

GRIM CORPS

VOLUME I: FEBRUARY 2013

PUBLISHER/EDITOR

Charles Patrick Brownson

ASST. EDITOR

Jenna M. Pitman

COVER ART

Marisa Cole

ILLUSTRATIONS

Luke Spooner

PROMOTIONS

I'la E. Orcutt

Established in 2012

grimcorps.com

Second Edition

Published at Smashwords

Copyright © 2013 Grim Corps Magazine

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written consent of Grim Corps Magazine.

The short stories in this publication are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The views expressed in the nonfiction writing are solely those of the authors.

This eBook has been made available to download and read free of charge. If you enjoy the stories in this collection, we encourage you to make a donation through our website as a way of showing your appreciation and helping to support the hard work of creative writers and artists. A print version of this volume is also available through various online retail outlets.
PATRONS OF THE DARK ARTS

We dedicate our debut issue to the supporters who pledged to our fall 2012 Kickstarter Campaign. Because of their support, we bring you this collection of quality dark fiction while paying contributing writers and artists for their creative work. We present their names here along with our eternal gratitude.

Alex Fox

Art Boulton III

Atticus Q Redghost

Charlene Brownson

Dan Valone

Erin Olive

Heidi Ellis

I'la

Jeff Xilon

Joanie Rich

Joey Orlowicz

Katie Caicedo

Kyle Frazier

L. Ann Ahlstrom

Laura Meredith

Malachi deAElfweald

Mark McClure

Roxanne Skelly

Scott LaBree

Tifanny Atencio

With Special Thanks To Alex von Hochtritt
CONTENTS

Introduction

The Black Pageant by Cory Cone

Guardian Angel by Keith Komorowski

Human by Domyelle Rhyse

Brindle by Sarah Cypher

When Mamma Comes To Visit by John S. Barker

The Well by Tim Jeffreys

Theft Of Me by Kristin Dearborn

Ms Brellin by Therese Arkenberg

Getting The Meat by Nathaniel Tower

Till The Dogs Come Home by Ian Kappos
I've never gone for broke and tried to write the most horrifying tale I can concoct, because I don't quite see the point.... [I]t seems to me that too much straining for terror...is wont to produce nothing more than a disgusting dump. If I can't approach awe, I'd rather try for the other quality I value most in dark fiction, not exclusively in generic horror—a lingering disquiet.

—Ramsey Campbell
INTRODUCTION

WELCOME TO THE DEBUT issue of _Grim Corps Magazine_. We have a great selection of dark short fiction for you to enjoy, but first I wanted to take a moment to talk about how this magazine came into existence, which seems like an appropriate topic for the introduction of a first issue.

I initially conceived of the name _Grim Corps_ about thirteen years ago. There were a lot of different ideas in my head, but at the time, I wasn't in a position to do anything about them. I registered the domain name, grimcorps.com and, for the exception of a two or three year lapse, I managed to hang onto the domain ever since, using the server space on my hosting account as a test bed while teaching myself HTML, CSS and graphics design. The web design skills came in handy on a few occasions where I was able to earn a little money on the side while pursing my own writing career, but I always had the sense that somewhere along the line they'd come in useful for something greater, whether it be as simple as promoting my own fiction or for a large-scale creative project, such as a magazine.

I made the decision to move forward with the idea of editing and publishing a magazine in August of 2012. Many factors, both in my personal life and in my career, indicated that the time was right to make it happen. I'd spent two decades writing fiction, mostly in obscurity while honing my craft and strengthening my self-editing skills before making any real effort at seeking publication. With my work finally making its way into small press markets, along with the advent of print-on-demand publishing, (which didn't exist thirteen years ago) and the years of accumulated knowledge regarding web design and desktop publishing, I realized I had built up my skill-sets enough that I just might be able to pull this off, and with very little expense. There were still things I didn't know, but being mostly self-taught, I was confident I could learn them quickly on-the-fly.

Of course, money was still a limiting factor, mostly because I had no interest in starting a free online e-zine that didn't pay contributing writers and artists. But there's this site called Kickstarter, which is a crowd-sourced funding platform for creative projects (another thing that didn't exist thirteen years ago), and with a little social networking help from my friends—thank you, I'la!—we managed to raise enough money to produce a single issue.

So why the name _Grim Corps_? As we state on the "About" page of our website, the connotation of the word grim hardly needs explanation, as it immediately invokes a sense of the ghastly and the macabre. Corps (pronounced "kor" and not to be confused with corpse, even though a cadaver ironically fits our emphasis on the macabre) is "a body of people associated together," as in a diplomatic corps, or the humanitarian organization known as The Peace Corps. Simply put, _Grim Corps_ is a body of people associated together for the common cause of promoting and sharing our passion for dark literature, art and culture.

Like a lot of writers I'm very much an introvert, but I've come to view the project as an avenue for social interaction and community involvement. So far, it's proven successful in this regards. I've made new friends and contacts over the last six months, and through them, I was introduced to Jenna Pitman who became my assistant editor.

Jenna has been a great help with moving this project forward, from sharing the workload as we read through story submissions to helping me throughout the editing phase. I'm especially grateful to her for patiently reading and responding to many long-winded emails in which I formulated or brainstormed ideas, or when I felt the need for objectivity while troubleshooting problems as they arose, perhaps saving me from a number of missteps along the way. It has been a tremendous pleasure working with her.

Now that you know a little bit about what has gone into producing this first issue, let me give you an idea about what's in store for you. We bill ourselves as a biannual magazine of speculative, dark fantasy and horror short fiction, which as far as genre categories is concerned, encompasses many different story types and forms, all of them coming in a variety of flavors, from the quiet, literary horror story to the viscera-strewn hotel rooms and landscapes of stories often referred to as splatterpunk. Within this collection—and in issues to come—you'll find more of the former rather than the latter, but most likely a range of stories that fall somewhere in between.

Our tastes as readers of dark fiction lean more towards stories that evoke a sense of dread or awe or the lingering disquiet that British horror novelist Ramsey Campbell speaks of in the epigraph found on the preceding page. (You can read the quote in its entirety on the homepage of his website.) I believe that the ten stories we've selected arouse these types of emotions, each in their own unique way, with Luke Spooner's black-and-white illustrative artwork befittingly capturing the nuances of character, tone and theme.

Beginning with a darkly enchanting piece that reads like the literary equivalent of a Tim Burton short film and written by newly-published author Cory Cone, we move on to the childlike fears and rationalizations of the young narrator in Keith Komorowski's _Guardian Angel_ , which is followed by a conflicted vampire clinging to what's left of her humanity in the aptly titled, _Human_ , and then to Sarah Cypher's poetic and psychological tale of an ancient horror that "survives on blood and worship"; John S. Barker's _When Mamma Comes to Visit_ contains a theme about family relations buried within a tale of supernatural horror, while Tim Jeffreys's creepy flash fiction piece effectively delivers that aforementioned sense of dread in about four hundred words; Kristin Dearborn's self-effacing narrator confronts her doppelgänger but not without consequence, and Therese Arkenberg's story about the Brellin sisters addresses the universal fear of being alone; _Getting the Meat_ has somewhat of a gross-out factor—as one would expect from a story featuring cannibalism—but it approaches the banquet table with humor and kinky sex in much the same way that the French film _Delicatessen_ treated the subject of cannibalism with humor and pathos; and finally, Ian Kappos's surreal story _Till the Dogs Come Home_ , is at moments bizarre, but it manages to explore themes such as addiction, grief, identity, and Eastern vs. Western thought.

Assuming you enjoy these ten stories, what can you expect for our next issue? We're already reading submissions for our second installment, and our hope is that this first issue will encourage more writers to submit their work. Our plan is to stuff issue #2 with even more quality dark fiction. Our desire is to do this while paying contributors even more for their work and also including more illustrations and artwork and upgrading to full-color.

But remember, we only raised enough funding for a single issue. Kickstarter was fun but also exhausting, and we have no desire to launch a new fundraising campaign for each issue. This means we're depending on the sales of this issue to support the next one. So please, pass the word along and share us on your social networks, tell everyone you know that there's this great new publication that has managed to get off the ground but could use some help if it's going to stay aloft. Each issue is reasonably priced and available in both print and digital formats. Having delivered that little sales pitch, I will now let you get on with reading the stories. Please enjoy!

Charles Patrick Brownson

January 2013
THE BLACK PAGEANT

Cory Cone

MY COACH HAS BEEN dead for so long that time has reduced her to bones. Her frantic pacing is almost cartoonish. She places a skeletal finger to her click-clacking jaw.

"You'll do great, Jeanie dear," she says. "Stand tall, and remember to twirl at the edge of the stage. They love a good twirl out there."

I brush away streaming tears and gape at the dust covered mirror. I look positively dismal in the ensemble they've given me to wear, a tattered black dress with black gloves, a black veil, and black shoes. Only an hour ago I was sleeping soundly in my bed with no thought in my mind of stepping before a crowd of the undead.

It's cold, late October, and far in the distance I see the warm glow of someone's house lights. I wish to cry out and make my unwitting captivity by these living skeletons known to any human soul who can hear. But my voice sticks in my throat. I can't scream.

"Let me go home," I manage. I meet my coach's eye sockets only briefly. Her polished skull shines in the moonlight.

"Focus," she says, then places her hands on my shoulders. I can see through her ribcage in the reflection of the mirror. There are other terrified children being coached as well, their mentors also skeletons.

From beyond the curtain I hear a girl scream. There's a thud, followed by the sound of retching.

My coach shakes her head at the curtain. "She'll lose for sure," she says. "She lacks poise for the stage."

Before I know what's happening, she ushers me toward the opening in the curtain.

"You're up," she says, her jaw rattling. "Goodness, I'm so nervous."

"What do I do?" I ask.

She forces me forward. I don't want to imagine what's on the other side.

"Just be your beautiful self," she says. I feel like she is smiling at me, though I cannot be sure. "And don't forget to twirl."

She shoves me through the opening in the curtain and onto the stage. The last girl's vomit steams nearby. I take my first glimpse of the audience.

There are chairs set up as if the cemetery is a concert hall. Every seat is filled with gawking, rotted corpses that stare at me, anticipating, judging, chattering with one another while hunks of flesh peel away from their limbs.

"Psst." My coach pokes at my back. "Go on."

I step forward into moonlight and the ghastly chatter falls silent. I do not look at them as I cross the stage. Corpses stand sentry at either side. There is nowhere to run.

I stop at center stage. Overcome with nervousness, my body sways back and forth, sobbing tears that puddle at my feet. The crowd applauds.

"Solid despair," says an admiring voice within the crowd.

"Beautifully tragic," chimes another.

My coach is at the edge of the stage, rotating her finger midair, around and around.

She wants me to twirl.

_If they like my twirl as much as they've enjoyed my despair, will they let me go home?_

I steady myself and inhale a deep breath of air that is cold and tastes of rot.

I extend my arms and spin once, twice, three times.

The world blurs.

Applause raises high around me. The crowd is on their feet, their clapping a muted soft rumble, a pattering of bones.

Hoots, hollers, cheers fill the night. The Master of Ceremonies comes on stage. Fat with skin tainted green, he wears a purple suit and top hat. He grins widely, bloody mucus running from the sides of his mouth. Forcing back bile, I take his extended hand.

"Ladies and gentleman!" he cries. "There is no need to see another. I believe we have found our newest Black Pageant Winner!"

The crowd erupts anew, and I betray a smile.

_I've won!_

"Can I go home then?" I beg.

"You've won, darling," he says. "This is your home now."

Beyond the stage and scuttling crowd, I see the tiny silhouettes of the other children escaping into the shadows. Their coaches stand idly by, disappointed.

My coach runs to me, wrapping her skeleton arms tight around my body. "I knew you had it in you," she says.

Flimsy hands take hold of me, lifting me into the air. "Wait, where are you taking me?"

The Master of Ceremonies says warmly, "Home, dear."

A coffin looms. A corpse in overalls is just finishing carving my name into the wood. He looks at me and then glances back at his work, proud like a father.

They lower me into the coffin. I thrash wildly, but it's no use. A circle of heads peers down at me—my coach, the Master of Ceremonies, the carver—before they hoist the lid up and over.

"Please!" I cry. "I want to go home!"

"Soon," they say in unison.

The lid falls over me with a thunk and I plummet into darkness.

The hammering of nails is like the sound of thunder.

I am sloshed about as they lower me beneath the earth. Now it's the patter of dirt raining down.

They're taking me home, and it seems that in some terrible way I've earned it.

* * * *

_Cory Cone lives with his wife and two cats in Baltimore, MD. He works at his alma mater by day, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and writes about monsters by night. He blogs occasionally at www.corycone.com and tweets when the mood strikes: @corycone._
GUARDIAN ANGEL

Keith Komorowski

I LIKE MAMA'S JOB. Sometimes she brings cookies home when the patients at the nursing home don't eat them. Sometimes she brings supper too. I like it because on paydays she takes me and Shay down to Irwin's and gets us an ice cream and maybe a pie for dinner. I like it cause mama says that since she's working we don't have nothing to worry about and all I got to worry about is school and nothing else. I like not worrying about anything but school, cause I do just fine in school.

What I don't like about mama's job is that she works lots of times at night and doesn't get home til late when I'm asleep, or supposed to be asleep, and sometimes I'm not and I fake like I am. I don't like it cause when she works late Shay watches me, and she's always takin' up with Micah and his friends and going outside and sitting on the stoop and yelling at people in cars. I don't ever tell mama on Shay. Shay wouldn't hurt me or nothing, but she'd make me feel bad and might scare me sometimes, more than she does now at least.

I like Shay just fine, like any girl likes her big sister. But I don't like it so much when she's in charge. She shows off for Micah and the boys and yells sometimes at me. One time when mama just started working I asked Shay if she'd fix me something for a snack, and she was on the stoop with Micah and the boys and she yelled through the door and said, "SoSo you eight years old, you go make your own snack." She only called me SoSo when mama worked, cause everybody knows only mama calls me SoSo. Shay always calls me Sophie when mama's home, and she never yells at me then. Mama doesn't like it.

When mama works and the sun goes down, Shay doesn't come in like she's supposed to either. I try to turn on the light over the sofa, but Shay yells and says for me to turn it off cause the skeeters are out, and she don't want to get bit. So I watch TV in the dark, and I don't like that, cause mama says you should watch TV with some light so you don't hurt your eyes.

I lied and told mama I was just fine when she wasn't home cause I knew it would make her cry if I told her I didn't like it. But it's not the kind of lie you go to hell for cause I was just trying not to hurt mama's feelings. But I don't like it much cause I do get scared, and Shay isn't no help cause she's never inside.

One time I tried sitting on the porch, but the boys laughed and smelled like smoke and Shay said, "SoSo get your butt inside girl," so I did and stayed scared. I did tell mama sometimes I got bored, and that's when she got me this notebook and pen and told me it was a special notebook, and I could write or draw or anything I wanted in it, and it was mine and not Shay's, and I could keep myself busy when she was working.

I was always a little scared by myself with Shay and the boys outside, but most nights it was ok. Tonight was bad, though, and it started before mama left for work. Mama was fixing up for her night at the home and she always spends a really long time in the bathroom putting on makeup and things, and tonight she started yelling a little and cussing, but it wasn't the cussing that'll send her to hell cause she was just getting ready for work. Mama came out of the bathroom and looked at Shay and me and said we couldn't use the toilet upstairs tonight cause it was stopped up, and she didn't have no more time to get it unstuck. She asked Shay did she want to try to fix it, and Shay just got big-eyed and shook her head and mama kind of laughed. Then mama said we was to use the toilet in the basement if we really had to go, but she didn't use that one for a long time, and if we could hold it we should cause she wasn't sure that one worked either.

Shay said why couldn't we just go down the street and use Micah's toilet if we had to, and that made mama mad and she yelled and said Shay and me was to stay in _this_ house and not go nowhere else. I was glad mama said that, cause sometimes I think Shay would leave me in the dark by myself, but she don't want to disobey mama that much. Then she kissed us on the cheek like she always does and left for work.

Those boys watch for mama to get on the bus up the street and as soon as it pulls away they always run up to our stoop and start smoking. Tonight Shay said that I shouldn't eat or drink nothing since the toilet didn't work or I'd have to go down and use that nasty old toilet downstairs, and it had spiders and bugs and maybe snakes all around it. I didn't say nothing, and then she ran outside and laughed and yelled at cars.

My show wasn't on cause the president was making some speech on all the channels, and even the stupid shows weren't on cause of that. I got bored, and I knew I shouldn't but I was thirsty and made a big glass of cherry Kool-Aid and drank it all down before Shay knew I had done it, then I went back and tried to go to sleep on the couch cause there wasn't anything good on TV. Then I had to go to the bathroom. It was coming quick, and I guess I was plenty stupid for making such a big glass. I tried getting my mind off it and flipped channels on the TV but the president was still on and nothing was working.

