Orphans of Bliss

Tales of Addiction Horror

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wicked Run Press

“The wicked run when no one is chasing them”

Proverbs 28:1

 

Orphans of Bliss: Tales of Addiction Horror is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

 

For more information, contact: WickedRunPress@gmail.com

 

 

Edited by Mark Matthews

My Soul’s Bliss edited by Julie Hutchings

Cover Art by Marcela Bolivar

Cover Design by Mark Matthews

 

Copyright 2022 all rights reserved.

ISBN Paperback: 9781736695043

ISBN Digital: 9781736695050

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Praise for ORPHANS OF BLISS

 

"Powerhouse anthology”"

—Publishers Weekly

 

"This triumphant conclusion to Matthews' trilogy of anthologies is a must add to all collections... All ten are compelling horror stories on their own, but gathered together, they hold power, one that will break readers, opening their eyes to a truth we are all facing, something that only the very best horror is capable of.”

—The Library Journal, Starred Review

 

"A phenomenal collection of addiction stories, written by a list of authors who qualify for a who's who of dark fiction's best."

—Char’s Horror Corner

 

"I absolutely loved and devoured this book. Haunting, powerful, and chilling. I cannot stress enough how much you need this on your shelves."
—The Wandering Reader

 

"Memorable, visceral, cutting stories that will resonate with horror fans."
—Booklist, Starred Review

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents

 

You Wait For It, Like It Waits For You

by Kealan Patrick Burke

 

One Last Blast

by S.A. Cosby

 

What We Name Our Dead

by Cassandra Khaw

 

Huddled Masses, Yearning to Breathe free

by John FD Taff

 

Through the Looking Glass and Straight Into Hell

by Christa Carmen

 

Holding On

by Gabino Iglesias

 

Buyer’s Remorse

by Samantha Kolesnik

 

A Solid Black Lighthouse on a Pier in the Cryptic

by Josh Malerman

 

Singularity

by Kathe Koja

 

My Soul’s Bliss

by Mark Matthews

 

 

 

 

The Frozen Seas Between Us: An Introduction

If there’s one thing ancient Greek philosophers and schoolhouse rock agree on, it’s that three is a magic number. Welcome to the third and final fix of addiction horror.

The Final Fix was to be the subtitle of this work, but I feared it would lead readers to believe they had to read the previous two anthologies first. You don’t. You can start here, you can end here. Whatever your starting point—Orphans of Bliss, Garden of Fiends, or Lullabies for Suffering—you’ll find tales of horror featuring the insidious nature of addiction, told with compassion for those who suffer from the affliction.

That is not to say that all three are the same. After the success of Lullabies for Suffering, which was nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, I wanted to end with the biggest one yet. The goal was more diversity, in both writers and content, and that’s what you’ll find here. There’s an amazing and eclectic list of authors including two New York Times Best-Selling writers, a USA Today Best-Selling writer, and a host of Bram Stoker award winners, all who bring their unique talents to the table. Settings range from dystopian worlds to deep space, from urban barstools to rural woods, told in a manner only possible through horror.

Perhaps my first big scare from horror as a child was from the TV series Salem’s Lot. That friendly face of a vampire at the window, beguiling you to let them in, only to drain your lifeforce, made a permanent psychological imprint. I feared going past a window in my house, scared not so much of the vampire, but of myself, since I knew I wouldn’t resist the vampire’s seduction. The desire for that warm and friendly presence, though a deadly illusion, would be too much for me to deny.

Such is the pull of addiction.

The bliss that drinking and drugging offers eventually fails to deliver what it once gave freely. The initial feelings of heaven on earth, that warm blanket, that soothing lullaby, over time leaves you with a cold loneliness and a bitter heart. Even as mind, body, and soul are destroyed, addicts still crave that which is killing them. It’s a life of perpetually crawling through a scorching hot desert from one vanishing mirage to another, living, as the title suggests, like an Orphan of Bliss. That famous literary orphan, Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, perhaps described it best when he said, “My soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself.”

Horror can shine a revealing light onto these demons, the dark truths of addiction, in a manner no other genre can. In this way, horror, even at its most grotesque, can lead to a deeper understanding of addiction and offers compassion for the sick and suffering addict. “Horror is not about extreme sadism, it’s about extreme empathy,” Joe Hill so aptly noted. Our hearts are fragile, the horrors we have to navigate are very real, and the genre understands that. It doesn’t flinch from telling our story, and when it rings true, we can’t help but listen and learn about our journey.

“Storytelling has a narcotic power,” said bestselling writer Robert Harris, and part of that power is helping us feel less alone. “Books are the axe for the frozen sea within us,” said Franz Kafka. To take that a step further, books are the axe for the frozen seas that separate us. When we live through a tale of trauma, it binds us together as if we’re part of a family, no longer living with the loneliness and the singularity of obsessions, as described in Kathe Koja’s short, mystical story inside.

This holds true not just for those who’ve suffered from addiction, but those who’ve been touched by it. After reading Cassandra Khaw’s story about an adult child haunted by the ghost of her substance abusing father, you will inevitably feel the character’s abject loneliness, but at the same time, once you finish reading, feel quite less alone.

Of course, one should not confuse this anthology as treatment for addiction. Horror stories are hardly enough to convince someone to get sober, nor is the goal here to condemn those who use substances. Despite my twenty-five years of recovery, God knows if I could use substances and get by, I would be doing so, (right now, in fact). My unhealthy love and craving for them will never die. It nearly killed me, and at the time, I felt hopeless. Like there was no other option than to keep pursuing the fleeting sense of bliss that delivered only suffering.

But recovery is possible, miraculous as it may seem, and I hope it’s clear to everyone reading this that treatment is out there, and so is another way of life. Some of the happiest, most spiritually powerful people I know are those who’ve been through the hell of chemical dependency.

Horror as a genre is a testimony to this ferocity of the human spirit that faces our demons. We love Jamie Curtis from the Halloween franchise because, like her, we all have to constantly fight monsters, often from our childhood. And even if the battle is won, the war’s not over. Michael Myers gets up from the spot on the lawn, after that cathartic moment when you were sure he was dead, and he runs back to the darkness from whence he came. Like addiction, the monster is not conquered, but only in remission. Those in recovery learn not to feed the beast, but to keep it locked up as best as possible. Like Annabelle, the doll from The Conjuring, trapped in a glass box where they can’t hurt us any longer. The recovering addict knows all too well what horror often teaches, such as in The Haunting of Hill House, there are not just haunted houses, but haunted people.

You’ll find this theme of the chronicity of addiction in Orphans of Bliss more than in any of the previous collections. You Wait For It, Like It Waits For You, the lead story by Kealan Patrick Burke, is about a man whose addiction is a perpetual specter to be faced in fever dream nightmares. And there are witches on every barstool, as in Josh Malerman’s story, where drinking provokes the desire, but takes away the performance. Josh’s story is a sort of King Midas curse for those who feel they can never get enough to drink. We can try to escape and run for cover, as in SA Cosby’s story of a deadly version of meth that overruns a rural community, but safety is a ruse. Addiction will hunt you down, and you better be armed, because there it is—smash—against your trailer’s window pane.

Christa Carmen is in recovery from addiction, and this is completely evident in her story that depicts the cunning and baffling power of substances. Readers are in for a shock when they follow an addict trying to get clean Through the Looking Glass and Straight into Hell. Even if we stay clean, but don’t dig into the deep corners of our psyche to make changes, we stay sick. This is the case in John FD Taff’s cosmic story about a man who has stopped using drugs, but hoards his character defects piled high in his basement cellar.

You’ll find a sense of abject loneliness in these characters who are longing for connection that addiction shatters, such as in Samantha Kolesnik’s story. Her tale is about a character who is constantly craving a new identity with perpetual consumption to fill her empty spaces. Her addiction is not of a drug, but the cycle follows the same template.

Gabino Iglesias was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for his work in Lullabies for Suffering, and in Orphans of Bliss, he’s once again created a whole new world. This time, it’s a dystopian landscape where the government banishes those who are hooked on drugs, while making sure it infects the most disenfranchised. It’s a super-charged story that only Gabino could write, and he is certainly not afraid to go there, so hold on tight.

The sharpened axe of each story aims for a different target inside the frozen seas of our soul, but they all work in harmony with each other. I saved my own short story for the end, the funeral for these monsters of the human heart. But death and funerals are not the end in horror, just some new beginning. As brother Heathcliff says, our soul’s bliss kills the body, but does not satisfy itself. But that’s okay, because we have each other stories to tell as we walk hand in hand through the darkness. We don’t have to take this immense journey alone.

Thank you, dear reader, for being a part of the addiction horror family.

~Mark Matthews, January, 2022

 

 

 

*1-800-662-4357 (HELP) is a free, confidential, treatment referral and information service for individuals and families facing substance use disorders.*

 

 

 

 

 

You Wait For It,

Like It Waits For You

by

Kealan Patrick Burke

 

 

The last thing I remember is Maggie’s voice transmitted to me from some distant planet, telling me I was going to be okay, that I didn’t need to worry, and that she’d be there waiting for me when all this was over. I remember thinking that was an easy promise to make when she wasn’t the one about to drown in her own poison.

 

Day One

 

I wake up bathed in sweat that smells of sour milk, the mattress cover sticking to my naked back. When I sit up, it peels away from me like dead wet skin. My mouth is the kind of dry only people who’ve walked deserts can understand. I’m too hot, too cold, and confused. Where am I? My head is a wasp’s nest, and something has maddened the hive. Breathing seems optional, a trick designed to make me stop, and my chest is stuffed with cotton. My limbs don’t feel like my own, rather it’s as if someone crept in while I slept my uneasy sleep and screwed on shoddy replicas designed to keep me from running. My bones vibrate with the need to be free of this imposter’s coat. I am damp, and I am scared.

Opening my eyes is raising an old heavy curtain on an old heavy world. Already I don’t want to be here before I even know where here is. Certainly, it’s not home, not the bedroom I have shared with my wife for over ten years, not the kids’ room where often I’ve fallen asleep drunk and/or high because I confused it for my own. Ew Mommy, Daddy wet the bed. It’s not even the couch where Maggie used to make me stay after one of our endless screaming fights in which I called her a nagging bitch and she called me a hopeless addict and a rotten drunk, a routine that was old before it ever began.

It takes me what feels like fourteen years to swivel my shuddering body so that my feet are on the floor, which is wet too. Blearily, and with no curiosity at all, for that would require some active cognizance on my part and my brain is basically a knot of dead coral, I find that the tide has come in. Foam hisses against my ankles as the waves break. Briny water enwombs my pale feet.

It is time to know where I am.

I raise my head and hot ball bearings roll around my skull like untethered cannons on a storm-tossed brig. A fitting sensation, for this is a war I have declared on myself, a war in which I’m the only enemy, and I am outclassed.

The room is small, little bigger than a prison cell. The green tile floor is buckled and uneven as if something is trying to push through from beneath. The view through the only window in the room is obscured by condensation. In the opaque fog, someone—perhaps me—has fingered out the message 99 BOTTLES OF BEER ON THE WALL. Around the window, the walls are covered in flocked floral wallpaper, though “covered” is being generous. Here and there it has started to peel away. Flaps of it loll like idiot tongues. Beneath, the concrete wall is cracked and spotted with specks of mildew. When I tilt my head back, the cannons roll again, and I wince. Before me a lightshow as the pain causes universes to be born and destroyed in my vision. I await the calm and look up at the ceiling. A single naked bulb dangling like an eyeball on an optic nerve is the locus of an otherwise unremarkable grey expanse.

There is no door to this room. Only that window.

Maybe I’ve awoken into a dollhouse.

Probably I have awoken in Hell.

And as I suspect I would if the latter were confirmed, I lie back down in the cold damp bed, draw my knees up to my chest, and weep.

 

Day Two

 

If there was a night, or dark, I don’t remember it, but there is a glow pressing against the window that could be the benign radiance of a forgiving dawn or the birth of some hellish monstrosity somewhere beyond the glass. I note with a spark of amusement that the words in the condensation have changed. There are only 72 bottles of beer on the wall now. Surely I haven’t slept that long? But does it matter if I have? Time is meaningless here, just like everything else.

My focus now is on the screaming of my organs, all of which are imitating my bladder and threatening to burst. My heart feels like a desperate prisoner hammering on the doors of his cell, begging for clemency that will only come when he is allowed to die. My joints are rusted hinges. Statues have been erected in less time than it takes me to stand.

I go to the window, and with the heel of my hand, sweep a translucent rainbow into the mist of my expiration.

There is a garden out there, untended and overgrown, wild with brambles and weeds. Once, it might have been an orchard, but those broken black trees have been strangled by leprous vines. What fruits and flowers have weathered the chaos look gravid with pustulant poison. Ravens stand atop the remains of ruined walls, eyeing me with Poe-like disdain. Vermin scurry fervently through tunnels in the undergrowth. Thorny veins rise from the verdant mass to scratch at my window. They don’t want to come in here where there is nothing to subsume. They want me to come out so I can be strangled and returned to the earth. I might, but there is no door and no latch on the window. Security wire has been threaded into the glass like needles into veins. This is, I assume, for my own protection. Letting the garden devour me is a mercy I have not yet earned.

My bladder lets go, soaking my thighs with welcome warmth. In life, I might have been ashamed (though evidence suggests the contrary), but this is not life. This is Nowhere, and for the time being, the only place that will have me. There is also nothing to do. No books, even if my eyes could stay focused long enough to read them. I am not even alone with my thoughts, which are too fractured and dislocated to serve much purpose. I’m just here, a caged animal waiting for whatever comes next.

What comes next, is a dream with sharp edges.

 

 

 

Day Three

 

I am no longer in the room, no longer in that miasmic pit. I am in some lazy artist’s impression of the real world. It’s a visitor’s room, and I’m alone but for a young woman with long tangled blonde hair and dark roots who sits at one of the other tables. She wears colorless scrubs, and I’m wearing the same. Neither of us look good in them. Her face is stark-white but for the dark semicircles beneath her luminous blue eyes. A slender trembling hand brings a long-ashed cigarette to her pallid lips. She sucks on it as if it’s the only thing keeping her anchored to reality. When her eyes find me, the complete absence of emotion in them makes me look away to the row of tall windows at my back. Through them I see a much more inviting view than the one in the real world. Out there are lush green trees swaying in the summer breeze, blood-red cardinals flitting from one unsteady branch to the next. Through the phalanx of pines, green hills roll away to the horizon. There are crops and farmhouses. It’s all very pastoral and pristine. I live in the city. This bucolic portrait is no more familiar to me than the room in which I’m certain to awake, with its view of a rotting orchard, but it’s a great deal more comforting.

Muted voices in the hall outside and the door swings open. My heart gives a pleasant jolt. It’s Maggie. She breezes into the room, nods politely at the blonde, who is too focused on nothing to notice her, before hurrying over to my table. She looks…she looks impossibly authentic for a figure in a dream. Everything about her glows from the same inner light I’ve been denied or have denied myself. Her eyes are bright, her smile radiant, her hair a wave of autumnal grace. She sits down across from me and the scent of her is maddeningly familiar and heartbreaking.

“Hi honey,” she says and reaches across the table to take my hand. Though her joy is like a clown at a funeral, the warmth of her skin is welcome. If this is a dream, I don’t ever want to wake.

“Hi.” My voice sounds like an engine stalling. The idea of releasing with any degree of success the desperate scream trapped in my throat seems like mythology.

“You look good.” She was never a good liar.

“You too.” Because she does.

“How has it been?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I shake my head and it makes my teeth hurt. “This dream has been the best part so far.”

She looks confused for a moment, but then smiles and squeezes my hand. “This isn’t a dream, honey.”

I never liked being called ‘honey’, but I like it just fine now. It feels like the only exit in a room consumed by fire.

“Am I?” I ask.

“Are you what?”

“Am I the dream?”

“God, no, babe—” I never liked ‘babe’ either. “This is real. I’m real and so are you. Do you know where you are?”

“Inside myself. There’s the room, too, though that feels—” I massage my raw throat in the hope of giving the words gentler passage. “That feels strange.”

“Babe, you’re in Smith Pines Clinic, in Harperville.”

“Why?”

“You OD’d.”

This sounds like secondhand information from an unreliable narrator, a tale that has traveled so many mouths, it’s lost all truth.

“When?”

“About a month ago, but listen, we don’t have to talk about that now.”

“We can. We should,” I tell her, operating on the assumption that she’s an emissary from my subconscious, dispatched to fill in the blanks in my memory.

She nods, perhaps remembering what past doctors have told her about the benefits of confrontation and culpability. We can’t, after all, atone for the things we deny.

“You don’t remember anything at all?”

She might as well be asking if I remember taking my first step. I give her a slow shake of my head.

She takes a deep unsteady breath. “You went on a bender. You were gone for the better part of a week. I was worried sick. Then, on that last night, I came home and you were…with someone.” She looks down at our conjoined hands, the memory clearly paining her. “You’d brought someone home to our house. A woman. We fought, then I left. You were drunk. Very drunk. And high on something. Your nose was bleeding. I don’t know what happened to push you over the edge, but you helped yourself to every narcotic in the house: Percocet, Vicodin, Oxy, all of it. You said you wanted to die because it was the only way out. You said you wanted to go back to the sea.” She brought her free hand to her brow, shielding her eyes from me. “You almost did. They said you suffered hypoxia, starvation of oxygen to the brain. You were in a coma for ten days.”

I nodded at her as if she’d just read from the TV Guide. “I miss you. I wish you could come with me.”

“Where?”

“To the room.”

She regards this invitation as something better dismissed. “I miss you, Sean. So do the kids. They say hi.”

“The kids.” Specters from some other life. “How are they?”

“Worried, but being brave.”

“Are you worried but being brave?”

“I’m hopeful. You look better than I’ve seen you in a long time.”

If I could laugh at that, I would, but the amusement must have reached my eyes, because she qualifies her compliment.

“Worse, but better, if that makes any sense.”

I shrug. “Sure.”

“How have they been treating you?”

They? Does she mean the faceless demons that invade my dreams and stab me with needles and force pills down my throat that keep me docile and sick? “Fine, I guess.”

“Well, that’s good. Hopefully you’ll be able to come home soon.”

I do not tell her that when I try to think of home, every room is bare, the angles mismatched and the colors wrong, like an unfinished drawing. I do not tell her that the longer I’m here and the worse the pain gets, the more she seems like one too. I do not tell her that sometimes I can’t remember the children’s names and that even when I do it feels like something I’m doing as rehearsal for the lies I’ll have to tell when I come back to life. Telling her these things would scare her, and I know she’s scared enough, even if this version of her is a conjuration intended to keep me sane.

“Ron has been good enough to cut the grass for me while you’re recovering. You remember Ron, right?”

“Yes.” But I don’t. For all I know Ron is one of many predatory suitors out there eating up my old life so he can fill the space.

“He said to say hello.”

Time passes as time in dreams will, adhering to no logic but its own, and Maggie stands to leave. I rise too, on legs that try to betray me. “Keep fighting the good fight,” she tells me, and leans over for a kiss. “I’ll come again soon. Hang in there.” The brush of her lips is like the promise of salvation and is just as fleeting, a velvet touch on the cold stone of my face. “It’ll be worth it in the end, you’ll see. Be strong.”

A hug and she walks away from me. Bile fills my mouth and I will it to wait, to just fucking wait until she’s out of the room, even if none of this real, I don’t want to look like the loser she deposited here. But then something happens. FX trickery the dream has been hiding up its sleeve.

Still walking forward, somehow my wife’s head turns all the way around, in ways that would snap a real person’s neck, and her face is slack and gray and dead, her eyes bloodshot and leaking, dripping, running down her face, and now her face is melting too, mouth dropping open at a terrible, impossible angle, tongue tumbling out to splat on the floor, and I scream because I can’t not scream, no matter how much it hurts my baked throat, and her head is red and gray candle wax, an indiscernible mess, done playing human. And she screams at me in ways I’ve heard before, ways I’ve inspired. “I HOPE YOU FUCKING DIEEEEEEEEEE IN HERE YOU RAT BASTARD FUCK.” Right before her body crumbles like a vacated coat, the orderlies appear and they have no faces too, just smooth, unhollowed skin. I kick, I scream, I may have bitten one of them, I don’t know, and he may have punched me in the face (perhaps jealous that I have one) and then I am back in the room with a needle in my arm and the dream is finally, mercifully over.

I drift.

I drift.

I drift away and recall that in the moments before those burly antagonists dragged me away from that awful room, the blonde looked at me again, and this time I saw something different in her eyes as she registered my panic.

Recognition.

 

Day Thirty-Four

 

145 bottles of beer on the wall today and there’s a man out there in the orchard, tearing at the briars and weeds. I assume him a caretaker but something about him is familiar, suggests he’s someone I’ve encountered before. When not willing him to turn and face me, which to my great frustration, he never does, I wade through the seawater in my room and try to recall where I might have seen him. Blue sportscoat, white polo shirt, jeans, slicked-back silver hair. The back of his thick pink neck is crisscrossed with deep lines like a pork roast bound with twine.

Maddened, I try to tell myself it’s my father out there, a man who would never dream of coming to see me when I’ve fallen so low, but perhaps decided to make my view more hospitable as a small measure of love. But no, he’d consider such a thing beneath him. Better to pretend I don’t exist. It might make him happy to know he no longer needs to pretend. His wish has come true. My pain has erased me. Soon Maggie will forget. Maybe Ron will move in, encroaching on my life the way his lawnmower encroaches on my lawn. My kids will mourn me, secretly relieved that they no longer have to live inside a tornado. My keepers will forget this room was ever occupied. The lack of a door will make it easy. Maybe they’ll hear me weeping behind the wall, but soon that will stop and it’ll become a ghost story they’ll use to rattle the nerves of the new hires.

I have a crippling pain in my gut today and I can’t keep food down. I don’t know where the food comes from, but it’s the color of the wallpaper and I don’t trust it, so better that it doesn’t stay. I need to sleep. I need that man out there to let me know who he is. I need to die. This last desire is the strongest of them all.

 

* * *

 

I awake to Maggie’s voice, feel the weight of her on top of me in the dark, an intimacy so far in the past it’s unfamiliar.

“Look at me,” she gurgles, but I dare not open my eyes. Instead, I freeze and beg sleep to return. I can smell the burnt hair, taste the candle wax. “Look at me, you fucking coward.” I won’t, can’t. Her fingers turn to hot liquid on my chest. I cram my hands into my mouth to keep from screaming. The gelid mass of her shifts on my body, her whole weight gathering on my left side where the worst of the cramps live. She knows this, of course. This is punishment, a reminder that forgiveness, should it ever come, will never absolve me from the horrors I have brought down upon my family. Then, because the horror is too close and too dangerous to remain unseen, I open my eyes and she is right there, her obliterated face inches from my own. Her skull is hollow, lit from within by the guttering candles in her otherwise empty eye sockets. Her hair moves as if she’s underwater, and I can feel her hands dripping and sizzling and burning my flesh as she brings them to my lips.

“Open wide, you prick,” she demands, and when I refuse, she forces my jaws apart. Her melting hands slide inside, cauterizing my tongue and now I’m lit from within too, me and my wife like Jack O’ Lanterns in a Gothic painting by some maddened artist.

Jack o’ Lanterns.

Halloween.

The agony summons the hem of a memory gone too quick, lost in my pain as her hand reaches down my throat into my lungs, clenching my heart, flames scorching organs, boiling my blood…killing me.

 

Day Forty

 

In this dream, there’s a doctor. A woman with kind eyes magnified by expensive-looking glasses. Her hair is threaded with gray and held in place by a silver barrette. She sits on the edge of the bed, seemingly oblivious to the stink in the air of sweat and singed hair and saltwater. She has a hand on mine that looks older than her face and she tells me I had a panic attack.

“Can you recall what brought it on?” she asks, her voice convincing mimicry of someone real, someone who cares. I know at any moment she might disappear. There is no door through which she could have entered the room, which makes it most likely she’s a dream. And if she isn’t, I can expect her face to melt and the nightmare to begin again. I’m afraid, and I can’t move. All of them can have their way with me now if they wish, just like Maggie did. The spotlight of blame is fixed solely on me on a stage I can’t leave.

“My wife.”

“Because she visited you?”

“Yes. Her skin came off and burned my throat.”

She weaves in and out of existence after that, her tone changing from nurturing to authoritative as she reminds me of my obligations if I want to get better. When she asks why I haven’t attended meditation and group, I tell her it’s because there’s no door.

“Sean.”

Her voice snaps me from near-sleep, and I crane my neck to look at her. She is standing a few feet from the bed, one hand on the knob of a partially open door. Beyond it I can hear voices, the clatter of a dropped tray, laughter, and low, distant music. I’m no longer where I thought I was. This must be a hospital.

“Life is just beyond this door,” the doctor says. “But not if you don’t let the healing begin in here first.”

I drift away, barely conscious of the labored thudding of my heart, and when I wake again, it’s night, and she’s gone.

So’s the door.

 

Day ?

 

“I know you,” says the blonde. She’s looking at me from across the room, from the same table where she sat before. I’m here to see Maggie, but Maggie is late. I wonder if anyone has ever come to see the blonde, or if it matters when she’s probably just a figment of my enfevered imagination. In truth, I don’t want Maggie to come. She hasn’t for a while and that’s been good for me because I’m afraid of her now.

“They don’t know, do they?” the blonde says, lighting up the third cigarette in as many minutes.

Despite the pointlessness of engaging someone who may only be a facet of myself, I am suddenly curious. “Who?”

She slides ghost-like from her seat and comes to join me. Blowing blue-gray smoke in my face, she frowns as if I should already know the answer. She reeks of nicotine and the fingers clamped around the cigarette are the color of old mustard. “The Outsiders. Your wife, family, the doctors. None of the people responsible for knowing what’s really going on know anything’s happening at all. I know you, because I’m the same as you. I see it in you, the look people get when they see beyond the walls where the monsters live. It’s like an aura you carry when you’ve been marked, cursed. I see it because I have it too.” A dry bitter chuckle emerges from her seared throat like some long-dormant creature yawning itself awake. “They think we’re stupid. They think they have us fooled. They call it recovery, like we wouldn’t recognize the work of the true boogeyman we’ve spent our lives trying to outrun.”

I look down at my hands, pale and bruised. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You ever been to rehab before?”

“No.”

She scoffs and looks around the unremarkable room. “It can look like a lot of things, but it sure as fuck doesn’t look like this.”

“I should go.” I want to wake up before Maggie materializes in this dream and subjects me to all manner of horrors. It’s bad enough that this young woman, this addled lunatic, has inveigled her way into my subconscious, because one thing I don’t need is more confusion.

“They said you died, right?”

“No. I was in a c—”

“What if when you died, your addiction took your soul, transformed you completely, like a demon just waiting for the last door to be unlocked so it could own the house you think is yours?”

When I give a dismissive shake of my head, she sits back, appraises me, then leans close again. “Listen,” she says, and clamps one bird-like claw down on my wrist. “Just listen for a sec. We have to help each other. It’s the only way out. Your room, it doesn’t have a door, right?”

When I say nothing, she continues, her smile revealing missing incisors.

“The door will come when you acknowledge all the things that led you here in the first place. Memories are the key, but don’t be fooled: there’s no reward at the end of it, no salvation when you get out, and no escape. This nightmare, this demon will follow you for the rest of your life. Recovery is an illusion of escape because the addiction is always there. You wait for it like it waits for you. It’s a parasite and just because you don’t feel it feeding off you doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its teeth buried in the back of your neck.”

I rise from the table and tug my wrist free of her grip.

She smiles up at me. “I used to burn ants with lighter fluid when I was fourteen. Guess what kind of little-bitty insects make their homes in my skull now?”

I head for the door, knowing I’ll be awake and out of the dream before I reach it.

Her words follow me into the dark.

“I’ve been here six times.”

 

Day ?

 

There is something less severe about this day. I don’t know what it is, but I feel lighter, and the air looks cleaner. There is no water on the floor, only that bilious, crooked green tile. The condensation and the writing is gone from the window, allowing golden sunlight to flood unfiltered into the room.

Outside, the old man continues to labor away in the thicket. Sometimes he digs; sometimes he hacks. He has removed his shirt and the light makes jewels of the sweat dripping down his scarred back. He’s making progress. The garden doesn’t look nearly so wild anymore. He’s reduced the mass of brambles and thorns and weeds and cut away some of the dead trees. Patches of loamy earth are visible now, and although it doesn’t look healthy from years of lying in the dark, perhaps it’ll come back to life. It gives me the first foreign taste of hope that maybe I will too.

But I am not yet fine. Darkness still coils in the back of my mind, perhaps because I don’t feel as if I have earned this reprieve, not unless suffering counts as currency.

As if in response to my thoughts, the old man turns his head just slightly. His thin lips are set in a grim line above a prominent chin. He listens for a few moments and that sense of recognition flows over me again. Then he goes back to work, digging with all the ferocity of a man on a schedule, and perhaps the schedule is part of the way out of here. If nothing else, it would give me a more stable handhold through the blizzard of days, but it’s too late for that now. I’ve lost track of time.

I move away from the window. Not for the first time I wonder what the old man is digging for, and who he is, but I’m no longer sure I want to know. Today is respite, however small, from the maelstrom, and I will hold onto it for as long as I can in case it never comes back.

 

* * *

 

My children have come to see me, but not in a dream. At least, it doesn’t feel like a dream. They’re here with me in my room. Backlit by a moon large enough to be the eye of a baleful god, Aaron and Caitlin are mere shadows of themselves except for the guttering flames of their eyes. I dread they’ll attack me like their mother did, but these avatars of vengeance and guilt and hate are content to just stand on opposite sides of the window like guardians, whispering. And that whisper is the sound of winter through the fingers of long-dead trees. Stay here forever, they tell me. Stay and don’t come home. We don’t want you to. We’re better off with Mommy. Please just die. If you loved us, you would.

 

Day ?

 

There is an easel in my room. I don’t know where it came from no more than I know who prepares and delivers my food, or how they get it in here without me knowing, but I’m long past questioning it. There are paints too. Cheap watercolors inset in a cutesy white plywood palette shaped like a quotation mark. I remember the doctor challenging my absence from art therapy, so I can only conclude it’s being forced on me, though the notion of exercising any of this horror by painting a fucking meadow is hilarious. So I ignore it, stow it in the corner and do all I’m capable of doing anymore when actual consciousness comes to play: I stare out the goddamn window.

The chaos is gone now. The garden has been cleared, though the absence of the verdant frenzy doesn’t mean it looks cared for. It’s scraggly, uneven, stony, and studded by roots and tree trunks that proved too arduous a task for the old man to manage on his own. A low stone wall separates the garden from whatever world lies beyond.

The man out there is digging a hole in the mossy earth. I worry it’s a grave, my grave, and that maybe he’s the caretaker here, the man who digs the holes for those who have no hope of coming back from whatever hell they’ve designed for themselves.

You wait for it like it waits for you.

Was she speaking of death?

Does it matter?

Defeated, I let my forehead bump the windowpane, my breath rushing around my face as it buffets the glass. Alerted by the sound, the man in the garden turns and for the first time I get a proper look at him, and am shocked by a jolt of recognition that sends me reeling away from the window.

My breath has revealed words in the glass.

The Sponsor would like a word.

 

Day ?

 

“Do you remember who I am?”

I open my eyes expecting to be in my grave, that wraith-like figure from my past standing over me, shovel poised, but instead I see the doctor from a century ago, sitting in a chair by a bed that is clean in a room that does not offer a view of graveside orchards. It looks polished and drab, from the acoustic-tile ceiling to the sky-blue colored walls. A machine beeps sonorously somewhere next to my head.

“Doctor Casey,” I say, unaware until I spoke that her name existed in my brain.

There’s a curious feeling in my skull today. Like someone drilled a hole right into the top of it to put something in there, or let something out, but a tentative probe reveals nothing but lank greasy hair, much longer than it’s been in years.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Casey says, and impressively, she sounds like she means it. “I wondered how you were doing.”

I don’t feel like talking because my throat is raw and sore, but I also feel a crushing panic and loneliness that makes me want to beg the doctor not to leave me alone.

“I’m not doing well, Doctor. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

“After what you’ve put your body through, that’s to be expected. You’re very lucky to still be with us.”

Us? I have to evade all the nightmarish associations conjured by that word. The gravedigger? My Jack o’ Lantern fam—

And it comes to me.

Halloween.

“Talk to me, Sean. I’m here to listen.”

I have to watch it play out on the ceiling first and let the horror authenticate itself as something distinguishable from delusion. But no, there it is. As real as I am, or have spent my life wishing I could be.

“Halloween,” I say aloud. “I told myself it was a dream, that it never happened, that it couldn’t have happened because I’m not a monster no matter how bad I let things get, but I think—” The tears I swallow are acidic. “I think I am.”

“Talk to me. What happened on Halloween?”

I’ll tell her, or maybe I won’t. Up there on the ceiling, the flickering projector is showing the horror movie of that night. I wish she could see it so that I don’t have to explain it. But she can’t, of course. I’ll be forced to confess, and that’s the worst horror of all because it will make it what so many things in my life haven’t been.

It'll make it real.

 

* * *

 

It’s a long story, but all that really matters is the ending.

I don’t recall exactly when it happened, but the kids were younger then, and I was three years dry. I stayed late after work, but was not in my office. The place was empty but for the cleaning staff. I was sitting behind my boss’s desk an hour after he’d already gone home, looking at the bottom drawer where I knew he kept the bottle of Tullamore Dew he used to celebrate new clients. I had one hand clenched around my knee, the other clenched around the phone. I dialed The Sponsor’s number, and it rang, rang, rang. If he didn’t answer, I was going to drink. And that made me hope he wouldn’t answer so I’d have someone other than myself to blame. Finally, he did answer, and I felt like crying, with relief or disappointment, I don’t know.

“Hello? Stephen here.”

“It’s Sean. I want to…I think I’m going to have a drink.”

“Where are you?”

“At work.”

“I will come meet you.”

“No. I have to get home. There’s a bottle here and I want to face-fuck it until it’s gone. Tell me that’s crazy.”

“It’s not crazy at all, but it would be a mistake. You’re three years dry, buddy. Will it be worth it to undo all that hard work just for a short trip to hell? Tell me what’s going on. What’s brought you here?”

The work. It’s always the work, which never seems good enough. I’m disappearing here. Nobody would notice if I vanished. The kids are just being kids and it’s driving me crazy. They won’t listen to me. Nobody listens to me. My dick doesn’t work. Maggie’s worried I don’t find her attractive anymore and I’m worried she’ll find someone else. I miss her when she’s right there. I’m going gray. My car’s a piece of shit, the only one in the lot that looks second-hand. I—

“Just tell me not to do it.”

“I’ve said as much already, but you know that’s not how it works, it’s not that simple. It has to be your decision.”

He talked me down like he always did, with measured tones that reminded me I was in control, and for a while I thought so. Until I found the Percocet in the glovebox of my piece of shit car, left there after Maggie got her wisdom teeth out. I looked from the pill bottle to the doors, which maintenance had locked behind me, and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to roust them just to make another phone call. This was lame justification, but every addict knows that anything, no matter how small, is reason enough when you’re tired and faced with the beautiful promise of chemical bliss. I downed four of the pills and by the time I stopped at the liquor store, I couldn’t remember ever feeling so good about myself.

That euphoria lasted until I got home and saw that Maggie and the kids had carved the jack o’ lanterns without me, despite promising they’d wait. Of course, there was no room in my pharmaceutical fog for the reminder that I told them I’d be home at six and it was now edging eleven.

There were four jack o’ lanterns, one for each of us. The designs ranged from the simple to the intricate, courtesy of a packet my wife had bought at Spirit Halloween. Ultimately the amount of work they’d required meant little in the end because, filled with impotent rage and feeling conspired against, I hoisted the first Sawtooth Jack pumpkin from its wax paper bed atop the kitchen table, raised it in my arms, ignoring the warning flutter from the lighted candle inside its mouth, and smashed it on the linoleum floor.

