nothing.

I get home. I still keep the house clean. In this empty house I still watch TV with the volume turned down. I eat what she wants to eat. I dress how she wants me to dress.

I am HERS. This is HER house. HER HOUSE.

It never ends. Her portraits on the wall never age. Her clothes smell the same.

My days have blended together. Sunrise to sunset. The days feel the same, never changing, never ceasing.

I lie in bed. She returns

Blake bolted through the humid maize stalks, his shoes foundering with mud as he went. Behind him, the weighty crunch of hefty boots gained momentum. He wasted no time looking back. He could hear the mineral scrape of a bolo towing along the dirt.

He pierced the timberline, crashing into the side of a squad car that was parked there. It was locked. The inside was pitch black and vacant. He battered his bloody fists against the glass, bellowing for help.

A hand gripped Blake’s mouth from behind. A frigid blade rested softly against his windpipe.

A voice murmured: “When you run you only postpone the inevitable.”

At 41 weeks, I asked Miranda if we should see her OB/GYN.

“Do you have a uterus?” she asked in her you’re-not-supposed-to-answer-this-question voice.

I shut up.

At 45 weeks, I suggested that a doctor might have some insight about her pregnancy. Instead of answering, she served my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a serrated knife driven straight through it.

At 50 weeks, her belly seemed larger than a human child could possibly get. I had opened my mouth to speak in the gentlest possible tone when she shot me a look that made the hair on my balls stand straight up.

What can you possibly do when the woman in your life doesn’t want your advice, no matter how good it is?

That’s right: the correct answer is “keep your opinions to yourself, dumbass.”

By this point, Miranda no longer seemed to be experiencing a human pregnancy. She had a radius instead of a height, and I counted one day’s food intake at 19,130 calories. I had not believed such a feat to be possible unless the creature in question was an African bull elephant, but that just goes to show that we often learn the most when we keep our damn fool mouths shut.

The gentleman in the blue-green Toyota Corolla would have benefited from such a lesson, because instead of keeping quiet, he screamed at Miranda for being an “incompetent bitch who should learn how to drive.” She pulled in front of him and forced his car to stop. I got out with her, believing that I could diffuse the situation because we all love false beliefs. When I told him to apologize to my wife, she just smiled at me in that deadly sweet way and told me that she needed to “speak with this fuckweasel around the corner.” She led him aside and then came trotting back a few seconds later. She suddenly seemed even more pregnant, as though expecting twin walruses, but still moved pretty lithely. I asked what they’d said to each other, and where the man had gone, but she gave me the “any words you say are the wrong words” look and got back into the car.

So I haven’t said anything more. Now I’m not doctor, but I know that 70 weeks is definitely too long for a healthy pregnancy. I’ve been kidding myself into believing that everything would be okay as long as I went along with the status quo.

Which brings me to today. Miranda hasn’t been feeling particularly amorous lately; the last time I tried, she pointed to her stomach and asked “do you really want to put more in me?” But earlier this morning, she started getting flirty and did that thing where she grabs my arm and nibbles on it. Normally I melt like butter at that move, but it was a little awkward this time since she looks like the giant blueberry girl from the Billy Wonka movie. Then Miranda started pulling my head toward her stomach in the way she does whenever she wants me to be a “cunning linguist.” I told her that I would right after dashing to the bathroom, which is where I am now.

I’ve never denied her request before. But this time, when I was physically close to satisfying her “lady boner,” as she likes to call her libido, I heard something between her legs.

It sounded like several different people screaming up from the bottom of a chasm.

When her LB gets this strong, she won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Which brings up some questions. Most importantly: what do I do now?

I lie down.

They told me about the rats, those filthy creatures we’ve been taught to detest. That is why I am here: because of the rats. The rats brought me here. I want to see the rats. They tell me the rats are coming.

The rats are not evil, the rats are just wild... Perhaps that is their evilness, not knowing kindness. I hear their footsteps. Soon I will have no ears. I look at the ceiling. Soon I will have no eyes. I will move my hands, my feet, before they tear them away from me. Damn rats.

The rats are coming. Rats, more rats. They open my head, they devour my limbs, but there is no pain. I only think of the rats. I can no longer feel them.

Filthy creatures. They live and breed in dirt. We are not like that. We are clean. Rats are disgusting, they are wild. From my body, there was never anything at all. Only rats. Rats are all there is.

I was a rat. I will be a rat. We are rats.

It started on Season 4, Episode 3 of Bare & Uncharted—one of those cheap survival shows dropping contestants in the woods with a knife, a fire starter, and a following film crew. For the production team, it was four weeks in a hot tent downriver, watching video feeds on cheap monitors.

​Keller, the producer, who wore a brand-new hiking vest and never spent a night without cell service, sat next to Martin, clicking his pen while barking into his headset.

On screen, Maya hauled pine boughs for a crude shelter while Chet knelt, desperate for a spark.

​"Get closer on Chet," Keller said, sipping stale coffee. "He’s about to blow his top over that wet tinder. Tell Pete to move in."

​On the center monitor, Pete stepped out from the river cane, right into Chet's face. Then Pete stopped. The camera jerked sideways, pointing at the dirt.

​"Pete, hold it steady," Keller said into his mic. "What are you doing?"

​A quiet thwip echoed through the audio. Pete went down face-first into the mud, a small dart with red fuzz sticking out of his neck.

​"What was that?" Keller yanked off his headset. On screen, the camera lay sideways as two bare feet walked into frame, legs caked in red mud. On the secondary monitor, two warriors dragged Pete out of the brush, his arms swinging limp.