I went to the front door and whispered to Shay through the screen that I had to go, but she just yelled at me to hold it. I walked around the room a few times and tried sitting with my legs squeezed real tight but it just kept getting worse. I told Shay I had to go real bad and would she walk me to the basement, but she just laughed and the boys laughed, and she said if I had to go so bad I just needed to go downstairs and do it. Then she yelled something at someone in a car.

I never was in the basement by myself. And I was never in the basement at night after dark. And this was the first time since mama got her job that I really missed her so bad I felt like crying. But I didn't cause I knew that mama would tell me to wipe them tears and figure out how I meant to solve this problem. That's what she always says to Shay and me when we get stuck on something.

I thought maybe about going out the back door and just squatting by the bush, but the back light was broken a long time ago, and mama never put a new bulb in it yet. Besides, big dogs sometimes pushed through the fence and sniffed around looking for trash or something, and that scared me too. I thought a second about maybe going in a pot in the kitchen, but then I wouldn't know at all what to do with it, and it might smell and make the noodles smell, and then I wanted to throw up a little. So I knew I had to go down those steps and into the basement.

I felt around mama's nightstand in the dark so Shay wouldn't yell at me for turning the light on. I was looking for mama's flashlight, and I felt a little better when I found it, but when I pushed the button nothing happened. I guess mama didn't have no batteries either. I had to go even more now, and I made it to the basement door that opened into the hallway before the bedroom. I looked out the front door and saw Shay laughing with Micah and the boys. I couldn't hold it no more.

I told myself, "SoSo you're just gonna have to suck this one up and get your skinny legs down these steps and go fast and run right back up. There's nothing down there. There's nothing down there."

But I didn't believe it even though I said it.

When I turned the handle on the basement door it kind of stuck a little. I just wanted to do it real quick and quiet, but when I turned harder it squeaked like an old mouse, and when I pulled it open just a bit it made some awful creaks. It was black like night through the opening and I turned down the hall to yell for Shay, but I knew she wouldn't hear or just yell at me, so I stuck my left eye into the crack to see what was there.

I could only see a little ways down about two steps before the light from the TV ran out. I blinked real hard but still couldn't see no farther, so I pulled the door open some more, real slow, but it creaked more anyway.

_Whatever's down there don't you go waking up now. Just stay there and don't hear the creaks._

I blinked both eyes now but the light only went down the four stairs to the landing where the stairs turned right and back down and you couldn't see them. All I could see was the side door that mama had nailed some boards across and put up some bars over the windows cause one night someone busted out the window and mama got scared about that. There was an old dry mop and a broom hanging by the door and an old mouse trap that was already snapped shut but no mouse in it.

I pushed the door all the way open to see if more light would get down there but it didn't help cause I still couldn't see past the turn in the steps, but I put my shoe against the door anyway to make sure it didn't close back on me. I had to pee worse than ever and so I tried not to think much more about anything and held my breath and took a step down. I was in sock feet and I was glad cause I figured they'd make less noise that way. But the stair creaked anyway, and I stood there with one foot still in the hall and I wanted to just pee in my pants and slam the door and take a bath, but Shay would tell Bess and Tara and they would tell everyone else in school and then school would be bad too.

I closed my eyes tight and took my right foot down, and it didn't creak quite so much but still a little bit. I thought maybe it was a good idea to just keep my eyes shut, and I creaked down the other steps real slow until I ran out of hand rail and figured I was on the landing. I wanted to just turn right with my eyes shut and keep going and hold my breath and tiptoe to the toilet, but I didn't know nothing about where the steps were or where they went, so I opened them and was looking right at the wood mama nailed across the door. The bars were above my head, and I looked up and saw a light switch above me on the wall next to the door.

_Please God let the light work._

Mama always said you can't get what you want if you don't ever ask, and I hoped God would give me light. I held my breath and crossed my fingers and stood on my tiptoes and pushed the wall switch up. It clicked but nothing happened. I pushed it down and up again and it still didn't work, and the clicking seemed awful loud, and I didn't want to wake nothing up so I stopped and closed my eyes again. I got mad at God for not giving me light, but mama says you can't get mad at God if you don't get what you want cause he just helps you get things yourself, and if you don't get them there was some other reason, like you didn't try hard enough or He was testing you. I was still a little mad and didn't want God to test me just then, but mama never lied about nothing, so I thought I just needed to figure it out some more.

Then I remembered mama said that sometimes God gets too busy with all us people always asking for things, so he gave us each a guardian angel to watch over us, and I figured that this was the right time to ask my guardian angel for some help. I figure my angel wouldn't give me no light neither, but at least maybe she would stay over me and keep everything down there asleep. Mama taught me the prayer to ask for help from my angel, so I tightened my eyes and tried to not hear my heart pounding no more and said the words mama taught me at night when she wasn't working.

_Angel of God my guardian dear to whom his love commits me here, ever this day be at my side to light to guard to rule and to guide._

I figured maybe I said them too fast cause I was so scared. So I said it again slower so my angel would hear it better.

I opened my eyes and peeked over my shoulder down the stairs, but it was still real dark and there wasn't any light that appeared. My feet didn't want to move, but I made them turn and take slow steps down one stair into the dark. I couldn't see nothing past a couple stairs and didn't even remember now where the toilet was, but I knew I had to get there quick or I really would pee my pants. I took another step and I couldn't see much of my feet anymore, and my pink socks were getting almost black looking from the dark. I thought it looked like the dark was going to swallow me starting with my feet.

_Angel of God, Angel of God, Angel of God._

I kept creeping down the stairs into the black real slow, but it didn't matter cause each step kept creaking louder as it got darker, and I knew that whatever was down there was hearing those creaks and was awake by now. I felt my socks touch on the cold concrete, and I knew the steps were over, but I couldn't see nothing in that black so I just scooted a little away from the steps, but I kind of leaned back and kept my fingers touching the wall by the bottom step so I could run up out of the dark if something happened.

I blinked again and opened my eyes real wide to let more light in them, and I could just see a white wall across the basement with a handle on it. Mama said whoever lived in our old house before us made that bathroom down here, and it was a good thing too so we could have an extra bathroom, but I didn't think it was so great cause we never ever used it, and I didn't want to use it now, but I had to. I slid my feet so quietly over the slick concrete, and the white got closer, but there were all sorts of shadows now cause my eyes were starting to see things through the black. There were shelves and things on the floor and things hanging all around me that had other things behind them.

My skin got so shivery, and the goose pimples popped up all over my arms and legs. I slid towards the wall and saw something move or at least I thought I did in the shadows behind something hanging there. Everything was a shape I didn't know. Now everything seemed to be moving closer, and I kept scooting closer til I could reach out and touch the handle. I pulled but the door was built into the wall, and it didn't budge, and when I looked and opened my eyes wide I saw a twisty wood thing I needed to turn to open the door, but it looked awfully high. I jumped but missed, and when I landed, something else moved on the other side of the basement, and there were shapes there that weren't there before. At least I didn't think they were.

"Keep trying SoSo," is what mama would have said, so I jumped again and moved the wood just enough, and when I pulled the handle this time, the door popped out of the side of the wall a little. It smelled stinky and old and like a toilet that wasn't cleaned in a long time, and it was blacker in there than outside, but I pulled the door all the way open and widened my eyes again and could make out the toilet but just barely. And when that door was all open and the smell blew past me, there was a rush of wind or something like it that wrapped all around me and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I got so cold like I needed a jacket, and I thought the pee was gonna come straight out now so I shuffled to where the toilet was. I couldn't see nothing and felt for a lid but there wasn't none, and just then I knew my pee was coming, so I pulled down my jeans and my shorts and was too scared to sit down, so I kind of leaned backwards where I thought the toilet hole was, and it came out, and I could hear it hitting the inside of the toilet, and for just a little bit it felt really good.

But when I was squatting there, more air or whatever it was started rushing around me like someone just opened a door, but I knew there wasn't no door down there, and then whatever that wind was started glowing, and I stopped peeing and stood up, but I was too scared to move any more. Everything around me started turning a little purple, and I could start seeing the things in the basement on the shelves and on the floor, and the purple started filling the whole basement and swirling around like oil in the street puddles. My eyes were still wide, and I was too scared to even think about shutting them, which I think I should have done, and I was too scared to think about mama or what she would have said. The purple took over the whole basement and looked like it was crawling into the bathroom and around my feet, and it looked like it was starting to swallow my socks.

"Angel of God, Angel of God," I said out loud, almost crying.

Then the purple wind stopped coming towards me and pulled out into the basement.

Then another light started swirling around it, a white light, but not like sunlight or light from a bulb, just a glowing white wind that swirled around the shelves and the walls of the basement and kind of moved towards me. The purple wind started winding around tighter and tighter and looked like it was making itself into a tornado in the middle of the basement, and the white wind kept surrounding it. There were electric sounds, and then the white wind wrapped itself around the purple one, and sparks started shooting out across the basement, real sparks that landed everywhere, and the sparks sizzled and even popped, and there were fighting sounds like things hitting each other really hard. The sparks made it really bright, so bright I had to squint my eyes shut. I watched through my eyelids, and the white wind seemed to go all around the purple one, but sparks kept shooting out, and the sparks were turning colors now from white to red then orange and purple.

I couldn't do nothing but watch those two winds or whatever they were, and then the noise got so loud it made me think of Shay and why she and Micah and the boys didn't hear it and come running down with their lighters, but they never did. There started to be noises like I never heard before, scary noises like groans and howls, and the winds were all wrapped around and spinning and sparks were flying everywhere. Then there was some sort of moan, and the white wind started to settle to the floor but the purple wind kept spinning and filling the room bigger and bigger with its tornado. I knew then that the purple wind was everything I was ever scared of, that all my scaredy thoughts about that basement were real.

The white wind kept fading, but it spread itself around the purple tornado, and just when my skin started crawling with cold pricklies and my heart pounded so loud I could hear it, there was a voice. "Run, SoSo." It sounded like mama and Shay and auntie Gracie and old Mr. Irwin and Ms. Spencer my English teacher and every other nice person I know all rolled up into one big sound. I made my feet move under me and my socks skipped across the concrete floor as fast as I could make them go, but I forgot my pants were still around my ankles, so I had to reach down and hitch them up with one hand.

I stayed to the shelves on the wall, and when I ran past the purple wind it felt like a big fan in reverse was pulling me to it, like I was a piece of paper gonna get stuck on the back of the fan case, only there wasn't no case and my socks kind of slipped on the concrete, but I grabbed the shelf and pulled along it to get past. The white wind made itself up into a glowing wall between me and the purple tornado. The pulling was gone. I ran as fast as I could up two steps at a time to the landing. Before I turned up the next set of stairs, all I could see below me was purple and no white, and I heard more moans and scary sounds as the purple wind twisted itself into some kind of face with a big eye that looked at me. I saw things in it I didn't like and it scared me something awful.

I kept going up the next flight and slid into the hallway, kicked my shoe from the door and slammed it hard, ran into the living room, jumped on the couch and threw the pillow over my head.

Shay heard the door slam, and she stuck her face to the screen and yelled in for me to keep it quiet or she'd tell mama I was slamming things around, but she didn't even notice my pants were down, so I pulled them up real quick and stayed under the pillow. Then I cried, real quiet so Shay wouldn't hear me, but I cried a long time and wished real bad that mama was home and the boys weren't out there yelling, and mama and Shay and me were watching TV, and I was falling asleep with my head on mama's lap.

All I could hear was the TV and nothing else, no sparks or fighting sounds or groans, but I wasn't going to go back to the hall cause I knew what was down in the basement now. And I thought how mama was right. You do get what you ask for sometimes. You do have a guardian angel who watches over you. Then I had a scary thought I never had before and got cold pricklies on my neck again. Who was gonna watch over me since my guardian angel was dead? Mama never said nothing about that.

* * * *

_Keith Komorowski has had stories published in_ Deadman's Tome _and_ Dark Edifice _. He has been writing stories of all kinds since the seventh grade. He especially enjoys writing dark fiction because it allows him to turn ordinary events into extraordinary tales._
HUMAN

Domyelle Rhyse

I HEAR NOTHING EXCEPT the pounding of the rain hitting the pavement as if it's trying to break the asphalt apart. The cold soaks into my bones, and water floods my boots, slowly crawling up my pants. Everything is gray; the buildings are dark, hunched-over shadows. But the miserable night is nothing more than a phantom in my awareness. There is only the hunger, a predator clawing and tearing at my insides, demanding a freedom I won't, can't, let it have. The monster I hate is everything. I must feed it or it will take control and feed itself.

I stumble, fall, use the wall next to me to rise. I cling to it, like an infant to its mother. The killer is made stronger by my weakness.

_Where am I?_

A sign with faded white letters indicates the wall belongs to Cecilia's Bridal Shop. Bitterness wells up. I will never marry, never have living children. All those days as a teenager going through bridal books, planning and replanning my wedding, wasted.

The hunger tries to use my anger to force me forward, but I refuse to give it the satisfaction. I know what it's doing and I won't let it have control. I haven't let the beast have control in seven years. I refuse to become like the others of my kind.

_Hungry. Food..._

"I'll feed, damn you!" I can barely hear my voice over the rain. What I do hear doesn't sound reassuring.

I push away from the wall, off-balance and shaking. As I stagger forward, pulling my coat closer around me, the beast rages within. Angry claws pierce my belly. If my will fails me, the beast will take what it needs...and more. I hate killing, but the monster revels in it. For seven years I have won this constant battle and have fulfilled my needs without killing. I will win again tonight. I refuse to have it any other way.

Pounding music rises over the sound of the rain. A blur of neon flashes ahead. Before I can brace myself, the warm wine of blood entangles me, the scent of it drawing me forward, turning the ache of need into a fire. Panic builds as the rage of a hunger too long denied rushes through me.

NO!

Something pounds in my head, a steady, demanding rhythm that doesn't match the beat coming from the club. It takes me a moment to realize that it's my blood-starved heart and I want to weep. I hate this life. I hate what has been done to me. Blood. It's a need, a drug, an addiction. I give in only when I must, take only what I need. I struggle to be human, refusing to become the murderer that lurks within.

My body aches with a fever that's far too high. Every step between the alley and the club drives burning needles through me.

Dead but not dead, my senses more sensitive than anything I had ever imagined or thought possible—if I thought about it at all. When I was turned, the world crashed in on me like a tidal wave; hearing, sight, taste, smell all becoming so much more than I was used to, overwhelming me. The world pressing in all at once, all the time. Learning to filter it took months, maybe years. I can't remember any more.

I reach the door as four young men come out. For a fleeting second, hope flares then dies as the scent of the death within them reaches me. Their auras still have life within in them—deep, vibrant color not yet leached away by their condition. They are very new to the night, turned perhaps a month or two ago. The heat radiating through them gives me some small hope. If they were able to feed here, I should be able to as well.

The leader bumps into me as he passes, almost pushing me into the path of the next man in his pack. Rage floods into me. I can't let it out, not here. Anywhere else I would show them the cost of their stupidity, but not here. Not where others can see. Caging my fury, I hiss softly in warning.

He laughs, a sound harsh and grating to my overly sensitive ears. "I'd be careful there, pretty girl. Don't start what you can't finish."

Stupid grave crawlers. Ten years may not be long in the life of a careful vampire, but it's more than enough time to make me strong enough to take them. The hunger would only fuel my strength and power.

They are young, and their sense of smell is not yet sharp enough to smell the death in me. Their arrogance indicates they have yet to cross someone who is not an elder but is still powerful enough to teach them the limits of their immortality. I contain myself but the fury raging through me spills into my voice. "Perhaps that is a warning you should take, young one."

A glint of red films his eyes. He's using his sight. I wait, still only to prevent the shaking that threatens to overwhelm me. It lurks in my stomach, my arms, my legs, like a deep earthquake waiting to break through to the surface. But I cannot give in to my weakness. I cannot let my hunger use my rage as a way to break free. Draining another vampire into true death is one of the few things my kind does not tolerate. Not that any of them care about the one killed. Vampires, like humans, care only about their own necks, and the law against feeding from one of our own provides only a small measure of protection.

He steps back. "I..."

Not as inexperienced as I thought. "Next time make sure you know who, or what, you challenge before you do. Any other would destroy you for your lack of respect."

He nods and takes another careful step back to a more respectful, and safe, distance. I look at the others and watch them move aside so I can pass. Before I do, the leader reaches for me. I turn my head only slightly, looking at him with an arched eyebrow, and he pulls back again. I wait.

He swallows, attempting, and failing, to hide his unease. "I just thought..." He trails off for a moment before he tries again. "There's an Elder with his court inside. They aren't being too territorial, but..." His voice fades out again.