By the third pumpkin, my wife and kids were standing at the foot of the stairs, faces drawn with shock, as they watched me destroy the fruit of their labors.

“Sean, stop!”

“Daddy, please don’t.”

When I hoisted the fourth, which bore a complex outline of a witch on a broom over a dead orchard, Maggie’s hand was on my arm and she was yelling in my ear. Her voice may as well have come from the moon. I shook her off, more roughly (or perhaps less roughly, I don’t know) than I’d intended, and she collided with the fridge and went down. The kids screamed, and I thought they were either screaming for me to stop, which had the opposite effect, or screaming for their mother, because those little fuckers were never loyal to me, but it was neither.

They were screaming because the last pumpkin I’d smashed had ignited the ragged streamers of pumpkin seed-studded newspaper scattered all around ground zero, and when my wife fell, the flames had caught on the hem of her nightgown. I watched from a million miles away as the fire turned blue, then yellow, and raced in a curiously disciplined line up her gown toward her face.

Then I shattered the last pumpkin on the floor.

I don’t know whether it was the kids or Maggie or all three of them who put the flames out, or how my wife didn’t suffer any serious injuries, but the damage was done, and would, no matter how dry I became or how much forgiveness they allowed me, never go away. Because that night, I was the fire, stealing the oxygen from our lives and using it to immolate all that had been built in our name.

We repaired the linoleum. The next year we went trick or treating. We even carved pumpkins, and if there were wary looks on my family’s face, I didn’t notice, or understand, because by then what had happened the year before was an urban legend, a shocking story I’d overheard about other people and the monsters in their midst.

Not me, I hadn’t done a thing.

 

* * *

 

“But it was me all along,” I told Doctor Casey. She looked troubled now, and I had to assume the focus of her practiced concern had shifted from me to the family waiting at home, the same family that probably held vigil at my bedside when I was first admitted after far from my first relapse.

The projector on the hospital room ceiling flickered and died, became a single thread of smoke that dissipated before my eyes.

The doctor fed me some more practiced lines and squeezed my wrist, repeating the same words my wife had said when all of this came to a head. “It’ll be okay, Sean.”

No matter what happens next, I know this to be a lie. Once upon a time, maybe, but not now. I’m trapped too deeply inside myself.

 

Day 7, 921

 

I wake up to find my Jack o’ lantern family watching me from the shadows, their eyes filled with the oily guttering fire of what could have been if their luck had just been a little bit worse, or if I had gone just a little bit further.

 

Day ?

 

Today I am in a bar, flirting with a woman who isn’t my wife. It’s Christmas and the snow is so bad it’s halted traffic. The woman asks me for surface details about who and what I am and I lie about all of it. Lies come easy to me because the truth is terrifying. If I don’t look in the mirror, I’ll never have to admit what I’ve become. The girl helps by believing I’m anything but a monster, perhaps because here, tonight, she’s running from monsters of her own. The coquettish look on her face, the false modesty in her eyes, and the way she flips her hair and sighs reminds me of the best parts of my long-forgotten bachelor life. It’s two years after the Halloween incident, and I’ve flown straight since then. Until tonight, when the plane abruptly banked and crashed into the side of a mountain. I don’t remember why. Perhaps there was no reason. There doesn’t always need to be one, but when there is, it can be anything from the catastrophic loss of a loved one to the change in the quality of the light through the trees. But, I tell myself, I’ll survive it. Tomorrow. Always tomorrow, I can try again, because despite my compulsions, I love my family, and I don’t want to lose them. Only the seduction of pills and booze and the occasional welcome bite of a needle reduces the enormity of this concept to science fiction.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the woman asks, and in this remake of a memory she’s the ashen-faced blonde from the waiting room in whatever hell I’m in now, even though that’s not what the real woman looked like that night. I just can’t recall her face. But I tell her yes, I would very much like that, because I’ve already bought her three gin and tonics and we’re the only ones here save the bartender, and we’re in a cocoon now, all cozy and warm. The rest of the world, with all its unreasonable rules and conditions, doesn’t exist…until close to midnight when the door opens and a blast of cold announces an interruption to our escape. By then, the woman is sitting close, one warm hand resting on my thigh, her hair tickling my ear. She’s thinking we’re going to leave together. She’s thinking we’re going to have sex, but that can’t happen, because my dick doesn’t obey the commands of a drowned brain. Still, being wanted is nice. She’s probably going to get angry when she realizes she’s brought home a dud, but by then I’ll be too fucked up to care.

When someone says my name, I think I’ve imagined it, but then a hand finds my shoulder and spins me firmly around to face the speaker. And it’s The Sponsor. Stephen. That was his name. Stephen Carver. He doesn’t look happy. Looks like death, in fact. Without thinking, I ask him if he’d like a whiskey, and he sighs and shakes his head, takes the stool next to mine.

“Why are you here?” he asks, and it’s the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life. The only reason we know each other is because I can’t stop coming to places like this, can’t stop gobbling up my wife’s pills, or the pills in the bathroom of anyone foolish enough to let me use theirs, can’t stop shaking hands with lowlife dealers on street corners in the bad part of town, can’t stop not wanting to stop.

My brain sends me a few wry jokes to deliver, but they falter at the look on his face. There’s disappointment in his eyes, and something else. Shame? So I switch gears into apology mode because that’s the only thing that has a chance of working, even though he’ll see through me so easily I might as well be an ice sculpture.

“I’m having dreams,” I tell him. “Frightening dreams, and when I wake up, I can’t always tell if I’m back in the real world or not. And there are headaches, awful headaches, like hangovers I haven’t earned. I feel like I’m losing my grip on things. Nothing feels real anymore, and if that’s not an excuse to get absolutely fucking wasted...”

He nods at the drink on the bar before me. “That’s the only indicator you need that you’re losing your grip. That’s the only reality that matters.”

There’s something not right about him tonight. He’s saying these things to me as if reading them from the back of a pamphlet. The conviction and sincerity are absent and there are red threads in the whites of his eyes.

He is not himself.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” says the woman, and I give her a brief glance and shake my head because I don’t want to tell her who Stephen is, or why he is here, or how he knew where to find me. This is my story, and I don’t feel like sharing it with a stranger.

“Go home, Sean,” he tells me, and the weariness feels like my soul has learned to speak. “Go home while you still have one.”

His phone rings and he glances at it like a man who needs the whole world to be quiet. This time when he sighs, I smell the alcohol on his breath and rather than feel surprise or concern, I feel something much worse: smug satisfaction, because it makes his intervention not just hypocritical, but fraudulent. I want to tell him this, but before I can get the words in order, he pushes away from the bar and heads for the door. “Just go home,” he says.

It’s then I realize he didn’t know where to find me after all. It was just coincidence.

He was coming here to drink at a place where he thought no one would see him and nobody would know. It’s the same reason I came here. We both sought out a hidey-hole.

“Who was that?” the woman asks, a little annoyed that I’m not paying her any attention as the cold breath of The Sponsor’s exit raises the gooseflesh on my arms.

“No one,” I reply, and order us another round.

That night, Stephen Carver, whether intentionally or not, drove his car into a snowplow. He died of massive trauma a few days later. His blood alcohol level was 0.345, four times the legal limit. I remember hearing the news and feeling nothing at all. But I pretended to mourn him because it was an excuse to extend a lapse in sobriety that needed no excuse to continue.

 

Day ?

 

I had food today. Some tepid gruel that looked like mashed potatoes and gravy. It tasted like nothing, and didn’t stay in my stomach long, but one of the faceless attendants here told me it represented progress, and that struck me as hilarious. He didn’t think it was funny.

None of my ghosts came to see me, and maybe that is progress.

 

Day ?

 

It’s overcast out there. Specks of rain hit the window. On the upper right pain is a smiley face I don’t remember drawing, but already it’s starting to drip tears onto the sill. I don’t mind depictions of sorrow. They’re infinitely better than burning eyes. Beyond the glass are rolling patchwork fields. No Sponsor digging a grave, no overgrown orchard. Just hills.

 

Day ?

 

We had a group session today and my god all these people are drab and colorless and empty, like dusty drop cloths in a haunted museum. Is that what I look like? I can’t tell. I’m not ready to look at myself in the mirror. We talked about our art and our feelings and our hopes and regrets. Well, they did. I just listened. All these people sound like they’ve lived inside my head. Maybe they’re my reflection, or maybe I am theirs.

 

Day Fifty-Two

 

Maggie told me how long I’ve been here. It sounds impossible. I thought surely it was long enough for stars to burn out, for empires to rise and fall.

“They’re saying you could be out of here in a few weeks,” Maggie says, and I try to make myself believe her enthusiasm is genuine, but could hardly fault her if it wasn’t. How on earth has she lasted this long after all I’ve done? When I remember the things I’ve put her and my children through, it’s like watching a videotape of someone else’s life, but of course, that’s the only way we can deal with the monsters we become without going insane. We have to distance ourselves from the horror, bestow the responsibility onto some dreadful avatar we only vaguely recognize.

“The kids can’t wait for you to come home,” she says, and the uncertainty on her face is crushing to see. She wants me to be okay as much as I do, but neither of us have much faith that it’ll stick, and this time, if it doesn’t, I think she’ll be done. I’m not even sure it’ll take another relapse to do it, either. Perhaps she’s already done and my recovery is just something her ghost feels duty-bound to oversee. Perhaps she’s afraid leaving me would undo whatever progress I’ve made in here, and she doesn’t want it on her conscience. Or perhaps she still loves me and we can make it through this. Perhaps, perhaps. I want to believe there’s hope, but if I was any good at believing things could be better, I wouldn’t keep falling so deep into the toxic garden inside myself.

All I know is I will try, if not for my own sake, then for Maggie and the kids, even if just to repay the debt I owe them.

It can’t only be for them, The Sponsor intones in my head. If it’s not for you first, it won’t matter who you’re doing it for. It won’t stick.

“I’m excited to see them,” I tell her, and I mean it. They’ve ceased being amorphous presences in my life. I’ve remembered what it’s like to love them. How Aaron almost died at birth. How Caitlin would go to bed and pretend to be sleeping because she was afraid I might be drunk. How they begged me to take them to Disneyland, and how I agreed, and never did.

I can never undo what I’ve done, but I can start making amends. It’s what they teach you in places like this. Own it and make amends, and never ever lie to yourself about who and what you are.

I’m still struggling with that last part.

I look past Maggie to where the blonde sits. She looks healthier than I’ve ever seen her. She’s washed and combed her hair and there’s a new light in her eyes. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time she’s had a visitor. It’s a man whose age and body language suggests paternity, and he’s making awkward small talk with her. A wounded man trying to be okay around the animal who clawed at his heart. She’s smiling a shaky smile, but I feel a surge of warmth and love for her at the sight of it. God bless her, she’s trying too.

 

Day Fifty-Seven

 

More hospitals, more doctors, more tests, more group therapy, more 1-on-1’s, more art. A lot of talk that blurs together into white noise. I’m sure some of it helps, especially now that they insist I participate rather than just sit there with my arms folded, listening, and feeling sorry for myself.

I walked the grounds with Doctor Casey and the air was like a withheld gift, painting the insides of my lungs with benevolent light. I think I might have smiled. I don’t feel quite so sick anymore except for the cold black knot in the center of my chest I imagine is a toxic flower of temptation and fear that, if it ever blooms again, will destroy me from the inside out.

Mostly I feel numb, an android awaiting programming so he can know who to be when he’s allowed back into the world. But that also suggest possibilities. I can, if I want to, be anything and anyone. My job is gone. They got sick of my shit long before they pulled the plug, but that’s okay, I hated it there anyway. So I get to start again, even though it will be tough for a while financially. I don’t have savings. I drank or swallowed it all when, in an act of desperation, Maggie took my bank and credit cards and claimed I’d lost them while out of my mind.

It’s going to be hard, but that’s how it should be. You don’t get to move back into a haunted house and not expect to see ghosts. From what they’ve told me here, I have a medical imperative to never abuse drink or drugs again. They say it will most certainly kill me. I’d like to think that will be reason enough to stay my hand, but one never knows. Addicts don’t fear death. It’s the ultimate high.

 

Day Fifty-Nine

 

Shower, shave, change of clothes.

Today I saw myself in the mirror and it scared the living shit out of me.

The man pictured in my driver’s license bears no resemblance to the hollow-eyed, undead nightmare gawping back at me.

But that’s a fixable problem.

 

Day Sixty

 

A young volunteer came to see me today. She radiated ambition and positively thrummed with the need to help my poor wayward soul. It amused me in much the same way as my constant opening and closing of the door amused her. At her questioning look, I smirked, shut the door again and told her I was just glad it was there.

 

Day Sixty-Two

 

Maggie was supposed to visit today but didn’t show. I tell myself not to read too deeply into that, to speculate about what it might mean so close to my release.

The blonde girl was there though and so was her father. He still seems to have trouble making eye contact with her, and what little physical contact they have is light, hesitant. I don’t know what she did to him, or he to her, but the wall that exists between them is almost visible and will take some time to tear down. The same wall exists between Maggie and me and maybe today was just one in which she didn’t feel like climbing it.

The blonde reaches out and touches her father’s hand. He doesn’t flinch but looks like he thought about it. I’m rooting for her. I like seeing her smile. It transforms her from a lost soul to one who believes there’s a chance she can make it out of the dark. And maybe that’s what she meant a hundred years ago when she told me you wait for it like it waits for you. Maybe she was talking about hope.

 

Day Sixty-Three

 

Maggie called to tell me she didn’t come yesterday because she had a rescheduled meeting with a drug and alcohol therapist. My first thought was that somehow I’d transmitted my disease to her, spread it like the common cold so it could begin tearing her apart too. Then she explained that she and the kids have been getting counseling for families of addicts for the past few weeks and that it’s been helping them to deal with their feelings and preparing them for whatever comes next.

Of everything, this revelation has been the worst of all. I think it broke me, and I couldn’t convincingly listen to the rest of it before breaking into tears.

“We’re doing it for you, honey,” she said, and I could only nod at the lie. She was doing it to repair the destruction I’d caused and all I could see now was a future in which my children grew up warped by my influence, becoming addicts themselves despite vowing to never be anything like their father.

When I got back to the room, the door was still there, but was hanging slightly askew in its mildewed frame.

 

Last Day

 

Today in group, I spoke at length for the first time about all the horror I’ve bestowed upon my family. I opened up about my own upbringing and my fears that history would repeat itself with my children. I was not offered assurances or false promises in return, only adages meant to bolster my journey forward. The responsibility, I was told, will forever be mine. There’s no outrunning such a dirty shadow and trying is useless. You just have to retrain yourself to welcome the light, capture it, and let it shine on the people you love so it can burn away the dark. You must seek forgiveness, no matter how small the units are when they come, and no matter how conditional. You must reboot yourself while remaining cognizant that the same old viruses can still infiltrate the system. You must renew your vow to be a good man and fight daily wars to retain that title. Forever.

Because drink, drugs, all the bad things that change who you are, well, you’ll always want it, and when you find excuses to seek it out, it’ll be there like an old poisonous friend. Because you wait for it like it waits for you. I get that now.

And I want to change.

I have to.

 

D-Day

 

I say my goodbyes to people who’ve become no closer to me than the staff but whom I know I’ll miss because only they understand the unique lullaby of suffering that sings us to sleep. I look for the blonde, but they tell me she’s been discharged. I like to think her new chapter will be a happy one, but I’ll probably never know. I suppose it’s just as likely for her, as for me, as for any of us, that she might be back here in a month, or worse, found dead and gray-faced with white foam dried on her mouth in some sleazy motel room. But I prefer to believe in the better outcome, because that’s my mantra now.

Maggie picks me up at noon. She didn’t bring the kids, because she thinks it would be better for us to reunite on familiar turf and not in the shadow of the forbidding monolithic structure that has housed their addict father for almost two months.

We stop at an Applebee’s for lunch, and I find I’m ravenous, unsurprising given how little I ate at the facility. We don’t talk, and that’s fine. There’ll be plenty of time for that later. At least, I hope so.

Our next stop is Nordstrom’s. We can’t really afford it, but Maggie insists I need new clothes so I can look a little less destitute, so she puts some sweaters, jeans, and new kicks on her credit card. I change into them at the store and toss the old ones into the trashcan outside while trying not to imagine homeless people turning their noses up at them.

Suitably dressed, we head home. On the stoop, as Maggie keys the door, I’m overcome with sudden dread, sure she’ll announce me to an empty void as the children hide from me, afraid of the monster their mother has allowed back into the house, and for a few moments, when nobody comes rushing out to meet me, I’m convinced that’s what’s happened. But then Caitlin rounds the corner wearing her headphones and offers me a shy wave and my heart explodes. There’s wariness in her eyes, of course there is, but the love is there too, and her small smile almost kills me. Aaron appears a moment later and shows none of his older sister’s reluctance. He’s younger and has not yet fully learned mistrust. I wish I could spare him that, but it’ll come, one way or another. He rushes to me with a grin, and I sweep him up in my arms.

“Missed you, Daddy.”

“I missed you too, buddy.”

“Are you okay now?”

The only answer is one I’m not sure is true, but with my boy’s warm cheek pressed against mine and Caitlin moving in to share the embrace, I desperately need it to be.

“I am.”

Maggie has tears in her eyes. I want to believe the memory of our old, good love still swims there too. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

 

 

ONE YEAR LATER

 

Maggie wants to go to the Outer Banks for the summer. I’m not sure we can afford it with how little my job as an accounts clerk is paying me, even subsidized by driving for Uber on the weekends. The trip seems important to her, a further form of healing and a welcome return to the old ways, back when things were less dangerous, so I’m not going to talk her out of it. Besides, it’ll be nice for the kids.

It’ll be nice to be back by the water.

I grew up in a small seaside town. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Whenever my parents fought, which was often, I would walk the shaded road down to the shore, remove my shoes and socks, no matter the weather, and let the tide rush over my feet. It was a form of dissociation, I suppose. It removed me from the reality of myself, made me feel connected to forces that had never tricked me into trusting them. They just were what they were, nothing else. Unknowable, and therefore safe.

It was the last time I remember feeling that way.

Somewhere out on the horizon was a lighthouse and I always promised I’d see it someday. I never did though. All I’ve got is the memory of the light winking in the dark and the sweep of its beam washing over me, purifying me.

 

* * *

 

We went to Maggie’s niece’s wedding today. It started out as a nice affair, everyone dressed to the nines and in good spirits, but when the girl’s father, Maggie’s older brother Dean, stood up, he did not look the same as I remembered him. Instead, he was wearing a blue blazer and a white polo shirt and his gray hair was slicked back. I must have jolted in my seat, because Maggie put a hand on my wrist and asked if I was okay. I told her I was, but I wasn’t, because I’d suddenly become aware of how much alcohol there was at our table, how much there was at everyone else’s table, and how many tables there were, total, in this impossibly long room with no doors. 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

“I’m a proud father today,” said Dean who was no longer Dean. “I get to give away the smartest, kindest, most beautiful woman I know. Except for my wife, of course.”

Good-natured chuckles momentarily distract me from the low hissing at my feet as seawater rushes out from beneath the table, soaking my shoes.

“Sean?”

Abruptly, it feels as if I’ve fooled myself, as if I’ve never left the room and this is all just another hostile façade meant to trick me into believing in sobriety.

“I have to go. I can’t be here,” I tell her in as low and calm a voice as I can muster.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just…something I ate. My stomach’s acting up.”

“Oh, okay. Go then. I’ll make excuses.”

“Uh-oh, looks like I’m losing my audience,” Dean announces into the mic to murmured laughter from the crowd. “You okay, Sean?”

I wave a hand and smile without looking at him, without looking at The Sponsor, because I know what his face will say. Welcome home. We’ve been waiting for you.

I bump into a woman on her way back from the bathroom, and the candles gutter in her eyes as her jaw begins to melt.

Somehow, I keep from screaming.

 

* * *

 

My wife is downstairs cooking breakfast. I can smell it. It tells me I’m here, that I’m in the real world.

But…

But there is something written in the condensation on the bedroom window. I tell myself the kids did it, some sweet innocuous message meant to greet me upon waking. Hello Daddy! and not another accounting of beer bottles. I tell myself the light through the window is supposed to look the way it does, like dirty dishwater infiltrated by a thread of scarlet light.

And I tell myself there isn’t a man out there, his face turned away from me as he silently, patiently digs my grave.

I get up and go to the bathroom, splash some cold water on my face.

I don’t hate the man I see looking back at me, though he carries the weight of his past in his eyes. I don’t like him yet either, but maybe that will come in time.

Healing.

Normal.

Before I head downstairs, I listen, but do not hear the workings of a shovel taking bites out of the thorny earth, and I take a deep breath before going to join my family.

Every day I expect to wake up back in that room.

Worse, I sometimes want to. At least there, the horror is familiar with a promise that someday it’ll end, even if that promise is a lie.

Today, I’m fine.

Today, I’m okay.

Today, I can mimic what I believe real life is like and go be with my family.

Today, I will not look out the window of the small room.

Whatever’s out there, if anything, it can wait.

Like it always does.

 

 

 

About the Author

Kealan Patrick Burke is the author of the acclaimed southern gothic slasher, KIN, and over two hundred short stories and novellas, including Peekers, Sour Candy, and The House On Abigail Lane, all of which have been optioned for film. A five-time Bram Stoker Award-nominee, Burke won the award in 2005 for his coming-of-age novella The Turtle Boy. Burke has had a story in all three addiction horror anthologies, weaved together and taking place within the same universe.

 

 

 

 

 

One Last Blast

by

S.A. Cosby

 

“To Mike,” Tyler said.

Kenny Wayne joined the crowd surrounding the bonfire in raising his red SOLO cup. He didn’t know Mike Jacobs that well but heard all about the OD at Trouble Richard’s trailer a couple of weeks ago. Hit that Ice Man and keeled over stiff as a statue.

“Motherfucker hit that shit, growled like a dog, seized up and hit the floor. That Ice Man is the mega. Made me put my fucking pipe down,” Trouble had said.

Kenny Wayne knew that was a lie. Nothing a meth head liked more than getting a hit of some potent shit that took some other meth head out of circulation. Trouble had probably only put his pipe down long enough to see if Mike was dead. Then he’d picked that shit back up and got him a blast.

Kenny Wayne didn’t blame him. He would have done the same thing. Hold the lighter under the little glass bubble, inhale the smoke that tasted how ammonia smelled and then BAM! Lightening coursing through your veins. Every nerve in your body on fire. Your brain buzzing like a nest of ground hornets. Then BOOM! Five minutes later you’re coming down hard and ready to chase those crystal dreams again.

Kenny Wayne sipped the moonshine in his cup. It burned like dragon fire going down his throat but once it hit his belly a warm sensation moved through his body. His face felt hot but in a good way. He put his hand in his pocket and felt the six small baggies inside. Each baggie had a couple of good-sized chunks of Ice Man. He was selling them for fifty bucks a pop.

Tyler Grandison’s annual Fourth of July bonfire was the best place in the county to move this particular brand of crank. Everybody under 35 but over 18 in Cutter County was here. If you believed the local newspaper, the county was being overrun by drug addicts and drug dealers. He should have no problem unloading his stash. He might hold one back for himself.

Like the guy in the commercials said—he wasn’t just the president, he was a member.

Kenny Wayne had just arrived a few minutes before Tyler had convinced everyone to toast Mike’s early demise. Four years ago, Mike and Tyler had been the two-headed monster of Cutter County’s state champion football team. Tyler was the quarterback, naturally. (With a name like Tyler what else could he be?) Mike had been his favorite wide receiver. They had been thick as thieves back then. Kenny Wayne hadn’t been on the team. He’d dropped out in 9^th grade but he’d seen the two of them strutting around town like a pair of peacocks. Emphasis on the cocks. They’d been big fish in the state’s smallest pond. Then Mike had started sucking that glass dick and Tyler had cut him loose as he moved on to Green Valley State to play ball.

Now here he was, leading a toast to a guy he hadn’t spoken to in three years.

“Fake ass,” Kenny Wayne thought, but he took another sip of Tyler’s moonshine before making his way into the crowd. There was a live band playing a blistering version of “Hard to Handle.” Kenny Wayne saw Donnie Branson standing next to a cooler of beer. He went over and nudged him with his shoulder.

“Hey man! What’s good KW?” Donnie asked. Donnie was a few years older than Kenny Wayne. He was the assistant manager down at the Winn-Dixie. Kenny Wayne didn’t know how much longer he’d have that job. He was rapidly becoming one of his best crank customers.

‘What’s up Donnie? Tyler going all out, huh. Four kegs, a band, two gallons of shine,” Kenny Wayne said.

“Shit, his folks went all out. This the last Tyler Grandison Fourth of July Bash Cutter County gonna see for a while,” Donnie said, his high-pitched voiced hitting soprano notes on the word while.

“Why you say that? He going pro?” Kenny Wayne asked.

“Nah man. Word is he got a degree in finance. Going to New York City. Working on Wall Street,” Donnie said. He threw his cup to his head and took a long sip.

Kenny Wayne never had any desire to go to New York. Didn’t know enough about the place to even realize what he might be missing. If Tyler was heading up North that could only be good news for guys like him. Maybe now he’d have a chance with a hot piece of tail like Madison Carter. Her of the long black hair and the vine of roses tattoo on her thigh. Tyler leaving town was a blessing really.

Then why did he feel a sour knot of jealousy unfurling in his chest?

“Hey KW you holding?” Donnie said in a whisper. Kenny Wayne didn’t look at him but spoke out the side of his mouth.

“How much you want?”

“I got a hundred,” Donnie said.

“Follow me.” Kenny Wayne led Donnie out of the light of the bonfire and into the darkness that bordered the edge of the Tyler’s backyard.

“Hey, is what you’re selling some of that Ice Man?” Donnie asked as they walked. There was an eagerness in his voice that Kenny Wayne recognized as almost sexual. He’s heard it for years but it still makes him queasy. They tell themselves it’s all about partying and getting wasted but he knows, deep down inside in a place he doesn’t like to touch, he’s a slave to this shit.

“Yeah, I got a connect,” Kenny Wayne said, thinking of when he and Josh Kenner had gone down to Norfolk to one of Josh’s biker buddies to pick up this powerful shit. Josh was a hanger-on but he wanted to join up with the biker’s MC. Kenny Wayne just wanted to get high and get paid. Josh sent him inside saying, “just look for the creepy looking dude sitting in the corner of the Shuckers Bar and Grill. Look like a goddamn vampire but he holding that Ice Man. Just tell him I sent you. Don’t fuck up the money and you on your way to getting patched.”

Josh was telling the truth. He was creepy as fuck. He’d seen him as soon as he walked in the bar. He was sitting in the corner with his back against the wall wearing a black turtle neck even though it was the middle of summer. Head bald as an onion with no eyebrows or hair on his face. Big, gray, almost translucent eyes.

He walked out holding bags with the biggest blocks of crystal meth Kenny Wayne had ever seen in his life. He and Josh had both lost a gallon of sweat driving back to Cutter County despite the AC going full blast. Kenny Wayne was doing okay with his package. Josh fucked up. He couldn’t handle holding in his pocket. Smoked up his part and then ran off.

Donnie was in for his own Fourth of July blast with this ice. Kenny Wayne took Donnie’s cash, reached into his pocket, and that’s when he heard the twig snap.

He turned his head and peered into the darkness. The band had switched to playing “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” giving the party goers a chance to slow dance. To grind up on each other and get close.

More twigs breaking. No, not twigs, branches. Something big was moving through the woods. Big enough he could hear it over the band. A bear? Virginia had black bears but not this close to the coast.

“Hey, who out there?” Kenny Wayne yelled.

“Who is it?” Donnie asked.

“I don’t know, that’s why I asked,” Kenny Wayne said. He began to make out the outline of someone moving through the pine trees into the wild azaleas and blackberry bushes.

“Kenny…Kenny….” a voice said. A voice? It was more like a rock being dragged across concrete. A guttural sound that hurt his ears.

“Who is that?” Kenny asked again.

“Kenny….Kenny….you holding,” the voice said as its owner stepped out of the shadows.

“What the fuck man,” Kenny Wayne said.

It was Josh. Kenny Wayne barely recognized him. The last time he’d seen Josh after scoring the Ice, he’d been wearing some boot cut jeans and a black t-shirt. His wild mane of brown hair was spilling over his shoulders like the collar of a royal cape. His beard had been just a wispy suggestion over his jaw line.

But this… this thing shambling towards him out of the darkness was like a child’s drawing of Josh. A child who had forgotten to draw on the boots so Josh’s bloodied feet were there for the world to see. Who had went heavy with the brown crayon and given him a thick, crust-filled beard. Who had gotten carried away with the black marker and drawn dark streaks all over Josh’s face like cuneiform.

“Josh, you alright man? Where the fuck you been?” Kenny Wayne asked.

“He stinks,” Donnie whispered.

“Shut up Donnie. Josh you alright man? Your boy been looking for you,” Kenny Wayne said.

Josh blinked. Hard. Kenny Wayne stared at his friend. There was so much wrong he was having a hard time focusing.

“You….holding. I can….smell it,” Josh said.

“Fuck this,” Donnie said and moved quickly back towards the party.

“What do you mean you can smell it? Man, what are you talking about?” Kenny Wayne asked. Josh shuffled forward, moving closer and into the glowing light of the bonfire.

“Jesus Christ,” Kenny Wayne said. The black streaks on Josh’s face were not dirt. The skin across his cheeks and over his forehead was mottled and rotting. Pulsating sores oozed green black ichor. Kenny Wayne’s eyes moved to Josh’s hair. He was comically vain, buying hair product like he was auditioning for a modeling gig, but the usually luxuriant locks were now caked with dirt and mud. The wind was moving his hair like he was on set of the modeling gig.

Then Kenny Wayne realized there was no wind blowing. Josh’s hair was moving because it was full of maggots. They wound their way through his hair like it was a jungle and they were determined to map its expanse.

“I…can….smell it.” Josh said again.

He lunged for Kenny Wayne. The move surprised him but not so much he didn’t react. Kenny Wayne jumped backwards and fell on his ass. Josh was on top of him in an instant. Cold filthy hands pawed at his pockets. Donnie had been right. Josh stank. A high sweet putrid scent that made him gag from the bottom of his throat. The nausea gave him a panicked burst of adrenaline. Groaning, Kenny Wayne pushed Josh off and scrambled to his feet. As Josh struggled to get up, Kenny Wayne kicked him hard as he could in the head. His size ten connected with Josh’s cheek like he was kicking the winning field goal for the Cutter County Cutlasses.

Fat white maggots spilled from Josh’s ruptured cheek, and for a moment, Kenny Wayne felt certain each tiny maggot wriggling on the ground was also craving for ice.

At the same time someone in the crowd yelled a warning.

“Cops!”

Kenny Wayne saw the red and blue lights reflecting off the side of the Grandison’s two story Cape Cod. The crowd scattered like grazing animals when a predator rears their shaggy head. Kenny Wayne ran across the yard heading for his car. Another set of red and blue lights exploded on this side of the yard. Kenny Wayne saw a cruiser pull up alongside his car.

“Goddamn it!” He yelled. One of Tyler’s neighbors had evidently not given one single solitary fuck that this was the Prince of Cutter County’s last get together. It was after 2 a.m. and they wanted to sleep by God! And now they had Kenny Wayne trapped with enough crank in his pocket to put him away for five years.

Kenny Wayne didn’t plan on spending any time in the gray bar hotel. He left his car and tore off into the woods behind Tyler’s house. He forced himself through the brambles and the branches all the while telling himself he had imagined seeing Josh’s face dissolving right in front of his eyes. He had obviously gone on a two week tweakfest. The kind that made you forget about taking a bath or changing your clothes or brushing what was left of your teeth. The kind of bender where nothing mattered but the lighter, the pipe and the next blast. Kenny Wayne hadn’t taken that trip…yet, but he knew about them. Knew people didn’t come back from that shit.

He stopped and leaned against a tree. His breath was coming in great ragged beats. He was good. It wasn’t like the cops were looking for him specifically. Were they? He had a warrant but it was a failure to appear on a DUI and really who gave a shit about that?

“I think he went this way!” A deep authoritative voice said. Kenny Wayne saw the bobbing lights of the cop’s flashlights cutting through the night.

“Fuck my life,” he muttered. He grabbed the baggies out his pocket and prepared to sacrifice them to the forest gods.

He hesitated.

Did he really have to toss them? They were in plastic after all. Thicker than latex. If he tossed them he was throwing away a shit load of cash. Cash he needed.

People swallowed condoms and moved them all the time.

Kenny Wayne didn’t believe in long drawn-out debates with himself. He swallowed the baggies and made his way back towards the house. Let the cops frisk him now. In a few hours he’d have his product back and Tyler Grandison would be gone. Cutter County would belong to guys like him.

“About fucking time,” he thought.

 

***

Later, much later, after the cops had rousted everyone at the party and made Tyler extinguish the bonfire, Kenny Wayne pulled up to the old single wide trailer he rented for 200 dollars and an hour of banging from old ass Martha Lee Jenkins. He’d graduated with her daughter who was another one of his customers. But Barbara Jenkins only liked girls. She had no interest in exchanging favors for a hit. All things being equal, Kenny Wayne would rather crawl into her bed instead of her mom’s, but beggars can’t be choosers and his own parents had made it clear he wasn’t welcome anymore.

He didn’t blame them.

Kenny Wayne went in the trailer and tossed his keys on the coffee table. He went to the fridge and grabbed a Miller High Life. He sat on the couch and considered running out to Wal Mart tomorrow to get some Milk of Magnesia. Nothing wrong with giving mother nature a helping hand.

He popped the top on the bottle of beer and took a sip.

A hand slammed against the front window of his trailer. A wide white palm that smacked against the glass then slid over the surface like a slug.

“What the fuck,” Kenny Wayne said. He didn’t have a gun. He knew he was an anomaly but he just never felt like he needed one. He was as small time as small time got. The only weapon he had in the house was a baseball bat and that was in his bedroom.

He got up and headed for it when the hand hit the glass again and, this time, the glass shattered. Shards rained down and spilled across his carpet catching the light. They looked like fallen stars.

Josh climbed through the window. His left thigh got caught on the frame and he wrenched himself forward with an unnatural disjointed motion. Kenny Wayne saw the chunks of flesh and bits of denim he left behind. He didn’t have to smell it to know it reeked.

Josh flopped onto the floor. Kenny Wayne backed up until he felt the wall stop him.

Another body followed Josh through the window. Kenny Wayne thought it might have been Jennifer Aspen but last he heard she had gone missing three weeks ago. Another former customer. Another connoisseur of Ice Man.

“No. No. Noooo,” Kenny Wayne moaned. Jennifer’s head was facing the wrong way. Her long, dirty hair fell over her breasts and her sharp, aquiline chin dropped into the space between her own shoulder blades.

Two more bodies came climbing through his window but their faces were so desecrated, their clothes so filthy, he couldn’t say if they were men or women.

Kenny Wayne spun and ran down the hallway. The back door of his trailer was fifteen steps away. Just as he gripped the door knob, he felt hands pulling him backwards, forcing him to the floor.

“I can….smell…..it….” Josh said in that voice that sounded like scrap metal falling into a crusher.

Kenny Wayne felt hands pulling under his shirt and into his belly. Hands that were strong and powerful even if the flesh that covered them began to slip off like a glove.

He looked and saw Josh, Jennifer, and even more faces, all of them in various stages of decomposition. Another hand reached over Josh’s shoulder, tearing and clawing at the flesh over his ribs. This one was attached to an arm clad in the sleeve of a cheap blue blazer.

Mike recognized the suit and the man wearing it. He had been laid down in a casket just days before.

It was Mike Jacobs. Mike, whose death they had toasted to, whose death they hard partied over, had sunk his hands into Kenny Wayne’s chest. Ripping, tearing, searching through his organs, now exposed to the hoard, looking for the Ice.