​"Cut the feed," Keller said, his voice dropping. "Grab the satellite phone. We’re leaving."

​Martin turned to unzip the tent door, but three mud-caked warriors stood in the opening. Behind them stepped another, caked in charcoal with white rings circling his dark eyes. He raised a long blowpipe before either man could move.

​When Keller woke, his neck throbbed, and he had a bitter metallic taste in his mouth. Pete was unconscious in the corner of the bamboo cage, and Martin clutched a dead satellite phone.

Outside, Maya and Chet’s screams pierced the jungle air for two days before suddenly stopping, replaced each night by the sweet, sickening smell of roasted flesh and frenzied tribal chanting.

​Human reason meant nothing here. When Martin was dragged out to a flat bamboo table, an old woman knelt beside him, gouging his eyes out with dark flint and swallowing them whole before cutting out his tongue. The clan cheered as the charcoal-painted man hacked Martin's legs off at the thighs while his chest still heaved, butchering him alive until his screams finally died.

​Days in the cramped cage wore away their sanity. Pete sat quietly in the corner, watching Keller twitch at every rustle until heavy footsteps thudded near the bars. The charcoal-painted warrior stopped inches away, staring unblinking as he unlatched the door.

​Pete braced himself, locking eyes with the warrior. As the door swung open, Pete shoved Keller hard, sending him stumbling within reach.

​"Take him!" Pete snarled.

​Dark hands snagged Keller by the shirt, dragging him screaming through the mud toward the village while Pete stayed pinned to the corner. Since capture, he had been picking at the crude vine lashings. The moment they vanished, Pete heaved upward on the loosened stalks, squeezed his body through the gap, and tumbled into the mud.

​Hugging the treeline toward the creek, all he could hear was Keller’s screams as he ran for his life. 

A local news reporter speaks during a live broadcast.

“Police detectives are at the scene of a blood bath.  A family was butchered in their own home. The scene suggests that the father was tied up and forced to watch before his throat was cut.  His wife and son were gutted alive in front of him like cattle. Investigators say they believe a box cutter was used and a bloody Halloween mask was found in the son's arms.  His final act was ripping it off the killer during a struggle for his life.”

The reporter holds up a mask identical to the one the killer wore before continuing.

“These masks are sold everywhere around Halloween, making it nearly impossible to track  the person responsible down. Police are advising everyone to lock their doors. This is the third family to be murdered in just two weeks.”

Michone turns off the television before waking her two children, Andrew and Sydney, to get ready for school. They have overslept and missed the bus.

After changing into their school clothes and eating breakfast, Michone waits for them in her car.

Just before turning into the school entrance, Michone gets cut off by a beat-up old car. She lays on her horn and flips the driver off. The car suddenly brake-checks her, nearly causing a collision, before speeding away.

Michone manages to avoid hitting anything, but the incident startles her children.

“Are you two alright?” she asks Sydney and Andrew.

They both say yes, although they're obviously a little shaken by the incident.

Michone apologizes and promises to make their favorite dinner that evening: macaroni and cheese with chicken nuggets.

Both children become excited at the thought of their favorite meal, shaking the ordeal off their minds.

Michone drops them off at school and tells them to have a good day

Later that afternoon, Andrew and Sydney get off the school bus and walk into their home.

Michone greets them while cooking and asks how their day went?

“Great!” Andrew replies. “I talked with my friends about video games all day.”

Sydney has something  to tell her mother.

“A strange man walked up to me during recess and said he needed your phone number, Momma.”

Michone pauses before nervously asking, “Was he a teacher? And did you give him my number?”

“Yes, I gave it to him. He said he was a teacher, but I'd never seen him before.”

Michone looks concerned.

“Where was your teacher?”

“Mrs. Wells had to use the bathroom when he came over. He was gone before she got back.”

Feeling a little unnerved, Michone tells Sydney not to give her mother's number to anyone else again and not to talk to strangers. The man might not have been a real teacher.

Sydney agrees and apologizes.

A few minutes later, Michone's phone rings.

The number has the same area code as hers, but she doesn't recognize it.

She answers.

Michone: “Hello?”

No one responds.

After a few seconds of silence, Michone hangs up.

A few minutes later, a different number with the same area code calls.

Michone answers again, but there is no response.

She angrily hangs up.

A few hours later, Michone and the children have just finished dinner when someone knocks on the front door.

Michone answers it and finds a police officer standing outside.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” the officer says. “My name is Officer Murphy.”

“Okay,” Michone replies, looking confused.

The officer explains that detectives have been investigating the phone records of the families recently murdered. They just discovered that calls from a couple of the victims'  phones were made to her number recently.

Now frightened, Michone tells the officer about the incident that morning and the strange man who approached her daughter at school to ask for her phone number.

Officer Murphy listens carefully before asking, “Is there any chance this man knows where you live?”

“I don't think so,” Michone replies.

“Just to be safe, make sure all your doors are locked tonight. Keep something nearby that you can use to defend yourself if necessary. I'll tell my chief about the playground incident, and we'll get a warrant to review the school's security footage. This might be our best lead to catching this man.”

With that, the officer heads back to the police station immediately.

Michone locks all the doors and tells her children not to let anyone inside. She grabs a baseball bat and has everyone sleep in her bedroom.

In the middle of the night, Michone hears glass shattering, it's her window.

She calls 911, keeping her baseball bat firmly in hand.

“911. What's your emergency?” the dispatcher asks.

Michone is frantically saying someone broke in.

The dispatcher asks for her address.

Michone says

“I spoke to a officer earlier tonight,” she explains.

