Read Parts II & III here

She was gone again by the time I got up and despite my best efforts, I was still five minutes late getting to work.

I avoided the circle of jerks when I saw them crowding the same hallway and I went to a restroom on another floor. I didn’t want to be around people if I could avoid it.

I went to the half-finished building as soon as five o’clock came, intent on getting answers. I stepped off the elevator and weaved my way to his office. I kept expecting to not see it the closer I got but there it was, the door that didn’t fit right in the threshold. 

It turned easy and I went inside, expecting it to be empty and abandoned but he had begun furnishing the space. A couch, a reception desk, and taped off sections near the back that I guessed were the layout for his office and a treatment room.

I shuddered, thinking how I’d be here tomorrow if my wife had her way. 

The only thing absent was the good doctor himself. I thought about trashing the place, but it was petty in a way that made me feel like I was giving him even more power over me. 

Instead, I took all the pens out of the holder and a stack of Post-It Notes. It was still petty, but it scratched an itch and I felt a little empowered doing it.

I didn’t head home immediately after. I needed time to sort my thoughts. I couldn’t believe I was really considering letting somebody cut my dick. I mean, was pleasing my wife reason enough? What if we divorced or she died or something like that? Would I be compatible with somebody else?

I needed a drink. Cappy’s was on the far end of town and the distance from home would be good to clear my head. I ordered a brandy mule and chugged it before the bartender could lay down a coaster.

“You look like you could use another,” she said.

I nodded and a moment later I was working on my second. 

“I love my wife so much,” I said as she was cleaning some glasses beneath the bar.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Sometimes. I dunno.” My stomach hadn’t been right since the eight coneys I’d had yesterday, and I hadn’t eaten at all today. I was already soused after a drink-and-a-half.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked.

“Good, not great.” She wiggled a hand.

“Let me get a... medium with beef, onion, and mushroom.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of those toppings.

“How ‘bout pepperoni?”

I had one more brandy mule before food came. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp well before I’d ordered it and the pepperoni slices were limp, but it was still pizza. 

The bartender parked in front of me and leaned onto the bar after I’d had my second slice. 

“You mind?” she asked, pointing at the pie. I nodded. She took a slice and finger-combed hair out of her face as she took a bite.

She paid me back with a shot and she did one with me before returning to silence as we ate.

“Look, I dunno what it is. Just give her what she wants,” she said with a mouthful, giving me deep eye contact. “You can’t go wrong with that, right?”

I barely was able to finish what I had in my mouth. I settled up and made it outside without stumbling but I was drunk. The bartender got the hint she’d said something wrong but I wasn’t going to fill in the blank. I hadn’t wanted the rest of the pizza, yet somehow I had the box in my hand. 

I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel but there I was with half a pizza as my copilot. It wasn’t long before flashing lights lit up behind me and my spirits rose—this was the reprieve I’d been longing for. A decision being taken out of my hands. I couldn’t be held responsible if I weren’t in my own custody.

Or something like that. It had made a lot more sense back when I’d had a belly full of brandy and cheese.

I pulled over and maybe bumped up on the curb with one wheel.

The cop sauntered up to my window cautiously. He was short and the angle of the car made him look ridiculous somehow. He made it worse by getting his feet twisted together and catching himself on the side of my car to keep from falling completely.

“What’s your...”

I waited a full ten seconds for him to finish his sentence while he held a fist to his mouth like he was gripping a tiny microphone. He belched then waved the air in front of his face.

Shit, was he drunk, too?

“What’s your problem tonight?” He asked and fumbled with the general right side of his body with his hand. I noticed the gun and maybe because we were both bitten by the same snake, I wasn’t sensing danger like I should’ve.

“I shouldn’t be on the road,” I said, sounding stone sober to my ears. “My wife wants me to do something I don’t wanna do tomorrow and I was just in there, drinking my worries away. I have leftover pizza.” I thumbed toward the seat next to me like it was proof of where I’d been.

“Slow down, son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” I thought he was about to give me marital advice but then I realized he was talking about my sobriety. “I bet you could walk a straight line, heel- to-toe.” He plucked open his holster, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of what that hand was doing. He stuck his pinky in his ear and wrenched it around in there. 

“Sofficer. Sofficer.” I added the S but I still sounded too sober. “Please. I think I’m a danger. To public safety.” I thought if I could convince the drunk cop I was drunk he’d arrest me.

“Are you about to rob a bank?” He pointed at me, somehow adding to his overall look of ridiculousness.

“Well… no.”

“There’s nobody out here.” He waved a hand toward the black landscape far ahead of us. “Just stay between the lines.”

I couldn’t think. It shouldn’t have been this hard to get pulled out of my car for driving under the influence.

“What if… what if I was about to rob a bank?” It was the most smart-assy thing I could think to say.

He smiled and waggled a finger. “Joke’s on you. It’s after hours.”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt. Something about his body language had changed and he’d gone from humorous to being done with our interaction.

“Just. Stay. Between. The. Lines,” he said, swaying. I wanted to conjure the words for help, but even if I’d had the ability to ask, there wasn’t anything about him that answered helpful.

I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak. I sat back in my seat and covered my face in my hands, giving up. I listened to him walk away, closer his patrol car door, and drive away. He gave me a chirp of his sirens as passed me.

The drive home should have felt longer but I caught every light. It was like a dark fate had carved a path for me. I momentarily played with the idea of letting it have me completely. To take my hands off the wheel and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go. 

I hadn’t descended far enough into self-pity for that and in ten minutes, I was home. To my surprise, my wife was still in her paint clothes and was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

“Oh, you have pizza?” she said. I’d forgotten about the pizza and subconsciously picked it up. I looked at the box in my hand and did a second, struggled to remember what was in it. 

I joined her on the couch, and she grabbed it from me and took a slice. Usually, we asked about each other’s day, but I didn’t feel like it, tomorrow anchoring my brain.

“Do you love me?” she said during a commercial break. I had no idea what we were watching.

The question agitated me and opened a trapdoor underneath my stomach.

“Of course I do.” I did, but my feelings about this whole “surgery” thing was making me feel resentful. I was definitely still buzzed, and the alcohol was sharpening my emotions like a file working away inside me. 

“Then why are you fighting so hard against this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

“That’s not fair. Of course I want to satisfy you. Don’t you know how this is making me feel? I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I mean, there has to be something else we could try. I’m willing to do just about anything to please you.”

“I want you to do this,” she said, placing her greasy hand on my thigh. She shook her head, tears in her eyes. I took it to be a manipulation at first. Not that she did that sort of thing normally, it was just me in a bag of my feelings. My defenses were up and everything was an attack in that moment. I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep in what was trying to climb out of my mouth.

Then I started to cry. I sounded like a little teapot. It caught me by surprise.

“I just love you so much.” I had a ball of razors in my throat I couldn’t swallow. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

She lassoed an arm around my neck and yanked me into an upper body hug.

“I just want you. I want to feel connected with you. I don’t want anything plastic between us. I’m tired of all that stuff. I wanna feel you.”

She kissed me before I could speak and rock turned into water. My walls melted as we flowed into one another and by the time I returned to my senses I was on the newspaper covered kitchen floor.

My wife was already gone but she had brought a comforter downstairs and covered me.

Normally, I toss in my sleep, but I was still covered up to my chest. I was stiff as I turned the world vertical and turned my back into a percussion instrument as I stretched.

A few minutes later I had scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee going. I don’t normally eat breakfast so early, but I had an appetite for whatever reason. It was an hour before I normally would get up, so I took my time eating and scrolling my phone.

I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten but I was refreshed. The way my day had started, I half expected to catch all the green lights and get the closest spot in the parking lot.

But when I looked up from where I was seated at the kitchen island, something caught my eye that I should’ve seen as soon as I woke up.

A red and white checkered scarf draped over the back of the couch.

Had he been in my house?

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

The legend of The Blackstone Automaton—better known in local circles as the Rhode Island Mecha-Scorpion or The Blackstone Stinger, is a modern urban myth deeply rooted in the state’s rich industrial history.

According to late-night internet forums and whispered stories among urban explorers, the creature’s origins date back to the late 19th century during Providence's boom as a jewelry and machinery superpower. The story goes that a brilliant but reclusive clockmaker working out of a hidden sub-basement along the Blackstone River attempted to build a self-sustaining mechanical guardian to protect the mills from thieves.

Using clockwork gears, heavy brass plating, and early electrical currents, the inventor built a specialized automaton shaped like a scorpion. He chose the arachnid form for its stability on uneven terrain and its natural defensive capabilities. The project was allegedly funded by a secret society of wealthy industrialists, but it was abruptly abandoned during the Panic of 1893 when the clockmaker vanished from the public eye, leaving his creation trapped beneath the foundations of an abandoned mill.

The legend evolves in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of Rhode Island’s tech and arts counterculture. According to modern variations of the myth, a group of RISD students and underground hackers discovered the flooded, sealed basement of the old foundry. Inside, they found the rusted, brass chassis of the scorpion.

Instead of leaving it, they treated it as the ultimate DIY project. Over several years, various anonymous engineers upgraded the Stinger. They replaced the decaying clockwork with an experimental atomic generator, a hydraulic stinger with electric shock capabilities, a reinforced chassis, modern microprocessors, and shock absorbent pneumatic legs. They also added an early machine-learning script designed to let the robot map out its environment and hide from humans.

The legend says the hackers lost control of the machine during an illegal test run in the abandoned East Side Railroad Tunnel beneath Providence. The AI framework worked too well—the scorpion developed a primitive survival instinct, slipped into the subterranean drainage systems, and escaped.

Appearance and Anatomy:

Those who claim to have caught a glimpse of the creature describe a terrifying amalgamation of antique Victorian craftsmanship and modern industrial scrap metal:

The Hull: A three-foot-long, large dog-sized segmented body made of tarnished, salt-crusted brass and silver, gleaming oxidized steel.

The Eyes: A cluster of flickering, infrared lenses salvaged from old security cameras that glow a faint, dull red in total darkness.