“Just….want….a….blast,” Mike said as his lips slid off his face and fell into Kenny Wayne’s eyes.

The world turned dark.

 

 

 

About the Author

S.A. Cosby is the New York Times best-selling author of Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland, Amazon's #1 Mystery and Thriller of the Year, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Winner of the LA Times Book Award.

 

 

What We Name Our Dead

by

Cassandra Khaw

 

 

She was exactly fifty-four when her father died again for the umpteenth time. Eleanor watched impassively as his body careened down past the window next to where she sat on the twenty-fifth floor, her office flocked with wide-leafed tropical plants. The air smelled humid and dark and of rich dirt. Clean things, growing wild. Eleanor inhaled the scent deeply as she thought again on her father’s limbs flailing past, how boneless they were, barely tethered to the joint. The sight reminded her of those inflatable tube men outside car dealerships, thrashing at the air, their expressions fixed despite the violent motions of their arms.

At least he’d stopped hanging himself in her presence.

The tragedy of her father’s death was a selfish one. Like the man himself, the event lacked any social grace. The grief it brought lingered too long and took far too much. It shredded Eleanor’s relationships then; it left her small, unsure of herself for the first time in years. And when she finally began recovering from her bereavement, his ghost arrived broken-necked at her front door, unwilling to subside into a soft ache. Eleanor had no doubt at all that it had to do with the fact that her father was an absolute narcissist, wholly unable to even conjecture the idea that people had needs, never mind the thought he should occasionally prioritize those needs over his own. As such, it didn’t surprise her terribly to find his ghost there on her porch, strangling on an invisible noose, his toes wiggling an inch above the floorboards, sun-fired motes of dust and pollen wafting through his legs. A hello so emblematic of the man, she was barely perturbed by her discovery of it.

She had wondered with a lean curiosity if he had taken his pills first to soften his coming death and if he’d been aware of its arrival or had simply hung there, detached from the fears of his body. She wasn’t sure if she cared.

Eleanor watched until the apparition ceased its struggles and then shut the door.

Her father came again the next year, and then the next, and then the one after that. Always around the same time: not quite at his death anniversary but close enough, every visitation lasting longer than the last until finally, Eleanor woke to the realization she could not remember when last she had an afternoon without him in her living room, propped up in a corner, his torso a gaping mouth, the snapped-off tines of his ribs like the teeth of an old drunk. She could recall neither how nor when he transitioned from the stoop outside her front door to the floor beside her television cabinet, and she did not care.

When she and her therapist first autopsied her early life, Eleanor was told there was no silver bullet, no magic potent enough to excise everything that had happened to her. The best she could aspire to was moving forward. Moving on was Hollywood drivel. No one ‘moved on’. Everyone dragged their pasts and their pain behind them. This was why, Eleanor had thought while she sat in the woman’s office, buttoned to her jaw in black silk, post-traumatic stress disorder was a disability, not a blip; why depression was a chronic morbidity. Hurt changes you. Hurt stays. Hurt gnaws a nest for itself in the heart and stays burrowed there until you die.

The worst thing about abuse is how it makes you believe suffering means you’re safe, said her therapist. No surprise that Eleanor found such macabre comfort in being haunted.

But not any longer.

Her father had crossed a line.

Eleanor gnawed on the nail of her right thumb, working the keratin between her teeth until a crescent broke free. Out of the corner of an eye, she saw her father falling again. Eleanor knew. This was him claiming this space as his own, him deciding he belonged here, that Eleanor was now disallowed any refuge from him. Her jaw twitched and clenched around the embolism of her sudden anger: all other thoughts gone, obliterated by that singular emotion, by a rage so paralytic Eleanor thought her heart had stopped.

Maybe this was a sign. The house in which he lived was occupied now by one of Eleanor’s myriad nieces, but there were boxes still rotting in the basement: indexed, color-coded, densely packed with the marginalia of her father’s life and the debris of Eleanor’s childhood, her father having taken everything—every photo, every toy, every keepsake from when Eleanor was too small to do anything but whisper please stay—when he walked out on his family. There were letters too, her mother said. Hundreds of them.

All unsent. All unread.

Eleanor exhaled, sharp, graceless.

Maybe it was time to go home.

 

***

 

Eleanor stood at the gate outside her childhood home, a lean suitcase in her hands, feeling unmoored. Twenty years should have been enough time to bury the little girl who grew behind those walls, who used to dig her father’s empty prescription bottles out of the garbage, and then stack them up, one by one, until they got too high and fell with a clatter, but as Eleanor stood there, skin sticky with the hours spent flying through the sky in a snub-nosed metal bird, she heard her younger self scream. To be here again after everything they’d done to get out; she wanted to claw her skeleton out of her skin.

Before Eleanor could lose her nerve, the front door creaked open.

“Elly?” said a woman, the sunlight colliding with the half-moons of her glasses just so, turning them ghost-white for the flash of a second, turning her ethereal. Eleanor’s breath trapped itself in her throat. Then, the woman was flesh again: a trim Chinese woman no older than twenty-five, hair buzzed so far down Eleanor could almost see a gleam of skull. Eleanor relaxed. As she did, her younger counterpart brightened, began waving with child-like gusto, arm pumping wildly above her head. “It is you, Elly! It’s been so long!”

“Time flies, doesn’t it? Hello, Veronica.” She held her smile tightly.

The woman trotted up to her. Close enough now to scrutinize the texture of her niece’s complexion, Eleanor found herself riveted by the youth on display, the glow suffusing Veronica’s skin. Had she shone like that as well? In that now unimaginable period when she had been young?

“It does,” said her niece. “Although I see time doesn’t fuck with you.”

Eleanor cracked a grin. “It’s not Chinese New Year. You’re not getting a red packet.”

“Damn. The empty flattery works on everyone else.”

Of the honorary nieces and nephews that she’d accumulated over the years, the children of her many cousins, the grudgingly adopted mentees, Veronica was who Eleanor loved best. Although it was rare for Eleanor to make conversation with her family, she made a point of tracking Veronica’s needs, silently and very anonymously funding her niece’s more esoteric obsessions: a stint in creative writing, a six-months course in typography. In the younger woman, she recognized an echo of herself, a version composed with more love and played on better instruments.

“How’s your mother?”

“Annoyed. She says you need to call her.”

Eleanor’s smile did not waver. “I’ll make a note.”

Her niece shook her head. It was no secret that Eleanor had not spoken to Veronica’s mother for ten years and that she had every intention of going to her deathbed hoarding every syllable she could have spent on her sister. So, instead of arguing, her niece asked:

“Are you okay?”

Eleanor cocked her head.

“What? You never know. Fourth Uncle had cancer at forty-two. And people, when they’re dying or, you know, in a bad place, they go back to where it’s familiar.”

A throwaway statement, guileless; still, it stopped Eleanor cold. She thought of her father. Up until the day he bailed on her, she’d functioned as his sin-eater, sitting quietly as he disgorged past cruelties, swallowing his confessions, choking them down. Eleanor wasn’t particularly superstitious but often she wondered if his exorcism from their family was what precipitated her eventual hauntings. Perhaps, without Eleanor there to glut herself on his misdeeds, he became so weighed down by them, he was anchored to the earth. Unable to finish the work of dying until he dragged himself to Eleanor’s door and had her chew the wrongs out from the rot in his belly, disembowel him, bless him with her bile.

Eleanor wrung a shivering breath from the air.

“Elly?”

She shook herself from her thoughts. “I’m fine. I just—I think it’s time. I don’t know how many years I have left.”

“You’re not that old.”

Eleanor flashed a smile. “And honestly, it’s about time I faced what my father left me.”

The humor fled her cousin’s eyes. Veronica looked then to the house, the light gone from her expression too. In its place: the tension of a guitar string wound too tight. At once, Eleanor understood the change for what it was.

“You see him too.”

Veronica nodded. “No. Well, yes. I mean, it’s complicated. The first few months I lived here, I thought I was going nuts. I kept seeing Grandpa everywhere. Except he was this two-dimensional silhouette. Like, someone had cut him out of an old photograph. He’d peer through the doorway or through the railings of the stairs. I saw him standing over me once when I was sleeping, mumbling to himself.”

“What did he say?” said Eleanor.

“You left me,” said Veronica, softly, not meeting her aunt’s gaze.

Eleanor understood what this meant too.

“I’m sorry.”

Veronica shrugged again. “Not your fault. Anyway, it stopped after I got Roger. I feel like Grandpa either didn’t like cats or he was embarrassed about being a creep with Roger around. And it was okay for a while, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” said Eleanor again, but to herself, in a voice too low for Veronica to chastise.

“Then a month ago, he came back.” Veronica clasped both arms around herself. “And he was looking for you. He trashed the house. He kept howling. I just—”

Thirty-five years later, but Eleanor still recalled with lurid clarity the welter of her father’s rage. Both her parents had been angry people. Eleanor’s mother wore the temper like a favorite coat until it wore down at the elbows, revealing the grief beneath. But her father, though, he was a quiet man, reserved in company, charismatic, charitable, committed to the fiction that he was kind, good, beleaguered by a tempestuous wife, a spouse who gave him no respite from her doldrums, wasn’t he the unfortunate saint? Even when he was beating them, beating Eleanor and her sister, he kept to his charade. The pills he took, known for washing the synapses clean, gave him little memory of the beatings. It was only in the liminal moments, when he struck or when he was wrenching someone from their bed, that the illusion slackened, and his fury grinned through his eyes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.”

“The dead aren’t sacred.”

“But it’s Granddad.”

Eleanor took three steps forward and circled Veronica in a tight hug, pressing her niece’s face into her shoulder, holding her. “Enough.”

“Elly, I wish…”

“I know,” said Eleanor. “I know.”

 

***

 

Of the houses in the neighborhood, only Eleanor’s childhood home clutched a basement to its underbelly. The soil was ill-suited: the clay impermeable, prone to flooding. But her family had built one anyway. How they bypassed the local ordinance, Eleanor could not recall. What she remembered was the smell, the pungent wet-earth stench of rotting plants wafting from the stairs leading into the dark.

“I put everything down here when I moved in,” said Veronica once they arrived on the final step, tugging on a pull-chain switch. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t have. The stupid basement is so moist. But…”

Eleanor shook her head. “I understand. It had to be strange enough already, living in a dead man’s home.”

Especially when the dead man won’t leave you alone, Eleanor thought but wouldn’t say out of fear she would call her father into flesh. The light halved Veronica’s face, elongated its dimensions. It discolored her skin and deepened the crevices of her skull so that she resembled an old linocut or a thing scrimshawed on aged bone.

“It was. Still is. I’m grateful for the free roof over my head but sometimes…” Veronica let the sentence die, shaking her head. “Anyway, I’m going to buy groceries. Tell me what you want or it’s just going to be frozen dinners for a month.”

Veronica wouldn’t say it aloud but they both knew what she meant: she wasn’t staying for whatever came next. Still, it warmed Eleanor to see how hard Veronica was trying to make up for her imminent vanishment. “I’ll be fine with whatever you bring me.”

“Are you sure?” Veronica hesitated. “Auntie…”

Eleanor touched a hand to her niece’s wrist, the skin under her palm tacky with sweat, almost frigid. “I’ll be fine.”

Easier to talk in banalities than it was to speak frankly about the hard things. Theirs wasn’t a family scaffolded on affection. When Eleanor’s father died, they didn’t close ranks around his daughters, didn’t extend more than the most nominal of condolences. What they did was congratulate them on being free of a tenured debtor, a black hole of a man whose only gift in life was transmuting money into nothing.

Veronica frowned at her aunt. “Are you going to be okay?”

“You should go.”

Thus instructed, Veronica hurried up the creaking stairs, taking the steps two at a time, leaving Eleanor in the yellow shadows, alone with the debris of her father’s life. There was so much of it somehow. More than she’d initially realized. Like her mother, Eleanor preferred minimalism, routinely expunging the inconsequential from her life. This was foreign to her, this excess, an indulgence in clutter that Eleanor found both unrelatable and repulsive.

She freed a notebook from her shirt pocket and flipped to a bare page, threading a pen through her fingers as she mused on how best to address the herculean task ahead. Part of Eleanor longed to consign the whole mess to the landfill but as the thought whiffed through her head, a box towards the rear of the heap squirmed.

Eleanor drew back a step, cautious.

The container tottered and swayed for another half second before tipping over, spraying the concrete floor with envelopes.

There were letters, her mother said. He wrote you hundreds.

Eleanor attempted to inhale only to find her lungs shrink-wrapped, unable to swallow more than a thread of air. She stood there idiotically for a minute, trying and failing to breathe, the exercise arrhythmic, conducive to nothing but the tightening of the panic roped around her throat. Eleanor wanted to throw up.

Trembling, she dropped to a knee, pawing at the envelopes, a tarot spread of the past. Each of them were marked with her name. Her real name. The one she buried even before she left home so many aching years ago; she could barely even stand reading the N at its beginning

Eleanor tore open the one closest in reach. Inside the envelope was a gold-shot lilac card that smelled vividly of her father’s cologne and a worn Polaroid.

 

N___

I am so proud of you. You’re going to do great things out there. I hope that’s enough Hainanese white coffee to last you the next six months. See you when you are home.

 

It was her father’s handwriting: legible, plain. Her father’s diction, his kneejerk officiousness. The photo was of him and a twenty-two year old Eleanor, one of her duffle bags slung over his shoulder, his hand on her head. In the Polaroid, his hair was still dark, glossy. He wore a grey button-up Eleanor didn’t recognize. The paunch he would grow in his fifties hadn’t yet developed and at a glance, he could have been mistaken for Eleanor’s brother, the two of them wearing identical smiles.

They looked happy.

The problem was this moment never existed.

Between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-two, Eleanor saw her father precisely once and that was at the funeral of his own father, and only long enough to deliver her condolences. He had come with the newest of his wives, a girl in her twenties, ruddy-cheeked, her youth startling amid all that death. She looked bitterly out of her depth and smiled inchoately whenever spoken to, never answering in return, silent save for when she leaned up to cup a hand around her husband’s ear and whisper.

Not once did Eleanor’s father meet his eldest daughter at an airport or walk her to the departure gates. The photo shouldn’t have existed. It could not have.

But it did, anyway.

Eleanor ran a thumb over the Polaroid, turned it over. On the back was a cartoon unicorn with a speech bubble that declared, “You can do it.” She let the Polaroid flutter to the floor, the hand that had held it now balled, its knuckles shoved between her teeth. She kept it there even when her tongue became warmly rinded with a pang of iron. Eleanor’s nerve, which had held when her father’s ghost first came to die at her front door, and had continued to hold through the years of haunting and the long hours at her mother’s deathbed and every hurt in between, shattered at last.

She ran.

 

***

 

That night, she dreamed of her father as a young man, young enough to be her grandson, raw-boned with scarred knuckles, a gash along his upper lip that would heal into his trademark smirk. He stood with a woman she did not recognize but knew to be the one he had wanted to marry instead of her mother. She was lustrous, bird-boned and ethereal. They laced their hands and Eleanor’s father kissed knuckles purpled by what looked like teeth, murmuring into her skin:

“I loved you. But I love her best.”

 

***

 

Eleanor emerged from her dreams that morning slick with sweat, feeling as if she’d been racing in a marathon. Every joint sang out with agony. She winced as she forced herself upright, the thin cotton bed sheets welded uncomfortably to her skin. Eleanor grimaced, peeling herself out of the red tangle of fabric.

Veronica was long gone. She was there when Eleanor stampeded out of the basement, the older woman reduced to a moronic animal too terrified to do anything but allow itself to be steered into the kitchen where it was sat down and handed a wide-mouthed cup brimming with barley tea. Eleanor’s niece asked her nothing. She watched her face instead, studied her with a grim, corrosive intensity. Veronica refilled her cup twice before rising jerkily to her feet. She then scooped her car keys from the kitchen counter and walked away, her expression unchanging throughout, a careful blankness. Eleanor heard the front door click shut, heard the thrum of a car engine, and knew she would not see her niece again until this was over.

The knowledge somehow didn't frighten her. Eleanor was used to being alone. She liked it that way. And there was a relief too in knowing Veronica wouldn’t be anywhere near the house when things finally came to a head.

Eleanor paused at the thought, struck by its portentousness. It should have felt gauche, even embarrassing to be so melodramatic while basting in the golden heat of the morning, but it did not, which unnerved Eleanor deeply. Rather than interrogate her discomfort, she took to studying the small bedroom in which she slept. The pull-out couch bore tufts of dark hair as did the pillow she’d used: signs of Roger’s presence, no doubt. White IKEA shelves lined both walls, narrowing the room. A desk sulked under the only window. There were twine-tied books on the floor; artwork, some framed, others not; a guitar, red as a split lip. Her suitcase was propped up in a corner. Opposite of it was a shadow: the silhouette of what looked to be a man standing with his face to the wall, arms slack by his side.

“Hi, dad,” said Eleanor, softly, more tired than affronted, more resigned than afraid.

It did not move despite being addressed nor did it move when Eleanor rose, cautious, and tiptoed past to the bathroom at the end of the hall. When Eleanor returned after her shower, it was still there though its outline had eroded somewhat: no longer identifiable as a man’s shadow, resembling instead a streak of black paint splattered over the wall. Eleanor eyed it with distrust regardless. She knew her father, and she knew both the type of man he was and how viciously inventive his specter could be.

Eleanor dressed and went down to the kitchen where she briskly made herself a coffee, reviewing the night’s strangeness in her head. Had there really been a note? A Polaroid of her father and her depicting a moment that never was? Or had she hallucinated the whole thing? She was old enough to not discount the possibility of this, and the decades preceding it, being the consequence of a stroke. Maybe, she was dying on a hospital gurney and her brain, out of options, cobbled a last-minute phantasmagoria to distract her from her incipient demise. The idea comforted her. With luck, she would simply wink out, no longer on the hook to solve this mystery. Until then, Eleanor had work to do.

Draining her mug of its coffee, Eleanor began rummaging through the pantry for breakfast. Like most of the house, it was unchanged from when she lived here as a child: an L-shaped extrusion with concrete floors, barred windows above the stove, a faint miasma of gas though it was clear no one had cooked anything here in days. Under better circumstances, Eleanor might have found the tableau pleasingly nostalgic. She cracked open cupboard door after cupboard door until suddenly, she heard clacking, a scrabbling noise as if a child’s trove of polished stones had been jostled and was rattling apart. Eleanor hesitated and then reached for the next door, nudging it open with the tiniest crooking of a finger.

Blue pills fountained out of the opening. Eleanor recognized them instantly. Dormicurm. Her father had he never admitted his addiction, deriding anyone who even suggested his use of the medication was anything but ethical, within bounds of normal. In the same breath, however, he would sometimes brag about how he should have not have had access to the substance, not at those quantities and not with such frequency. How often she heard him wrestling with the prescription bottles, the popping sound of the cap, saw his eyes grow diffused, soft with the effects of the pills.

The volume of the stream increased. Pills sleeted onto the kitchen counter, the floor, pinging off the edge of the bench where Eleanor had sat; clattered atop the table in the makeshift breakfast nook; a frenzied hailstorm of benzodiazepines, blue as Skittles, and it was almost comedic to see. Eleanor stepped back from the cupboards, arms folded over her chest. She said, in a bitter tone:

“Stop it.”

When her father—who else could it have been, after all?—did not stop, when the other cupboards began to rattle in unison, the drawers inching open to drip pills into the growing technicolor sea, Eleanor did the only thing she could, which was to wade through the spill and return to the basement.

 

***

 

Where before there had only been the boxes and the basement and the dark and the wet stink of vegetal rot, there were now stick-figure silhouettes constellating the walls. Eleanor watched them for a minute. They gestured at her, although Eleanor couldn’t tell the intent of their motions, if they were beckoning to her or entreating her to run. On the floor still were the envelopes from the night before, their position unchanged, arrayed like a summoning circle. From where Eleanor stood at the foot of the stairs, she could see a flash of white among the pile, bone jutting from an open wound: the Polaroid.

“Asshole,” she said before she could stop herself, masking her terror with her rage, her awareness of the former’s presence ballooning inside her, infuriating her. Eleanor had not been scared of her father for years, familiarity breeding not contempt but inoculation. How aggravating to feel that gone, her cultivated indifference supplanted by childish anxiety.

“Fucking asshole,” she repeated as she squatted by the envelopes, gutting one to read its contents. There was a Christmas card and three withered chocolates in crinkly golden wrappers.

 

N___,

I’m sorry he was wrong for you.

 

Eleanor married once and poorly, to a man she didn’t love but pitied, responsibility manacling her to him for seven years until his adultery picked the lock. Last she heard, he remarried, his new wife young enough to forgive every discrepancy in his stories. She didn’t.

The next envelope Eleanor tore open held another Christmas card and another Polaroid, this one of her mother staring at the camera, bewildered and beatific, a swaddled newborn clutched in her arms. A sweet pain swept through Eleanor. Even before she read the accompanying card, she knew what it would say.

 

N__

Meet Adam. I joked with your mother about calling him Miracle, but she pointed out how much your little brother would be bullied in school. We can’t wait for you to meet him. I love you.

 

“Hello,” said Eleanor to the dark and to the bulb that had started swinging overhead, harried by a non-existent wind. When she was young, she had wished for the storybook symmetry a little brother would have offered. Eleanor hoped he existed somewhere. She hoped he was happy. “It’s nice to meet you, Adam.”

She unearthed more cards, more photographs, more pictures of moments that never happened, and in each Polaroid, her father’s countenance seemed more dilute, losing texture, losing contour until it degraded to a flesh-toned smear, as if someone had rubbed out the details with their thumb. The cards, too, lost their coherence, the messages fragmenting into poetry, disjointing into unrelated phrases: little aphorisms like those bantered by Hollywood families. Statements like ‘home is where the heart is’ and ‘blood is thicker than water’ and ‘you can always come home.’

Eleanor barked a miserable laugh at the last.

Hurt seeped into her bones, a dull wash of pain that ran down and collected in the basin of her right hip. Eleanor wondered how long she had stooped over the envelopes, feeling her age all at once when most days she couldn’t think to care about what the years wrote on her skin. Eleanor was tired. Palming the back of her neck, she looked up.

Her father’s ghost stood in front of her, a stranger in his solidity, in the straightforwardness of his manifestation. Eleanor was accustomed to watching him die, to watching him rot while he dangled from his rope, to waking with him above her bed, his fingers dug into the lattice of his ribs, prying them open, showing her the coroner’s bounty, the red-sheened mess of blue-gray organs. Not this, though. Not this pale specter with its distended belly, its too-long neck, its proboscis mouth, its sad eyes like coins left to verdigris in the water.

“What do you want?” said Eleanor, glaring at the apparition. An e gui, she thought. Of course, he would become this: a hungry ghost unable to gorge itself on enough.

It went to its knees before her, an opened envelope in its grip, held out like an oblation for the dead. Wordless, Eleanor took its gift and poured its contents into a palm. Another card, its interior black with writing; a single sentence written a thousand times over, scarcely a gap between the letters.

 

N__

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

 

It clicked then. All this artifice. All the letters. All the conjurations of a past a younger Eleanor would have given up every limb to possess. All of it in service of her father’s pursuit of absolution. Pretentions, pretenses. This was all that was and ever would be and how dare he, the unrepentant fuck, how dare he force her to carry the burden of his grief like this, how dare he drag her here.

“No,” said Eleanor, barely aware of the word she spat.

The light of the bulb dimmed to a slick of amber along the surfaces of the boxes and the pitted skin of the thing before her.

“No,” said Eleanor again as her father groped for her hands.

She knew what he wanted: her forgiveness like a knife to finally cut him free, this purgatorial state worse than any hell. If Eleanor did nothing, if she refused him last rites, if she died without allowing this final transgression, his demand for exoneration, would he remain here until the earth was dust in the mouth of the dead stars? And would she do such a thing? When he craved her forgiveness in his death the way he craved for his pills in his life? When she’d spent a lifetime teaching herself how to be better than her past. Wasn’t she better than this?

Eleanor felt the grip on her hands tighten.

“No,” she said again as the dark closed in. “Absolutely the hell not.”

 

 

About the Author

Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer, and former scriptwriter at Ubisoft Montreal. Khaw's work can be found in places like Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Tor.com. Khaw's first original novella, Hammers on Bone, was a British Fantasy award and Locus award finalist, and their novella, Nothing But Blackened Teeth, was a USA today bestseller.

 

 

 

Huddled Masses, Yearning to Breathe Free

By

John F.D. Taff

 

 

Holes.

The human body is full of them, from the millions of pores of our skin to the many orifices of our heads—eyes, noses, mouths, ears. From the closed cavities of our navels to the puckered anuses of our assholes, we’re riddled with holes.

That doesn’t even count the holes we make in ourselves. The piercings, the kid who cuts herself just to feel something. The holes I’ve drilled into my own veins with syringes full of heroin.

But it’s not just us. They’re everywhere. Sinkholes suddenly appearing to swallow wayward cars in Florida. There’s one in Siberia opening on some subterranean kingdom, whose moans and cries carry piteously to the surface. Maybe from a circle of Dante’s hell. There are holes in Central America covering sacred cenotes; calm, crystalline surfaces shrouding the bones of centuries of silent sacrifices.

They’re everywhere, within us, without.

Even far, far away.

The universe might be lit by a spangle of stars and galaxies, but it’s also chock-full of black holes.

Holes even things out.

Ya got stuff, you got holes.

And me? Lord, do I have stuff.

 

***

 

I stand at the edge of the drainage culvert out back of the house and watch a trail of red meander across the cluttered lawn to flow slowly over the concrete lip, languorously drip into the rushing, muddy water.

The crimson blood swirls within the brown water, forming a curlicue within itself, then is carried away—carried away as I could never offer it, never allow myself to be parted from it.

Will.

Its will was always greater than my own.

The will to remain, to stay here. To be collected.

To be hoarded.

Put another way, I’m not addicted to stuff, the way stuff is addicted to me, like it wants inside me, right in that place that’s empty now. The one I used to fill with heroin.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Nature needs stuff.

But this time, my will has won, and I am able to release it.

Just a bit to be sure, but I had let go of something.

It feels new and different, yet strangely familiar, achy and powerful at the same time.

It is a feeling I enjoy.

Letting this thing go, small as it was, feeds the thing curled inside in a way I can’t understand. How could letting go feed it when just yesterday it screamed in my skull for more! MORE!

I breathe heavily, curling and uncurling my hands thrust rigid at my side.

This is it.

I could collect and release.

And it would feed that thing inside me—up to his point only satisfied with stuff and useless objects—feed it and release those sweet, sweet endorphins I crave, and let me rest, while it, too, rested.

I turn back to the house, take in a deep breath, and go inside.

 

***

 

Never believe a story.

All stories are made up, even the supposedly real ones.

I don’t care if it’s a piece of family history told to you by your sainted mother or the guy at the end of the bar slurring his words as he recounts the half-assed tale of some broad he lost out on.

Lies, to one degree or another.

Swirls of truth and untruth.

Maybe I should say never believe a writer. Storytellers are bad. Writers—from your questionable uncle scribbling Supernatural fan fiction all the way to professional authors spinning bestsellers—are worse. Because they make shit “real” by putting it onto paper.

All writers lie. It’s axiomatic, part of the gig.

You’ll read what follows and maybe think, well, that’s a helluva story. Wonder if it’s true?

Or maybe you’ll read this and think, nah, that’s all bullshit.

Either way, you’ll be right, and for all the wrong reasons.

So, let me tell my story already...

 

***

 

The problem began with the rain pouring in through a couple of holes in the ceiling, like the Beatles’ song. See? More holes.

Those holes didn’t stop my mind from wondering, but they did start other people paying more attention to what I was doing.

Hoarding is what they call it on television these days, on those stupid shows where some toothless gem from Akron or Muncie lives in squalor, like in a trailer or in a once-nice house on a dying urban street. Maybe grandpa buys too much shit from Amazon, maybe grandma thrift stores endlessly. Or maybe Aunt Clara is one of the truly maddened, and she shits in Wal-Mart bags and pisses in empty Fiji water bottles, saves them all in the house, which becomes a sort of mausoleum of bodily excretions.

I watch those shows with contempt. I have a TV, sure. One of the few things left in the house that actually works. An old shortwave/Ham radio outfit my dad had abandoned when he abandoned us. A decent CD boombox I can carry from room to room, if I could actually go from room to room. A toaster oven and an electric kettle. A CPAP machine.

All I need, understand?

I don’t hoard so much as…collect. And yes, there’s a distinction. If you know what, great. If not, I ain’t telling ya. I’m not like those poor people in that show.

My will is just not strong enough.

Anyway, there was water getting in, causing problems, nothing I couldn’t handle with tarps and plastic sheeting. Inside the house, I’d pitched a water-resistant tent, so the rain wasn’t causing me much of a problem.

It was pouring in from all the rain we got that week back in May. Remember? Jeez, it must have rained for ten straight days. Yard was a swamp. The drainage culvert snaking out back through our lovely urban neighborhood was spilling over, sluicing down its concrete bed as fast as the rapids of a Western river, the kind you see on postcards and slick brochures. Brown with frothy whitecaps, like whipped cream on hot chocolate. Choked with all manner of stuff. Swirling to beat the band.

I know because I pulled an old lawn chair from a tangle of them in the backyard, sat eating a bologna and mustard sandwich, drinking a Rip-It from a case I found out back of a Dollar General. I sat there for hours, nibbling my sandwich, watching shopping carts and tires and shoes, a baby doll, even a huge old mohair throw cover drifting like a deflated buffalo.

Thought about wading in a few times to snag this or that but I didn’t, though the pull was strong. It was deep out there, I knew. If the water was already at the lip of the culvert, it must be at least seven or eight feet, maybe more. The soles of my sneakers were worn slick, and I didn’t think I’d be able to keep my footing.

But the pull of stuff moving past me as if it were on an assembly line was strong, dope strong. I say this with authority, having spent years with needles in my arms. Story-tellers say you can’t stop heroin. Don’t believe them. I stopped it. Those were deeper waters than this—dirty, nasty, deep waters—but I’ve been clean for twelve years or so now, and living good.

Anyway, I didn’t push my way through those waters, though I truly wanted to. Eventually, the rain increased, so I packed up the chair, my empty sandwich bag and drink can, made my way to the house.

As I did, my neighbor called to me from his porch. He didn’t like me, didn’t like what I’d done to my house. Always bitching at me to fix or move or clean.

I turned to him through the rain, though, and saw something other than anger.

Concern.

“Hey, man,” he said. His tattooed hand holding a beer in a koozie, and I ducked my head and sneered. A little early to be drinking, but I let it go. “Looks like the water caved in part of your roof.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “What else is new?”

“Do you want help fixing it? I could get up there and…happy to do it I mean, and you don’t need to pay me a di—”

“Nope. Got it under control, thanks,” I said, then slid into the house and threaded my way through the stacks and piles. I had to retreat from his overwhelming concern, just as I usually needed to flee from his anger. As I peeled off my sodden jacket and the plastic trash bag I wore over it, I saw a tiny waterfall cascading into what had once been my mother’s living room.

“How d’ya like that, ya old bitch?” I never liked my mother much.

I ducked through the flaps of my tent, zipped it closed, turned on the space heater and my television. Judge Judy was on. She was always on. I found my soup mug, broke up some ramen, then put the kettle on.

Life was good.

 

***

 

The next day I was awakened by hard, fast rapping on my front door. I knew, instantly, it was my son, Caleb. Knew it in the way parents know the cadence of their kids’ footsteps, the measure of their breathing.

Shit.

I rubbed calloused hands over my face, wiped the sleep from my eyes. The air felt warm and damp inside the tent, the dewy residue of all my bedtime exhalations. I needed coffee in order to face him.

Harder rapping at the door told me emphatically I wouldn’t get any.

I unpeeled myself from my sleeping bag and took off the CPAP mask. My sleeping bag was the mummy type. I crawled in each night, donned my mask and zipped it all the way up, sealing me inside. It was useful to prevent mice and rats and bugs of all kinds bothering me in the night. And the CPAP machine pumps air in so I don’t suffocate.

I felt muzzy, head filled with cotton gauze failing to dissipate as quickly as I might have liked.

The pounding, the pounding.

“Jesus, alright already,” I yelled, straightening up and feeling my spine crack. “I said alright!”

I threaded through the valley of debris between the cliffs of books and boxes, found the front door. Like most of the house, it had seen better days. Warped, some of its veneer peeling, it shuddered under another series of blows.

“Dad! Open the goddamn door!”

I peered through the tiny peephole, then turned the deadlock, drew the door open just a crack.

“What, Caleb?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’? Open the fucking door.”

Caleb hadn’t been in the house in years. Not since we’d had our last argument about my habits.

I eased the door open more and was greeted by the usual tilting of the head most people did to see around me, to look into the house and what it held. Pulling the door closer to me, I wedged myself between it and the frame

“Dad, let me in,” Caleb said. “Can’t you see it’s raining?”

“What do you want?” I could hear the gathered mass sing behind me, a chorus of wills stronger than mine.

Caleb sighed. “The neighbor called. Again. He noticed a huge hole in the roof. Said he’s worried it’s going to collapse from all this rain. He even offered to fix it.”

“I don’t need his help, and I sure as hell don’t need yours.”

“You think I want to be here? Just let me in so I can at least take a look. I promise—”

“Oh, you promise now, huh?” I turned my head back into the house, as if talking to someone there. “He promises this time.”

“Dad, come on,” Caleb said. I could hear the edge of exasperation on his voice, whetted keenly over dealing with me through many years and many different addictions—alcohol, heroin, meth. Now this.

Hey, at least I was clean…if not clean.

“Caleb, no!”

I heard a sibilant breath from the other side of the door.

“Then I guess I’ll have to come back with the police. I guess I’ll have to contact adult protective services. I guess—”

Motherfucker!

I drew the door open just enough to show one side of my face; my nose and a single eye. “I don’t need any help, goddamnit! I can get a handle on it myself.”

Caleb pushed. He’d always been a large kid, football linebacker large. Now he’d become a large man, solid. He easily leveraged the door open, pushed me aside.

“Dad,” he said, then covered his mouth with a hand the size of a canned ham. “Jesus H. Christ. Jesus. Jesus.”

Far as I knew, Caleb wasn’t a religious man. Funny how when some things are so out of your personal scope you’ll call on a God you don’t even believe in.

“Come on, now,” I said, squeezing myself against a teetering stack of old newspapers and junk mail near the door as he barged by.

“Christ, dad, I mean…why can’t you just let me help you get this cleaned? I mean…and what is that stench? Really?”

I stepped away, following him as he paused to take it all in.

“What stench? I don’t smell anything.”

“Probably because you smell as bad as the house. Fuck.” He was speaking through the spread fingers of the hand clamped over his nose and mouth. “Do you even have running water for showers and washing your clothes and dishes?”

“Ahh, I stopped paying the water bill years ago. I can get water for free when I need it.”

“How?”

“The neighbor’s hose. They don’t miss the little I use.”

Caleb turned in the room, taking it all in as best he could. Then, he sighed heavily, put his hands on top of his head, elbows out.

“Fuck. Why am I the one left holding the bag?”

“I don’t need help!”

“You do need help,” Caleb said, more softly than I feared he would. “And you’re gonna get it this time, Dad. You’re gonna get it. This, though, this is too big for me. I don’t even know where to start.”

“Now you know how I feel.”

He turned then, arms still fanned out from his head, and I saw his face was red, suffused with blood. But he said nothing.

“Wish I could find Burke, Nate and Hank. I could really use some brothers right about now.”

I said nothing because there was nothing to say on the matter.

 

***

 

I don’t talk to my four kids much.

I’d started collecting stuff, oh, lord, maybe forty years back, way before I even met their mother and had kids. But by the time we did have kids, I’d filled an entire house with things.