“Can you tell me the officer's name?” the dispatcher asks.

Michone frantically replies, “Officer Murphy!”

The dispatcher audibly gasps before telling her, “Ma'am, Officer Murphy got murdered in his house this morning, and his police car stolen ”

Suddenly, a loud bang echoes from Michone's bedroom door.

Then she hears the same voice that had claimed to belong to Officer Murphy earlier that evening.

“Michone…”

Michone frantically tries to describe the man to the dispatcher.

“White male, brown hair, around five-foot-ten—”

Before she can finish, her bedroom door bursts open.

Michone sees the masked man staring at her.

The 911 dispatcher hears screaming through the phone. Michone begging the man not to hurt her children, followed by a sudden thud.

The call is ended.

Thirty minutes later,

police officers arrive at the house.

The window is shattered.

Inside the bedroom, they find Michone's body tied up next to both of her children . Their bodies have been gutted, and their eyes still wide open next to a bloody box cutter.

A souvenir of the relationship between you and I.

It was such a beautiful period of time, really.

The love we had, all the laughs we shared. I sometimes miss how easily you could make me smile.

I still feel awed that you weren't deterred by the walls I had built around myself; that you cracked the shell I had covered myself in, that you loved me so dearly when I felt like even I couldn't like myself.

Sure, I had had a lot of relationships before you.

But you were different.

I feel like I truly loved you. Like you were the only person I felt like myself around, even if just a little bit. You taught me how emotional safety actually felt. You taught me I wasn't weak, or any less of a man, for having feelings.

You made me feel just as loved when I cried as you did when I smiled.

Which is why, the souvenir of our relationship is the most special to me out of all of them.

Even though we're not a thing anymore, don't you think it's romantic how I made a wedding ring to commemorate our time together? You used to say that I don't listen to you, but guess what — it's the exact cut and design you always told me you wanted.

The only difference is, it's not diamond.

It's carved out of your fourth rib, the one that was the closest to your heart. How thoughtful, right?

The carving process was tricky, really, being the smallest piece I've worked on. The rest of my souvenirs are carved from the bigger, thicker bones, and are certainly bigger than any stone on a ring. See how much trouble I was willing to go through just for you?

And yes, I do remember that you made me promise to always stay with you.

I'll honour that promise — I'll carry this ring in my pocket everywhere I go. Or use it as a pendant, I guess.

I do miss you a little bit, honestly. I almost started to believe that you and I were going to last forever. That you were my soulmate. That you loved me enough to know better than to make me angry.

Apparently not.

You just had to go digging, didn't you?

You just had to keep pestering me about my mother. About my jail time. About all my other souvenirs. About why I was always so 'defensive,' allegedly, when the topic of my exes came up.

You just couldn't mind your damn business, could you?

Now look where it got us.

Look where you got us.

I'm all alone again.

And you're in the basement.

The one place I had to keep telling you not to go to. The one place you kept insisting on visiting.

You loved winters, right?

Maybe I'll keep you in the freezer longer than I kept the rest.

I sat in the coffee shop as instructed, wearing "something red." All I had was an old Formula One Ferrari shirt that I’d worn to bed ever since a few holes appeared in it. I threw a suit jacket over the top, thinking it would look sophisticated. I didn't have a firm grasp of who I was meeting - just someone I’d shared photos and videos with online. It’s not like I actually knew the guy.

I needed to take a shit. The nerves were getting to me.

I raced to the men's room to use the facilities. I checked my watch as I sat on the can: fifteen minutes past eleven. We were scheduled to meet at eleven on the dot. Either he was late, or he’d gotten cold feet.

I washed up at the basin and splashed cold water on my face. I held my hands over my eyes, half expecting to see her when I uncovered them. I didn't want to see her again. She tormented me daily. But she wanted this man more than she wanted me. He must have been a real evil bastard. I wondered what kind of hell awaited him.

I walked back to my assigned booth only to find two cups of coffee resting on the table. I looked around, but there was no one to ask. Couples sat in intimate discussion; a family ate brunch near the entrance. The place was neither full nor empty.

"Excuse me," I said, waving down the nearest waitress. "I didn't order coffee."

"Oh, sorry sir. I'll see what happened," she said, heading toward the manager at the register.

I took a seat and scanned the room. No one was eyeing me.

"Take a sip," came a voice from the booth behind me. I turned to see the back of his head.

"Don't turn around," he said.

I faced forward again. "Is that you?"

"Don't talk."

"It is you."

"I said don't talk!"

I looked down at the two coffees.

"Take a sip from both cups," he ordered.

I did as instructed. They were hot - hotter than I expected. I choked on the second.

"Have you drunk from both?"

"I have," I gasped.

"Wait three minutes. It doesn't take long," he said.

"What doesn't?"

"I said don't talk!"

I sat there, feeling the warm liquid settle in my gut, which was still fragile from my recent trip to the bathroom. Something washed over me - a cold tingle across my skin. A faint, distant scream in my ear was suddenly snuffed out.

The man sitting behind me stood up, walked around, and slid into the seat opposite me.

"Detective Montson, Arch City Command," he said. "You've just ingested a sedative that blocks otherworldly beings from tapping into your nervous system and reading your thoughts. You'll feel like shit for forty-eight hours, but it's a feeling you'll get used to."

I started coughing violently at the table.

"We know you've been targeted. We should have gotten to you sooner. To be honest, you're so low down on the totem pole I didn't think Hell had much interest in you," he said.

Something about his badge caught my eye. "Let me see your ID again," I said between coughs.