I give a brief, curt nod and turn to enter the club. They are merely a fragment of a memory by the time I am inside.

I barely feel the blast of heat on my face as I walk through the doors into a small hall. The smell of warm, human blood fills my senses and drowns out all else. For a moment I am stunned. Everything falls into silence. Even the beast within becomes still and transfixed by the scent of prey.

White Zombie's "More Human Than Human" shatters the moment with a female voice crying out her ecstasy over the ripping guitar and pounding drums. I let the rhythm fill me, using it to control the rising bloodlust. My heartbeat changes to match the music. I focus only on the music, let it distract until even my shaking fades. Harsh as it is, for the time being it restores me, allows me to be human again.

No. I can't be human again. I can only wish, imagine, try to feel the life I've lost.

_Grief. Longing. Hunger..._

For ten years I've lived this life of darkness wanting nothing more than to be mortal again. I even attend evening church services at a Charismatic Baptist church after sunset. My parents raised me with a strong belief in the sanctity of life. No one has the right to take life away except God.

Over the years I have struggled with this need, this craving that would control me and turn me into a killer. And I have developed a discipline known to few, if any, of my kind. I know I will never be fully free of the monster that doesn't care when it kills, but unlike the others of my kind, I refuse to give in. Like the punks who left tonight, like the Elder I will see once I enter the bar. They laugh at my determination, but I won't allow that to deter me. I will never let the horror lurking inside rule me again.

I show my ID and pay the cover charge without a word, even though the place doesn't look worth $35. There is a stink to it worse than the dingy floors and dirty walls that make the place a questionable choice. But if I find what I need, the money will have been well spent.

I stop just inside the entrance to the bar, my chest tightening as I realize how small the club is. The walls close in around me. Every sensation, every emotion, every need seems so much more than it was, than it really is. I've always been claustrophobic, becoming a vampire has increased it almost to a paranoia. But there is nowhere else to go and no more time. Walking out without feeding my hunger would destroy me.

_Food..._

Breathe. Close eyes. Calm.

I open my eyes again and see how few are here. The Elder and his small court sit next to the small booth for the disc jockey, the faintly flickering light making them seem like uncertain ghosts trying to decide whether they should remain visible. The Elder's eyes meet mine, burning into me. They narrow.

I remember sneaking into an adults only club before I became...this. I looked up and there was a man staring, his look making me shiver. Emotionless and flat but seeing through my clothes, through my skin, all the way down into my being. The next thing I knew, a bouncer was dragging me out and threatening to call my parents. Remembering the humiliation, I lift my head and face the Elder, refusing to let his gaze penetrate any further than necessary.

He smiles and nods. I incline my head once. This is his territory, I must respect him or the acceptance will evaporate like an elusive desert mirage at dusk.

There are too few patrons, although most are living. Given my choice of tables, I take one across the pale, polished wood dance floor. Away from the bar with its garish neon signs, it provides a perfect place to study the young men in the crowd before I make my choice. My coat feels far heavier than I ever realized. I lay it over one of the metal chairs and sit in a second one. A waitress in a short black skirt and black halter top starts to approach but I wave her off. There is only one thing I want.

I study them. All fairly young men, dressed in jeans and T-shirts and drinking their beer slowly. There aren't many to choose from and none of them really appeal to me. But I must choose. There is no way I will get out of here without doing so. I wrinkle my nose at the first in my line of vision—a thin, unkempt looking man with dirty blonde hair. The idea of even touching his skin with my mouth fills me with revulsion. A queasiness rolls in my stomach.

Flicker. Something moving towards me. Turning my head, I see him. Asian with a mix of something else. Handsome face with a thin mustache and beard; a face that's not unappealing. Tall, thin, clean. My eyes are drawn to his hair. Thick and black, it streams down to his slender waist in a smooth, rippling waterfall. Stop. Look away. Don't let the fascination take you.

He holds out his hand. "Dance with me."

Hungry as I am, I do not like being ordered about by anyone. I force a small smile. "Only if you ask."

The game is begun.

He bows and his voice changes to something more pleasant. And very soft. "My apologies. I would be most honored if you would dance with me."

I pretend to consider. The hunger growls, but my stomach doesn't make those sounds anymore so I ignore it. The most appealing woman is the woman a man cannot have. I will not risk losing his interest by appearing too eager. When I do agree, I do not say anything. Just give him my hand. The warmth of his skin makes me shiver.

The music changes when we reach the center of the dance floor. I stiffen. It's slow. Dangerous. There's nothing to hang onto to keep my control. He pulls me close. His body close, warm, desirable. His smell. So...human.

_Must feed._

Not yet. I will not be a beast with no control. Focus. Must focus.

"So, how much did you pay him?" I tilt my head toward the DJ, unsettled by the strain I hear in my voice.

His chuckle is warm, enticing. "Not too much. He agreed that you are far too lovely to be left sitting alone in a corner, even if it's one of your own choosing."

I struggle to maintain my concentration. He smells so good. There is a spice to the wine of his blood, mixed with honey-sweetness. "And you paid him just enough to keep him from feeling too put out when he saw us together." I want to wince at the sarcasm in my voice. Somehow I manage not to.

"Of course." His eyes glance over to the DJ briefly. "I didn't think you would be interested in him, but I can make an introduction if you would like."

I glance at the disc jockey. Tall. Cinnamon hair. Heavy. But there is a sickness in him that I can sense without my night vision. Two very young girls have his attention. And the Elder's.

"No, I don't think that will be necessary."

I like his chuckle. I like his voice which is deeper than I expected. "I'm Keitaro. You are?"

"Shay." Not quite a lie. But not the truth. The truth can destroy, especially one of my kind. I won't risk having anyone find where I sleep in the day, so I don't give my real name.

"Why are you here alone, Shay? A woman like you should be with someone."

I realize, from the pleasure that rises up and breaks over me in a warm wave when he says the name I've given, that the fascination holds me in its unrelenting grasp. The clock is winding down in time to the slowing beat of my heart. I'm being slowly smothered, my will draining away bit by bit. The beast curls deep within me, waiting, ready to overpower me when I'm too weak to fight it off. Somehow I manage to come up for air.

"We had a falling out." I lie. "I refused to share."

His laugh is rich and intoxicating. "An unwise man to think that you would."

"Most men are, as far as I can tell."

"Yes, I would agree." He looks into my eyes. Connection. His desire is plain to me. He is as trapped as I am. His voice softens, but I barely hear him as I slide into a drunkenness I haven't felt since the early years of my turning. "I shall endeavor to be wise for you."

I cannot speak. Desire. Hunger. Need. No. It's not time. Hungry! I'm losing...I won't lose. I look at him again. My need is answered in him. All I want is him—his scent, the touch of his skin, the sound of his pulse. The taste of his blood.

"Would you like some air?" He sounds concerned.

Although this is not what I truly want, I manage to nod. His offer will give me what I need. My power over my will is fragile now, thin, ready to tear away. I try to hold onto who I am with everything I have, but my monster gleefully shreds what is left of me, leaving me with nothing but tatters. I don't even have the strength to feel the hatred that has kept me safe for so long. I hope I haven't waited too long. There are limits to control, limits I haven't crossed in years. I can't remember why I waited so long this time—perhaps testing my limits. I spent three years enslaved to the thirst, then somehow I found a precious balance. I don't want to lose it.

Something deep inside whispers with the joy of freedom after being trapped for a long time, _It's already gone._

All I can do is let him guide me back to my table. A gentleman, he slips my coat over my shoulders. I'm glad he doesn't touch me. The shaking is back, deep in my bones, and threatening to break lose. _Guide me_. My plea to him is silent—I cannot speak—but he hears me. His touch on my elbow is light as he takes me to his table. The smell of his leather jacket jars my senses. For a moment, I find purchase on the slippery, downward slope into the mind of the beast.

Cold air hits my face like a slap. The back parking lot, almost empty of vehicles, barren of anything living but us. But him. Three of the lights are out and the fourth flickers, drawing my eyes to the damp pavement as the pools of water shimmer in the uncertain light. The rain has become a faint misting. Even so, we stay under the overhang provided to protect smokers in unpleasant weather. I'm thankful for my coat as he helps me settle on a nearby bench.

Wake up. The lights. He's speaking. Listen.

_Hungry..._

I turn to him. "I'm sorry. I don't know what happened."

His eyes are intense, studying me. He lifts a hand towards me, hesitates, then continues when I make no effort to stop him. The warmth of his hand against my cheek is delicious, soothing. My resistance dissolves.

"Do I frighten you, Shay?"

My voice is deeper, huskier, and filled with my hunger. "No. Should I be frightened?"

His voice becomes a whisper filled with desire, "No. But I have a request."

"What?" I can't look at him. All that matters now is the hunger. His request is dust.

"Make it pleasant for me."

His words filter into my thoughts and time seems to stand still. I can hear his heartbeat, smell his desire for me. The moment shatters when his warm flesh touches my cold hands as he gathers them into his own and kisses my fingertips.

"I know what you are Shay. I enjoy being with your kind." Desire sweetens his scent. He hungers too, but for something far different.

"You don't know what you're asking. Not here, not now." I don't know why I argue with him. Or why I suddenly feel fear.

"I know you can control what you take and how it feels when it's taken." He reaches up and caresses lightly down to my neck. "Not even sexual pleasure exceeds the rush of a vampire's bite when the intention is ecstasy."

_Hungry! Food!_

No...

_HUNGRY!_

A wild rage fills me. _Hunger, desire, need_. Sharp claws of white fire rake through me, tearing away the last of my composure, stripping my need bare. I hear him cry out but so faintly it's hardly a whisper in my mind. Only the flow of his blood matters. Sweetness on my tongue. Ice in my veins. Heart pounding in my temples, in my soul. The rush starts in my belly and spreads outward in a wave of fire, burning away everything human, everything that is me. I lose all sense of time, direction, caution. Life, death, sense of self, all wash away. There's only the blood. Nothing beyond it or after it. Nothing else has meaning.

When I come to myself again, it's too late. Ecstasy. Hatred. There is no freedom. No hope. The killer has won. Grief. It floods through me, overwhelming me.

I failed.

Seven years washed away in a single night. I am nothing compared to the hunger. Nothing. It has become intertwined with my being, inseparable from the rest of me. My mind is numb, dying away like it should have so many years ago. It slips away, sinks into darkness until it's beyond my reach.

I don't remember when or how I fell to my knees. I won't look at him, I know what I will see. I sense the dawn touching the night air. Survival. I must go. A creature of the night. Killer. There is nothing but darkness and shadows.

* * * *

_Domy's short stories have appeared in_ Aoife's Kiss _,_ Golden Visions _,_ Distant Passages: The Best from Double-Edged Publishing Vol. 1 _, and_ Something Wicked _, among others. As an admin of Dreaming In Ink Writers Workshop and editor, she's had the honor of working with a number of published authors. She lives in Georgia with her chef husband, her autistic son, and four cats._ Human _originally appeared in_ Worlds of Wonder: A Webzine of Fantasy & SF _._
BRINDLE

Sarah Cypher

ELI SHIFTED THE QUAD into third to climb Brindle Hill. The quad pitched upward with the slope, and his passenger slipped backwards on the seat. Mason was the college's starting point guard, and he grabbed Eli's waist in a gorilla grip. His borrowed .22 clacked against the high-powered deer rifle slung across Eli's back.

"Dude."

"What?" Mason's voice was muffled against the shoulder of Eli's coat.

"If that thing blows my head off, I will haunt you until you die."

Eli regretted giving Mason a gun. For one it was just for show—the power line was safe at night—and for another, Mason's only gun experience was a joystick and _Call of Duty_. Yet he'd begged to kill something tonight; he was a guest at the house, so Eli had resigned to help him shoot one of the farm's deer. He would guide Mason, take the killing shot, and gut it. Mason would do the dragging and pay to butcher the meat. Neither of them would tell Eli's father, who had an insane and evangelical respect for the woods. That was the deal.

"Coming up on it soon," Eli shouted. "Hold on."

The quad's headlight blanched the maple trunks to the color of newly stripped bones. In daylight, their fine branches were the purple-brown color of dead veins, but at night they seemed to be a corporeal red. When Eli was younger he had never been brave enough to come here after dark, and now he found himself pushing down the much younger voice of his conscience. It quavered with his father's warnings and with a child's wonder and respect. He'd been raised to believe these ancient hills still belonged to someone, to a thing older than the pilgrims and older than the tribes, to a thing as old as the direwolf and the sabertooth. An intelligent thing that survived on blood and worship.

Kids will believe anything.

An easier route to the deer field was to stay on the power line, but since last week's argument with his father, he wanted to prove something to himself. See the old altar. As a boy of nine, he had watched while his father anointed his own blue-white flesh with mud and entrails, his arms shaking with weakness and starvation. Each autumn he made a wordless offering to the thing he called Brindle, the god of old mountains. Eli would hang back in his little league jacket, solemn enough to convince his father that maybe he would take up the priesthood, but far enough away to keep one Nike Air in the world outside, in the great river of promises that fed his teammates their dreams of space travel and surgery and mile-high skyscrapers.

Years later, lying in his dormitory bunk and staring into the lonely city night, Eli decided that his childhood was humiliating. He was the warped son of a man broken by grief and isolation. Meanwhile, the whisper of urban nights rushed into his skull, filling the empty nook where mystery once lived. It carried the sounds of distant traffic, a breathing chorus of air conditioners and engines, the sky light-stained to the color of marmalade, all hissing the wisdom of a newer age. You grow up, you get a good degree and you forget your backwardness. You make friends with Mason and invite him for holidays, hoping his green-numbered Wall Street dreams turn out well enough to reward you for your friendship. That someday he'll remember tonight's deer and take you hunting in Wyoming.

In other words, for the sacrifice of your past, you might one day live a life that prevents you from going mad like your father.

Eli shifted down to first and let the engine die. Brindle Hill's power line was a strip of clear-cut earth forty feet wide, but the game trails that led to it slipped through underbrush and blackberry canes—you could go by foot, but not ATV.

"What, we just wait here?"

"Bring the spotlight. And fuckssake, carry that gun across your back—don't walk with it pointing at me."

Eli shut off the quad's headlight and pulled a Maglite from his coat. The trail was a pale thread of dirt and matted leaves; it began exactly in the place where he remembered. They stepped into the trees. Eli felt a shearing sensation around his ears, as if his noisiest thoughts were being lopped off and shown to him. _These? These don't belong here_.

He wondered if Mason felt the change; his friend was talking way too much all of a sudden. ". . . really live in the middle of nowhere and I don't get why this whole area isn't a housing plan. Like, it's not that far from the city. People in Pittsburgh commute way longer to work so the real estate could explode if—"

Eli reached back and set his hand on the front of Mason's coat, as if to push the words back into him. Mason stopped talking.

"No one lives here because no one wants to," Eli whispered.

A November night in the eastern woods is not silent, but if you have been away from it long, its ground will feel somehow dead beneath your boots—its loud summer body chilled, its breath and blood cool, the lively shrill of crickets and cicadas buried in the autumn air; the earth stiff and dry, like walking on a dead animal.

Blackberry canes snagged on Eli's jacket. He pivoted sideways, pushing farther into the trees, and held his flashlight higher. Chilly LED light bled away, bleaching stumps and downed limbs, finding a group of trembling birch leaves. The leaves shivered and rasped like a cloud of white bees. Deep within the trees, a single pair of yellow-green eyes snapped the light back in his direction.

"Is that one?" Mason whispered.

"Deer move in packs."

"Is it, like, a mountain lion?"

_Or, like, something more._

"Hold this," Eli said, and handed the light to Mason. He pulled his deer rifle around from his shoulder and thumbed the switch on its scope, powering a light stronger than the Mag.

"You want the spotlight, man? It's brighter."

Eli shook his head. "No, I want this." He flipped a tiny switch near the trigger to disengage the safety. He raised the rifle to his shoulder. The mounted beam pierced the darkness. But in the handful of seconds since the eyes appeared, they had slipped away. "Okay," Eli said, still looking at the forest down the barrel of his gun, "come on. The field isn't far. We'll take a shot or two and go."

"C'mon, man. I'm not cold. Don't pussy out on me."

"We'll take a shot, and go. If my dad wakes up and we're not home, you're gonna wish you'd stayed out all night."

They had pushed the quad away from the house in neutral for almost a half-mile before starting the engine. Even though they'd seen a herd of deer in the field behind the broken clapboard church, the gunshots would have woken Eli's father. Yet as Eli stalked ahead, following the chilly beam of his barrel-mounted light, he realized just how much he had set himself up to be caught. Sound carried. The quad's headlight had lit the whole hillside. He'd even worn his boots in the house, tramping around, gathering the guns and skinning knives and drag bag from the basement. He'd wanted his father to wake up and scold them—he'd wanted to be caught, made to believe again.