My wife—not the brightest nor the pickiest—let me go at it for quite some time before she put her foot down. Quite some time. My oldest, Burke, was 17. The youngest, Caleb, was 12.

She packed them up in her aging minivan and went to live without me. She eventually got a house and full custody of the boys. Me? I moved in with my mom, who I think hated what she saw as the social necessity of having to accommodate her only son. She definitely wasn’t a fan.

The house shared by me and the now ex was put on the market as-is. I left most of my stuff there for the new owners to deal with. What little I did take, just some clothes and a few things, were like seeds for my new collection.

My mother, of course, disapproved. She watched everything I carried into her house—my childhood home!—with a gimlet eye and a sharp tongue. When my collection spilled out of my room into the hallway, the screaming started.

It might still be going on to this day if she were still alive. But she didn’t last long after. Cancer or something. I honestly didn’t pay much attention to what killed her. Just that it did the job.

Then the house being all mine, I filled it in no time at all, from basement to rafters.

 

***

 

I have these fugue states, times when I sort of wake up and I’m somewhere inside the house I don’t remember going into. These happen a lot, and most of the time, I come to inside the sub-cellar.

My mother’s house was an old one, probably about 175 years or greater, she couldn’t be sure. Stately and imposing as a single-family structure can be. All white clapboard and covered porches, solid wood stairs and floors, nine-foot ceilings with towering doorways.

The house had a stone cellar, dank and noisome. It also had an earthen-walled root cellar someone had dug out in one corner; a small chamber about eight-foot square, niches hacked into the clay walls to hold, I suppose, canned vegetables and bushels of potatoes and apples.

In the corner, though, cleverly concealed under a trapdoor, was a narrow shaft with a rickety ladder leading down to an even deeper cellar, this one larger than the root cellar leading to it. A massive room some twenty feet square, hacked out of a limestone karst.

At its center, like the darkest iris of the darkest eye, is a hole.

The hole is about four feet across, smooth-bored as a musket barrel. It descends past depths I cannot perceive. I’ve dropped things into it before, and I only hear them careen back and forth against the hole’s sides.

I’ve never heard anything I’ve sent over the side strike ground or water.

Winds come up from this hole, warm and wet. While I know they’re fetid, I also find them attractive on some level. The winds and their strange, whistling sounds I find calming.

When I awake in this chamber, I have no recollection of the series of maneuvers I must achieve to get there. Going down the cellar stairs, winding my way through the debris filling it, finding the earthen slope down to the root cellar, hands searching the ground there to find the trapdoor, then down the ladder in the shaft.

I remember nothing of it.

I awake, always, crouched down on my knees at the edge of the pit, feeling the humid breeze on my face, nostrils flared at the sweet, methane scent, head spinning at the vertigo of sitting in endless darkness at the lip of a pit of endless darkness.

I try to shake the grogginess, the feeling of disconnectedness, out of my head, but the weight of it all, that central pit pulsing with will, pushes against my skull, and I fear it will pop like a grape.

In the chamber around the pit, I can see the niches carved in the clay, rough and rectangular, encircling the room. Each one sealed by a grate of bars, dull vertical steel lines in the black.

And things move slowly behind some of them, slithering, sending cascades of dust and pebbles to the unseen ground.

I think I fed them…I think. It’s so hard to remember.

I rise, stumble to the ladder, climb up to the root cellar, then back to the main cellar and up to my tent. I climb in, zip up, crawl into my sleeping bag. The CPAP machine whirrs to life as I strap the mask over my face, and I sleep.

It’s the only way to protect myself from its will.

 

***

 

Caleb showed up early the next day, his truck pulled onto the lawn. Pounding at the door announced his arrival. I was already into my second mug of instant coffee and a bruised and beaten banana from the Dollar Store down the street. One of only two fresh things they offered, the other being bruised and beat up apples. Such is poverty in these United States.

I gobbled the banana, shucked the skin outside the tent onto a pile of slumping, decaying trash, and slammed the last lukewarm dregs of coffee.

“Yeah, yeah,” I called as the pounding on the door continued.

Caleb stood on the porch clad in a pristine white disposable hazmat suit, hood already pulled over his head.

“Are you kidding?”

“Fuck no,” he said. “I’m not letting anything you got in here touch my skin. Probably come down with Ebola or cancer of the Covid or some damn thing.”

As he shouldered past me, I felt it—waves of it rolling off him, crashing over me, the survivor of a shipwreck on a dark, deserted beach.

Will.

The will to remain.

I shook it off

I felt this way about stuff. Mostly stuff. I mean transistor radios and boxes of batteries. About cases of canned goods, bags of winter gloves and scarves. Stacks of unopened boxes from Amazon, Lillian Vernon, QVC. Direct mail and newspapers and magazines.

But never about people.

People. Huh. Mostly not a fan. I deliberately made it hard for people to like me, much less get close to me. Even family. I worked hard to avoid my ex and the boys, to stay away from them, stay out of their lives.

Why did I need any of them, family included? My stuff called to me, filled the hole inside of me family could never touch.

If that sounds somehow too self-aware, don’t worry. I just parrot shit back from previous rehabs and numerous group therapy walk-throughs. It doesn’t in any way signify a single ounce of serious introspection or knowledge of the things driving me, leading to my various addictions.

Now, I just let the willpower of all this stuff, all the stuff in the world call to me, supersede my own, weak will.

It’s just fucking easier.

But now…this was different. This was a person.

My son, to boot.

The pull was insistent, though, washing over me, dissipating my will until it was a soft, distant voice, a candle seen from far away, lighting no one’s way.

I felt the rush of sweet serotonin as everything within me realized what I was going to do before even I did.

It’s the way these things go.

 

***

 

Caleb wanted to start in the basement. Move from there into the main part of the house, throwing things out as we went. He’d found the old coal chute on the side of the house, yanked at it barehanded at first, then with a crowbar. It opened with a groan of metal and a shower of rust and paint flakes.

He laid a blue tarp over the ground outside near its mouth, and I helped smooth it down.

The plan was we’d toss the trash out through the coal chute onto the tarp. When we were ready, we’d drag the tarp to his truck, load it up, and he’d haul it to the city dump.

This all seemed fine in the abstract, and I readily agreed.

Inside, he opened the basement door wide, recoiled at the smell wafting up from there.

“Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, dad.”

He turned to me and I shrugged.

“Look we may not get far today, but we have to start somewhere. You really okay with this? We’re going to be getting rid of a lot of stuff.”

“Sure,” I said, biting my lip. I could feel the gathering will of all my stuff, and it crawled over my skin like fire ants, made my scalp itch. I found myself scratching at my forearms like I used to in my meth head days. But unlike the meth I put down for good, I knew I wasn’t going to actually go through with giving up all this stuff . There was no way.

Adding…adding was what I needed to do. What I always needed to do. Not subtracting. That never figured in my math.

Caleb turned and set his first boot-clad step on the stairs.

I moved behind him, placed both hands on his wide, solid back and pushed. Hard.

“What the…”

He launched into the stairwell, hands grasping for rails I had removed the night before. With nothing to brace himself or stop his fall, he smacked hard on the bottom landing, which I had covered with broken chunks of cinderblocks, cemented in place.

Hitting them face forward, he instantly stopped moving.

I waited at the top of the steps until I was sure he wasn’t going anywhere. I came down softly, quietly on the treads until I reached his legs. They were bent all akimbo, the soles of his boots pointing up toward the top of the stairs.

Gingerly, delicately, I stepped around him to stand on the earthen floor of the cellar. Blood flowed around the mountain scape of the broken cinderblocks, dripped to the floor, thin fingers running through the dirt toward the root cellar.

I felt a surge of anger at its release, its attempt to escape.

That was my blood—MY blood—and it stayed with the rest of Caleb in MY possession.

I found a rag from the piles and stacks of stuff in the basement and cleaned the blood from his wounds, eventually winding it around his head to collect the blood still blossoming from the scrapes and deep cuts on his face.

I noticed, too, his leg was twisted at an unnatural angle as I dragged his body into the root cellar. He was a lug, so heavy, my boy. It took me twenty minutes and a lot of sweat to haul him to the trapdoor, but we made it.

From there, it was relatively easy. I slid him down the hole into the subcellar, descended the ladder, and stepped gingerly over where he’d fallen.

I saw him breathing, so I knew he was alive. His wounds still seeped blood into the cloth bound around his forehead. His head was swollen where it had struck the cinderblocks, and both of his legs moved in boneless, disconnected ways.

With a great deal of effort, I hefted him into one of the niches around the central pit, moving aside the dry bones already there. He barely fit inside, so much larger than Burke had been.

But Burke had given up years ago, driven mad from the pain of his wounds and the realization he was never, ever leaving.

I slumped my tired self against the clammy clay wall of the chamber, closed my eyes, and waited for Caleb to regain consciousness. After the obligatory anger and screams—sobbing?—perhaps we could talk.

Lonely, you see. Just me and my stuff, and all they ever asked of me was MORE, MORE! I had no one else to sit and visit with. Burke was gone. Hank and Nate, too. And their mother…well, she didn’t speak to me much these days.

Sometimes being inside my own head reminded me of suffering through holiday gatherings as a child. Being piled into the family sedan toward some distant aunt and uncle we rarely saw otherwise. Going into a house, hugged and pawed by ancient, unknown relatives, the funk of death wafting from them.
Then being left to the rest of the children, younger cousins barely tolerated or older cousins who barely tolerated me.

I remember wearing the hottest, itchiest sweaters my mother could find, dressing me in them, cooing at me as I came out of my bedroom, admiring me as I stood before the doorway before we left. Then sitting with these same people, sweltering and uncomfortable, either around a table picking at holiday food or on the floor of some cousin’s room listening to LPs of bands I was unfamiliar with, all with unlikely names like Kansas or Lynyrd Skynyrd or Cream.

Pulling at my collar because the sweater’s fabric chafed my neck. Scratching at my forearms. Beads of sweat tracing down my forehead. Beads of it trickling from my armpits and down my sides.

All the while feeling different, alone, isolated.

In a hole.

I felt like that now, sweaty and itchy and alone.

 

***

 

I came down the next day, and found Caleb awake. When he heard me come down the ladder, he started yelling…then screaming.

When I finally stepped into the dark chamber, the crunching of my shoes on the earthen floor set him off again.

“Help!” he cried, almost literally. “Help me. What the fuck is going on? I can’t see anything.”

I stood in silence.

“My legs are broken, and my head…oh god, my head hurts. Please, help me. Get me outta here.”

Silence.

“Where the fuck is this? Who are you? I can hear you out there!”

I clicked the small flashlight I held, and a bright, narrow cone of light shot out into his enclosure, blinding him.

“You’re safe now, Caleb,” I said.

His huddled form had raised a hand to shield his eyes.

“Dad?” That single word came out soft and strangled. “Is it you?” I’d heard much the same from Burke, Nate and Hank.

“Finally,” I said. “Got you all.”

He sputtered and coughed, collected himself.

“What the fuck are you doing, dad? I’m hurt, really hurt. I need to get out of here,” he said, rattling the iron bars of his earthen cage as if not understanding what they meant. He’d wouldn’t be seeing a hospital. He wouldn’t be getting his bones set or his head looked after.

He wouldn’t be leaving.

I crept closer to the cage, knelt. “I know you’re hurt, son. I know. But don’t worry. It won’t be for long. Not now.”

“What are you talking about?” he screamed now, really yanking at the bars. “Get me out of here! Get me the fuck out of here!”

“I will,” I said. “I promise.”

“Dad,” he said, lowering his voice. The beam of the flashlight showed he’d collapsed to the floor, his chin propped on his arm. “Please.”

“You’re not alone now, son,” I said. “You’re here with your family.”

I raked the light around the room, shining briefly into each enclosure. Through the shifting shadows cast by the bars, he saw, in the cage next to his, the dull gleam of white bone, unmoving, unarticulated.

“Wha—?”

“Shh…look.”

Inside the cage next to that was a similar scene, a slump of bones pressed against the tarnished iron bars.

I slid the light over, tried not to smile.

At first, it was more of the same. Just a puddle of dusty clothing.

Then, it moved.

I heard Caleb groan.

From this cage, the leathery sound of its skin slithered over the dirt. A head turned to show its face, dark and skeletal with sunken cheekbones and deep eyes reflecting red in the flashlight’s illumination. A shock of frazzled hair spilled over it, shot with grey.

“Mom? Mom?” he said. And then he began to weep.

The thing within that cell made low, croaking noises, barely human.

“No, no, no,” I said, crouching low. “You’re not alone. She’s not alone. I’ve brought you all back together now, you see? All of us. Our family, all together. All here. Right here. Isn’t that great?”

Caleb was breathing heavy, catching in his chest while he wept.

“Nate and Hank…Burke? All of them? You…killed all of them?”

“Killed?” I repeated, rocking back on my knees? “Killed? No. I collected. They just didn’t make it until I got you all. I tried. I tried so hard, you see? So hard to get you all. But you had all separated to different parts of the country. Even the world. It took me a while to find you all, bring you here. But I did it. I did it!”

The sounds of Caleb’s weeping echoed in the chamber.

“You thought I was addicted to things. You all did. And I might have been, I guess I might have been. But it was all for this. All to bring us back together, as a family. As a family. Isn’t that a good thing? Well, isn’t it, Caleb? Caleb? …Caleb?”

He didn’t answer.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to answer. I know now. I know I can satisfy that desire, that need to get high another way,” I said, becoming excited. “I found out how. It’s so easy, really, so simple, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.

“Releasing. Letting go. What you were trying to make me do yesterday. But I’d already figured it out. Let it go. Let it swirl away like a leaf on the wind. Like a ribbon of bl—”

I saw a thin hand reach through the bars at me, begging, pleading in glottal sounds from the starkly lit recesses of her cell.

I snapped the flashlight off.

“I can let you go. I can let you all go and be perfectly fine. Perfectly fine.”

I rose, stepped to the cage next to Caleb’s, opened it.

The hole behind me, the bottomless chasm in the earth apparently opened into some fissure within the drainage ditch out back.

I could feel the will of it, so strong, reaching up from its maw, overriding my own.

No longer the overwhelming will to be collected, but to be free, to be let go.

I gathered the bones, clinking in my arms like the hollow tubes of a collapsed wind chime, carried them over to the hole.

“No need to cry.”

I lowered my arms, let the bones fall into the hole.

I shivered with the release of it, turned back to his cage.

 

***

The difficult part of a story is not in the writing of it.

 

***

 

The two men moved through the tight, bare corridor with a sense of purpose underscored by the clipboard carried by the one in the lead. The man who followed was young and seemed nervous.

They stopped in front of a metal door with a number stenciled on it.

“Okay, this guy is pretty tame compared to some of the others we got here. White male, Alan Denbrough. Sixty-one years old. Five-ten, about a buck fifty. Historically no trouble, but he’s a weird one.”

“How so?” asked the newbie.

“Basically sits in his cell all day, staring at the floor. Claims there’s a hole there.”

He nodded to the younger man, who fumbled with a ring of keys at his belt. As he found the correct one and moved it toward the lock, the older man stopped him with a firm grip of his wrist.

“Be prepared. He…collects stuff. Lots of stuff. Spends every dime he makes working the laundry, and he fills his cell with shit. We gotta go in every quarter or so and clear it all out.”
“Like the TV show?”

The older man nodded.

“What’d he do anyway?”

“Killed his entire family back in the nineties. Four sons and an ex-wife. Even his mother. Grisly shit, dismembered them all and was trying to force the…well, the remains down the kitchen garbage disposal. Helluva scene when they caught him.”

The younger man hesitated.

“House was filled with shit from cellar to attic. Had to clear it out, tear the entire thing down. Funny thing, though. There was a sinkhole under the house, getting ready to swallow the whole mess.”

The key went into the lock with a loud clack, turned.

They stepped inside.

***

 

The difficult part of any story is getting the reader to believe.

 

 

About the Author

John F.D. Taff is a multiple Bram Stoker Award nominated author with more than 100 short stories and seven novels in print. The End in All Beginnings was called "the best novella collection I've read in years" by Jack Ketchum. His upcoming anthology Dark Stars, a tribute to that seminal '80s work Dark Forces, will be published by Tor/Nightfire in 2022.

 

 

 

Through the Looking Glass

and Straight Into Hell

By

Christa Carmen

 

Then

The white porcelain sink is a leaky life-boat beneath her. Allie clings to it with slick fingers and prays not to drown. There is something wrong—all wrong—with the area between her ribcage and her pelvis; it fills with heat so crackling and white-hot, she brings a hand to her neck, waiting for the flames to rise up her throat. As quickly as it ignites, the blaze dulls. Her organs freeze, then shatter. Shards of ice poke her sides like knives. The cold is awful in its heaviness, as if she’s swallowed something beset by rigor mortis, the rot of which will infect her as it thaws.

The cycle begins anew, fire to ice, ice to fire, but before she can retch or run or recoil, a knock comes at the bathroom door. “Ms. Stevens? I’m your case worker. We need to speak.” The voice scrapes her skull like a fork against glass.

“I’m coming in, Ms. Stevens. We have to get through the rest of your paperwork.” Allie lurches to the side to avoid being hit by the swinging door.

A petite blonde in Baby Shark-print scrubs gestures for Allie to follow her into the main part of the room. She takes a seat on a polyethylene chair, the edges of which are rounded enough to render an attempted bedsheet hanging unsuccessful. Allie follows, navigating the vinyl tile floor as if it’s quicksand, and falls hard onto the mattress. The internal frost gives way to another blistering heat wave, and she groans.

“I’m Renee Murphy,” the case worker says, ignoring Allie’s distress. “Can you tell me your name and date of birth?”

“Alice Stevens.” Her voice croaks. “September twentieth, 2001.”

“Thank you. I understand you were feeling too poorly to complete the intake last night.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not feeling any better this morning, if you haven’t noticed.”

Renee doesn’t react. “This is your thirteenth admission to Harbor House detox, correct?”

Allie grunts.

“And each time you’ve been discharged, you’ve refused any aftercare referrals, is that right?”

Allie grunts again.

“Have you thought about what you’ll do when you’re discharged from our facility this time around?”

Allie’s face—like everything else—pulses with pain, but she manages a withering glare. “I can barely tolerate sitting here talking to you. I don’t know how I’m going to survive the next five minutes without running through that plate-glass window, so, no, I haven’t thought about what I’m doing five days from now.”

Renee nods. She’s infuriating with her sleek blonde bun and ridiculous vintage scrubs. Allie wishes she could regurgitate this sickness down Renee’s throat and see how well she tolerates having a conversation while her insides are on fire.

“Well, you see, Alice—”

“I go by Allie.”

“Sorry. You see, Allie, I’m not your typical case worker. I specialize in virtual reality recovery simulations. Has anyone spoken to you about VR recovery before?”

The first twelve times Allie was accompanied up the back wing elevator to the detox, talk of VR recovery simulations were just that: talk. She paid as little attention to stories of glimpsed futures and visions of meaningful drug-free lives as she had to which halfway house or methadone clinic was the best.

“I can afford what my plan covers. Nothing else.”

“That’s just the thing, Alice, err, sorry, Allie, you’re actually eligible for VR due to a change in your plan. The duration of which would be...” she checks her tablet, “nine years, three months, and twenty-seven days.” Renee’s face makes no secret as to how exciting she thinks this prospect should be. Allie wants nothing more than to curl into a ball and scream, or else take a scalding shower while sipping ice water, but she forces herself to meet the case worker’s eye.

“Thanks, but I’m not interested.”

Renee sets the tablet in her lap and purses her lips. Allie knows what is coming. Some variation of the, “you’re going to die if you keep doing what you’re doing,” conversation. She zones out, concentrating on not running out the door, hustling for a bag, and washing this bullshit away on a tidal wave of China white. While Renee yammers on about the potency of synthetic opioids and the irreversible effects of various infectious diseases, Allie nods as if she is listening. As if she cares. “And what,” she says when Renee finishes, “sitting in some cryogenic freezer for a decade is any better?”

“That’s not at all what virtual reality recovery entails. The simulation is set so that, whether you’re approved for ten days’ worth or ten years, it will take just six hours to complete. You would be in a room at the end of the hall, hooked up to an EEG, heart rate and blood pressure monitors, everything to keep you medically stable. Though what you’ve been subjecting yourself to on the street is far more dangerous than even the most intense of VR sessions.”

Allie looks to the plate-glass window again. It’s a ludicrous idea, but it might blunt the agony of her withdrawal. Especially when what they’re giving her for “comfort meds” is the equivalent of slapping a band-aid over a bullet wound. She’s sick of it all. The detox regimen and group therapy, the visits from AA groups and NA speakers. The war stories shared at the common room table at breakfast, each addict trying to one-up the others. Most of all, she’s sick of herself. Of how she cannot banish the cravings to shoot her veins full of bliss, of salve, of warmth and light and love. Why would the equivalent of an exceptionally vivid fantasy film shake her from the cycle she’s been in for so fucking long?

“The simulations are the embodiment of what we as counselors have always tried to do, which is to get our patients to see that there’s another way of living. Free from chaos and disappointment, from mental health facilities and jail. There’s so much you can accomplish if you get sober, Allie. So many things to look forward to.”

Allie resists the urge to laugh in Renee’s face. “The steps to get from here to there are too many,” she says instead. “There’s no way to clean up my life without relapsing first.”

“That’s what the simulation does,” Renee says, leaning forward. She catches the tablet before it slides off her lap. “That’s its point, its very essence. To show you that you can do it, that it is possible.”

“Every counselor and doctor and sponsor over the past eight years has told me that exact same thing. What difference does it make if I see it play out?”

“The simulation is not some glorified video game,” Renee explains. “It’s built from information about you. We feed it the details of your intake session, past counseling notes, your background, education, hopes, dreams, personality type, family tree, DNA. It will show you the most realistic path your life would follow, post-discharge, short of having a crystal ball or a time machine. It will show you the results of decisions you would make without drugs in your system, based on decisions you’ve made in the past.”

This is interesting. Allie’s never heard this part before. Still, something nags at her through her queasiness and discomfort. Something she wishes she hasn’t thought of, but can’t deny it now that she has.

“What if it’s worse?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What if the life the simulation shows me is worse than the one I have now? What if I get sober and get hit by a bus? Or am diagnosed with cancer? Or I get clean, marry Prince Charming, and he cheats? Or beats me? What if, no matter what I do, I’m just as miserable? What if...”

She takes a breath and blurts her biggest fear: “What if I never find anything I love as much as drugs?”

Renee nods once, and stands. She tucks the tablet under her arm and studies Allie where she’s slumped on the bed. Her face betrays no emotion. “You’re right,” she says. “That is a possibility. Those are all perfectly viable futures the VR could show you. You might be no better than you are now. You might be far, far worse.”

Allie squirms under Renee’s gaze. The case worker’s amber irises are like the swirling chamber of a loaded syringe. Allie wishes she could disappear into their warm, silent depths.

“But what if your life without drugs and alcohol is everything you dreamed it could be? Renee says. “Everything you’ve ever wanted? Success. A family. Contentment. Love. You would turn down the opportunity to see that? To know that, without drugs, you are happy?”

Renee turns and walks to the door without waiting for an answer. Grateful to be alone, Allie closes her eyes. But then Renee’s voice floats back to her on the disinfectant-scented air, cuts through the anti-convulsant and anti-nausea meds, the fog of her dopamine-starved brain:

“You don’t have a crystal ball or a time machine, Allie, so there’s only one way to find out. What do you have to lose?”

 

Now

The applause is enthusiastic and prolonged, accompanied by warm smiles and appreciative nods. Alice grips the podium with one hand, the other still holding her place in her book, a book she has to remind herself people purchased, read, enjoyed, and from which they came to hear her read aloud.

The bookstore’s event coordinator, a bubbly, turquoise-haired young woman named Maura, makes her way toward Alice, clapping as she skirts the narrow aisle between rows of tightly-packed chairs.

“Alice Shelley, everyone!” Maura exclaims when she reaches the front of the room, referring to Alice by her pen name. “That was phenomenal. Utterly creepy, and gorgeously written.”

The audience takes up their vigorous nodding once again. Alice feels herself blushing, and murmurs a thank-you. She’s a far cry from a bestselling author, but praise for her work is always exciting. This is the sixth event for her debut novel, and she is still surprised by how much she enjoys them. Seeing the book that she spent three years writing in readers’ hands, held out for her to sign, is another thrill entirely.

“We have fifteen minutes left,” Maura continues, “and Alice has been gracious enough to agree to answer some questions about Sequela Manor. Who wants to get us started?”

A few hands go up. Maura smiles and steps back, indicating that the floor, once again, is Alice’s. Alice sips from a mug of rose hip tea, then nods at a man leaning against a set of shelves marked Fantasy.

“Hello,” he says shyly. “It was so great to hear you read, and that passage was one of my favorites. My question is: what made you decide to combine the horror of addiction with trappings of the Gothic? They don’t seem to go together at first glance. Sure, we’ve been dealing with the opioid epidemic for, what, fifty years, since the 1990s, but the issue of heroin addiction still feels more modern than those explored by Radcliff or Lewis. When I got to the scene where Emilia discovers that Dr. Lanius has been ...” he pauses, and looks around guiltily. “Sorry, I just realized that would be a spoiler. When I got to the... dungeon scene, I realized how well a Gothic setting can encompass the distress of someone running from their addiction, and I was curious how you conceptualized the pairing.”

Alice smiles. The question is really just a riff on “where do you get your ideas,” but she doesn’t mind. The question hits on themes close to her heart.

“I’m so glad you liked the passage,” she says. “It’s one of my favorites too. As for the intersection between addiction horror and the Gothic, I’m afraid my pairing isn’t all that inspired. Addiction is inextricably linked with every subgenre of horror. Addiction is horror, and the history of horror is incomplete without addiction. It both sneaks and explodes through so many of our stories. Captain Crozier was plagued by drink before he was ever plagued by the Tuunbaq, or a ship beset by ice, and Willkie Collins’ account of Dicken’s obsession with Drood was distorted by laudanum. Vampires have long been stand-ins for insatiable addicts, and addicts—with their mindless obsessions—are often referred to as zombies. Addiction horror is horror history, but it’s the future of horror as well.” Alice stops, and blushes again. “At least, that’s my take.”

The man smiles and thanks her. Alice looks around for another raised hand, and points to a middle-aged woman dressed in a burgundy sweater and khaki pants. Large pearl earrings wink from her ears. Maura reappears and hands the woman a microphone.

It’s only when the woman speaks that Alice notices how pale her face is, the blotchy red spots peeking out from the neck of the sweater. The hand that grips the microphone trembles, and she’s breathing as if she’s just run up a flight of stairs. The woman is nervous... or very angry.

“You’re an addict yourself, aren’t you?” the woman says. Some deep part of Alice recoils. “Or, a ‘recovering addict,’ as you say? My daughter was a recovering addict, and a writer, too, like you. She wrote the kinds of things you write: addicts’ whose pasts come back to haunt them; methadone clinic mothers, the ghosts of boyfriends who died of overdoses. She used to tell me that it helped keep her clean, writing those awful, triggering stories. And then she relapsed. Relapsed, overdosed, and died. You were her favorite author. Did I mention that?”

The room—and everyone in it—disappeared. Only Alice and this woman remain. The microphone gives a high-pitched squeal. The angry, sad, trembling woman with the dangly pearl earrings narrows her eyes and licks her lips.

“So, my question is,” she continues, “are you aware that writing these kinds of things means you’re not really cured?”

The room whooshes back to Alice. The audience is horrified. Maura attempts to grab the microphone, but the woman jerks it away. “That it’s not a matter of if you will relapse...” Each word is a buckshot, but Alice does not avert her gaze. “... but only a matter of when?”

A bookstore employee manages to snatch the microphone. The woman gives Alice one final look of anguish and staggers toward the exit, leaving Alice staring at the book in her hands and sucking in air with shaky breaths.

A man takes Alice by the arm. He apologizes over and over while leading her to the back of the store. “Take your time,” he says, holding open the door to a spacious bathroom. “As the manager of Black Cats & Bookmarks, let me say how sorry I am. We strive to provide a safe space for all the authors we host.”

Alice nods numbly, and slips into the bathroom. She double locks it and flips the switch. The room is papered from floor to ceiling with covers from The New Yorker. Light reflects off cartoon politicians and abstract animals. Dizzy, Alice bends forward and places her hands on her knees. Staring at the intricate tile patterns, she tries to calm her breathing.

The echo of the woman’s words—You’re not really cured!—takes a lap around her brain. She refuses to let it circle a second time, afraid it will get stuck on a loop and drive her crazy. She straightens, runs the cold water, splashes some over her face. It’s only after she blots her cheeks that she looks in the mirror. Before she can meet her own gaze, the light goes out. Alice gasps, then feels foolish and reaches for the switch.

She jiggles it, but nothing happens. “What the fuck,” she whispers. She pats her pockets before remembering she left her phone in her purse.

She reaches for the doorknob. The light flashes on.

The mirror is visible again. And the mirror is... wrong. All fucking wrong. No... she must have gotten turned around in the dark and is facing a photograph.

The image is of the back of a woman’s head. The long hair is dark and unkempt. Alice moves, the woman moves too. The woman is backdropped by New Yorker covers. Alice is definitely still facing the mirror, but the reflection does not match. The reflection is, somehow, not hers.

Alice freezes. The backwards woman goes still. Alice knows her eyes are wide and unblinking, but she cannot see the truth of this in the mirror. Her insides ice over, then turn hot as lava. She feels like she’s swallowed a mouthful of ash. She’s too scared to run, and so studies the figure. The woman’s elbows form downward slanting right angles, and she wears a stretched-out ballet sweater. The fabric is threadbare, and there are holes in the sleeves. Alice can see each of the vertebrae in the long, thin neck. She has a twisted urge to run her fingers along the knobby bones as if playing a xylophone.

“Hello?” Alice chokes out. There is no answer from the mirror, but the backwards woman’s body hitches slightly, as if she, too, spoke the word. Alice tries to scoot back, but she’s as sluggish as if she’s shot herself full of black tar heroin. She wishes the mirror were a portal. She wishes the backwards woman was a ghost. She fears she knows exactly what this is.

The figure in the mirror raises one hand in acknowledgement. Alice does not return the gesture. The walls around the mirror shimmer like the air above pavement on a hot summer day. There’s an insectile hiss in Alice’s ears. The backwards woman takes one step forward, then another. Her reflection grows smaller with each step. The farther the woman walks, the closer she is getting. Alice is being snuck up on, she is sure of it.

But there is nothing behind her but a wall.

Alice’s breath grows short. The lights go off again. A whimper escapes her. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears. And what is that? A footstep? A puff of air hits the back of her neck, soft as a breath. Alice’s arms break out in gooseflesh.

The lights flash on, and the backwards woman is behind Alice, leaning over her shoulder. She is no longer backwards. Her mouth is open in a scream both deafening and silent. It is all around Alice, and yet only in her mind. Alice opens her own mouth, but by the time her scream echoes in the bathroom, the figure is gone. Alice is alone.

 

Then

There’s never anything to read at Harbor House, and this admission is no exception. Allie flips through an old issue of The New Yorker but cannot concentrate on the cartoons let alone the articles. Her room is not far from the (perpetually locked) exit, so she can pinpoint the moment the meal cart rolls onto the unit. Instead of trudging out for dinner, she takes another shower, her third since Miss What-Do-You-Have-to-Lose Renee left that morning. It does as little to help her withdrawal symptoms as the meager meds they toss her way.

When she emerges from the bathroom, her new roommate is sitting cross-legged on the opposite bed. Allie saw her when she was admitted, but this is the first time they’ve been alone. “Hi!” the girl says. She is about eighteen, and pretty. Her hair is dyed a vibrant aquamarine. “I was wondering when I’d finally get to meet you. You skipped dinner. I’m Judy.”

“I’m not really one for tuna melt night,” Allie says.

Judy giggles. “It was pretty gross. All gloppy and full of mayonnaise. I take it you’ve been here before?”

Allie should be annoyed by this question, but the girl doesn’t seem to be judging, so she answers. “More than once. Their frequent flier program sucks.”

Judy giggles again. Allie wonders what kind of meds she’s on to be so fucking chipper but, at the same time, the girl’s sunny disposition doesn’t annoy her nearly as much as it should. She is guileless and friendly, and Allie is a pro at detecting guile. Somehow, she’s ended up with the least shady roommate in all of Harbor House history.

“It’s my first time in detox,” Judy says, and sighs dramatically. “My dad made me come.” The feigned exasperation is no good; Allie can see Judy’s affection for her father in the wistful curl of her lips. “He saw me sprinkling something on my cereal, thought it was MDMA, and staged an intervention.”

Allie cannot repress her curiosity. “Was it MDMA?”

“Hell no! It was sugar. I mean, God, what kind of person does he think I am?”

Allie scrunches up her face. “Sooo, you were sprinkling sugar on your cereal and… ended up here?”

Judy raises her eyebrows and shakes her head. “I know! Can you believe that shit? I mean, I really needed that sugar to help with the MDMA hangover I had from the night before.”

Allie surprises them both by bursting into laughter. This girl is so her, ten years ago. “Well, I’m sorry your dad decided this was the place to send you. Harbor House really does suck. I wasn’t kidding about that.”

“It’s not that bad,” Judy says. “I’m actually excited for the VR. Getting to see what the next fifty years of my life could be like will be pretty gnarly.” She bounces on the bed like a little girl at a sleepover. “What kinds of things have you seen in sims before?”

Allie bristles, but takes a sip of water to keep from responding too harshly. “I haven’t done any simulations,” she says, finally. “They’re not really my thing. Have you ever heard the whirs and whines coming from the rooms that house those VR machines? Creepy. I’ve also heard that ‘it works if you work it’ bullshit a hundred times. I get it. I don’t need an ‘immersive experience.’ What difference does it make if I see it play out?”

Judy nods but seems unconvinced. “Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. I’m also a little scared. What if it shows me something unbelievably awesome? So awesome that I need to break out of here early or risk dying from excitement? So awesome that I realize I have been being an idiot with the drinking and the drugs?”

Allie searches Judy’s face, but the girl is—inexplicably—not being sarcastic. Her expression is hopeful, the smooth skin around her eyes and mouth emphasizing her youth. Judy’s addiction can’t be all that bad yet, not with an attitude like that. Not when she’s still in possession of that kind of naiveté.

“I hope the sim shows me that I move to California,” Judy says. I’ve always wanted to live somewhere that’s sunny even in December. I want to see myself walking down the steps of a Tudor revival-style apartment complex in West Hollywood, on my way to my job at a talent agency for the stars. I want to be in open-toed sandals a week before Christmas and for my best friend to be a sober stripper whose birth name is actually Destiny. We’ll hang out at the Rainbow Room, even though we’re teetotalers, and everyone will be super intrigued by the irony.”

Allie laughs again. She can’t help herself. This girl is too fucking much.

“I hope it happens,” Allie says, and means it. “Both in the simulation and real life.”

Judy beams, as if she’s seeing Destiny across a booth at the Rainbow Room as they speak. Then she shakes herself, looks at Allie, and asks, “What do you hope it shows you?”

“I’m not doing it, remember?” Allie says. She attempts to fluff the pathetically flat hospital-grade pillow, then gives up and shoves it between her shoulder blades and the wall behind the bed.

“I know, I know, but if you were. What do you wish it would show you?”

Allie’s instinct is to retreat, or to say something dismissive or mean. Judy’s not her friend, and she’s not her fucking therapist. Does she want to hear about the failed relationships, failed pregnancies, and self-doubt that have convinced her anything the simulation might show her is bullshit? Does she want to listen to the stories that would prove her dreams are as feasible as virtual reality recovery was two decades earlier?

Then Allie realizes something. Talking with Judy these last ten minutes has been the best she’s felt all day. If indulging the girl’s questions means extending her reprieve from withdrawal, it’ll be worth it. She can bullshit with the best of them. She can fake buying into the fairy tale. She’s an addict, after all.