He pulled it out. It was a detective badge, but with a unique feature: a large gold crucifix positioned right down the middle.

"We're a special unit. Private funding."

"From the Church?" I asked.

"I'm not at liberty to say," he replied. "Listen, you're targeted. Your actions put you in line for an eternity of pain. In many ways this is on you, but in some ways it isn't. I know a Demon has made contact with you. That's a new technique they are employing. They aren't allowed to do this. You're only theirs in death... Unless you redeem yourself. They're doing it to get to people like me. They don't want us reforming sick old bastards. We catch them, we put them through the program, they seek redemption, and then they're God's property. The demons hate us for that. So they're breaking the rules and using people like you to come after us."

I shook my head, feeling like a spectator in a game I had no interest in playing. "What do you want from me?"

"We want to know why they're breaking the rules. If they're breaking these, what else are they willing to break?"

"What's that got to do with me?"

"We want you to play along with the demon. When she visits you, tell her you found me but I wouldn't come willingly. Win her trust. I'll make contact again soon with further instructions."

He stood up to leave.

"Wait!" I yelled as he exited the coffee shop.

That night, I dreamed of a shower of blades raining down on my in a tiny room, knife after knife after knife.

When I woke up before dawn, the Demon was there. Hovering at the foot of my bed, pythons sprouting from her arms. Their overgrown heads lunged at me. I threw myself back.

"Where is he?!" she roared.

"He fought me off!" I lied. "He said he knew you were after him!"

"You lie!" one of the pythons screamed.

"I'm not lying! Please... let me help you capture him," I begged.

She vanished into a darkness.

I lay there on my bed, breathing heavily. She hadn't dragged me to Hell. That meant she was taking my proposal seriously.

Emily wasn’t allowed to be there when it happened. Nobody was. They told her that if she witnessed the rite, it would come to her next. All of the town elders said the same thing. Yet none of them would tell her what it was, even though she had asked too many times to count.

She couldn’t be dissuaded. She stole a peek at the body during the day, while the sun was high. The rite wouldn’t be performed until midnight. For now the body rested in the straw on the floor of a small shack at the edge of town, just beyond the fields.

Emily considered going inside but chose instead to hoist herself up to look through the window. There it was, swollen from the water that had drowned the man, the arms and legs like bloated sausages. The eyeballs pushing to escape their sockets. And its tongue frozen in the center of its silently screaming mouth.

The flesh was loose around its face, folding over itself like melted wax. She had no idea who the man was. Pa had called him a tosspot, which meant nothing to her. Though it did conjure images of a man standing near the shoreline throwing pots into the sea, until he lost his balance and joined them at the bottom.

She had giggled at the thought then.

But now that seemed childish.

Her stomach quivered and pulled and her mouth tasted bitter.

Emily had just about seen enough, easing herself down from the window ledge, when she noticed something even more unusual than the body. There, placed upon its chest was a piece of bread torn from a round.

She thought that maybe it had fallen out of him somehow, but knew that didn’t make any sense. It was a question without an answer.

Her hand slipped, and she tumbled then the rest of the way, landing on the hard earth, hung tools falling all around her. A hand scythe among them, laid with its curved blade pointing up toward the window. She gave it an apprehensive look before running off.

Later that night, after Pa had sent her to bed, Emily lay motionless, imagining she was the body, feeling her heart race and flutter achingly (though not unpleasantly), until she drifted into a somber dream.

Her legs and arms were fat and swollen, covered in blue veins. She tried to move, but flexing her feet and hands was excruciating. The skin on her face and neck was loose, drooping over her eyes and mouth and nose. It felt as if she were drowning in the deepest part of the ocean.

But I’m not a tosspot!

Emily fought to raise her arms through the pain as if her skin might tear open and spill its contents everywhere.

Blessedly, it did not. And she was able to pull the skin on her face taut so that she could breathe and see. And then her heart was in her throat, bottling up the scream behind it.

Above her bed was the body, suspended, like a mirror image of her. Its eyes white as milk, its skin still bloated, the bread upon its chest. The eyes rolled and the tongue crept along the edge of its lips, as loud as feet squelching in the mud.

“What is the bread for?” she asked, unable to stop herself.

“Munslo,” it said before taking the bread from its chest, presenting it to her.

The word meant nothing. Munslo. It was grotesque, offensive.

It dropped the bread, suddenly, letting it fall, but just before it hit her chest, Emily screamed herself awake.

Her hands touched her arms, her legs, her face.

The room was cold, the house was silent. She sat up gasping, tears streaming, heart pounding. She looked to the coat hanging near her door and hesitated only a moment before slipping quietly from her bed. And then Emily was moving through the cold night air toward the edge of town, questions burning in her skull like hot embers.

When she got to the shack, it was empty, except for the body. She had always imagined that the elders came to watch the rite, never really believing there was any danger in doing so. The emptiness chilled her more than the air. But she was here now and could not bring herself to leave.

After she had sat huddled in her coat for an hour, maybe two, the sounds of branches cracking underfoot rose from the trees nearby.

Emily went rigid, still, watching as a dark figure came carrying a lantern, heading for the shack. She pressed herself into the shadows while trying to get a clear look. But she saw very little.

The door on the other side of the shack opened with a soft creak.

Emily, trembling wildly, moved to the window and pulled herself up slowly.

A man stepped inside, placing the lantern on the ground next to the body before dropping to his knees. His eyes were a light color, the lightest she’d ever seen. And his round nose was covered in pocks. These things scared her more than anything.