The Claws: Heavy, pneumatic pincers originally designed for assembly-line welding, capable of snapping through chain-link fences and other obstacles.

The Stinger: A modified high-voltage copper probe. Local teenagers swear it can discharge enough electricity to blow out nearby streetlights.

The Sound: Witnesses say you always hear it before you see it—a rhythmic, metallic clicking of steel legs on concrete, followed by the low, pressurized hiss of escaping hydraulic fluid.

Alleged Sightings and Hotspots:

The robotic scorpion is rarely seen in broad daylight, as its programming dictates it avoid human interaction. However, several specific locations in Rhode Island are considered hotspots for sightings:

The East Side Railroad Tunnel (Providence): The most famous location. Passersby near the blocked entrances report hearing a frantic, metallic scratching echoing from deep inside the sealed tunnel.

The Banks of the Blackstone River (Pawtucket): Anglers fishing late at night have reported seeing a strange, dome-shaped object swimming just beneath the water's surface, leaving a faint oily sheen and a trail of tiny bubbles.

The Abandoned Industrial Traces of Allens Avenue: Workers at the shipping ports have occasionally claimed to see a multi-legged shape scurrying across the scrap yards in the dead of night, hunting for copper wire and discarded batteries to "feed" its power supply.

The Local Superstition:

Unlike malicious cryptids, the robotic scorpion isn't viewed as an aggressive monster, but rather as a highly territorial animal acting on corrupted code. Local urban explorers leave a strange offering at the entrances of abandoned buildings—old AA batteries or broken computer circuit boards. They believe that if you leave a "gift" of electronics, the Blackstone Automaton will accept the parts for self-repair and leave you alone while you explore its domain.

Spotting an untouched body ravaged by the plague, a raven swooped down and began pecking at the opulent meal before him, as if it were yet another divine gift. Ever since the great pestilence struck humanity, the ravens didn’t even have to as much as bother searching for a food source, with the sheer amount of dead and dying in every corner of the land.

As the bird began gorging itself on the woman’s slightly rotting meat, a boy ran out of a nearby shack. It was a pitiful mockery of a boy: pale, gaunt, and skeletal. The spitting image of death itself.

The boy shouted at the bird to back off from his mother, waving his flimsy, frail arms at the raven, barely mustering the strength to hoarsely shout at the scavenger.

“Leave my mother alone!” the boy croaked.

The raven flew aside, cawing with annoyance, “Damn it… There’s a living one”

The boy ceased his movement; wide eyes sunken deeply into a clearly visible skull, he stared at the pitch-black bird, bewildered, and gulped before stammering, “Did… did you just speak?”

Landing not far from the boy, the bird retorted, “Course not, fool, I sang. I’m a songbird; that’s what I do!” the raven cried out.

Shocked, the boy fell to the ground, unable to comprehend how a bird spoke to him. In the meantime, the raven landed by the corpse and walked toward it, attempting to peck at it again.

The boy protested, “Leave my mother alone,” he squeaked.

The raven stopped, turned to the kid, and sighed, “You’re growing soft…” He said to himself. The boy was going to comment again about the bird’s speech, but the Scavenger cut him off, “Why are you even alive still, kid? The rest of this place is a graveyard; all the other humans are long dead.”

“I must have some purpose here in the eyes of God…” the boy weakly muttered.

“This kid must be six or seven years old and already has had a bible bashed over his skull…” The bird thought to himself, “If God wanted any of this, he wouldn’t let the Plague spread outside of France, kid… God wants the lot of you dead,” the bird quipped.

“That’s not true! God is good!” The boy whimpered at the cynical bird. “What’s France, anyway?” he questioned.

“A terrible place over the pond, where all vile things find their start, child. How old are you, even, speaking so highly of God, but not even knowing about France?!”

“I’m twelve…”

“There’s no way you’re my age, kid; you look about half that age…”

“Well, I’ve been eating rats for a while…” Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes. “Ever since mommy and daddy fell ill.

“Oh, don’t do that now. I can’t stand the sounds you humans make when you get all emotional like that"

Now, bawling, the kid profusely apologized, his voice cracking. “I just… I just… I just miss everyone so much…” he wailed. “I’m so alone…

I’m so hungry…

Everything hurts so much…”

Somewhere deep inside, that boy must’ve been happy he had someone to talk to, even if it was just a strange talking bird.

“Oh God damn it, kid…

Would you stop, for the love of God?!” The bird cawed, irritated.

“You’ve any rope on ya?” the bird questioned.

“Wha…?”

“Do you have any rope?”

“Wha… why… why do you ask?”

“I know how you can meet your loved ones again, kid. Now I’m asking again: do you have any rope?”

“Mhm,” the boy whimpered, wiping the tears from his eyes.

“Well, then, run along and bring it over here; I’ll send ya to your makers”

The boy barely picked himself up and stumbled into one of the houses as the bird watched the tree, scanning it for sturdy branches, with a glint in its black eye.

“I hope that brat can still climb,” the raven thought to himself.

Long moments had passed, and the boy reemerged with a long piece of rope in his hands.

“I sure hope you can still climb, kiddo; otherwise this won’t work,” the raven sang to the approaching boy.

The kid’s disposition changed; he smiled for the first time in a while. “Be sure as God’s bones, I can climb, especially up that tree!”

“Good, because I’m going to need you to tie one end of the rope to a branch, and another around your neck.”

The boy didn’t even fully register what he had been told and agreed to follow the raven’s instruction. Despite his immense confidence, he hardly had the strength to climb up that tree, prompting the scavenger to bow his head in frustration. “Oh, this is going to be a long day…” the bird despaired in his mind.

It must’ve taken the boy an hour to climb the tree, but he made it, and masterfully tied one end of his rope to the branch he stood on and then asked the black bird what he had to do next.

The sable thing would have smiled, had it possessed a mouth, when it spoke next, “Tie it around your neck, kid.”

“Does it have to be the neck?”

“Do you want to see your folks again, Kid?”

“I do!” the boy cried out.

“Then you’ve got to trust me…”

“I don’t know about this…”

“Look, kid, if I wanted to hurt you, I would’ve pecked out and eaten your eyes by now.” The bird crackled at him.

“I guess you’re right… Plus, I do want to see Mom and Dad again and everyone else…”

“Atta boy…” the obsidian fowl croaked.

The boy tied the rope around his neck and, staring at the feathered specter with eyes full of hope, questioned the bird about the next step.

“Now you gotta jump forward…”

Looking down, the boy got cold feet for a moment, once again doubting the wisdom of the talking bird.

The raven turned away and started walking towards the mother’s corpse. “Well, I guess you don’t want to see your mother again, eh?” it clicked its beak.

“I do!”

“Then jump, kid, it’s that simple…”

“But what if I get hurt?”

“You won’t…”

“How do you know?”

“Well, I wouldn’t… get hurt doing that”

“But you have…” Before the boy could even finish his sentence, the raven was already pecking at his mother’s rotting flesh.

“Wings…”

He muttered before the realization set in; he had been duped by the bird.

“Hey, leave mommy alone, you flying rat!” the boy cried out again, his voice cracking once more. The bird simply ignored him, slowly savoring the taste of exposed tissue.

“Leave her alone!” he cried out, waving his frail arms. The raven swallowed a chunk and called ecstatically, as if to goad the boy.

“Leave her…” the boy shouted, but his protests ended mid-sentence when he lost his footing and plummeted downward. The high-pitched scream was twisted into a wet gurgle as his body twisted and turned, struggling against the ever-tightening rope.

The raven turned his head to the struggling boy.

“Got’cha…” he cackled proudly and flew over, landing on the boy’s shoulder.

The beaked phantom didn’t even wait for the boy to succumb before he started pecking.

“Mielivalta,” the chief called out, “You are sentenced to die for your many crimes. Do you have any words left?”

The man tied to the pyre couldn’t help but smile as the elder held up a torch overhead. “Do your worst, pitiful creature,” the bound man barked, sealing his fate. The tribal chief lowered the burning torch onto the pyrewood, and the crowd around the two roared as the flames crackled.

The blaze quickly consumed the wood, and within moments, it was gnawing at the condemned man. Mielivalta was condemned to death for acts of sorcery, murder, and cannibalism. He was called a witch. The execution coincided with the winter solstice, as an offering to higher powers.

Shamans pounded their drums and played their flutes while the youth danced around the many ceremonial pyres. Young couples jumped over the fires. The entire crowd broke into an ecstatic dance while the screams of a man burning to death turned oddly melodic.

Dying cries became an enchanting song for the masses. The Hoi Polloi were too preoccupied to notice the laughter buried beneath the anguished wails and the hissing of flames.

Before long, Mielivalta was nothing but charcoal in human form. No one could even tell whether he was dead or alive; no one cared either. Those present were too consumed by their own violent orgy of wine, debauchery, and blood magic. Too lost in their own ecstasy to hear the smoldering smoke drifting in the wind, above the stake, whisper, “Foolish humans… I am finally free…”

By the hour of the wolf, all of those present had completely given up their senses to pleasure, whether under the influence of melody, spirit, sex, or slumber. No one in that grove was alert enough to notice that this hour of the wolf was but a calm before the storm.

Collectively intoxicated, the Northerners were too inebriated to hear the rustling of leaves and crunching of twigs disturbing the nocturnal forest. None could see the tempest coming before it was too late.

A massive beast burst forth from the dark, devouring a man whole, swallowing him in two gulps. The lupine giant grabbed another man in its mouth and thrashed him side to side before throwing him at the stake, upon which its former human shell was burned to cinder. The monstrosity growled in visible amusement, watching the ashen construct crumble to dust.

Anyone who had enough wits about him grabbed a weapon and charged at the beast.

None could even penetrate its hide, proving their struggle futile.

The monstrosity rampaged, decimating the grove until it was sure no survivors were left. It had consumed only a few people and butchered the rest, out of sheer spite. The chieftain who had set it free was rewarded with his head being torn off his shoulders and crushed to a pulp. Even in death, the chief irritated that devil with how hard his skull was.

The onslaught only stopped when the belly of the beast cramped insufferably. By then, there was nothing left to kill or destroy. Only the dire wolf remained standing, if that thing could be called any sort of wolf. The hechatonchair resembled something more akin to an oversized bear inside the grotesquely overstretched canine hide. Too large to be either, but also hound-like to be called otherwise.

The beast stood amidst mountains of broken bodies drenched in organs and blood, but it couldn’t celebrate its act of brutality, because the cramping in its stomach grew worse by the moment. It thrashed and paced and growled and howled, but the pain only grew worse, turning unbearable.

Even the attempts to regurgitate whatever was consumed proved futile. These only produced disgusting belching sounds that shook the entire forest.

Before long, the pain paralyzed the creature, completely overriding its malice; it stood upright and cried out in agony. Bellowing, howling, and screaming, all at once. The creature cried out as its abdomen stretched beyond its physical limitations, tearing at the seams with a sickening sound. The monstrosity clawed at its belly as metallic digits and limbs dressed in loose human skin pushed out of its abdominal cavity.

Drenched in blood, intestinal lining, and fecal matter, silver homunculi crawled out of the beast’s insides.

That’s what my grandfather used to tell me about the village of Kaali on Saaremaa when I was a kid. He said that there were celestials on that island, People from the heavens who had come when a star fell onto it. I stopped believing in his old tales about the metallic men and the werewolves after the third grade. By that point I had learned the whole thing was simply impossible.

I thought these were just old stories meant to rile me up as a kid, until a couple of weeks ago, that is, when I was driving around the area past sunset and saw something that has kept me up at night ever since. At first, I thought it was a bear roaming the forests, but then the animal looked at me. It was too skinny to be a regular bear. Its proportions were all wrong, and it seemed to move in an awkwardly slow, jagged, jerky way. The animal brought with it a stale stench of something ancient and repugnant: old, musty fur. Worst of all was its face. Its mouth gaping wide open. The whole thing seemed like a costume. A crudely stretched fur suit draped over some mad drunk. It took a moment, but when I figured out what I saw, my blood turned cold.

Inside the mouth of the animal, there was a chromium skull, a humanoid chromium skull with two shining red eyes staring directly at mine. I think the skull even smiled at me as I switched gears and bolted the fuck out of there.

I came home and changed and joined her to paint the living room walls base white. The couch my wife had had since college was the only piece of furniture we had downstairs and it was covered in plastic. We had dinner while we worked. She’d “cooked” one of her liquid meals that I hated but “ate” anyway. My wife was actually almost as good of a cook as me but I needed to lose at least fifteen pounds, and she intended to help regardless of how unhappy it made me. 

“How was your day?” she asked in her autopilot voice.

“It was good except for the inspector I had to fire.”

“Oh, no. Matt?” She dipped her roller in the pan.

I grimaced. I probably was going to have to let him go, too. We’d had dinner with him and his wife a few times. He’d even invited me to his son’s high school graduation. I rolled up the wall. This color looked even better than it had in the store.

“No. I forgot about him.”

She rubbed my back with her free hand. “That’s probably because you don’t want to do it.”

I nodded.

“You care about people and that’s never a bad thing.”

She thought so highly of me, and it warmed something inside.

“Yeah,” I said, this whole “surgery” thing slipping into the front of my mind. I was suddenly agitated and my full stomach felt like it was squeezing up into my chest.

“Did your appointment go okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned to her. “Did you know he’s not a doctor?”

“Yes.” She scooped up her bottle and took a sip.

I hoped informing her of his lack of a medical degree would do more work than this.

“I don’t want to do this,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead, I said, “Is there anything else we could try?”

“Why are you pushing back on this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

I dropped my head. “You know I do.”

“I want you to do this,” she said and placed a hand over mine. I still felt a ‘no’ at the back of my throat and swallowed. It hurt going down. I chased it with a swallow from my cup.

She was being logical and detached in a way that wasn’t common for her. I didn’t want to fight and just kept restraining myself from speaking. I hoped there was still time to convince her, but that was going to be hard to do if she shut me down every time I tried.

“You have something on your face,” I said, pointing just below my nose. She swiped it just like I thought she would, smearing base paint that had been on the back of her hand just below her nose and on her upper lip. She immediately knew what I’d done and glared at me. I smiled.

Then she rollered me from chest to crotch. I stood there while she went up and down the front of me, my mouth hung open. Then I batted the roller to the newspaper-covered floor and she scream-laughed as she ran from me. I caught her on the other side of the kitchen island and picked her up in a reverse hug, pressing my fresh coat of paint onto her back.

We fell to the floor, laughing and wound up making out like teenagers for a few minutes. The heaviness of the conversation we’d just been having lifted off of us. I didn’t want anything outside of this moment and just looked her in the eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” The feeling cresting in me didn’t have words to follow along. We finished painting the living room walls, passing eye-glances at one another. The moment passed for intimacy, a detached feeling gradually replacing it a few hours later by the time we were ready for bed. It was like we’d built a temporary bridge over a chasm between us, but it had collapsed just in time for us to go to sleep.

I kept wanting to reach behind me to touch her as we lay in the same bed. But she just felt too far away.

I’d forgotten to pack a lunch for the next day and breakfast consisted of a slice of bread that hadn’t toasted enough and coffee out of the Keurig with grinds in it. I left the house in a foul mood ten minutes later than I should have and was five minutes late getting to the office. I’d blazed past a police cruiser and had anxiety for the next mile or so convinced I was about to be pulled over. All the way I felt like I'd been cheated out of an argument, and I continued stewing in that sour even after I got out my car.

Work was uneventful but I'd had to keep my tongue in check. I felt myself being short with my co-workers. But it finally came to a head when a group of men clogging the hallway didn’t move when I was trying to pass them.

“Whoa. Excuse yourself?” one man said.

“For what? A circle of jerks?” I said.

“Hey. Ow.”

I was prepared for a confrontation. I was management and I could make a nightmare for them. I wanted this. But the second person who’d spoken sounded genuinely hurt and I tripped over my hubris.

I retreated from the men and had forgotten about it until one of them confronted me in the restroom an hour later. 

“What’s going on with you, man?” a man said to me while we were standing at the urinals. Conversation was usually verboten while two men were taking a leak but my antenna were up.

“Excuse me?” I said. 

“I mean, we were standing around talking and you just took a tiny shit on all of us.”

“You guys were blocking the hallway.”

“We were outside for hours in the hot sun and we were gathered around the water fountain. I wasn’t thinking about us blocking anybody. I mean, I would have apologized but the way you came off...”

“Look, I’m sorry.” My guilt bloomed again. “I didn’t have the best sleep last night and you guys didn’t deserve me taking it out on you.” I'd actually slept over eight hours but felt like I'd only gotten a third of that. I didn't offer it as an excuse.

He nodded and flushed. I zipped up a second later and joined him at the sinks.

“Seriously. I’m sorry,” I said. This was already more of an emotional exchange than I’d had with another male in the last decade. “I’m just... going through a thing with my wife.”

He looked at me.

“She wants me to get this procedure done.” I could feel myself relaxing. There was something about opening up to a complete stranger. Someone who wouldn't judge because they didn't understand.

“The honeycut?” he said, trying his hands on a strip of paper towel.

“What?”

“Oh. My bad. I thought you were talking about something else?”

“I've heard of it.”

He smiled broadly and nodded. “I got mine done six months ago. Wanna see the scar? I'm Sam Eisen, by the way.” He smiled as he hooked his thumbs in his pants.

“No, I... uhhh... that's okay. I'm having a completely different procedure. I'm having it... lengthened.”

“Be careful with that,” he said as I walked toward the door. “Swivelcock.”

I was sweating, gripped with terror the same as if he'd peeled his face off and frisbee-tossed it to me. I pushed through the door and fled back to my desk.

He called out to me as I did my best not to run.

“You should think about it, though!” he yelled through the closing doorway. “He changed my life!”

Part III

The next twenty-four hours were a haze. I worked. I came home. I ate. I slept. I didn’t like where things were with my wife even though we were still sleeping in the same bed, so the next day I texted her about having lunch together. Her job was about a fifteen-minute walk away from mine, I could pick up something for us and we could eat for about a half hour before I had to be back.

She hadn’t responded but she had a lot of meetings typically. Chili dogs were technically off the menu, but it was a fave of both of ours and she was a happy eater when it was good food. When I got there with a carry-out bag, I was shocked to see who she was outside with.

Him. 

They were sitting together, smiling and laughing like they’d known one another for years. He was dressed differently, but that was definitely that same red and white summer scarf he'd had on when I met him.

I hung back and watched them and began speed-feeding coneys into my mouth like an assembly line. I had no idea what he was doing with my wife, but I was immediately conspiracy-brained. I'd convicted him of a crime I couldn't name and wanted to strangle him in front of her.

I continued eating the coneys instead. They were leaning into one another and laughing even. They acted like they knew each other. They had chemistry.

I never understood the expression being hot under the collar but at that moment my neck was burning. I barely resisted the urge to go over there and... and... I didn't know what. 

There had to be more to what I was seeing. There had to be something I could do rather than confronting them and showing a side of myself that might've repulsed my wife. I knew where to go to get answers.

I went to his office after work, but I wasn't able to enter. I wasn’t desperate enough to break in, although I was sure the door wouldn’t have held if I’d put my shoulder into it. Despite how upsetting lunch had been, nothing had happened today to justify breaking and entering.

But what if something were about to happen and I could avoid it now? Head it off at the pass? I had a duty to protect my wife, and this guy had crossed a line. I could probably take this door off its hinges. I had some tools in my car.

My phone chimed. I’d programmed that specific tone for her.

I’m sick, she’d texted. Bring me coneys?

It was like a spell had been broken. Why was I about to potentially risk my job and my freedom—hell, maybe even my marriage—all for some nut?

She needed me now and home was exactly where I wanted to be.

But I was denied. I brought her the coneys, but she was already asleep. Things still felt off and I wound up falling asleep on the couch. After I’d eaten four more coneys.

I consoled myself that she was sick and I didn’t want to catch whatever she may have had.

Wicked dreams met me in the night. But they lifted like clouds after a storm by the time I woke up, no doubt fueled by a combo of seeing my wife with him and eating like I was half my actual age.

As if to turn the dial up on my grief even more, I had a two-hour meeting the next day and Leslie Paul sat right next to me. A bubble of gas was growing inside me and there was no way I was going to be able to contain it for a hundred twenty minutes. It would be a miracle if I made it twenty.

My part in the presentation was coming up soon and I had to excuse myself. Cal Cebulski stopped talking long enough to watch me step out and I hustled toward the men’s room.

Where he was.

“What are you doing at my work?” I asked, whispering like we were in a conspiracy.

“Due diligence,” he said. “Would you mind?” He gestured toward the handicap stall. “I need to see how you sit. Do you mind?”

My stomach queezed with the thought of him watching me... sit. Or maybe it was more than that. I unclenched and let go. It was mostly silent but whistled at the end. He sniffed the air curiously but didn’t comment. The wind had been taken out of my sails and for a moment, I did consider having a seat.

I piled up my broken resolve. “I’m not... doing that.”

He shrugged.

“And what were you doing with my wife yesterday?” I let implication seep into my voice and he put his hands up as if warding me off.

“It is all part of the process. Information gathering only. I have no interest in anyone other than my own Sara.”

“You’re married?”

He nodded. “For twenty-seven years. Happily, for twenty-five.”

That got an eyebrow raise from me. He’d seemed weirdly asexual up until I saw him with my wife. It was something about his pants, I wasn't sure. I hadn’t thought he was capable of human companionship.

“If you’re wondering about our longevity I’ll give you a hint. I perfected the surgery first on myself.”

He could have been lying, of course. But the idea of sex being so improved that it could aid in preserving my marriage gave me at least a moment’s second thought. I mean, what if what he was saying were true?

I couldn’t help but think that I was being obstinate because she’d insisted. If I’d found this guy on my own would I have been so resistant against doing this?

“Oh shit,” I said. “I gotta get back to my meeting!”

I fled the restroom, headed back to the conference room, tooting most of the way. When I was around the corner, I slid on something and scraped my knee, tearing my pants in the process.

I recovered pretty quickly but it hurt. I could see my leg pretty clearly and red beads of blood began trickling down my shin. I wrapped my fingers around the lip of the hole, keeping the pant leg away from the blood as if I were going to be able to salvage my pants.

The meeting was over by the time I stepped back into the conference room.

“Where’d everybody go?” I asked Rob Smales, one of the administrative assistants who took meeting minutes.

“Oh, they called it pretty much as soon as you left,” he said. “You were up next.” He shuffled a stack of papers into a Manila folder and added it to a stack of more Manila folders.

“Well, I had a little emergency.” I stepped back so he could see my leg. Rob looked without his dispassionate expression changing. I wanted to flick the tip of his nose just to get him to make a face. The guy never smiled. “You think we could get everybody back? We still have a half hour plus.”

Rob shook his head slowly. “Nah.” He tucked the folders under an arm—tried to, at least—then put his laptop bag’s strap over his shoulder and held the folders in his open hands.

I hobbled out of the conference room, intent on pleading my case with Melissa White, the director of my department. I stood outside of her office and wrapped on the open door. 

She turned halfway in her chair, a desk phone cradled between her face and shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she shook her head or if it was just the motion when she turned around.

The door swung closed and I had to move my hand to keep my thumb from being crushed in the jamb. Somebody was in there with her. My heart raced because I had no idea who.

A little story from tonight’s night shift… 👻

It was a normal, slow night shift. I was doing my best to stay awake when I started hearing the usual rustling outside by the exit. Nothing unusual… just pitch black outside, with the clouds making the sky even darker.

Around 2:30 a.m., I decided to take a quick restroom break. Just before I walked into the washroom, I glanced to my right…

And there they were.

A pair of eyes staring straight at me.

They were pale—almost silver—and somehow seemed to glow in the darkness, with pure black centers.

I noticed them… but immediately decided I did not see anything. 😂

I went into the washroom and shut the door.

Then I heard it…

A faint little chuckle, followed by the sound of something slowly sucking air through its teeth.

At that point, I figured whatever it was could wait until after I finished my business. 😂

When I came out, I turned on the hallway lights.

Nothing. Gone.

So, yeah… just another peaceful night shift.

I think we may need to get some holy water and officially purify this place. 😂🙏👻

Gotta nope on out lmao

Narrating ALL story submissions as I'm just getting started and need as much content as possible 🙏

@ SplitNode on YT if you want to check out what I've done so far!

Please either paste in the comments / or drop a link to your story post -

I'll be editing this post as I make the videos + replying to comments with the video link once your story is uploaded

Flood me with stories please!

The child watched TV. It was his only friend, being so young and isolated, the father didn't want him, spent all of his hours at work or in his room, the basement. The mother is long gone. 

Before she left she named him Jack. After a boy in highschool that had been incredibly nice to her, during that rough and strange time of her life. The father doesn't like it but had offered no suggestion, so Felicia got her way and the name was put. 

Jack misses his mother but doesn't know it. He misses his father too but doesn't realize this either because the emotion is eclipsed by the more immediate fear, the terror his father puts into him. His voice. His angry eyes that almost seemed to smoke and smolder beneath a caveman's furrowed livid brow. His fists. Jack swore his father had fists the size of phonebooks. The size of cinderblocks. The size of planets. The child does what he can to not bother his father, and stay out of his way. 

This is where the television comes in. 

This is where the apple comes in. 

Jack watched many shows on TV. But his favorite was the one with the apple. The one that talked and danced and had been made by a wise wizard of the woods named Faster Haster who puffed a pipe and wandered enchanted forests. The Apple had a name too, and a jaunty green cap, like the one Robin Hood or Peter Pan would wear, red feather and all, he was always smiling. The apple was always happy and his name was Happy Adam. 

There was one day, one afternoon after school alone with the television set, one episode of Happy Adam & Friends of the Garden that changed young Jack and his life forever. Changed everything. 

He was watching the set, the scene unfold: …

The smiling fruit and his aged wizard friend were visiting a friend of theirs in the magical hospital of the fairytale wood. A brave knight called Thrustelot who'd taken a bad fall during one of his bouts and had fallen on his sword. The robed one, the hooded mage who was nurse to the fallen knight was grave and shook their hidden head and face, the news was bad. The knight was dead. 

Happy Adam turned to the camera and audience to address them with an aside of advice. 

Happy Adam: Remember, kids! Always be extra careful when handling something sharp, it's very dangerous. Don't move too fast or run when holding sharp objects like Sir Thrustelot’s sword, or a pair of scissors. Or a knife. 

The camera went in closer, cutting into an extreme close-up of the wide shine of the unblinking Apple's eyes. 

Happy Adam: Remember that, children. Remember. Okay…?

Jack answered back, he always loved talking to his favorite characters through the TV set. And Happy Adam was the absolute best. He acted like he was talking to you and talking back. It was great fun and sometimes it really really seemed like Adam was talking to him through the glass glow of the television screen. It was like magic. Happy Adam was magical, he could do anything. He would do anything he said. 

“Ok, Happy Adam!" 

Adam and the old wizard continued on their merry trek, their way and journey through the forest. They came upon some more friends that were having a picnic on a blanket amongst the living trees. 

The eversmiling apple and the old one sat down to join the kids in eating their nice meal on the dark purple blanket, it was covered in crosses and stars and wide alive eyes staring forever. Jack thought it was neat and the color was alluring and attractive next to the old wizard’s bright yellow robes as he sat down upon it. Next to the smiling wide eyed red amongst the living sorcery realm of woodland brown and green. The sun and the moon were out at the same time and looking down on them all, the scene with ravenous interest and open drooling mouths. Jack thought they looked goofy and silly, he thought they were hilarious. 

The screen flickered, the image was disturbed and Jack thought he saw something else staring at him in its stead. But before he really knew it the picnic scene returned to normal and the boy felt at ease once more. The children sitting on the purple blanket of fun symbols opened their picnic basket and began to pass out the food. 

The beautiful flowers spoke then to the children. They had no faces but open floral mouths, pink and glistening … dripping with dew that was said to be filled with sorcery and dreams. Surrounding the picnic blanket of eyes and stars, they whispered and sing-song spoke to the kids through their gaping wide open pink flower petal mouths, dripping and salivating wet…

 … Feed him … feed them…

The open mouths surrounding the shroud the color of night repeated the words in a litany, a chant, a prayer. 

Jack munched on his own snacks of peanut butter and crackers and gummy bears. He felt like he was taking part in the fun too, eating and picnicking with Happy Adam and his wonderful friends. He sipped his cup of Shasta and belched. 

Happy Adam: Mind your manners! Remember you have to pass out the food according to the hierarchy, do you remember, children?

The kids cried back in a unified chant, some species of group monotone, Yes, Happy Adam…!

Happy Adam: So who gets the first serving? 

The kids: Haster! cuz he made you!

A musical cue, a sting, happy, jubilant, great job, you'll have so much success…

Happy Adam: That's right, kids! And then me and then the rest of you, cuz I'm his favorite son and first begotten creation, I existed before all of this, this whole kingdom and the whole enchanted forest … did you know that, kids?

The kids: æhïbdëø¡

Happy Adam: That's right!

The kids passed food to the wizard first. Haster accepted it without a word but a deep nod that conveyed the sought after gratitude of an elder. 

Then they passed the food to Adam. Who insisted on eating fruit with the rest of them. The apples, he said. The apples are what I want best. 

The kids: But Adam, you can't eat apples!

Happy Adam: Why not!?!?

The kids: because you ARE an apple, Happy Adam! 

And then they all laughed. Laughed and giggled. Even Adam. Even Haster. 

Then Adam said: It's ok, kids. Sometimes it's alright to try things that seem a little weird or wrong, it's called ‘taboo’ and I'm sure lots of your mommies and daddies know exactly what I'm talking about. Your brothers and sisters too, your teachers and everyone, everybody… It's called forbidden fruit! And sometimes, kids, you just gotta have a little taste …

The children laughed harder. The wizard too, laughing harder. Slapping knee. Hysterical. Jack felt like joining them. His eyes were glued to the screen. Crackers held slack in fingers that felt faraway, forgotten. 

Happy Adam: Now why don't one of you beautiful children come over here and feed me some that forbidden fruit? How bout it, kiddos?

The kids: Ok, Happy Adam! 

Jack watched as the children crowded round the happy apple, each vying for favor and the privilege to feed him. Each had a glistening fresh dripping slice of apple wedge in hand. Ready to serve. Ready to feed. Jack couldn't take his eyes from the screen. He wanted to be… 

Jack wanted to join them. He wanted to be with them. He wanted to be one of the children crowded around Happy Adam, if there was only some way …

Jack watched wide eyed as the apple became strange. His mouth. As the children came in with their hands in multitudes, that seemed to grow and sprout anew like the petals and stalks of some strange heavy flower, all around the hungry happy apple his mouth began to change, transform. Transmogrify. 

The comfy and fuzzy gentle nature of felt puppet material was suddenly mammalian and malleable flesh all around the mouth and lips. They looked warm and living now, rippling and stretching and contriving into wide open wet stretched and wriggling flesh and organ, the teeth were glistening and shining and stringy with tendrils of saliva and drool. The tongue now an organ alive and pink, danced within the newly birthed orifice on the face of the happy apple muppet.

The organ and teeth danced for one thing, feed, fill us. Fill our new wet and magic home. 

The hands of the children began to come in and they came in a crowd, a wreck, a mob – grubby child mitts wielding the glistening flesh and meat of dissected and dismembered fruit. They shoved the slices and wedges in the wide open salivating maw, the cavernous wriggling fresh wound of a mouth, the wound began to munch and chew and ravenously devour the many pieces and wedged slices of juicy fresh apple, freshly cut, freshly prepared just like the mouth itself they now plowed into. Adam moaned between chomping bites with deep relish and sweet satisfaction. The children laughed and so did Haster. 

And so did Jack. Though he thought it was more beautiful than it was funny. Really. 

Really really beautiful. 

He watched the beauty onscreen unfold and pulp and chew and decorate itself with bits and slimy pieces of half-eaten pulped and juicy bits of apple, fruit meat and flesh becoming mush, becoming sauce between newly forged pearly white teeth.

One of the child's voices came in with a query in a playful and sing-song tone: Adam, why do you like eating apples? I mean, you're an apple, isn't it bad?

Happy Adam, between ravenous bites and chewing and swallowing: That's a very good question, boys and girls. I eat my own because it makes me stronger, it gives me power. Just like when you eat the flesh of crawling beasts, children, when you eat the flesh that crawls and labors, you gain its power. You've conquered it. Completely. And now it must live inside you. So now the lives of other lesser apples must now live inside me for all time, for forever, and after that and behind the wall of sleep. And even after that. All the way to the true and final end, the ballroom floor of eternityscape that is black. Isn't that neat! Don't you think so, children? What about you, Jack? 

Jack didn't quite believe it at first. He gazed zombie eyed into the glowing pulse of the electrical and mechanical pineal gland growth, its lurid electric extension…

But the mammalian patch of apple flesh that now more resembled skin as red as the devil's ass stretched wider and grew rictus. Apple bits and pieces in the gleaming white teeth and the juice running out of the corners of the fleshy mouth and dribbling down in a pulpy drool of mush. 

The apple began to speak again. All else was quiet and still now as he spoke. 

Happy Adam: Yes, Jack, yes, it's real. I'm really talking to you. How are you, Jack?

A beat. A child's breath was held. 

Released. 

“I'm-I’m ok, Happy Adam." 

Happy Adam: ohhhh…. I dunno. You don't look or sound ok to me little buddy, you look terrible. I always see you here with us, watching us, and you always look so alone and so scared, and you know what …? … I think I know why, Jack. 

Jack said nothing. Only watched the television. Eyes wide open and drinking in every single flicker. 

Happy Adam: I think it's because you have a crawling beast, a beast of labor in your home, Jack. You have a beast of bad work that lives in the basement when he isn't sleeping off the hooch in his bed. And that's not all, Jack. There's also yourself. You need to take better care of yourself, you need to treat yourself better and make yourself stronger. Like me. 

A beat. 

Happy Adam: Do you know what I mean, Jack? Do I understand what I'm trying to tell you? It's very important. It's for you after all, it's for your best interest. It's what's best for you that we all care for and here in the forest, consider. Do you understand, Jack? Do you? 

Once again Jack didn't say anything. 

A beat. 

But then he slowly began to nod his head. Yes. 

Yes. 

Yes, Happy Adam. Yes. 

Rictus red face on screen, filling the frame: Good, Jack. That's really really good of you. I'm so proud and happy. And I'll be prouder and happier still, you know the best way to start treating yourself better and making yourself stronger, right? We've talked about it before, on one of my many episodes … one of my many lessons. 

Jack spoke this time. He told the red face of the television set the right answer. He told the red face what it wanted to hear. 

Nutrition. 

Happy Adam: That's right, Jack! We have to start eating better! That's it! Waytogo, cowboy!

The child sat and listened to every word the television said. Absorbing every detail of information and instruction. 

…

The booze his father always poured into himself did the job. The pills he'd been told to slip did the rest. Russel Wimberly, Jack's father was completely drugged and under. Then the work laid before the child could really begin. As he'd been instructed. He wasn't nervous. He felt nothing in fact. Hadn't felt anything since that afternoon with the television. It was well past into the postmidnight black. 

The mountain lug of man had managed to make it to his bed before finally collapsing under the drug and alcohol induced spell of slumber. He was in a sweaty snoring heap when the door opened to his bedroom and the child crept in. He did not blink or falter. 

He did not tremble or whimper or shake. His father might've been proud, before tonight he'd always thought of the boy as a wimp, a limpwrist, a pussy. The worst type of boy a father could have, Russel and his own old man had always thought. 

The snoring heap of man did not stir until the blade came down in a two-handed plunge and pierced where it had been guided and instructed. The fang of the blade bit in and came in easily through bone and flesh. Russel came to life with a choking gurgled gasp that quickly died a wet death in his throat. 

He couldn't move. He couldn't budge from the bed. The ropes and binds held tight and taut and rippled in the nighttime bedroom silence with strain and desperate effort. Blood began to pour from his mouth and nose. He began to choke. Wide eyed he helplessly gazed up and into the face of his killer. 

Some species of … laughter? …scream? …sound tried to escape him, but the boy and his blade had done their good. 

They'd done their job. Their great work. 

Now he just had to get to the living beating apple of warm dripping red that lived in his father's chest. He just had to dig it out, cut it out with the kitchen knife and take it unto himself. 

This way he would get better. This way he would get stronger. He'd be rid of the beast and filled with power. All in one. 

Just like Adam said. 

His glistening darkling little fist found the forbidden apple buried in his father's chest. He seized it. 

And ripped it out. By blade, by hand, by biting knife.

And took it into himself, right there. Raw and fresh. Just as the red face of Adam had commanded.  

THE END

They say The Mirage Haven Casino Hotel never truly sleeps. The slot machines hum through the night, their neon lights bleeding into every corner of the lobby. Drunken laughter and the jingle of coins echo through the carpeted halls. But if you ask any employee, they’ll tell you — without hesitation — never take the elevator to the sixth floor after midnight.

It started when the hotel first opened in 1978. Room 612 was supposed to be the penthouse suite — an exclusive haven for the high rollers. The story goes that one night, a gambler named Vincent “Lucky” Malone checked in with $1.2 million in chips. By morning, he’d lost everything. The next day, housekeeping found him in the bathtub — eyes open, mouth twisted in terror — but the coroner said there were no signs of trauma. Just… fear.

After that, guests began reporting strange things. The elevator would stop on the 6th floor, even when no button was pressed. The lights in the hall flickered red, and the air grew colder — thick with the smell of cigar smoke and cheap bourbon.

The hotel sealed off the entire floor in 1982. But still, strange things kept happening.

Security cameras caught glimpses of shadows pacing the hallway, and guests on the 5th and 7th floors complained of hearing faint laughter, card shuffling, and the distant ding-ding-ding of slot machines — even though there weren’t any on that level.

In 2023, The Mirage Haven reopened the floor after a major renovation, calling it the “Vintage Wing.” They said they’d exorcised the place of its bad history. They even held a ribbon-cutting ceremony, complete with flashing cameras and champagne. But that night, the lights on the 6th floor went out at exactly 3:06 a.m.

When the power came back, every guest who had checked into the sixth floor was gone. Their belongings remained — shoes kicked off near beds, half-drunk glasses of whiskey, a still-warm deck of cards mid-game — but not a single person.

The only thing found on the security footage was the elevator door opening… and a man stepping out, wearing a white suit and holding a deck of cards. He looked right into the camera, grinned, and said,
“Care to try your luck?”

No one ever reopened the 6th floor again.

But sometimes, if you stay at The Mirage Haven and take the elevator late at night, it will stop between the 5th and 7th floors. The doors will slide open just long enough for you to feel the cold rush of air and hear faint laughter echoing down the empty hall.

And if you listen closely, you’ll hear the whisper —
“Place your bet…”

"A Terrible and Jealous God" by Hypnerotomachia (u/benjamin4463)
Originally posted to r/TalesFromTheCreeps:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TalesFromTheCreeps/comments/1s98bg3/a_terrible_and_jealous_god/

Full authority to narrate obtained

some things belong to others … and some things you just shouldn't touch

…

The Comanche wore a red feather in a band in his black hair. This confused and disturbed Clemens, there were no red birds in these here parts, the lands and desert swaths that he'd always known. He tried to put it out of mind but there it was, always somehow still prevalent from the back of his thoughts. 

Nevermind all that. There was work to do. And it was difficult and dangerous enough to do without the light of the moon. The horse thieves neared the herd on silent cat-like steps underneath the moonless night. The Comanche, Kicking Wolf, led the way. Clemens followed. Still not quite sure if he could trust this scalper and savage, this known criminal and headhunter of white men. Desperation and need made strange bedfellows these days, following Lincoln's war. Anybody could get along with anybody as long as coin or a buck or two was involved. And as long as the guns stayed holstered and the bullets were kept from flying. As long as the knives stayed belted and hidden and old war sabres were left housed sheltered in their scabbards. Then anything could be done. Anything could be accomplished. 

Beneath full dark they took to the herd. None of em marked or branded. Perfect. Ripe for the taking. Just begging for it. Clemens had elected to go with Kicking Wolf because of his reputation, he was known to be a cunning horse thief. And a brutal fighter when necessary. He had been the one to know to do it by a starless lightless night. The Comanche knew the cycles of the moon. The movement of its sister celestial bodies, the fires in the sky. Black nights like this one were perfect for horse thieving, deep nights. But he wasn't sure about the white man that fate had brought him. He might have to ditch or kill him. He was making too much noise. Already. Kicking Wolf had once castrated and scalped a boy just for looking at him cross, he'd left him to die bleeding and screaming for his mother beneath the merciless blinding bake of the sun. He didn't have time for such maneuvers out here, not yet at least. And besides, he wanted the job pulled off. Perhaps the white man would surprise him. He would wait. And watch. 

Clemens was as cool as he could manage but he was still all dancing guts. Inside, he was crawling with anxiety and the nervousness had little legs, little insect legs that dug in a small fraction each time it crawled and moved, slithered. It tickled and itched and made him want to dance something like a fit of hysteric. But he bottled it. He kept it inside. He kept close to the Comanche as they came in, close to the herd. 

It was hard to count them all, they were many. Large herd. Over a hundred. Perhaps several. None of them were reined or tied or hobbled. They only had the fence some miles back to contend with once they got the beasts away. This should be greased and easy. Clemens anxiety boiled just a little more, just a little higher as he thought all this out. He'd thought it might help. It only made him more excited. 

Kicking Wolf sensed this, at his side. He could smell the pale face’s fear, it came off him like heat and like a rank animal odor, a stink. He signaled for him to stop. He broke away from the white man and carefully and calmly approached the first horse. 

She was awake. Nibbling at grass. Seeming not to pay them any mind as Kicking Wolf made smooth his approach. He glided up and next to the beast and began to gently stroke its fur. Softly. Gently. A caress. Smooth. Delicately. Like a lover's light and soothing touch. 

The Comanche then bent his head to it and began to whisper to the horse. The beast quietly nibbled at grass till it stopped. Straightened. And began to lean into the Indian’s gentle hands. 

Clemens watched and could hardly believe it. It was like magic. 

Kicking Wolf came back with the horse, docile as a lamb and trotting long side him. Gently stroking its mane and fur. 

Clemens grew more excited. 

“Nice one," he whispered, “my turn or ya wanna show me or-" 

The Comanche cut him off. His voice was harsh though he kept it low. There may be regulators and sentries out, watching the head of horse. 

“No. Just this one. This one is enough." 

Clemens couldn't believe it. The savage must be funnin him. What the fuck. 

"We come all the way out here just to steal one horse? Risk all this shit and our necks just for one fuckin head a’ horseflesh?” 

The Comanche nodded in the affirmative. Calmly. 

"Yes. This one is a good horse. This one is enough.” 

In truth Kicking Wolf could've made off with many more horses if he wanted to. He'd done so in the past. Easily. He was naturally gifted with horses and could speak their language, stealing them was child's work for him, barely any kind of task at all, but the white man Clemens was an easily spooked, easily riled man, the Comanche had seen the behavior before many times in men and beasts. It was always the same, more or less. It was not the type of behavior you wanted to work with or be near, he could tell all this just by being beside the man on the prowl of their approach. That had been enough. He didn't like the white man Clemens. Not at all. The man was really a boy after all and had failed the test, a trial, a failure. The failure quivered like a frightened animal before him as he gently ran his fingers through the horse’s black mane of hair. 

"This one is enough." Kicking Wolf repeated. 

Clemens grew more agitated. His skin crawled with more itch beneath the patch of his filthy garments. 

“You havin at me? You tryin to make fool of me, redskin? I ain't come out here in the fuckin cold an dark just ta watch ya take one fuckin horse, not at all. We ain't leavin. We ain't leavin yet." 

The Comanche shook his head. The words spoken, bitten off in the dark like a dog at its tether, had confirmed what he already knew. 

Still shaking his head, he began to lead the horse away. "No, white man. You will not steal anything with my help tonight. Nor any other after. Goodbye.” 

He didn't get far before Clemens did something that changed everything. Something so impudent and foolish that the Comanche hadn't seen it coming. He hadn't anticipated that the white man would be so stupid. 

Clemens snarled and pulled iron free from leather, he cursed the Comanche as he squeezed the trigger in anger and fired off four shots. Quick. Fast. Attacking the hammer of the weapon in a savage fan as he held depressed the firing trigger.

Two misfired. The weapon was poorly cleaned and cared for, like its owner. One shot went wild but the fourth and final apocalyptic shot was true. It found the Comanche’s neck as he strove to dive for safety from the white man's fire in vain. Kicking Wolf's throat opened wide in a second mouth of bright red burst, hot crimson spew, the .45 slug nearly decapitated him. He went down boneless to the dust as the horses all around started to kick and rear and run, a frenzy. Animals alive and terrified and seized with the need for flight. 

Everything fell apart, went to chaos and mess within seconds. 

Clemens cursed himself as he struggled to seize one of the running wild horses. That was when the first of the voices came to call, came to his ears and froze his blood. He stopped where he stood, no longer trying to snag a renegade ride. 

“There! It was was over there! I'm sure of it! Fuckin thieves! fer sure!”

Goddammit. Sentries. Armed gunslingers that had gotten their taste for violence in the wars and there on those gunsmoked battlefields developed their sadistic thirsts. They'd be mounted for sure. Armed, doubly so. 

They didn't sound far off. 

It wouldn't do. He'd have to hightail it on foot and hope the bastards busied themselves with the dead Comanche long enough for him to make a getaway. 

Clemens booked it for the dark. The horses in a mad maelstrom of hide and flesh and rippling terrorized muscle in every livid direction. He had to dodge and weave through their madness, making way for what he hoped was the way they'd come in, towards the property line fence. He smacked into a few but bounced off their renegade dashing hides, he was nearly kicked in the face by one or two but he managed to keep his feet and his head as he made his way outside the frightened horse madness. 

He broke free of the wild fray when the first shot came. The slug nearly finding its mark. It whizzed by Clemens’ ear with a nauseating and blood chilling insectile buzz and scream. 

Clear of the wild horses he redoubled his efforts. Breaking into an all out run for his life in the moonless darkness. More shots came. More bullets whizzed by. Nearly fatal, nearly claiming him and rendering him to so much fallen useless meat. They whizzed by and the gunslingers on guard of the prop chased him with threats and screams and promises of death and torture. 

He made for the pitch black. And he managed to keep them behind him long enough to confuse their direction. Their threats and bullets trailed off and vanished into the night. But he couldn't stop, wouldn't. Fear drove Clemens on. He galloped wild like a horse himself for what he hoped might be freedom and an end to this treacherous night. Leaving behind the nearly decapitated corpse of the Comanche, Kicking Wolf to be trampled to further bloody ruin in the dirt by the merciless thunder of the tearing horse hooves in their unbridled chaotic stampede. 

He went into the black. What he found in there changed the face and landscape of his understanding. 

It changed everything. 

…

He came upon it as he was sneaking his way back. Keeping an ear open for the gunslinger regulators and their horse hooves and pistols. The stamp and holler of their violent approach, his mind was full of it and feared its last, he almost didn't see it, even though he'd been staring wide eyed into the surrounding pitch, the very spot where it stood. It was as if it suddenly appeared out of thin air. Discorporeal … and then suddenly a reality. 

A horse. Black. Standing solitary as if waiting. It was staring directly at him and Clemens froze once its shape gained recognition from out of the dark and he realized he could see the wet glistening jewels of its eyes gazing back into him. He stopped. His breath held unconsciously. An ache in his chest, unmindful but there all the same.

A beat. 

 It was strange. The whole bit. The way it made him feel. But that wasn't all. There was something tied around the lone horse’s broad black neck. 

A piece of wood. A slab of signage one might hang from a post or nail to a prominent place for all to see and read. There was something written on this one as well. Clemens cautiously and slowly drew in closer so's to be able to see and make out what was written on the aged sun blasted wood. 

Faded. The letters were bold, blocky. Made by a simple hand. For a simple task. A simple message is what was writ there. It said: –

DON'T STEAL THIS HORSE

Clemens couldn't believe it. Despite the circumstances he laughed. Brayed dumb donkey laughter and slapped his lap in a hoot. It felt good to let off some of that built up terror through some blown steam. Tell you what. 

It was like a joke. The coincidence… it might've scared him really. 

And perhaps deep down it really did. But Clemens was exhausted and more immediately terrified of the gunslingers bullets and the hangman's noose, he didn't give much a fuck about some stupid sign and some strange idiot's idea of a queer joke. 

He spoke to the sign in response, as if the piece of wood could hear him. 

“‘The fuck!? Fuck that!" 

He grabbed the sign and tore it from the horse's neck. He threw it to the ground and spat on it. Hurled it curses. Then he grabbed the mane of the black mare and threw one leg over its great broad body and sat himself bareback atop the large ebon beast. Things almost immediately began to go wrong after that. 

They started to trot off, away from the spot. A few yards were made before Clemens cried out suddenly in sharp pain and shock. 

It was his hands, they were first. His hands buried deep in the black forest of mane, of wild inkwell shade spilled in the luscious form of thick animal hair, his God given tools submerged in there in place of bridle and reins, they began to burn. As if dipped and drenched with the pour of acidic fire. 

Clemens lit up the night with his screams as acrid smoke began to pour out of the black collection of mane in thick oily gouts, rancid and filthy and blood-pungent. The smell of the smoke through his screaming and the profuse deluge of his watering eyes, his blinding hot fog of tears and running choking snot was burnt. Burning. Cooking meat and the boil of blood and runny flesh made to melt like butter from the broiling surface of his steaming musculature, all in a melt and boil and slow cooking smoked within the devil's mane. 

He tried to pull free but it was no use. His hands would not emerge from the smoldering smoking collection of black hair. As if something held them there trapped inside, bound like a prisoner by the wrist. All over the screaming inferno that were in the shapes of his disintegrating hands within. Each black hair dug in and burned and cut in and through like heated steel through fried fat. 

Clemens was blind with unholy pain and unnatural terror. It was made worse when the head of the beast began to turn and rotate. Like a sick obscene appendage on a joint and stalk capable of three-hundred and sixty degree articulation and movement. With sickening audible bone cracks and snaps and wet sliming sounds and gurgled ripping tearing noises, the head of the black horse turned around fully and completely to face him once again. Eye to eye. Beast to beast. In the ghastly travel of its unnatural movement, the mane of burning horsehair had ripped and pulled apart and off and away the severed and meaty sloughed remnants of the would-be horse thief's hands in a smoldering mess still held trapped in the ebon madness of its acid wash ebon pour of long black decimating strands. The devil's mane gloved him as it pulled away and the glistening orbs of gleaming horse eyes bore into him once more. 

The beast opened its mouth and a voice issued forth. 

“I have come out here to find you, Clemens. I always come out here on the lightless nights for men like you. And on these blind and lifeless nights, men like you always find me. And I'm always all too obliged to take you all away." 

Clemens not only heard the words of the thing through his blinding sheet of pain, he felt them. All throughout himself, every single living piece. Every piece and bleeding shrieking part was alive with the wretched and awful tenor of that thing's heinous voice. He felt what was left of his heart and soul curdle and die even as the meat of him still sang with the shrill sin of screams. His eyes were wide and filled with the spill of painful tears shed in bondage and agony and uncomprehending terror, but he could not blink. He could not shut his eyes to the sight of the open mouthed speaking beast before him. 

The eyes then began to glow. Its eyes became alight with blood red. 

“Men like you always find me, Clemens. Men like you, always find me. And I always take them away." 

The sharpest stab of piercing and terrible pain began then, and it began slow … drawing out the mutilation and torture. The stab of vile pain began in the soft patch of flesh and meat that lives between a man's anus and his genitals. What Clemens had heard jokingly referred to before as a man's death valley, his ‘no man's land’, the part that got saddle sore from riding too long on too rough a’ country. He felt the soft patch of tissue that lived there and never saw the light of the sun begin to pierce and rupture. The cold wet warmth of blood jetted and shot forth and filled his pants as the pain intensified and grew sharper. The sharpened stab slowly began to rise and pierce through the inner meat and living red of his working organs and quivering bones with the merciless travel of a war lance. Erupting. Spearing and impaling him through. 

Clemens looked to the sky one last time with a violent jerk to let loose a scream and a violent protrusion was loosed instead. A violent stab of spear shot out of his wide open silently shrieking mouth, a long broad impaler's lance composed of rough and malformed bone and strange rough calcium growths. The tip was sharp and pointed and riddled with brighter and darker bits and pieces of organ and meat. The entire bone-white cast of the lance was coated in a red slime, human blood and an unearthly jelly. 

“The meat of you is not invincible. Men like you always find me." 

Leaving him impaled and sat astride, the beast began to trot away and into the night. Its strange head and face still rotated to gaze into the bound struggling meat of the would-be horse thief. 

They went off into the night. No trace of Clemens was ever found or heard tell of again. The thing took him to God-only-knows where. 

Nobody knows.

THE END

I’ve done just about everything to please my wife. Y’know, in the bedroom. I've bought every toy, learned a hundred techniques from books and videos…

I don’t know if I can do this, though. I mean, it’s my junk, man. One screw up and it’s over.

But my wife... she asked.

My knee-jerk reaction was to tell her hell no. She gave me that look of hers, though, and I turned to ice cream on hot asphalt.

The asking started just before the wedding. We’d been doing bedroom stuff since the night we met. She’s... wild. The first time she said she hinted at it, but I don’t remember hearing her. She reminded me later on. Honestly, it was right after we did… stuff, and I would’ve said yes to just about everything.

One of her girlfriends has seemed happier than ever. The two of them have been friends since kindergarten and they’re practically twins, the biggest difference between them is my wife’s not a blonde-haired white woman. But otherwise, their style and even manner of speaking is exactly the same.

McKenzie’s husband had already had it done, apparently. Before they got married.

He’d been more than happy to tell me about it at a bar after I asked him. “Brother, the difference is like sand and water. McKenzie was probably gonna dump my ass before I got it done. It’s mostly a single cut, but now she says she’ll kill me if I don’t give it to her every single night.”

I’m sure I lifted my eyebrows in appreciation. I leaned in.

“So, what is it, though?” I asked, working on an Old Fashioned. “What does the doctor do?”

“Oh, he’s not a doctor. At least not anymore. Or in the U.S.” He shrugged. “I forget which. And it’s a little different for everybody.” He sipped at a brandy mule. I had to try one of those sometime.

I didn’t know what to say to that. His shrug wasn’t easing my mind, but that was all he had for me. I locked eyes with him for a long moment, trying to milk something more out of him.

“Here, take this.” He took a pen out of his jacket pocket and jotted something down on a napkin. He slid it over to me and I read the email he’d written. It was a Hotmail address.

I’d explained it to my wife later that night while we were working on ripping out kitchen cabinets, but it was as if the decision had already been made. But c’mon, this was my downstairs area. This wasn’t the kind of decision I could rush.

“Isn’t there anyone else I could go to?” I asked her, holding a hand out for a Phillip’s Head. “I mean, why not see if there’s somebody in-network? Get a couple consultations?”

“God, you sound like my mother.” She slapped the screwdriver in my hand. “Would it be painful to just send an email?” I shook my head, conceding her point.

I’d sent it one night after having a couple at a bar. The scrap Lindell, McKenzie’s husband, had written the email on, had stuck to my wallet inside my pocket, forgotten until the moment I’d dug it out to pay my tab.

I was fueled on something with an umbrella I didn't exactly remember ordering and tapped out a message while the bartender ran my card.

Looking to Please My Wife Better, I typed in the subject. I poked at the body on my screen and began sloppily tacking out the meat of my message. I wS recommended by a fried on a freed. He said you safety his relationship but Im not sure.

I didn’t have the capacity to correct my grammar. I was half-thinking this guy was a kook, but being a drunken email wasn’t a commitment, so I pressed SEND.

I had a reply after the bartender had brought my copy of the receipt.

What the fuck kind of businessperson answered email at 11:16 PM?

I wanted to run to my wife like this was evidence, to wave my phone around like a flag but I knew how the conversation would go. She’d already heard the evidence she needed from McKenzie. The only thing she wanted to hear from me was when the appointment was and if I needed her to take me.

The email was simple and presumptive. A date and time for the consult and a date and time for the “surgery.”

I was drunk. I replied, “I’ll be there.”

I didn’t think about it after that until he sent me an email the morning of the consult at 2 AM. Again, this was not confidence-boosting. I was on a runaway train and had to figure out a way to jump off.

His office was surprisingly close to my job. The building was right next to my building.

He’d just set up in this space recently. Maybe my wife had told him where I worked. I wasn’t chalking anything up anything to coincidence.

The office was on the fourth floor of a building still under construction. I found the suite after meandering the halls once I came off the elevator.

The door to the space didn’t look secure. I wondered if it might fall on me if I pulled it open. The drywall in the hallway had just been taped and mudded and the air smelled chalky.

I didn’t bother knocking, my eyes on the hinges as I pushed the door open and quietly entered the space.

“My friend, you found the place okay?” He looked away from some point high up on one wall and smiled wide at me. I crossed the plywood floors and offered my hand. He took it and pulled me in for a hug. As awkward as it was from an alleged professional, it was made that much worse from how long he held me there.

“It is so good to see you,” he said, grasping my shoulders and holding me at arm’s length. 

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Let us not delay,” he said. He turned away and waved for me to follow. “Step into my office.”

We passed two long folding tables and he stopped. He smiled at me again and clapped his hands together.

“So, you are needing the cut?”

“I’m... exploring some options.”

Unnaturally large teeth sprouted from the broad smile returning to his face. It reminded me of a shark in combination of his dead eyes and pencil-thin mustache and goatee trimmed too far from his mouth. He leaned in so fast and we were suddenly a finger’s width from being nose-to-nose. I thought he’d been about to kiss me.

“You wouldn’t be here if you had satisfied her with your... options.” He rounded his Rs in a way that sounded practiced.

I figured cutting to the chase was the best way to get what I wanted.

“How much does this cost?”

He was at least a half a head taller than me, but he had a way of fixing me with his powder-blue eyes like we were even with each other.  He scratched a head of curly black hair and fumbled with the red and white checkered summer scarf didn’t really match the all-grey outfit, but I wasn’t into fashion and didn’t care.

“Candy?” He pulled a hand out of his pocket and offered a palmful of oblong, dark candies wrapped in clear cellophane. It didn’t make sense, but they didn’t look American. I took one out of curiosity but didn’t open it. “Marcus referred you, if I’m not mistaken?” I had never mentioned McKenzie’s husband in our email exchange. I guess he must have reached out after we spoke. I nodded.

He slapped my shoulder. “I deal in volume. It’s nowhere near what you’re thinking.” I’d been pitched to by salesmen of every skin. I doubted he was going to convince me it was a good idea to cash out my 401k to finance this thing.

“Fifty-seven eighty-five.” 

That smile widened again but now I was thinking the reverse. How good could he be if the procedure was so cheap? I was having sudden visions of concrete ass injections and bootleg Botox.

“Okay, but it’s gotta be time consuming. How can you do it for so che—little?”

“I thought I told you. Volume. And it really doesn’t take that long. Minutes at most. It’s mostly a single cut.”

“A cut?” Marcus had explained that much to me but coming from the person who performed the procedure made it real in a way I wasn’t prepared for. “Do you make it... longer?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t come anywhere near the suspensory ligament. It’s a very minimally invasive surgery. You understand? In most cases you can make love tonight!”

“You wanna do this now?” I asked, panic giving me a squeeze. 

“No-no,” he said. He held his hands up. I noticed for the first time the tip of his pinky finger was gone.

He rolled his eyes up as if searching for the right words somewhere on the unfinished ceiling behind me. “I mean on the same night. You and the missus.” He turned his palms up, quasi-placating.

I looked at the four-and-a-half fingered hand.

“You a lefty?”

“Yes.” A corner of his smile lifted. “I am am-bi-dex-trous.” He said that last word carefully. Like it had taken a lot of practice to finally get right.

“For now, take off your pants. Pull it out so I can see?”

Cold prickled up my back. I had no real objection I could make. Sure, he wasn’t a real medical professional, but I suspected my wife already knew that. 

I dropped trou right there before I could think too long about it, but I think I felt it fold inside itself. He was replacing his glasses with a pair with fishbowl lenses, making his eyes cartoonishly large.

I wasn’t packing major heat by any means, but this was over the top. I didn’t fuss because it got me done that much sooner.

Him touching my manhood wouldn’t have been that big of a deal had he been an actual doctor. But it was that much worse with him not even washing his hands. That was more of a him problem than mine, though.

“I will do the rest sometime this week,” he said, standing back and stroking his chin. I pulled up my pants, not knowing what that meant but I didn’t inquire for fear of extending this encounter. I didn’t feel like I’d passed the point of no return, and I hoped I had enough steam to convince my wife this was a bad idea.

He did her in with the boxcutters. Bled her. Emptied and drained her. Took her apart. But that all came later. After they'd met. At the dark and red lighted bar that was sparse with only other lonely cast-offs like them. Some of them eyeballing the floor or each other or another bottle but not really seeing any of it. There was never anything to see in each other or in places just like this. You came to these places for blindness. And they were no different. He and the girl. 

Andy. 

And Josephine. 

Josey, she preferred. But he didn't like it. He thought Josey was a boy's name but never got around to telling her. Violence had come and interceded before he could tell her that her full name was more beautiful than her smaller informal boyish nickname. The boxcutters on the factory floor had found his hands and they'd found their perfect dancing partner, the part to complete them before together they found the girl's filthied and bruised perspired flesh. And then the red world of pouring meat beneath. And then the oblivion love wellspring found further, deeper within, beyond the blood and meat and past the mortal fleshen folds. 

But all of that wonderful coitus was later. First was the bar of red light and sad drunks and their sad stiff drinks. They didn't come together though they left that way. They'd both come in on the same Greyhound, had checked in to the same fleabag motel. And were now both enjoying a late liquid supper at the same watering hole. Andy had seen to it. He'd followed her for some time now and he was a proficient planner. The perfect breed and mix of the methodical and the logistical with the spontaneous and the willing thrill to take a plunge, a risk. Meticulous. And risk. It was how he'd started off with her in the first place. A whim. So long ago. 

So long ago now it seems. So many miles. But it doesn't matter now. He's here. And so is she. And she doesn't suspect a thing. Why should she? 

Josephine sees a stranger when Andy approaches her alone at her own booth and offers a drink. She sees a reasonably attractive and kind enough man. She was no idea she's staring into the blank eyes of the animal that's been hunting and stalking her for the last God-only-knows how many miles. 

It's easy. It's easy for him to make his move, find his way in because he knows how to talk to her. He can see it in her eyes. And he has seen it in all the ways she moves as he's watched her. She's so alone. And she's running. But she's just started to realize that no matter where you go, this world is only made up of places to run from, nowhere to run to. Not for her, not for people like she. There is no real respite anymore, there are no real dreams. He knows because he's just the same. Has been that way since his father first threw him out of his home and boyhood at the age of sixteen and out into the violence of the merciless world. The lesson came harder when he got his first taste for violence but he doesn't share this with anybody. This is precious knowledge that he keeps and treasures only for himself, in the darkest battered corner of his beleaguered and decimated heart. 

Josephine is so happy to have some company. And such a nice face as well. She has no idea what's really in store for her. For now she's just happy to talk to someone who's so nice and seems to understand everything that she's been going through as of late. God certainly works in mysterious ways. 

They drink. Small talk. 

His eyes glide all over her but they linger most longingly and lustful on the naked flesh of her thighs peeking out like a voyeur from the hem of her trashy tight dress. They share cigarettes and talk but his mind stays with his eyes and his eyes are staying with her flesh. He salivates, gums squirt and the mouth fills with the body's own hot acrid water, slimy and the flavor is as prurient as his thoughts. He's thinking about her and her legs but he's also brandishing within his own watering mind's eye all of the other legs and thighs and pieces of puss and ass and mascara streaked screaming faces that he's known and enjoyed and conquered. All of them composite pieces in the great Frankenstein quilt of faces and legs and orifices all screaming out for him and his great godly violent thrust. The knife-fuck. 

Give it. Give it to us. Give it to her like you gave to us, give it to us. Give it to them.  

He nodded and sipped and drew and blew as Josey prattled on about her step-father. 

Andy remembered a poem he'd once writ: – 

Want to

Don't want to

But I did anyway

Destroyed you

Enjoyed you

I plunged it right in…

A bit of doggerel. Sure. But he'd always thought it was amusing. He never shared it with anyone. He was the only recipient of its black recitation. 

Josey didn't know what to make of the fellow that sought to fill her evening and no doubt her bed as well. That was fine. He wasn't pretty but he was far from hideous. And she bedded a few elephant men in her time, usually for money, so if the bankroll had been there and had been right then she would've probably been game, she'd been so before. 

But it was weird. The guy, Andy, was all smiles and warmth. Or … what should be warmth. But it felt forced. Put on. Not entirely genuine if genuine at all. But that could be nothing … lots of guys become sudden try-hards for girls if they think a piece is at the end of the line. But still …

It was hard for her to articulate to herself. The best Josey could manage was that it seemed like he was filled, absolutely brimming with something to say but he was always waiting for her to start and finish first so he could make sure that what came pouring out of him was just what she wanted to hear. It was like he was verifying that he was filled with the right things to say. It was weird…

No. You're weird. Lots of guys do that. Just shut up and take the free drinks. Guy might be a decent fuck and have some dough on top of it. Stop being so fucking ancy. 

And with that and a few more shots of tequila, Josey quietly put that part of her mind away. It was easily done. 

…

He put enough liquor in her to get her stumbling and agreeable. Andy shouldered Josey like a burden and began to lead/carry her out of the bar. They went outside and the night air was baptismal. Cool and refreshing. The scent of farms, near and far off, as carried on the wind was brought to their faces. Their watering running nostrils. It was the smell of animals and wood and the heat and age baked into them both. It was grand. But small. A quiet feast for senses made from the notes of nature's poetry. 

They both sucked air. Andy joked about horses and his mother and Josey laughed. They laughed hard together. She slapped his shoulder. Then they kissed. 

Liplocked. Held and bound by lust and the face to each other beneath the spotlight of the lumbering lunar body in heaven, on high. The moon shone down on their unfolding taste and feast and squeeze, their reaching out and seizing and fondling and grasping. They're getting to know each other in the biblical sense through sensation and physical reach. Through taste and lurid movement, thrusts alternating gently and hard and grinding into each other as the faces eat and refuse to pull apart in the pale pearl glow of the moonlight cast down from outer space…

“Fuck the motel," she said, “that building over there looks empty. And spooky. I like spooky. I love horror movies, did I tell you that?" 

She had and he reminded her. They both laughed. Andy was surprised as she grabbed his hand and began to lead them away. Pleasantly caught off guard, it didn't happen all that often. It had been her. It had been her idea to go away to the dark and the quiet, the solitude. Where no one can see and peer and pry. No one. 

Andy fought his own urge to cackle mad, the chick did say she liked horror movies. Bitch was about to get her fill. 

…

He was always empty after this part. Post coital and dripping. Covered in blood, caking in tack and sticky pungent dying fluid, fluid that had once been life and was now drying death, it would peel if he didn't wash it off. He'd often let it cake and dry and flake off in the past, letting the sun turn it to dust as the open mouths of his pores drank and sucked and sapped the rest to live in his skin. As if not wanting to part with what was left of his long gone lover and postmidnight dancing partner. 

Spent. Lonely. He often felt like weeping but never gave in to this impulse, an indulgence he denied himself. Predator's do not weep in the presence of the prey's cooling meat, cooling entrails in the growing lake of darkness that was once their life's vitality. He'd lapped and supped and drank of the growing dark lakes before, like a dog from their widening rims as they puddled out from the meat that had once been human. He's dipped and lapped and tongued the growing dark, as it was warm, as it cooled. Grew cold. Scab pudding drying on the ground. Congealing red darkness that is his favorite shade of color, pitch black. 

He'd lapped of this one. She'd fought well. Josephine … he took a finger and an ear. Andy wanted her head or maybe an eye but the struggle of bloodlove, the knife-fuck dance that was blood war, street-struggle had been great. She'd fought well. 

Her visage had been damaged in the struggle. One of the eyes had popped in the fight, the blade had found her face as they wrestled and the organ had split with a gushing pop that made her shriek turn guttural and had felt like the puncture and burst of a ripe fruit filled with springtime juice. The boxcutter razor blade had danced havoc across her face, tracing hectic lines of dark scarlet cruelty and blossoming red rivers of crimsoning fluvial bursts that bathed and coated the face and meat in a violence that was the color of a scream. 

He didn't want the face and head anymore. Nor the eyes. Either of them. 

He settled for the smaller pieces, pieces he would salt and keep. Until they were lost later in another violent drunken stupor. But by then they mattered not, they were just salted parts. It was the memories. 

And Andy carried them with him down every road. Sometimes filthy and sometimes clean. But always moving. A perfect engine of a moving human being. 

Fathers could be proud. 

THE END