“To start, I’d get the hell out of Boston,” Allie says. Judy nods, egging her on. “Though I’m not sure where I would go. I’d… meet someone. Have an actual relationship. Not a distraction or someone to fuck and watch Futureflix with. Someone I can...,” She pauses. This is stupid. Why am I saying anything? Am I trying to make myself cry?

“Someone you can...?” Judy pushes. Again, the girl’s forthrightness doesn’t bother her. Judy’s expression is so earnest that Allie believes she wants to hear her response.

“Someone I could have a baby with.” Allie’s cheeks flush, and a blaze ignites within her core, followed almost immediately by a piercing frost. She refrains from doubling over, unwilling to appear as physically vulnerable as she’s allowed herself to be emotionally. “And I’d be a writer,” she says quickly, before she loses her nerve. One dream is as impossible as the other; why not speak them both and wallow in the resultant gloom?

Judy’s eyes go wide. “A writer would be totally cool. You should do it!”

Allie’s grateful that Judy has chosen to comment on the second of her revelations. She doesn’t want to speak of the child she’s lost. “I already told my caseworker I was bowing out. It’s not going to happen.”

“I don’t mean the simulation. If you don’t want to do it, that’s your business. I mean when you get out of here. You should do the writing thing. Move out of Boston.”

The door opens, saving Allie from having to come up with a response. “Judy?” a counselor asks. “The nurse needs to see you. She wants to check something on one of your meds.”

Judy shrugs and hops off the bed, smiling at Allie as she scampers out. In the girl’s absence, Allie stares out the window. It’s dark. No stars. Just a sliver of moon. She leans back against the pillow and closes her eyes. It’s exhausting being so fucking tired.

She could leave Boston. There is nothing holding her here. Except for those dealers familiar with—and tolerant of—the ebb and flow of her bank account. She groans. Wishes for even a sliver of Judy’s enthusiasm and pep. The clock above her bed ticks onward.

Allie doesn’t get up for evening meds. Eventually, she slips into something like sleep. A nurse wakes her by asking for her name and date of birth. Allie mumbles her response and swallows the pills being held out to her with a swig of flat ginger ale.

Through the shadows, she can make out Judy in the bed across the room. She is facing the wall, apparently asleep.

“All right then,” the nurse says. “Sleep well.” The soles of her shoes squeak against the vinyl tile as she leaves.

Judy sits up the moment the door clicks shut. “Man, when you do become a writer, pleeeease don’t set any of your stories here. This place has all the excitement of a morgue.”

Allie snorts. “Let that be your motivation not to come back. It gets worse with each return visit.”

Judy scoots to the foot of her bed. “That’ll be all the truer now that I’m not doing the VR anymore.”

Allie narrows her eyes. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking about what you said, and you’re right. It’s silly to have to ‘see’ your future in order to live it. I’m going to skip the sim, get out of here early, and live my life.”

“No!” Allie says sharply. Judy’s smile slips, but Allie doesn’t care. She wants to pierce the girl’s carefree bubble. “Don’t let anything I’ve said sway you from your treatment plan. I’m the last person in here you should be taking advice from. If you came for the VR, you should do the VR.”

“But the sim adds time to the duration of your stay.”

Allie pushes herself up and crosses the room. She sits next to Judy on the edge of her bed. From here, she can see the worn stuffed lion on the nightstand. She thinks of another stuffed lion—and a lion-print baby blanket—that was never used and ultimately sold online for drug money. She shakes her head to push the image away.

“Judy, please do the VR simulation. If not because you were excited about it just an hour ago, then because your dad will be crushed if you refuse it. You want him to have faith in you, don’t you? To build back trust. You want your counselors to have faith in you too.”

“But what you said made sense,” Judy persists. “What’s the point of seeing something if you know its intention? My dad, my teachers at my school, they’ve been telling me for forever that my life will be better without drugs, and I know it will. I just have to start working on my actual goals instead of messing around with club drugs and girls.”

Allie’s heart hurts to hear this earnestness. Judy is ignorant of the fact that her addiction has likely crossed the line from choice into physical dependence. While she’d love for the girl to simply turn and walk out of the dense, dark forest, the roots already have her by the ankles.

“Do the sim,” Allie says, pleadingly. “If only for the sake of my own guilty conscience.”

Judy taps her temple in an exaggerated display of pensiveness. “I wiiiill,” she says, and pauses. “If you do.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Allie says. She stands, stomps back across the room, and collapses onto the bed.

Judy is undeterred. “Everything you said to me goes for you, too. It couldn’t hurt to see how your deepest wishes might play out. And if there isn’t anyone with whom you want to build back trust, it couldn’t hurt to have trust in yourself.”

“For someone new to detox,” Allie says with a mix of irritation and amusement, “you sure adopted the psychobabble bullshit pretty quickly.”

Judy grins. “So, you’ll do it?”

Allie winces. “You are the most relentlessly positive drug addict I’ve ever met.”

“For me?” Judy pushes. “So your wayward advice and poor example don’t derail my fragile commitment to my treatment?”

It’s Allie’s turn to sigh dramatically. “I’ll think about it,” she says.

 

Now

Alice avoids the rearview mirror on the hour-long drive home from the bookstore but is forced to check it upon exiting the highway. The right-hand corner is shimmery and out-of-focus, and a chill crawls up the nape of her neck. When she pulls into the garage, it takes several long minutes to work up the courage to go inside. Eric knows her too well. He will know there’s something wrong. The angry bookstore patron’s accusation—You’re not really cured!—sounds through her head as if from a loudspeaker. How is she supposed to explain to her husband that the mirrors are wrong? He’ll think she’s lost her mind. Worse, he’ll think she’s looking for an excuse to pop the balloon of her stress with the tip of a needle.

And let’s be honest, how good would just one hit of dope feel right now?

It’s happened a few times over the course of their marriage, a marriage otherwise solid and built on trust: Eric becoming convinced that she’s not doing enough to maintain her sobriety and encouraging her to return to therapy or meetings. She’s never pushed back or disagreed, always found him to be a reliable witness to her journey. But this is different. This thing with the mirrors is the manifestation of her greatest fear.

She can’t think about it right now. It’s too daunting. Plus, she needs to see Leo. She forces herself out of the car, up the stairs, and into the house. Eric is asleep on the couch. There’s a movie on, but it’s quiet enough so that Alice can hear the white noise of the baby monitor beside him. She watches the rise and fall of his chest before tiptoeing into the kitchen. At the island, she leans over a notepad and inspects Eric’s spidery, blue-inked scrawl:

“Full dose at 7:05 w/no trouble. Asleep @7:15.”

Alice exhales with relief. Getting a one-and-a-half-year-old to take an inhaler is a struggle, but Leo tolerates it better with each week that passes. Still, she’s compelled to check on him every night. She pulls off her boots, pads down the hallway to the nursery, and slips inside. The smell of her son—of lilac lotion and milky skin, and of that honeyed sweetness that clings to his hair—envelops her, calms her, makes her feel, for the first time since exiting the car, that she is home. With a smile on her face, she goes to the crib.

Leo is on his side, legs splayed haphazardly. A stuffed lion is smushed under one arm. His face is serene; the blue pacifier he always requests before bed has fallen from his lips and rests on his chest.

And though his chest rises and falls evenly, Alice can’t help but think of the times it has hitched and spasmed, of the terror this induces and of the dread both she and her husband can’t help but harbor, having a son who—already diagnosed with asthma—is now working to recover from a bout of COVID-41.

The doctors said he’d recover just fine, as everyone diagnosed with COVID does these days, twenty-two years after the novel coronavirus brought the world to its knees. “Just make sure his inhaler is always nearby,” they said. “And of course, keep him away from stringent chemicals or cleaners that can trigger an attack.”

She presses a finger to her own lips, then trails it, light as a butterfly wing, down the side of her sleeping son’s cheek. When you wake, we will read, and laugh, and play, but for now, loving you is checking for inhaler refills.

The master bathroom is on a separate heating register from the rest of the house. Alice shivers from the cold as soon as she enters. She slides the dimmer until the bathroom is bathed in an amber glow, walks to the medicine cabinet, and pulls open the mirrored door. Leo’s inhaler canisters are on the top shelf; at least, they should be. At present, there is only one. Alice shakes it and finds the canister almost empty. We need more. She’ll call the number for the pharmacy’s automated refill tonight, before she falls asleep.

She pushes the medicine cabinet shut. The backwards woman fills the pane, wearing the same threadbare lilac sweater, arms held in the same ninety-degree angles, hands still clasped at her front. Alice’s terror, too, is the same, swift-winged and all-consuming. She takes a shallow breath, trying—and failing—to keep the exhalation quiet.

The mirror is different from when she saw the backwards woman earlier. The top right corner reflects a wall that is white, though the walls of her bathroom are a deep bluish grey. It appears almost to dangle, like a sheet of paper, as if she could reach up and wrench it down. She steps forward, but the woman doesn’t move. She grunts, but the woman’s body does not hitch. Pacified by this lack of mirroring, Alice steps forward. She reaches up, grabs the corner of the mirror, which feels cool and liquid, and pulls it down, ever-so-slowly. It reveals more of the white-washed room. Alice pulls harder, and sees a tendril of hair. She grits her teeth, plants her feet, and rips the mirror all the way down to the sink. Behind it is a new image: the woman, no longer backwards.

And now the image is me.

It is the Alice of nine years ago—nine years, three months, and twenty-seven days, to be exact. She is skeleton-thin and pale as if she had just emerged from the underside of a moss-lined rock. She sits on the edge of a hospital bed, plum-colored bruises visible in the crooks of her arms. Behind her, Alice sees what she didn’t notice upon tearing the first, false mirror down: another room, another hospital bed, beside which is an EEG, heart rate and blood pressure monitors, and a large blank screen.

Alice’s mouth opens in shock.

The Alice from the past—or is that the present?—opens her mouth too. Another silent, earsplitting scream. The figure’s face flickers, alternating between the dead-eyed addict of the past and the shocked and heartsick addict of the present... or the future? The flickering intensifies to dizzying effect. Alice peels her gaze away, lunges for a heavy ceramic soap dish, and raises it above her head.

She will smash the mirror to pieces.

A hand grips her shoulder. Alice’s scream pierces the chilly night, and she drops the soap dish. The mirror snaps back into place. In it, she sees Eric’s shock and confusion, along with her own ashen face.

“What the hell are you doing?” Eric asks. “What the hell is going on?”

Alice stares down at where the soap dish cracked the white marble tile. “I... there was... something... someone in the mirror.”

“What are you talking about?” He points to the medicine cabinet. “The only thing in the mirror is you.” He takes her by the shoulders and spins her toward the sink to see.

“No!” Alice shrieks, and drops to the floor. When she looks up, Eric’s expression is even more horrified. He takes her hand and leads her out of the bathroom. “Talk to me,” he says, sitting her on the bed. He backtracks, shuts the bathroom door. “Tell me what is going on.”

“I can’t,” she whispers. “This isn’t real.”

“What’s not real? You’re home with me, and Leo’s in his room, perfectly fine.”

“This isn’t real,” Alice repeats. When Eric doesn’t say anything, she continues, “At first, I thought it was because of what she said at the bookstore. That her accusation was bringing things up for me, allowing old paranoias to surface. But then the mirrors... it’s not a coincidence. I’m not imagining things. It’s real. Well, it’s not real, but in the simulation, it’s real. It must be a glitch.”

Eric’s eyes go very wide. “You’re scaring me. What who said at the bookstore? Did something happen at your event?”

She cannot tell him. He won’t understand. She will stay inside her own head, check on Leo, and go to bed.

But... what does it matter if I tell him? A short bark of laughter escapes her. This isn’t real. What do I have to lose?

“She said I write the things I do because I’m not really cured. And... I guess she’s right. It’s been three days since I was admitted to detox. And since it’s almost the end of the VR duration, maybe five and a half hours since the simulation started?” She laughs again. “Judy is probably waiting for me right now. That little shit got her way after all.”

“Detox?” Eric’s voice is sharp. “What are you talking about? Alice, did you... relapse? Are you on something now?” A look that Alice fears has come over him. It’s a look that says he is calculating the amount of time it will take his mother to get to the house to watch Leo, so Eric can haul his wife off to the psych ward.

What if she gets thrown into a VR recovery simulation within a VR recovery simulation? Could she get stuck in some never-ending loop of virtual recovery, and never find her way back to real life? The thought is more chilling than the prospect of seeing the backwards woman in every mirror for the rest of her life.

She takes a deep breath. “No. No, Eric. I’m sorry. I’m not on anything, I swear to you. I just...” She concentrates on remaining in whatever version of reality this is, and explains what transpired at Black Cats & Bookmarks earlier that night.

“I freaked out,” she says in conclusion. She’s committed to getting Eric to believe she’s all right. “While I was looking in the mirror, I thought about how awful it would be to go back to the person I was. I guess I just lost it a little.”

Eric still looks concerned, but less so. He puts a hand on her leg and attempts a smile. “I wish you’d woken me when you got home so we could have talked. I’m sorry you’ve been going through this. But there’s something else I’m going to say, and you might not want to hear it.”

“I know,” she says with exaggerated resignation. “And I’ve come to the same conclusion myself. I need to go back to therapy and get myself to NA meetings.”

She’s said the right thing; Eric is the picture of relief. “I’m glad we agree,” he says. “I’ll even go with you to that joint Al-Anon NA meeting next Monday.”

She nods. “I’m so sorry. I feel even more awful because you have work tomorrow.”

“It’s fine. Let’s both get some sleep.” He pulls down the covers, and she crawls up to lay beside him. He’s asleep within minutes.

Alice lies awake for a long, long time.

 

***

 

In the morning, Alice thinks Eric will leave without saying anything, but on his way out the door, he takes her arm.

“I assume you’re dropping Leo at my mother’s and coming home to work on the new book, but maybe you could hit the ten o’clock meeting on Broad Street?”

Alice flashes a smile so contrived, she feels like a jack o’ lantern. “That’s a great idea,” she says, and kisses him on the cheek.

After Eric’s car disappears down the street, she continues to stare after him. She should have said something more meaningful, should have prolonged their goodbye. She spins from the window, blinking back tears, then heads to the living room.

It’s time to collect her son.

She tries not to inhale Leo’s scent as she lifts him out of the playpen, but drowns in it all the same. Every second with him is now both the worst kind of torture and a euphoria a thousand times more intense than any dope she’s ever shot. She packs his bag and changes his diaper, struggling to keep his attempts to boop her nose from penetrating her heart. That anything as pure and good as what she’s had with her son could be a virtual reality illusion is a cruelty she cannot tolerate. She has to wall off her love.

“I’m running very late,” she says ten minutes later, when Eric’s mother, Sharon, opens her door. She thrusts the diaper bag at her and prepares to set Leo down beside his grandmother. Before she can do so, her body goes cold as ice. There is mercury—no, steel—in her blood. She pauses, but no wave of heat comes to displace the iciness. Alice squeezes her son, and he giggles, then squirms.

“I love you,” she whispers so fiercely it sounds like a threat. Tears sting her eyes. “I’ve always loved you, and I always will. You’re all I ever wanted.”

She hands Leo to her mother-in-law, who’s looking at her strangely. Before Sharon can ask if everything is okay, Alice runs to her car.

 

***

 

She is going to Broad Street, as Eric requested, but not for any meeting. Dealers still lurk in these doorways, and she finds one willing to sell to her without any trouble. After the exchange, she pushes the baggie to the bottom of her pocket, feeling that same jolt of comfort she always did at its bulge. It is only in the parking lot of the pharmacy, where she’s bought cotton swabs, hypodermic needles, and a bottle of water, that she pauses. There was some other reason she’d needed to come to the pharmacy, wasn’t there?

Alice strains for the answer, but like telling Eric the truth of the mirrors, it really doesn’t matter. The only way out of the simulation is to use. It’s a recovery simulation, so getting high should boot her out. Getting high will return her to her miserable—but very real—life.

Though she’s restless with anticipation, she pulls out of the lot to get high at home. She isn’t willing to have someone see her, call the cops, and thwart her mission. She’s so distracted by what awaits her, she doesn’t notice Sharon’s car in the driveway. Her mother-in-law opens the door as she jogs up the porch steps, startling Alice so thoroughly, she yelps.

“I’m so sorry,” Sharon babbles, “I know you have to work, but Bill fell on the back patio right after you left and broke some ribs. He went in an ambulance to St. Jude’s, and I came straight here.” Sharon’s brow furrows. “I didn’t call first, I was so frazzled, but I thought you’d be back before now. Now that you are here, I need to go so I can meet him.”

Sharon pushes past her, oblivious to Alice’s dumbfounded expression. This isn’t supposed to happen. Something as stupid as Eric’s father falling in the backyard would throw a wrench in her plans.

“I just put Leo down for a nap,” Sharon calls from the driveway. “I promise I’ll call as soon as I can.”

Like a woman in a dream, Alice steps into the house. She stares down the hallway at Leo’s closed door. Her hand travels to her pocket on autopilot, prepared to open the baby monitor app. She stops it halfway and plunges it into her purse instead. With the pharmacy bag clutched tightly, Alice retrieves a spoon from the dish drainer. As she bends it into position, a noise like a large flag unfurling sounds from across the kitchen. The foyer mirror has shed its skin, allowing her to see through the simulation. Her past self doesn’t bother to remain turned away.

The past her; Allie Stevens, desperate addict, looks the present her; Alice Shelley, mother, wife, and successful author, in the eye. Allie grins a horrible, skeleton’s grin. Alice takes one step back, then another, then she’s running down the hall. She slips into the only room in the house without a mirror: the nursery.

Leo is still asleep, and snoring softly, the feathery fur of his lion stuffed animal held to his face. Alice turns away, unable to look at him, to make sense of who he is... this virtual reality baby. She closes her eyes so hard, kaleidoscopic auras detonate behind her eyelids. She moans and sinks to the ground.

The pharmacy bag crinkles against the carpet, reminding her that everything she needs is right here. Both in her old life... and her false one. She dumps its contents onto the floor and feels the passage of nine years—or six virtual hours—give way to the muscle memory of preparing her dose. She dumps, sprays, mixes, holds the lighter under the spoon, and flicks.

The anticipation is akin to slipping beneath a hearth-warmed fleece blanket. The smell, a moment later, is harsh, chemical, divine. It is bubbly and thick, amber and sensual. It engulfs her senses. It engulfs every crevice of the room.

She ties off, the pinch of skin like a lover’s embrace. Blood whooshes in her ears. She’s about to release the tourniquet, but there’s another sound. It takes her a beat to realize it’s Leo, sucking in a breath.

For a second, maybe two, the spell is broken. The backwards woman is only a dream. The mirrors are an excuse to regress, to succumb to weakness and latent cravings, a trick of her brain so the banished addict can win. Alice remembers the doctor’s warning to avoid chemicals that may trigger Leo’s asthma, and the empty inhaler in the medicine cabinet. She was supposed to pick up refills at the pharmacy. She was supposed to protect him.

Then she recalls the sounds that came from the hospital room where the VR sims took place. The whirs and whines of inexplicable technology. This room and what’s in the crib, doesn’t matter. It isn’t real. Every moment she spends here is another moment she is doomed to love a child that doesn’t exist. Her heart can’t fathom that pain, and so she presses the needle to her skin. This is the only pain she wants to understand.

The sounds from inside the crib grow louder, more urgent. Begging for attention but easy to ignore. Alice pulls up on the needle’s plunger until blood sparkles in the chamber like a star falling from an ocher sky. She pushes the plunger like forcing the bottom of a mirror down onto its own frame. Reality and virtual reality are the same when it comes to getting high.

The dappled light that softens her brain is as perfect as she remembers. She melts into the floor, into herself, into a hallucination. She hangs, suspended, and the sounds from the crib grow more strangled. She smiles a little at the simulation’s death rattle.

The sounds grow softer. Alice hangs in the velvet silence, her mind cushioned and at peace. Any moment now, she will open her eyes and blink away the simulation like a hangover. The forgotten remnants of a feverish dream.

 

Then

Allie blinks away the sunlight streaming through the windows up ahead. She had no idea the leaves were this ablaze, the late September air so blustery. The counselor beside her is about to unlock the door to the world beyond the unit, when a voice comes from behind them.

“Where are you going?” Judy’s tone is not accusatory, just confused. “I got out of group and your stuff was gone.” Judy sees the counselor with the ring of keys in her outstretched hand. “What, you’re leaving?” Now there’s a note of accusation in her voice.

“I am,” Allie says. “Renee said if I wasn’t doing VR, my discharge would be early.”

“But...,” Judy sputters. “You said you would do the simulation.”

“No, I said I would think about it. And I did. I decided not to do it.”

At Judy’s hurt expression, Allie softens. “Hey, don’t look so glum. I’m going to get out of Boston, remember? Do the writing thing. Meet someone and start a family. I don’t need virtual reality to show me the path there. It can all come true if I stay clean.”

Judy nods once, and smiles sadly, like she believes her. Like she understands.

“Good luck,” she says.

Allie meets her eyes, and smiles.

The counselor unlocks the door. The air is invigorating. The world full of possibility.

Allie steps outside, into the first day of her new life.

 

 

About the Author

Christa Carmen's debut collection, Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked, was published in 2018 by Unnerving Books, and won the Indie Horror Book Award for Best Debut Collection. Her fiction has appeared in Not All Monsters: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women of Horror and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Adaptation.

 

 

 

Holding On

By

Gabino Iglesias

 

The elevator door creaked open. The sound reminded Guillermo of the creatures he heard when he was high. But he wasn’t high—not yet, at least—just buzzing with adrenaline. He picked up the bag of cans he'd traded, set his right foot against the door, and scanned the hallway. It was always good to hold the elevator in case he had to get away.

With the elevator’s door gently pushing against his shoe, Guillermo noticed something was off. His hyperawareness was the result of years living off the grid and constantly being on the lookout for cops. Life in Sector C was not as dangerous for him as it had been for the short time he was a fugitive in Sector B, but death could still jump out at him from any dark corner. When the government hates you, there aren’t many places to hide.

It took Guillermo a few seconds to realize what was out of place. As soon as he did, he filled his lungs to gather courage from the oxygen around him and stepped out of the elevator. About twenty feet ahead of him, a white triangle peeked from under his door. He examined the hallway once more and slowly approached his apartment, ready to swing the bag of cans if anything jumped out.

Cops don't leave notes under the door, so Guillermo's curiosity grew with each step. He bent down to retrieve the note, a white piece of paper that seemed to have been ripped from a small note pad. It had the typical rough left edge caused by all coil-binding notebooks. He recognized Matt's chicken scrawl, but the letters were even worse than usual. The short lines scribbled on the note had obviously been penned in a hurry, but that wasn't what sent shivers down Guillermo's spine.

There was a red stain on the note’s bottom corner. Its roundness and position suggested a thumb. It was still sticky in the middle.

Guillermo read the note:

Alondra and I are in trouble. They want to pull the baby out of her. We tried going underground, but the tunnels are overrun by gravedust makers and their fucking dogs. I had to fight two of them just to get out. We were lucky to make it back here alive. I came looking for you, but couldn't wait around. There are at least two cops following us. When you get this, grab your gun and meet us behind Opium. We need the gun to go back underground and sneak into Sector B until the baby's born. —M.

Matt had never been one for jokes. He and Guillermo had been with the same rebel brigade back in Sector B a few years back. They had gotten hooked on gravedust to help with the pain of being outsiders around the same time. Fighting together, and then being strung out together, had bonded them as friends ever since. Their deportations were even scheduled for the same week after they were caught interfering with the senseless arrest of an elderly neighbor whose cat had snuck out of her apartment. Matt suffered from depression and was dyslexic and Guillermo was brown, so they got kicked out of Sector B the same day. Hooking up again in Sector C was easy. They had even started to plot ways to sneak back into Sector B using some tunnels, but then Matt met Alondra and disappeared.

Two years passed without a word from Matt. Then he left a message for Guillermo with a mutual acquaintance, which he’d received only a few days earlier. Alondra was pregnant and they had to go into hiding. Since Sector C residents were considered undesirables—black, brown, homosexual, neurodivergent, folks with disabilities, and anyone with a chemical dependency—no reproduction permits were ever given to them. Matt wouldn't allow some discarded, unscrupulous veterinarian who'd been kicked out of Sector B to perform an abortion on Alondra, so Guillermo wasn't surprised to learn the couple had decided to disappear.

Now they were back, and someone was after them, which meant their hiding hadn’t gone well. Guillermo knew the government was unyielding about its birth policy in Sector C, but they wouldn't perform hysterectomies on girls younger than ten. Apparently, Alondra had been a resident of Sector C for far longer than Guillermo had imagined. After surviving that long, now her pregnancy was making her a target. When pregnancies were detected during a mandatory checkup, or if someone reported them to get a day pass to Sector B, abortions were immediately performed.

Guillermo entered the apartment and checked the hallway one last time before closing the door. Pacing in front of his window with the bloody note still in his hand, he thought about Matt and Alondra out there. They were alone, unarmed, and running away from the cops.

Those were terrible odds.

Guillermo kept pacing in his small apartment. He knew the right thing to do would be to help his friend, but another part of him, the powerful part that kept him indoors most of the time, was telling him to score some gravedust and vanish in its welcoming warmth for a few hours. The world was a dark place, but gravedust offered an escape to a place full of color where the horrors of Sector C and the pain of living a life torn to shreds by addiction didn’t exist.

“You have two families in life,” Matt had told Guillermo soon after they met. “One family you’re born into and have no choice; the other you choose, and that one often matters more than the one you were born into.” Those words haunted Guillermo after Matt disappeared. They were brothers, didn’t matter they were separated by sectors.

You ended up in Sector C because you weren’t good enough, and once there, you still had to live up to certain standards. There was a long list of code violations that seemed to constantly grow in order to get rid of people. For folks like Matt and Guillermo, failing a drug test was enough. For people like Alondra, who had been exiled to Sector C because some teacher had decided she was on the spectrum, there were endless other reasons for termination. Everything sounded official, but everyone knew it was all about control, racism, ableism, and making sure those in power remained in power. It was the end result of slowly allowing fascism to creep into politics without serious pushback. Guillermo understood all that, but he also understood he’d been born too late to make a difference, and every attempt he’d made had been met with implacable force.

A violation in Sector C meant prison time, which Matt and Alondra had already been through. A second violation meant termination, and that was exactly what they were facing now. Going underground was the only way people could evade the repercussions of a second violation. He couldn’t imagine his friend sitting back and letting the government rip this baby from Alondra’s womb and then killing them after making sure the couple saw the fetus, as they’re known to do.

Before Matt had disappeared, he’d warned that gravedust runners had taken over the tunnels that connected Sectors C and B, a place where murder and human trafficking were commonplace. Between the gravedust runner's guns and the lethal bite of their biomechanical dogs, going underground without a weapon sounded like a suicide mission. Since the tunnels were full of threats, he had no doubt Matt and Alondra were still waiting for him near Opium, probably sticking to the alleys where the cops didn’t dare go. The idea of a pregnant woman having to walk around Sector C's alleys made Guillermo nauseous.

They needed his help, but if he was caught in the tunnels, he’d be facing termination just like Matt and Alondra.

The thought angered Guillermo, and anger made his system scream for the sweet, colorful oblivion of gravedust. The system was fucking pitiless, but it made prisons unnecessary and saved the government a lot of money. Despite the gruesome prospects, leaving Matt and Alondra to fend for themselves was not an option. He walked to his room, knelt next to the bed, and retrieved the gun taped to the wood under the grimy box spring.

The Colt Anaconda felt good in his hand. The gun weighed almost four pounds, had a nasty crack on the left side of the grip, and the serial number had been scratched off, but it still fired and Guillermo kept it loaded. It also packed enough power to put down an angry rhino. Standing up, Guillermo glanced back through the doorway. The darkening chunk of sky he could see through the window in the small living room told him night was coming.

Darkness.

Again, his brain screamed for gravedust. Guillermo stuck his hand out in front on him. He would never make a living as a surgeon, but the shaking wasn’t too bad, yet. He lifted his shirt, placed the gun against his lower back, pulled his t-shirt over it, and walked out of the apartment.

 

***

 

In Sector C, nothing good ever happens at night. Nighttime is a huge disaster waiting to happen, a tightly coiled spring of death ready to pop, a jack-in-the-box of murder and mayhem. Guillermo walked out of his building and scanned both sides of the street. He was always watchful, but the tiny, cold tendrils of fear that were wrapping themselves around his heart made his alertness kick up a notch. The rush of adrenaline dampened his gravedust craving.

Guillermo knew sick creatures swarmed the dark streets like misshapen, wingless mosquitoes on a fetid concrete mangrove. Known as nightwalkers, gravedust junkies who’d reached the last stages of their addiction only came out a night. There was a rumor going around on the feed that attributed this to the neon colors gravedust users saw while they were high.

The rumor was wrong.

The story sounded cool, but the real reason was that, like with all drugs, there were different quality levels to gravedust and the most inexpensive option was something akin to Russian krokodil that caused severe tissue damage, phlebitis, and gangrene. The synthetic codeine and cheap chemicals used to make the drug also caused junkies to be allergic to the sun. What few people knew is that the government actually provided narcs with everything they needed to make the lethal drug—It was the government poisoning the supply. An inexpensive population control method…and an excuse to kill minorities.

Guillermo tried to steer clear of nightwalkers, but walking out after sunset meant he would surely encounter more than one. The trick was to see them before they saw you. Looking at the city around him, which always took on a more sinister aura at night, he knew staying safe was easier said than done. The blood on the note came to mind, bringing with it another awful memory—besides nightwalkers, cops were on the prowl.

Opium was a small bar about six blocks from Guillermo's apartment. With the reassurance of the cold steel of the gun pressing against his lower back, he began to walk.

The first nightwalker he came across was wearing filthy jeans, surprisingly well-maintained white tennis shoes, and a massive jacket so coated with dirt you could probably plant stuff inside. He also had a cigarette stuffed up his right nostril. His mouth was destroyed from drug use and he couldn’t even suck on a cigarette properly, but found a way to inhale the smoke through his nose. Humans are very adept and finding ways to hurt themselves. Obviously high from a dose of gravedust, the nightwalker never even glanced at Guillermo.

Guillermo’s fear faded, and in its place came cravings, even jealousy, for this man who was flying high on the dust, and a flashback to his last binge just a few days before.

In the trip, Guillermo had been flying over an endless field of neon blue grass. Gigantic yellow bulbous flowers shot up into the sky and bloomed into purple tendrils that danced only feet below him, swaying rhythmically to the sound of drones that came from everywhere all at once. The air was warm and felt like a gentle current of water against his skin. He flew for hours, watching strange beasts that looked like massive neon bees sipping nectar from tentacled flowers. When the sky turned grey and the air began to cool, Guillermo knew reality was seeping in, and with it came the memory of his failed attempts at making a difference and his life of squalor in Sector C.

Guillermo snapped out of his flashback and found himself in front of another man. This one was shirtless and stood across the street, near the corner at the end of Guillermo’s block. He wore dark shorts and his legs were covered with suppurating ulcers. They made eye contact, for just a second, when suddenly the man bent over and projectile vomit shot from his mouth, quickly forming a large puddle of dark slime at his feet. Small round things that looked like tadpoles swam about in the puddle. The stench of decay and blood crossed the street and reached Guillermo's nose.

He was going to puke himself if he didn’t move. He walked faster out of the stench, sticking to the middle of the street.

The buildings in Sector C always struck him as having been maliciously thrown together in an effort to cover every inch of available space and kill every standing tree, shrub, and blade of grass. Denying those who were different the same things everyone else was entitled to had started with a few liberties, but eventually it became about making others feel less than human. The way this place was built—not to mention how they’d destroyed everything that was here before—drove that point home everywhere you looked. “Good” and “normal” people deserved parks and placid lakes full of ducks. Everyone else got a mess of rough angles, dirty concrete, dangerous corners, and shadows. The buildings themselves looked like blocky monstrosities, painted only with fungus and decay.

Behind the buildings was a mind-boggling maze of dark, dirty, and breathtakingly narrow alleys that served as the hellish backstage for an awful play. Knowing that he might have to go into that dangerous world to find his friends, Guillermo felt his resolution waver.

Why not just find some gravedust? The feel of wiping the tiny granules on his gumlines, the numbing sensation that followed, the tiny particles of dust penetrating through his mouth into his brain and then lifting his spirit to something so beautiful. He needed to see it, maybe just one last time. He deserved it, right?

Guillermo walked on, hating when he craved the dust like that, and kept his eyes trained on the discarded, rusted cars that lined the street. The barely-there burnt skeletons were fine, but the ones with more complete structures were perfect hiding places for nightwalkers. The vehicles were scattered throughout the city like shitty afterthoughts, reminding folks that once, before gas became a commodity in Sector C, there were cars actually driving on this street.

Three blocks later, he entered what was considered the commercial section of Sector C. Light spilled out of a few doors here and there. Whorehouses and bars were the only places that dared open after sunset, and they all had heavy security.

A few derelicts in rotting coats were unceremoniously dragging their smelly carcasses in front of the open doors looking for a handout that would put them closer to their next dose of gravedust. At the end of each block, a dark hole between buildings would signal the entrance to the alleys. Guillermo knew these were strategic places from which nightwalkers could observe without being seen.

A couple of young girls crossed the street arm in arm, giggling. Lascivious hoots and hollers came from a few open doors. The girls kept walking, unperturbed by the collection of carnal promises and verbal abuse. Their callousness impressed Guillermo. One of them was brown, which was surely the reason she was here, but the other one had pale skin and blue eyes. That mean she was on the spectrum or had maybe been outed as a member of the LGBTQ+ community.

Finally, Opium's green neon sign came into view. It was the last door on that block.

The joint was a long corridor-looking space that was about twelve feet across and had no air conditioning and no windows. Patrons were sitting close to the door trying to escape the heat inside, their faces all different shades of black and brown. Guillermo approached the door. The odors that came from inside wafted out and crawled up his nose.

He was about five feet from the door when a woman’s shriek came from the alley. He looked to the shadowy rectangle and his right hand flew to his gun. Whoever made the sound could come running at him from the shadows at any moment. When that didn’t happen, he relaxed a bit and walked on.

But what if that scream was Alondra? The cops could have gotten their hands on the couple.

He ran into the shadows.

Darkness enveloped Guillermo the second he entered the alley and he was forced to stop. Fear’s icy hand gripped his heart and squeezed hard. It felt as if a cold steel band was constricting his chest. A second scream erupted somewhere ahead of him. This one a tad lower in decibels but just as violent as the first, a sound ripped out of a throat by pain. It was followed by a wet thud. Guillermo wanted to sprint forward deeper into the darkness, but running into whatever was causing those screams was not a good idea. He pulled out the gun and moved ahead slowly, allowing his pupils to fully dilate.

The alley was straight, narrow, and reeked of mold, garbage, and stagnant water. Guillermo’s eyes slowly adjusted. He could see the alley opened up at the end of the tall buildings that rose on both sides of him. Somewhere behind the building to his right, either an open door or a distant lamppost, was throwing a bit of light on the alley.

He needed to get as close to that light source as possible.

Many footsteps later, Guillermo spotted a figure on the ground. It was slumped against the wall, moving slowly as if was trying to get up. He stopped and raised the gun. A gurgling sound came from the thing on the ground. With the gun trained on it, Guillermo took a few steps closer. Sweat started running down his sides and his brain screamed for gravedust. If only he had some. Why not become a nightwalker rather than live in fear of them? He wanted to be out of that alley. He wanted to be floating above beautiful vistas. He wanted to be as far away from reality as he could be and never return, but instead was getting closer.

The creature on the ground was a man. His head was moving from side to side and he was holding his neck with his left hand. Guillermo moved closer to the wall and walked forward, ready to shoot if the man suddenly came at him.