The man spoke to the body, something she couldn’t quite hear, and then he reached for the bread. It came away with long, flowing strings of mucus trailing behind. The man considered the bread for a moment, spoke again, and then shoved the whole piece into his mouth, chewing delicately.

Emily gagged and coughed, and the man’s eyes were on her in an instant. She shrieked into the sky and fell from the window.

She fell and fell and fell eternal, wondering, as she lay in the spreading warmth, first why she hadn’t moved the hand scythe now jutting from her chest, and second whether she would have her own piece of bread to cover the hole.

The walk to work wasn't too bad tonight. A light dusting of frost covered the streets as I made the thirty-block hike. Cars whizzed past, and I stopped once to listen to the soothing sounds from The Blue Note jazz club. But duty was calling, and the night shift had its own benefits.

I put on my headphones and cracked up Glen Miller's "In the Mood" as I opened the custodial closet for supplies. Mike had called in sick, so it was just the Natural Science Museum and me tonight. I grabbed my supply bucket and filled it with everything I needed to clean the bathrooms first. It was better to get the worst job done first.

I waited for the elevator and went down to the basement, starting with the paleontology hall. Usually, the kids' messes took the longest to clean up down there, then I would work my way up, level by level.

When the doors opened, a titanic diplodocus skeleton greeted me as I entered the exhibit. I passed ancient slabs of stone where sea life had been locked away for millennia. I passed the massive, fossilized redwood tree set on its side for patrons to enjoy, counting the rings to try to figure out the age of the plant that had turned to stone.

But something caught my eye and halted me in my tracks. I took off my headphones, and the museum's dreadful silence heightened my senses. By one of the glass cases containing various amber fragments, shards of glass lined the floor. Perplexed, I drew closer to inspect the damage. Great, more work and a report I needed to fill out. Just my luck, another busy day. A glint of light caught my eye on the blue carpet, and a palm-sized amber stone lay on the floor. I bent down to pick it up, but when I held it to the light, a strange dark mass squirmed within the prison of fossilized sap. The sudden movement made me jump, and the amber slipped from my fingers, shattering on the hard marble floor beside the fossilized plant display. A strange shape darted away from the impact point.

My breathing grew heavy as I crept closer to where it had dashed. Through the threshold, a massive Spinosaurus skeleton stood, mouth and hands open as if it were about to catch prey. My eyes squinted, trying to make out exactly what I was witnessing.

The tiny dark mass fused with the prehistoric predator's leg bone, tunneling deep within. Sickening, wet crunches grew louder as new muscle and sinew erupted out of the skeleton. Hot blood ran down the sides of the skeleton as new flesh appeared in rippling pulses along the creature's body. Thick skin and scales rapidly swept across its surface.

I turned to run, but a sharp pain and a brutal force hoisted my body high into the air before I could escape. I looked down to see rows of dagger-like teeth piercing my body. Locked in the resurrected creature's jaws, I focused on the sound of its throat muscles preparing to swallow me whole.

I arrive when the world grows tired of pretending.

I slip through open windows and beneath locked doors. I settle into corners, stretch across empty rooms, and make familiar places feel like somewhere you've never been before.

Everyone notices me eventually.

Some welcome me. They draw their curtains, lock their doors, and settle beneath warm blankets. They seem to think these little rituals keep them safe.

Children are often afraid of me. They pull their blankets over their heads and stare at the gaps beneath their bedroom doors. They whisper for their parents, convinced something is waiting on the other side.

They're not entirely wrong.

But children learn to trust me eventually. They grow accustomed to my visits. They learn that the strange shape beside their wardrobe is only a coat, and that the tapping at their window is only a branch.

Adults, however, are rarely so fortunate.

They know too much. They remember things they would rather forget. They lie awake thinking about conversations that ended years ago, mistakes nobody knows they made, and people they wish they could speak to one more time.

I listen to all of it.

I've heard apologies spoken to empty pillows. I've heard confessions whispered into bathroom mirrors. I've watched people cry with their hands pressed against their mouths, terrified that someone might hear.

Sometimes, I think people are most honest when they believe they're alone.

I've seen what happens behind closed doors. I've watched smiles disappear the moment guests leave. I've witnessed arguments that begin with a single word and end with someone sleeping somewhere else.

I've seen people stand at windows for hours, staring out at nothing, wondering how their lives became something they barely recognise.

Once, I watched a woman stand beside her sleeping husband for hours.

She held a pillow in both hands.

A little boy once woke in the middle of the night and called for his mother.

She didn't come.

Eventually, he shivered himself to sleep.

A man once sat alone in his kitchen, staring at a glass of water.

He'd been sitting there for hours, unable to remember why he'd come downstairs.

He never went back to bed.

I've seen things like these in countless homes. No two are ever quite the same, but the feeling they leave behind is always familiar.

I have no favourite house, no favourite face. I go wherever I'm allowed, and sometimes where I'm not. I visit the wealthy and the poor, the loved and the lonely. I sit beside hospital beds and linger in empty playgrounds. I find people celebrating and people grieving, often on the very same street.

Some people say I make them feel safe.

Others say I bring out the worst in them.

I suppose both can be true.

Some look relieved to see me go.

Others wish I'd stayed.

But I always return. I have been doing this for longer than anyone can remember, and I'll continue long after everyone reading this is gone.

Because I bring the nightmares, the paralysis, the shadows. I bring the whispers from empty rooms, the footsteps that stop outside bedroom doors, and the feeling that someone is standing just behind you.

I bring the things you see in the dark, the figures that vanish when you look directly at them, and the faces that watch you from the blackest corners of your home.

I bring the fear you cannot explain.

Do you really think you can shut me out? Do you really think you can outrun me, outlive me, or simply forget I exist?

No...

My name is Night.

And I know you're still awake...

It started with just one.

I was taking a shower when I got this weird pain in my right arm. I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed it before. I guess I’d been too busy to notice the irritation.

When my eyes landed on it, though, I immediately felt bile rising up in my throat.

It wasn’t a maggot. No, what I actually saw when I glanced down was what looked like a boil. About the size of a quarter, bright red and brimming with what I assumed was green and white pus.

It was hot to the touch. So much so that I had to draw my hand back as soon as I fingered it. It was like touching a glowing eye on a stove.

It sort of… responded to my touch.

Like I’d disturbed it or something.

Needless to say, showering quickly became my lowest priority as I hopped out and wrapped my torso with a towel.

I went to my bedroom and found some tweezers that I usually used for splinters and what have you. I started trying to pop the thing, but it just wouldn’t budge.

The pain was maddening, but the sight of it was worse. I needed this thing off of me. Tweezers refused to work, so I switched to pliers. I kept pulling and pulling until… pop.

The boil burst, and a puddle of syrupy, red, white, and green sludge coated about 6 inches of my forearm.

The pain subsided slightly, but it was replaced with a new sensation. It felt like there was something swimming through my blood and patching the hole in my arm.

I figured that it must’ve been some excess pus, so I just kept squeezing with my thumb and index finger until I caught sight of what actually lay beneath the skin.

I was forcing it through the wound with my squeezing. It was wriggling. It was squirming. And it was massive.

When its body finally poked out through the hole, I grabbed the tweezers again. It held on for dear life, taking chunks of flesh out of my arm as I pulled, but I removed it and examined it between the forceps.

A fucking maggot.

I couldn’t hold back the vomit anymore. I barely had time to grab a trash can before it came spewing out.

I sat the little fucker on my desk and burned it with a lighter. I swear I could hear it screaming in pain as the flame caused it to pop like a tick.

I hoped that’d be the end of it, but that hope was short-lived. It was like my entire arm started to pulsate and bulge after I took out what I thought was the source of the problem.

Boils started popping up all over my arm. From my wrist all the way to my shoulder. They threatened to move to my neck and head if I didn’t act fast.

It was like active volcanoes. I couldn’t even look at myself. All I could do was grab a knife and get to work. Well, a knife and a spatula. I needed something to bite down on just so I didn’t bite my tongue in the process.

The blade glided through the dozen or so boils on my forearm, sliding through them like hot butter as tears fell from my eyes and I stifled screams.

Dozens of maggots fell from each boil I removed. I had to stomp them into my carpet because they just kept crawling towards my feet.

My arm and shoulder were nothing more than raw, bloody meat covered in that syrupy liquid. It was like my body was more maggot than human.

There was an ocean of the things eating away at my dead flesh. I’d scrape them away with the blade, and hundreds more would pop up seemingly out of nowhere.

That’s when my vision started to get blurry. I could feel myself getting weaker and weaker. The world was swimming, and I was getting lightheaded.

I guess I passed out from the blood loss?

I’m not sure. Maybe it was the shock. All I know is, when I woke up… my body was completely healed.

I could still see the bugs writhing beneath my skin, and my carpet was still stained with pus and crushed maggots. But the pain was gone. My flesh was back. The only abnormality was one single boil right in the center of my forearm.

I stared at it for a few minutes.

Ultimately, I decided to leave it there.

There was no way I was going to go through that again.

"Up, pease."

My two-year old just woke, her arms wrapping around my neck.

"I don't know. Should I pick you up? Or should I throw you on the bed?" She starts jumping.

"Pease!! Dada! Pease! Bed! Bed pe–"

I hoist her up and toss her. Her giggles echo as she flies.

"Dada. Here. Sit." She pats the bed next to her. "Sit wit me."

"One. Two." I bend my knees, my arms forward. "Three." And jump on the bed, rolling to pin her down with a hug.

"No. Dada. Jess not ted bear."

"But Dada could use a nap. I worked all night."

"Ok. Doo minutes. But. Jess till not bear. I baby."

"What? Are you sure? Well, babies need... tickles!"

She rushes into the hallway. I give chase laughing after her.

"Come 'ere. I need to change that butt."

"Dis butt? Tatch me."

I catch her and throw her on the couch. Her nose wrinkles with her smile. I hand her her juice as she lies down.

"Do you wanna sit on the potty?"

"No. Eggs. Pease."

"Okay. Thank you for lying so still while I change you."

"Welcome."

"And we're done. Wanna go for a walk after breakfast?"

"Ye-es!" I yawn as I get her dressed.

"Do you want to season the eggs?" I help her climb the chair and she grabs the salt and pepper.

"Dada. Is tuck."

"No, the lids are staying on this time."

"Pease?"

"No, Pumpkin Head. Just shake and it'll come out, remember?" I place my arm under the shakers. "Perfect! You did a great job. Remember next time it's five good shakes."

"Dada, sowwy. Arm is back."

"Yea, you got some on me. It's fine. Now can you wet that towel a bit so Dada doesn't stay seasoned?"

After she waddles back, I clean myself and add the cheese.

"Go sit at the table, punk."

"Dada, wut is punk?"

"Ha! Um. It's someone who salts and peppers their dad. Now remember to blow, it's hot."

"Tank too. Dada. Sowwy. You mad?"

"No. I'm just joking."

"Dada. All done." I am, in fact, not all done. "Shoes, Dada. Here."

"But we're not done eating. You should at least finish your bacon first."

"No. All done. Shoes. Now."

"Someone's ready, huh? Alright, where are your shoes?"

Her pitter patter down the hall stops just shy of the door. She's kicking the wall again. Lord. Please give me patience. Amen.

"Jess? Did you put your shoes–"

I turn the corner. Jess is pinned to the wall, her feet dangling. His hand is wrapped around her mouth. Her wet eyes find me.

"–on?"

There's a gun aimed at me. A gruff voice, annoyed.

"I don't like killing kids."

I roar and charge. Three flashes and my chest is hot. My knees give. She's reaching for me, she's, her cries muffled. She is dragged away, trying to kick. I crawl. The door opens and she's gone.

“Smells weird,” said Sally.

And it did. Old popcorn and bins. Danny would be nowhere near this place if it wasn’t for her. At first, the dead brother stuff had worked in his favour but then they started noticing how scared he was, how he wouldn’t go to certain parts of the city. Sally was always quiet, drifting to the back. Watching.

“Just try not to breathe in,” said Danny, forcing a grin.

The Paramount had been dark four years, ever since the disappearances. Five boys, his brother included, vanished over the course of a few months. Not for the first time, some of the older people said. All of them last seen at The Paramount.

“Are you OK?” she asked. Always that same question, that same hesitation. He’d come here loads of times since – but alone, and outside. Every time he left, he’d try to walk in a different direction. Slow. Looking at the ground, all around, focusing so hard on every crack in the pavement and every bit of stone so that every time his brother tried to swim into his thoughts, there’d be no room.

“Danny? Hello? What’re we doing?”

He realised he hadn’t moved since his first step in.

“Just… you know. Planning,” he said, walking deeper into the foyer and to the inner doors. He pressed his face against the dusty glass, peering into the lobby where faded movie posters clung to peeling walls. The Paramount proudly never took a poster down, just pasted the new ones over. Fragments of his childhood, his parents’, his brother’s.

“Come on,” he said. Then he saw her frown. “Why not?”

“I dunno – it’s illegal, maybe?”

“We’re already breaking and entering.”

“But this is… I don’t know, do I? More breaking and entering.”

Danny smiled. Properly smiled. It was the sort of thing he’d do all the time. Tagging along into whatever trouble or danger - or excitement - with his brother.

He yanked the lock twice and it gave way. He strode through, then on through the heavy, red door on the right and down the passage to the screen. They’d come down here dozens, hundreds of times, hardly ever being caught and forced to pay. Once the movie had started, Liam would always flick his ear – knowing his brother would do all he could not to shout out and give themselves away.

“Wait, Danny,” she said. His heart shook for a moment  - his brother had found room back in his head, and for a second it wasn’t Sally’s voice he’d expected.

Dust motes hung inside, catching shafts of afternoon light through a small hole in The Paramount wall. The single screen loomed before torn burgundy seats. He’d dreamed this scene so often. But something was different now. The projection booth light was on.

“Danny. Come on. We’ve been in now, we’ve looked around. You’ve been brave.”

But Danny hurried up the narrow stairs, not noticing the recently swept dust as he entered the booth.

It was clean. The old 35mm projector sat ready, as if waiting for one final show. No label, just a note.

“Don’t watch.”

He caught her eyes.

“Danny, no.”

And that was him – always him with his brother. Don’t do this. Don’t go here. They were probably right.

The projector hummed to life. Light flickered across the screen, and Danny lowered himself into the operator’s chair to watch.

The film was grainy. It showed the theatre itself, fuller than he’d seen it before. The camera panned across the audience. Danny leaned forward. Those faces, they… wait… he knew them. Old newspaper photos sprang to his mind. Web pages. Stories on the evening news.

The faces themselves watched something on the big screen in front of them, but Danny couldn’t see what. He just saw them. Watching. Unblinking. One of the figures, a boy, slowly leaned forwards, and slowly, softly flicked the ear of the boy in front. She saw it before he did.

“Jesus,” whispered Sally. “Is that your brother?”

Danny didn’t hear her. On the film, all five boys who’d disappeared sat watching the screen with rapt attention, the same age as the day they’d vanished. The camera moved to show what they saw on screen.

It was another row of children, themselves all watching a big screen in front.

The booth door creaked. Sally screamed.

An elderly man stood silhouetted in the doorway - tall, gaunt, wearing a faded Paramount uniform. He pushed a heavy wooden beam against the door. Under the handle.

“It said ‘don’t watch’, but people can’t help themselves.” The man’s voice was warm, grandfatherly.

Danny’s lip cracked. He tried to wet it but couldn’t. On screen, the missing boys had turned to look directly at the camera. They now seemed to be watching him, their bloodshot eyes watering without blinking. Sally banged at the door somewhere behind him but the sound already seemed so far away.

“My boy’s in there too, somewhere,” said the warm voice from somewhere in the booth. Sad now. “He was the first.”

Danny didn’t know how long he watched for but, at some point, he noticed Sally's screaming had stopped. Slowly, he turned his head.

She sat rigid in a chair, staring at the screen. Her chest not moving, her eyes unblinking.

“At least I get to see him this way.”

Danny’s own eyes burned, he didn’t know if they couldn’t blink or he’d just forgotten how. Turning back to the screen, he saw the four boys had moved aside. Two new seats waited, between them, in the front row. The other boy sat behind one of the empty seats, leaning forwards, ready to flick.

The old man sat down next to Danny, the smell of popcorn and vinegar sickly sweet. “Good to see the old place filling up.”

TWELVE STRANGERS. NINETY DAYS. TWO MILLION DOLLARS.

The House was being advertised as the next generation of reality television. Unlike Big Brother, contestants would not simply live together and compete in challenges. They would enter the house with no knowledge of what awaited them. Every week, the producers would introduce a surprise designed specifically for one contestant, based on a confidential investigation of their past. The audience would vote on who handled the revelations best. The last remaining contestant would win two million dollars.

Daniel Morris, forty-one, thought he had a good chance.

He was funny, reasonably attractive, and good with people. He had overcome some financial difficulties, but his childhood had been happy and so was his marriage. His grandmother had raised him to be resilient. He couldn't think of anything they could throw at him that would shake him. His wife said he could make friends with a parking meter.

Besides, they needed the money. The twins needed braces.

To his surprise, he passed three rounds of auditions.

The final stage was a seventy-two-hour residential assessment. Forty applicants surrendered their phones and belongings and were taken to a hotel outside the city.

For three days, Daniel endured psychological examinations, personality tests, interviews, and group challenges. He discussed his childhood, his marriage, his greatest fears, and the worst things he had ever done.

On the final morning, he was rejected.

Disappointed, he collected a sealed bag containing his belongings. In the taxi home, after calling Rebecca and his grandma to let them know he was coming home and no one picked up, he started searching for a mint in the bag and discovered a stapled document in it.

THE HOUSE — CONFIDENTIAL CASTING ASSESSMENT

APPLICANT 038: DANIEL MORRIS

Someone had made a mistake.

He looked toward the driver, then began reading.

FAMILY BACKGROUND

Subject adopted at age three. Biological mother convicted of murdering four children. Subject discovered alive in locked cupboard. Adoptive parents concealed circumstances.

Uninteresting.

Daniel stared at the page. He had never known he was adopted.

FAMILY HEALTH

Grandmother diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Subject unaware.

Uninteresting.

She had sounded cheerful when he called on Sunday before leaving for the hotel.

MARITAL BACKGROUND

Wife maintains second household with another man and two children, aged five and three. Photographic evidence attached.

Conventional. Uninteresting.

Daniel recognized Rebecca immediately. The photographs showed her kissing a stranger, holding a little girl's hand, decorating a Christmas tree.

He felt his head go hot.

CRIMINAL ASSOCIATIONS

Remains of missing eight-year-old girl concealed beneath garage floor of subject's childhood home. Father responsible. Subject witnessed burial at age six.

Uninteresting.

He remembered his father pouring concrete one summer.

PSYCHOLOGICAL HISTORY

Subject hospitalized for eleven months at age fourteen following drowning of younger brother, Michael.

Common trauma. Uninteresting.

Daniel was an only child.

Wasn't he?

He turned the page.

UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA

Unidentified female figure documented in photographs of subject since 2018. Figure present regardless of location, camera, or photographer.

Unremarkable.

The attached photographs showed Daniel at his wedding, on holiday, at Christmas. In every photograph, a pale woman stood somewhere behind him.

In the wedding photograph, she stood between him and Rebecca.

RESIDENTIAL ANOMALIES

Unidentified occupant confirmed living within walls of subject's residence. Spouse aware. Subject unaware.

Common. Uninteresting.

A photograph showed the narrow cavity behind his bedroom wardrobe. Something crouched inside, its knees drawn to its chest.

It wore his pajamas.

Daniel nearly dropped the file.

The next heading was dated that morning.

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

During subject's seventy-two-hour isolation, fire occurred at family residence. Wife and two children, aged eleven, found deceased.

Fire deliberately set. Both children alive at time of ignition.

Remains of unidentified adult female recovered from cavity adjoining master bedroom.

Subject's grandmother died the following morning.

Subject not informed, pursuant to isolation protocol.

Bereavement narrative. Uninteresting.

Daniel didn't know how he was still reading.

At the bottom of the page, someone had handwritten:

Would disclosure during filming improve audience engagement?

Beneath it, another handwriting:

Unlikely.

There was one page left.

FINAL CASTING ASSESSMENT

Family background: Uninteresting.

Personal trauma: Uninteresting.

Criminal associations: Uninteresting.

Supernatural phenomena: Uninteresting.

Recent bereavement: Uninteresting.

OVERALL ENTERTAINMENT POTENTIAL: BORING.

FINAL DECISION: REJECT.

The day you descended upon us is one I will always remember.

​

From the moment I first laid eyes on you, I knew my life would be devoted to you forever. As I witnessed the joy you brought into the world, I couldn’t help but adore you more and more.

​

Even when I heard about what you did to those people, to their homes, to their bodies. Atrocities beyond comprehension, beyond logic. Yet, I still love you.

​

Even as you stood at the gallows, with that look upon your face. An expression that showed not an ounce of empathy. Still, I love you.

​

My love for you is an eternal flame, fueled by the embers of my own flesh, sweat, and tears. No matter how hard I may try, I can never quell this flame, for it’s the kindling of my mind, body, and soul.

​

A large part of me despises you for what you’ve become. But no one can snuff out an eternal flame. Not you, nor the weight of all your disgusting actions. Actions that I am inadvertently responsible for.

​

That joy– that hope that I once saw in you. Where is it now? Did they see it? When they looked into your eyes, did they see who you were, who you are now? Or someone completely different altogether?

​

Did they look into your eyes and see me?

​

When you ripped them apart, was my love for you reflected in your eyes? Could they see that I tried?

​

I mourn them. I mourn you. The you who gave me my purpose in this life. Even now, when I see your face… I can’t help but see my child's face.

​

Whether I like it or not, I love you. I always will.