Everything rational said no monster-god lived in the woods behind the house. But then what? The world would be a place of bad luck and hunting accidents, a hungry nothing that devoured his mother and brothers one by one by one. A place where violence was as blind as justice.

Mason's light swung up to the trees overhead.

"What the hell is that?"

Eli's stomach dropped. He aimed left and his light swept across the body of an oak so massive even Mason's long arms wouldn't reach halfway round its trunk.

"It's just an old tree," he said.

"No," Mason said. "That. Hanging."

Yes, that. The iron hook. It had hung in the forest since before Eli could remember—his father said that it had been part of the forest since men's hands had first dug the ore from the ground. Its surface was polished clean and mutilated with gouges. It hung six feet above Mason's head and was big enough to suspend a helicopter, or the yearling bear his father once hung there from its sternum, the carcass stripped overnight, leaving Eli in wonder of the tooth-marked metal, his head filling with images of the macabre. He had hoped that the iron hook would be rusty. If it were rusty it was disused. If disused, he could go on believing that his father had simply put on a madman's show to scare his last living son out of the woods at night. But the hook gleamed, indicating that something still ate from it. And often.

"It's just for skinning deer," Eli said. He swung his light forward. "Come on."

He didn't want Mason to look down and see the stones patterned on the ground, arranged by his father with the care of the obsessive-compulsive. Tonight the stones gave off an uneasy disturbance: a friction, like bear hide dragged along his skin.

"Field's up here," he said. He kept his voice low to hide the knot in his throat. "If the herd isn't here, we're gonna take another way back to the quad and go home."

Mason didn't answer. His tennis shoes trod on little sticks, making a racket.

"Get your gun ready." The prickly sensation was getting stronger. His fear had a mineral clarity, as though he were standing on the edge of a drop and looking down at the possibility of his death. "And take the safety off."

He sensed an interruption in the forest's uniform dead feeling and suspected that something was keeping up with them, sliding parallel to the trail beyond the reach of his light. He could have asked for the spotlight but he did not want to see what it was. He regretted again giving Mason the .22. It wasn't powerful enough to save their lives from an angry god.

"You know," Eli added, "go ahead and shoot at anything that moves."

Again, Mason didn't answer. His footfalls were closer to Eli's now, and every few steps, his weaker light panned the trees beside and behind.

"Hey. I think I saw those eyes again. Kind of to the left."

"Okay." Eli avoided the left. His light spilled from the encircling trees and into the field, which was matted with frost. It was bigger than the scope of his light and the effect was one of infinite darkness, the precipice of the world. Eli thumbed the switch. His light blinked out. The dark lurched closer. The cold air bled a strange musky odor, the reek of saturated clay and rotting windfall mingled with a scent that alarmed some dormant part of Eli's brain.

He said, "We'll wait ten minutes, listen, and if we hear the deer you turn on the spotlight to freeze them in their tracks. I'll shoot one. Any questions?"

"What should I do with—?"

Something close howled, a sound to peel the skin from their necks.

Mason cursed and pulled the trigger twice. The .22 made a terse _thwack, thwack_. Eli brought up his gun, aimed in the same direction, and fired. The report of his thirty-ought-six was biblical. The chamber sparked, the flash illuminating what looked like a rock face in front and behind them, as if the two boys were standing in the pit of a crevasse. Eli tried to make sense of it but his gun flew from his hands and something knocked the wind out of him.

_We pray for its health_ , his father once told him. _We pray never to see it with our own eyes. We feed it with our prayers, in its language of blood and rock_.

The whole forest held its breath, waiting in the lull after the violent crack of sound. Eli half-kneeled and planted one hand on the frozen dirt. The paralysis in his chest passed. His breath returned. "What did you shoot at?" he whispered.

No answer.

"What did you see?"

Still no answer. The cloud of noise that usually traveled around Mason—plodding footsteps, mouth-breathing, the zip of expensive fabrics rubbing together—had evaporated. In its place was the November night hush. All the hairs on Eli's neck prickled and his skin surged with an impulse to run. Had he shot Mason by accident? He fought the urge to panic. The earthy reek grew pungent, pouring over him and thickening in the back of his throat. With the surety of a hunter turned prey, he knew that his friend was not alive anymore.

He stayed still, hearing no creak or snap of branches in the woods. The monster, his father's god, waited beside him in the field.

_We pray for its health. We pray never to see it with our own eyes. We feed it with our prayers, in its language of blood and rock._

He knelt, head bowed, scrambling in his memory to remember the old worship, to find a tremulous scrap of reverence, that old part of him that had once followed his father up the hill. His knee met warmth and moisture. He slid his hand through the sludge of blood and dirt and encountered his friend's remains.

Mason was in more than one piece. There were knobby pieces and slick twitching ones, regions gritty with splintered bone, and velvety convoluted ones. Heat rose against his hand.

Eli rose to his feet. He shed his boots and outer clothing until he stood in nothing but his canvas hunting trousers. He emptied his pockets of metal. He would meet glory in the proper way. With the bare soles of his feet planted on the earth, he waited, shuddering.

"Forgive me. Father..." His voice was barren as a clay pipe. "Forgive me for being deaf. Arrogant. Not believing enough."

The simplicity of his regret soothed him. He would die knowing his father was not insane. He'd told him the truth. It was Eli's choice to walk away from the old religion and into the city.

Delicately, the beast dragged leathery fingertips down Eli's face, shutting his eyes. On instinct, Eli reached for the hand, seizing a weak emaciated forearm. The air whistled. The axe met him on the soft meridian above his navel, severing his aorta.

The night grew very bright. The moon had not risen nor had the sun. Yet the field and its skirt of arthritic boughs opened with their own brilliance. Maple and poplar and oak trees split, releasing a sapcolored glow that reminded Eli not of winter but of a May midmorning. He reached into it with both hands. A seam in his flesh parted and that seam spilled not blood but more light. He was his own final morning, casting red flares across the earth. On that plane where such light was visible, it made a gaunt shadow of his father, who was already walking away.

* * *

After hanging the offering by its sternum on the iron hook, the man named Increase Claymore retrieves his two guns and stalks to the bottom of his hill. His face is brindled with mud and blood, and he carries his son's head tenderly against his side. He approaches the clapboard church, leans his great axe and two guns against the outer jamb, and steps over the doorsill worn to silver by his ancestors' feet. The church's windward face has shed its boards and sits with battens exposed. Wafers of broken glass crunch under Claymore's boots.

He kneels inside the empty nave, lifts a floorboard, and unhouses the three skulls resting there. Skull of a woman and skulls of two boys, but in their essentials time has made them the same. He arranges the skulls with one hand, setting his son's head beside the third, and lies down lengthwise along the line of them. His skin is the color of limestone. His eyes are bloodshot and blind to the church's darkened clerestory. He is sorry it has gone this way, but the winters are growing deeper, and the god is hungrier. Its howling pierces his chest. Panicked snuffling about the rafters drowns out the whistle of wind through jagged windowpanes.

It is always approaching. It will be here soon. He waits for his reckoning.

* * * *

_Sarah Cypher is a freelance writer and editor on the West Coast. She is currently at work on a novel, a dystopian story set in the near-future Middle East. Her nonfiction guide for writers is_ The Editor's Lexicon: Essential Writing Terms for Novelists _. This is her first horror publication._

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WHEN MAMMA COMES TO VISIT

John S. Barker

IT ALWAYS RAINS WHEN Mamma comes to visit. "She brings it with her," says Allison, "along with her funk, fungus and warts." Allison has spent the last two days making things ready for Mamma's visit. "She's five feet of ancient and she should just stop coming."

Stanley does not think such talk is funny. "It's Mamma, after all, and funk or not, you can't disrespect the woman," Stanley says. "Her room has to be spotless. Mamma always knows whether it is or not."

In Mamma's room the smell of bleach still hangs in the air from the last time.

Allison doesn't see why it should even matter. She's just about rubbed her fingers raw with scouring the walls and ceiling and baseboards and parquet floor every time Mamma comes to visit, and the sting of bleach and soap eats into her dry, cracked fingers. Her hands and knees ache from all the scrubbing. But this time, she says she won't do it. This time, no matter what Stanley says, she's had enough. "To hell with what Mamma thinks or not. There's no disinfecting her, after all."

Stanley broodingly stares her down. She feels her face flush when he does. She's no match, physically or emotionally for the bulk of him. So Allison angrily vacuums, and dusts, washes the windows, and does the baking that Stanley wants done. Garlic, pecan and ox tail loaf, made the way Mamma always wanted it. She knows Stanley can't control himself when Mamma's about to visit. He's been eating practically non-stop for the past month.

Even so, she has her limits. That's all the work Allison's going to do. "No scrubbing," she says, and points a finger at him angrily, holding her ground.

Stanley can't stay mad at his sister. He loves her too much. And that little angry glint in her eye softens him and he feels a bit of warmth rise into his face. He smiles just the tiniest smile and thinks about that garlic, pecan and ox tail loaf she made for him, the way Mamma always wanted it. His large stomach rumbles. He places his right hand on it.

"No scrubbing," he concedes.

* * *

Stanley is digging in the back yard when the wind comes up. It's just a gusty breeze, a harbinger of autumn storms yet to come. Allison watches her brother through the back room window. The weed-infested grass looks more like pasture than lawn, and she thinks it is desperately trying to stay alive despite so many years of neglect.

Stanley heaves himself around, all four hundred and fifty pounds and six and a half feet of him, lumbering like a two pack a day smoker about to collapse after running a marathon. Five minutes later he has dirt smeared across his bald head where a few remaining strands of hair flutter about in feathery wisps.

He's wheezing and coughing. She can't hear the wheezing through the windows, of course, just the coughing, but she sees his labored breathing and the beads of sweat dripping from the tip of his nose. She knows how hard he's working. All for Mamma's visit.

A page from a newspaper flyer picked up by the wind wraps itself around his ankle. She can see the words MUST GO on it in large, bright-red print. He pauses, straightens up and leans on the spade to take a breather, inspecting the wound he's making in the yard. He scuffs the paper away with his other foot and watches as it blows against the broken-down picket fence that separates their back yard from the neighbor's.

He stabs at a buried root with the spade and looks back to Allison with a yellow-toothed half-smile. As his lips curl, his tiny eyes all but disappear. The sky is dark now with gathering clouds, and the gusts have become stronger. The tops of the neighbor's spruce trees sift the wind through their needles as the branches begin to bow in a sweeping dance. Stanley wipes his head again with the back of his jacket sleeve, leaving behind a matching set of streaks on his arm and head. He begins digging again. It's only inches, she thinks, but it might as well be a mile.

* * *

Fat rain drops tap lightly on the window. Mamma's just about here, Allison thinks. She smoothes the front of her cotton apron. The apron was Mamma's best and Allison still keeps it neatly cleaned and pressed. She likes the large daisy print, but most of all she likes the nearly-nonsense writing on the pockets: BOUQUET FRESH SUNSHINE FOR YOU. Mamma used to say nobody spoke English in Taiwan, so whatever they were trying to say when they made the apron was anybody's guess. She knows Mamma was wrong. There had to be some people who spoke English. But it didn't matter whether they knew what they were saying or not. It was the thought that counted.

She's already wearing her special cream-colored pumps with the two-inch heel, has her make-up on, and her hair coiffed the way it's supposed to be when Mamma comes to visit. But she knows how Mamma can be, so she's nervously touching her graying hair, her dress, inspecting her shoes again.

Stanley is quick to remind her of what happens when things aren't perfect. But frankly, Allison is fed up with perfection. She's settled for "just okay". Everything is okay. She tells herself that, again and again.

The wind shifts. Raindrops hit the window like noisy pellets. It is nearly sunset, but under the heavy clouds not much sun gets through so it seems much later. Allison taps on the window. That's enough, she mouths. Stanley stops, straightens, turns to look at her, raises his hand. _Okay, okay_ , he gestures. He's got time to clean up if he comes in now. And if he doesn't clean up, there'll be hell to pay.

* * *

Stanley steps from the shower and dries his hair, the nape of his neck, his left arm, his right arm. He changes towels. He dries his left leg, his right leg, his massive chest and gut. With his third towel, he dries his back, his butt, and his crotch. The last time he could see below his navel he was nineteen. He only weighed two hundred and eighty pounds then. It seems he and Allison had won the 1966 Genetic Lottery for Fraternal Twins—he got all the fat, she got all the lean. The smell of the garlic, pecan, and ox tail loaf cooling on the kitchen table makes its way to his nose. He salivates and accidentally drools onto the floor. He bends to mop it up with the towel, bangs his head on the bathroom door handle.

Allison hears him grunting and cursing. "Are you okay?"

"Yes, yes, I'm fine," he shouts. Now he'll have a bruise high on his forehead. Mamma will not be impressed.

The power flickers and the bathroom light dims. Big wind today. Big rain, too. Just like the first time, years ago. He hopes Allison has done everything the way Mamma likes it. She always forgets something, year after year. There's always something wrong.

He goes to the closet and pulls out his best black suit, the one he wears when he drives the airport limo. Black tie, black shoes, white shirt. No cap today, though. He forgets to put on his underwear. By the time he's redressed himself, he's sweating again and breathing hard.

"Allison! Shoes!" he shouts.

When Allison comes into the room, he is seated on his bed, fully dressed, wiggling his bare toes at her. Each hairy toe presents itself like a small rodent. He smiles. "Thanks, Sis."

Allison kneels and slips a sock onto his swollen right foot before doing the same with the other. She can smell his feet—not just the soap, but the oily reaches he hasn't been able to clean, and the garlic and ox tail smell that now seeps from every pore of him. If that's good enough for Mamma, she thinks, then to hell with the rest.

One black shoe on the right foot, one on the left. She yanks the laces tight.

"Hey!"

She loosens them. Beads of perspiration form along her upper lip. Nerves, she tells herself. She stands, smoothes her apron. Lightning flashes. Heavy rain batters the bedroom window. She visualizes the muddy soup forming in the hole Stanley dug, imagines it collecting and mixing into a dense blood-red mud. Unnatural mud. The kind of mud into which Papa pushed Mamma's face in 1978 after the big fight about Agnes Hewitt's interest in him. The kind of mud into which he had buried her after he'd cut Mamma open with a Skill saw in her room. The mud where Mamma still lies. Between visits.

"Ready?" she asks, her voice trailing a peal of thunder.

Stanley is ready. Grunting, he waddles his way to the living room.

Allison lights an old ceramic hurricane lamp in Mamma's room. In the kitchen, she lights another lamp that looks like an old teapot. Protection from the darkness should the power go out.

* * *

"Mamma just likes to make sure her children are doing okay," Stanley says. "And we are doing okay."

"But we are getting older now," Allison says. "Something has to change. We can't take much more of this."

Stanley thinks that maybe she's right. But they are, in a way, both strangely comfortable with the bizarre ritual of Mamma's visits every few years.

Except Allison just wants Mamma to stay dead, the way most people in Mill Town stay dead, the way she hopes she as well will stay dead when her time comes.

_Go away, Mamma. I want you to go away for good._

She feels the acidy sickness in her stomach rise as adrenaline courses through her arteries. The power goes out. The light from the hurricane lamps is steady and warm, casting a delicate glow throughout the rooms.

Outside, bubbles surface in the gash Stanley had dug. A withered right hand rises from it, slowly, the way a balloon floats up when you gently tap it from below. Then the left hand. And then Mamma's arms, her nose, her chin, her gaping lips. The rain drives and washes the mud from Mamma as she sits up, pulls herself onto her knees, and stands.

Inside, Stanley clears his throat.

Allison's hands are shaking. "I'm not going to do this anymore," she says. "I can't do this anymore."

They hear the sound of Mamma's hand scraping along the side of the house. She makes her way around to the front door. Allison fixes her eyes on the handle. There is a soft thud. Stanley steps toward the door.

"Don't open it!" Allison shouts. "She can't come in if you don't open it!"

"But it's Mamma," he says. "This is her house."

"That thing isn't Mamma!"

Stanley shakes his head and opens the door.

Mamma steps inside. She's still wearing the decaying dress and apron Papa buried her in, but it's rain soaked and traces of grave mud puddle at her feet. Her empty eye sockets stare at each of them in turn. She sniffs the air in short quick spurts as though trying to catch a shallow breath.

Allison groans with rage. She pushes her way past Stanley and grabs the matted tangles of Mamma's dead-white hair. "Go away!" she shouts.

Her bones creaking, Mamma snatches Allison's wrists, digging her withered claws into the skin. Allison winces and tries to push herself away, but Mamma's grip is inhumanly strong.

Mamma moves steadily forward into the house, pushing Allison ahead of her, making her way to her room, the room where Papa killed her, the room where blood still stains the floor despite all the years of scrubbing, where the stale stench of death permeates the parquet floor, the faded braided rug, the disintegrating drapes and pallid walls.

Allison knows she should have bleached the parquet again because she still smells it—the odor of Mamma's blood that not even garlic, pecan, ox tail loaf can mask. It comes back, year after year, as fresh as the day it happened.

Mamma's blood lives in this room.

Mamma pulls Allison inside and shuts the door. Allison's muffled pleas mingle with the sound of Mamma's chair being dragged across the floor. The creaking sound of the chair rocking and rocking resonates its way to Stanley. He covers his ears, shuffles to the kitchen and cuts a thick slice of his favorite loaf.

The sound of Allison's tearful singing filters through the house: "No storm can shake my inmost calm while to that refuge clinging."

This could be a long visit, Stanley thinks.

* * * *

_John S. Barker has been a freelance editor, a contributing editor to_ Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly _(1980-84) and a technical writer. His novel,_ Trajectory _(Anarchy Books), is available through Amazon and The Robot Trading Company. His short fiction has appeared in several magazines. He plays piano and Angry Birds in Delta, BC._
THE WELL

Tim Jeffreys

"I'LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU," he tells her.

Of course, there's no reply. He wonders what has brought about this confession. Maybe it's the noise he hears, a shuffling sound from all around. He reaches in the dark for his matches and, with trembling hands, strikes one off. What he sees in the moment before the flame burns low and dies he does not like at all.

"Help me," he pleads with her, knowing she can't.

He tries to shift position and pain shoots along his leg. He bites down on a scream. The things he saw were sleeping. He does not want to disturb them. For a few seconds he rolls, his knuckles pressed against his lips. The ground beneath him is hard and slippery. He can hear another sound: _drip, drip, drip_.

He stills himself and the pain subsides. He listens again for that noise, which sounded like the fluttering of great wings. He knows, from what he saw in the match light, that they surround him. They cover the walls with their bodies. Do they dream? He finds it ludicrous to be thinking such things. But what would they dream of? And what could inhabit the nightmares of something apparently born of his own?

He does not know. All he knows is that he must stay still and be very very quiet.

Suddenly he hears a voice from above calling his name. It echoes down the throat of the well to the place where he lies. It's her. She's back. He knew she would return. A wave of relief rushes over him. The shuffling sounds increase.

Silently, he pleads with her. _Please be quiet, love. Get me out of here, but don't make a sound. You don't know what's down here with me_.

Unknowing, she hollers that she's brought help.

Wings twitch.

A man's voice joins the girl's, louder still. There's humor in it. If only they knew! The man asks, laughing, how he managed to fall into a well. The man tells him they'll have him out in no time. The man has too much to say, too loudly, and the creatures are waking now.

His hands scatter across the ground in search of matches. He finds the box, freezes. Very close to him, he can hear their breathing.

More voices from above. The threshing of a rope.

He wants to tell her he loves her again, despite this, despite everything. But he doesn't even have time to scream.

* * * *

_Tim Jeffreys grew up in Manchester, England. After completing a degree in Graphic Arts, Tim decided, thanks to much encouragement, to sideline the artwork and make writing his main focus. In 2007, he published his first collection of short stories_ The Garden Where Black Flowers Grow _, in which this story first appeared. Visit him online at timjeffreyswriter.webs.com_
THEFT OF ME

Kristin Dearborn

I SAW MYSELF TODAY. I was walking home from work, my eyes on the sidewalk, when something made me look up. And I saw her.

Her legs were crossed at the ankles, soft calfskin leather boots. She sat outside on a wrought iron chair at an abandoned café that was closed up for autumn. Outside, despite the bitter wind whipping auburn hair in her—my—eyes. Were there two Dorys, then?

She looked up at me and I opened my mouth to speak but a busy road separated us, four lanes of traffic divided by brilliant white lines, kicking up a firestorm of fall leaves: red, orange, yellow and brown. Then she was gone. I wanted to cross, to feel if she had left the chair warm... but I pulled my scarf around my ears and chin and went on.

Later I looked in the mirror and thought of her. Even back in the cozy apartment I couldn't get warm. I pulled off cheap little girl shoes and nylons and my dowdy skirt and shrugged into sweats. Even with scalding tea and turning up the heat I couldn't rid myself of the cold that sunk into my bones. Telling myself I'd only seen a girl who looked like me didn't make me feel any better. I hadn't. Her posture, even in the wind and the cold, the leaves whipping past her face, was more free than I ever affected. Could I sit like that? I wanted to try, but told myself I was too cold.

I wouldn't think on it.

I would lose myself in the television's blue glow, in something mindless. I would only think about things that I could touch. Outside, it began to rain.

Amanda came in around ten, laughing and saying goodbye on her cell phone. She hung up and looked at me, swaddled on the couch.

"I liked the way you had your hair this afternoon," she said as I watched her bustle into the kitchen. "And great boots." She gave my sweats and slipper socks a disapproving look, then answered her ringing cell phone. In a gale of laughter, she vanished into her bedroom.

I didn't sleep well that night, drifting in and out of murky dreams. The wind whipped sodden leaves into the windows; the downpour beat a tattoo against the glass. Outside, the branches waved and cast shifting, distended shadows on the ceiling and walls.

* * *

My exhaustion bled the color from the world the next day. The office, normally beige, was reduced to a dim grey wasteland. Noises blared too loud and the flickering fluorescent lights overhead devoured the shadows. Their hum pressed into my ears, omnipresent. My monitor blazed to life, too bright. The thought of looking at it for another eight hours made the acid in my stomach churn. I lost myself in bitter coffee and a miasma of data that needed to be transcribed. Before me on the blinding screen the numbers blurred and swirled, doubling and coupling and retreating. The clock on the wall pushed forward with a steady, but too slow, tick...tick...tick. By the time noon rolled around I felt better, ready to eat lunch at my desk. Just like every day before and every day to come. Lean Cuisine shrimp alfredo, a portion the size of a teaspoon that would leave me hungry all day.

But I saw her again.

She walked with Johann from the mail room. Johann who had never noticed me, not in the six months since he'd arrived here. She was laughing and her hand rested in the crook of his elbow, like a satisfied squirrel settled in to perch. Her hair was curled and bouncy, her complexion flawless and smooth. Her fine clothes didn't need to be ironed, they weren't stained or torn.

If I was here she couldn't be me. One Dory. Not two. I stood up and looked around, scanning the cubicles of placid cows—someone must notice what was going on. Was she so different that people didn't even notice we were the same person? Johann was mine. I would never dare to speak to him, Johann of the spiked blonde hair and two earrings in each ear, but I couldn't let her take him.

My legs felt like lead. I stomped through the maze of cubicles towards the elevator where they waited and talked in hushed tones. She never stomped, not with lovely red stilettos that shaped her calves and made her seem so tall and thin. The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside.

"Excuse me," I said.

Johann never looked away from her. Why would he? She met my eyes and held the elevator door for a moment. When I didn't move she pulled her hand away and the doors slid closed. The ding of the elevator bell, loud as cannon fire, signaled the departure of Johann and me. And her.

In her absence the air rushed back into the room. I didn't look at my clothes but I knew they were rumpled. There wasn't time to iron, I told myself in the black mornings when I left the house before dawn. And no one noticed anyway. Seeing her was a mirror of what I could be. If I cared. And my hair? Pulled wet into a sloppy bun, some strands escaping as they dried frizzy. Could I be what I had seen? Would the Johanns of the world want me then?

The encounter robbed my lunch of its flavor. I tapped at it with my fork, once, twice, then slid the frozen entrée into the trash can. I bet _she_ didn't eat Lean Cuisine. She would eat a robust pasta lunch then work out at the gym for hours after. Wouldn't she? Did she need to eat at all? I was the person, so what was she?

* * *

And then it was five o'clock and I felt grainy and hung over, as if someone slipped a layer of fine beach sand between my skin and my muscles. Would I see her again? I sunk into my raincoat and imagined _her_ out in the rain, her hair a bastion against humidity, her lipstick perfect. When I wore lipstick it got all over: on cups, on food, my teeth, my hands. I dragged myself from my desk and hurried out to the street, careful not to make eye contact with anyone. I needn't have worried. They were all equally careful not to meet my eyes.

Amanda was home when I got in, lounged on the couch. I avoided her for a while, but around eight-thirty she caught me—not a challenging task in our small apartment.

"Dancing tonight?"

"No," I said, keeping my eyes on the floor. Amanda always looked well put together. Why was she friends with me? She should be out with the new Dory.

"Come on. You know you need it. You need something. A drink? Blow off some steam?"

"No, I'm tired."

"You can't always be tired. Just come out for an hour. For one drink."

The new Dory would do it. But I didn't want to. Maybe I could try...

Amanda sensed my hesitation. "Come on. Go get dressed. Wear those boots you had on yesterday."

"They aren't mine." Amanda really thought that was me?

"Then whose are they?"

"A girl from work," I mumbled.

I went to my closet. What would _she_ wear? Should I strive to be more like her, or knowing that such a thing is impossible, should I be less like her? I picked black pants, the creases long gone, and a dark grey sweater that looked like a trash bag. At least I would be warm.

"You're wearing that?" Amanda asked, looking down at me. She wore her skinny jeans and a tank top under a rain coat. I don't have skinny jeans.

"You are such a schizo," she said, then turned away before I could answer.

* * *

The darkness throbbed with the sound of the music, intersected with colors. Red, green and blue, with cyan, magenta and yellow whirled and spun through machine-made fog in a myriad of shapes and textures. The light rested on the haze in the room and built patterns in the air. Amanda gyrated and spun, thrusting herself out onto the dance floor and moving with the people. She turned and twisted, becoming just a part of a whole. She waved to me once, twice, and then gave up, the pseudopod that was her head retracting back into the creature on the dance floor. I sucked at a cosmopolitan and when it was finished, I had another.

Then _she_ was there, first shouting to Amanda, then losing herself in the music. I didn't know this body could do those things. She wasn't a part of the mob, she was her own mob of one, beautiful and graceful and confident. She wasn't ashamed to bare her cleavage or her stomach. She danced to every song they played. I fed quarters into the jukebox, challenging her with different genres. Rap. Country. Rock. Blues. She moved best to the blues. Moved best because she could relate to their sad stories, her not being a real person and all. I was the real one, not her.

Settled in a corner booth alone, I watched, wrapping my arms around my chest.

Everyone loved her. Shouting to be heard above the music, they called to her, laughed with her. She let them touch her, dance with her—men and women alike. Amanda was there for a moment, losing herself in the glow. She cast a puzzled look to me, and I dropped my eyes. I stood up to leave, tugging on my coat and pulling it up around my chin. I left a twenty dollar bill on the table and tucked my head down, moving for the door.

A man caught my arm and when he saw I wasn't her the smile died on his face. He looked to me, then to her, then back again. I hurried off, away from his confused expression. _She's the one you want, not me. Never me._

I just didn't understand how it worked, how any of it worked, how she could move like that, or look like that, what was fundamentally different about her that I didn't have. How her skin was so clear, or even how she could get her armpits shaved so smooth without a perpetual five o'clock shadow.

Outside I turned my face to the rain. It didn't take long for my teeth to start to chatter, for the cold to drag itself inside me, to the marrow of my bones and take root there. My slicker was unzipped and the rain soaked my shirt, creeping up into my shoes. _She_ wouldn't wear shoes like this, round toed and black. A child's shoes. Even on the dance floor, she could move in heels with dagger sharp toes. I hated her. Tears welled up in my eyes, the rain bleaching their warmth away. I did. I hated her. The things she took weren't even mine, they were just a promise of what I could have. But as long as she was here, I couldn't even dream about being beautiful or popular. I looked back at the door to the club. A bouncer perched on a stool just inside the doorway, watching me. If I were her, I would captivate him with a glance. Curl my lip, raise an eyebrow, toss my hair... and he would come. If I tried, though, it would just be a parody.

Cars rushed past on the busy street, the road slick with rain and fallen leaves.

I could kill her. Or I could kill myself. Let her have all of it. I chewed on the thought for a moment. No comfort came from the idea of killing myself. I was real. _She_ wasn't. The raindrops took me for a moment, catching the yellow of the street light and the red of the neon sign of the club. Each drop took a colorful shape, plummeting to the earth where they came to rest in black pools amid soggy leaves.

The bouncer was watching. I needed to go. I retracted into a shadow. On the ground, all around me, weapons waited. A brick, a discarded beer bottle. Would I do it out here on the street? Was I even thinking this at all? A giggle shouldered its way past my lips, soft against the sound of tires on wet pavement. She wasn't real. I was.

The club disgorged a glut of people, spitting out the thing from the dance floor. Amanda was there, I could hear the shrill notes of her voice. And there, apart from the blob but revered by it, she stood. Smiling at them like they were disciples. I picked up the beer bottle, the scrape of glass on concrete too soft for them to hear under the sound of the laughter and voices and stupidity.

The rain didn't even touch her, just parted around her in a fine mist. When I saw it in the mirror, that nose was crooked and unremarkable. On that pristine face it looked cute and refreshingly atypical. How could she take what made me so ugly and use it to enhance her beauty? I ground my teeth watching from the shadows. The blob started to move, but she stayed behind. They begged her to come, pleaded. Her smile, while dismissive, was benevolent, and they lapped it up like dogs. They left her. The bouncer went inside. Traffic stopped on the street.

Holding the neck of the bottle, I dashed it against a graffiti'd wall, a shard slicing the fleshy pad of my thumb. She cocked her lovely head, hair tumbling over one eye. She tucked it behind her ear. When I stepped from the shadow, out into the light of the neon sign, she just smiled at me.

"What do you want to ask me?"

Did my voice sound like that? Beautiful and airy? Her smile never faltered. Such a wise, knowing smile, her tan eyes all warmth, moisture and compassion. I brandished the bottle towards her. I took a step and another step. The lights made the broken glass in my hand sparkle. I reached out, slashed, and saw that her thumb was bleeding. The glass dug into smooth warm alabaster flesh. Her lovely pink lipsticked smile widened.

* * * *

_If it screams, squelches or bleeds, Kristin Dearborn has probably written about it. She revels in comments like "But you look so normal...how do you come up with that stuff?" A life-long New Englander, she aspires to the footsteps of the local masters, Messrs. King and Lovecraft. When not writing or rotting her brain with cheesy horror flicks (preferably creature features!) she can be found scaling rock cliffs or zipping around Vermont on a motorcycle._
MS BRELLIN

Therese Arkenberg

I'M WRITING THIS AS an explanation. This isn't a story I want to tell more than once. It's easier to write it down and let people read it when they want to know why I can't stand being without other people.

As some have guessed, it's because of the Brellin sisters. I think it was Madeline I met first—my confusion isn't because I confused her with Sarah, though to those who didn't know them well they looked very similar, but because I first saw them both at the exact same time. Three weeks after I moved into my last apartment, I stepped out to get the paper and saw two ladies in the garden of the cottage across the street.

Sarah was sitting on a bench-swing, rocking back and forth while staring at a tangle of weeds and dahlias. She was the thinner of the two, and looked taller, though neither Brellin was a giantess. She wore the sort of dress my mother wore on Sundays, a sack-like white gown with big blue splodges I barely recognized as flowers. Her feet were covered in slim bedroom slippers, damp with morning dew.

Her sister was on her knees in the midst of the dahlias, attacking weeds in their defense, armored in a tattered sweatshirt and pair of jeans. Madeline's graying blond hair was pulled back in a ponytail; she ripped up plants with hands in sleek black gloves that didn't seem made for gardening. No true gardening tool was in sight except maybe the straw hat lying at Sarah's feet, bedecked with a ribbon and plastic sunflower. There was something so charming about the two of them that I found myself walking across the street to introduce myself.

Madeline saw me first. She waved and bared the toothiest grin I had ever seen on a lady her age. Many teeth, pearl-white and tiny. Definitely originals. "Young blood, Sarah," she said.

Sarah looked up and offered a smile that must be what people think of when they say 'beatific.' "Who is this?"

"Amanda Colt," I said. "I just moved in—" I gestured across the street "—the first floor apartment."

"Pleased to meet you," Madeline said, then introduced herself and her sister.

"What brings you to Hartfield?" she asked. "For years I thought it was the domain of dried-up prunes like ourselves." Sarah laughed softly in agreement.

"A job opening," I said. "I'm an assistant accountant."

They asked a few questions about the work, mostly to be polite. They sounded sincerely interested but I couldn't believe anyone besides me and some of my colleagues was honestly interested in number crunching. I figured I was doing them a service in turning the conversation to gardening. I learned a lot about dahlias, most of which I've now forgotten.

Honestly, I can't remember much of what we talked about that day. The thing is, we had so many conversations after that and the topics ran together. What I do remember, more than the words, is what the Brellins looked like when they said them. I can describe every one of Sarah's outfits, though to be fair, she never had more than a dozen. Madeline's animated motions were so fascinating—her hands never made the gestures I'd expected, she was as likely to point with her chin or elbow as with a finger—I found myself watching them rather than listening. I think Sarah felt the same way. Whenever we spoke, her eyes rarely left her sister, and that first day she didn't say a word until she rose and murmured about getting some iced tea.

"We'll go with you, dear," Madeline said. Something about her tone made my stomach clench. She sounded hurt, as if Sarah had betrayed her by trying to leave.

"Yes, let's go inside," I said, adding an eager smile which had smoothed things out in my past experience. "I'd love some tea. Thank you, Sarah."

While her sister worked, Madeline and I sat at the kitchen table, chatting about whatever we'd discussed before. I'm bothered that I can't remember it. And yet, as time goes on, it seems harder to remember anything about the Brellin sisters.

It really is good that I'm writing this.

We drank our tea pleasantly enough and I found myself agreeing with my first assessment that the Brellins were charming, if unusual, ladies. I left around noon, promising to visit again.

I forced myself to wait a few days before coming over, so I didn't seem intrusive, but it was hard. I really wanted to see Sarah's smile and to speak with Madeline. Hundreds of topics struck me that I realize we hadn't discussed yet and I felt as if I was dying to hear her opinion on them.

One Saturday morning at ten, I rang their doorbell—it was surrounded by a bronze Celtic knotwork and resin ware frogs flanked the welcome mat—and after one second of fretting over how I would be received, I was grabbed by the arm and pulled into the foyer by Madeline, who treated me to her toothy smile.

"Why, it's Amanda! How are you, dear? Come, sit down—keep us company—Sarah must be weary of listening to me." Sarah nodded with a smile that seemed drawn, and I found myself thinking Madeline's laugh was too insistent.

"How are you doing?" I asked.

"Healthy as a mare," Madeline giggled.

"Oh, I'm all right," Sarah murmured. That was when I realized that she wasn't.

Her arms were so thin and pale that the bones of her wrists and hands showed through, looking like the wickerwork backing of a garden chair. Her hair, still faintly wheat-golden, was thinning, and her eyes were sunken and red. I remembered how she did everything so softly.

"She isn't feeling very well, poor dear," Madeline said. She kissed Sarah on the forehead. "So tired all the time."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"Oh, it's all right," Sarah murmured. "Your visits are nice."

For a moment the only sound was the whirr of the corner fan.

"It's such a warm day," Madeline said. "Would you like something to drink, Amanda?"

"Yes, thank you."

"There's cola in the fridge." She started for the kitchen. "Come with me, Sarah."

It seemed cruel to expect the poor, frail woman to walk all the way to the kitchen, but Sarah didn't seem to mind. I offered her my arm and she leaned on it for support. Despite the thinness of her wrists, she was heavier than I expected.

Over glasses of Coke and some generic white soda for Sarah, we talked about the Brellin family history.

Most of it I forget—the founding American members were middle-class immigrants turned modest capitalists—but rather than stop at her parents' or grandparents' generation, as most tellers of family histories do, Madeline went on to share her own. That I remember.

"We were born right here in Hartfield," She said. "Never spent a day in our lives outside of it." She exchanged a glance with Sarah, who nodded.

"We're perfectly happy here. With each other."

"With each other." Madeline bobbed her head and flashed another toothy grin. "Sarah almost married away from me once, back in '64."

"It didn't go through," Sarah murmured.

"Just as well. Men—" Madeline laughed "—I have no use for them."

"Sometimes," I agreed.

"Always get in the way. Always interfere. Not like ladies, now. _They're_ always welcome to stay for a chat. They always respect boundaries."

I nodded just so I wouldn't be called upon to say anything.

Madeline traced imaginary borders on the tablecloth. "We had our girl friends, growing up. They're mostly gone now. Moved away, in place or heart, or died—so sad. Good friends always go."

"But so do the bad ones," Sarah interjected. "Thank God."

I laughed. I can't tell why that conversation stuck in my mind, but since it did I thought I should add it. Maybe, looking at what came next, it said something important.

It was true, all of it. Madeline had no use for men. She and Sarah had no other friends. They were perfectly happy together.

* * *

I continued visiting throughout the summer, and with each visit I was offered more of Madeline's thoughts and insights from sixty-odd years of living in the world, or Hartfield to be particular. I assume she was sixty something. She may have been older.

Accounting, history, natural science, gardening, weather, fashion, religion, and every aspect of politics flowed at some point from Madeline's mouth and gesturing chin and fingers. She never asked much about me, which was just as well—compared to her, I didn't have much to say. I enjoyed hearing her though. Sarah sometimes added something but more often, like me, she just listened. As autumn came around she began to fall asleep during my visits.

I asked Madeline one rare time when we were somewhat alone—I was helping her trim her way around the house and Sarah was slowly rounding the corner after us—what was wrong with her sister.

She shrugged one shoulder then the other. "She's tired, poor dear." She shrugged the first shoulder again.

"Do you know why?"

She snipped off the top of a wayward hedge and stepped back to let me collect the clippings. I threw them in a trash bag and we moved to the next bush. "The years are piling up on her, I suppose."

"Is she the eldest?" I asked. It would be a rude question to ask anyone else, but Madeline didn't hold with the concept of rudeness.

"She is." She lopped off more springs. "I've never lived a day of my life without Sarah."

"Do you two ever go out?" I asked. I was about to raise an idea that had been on my mind for weeks and Madeline, being less talkative than usual, had given me the opportunity.

"Except to the farmer's market and the grocery store, no. We've fine right here. Why do you ask?"

"I was thinking I could take you two out to lunch some day."

She stopped trimming. "Lunch. Hmmm." She clacked the shears idly as she thought. I stepped back and nearly collided with Sarah, who had caught up with us.

"Oh! I'm sorry, Sarah."

"What's going on here?"

"Nothing, darling." _Snap-snap_.

I read the sound of the shears as _shh, shh_. I didn't obey them. "I was thinking of treating the two of you to lunch sometime."

_Snap_! Madeline severed the fresh green fingers of a reaching bush.

"Do you think we should?" Sarah asked.

"Whatever you'd like," Madeline and I said at exactly the same time.

The Brellin sisters exchanged a glance, if you can call something that lasted so long a glance, and at last Sarah said, "Well, why don't we?"

"I don't go out much," Madeline said. "I'm happy here."

"Just lunch—only an hour or two," Sarah said.

"Well, that's fine," Madeline said. "But we can't be out for long, Sarah. It'll tire you."

"Not too much."

Madeline nodded and lifted the handles of her wheelbarrow. I piled in the rest of the clippings. She started moving before I could finish, and I sprinted after her with an armful of prickly branches, Sarah drifting behind us.

Madeline stopped at the compost pile and upended the wheelbarrow. It was a simple pile, filled only with garden waste—no manure; I'm not sure if the Brellins were squeamish or just didn't care to buy any. Nothing seemed to be rotting yet. It was a dry summer.

I tossed the branches onto the pile and rubbed my palms on my jeans. "How about we meet on Sunday for lunch?"

"That sounds lovely," Sarah said.

"Whatever you like," Madeline said. Her tone sounded perfectly sincere but I saw her shake her head when she said it.

Sarah didn't seem to. "It's so kind of you," she said.

"My treat," I said. I left with a smile, but it didn't last long after I was gone from Sarah's sight.

* * *

When I arrived at eleven on Sunday, I had to ring the bell and wait, scuffing my shoes across the welcome mat, until the door was opened. Normally Madeline was out and greeting me before I reached the front step.

Sarah opened the door a crack, peered out, then threw it wide with a bright, "Hello!"

"Good morning, Sarah." I wore a nice blouse and one of my mother's necklaces and worried that I was overdressing, but Sarah was done up in a full, long-sleeved gown—white, as always, and accompanied by a prim hat. I looked at her hands, half expecting to see gloves, but she wore none.

"Well," she said, smoothing her skirt with ivory fingers, "shall we go?"

"Madeline isn't coming?"

"She says she wants to work in the garden today." Sarah frowned.

I found myself looking over her shoulder but I couldn't see anything in the dark house. And if I had seen Madeline, there wasn't anything I could have done—Sarah's frown told me that much. So I left with her and with the feeling of taking a victory where I could get it.

The restaurant was a small place, family-owned. I wouldn't call it formal, but there were dark green tablecloths, cloth napkins, and the steak didn't arrive with the bars of a grill seared into it.

I was the one who ordered the steak. Sarah had a soup and salad combo and nibbled both daintily. Her eyes were in constant motion, darting from the door to the windows to the corners of the room.

"I'm not sure how I feel about coming out like this," she said. "It's strange not to have Madeline around."

"It's too bad she couldn't come." I forked a potato but didn't lift it from the plate. My mouth felt too dry for eating.

"I don't think she wanted to," Sarah said with the air of a confession. "She hates leaving the house. I can't remember the last time she did, except to shop. And I hardly ever leave her alone... to tell the truth, I can't remember the last time that happened, either." Her small, age-webbed hands held each other and twisted.

"I guess it can be hard to live with someone who's so... clingy." I regretted the words as soon as I said them. I wanted to sympathize with Sarah—I _did_ sympathize with Sarah—but I didn't want to do it by cutting down her sister. I still admired Madeline, and didn't want to gossip from what I knew was a lingering resentment against her for not coming.

"Clingy." Sarah nodded. "That's exactly it. She can't stand being without me... and it's exhausting, being needed." She stirred her soup, but didn't eat any more of it. "I thought I would feel better away from her, but I just feel nervous...as if something horrible is going to happen without me...Amanda, thank you for taking me out, it's really sweet, but _please_ let's go home now."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes!" She braced her hands on the table, her arms tense as if about to push her to her feet.

"Okay, Sarah. Just let me pay the bill."

We paid and left. The drive home was quiet. I broke the speed limit, and even so the ride didn't seem to go fast enough. Sarah sat beside me, silently wringing her hands.

The garage door was open and Madeline's wheelbarrow was out in the driveway.

"She'll be in back," Sarah said. "I'll speak with her first."

She got up and was around the corner of the house before I could reply. I turned off the ignition and got out slowly. As I went after her, I heard raised voices.

"I don't ask so much," Madeline said. "I just don't want you to run off on me like that." Her voice was rough; I realized she was close to tears, if not already in them.

"And all I wanted was one day out, one day on my own. I came back to you..."

"Where's the little bitch?" Madeline said.

I stopped walking.

"Who?"

"Where's Amanda? What makes her think she can just take you from me for a day and drop you off and not even apologize?"

"It was barely an hour..."

I heard Madeline's steps, nearing the corner, ready to round it and confront me and...

I'm not all that proud of it but I ran. I turned and dashed to the car and was in it, starting the engine, before Madeline's gardening shoes touched the driveway. I saw in the rearview mirror how her hands, wrapped in scuffled black leather, were clenched into fists.

Since I only lived across the street, I must have looked foolish backing into the road and making a Y-turn to enter my own driveway at breakneck speed. Right then I didn't much care about looking foolish. I opened the door as I pulled the key from the ignition. I hadn't buckled the seatbelt so there was nothing holding me back as I leapt out and ran for the apartment door.

Madeline never even went across the street.

* * *

It took me two days to gather up the courage to see the Brellins again.

At first I thought of apologizing to Madeline, but on reflection, after the dread faded, I felt I had nothing to apologize for and my pride rebelled at the idea after I had been monikered "the little bitch." Instead, I went to see how Sarah was doing.

Madeline opened the door. "Why, hello, Amanda," she said, and grinned with all of her teeth.

"Hi." I swallowed, dampening the squeak in my voice.

"You here for something?" She put one hand on her hip, the other on the door frame, and raised her chin. Her tone was reproachful but I couldn't be sure what her body language meant—maybe the same. As I've said, she never moved the way it seemed she would, and though it often threw me there was also something mesmerizing about it.

"How's Sarah?"

Her eyebrows shot up, though I thought she should have expected the question. "Sarah? Oh, she's...tired. Not very well, honestly."

"What's wrong?"

"Tired, I said. I told you taking her out would wear her down."

"I'm sorry," I said, though I hadn't intended to.

"You want to see her?"

I nodded.

"Come back later." The door snicked closed.

I went home. And though it took more than two days to regain my nerve after that, I did come back.

Madeline let me in. The house was filled with the musty odor of mothballs, something sickly-sweet that made me think of illness, and the bitter-strong smell of tea.

Sarah sat huddled in a parlor chair, muffled in a brocade nightgown. Her complexion, always parchment-like, had actually darkened to a waxy gray. Her hair and the whites of her eyes were both a yellowed-ivory color.

"Hello, Amanda," she whispered.

"Sarah! What's... how are you feeling?"

"Very tired..."

Madleine perched on a chair near the door. She was wearing black that day, I remember, and I don't know if I thought of it at the time but now she seems so much like a vampire bat fluttering around the ceiling. She was smiling, showing all her white and tiny teeth.

"Have you been like this...?"

"Since our lunch, yes." Sarah smiled, but it wasn't her usual beatific smile. "I'm like this a lot, Amanda. It comes and goes."

"And visitors will only make you more tired, poor dear," Madeline crooned. Her voice traveled up and down my spine on spider legs of ice. "You've seen her, Amanda." She refrained from saying _Now go_.

I pressed Sarah's hand, then left the room. "Madeline," I whispered once I was in the hall, "maybe you should do something. Call a doctor...maybe even bring her to a hospital. She doesn't look well."

"That's overreacting," she said evenly. "There's nothing she needs that I can't provide at home."

I've never enjoyed being competitive, but I was worried enough about Sarah that I might have tried to press the issue. Then Madeline bared her teeth at me with such a look that I left, fled the house without another word. From the day I met her I knew she was unusual, but before her eccentricity had charmed and drawn me in. Now she was weirdly feral.

Sarah died three days later.

* * *

It was a hasty funeral, sparsely attended—the priest, myself, Madeline, and the body in the casket. Madeline cried through the ceremony, but quietly and with dignity. She seemed to be holding up well, and more, the feralness of Sarah's final days was gone. She met me at the door of the church with an embrace, and when she welcomed me her voice was as it had been when she called me to report Sarah's death, soft and warm.

The church was small, old, made of golden stone on the outside and paneled with dark wood within. The Brellins almost never left the house, even on holidays, and I don't know Sarah came to be buried at it, but the eulogy was kind enough and seemed sincere.

"You'll have to visit sometime," Madeline said before I left. She was going to the cemetery with the casket, and though I offered to accompany her she refused with a jerk of her head, a gentle smile, and "No, I'd prefer to see her off myself—alone."

"I'll drop by," I promised.

"Thank you. I'm afraid I'm going to be lonely now." Her tone was flat, as if the life had been drained from it. I put my arms around her.

"Madeline, I'm so sorry."

She leaned into the embrace. "It's all right, Amanda. I forgive you."

* * *

Autumn that year was warm and dry, and as I crossed the street to Madeline's house sprinklers chittered over lawns around the neighborhood. Oddly, Madeline didn't have hers out. With a chill I wondered what effect the loss of Sarah must be having on her, if she neglected her beloved lawn and garden's upkeep.

She had finished raking the first good fall of dead leaves into a pile, and was now forking them into her wheelbarrow. As I approached, she looked up and grinned. Her smile had an air of relief.

"Amanda, it's so good to see you! I was just bringing this lot to the back."

"I'll help." I took the wheelbarrow's handles and guided it to the compost pile.

"Should stir it up," Madeline mused. "Getting dry."

When we had forked the last of the leaves onto the mound she brushed off her hands and invited me in for tea. I accepted.

"It's _so_ good to see you," she said again as she offered me a steaming mug.

"How are you...lately?"

"It's just quiet around here." Madeline rubbed her wrists as if chafing away cold. "But it's all right with you around. I'm just... not used to being alone."

"I understand," I said.

"Do you?" Her hand snaked out suddenly and grabbed my wrist. "You're going to leave again, aren't you?"

"What do you mean?"

"You're going to go home and leave me here, alone! I'm not used to it. I've never been...all by myself..." She shook her head. Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

"I'll keep visiting, Madeline. You don't have to be...alone..." I wiggled my fingers, but she wouldn't release my wrist.

"I _needed_ Sarah. She knew, she knew and she left me anyway. Left...first for you, then...She was so tired. She said I wore her out. But I just wanted to be with her!"

"Madeline! Please, calm down." I twisted my wrist out of her grip.

"Amanda... Amanda..." Her voice was very quiet. "Don't you want to be with me?"

Her eyes bore into me with a feral intentness. Madeline's mouth hung open, revealing bright, slick teeth. I found I couldn't breathe, could barely move. My wrist still ached from her grip on it.

"I...I... _no_." I stood and started for the door. I heard steps behind me—without Sarah in the house, Madeline had no reason not to leave it.

With no care for looking foolish now, I ran across the street, back to my apartment, and shut the door. For a moment everything was still. I heard my own panting and sank to the floor.

The doorbell jingled. "Amanda?"

I almost rose but then I saw her face pressed to the hall window above me.

"Amanda..."

I curled against the wall, shivering. I didn't answer.

* * *

At some point as evening fell Madeline returned to her house. I don't remember it well; I know only that sometime the silence returned, and by then I was too weary to move. I was exhausted... so exhausting... I remembered what Sarah had said.

_It's so exhausting being needed._

I slept long and deep, until noon the next day, so deep I never heard the sirens. The first I knew of anything was when I rose from the hall floor, rubbing my aching muscles, and looked through the front windows.

The Brellin house was a smoking ruin.

The fire department judged it started in the compost heap, the desiccated, mounded leaves smoldering in the heat, then bursting into flames. It happens sometimes, though rarely with such a spectacular effect. Sparks must have jumped a long way over the dry lawn to ignite the house.

Firemen found Madeline while shifting through the rubble. I didn't attend the funeral. I don't know if anyone did.

At first, I wanted to leave town, but I didn't have the money and I wasn't certain I could find another job. I did get a new apartment several blocks away. Of course, that was only to be expected, given what was across the street.

There's still something about being alone that gets to me, the quiet, the realization that there's nobody nearby I can rely on, no one to hear me, no one who cares. But worse than being alone is finding myself with only one other person. Sooner or later they'll have to go, and I'll be alone again, or worse—I'm afraid one day I'm going to try to stop them from leaving.

But I feel so tired, having no one to rely on, no one to be with.

The sisters weren't well known in town since they rarely left their house—don't I know that—but sometimes, in conversation with my old neighbors, or in the farmer's market, or at the little gothic church I've joined, the names come up. And that's the last part of why I wrote this: to explain to everyone why I shudder at the mention of Ms Brellin.

I can only hope the explanation doesn't drive you away.

* * * *

_Therese Arkenberg exists in a state of flux, though once she lived near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She read H.P. Lovecraft at a formative age. She's written ever since she remembers, and her fiction has appeared in_ Beneath Ceaseless Skies _and_ Daily Science Fiction _. WolfSinger Publications released science fiction novella,_ Aqua Vitae _, in 2011._ Ms Brellin _originally appeared in_ Semaphore Magazine _._
GETTING THE MEAT

Nathaniel Tower

MY WIFE AND I wanted meatloaf, but we didn't have any meat ready. Shelly thought she could scrounge something up from the garage where we keep the big industrial freezer she insisted on getting because her sister had one. I was left cutting onions and measuring ingredients while she went to find the meat.

After ten minutes of chopping and pouring, I realized she hadn't returned. I put down my measuring cups and went to the garage to see what was taking so long. There she was hacking the shit out of a carcass, blood erupting all over her face and torso. She had my best hacksaw in her left hand and our hedge clippers in her right. I'd never seen such aggression.

"What the hell are you doing?"

Her lips curled into a smile, her pearly whites speckled bright red. She looked sexy.

"I'm getting the damn meat ready." She assaulted the body with the hedge clippers.

"What is that?"

"It's meat. I already told you that." The sawing of flesh and crunching of bone and tendon almost drowned out her words.

"What _kind_ of meat?"

"What the hell's it matter?" She tugged with all her might. "Did you cut all the onions?" She set down the hacksaw and hedge clippers and used my heavy duty wood chisel to scrape the meat off the bones into a big cleaning bucket.

"Yeah, I just finished." I watched her boobs gyrate and her little arm muscles ripple.

"Great. Go get the food processor."

I ran inside, the fastest I'd moved in months, a young servant eagerly obeying his master.

When I got back into the garage, she yanked the processor from my hand and loaded it with the flesh. It was dark and thick, swirled with shades of tan and red.

"Take this out," she said, nodding to a stuffed garbage bag. "Take it out the backdoor." She switched on the food processor. The grinding was horrible, a cacophony of whirring and shrieking and clashing.

I lugged the trash outside. It easily weighed seventy pounds. Thank goodness for those extra heavy duty bags guaranteed not to rip. You know the ones. They have the commercial where a piano falls from the sky and lands in the bag and nothing breaks.

I tossed the bag into our trash bucket and it tore open. A couple of clean bones fell out. I picked one up and examined it like I was holding a rare archaeological find. I tried to figure out what type of animal yielded such bones, but I gave up and tossed it in the trash.

I picked up the torn bag and a few more bones slipped out, along with a pair of blood-stained jeans. I checked the tag, a size forty-four waist. Not ours. I tossed them into the trashcan and emptied the bag onto the grass. Among the pile of bones I found a green t-shirt, a pair of socks, and some tennis shoes. A belt and wallet came out last. I checked the wallet, but it was empty. I scooped up everything and tossed it into the bin, closed the lid and went inside.

"What took so long?"

"The bag broke."

"Shit. Those bags aren't supposed to break."

"I guess we should sue for false advertising."

She switched on the grinder and I watched the meat shred to itty pieces. "Last batch," she yelled.

On the floor I noticed over a dozen gallon-storage bags full of ground meat, zipped up to keep the blood from seeping out.

"Where the hell did you get all this meat?"

"At the store."

"How much did it cost?"

"I got a good deal." She laughed. "It was to die for."

Terrified and horny, I didn't want to get on her bad side, so I laughed with her.

"Should I get ready to cook the loaf?"

"Yup. Here's some meat." She tossed me a handful of ground flesh. In the kitchen, I slapped the clump of meat into a smooth loaf with my bare hands while working in the chopped onions, bread crumbs, and other ingredients. Satisfied with my work, I plopped the loaf into a pan and placed it in the oven. I wanted to go back in the garage and see Shelly at work, but I knew it was best to clean up first.

The doorbell rang while I was washing a bowl. I dried the bowl on my way to the door. My neighbor's wife, Janice, stood on the porch wearing a pencil skirt and a tight eggshell blouse that showed off her sizeable tits.

"What's up?" I asked.

I looked up from the bowl and noticed she'd been crying.

"Have you seen Darrel?"

I could tell she was trying not to sob and I felt a bit foolish when I realized I was still toweling off the bowl. "I saw him leave for work today."

"Who's at the door?" Shelly called.

"It's Janice."

"Invite her in for some meat."

"Want some meat loaf?" I asked.

"I need to find my husband."

She seemed preoccupied as though she were worried something terrible had happened. Knowing Darrel, I figured he was fornicating in a cheap motel. That was Darrel's style. He wouldn't spring for a nice place.

"Do you have any idea where he might be?"

"Probably stuck in traffic, that's all."

"I've called four times and he hasn't answered once. Something's wrong. We're supposed to go out tonight, and he's over two hours late."

I looked at my watch and saw it was after seven. Shelly had been chopping meat for almost two hours now.

"I'm sure he'll turn up. You know Darrel." I laughed at this, not really sure what I meant. "You must be hungry though. Come have some meat loaf. Then we can go look for Darrel together." I wasn't sure why I said that either, but some ideas rushed through my head while I thought about running around town with Janice looking for her fornicating husband. It was almost as hot as my wife covered in blood hacking the shit out of some carcass. I know it sounds weird, but I'm not a fetish guy or anything. I've never done anything kinky. It was just hot though.

"I guess I can do that." She looked distant and unsure. Her eyes were sunken and I wasn't sure she could even see out of them. "Let me go change first."

I wasn't happy about that. No doubt she'd come back looking less sexy.

Shelly was in the kitchen getting a drink of water. With blood stains all over her sweaty body, she looked like one of those buff chicks in a workout video, all tan and glistening, but it was like a horror workout video where she'd just finished a workout that involved killing people. A murder workout. Now that's a fitness craze I could see catching on.

"Is Janice coming over?"

"Yup, she's coming. Had to change first. Want to get cleaned up?" I gave her a wink.

"And her husband?" She threw me a devilish smile.

"Oh yeah. Funny story. She can't find him and he won't return her calls. He's probably with some number from the office."

"Or maybe he's stuffed in a trashcan somewhere."

Her laugh doubled mine, her sweat-and-blood-covered body rippling with each chuckle. I just wanted to get her in the shower.

"C'mon, let's get cleaned up."

"But there's no time for messing around. We need to get our feast ready. We can't just serve meatloaf. That would be barbaric."

She started laughing again, so I laughed too, picturing Janice sitting there, probably in jeans and a sweatshirt, eating nothing but meatloaf.

"Can you imagine Janice just eating meatloaf?"

She doubled over at the image. "Maybe she'll figure out where her husband is then."

I laughed too, not really sure what was so funny about that. Truth is I felt a little bad for Janice. She had no idea her husband was such a sleaze ball. I couldn't imagine what it must be like to be married to someone who could do such terrible things.

While she showered, I cut some vegetables and heated a few baked potatoes in the microwave. I opened a bottle of wine, a nice cabernet, and then set the table for three. It was odd seeing three place settings.

My wife was still in the shower when Janice came back. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, just as I had predicted. I wondered what her panties looked like.

I offered her a glass of wine. "Did Darrel come home yet?"

She shook her head. "No, Darrel's still not back, and he still isn't answering his phone."

I poured a full glass for myself. "That's so bizarre. Want me to call?"

She sighed. "If you want."

I pulled out my phone and dialed. My wife came downstairs in a tank top with her hair still wet. A cell phone started ringing in the garage.

"Honey, I think your phone is ringing," I said, covering up the mouthpiece.

"That's funny," Janice said. "You have the same ring tone as Darrel."

Shelly shook her head. "That's not mine."

Janice bolted for the garage and returned with her husband's phone.

"What the hell is Darrel's phone doing in your garage?"

Shelly shrugged. "Honey, why don't you get out the meatloaf."

I did as I was told, wondering if maybe Darrel had left his phone in there last night when we drank a few beers and stared at the car.

Shelly opened a cabinet and pulled out the still-bloodied hacksaw. I stood frozen in the kitchen holding the meatloaf.

"You can toss that out," she said. "Change in the menu."

She sliced into Janice's face with the hacksaw. Blood squirted in all directions.

The meatloaf slipped out of my shaking hands. "What the hell are you doing?"

She didn't seem to hear as she ripped the hacksaw right through Janice's breasts. She tossed one to me. "I've seen you eye these boobs before. Enjoy the feast."

My eyes widened as I observed the brutal killer my wife had become. She clutched the hacksaw like it was a prized possession. She was panting and had a deranged look on her face. I looked at the bloody body and the meatloaf on the floor and it all started to make sense. Except I had no idea why my wife had murdered our neighbors.

"So are you just going to stare, or are you going to screw me?"

I didn't bother to ask questions. We'd never screwed so hard in our entire marriage. The sex was the best I'd ever had. And the new meatloaf was as delicious. It only took a bite to realize why she'd done it. It was the best meal of my life. Now we have a freezer filled with packages of ground up meat. That stupid freezer finally paid off.

* * * *

_Nathaniel Tower writes fiction, teaches English, manages the online lit mag_ Bartleby Snopes _, and juggles (sometimes while running). His fiction has appeared in over 200 online and print magazines. Visit him at nathanieltower.wordpress.com to read his mind._
TILL THE DOGS COME HOME

Ian Kappos

I CUT THROUGH THE heavy air of the hallway like a spatula through old grease. My vision swims in the humidity. The walls of the hostel appear to sweat from what the pest control company calls a heat treatment; they couldn't have picked a better time than summer to implement it. I reach the door of room number six and knock, using the wall for support.

"Enter." The voice filters through the door as if through water.

The man previously known as Ronnie Granger sits full lotus on a nest of old newspapers in the middle of the room.

"You're insane," I tell him, and lay a banana beside the door.

Mohesh Gupta smiles behind the surgical mask. "Thank you for the food, Liam." His mask and beard buffer his words to a barely discernable grumble.

Ronnie has always been a soul-searcher. In his youth, he would gallivant about his hometown spray-painting the word _tse-wu_ —the Tibetan word for "compassion"—across the walls of buildings, until his spiritual mentor scolded him about the environmental hazards of spray paint. Ronnie later forsook this guide when he moved to Philadelphia to study under the direction of Sufi scholars. Since then Ronnie has hopped from one brand of spirituality to the next the way some people bounce between lovers. These days it's Jainism, an ancient Indian religion emphasizing steadfast, meticulous non-violence in all acts.

"How are the track marks?"

I self-consciously clasp my hands behind my back. "Healing. Slowly, I guess."

"As they're prone to do."

"How are the bedbugs?"

"Suffering."

"As they too are prone to do, I suppose."

"It's an unfortunate state of affairs."

Grains of lice trace the wiry contours of his facial hair.

"It has to be over 120 degrees in here. How can you stay here? Why are you doing this?"

"Someone must stand vigil."

"Stand vigil...?"

"All beings are on the journey to _moksha_. All beings suffer, as you and I do. The bedbugs die in this heat, but you and I don't. It's a difficult thing for a soul to acquire human birth. I intend to honor this privilege as I pay my respect to those that haven't yet acquired it. How's your mother, Liam?"

"Healing." My brow has become a reservoir. I turn to leave.

Mohesh Gupta calls out some Hindi farewell. I mumble a not-so-pleasant English one.

* * *

"God, grant me the serenity..."

Gray faces to match gray walls and a drone that would shame a washing machine. It's a smaller turnout than last week. Lots of swiveling heads, lots of wrinkles and twitches and downcast eyes, people with thumbs poised over cell phone keypads, not quite sure of themselves.

Wetbrain Walter is in attendance. He never misses a meeting that serves free coffee, which today he spikes with Listerine from a bottle he keeps hidden inside his fatigue jacket.

God, grant him the serenity.

The speaker isn't the most inspiring. It could be the mood I'm in, but there's no denying the high point of this meeting is the endless grumblings from Walter. The man has the vocabulary of a pigeon spoken with the accent of an open sewer. His recovery is a consistent reinforcement to maintain sobriety. Wetbrain's story is written in scars and patches and curses. Worlds more inspiring than any of these smug assholes talking about how much they've gained from letting God in and the booze and dope out.

* * *

"So whudju think?" Lee looks at me as if for confirmation of his own evaluation.

"It was shit."

Lee nods. "Yeah."

We're standing on one of the many streets comprising the infamous Pill Hill. An NA meeting in this territory is similar to discovering a house cat in a safari.

"OCs, OCs..."

"Chiva, chiva, chiva..."

"You good, bruh?"

The ambiance isn't unsettling as it is surreal. Stomping grounds will eventually stomp back.

"They say I'll get the results in four days." Lee stares at his feet. "More or less, they told me."

Lee is a skinny guy with more hair on his arms than on his face—and he could use some hair on his face. The craggy lines carved into his features remind me of the landscapes of Mars I used to see in old sci-fi B-movies. There are broken blood vessels on his nose and broken blood vessels in his eyes. Lee's eyes say it all. I don't really know what to feel for Lee, and I try not to spend too much time thinking about it.

* * *

The sun is as high as I want to be by the time I get back to the hostel. In its glare, the building's facade looks like a watercolor painting done in shades of sewage.

In front of the piss-and puke-washed steps, Mohesh feeds bread to a couple of mutts. The crease in his mask and the wrinkled borders of his cheeks reveal the hidden smile on his face. The crust punk owners of the mutts look on with suspicion, though they make no move to discourage him. One of the mutts doesn't resemble any breed I've seen. Mismatched eyes, one green and the other an off-yellow. It makes a point of keeping its distance from Mohesh, creeping in only to snatch up the pieces of bread closest to it, a guarded and insidious look in its discolored eyes. Tied around its throat is a thin hemp rope, the other end of it knotted around one of the punks' belt loops. The creature moans, inhaling measured breaths, but its yellow teeth, jagged like wavering stalactites of urine, hardly attract my sympathy.

"Crocotta," Mohesh says to me as I try to slip by up the stairs.

"What?"

"Crocotta," he repeats. "Crocotta were a mythical wild dog in India and Northern Africa. They were ugly, feral, a lot like this one here. Turns out they were probably just hyenas. That's what they're saying nowadays, at least. Similar to recent assertions concerning the South American chupacabra, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Forgive me, Liam. You know I'll talk till the cows come home."

If there's anything that bothers me, it's his courtesies. "It's probably just sick."

"Scumfuck," one of the crust punks calls, and the mutt in question withdraws from the banquet. The dogs and owners trudge up the sidewalk, heralded by the clattering of a shopping cart. Mohesh watches them go in silent reverence.

"Didn't sound much like 'crocotta' to me," I say, ascending the stairs. With each step, my knees melt to jelly and my spine splinters like a toothpick. I grab at the railing.

I don't remember making it up the next three flights of stairs, turning the key to my door, or crumbling onto my bed like a sack of wet clay. I rarely remember much these days.

* * *

I wake up in a cold sweat, clutching the urn. Someone is knocking at the door.

"What do you want?"

"Phone," replies Mr. Bonjani, the manager.

I place the urn on the bedside table. When I open the door, he's still standing there.

"Phone," he repeats, scowling at my disheveled appearance.

I swipe a lock of greasy hair from my forehead, rub the gunk from my eyes. "Who is it?"

"Did not say."

As always, Mr. Bonjani's turban is immaculate, the broad puff of his beard emerging from beneath. I once made the mistake of suggesting he talk to Mohesh but he wrinkled his hooked nose, rebuking the idea with a scoff. Southern Indians have little love in their hearts for the Jains of the north, let alone white boys playing dress-up. Nothing can be more divisive or inclusive than hostel-living.

We twist down the narrow staircase to the second floor. The reception area is nothing more than a converted room, the doorway halved by a makeshift desk. On top of it, a telephone lies beside its receiver. To my relief, the windows are open and the temperature is once more at a tolerable level.

"Hello?"

"Liam."

A warm swelling diffuses in my chest. I mute an awkward choking noise that bubbles up from my throat. "Mom."

"Liam. Come home. This has gone on too long." Her voice breaks a little but it doesn't lose its sternness.

"I'm not leaving."

"Bring Dad home then. Bring Dad home and then do what you will with your life. But. Bring. Dad. Home."

"Dad is home."

"You've lost your mind, Liam. Do you hear me? You've lost your fucking mind!"

"How'd you find me? How'd you know where I was?"

"Don't change the subject on me. Do you know what you've put us through? Freddy hasn't shut up since you left. Earlier this week he bit your brother. Bit your brother, Liam. He got stitches all down his cheek, all down his jaw. We had to put Freddy down yesterday. We put Freddy down and you're already gone before we could mount Dad on the mantle and your brother won't stop crying. Liam, why did you leave—?"

"Freddy's dead?" My hand is shaking and I nearly lose my grip on the phone.

"It was so hard for me to find you, Liam. Your cell phone was off, your..." Static shudders between her words. "Please come home. If you don't—"

"I'm not coming home. Freddy's dead. Dad's dead. Why would I come home?"

"I wanted to call you and ask you. I wanted to ask you, I was hoping you'd listen. I don't know what else to do, Liam. I'm calling the cops. I don't know what else to do."

"Goodbye, Mom."

I lay the phone down. Mr. Bonjani regards me from the far corner of the reception area, arms crossed.

"Mr. Bonjani," I say. "It's been nice."

I grip the railing and pull myself up the stairs with feet like slabs of concrete. Once inside my room, I open the windows, turn on the bedside lamp, and wait for the room to cool down. I gaze at the urn and wonder about all the little bedbug souls drifting up through the air, like ashes up a vacuum. It doesn't take long for a chill to set in.

* * *

_The walls are made of paper and Ronnie wears a kimono. This isn't right, but nothing ever is and nothing ever makes sense. It is hot._

_Ronnie sits full lotus in the center of the room. In his lap sits a tabby cat whose petulant mewing fills the space like helium in a balloon. Everything wavers._

_Ronnie brandishes a knife and at the sight of it, the cat calms a little. Ronnie uses the knife to skin long strips of flesh from the cat's tail. The cat's purring is cataclysmic. It nuzzles its head against Ronnie's breast. Ronnie smiles._

_As a heap of bloody furry accumulates at Ronnie's side, he strikes up a conversation with me. He says something in Japanese and I say something like "fuck you."_

_The cat has donned an expression of utter placation. The yellow of its irises fragment into smaller irises of yellow, and these irises of yellow grow legs. The legs wiggle and then shatter like glass. The yellow irises eject from the black pits of the cat's eyeholes._

_Tiny bug-bodies spread across the floor, which I now notice is soft and springy, like a sofa cushion._

_The ground squirms. The knife rises into the air._

_"Moksha," says Ronnie. He isn't wearing his mask._

_The blade slices through the cat's middle, through Ronnie's middle. Fractals of red glisten in the sea of living floor._

_It is so hot._

* * *

The breeze cracks open my eyelids. I look to the bedside table and address its lifeless occupant. "Dad, I'm running out of places to go."

I gather up the least crusty of my garments while birds chirp somewhere nearby. It's dark out, the stars hidden behind a foam of churning gloom. Evening has fallen on the unsuspecting and the indifferent. Not even the birds know what the fuck's going on.

At the bottom of the second flight of stairs, one of Mr. Bonjani's daughters plays with a fire truck and a doll, earnestly cramming the doll into one of the seats but it is too big for the compartment. I walk past, careful to avoid eye contact. Her humming stops. My body crackles to life with a million little itches. My nerves are finally coming to life.

I'm at Mohesh's door before I realize where I've gone. As always, it's open.

"Liam." Mohesh's voice is nothing but pleasantness. I hate him.

"The dog," I say, pointing to the ugly crocotta-mutt that's staring down the untouched banana on the floor.

"Yes, the dog." The mask doesn't muffle the fondness in his voice. "Yesterday I found him—it's a 'he'—walking back up the street. That rope that was around his neck, the end of it was frayed, like it had snapped clear in half. No one was pursuing. He seemed even-tempered enough. Didn't seem to be in much of a hurry. I brought him up—by the way, please don't mention any of this to Mr. Bonjani, I'm only trying to feed—"

"Ronnie," I interrupt. "Do you believe in omens?"

_My god, withdrawals really have gotten the best of me._

The dog regards me with an implacable stare.

Mohesh gazes into the near distance, clearly in thought. Suddenly it's hot again. I don't know if I'm sweating or if invisible fleas are exploding across my flesh in acidic bursts. I don't want to scratch myself. That dog's eyes...

"In the context that I suspect you speak," Mohesh finally answers, "no, I don't believe in omens. Allow me to pose a question to you, Liam. Why do you think that, after meeting this dog earlier today for the very first time, it now stands in this room with me?"

"Because you found it later on and you took it in."

"Maybe. But certainly you agree that the first meeting of this dog wasn't an omen, or a premonition, of its now much more prominent role in my immediate life."

"I guess."

"I'm partial to the theory of causality—that is, that one action enables another to occur in response. Karma functions roughly according to this paradigm. It is natural mechanics contingent on spiritual virtue. When deduced to the bare spiritual circumstances of my experience and this dog's experience, it is suffering and acts that breed suffering that brought us together. It's further testament that a string of meritless actions propagated our convergence. Maybe you've heard the saying 'misery loves company.' Well, karma runs a circuit. My old sadhu once told me—"

"Thanks, Ronnie."

The hallway seems much longer with my head steeped in the amputated words and phrases of Mohesh's rant.

_String of meritless actions...causality...misery loves company..._

The smell of wet dog is intoxicating.

Some Indian soap opera blares in the reception room. In order to make out the ringing, I have to pull the phone as far away from the receiver as the cord will allow and smash my face against it. It rings for far too long.

"Hello?"

"Lee, it's me. Do you still have the other half of that round-trip ticket to Arcata?"

Shuffling. "Probably. Around here, maybe."

"I'm gunna need that."

"Uh..."

"Lee, I need this. She found me, my mom found me. She called the cops. She knows where I am."

The scene on the TV reaches a fever pitch.

"Man, I can't just... do that. This thing cost me. I paid for it, you...I, uh...paid..."

It occurs to me that Lee is high.

"Lee. What do you want?"

"I got my results, man." His voice is a croak. If he wasn't so loaded, he might be crying. "I got my ticket."

Or laughing.

"Lee, I'll help, man. Just tell me what to do."

If there is still an ear on the other end of the line it's no longer devoted to hearing me out.

A hollow _thunk_ crackles across the connection.

"I'm coming, Lee."

I drop the phone. The staircase rushes up to meet me. My legs pull me forward with the unlikely strength of a poodle tugging its owner toward a busy intersection. Accidently, I kick the miniature fire truck aside. Behind me, the girl hurls a string of high-pitched complaints.

"I'm sorry," I yell, not turning around. At any moment, I expect a leg to fail me and send me tumbling down the stairs, mercifully.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I don't know, I'm sorry, I don't know."

* * *

Lee's hostel isn't far from my own. I pull my hood over my head as I pass by a huddled group on a street corner.

"Chiva, chiva..."

"OCs..."

One thing I've always liked about overcast evenings is that you never can quite tell what time it is. An ambiguous uniformity to my surroundings lends everything its own little charm. I can breathe. The night itself is one big coughing fit in an expanse of quadrilateral gray. The worst of my shivers has finally begun to subside. Everything is damp, so I'm not without company. I almost start crying when I accidentally step on a snail, and somewhere in the back of my mind Mohesh cackles.

Soon I'm enveloped in the fluorescence of a hostel lobby, relieved to find the receptionist asleep at her desk. I slip past her and up the stairs, my only witness a drooling paraplegic whose eyes don't leave a muted television. The smell of antiseptic thins, sours the air.

I press my ear up against Lee's door, but it does no good—the hallway is rife with late-night argument and delirium.

"Lee?" I turn the knob and push the door in, not waiting for a response.

Lee's arm and upper right half of his body are pinned at a weird angle between the bed and bedside table. One leg is off the ground, barely touching the floor with the tip of a toe. The other leg is bent beneath the rest of his disoriented anatomy. He is naked but for a pair of holed boxers. Beneath the lamplight, a blue tinge has settled on his already sickly skin.

_How can that happen so quickly?_

The phone is still off the hook, emitting a distant dial tone. Constricted in a tangle of telephone cord is a syringe, the accompanying gear lying in a mess not far away.

His face is turned away from me, but I don't need to get any closer to inspect. I know he's dead. I know what dead looks like. Dead is still and blue and awkward. Dead is composition. Lee is just that.

"Lee. You fuck."

In a corner shaded by the door, someone or something says, "Blow, tenor, blow." And laughs.

All I see are a pair of eyes, trembling in the darkness, alight with mirth. One green eye, the other yellow, wide and spherical and crazed and disembodied in an expanse of blackness, framed by the light of a moth-infested hallway and the cooling, already forgotten body of a young, defeated junkie.

The night is cold and I'm thankful for that. All sounds of activity mesh into a stuttering cackle around me. When I'm propositioned on my way up the street, I can't distinguish the words from the rest of the white noise fizzing between my ears. I don't look at anyone. The moon above is a rheumy blur among bored ghosts.

I can't call the police, even anonymously. I wish I could say to myself in confidence that someone will find him, soon. That someone will pay him a visit, that someone will eventually single out the aroma of decay and go investigate. But I can't say that to myself, not in confidence. Never in confidence.

I can't bury my hands into my pockets deep enough, pull my hood low enough over my face, or raise my feet high enough off the ground to be anything more than a slick shuffle across broken pavement and soiled newspaper.

A growl disperses the cacophony in my brain.

A brown shape barrels past me, dragging along with it the snarl that shakes me from my reverie.

"Stop it! Stop—"

Mohesh is screaming, clutching his face. The surgical mask is in tatters, hanging from his ears, framing the bloody shutter of his face. One cheek dangles lamely from his jaw.

"Stop—" He pulls up to me, gasping, and points.

The dog is still visible, a darker blur in the fog, descending the slight incline of the street. I start running. Traffic lights stutter yellows and reds, and there's not a car in sight, or a pair of eyes that aren't bloodshot and dazed and diffident. Mohesh still wails.

_How did I get back so quickly?_

Intersections leak by. Bus stops and grating and crosswalks and hooded figures are nothing more than smudges idly floating by in the reservoir of cold humidity as I dart across pavement, the dog ever ahead of me. We cut, turn, zigzag. A new smell whips me with every stride, like leaves if I were running through a forest.

_This isn't an alley, is it?_

The walls are close together, leaning slightly inward at the top. They seem to be made of plywood or something equally cheap and hazardous. Holes in the woodwork drool ants, termites, spiders. Tin roofs overlap in places, as if cut by a kindergartener's inept scissors, edges gleaming, limned in the light from the pregnant moon that I know hides just beyond a rough contour here or there. I don't remember where I saw the moon last.

Filling the negative space between the walls is a mess of sunken cardboard architecture, molding mattresses, dilapidated makeshift fortresses. Little sparkles of glass catch the light. Two spheres of yellow and green shimmer at the end of the tunnel. I pick my steps with caution. The eyes are patient.

Animal musk pervades everything. The scuttles and squirms of insects are as audible as the crunching of dry leaves and bottles beneath my feet. It takes all of my willpower within me to yank my gaze from the eyes at the end of the alley in order to check my footwork.

I move in, increasingly conscious of the distance I'm putting between the moonlight and myself. The absence of a draft is suddenly apparent. I feel the walls closing in. I panic for a second, thinking I've lost the eyes, but realize it's just mine that are closed, and by then my hand has already found the doorknob.

It's hot inside.

They line the walls. There are more eyes than I anticipated. Yellow and green, yellow then green, yellow, green, yellow, green. A succession of frenetic traffic on pause and playback. But there are faces, too. Faces stretch into the distance. Halogen lights positioned beneath each one push dark fingers of shadow up through the contours of their features. Yellow, green.

I can't see the ceiling. It could be miles high; there could be shelves upon shelves of faces above this one. I keep my eyes low.

In a curl of patchy brown, the mutt lies beside one of the halogen lights. It snorts, appears disinterested. It stinks.

My feet pull me down the hall. The lights simultaneously have the semblance of frailty and an intense deliberation. But it isn't the lights that I'm focused on now.

Wetbrain Walter looks dignified from this angle. Detached, extracted from the splintered mush of his body, mounted up high, eyes half-lidded, serene perhaps. There is a truth in each and every one of those scars. A proverb for every pockmark. The lank spillage of unkempt hair is regal, every fallen lock divine in its positioning.

Other visages from half-dreamt days follow Walter's—beaten and lordly, worn and hallowed. All familiar in the way that the smell of a childhood home long forgotten and then rediscovered is familiar, or a mother's favorite dish gone to rot.

Of course, there is Lee's face. A perfect porcelain chunk of degradation. The stubble on his chin shines and stretches like crystallized maple. The smell of vinegar permeates from his freshly mounted head—gutter cologne—and it makes my eyes water.

An itch skitters past my ankle: a rat on the run. Then, a shadow, much larger, now a cumbersome shape pushing past me, falls toward the fleeing rodent. A terrified squeak, followed by a gurgling cackle.

Mohesh turns around on his back, propping himself up on an elbow, the head of the rat pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He laughs. His mouth is an abattoir.

"Dogma! Dogma, Liam! Dogma Ronda wants to preach. Sing it with me, Liam! Dogma Ronda wants to preeeeach. Liam! Come on, Liam! Dog-ma Ron-da wants-tah preeeeach."

Ronnie Granger engulfs the upper half of the rat's body in his mutilated mouth. He hums through the crunching. I feel a scratching at the back of my throat. _Squeak squeak, squeak squ_...

The mutt looks on in approval.

Turn.

Run.

My pumping legs carry a beat.

_Dog-ma Ron-da wants-tah—_

Screeching cars and catcalls enshroud me as the alley falls away behind my kicking feet. A sluice of piss and suds lazes down the slope of sidewalk. I run through it, my heels squirting up the cocktail while a man with a hose stands aside to let me pass. The salt of an ocean breeze tingles my nostrils.

The hostel looms ahead. Among the cars parked haphazardly around the entrance stands Mr. Bonjani. Men in suits follow me with their eyes. I slip on my way up the stairs. Bruises never stopped me before and fuck if they will now.

My key glides into the lock as my pursuers ascend the stairs. I rush in and grab the urn. When I turn for the door, my foot catches on a bedpost and the urn sails from my grasp. A powdery explosion spreads across the floor.

If you look hard enough, you can see a face in anything.

The footfalls grow audibly, drawing closer, interspersed with a dialogue of we-just-wanna-talk and hey-there-sons. But I hear something else, too. A whine, an imploring, a litany of atonal fuck-its and wherefores, and it is something like the whimper of a beaten pup.

* * * *

_Ian Kappos was born and raised in Northern California. His short fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from_ Specious Species _,_ Neon _,_ Crossed Out Magazine _, and_ Pravic _. An art school dropout, he lives and attends community college in Sacramento, California._
ABOUT THE ARTISTS

The cover art is an original oil painting by Marisa Cole. Marisa is an established, Seattle-based artist and a graduate of the Pacific North West College of Art. Her work is surrealist in nature, emphasizing fantasy and science fiction themes that often explore the mythical and the erotic. Her online portfolio can be found at marisacole.com.

Story illustrations are by Luke Spooner, a freelance illustrator and painter from South East England. His projects and commissions include graphic novels, album artwork, children's books, and eBook covers and illustrations. His online portfolio can be found at carrionhouse.com.

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