When he was a few feet away, the man lifted his head. More gurgling came from his mouth, accompanied by a hiss. The scant light that came from behind the building reflected on the blood that was flowing from his neck and running down his chest. Guillermo bent down to look closer. He had a long, black goatee that cascaded over his hand, a very sharp nose, and a receding hairline. Recognition dawned on Guillermo with the power of rushing water.

It was Matt.

Guillermo checked behind him before kneeling down next to his friend.

“Matt!”

Instead of replying, Matt grunted. The wet sound came again.

“Can you talk?” asked Guillermo. “Where's Alondra?”

Something sharp bounced around Guillermo’s chest, cutting at his heart. Fear crept into his brain. Every instinct was telling him to flee.

“Cops...” Matt's words became a wet cough. More blood came from his mouth. He coughed again.

His friend was drowning in his own blood.

Guillermo grabbed Matt’s arm to help him to his feet, but Matt shook his head, removed the hand that covered his neck wound, and pointed toward the end of the alley.

He was not left-handed, so Matt's use of his left arm meant his right arm was probably broken. Cops in Sector C were very good at what they did: hurting people. There were no dead cops next to Matt, so they had done their job and moved on. The pool of blood under his friend told Guillermo his carotid artery was history. His inability to talk meant the wound was very deep. If Matt was still alive, the cops were close. His friend only had a few minutes left.

But where was Alondra?

He looked towards the alley ahead, wanting to both save Alondra and stay with his dying friend. Matt was looking at him with dying eyes. The bleeding from the gash in his neck was slowing down, and when it stopped, his eyes closed for good.

Matt was gone.

Anger filled Guillermo’s chest and pried away fear’s cold fingers from his heart. No more fear, only rage. He stood up just as another shriek echoed off the alley walls.

The scream was agonizingly long and trembled a bit in its last few seconds. Guillermo was sure the screamer was a woman. It had to be Alondra. She sounded like she was crying. Guillermo moved past a few dumpsters in silence and stopped to concentrate on listening. A scurrying sound came from behind. He turned around with gun ready. Two huge rats were making a rapid retreat to the back of the dumpsters.

Guillermo jogged until he was almost at the end of the alley. Adrenaline had once again pushed his craving for gravedust back to a dull ache rather than a crippling need. He pressed his body against the wall and closed his eyes. Alondra was struggling somewhere ahead of him. He could hear feet scraping furiously against the mucky ground followed by a muffled sound. The sound could only come from a hand-covered mouth.

Whatever was happening was just ahead and around the corner. Guillermo kept moving. When there was no more wall, he took a deep breath and jumped out into the parallel alley.

A balding man with a long beard wearing all black was holding Alondra by the stomach with his right arm. His left hand was clamped over her mouth, provoking the muted sounds. Alondra was wearing a black shirt and nothing more. Her legs were covered in blood and she was struggling to get free. She had dug her fingernails into the cop’s forearm. Blood was trickling down from the attacker’s ragged flesh, but the scratches were not enough to do the trick because he had a big gap-toothed grin on his face. His out-of-place smile scared Guillermo even more and he fought to stop his gun from shaking. Then a snarl came from a shadowy spot in front of the cop. That’s when he noticed the other two figures on the ground.

A second man and a woman were hunched like dogs over something in front of Alondra’s feet and closer to the wall. Guillermo fired a warning shot that echoed up and down the alley like an explosion. The shot landed to the side of the balding man’s head, making the wall burst in a cloud of dust that danced in the scant light. The cop immediately let Alondra go and raised his arms. Alondra dropped to her knees and bawled frantically. Guillermo approached the two on the ground with the gun shaking in his hand.

These other two cops were nothing like the ones he had seen previously. They resembled nightwalkers more than government employees, but their entirely black uniforms gave them away. As Guillermo stood over them, the two cops raised their faces. They looked mad and scared at the same time. Their pupils were those of cornered animals on the verge of attacking. Pustules were oozing on both of their faces.

The cops were gravedust junkies.

Guillermo looked at the cops in disgust and realized their mouths were covered in blood. When they twisted a bit with mouths chewing, he saw why. There was a dead infant on the floor between them. Its tiny, pink body had been mauled and blood was pooling around it.

But this was not just a baby; it was Alondra and Matt’s child. The very reason they had to live a life on the run.

The urge to shoot the motherfuckers on the floor became secondary to pain and revulsion. Something as natural and human as bringing a child into the world had turned into something that those who weren’t the right color or met the right criteria couldn’t do simply because they didn't live in the right sector. That was horrible, but the scene in front of him was so much worse. This was the law showing its complete lack of humanity. A perfect example of how those who criticize and discriminate are often monsters deserving of everything they wished upon those they disapprove of.

Guillermo was brought out of his stupor by a sudden movement. The bearded cop had turned and was making a run for it. Instinctively, Guillermo fired. Despite the need for gravedust making his hands shake, he hit his mark. The man’s right shoulder exploded in a red mist and he stumbled forward, but kept on running.

Alondra was crawling toward what was left of her dead baby. A voice in Guillermo's head was telling him to shoot the two monsters on the ground right then and there, but he couldn't bring himself to squeeze the trigger. He felt cold and paralyzed. Taking their lives should be easy, but it wasn’t.

The two cops sensed his tentativeness and began getting up. Guillermo looked back at Alondra and saw a young woman who had lost everything once, regained an entirely new life, and then lost it again in one night.

His heart, which he wasn’t sure was there anymore, shattered. Years of resentment boiled in his chest. Guillermo took two steps forward and fired twice. The cops slumped to the ground with holes in their foreheads.

Guillermo looked back at Alondra and the anxiety and desperation on her face almost knocked him back. She had blood on her legs and arms and her expression betrayed the fact that she had completely lost her mind. She was cradling the dead baby and whispering something in Spanish “Te protegeré mi bebé”— I’ll protect you my baby. Guillermo looked at the small, bloody body in her arms. It had been a boy. The umbilical cord was still attached to his pink belly, but most of his upper chest and face had been gnawed away.

When he was finally able to peel his eyes from the dead baby, Guillermo mumbled something about getting Alondra some medical attention. The second the words left his mouth, he knew they were useless.

Alondra was alone. He was alone. There was no one to call. There was no future, no choices, and no breaks. They were two brown people in a dirty alley with a dead brown baby and no options. The authorities were the ones who had done this to begin with, so they weren’t about to offer any help. In fact, the cop who had run away would be telling someone about what had gone down in the alley in no time. They had to vanish quickly if they wanted to live, since many more would come, and now they were considered armed and dangerous.

Guillermo had the impression the grimy walls wanted to close in on him. The alley seemed somehow darker and dirtier than when he had first entered. His hands shook. He needed a fix. He needed to fly for a while. He had to soar over all this death and hatred. He wanted to look down on a world with no discrimination or sectors; a place where what mattered most would be the brain in your head and the kindness in your heart, not the color of your skin, the way your brain processed information, or how well you could use your limbs.

Gravedust had always been an escape and Guillermo knew it, but he also knew that most people wouldn’t even think about touching it if the world around them didn’t push them to do so, if it didn’t give them plenty of reasons to want to escape. As someone who depended on a chemical to cope with his miserable life, Guillermo had accepted a long time ago that those responsible for creating the elements that shaped his life were always the first one to call him a junkie and the last one to accept the role they’d played in his addiction.

Guillermo closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the feeling of warm air caressing his skin like water. He tried to ignore his ragged breathing and his shaking hands and thought about flowers the size of buildings with beautiful dancing tentacles waving at him from below.

A scream from somewhere down the alley pulled Guillermo back to reality.

Alondra was no longer crying, but she was still talking to the dead child. Guillermo walked over and sat down next to her. She was in shock, she was injured, but she would survive. As long as she was alive, there was still a bit of hope. He looked down at the gun in his hand. With enough ammunition, maybe they could sneak into the tunnels and make it to Sector B. It was worth a try. Having nothing to lose somehow filled him with optimism. Since there was nothing else for the two of them, he decided to hold on to hope for as long as possible.

 

 

About the Author

Gabino Iglesias is the author of the Wonderland Book Award-Winning novel, Coyote Songs. His upcoming novel, The Devil Takes You Home, is coming in 2022 from Mulholland Books. He is a two-time Bram Stoker Award Finalist as well as a Locus Award Finalist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buyer’s Remorse

by

Samantha Kolesnik

 

I’m the nicest person you could ever meet. Anyone would tell you that.

It’s not easy to be nice in this world. I held the door open for three people today. I let an older gentleman cut in front of me at the grocery store. I said sorry to the barista who messed up my drink order—and I still didn’t even skimp on the tip. I let car after car pass me on the highway because I truly have that much empathy for the people around me.

I’m always putting other people first.

At least that’s what Martha tells me as I pile out the groceries in our new apartment. I got her all of her favorites. Martha’s on her period and gets horrendous cramps. They’re not normal levels of pain, she swears, but the doctor tells her otherwise. She sees the chocolate-covered cherries and burrows herself in my chest. She then turns away and rips the package open before I can land a hello-kiss on her cheek.

“I got the good kind, the ones from Belgium.”

She doesn’t seem to care about this distinction, but I do. I like shopping. I took my time at the grocery store; savoring the selection was three-fourths of my high, after all. I lingered in the specialty aisle. I threw in almond butter candies, organic pomegranate juice, some expensive cheese from Ireland, more expensive cheese from France, organic locally-sourced vegan bacon (we’re not vegan, but the packaging was so cute, so small, so on point), free-trade dark chocolate-covered goji berries, raw plantain protein bars, duck fat, coconut curry flavored hummus, and so forth. My cart was full of little packages of special snacks. The packaging was half the thrill. I loved to hold the branded boxes and plastic containers in my hands. There is a lot of work that goes into good packaging. A good package sells more than its contents—it sells a feeling.

Mostly, I shopped for that—for feelings. Superiority. Comfort. Self-esteem. Adrenaline.

A tiny, individually-wrapped organic fair-trade peanut butter cup from Brazil could briefly provide a high octane dose of all four.

Five dollars and sixty-two cents for two bites of I’m-powerful-and-classy was worth it.

For just the right price, I get the high that I’m after. I don’t need to stick needles in my arm. And besides, it wasn’t my money, anyway. It was Mrs. Richardson’s money.

Before you think I’m horrible for spending another woman’s money, I’ll have you know she doesn’t need it anymore. Mrs. Richardson is dead.

And I don’t think Mrs. Richardson, as sweet as she was when still breathing, would begrudge my beautiful girlfriend Martha her Belgian chocolate-covered cherries on the first day of her period. That would just be cruel. It would be unbecoming to think that way about the old sugar heiress and so I prefer to think she’d want a number like Martha to indulge.

Martha, oh Martha.

She reclines on the couch and makes a pout. “You don’t like them?” I ask. I suddenly think of all the other special snacks I bought and get a slight buzz trying to land on which one to offer next.

Just as I buy feelings, I also give them. There’s no better way to prolong the endorphins than to share what gets you off, and I get a vicarious hit off watching Martha’s slender fingers run over the glossy fonts as they fondle the premium packaging of my edible gifts. It’s a mutual fantasy of luxury and though it’s hell to sustain, the brief reprieves of validation make it worth it.

“I need a drink,” she whines in a baby voice and half sticks out her bottom lip. It’s a tired affectation but she still looks stunning sprawled out on our new leather sofa. She wears a white t-shirt with black text that says, “WILL DO ANYTHING FOR COFFEE” and white terry-cloth booty shorts. Her toes are perfectly manicured—she clearly painted them this afternoon because in between bites, she wiggles them and smiles, admiring herself.

I pour her a glass of wine—the most expensive bottle in the supermarket. I’m not even sure it’s good, but it feels good—and I make myself tea. I need to think straight; Martha doesn’t.

I hand over the wine to Martha and she takes it in both hands, the package of cherries balanced unevenly on her stomach. Just as she reaches to pull me down toward her, I hear my phone ding three times.

“Is that Nicole again?” I see the preemptive anger on her face. Martha is wondering if it’s my ex and she might be right, but it’s unlikely. Nicole and I didn’t exactly part on great terms, but that’s what I get for being too nice.

I make a show of how casually I approach my cell phone and eyeball the home screen alerts. Three months late on the electric—they’re going to turn it off soon. Two months past due on the leased Fiat and another text—arguably the most worrisome. It’s from Mrs. Richardson’s granddaughter, an insidious little nose-about named Lise, and she’s asking if her Grandma is alright.

In the old days, I might’ve panicked, but I’m more seasoned now. I send Lise a data-scrubbed photo of Mrs. Richardson sitting up in bed, a teacup and paperback propped on her nightstand. Lise texts back immediately (never a great sign). “She doesn’t look good. Is she sick?”

It’s hard not to roll my eyes because Mrs. Richardson is not sick in the photo—she’s fucking dead. I learned from the first time, you need proof or people start getting antsy. A well-planned postmortem photo shoot can buy a lot of time, but it has to be done when they’re still fresh or it’s nearly impossible to pull off. These are the things you can only learn by doing and I’m not trying to brag, but I am proud of the fact that I’m an autodidact in this regard.

And I’m good at what I do, too. Lise says the old heiress doesn’t look good, but Jesus, when is the last time Lise even saw her grandmother? I was light with the make-up—a natural look is the most beautiful—and over the years, I’ve accumulated a whole book of flattering poses in my mind.

Martha stirs over on the couch. Clearly, I’m taking too long and she’s gotten infinitely more agitated.

“Baby, I’m cooold,” Martha whines, and she slinks over to wrap her arms around me from behind. What she’s really doing is spying, but I close my phone in time. Lise will have to wait. The photo should tide her a day or two. After all, she won’t want to seem like a bother. The relatives rarely do.

I turn to Martha, our hips pressed against each other. I cup her face in my right hand and stroke the outline of her lips with my left. Just as I complete the circuit, her mouth succumbs and opens. She runs her tongue along my finger and sucks on it like I have a dick.

(I don’t.)

And then she travels downward…

Goddamnit. She’s downright delightful.

Martha’s undoing every last stress in my body with her mouth and I’m mentally reaching somewhere calm—somewhere void of bill alerts and nosy relatives—somewhere that doesn’t smell like bleach…

Ding.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Martha stops her flicking tongue and puts her teeth on the soft flesh of my inner thigh. She gives it a little bite and scowls at me.

I’m so distracted grabbing for my phone that I forget to tell her it hurts.

(It really does.)

“You’re running out on me!” She accuses me of this most likely because I ran out on Nicole for her. More aptly, deep down she knows I can’t stay with her forever. She rightly suspects in her tartish heart that something this nice is here-and-now and not love-everlasting.

She snatches the cell out of my hand.

And then I have to get rough.

She’s crying and holding her face, but the important thing is that I have the phone back. She yells that I’m a bitch-or-this-and-that (it’s all the same, isn’t it?) and anyway, we all know I’m not. If she knew the lengths I go to just to give her sweet ass the finest leather pedestal, she’d stop her pointless screams.

I block out Martha’s tirade and turn my attention back to my phone. Lise again? Jesus Christ.

She wants to visit. She feels bad she hasn’t visited in such a long time, and she’s wondering when I can arrange to pick her up from the airport if she books a flight. She’s worried about her Grandma and she apologizes for the multiple texts, but…

Martha’s now stopped her screaming and is back to pouting at me from her place on the couch.

“You know if you wanna leave me for someone else, you can tell me!” Her face crumples into an all-out sob and I go to her side. I tenderly caress the cheek I slapped. I caringly, sweetly touch my lips to the place I planted the bruise and show it my love. Soon our tongues are circling each other as fast as they can and I feel her desperation to tap out mentally and get lost in an orgasm.

And I’m just so damn nice, I can’t help but oblige.

It’s okay—the sex—but it’s not as satisfying or calming or thrilling as what comes after. I show her the diamond tennis bracelet I bought courtesy of Mrs. Richardson. It sits nicely on Martha’s wrist and glitters promises I’d love to keep, if only the world would let me.

It’s going to be my last gift to this one. The bill collectors are chasing me for this haunt and though it’s been fun, I’m going to have to get out soon. Martha says the name she thinks is mine, but I’ve had so many over the years, I’m not sure I can even remember the true one.

She thinks of me as rich—exotic—powerful—mysterious—sexy, and it’s so intoxicating to bask in her fantasy of me. The diamonds sparkling on her petite wrist are tiny, glittering props in our movie. After the credits roll, she’s going to try to hate me only to realize she doesn’t actually know who I am. It’s hard to hate a phantom and though she’ll want to be rid of me, she’ll never forget me.

Because no one was as nice to her as I was.

I wait until she’s dozed off before I get to work. I pour another glass of wine for her, but not before crushing a few benzos onto our coffee table. I stir them into the red liquid and set it on the table for when she wakes. It’ll fuzz her out real good and keep her off my case while I tie up loose ends.

This part is always hard. It’s not leaving Martha that’s hard. It’s leaving the mint green espresso machine that’s hard. It’s leaving my alligator-skin knee-high boots that’s hard. And the cow-hide lampshade I’d bought at a ridiculous price from an online boutique. All of these things—they were so carefully, thrillingly selected. I wish I could keep them, but I can’t.

The only thing that keeps me going through this gloomy acceptance is the prospect of buying more. There will be a new apartment. And a new pretty number to adorn. A new wardrobe. A new haircut.

I take Mrs. Richardson’s cards out of my bag and spread them out on the counter for one last glance. They’re the thicker kind of credit cards—the ones that have real weight to them, the kind that makes cashiers give you a second glance. I’ll miss them. I think about one last spree, but am not sure I’ll have time. Still, the thought of buying something—anything—to give me a pick-me-up, is tantalizing. One last hurrah for this name I can no longer wear.

No, there isn’t time right now. Or is there? This internal battle is insufferable and constant. I know rationally that I shouldn’t. That I should head straight to Mrs. Richardson’s house and sort out what I have to before Lise breaks it all open and lands me in a place where I can’t buy more than a roll of toilet paper.

I know this.

Yet I still find myself walking into a department store ten minutes before their posted closing time. The lady on the sales floor shoots me an awful look, but she’ll be happy soon because I’m going all out tonight. They work on commission here and with my endorphins pumping, I know I’m going to make her more tonight than she’s made all month. She asks me my size and I tell her it’s not for me, that it’s for my wife. I don’t have a wife, of course, but maybe I will one day, and besides, it’s fun to watch the sales lady’s feigned smile, her buried shock receding beneath the need to make money. Everyone’s belief system takes a backseat to money.

“Oh…that’s…that’s so cute,” she says, and then second-guesses her word choice. I let the silence bathe us for a moment before she flounders over to a rack of discount dresses. She holds a yellow sleeveless one up, and I wave my hand in dismissal. “No, no, something nicer. Something much nicer.”

I stay far later than I should. The sales lady’s name is Liz and she’s become flirtatious, the more she realizes I have money to spend. I’ve spent two hours having her show me bags and earrings, perfumes and dresses. The sheer tally of it all on the register makes her eyes light up with lust. She’s not attracted to me, but I think I see in her eyes that she thinks she could be. She’s wondering if she could bear it, at least, for that kind of dough. She could quit her job, she could travel, she could…

I know the type; I’ve fucked the type. And I don’t mean to be mean, but they’re not that great in bed.

I let my hand linger on hers for a second longer than necessary when she hands me the card back and I gauge her expression. Is she interested—confused? She looks like she’s considering swallowing a bug. Yeah. That’s what I thought.

In the back of my mind, I know I have to get going, and now I have five bags worth of merchandise to transport. Where am I going to put all this stuff?

I try not to think about it.

I say goodbye to Liz and carry my bags out to the car. I throw the bags in the trunk and mince the receipt. I toss the shreds into a parking lot puddle and grind them into the water with my boot heel. It’s not that nice to litter, but paper decomposes and I’ve got more important things on my mind.

By the time I pull into the long drive of Mrs. Richardson’s house, it’s early morning. I’m tired, but focused. I check my phone as soon as I put the car in park and see that Lise, the scoundrel, has booked an early-morning flight. “No worries about a ride from the airport, I’ll take a cab!” This is worse than I could’ve imagined because at least I could’ve delayed picking her up.

I won’t have everything scrubbed by the time she gets here, she’s flying in so soon. It’s not enough lead time if she arrives and sounds the alarm. This situation is ten-ways-fucked-to-Monday and it’s just not fair. This is what the world does to people like me; it screws us over again and again.

I leave my bags in the trunk even though I want to run my hands over the tags and look at the prices. I could spend a whole night picking up the products and looking at them, neatly folding them, hanging them up, imagining the reactions of people as I show them off.

But I can’t do that tonight.

I can’t do that tonight because this fucked up universe is sending nosy Lise Richardson to come spy on me. She wasn’t interested in her grandmother before, but now she cares?

I take a deep breath before texting her back to have a safe flight. As soon as I hit “send” I think I’ve fucked up because it’s super late and she might wonder why I’m up. She doesn’t reply and I figure she’s on her way to the airport or catching some quick z’s before she heads out. It’s not exactly reassuring that she’s gone from “How is Grandma” to booking an early flight within the span of less than twenty-four hours.

She’s suspicious. She’s got to be.

I’ve kept this name for far too long and I’m going to need all of my faculties to get out of this one. I hope Martha’s enjoying the wine, I think bitterly, but I snap out of it. While it’s true that I’m a victim in all this, I can’t let that get me down. I’ve got work to do.

First-things-first, I need to do some damage control. I unlock the key to Mrs. Richardson’s house and enter the alarm code on the pad as soon as I’m inside. The foyer smells stuffy, like old perfume and stale potpourri. It’s nauseating.

I see the old woman’s slippers by the interior entrance door and do a double take. Did I leave them there when I left yesterday? I’m sure no one could have been here, because the alarm didn’t go off. I’m on the contact-first list for any alarm notifications, and have been for the last several months. Mrs. Richardson wasn’t good with that kind of technology, so she entrusted me to handle it for her.

I walk inside and head straight to the bathroom. I open the medicine cabinet and pull out the old woman’s pill bottles. I take out the number appropriate for the days since she’s died and flush them down the toilet. It’s a minor detail, but every bit counts. The key is to not arouse immediate suspicion so that I can have enough time to get out of dodge.

I go to the kitchen and dirty up a few dishes for the sink. I make it look freshly lived in. I go to Mrs. Richardson’s cats-on-ice calendar on the fridge, and swipe off the last few days with a black marker. I add a few fake appointments to the next week for any case.

I take the dead hydrangeas from the dining room table and toss them into the trash. Mrs. Richardson had a strange obsession with hydrangeas. She said they kept evil out and were good for reversing curses. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo, of course, but everyone has their quirks.

I take a dust cloth from the closet and start to wipe down the furnishings and fixtures. I swipe it across the top of the baby grand piano in the sitting room and hear a wheeze. A rasping, phlegm-filled wheeze. It sounds distant enough, but there’s no neighbor for miles.

For a minute, I think it’s the old lady and I have to remind myself she’s dead. Her body is contorted neatly into an industrial-sized barrel in her walk-in closet, right under her sweater collection. She’s sleeping in lye and never has to wheeze again. I fixed that for her, kindly enough.

It’s gotta be a stray cat. Mrs. Richardson was always feeding the strays that came around the back garden door. She’d probably let one in before saying her final farewell, and I’d been too preoccupied to notice.

I look around the sitting room to see if I can spot the rogue feline. I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I hate cats. They’re nasty little buggers who don’t owe anyone loyalty. A dog, you can train, but a cat—you have to work for their affection, and it can’t be bought. I don’t like things I can’t buy. It’s no fun and all work.

I hear the wheeze again. It sounds like a damned croak—like the little bugger really has a hairball stuck in its throat. I try to chase the origin of its rasping and the more I look, the angrier I get. This four-legged creature is wasting precious time and soon Lise will be here. It’s hard to cross every item off my post-job checklist when I’m trying to find this thing.

I round the corner of the first-floor hallway and listen for its footsteps. I don’t hear anything, so I think it’s gone upstairs. I don’t like going up there. The lye barrel hides a good deal of the stench, but some does leak out. It’s where the old lady spent most of her time, and I don’t like remembering her or her ankle-length nightgowns.

When I’d finished her off, she’d urinated onto the mattress—a pungent urine. The ammonia scent fills my nostrils every time I think about her and even though I know it’s not real, I think I smell it now. I remember feeling embarrassed for her—silly feeling, that—and spent way too long scrubbing the yellow out of the mattress. “Sorry about that,” I’d said to her.

Oh how many apologies I’d uttered over the years, and all to ears that couldn’t hear them.

I glimpse the early sunlight coming through one of the windows before steeling myself to go upstairs. I take one step—then two—and on the third, I lose my balance and tumble forward. My hands brace my fall, but in doing so, crash through the wooden stairs. I think I’m going to tumble to the floor, but my palms are stopped by what looks like a cement underlay. I upright myself partially and realize I’ve busted my lip. This is all going to be very hard to explain to Lise when she arrives. I may have to just book it.

I look down at my hands, my lip dripping blood onto them, and am confused. It looks like a compartment beneath the stairs. A cache? I feel around and dust flutters up in my face. Sneezing and squinting, I grab onto the only thing my hands can reach and pull it out. It’s…

Huh.

What on earth...

I hold it up, trying to confirm what it is in the dim blue early-morning light.

It’s a small doll made of long gray hairs, its appendages tied off with black ribbon. It’s a peculiar craft and I may be imagining it, but I think it reeks of ammonia. I feel something hard in the doll’s center and with some massaging, the heart of the thing falls out into my hand.

It’s a tooth, a molar, and clearly extracted from the mouth of a human.

I drop it immediately and it clacks down the stairs. I toss the doll-shaped wad of hair into the dusty cache from whence it came and consider fleeing before Lise arrives. I can’t fix the stairs. I can’t explain any of this. And I need—I desperately need—to take a shower. The stench of this place is getting to me, and it’s unbearable. My eyes are watering but I can’t touch my face after holding whatever that thing was. It’s probably full of disease. Who knows how long it’s been under there.

And then I hear the wheeze again.

If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to snatch that cat and throw it out the second-story window. I’ll solve its cough for good.

I carefully crawl up the remaining stairs and once on the second floor, I get to my feet. I don’t know why now, of all times, but I briefly remember my aunt Tricia from way back, and how she’d looked at me in that last moment. “You don’t have to keep doing this. You have a problem that you can’t stop on your own. You have an addiction, but we can get you help,” she’d said, but she was still going to press charges for the credit card fraud, and I needed out.

Just like I need out now.

Going to press charges, after all I’d bought for her? After all I’d bought for my mom, for my dad, for my friends? I was always thinking of others, and that’s where it got me.

I cup my hand over my nose and mouth as I round the corner into the old woman’s bedroom. The smell is bad here, worse than I remembered. I hear the wheezing now very clearly—that damned cat is close. Real close. I’m going to grab it by the tail and bash it against the wall.

No. I’ll do it another way. A nicer way. I’ll shove it in the barrel with the old woman before I lug it to the crawl space.

I look at Mrs. Richardson’s sleigh bed as I pass it, even though I don’t want to. The blankets are pulled down and I can still see the indent in the mattress where the old woman slept for so many years. It’s distinctly outlined as if she’s still laying there now. I sigh when I spot the hydrangeas in the vase by her bed—wilted, rotten. Their small, dry petals cover the table. More to clean.

I open the door to the walk-in closet, where I’m sure I can hear the feline croaking.

I ready myself to pounce on the thing as soon as I open the door. Only, the stench overtakes me first and I cover my face trying to filter it out. A mixture of dust, ammonia, shit, and… is that Aunt Tricia’s cheap drugstore perfume? I swallow my dry heaves as best I can and peek through my hands.

The lye barrel is on its side and a black cat—one of the strays the old woman used to feed—is lapping at something fleshy, nibbling it and then hacking it up, nibbling it some more, and then throwing it up anew. There’s no longer a body, just bits and pieces of humanlike substance. I’ve been doing this long enough to know she wasn’t in there for the time needed to decay so much, and so my first question is where is she?

I hear the creak of the mattress behind me before I turn and see her.

As I fall to the ground, a curtain of gray hair sweeps over my face and the old woman opens my mouth and shoves something hard inside, something impossible to breathe around. I choke and slobber around the gag, but it’s to no avail. I can’t breathe, and I can’t move. I’m not sure how someone—something—so old, is somehow so strong. I hear the door open from downstairs and for a moment, I still have hope of getting out of this.

“Grandma!” It’s a younger female voice. It’s got to be Lise. “Grandma, I’m here!” I can hear footsteps coming up the stairs and for once, I don’t care if I’m caught. I’m happy to know I’ll be alive. That’s all that matters now—surviving. I internally swear I’ll never steal or shop again if I can just get free of this old ghoul.

The black retching cat from the closet patters over to me and laps a scaly, putrid tongue at my face. I want to bash its little skull in, but I can’t move. I have no energy and am so tired, so full of desperation and regret. I hear Aunt Tricia’s voice in my head, “We can get you help,” and see her eyes lose life before me all over. It seems so silly now—the lying, the running off, the need to keep buying more and more and more until—

The younger woman enters the bedroom and I see her feet first. She’s wearing red heels—nice ones. Ones I would’ve bought for Martha. I can’t help but think she has good taste. She’s going to get me out of here. This is all a mistake. A ghastly mistake.

“Oh Grandma,” the young woman coos, and her tone feels much too cloying.

Shouldn’t she be shocked? Shouldn’t she be helping me this very minute?

“Old magic,” the old heiress whispers. “It’s not as clean as what the young folk use, but it’s what my Mama taught me, and her Mama before her.”

I wriggle and moan. It’s all I can do. I feel paralyzed, as if I’ve been drugged, and yet I know I haven’t been.

“Fetch me my sewing kit,” the old woman whispers again. Her whispers, so frail but resolute, terrify me.

I want to say what I’ve always said, that I’m so sorry, but I can’t speak this time. I just have to lay here and wait.

Lise steps out of my view and returns a moment later. The old woman opens a small wooden box and removes a piece of card stock with a brass-ringed hole on the edge.

“Everything has a price,” the old woman whispers. The heiress then threads a needle and loops it into the brass hole before plunging it into my flesh. I groan in agony and Lise kneels beside me. She pats my forehead like a nurse would—the sick fuck—while Mrs. Richardson takes her time attaching the old-fashioned price tag to my arm. My arm burns with pain every time the needle moves and threads through my flesh. This kind of needle just isn’t meant for human bodies.

My arm is aching where she sews, and by the time she’s finished, I think of a time in third grade when I was outside for recess and Mrs. Rockford had a grip on my arm just the same. It was a snowy day, and my face felt raw with cold. “Honey, doesn’t your father have the money to get you a nice winter jacket?” She had said it in a way that felt like condemnation. Mom and Dad barely had money for dinner, let alone cold-weather clothes. The memory of the snow coming down and landing on Mrs. Rockford’s scrutinizing face fades as I feel Lise dragging me toward the walk-in closet…

Oh no.

No, no, no. Not there.

Please, not there.

They are folding me up now and putting me inside my own special, little package. The liquid burns. My eyes glimpse upward at the last ring of light before the lid closes shut. It’s pitch black now and I’m burning all over.

No one will be looking for me. No one even knows who I am anymore.

 

 

 

About the Author

Samantha Kolesnik is the Splatterpunk Award-winning author of True Crime as well as the Bram Stoker Award-nominated editor of Worst Laid Plans. Her new novella, Waif, was released in 2021 from Grindhouse Press. You can find her short fiction in many anthologies, including Midnight from Beyond the Stars (Silver Shamrock Publishing) and The Bad Book (Bleeding Edge Books).

 

 

 

A Solid Black Lighthouse

on a Pier in the Cryptic

by

Josh Malerman

 

Five martinis in, Loni Chamberlain had little difficulty believing there was a witch seated at the opposite end of the bar. The black dress, the high neckline, the stringy dark hair, and the look in the woman’s eyes: all verification for Loni. Things had gotten cryptic, certainly (cryptic: Loni’s word for when she couldn’t see straight, i.e.: Sorry I can’t make it from the couch to the bed, as things have gotten cryptic), but it was clear as candy all the same. A witch. Loni even said as much, though she wouldn’t remember doing so the next day:

“Check out the old crone down there.”

With a laugh. A cruel, little snivel of a laugh. Happy, perhaps, she wasn’t being referred to as a witch herself.

And five martinis in, it was funny, the idea of a mystic hag visiting the Fox in the Henhouse for a drink. Did she order a cauldron? Maybe she parked her broom outside.

“Hey, keep it down,” the boring man named Kenneth said. A slash of severity in his voice, his eyes, even as he brought his fifth martini to his lips.

Loni hated him. Suddenly and irrevocably, she hated everything about this “date,” for telling her to be quiet, just when she’d found something to feel good about.

“Hey,” she said. “Fuck you.”

“Aw, come on. She might hear you is all.”

The woman, yes, wore all black, held a short drink with both hands, elbows on the bar. She gazed into her drink like she was reading tea leaves.

Loni snorted.

“Fucking witch.”

Kenneth eyed her in a way she’d been looked at many times. She hated that look. From friends, family, lovers, strangers. In his eyes: this woman sucks.

“This date sucks,” Loni said, wanting to get the jump on that.

Kenneth sipped. Seemed to think this over.

“Fine,” he said. “Know what?”

“I do. Yes. I know what.”

“You’re a bad person.”

And then he was gone. Into the Cryptic: the fogginess of dozens of men and women laughing in the Fox in the Henhouse, most of them in flannels and baseball caps, jeans and sneakers.

All but that witch.

“Gimme another,” she told the young man behind the bar. Her personal record (something she bragged about when apt, and often when not) was nine martinis. She woke up that night under the pool table at a bar on Maple. What was six to nine? Loni was fine. Fuck the date. Fuck this place.

And fuck the book, too.

Yes, fuck the book most of all. The story that bullied her by day, nagged her by night. When was she going to do it? When was she going to write? She had all the tools, the time, the space.

What was stopping her?

The young man set the fresh martini on the wood and Loni lifted it quick to her lips.

“Dumb fuckin story,” she snarled. The bartender was giving her that other look: no doubt weighing whether or not to cut her off. “What?” She asked. And her voice was metal.

“You okay?”

A man, bearded, flannelled, took the stool Kenneth had been boringly using minutes ago and spun to face her.

“Dance?” he asked.

“Sure,” Loni said, without hesitation. She took the man’s wrist and dragged him out onto the floor, elbowing all in her way.

“What’s the hurry?” the bearded man asked.

Loni turned, kissed him, poured her drink down the front of his shirt.

He shoved her.

Things got real cryptic then. Voices and volume. Arms and legs. Loni saw the floor coming toward her, met it, was standing upright again. The bearded man was fist-fighting another man and people were trying to break it up. Loni stumbled back toward the bar.

“My fuckin drink is empty,” she told the bartender.

“Hey,” he said. “I filled it.”

“No, you didn’t. You gave me an empty drink. I didn’t touch it.”

“I saw you touch it.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“Hey, ma’am.”

“Ma’am?”

“Listen–”

“Listen?”

The young man went quiet. A deeper look in his eyes now. Cops and car keys. Loni knew them all. Even when things got cryptic you could pick out the silent language of looks.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” she said. “And don’t lie to me, either. Fill up the glass. But this time do it.”

But he shook his head no. Loni knew this was coming. She didn’t even let him tell her he couldn’t or that she was cut off or any of those cliché comments young men like this one have been waiting their whole lives to say to a woman like her. Loni Chamberlain wasn’t having that. Not tonight. She wasn’t going to stand still while the fuckin child bartender told her she should be writing the book she’d been telling her friends and family she’d been working on, skipping out on holiday parties, pretending to be writing, writing anything, when actually she was either too drunk or too hungover to make it to her nephew’s fourth birthday party. He’s four, she told her sister in the grip of a particularly foul hangover: He won’t fucking remember this party. Oh, that was rich, that one! The whole family still cites that one!

And there were others. Many.

Like what happened with Blair.

And Robby.

And Mike and Evan and Wendell and Catherine and–

“Yo!” a woman yelled.

Too late, though. As Loni had the woman’s drink in hand. This was funny! Didn’t the woman think it was funny? Didn’t she see the Marx Bros humor in Loni going from patron to patron, testing their drinks for poison? Didn’t the woman think it was funny that this little writer could put down so much liquor, that she loved so much liquor, that she didn’t care if the drink was originally yours… it was hers now?

Didn’t everybody understand how fucking funny that was?

She’d already downed the thing before the woman turned to the bartender who was reaching across the bar but was too late.

Loni set the glass on the wood.

“It’s safe,” she told the woman. And she laughed. That snivel laugh. Because: funny. Maybe the next fool would get it.

Loni stepped deeper into the Cryptic. Spotted the next one: a woman square dancing like she’d never moved her arms and legs at the same time in her life. Maybe she’d like the joke.

Loni found out.

As the woman locked eyes with her partner (do-si-do), as she raised one wrist and lowered the other, Loni snatched the drink from her fingers. The woman turned, half-smiling (maybe she got it!), saw Loni downing it, and saw the snarl in Loni’s eyes, too. A dare: Come get it back.

“The fuck,” the woman said.

“Hey,” her partner said. More like pardner in these parts. Words like that would be good for the book. “That was hers.”

But Loni recognized another look then, there in the matching faces of this perfect hillbilly union: It’s not worth it. This woman is crazy.

Crazy! Ha! Yes. Like all her fucking idols: crazy. Like William Faulkner and his jug of whiskey at his ankles as he wrote. Like Jim Morrison and the LSD writhing through his leather pants. Like all the men and women who drugged themselves silly, reaching for the Goal, professional decadence, legendary writers.

Why should Loni Chamberlain have to sit at home, sober as a sermon, staring at empty pages of paper? Why shouldn’t she be legendary, too?

“Fuck you all,” she said and swung both arms, smashing a man’s plastic cup to the dance floor.

People backed up then, these flannelled squares, stepping out of her way, her path of destruction (Loni actually thought the phrase: path of deconstruction and knew it would be good for the book she was not writing), until they made the kind of circle people make when one person is expected to let loose in the middle.

Loni let loose.

Even as the man spoke to her, told her she owed him a drink, balled his hands into fists, Loni fell to her knees.

The remains of the drink sparkled on the wood floor. Shimmered beneath the dancefloor lights.

Loni wide-eyed the spill.

Then she brought her lips to the floor and licked it up.

“That’s fuckin goooood,” she said. Feeling legendary. Feeling like everybody here would read a book by a woman like her.

She heard the communal groan from the Cryptic. Heard a skip in the music. Heard feet moving and people hollering for the staff, but she kept on licking. Who knew what else had spilled down here? Surely this wasn’t the first drink of the night to make it the dancefloor?

She licked up something fuzzy. Reached for it. But hands were upon her. Strong hands. Hands she couldn’t stop from pulling her up, dragging her away. Was this the young bartender?

Maybe. Probably not. What did it matter to Loni? She snarled at the faces she passed, the slack-jawed looks of sympathy from a shitty bar full of shitty people who knew nothing about her, had no idea the story she had inside. She spit the fuzz out but only half of it and wiped her mouth dry and slapped the hands off of her, telling the man, stop, hey, hey, stop, I get it, I got it, I’m out, fuck this place, you can stop dragging me for fuck’s sake, I’ll see myself out.

When she got free enough to turn around, she found herself chest-to-chest with the woman in black, the witch.

And the witch said:

“Drink and you are drunk.”

She was taller than Loni thought she’d be. Had a strength, a presence to her that didn’t show earlier through the Cryptic.

“Who the fuck are you?” Loni said. “Broomhilda?”

But the joke fell flat. Not on the woman, but on herself. Felt like she’d hollered a joke over the edge of a dark cliff, into a chasm with no bottom or boundaries yet discovered.

“Hey,” Loni said, suddenly angry, suddenly very annoyed that this woman thought she knew what Loni was and what Loni was not, and maybe more irrationally: that this woman scared her.

Why?

But those hands again, and Loni being propelled out of the Fox in the Henhouse, the people like stuffed dummies, so many people, talking about her, making a flannelled wall from which a pillar of black could still be seen, the witch, cold white eyes on Loni before the woman’s entire form went black, her head turned away now, her long black hair facing the door.

Drink and you are drunk.

No shit, witch.

And then, out the door in a rough way, stumbling on the pavement, wiping her mouth and trying to get that other half of the dancefloor fuzz off her tongue.

The door slammed shut behind her.

She heard the muffled roar of applause. Cold out here. She patted her pockets for her keys, but whoever tossed her had taken them.

She turned to go back inside.

She stopped.

And she knew, even in the deep embrace of the Cryptic, she knew the reason she did not go back in for her keys was not because they wouldn’t give them to her, was not because the same people who just cheered her exit would force her out again. No. It was because that woman was still in there, that woman who had more presence than she had any right to have.

The woman who had given Loni a look she’d never quite seen before, not on any angry face, family or friend, stranger or one-night stand.

And while it was indeed cold outside, Loni bundled herself not against the weather, but against that look.

And so bundled, and unnerved, and restless and raged and mad at herself for not writing and mad at the bar for removing her, she began the long walk home.

Drink and you are drunk.

“Yep,” she said. Then she yelled it: “That’s how it works!”

She walked. Stumbled. Slurred.

Half of her wanted the woman to have heard her.

The other half knew better. The other half never wanted to see that woman again.

 

***

 

She woke up in a bad way.

Sometimes, you got lucky. You did shots all night, slung insults and hard kisses at strangers, maybe broke a glass or two, and still woke up clean on the other side.

Not today.

“Fuuuuuck.”

It took her a beat to see she wasn’t in her own bed. The room, whoever’s this was, was a cluttered mess. Not with books or movies but with clothes. Everywhere. Hanging from the door, hanging from the ceiling fan, piles on the floor. The closet was an open mouth that had eaten too much cotton.

Loni suddenly felt like vomiting.

“Fuck,” she said again, trying to sit up but failing. Her stomach was in a bad way. All of it was. Her head, her body, her self-confidence.

Not to mention her sense of location.

Where was she?

But the blonde woman who stepped into the doorjamb, wearing nothing, cleared some of this up. Loni had no memory of stopping in at another bar on the walk home but now knew that’s what she’d done.

“Oh,” the woman said. “I didn’t expect you to wake for at least another four hours. How you feeling?”

Loni knew her type when she saw it. Like most people, she didn’t want to admit she even had a type. Yet, there it was, looking back at her: cynical, smart, cool.

“Not good,” Loni said.

The woman nodded.

“I’m Quail.”

“Quail? Did I like that name last night? I like it now.”

“Not really. You were a mess though.”

“Did we…”

“We did.” Quail smiled. “It was pretty fun.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“Here.”

Quail crossed the room with a glass of water.

“I don’t even know if I can sit up to drink this,” she said.

“Then don’t.”

Quail handed it over all the same.

Loni craned her neck enough to take a sip.

“Fuck,” she said. “I feel like I’m still drunk.”

“Hair of the dog?” Quail offered.

“No thanks. I don’t usually do it that way. Makes me throw up.”

She sipped more water. She eyed the glass.

“You know you haven’t been drinking enough water when it tastes this good.”

Quail stepped to one of the piles of clothes and got dressed.

“I gotta go to work,” she said. “Thank God I don’t feel like you do.”

Loni sat up, drank more water.

“Where’s your toilet?”

“You don’t remember?”

Loni didn’t bother asking why she should.

“Just up the hall,” Quail said. “You okay? You look pale.”

“Yes… or no. I just feel… like I’m still drunk. Or like…” She paused. Considered. “Fuck,” she said.

Then she was up in a hurry and out of Quail’s bedroom and down the hall and on her knees before this stranger’s toilet, hurling after all, thinking, You shouldn’t have tried the hair of the dog, it doesn’t work for you, never has.

Even though she hadn’t. Even though all she’d drank this morning was some water.

And a weird feeling, too: as Quail came to the door and asked if she was doing alright and told her she could stay if she wanted but please do not steal anything and lock the door when you leave, about exactly then, Loni realized that the “still drunk” she felt was not the echo of last night’s bender. She was used to that “still drunk” feeling. But this? This wasn’t the remains of the night before.

This felt like now.

Like she’d taken three shots of vodka since waking.

“Hey,” she called. “What did you give me? Was that vodka?”

But Quail was already gone. Already off to work. And Loni remained on the bathroom floor another few minutes before getting up and re-entering the bedroom, curious about that glass.

It wasn’t there anymore. Despite her piles of clothes, Quail must’ve been neat with the dishes.

“Fuck,” Loni said. Then she smiled. Then laughed. Because, truthfully? It felt okay. Felt like she was starting a whole new drunk. Felt like she’d won a free-guy on a video game.

Maybe she’d got lucky after all.

 

***

 

Her car was still at the bar. Turned out Quail lived almost seven miles away. This would’ve been bad enough if not for the cold. Not winter yet, no, but one of those days where the preview for winter was running and everybody in town saw it at the same time. She had no hat, no gloves, no proper boots. Outside on the sidewalk, she thought of all the clothes Quail had lying about her place. She re-entered, realizing then she hadn’t locked up like she’d been asked. Then she broke the second rule Quail had given her: she stole a scarf. A green wool hat. She considered taking a bigger coat, too (it felt unlikely Quail would notice any item gone missing, but you never knew), and she finally decided she’d taken enough. But she hadn’t. A quarter-mile into her walk, Loni stopped into a diner. She’d been out this way before. East Kent wasn’t a big city, but big enough to excuse not having been everywhere at least once. She still had her wallet, what little was in it, and entered the place quick, wanting, and needing, a warm-up.

She nearly slipped on the welcome mat and thought again, Still drunk.

“Coffee, black” she said, stepping quick to the counter.

“For here or to go?”

“To go,” she said. But maybe she’d drink a little here first. Get warm again. The idea of walking twenty times further than what she’d just done was becoming unthinkable. She might need to ask for a ride. She might need to call a cab.

“Black,” the man behind the counter said, setting a steaming Styrofoam cup in front of her on the counter.

Loni took a stool, put two dollar bills on the counter, and sipped.

The effect was immediate. This wasn’t the warming-up that she’d come for: one sip of coffee and Loni Chamberlain became, well… a little more drunk again.

Like she’d taken a nip from an airplane bottle of Fireball.

She took a second sip.

Felt it a little more.

She took a third.

A long time ago a friend’s older brother had advised against trying LSD. He’d warned her of a “sudden and unexpected flashback.” He’d said that anybody who did LSD could be driving their car, twenty years later, and suddenly hallucinate they were at home on the couch.

So… was that what this is? A flashback from… drinking?

“What did you put in this?” she asked the man behind the counter.

Because, really, that’s what this had to be. It tasted like coffee. It steamed like coffee. It looked like coffee. But this was not coffee, black.

Loni got off the stool.

“It’s coffee,” the man said.

“No,” Loni said. Because she was emboldened now. The way people who take a few shots of alcohol in the morning are.

The man took the pot from the burner and smelled it.

“Did you wanna check for yourself?”

Loni eyed the pot.

“No… it’s just…”

She wanted to laugh. The way people who take a few shots of alcohol in the morning do.

This was ridiculous.

How much did she drink last night?

She exited the diner without getting to the bottom of the mystery of the pot and was hit with the memory of leaving the Fox in the Henhouse last night. Had she been thrown out? Jesus. For what? She didn’t know for sure what had gone on. But she knew it was something. She had the familiar vague sense of the shame that accompanies a night of hard drinking. Whether the night went awry or not.

“Get home,” she told herself.

It sounded good. And so she walked. Only, walking wasn’t easy. She moved serpentine, a little bit, involuntarily, wobbling off the sidewalk once, actually stepping onto the cold street, a wide enough berth for a car to honk, a noise that surprised her the way it would have had she been drinking.

“The fuck?” she asked. She stepped back onto the curb, looked to her hands as if they might tell the story.

Was this the DTs? Did Quail slip something in her water? Was she losing her mind? Or was this what people really meant when they said they had a problem?

Did Loni have a problem?

“You’re drunk,” she said.

Because it was true. Because nothing else felt exactly like this. Nothing other than drunk.

And with the sound of her own words, she had a vague memory of a pillar of black amongst a wall of flannel. Long dark hair facing the other way. A woman’s voice.

Loni walked on. The scarf and hat helped but, really, she should’ve stolen a coat. She had a job, kind of, a temp gig in downtown East Kent. But she only worked twice a week and it was nowhere near enough money to buy things like what she needed right now. That said (and every time her thoughts turned to her job, they were followed by thoughts of writing), two days a week meant five that were open: five days she could (should) spend working on the book.

The Book

Like it was already bound in black impenetrable leather. Like it contained secrets and dreams she wasn’t allowed to see. Not only did it seem she couldn’t write The Book, she couldn’t even open it.

Wasn’t allowed to look.

At what she was supposed to be writing.

Bad feeling, this.

She thought of the bar. Any bar. Never mind the one she was walking to. In fact, there was a chance the Fox in the Henhouse wouldn’t let her in. Why not? She didn’t know for sure. A sense told her so. Maybe she should stop somewhere else on the way? Fuck this walk. And this cold. And this feeling… like she was never going to write her book.

Also… drunk.

No? It sure felt like it. The feeling inside the diner hadn’t left her. And while it hadn’t gotten any heavier, Loni Chamberlain knew day drinking when she saw it.

But… had she been?

“No,” she laughed. And the laugh was nerves.

She felt the pockets of her jacket then. Felt no keys.

“Oh, come on.”

Had she left them at Quails? This day was getting worse. Whatever happened last night was becoming more tangled and it was starting to drive her a little nuts. She had to work tomorrow. Fine. Not today. Where were her keys?

But the memory, mercifully, came back. Of all the events of the previous night, the realization that the bar had taken her keys came crystal. She remembered standing outside the place, deciding not to go back in, sensing a distant warring of anger (they took her keys) and gratitude (they took her keys) and understanding, firmly, she should not re-enter the bar.

So, okay. They’d have to let her in for her keys. And while there, maybe she could summon an apology, explain how this kind of shit didn’t usually happen. Make a case for a fresh drink. Because, if Loni Chamberlain wasn’t mistaken, she was experiencing the sensation of losing her drunk… i.e. as if she had been day drinking and had stopped and now wanted badly to carry it on.

She turned and stuck out a thumb. Fuck it. A cab to the bar. She’d spend her money on the cab and the bartender at the Fox in the Henhouse would take pity and give her a few on him. Maybe she could talk about her book like she was already writing it. Yeah. People were interested in these kinds of things. Maybe she could play the part of a writer, hard at work. She could really get into the plot, no, the characters, yes, she could go off about a woman not unlike herself, a woman working her ass off and receiving no reward for that work, yes, a pity party, hosted by Loni, a–

A car came close to the curb and splashed ice-cold water up onto her face and some of the water went into her mouth and Loni swallowed and, shocked, tried to yell out, to say something to the driver who was already twenty feet gone.

She opened her mouth to do it but recognized the feeling immediately:

Quelled

Yes, the mean sense of coming down from day drinking (of which she did not partake, not today!), the need for more booze, was suddenly and absolutely satiated.

As if Loni had just taken a shot of alcohol.

She wiped her mouth dry and eyed her fingers. As if there might be proof, yes, evidence there of Crown Royal, Bushmills, Grey Goose.

She looked to the puddle in the road.

“Okay, you need to keep walking.”

She continued then, because she had to. But she didn’t need to bundle up quite as much. Not unlike how drunk people can stand outside in the cold, talking, waiting in line, with only a t-shirt in a Michigan winter.

Up ahead, a bar. It was early yet. They might not be open. But Loni wanted to continue what was happening inside. Yes. She wanted to keep drinking.

Despite the fact she hadn’t yet had a drink all day.

“Do it,” she said. A phrase often reserved for meaning WRITE YOUR BOOK, but often repurposed first.

She walked. Warring emotions within. This feeling. Almost like something might be, could be wrong inside. As if, last night, she drank herself to a new place.

It scared her. And it scared her that it scared her.

And the fear reminded her of another part of last night. Yes. Yes! She had been on a date with that bore Kenneth from online. She hadn’t gone to the bar alone! Right. And they were making fun of… or wait… she was making fun of a woman at the far end of the bar. A woman in black. A woman she’d called a witch.

Right.

But it wasn’t just the vague memory of this woman, solo. It was the memory that Loni had found herself, for whatever reason, at some point in the night, afraid of that woman.

She reached the parking lot of the Duck and Dive and was glad for not spending her money on a cab.

Who knew what triumphs awaited her here?

And as she opened the door, she thought of The Book. How today was supposed to be a day for writing. Just as five days a week for the last seventeen months were supposed to be days for writing.

And she thought, too:

“Fuck.”

But what else to do? If it felt like she’d already begun drinking… what else to do but… drink?

 

***

 

Whether the woman working the day shift at Duck and Dive understood English or not, Loni hadn’t determined. She told the woman six times she hadn’t had anything to drink yet today but the woman kept talking as if she, Loni, had. Not only that, she bemoaned the fact she couldn’t serve Loni, couldn’t help her continue what she’d started, until the big white clock on the wall showed ten.

“A Vernors will have to do,” the woman, Magritte, offered.

“Fine.”

And so Loni started with one. Then two. It didn’t take her long to realize the woman had indeed been sneaking booze into each glass. Quite a bit of it, in fact. Despite the fact Loni hadn’t seen her actually do it. And she watched, closely, the second time. It must be that the Vernors line had whiskey in it. How else to explain the fact that she was absolutely, unquestionably, drinking right now?

Magritte denied it. It was funny at first. Then it got weird. Magritte talked about how sometimes a person could drink so much alcohol that they got “full.” Loni didn’t understand. She didn’t understand much of anything, as, after two glasses of pop, she was having a hard time staying on her stool. And her voice had gotten louder. Drunk loud. She knew this volume well. If she’d come with a personal V.U. meter, this would be in the red.

It was a telltale sign.

“You okay there?” Magritte asked.

But Loni knew what the woman was up to. Had to be. People didn’t get drunk off water, coffee, puddles, and pop.

They got drunk off booze.

“It’s after ten,” Loni said.

Magritte gave her that look, though.

“Fuck it,” Loni said, a snarl to her now. “Give me another Vernors.”

Then she winked and Magritte looked confused but got her the pop.

Loni took it from her (more than Magritte handing it to her) and she downed the entire thing in one long, angry gulp.

She wiped her mouth. Set the empty glass on the bar.

And the rest, whatever the rest was, occurred in the troublesome, meddlesome, clumsy, and often dangerous arms of a blackout in the Cryptic.

 

***

 

She woke at home.

It took her very little time to determine this was her own apartment, though she wondered at the unfathomable headache that woke her. She hadn’t decided to drink yesterday, yet that’s most certainly what she’d done. And not only did she “drink”: she’d gone for it. Again. Another day when she should’ve been writing. Another day added to the pile of days that became the lie she repeated to her family and friends all the time:

Where was I yesterday? What did I do today? What am I doing tomorrow? Why, I’m working on the book, of course. Yes, THE BOOK. And no, you cannot see it. How many pages have I written? I don’t like keeping track of stuff like that. Writers who pay attention to numbers aren’t writing: they’re adding. But me? I’m pouring out my soul is what I’m doing. Yes. All of me on the page. Pages. Tons of them. Hundreds, if not thousands. A million pages. Well, haha, when it’s all you do, right? It all adds up. What’s that? You wanna see the stack of pages? Oh, you. Have some faith. I can’t bear the idea of anybody even seeing what I’ve done, let alone reading it. I’ll be done soon enough, any day now, and when I am, you’ll be first to read. And if I can maintain what I’ve done through to the ending… this is going to BLOW YOUR MIND.

Writing.

I am writing.

I am.

She looked at the clock.

Shot up in a hurry.

“Fuck.”

Work. Work today. Work today.

She hurried out of bed and went to get dressed and saw she already was and suddenly wondered as to how she got home and who took her and what might she have done the night before and how long did she do it for? In the hurried, harried, worried throes of embarrassment and more, Loni recalled that shaft of black again: that woman alone at the end of the bar at the Fox in the Henhouse from two nights ago. Was it two nights ago?

Didn’t matter.

She threw on a blazer. Bolted for the kitchen. Poured a glass of water and grabbed three aspirin and downed them and downed the water and…

…and almost fell over for the wallop the gulp of water gave her.

“Jesus,” she said, steadying herself on the counter.

Because, while this wasn’t funny yesterday, it was flat out frightening today.

She eyed the water. She smelled it.

“Water. Just water.”

But it didn’t feel like water. That was for sure.

Her alarm went off. The second reminder. The one that said YOU BETTER GO NOW, LONI. And so she did. After dumping the remains of the water into the sink and pausing to smell the air above it.

Just water.

She looked across the room to the stack of pages on the small kitchen table.

Still there.

Still blank.

Then she hurried out of her apartment, raced down the hall, opted for the stairs over the slow elevator, and ran outside, into the cold, to where her car was parked at the curb.

Only her car wasn’t parked at the curb.

“Oh, no!”

No car. Still at the Fox in the Henhouse?

“FUCK.”

It didn’t matter where it was. For all she could remember of last night, who knew?

Up the street: the blue and silver East Kent bus.

Loni raced for the bus stop. She hadn’t taken the bus since…

… since the last time she got drunk enough to leave her car somewhere on a worknight.

And she made it, too. Woozy as she felt. Still drunk. Or… new drunk? That shot of water. Well, that glass of water. What had it done to her?

The ride was grueling. The headache. The sense that she was in no condition to be seen. Unshowered. Wearing mostly the same clothes she’d worn for days. Confused. Disoriented. And, worse:

Another work day without having taken advantage of the days off.

No writing done.

“Fuck off,” she told herself. “Not now.”

And she spoke to herself this way on the entire ride downtown, to East Kent Road and Collingsworth Street. Her temp job. Data entry. In which she sat at a desk and typed up the hours the real workers got paid (a little) to do.

It wasn’t but five minutes after she’d gotten herself seated in her cubicle, her hair under some control, that her coworker Andrew set a bottle of juice on her desk.

“You look like you need it,” he said.

He winked. It was funny, no? Pointing out how hungover she looked? Hilarious, right?

Loni eyed the bottle.

“What’s in that?”

“Green juice. Gonna make you feel like a thousand dollars. Though you look like a hundred would do.”

“Hey.”

“Sorry. What’s up?”

“I’m working, Andrew.”

But was she? Or was she just staring at a bottle of juice like it might not be what it was purported to be? Like it was a trick of reality? Like the Universe was mocking her, fooling her, trying to keep her drunk?

Andrew left her then and Loni tried to work. But she felt horrible. And the juice sounded like a good idea to any sane person.

She was that, right?

She opened it. Took a sip.

Felt it.

“Oh, come on.”

But there was no denying it. The sip (and then a big gulp) flowed through her body hot, like a shot, and she sank deeper into her office chair: the way someone sipping scotch at home might sink.

“Andrew?” she called. A little loud, yes, for the workplace. That volume again, unmitigated by any sense of decorum, emboldened for having drank some alcohol on the sly.

But she hadn’t!

And the morning passed this way, with Loni sipping from the juice bottle, growing more comfortable and caring less if the numbers she entered were right. In fact, she added two hours to one of the workers and deducted two from another, based, of course, on what she thought of them. Fuck it. This place sucked. Like all jobs sucked. They took away from what you really wanted to be doing. They occupied your time when you should be at home, working on what really mattered: pouring your soul into a story.

Working on your book.

The bottle was empty.

Loni had some trouble standing up. She felt like she’d had three strong drinks. She stumbled past other cubicles, feeling a little hot, the way people do when the drunk starts to set in. Her coworkers’ faces were blurs on the way, and she snickered at more than one. She knew what they were thinking: What’s with her?

And, oh, there was something most definitely with her.

And what a boring place! The office. What a terrible place! People came here, willingly, every day. They spent time here instead of doing what they really wanted to be doing and how many amazing books and songs and conversations might be had if people didn’t have to go to–

“The office,” she said. Vile, and perhaps bile, in her voice.

“What’s that, Loni?” a coworker asked as she passed.

“All good, Loni?” from the next cubicle over.

Never mind that she hadn’t made the most of her days off. Never mind that it was the work, this job, that paid for the little space she called home, the square where she could do the writing that would no doubt lead to better things. Never mind all that.

Loni eyed the water cooler like a dog eyeing leftovers after its owner had fallen asleep.

Water.

She needed water.

She hadn’t had any in two days, it seemed. Her throat was dry. Her body weak. Yet… hadn’t she? And hadn’t she just had the juice Andrew so chivalrously gave her?

She knocked into a partition on the way. Knocked a man’s family picture to the floor.

At the cooler, she struggled to pull out the little paper cup. The Goddamn things were so small. She dropped four on the carpet. Knelt to pick one up and had trouble standing again. Behind her, heads craned out of their cubicles.

She poured the water, overfilled it, and downed what was in the cup.

Then she did it again.

And again.

And there was no sense of quenching her thirst. No fresh satiation of adding water to a body that badly needed it. Not even close.

“I feel like…”

Like she’d just downed three shots of whiskey in a row.

She leaned against the wall and mumbled to herself and did not laugh when her boss Amanda appeared in the Cryptic, the woman’s serious face and tight curly hair like a mask, a bearer of rotten news, a terrible mood only seconds from arriving in full.

“Loni…”

“’Manda…”

“What’s going on?”

Loni tried to speak but it was hard. Still:

“Water isn’t water anymore. Everything is booze.”

“Oh my God, Loni.”

Some confusion then. A lot of masks. Others in the office. Amanda conferring with people. Lots of looks. And while Loni understood what each meant, she was still thinking about what she’d just said:

Water isn’t water anymore. Everything is booze.

“Get out of here,” Amanda said. “You’re fired.”

Fired. The word felt like a flint spark in her head. Loni needed some water.

How long had it been?

She reached for the jug, tried to pour a fourth little cup, and brought the entire cooler down with her to the floor.

Water spread like blood, like Loni had just killed someone and this wet evidence would put her away forever.

She smelled the carpet.

Had to be alcohol.

Why wasn’t it?

“Loni Chamberlain,” Amanda said. “You are drunk!”

Such anger her boss’s voice. Such rage.

And more, too. For Loni: a memory.

As her coworkers walked her out of the office, Loni looked back to where the others still stood by the cooler. Amanda was there, too, but it wasn’t Amanda Loni was looking for.

It was the woman from the Fox in the Henhouse. And while that woman, that witch, was not here, her words remained.

Yes. Words Loni recalled now. And the way they were spoken, too:

Drink and you are drunk.

“Hey,” she said. And she spoke to the woman who was not here. “Hey!” And the certainty grew.

That woman was responsible for all of this.

“HEY! What did you do to me? What did you do?”

 

***

 

“Take me to the Fox in the Henhouse.”

She slurred her words. Someone did this to her.

Even in the throes of this unnatural bender, she knew that truth.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to take you to a bar, Loni. Amanda told me to get you home safe,” Andrew said. He drove his small Dodge. Cold in here. Not much heat. And it smelled like him but bigger, stronger. “Probably she’s worried about a lawsuit otherwise.”

“Take me to the Fox. I’m not going home.”

“Loni…”

“My keys are at the bar.”

“House keys? Because I’m not driving you to your car. Not a chance. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I drove you to your–”

“My fucking house keys are with my car keys, Andrew. Take me there now.”

This was a lie. Partial. There was a key above her front door. It’s no doubt how she’d got in the night before.

But what was a lie anymore? And why do it? Here she was, yelling at a coworker. A man she’d never done much more than chit-chatted with. The big curtain had been pulled aside. This was Loni Chamberlain. This was her.

Drunk.

Drink and you are drunk

“But you’re not gonna drive home from the bar, are you?” Andrew asked. He leaned close to the wheel when he drove. Like he needed the extra few inches closer to the glass to really see the road.

“No,” she said. “I fucking won’t. But what’s it to you? I’m out of your life, Andrew. We don’t work together anymore. I’m now the insane woman who got wasted at work, remember? Bet you can’t wait to tell that story at the bar yourself. You and your friends can laugh all about the crazy woman who knocked over the water cooler while you drink yourselves into oblivion. Oh, you’re allowed to do it. All those fuck-sticks in flannel are allowed to do it. All the square-dancing hoes can pound plastic cups of vodka… but me? I’m the fucking nutcase who came to work drunk even though I didn’t have a single fucking drink.”

“Loni… I mean… that part is obvious…”

“You don’t know shit, Andrew.”

“Okay.”

“You don’t. I work my ass off on my book. I write all the time, constantly. And somehow I’m the asshole here? I’m the butt of your bar jokes? Because I got sick at work?”

Andrew didn’t respond. Loni didn’t give him much space:

“I have all this fuckin free time and I don’t do anything with it. It’s maddening, Andrew. Bet you didn’t know that. Yet… water cooler girl. That’s me. Never mind all the work I do at home. Never mind all the writing. And never mind what a burden it is to fuckin not take advantage of all the fuckin time off I’ve had. But I guess I have a lot of time off now, right? All the days off. Fuck it. Then I’ll write. Finally. This is it then. I’ll work on what I’ve been doing every day forever, which you didn’t know anything about. Don’t look at me like that, dude. Don’t look at me like I’m confusing you. I think I’m gonna fuckin throw up. Fuck. I feel insane. Take me to the Fox. Is that where you’re going? You didn’t spike my drink. I know you didn’t. Just like nobody spiked my water at home. Holy shit. And this is what I get for being a writer, huh? For dedicating my life to my dream? I get fired and shat on and dudes like you make fun of me at the bar because you got nothing better to talk about. Well, fuck you, Andrew. And fuck the whole world. When I’m done with my book I’m gonna buy the fuckin company from Amanda and the first thing I’m gonna do is fire her. Then you.”

“We’re here,” Andrew said.

Loni couldn’t hide her surprise. They were there alright. In the parking lot of the Fox in the Henhouse. The car was idling by the same front door that had been closed on her a hundred years ago.

She undid her seatbelt and angrily opened the car door.

She stomped out onto the concrete.

“Loni…” Andrew said. “Walk home.”

But Loni was already onto other things. The fact that her car was the only one in the lot, for starters.

“Fuck,” she said. And Andrew pulled away, back out onto the road. He made a right, heading to downtown East Kent again where he’d no doubt field questions for the next two weeks about the drive here.

“Fuck,” Loni said again.

Because if her car was the only one in the lot, then nobody else was here. Including any staff.

She tried the door anyway. Pulled hard. Kicked at it. Punched it. She tried to read the hours on the door but either she was too drunk or the sign was too sun-bleached and oh, what did it matter?

She knocked her forehead against the wood. Could smell the booze inside.

“Of course you’re closed,” she said. “Just like every other door in my life.”

She turned then to face the large empty lot framed by unmowed grass and rusted fences.

The witch stood in the center of all that concrete. A glass of water in her hand.

“You,” Loni said.

She crossed the lot at a fast stumble, ready to punch this woman in the face for whatever she’d done to her, whatever curse she’d placed upon her.

Because even drunk, even dehydrated, even delirious, Loni knew that’s what happened.

“What the fuck did you do to me?”

But she stopped shy of the woman. Maybe it was because the woman was intimidating in her sobriety. Maybe it was because, out here in the daylight, she was somehow even more ghostly, more witch-like, than when she had been sitting alone at the end of the bar, a solid black lighthouse on a pier in the Cryptic Loni knew so well.

It was like the woman had a forcefield, or like whatever was inside her, whatever was hidden by her long black dress and the black lace at its neck and hem, expanded beyond her, creating a web, one Loni didn’t want to touch.

“Do you want a glass of water?” the woman asked.

The entire world, all of East Kent, it seemed, went quiet. No cars passed the lot. No honking horns. No engines. Just Loni and this woman in black, facing one another across a concrete corral.

Loni eyed the glass.

“It’s not water,” she said. “It’s–”

“You lie to your friends and your family. You lie to everyone you speak to.” And the woman’s voice was without obstacle. Her voice was smooth slate. “Worse: you lie to yourself as you lie to these others. You play the part of someone who follows their dreams. Why?”

But Loni could tell the woman wasn’t looking for an actual answer. Not yet. And the woman went on:

“On your days off, you do not work. You drink. When inspiration strikes, you do not respect it, you drink. When feelings of inadequacy and guilt assail you, you do not use them as fuel for working, you drink. It’s all you do.”

“Yeah, well…”

“Yet, you believe you have this story inside you. You believe it’s a story so powerful that not only will others want to hear it, their own lives may be improved for doing so. You believe you have talent, vision, intelligence. Yet, whenever the stage is lit for you to prove these truths… you drink. You argue. And when things go bad, you accuse someone else. Someone else did this to you. Someone else is to blame for the blank pages that sit upon your kitchen table.”

“Who… who are you?”

“Do you want a glass of water?”

This woman, who knew things about her, this witch in a dress that might’ve been worn at a funeral in Victorian England, wasn’t as out of place as that glass of water in a pint glass. Not a bottle. Not a cup.

It looked like an offering.

“I see what you do,” the witch said. “And I see what you want to do. But so long as you never write that book, you can keep believing in its potential. Is this true?”

Loni, with unexpected tears in her eyes, said, “Yes.”

The witch nodded.

“Yet, by actually doing the work, you will have fulfilled what you believe yourself capable of doing. Which is—the work. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“And you know that the only thing that separates you from who you want to be, the real you, is filling the blank pages that sit upon your kitchen table and have for seventeen months. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

A little more than tears now. An overwhelming sense of something building up inside her.

“You drink to escape, Loni Chamberlain. Or worse: you drink to avoid. But, you want to drink to celebrate. Isn’t that part of your dream? The drink you have when you have finished the book?” She didn’t wait for an answer and Loni might not have been able to give her one for the tears. “You drink to avoid becoming the woman you want so badly to be.”

If it was cold out, Loni didn’t know it. If East Kent had come alive again, Loni didn’t know it. Only this woman. And her words.

“You need to make a deal with yourself, Loni Chamberlain. And you need to do it right now. You must decide to drink to celebrate. In the name of joy. In the name of completion. Or you will forever be drinking to escape the very thing you want so desperately to cheer.”

Loni nodded. This woman, her words…

“Can you do this?”

“No.”

The answer came out faster than she’d wanted it to.

“Is this because you haven’t seen yourself do it before?”

“Yes.”

The witch nodded.

“But you can do this. Because nobody else can do this for you. And for that… you must.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“You have the space.”

“Yes.”

“You have the time.”

“Yes.”

“You have the will?”

“Yes.”

“Prove that.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

Tears came then, hard, and Loni did nothing to cover them up. Let the witch see her cry. Let the witch see her shame.

“I’m scared,” Loni said.

“Then be brave. Alone. In your home. At your kitchen table. Be brave. At night, in the morning, when you doubt…be brave. On page one, page two, page one hundred, be brave. When you pace your apartment and your peers ask how it goes and you think it goes poorly, be brave.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

The witch looked to the glass of water.

“Do you want a glass of water?”

It looked so real, so natural, so… just water.

“Yes,” Loni said. And the word came like a stone from her throat.

The witch seemed to glide across the concrete, both hands on the glass now.

Up close, her face appeared waxen, her eyes deep set. Loni had trouble looking at her. She focused on the glass. And the glass was offered to her, in the white hands of the woman in black.

Loni took it.

“Drink,” the woman said. “And you will be.”

Loni drank. And she waited. And felt nothing like the effects of booze.

Then she downed the rest of it, pounding the water like she’d pounded so much alcohol in so many East Kent bars.

And when she lowered the glass, the woman was gone.

Just Loni, here in this empty parking lot.

She waited.

She felt for it.

But she didn’t have to feel long.

The sense of having been drunk for days was gone now. And Loni Chamberlain stood sober as a school under the cold East Kent sun.

“Holy–”

The door to the Fox in the Henhouse opened behind her and an older man stood in the jamb.

He eyed her glass.

“You bring your own pint glass?” he asked. A partial smile there. One drinker to another. “We’re open now. Come on in.”

Loni looked past him. Into the bar. To the empty tables and the empty dancefloor beyond. From here she could just make out the beginnings of the many bottles behind the bar.

“No,” she said. And she was sober. And she felt light. “No, I need to work.”

“Suit yourself,” the man said. And with those simple words, Loni sensed how easy it was to say no.

The man started to close the door.

“My car keys are in there,” she said.

“Oh? A responsible drinker.”

“Yes. Maybe. We’ll see.”

The man eyed her, sensing a larger story that he wasn’t going to get today.

“I’ll come back when I get the work done,” she said. “That day I’ll come back. With a story.”

“And we’ll cheer you when you do,” he said.

“Yes,” Loni said. Thinking of the woman in black, and how for the first time in her life, someone had put to words what she needed putting. Now it was time for her to do the same. “We’ll do that. We’ll cheer me when I do…”

And we’ll cheer her, too, she thought. Then, because words mattered, all words, and because often they only needed to be spoken to become truth, she said:

“We’ll cheer her, too.”

 

 

About the Author

Josh Malerman is the New York Times Best Selling writer of Bird Box, Goblin, Black Mad Wheel, and the Bird-Box sequel, Malorie. Malerman is also a producer, singer-songwriter, and a Bram Stoker Award winning writer.

 

 

 

 

 

Singularity

by

Kathe Koja

 

 

It's not real, you know, she said.

It's real all right.

Not real like a person. Not like someone you know, who knows you –

Not like someone I came all this way to see, is that what you mean? Not like someone I'm going to have dinner with, someone who might fuck my brains out later?

Might or might not, with a dry little frown, looking down at her hands; long fingers, capable hands. She wore no rings and never had, not as ordinary jewelry or during either of her two marriages. Especially then. Now she said, looking past him, into the dark: There's a certain Freudian aspect here that I frankly find—discouraging.

Oh, lighten up. You're the one who started it, you're the one who –

You're the one who wants to fuck a black hole.

Her face did not change as she said it, though she tried to change it, to smile; she thought she did smile but he frowned, a luxurious frown of censure and If that's the way this dinner's going to be, he said, if that's the way this trip's going to be then there's no point in –

No point in what? In your being here? But I was here first, remember? when you were still calling it the ass-end of nowhere, insisting there was nothing to see but the NASA hermits? But she didn't say that, she didn't say anything, she kept her face pointed at the window, deep bowl of plastic with a million scratches, a million light-years' worth, all the hieroglyphics written on the endless dark and If you didn't want to discuss it, she said, you shouldn't have told me in the first place.

You asked. You specifically asked, What's your fantasy? And then you were going to tell me yours, which I notice you never did. Why not? Are you –

I said –

– afraid of your own desires? Or is it that you're drying out, working up here like a, a nun, is it that the loneliness and solitude are –

Her bare hands moved, one then the other, climbed up and down her arms and I like it here, she said. I never get lonely.

He had turned away from the window, she noticed; he said he wanted to see and then he turned away. See what? nothing without the right telescope, even as close as they were: no other way to glimpse the redshift dazzle, the gases streaming away: X-ray trail like pheromones, a god's gigantic musk. Hydrogen, helium, gravity: the dark. And ringed all around with imaginary DANGER signs, skull-and-crossbones, no admittance which she knew was more than likely part of the attraction, the head-on, dead-on lure of it, la belle dame sans merci. But be fair, she thought, who would you rather fuck: Mary Poppins or Lorelei?

He was marching up and down now, before the window, marching without looking and I'm not afraid, he said, to claim what I want. Even if it's Freudian as hell; so what? Whose kink isn't?

Or Jungian, she said in her head. Her hands continued to move. Go on, she said aloud.

It's like—it would just be the ultimate bang, right? The big bang, and he smiled a little, at himself, for himself. It just sucks you right in –

Sucks you. He would think that. He didn't want the big bang, the ultimate lover, what he wanted was an infant's oral joy, oh boy, how typical. He was so typical it hurt, so much like all the others who came up here, stitched together fine for Earth but in this weightless, stateless place they started to come apart, to grope and flounder and strike, sometimes, at the ones who were here all along, the ones who had if not conquered then reached détente with what was out there. The ones who could look out the window.

Big bang, she said; she knew already what she was going to do, knew and at a certain level deplored it, knew and could not stop and You think you know what it's like, she said, as her hands moved again, white animals, white crabs moving to rest on her elbows, promontory rocks. Should I tell you what it's like? Because I know.

You're a physicist, he said, as if this were an insult. Only a poet could really do it justice.

But only a physicist understands. The white crabs had crawled down from the rocks, and now they joined together, pushing one against the other, nestled and twisting and Danger, she said, is an aphrodisiac. One way. No exit. But that's not what makes you hot, is it?

Listen –

Is it the darkness? the invisibility? You can't even see what's got a hold on you; that's like desire, isn’t it? Can't see it, taste it, smell it, only its byproducts. But once you're in it, once you get to the place where you can't turn back, once desire's got you good: then what?

Approaching him, advancing as he stood with his back to the window, a dry frown on his face and Smooth, she said, is how I imagine it, smooth and welcoming and slick: like that second glass of really fine wine, or satin molded to a humid thigh, so smooth that all you notice is the way it cradles, no, caresses you, taking you just as you are. Insisting on you, in fact. You know you've never been wanted the way the dark wants you now.

He took a step back, even closer to the window. You sound like a cheap romance novel, he said.

The white crabs, white animals moved again, climbing up her arms, resting on her shoulders. Her voice was calm and calmly pleasant; she looked not at the dark but at him.

And this, she said, is the one lover you can't deny. Demanding, like gravity, impelling, no, pulling you in, drawing you deeper and deeper, that's what it's all about, right? Getting all the way in? Where time dilates, and seems to slow down, just like when you're in love, when you're with the beloved, time stops mattering, isn't that what it's like? Relatively speaking?

You're taking this way too seriously, he said, stepping back another pace. You're making it into something that's –

Now she was before him, the white hands gesturing, reaching, brushing his lapels and Once you're in, she said, once it begins then everything starts moving faster. Her voice rose and roughened, her eyes were wide. Faster and faster, she said, so close now she could have kissed him, her odorless breath in his face, harder and harder, it's pulling you to your limits, stretching you to the breaking point, it's taking everything you've got –

He tried to take her hands, to stop them but they danced away, ran up his arms to his shoulders, crept up to his throat and Then, she said, her voice less murmur than pure exhalation, then at the hot point, the absolute center, the singularity, everything becomes infinite: time and space, hunger and pleasure, fury and need all collapsing on themselves, into themselves…it's just like orgasm, don’t you see? A moment of no-time that lasts forever, a pleasure that peaks as it begins, it pulls you to pieces just as it makes you whole –

Don't! loud, his hands on her wrists, head twisted away from her seeking face so close, too close, his back pressed against the window too thin against the dark, against what was out there and You are nuts, he said, still too loud, as if they were grappling, fighting. Absolutely fucking nuts. All I meant, all I wanted was a –

All you wanted, she said, the white crabs flushing pink, a tender, hungry color, was for someone to share your fantasy. Right? Isn't that what you said?

Jerking at his lapels, drawing himself together and I don't need this, he said, any of it. I'm going back to the dormitory. Don't call me—palming the door and gone, the noise of his retreat absorbed by the nonslip tiles, sucking up the sound but she had stopped listening, her attention to the window now, the window and what lay beyond: pink hands moist against the scoured plastic, breath a cloud of longing, cheek against her lover's in the vacuum of the dark.

 

 

 

About the Author

Kathe Koja is a novelist, performer, director and independent producer. Her novels include The Cipher, Skin, Buddha Boy, and Christopher Wild. She is a multiple time Bram Stoker Award winning writer known for her intense speculative fiction.

 

 

 

 

My Soul’s Bliss

by

Mark Matthews

 

 

Peter at Quinn’s Funeral

 

Nobody else in church can smell the dead body, but I can. Quinn has shot up so much meth into his veins, I can sense its presence. No mortician can embalm that out of him.

I stand with hands folded, head slightly bowed to the priest, trying to be invisible and silent in my freshly laundered Brooks Brothers suit.

"Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks, who stay up late until they are inflamed with wine...” the priest reads from the Bible opened before him.

He stares into my eyes just then, a piercing glance, holding eye contact as if searching my sins, taking his time to judge them all and rank them by degrees. I shift my feet and rebalance myself closer to the pew. His gaze moves on, but I want this over.

Why did I stand so close to the front?

To avoid seeing her, that’s why.

Luci is in the back, I know this, certainly full of morning liquor while I face it stone cold sober, same as I have for the last five years, three months and ten hours. One look into her eyes and I’ll easily get sucked right back into the lifestyle.

My stomach gurgles, digesting this morning’s toasted bagel with lox. I glance to my side, hoping nobody can hear, but of course they can. Everyone can hear what’s happening inside me. The people next to me know. My freshly shaved face, my eyes bright and alert, my hands steady, my social graces refined, yet I still can’t hide what I am. I’ll always be just like Quinn, the Mighty Quinn, as we called him, but now he’s dead, so what does that say?

“When Quinn came to our church for help,” says the priest, “I could smell the sickness in him. Days that followed he took Communion with the same passion he used to take his drink. The Blood of Christ began to heal his afflictions. If he had only stayed…” The Father pauses his reading and shakes his head.

Father Patrick was legendary for his efforts to help addicts, for his understanding words and lofty expectations. This church housed addicts like Quinn in their annex, its own kind of halfway house. Luci and Quinn lived here for a bit, but Quinn died just days after they left out.

Luci had texted me on Quinn’s last night—Quinn’s bad. Real bad. We need you—and I wrote back but didn’t come to the rescue. I couldn’t keep coming to their aid. I had to care for myself.

In case of emergency, put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others.

You’ll inhale survivor guilt.

“His family loved him,” the priest says with a nod to those hunched in front. “But Quinn rejected his family like he rejected Christ. He lived as a desolate orphan—an orphan of bliss, really—a bliss he revered though it failed to deliver. The false gods he worshipped corrupted his soul, yet he sought them still—just a bleached skeleton crawling through the desert towards an oasis, finding only a mirage, until another appeared, and he crawled some more. His soul’s bliss killed his body, but was never satisfied. It still to this day is not satisfied.”

The priest stops talking, pausing to let his words sink in, and I watch the tearful parents hugging on Quinn’s sister. She was their lone child now, the tree with deep roots to grasp onto during their hurricane of grief.

The priest begins the ritual of Communion, blessing the wafers, blessing the wine. Incense smoke creeps into the front rows. He speaks with certainty: “Only those who eat of my flesh and drink of my blood shall have salvation. When you drink of the blood that martyrs have shed for you, you become as one with them, and have eternal life.”

My stomach churns again, rumbling like thunder in the distance. I should be at home and not have come. Quin would see that from the afterlife, right? The final betrayal. I’d gotten out of the lifestyle and survived, while he stayed true and died because of it. His accusations scream from the open casket as I stand in line to take the Sacrament.

Why are you alive and I am not?

Communion time means the service is almost over and I can get out of this building and take comfort that I did my part. I’m right behind Quinn’s sister; short black hair, head full of sorrow, heart full of ache. I hope she finds comfort from this ritual and isn’t feigning belief like I am. She accepts the wafer from the priest, steps aside, and it’s my turn in front. I do as she did, and the flesh of Christ dissolves on my tongue.

I turn for my slow march back to the pew, hands folded in front of me, but pause on the red carpet.

A second line has formed to accept the blood of Christ. I watch in admiration as mourners drink from a golden chalice. The smell of wine spreads with each sip, so rich and full of promise.

My God, that wine is like heaven.

The fragrance coats my lungs, coats my soul. I’m getting drunk off the scent.

Something directs my legs to stand in line. I’m not feigning any longer, I’m a believer, just like them, and they’re just like me, for they are drinking wine in the morning. The aroma has dug its claws into my brain. Something dormant inside my heart awakes. My mouth waterfalls. That whisper in my head, always begging me to drink, starts to scream with passion, the volume getting louder, cymbals crashing.

I’m in a line five deep. I hear the priest declare, “Blood of Christ” before the mourners take a delicious sip, and the chalice of glorious nectar is wiped clean for the next in line. In between each sip, I take a step.

God, don’t do this, turn around.

Another person drinks. Another step up.

Stop. Turn off.

Another person drinks. Another step.

God do I want a drink.

Another person drinks. Another step up.

Relief is coming, no need to fight.

One more to go and it’s my turn. My heart rapid fires, blood courses through my veins until my head pounds, palms sweat. My saliva tastes like wine already, the chalice may as well be at my lips. I’ve been dry for five years, three months, ten hours and thirty-two minutes, crawling through this desert towards this mirage that will not fade before me. The dam’s about to break loose, the levee will break.

“Body of Christ,” the priest says. Kindness sparkles in his eyes. He raises the chalice.

I feel an arm at my shoulder, a slight pull. I turn.

“Peter. I know you, he talked about you, I hope we can speak. I need you.”

I look into her eyes. It’s Quinn’s sister. She does know me, because she knew Quinn, and I am Quinn. To the front of me, the promise of wine in the morning—but this woman who knows me, who needs me, wants to talk, and I chose her.

I go with her, and stay with her. And I cling to her for the days that follow, for she is not only a tree trunk with deep roots to grasp onto, but also a field of wild flowers blooming with joy, a love for all seasons, a rainbow to my ark, and I follow.

 

 

Luci at Quinn’s Funeral

 

“Woe to those who rise early in the morning to chase after drink…”

I have no woe, for I’d already chased and captured my drink. It had been waiting for me in my Ford Focus, chilling overnight. It burned going down my throat. The bottle was empty before the engine even sputtered to a start.

I showed up late to the funeral wearing jeans that had turned the color of all the places I’d laid down the last few years, chameleon-like, and a leather jacket that had become my protective hide to survive in the jungle I lived, day after day.

Soon enough, the vodka will seep out my pores. I’ll start to tremble and sweat. But for now, it was the best of the liquor before the magic wore off.

I can make it through this service. I can deal with these sober shitgibbons giving me the side-eyes.

My friend, the Mighty Quinn, deserves my efforts. So few of us are left, but dead or alive, we’re all still connected. When you’ve danced together in raw, naked ecstasy and felt sensations most humans didn’t know existed, and when you’ve seen others in such inhumane states, you’re blood brothers and sisters for eternity.

And if you have any dedication, you keep chasing your highs with fervor until you burn, burn, burn like a distant star that explodes and then dies out alone, in a cold, dark night.

God, those old joys have turned sour and bitter.

I wished I’d eaten some breakfast to stop the vodka from making my gut feel like the pits of hell. I can feel my stomach lining bleed, imagine red bloody swirls in a pool of Smirnoff. My pancreas is swollen, my stomach is ulcered, my liver ripped to shreds. I hold one hand over my belly, like I’m applying pressure to a wound so it doesn’t bleed.

I’m not alive, I’m dead like Quinn inside that casket. We all are. So is Peter standing up there, pretending in his new life.

How will the priest react when he sees me again?

Quinn and I lived some of his last days in the church’s annex. Strung out, out of cash, out of energy, we knocked on the door of the Church of Eternal Bliss and were greeted by the legendary Father Patrick. We were taken in, given three meals, hot showers, and even medications for the inevitable withdrawals.

“But you must follow simple rules,” said Father Patrick. “You must attend mass on Sunday. You must not use drugs, and you must not drink. Not for six days a week. But on Sunday, drink our wine with a merry heart, for God gives wine that makes glad the hearts of men. You will not bow down to false gods or false drink, for ours is a jealous God.”

My first Holy Communion was an intoxication unlike any other. Drinking from that cup was like siphoning the blood from the veins of Jesus. It lifted every cell up to the heavens. Quinn and I tolerated a mundane life for six days a week, all for the communal wine on the seventh.

“The blood of Christ is changing you both, cleansing your very soul. This is what you have been seeking. You may scream ‘God’ when you fornicate or put drugs into your veins, but that is not a real God. What you seek is the sacramental wine. To drink of any other is an abomination and you will be cast out and allowed no more.”

Father Patrick was right. It did repair me, change me, and I could endure sobriety Monday through Saturday just to drink that wine on Sunday.

But Quinn got itchy. He loved his speed, his meth, his coke, his gods other than Christ. When he started packing his bags one Monday morning, there was no stopping him.

I didn’t want to leave the church, but you don’t betray friends like that.

We stole the silver from the church’s annex, brought it to the pawn shop, and turned it into meth. Oh God, that first blast. Quinn couldn’t get enough. He kept tapping his vein, shooting up meth, pacing the room, chewing his tongue, peeping out the window, and then shooting up some more. He finally stroked out, fell to the ground trembling like he’d been hit by lightning.

He's dying? What the hell do I do? I was lost, confused, scared. I texted Peter, the only straight person I knew: Quinn’s bad. Real bad. We need you.

Peter’s response: Call 911. Then get out. Cut and run.

I did as he said—called 911, with voice trembling, and then left the room at the Motel Six with the door open. I watched from afar until the ambulance drove off. Quinn’s family would have despised my presence had they known who I was. Even Father Patrick might not welcome me.

I feel the priest’s eyes scanning the crowd and I duck his gaze as if it were the searchlight of a police helicopter. His words come in and out of focus to my vodka-soaked brain, talking shit about “skeletons in the desert crawling towards mirages,” and how “his soul’s bliss killed his body, but was never satisfied…” and I want to raise my hand from the back and ask; Why should I be satisfied?

He blesses the wine, my mouth waters and my pulse quickens. Even in the back, I can smell the rich, red drink.

My senses burn, craving that magic elixir that Father Patrick said, “tasted special for those with my affliction.” I shift my feet to comfort the massive craving. My old leather jacket crinkles. The cow who died so I can wear its skin seems the lucky one.

I watch well-dressed mourners get in line for Communion and wait to be the last. They walk, slow as pallbearers, but carrying their own dead weight, and I hate them all. None of them knew Quinn like I did, all of them judged him for his mistakes. Sure—you know better, but I know him.

And as I fall to the back of the line, I see Peter a few people before me.

My God, Peter.

Peter’s in line. See, he knows, he knows about the bliss. He’s about to get a taste. Get some, Peter. Go get some. I imagine kissing his lips right there in church for all to see, the way we kissed in the past, dancing in the joys of the world and wrestling in the dredges. I went with him to detox, like he begged, but I had to leave out when he stayed. I’m sorry Sweet Pea, I had to leave. I had to.

Pete’s in front of the priest, a position I cherish. I watch the Father offer him the wine. My mouth waters as if the golden chalice is at my own lips. We’ve drank from the same cup so often, why should this be different?

But then a succubus appears to pull him away, an arm on his shoulder, a tug. Peter is balancing on the edge. I feel sick.

And then my Sweet Pea leaves. He leaves with the other woman.

Peter, I’m back here! Can’t you see? How can you forget me?

My turn to drink.

The priest is before me, holding forth the chalice. His eyes gleam, the wine sparkles. Here it comes!

But then his eyes dim, he pulls the chalice away, and with one hand makes the sign of the cross. “Our God is a jealous God. Whoever drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be answerable for the blood of the Lord. Examine yourself.”

He leaves me there, alone. I wasn’t blessed, I was cursed, empty, trembling, lost.

I turn to follow Peter out of the church, a shadow lying long, watching him walk with another woman, chemistry building between them with each step.

I’ll always be his shadow, and he mine.

I pull the jacket tight around me. I’ll live out of my car and scrounge for my daily fix. I’ll do what I can. I’ll rise early in the morning to run after my drink, for my soul’s bliss is not satisfied.

 

 

Six Months Later—Peter at 7:42 am on Monday Morning

 

My eyes are open but my awareness is hazy. It feel like I’ve woken from a medically induced coma so I could travel through deep space.

What happened?

I wait for reality to set in and wash away the uneasy dreams.

I’m lying in bed, and I’m not alone. There’s a leg next to me. I know that leg. My fingers have danced across it with such joy. I’m in my room, and I did travel through deep space—a galaxy of addiction and madness. Now I’m six years, one month, five days, and eight hours sober, and the most treasured part of my new life, Kate, lies next to me.

We met in the Communion line. She saved me from a relapse that would certainly have sent me spiraling

Instead, we went for coffee, and I listened. She talked about Quinn, how even as a little boy he was kind and adventurous, always needing to test limits. “I tried to save him,” Kate had said. “I tried so hard, so many times. He made promises to get help that I believed were genuine, and each time I realized they were lies. I thought it was my fault, that there was no such thing as truth—but I’m finding a truth with you.”

She had a zeal for life. She was so many flavors. Nearly every color in the Crayola box, and unbroken. She saved insects and brought them outside. Broke into random yoga poses when the moment hit her. Always focused, deliberate, living in the moment. I never thought sober life had so much to offer until she became my tour guide, and she seemed to love that role.

Time was lost together, and we’ve been dancing in the throes of love ever since.

Today we go further.

Today we’re busting out of this town, getting in the Subaru Outback and driving across country. Taking I-90, through the Badlands, across the Rockies, to Yosemite Park. And when we’re at the perfect spot, hopefully the cliff of Taff Point, I’ll get on one knee, reach in my pocket, present her the engagement ring, and ask her to join me in eternity.

I don’t just want a yes, but a YES, with conviction. A moment that imprints itself on her psyche so she’ll never forget it.

Because that’s what happens with certain moments. They imprint themselves on you and you can’t change them. They define you, become the hinge all your decisions swing upon. I want a moment so powerful it realigns her world view for decades to come. The huge canyon below us, the gods and heavens above.

I place my palm on her leg and she doesn’t stir. Doesn’t react. Because our flesh is becoming one, melting together.

Her sleep washes away and her legs move, gliding upon each other like a violinist strumming her chords. I slide an arm under her and pull her towards me. She murmurs a slowly waking moan and I feel her breath against my bare shoulder, warm and moist.

Her eyes open, lock into mine, her head shifts on the pillow, and she extends a finger to trace the tattoo on my bicep, a glossy blue eye, with Luci written in cursive underneath.

“I’m sad I never met this Luci,” she says in a morning voice. “I bet she’s remarkable, and apparently stuck to you forever.”

I slide my arm to move the tatt out of place. Luci knows me in ways Kate never will. Ways I don’t want Kate to.

“Tattoo ink fades, my love for you will not.”

“Well played, mister,” she smiles. “You rehearsed that, didn’t you?”

I am rehearsing, she’s right, rehearsing how to ask for a commitment to keep growing together.

Every time Kate had to leave my side, I felt ripped open and ached to see her again. Craving her taste, her touch, her smile, her presence. That smooth olive Italian skin. That black hair, a smile so content, a face that holds mysteries and reveals them in tiny bread crumbs for me to travel.

“Your love is all I need,” I want to say, a joy that I didn’t know humans could find. A reason to stay sober.

From one addiction to another, a voice inside me warns.

Instead of words, we kiss. Our flesh humming together. Our movements creating moisture that rises from our pores, spreads about the room like some magical mist created by mages. The sounds we make are the morning rooster announcing a new dawn, her spirit and mine leave our bodies, circle together like smoke, and then return to their host.

The afterglow settles in, the day’s adventure awaits.

She dashes out of the bedroom to take a shower, and in her place, a shroud creeps into the room through the fissures of my memory. It reminds me who I really am, the things I’ve done. The dirty, desperate moments, the core of the parts of me I hadn’t shared, a disease that was dormant and if she saw a glimpse would be sickened to lay with me, to travel out west as we planned today. I held things back that she didn’t need to know, like my response to the last message I received about her brother.

Quinn’s bad. Real bad. We need you.

Today will change everything and wash away the past.

My gut tingles with anticipation. The most exciting time is just before it starts. A life with Kate is one more reward for getting clean, for staying in detox and not leaving with Luci when she left out, and then making hard changes with patience and persistence, everything leading up to this day.

“You love hard when you love, don’t you?” she said to me just last night.

“Find what you love and let it kill you,” I quoted Bukowski.

She’s asked so little of me other than honesty. Just please tell me the truth, she had pleaded, lies are their own addiction, I’ve lived with such an addict, and I won’t do it again.

I make her coffee, three scoops of sugar, just a smidge of cream, and place it on the bathroom sink for when she gets out of the shower. She’s diligent getting ready, content to leave out with wet black hair that shapes to her skull. She wears a white tank top, and is gathering our luggage by the front door.

The windows are locked. Thermostat set to sixty-eight. The mail is held.

The glow in her eyes. The electricity in the air. The joys that await.

The engagement ring is deep down in my pocket, buried in a place nobody will find but me, and when the time comes, I’ll dig it out and present it to her.

She opens the front door, one bag slung over her shoulder, and she screams in terror. A TV scream with windows open and volume loud enough to wake the neighbors. I rush through the front door ready to defend her against all threats.

A body is lying on the porch.

A woman with eyes still open, looking towards my front door as if she was trying to reach the handle, but came up short.

Her skin is jaundice yellow, her cheeks hollowed out. Blood pooled under her as if a red rain last night had left a puddle, and the air is tainted by the liquid. Blood still trickles from her lips, like the last bits of lava from a volcanic explosion.

A liquid path follows where she dragged herself across the cement towards the door, but could get no further. A bleached skeleton crawling through the desert towards an oasis, but finding only a mirage.

I spring to her side, kneel beside her, and put a finger to her neck. Still warm, but no pulse in the jugular. She hasn’t been here long. I put a hand to her chest but feel nothing, God, she got skinny. I put my ear over her mouth, not a breath, but there is life inside, has to be. The spirit’s still there even if the body is dying.

I roll her flat on the front porch, the body limp and bloody like a Halloween dummy meant to scare trick or treaters.

I can do this.

Fifteen compressions and then one breath. Or is it thirty and then one breath? Sweep the mouth, tilt the head, don’t tilt the head? I can’t remember which, and I don’t need it exact, I just need to try.

I cup my hands in CPR position, and start compressing. Boom-Boom. Boom-Boom. Each time my fist brings a flow of bloody lava streaming from her mouth.

It’s working. I can resurrect her.

She just needs oxygen to her brain.

I lean over, pinch her nose, put my lips on hers, and blow air down her throat.

My god, I’ve tasted these lips before. I’ve wrestled with her naked in just as much grime from dingy basement parties and outdoor concerts with rain and mud. We woke up mornings moaning with pain, and excused each other every bit of primal nastiness.

The blood on her lips is wretched, like her rotting insides; wet, sticky, thick plasma from somewhere down her throat that erupted. I make sure I don’t get any down my throat, as if I might catch the disease that caused this.

Kate’s on her cell phone talking to 911 in a steady business voice; “An unconscious person, performing CPR, send life support, stat.” She hangs up maybe sooner than she should to help. She kneels down alongside. The two person CPR training over the plastic dummy comes back to me, only now the dummy is bloody and rancid.

Kate blows air into her mouth while pinching the nose, neither of us following universal precautions. Kate’s lips now glisten from the blood. She’s doing the breathing, I’m doing the pumping, and I keep the delusion this carcass we’re working on will start breathing on its own—but nothing. She’s lifeless and getting colder.

Boom-Boom. Boom-Boom.

I can’t give up, I won’t give up.

No, just let her die! another part of me screams. You need her to die.

I need her to die. I need to bury her and watch her go below the earth, so that I’ll stop having dreams of getting high with her. This foul blood from her insides makes it clear how much she’s been suffering. It stinks of bitterness and despair.

Boom-Boom. Boom-Boom

I keep compressing, Kate keeps breathing. Her desire to save this woman seems stronger than mine. Her hands and clothes getting stained with blood, her white top a red badge of courage that keeps growing, the crimson splotch like a bullet wound.

So much blood. How can she be alive?

I mumble a prayer that seems an unnatural reflex, begging God with each compression.

Maybe I’m doing this wrong. My compressions not deep enough, or they’re too deep. I can feel the chest cavity about to crack, my arms ready to bust through the cavity wall and the ribs will amputate them both like The Thing she’s become.

Her eyes stay open and do not blink and I’m getting sucked back into them. I want to send her out to a peaceful death with one last apology—I’m sorry, I’m sorry for my sober self. It was a mistake for me to stay in detox when you left. That feeling flashes out of me, when I look up at Kate, her strong natural confidence, that steadfast serenity.

The body spasms under me.

It moves.

It starts with a gurgle, then becomes explosive. As if possessed, she’s come to life. She reaches one hand behind Kate’s head and pulls it down onto her own. She holds their mouths together with unnatural strength. A desperate lover’s kiss.

And in an instant, I can hear the vomit shooting out of the dying body into Kate, the sound muffled by Kate’s mouth, stuck there, lips to lips, as if suctioning the poison out.

Kate finally pulls away and chunky blood splashes out of her mouth to the ground. It’s rancid, sour, and Kate starts coughing spastically, spitting with each breath, hands on her knees, trying to expel all that she’s swallowed, and I stop my compressions and lean back.

We’ve saved this woman. A testimony to what Kate and I can do together.

But then the body falls back flat. It was her last gasp before dying.

Kate can’t talk when the ambulance arrives. She’s bent over, hands to knees, stuck in that moment before throwing up but never getting past it, two dogs fighting indeed, and none of them winning. All I can do is pace and try to breathe rather than fall flat on the porch myself.

Neighbors have gathered to watch emergency technicians cart the body away. I’m left with Kate at the scene of this bloody mess. I put an arm on her back and can feel her body in a state of emergency. Electric signals go zip-zapping up and down her spine.

I need to fix this. Then I need to wash my hands.

I reach a bloody hand into my pocket and fumble with the engagement ring. The smooth gold, the tiny diamond. Not a big jewel, but as much as Kate would ever want. I could kneel down in the bloody puddle and ask Kate to marry me right here, a moment imprinted forever. That will fix things and power-wash this moment clean.

Kate speaks. I stuff the ring deep in my pocket.

“Who was that?” she asks. “You know her. Who was that?”

Just please tell me the truth, lies are their own addiction.

“That was Luci.”

 

 

Luci at 7:42 am on that same Monday Morning

 

Monday morning, sitting in my car with the engine grumbling and the gas gauge flirting with empty. The radio plays classic rock, Steppenwolf on a magic carpet ride. Birds are chirping announcing to the world they survived the night—time to wake, rise with the dawn—but I was not of their world. There’s no real sleep, just perpetual sickness, suffering, cravings.

I had to scrounge through the bottom of my car seat for the last twenty cents to afford the pint of vodka. The cashier didn’t hide his pity when my fingers trembled as I paid in nickels, dimes and quarters. Now I sit nursing the little treasure. With every sip my organs emit acid, beg me to stop, protesting their assignments to process what I’m pouring down my throat.

I’m sick. I know it. Crooked blue rivers run through my swollen gut. The tiny veins keep getting longer like I’m cracking apart, a busted china doll and not enough glue.

I take another gulp. Acidic bile seeps through the cracks and I quickly say my morning prayers: God, please. I need your help. Please let this vodka stay inside of me. No more vomiting.

I need the relief only drink can bring. I imagine the liquor turning into little soldiers fighting my battles, invisible microscopic heroes made of vodka, fighting off the evil swarm inside me. There has been so much black, tarry gook gathering. I’ve been shitting it for days. It clogs my head.

Ahh… There it is, the vodka soldiers are doing their work.

A slight comfort. My prayers have been answered. A blow torch flame burns down my throat, into my stomach, through my intestines, down to my asshole, but everything stays inside where it belongs.

I watch doors on the street open and close. Humans with freshly showered bodies and clean clothes walk to their cars to face the day, not noticing me. How I hate them, how I envy them. These sober Shitgibbons. They don’t need a morning fix, aren’t suffering with this curse. It’s hard to feel I’m of their same race. I’ve warped my body, mutated it.

That foul-smelling grey matter inside me will gather into a blob and eat all of us. Certainly it will eat me first.

There is one house I came here for. I sit with the car idling, listening to the magic carpet ride ending. Close your eyes girl, look inside girl, let the sound take you away.

It’s Peter’s door. He’s inside his new house with a new woman and a new life, pretending to love her. He could never love another the way he loved me, right? I’m inside his brain stem, I’m in every bit of his flesh. When he gets cut, I’m the one who bleeds. When he dreams, he dreams of us together, getting high from all the wonders of the universe.

“It’s like we have an outer layer that includes everything, not just us,” he had said while we were laying on the beach, tripping on LSD. We watched the stars from the flat of our backs while the tide came higher and higher, caressing us with foamy fingers, and then retreated back to sea.

It can take us, no need to be afraid. We weren’t living in the regular confines.

We got our tattoos back then, or as Peter said, “Not getting inked, just removing the flesh that covers where our names are written on each other already.”

We laughed at the absurdity of those who lived straight lives, running their rat race.

We stopped laughing so loud when our bodies started to decay, holding each other through sweat and shakes and cravings.

He broke away. Swore he was getting clean, going straight, selling out. I agreed to go with him to detox, but my pain was too much, so I told the doctors to go fuck themselves and left against medical advice. He had to understand that. Staying there to suffer was senseless, hurtful, impossible.

I went straight to the liquor store, whistling dixie, I suppose, so sure he would follow that I had Smirnoff on ice waiting for his arrival.

But he didn’t follow, he stayed in detox, and now he’s getting reborn to a new life while I disintegrate.

My diseased liver makes my stomach bulge. My pancreas is swollen and pressing against my spine. God, do I hurt. God am I forsaken. Even the Church of the Eternal Bliss, that haven for addicts, has now considered me an outcast. If only I could return and live each day on that wine.

But I can’t, this hell is all I have.

I take one last sip of vodka and Jesus does it burn. One hand rubs my belly, like always, applying pressure to keep this wound from bleeding.

I pray again with all my might and rub my hand harder and…

Thank you, God, no vomit.

The bottle’s empty. I get out of the car, one step on the grass, then two, waiting for some balance. I feel the eyes of the suburbanites watching me from their windows, none who will help. But Peter will help me. We have a permanent covenant. I remember those Led Zeppelin lyrics he sung to me: Mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

I walk up his driveway, and with each step a new thought of what I’ll say. Or maybe I’ll not need to say a word, one catch of my eyes and the moment will be felt and he’ll join me in one last permanent midnight. Self-combust. Blow ourselves apart into those stars we gazed up at and then float down like dust.

It will work out, with each step, I tell myself, it will work out, but then I feel a warm surge as if an elevator full of blood has opened in my throat, and the vomit does come in a tsunami wave. One big heave.

Something has ruptured.

A stream of liquid firehoses out my mouth. Not just bile, but warmer, creamy, thick. My God, the blood. It’s blood, and I fall to my knees as it comes pouring forth. More liquid than I knew was inside me, and such a foul taste, such a noxious smell. A witch’s cauldron, overturned.

I fall to my knees and start crawling, one arm extended, drag, one knee extended, drag. He needs to know I’m here. He’ll help. One arm forward, drag, the cement slick with my blood.

Peter, we need to fix this.

I move across his porch, bony knees on the cement, scraping and slipping over the blood trail leaking from my mouth, leaking from my nostrils, like the way I used to laugh so hard during grade school that milk shot out my nose.

Only this time it’s blood.

Another heave of vomit tears up my throat, sprays from my mouth, and splashes to the ground. I think for one odd moment of how embarrassing to be found this way. Perhaps this is my most honest moment and I’ll finally be noticed. My confession surrounds me in a puddle of poison, and I’m certain the liquid is flammable.

One more heave, a massive spasm of muscles. I’m almost to the door, legs sliding on the slippery bloody path. If I can just twist that doorknob Peter will help but I can’t. I’m empty. It’s finished. I can’t go any further. As much as death wants me, my eyes won’t close, I can’t seem to die. The vision of the door before me, but out of reach.

Peter, open it for me, let me in.

My prayers answered, the door does open, but instead of Peter it’s her. She’s looking straight at me from the doorway. I’m a monster to her, for she hollers in fear, scared at what humans do. