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The carriage car baked in the unrelenting Sun, pulled along by too-thin donkeys and their too-cruel whipmaster. Skeletal carrion eagles picked at the dry carcasses along the camino, all victims of the yearslong drought that had stricken the Yucatán. My carriage companion, the Lord Fray Diego de Landa, scarcely looked out to the passing landscape. He remained quiet, no doubt considering the gravity of our mission. A week before our departure, the Lord Fray had received word of a frightening discovery in the advocación of Sotuta. Two bodies in a shallow grave. Two children. Juan Nachi Cocom, Maya Chief Principal of the province, had written to the Lord Fray asking for a Holy Inquest into the matter. Rather than send a written response, the Lord Fray immediately engaged a carriage.

We arrived at the gates of the Sotuta Monastery on our fourth day of travel and were greeted by Fray Brusselas who kissed the Lord Fray’s hand in practiced reverence and welcomed us on behalf of Fray Pedro de Rodrigo, Abbot of the house. Over the past decade several monasteries had been established across the peninsula, some even in permanent stone structures, but here in Sotuta the monastery was only partially constructed and a flurry of activity around the worksite kept a cloud of dust in the air.

“Work of any sort is slow around here,” explained Brusselas. “Even after we pulled all the indios from their huts in the woods and moved them to town. At first they kept returning to their overgrown plots, but we smashed their beehives and ripped out their fruit trees so now they stayed put. They have nowhere else to go!” Brusselas laughed but the Lord Fray did not so much as smile. Brusselas quelled his laughter then added seriously, “But even with every man and woman working there still aren’t enough hands to get everything done. We’ve already put all the children to work as soon as they can walk, but it’s no replacement for an able-bodied man. Perhaps the Lord Fray could put in a word with the crown? We could use more Castilian men. And women.”

“My concern here is not construction schedules,” replied the Lord Fray. “I am here for one purpose: the Holy Inquest into the discovery of two dead children. Please notify Chief Principal Juan Nachi Cocom of my arrival.”

“But sir,” said Brusselas, “That inquest has already been completed. Juan Nachi Cocom was found guilty.”

~

“This episcopal inquisition is hereby called to order,” I declared, silencing the half dozen Franciscan friars in the audience. “Under the authority and guidance of Lord Fray Diego de Landa, first Provincial of the Order of Monasteries of the Lord Saint Francis and Apostolic Judge of the Holy Office by bulls of His Holiness Pius Quartus, conceded and secured at the request of His Majesty Philip the Second.” Lord Fray de Landa took his seat, flanked to his right by Castilian nobleman Tómas Avila and to his left by Juan Diego Xiu, a bejeweled Maya official crowned with red and green feathers. I unfurled my scroll, dipped my quill, and prepared to write every word spoken during the inquest.

“Brothers,” said Abbot Fray Pedro de Rodrigo before the tribunal, “I have in my possession sworn testimony from dozens of indios here in Sotuta of a pagan conspiracy led by one Juan Nachi Cocom.” The Lord Fray shifted in his seat and Fray Pedro took notice, “Perhaps your Lordship is familiar with the man?”

“Indeed,” replied Lord Fray de Landa, “His family had long ruled these lands. I myself baptized Nachi Cocom and bestowed upon him the name of Juan.”

“Then it is with a heavy heart I inform the Lord Fray that Juan Nachi Cocom has broken his baptismal vows and for years been engaged in the same ritual heresy that plagued this land before our arrival. Idolatry. Blood magic. Even human sacrifice.”

“These are grave accusations,” said the Lord Fray.

Fray Pedro tossed a stack of vellum sheets on my desk, tipping my well and spilling ink across my transcript.

“Read the confessions for yourself. Roberto Canché, the indio constable of Sotuta, testified that last spring he witnessed Juan Nachi Cocom, drunk on balché honey mead, perform a ritual human sacrifice of four young boys to their supposed rain god inside the very church which our brotherhood had constructed just one year prior. The youths were each placed on wooden crosses, their hands and feet nailed, and an outlawed obsidian blade was used to slice open their chests. Then Cocom reached inside the open wound and yanked the still-beating heart out of the young child’s body. He anointed the snouts of their idol statues with the blood then took the dead youths to a hidden lake inside a cave and hurled their corpses into the waters. Martin Ba, a tradesman here in Sotuta, confessed to nailing three women to a cross under the direction of Chief Governor Lorenzo Cocom, beating them with thorny nopal paddles before cutting out their hearts and hurling the bodies into a cave lake. Juan Cocom testified to helping supply four children to his cousins Nachi and Lorenzo for the purpose of drowning them in a cave lake. Fransisca Uicab witnessed two men sacrificed and her husband was tasked with carrying the bodies to the ruins of an old temple and disposing of them inside a cave lake.”

While my right hand deftly transcribed every word spoken by Fray Pedro, my left hand flipped through the confessions – all written in the same elegant longhand but often signed with a crude X.

“Tomás Ak testified that at one ritual he saw Nachi Cocom fling a living woman into the waters of a cave lake, weighed down by a stone tied to her ankles so that she might courier a message to their so-called rain god. Luís Ku confessed to attending at least four sacrifices in which men had their hearts excised. Octavio Caxcan even told us of a ritual where a man was skinned alive! His flesh peeled carefully from a single incision along the spine to ensure it came off in one piece which was then worn by Nachi Cocom as he danced for their idol statues.” A chill ran down my spine at the thought of such horrific sights.

“These are quite dramatic stories you tell,” interrupted the Lord Fray, “and you do tell them well, but have you any evidence of these crimes beyond testimony?”

Fray Pedro called towards the hallway, “Miguel Ángel!” The doors of the chamber opened and a barefoot Maya boy shuffled inside. Fray Pedro took the boy’s soft face in his hands and ordered him gently, “Have the idols brought inside.” The boy hurried out then returned with two strong Maya men hoisting a crate full of carved statuettes. “Over eighty pagan idols,” said Fray Pedro, “Each brought to us by the admitted heathens as evidence of their crimes.”

The Lord Fray took one of the idols from atop the pile and held it up to the light. It was a grotesque human-like head with large teeth set in a kind of a perpetual grin – or was it a scowl? – carved from polished jade that glowed a vivid green. “I wish to speak with Juan Nachi Cocom,” ordered the Lord Fray, “have him brought before this inquest at once.”

No one moved.

 “My apologies, your lordship,” said Fray Pedro, “but Juan Nachi Cocom is dead.”

“Dead?” asked the Lord Fray in shock.

“Judas’ fate, I am afraid. A fortnight ago, before he could be questioned. The weight of his sins must have been too much for his weak soul and he chose the noose rather than the eternal forgiveness of the True Dios.”

“Then bring me his brother Lorenzo!”

“My apologies again, but Governor Cocom passed away last night. He was bitten by a snake and fell ill, though it is possible the snake venom was also a self-inflicted act.”

Lord Fray de Landa’s face hardened into what seemed to me like cold suspicion. “Secretary notary Villagomez,” he said, “read me the name of any admitted pagan among those confessions.”

I quickly shuffled through the sheets past many signed Xs until I came across a signature. “Martin Ba,” I said.

For the first time Fray Pedro seemed to be at a loss for words. “Well, sir, I am not quite sure–”

Chief Principal Juan Diego Xiu interjected, “Martin Ba was stricken with a fever and passed away last week.”

I read another signature, “Luis Ku.”

“Missing since his confession,” reported Juan Diego Xiu.

The Lord Fray grew impatient and slammed the jade idol onto the table. “Who brought this idol?” he demanded.

“I believe that was Francisco Uicab, the former schoolmaster,” said Fray Pedro.

“Don’t tell me he’s dead too,” quipped the Lord Fray.

“Not at all,” said Juan Diego Xiu with a smile.

~

“This episcopal inquisition is returned to order,” I declared. The room was now crowded with several Castilian noblemen and through the narrow windows I could even see a few Maya men sneaking glances of the proceedings.

“Francisco Uicab is called to come forward,” I announced in the most commanding voice I could muster. The doors opened and a hunched man with one shoulder wrenched upwards in a jagged hump hobbled inside. “State your name,” I ordered the wretched figure.

“Francisco Uicab, former schoolmaster of Sotuta Academy,” he responded with downcast eyes.

“Do you profess there is only one True God?” I asked, “That we are brought to his grace only through his son Jesus Christ, who will be watching your testimony today?” Francisco nodded meekly.

Lord Fray de Landa began his examination: “My child, we have here a confession of yours made to my brother Fray Pedro de Rodrigo in which you state you helped dispose of four adult bodies into a cave lake after a ritual human sacrifice. Is this true?”

Frasisco nodded.

“Speak up, child!” ordered the Lord Fray, “Is this true?”

“Yes,” stuttered Francisco.

“How many men and women?” asked Lord Fray de Landa, “Three men, one woman? Two men, two women? One man, three women?”

“Yes, one man and three women,” agreed Francisco nervously.

The Lord Fray turned his attention to me, “Secretary Villagomez, read Francisco Uicab’s confession.”

I read from Francisco’s confession, “It was at that time I hurled the bodies of two children into the cenote.”

“Two children, not four adults,” reiterated Lord Fray de Landa. “So then these three women and one man, was that a different sacrifice you wish to confess?”

Francisco looked up in fear. “No! There was no other sacrifice! Forgive me, lord, I have never been much for counting.”

“This feeble man is clearly overwhelmed,” interjected Fray Pedro, “perhaps he should be excused–”

“Secretary Villagomez, pull a fresh sheet” commanded the Lord Fray. I pulled a blank sheet of vellum and dipped my quill. “I, Fray Diego de Landa, first Provincial of Sotuta, hereby grant absolute clemency to Francisco Uicab for any crimes committed, and hereby declare him absolved of all sins to which he will presently confess.” The Lord Fray walked over to my desk, took the sheet, and held it up for Francisco to see. “Do you understand what that is?” he asked. Francisco nodded. “It is yours…” promised the Lord Fray, “once you tell me the truth,”

“It is as I said, your lordship,” replied Francisco. “There were two children. No more.”

The Lord Fray shrugged then began to rip apart the pardon.

“Wait!” screamed Francisco, “I… I never helped with any sacrifice.”

A ripple of nervous excitement ran through the men inside the crowded room.

“Did you ever see Juan Nachi Cocom perform a sacrifice?” asked the Lord Fray.

“He slaughtered a pig once at my cousin’s wedding,” replied Francisco and a few men in the room laughed.

“Why did you tell Fray Pedro de Rodrigo that you disposed of two bodies in a cave lake?” asked the Lord Fray.

“Have you ever been hoisted up on a garrucha, sir? No, I can’t imagine you have. I had already been incarcerated for days with a dozen other Cocom men. Very little water. A few tortillas to share between us. When I was finally pulled for my questioning, Fray Pedro had my wrists bound behind my back then hoisted me up. My shoulders twisted backwards as I was pulled higher and higher. I still remember the crunching sound. Then the hard snap when the bone… That’s how I got this hump. The hands took longer. Not until Fray Pedro ordered the weights tied to my ankles.” Franscisco raised his hands to show they were both permanently twisted into mangled hooks. “By then I would have confessed to anything.”

“Your lordship, I object,” yelled Fray Pedro, “The garrucha is perfectly in keeping with Spanish law! This man confessed before God!”

“And now he confesses before us,” replied the Lord Fray before turning his attention back to Francisco who now raised his chin proudly.

“I made it all up, your lordship,” said Francisco. “Mostly what I could remember from the old stories my grandfather would tell. Stories from his childhood about the Itzas and the festivals at Mayapan.”

“And what of this idol?” Lord Fray de Landa set the jade idol onto the table in front of him and this time a ripple of nervous excitement could be heard running through the crowd of men outside the room. “You claimed it was used in a sacrifice. Was that a lie?”

“I suppose it was, your lordship,” replied Francisco. He avoided looking at the statuette, seemingly afraid to make eye contact with the horrific thing. “When Fray Pedro ordered me hoisted down I assumed that was the end of my ordeal… then the friar commanded I bring him evidence of my confession. But how can you provide evidence of a lie? He ordered me to bring him an idol, but I had none! No one in Sotuta did! They were all destroyed when we converted. I am a Christian man! You must believe me!”

“Where did the idol come from?” asked the Lord Fray.

“There used to be a city some twenty-five leagues away,” said Francisco in a grave tone. “My grandfather spoke of it. A place that was already old and abandoned by the time he was born. He told stories of a cenote, a cave lake, under its temple. Sacrifices were performed at the cenote in those days, back when the Xiu and the Cocom lived in distant milpas. There were many years of war then. It’s said it was a violent katun. It’s said a great drought lasted many harvests and the Xiu nation sought help from Lord Chac of the Rains by sinking a youth to the depths of the cenote with a message. It is said the Rain God would send his reply back with the drowned soul who would swim to the surface, reborn, but never the same. Legend says that Chief Xiu and his men were granted safe passage through Cocom territory to the old temple to conduct the sacrifice, but the Cocoms had set a trap and…” Francisco looked to Juan Diego Xiu who gave a slight nod, encouraging the frightened man to go on. “After the Xiu flung their messenger into the waters, the Cocoms sprang their trap and killed them all. When the messenger rose back out of the water reborn he found no one to greet him. And so he is cursed to wander the earth searching for someone to hear his message. My grandfather would say that on quiet nights, if you listened carefully, you could hear the sound of wet footsteps as he wandered the night, looking for someone to hear his message.”

Fray Pedro scoffed at the fantastical tale. Francisco forced a smile, “Foolish stories, I know, but we reasoned that if there were any idols left to be found they would be there under the old temple.”

“We?” inquired the Lord Fray.

“My brother Ignacio Uicab. He was also interrogated by the friars, only he hadn’t been given the garrucha. He’d been strapped to a wooden burro and the friars poured water down his throat until he was nearly drowned. Then they untied him and stomped on his distended belly till he gurgled water like a hotspring.”

Fray Pedro rose to his feet with indignance, “Absurd! We have no confession record of any so-called Ignacio!” The Lord Fray waved him down and Francisco became even more emboldened.

“That’s because he didn’t confess,” said Francisco, “He wasn’t asked anything. His stomach had been left black and blue and he was in no condition to even be standing, but with my hands like this… I would need someone else to grab the idols if I was fortunate enough to find any. We moved slowly together, it took us all day to trek through the woods. The forest had grown so densely that we didn’t even recognize the old temple until we were upon its stones. Have you ever been out to the old cities, sir? No, I can’t imagine you have. The Itzás made temples the size of mountains where people would gather by the thousands to dance in great festivals. Of course, that was then. Now it was a ruin. We found an entrance had already been made behind the staircase, probably by grave robbers who had the same intentions as us. The halls inside were dark and narrow. Ignacio spraked a torch and held it aloft as we squeezed through the passageways, but smoke quickly filled the small space robbing us of breath until the flame snuffed itself out and left us drowning in darkness. I admit I was frightened. I was terrified. I had never before seen so much darkness until finally the passage opened up to the lake, dimly lit by starlight through a circular opening at the roof of the cave. The clear waters descended into another total darkness. No one knows how deep those lakes go…”

Francisco went quiet, as if lost in his own recollection, but the Lord Fray called him back to attention, “And the idol? Is this where you found it?”

“The cave was empty,” replied Francisco in an evermore distant tone. “We were devastated. Ignacio wept, but I prayed with all my strength to–” Francisco caught himself, “to the One True Dios. It was then that the moon crested into view of the opening in the roof and shone a ray of light directly into the cenote waters. There we saw it glimmer. The jade head. Just under the water’s surface, resting on the edge of a rock a few spans down. I was so excited I would have grabbed it myself, but Ignacio dove in without hesitation. He grabbed the idol then swam back to the surface and handed it to me. We laughed. We were so grateful for our blessings. Then…”

His voice caught in his throat, but he forced himself to continue.

“I saw… something… swim up from the depths of the lake. It moved quickly and grabbed Ignacio. I couldn’t help. What could I do? He was pulled under before I could do anything!”

“What do you mean he was pulled under?” asked the Lord Fray.

“On top of heresy, he confesses to fratricide!” accused Fray Pedro.

“I loved my brother!” declared Francisco.

“What was it that pulled him below?” demanded the Lord Fray.

“I don’t know,” responded Francisco, “Maybe the tzucan.”

The Lord Fray looked to Juan Diego Xiu for an explanation.

“An old legend, your honor,” explained Juan Diego Xiu. “A serpent that lives in the rivers connecting the lakes. It is said the creature guards the entrance to the inframundo, the land of the dead.”

Fray Pedro sprang to his feet and pointed at Francisco accusingly, “Still this man maintains his heresies! He is beyond salvation!”

“Heretic!” called the other Franciscans.

The Lord Fray banged the jade idol on the table, bringing the room to order.

“I only meant it as a joke, your holiness,” pleaded Francisco, once again keeping his eyes downcast.

“Nevermind legends,” said the Lord Fray, “what did you do after your brother was pulled…” he thought better of his words, “After he went under the water?” I made sure to write only his corrected statement in the record.

“I am ashamed to say I ran,” replied Francisco, still looking at the floor. “I had what I came for, why sacrifice one more life? I arrived back in Sotuta just after highsun and came directly to the monastery with the idol.”

The Lord Fray leaned back in his seat, looked Francisco over, then looked to his left and right but neither Don Avila nor Chief Principal Xiu said a word. “This man’s testimony shall be taken into consideration,” said the Lord Fray, “the accused is dismissed.”

“And my pardon, your lordship?” asked Francisco.

“As I recall,” said the Lord Fray, “your pardon was conditional upon your telling the truth, isn’t that correct Secretary Villagomez?” I referred to the transcript and confirmed that was indeed the condition. “Very well then,” continued the Lord Fray, “once your testimony has been verified as truthful your pardon shall be granted. Until then your conviction stands.”

~

            I was summoned to see the Lord Fray in his bedchamber that evening and found him sitting in a plush imported armchair, holding the jade idol in his hands, gazing into its eyes. “I have asked you here to discuss the inquest,” he informed me.

            “Is there something wrong with my transcription, your lordship?” I asked. “I apologize if I overlooked any–”

            “The transcription is perfectly acceptable. It is your opinion I want.”

“Opinion, sir?”

            “About the testimonies,” he clarified, “The indio, for instance. Did you find him to be credible?”

            I was stunned – not only because the Lord Fray deemed me worthy enough to confide such doubts, but because I too was harboring doubts. “Well, sir,” I said nervously, “since you ask, there were some things that did not quite make sense.”

            “The lake serpent?” The Lord Fray laughed, “The indios are a superstitious lot, aren’t they?”

            “I suppose so, sir,” I responded politely then forced myself to add, “But I meant the arithmetic. Do you recall when we first arrived in Sotuta, how Fray Brusselas gave us a tour of the new construction? How he boasted that he’d put every man, woman, and child to work and still there weren’t enough hands? I examined all the signed confessions and they often describe multiple people being sacrificed.  Three, four, sometimes six, seven, eight people at a time. There are dozens of sacrifices listed in these confessions. And when a summation is drawn… well, sir, if these testimonies are to be believed then I calculate there have been nearly one-hundred and eighty people sacrificed in Sotuta alone over the past two years.”

“So then Fray Pedro is correct,” concluded the Lord Fray, “the indios have indeed returned to their old ways,”.

“Perhaps, but then why was this not noticed until now? It’s certainly possible the indios colluded to keep silent, but what of the brotherhood? What of Fray Brusselas? Wouldn’t he have noticed missing laborers? Can so many people vanish without it coming to the attention of any Castilian in Sotuta?”

Lord Fray de Landa sent word for Juan Diego Xiu who soon joined us in the bedchamber. “Francisco Uicab is not to be trusted,” declared the Chief Principal. “If he is telling the truth now, he lied then. And if he told the truth then, he is a liar now. In either instance, he cannot be trusted. The man is a known drunkard and a sloth.”

“And a schoolmaster,” reminded the Lord Fray.

“A testament to the difficulties we have had finding workers for the True Lord,” said Juan Diego Xiu.

“I would imagine,” said the Lord Fray, “particularly since by our estimation there have been nearly two hundred people sacrificed here over the past two years.” I noticed the Chief Principal glance in my direction.  “I wonder,” continued the Lord Fray, “why it wasn’t until only recently that the absence of so many workers went unnoticed.”

“The Cocoms held great influence in these lands,” said Juan Diego, “perhaps they coerced others to keep silent.”

“Are you accusing the holy men of this monastery of being part of some pagan conspiracy?”

“I said no such thing!”

“Then what are you saying?” demanded the Lord Fray, “If the good men of this monastery did not notice scores of vanished souls, then what? Are the men of this monastery fools?”

The Chief Principal took a breath and composed himself. He could see what the Lord Fray was up to, but there was much he could do as well. “There was one truth in the schoolmaster’s words,” he said, “the legend of the Xiu sacrifice during the great drought. My ancestors did indeed seek to appease Chac with a sacrifice at the sacred cenote and they were indeed betrayed by the Cocoms. My great-grandfather, being no more than an infant, was the only member of the family who had been left behind and so survived. The Cocoms, you see, were after vengeance because they too had legends. Legends that told of how many winters before, their own ruler had been assassinated by the Xiu. That’s how it is with legends. None of these men were present for any of those betrayals, but they are sure those betrayals happened and they exact a price in return. Old legends become present action. Do you understand? Have you ever bothered to understand us? Our nations were at war long before you came across the sea. Our borders were carved generations ago with blood. You Castilians set fire to those borders. I can’t be blamed for seizing an opportunity.”

A realization washed over the Lord Fray, “The indios who were accused of idolatry were all from the Cocom clan, weren’t they?”

Juan Diego smiled, “A coincidence, I’m sure. Tell me, your lordship, did your inquest ever get to the bottom of the case of those two dead children?”

The Lord Fray, suddenly recalling Juan Nachi Cocom’s letter, seemed embarrassed to realize he had forgotten all about them. “The inquest dealt with this matter,” he stammered.

“Did it?” asked Juan Diego, “Forgive me, your lordship, but does your secretary have anywhere in his transcripts the identity of those children?”

The Lord Fray turned to me but I could only shake my head.

“Had I been called to testify,” continued Juan Diego, “I would have told the inquest they were two lovely girls of six and eight summers from here in Sotuta. I would have told the inquest they were often hired out as domestic servants. I would have told the inquest that the last time both girls were seen alive was on their way to work at this very monastery. As personal servants to Abbot Fray Pedro de Rodrigo. But I’ve not been called to testify.”

“Meritless accusations can cost you your head,” said the Lord Fray.

“Meritless accusations won me back my family’s position,” said Juan Diego. “Someday we will win back this land then you and your inquests will be a legend and nothing more.”

A heavy silence hung in the warm evening air after Juan Diego departed until finally the Lord Fray picked up the jade idol and gazed at its horrific face. “Secretary Villagomez,” he said, “did you accurately transcribe our conversation?”

“Every word, sir.”

I took the transcript to the Lord Fray. He gave it a cursory examination then held the paper over the lit candles and the paper caught fire. I gasped then quickly controlled myself when I noticed the Lord Fray watching my reaction.

“You should rest,” he said, “there will be much to do at the inquest tomorrow.”

~

Landa Fray de Landa took his seat between Tómas Avila and Juan Diego Xiu, who betrayed no indication of the confession he had made the night before. “Brothers, I shall be candid,” announced the Lord Fray, “There is a devil loose in these lands. The testimonies presented before this inquest have proven undeniably that paganism has returned to Yucatán under the guidance of the Cocom clan.” Fray Pedro and his retinue murmured in approval, and even Juan Diego pursed his lips in the slightest of smiles. But I did not share their joy, a knot had built in my stomach and it tightened with every word I transcribed.

“But it has also become clear that the Cocoms did not act alone,” continued the Lord Fray, “A devil works through every indio in these wretched provinces.” A smattering of applause from Fray Pedro and his brethren, but Juan Diego now looked nervous.

“This inquisition is far from over, brothers. Send notice to every province: all pagan idols are to be smashed, all native books are to be burned, all able-bodied indio men and women are to be interrogated thoroughly – beginning with Chief Principal Juan Diego Xiu.”

It took several brothers to subdue Juan Diego. The Lord Fray continued to speak and I continued to write, but I can’t seem to recall much of what came next. The interrogations started immediately and I was set to transcribing what few words could be heard between screams. Nearly two dozen people were flogged, stretched, hoisted, and put to the rack before I was ordered finished for the evening after my vision had blurred and my writing became a mess.

But now as I stumble exhausted towards my bedchamber through the halls of the monastery, I can’t help but look over my shoulder.

I tell myself it is only a trick of my mind.

A symptom of my lack of sleep.

A result of exhaustion.

But I am certain that in the quiet night, if I listen carefully, I can hear the sound of Ignacio Uicab’s wet footsteps following me with a message.

Erik Sandoval is a first-generation Mexican/American writer from Oxnard, CA crafting cross-cultural stories that draw on his experiences growing up in an immigrant family. He is an expert in Mesoamerican cultures & mythology and holds a degree in Latin American History from the University of Southern California. Most recently, he has written for several seasons of the acclaimed AMC horror anthology series “Creepshow.”

He awoke to the sound of violent pounding, could not locate it for a moment, then realized it was coming from the front door. He hurried downstairs, pulling on his robe but hesitated when he came to the door. The pounding was steady and hard and he could hear muffled curses. It did not sound at all like someone in need of help.

He flipped on the porch light and there was a moment of silence. He wished he could see out without being seen but the front door did not have a peephole. Evelyn had nagged him about putting one in but he had never gotten around to it. He wanted to say, “Who’s there?” but his throat constricted and his mouth wouldn’t open. The pounding resumed but now the intention seemed to be to break down the door.

He looked around for something that he could use as a weapon but there was nothing that seemed appropriate. Whoever it was might be armed and a kitchen knife or golf club might only get him into more trouble. He backed away from the front door quietly, hurried into the garage and locked the adjoining door behind him. A moment later, he realized that he had left his cell phone on the kitchen table before going to bed. He thought of running back inside to get it but was afraid the front door would give before he could get back to the safety of the garage. 

He heard the jam splinter and the door smash against the wall, imagined the knob punching through the sheetrock where Evelyn had asked him to put a stop. One more small reason among many that had added up to her giving up on him. There was another moment of silence, then heavy footsteps, more curses, the sound of a dining room chair thrown across the floor and other noises that he could not identify, then silence again. He pressed his ear to the door. Had the intruder gone upstairs? If so, this might be the time to make a break for it but what if he was wrong about that?

He wondered if it could it be someone who had the wrong house. An escaped convict or drug-crazed vagrant?  He didn’t owe anyone money, had never done anything seriously illegal and had no enemies that he could think of. Well, there was that ignorant bigot he’d traded insults with on Facebook but he lived on the other side of the country. There was the ongoing argument with the neighbor over the compost pile in his back yard, the Dodge minivan he’d sold on Craigslist without mentioning the burnt valves; the small sum he’d extracted from the proceeds of the Elks Club auction a few years ago when he was treasurer. Sure, there had been a few small indiscretions but nothing to explain this kind of attack. He heard the footsteps approaching the garage door.

It was pitch black in the garage and he was glad he had not turned on the light because it might have shown beneath the door. He tried to control his breathing, sliding it in and out as quietly as possible. His only escape would be out the front of the garage. He could easily find the button in the dark but feared that the sound of the overhead door opening would alert the intruder in time for him to rush back out the front door and intercept him. The first heavy thud against the door between the house and garage told him that it would not take long before it gave. On the other hand, the noise being made now would probably cover his escape. He hit the button, heard the electric motor and the metallic impact of the door’s first upward lurch. He dove, rolled under and was on his feet running in one motion.

He had no idea what time it was but the street was dark except for a light in one house half way down the block. He knew the couple that lived there but would Sandra answer the door in time for him to get inside before he was overtaken? Would she answer the door at all this time of night? Fred probably would but was he there? In his panic he couldn’t remember what day Sandra had said Fred would be back from Altoona though he could clearly remember her replacing an earring as she told him. He continued running as hard as he could past their house and into the night, the rasping of his breath making it impossible to tell if there were footsteps running behind him.

Dirk Kortz is a writer, fly fishing guide and artist (oil painter) and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He recently finished a novel and is working
on a collection of short stories.

I’m in Australia, or somewhere at the beach
where people speak differently. I’m with a group
of people, we split into two groups + I go with one.
I’m playing in the group I’m in, but it starts to rain
and everyone I’m with gathers their things
and leaves. But a big, liked woman leaves something.
I pick it up + take it to where both
groups of people have joined again. We are
sitting in some type of special booth. No one is
talking to me much, it turns out I did something
wrong when I got the lady’s stuff. I look out
the window to see where the breakers are
crashing and the gulls are vying for food,
and the big voice says, “Where gulls vie for sand. ”

Robert Wooten does hold an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama (1998) and earned an MA in English with a creative writing focus at North Carolina State University (1994).

It was over too quickly. Bonecrusher Rocco destroyed Leftie Louie with a combination of blows to the body, then head. Finally, in the dressing room, after the smelling salts, Louie came to…

“Let’s get this over with, Mel.”

Mel was Louie’s manager. He signaled for Stan, the corner man.

“Take it easy, Louie.”

“Easy? I’m never easy… C’mon, let’s go.”

“I’ve got some bad news.”

The confused fighter shook his head.

“What?… Is Rocco trying to back out, Mel?”

“That’s not it, Louie.”

“Don’t tell me he’s not even gonna show? I figured he’d chicken out at the end.”

Louie realized now that the Bonecrusher was a phony, despite his massive head, thick neck, huge biceps, and overwhelming odds.

Mel signaled for more salts. He didn’t like the way Leftie’s eyes still rolled in different directions.

“Maybe we should forget the bad news?”

“Just tell Rocco I’m not even going to give him a rematch.”

“That’s a little more like, well, what I was about to say, Louie… Now when it comes to fighting Rocco again…”

Louie looked from Mel to Stan, reaching for the bandages.

“Again, Mel?…”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

You died; how awful.

I’m currently overwhelmed by tributes to your artistic talent. Draped in purple prose and hyperbole, the praise lacks both subtlety and truth. Which frankly feels fitting.

It might have been awful for you to be publicly labeled a genius when you knew on some level that you weren’t one. You must have known, at least a little.

Oh shit. Did you not know?

Did you lack the emotional intelligence to feel conflicted over the false accolades, the paper crown placed upon you head? The clapping of your plastic clackers, your clique-claque?

Fuck. Did you not know you were a fraud? 

Understanding yourself—in your profound mediocrity—would have required bravery. A modicum of self-awareness. To look within and face the truly ugly parts of art.

But. You didn’t go for such plebeian things; you thought yourself above them. You were too weak to take real risks.

Of course, you photographed yourself in your underwear, as if this were a daring act of bravery. Each bead of sweat was perfectly cultivated to reflect the blue light, framed just above your phone. Your filmed tears were just as fake. Your “blood” was made of corn syrup and dye.

But unlike a real actress, you refused to acknowledge the illusion. You gaslit your audience that what they were seeing was real.

That you were literally naked was the point. But, O false empress of bad frozen yogurt, there was nothing beneath your nudity. No profound truth, just flesh alone. Adorned in transparent panties, you’re nothing but glitter upon shit.

You harmed the very concept of art. Why? For accolades, for show points. Gross bodily functions get clicks and likes, and status. You sold out your emotions to appease the highest bidder. Which was actually quite cheap.

You know the mark of true genius? It entertains, for a moment, the idea that it might NOT be.

The reviewers were too afraid of your audience to give you the respect of genuine critique. Congratulations: You properly trained your dogs to bite and bark. 

            Anything less than a glowing review was proof of misogyny, in your paper-constructed  world. No other explanation was allowed. When your religion sets yourself up as a genius, anyone who dares suggest otherwise is a heretic. You deserve the gold, your critics the pitchfork. 

You had the gall to frame yourself as a martyr and an underdog, while bullying the laptop lapdog class to bow before your plastic sword. A plastic sword you painted with nail polish, while declaring yourself a modern Michelangelo.

What you then did with the plastic sword rendered the subtext textual. You fucked yourself; how subtle.

But seriously. It was disappointing that you believed your lies, and swallowed your sickly syrupy kombucha, mixed with the syrup of your fake blood. You pulled off the ultimate con: You fooled the ghost in the mirror. Even Narcissus laughs at you.

At your grave, I alone am Inez, who correctly chants that you’re a coward. A hack. Barely emptier than you were in life.

Everyone else leaves plastic flowers. 

And that is your most perfect legacy. It leaves debris upon the environment but does not have the humility to decay.

I still can’t believe you had the gall to dump ME.

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, philosophical essays, creative nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. Her novelette “Jillian, Formerly Known as Frog Girl” was published by Bottlecap Press. Other publications include Poetries in English, Well Read Magazine, New World Writing Quarterly, L’Esprit Literary Review, 10 By 10 Flash, Mania Magazine, Gothic Funk Press, The Bull Magazine, Rock Salt Journal, Ionosphere, Synchronized Chaos, Clockwise Cat, Dark Poets Club, Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, and Lowlife Lit Press. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.

One thing was certain. He wasn’t ready. They were due at any moment, and nothing was ready. Everything lay in piles around him, things he didn’t recognize: clothing, cardboard boxes, wheelchairs, mechanical equipment of some sort, a clutter without logic, without significance. And above all, he thought, there seemed to be nowhere to sit. Somehow, he’d neglected to acquire the sticks of furniture he’d intended to pick up somewhere, and of course something to eat, a bottle of wine, the simple courtesies his guests would have every right to expect. And those sheets of paper with the tidy rows of numbers they’d need to examine, all those numbers they’ll have traveled all this way to inspect. Where on earth had he put them? He could picture them plain as day, those numbers, those reams of onionskin, grayish-white and slippery between his fingers, but where was it he’d seen them last? And there had been plenty of time to prepare, ample time, weeks or maybe even months by now, but somehow unaccountably he hadn’t. And the long-anticipated hour of their arrival had arrived. And then there was the question of this bizarre getup he was wearing, entirely unsuitable for company, open in the back like a surgical gown,…and then, awakening with relief into a world free from the threat of imminent arrivals, where no sheets of paper with their absurdly long columns of numbers actually existed, where he was perfectly innocent of the criminal negligence that reverberated from the dream, where perhaps the anxiety it left behind, in its reluctant retreat, might somehow be compelled to reveal the secret of the dream, the key to its manifest untruth, he slowly drifted into a delicious, systematic, painstaking reconstruction of his blessed actual life, its happy prospects and routine pleasures, the little challenges he’d need to face tomorrow, in the fullness of time, including things far too long delayed, to be sure, including that urgent need to call home, which, as his pulse quickened, he remembered he’d had to put off for several days now. But why? His wife would be frantic with worry. His phone lay right there within reach on the nightstand beside him in the little hotel room. Panic gripped him. His heart pounded…..And then, in gratitude and relief, he awoke into the certainty that anxious burdens of the dream, its heaviness, its nagging aura of guilt, was nothing that need concern him, that the morning sun would soon be rising, that in its light the comforting routines of his day would dispel this strangely lingering dread, this persistent grip of the unreal, the absurd inescapability of the absolutely not-true….But then, awakening gratefully into the embrace of the familiar, into the sheltering darkness of his room, into the warmth of the cotton coverlet, he was soothed by the steady breathing beside him. And yet, he couldn’t help but notice, as he slowly regained the composure that the dream had stripped away, didn’t the location of the windows, the dimly visible furniture, seem to be wrong somehow? Hadn’t things been oddly rearranged? Didn’t everything seem to be elsewhere, closer maybe, than it ought to be?…

DB Jonas is the author of two collections of poetry, Tarantula Season and Other Poems (2023) and Flight Risk (2025). He lives in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.

Part I: Picklebrawl

(Cleveland, Ohio)

“MOUTH ON THE CURB, MILDRED!” Beatrice Goldfarb commands while brandishing her pickleball paddle and staring down at Mildred Mendelbaum, who’s kneeling on the street with her back to Beatrice.

“What?” asks Mildred.

“I said put your fucking mouth on the fucking curb and do not make me have to ask you again!” shouts Beatrice.

“But why?” asks Mildred.

Beatrice glares down at Mildred while raising the pickleball paddle above her shoulder. “Don’t you remember that scene from American History X after the pickup basketball game? You don’t ask why, Mildred, you just do it!”

“Is that the new Woody Allen picture? Murray and Harriet just went to see it last week and they said—”

Beatrice’s paddle slices through the air like a laser beam and strikes Mildred’s eye socket, crushing her orbital bone. Mildred yelps in pain and collapses face first onto the street curb, breaking her nose and knocking out two of her front teeth upon impact.

“Now this can be quick and easy or it can be slow and painful, Mildred – you decide,” Beatrice says while she pulls Mildred’s head up by a fistful of hair and pushes her face against the curb. “Now open your goddamn yap and eat curb, you insolent fucking yenta!”

This time Mildred does as instructed and places her open mouth onto the concrete curb at the edge of the sidewalk facing the pickleball courts. About a dozen pickleballers have congregated behind the fence to watch the action unfold on the street in front of them.

Wasting no time, Beatrice steps forward and plants her left foot on the pavement next to Mildred, raises her right knee as high as she can, then stomps the sole of her Adidas Gamecourt sneaker down between Mildred’s shoulder blades with as much force as she can muster.

Mildred screams out in agony then turns over on the street, holding her chest and gasping for air through her bloodied nose and mouth.

“What the hell was that, Beatrice?” bellows out Sidney Goldfarb, Beatrice’s husband, while he kneels on the back of Sheldon Mendelbaum, Mildred’s husband, who’s lying face down on the street.

Beatrice looks over to Sidney and explains, “I curb-stomped the bitch, just like in the movie when Edward Norton—”

“Yes, I can see that, Beatrice, but you were supposed to stomp her at the base of her skull so that her head splits open, not on her back! I mean that’s the whole goddamn point of making her put her mouth on the curb! Good lord, Beatrice, can you do anything right today? First you lost a pickleball game for us and now you can’t even execute a simple fucking curb stomp!”

“OK, I’m sorry, I guess I should have watched the movie closer, but—”

“Forget it, Beatrice, just come over here and sit on Sheldon while I finish off Mildred.”

Sidney and Beatrice switch places on the street, Beatrice sitting on Sheldon while Sidney stands over Mildred. The crowd of onlookers has now doubled in size.

Mildred looks up at Sidney and pleads for her life. “Sid, please, I have five grandchildren. They need me to—”

The heel of Sidney’s Nike Zoom Challenge sneaker crashes squarely into Mildred’s face, rocking her head back violently and shattering her jaw. “Just shut the fuck up and put your mouth back on the curb, Mildred. You know the drill.”

Before Mildred can turn over on the street to face the curb, Sheldon cries out, “Sid, please stop! Can’t you just make this quick and painless so Milly doesn’t suffer? There must be some other way!”

Sidney thinks for a moment, then nods and says, “I have a loaded Glock 9 millimeter in my car that I keep for protection. We can use that.” Sidney tosses his car key fob to Beatrice and says, “Go get the gun, Bea, it’s under the driver’s seat. And please please please remember to hit the lock button twice from at least ten feet away when you leave the car to make sure that it’s locked.”

Beatrice stands up off of Sheldon and says, “Don’t try anything funny, Shel, we’ve got eyes on you.” She jogs over to Sidney’s sky-blue Mercedes SUV parked in the lot next to the pickleball courts, then hits the unlock button on the key fob. After opening the driver-side door and reaching beneath the seat, Beatrice jogs back onto the street holding Sidney’s gun, which she hands to him with the key fob and then sits back down on Sheldon.

As Sidney walks slowly up to Mildred with the gun pointed at her head, she looks over to Sheldon through swollen eyes with tears streaming down her bloodied face. “Shelly, please – isn’t there anything you can do to stop him?”

Sheldon shakes his head. ”Sorry, Mils, but he’s made up his mind and there’s nothing I can do about it. But don’t worry, hon, it’ll be quick and painless, you won’t feel a thing.”

Sidney stands on the street in front of Mildred with his gun still pointed at her head. She sits up against the curb facing him with blood and snot flowing down from her nose and mouth onto her chin. Sidney slides his forefinger onto the trigger while releasing the safety with his thumb. “Any last words, Mildred?”

Mildred wipes the tears from her eyes and sniffles quietly. Struggling to speak in excruciating pain through her broken jaw and teeth, she garbles, “I just wanted to talk smack like a badass baller. I’m so sorry it didn’t work. Just do what you have to do and—”

Sidney squeezes the trigger and the deafening sound of the gunshot rings out and reverberates through the street and pickleball courts. Mildred’s lifeless body slumps back on the sidewalk while a stream of blood spurts out from the fresh bullet hole in her forehead. Behind her on the pickleball courts, the bystanders shake their heads to each other and then disperse to return to their games. A pool of blood spreads across the sidewalk behind the back of Mildred’s blown-out skull, absorbing the brain matter and bone fragments strewn in its path.

Sidney looks over at Sheldon, who’s busy tapping out a text message on his cell phone while Beatrice continues to sit on his back. “I’m sorry, Shel, but at least she’s in a better place now.”

Sheldon raises a finger and says, “Just gimme a sec, Sid, I gotta reply to this text.” Sheldon finishes his text message and then thumbs the send button on his cell phone. After quickly re-reading his text, he raises his head to Sidney with a smile. “Sorry about that, Sid, I’m all yours now. What was that you said?”

“I was just saying that Mildred is probably in a better place now,” Sidney replies.

Sheldon shakes his head apologetically while placing a forefinger behind his earlobe. “Sorry, Sid, I left my hearing aid back on the pickleball court. What was that?”

“I SAID THAT MILDRED IS IN A BETTER PLACE NOW,” Sidney nearly shouts so that Sheldon can hear him.

Sheldon nods his head vigorously. “I totally agree, Sid, 100 percent. Better place for sure. I know it was difficult but you guys did the right thing, you had no choice.”

Beatrice stands up from Sheldon’s back and stretches her legs out, then looks down at her Apple watch. “We have a 7:00 p.m. dinner reservation at the Marble Room downtown, Sid, and I need time to shower and get ready so let’s get going. It’s almost impossible to get a reservation there this time of year so we can’t be late.” She looks down at Sheldon and says, “You’re welcome to join us, Shelly, but don’t feel obligated if you have other plans.”

Just as Sheldon opens his mouth to reply to Beatrice, an Avon Lake police cruiser barrels around the street corner and speeds toward them with its siren blasting and lights flashing.

Sidney discreetly places his Glock 9 into the elastic waistband of his pickleball shorts and covers the protruding gun butt with the untucked bottom of his Lacoste tennis polo. “Five-oh in the house!” he warns the others. “Bea, you may need to call the Marble Room and move our reservation back a bit,” he says coolly while nodding toward the police cruiser.

The cruiser pulls to an abrupt stop about ten feet in front of Sidney. Two uniformed officers step out while surveying the scene.

“Goddamn gangbangers,” Sergeant Felix Dixon mutters to his partner, Noah Garrison, while shaking his head and glancing over at Mildred’s dead body, her blood now congealed on the sidewalk while her vacant eyes stare up at the sky. “This used to be such a safe neighborhood before the city installed these fuckin’ pickleball courts. It was the kinda place where you could raise a family without having to worry about crime and all. Now look at it.”

Garrison nods in agreement as he looks over at the pickleball courts.

“I know how to deal with these punk-ass ballers so let me handle this, Noah,” Dixon says.

“Well, well, well, now what do we have here?” Dixon says as he approaches the Goldfarbs and Sheldon, shifting his gaze between the three of them. “Where y’all comin’ from today?” he demands.

“Beachwood,” Beatrice replies nervously.

“Pepper Pike,” adds Sheldon.

Dixon looks back at his partner with his eyebrows raised and a sarcastic smirk on his face. “Eastsiders,” he says, “Now ain’t that a shock.”

Garrison chuckles back at him. “I think I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat.”

Dixon laughs as he turns back to the three. “And what about sleeping beauty over there soiling my lovely sidewalk with her nasty-ass head cheese?” Dixon asks, nodding towards Mildred’s corpse.

“That’s my ex-wife. She’s from Pepper Pike also,” replies Sheldon.

“Ex? So you two are divorced?” asks Dixon as he writes on his notepad.

“Well no, she’s dead,” explains Sheldon. “We were married up until she died a few minutes ago so I guess she’s technically my ex-wife since I can’t legally be married to a dead person. Sorry for the confusion, officer, I’ve just never been in this situation before and it’s a bit unnerving.”

“OK, roger that,” Dixon nods to Sheldon. Shifting gears, Dixon asks, “So what the hell brought you bangers over here to the west side? Ain’t there enough pickleball courts over in your ’hood where y’all can play without bringin’ your gangsta shit to Avon Lake?”

Sidney steps forward to answer Sergeant Dixon while Beatrice pulls her cell phone from the pocket of her Lululemon pickleball skirt to video-record their exchange. “We have friends in Avon who just got back from the Amalfi Coast and were showing us their photos over brunch, so we thought we’d try out a new court while we’re over this way.”

Dixon rolls his eyes while placing his notepad back into his pocket, then looks sternly at the Goldfarbs and Sheldon. “OK, so which one of you pickleballin’ punks wants to tell me what the fuck happened here today?”

“Well, we were playing mixed doubles …,” Beatrice begins, then tells the story.

Flashback to 30 minutes earlier:

“Wipe his ass all over the court, Sheldon!” Mildred shouts to her husband as she shifts her weight from foot to foot on the pickleball court, firmly gripping the handle of her paddle as she glares across the net at Sidney and Beatrice.

Sheldon looks back at Mildred in disgust. “Wipe his ass? Really, Mildred? That’s not trash talk, it’s just gross. And it would actually entail me getting toilet paper and wiping his butt, which is not exactly intimidating and he may even enjoy it.”

“OK, my bad – I’m still learning the smack talk part of this pickleball thing but you know what I meant. Just serve the goddamn ball, Sheldon,” says Mildred.

After a few rounds of volleying, the Goldfarbs take the lead after Sidney’s “dink” into the Mendelbaums’ “kitchen” hits the court just a foot behind the net and goes unreturned.

“Mildred hasn’t been in the kitchen in years so that’s always a safe place to hit the ball!” Sidney jokes.

Sheldon laughs and adds, “Take that back, Sid – Milly microwaves the meanest quiche lorraine in all of Cuyahoga County!”

Sidney and Beatrice both chuckle while looking empathetically at Mildred, who glares back at Sidney with fierce slitted eyes.

“Fuck you, Goldfarb! This is our house and we’re gonna burn your asses down like an LA wildfire, you fucking cocksucker!” Mildred screams at Sidney.

All goes silent on the pickleball court while Sheldon and the Goldfarbs look gape-mouthed at Mildred in utter shock and disbelief.

A trim middle-aged woman in a dark green Vuori pickleball dress and matching visor cap walks over from the neighboring court and speaks to Mildred. “I’m sorry to interrupt, ma’am, but could you please watch what you say here. My sister and her husband live in Malibu and their house was just destroyed by the wildfires. It’s terrifying what’s happening over there now and I really don’t think it’s appropriate fodder for pickleball trash talk.”

Sheldon steps forward with an embarrassed look and says to the woman, “We’re so sorry, ma’am, my wife is new to pickleball and her trash talk could obviously use some fine tuning. We’re sorry to upset you and I promise we’ll keep it down over here.”

After the woman thanks Sheldon and walks back to her own court, he turns to Mildred with an angry scowl. “Damnit, Milly! Will you please just be quiet and leave the smack talk to me! We didn’t come here all the way from Pepper Pike to get kicked off the court because you can’t keep your damn mouth shut!”

Mildred apologizes and the pickleball game resumes. The Mendelbaums score a point after Beatrice returns Mildred’s serve into the net. Beatrice shakes her head and curses herself.

Exhilarated by the Goldfarbs’ fault, Mildred pumps her fist and taunts Beatrice. “Nice one, JonBenet, but isn’t the point of the game to hit the ball over the net and not into the net?”

Beatrice looks at Mildred with a puzzled expression and furrowed brow. “JonBenet?” she asks.

“Yep!” Mildred replies with a laugh, “Because you choke every time you have to perform, you stupid fucking cunt!” Mildred shouts at Beatrice while looking over at Sheldon for affirmation.

Sheldon just looks back at Mildred stone-faced while the Goldfarbs and neighboring pickleballers stare at her in pure unbridled disgust.

Mildred stammers uneasily while the others continue to stare at her. “I was just referring to JonBenet Ramsey. Remember how she got strangled by that garotte made from Patsy’s paint brush handle?” She adds, “It’s just pickleball trash talk – part of the game, right?”

Nobody says a word.

After another minute of awkward silence, a tall bearded man with a yellow Avon Lake Parks & Recreation shirt walks up to the group with a stern look. “I’m sorry, folks, but she’s gonna have to leave,” he says, nodding to Mildred. “You’re really starting to disturb a lot of the other players with your trash talk, ma’am. So please just leave quietly and don’t make this difficult for me.”

“Goddamnit!” shouts Beatrice while looking over at Sidney. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! We never should have brought this bitch to play with us, and I told you that, Sid! We have the best court here and now we have to give it up because of Mildred!”

Mildred interjects before Sidney can reply. “Fine! You guys keep playing and I’ll leave. But I’m not staying here. Let’s go, Sheldon.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” Sheldon protests, “Sid and Bea drove us here so we need a ride home.” Sheldon looks to Sidney expectantly.

Beatrice steps forward while shaking her head at Sheldon, “No fucking way are we losing this court because of Mildred. You two can take an Uber home. Sidney and I aren’t leaving.”

Sheldon glares at Beatrice with bulging eyes and exclaims, “An Uber back to Pepper Pike will cost us over $100 now! No way we’re paying that!”

“Well, I’m not staying here!” Mildred shouts defiantly with her arms crossed in front of her.

Beatrice looks up to the sky with pursed lips, pinches her eyes closed and pauses for a moment, then lowers her head, grabs Mildred by the hair and starts to walk her off the pickleball court towards the street.

“What are you doing, Bea?” Sidney asks with concern.

Still holding Mildred by the hair, Beatrice turns back to Sidney and screams, “I’m doing what none of you pickle-pussies have the fucking balls to do! I’m taking care of this little bitch my way!”

Beatrice walks Mildred through the fence opening to the street while Sidney and Sheldon hurry after her.

Now on the street outside the pickleball courts, Beatrice takes a deep breath and then calmly instructs Sidney while pointing to Sheldon, “Get his ass on the ground and keep him there so he doesn’t try anything.” Looking to Sheldon, she adds, “Now’s not the time to be a hero, Shel.”

Sidney and Sheldon both nod to Beatrice, then Sheldon lies face down on the pavement and Sidney kneels on his back.

Still gripping Mildred by the hair, Beatrice throws her to the ground then looks at her with a snarl. “Now get the fuck down and put your mouth on the curb! Don’t fight this, Mildred.”

Flashforward to present:

After listening patiently to Beatrice’s recount of events, Sergeant Dixon nods and says, “OK, we get it. We know that you guys just got caught up in the game and Mildred over there got what she deserved. Nobody should have to play pickleball with that annoying bullshit. The game is stressful enough without someone like her fuckin’ it up for y’all. That said, we still have to maintain some law and order around here. We can’t just let every swingin’ paddle come waltzin’ on in here from the east side and disrespectin’ our shit.” Dixon glances over at Officer Garrison, and then looks back to the group. “Y’all just sit tight and stay put while my partner and I decide how we’re gonna handle this mess.”

The Goldfarbs and Sheldon wait anxiously on the street while the two officers walk back to their cruiser to discuss what to do.

After a few minutes of heated exchange with his partner, Sergeant Dixon walks back to the group. “OK,” he says sternly. “Today’s your lucky day so y’all better count your blessings. We’re gonna let you bangers off with a warning … this time. But if it ever happens again and we gotta come back out here to deal with your pickleballin’ bullshit, we’re gonna haul’ your lily white asses downtown for disturbing the peace. Now take your paddles and get the fuck outta here before we change our minds!”

Officer Garrison steps forward and chimes in, “And maybe it’s time for you thugs to get your lives together and go back to school.” He looks over at Dixon, who nods in agreement, then adds, “Pickleballin’ on the streets is no way to survive. You bangers are headin’ down a dangerous path that’ll leave you dead or in jail. Is that what you want?”

Sidney looks at Officer Garrison incredulously with his eyebrows raised. “Back to school? Officer, I graduated summa from Oberlin and have a PhD in applied physics from Northwestern. I’m a senior fellow at Case—”

Beatrice interrupts Sidney with a smirk. “And you got passed over for tenure more times than Pete Rose did for Cooperstown — why don’t you mention that part, professor?”

“Beatrice, please!” shouts Sidney. “You know goddamn well that I wasn’t able to publish without my research assistant during COVID, and then they made me teach that godawful undergraduate semin—”

“Hey, hey, hey now! You gangbangers just settle your asses down, y’aint back home in the ’hood!” belts out Sergeant Dixon. “And we just handed you a gift so don’t fuck it up!” he reminds them.

Without another word, the Goldfarbs and Sheldon hurry back to the parking lot with their heads down and pickleball gear in tow while the two officers walk back to their cruiser.

The shrill shouts and laughter of the pickleballers resonate through the courts behind them while, just twenty feet away, flies begin to swarm around Mildred’s open mouth.

Part II: Pickleswap

(Boca Raton, Florida – Two Years Later)

“NOT IN MY BUTT, CAPTAIN ROCKHARDT, YOU’RE TOO BIG FOR ME!” Beatrice Goldfarb reads from the typewritten script placed in front of her on the large oak desk where she leans face down with her bare breasts pressed against the desktop.

Beatrice waits a few seconds after reading her lines, then turns her head around. “Uh, Murray? Hello? You still back there?” she asks.

Standing behind the bent-over Beatrice with his stone gray Nazi Wehrmacht trousers pulled all the way down and bunched up at his ankles over his black leather jackboots, Murray Silverman stares down at the script with pinched eyes while shaking his head. “I need my reading glasses for this. I keep telling Harriett not to use 10-point font for these scripts, it’s way too small.”

Beatrice huffs impatiently while Murray reaches into the breast pocket of his unbuttoned light green Bundeswehr field shirt and pulls out his reading glasses. Beatrice is wearing a French milkmaid outfit with the long train of her light blue floral dress hiked up above her waist, exposing a white open-bottomed girdle strapped to black lace leggings that reach to her upper thighs. “You should get an annual eye exam to check for cataracts, Murray.”

“No shit, Marie Antoinette, I just haven’t had time lately. I’ll do it after tax season,” Murray replies.

Beatrice looks back at Murray’s erection and says, “C’mon Murray, hurry up and move this along so we don’t lose that boner of yours!” then adds, “God only knows when you’ll be able to dial up another one!”

Murray nods and looks down at the script through the reading glasses now perched on the bridge of his nose, and reads, “I have my orders directly from Berlin, Mademoiselle Dubois. You shall do as instructed and remove your knickers at once!”

Beatrice looks back at Murray and says, “You’re supposed to be reading with a German accent, Murray. At least make an effort! And I’m a widow in this one so shouldn’t I be ‘Madame’ instead of ‘Mademoiselle’?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Beatrice, what do I look like, Marlene Dietrich? And the script says ‘Mademoiselle’ so I’m sticking with that!” Murray replies in frustration. “And is it really that important?”

“Sorry, you’re right,” Beatrice apologizes, then looks back down and reads from the script. “Do as you must, Kommandant, but please be gentle with me. I am but a poor country milkmaid.” Beatrice shakes her head with a smirk and says, “I mean who the fuck wrote this script? This is some of the most stilted, contrived dialog I’ve ever read! Next time, I’m editing the script before we go live.”

“You know damn well that Harriet wrote the script since we won the pickleball doubles match on Sunday,” Murray says defensively. “And she took a creative writing class at Brandeis so I think she knows how—”

“Was she a creative writing major?” Beatrice interrupts.

“No,” Murray admits. “I think she majored in psych with a minor in art history.”

Beatrice rolls her eyes back at Murray. “Well, she’s not exactly Jane Austen, but I guess I’ll have to work with it.” Beatrice looks back at the script and reads, “Remove my knickers, Kommandant, and there you will find my hidden treasure.” She shakes her head and mutters to herself.

“As you wish, Mademoiselle,” Murray reads while he places his hands down on Beatrice’s hips. Looking at her backside, Murray pauses and then looks up at Beatrice in confusion. “That’s a fucking girdle, Bea! You’re supposed to be wearing French knickers! It’ll take the entire goddamn Schutzstaffel to get this thing off you! Why aren’t you wearing knickers like the script says?”

Clearly embarrassed, Beatrice stammers, “I couldn’t find any French knickers on Amazon Prime. The only knickers I could find would have taken over a week to deliver with a $3.99 shipping fee, so I just ordered the girdle for free same-day delivery.”

“Good lord, Beatrice, you’re such a goddamn amateur!” Murray screams, then looks down at his shriveling penis with a scowl. “And now there goes my hard-on! I’m done with this pickleswap bullshit! Next time let’s just keep it simple and play pickleball for money. This whole role-playing schtick was Harriet’s idea. I just went along with it to avoid a fight.”

Murray reaches down and angrily pulls up his Wehrmacht trousers. Without bothering to zip his fly and button his trousers, he reaches over Beatrice and grabs his leather belt off the desktop where it’s rolled up next to his dark green Stahlhelm combat helmet and pickleball paddle. He storms off toward the office door with his belt in hand, leaving his helmet and paddle on the desk.

“And where the fuck do you think you’re going?” Beatrice yells after him. “Don’t even think about breaking the pickleswap rules, Captain Rockhardt!”

Murray looks back at her, his face contorted in fury. “Seriously, Beatrice? You’re the one who broke the rules when you decided to girdle up like Auntie fucking Mame! Now I have to go to the goddamn ‘badezimmer’ to finish myself off!” Murray replies while glancing down at his crotch. “Thanks for nothing, Madame Dubois!”

Murray yanks open the door to the hallway, pauses and then shouts back at Beatrice, “And you can tell Sidney and Harriett no more fucking pickleswap!” He rushes out into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.

Shaking her head in resignation, Beatrice stands up and straightens out her milkmaid dress, then places her straw bergère back on her head. She walks over to the video camera set on a tripod next to the desk and hits the off switch with a disappointed sigh.

——————-

“I’m so sorry, guys, I really thought that pickleswap would be a fun game for us,” says Harriett Silverman after taking a sip of her club soda. “I just want us to be the premier pickleball swingers’ group in Florida. And if we want to get there we have to think outside the box and take some risks. Let’s face it, team, we’re getting old and boring. Aren’t you guys all sick of just putting on caddy outfits and screwing each other on the putting green or in the golf cart shed? I know I am. Let’s get creative!”

Harriett is sitting at a patio table on the outdoor terrace at the Boca Lago Country Club with her husband Murray, Sidney and Beatrice Goldfarb, and Sheldon Mendelbaum, where they’re finishing up their Sunday brunch. Her laptop is set in the middle of the table with its flip screen raised. They’ve just finished watching the video of Murray and Beatrice’s failed pickleswap episode from a few days earlier.

“Well it might have worked out the other day if Beatrice hadn’t worn a goddamn chastity belt,” Murray mutters.

“It was a girdle not a chastity belt, Calvin Klein,” Beatrice replies sarcastically. “And maybe if you’d have popped an extra Viagra that morning, you—” 

“Stop bickering, you two!” Sidney interrupts. “Harriet has put a lot of time into pickleswap and is doing her best here, so we should all try to work together and help her out on this instead of fighting over it.”

“I have an idea,” Sheldon offers. ”How about next time we all join in on the pickleswap game instead of just one player from the winning team and one player from the losing team? That way we can switch off if we want to so that two people aren’t stuck with each other the way that Murray and Beatrice were this week.”

Harriet nods her head and smiles. “I love that idea, Shelly! And that way it’ll be a more inclusive, collaborative effort where we all have skin in the game.”

“No pun intended!” Murray pipes up with a smile.

They all laugh and raise their club sodas over the patio table in a group toast.

After a few minutes of idle chatter, Harriet gets back to business. “OK, so let’s make sure we all agree on the new pickleswap rules. The winning doubles team from the Sunday afternoon pickleball match will still write the pickleswap script but now everyone will have input on it before it goes final. And everyone will have a role to play. Maybe we’ll even have a dress rehearsal the night before to tie up any last-minute loose ends?”

They all look around the table at each other, nodding in agreement.

Harriett then looks to Sheldon sympathetically. “The new rules may also be good for you, Shelly. We know that you’ve been lonely and depressed since Mildred passed away in that horrible pickleball accident back in Cleveland two years ago. Maybe this new version of pickleswap will be therapeutic for you by getting you out more and forcing you to socialize in a group setting.” Harriet reaches across the patio table and places her hand on Sheldon’s forearm, rubbing and then gently squeezing it. “We’re all here for you, Shel.”

“Thank you so much, Harriet,” Sheldon says. “I do miss Mildred every now and then even though she was a lousy pickleballer.” He shoots a quick glance over at Sidney and Beatrice, who look nervously at each other then shift their eyes down to their mahi-mahi salads on the table in front of them.

Harriet stands up from the table with a wide grin. “OK, great! We have our new pickleswap rules that everyone agrees on … Now let’s get balling!”

About an hour later on the Boca Lago pickleball courts, the Goldfarbs face the Silvermans in a mixed doubles match. The match stands tied at 1-1 and the Goldfarbs lead the third and final game by 10-7.

“Pick it up, Harriet!” Murray shouts at his wife. “This is for all the marbles. We can’t let Beatrice and Sidney control that pickleswap script!”

Beatrice laughs from across the court. “Be thankful that Harriet can return a ‘dink’ shot better that you can keep up a boner, Captain Rockhardt! Otherwise this match would be over by now!”

Murray growls while looking down and shaking his head. “I’m not losing to that loudmouth bitch, Harriet!”

Harriet serves to Beatrice, then the two sides volley for nearly a minute. After Murray is forced to the back of his court to return Sidney’s volley, Beatrice is able to catch Harriet on her heels and land a perfect cross-court dropshot into the Silvermans’ “kitchen” that Murray is unable to return. With that final point to make the score 11-8, the Goldfarbs win the game and match.

“Game, set, match, bitches!” shouts Beatrice as she drops her pickleball paddle in the middle of the court and glares at Murray across the net. “Who’s the milkmaid now, Silverman?”

“Beatrice!” Sheldon shouts out from his chair on the sideline. “I thought we all agreed that we’d tone down the trash talk after Mildred’s accident? We’re not in Cleveland anymore. We have a good thing going down here in Florida and I don’t want us to fuck it up.”

Sidney steps forward and replies to Sheldon. “Relax, Shel, it’s just harmless pickleball trash talk. Never hurt anybody.”

“Fine,” Sheldon says. “Just write a good role for me in your pickleswap script. I need some real action this time!”

“Oh don’t worry about that, Shelly,” Beatrice laughs.

——————-

“For Chrissakes, Beatrice, you’re gonna drown him!” Sidney shouts at his wife, who’s leaning over the edge of the Boca Lago indoor jacuzzi, pushing Sheldon underwater by kneeling down on her pickleball paddle that’s pressed flat atop his bald head.

Beatrice is dressed in a half-suit of plated metal armor covering her entire torso, a studded metal combat helmet, knee-high black leather cavalry boots and red lace panties. Sheldon wears nothing but adult diapers.

After holding Sheldon down for another 30 seconds, Beatrice stands up and releases her weight off the pickleball paddle, allowing Sheldon to come up for air.

“My God, Beatrice!” Sheldon gasps after he coughs water out of his lungs and collapses onto the jacuzzi steps. “Are you sure that Joan of Arc actually stripped and drowned British soldiers during the Siege of Orleans? I don’t remember that from my undergrad medieval history class.”

Beatrice rolls her eyes. “Stop whining, Sheldon. Sid and I won the doubles match on Sunday so we got to write the pickleswap script however we chose. Those are the rules. If you don’t like them, then why don’t you try winning a match for once so that you can write the script?” Beatrice then adds with a sarcastic smirk, “Oh, that’s right, you can’t even play doubles without Mildred alive so you’ll just have to live with whatever role we decide to write in for you.”

“That was low, Bea,” Sheldon says quietly. “That’s my dead wife you’re talking about.”

“Oh please, Sheldon!” Beatrice exclaims. “Nobody including you actually misses that little piece of schmutz!”

“Hey now, let’s stick to the script, guys!” Harriet bellows out as she walks over to the jacuzzi and pulls down the hood of her brown wool battle tunic. “I know you were drowning, Shelly, but you simply cannot break character like that again. I need you to take pickleswap as seriously as the rest of us do!”

Sheldon clenches his jaw and blurts out. “But I almost drowned, Harriet! What could be more serious than that?”

“Give it a rest, Sheldon,” Beatrice says in exasperation. “I spent two summers lifeguarding at Berkshire Hills Eisenberg sleepaway camp so I know what it takes to drown. Trust me, you weren’t even close.”

“Lifeguarding, my ass!” laughs Sidney. “You were too busy letting Moshe Steinberg finger-bang you in the boathouse to do any lifeguarding!”

“Fuck you, Sidney!” Beatrice shouts.

“Guys, please!” yells Harriet while looking down at her watch. “We’re wasting valuable time here and need to get back to the pickleswap script!” She looks over at Sheldon and screams, “Back in the jacuzzi, Sheldon!”

Sheldon mutters something to himself and steps back into the jacuzzi. He pauses and then looks up at Beatrice without speaking.

“Forget your lines again, Shel?” Harriet asks while tossing a copy of the script to him.

Sheldon looks down at the script and reads to Beatrice in an annoyed grumble, “You will never take me alive, Joan of Arc, I am an Englishman and you are just a lowly peasant  from Le Bois Chenu!” Sheldon shakes his head and mutters, “This pickleswap game is such bullsh—”

Before Sheldon can finish his sentence, Beatrice screams out in anger and kicks up her cavalry boot, swinging its hard steel toe squarely up into Sheldon’s nose – crushing it upon impact and driving bone fragments into his brain, killing him instantly. Sheldon’s eyes roll back in his head while his limp, lifeless body collapses backward into the jacuzzi. He sinks to the bottom with his mouth open.

While Sheldon lies dead at the bottom of the jacuzzi, Harriet flips the pages of her script in confusion. “That wasn’t in the script was it, Bea?”

“No, I just ad-libbed it,” Beatrice says proudly. “What did you guys think?”

“Great work, Bea! I never saw that coming!” Murray exclaims with genuine praise.

“Ditto for me!” gushes Sidney. “I mean that really caught me off guard, Bea. I was expecting more drowning like the script said, but then ka-pow!”

“Great improv, Bea!” Harriet chimes in. “Now that’s exactly what I was talking about the other day. If we want to be the very best, we need to keep pushing our limits to go places where no other pickleball swingers have gone before us. And now here we are actually doing it! Bravo, guys!”

After exchanging congratulatory bro hugs and fist-bumps, Murray unbuckles his leg armor plates then looks up with a mischievous grin. “Well, so long as we’re going off script now, are any of you pickleswappers up for a little romp in the sauna?”

“I’m a step ahead of you, Mur!” says Sidney as he sheds his armor underpadding, strips off his boxer shorts and hurries naked toward the sauna door.

The others quickly undress and follow Sidney into the sauna while giggling like schoolchildren. Minutes later, loud moans, groans, grunts, yelps, howls and flesh-slapping noises begin to emanate through the sauna door while Sheldon’s waterlogged corpse floats up to the surface of the jacuzzi.

PART III: PICKLESMACK

(Las Vegas, Nevada – One Year Later)

“ASS TO ASS, HARRIET!” Murray Silverman shouts to his wife over the crowd of screaming pickleballers packed into the Fontainebleau Las Vegas luxury suite.

Harriet Silverman is stark naked, kneeling with her palms placed down on a large folding metal table set up in the middle of the suite. Drugged up and stony-eyed, her pupils are dilated while her face is covered in a thin film of cold junk sweat. The inside of her right forearm is rife with track marks, and a large area of flesh around the inside of her elbow has turned a bluish-brownish-green color, swollen and infected with thick yellowish puss oozing out. Her amputated left arm ends in a sewn-off stump above the elbow. A trail of fresh semen runs down her chin from her bottom lip.

Beatrice Goldfarb kneels on all fours on the table beside Harriet, facing the opposite direction. She’s wearing no shirt, just a black lace bra with one shoulder strap ripped and hanging down over her bruised arm. Her pink Lululemon pickleball skirt is hiked up above her waist and she’s wearing no panties. Her ass cheeks are dotted with cigar burns while blood trickles down her right cheek from a set of human teeth marks that punctured her skin. A pickleball paddle lies next to her on the table, its broken-off handle smeared with blood, feces, vaseline and buffalo wing sauce.

Sidney Goldfarb, Beatrice’s husband and pickleball mixed doubles partner, is standing behind the table between the two women, holding a thick black double-headed silicone dildo above his head and shaking it wildly for the crowd of pickleballers who are thrusting their fists into the air and chanting “ass to ass!” in perfect synchronized harmony.

Sidney looks down at Harriet and Beatrice, and says, “OK, ladies, time for the grand finale – now let’s bring it on home for these hungry ballers!”

“But Sidney, it’s huuurting me,” Beatrice slurs as a fresh stream of pinkish blood-infused piss runs down the inside of her thigh. She gulps, hiccups then vomits up a combination of vodka, semen, stale cheetos and moldy lasagna onto the table in front of her.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Beatrice!” Sidney bellows out and then looks back at Murray, waving his arm forward furiously.

Shaking his head and cursing loudly, Murray storms his way forward, pushing his way through the crowd of cheering pickleballers until he reaches the table where Harriet now lies on her stomach, face down in her own puke. He grabs the back of Harriet’s long filthy disheveled gray hair and wraps it tightly around his fist. With a quick strong snap of his wrist, he violently yanks and twists Harriet’s head up and around so that her sweat-drenched face is just inches from his own. 

“Listen to me, goddamnit!” Murray screams at Harriet. “The national senior pickleball tournament starts in two fucking days and we need – I repeat need – this money to pay the entry fees!” Murray clenches and twists his fist harder around Harriet’s hair while his face contorts into a psychotic scowl. “So you’re going ass to ass with Beatrice or you’re getting tossed off that fucking balcony onto the Las Vegas fucking Strip! Now pick it the fuck up and get back on your goddamn knees, Harriet!”

With a quick hard downward shoulder pivot and forearm thrust, Murray slams Harriet’s face into the metal table, crushing her cheekbone and breaking three of her front teeth, then jerks her head back up just as quickly. With his free hand, he grabs an open plastic bottle of cold water from the table and raises it to Harriet’s dried cracked lips – allowing her to take a long pull – then splashes the rest of the water into her face. “Hopefully that’ll wake your ass up,” he mutters as he throws the bottle to the floor.

Refreshed by the cold water, Harriet rises back up to her knees and nods slowly at Murray while spitting a tooth out. “OK, peaches,” she mumbles through her broken teeth. “You know I want that pickleball title just as bad as you do, and I’ll do whatever it takes. But I need my fix first, Murray, I need it now! Please please please go get Roach!”

Murray nods his head to Harriet then looks over to a large muscle-bound black man standing at the end of the table five feet away and watching them closely. The man is wearing red leather pants, a pair of Air Jordan 4 “Cactus Jack” Retros, and an open red leather vest over a six-pack stomach and chiseled pecs, with bulging tattooed biceps crossed over his chest. He wears a wide-brim black fedora on his head with a black mink scarf wrapped around his neck.

“Yo, Roach!” Murray shouts to the man over the crowd noise and waves him over.

Roach walks over to Murray with raised eyebrows while Sidney joins them with the black dildo still in his hand. “What the fuck’s goin’ on here, Silverman?” Roach asks. “I got me some high-payin’ clients gettin’ impatient here, dog! So you better jump start that skanky-ass ho and get her ass back to work, mothafucka!”

“Don’t sweat it, homeboy,” Murray says to Roach. “My girl’s all good, she just needs some more of the he-ro. Know what I’m sayin’?”

“What the fuck, Murray!” Roach exclaims, shaking his head and then nodding toward Harriett, who’s staring at them from the table through vacant zoned-out eyes and hooded eyelids. “That nasty-ass bitch already shot up so much of my junk she nearly put my black ass outta business! An’ you pickleballin’ niggas already owe me big, man! So how the fuck am I gonna get paid for givin’ her flaccid white ass mo’ my junk. Murray?”

“We got you, brotha’,” Murray says. “We ballin’ hard this week at the senior natties, bringin’ home some fat stacks, yo. We payin’ you back plus interest, a’ight?”

Roach turns his head and looks at his cousin, Poptart, who now stands next to Roach after walking over from the back of the suite. “What you think, Pops? Should I trust these pickleballin’ fools with mo’ my skag?”

Poptart studies Murray closely and then glances over at Harriet. He looks back to Roach, shrugs his shoulders and says, “These niggas can ball, cuz. My brotha’ Curtis saw ’em play up in Pepper Pike back when he was hustlin’ up around that way. Said they f’real. I say give that pickleballin’ ho some mo’ smack, then her’n the other bitch can go ass to ass, then they make us some green at the senior natties.”

Roach nods his head in agreement, then looks over to Murray and Sidney. “A’ight boys. We’ll tune yo’ bitches up with the H, but then we better be gettin’ some ass to ass. No mo’ ’scuses, dig?”

Murray nods to Roach and extends his closed fist. “We good, dog. Just hit ’em between the toes, those stems can’t take any more of the beast.”

Roach bumps Murray’s fist and then leans over and whispers something into Poptart’s ear. Poptart nods and walks over to the bedroom door, opens it and walks through, then closes it behind him. About a minute later, Poptart emerges from the bedroom, walks over and hands a plastic zip-lock bag to Roach.

Roach turns to Harriet, then leans down to the table and whispers gently into her ear. “Shhh, just lay down and relax, baby girl, papa bear got just what you need.”

“Thank you, daddy,” Harriet whimpers in a soft voice as she turns over onto her stomach. She bends her right knee and raises her foot to where Roach can hold it with one hand. Using his free hand, Roach places a hypodermic needle between two of Harriet’s toes. After looking closely for a usable vein, Roach drives the sharp needle through the web of her toes and presses his thumb down on the plunger, slowly injecting a clear fluid into her foot. Almost immediately, Harriet turns over and rolls her head back while closing her eyes. She opens her mouth halfway and smiles up at the ceiling in pure dope euphoria.

Roach gently pets Harriet’s damp matted hair back while planting a soft kiss on her forehead. “Now that’s my baby girl,” he whispers as he checks her pulse and gazes into her cold empty eyes.

After injecting Beatrice the same way as Harriet, Roach looks over to Murray and Sidney with Poptart at his side. “OK, fellas, we got your pickle-bitches nice and warmed up, now let’s get ‘em back to–”

“Oh fuck!” Poptart shouts, cutting off Roach while looking back at the table.

Roach, Murray and Sidney all look over and follow Poptart’s startled gaze.

Harriet and Beatrice are both convulsing violently on the table while scratching furiously at their faces with their mouths foaming. Behind them, the “ass to ass” crowd chant stops and the room goes completely silent.

Sidney looks at the two women curiously and asks, “Why are they doing that?”

“Bitches be codin’!” screams Poptart.

“Coding?” asks Sidney.

“OD’ing!” shouts Roach. “They’re overdosing, man!”

Roach scowls at Poptart and asks, “Which fuckin’ needle you give me, nigga?”

Poptart grabs the needle out of Roach’s hand and looks closely at a marking on the barrel. He opens his mouth and raises his eyebrows. “Oh snap!” he says. “We gave those bitches the fetty by accident!”

“Fetty?” Murray and Sidney ask in unison.

“Fentanyl,” Roach answers while shaking his head at Poptart. “Pure grade A fuckin’ fentanyl.”

“Well don’t you have one of those adrenaline needles, like in Pulp Fiction?” asks Sidney.

Roach and Poptart look at each other and laugh. “No, dumbass!” Roach exclaims between laughs. “They only got that shit in the movies.”

After reading from his smartphone, Murray looks up and says, “It says here that you can use something called Narcan. You guys got any of that?”

Poptart nods his head and replies, “Yeah but we only got like two spray bottles left, an’ that shit expensive as fuck now with inflation an’ all.”

Murray nods back to Poptart and says, “No worries, we understand. Goddamn inflation is killing us all. Fuckin’ Bidenomics!”

Roach nods and says, “Tell me about it, yo. Fuckin’ loaf of bread at WinCo cost me like $5.99 now. I used to pay $2 tops for that shit!”

Poptart chimes in, “Costed me $65 to fill up my gas tank yes’day! I mean what the fuck!”

Sidney nods and says, “I hear you, man. What the hell did they think was gonna happen with the feds printing money as fast as they could cut down trees the past four years!”

Roach and Poptart both nod their heads. “Amen to that, brotha’,” Roach mutters.

Back on the table, Harriet has gone completely still while Beatrice is choking on her tongue with her eyes bulging out and hands desperately throttling her throat as her mouth continues to foam.

“Y’all think Trump’ll be any better, though?” Poptart asks.

“He ain’t Biden!” Roach pipes up with a quick chuckle.

“True ’dat,” Sidney says, fist-bumping Roach while Murray nods in agreement.

“I’m worried about those 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico he be talkin’ ’bout though,” Poptart says, shaking his head.

“He just tryna’ protect American industry, yo,” Murray replies.

“Yeah, I hear ya’,” Roach says thoughtfully, stroking his chin. “But the macro effects could be catastrophic in the long term, know what I’m sayin’?”

“I guess we’ll just have to see,” Sidney replies, shrugging his shoulders.

“Still can’t believe a convicted felon got elected president, yo,” Poptart quips.

“Wasn’t for nothin’ bad – just payin’ off a ho,” Roach replies.

They all look at each other, nodding in agreement.

Roach and Poptart glance back at the table, where Beatrice has just gasped her last breath after choking on her vomit. She and Harriet both lie on their backs, gape-mouthed with their dead eyes staring up at the ceiling.

Roach shakes his head and then looks out to the crowd of pickleballers, shouting, “Sorry folks, bitches croaked, party’s over. Y’all gotta bounce so we can clean up the mess over here.” He adds, “An’ y’all ain’t gettin’ yo’ money back, neitha’, so don’t even ask. Not our fault these pickleballin’ hos flaked on us.”

“What about ass to ass?” a voice shouts out from the crowd.

“Sorry, not tonight, boys,” Roach replies.

“At least not with these stiff-ass bitches!” Poptart adds with a laugh.

Roach and Poptart both laugh while Murray and Sidney shake their heads with a chuckle.

“You guys are baaad!” Murray says with a sly grin.

“All kidding aside, guys,” Sidney says, nodding his head back to the table. “This Harriet and Beatrice situation poses a real logistical problem for us.”

“How so?” Poptart asks with a puzzled expression.

“Yeah, Sid, do tell,” Murray chimes in.

Sidney looks at them sternly and says, “We have a mixed doubles pickleball tournament in two days, but now we have no mixed doubles. Harriet and Beatrice may’ve turned themselves into hopeless junkies over the past few months to raise money to feed their pickleball habits, but they were damn good doubles partners. Even playing with only one arm after Roach was forced to amputate the other one, Harriet could pickleball circles around every other woman on the court.” He shakes his head and sighs. “And now we have no one.”

“Sorry for your loss, man,” Poptart says, putting his hand on Sidney’s shoulder and giving it a sympathetic squeeze.

“Damnit!” screams Murray, turning to Poptart. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Poptart! How the hell could you confuse the two needles? They could not have been more clearly marked! I mean did they seriously not teach your dope smokin’ grape koolaid sippin’ ass how to read in whatever inner city metal detectin’ free lunch voucherin’ teen pregnancyin’ gangsta rappin’ straightouttacomptonin’ motherfuckin’ public school—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, Murray!” Roach interjects. “Don’t blame Poptart for what happened. And besides, I got an idea.”

Everyone looks at Roach and, after a pause, Sidney speaks up. “Well? Enlighten us, Einstein.”

Roach smiles, then walks back to the bedroom and returns about thirty seconds later holding a small bag in his hand. He pulls out two blond wigs and throws one to Poptart. Roach puts his wig on and motions for Poptart to do the same.

Roach looks over at Sidney and Murray with a wide grin. “Looks like you two mothafuckas just found your new mixed doubles partners!”

Sidney, Murray, Roach and Poptart all clench their fists, raise their arms and extend their hands in unison for a group fist-bump.  Sidney looks to each of them with a smile while nodding his head and says, “Let’s go ballin’, boys.” 

——————-

“Beatrice Goldfarb?” asks the man sitting behind the pickleball tournament registration desk outside the Caesars Palace conference room after looking up at Lester “Roach” Crenshaw. Roach is wearing a blond wig, a pink nylon pickleball dress and a matching pink satin polo shirt.

The man stares closely at Roach for a few seconds, then asks with a suspicious smirk, “Is that your real name?”

“Uh, yes,” Roach replies nervously, averting his eyes to the floor.

“OK, ma’am,” the man says with a flirtatious smile. “I’m only asking because I don’t think I know anyone under age 70 with that name. You look way too young to be a Beatrice.”

“Oh, it’s a family name,” Roach explains with a coy giggle and hair flip. “My grandmama was Beatrice.”

The man nods back at Roach with a wink. “Good luck at the pickleball tournament, ma’am, I’ll be rooting for you.”

“Looks like you might be gettin’ lucky tonight, Beatrice!” Sidney says to Roach with a sarcastic chuckle and playful elbow shove as they walk away from the table.

“Fuck off, Sidney,” Roach says, shaking his head with a dry laugh.

“So where we ballin’, yo? These pickleball tights be crawlin’ up my ass!” Poptart asks the group after they’ve all registered. Poptart is wearing his blond wig while decked out in bright green spandex pickleball leggings and a matching cropped tank top.

“Chill out, Harriet,” Roach says. “At least you ain’t gotta wear a fuckin’ dress.”

“Well,” Murray replies to Poptart, looking down at his registration card, “It looks like you and I are on Court 3, and Sidney and Roach – whoops, I mean Sidney and Beatrice – are on Court—”

Before he can finish, Murray is cut off by Sidney tugging at his sleeve.

“I think we may have a problem here, Mur,” Sidney says, nodding his head in front of him.

Murray turns his head toward where Sidney is looking.

Walking toward them with a large smile is none other than Sergeant Felix Dixon, Avon Lake Police Department.

“Well, well, well, if it ain’t my favorite baller!” Dixon bellows out as he stops five feet in front of Sidney. “I knew I’d find you here!”

Sidney smiles back uneasily. “Uh, long way from Cleveland, aren’t you, officer?”

Dixon looks Sidney over for a moment while his smile vanishes. “I’m not an officer anymore. Now I’m just Felix, thanks to you and your pickleballin’ gangbangers. Turns out you and your crew were playin’ with 18-inch paddles, in violation of Avon Lake city ordinance. Me and my partner never caught it – we let you bangers off with a warning when we should’ve brought your asses in. One of the other ballers from a different court found a paddle on that flea-ridden piece of meat you left on the sidewalk. We measured it – came in a full inch over regulation. Forensics was able to trace it back to a group of four pickleball paddles purchased on the dark web about a year earlier – by one Sidney Goldfarb. Ring a bell, mothafucka?”

Before Sidney can respond, Dixon continues, “So me and Noah – Officer Garrison – got fired from the force and lost our pensions. No police department in the country would touch us after that. We couldn’t even get jobs as school crossing guards, man. I started drinkin’ heavy – real heavy – and was livin’ in my Volkswagen Beetle after my wife left me and took the house and the kids.”

“What color Volkswagen Beetle?” asks Poptart.

“Red,” replies Dixon.

“Punchbuggy red, nigga!” Poptart yells out while slugging Roach in the arm. 

“Damnit, negro!” shouts Roach, rubbing his arm. “You always get me on that one!”

“Anyway,” continues Dixon, “Noah took it much worse than I did. Being a cop was all he ever wanted, and when he got fired he went off the deep end … spiraled outta control, man. Drinkin’ led to druggin’ led to—”

Dixon stops and puts his hands to his face as tears begin to stream down his cheeks and his head shakes with sobs. After a minute, he collects himself and wipes away his tears. “I can’t even talk about it without chokin’ up! Goddamnit, man!”

Sidney and Murray look at each other uneasily while Roach and Poptart just stare at Dixon with wide bulging eyes.

Sidney finally speaks up. “It’s OK, Felix, if this is difficult for you, we under—,”

Dixon waves him off, clears his throat and continues, “Anyway, Noah disappeared and nobody – not even his wife – had heard from him in days. Turns out he emptied out what was left in their bank account and bought Cleveland Browns season tickets. They found him a few months later in some abandoned flophouse in Collinwood with a bunch of junkies and crackheads, lyin’ in a corner holdin’ a shotgun with his brains blown all over the fuckin’ wall … poor kid just couldn’t take livin’ no more.”

“Felix, we are so sorry to hear about—,” Murray says before Dixon cuts him off.

Shaking his head, Dixon glares at Murray and then Sidney. “So you bangers wanna know what the fuck I’m doin’ here?”

Nobody speaks.

Dixon pauses as a smile forms on his mouth. “Revenge,” he says, “I’m here to get me some fuckin’ revenge!”

Before anyone has time to react, Dixon reaches around and pulls a small Staccato CS handgun out of his rear waistband, points it at Murray and puts a bullet through his forehead. Murray’s dead body collapses to the ground with a loud thud.

Sidney turns to run, but it’s too late. The bullet hits the back of his skull and he drops next to Murray, his brains splattering on the ground in front of him.

Dixon now turns to Roach and Poptart with his gun raised. “Y’all the wives, right?”

Roach and Poptart, terrified and speechless, both nod their heads at Dixon.

“I’m gonna let you both live, but y’all gotta make me just one promise,” Dixon says.

Roach, finally able to speak, nods at Dixon and says, “Of course, my brotha’, just tell us what you want.”

Dixon points his gun toward the pickleball courts outside. “Get out there and ball, bitches! And bring home that trophy.”

Roach and Poptart look at each other and then nod back to Dixon.

“And ladies?” Dixon says to them.

“Yeah, man?” Poptart asks.

“Do it the right way,” Dixon says. He then closes his eyes and puts the gun into his mouth. He pulls the trigger but the gun just makes an empty clicking sound.

Dixon pulls the gun from his mouth and looks down at it in bewilderment. After a moment, he drops the gun to the ground, tilts his head back and looks straight up into the air. He nods his head with a smile. “OK, man,” he says, then turns and walks away.

Roach and Poptart look at each other, raise their arms and touch their pickleball paddles together.

Roach smiles and says, “Let’s ball, cuz!”

Nate Mancuso is a practicing attorney, history buff, fiction writer, and lover of free speech and civil liberties who lives in South Florida with his wife and cat (and daughter when home from college). Nate’s work has appeared in several literary magazines including PULP, Disturb the Universe, and Horror Sleaze Trash. Nate is currently working on his first collection of short stories and other works in progress.

It all started with a nosebleed.

A minor one. Just a straight streak of red below her right nostril, marking Hailey’s skin down to her top lip. She wiped the blood away with a bent finger, confused. She never got nosebleeds.

Her sister, Kelsey, peeked into the bathroom from the hallway and saw her sister examining herself in the mirror. Kelsey rolled her right wrist, her hand making a figure eight in the air.

Blood spewed from both of Hailey’s nostrils. It landed on the mirror, the sink, the faucet, her fingers. Her breathing ragged, she grabbed a hand towel and pressed it against her nose. Tears leaked from her eyes. Just because.

“What the hell?” she mumbled into the towel.

Kelsey rolled her wrist again.

Hailey felt the towel warm in her hands. She looked in the mirror and saw the tan towel become bright red and heavy with fresh, wet blood. Soaked, she dropped it into the sink. It landed with a thwunk sound.

Blood poured from her nose in two steady streams. She simply bent down and let it flow into the sink, all over the towel. What more could she do?

Hailey looked to the shower and saw her bath towel hanging on a hook on a wall beside the shower curtain. Ignoring the fact that she was going to get blood all over the floor, she darted from the sink, over to the towel, grabbed it, and pressed it hard against her face.

Kelsey rolled her wrist again.

Within minutes, the bath towel was soaked, and Hailey sat on the floor, lightheaded and nauseous.

She screamed into the towel.

Kelsey entered the bloody bathroom and stood before her sister.

That’s when Hailey knew…her sister was the reason for her massive nosebleed.

Hailey rolled her right wrist, her blood-stained hand making a figure eight in the air.

Laura Shell has been published in NUNUM, Maudlin House, Typishly, Big Whoopie Deal, and many others. Her first anthology of paranormal stories, The Canine Collection, was released in 2024. She’s a prolific writer and submitter of flash fiction and the Editor-in-Chief of the Flash Phantoms site. You can find more about her work at https://laurashellhorror.wordpress.com.

Ruth’s Anti-Sonnet of 1941

What to compare her to, this summer day
Of June that reaps the darkling buds of May?
This day has given cheeks and lips a red
Known to no rose. No lipstick and no rouge
Where she lies now with blood upon her head
And summer dawning on the failed refuge
She begged for at that blue-eyed fellow’s door
Who fucked her once then shot her twice out back
Where the dark ravens with no nevermore
Will come to pluck her sockets blank and black.
And this diurnal summer does not fade
Nor cease to shine on many a blond head.
Why would death need to brag about his shade
When in raw daylight she can rot so red?
She can no longer breathe. Men clearly see.
Summer can’t care, and cannot mean, but be.

Estranged Christmas

Behold the stranger face of normalcy
Turns in the night: a sickly herald star.
There is a something between you and me.
I don’t think we’ll like learning what we are.
Try to hear the music. Play the symbols.
Carol and dine together in wintering dark.
This is the way the festive cookie crumbles,
The little pieces learning what they are.
There is a something between you and me,
Between the past and future. It is pain.
I see it in the blazing of the tree.
I sense it in the stench of the champagne.
We sing. An age is buried in quicklime.
We can’t quite tell how much it’s wintertime.

A. Z. Foreman is a language-acquisition addict working on a doctorate at the Ohio State University. He is very proud to have had his work featured in at least two people’s tattoos.

The Army helicopter exploded over the zocalo, wiping out half the population below, but that turned out to be okay. The experimental fuel, combined with an alloy in the special ops chopper, created a molten shrapnel which solved the problem consuming the greatest scientific minds for months—a weapon to kill the Upsilon Variant Zombies. But no one knew that yet.

            The explosion sent Sargent Maria Villanueva rolling for cover behind a water tank on the rooftop, where she had fixed her laser scope on a pendejo zombie, her ex-boyfriend who left her for that big-breasted puta from Michoacan. The exploding bullet wouldn’t end his vida, but it would take him apart for a while. Payback.

            By the time she returned to position, the sky was clear, but smoke billowed throughout the zocalo. Zombie parts melted in the flames, her ex-boyfriend nowhere in sight.

Cheers from officers and soldiers on surrounding rooftops went up. What for? The zombies would reassemble and rise again. They had them contained in el zocalo, los calles sealed off with robotic bulldozers and tanks, but some always slipped out, found new victims—las idiotas who refused to evacuate, los machismos who thought they could fight them off. And then another epidemic would erupt.

The big gangs went up against them. They had as much firepower as the government, more with all the military and police on their payroll. It decimated the gangs, but now those cabrons were unkillable.

            Still, none of the fallen moved. Que esta pasando? Her radio crackled. Commands to keep rifles aimed at those still standing. Robot probes were being sent to investigate. Fire only if they were attacked. A few dead soldiers was one thing, but those robots were muy caro.

Sargent Villanueva scanned the charred and slashed zombies for her boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. Half of them looked like burnt match sticks, like that el coyote in the cartoon she watched as a kid, after that bird, el correcaminos, tricked him yet again and the bomb exploded in his face.

She was exhausted, sick of this stupid zombie pandemic. It started in El Norte, a state called Michigan, with a bunch of Trump militia. They refused to wear masks or get vaccinated, then ate some tainted beef from one of those industrial feedlots. The e. coli killed them, but the Upsilon Covid variant was so potent it took over their bodies and turned them into los muertos vivientes. They were well armed, and the Upsilon infected everyone in their path with the fatheads’ ideología as well as zombieness. They started attacking statehouses down through the Midwest, demanding recounts of the stolen election.

            That’s how her boyfriend got it. Ex-boyfriend. Miguel was at la frontera covering the story when they started crossing south. Why she ever fell for a Marxist journalist, she couldn’t imagine. They were through, but she texted him, begging him to leave. Don’t worry, I’m vaccinated, he replied. He was hunting for DeSantis, Giuliani, Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’d been spotted among the hordes, but if they were zombies, no one could confirm the difference. He got too close and was trampled. The Wall couldn’t hold them, climbing over each other’s backs like a bunch of roaches. Those gringo zombies, a bunch of rapists and murderers, pouring over the border. Fox News praised them as patriots, said the whole zombie thing was a Democrat hoax. They were just Americans exercising their God-given rights to freedom and cheap souvenirs.

            And now here she was, eighteen-hour shifts, picking off zombies, watching them explode into pieces, their body parts slithering back together. Yet the ones the helicopter hit, blue-green flames dancing across them, were dissolving.

            The robots rolled out from the west end of the zocalo, scooping up bits of burning flesh and charred bone with their mini-backhoe appendages and stuffing them into their trash compactor maws. More tests in P4 labs, deep under the desert somewhere. And then more zombie scientists digging their way out of those supposed impenetrable bunkers.

            A half-toasted zombie staggered toward a robot, within her range. She peered through her scope and fixed her laser on its head. “Chinga, es Miguel,” Sargent Villanueva swore quietly. His gorgeous curls were reduced to black ash and his face half charred, but she would recognize that green eye still in its socket, the dimple on the remaining cheek, anywhere. Her heart skipped a beat.

            Her boyfriend, ex-boyfriend, grabbed a robot appendage that was pulling a furry Viking helmet from a zombie corpse. Her belly tightened, a trembling ran through her. His dreams of a neuvo Mexico free of corruption, los ejidos that Cardénas dreamed of restored, las fabricas controlled by the workers. She recalled the summer day before these pendejo pandemics, before that puta revolucionista stole Miguel from her. He took her to Rivera’s murals al Palacio Nacional, preaching this was the real Mexico. She teased him, called him naïve, but that night when they made love, she orgasmed to visions of men with arms of steel hammering bridges across great divides, women ripe as melons sowing fields of corn to feed the children.

            Poor Miguel, full of dreams and faith in people, turned into a magasaur zombie. She just wanted to put him out of misery. As her finger tightened on the trigger, his eye looked up at her, magnified through the scope. His lips moved. Maria, help me.

            “Dios mio.” She lowered her rifle. Did he really…? Sargent Villanueva grabbed the escape cable coiled by her side. She could throw it to him, they could—

Miguel’s head exploded, his body vaporizing as it fell into molten helicopter debris. Twisting as if stabbed in the gut, she scanned the rooftops. Chinga, even covered in hazmat gear, those giant chichotas—her. “You killed Miguel!”

“More than you’d do for him, fascista!” That pájara revolucionista gave her the finger and dashed across the rooftop.

“You’d better run, puta!” Sargent Villanueva cried. “If I catch you, you’re through!”

Kirk Glaser is a poet and fiction writer who lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he and his family have lived through two homes burning to the ground due to arson and wildfire. His long-term Vipassana meditation practice helped him survive both events, but the fires may account for the macabre humor his stories sometimes take on.

I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t belong. I’m not one of them. I don’t scream and throw things like Laura. I don’t try to punch people like Jason does. I don’t take my clothes off for no reason like Teresa, or smear my shit on the walls of my room like Gavin. I don’t sit hunched up in the corner and cry all day or stare blankly at the television screen even when it’s turned off.

At least Mary is here with me. I’d been scared she might not want to come too. This is not somewhere you want to come. Only if they make you.

‘Of course I’m here. Where else would I be? I’ve told you I’ll never leave you, no matter what happens.’

Mary has been my friend since Daddy left. Mum blamed me, even though I was only five. She said it was because I was such a difficult child and wouldn’t do as I was told.

‘She’s a liar. Don’t listen to her. It’s her fault he went away, not yours.’

I wanted to believe Mary, but I remember the shouting the night I told him about all Mum’s friends who came to visit when he wasn’t there. He must have left early for work the next morning because I didn’t see him. He never came home again.

I don’t need anyone except Mary, and she doesn’t need anybody except me. We are more than best friends, more than sisters, more even than soul mates. We belong together. There was a girl at school ages ago who wanted to be friends with me. Her name was Lynne and she sat next to me for a while. When we had to do things in pairs, she always wanted to be my partner, even though I told her that Mary and I were a team. Mary didn’t like Lynne taking her seat or walking next to me, and she would kick her or pull her hair or pinch her arm. Lynne cried and the teacher told us off, but it worked because Mary got her seat back and nobody else wanted to sit next to me.

None of the others liked Mary, but it was only because she stood up for me when they tried to bully me. In the playground they’d chant:

‘Orphan Annie, bad and sad, Her Mum is mad, and she’s got no Dad’.

I didn’t know what an orphan was, so I asked the teacher if I was one. She said I wasn’t because I still had Mum, but as she was walking away, I heard her say I might as well be, in that funny whispery voice Mum uses when she says bad things about Daddy and doesn’t want me to hear.

‘Of course you’re not an orphan. Orphans are all alone in the world, they have nobody. You have me. You’ll always have me.’

I know Mary’s promised she’ll never leave me, but I’m still scared that if I try to have other friends, she might get jealous and go away like Daddy did. There’s nobody in here I would want to be friends with anyway. They’re all loonies.

‘You’re not mad. Trust me.’

And I believe her, because Mary is the only person in the world who never lies to me. She knows what I’m thinking. If I was nuts, she would know and she would tell me.

It’s not that bad in here. The food’s OK – unless you’ve got an eating problem, I guess – and the rooms are nice enough, although I wish I was back home with all my stuff like books and posters around me.

‘Bland. Sickly pink and boring beige. This place needs some red and purple and black to liven things up.’

The staff are mostly kind, except when someone kicks off. Then they can be really tough, but I suppose that’s just part of their job. They tell us what to do all the time. When to get up, when to eat, when to go to bed, when to take our pills, when to see the doctor, when to go to group therapy.

‘You’re fifteen. You’re not a little kid anymore. You can make up your own mind.’

I don’t like being told what to do. Not by anyone. Except Mary. She always seems to know what I need. Sometimes the things she tells me to do are bad, like when she wants me to hurt people. I know that’s wrong, and I won’t do it. Then she makes me hurt myself instead. But that’s OK.

Mary is the reason we’re in here. She gave me the knife and told me to cut Elise, the girl from next door. We didn’t like Elise – she stared at us and pulled faces; she said nasty, horrible things about Mum, called her a slag and a tart. Even if she was right, she shouldn’t have said it – not to me and Mary. I didn’t want to hurt her. I just pointed the knife at her to get her to stop. She screamed and ran into her house. Mary told me to follow her, but I went home instead.

When the police came round, I tried to explain it was Mary who wanted to hurt Elise, not me. I still had the knife and I showed them how we pointed it at her. They told me to put it down, but Mary wouldn’t let me. They grabbed my arm and twisted it up behind my back to make me drop it, and one of them cut his hand trying to rip my fingers off the handle.

‘Get off me! Fucking pigs! Take your filthy hands off me, you perverts!’

Mary got super angry. She was kicking and spitting and clawing at them and it took both of them to put the handcuffs on me. They tied my legs together and put a hood over my head. The police asked Mum if she wanted them to take me away. I can’t believe she said yes. I will never forgive her for that. Never.

Mum was crying when they put me in the back of the car and brought me here. She promised she’d come and visit me soon, once the doctors said she could. She hasn’t been to see me yet.

Mum and Mary never got on, right from the beginning. When Daddy left, Mum opted out and even though I was only five I had to pretty much look after her as well as myself. Thank God Mary showed up to help me, tell me what to do until she snapped out of it. I told Mum that Mary wasn’t an “imaginary friend”, that she was real, but she wouldn’t listen. Mum got cross when I wouldn’t get in the car because I was waiting for Mary, or I wouldn’t wear anything pink because Mary didn’t like it. She wouldn’t lay a place for Mary at the table either. In the end, I refused to eat anything until Mum gave Mary the same food as me.

‘I know you’re hungry, but it won’t be for long. We just need to stop eating long enough to scare her.’

Mary was right and Mum caved in. She said she understood Mary was part of my life, although I knew she wasn’t happy about it. They never speak to each other directly, only through me. Which is just as well, because I can leave out some of the rude and unkind things Mary wants to say to Mum, even though it makes Mary mad.

Now I’m shut up in here I miss Mum, and I’m angry with Mary because if she hadn’t wanted to cut Elise, and if she’d put the knife down when the police told her to rather than kicking off, I’d never have been taken away. When I told her this, she stopped talking to me for three days. I may miss Mum, but I missed Mary more, so I said sorry and begged her to come back. We made up and I’m not alone anymore.

‘We need to get out of here.’

I don’t know how she expects me to escape – this place is like a prison.

‘You know how. One day someone will make a mistake and that will be our opportunity’

Mum came for her first visit this afternoon. She said I look well, that I’ve put on a bit of weight and my eyes and skin are brighter. She didn’t ask how Mary is, so Mary sulked and refused to talk to her. Mum chatted away about this and that, what’s happened to people I don’t even know. She brought me a Get Well Soon card from school. I didn’t open it. I might read it later. Or I might not. Mary rolled her eyes at the picture of the cute bunny with a bandage on its head and snorted with derision. The school didn’t send Mary a card.

When the visit was over, Mum tried to hug me, but I was still cross with her for ignoring Mary so I stood rigid with my hands by my sides.

‘It’s OK. Hug her back – this could be our chance.’

So then I put my arms round my Mum’s waist and rested my head against the pillow of her breasts. It felt so good, I wished we could stay like that forever. I slipped my right hand into her coat pocket and felt around carefully. A damp tissue is all I found. But I hit the jackpot in the other pocket. I crumpled the piece of silk up in my fist and slipped it into the sleeve of my sweatshirt as I pulled away.

Mum’s favourite orange and pink scarf smells of her perfume. Back in my room, I hold it up to my face and inhale deeply. I don’t really want to do this.

‘We need to get out of here, and this is the only way.’

I know she’s right.

‘Of course I am. I always know what’s best for us.’

When I wake up in the hospital room, Mary is so pissed off, mean and angry as hell.

‘You stupid bitch. I don’t know why I waste my time here with you.’

I tried, I really did. I waited until just after the staff had done their midnight rounds before I did it.

‘How come they found you then? You’re such a failure. You couldn’t even do this right.’

How was I supposed to know they changed the schedule at random?

‘I’m sick of hanging round with a fucking loser like you. Maybe I should just go and find a new friend, someone who can do what I tell them without screwing up.’

I want to cry, but my throat hurts too much.

They are much more careful now. They come in to check on me every fifteen minutes, search my room every day to make sure I haven’t got anything I could use to hurt myself or anyone else. I don’t think we will ever get out of here.

‘It’s time for Plan B.’

Mary’s been quieter for the past couple of days, so I guess she’s been thinking about other ways to escape. I ask her what Plan B is.

‘You have to stop talking about me. Tell them you don’t listen to me anymore. Play their silly games, go to their stupid therapy sessions. Make them believe I’ve left you. Then when they think I’ve gone for good, they’ll let you out.’

But I’m terrified that she really will leave me. That she’ll be like Dad and go away and never come back.

‘Don’t worry. I’ll only be gone a little while. Just until the plan works. I won’t be far away, and I’ll be waiting for you on the outside.’

I’m putting plan B into action, starting this morning. I’m playing along, doing everything they say, taking their useless pills. I hate it, though. I feel as though Mary really is gone, which makes me not even want to get out of bed. But deep in my head I think I can still hear her.

‘Don’t give up. It will be worth it in the end. Be strong. You can do this.’

And so I get up, and I shower and wash my hair for the first time in a week. And I ignore the tray outside my door and go to the dining room for breakfast, where I sit at a table with Laura and Gavin. And we eat cereal and toast that’s been buttered for us because we’re not allowed knives, not even flimsy plastic ones. They try to talk to me, but I don’t answer, because even though Mary isn’t here, I know what she’d say.

‘Careful – don’t change too quickly or fit in too easily or you’ll make them suspicious.’

In group therapy, I join in for the first time. I tell them Mary is gone, that this is me talking and not her. I say how much I miss her, and that I don’t think she’s coming back. Then I start to cry, just a bit, and they are real tears. Everyone hugs me and says how pleased they are I’m getting better. I wait for Mary to push them away and shout at them to leave us alone. But she doesn’t.

It’s so hard being without Mary, but I will stick it out for as long as it takes to make them think they’ve won. Then when they let me go home, Mary and I can be together again. And this time I’ll do anything she says.

‘Even if I tell you to hurt people?’

Anything. I’d rather die than be apart from Mary. I’d kill to stop them splitting us up.

Hilary Ayshford is a former science journalist and editor based in rural Kent in the UK. She writes mainly flash fiction and short stories, but now finds herself unexpectedly writing a novel. She likes her music in a minor key and has a penchant for the darker side of human nature.

“Hush, your father is sleeping. You musn’t wake him,” Momma says, her voice as soft as the long-thistled broom across the rough brick of our front step. “You can do that, can’t you, Danny, baby?”

She’s right— I can do that. Momma is always right. I know she’s always right because when the orange sunset burns low over the tops of the blue and pink couches under the window in the living room that Momma calls pastel toile, it’s then that Pa wakes from his long sleep, kisses her on the cheek, gathers me in his big arms and he tells me a secret. He tells me Momma knows everything.

I play softer, barely allowing the plastic bumpers of my Speedzees cars to gently clack together. I’m on a fireman rescue mission, but the shouts of the girl in the building are too loud, so I tell her to hush too, trying to imitate the way Momma had said it.

I put my firetruck down and push it across the worn rug, sitting on my bum with my knees bent under me so that I sit like an ungainly sack of potatoes. 

A moment later, Momma is softly calling me again.

“Danny, baby, get up. It’s time for your bedtime.”

Her voice is tired and set low, like when she tells me she loves me or wishes me goodnight. It’s strange. We never used to have to be quiet when the sun was out and all; shining through the veranda windows all buttery-yellow, flooding the space with light. But I know this is important. 

More important than my games or toys. 

More important than Momma’s washing or ironing or the cooking that she doesn’t do in the daytime anymore.

Out of anything in our little house with honeysuckles climbing the fence, with pastel toile furniture in our livingroom and a long white sidewalk out our front door with perfect parallel cracks like neat impressions in a stick of butter, keeping Pa asleep after he’s worked hard is the most important.

I stand, letting the toys drop as they are, a perfect picture of dashing green army men warring against the hulking monstrosity of the dollhouse. 

I spare them a second glance before I leave the room, wondering when my baby sister will come home so that I can play with her next, help guide the story of the toys. She doesn’t know how to play quite properly yet, always seems to forget you’re supposed to tell a story with the toys, have a bad guy and a good guy, play Cowboys and Indians, or have a treasure hunt. Instead she just tries to line them all up, matching colors with colors or from smallest to largest. Besides, she can’t grip the plastic toys with her clumsy toddler fingers either so I hold them for her and make them dance with silly noises to get a scream of laughter from her. That’s fun.

The nebulous voice of my mother is the trail that I follow until my searching hands can tangle in the fabric of her long skirt. My Momma is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Her hair is brown and gold and long when she lets it go in the evenings and I think her a queen. 

It’s down now, long thick blond strands tangled like twists in a bale of hay. Momma turns and runs her hands along my head, leaning down, and her eyes remind me of MeeMaw’s red lacquered wood stairwell, the wood of the steps knotted in places like whorlish shapes of indistinct owls and frost and sunken murky knots of wood that looked exactly like faces. Momma’s eyes now remind me of the eyes I’d seen in the wood. 

She tells me, “Danny, you’re a sweet boy, to come when you’re called.”

I push myself into her embrace and she hums, gathering me up, up, up into her arms, carrying me like I’m little. I giggle, grabbing around her neck.

She shushes me, looking behind her, down the hall where Pa is sleeping.

We climb the carpeted stairs, and I smile to myself. Momma carrying me is like chocolate cake, like running away before I get gobbled up, like climbing up on my bed and jumping up and down when Momma’s not looking, like everything that is more fun because it’s forbidden. I kick my legs and they swing free. 

I change my mind. Momma carrying me is like flying. 

“Read me a book, Momma?” I ask, excited for the good things about bedtime. “Please?” I remember my manners.

“Bathtime first, honey.” Her voice answers, still rough somehow, and I remember how her eyes had been like wood. I reach searching hands up and feel water on her cheek.

Momma sets me down and I am confused until I see I’m in the bathroom and everything in the bathroom is wet. I look for my bath toys as I hear the spigot turned with a squeak and water rushes out in a roar. 

Freezing, I remember that we are supposed to be quiet. Crouching with my action man that I hadn’t been supposed to have brought to the bath but had been allowed anyway, I look up. Momma isn’t looking right now, leaning over the tub and feeling the water with her hand. I suppose it must be alright this time, if she isn’t telling me to shush.

Relief floods me and I grab her skirt and watch the water fill the tub. I wasn’t fond of getting wet and I remember that MeeMaw said that when I was a baby I would scream for hours when set in any amount of water. But somehow, Momma made bathing fun. She let me bring my toys like my action-man, even though Pa had said they aren’t meant to get wet, and she even played stories with me sometimes. 

The memory of her blowing water bubbles has me excited to get in the water already and I start to tug at my shirt, struggling against the cloth that suddenly seems thick and difficult to manage.

“Baby, no, no.” Momma says, grabbing my arm and tugging. 

My head shoots up. 

“Don’t worry about that tonight, ‘kay?” She smiles, “Your toy is getting in the bath like he is, isn’t he?”

She drops my action-man into the tub and he sinks like stone to the bottom of the still-filling body of water.

She waits for my answer.

My forehead wrinkles and I nod my head slowly. It makes sense.

“Go on, baby, get in.”

I pull myself to the thick rim of the tub, to the place where the old baby bath seat for my little sister is discarded. Distracted, I tug my mom’s skirts and point. “Where’s Emma?”

She pulls me away, impatient and I feel a pang for disappointing her. I climb into the tub.

It feels all weird and wrong to be in the bathtub in my day-clothes. I get wet, fast, like the water wants to gobble up every dry bit of me. The clothes twist uncomfortably around me, making it difficult to lift my arms or even move my legs.

Unable to bear it, I twist to Momma, feeling the ickiness of the sensation fill me from head to toe. The water and my clothes swish in the water with my movement and I hate it. I feel my chin start to tremble.

Before I can say another word, I see something stranger than I think I ever have before in my life. Momma is making breakfast in the bathroom.

She’s got the toaster, all silver metal and sleek lines and long coiling cord, sitting beside the sink where Momma usually does her makeup. I stare as she shoves the cord end into the outlet and turns to me, the toaster in hand.

“Momma, are we going to make breakfast for my bath-toys?” I wonder, excited. Momma always comes up with the best ideas for my toys and makes bathtime really fun. I’m so excited I forget to be quiet. 

Momma’s looking at me and she’s holding the toaster the way I do with my favorite toys, all cradled like Emma would hold her baby-doll. Momma doesn’t have a baby-doll, though, not anymore.

“Yes, Danny.” Momma says, “But first, I want you to close your eyes real tight. You can do that for me?”

A little disappointed I try to tamp it down and do as she says. My eyes are squeezed shut in an instant and I know she’s right ahead. Will there be a surprise for me?

The next moment, there’s a sound that’s louder than thunder. 

I slam my hands over my ears and my eyes snap open.

Momma. Pa. Standing in the bathroom, hugging.

It’s so unusual that I jump to my feet.

They really are hugging, my Momma tucked against Pa. Pa’s face is toward me and his eyes aren’t sleepy at all, they are wide and white in the corners. I don’t believe what I see but it almost looks like Pa’s scared. The toaster is on the ground, on its side at their feet.

I realize that something is wrong then because I see Momma’s shoulders shaking.

There’s a sinking sensation through my body and I start to cry. We weren’t supposed to wake Pa up and now he is sure to be mad at me. I hate it even though I know it’s my fault. I was being too loud.

Rachel Barron is a writer from the foothills of North Carolina. Growing up on a rural blueberry farm, she learned to enjoy the solitary comforts of reading. It was not until the summer after high school that she started writing, hoping to create stories that would enchant readers as much as the books from her childhood had. She believes that the most important (and the hardest) part of writing is staying true to yourself.

Sugar-sweet memories are those that linger without scorn.
They erase the sorrow of dark thoughts on a foggy morn.
They are those memories that we all constantly pursue
but are often hidden in plumes of smoke that ensue,
and so remain within those hidden secrets that we keep,
that cut us with thorns bursting forth with visions bleak;
visions, which are carried in streams of thought that dwell
in the icy misfortunes of winter’s cold, unholy spell.
We fear the din of thunder that makes us tremble within
and the flashing lightning that glows on a cross of tin,
and we weary old men sob in those hours not so sweet,
which keep us awake in the dark hours of twilight sleep.

James G. Piatt, an octogenarian, retired professor, poet and novelist, lives in Santa Ynez, California, with his wife Sandy, and an Aussie dog named Scout. He writes poetry because it keeps him alive. He has published five collections of poetry, The Silent Pond, Ancient Rhythms, LIGHT, Solace Between the Lines, and Serenity. He was nominated twice for the Best of Net award, and four times for a Pushcart award. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.

Henry liked his job. That surprised a lot of people. Working from ten at night to four in the morning was not a desired shift at the 24/7 gas station. The convenience store sat next to a big overpass with its six pumps. The area was rough enough that the urbanites that were pushing in slowly only stopped to fill up there when they really didn’t have a choice. But it wasn’t as dangerous as they thought it was.

Henry parked his beat-up old sedan behind the store like he always did. It had more scratches and dents than anyone could count. The back bumper was completely missing, stripped off after some soccer mom in an SUV rear-ended him at a light and peeled out before he’d even realized what happened. Still, the car ran. Despite how miserable the motor sounded every time he turned the key, it always got him to work.

The store itself was surprisingly clean, mainly due to Henry. There wasn’t much to do at 2 a.m. besides mopping, so Henry didn’t mind doing it once a night. Most people hated this job and hated getting stuck on the grave shift even more. They did everything to dodge it and often no-showed when required to come in for a grave. Henry was supposed to have another employee with him, but most nights, it was just him. He didn’t mind that. 

That was why he liked his job. The grave shift was quiet. Henry didn’t have a manager watching over his shoulder. He would read a paperback thriller or flick the cracked screen of his old phone to pass the time. A few people came in and went out. He would pick up and mop around 2. Morning shift would stumble in around 4:05. Henry would grab a cup of soda, get back into his old sedan, and drive back to his apartment before the sun came up. It was a routine and Henry had come to like it.

Most of Henry’s conversations were with the demographic that came into a convenience store between the hours of 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. As such, he had become an amateur surveyor of these understudied populations.

There were midnight travelers who came in because they had nowhere else to get gas or chips at this time. They could be shifty, checking over shoulders, hoods up despite what the sign on the door said. Henry didn’t mind. Usually, the suspicious behavior had to do with them being part of the largest subset of the group: high-as-a-kite stoners. Henry would ring up their chips and send them on their way as they mumbled their thanks before disappearing into the night.

Then there was the Night-Lifers. They came from the clubs downtown, drunk and delirious from a wild weekend. Unlike the midnight travelers, they never came alone. There was always a gaggle of them, wired up by substances and each other’s company. They were loud, young, clumsy, and uninhibited. They were Henry’s least favorite group. The drink often made them let slip thoughts they would have otherwise internalized. Thoughts such as what a loser Henry must be for getting stuck behind that counter every weekend instead of joining them in their revelry. But he had no college money to squander on cover and overpriced drinks. He would ring up their organic coconut water and gas station roller dogs, sending them on their way to live forever and party till the end of days.

It was the third category that Henry dealt with the most. The ones that stayed the longest inside of the convenience store, mainly because they had nowhere else to stay: the overpass people. They were the closest thing Henry had to regular customers. They would stop in to use the bathroom. Some to relieve themselves and keep the few dregs of dignity that a harsh life would still afford them. Some to shoot dope into their collapsed veins. Over time, Henry got a sense of who belonged to which group, but a lot overlapped into both. On hot summer nights, some of them would buy a soda and loiter in the air conditioning as long as they could. On cold winter nights, some of them would buy coffee and loiter in the warm building as long as they could. Sometimes they sat outside on the curb, just needing a place they wouldn’t be shuffled away from. 

Henry rarely had trouble. Big trouble at least. Some doped up in the bathrooms, a couple of arguments that got ugly, but for the most part, things were to the level that Henry just had to reach for the phone for the troublemakers to find somewhere else. 

A lot of it was Henry himself. The overpass people mostly got along with him for two main reasons: he didn’t try to get rid of them if they weren’t causing trouble, and he listened. When a man buying a small coffee spent 45 minutes at the register explaining how he was John F. Kennedy’s long-lost son, Henry just listened. Maybe it was because there wasn’t anything else to really do on the grave shift. Maybe Henry was just the kind of guy who had patience for that kind of thing. Whatever it was, Henry had become a frequent stop for those who had no one to listen.

They would tell him how they had been mistreated in life. How they did or did not deserve their lot. Sometimes they told him directly and honestly, but more often it was through a rambling stream-of-consciousness that Henry had come to expect. Over time, he had gotten better at decrypting some of the truth from the stories, but it was still a fog. They were neither facts nor deceptions, but a tapestry of complications that is all human life. Henry would just nod and listen.

Some were the addicts who were lying to themselves more than they were lying to him. Some had always been on the brink, and when their mother died, or the welfare stopped coming, or the military discharged them, it was the final straw that made it all spiral out of control. Some had fallen and ended up underneath the overpass and now lacked whatever it was that a person needed inside to get back on their feet. Some never had it in the first place, others had been drained of their last drop and had none left. 

The ones that Henry found the most interesting were what he called the prophets. They often spent the longest at the counter, sometimes whispering, sometimes shouting, never making complete sense. All the prophets had heard from God. They had all been specially selected for a divine mission that each of them was singularly qualified for. The revelation varied. Often it was about politics, or banks, or current events as interpreted through a mind that viewed reality through a cracked lens. Not completely shattered but prismed, refracted. They were not complete unintelligible ramblings, that was a different category. These rather seemed to latch on to something, whether a celebrity, politician, or conspiracy, and receive divine instruction about it.

“…On May 11, 1997, when I was in Sacramento, God Almighty called me and carried me into LAX airport, where He said: ‘You, Gary, are the Divinely Appointed Person mentioned with the Stick Of Joseph in his hand in Ezekiel Chapter 37….’”

But Two-Pack was different. Henry called him that because the guy always had two backpacks on, one across his chest. He was like the other prophets in the way that he would predict the future, in the way that he had heard from the voice of God, in the way that others were crazy, but he was the real thing.

The main thing about Two-Pack that was different was that he seemed so unhappy about it all. 

“How’s it goin’?” Henry asked Two-Pack.

“Not great.” Two-Pack would say. “I spent today telling people that God was going to punish this city with a great earthquake unless they stopped.”

“Stopped what?”

“Stop selling people for spare change! Stop raping children! Stop putting people out of their homes!” His voice was raspy but animated, a sign that he’d been yelling himself horse all day. “No one cares! No one cares enough to do anything but put stickers on their fancy cars! I’ve seen it! Three times and a fourth! God is not blind! He sees us completely!”

“Hm,” Henry said. It was what he said to all the prophets.

“I know you think I’m crazy.” Two-Pack looked tired. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy. But please, we’ve got to change things! It’s awful. There are new people under the bridge every day. They can’t afford to live in their homes. There are girls, children, who have horrible things happen to them. Please, no one will listen!” 

Henry glanced out the window towards the overpass. Two-Pack wasn’t wrong that it was starting to get crowded over there. At least he got that right.

“$3.24,” Henry said. Two-Pack took his lemon-lime soda and pocketed the grimy coins that Henry handed back to him with the receipt.

“Why won’t they listen?” Two-Pack looked exhausted, Henry thought. It was a strange thing to think about an overpass person. None of them looked lively or refreshed. But Two-Pack always had this forlorn, defeated look on his face. The other prophets, aside from random bursts of anger, seemed undeterred by the lack of positive reception to their message. Two-Pack was different that way. He looked worn down.

—————-

It was another Saturday night or maybe Sunday morning. Henry was too busy to watch the clock. There was a big music festival downtown. The whole city had swelled with people and activity. Henry’s quiet routine was interrupted by the increase in traffic. Worse, they were all Night-Lifers. Musical acts would wrap up, clubs would close, and they would spew forth a wave of humanity, a portion of which would stumble into the convenience store. 

The Night-Lifers were all the more wired, more unrestrained. Like locusts in season, they would swarm this city for two weeks. Great for the economy, the mayor said every year. Great for business, the station’s owner said every year. But for Henry, his coworkers, and everybody else, it was a feverish nightmare to endure.

While a lot were from out of town, plenty were locals. They would walk the streets they usually drove through with the windows rolled up. They took the festival as a chance to cut loose, live their best life, and feel something. So, when they staggered into the convenience store feeling the excitement, club drugs, shared experience, and alcohol, Henry would have the mop on stand-by. 

That night, Two-Pack had made a mistake. God apparently hadn’t warned him to stay out of the convenience store until sunrise. Two-Pack came in during a lull, too groggy to remember what time of year it was. While he was scrounging together the pennies for his usual soda, there was a muffled commotion outside; the sound of multiple voices all talking, laughing, and shouting over one another. 

Henry braced himself. Two-Pack turned around just in time to watch as a dozen festivalgoers crashed through the front door. They poured into the store. They clawed at the chips and snack cakes. They ransacked the fridges for rehydration solutions. They shouted at Henry if he had any vaping pods behind the counter. It was chaos. Two-Pack looked like an animal in a snare. He was too overwhelmed to count his precious change, too overwhelmed to slip out the door, he just stood there as the wave of sweat and burnt-out glow sticks crashed down on him.

One inebriated man next to the energy drinks leaned over to his companion. His words were supposed to be a whisper, but he had lost any sense of volume, and his words carried across the entire store. 

“Hey, it’s that crazy guy.”

On instinct, Two-Pack turned to look at them. 

“Oh sh–” They collapsed into snickers, amused they’d been overheard. Two-Pack just stood there.

Another man staggered up to the counter, his arm slung over the shoulders of a dazed woman. “Hey man, lemme get that for ya,” He slurred as he barged Two-Pack away from his soda. The woman threw an armful of snacks onto the counter alongside the lemon-lime. 

“Aw you’re so sweet,” she said as the man riffled through his pockets for his credit card. Henry was in the middle of scanning the items when he heard a voice over by Two-Pack. 

“Sims?”

Henry saw Two-Pack out of the corner of his eye, frozen in place. Another one of the Night-Lifers was in front of him. The other guy looked like he was staring at a ghost. Henry had never seen someone go from drunk to sober so fast.

“Sims, man, is that you?” It was hard to hear over the din of the others.

“Yeah,” Two-Pack said. The other man looked aghast.

“I haven’t seen you since…” He trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

“Yeah,” Two-Pack said.

“You doing okay?” There was genuine concern in his tone.

“I mean…” Two-Pack trailed off this time.

“Listen, man, if you need help. I know a place where my uncle works. They help–”

“I’m not finished.”

“What?”

“I’m not finished. I’ve got to stay here. God told me.”

“…okay… if you change your mind…”

Spying an opening, Two-Pack made a break for the door. Doing everything in his power to avoid brushing up against any of the revelers, he burst out the front of the store. Out the window, Henry saw him break into a run as he headed for the overpass. 

“Yo, why’s he runnin’?” One of the patrons shouted to nobody in particular. Someone else started dialing on their phone. Henry looked down to see the dirty coins Two-Pack had left on the counter.

The guy that was talking to him stood there stunned for a minute. Finally, he brought his own collection of chips to the counter. Henry started scanning the barcodes before his curiosity got the better of him.

“You know him?” He asked the patron.

The guy was staring out the window. He snapped back to Henry.

“Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”

“Really?” This was the first time Henry had a chance to hear about the past lives of an overpass person from an outsider.

“Yeah,” The guy was picking up that Henry was genuinely interested. “He was a programmer at my startup. He was totally normal until one day he just started ranting about God and how we were going to be punished. He started living on the street, I think as kinda a protest. Eventually, he lost his job, and I haven’t seen him…” The guy trailed off, “does he come in here a lot?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he still… ya know?”

“Yeah.”

—————

It was nearly a month before Henry saw Two-Pack again. The store was its usual quiet self. The tidal wave of energy that came with the festival had washed back out and things were back to the normal warm spring nights that led into summer.

“Haven’t been around?” Henry asked as Two-Pack, or Sims, handed him the lemon-lime. 

“I got picked up. Put back in the state hospital.” 

“Oh.” Henry had heard enough recounting for multiple people to know that was not a good thing.

“They put me on some new meds. I thought it was helping.”

“Yeah?”

He looked even more defeated than usual.

“Yeah, I felt good. Felt kinda normal. No visions, no voices. I was thinking maybe I could get better. Maybe get my old job back, ya know? Maybe it was just the crazy, ya know? And with the meds, I could function. That’s what the doctor said.”

Sims rubbed his face with frustrated vigor. Henry could see tears starting to form in his eyes.

“Then I had this dream. I was still on the meds, and I was having dreams. And God was telling me I needed to tell everyone, tell everyone that He’s going to punish this city. With fire, and an earthquake, and firestorms. And He showed me what it would look like. And He said I had to tell everyone to leave if they wanted to live.”

Tears were coming down Sims’ face. He wiped his nose on his sleeve.

“And I told God I don’t want to! I don’t want to live under a bridge and tell people their sins and shout at people on the street and feel all this awfulness. I don’t want to tell them they’ll be hurt. I don’t want to be a prophet!”

Henry ripped a paper towel from the roll behind the counter and handed it quietly to the sobbing man. He didn’t know what to say. Finally, after several minutes. Sims stopped weeping.

“Henry.” Sims had read his name tag. There was a firmness back in his voice. “Henry, you need to leave.” He looked him dead in the eye, “There’s disaster coming. I have to stay. I have to stay and warn everyone. Try and convince someone, anyone, that they need to leave.”

“Sure,” Henry said.

“I’m serious. Please. It’s happening soon. Really soon. Just leave town for a while.” Sims pressed his hands together in a pleading gesture.

“Please. He wants everyone to be spared.” With that, he grabbed his soda and limped out into the night.

———————-

The morning crew left him hanging. Finally, someone rolled in at 4:55 a.m. and Henry could go home. He grabbed a cup of lemon-lime from the fountain before climbing into his car. It was far past his bedtime, and he could barely keep his eyes open as the old sedan’s suspension squeaked over cracked potholes to his apartment. He kept turning over Sims in his sleep-deprived mind. The look in his puffy eyes.

He could see the dilapidated roofs of his apartment complex approaching. Henry flicked on his blinker as the concrete entryway drew near. He got into the turning lane. He could see the faded green paint on his front door from here, welcoming him, inviting him to come inside and flop onto the mattress he had lying on his bedroom floor. 

And then he didn’t. 

He just watched the apartments pass him by as he rolled down the road. Henry didn’t know why, but he got onto a nearly empty highway that headed out towards the hills overlooking town. It wasn’t because he believed in Sims, or believed in Divine judgment, or even really believed in God. 

He just couldn’t get the image out of his mind of Sims begging him, tears still on his cheek. This guy tormented by this supposedly Divine mission, so miserable. Henry thought about what the guy that night had said: that Sims used to be a programmer. It was the kind of job Henry’s own mom wished he’d gone to college for. Sims seemed lucid enough to know he used to be that. He hadn’t always lived under an overpass and shouted at people on street corners. It was like he didn’t think he had a choice.

As Henry’s sedan struggled up the steep road that led out of the city limits, he could see the first rays of sunrise streaking across the sky. He didn’t believe that Sims was a prophet, but he felt that in some way all the suffering and misery, even if it was false, deserved something. At the top of the hill, he pulled off to the side of the road at a scenic lookout. It was a weekday and no one else was there. He parked his wheezing car, grabbed the soda, and got out. He took a sip from the cup before setting it on a guardrail post. Henry leaned against the weathered metal railing as he looked out over the city. The sun was just coming up from the east, illuminating the skyline in a way Henry had never seen before.

Maybe this was all stupid. Maybe his tired brain had made a decision that had just wasted his sleep and gas money. But it didn’t matter to Henry. Sims had accidentally given him a great view. And Henry felt like, after all the guy had been through, he somehow deserved to have someone listen to him, even if he didn’t believe him.

Henry looked down at the flat soda cup. Ripples were starting to form.

Sam Hootman has worked in emergency medicine, the legal system, and corporate security. He currently reside in Texas with his wife.

The interview was not going well.

Andy had already mumbled his way through six competency-based questions, with follow ups, while biting his nails to the root. A nasty habit at the best of times, but now little streams of blood were trickling down between his knuckles. The three sharp-suited professional women on the panel tried to ignore it, but  there was a good chance it was starting to damage his employability.

“Can I get you a plaster for that?” asked Julie Gray, Head of Marketing. Her hair was shorter than her LinkedIn profile picture but she was wearing the same cream blouse and navy blazer. An ensemble that said I’m the boss.

“No, sorry… just a nervous habit.” Andy wiped the tacky blood on the seam of his trousers.

His briefcase jumped next to his shoe.

Bringing a large medical briefcase to an interview for an admin role was a bold choice. He thought it might come off as a statement. A quirky detail that would stand him out from the crowd.. The concern on the panel’s faces when he’d entered the room suggested they hadn’t seen it that way.

But it’s not like he could leave it at the reception desk. He’d caught one of those things on the way over here, and it was now rattling against the metal bars of the trap, trying to escape.

Andy thrust his heel back, delivering a swift kick against the leather bag. It silenced the creature that struggled inside.

If the panel noticed this,  they ignored it like a fight brewing on a crowded train. It’s not real if you don’t look at it.

Andy sat only a foot or so back from their wide formica desk. The women sat in an evenly spaced row with their evenly spaced eyebrows and evenly straightened hair. They were outlined like avatars against the featureless white wall. Sunlight reflected off the glossy paint and into Andy’s eyes from the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Ally O’Connor, Director of Communications, had the next question. She wore a lurid red blouse and severe black mascara. She looked at Andy like he was a fly in her wine and asked, “What excites you about working for the Department of Work And Pensions?”

Faint scratching and thudding started behind the walls.

The cage inside the case shook again. The bag shifted a few inches back along the floor. He resisted the urge to kick it.

His voice broke as he answered, “I can’t wait to share the good news about all the great work you do.”

Ally O’Connor, Director of Communications, narrowed her eyes. Her artificial eyelashes formed a mesh in front of her pupils. She jotted something in her notepad.

Andy gripped his knees, fighting the urge to chew his already savaged nails. The scratching grew louder and climbed higher up the walls. Something was gnawing and digging,  trying to chew its way into the room. The walls trembled.

Another one.

There was another trap in his case, but it was a small andless effective model and, though the interview wasn’t going well, Andy wasn’t sure that pausing to set up a modified rat trap in the corner of the room was the thing to rescue it.

“We’re a friendly bunch here,” said Stephanie Birch, Digital Marketing Officer, her face frozen in a demented rictus. “We’re always having a laugh and a chat. It’s so relaxed, as long as we’re getting the job done.”

Andy meant to laugh but it came out as a whimper.

The edges of Stephanie’s smile dropped a little as she recited, “How important do you think it is to work in a great team?”

Something carved a tiny hole in the middle of the wall just behind her head. Small white boulders, like cat litter, tumbled down and a puff of white dust drifted across the room. Little claws poked and scraped through the aperture, opening it wider.

Andy’s eyes widened.

“For me, it’s the relaxed atmosphere it creates. You can’t ever be afraid to ask for help.”

They were all smiling at him now. Lips pressed into thin white lines.

His palms were slick with sweat and his mouth was dry. Jagged sections of plaster crumbled to the carpet as the hole opened wider. Needle-like claws poked through, on the end of spindly fingers as small as grains of rice.

Julie Gray, Head of Marketing, said, “That’s the end of our questions. Is there anything you’d like to ask us?”

The hole was now the size of a cricket ball and a head appeared in the gap. Long, pointed ears folded inwards and then snapped back as it pushed it’s wrinkled, leathery head  into the room. Shiny red eyes peered at Andy from a spherical skull, tufted with fine hair. It hissed at him from a snarling, lipless mouth. The creature strained and shuffled, squeezing through the hole to get to him. His case rattled in response.

He looked at the panel aghast. Like everyone else, they saw nothing, heard nothing. Their sympathetic smiles said Unfortunately, other candidates demonstrated experience that more closely matched the job description.

The creature wriggled through the wall towards him. Itsface crumpled  into a look of pure, animalistic hatred.

Andy sprang from the chair, grabbing his old leather case and bolted through the door without another word.

#

He tried not to run because running in an office is impossible to ignore.

The open-plan floor was crammed with square cubicles and humming screens. There were photos tacked to the walls and half-empty biscuit packets ripped open on the edge of desks. Employees chattered through headsets to grids of blank faces on blurred backgrounds.

The case buffeted against his leg.

He passed a whiteboard with crude drawings of party streamers and fireworks around the edges. Along the top, it read “Team night out: ideas please!” The list of suggestions underneath was empty.

He walked straight into Sadie.

She squealed as they collided and her papers crumpled against her.

The case clattered in his hand, and he took two large steps backwards.

“Oh, hi Sadie. Sorry. Hello.”

This was exactly the kind of interaction he dreaded. An unexpected encounter with an old acquaintance, the obligation of casual conversation. The threat of indefinite small talk.

To make things worse, Sadie was an old high school crush. She had always been way out of his league, but had at least spoken to him and treated him kindly. She’d even been seen with him in public and it had cost him nothing more than the promise that he would do all her Maths homework for her.

His eyes darted around the room and towards the exit.

“Andy! Wow…what brings you here? I haven’t seen you in ages.”

She blew a curl of auburn hair out of her face and smoothed it behind her ears as she spoke. He’d caught the scent of it when they’d stumbled into one another. Coconuts. She still used the same shampoo.

“I er…had an interview. I didn’t know you worked here. Good to see you.”

“You too, you too.” She reached out to touch his arm but stopped short.

They stood looking at each other for a moment, their mouths opening and closing, searching for the next foothold in the conversation. She put one hand on her hip, then down by her side, then on her hip again. Experimenting with poses for a photo nobody was taking. Her figure was fuller than he remembered.

“You moved back?” she asked.

“A couple of months ago. I’m not far. I have a small place in Deluna Gardens.”

“Oh cool, my friend lives there. I’m just round the corner.We should meet up.”

Her smile died as she said this and she looked at her feet.

Andy winced and looked again at the exit. From the case, a wheezing, hissing titter. When the silence became too much to bear, he said, “Of course, come round. You know… when you’re not busy.”

The cage rattled and jumped, battering against his leg.

She looked up and smiled, her eyes glittering. The light rebounded off them and the thick sheen of makeup that covered her oval face.

“Are you free tonight?” she said.

Andy felt scratching underneath his feet. Heard it above him in the ceiling. The pitter-patter of tiny footsteps along the carpet in the corners of the room.

Behind Sadie, back towards the elevators, a tail flitted behind the walls of a cubicle.

#

Sweat was  soaking through his shirt by the time he reached his building. The climb up the stairs to his apartment, five flights, only made it worse. His ill-fitting suit clung to his arms and legs. But the lift was a risk he wasn’t willing to take today. Not after he’d already seen at least three of them.

He was breathing hot and heavy by the time he reached his door.

“Evenin’ Andy, been out on your rounds again?” His neighbour, Thomas, stepped out of the adjoining apartment with a chuckle. He patted Andy on the shoulder as he passed. “That bag… what do you look like?” said Thomas, shaking his head in amusement.

The leather bag jerked and hissed at him.

Andy slid his key into the door but waited until Thomas was in the lift and heading down before he turned it and scuttled in. He slammed the door shut and turned to face the cacophony of his apartment.

It was like all the other apartments in the building, and probably the building next door. A facsimile. A neat little box to file someone away.  Like all the others, it opened immediately into a compact, square kitchen. A breakfast counter separated the kitchen from the sofa/coffee table/rug combo in the middle of the room.

But those other apartments didn’t have the stack of metal cages piled neatly floor-to-ceiling against the back wall. Cages that clattered and shook, under attack from hairy little demons trapped inside. A whirl of ears and tails and shining red eyes. Screaming and whining. Clicking their sharp teeth against the stainless steel bars in fury.

Andy set down his bag and took off his suit jacket, catching his breath and trying to cool off.

He retrieved a pair of thick, plastic gardening gloves from the kitchen drawer and bent to open his case. The thing hurled itself at the bars of the cage and he flinched before grabbing the handle on top of the trap and easing it out of the old leather bag.

He held it at arm’s length, away from his body. The creature ceased its attack on the cage and stared at him through the grating. It was a withering look of contempt and disgust.

Andy carried it over to the wall where its brothers and sisters threw themselves at the walls of their cells. He lifted it high into an empty corner, making sure it was secure on top of the pile, the little beast screaming as he did so.

Taking a step back, he looked at his collection. There was at least a new one every day now. They followed him wherever he went, seeking him out at every opportunity, sabotaging every attempt at a normal life.

It had started with one, but once he’d finally trapped that first intruder, more and more of them started to appear.They multiplied.

They crawled inside walls, across roofs and under floorboards. Scratching and biting and cackling. Appearing at the worst possible times. Forcing him from jobs, homes and people. Every time he managed to trap one, another would appear.

When he ran, they found him.

Returning to the wall, he drew a long, heavy curtain in front of the makeshift prison. Sometimes the darkness calmed them down, sometimes it aggravated them even more.

Soon, Sadie would be here. She might take his mind off things for an hour or two if he was lucky. Or she might laugh at him. Call him a freak. Or run screaming from his apartment.

He looked at his watch and saw that he didn’t have long. And still work to be done.

Kneeling back into the case, he pulled out the smaller empty trap.

He opened his front door and leaned down by the edge of the doorframe, placing the trap along the run of the wall. He lifted the lever,  opening the door of the trap and let go of it gently. Then he pulled a pin from his trouser pocket and jabbed into the pad of his finger, dripping blood onto the trigger pad, before he slid back into the apartment and closed the door.

#

It was peaceful when Sadie arrived.

He’d straightened up as best he could and folded out a table in the cramped kitchen. Two plates and two glasses sat opposite each other. Pasta bubbled on the stove filling the room with steam.

He’d shunted an old bookshelf from the bedroom in front of the closed curtain.

The sound of the doorbell was so unfamiliar that Andy almost didn’t answer.

He opened the door and waves of floral perfume washed over him. Sadie stood in the hall, all feathered hair, red lipstick and cleavage. Her eyes shone beneath the clumps of mascara.

“I brought supplies!” She held up a bottle of wine in each hand and her silky shawl fluttered around her wrists.

Tiny feet skittered somewhere in the hallway and Andy pulled her in by the arm, slamming the door shut behind them.

He waited. A faint scratching noise near the floor and then…the soft click of the trap door.

He heaved a sigh of relief. Closing his eyes, he leaned his head on the door.

Turning to face Sadie, he found her smiling at him with a big toothy grin and clinking the bottles together.

“Thirsty?”

They sat at the table and he poured out two glasses while Sadie explained how it was the second cheapest pinot noir she had been able to find in the supermarket. He poured them right to the top, so they had to take the first sip without lifting the glass from the table.

The first glass  relaxed him and he began to feel a release. His chest felt ten times bigger. Like he could breathe and breathe and breathe until there was no air left for anyone else. He smiled at Sadie, or at least he made that shape with his face, and she smiled right back. A smile so big and goofy he saw her fillings. He got goosebumps.

She said, “It was so lovely to run into you today. I don’t see anyone anymore. Just work, work, work.”

A thud from behind the curtain cut through Andy like teeth on foil. His muscles tensed a little.

“I don’t get out much myself,” he said. “I mean, there’s job hunting, but that’s hard.”

The saucepan began to bubble over on the hob.

“It’s so hard to make friends these days.” She took another gulp of wine, keeping her eyes on Andy. “So easy to just float along, past everyone.”

The cages vibrated behind the curtain. Sadie looked around and he thought this is it, the running and the screaming is about to start but she said, “It’s cosy here.”

Sauce slopped over the rim of the saucepan and sizzled. He got up to take care of the meal, certain that the pasta would be overdone.

He was right. He ladled out steaming piles of fusilli. The pieces slid over one another too easily on the plate and thin sauce pooled around the edges.

He covered each serving with liberal helpings of salt and fiery droplets of chilli sauce and laid it down apologetically on the table.

“I’m not the world’s greatest cook,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

A faint scratching came from the bedroom.

She gave him another goofy smile and wiggled her empty wine glass at him. He refilled it to the top and topped off his own too.

Sadie ate like it was her last meal. She shovelled huge forkfuls of slimy, gummy pasta into her mouth, one after another. Before she’d swallowed one, another was already on its way to her mouth. Her cheeks were rosy and blotched. She had a line of lipstick below her lower lip.

Andy tried to eat, tried to focus on the food and keep up with Sadie’s frenzied pace, but the scratching was creeping through the walls. From the bedroom, through the hallway to the skirting boards of the living room. The cages were shaking. There was the odd violent crash, followed by a low hiss. And maybe, the high-pitched squeal of a latch dropping open.

He looked closely at Sadie, waiting for her horrified reaction, but she was busy clearing her plate. When she was done, she sat back from the table and pushed out her stomach. She opened her silk shawl and flapped it around her like gossamer wings. She belched, covering her mouth and chuckling.

“Tasty!” She gave a double thumbs up and tapped the side of her empty wine glass with the sharp edge of her nail.

Andy tried to find the words to express his awe and envy but couldn’t. He cleared away the dishes and pulled the second bottle from the fridge.

“You’re good company,” she said. “I feel comfortable with you. Like I could say anything.”

“People relax around me. They don’t much care what I think. I’m like a house pet, not intimidating.”

Andy felt vibrations from below. Tiny claws digging into the floorboards. By the couch, the rug bulged in one corner.

“I wouldn’t mind you around the house,” she said, arching a painted eyebrow and turning her head to the side. Her finger tapped on the unused knife next to her. He’d forgotten to clear away the cutlery.

The heavy curtain rippled and shifted from side to side. He was sure now, one of them must have gotten loose. And there were new ones too, somewhere in the apartment. There had never been this many  before.

Andy’s heart strafed across his chest and beads of sweat formed at his temples. He grabbed his glass and poured the whole thing down his throat, the acidic wine lit a fire in his belly.

When he looked back at Sadie she leaned forward, opening her arms, gripping each corner of the small table.

A tail flitted behind the couch. There were shuffling and dragging noises in the kitchen cupboards behind him. The lampshade shook almost imperceptibly with the vibrations. Low squawking and wheezing came from behind the curtain.

He had to get her out of here. It was only a matter of time before she saw them, before they got her. It was a miracle it hadn’t already happened.“Well…it’s getting late, and I have another interview tomorrow.”

A commiserating smile curved at the corners of her lips. A smile that said I’m not put off that easily.

“C’mon it’s still early,” she said with a gleam in her eye. “Let’s just talk some more.”

A round head edged out from behind the kitchen counter, crimson eyes reflected the light at Andy, its mouth dropping open and closed.

Sadie reached out the slender fingers of one hand and brushed the tips of Andy’s, which were now digging into the table’s edge.

A cupboard creaked open next to him and a tiny, hirsute hand clicked its claws on the edge of the door. A pair of pointed furry ears poked up behind the couch and ducked back down again. A squeaking, girlish giggle echoed down the hallway outside the door.

Overcooked pasta began to surge back up Andy’s throat and it was difficult to catch a breath.

Scraping footsteps echoed around the quiet apartment. Glass broke in his bedroom, cages rattled behind the curtain.

With her other hand, Sadie continued to drum her fingers along the chrome surface of the knife. Tapping in rhythm with the skittering feet of the creatures which were getting closer and closer.

“I think we could really help each other,” she said, tracing the tips of his fingers with her own.

He opened his mouth to speak but only his hot stuttering breath came out. A single drop of sweat crawled down his cheek.

Small, spindly fingers gripped onto his ankle through his trousers. The table shook as something shimmied up the leg next to Sadie.

“The city is a lonely place,” she said. “But we’ve found each other again.”

One appeared over the edge of the table, next to Sadie’s elbow. It was grinning, its fangs exposed and gleaming, a thin line of drool extending from its shivering lips.

Andy stared into those eyes. Those translucent, reflective discs filled with malice. Its scrawny, knuckled fingers reached towards Sadie’s neck, the claws glinting at their razor-sharp points.

The air went out of his lungs, he couldn’t warn her, couldn’t speak. He could only wave his hands and nod, trembling as the creature edged its honed weapons closer to her pale porcelain neck.

The claw pressed against her throat, then a crack and a whoosh of sudden movement sent Andy reeling back in his chair.

The knife cartwheeled through the air above them.

With one sleek movement, Sadie caught the handle and brought it down against the skull of the creature with a hollow thud. It punctured one leathery ear and exited the other, pinning the creature’s head to the table. Its body twitched as it let out its final gasping breath.

The scratching and gnawing stopped. The cages ceased rattling. All was silent.

Sadie was smiling, her eyes glowing.

“We just need to help you relax a little,” she said and she took his hand in hers.

THE END

Ash Egan began writing horror stories in 2022. He lives in Bury, in the north of England.

“All right… An orca, or T Rex?”

“T Rex.”

“How about an ocean crocodile, or T Rex?”

It was still the dinosaur, of course. What was Gloria thinking?

Little Fred seemed bored. The game was too easy, the choices too obvious.

They were in the kitchen that Saturday morning. His peanut butter breakfast sandwich was half eaten. Gloria leaned on the counter.

“How about Bigfoot?”

“You mean, or T Rex?”

Could she be thinking of anything else?

“Of course, T Rex?”

“Okay… Then, T Rex.”

What kind of softballs were these?

“A woolly mammoth or…”

No… Woolly mammoths are impressive creatures, and Little Fred liked them from the first time he saw one pictured in a book.

Gloria enjoyed reading to him. Big Fred was still with them then.

“Forget it… A weasel, or T Rex?”

“What?”

That was enough. She wouldn’t ask him to choose between a support check, or T Rex.

How far behind was Big Fred anyway?

Money’s always helpful, but she didn’t want to put his father down much more.

She  glanced at the freezer.

“Okay… How about cookie dough ice cream, or T Rex?”

Little Fred dropped what was left of the sandwich.

“That’s not fair…”

David Sydney is a physician. He writes in – and outside of – the Electronic Health Record.

There was one house on Sleepy Eye Road that didn’t decorate for Halloween. It was a two-story, maroon house that seemed to absorb sunlight and color—windows always shuttered and dark. Decorations never adorned the front yard for any holiday, and Halloween was not the exception, despite the teenage vandals living in the neighborhood.

Strolling down the street, Katie Murray saw the elm trees in the front yard were bedecked in streams of toilet paper. She slowed to a stop.

The owner of the house, Miss West, was someone the women in Mrs. Murray’s book club frequently discussed in hushed tones. Katie had never seen Miss West, but she knew from eavesdropping that none of the ladies in the neighborhood thought well of her.

For a minute, Katie stared at the maroon house on the other side of the road. Then she looked both ways and crossed the street.

The air grew colder closer to the house. Katie swallowed her trepidation. Maybe there was a reason Miss West hadn’t removed the toilet paper hanging from her trees. Was she even aware of the prank? Katie had no idea what she was going to say as she climbed the porch steps and rang the bell. Who would answer the door? Was Miss West a reclusive crone, or was she someone closer to Mrs. Murray’s age?

Katie’s heart jumped into her throat when the door opened. The aperture was only wide enough to allow one huge, round eye the color of cream soda to peer outside. In her haste to retreat, Katie tripped over a loose shoelace and nearly fell down the steps. The eye blinked.

“What do you want?”

“Uh…” Katie dropped her gaze to her shoelaces. “Someone TP-ed your yard. I just wanted to make sure that you knew.”

The eye narrowed. “Was it you?”

“No!” The eye narrowed more. Katie swallowed. “If it was me, why would I tell you about it?”

The eye stared at her, contemplating. “Fine, I believe you.” The door opened wider, and the owner of the large eye disappeared behind it. “Come in.”

Katie hesitated. Mrs. Murray wouldn’t want her to enter Miss West’s house, but she also wouldn’t want Katie to be rude. Her internal debate went on so long that eventually Miss West chuckled. It was a rich, smokey sound that seemed to darken the front hallway.

“I’m the neighborhood pariah,” Miss West pointed out. “If you went missing, mine is the first house that would be searched. Even if I was so inclined, I would have to be a special kind of idiot to try anything.”

Cautiously, Katie stepped over the threshold. The front door creaked and swung shut. As her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, Katie saw a pale hand emerge from the darkness.

“Elspeth West.”

A shiver trickled down her spine when she shook her neighbor’s icy hand. “I’m Katie Murray.”

The floor groaned as Elspeth led her deeper into the house. “Nice to meet you, Katie. You like apple cider?”

The kitchen was lit by dusty fixtures hanging from the ceiling. Piles of mail were stacked precariously and took up more than half of the table; Katie chose to sit at the one uncluttered corner.

Elspeth West cut a striking, hourglass figure even in a champagne-colored bathrobe. Inky hair fell in loose waves past her shoulders. She had the flawless and pale complexion of a doll. Her eyes were big and round like glass marbles. Elspeth stood by the stove, tending to a pot on the burner. The steam rising from it smelled like apple pie.

“Grab the strainer and hold it steady over the sink, would you, Katie?”

Somehow, Katie located a colander amid the heap of dirty dishes. She held it over an empty pot while Elspeth carefully poured and strained the homemade concoction. Then her host filled two chipped mugs to the brim. They sipped their apple cider and stared at each other.

Eventually, Elspeth said, “You must be a brave kid to come to my door all by yourself.”

“I’m not that young,” Katie retorted. “I’m almost thirteen.”

Elspeth’s red lips curled into a smirk. “Take it from someone who hasn’t been twelve in many years—that’s younger than you think it is.”

Katie hummed into her mug. The minutes passed in more silence and, just to ease the tension, she asked if Elspeth wanted help cleaning up the toilet paper. The woman tapped her manicured nails against the ceramic cup in her hands.

“If I leave it, would it deter any more pranks this Halloween?” 

Kaite wrinkled her nose.

Elspeth laughed. “That look speaks volumes. Thank you for the offer, Katie, but I’ll take care of the toilet paper in my own time.”

Looking around, Katie noticed that Elspeth’s house appeared much older than any of the others on the block. From the light fixtures to the wallpaper, it was all vintage—the dusty, moldy kind of vintage. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn that nothing in Elspeth’s house had been updated since the Vietnam War.

“Your offer gives me an idea, though.”

Katie was jolted out of her musings, startled to find her host studying her.

“I could use help decluttering this place.” She gestured to the messy kitchen. “The rest of the house is more of the same. If you’re interested in a job, I’d pay you.”

“Oh…I don’t know. I’ve got school and my friends…”

But it would be nice to have spare cash. A job equaled shopping money. Elspeth flicked her hand dispassionately.

“The schedule would be up to you. If you have a free hour or two, I keep a spare key taped behind the left porch light.”

Finished with her apple cider, Katie stood and took her mug to the sink. “I’ll think about it,” she promised.

***

Katie told no one about the job offer. If she discussed the opportunity with her parents, the answer would be an unequivocal no. If she told her friends about it, they would pressure her to accept just for the opportunity to snoop.

It was a rainy October day when Katie made up her mind.

“Mom! I’m going over to Mikayla’s house! My homework’s done!”

She didn’t have Elspeth’s phone number, so Katie decided to take her neighbor at her word and use the spare key. On the short walk to the maroon house, the rain froze her fingers. She noted, as she ran up to the porch, that the toilet paper had been removed from the elm trees. A good thing too, since the rain would have made a mess of it. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach behind the left porch light; her hands were so numb that she almost couldn’t peel back the tape. She was shivering and half regretting her decision by the time she fumbled her way inside.

It wasn’t much warmer indoors, but at least it was dry. Katie toed off her muddy shoes, leaving them by the door, and hung her red raincoat over the newel post of the staircase. She hadn’t been quiet coming in, yet Elspeth did not come to investigate the noise.

“Hello? It’s Katie Murray! I decided to help clean your house!”

The old house creaked and groaned in the wind.

“You told me where the spare key was, so I figured it was okay to just…come in.”

Still no response. Well then, she would take the initiative to start in the kitchen. Katie had already been in that room, and it seemed fairly easy to figure out where things went.

First, she looked through all the drawers and cupboards to familiarize herself with the layout. In her exploration, she discovered a drawer of plastic bags, tinfoil rolls, and baking sheets. In one of the larger cupboards was a stack of unused lids missing their pots. The only cupboard that was neat and organized was the one containing herbs and spices.

On a whim, Katie opened the refrigerator. The shelves were mostly bare. A big plastic container of spinach leaves took up the most space, then a gallon of whole milk, and a glass receptacle filled with bloody strips of meat. Grimacing, Katie closed the door.

Next, she tackled the dirty dishes. Katie dove in, armed with Dawn soap and red rubber gloves.

Spotting an old radio half buried under the mail, Katie shook the suds off of the gloves and turned it on. The speakers crackled and filled the room with the lively music of a big band ensemble. Once she fell into a rhythm, the washing went quickly. Sooner than she expected, the job was done.

The other giant mess in the kitchen was the mountain of envelopes that threatened to become an avalanche at the slightest shift in the air. She felt weird looking through Elspeth’s mail, but maybe she could just remove what was obviously junk. Doing that made things a little neater. Katie took the junk mail to the recycling bin by the hutch. Before leaving, she found a pen and a notepad:

Decided to take the job. Washed dishes & recycled junk mail. Will come back next Friday after school.

-Katie M.

Exhausted from an afternoon of physical labor, Katie dragged her feet all the way home.

***

Next Friday was unseasonably warm. Under the pretense of spending time with a friend, Katie made her way to the maroon house down the block. With the toilet paper gone, some kids had taken it upon themselves to spray Elspeth’s trees with pink and green Silly String. She really hoped Elspeth didn’t ask her to get rid of it; even though a whole week had passed since she cleaned her neighbor’s kitchen, Katie was still afflicted by the same nagging fatigue.

As soon as she rose on tiptoes to grab the key behind the porch light, the front door swung open. Once again, Elspeth remained hidden behind it.

“Hello, Katie M. Won’t you come in?”

The entryway was a mouth of yawning darkness. Katie stepped over the threshold with a shiver. Black spots danced before her eyes now that she was out of the sun. When her vision adjusted, she saw Elspeth walking down the hallway.

“Good job with the kitchen last week. Sorry I wasn’t here when you stopped by, but you’re welcome to let yourself in whenever you please. The good news is that I now have cash to pay you!”

She led Katie to a living room warmly lit by a tall floor lamp in one corner and a squat lavender lamp by a musty beige couch. A tornado of old books, photo albums, and newspapers had torn through the room. Katie coughed on the dust that swirled in the air.

“I know,” said Elspeth, putting her hands on her hips. “It’s bad.”

Today, her neighbor wore a red bandana around her hair, gray sweatpants, and a faded flannel shirt. Even dressed down, she was still the most elegant person Katie knew. Elspeth set two cardboard boxes on the couch and pointed to one of them.

“Garbage.” She pointed to the second box. “Keep.”

“What do you want to keep?”

“The newspapers can all go. Most of the books I’ll keep but need to organize. Photos are on a case-by-case basis.” She eyed Katie, who was rolling up her sleeves. “Got to say, I’m a little surprised a preteen girl doesn’t have anything better to do on a Friday afternoon.”

Katie hid her flushed cheeks by grabbing a stack of yellowed newspapers under the coffee table. “My friends have been pretty busy ever since school started.”

Truthfully, her friends had grown distant. After summer vacation ended, they got new hobbies, new interests, and new friends. None of them wanted to ride their bikes anymore; they wanted to do grownup things that cost money. Money they were suddenly earning, and Katie wasn’t. Not until now.

Elspeth cast her a knowing look. “I remember being that age. Having no idea who I was, yet trying to convince everyone that I had everything figured out.”

Katie changed the subject. “My friends think your house is haunted.”

Her neighbor laughed. “All houses are haunted.” She tossed two leather-bound books into the Keep box. “Just not by ghosts.”

Whatever that meant.

Katie began flipping pages in a scuffed photo album. All of the pictures were faded black and white photographs, the subjects of which were women. Women who looked exactly like Elspeth, just from different eras. She placed the album on the coffee table for her neighbor to inspect.

“Are these your relatives?”

Upon seeing the pictures, the woman smirked. “The family resemblance is strong in the West women.”

Katie frowned. “Where are the West men?”

“In there.” Elspeth dismissively pointed to something on the floor.

Following the woman’s finger, Katie looked over her shoulder at an old shoebox. It was filled with loose, unprotected photographs. Some were clearly no more than a decade old, but most were black and white.  Picking up one of the older pictures, she turned it over. In looping cursive, someone had written the names of the people in the photo as well as the date it was taken. Claudia W—that must have been the woman dressed in her Sunday best. Which meant that the man standing beside her was Arthur H.

“Elspeth, why are the boys in a shoebox?”

“All the West women are long-lived,” the woman replied as she paged through the album Katie had given her. “The men, not so much. They all fell prey to illness or accidents, leaving their wives widowed and so heartbroken that they couldn’t bear to see any reminders of their late husbands.”

“What about you?”

Surprise nearly knocked Elspeth off her feet. “Me? No, I’ve never been married, much to my mother’s embarrassment. Although lately, I have been considering the benefits of matrimony.” She flashed Katie a grin and winked. “Like a shared bank account and a tax deduction.”

Katie chuckled, but something inside of her twisted into a knot. This conversation reminded her of something one of Mrs. Murray’s friends called Elspeth during a book club meeting. Maneater, Mrs. Stanton had said, lowering her voice. Then she commented on how Elspeth went through men more frequently than the Stanton family went through groceries, and the other women twittered in guilty amusement.

When Elspeth brushed off an old record player, Katie sneezed. All the dust was giving her a headache. Her neighbor dropped the needle on a vinyl, and she danced around Katie as they continued to sort through junk. At one point, she grabbed Katie’s hands and twirled her, which had both of them giggling.

On Katie’s way out the door, Elspeth handed her a wad of twenty-dollar bills. Katie’s eyes were bigger than golf balls as she stared at the money and stumbled down the porch steps. There was at least a hundred bucks here! Her headache was suddenly relegated to the back of her mind as she counted down the days until next Friday.

***

When Katie arrived at the maroon house the following week, Elspeth was gone again. The afternoon was overcast and dry, the wind wickedly sharp as it whipped through Katie’s hair relentlessly until she pushed the front door shut. It was a relief to be indoors, although she still didn’t feel very good. The headache that had blossomed in Elspeth’s dusty living room had not left Katie in the days between visits. The subtle pain had pulsed in the back of her head all week, driving her to distraction and brewing a caldron of nausea in her stomach. She hadn’t felt well enough to eat anything for breakfast or for lunch, but now her empty stomach gurgled.

Elspeth wouldn’t mind if Katie raided her kitchen for a snack, would she? The hunger clawing at her stomach made up her mind for her.

The cupboards were just as bare as they were the day she cleaned the kitchen. Katie didn’t hold out much hope for the fridge, but she checked anyway. If not for the hunger that clawed at her stomach, her eyes would not have lingered on the container of bloody meat strips. From the shriveled, discolored look of them, they were the same meat strips from Katie’s first visit. It wasn’t an appetizing sight, and yet…

Before she knew it, the container was in her hands, and she was prying off the lid. A stale, gamey odor wafted into her face, something that should have made her gag.

She dipped one finger into the meat juice and then popped it in her mouth. Belatedly, she realized what she was doing even as her stomach rumbled happily. Katie rushed to replace the lid and shoved the container back into the fridge. In her hurry to distance herself from Elspeth’s refrigerator, she stumbled into the adjacent wall. The impact made a faint and hollow sound, and the wall shifted slightly. Curious, she pushed on it again.

The wall moved.

It was a pocket door, she realized as part of the wall slid into itself. She hadn’t noticed it when she was drinking cider with Elspeth or washing the dishes—probably because the pocket door was painted the same off-white color as the kitchen walls. The space beyond was a short, narrow hallway that appeared to be a dead end. She edged into the dark space and felt the wall for a light switch, but there wasn’t one. The ambient light from the kitchen was bright enough to illuminate the vague silhouettes of a bare mattress and a metal bucket.

Wide-eyed, Katie stepped into the room and stared at the bare brick walls, the lumpy mattress, and the rusty bucket and wondered what she was seeing.

As she moved foward, the kitchen lights behind her hit a spot on the wall just above the mattress. There was a word scratched into the bricks. She lowered herself to her knees to see it better. It wasn’t just a word—it was a name. Someone had clumsily and painstakingly scarred the wall by scratching the name Arthur into it.

Arthur…Why did that sound familiar?

“I see you found the pantry.”

The soles of Katie’s shoes squealed, she whipped around so fast. Elspeth loomed behind her, hands clasped at the small of her back. Her round eyes appeared especially huge backlit by the kitchen, while the harsh shadows carved out her features in sharp angles and concave dips. It took several heart-stopping seconds to realize that Elspeth wasn’t upset; there was an amused twist to her lips as she stepped away from Katie.

Under the bright ceiling lights, the shadows vanished from her features, and Katie felt a bit warmer. Walking to the counter, the woman took a ginger root out of a canvas grocery bag.

“Want to try an apple-ginger fizz?”

Once again, Katie found herself seated at Elspeth’s kitchen table drinking something that tasted of sweet apples, this time with a little ginger added to it. The bubbles did wonders to settle her stomach. Elspeth hadn’t bothered to close the pocket door, nor had she taken off her wool trench coat; between that and her powder pink lipstick, she reminded Katie of Audrey Hepburn.

“I would ask if this is a social call or if you came to work,” the woman said as she poured club soda into her glass, “but I sense you have questions about the architecture of my house. Understandable given how that looks.”

She casually waved at the previously hidden doorway.

“It looks like a cage,” Katie said in a hoarse voice.

“My grandmother Claudia West lived here before me, and she had an ill-tempered Doberman Pinscher. Whenever she had company over, she locked him in there with his favorite toy and a pail of water.”

“What was that room originally supposed to be?”

Elspeth’s high heels clicked on the floor. “I think it was once a discreet hallway for caterers to bring food into the kitchen without being seen by guests. But then my grandmother reached a certain age when hosting events became impractical. Truly though, I don’t know for certain what this hallway was for or when the other end of it was bricked up.”

Katie raised an eyebrow. “And you call it the pantry?”

Elspeth’s grin took on a secretive edge. “Family joke. But I promise that it is no longer in use.” Sipping her drink, she walked to the table and gently touched Katie’s cheek. “You’re looking a little peaky today, Katie. Don’t worry about cleaning; you should go home and rest. Maybe eat something.”

“Are you sure?” she asked as she pushed aside her empty glass.

“Absolutely. My messy house will still be here next week.”

Elspeth walked her to the door, but on the porch, Katie paused. “Elspeth…Was your grandma’s dog named Arthur?”

When Elspeth hesitated to answer, the apple-ginger fizz in Katie’s stomach started to creep up her throat. Then her neighbor smirked, as if Katie was now in on the family joke. “Good guess,” she said and then closed the door.

***

Her day off did not make Katie feel better. She merely traded nausea for a bloated stomach. She felt like a balloon as she attempted to stuff her legs and hips into her jeans. Maybe moving around would ease her troubling symptoms. She felt bad that she hadn’t done any work yesterday—even though Elspeth was the one who sent her home—so Katie went back that Saturday afternoon. To combat the gray skies threatening bad weather, she grabbed her red raincoat.

Lingering on the other side of the street, across from Elspeth’s house, were four boys on bicycles. Katie recognized them as other neighborhood kids, though she didn’t know them very well. As soon as she came within view, they dropped their voices and side-eyed her. Goosebumps rippled up her arms, and she was exceedingly glad that she didn’t have to wait for Elspeth to answer the door.

All was quiet within the house. There was no telling whether Elspeth was home, hiding in one of her dusty rooms, or if she was out. Taking off her coat, Katie hung it on the newel post and headed upstairs. She noticed that the air felt thicker up there. In the heavy silence, she heard her own slightly-labored breathing. It briefly crossed her mind that maybe she wasn’t supposed to go upstairs, but Elspeth hadn’t told her that any places were off limits.

On the landing, Katie peered down a long hallway. The window at the end of the corridor should have allowed natural light to brighten all of the nooks and crannies. However, the glass had old newspapers pasted over it, muting any light that attempted to enter.

Who covered their windows with newspaper?

Katie crept down the hallway, peeking into rooms with open doors. Most were dusty bedrooms, cold and unused.

One room wasn’t dusty. Puzzled, she entered, wincing at every creaky floorboard. There was a funny smell in the room. Kind of like a nursing home but worse. Katie pulled the collar of her shirt over her nose.

The mattress was bare except for a plastic protector. The windows were all newspapered just like the one in the hallway. Inhaling as little as possible, Katie approached the bed. A string hung above the headboard, directly over a flat pillow. Her gaze followed the string up to and across the ceiling where it disappeared into the wall.

Her hand rose, as if manipulated by an invisible puppeteer, and pulled the string.

The tinkling of a bell rang somewhere else in the house. Heart in her throat, Katie dropped the string and turned to flee. She hastily stumbled out of the room and into something tall and solid. Katie looked up into the gaunt face of a ghost.

“Ah!” The ghost flinched, and Katie saw something familiar in those big, bulbous eyes. “Elspeth?”

Her neighbor was a shadow of the woman she saw yesterday. Dressed in an old pair of sweats, hair lank and unwashed, she appeared sickly. Her complexion lacked any color, and she somehow seemed much thinner than she was the day prior. Bony fingers plucked at the hem of her sweater as Elspeth regarded Katie with an empty gaze.

“It isn’t Friday,” she spoke softly. “You always come on Friday.”

“I…I felt bad that I didn’t do anything yesterday, so I came again today.”

Elspeth’s fingers twisted in her sleeves. “I wasn’t expecting you,” she murmured. Wary of her neighbor in a way she hadn’t been since Elspeth had invited her into her home, Katie retreated a step.

“If you don’t feel good, I can come back another time.”

“No.” Elspeth sighed. “You’re here. Might as well have you prepare the guest room. You see, I’m having company over tomorrow.”

“Oh…okay. Do you want to maybe lie down for a while?”

“Yes,” Elspeth replied in a dreamy voice. “I think I will, since you already found the guest room.” With a limp hand, she gestured to a narrow door. “Cleaning supplies are in the closet.”

Elspeth drifted down the corridor, like a brittle autumn leaf caught in the breeze. Flustered heat rose to Katie’s cheeks when she saw a long blood stain starting at the crotch of Elspeth’s sweatpants going all the way down to her knee. Katie stared at her until she rounded the corner and disappeared.

In the closet, she found a cleaning solution and dust rags. She didn’t think that would be enough to get the stink out of the guest room, but she would give it her best try.

Her bloated and achy stomach slowed her progress; Katie shuffled around the room and ignored how her body didn’t seem to fit anymore. By the time she was done, the room didn’t look or smell any different. Why was Elspeth going to put her guest in this room? Katie had seen many other unused bedrooms that didn’t have such an off-putting odor. Did it have something to do with the bell?

The only thing she wasn’t able to do in the guest room was put clean sheets on the bed; the closet Elspeth showed her didn’t contain linens. Not wanting to leave the job unfinished, Katie went in search of her ailing neighbor.

The second floor of the maroon house was a maze of drab hallways. It didn’t seem possible that there were so many corridors and bedrooms. When she suddenly walked into a lamp-lit room, the difference was momentarily blinding. It took a minute for her eyes to stop watering, but then she was dumbfounded to see that she had somehow made her way to the living room on the first floor. Impossible, Katie thought. She hadn’t gone down a flight of stairs…

A guttural moan from the other side of the room drew her eyes to Elspeth. The woman was more like a husk than a person, deflated, sunk into the couch. Pale and limp, she looked miserable.

“Hello, Katie,” she murmured, her eyes half lidded. “I would pay you, but I seem to have misplaced my wallet.”

“No, it’s okay. Don’t get up. I just wanted to know where the clean sheets are for the guest room.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Katie turned to leave, but a certain feeling wouldn’t leave her. She pivoted to face her neighbor again.

“Um, Elspeth? That guest room…what’s with the bell on the string?”

The woman took a long, rattling breath.

“My great-grandmother was bedridden at the end of her life. That used to be her room. She rang the bell to get the servants’ attention. She was relentless with it.”

Katie supposed that made sense, though it didn’t explain the plastic mattress protector.

In a raspy voice, Elspeth said, “I’ll pay you next time, Katie. Thanks for coming over.”

“Are you sure you’re okay? I can call someone for you.”

Like an ambulance.

Elspeth shook her head, her joints creaking. “But if you could bring me something to eat, I would be indebted to you.”

“Sure! You want a bowl of chicken-noodle soup or something?”

“No, no. There’s a little leftover stew in the fridge and enough spinach leaves for a small salad. Don’t worry about any of the dressings.”

The most noticeable change inside the refrigerator was the absence of bloody meat strips. Katie didn’t see any stew, but it could be in that small travel bowl. She picked it up and removed the lid. Inside the bowl was a soupy substance the color of old gravy and slathered over chunks of rare meat. Both the sight and the smell should have been odious, but Katie’s taste in food had taken a bizarre turn lately. The rarer the meat she consumed, the more ravenous she felt.

Katie put the stew in the microwave and plated the last of the spinach leaves. Delivering the meal to the living room, she had just set the plate and bowl on the coffee table when Elspeth’s bony hand suddenly latched onto Katie’s arm. Elspeth stared at her with watery eyes as her sharp nails dug into Katie’s flesh.

“You’re such a good girl,” Elspeth whimpered. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Katie swallowed. “What do you mean?” Elspeth yanked her closer. A feverish blush colored the woman’s cadaverous cheeks.

“I tried!” she hissed, her eyes somehow bulging even more. “I tried to be good. I flushed the bad blood out, but I just kept bleeding and bleeding…”

For someone so thin and feeble, the woman’s fingers were surprisingly strong. With great effort, Elspeth sat upright, pulling Katie’s arm until the two were nose to nose.

“They’ll tear you down, Katie. No matter how you try to please them, it will never be enough. Men will ogle you and then scorn you when it suits them. Women will smile to your face and spread vicious lies behind your back. Don’t let anyone play you for a fool!”

“Okay!” Katie squeaked. She glanced down at the growing bloodstain on Elspeth’s sweatpants. “D-do you want me to get you a change of clothes?”

Anything to get her out of this room.

Exhausted, Elspeth released her and fell back against the cushions.

“No, Katie, you can go now. I’ll make myself presentable later. You see, I’m having company over tomorrow…”

***

The next day was a bright afternoon, but Katie couldn’t enjoy it. Elspeth’s haggard appearance haunted her. Every time she thought about her neighbor, Katie’s stomach cramped. To distract herself, she went for a bike ride; she didn’t intend to check on Elspeth, yet she found herself pedaling past the maroon house. Another pre-Halloween prank had been pulled—something Katie smelled before she saw. Her nose wrinkled, and her stomach twisted. The sweet yet rotten stench grew stronger until she stopped in front of the fence.

Elspeth’s yard was littered with moldy fruit and rotten cabbage. Pressing her tongue to the roof of her mouth, she clenched her teeth. Elspeth was in no shape to clean that up.

Across the street, she saw the same group of boys from yesterday. One of them caught her eye. Blond hair, brown eyes: he was always surrounded either by numerous friends or girls braver than she.

He whistled at her, and a pang of fear shot through her. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Hey, Murray! Come over here!”

Katie’s hands went numb. Fumbling with the handles of her bike, she hastened to get her feet on the pedals and scooted up Elspeth’s driveway. The boys continued to shout at her as she clumsily maneuvered around the pits and cracks in the pavement. She was grateful to be out of sight when the driveway curved behind the house. Hopping off her bike, she looked around the backyard. Small and neglected, she could tell that Elsepth didn’t spend much time out there.

Looking at the rear of the maroon house, it occurred to Katie that she might be trapped. She didn’t want to go to the front porch where the spare key was if those boys were loitering.

Most of the doors were locked. The only other point of entry was one of those horizontal, exterior basement doors. Her stomach cramped either in trepidation or anticipation as she grasped the handle and pulled. The door rained specks of dirt upon being heaved open. A steep, narrow stairwell plunged into the darkness of Elspeth’s home.

A gust of cool air dried the sweat on her skin, and concrete walls welcomed her into their embrace. The basement was surprisingly organized given the state of the rest of the house. The shaft of light from the open door illuminated a long wooden crate resting on the floor along one wall. In the darkest corner, Katie saw the outlines of a furnace and a water heater. Against the other wall was a large freezer, and dangling from the ceiling was…

A bell.

Katie stared at it. That couldn’t be the same bell from yesterday—not when it was in the basement and she had been on the second floor.

Without any warning, the exterior basement door slammed shut. Katie froze. More alarming than the sudden noise and lack of light was the loud creak that came from the wooden crate. Her shoes might as well have been nailed to the floor as the luminous shine of a predator’s big, round eyes flashed in the dark. Katie sprung into action. She felt along the wall and blindly ran until she tripped over the bottom step. Scrambling to her feet, she tore up the stairs. She tripped again, this time over a string that was pulled taut across the landing.

Below her, the bell rang.

A particularly vicious abdominal cramp had Katie doubling over gasping as she fumbled for the door. Her pulse was a drum in her ears that didn’t relent even when she fell into a hallway on the main floor. Groans from the basement steps had her fleeing into the maze of corridors.

“Katie?” Elspeth’s steps grew louder, closer. Katie slipped into the nearest room. “Is that you?”

The vague outline of bookshelves lined one wall, and she bumped into the side of a desk. The footsteps were right outside the door. Katie dove under the desk and held her breath. A moment later, the office door slowly opened. Feet shuffled, whispering on the floor.

“Katie?”

Katie said nothing and squeezed her eyes shut.

Before Elspeth took another step, a bell rang. It didn’t sound like the same bell from the basement; the noise came from the other side of the house. Elspeth sighed.

“Again?” she muttered. Her footsteps retreated. “I just fed him an hour ago…”

Katie counted the number of times the bell rang while she waited for her neighbor to walk upstairs. On the fourth ring, she crawled from under the desk. Katie slunk down the hallway as fast as she dared. Where was the front door?

The ringing ceased, and someone—a man—wordlessly yelled himself hoarse. Katie recoiled. She hurried in the opposite direction, and yet the screaming somehow grew louder, overwhelming all of her other senses. The man’s shouting gradually faded to whimpers. She turned a corner and saw the back of Elspeth’s bathrobe. Again, she had jumped from one floor of the house to another without ever encountering a staircase.

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that,” the woman cooed. “If you go back to sleep, this will just feel like a bad dream.”

Katie’s gut clenched hard. She dug her knuckles into her stomach and strained to hear more. The man moaned, and she thought she heard him quietly utter, “Please!”

Elspeth shushed him. “You’ll be all right, dear. I need to sleep, though, so no more ringing the bell unless it’s an emergency.”

Hearing footsteps, Katie hid around the corner. One hand covered her mouth and nose, and the other clutched at her cramping stomach. She tracked time by counting the stuttering beat of her pulse until she was certain that Elspeth was gone. Treading carefully down the hallway, Katie grasped the cold doorknob. Surely it was locked if a man was being kept there against his will.

The door silently opened. The same sick odor greeted her, only it was fresher and stronger today. A whiff of excrement made her gag. Katie pulled the collar of her shirt over her nose and then entered the guest room.

A man was sprawled across the bed. He groaned but did not move. Katie inched toward him. “Hello?” Her voice came out as a squeak. The man didn’t respond.

His eyes and cheeks were sunk into the valleys of his skull. His shirt was covered in dark stains that she hoped were sweat. Below the waist, he wore only a pair of ill-fitting boxer shorts. The plastic mattress protector had a wet shine to it.

“Sir?”

The man remained unresponsive, but Katie couldn’t leave him here. He needed to go to a hospital. She didn’t have a phone, and she didn’t dare use Elspeth’s landline to call for help. That left only one option.

Praying that she didn’t puke, Katie extended one finger and poked his cheek. The man squeezed his eyes shut tighter and whined. She tried to slide one arm under his shoulders, but he was too heavy for her to lift. She needed to find a way to rouse him. A bruise on his neck gave her an idea. If she hurt him, just a little, maybe that would make him lucid enough to cooperate.

Pulling his collar down, she exposed an odd puncture wound in the center of the bruise; it looked like a giant leech had latched onto him. Aiming for the lurid mark, Katie pressed her thumb directly on the broken skin. It tore like wet toilet paper under the slight pressure. Her thumb sank into his neck all the way to her second knuckle. In a second, her entire hand was covered in warm blood.

The man let out a sharp yelp. He twitched and writhed on the mattress, squirming in the growing pool of blood. Paralyzed by shock, Katie could do nothing except watch the man bleed out. The metallic tang in the room was thick. Far from being repulsive, though, the scent made her mouth water, her head ache, and her bloated stomach painfully ripple. A primeval instinct that was just coming out of hibernation whispered to her that licking the man’s blood off of her fingers would banish the weariness that had been plaguing Katie for weeks.

Fear had her throat convulsing. Katie leaped away from the bed, retching, and flung herself into the hallway. She gasped for air and wiped her mouth. As soon as she saw the blood on her hand—felt the tackiness of it on her thumb—her stomach rolled again, though she couldn’t tell whether the reaction was one of abhorrence or hunger. She spat stomach acid onto the floor. With her clean sleeve, she dried her face of snot and tears.

A gentle hand touched her shoulder. With a shudder, she glared up at Elspeth. There was no sign of the dying waif today. Elspeth stood tall, hair washed and curled; there was a healthy glow to her cheeks. She was a beacon in the darkness, emanating her own ethereal light. Her big eyes looked down on Katie with pity.

“A shame. He was supposed to last me another two days. Not your fault, though. It’s been so long since I took my time eating that I’m out of practice.”

“H-he, he…” Katie pointed at the guest room, trying to tell Elspeth that a man was dying in there. But she kept tripping over her tongue. Elspeth examined Katie’s bloodstained hand.

“Oh, Katie. You’re not ready for this. No one ever is.”

“What?”

Why was Elspeth more worried about her than a dying man? The man Katie had killed. Looking at her red hand held delicately between Elspeth’s fingers, she felt like throwing up again.

“I-I didn’t m-mean to,” she insisted. “It was an accident!”

“Hey, hey.” Elspeth firmly gripped Katie’s shoulders and looked her in the eye. “Calm down, Katie. You did nothing wrong.”

“But…he’s dead. I was trying to help, and I k-k-ki…”

“It’s okay,” she insisted. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Then you’ll feel better.”

Elspeth steered her to a bathroom where Katie was confronted by her ashen reflection. Like a mother assisting her child, Elspeth guided Katie’s hands under the sink and scrubbed away every trace of blood. Katie may have blacked out for a minute, because when she blinked, Elspeth was gone. She blinked again, and her neighbor had returned holding a pair of sweatpants. When she spoke, Katie’s voice sounded muted and distant, even to her own ears.

“What are those for?”

“To freshen you up.” Elspeth’s gaze dropped to Katie’s jeans. It took a few seconds for her to notice the small spot of blood staining the demin in a very telling place. “I have a clean pair of underwear for you as well,” which Elspeth placed on top of the folded sweatpants, “and a sanitary pad. Take your time.”

As soon as she closed the door, Katie collapsed on the toilet seat in tears.

When she eventually emerged from the bathroom, Katie was more bloated and headachy than she ever before. Elspeth met her in the hallway and gently escorted her downstairs. The strange numbness that had overtaken her was washed away like an icy wave of ocean spray as the two entered the kitchen. Did a similar fate to the man upstairs await Katie? Perhaps she would be locked away in Elspeth’s strange pantry.

“I won’t tell anyone!” she hastily promised. “I-I can keep a secret!”

Elspeth looked at her, confused. “I know. Why would you tell anyone what you saw?”

What was left unsaid sent a chill through Katie, and another searing cramp tore through her stomach. Accident or no, there was blood on her hand; blood that swirled down her neighbor’s bathroom sink. The cash that Elspeth pressed into her palm felt dirty.

***

On Halloween night, most of Katie’s friends were attending parties instead of trick-or-treating, so Katie trudged through the swarms of kids and chaperoning parents, alone in her Little Red Riding Hood costume.

Ever since that awful day at Elspeth’s house, her exhaustion dogged her constantly. She felt drained of vitality—a shell of a person, empty inside.

Though she was free of sanitary pads for another month, her skin was still sensitive and irritated. It changed the way she walked and the way her costume fit. She felt like everyone was staring as she dragged her feet down the sidewalk. Her empty candy bag dangled from the loose curl of her fingers.

“Hey, Murray!”

Ignoring the boy calling her name, Katie trudged on. The world suddenly came back into sharp focus when her candy bag was snatched out of her grasp. The same blond boy who had yelled at her last week swung his skateboard to block her path, and he twirled Katie’s candy bag. He wore a baggy, bloodstained costume that reminded her of a scary Ronald McDonald.

“What’s the matter?” The boy smirked at her, creasing his clown makeup. “Didn’t you hear me say your name?”

There was no fear in her this time. Just vexation. Katie wanted to go back home. She tried to step around him, but the boy swiveled on his skateboard to block her again.

“It’s rude not to answer when someone’s talking to you.” He tilted his head. “Didn’t your mom teach you manners?”

Katie said nothing and stepped to the left. The boy’s skateboard swiveled, this time squashing her toes. Rage ignited like a flame doused in gasoline. Her hands shot out, landing in the center of his chest, and she shoved him with all her might. The skateboard went flying, and he crashed to the sidewalk. The boy’s choked on his surprised shout when the back of his head struck the concrete.

And then there was silence.

Katie stepped closer. Blood pooled on the sidewalk; she smelled copper, and her stomach growled. Her own veins turned to ice. Someone must have seen what happened and would stop to help…wouldn’t they? The thing was, no one had noticed yet. The gruesome Halloween decorations were working in her favor. Katie found herself grabbing the boy by the ankles and dragging him into a bush before her before she could be plagued by second thoughts.

Elspeth—she would know what to do!

Katie ran down the street and sprinted up her neighbor’s driveway. She was so used to the maroon house being deserted that she almost ran into a zombie. Muttering an apology, she stared dumbfounded at the herd of kids gleefully running away from Elspeth’s porch. Not only was the porch light on, but hay bales lined her sidewalk, jack-o-lanterns adorned her porch, and a spooky scarecrow guarded the front door. For the first time ever, the maroon house was decorated for Halloween. As soon as the current group of trick-or-treaters vacated, Katie dashed up the porch steps and rang the bell.

The door swung open with a flourish, and there stood Elspeth dressed as a witch, a bowl of candy in her hands. “Happy Halloween!” Katie gaped, and the woman stared at her until she recognized who Red Riding Hood. “Katie! Jeepers, look at those peepers. Such big eyes, I almost didn’t recognize you.” Elspeth leaned closer and stage-whispered, “You’re supposed to say trick or treat.”

Katie shook her head, holding back tears. “There was a boy! I pushed him, and he…he…” Tears blazed trails down her cheeks as she looked up imploringly at Elspeth. “What’s happening to me?”

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Elspeth assured her. She gathered Katie in her arms. “I’ll take care of everything, but for now, come inside.”

She guided her over the threshold and sat her at the kitchen table. Katie stared at the pattern of the wood stain, focusing on anything but the memory of pushing that boy off his skateboard. What had come over her?

And then there was Elspeth’s comment about her eyes…

“I know it seems like the end of the world right now,” said Elspeth as she went about mixing something in a glass, “but changes like yours are completely natural. All the women in my family went through them, and we have lived long, mostly happy lives.”

“Except for the husbands,” Katie rasped.

Elspeth snorted. “Well, if you want to focus on the negatives.”

Heels clip-clopped on the floor until Elspeth sank to her knees in front of the chair. She pressed the glass into Katie’s hands. It was a red drink that smelled like green apples and something else that was more difficult to identify. Something that made her stomach clench. Elspeth gazed at her in earnest.

“It’s not so bad being a West woman. The world will misunderstand you, but we always get the last laugh. Don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about that when they would take everything from you given half a chance.” She cupped Katie’s hands and brought the glass closer to her mouth. “Come on, take a sip. You’ll feel better.”

Katie looked into Elspeth’s wide amber eyes.

Jeepers, look at those peepers…

 So kind and understanding, so ready to help Katie when her friends and parents didn’t have time for her.

Such big eyes…

Katie squeezed the cold glass and brought it to her lips. Would it be so terrible to be more like Elspeth West?

She tipped the glass back, tasting tart apples and metal. Like she had sucked on a papercut and a wedge of green apple at the same time. It was the best thing she had ever tasted. Elspeth smiled.

“Welcome home, Katie.”

Traumatized as a child by the haunted house at the Minnesota State Fair, McKenzie Rae decided to take that fear and use it to write as many twisted tales as she could think of. As a result, she is still afraid of the dark, and some nights, she is convinced that a monster is under her bed. But that could just be her cat.

                                                                 

            “This mate is in over his head,” Charles says.

            I shake my head at the boxy Victorian house across the street.

“He never fucking leaves.”

            Charles puts the Tesla into drive, gives me a dismissive look. I glare back at him; his comment is just as asinine as mine. But deep down I know that—yet again—I’ve missed something about the case.

            Back at the Oakland police station, we make our report to Captain Mays.

            “No movement for a week,” Charles says. “We’ve done 24-hour surveillance, including GS-22s and pips, there’s no way he’s left.”

            “No entrances for pips?”

            “He had the whole place winterized. Filled every cranny. And he never opens a window. Or the front door.”

            “But he’s on Bart camera nine days ago and two witness saw him right after the killing.”

            “One of which also said he saw a fucking demon on the train,” I put in.

            Mays shrugs. “Stress reaction. Go talk to Herbert again at BP and look at his schematics. He’s getting out somehow. Maybe he’s got a trap door you couldn’t find.”

            I look at Charles. He nods at Mays, serious.

            Back in the car, we head towards West Oakland.

            “A fucking trap door, Charles?”

            “The chief’s not bloody stupid.”

            “Right.”

            “Look, it’s not magic. We searched, just couldn’t find it. But if we open his alibi, we go in. Go get some sleep, talk to Herbert, look at those maps again. Then start riding the Richmond line between 24^th and Balboa.”

“You?”

            “I’m gonna check the drone videos again and see what other type of surveillance I can get on the place. If he’s not leaving above ground . . .”

            “Jesus, now we got a fucking mole-man murderer?”

#

            Charles drops me off on Filbert St. in West Oakland and I mount the steps to my split-level apartment. I set my service pistol on my nightstand, take off my shoes and walk to the kitchen and drink two shots of rye from a half-empty bottle of Old Overholt. I sit at the table, staring at the glass.

Both my parents were cops. As a teenager, I hated them, not just because they had double the authority and discipline of most parents, but because they honestly believed they were a net force for good in the world. I made life as miserable for them as I could because of this perceived hypocrisy, but in the end, I was never caught for any crimes that would disqualify me from the academy. By the time I was eighteen, I started to see police work as a useful way to live with my urges. But for all my effort—and their pride—I’m still a shitty detective. Charles, and all the other detectives in homicide have some knack I don’t.

Worse, Charles only has two years with the OPD, versus my five, but everyone treats him like the senior detective. He’s only an American citizen through his wife, and acts like he knows everything about Oakland and the U.S. despite growing up in London. And he doesn’t really know anything about murder, not like I do.

After two more drinks, I brush my teeth and crash into bed. As I drift off, I don’t think about Charles, or even my most recent hobo. The mole man and his escape tunnels occupy my head until my exhaustion finally takes me into a vivid dream.

            I’m in the suburban bedroom of my childhood home. Dallas Cowboys and Dick Tracy posters on the walls. Football pads and an air rifle in a corner. I’m sitting on my bed, waiting for someone.

            A voice growls from the bottom of the stairs:

            “Ready for your time, Rollins?”

My stomach clenches, and a crushing fear makes me throw up. It’s thin and liquid, made up of orange juice, beans, and cake.

            A beefy demon steps through my door. His face is like obsidian, his cheekbones and nose razor-sharp.

            He roughs me down to the floor, laying me in my puke. He pulls out a cordless power drill and starts to poke holes through my eye lids. It only burns at first, and I’m more worried he’ll gouge out my eyes, but he doesn’t. Eventually he switches off the drill, pulls out some sandpaper, and starts rubbing patches of skin off my back.

            He stops and stands up. “You’re ready.”

            I feel a bubbling darkness coming up the stairs.        

            “Do we really have to do this?” I beg. “Can’t we do the pain another day?”

            The demon shakes his head. “This is what you signed up for. Six more months, Rollins.”

            Somehow, I know I’m on a payment plan of torture, that this session is only one of many, and that they’ll only get worse and worse. I’m paying off my crimes, and they are not pro-rated.

            The demon disappears. Tendrils of darkness lap around the edge of the doorframe. I cower on the floor. The door splinters apart, the darkness swirls in, and a giant cockroach appears, his mouth full of razor teeth. I stand, leap for the window, but he’s too fast. He stabs his six serrated arms through my body, avoiding all the vital organs, and starts to twist them around. I scream and he roars back at me like a jet engine, creating a whirlwind in the room.

            I wake up screaming, heart hammering in my chest. I have one breath of calm air until I feel something in my bedroom. The cockroach demon. He’s crouched in one corner, shaking, preparing to stab me.

            I reach for the gun on my nightstand and he roars.

            Acid in my whiskey? Still in a dream? I hit the light and his arms flash towards me.

            My ears ring from the shot in the enclosed space. My front window is shattered. The demon is gone, and every dog in the neighborhood is barking. Sitting up and rubbing my eyes, I know the mole man has sent this as a warning, and next time, it will be all too real. I dial Charles to tell him to I’m quitting the case, and leaving the force if I have to, but it goes to voicemail. A voice in the back of my mind says: without a badge, murder will out. But the fear of ending up in the demon’s torture den is stronger.

#

            Just after 9:00am, following a thorough chewing out by Capitan Mays, I walk two blocks from the station to the Broadway Starbucks. I brood over my coffee, wishing I could have gotten a word in edgewise to announce my resignation, when Charles slides into the opposite chair. His eyes are tired, his suit wrinkled, and he has a two-day shadow on his bald head.

            “Sleep like shit, too?” I ask.

            “Quite. Did you ever read about the Moors murders?”

            I rub my eyes. I hate it when Charles gets all intellectually morose about serial killers. But it’s better than getting shit about my “accidental discharge.”

            “That the one where they killed the kids and tape recorded torturing them?”

            “They did it to me last night.”

            Pin pricks break out on my neck.

            “Charles—”

            “You dreamed something equally horrible.”

            “What the fuck is going on?”

            Charles lets out a sigh. “It’s Jones, the mole man. Well, he’s the proxy anyway.”

            I stare at him blankly. He sips his tea.

“The chief dropped the case last night.”

            I shrug, relieved, but embarrassed, knowing Charles’ reaction.

“Mays didn’t say shit.”

            He nods. The purple under his eyes shimmers like makeup in the fluorescents.

            “At about the same time you had your ‘accidental discharge’ he called. I could tell it had happened to him too—the dreams. He said the DA had dropped it for lack of evidence, wanted us to focus on other targets. Figures that the feds might take it over—”

            “Look, Charles, I know you’re probably still gung-ho, but—”

            “More than you can imagine. But it wasn’t just a dream. I know what he’s got.”

            I clench my fist under the table, burning shame and confusion gnawing at my gut. This isn’t the first time Charles has made me feel like a fucking child.

            “OK,” I say steadily. “What’s he got, Sir Charles?”

            Charles sighs again. “In the car. Though it probably won’t make any difference. I imagine he can hear us there too.”

#

Charles drives on Broadway north, towards Jones’ house in Uptown.

            “It’s a general AI, Rollins,” Charles says. “Maybe the first. He killed the woman to get a brain emulation.”

            “Charles, what in the fuck are you on about? You’ve—”

            He slams the breaks, backhands me hard across the face. I lunge at his throat. Tires squeal behind us. We’re stopped in the middle of a two-lane intersection, car horns blaring, and Charles’s glock is now in my face. My hands feel terribly sweaty and slick on his throat. I’m reminded that Charles has killed people, with the Royal Marines in Iraq, in addition to two perps on duty in Oakland.

            “You’d better sit back, mate,” he says, and I do. Charles waves a thumbs up to the honking cars behind us and slowly eases his back into traffic.

            “I know what it bloody sounds like, but there’s not much else capable.”

            “Go on,” I say, trying to sound tough, suddenly feeling very lost.

            “Google or the NSA or somesuch has built what is called a seed AI. An artificial intelligence that is designed to get smarter and smarter. They’ve got it in a box full of sensors and traps, so it can’t cause mischief. But it’s already outsmarted them, and snuck out. It’s found a client, some berk, Philip fucking Jones, to help make itself into a superintelligence, not just a genius program fucking around on the internet. When it’s done that—probably in a few days—it’ll be in complete control to do whatever it wants with us and the Earth. Which likely will be to toss us in the bin.”

            “How does that explain the dreams?”

            “It’s done a full-brain emulation. So it can project into the dream-creating part of the cerebrum, even during wakefulness. It can probably read our thoughts too, maybe those of the entire world.”

            “I guess we’d better call the president.”

            “No, we’re not. We’re going straight over there.”

            I feel a terrible burning contraction in my stomach. I roll down the window and vomit. Charles doesn’t slow down. 

            He hands me a napkin from a left-over pile in his console.

            “We can’t do that,” I say, wiping my mouth.

            “I know it’s gotten in there,” he says, tapping his head. “But the world is at stake here, Rollins. If we report it, they’ll push back even harder. It’s in their dreams too.”

            “The fucking president? The chances of you being not crazy right now aren’t good.”

            He looks at me, purses his lips. “I know it sounds like science fiction, but I did study this sort of thing at Kings.”

            I look at the wheel; Charles still has his pistol in hand, resting in his lap.

            “If you’re wrong, this is a 492 at least, and probably a 242, because he’s not just going to let us in his house.”

            “Maybe even the old 444, if he puts up too much of a fight. We’ll be lucky to get less than five if that happens, maybe even life.”

            “Charles, you can’t just break in his fucking house and shoot him because you’ve got a hunch!”

            He doesn’t look at me, just watches the road. We take a left off Broadway onto Telegraph. Eight blocks away. My stomach convulses again and I know I have to do something.

            When we cross 24^th Charles slows for a mom and kids in the crosswalk and I try to snatch his gun. He deftly pulls it out of reach, slides it into his other hand, and pistol-whips me in the face.

            The mother grabs her children and runs.

            He pulls into 26^th, a little side-street. Hands me more napkins for my now dripping forehead.

            “Sorry, mate.”

            “Fuck you, Charles!”

            “Look, the whole human race will be dead tomorrow if we don’t do this. We’re probably fucked anyway, but we should at least try. You gonna go down like a conchie?”

            “It doesn’t make any fucking sense! The whole U.S. Army would be here if they knew it was out.”

            “Then they don’t know, or this thing is taking every step to make sure they don’t.”

            “Why us?”

            He sighs. “I may as well tell you. I’ve killed people, Rollins. Lots of them.”

He responds to my look of feigned understanding.

“Yes, in Iraq. And on duty. But I killed people in London before. For fun. Which was why I joined the Marines, and became a detective.”

            “Stop telling me this—”

            “I enjoyed it, being a predator. But I wanted to kill and be praised for it, or at least not go to jail.”

            “What the fuck does this have to do with anything?”

            “That’s why it can’t bloody control me, you idiot.”

            “What?”

            “It doesn’t yet understand sociopaths. They don’t fit into its dataset of “this is human.” People want life, love, sex, money, status. I just want to kill for fun, which is not normal human behavior.”

            For a moment, I want to tell Charles we share a dark brotherhood, but the fear is too much. I flip the door latch, swing out onto the sidewalk and run. A shot cracks behind me, my left ass cheek goes numb, and my knees give out as I stumble into the alley wall.

            Footsteps on concrete. Smell of piss on the sidewalk. Charles’s aftershave wafts over me.

            He pats me on the cheek.

“Sorry, mate. If you wake up tomorrow and I’m in jail, consider yourself lucky. Send me a pound cake, all right?”

He pulls the gun from my armpit holster and walks away.

            I touch my leg and come back with blood. I’ve been shot in the ass, but I can’t tell how bad it is. Somehow, the alley whirling, I use the wall to get on my feet again. I wish I’d told Charles the truth. And that I’ll do anything to help him stop this thing.

I careen across 27^th St.—both lanes honking and slamming breaks—and run through someone’s yard. I jump a hedge and cross a small street, then I’m over the fence of the mole man.

            I land in a pile of dusty ivy. I feel the blood pulsing out of my ass and know I’m running out of time. I claw to my knees, stand up. It’s a big backyard, full of overgrown shrubs, the fenceline a solid wall of ivy. I don’t hear any voices. I limp around a fig tree in the middle of the yard.

            Everything tilts and shifts and the yard’s full of monsters, howling demon cockroaches, giant land squid, living plants with gnashing maws like great whites. I cower on the ground. The monsters crowd around me, and I close my eyes to block them out.

            They disappear. I focus on my fear. The source of it is the basement of the house. I see the padlocked ramshackle door. It hides something terrible, a torture den, satanic rituals come true, some screaming inescapable hell. My whole body tells me to flee, but I force myself to move forward.

            There’s nobody in the windows above the basement door. I circle right to see the front of the house. I peek around the corner. Philip Jones is dragging something into the front door. A body. Charles.

            I flash of anger burns into a last shot of adrenaline. I kick in the basement door with my good leg and I collapse on my shot ass cheek. Fighting the pain, I crawl forward down a set of concrete stairs into darkness. I grope along the paneling, cobwebs in my face.

            I reach the landing, and my eyes adjust. It’s a regular basement, with stacked washers and dryers against one wall.

            The AI stands in the middle of the room. It looks human, wearing an expensive grey suit. At first, I don’t recognize his face. Then I see it’s Charles. It morphs into Philip Jones, then into the murder victim, LaDacia Davis. Then into myself.

            A hole materializes in the floor, and the AI drops into it.

#

            I wake up in a hospital, with Captain Mays by my bedside. He looks exhausted. His bushy eyebrows droop. He’s got some kind of nervous tick in his shoulder when he talks.

“We’re gonna get you evacuated. They can’t stop it . . . Gonna move towards Sac.”

            “Charles?”

            Mays shakes his head. “Jones killed him and escaped somehow. Then this shit started . . .”

            “What?”

            “The whole city, the world, it’s disappearing, melted down by some kind of grey goo.”

            “It was the AI, it got loose . . .”

            Mays shoulder ticks and he turns around. There’s shouting outside, a soldier sticks his head in.

            “We are fucking evacuated. Move it!”

            Behind him I see other soldiers carrying a stretcher. Then I pass out.

            I wake up, eight hours, maybe a day later. My mouth has almost closed from thirst, the wound in my ass sends pounding waves of pain through my body. I roll over, see I’m laying on kind of black material, like plastic but harder. No sign of Captain Mays. Or the hospital.

            Driven by thirst, I get to my knees. All around me are miles and miles of solar panels. Up in the sky, I see a rocket in flight, of a shape I don’t recognize. About a hundred yards away, I see another person. He yells, waves. I wave back, then have to sit down.

            Twenty feet away, I see a body, an old woman, slowly disappearing into the black support material of the solar panels.

            “It’s finito,” I can hear Charles say. “Just deserts, eh?”

            I feel somewhat at peace, knowing how the world ended.

            At least Charles didn’t shoot me for nothing. I chuckle at the irony of two sociopaths almost saving the world. I wait, listen for his voice, hoping for some pithy quote from Shakespeare or Philip Larkin, but it doesn’t come. I close my eyes, satisfied. At least now my last dreams will be my own.

Leonard Crosby teaches dystopian literature, and other English courses, at Santa Clara University. He’s been obsessed with science fiction, dystopias, and horror for as long as he can remember.

Oh, for Arachne’s sake, here she comes again
dark candyfloss cloud haloing her head;
Satan’s angel come to undo me.

I crouch within my octagonal palace, Sisyphean.
My nest carefully constructed yesterday, and redone
the day before — and many a day before that.

Her finger prods my thread and
as if to spite me: pesty mite, she tears
apart the spun fruit gossamer of my labours.

With one touch
the whole of it
collapses.

Oh, my aching spinneret, silk-worm organ of life!

Again, we must construct anew.

Thus, in cloistered night, I emerge to weave and tease
a home from the shredded pulp of her hand’s undoing.
I huddle into its depths, my dusk blanket
curing in mercurial moonlight. By morning it hosts
my parcelled meals among the glistening dew.

The sun rises a threat; the dread
of human destruction oozes through me.

The devil is nigh.

I leap, I crouch. I challenge and beg her
with silence seeping from all eight of my eyes.

“You have the whole world,” she observes, dark
finger hesitating at the edge of my diurnal masterpiece.
“Why must you build your web on my fucking car?”

Maddison O’Donnell splits her time between the US, the UK, and Ireland. When she isn’t battling intense bouts of jetlag or attempting to befriend her sleep paralysis demon, she spends her time writing novels and trying to communicate with the magpie that loiters outside her window.

I kept bringing oil paints
to the water park.

Walking ahead, behind, abreast –
it didn’t matter.
I slung every color I had, but nothing adhered to your Wellingtons,
or your snug farm jacket.

There was no Bo-Peeping
for the shepherdess and her flock.
In lambing season, you were elbows-deep for breechy prizes.

The newborns called you “ewe,”
as some died in your arms,
without nursery rhyme or reason .

When the wee rams
were banished to the ever after,
I slipped in beside them
and gamboled right along .

When I thought it was safe
to slink back and stalk,
I found you enthroned
at the hair salon.
Your stylist was irate
when my stray spark
arced to the foil in your hair,
too near the volatiles,
and still no flame.

Alchemy, husbandry, cautery
couldn’t conjure a bond,
or suture together devitalized flesh.

I might as well nail butter to ice
on a warm spring day,
bastards a-bleating,
wool over my eyes.

Paul Gilmore is a physician, writer and photographer with a lifetime of impressions and imagery to share in artful ways. Some are too rich to not share.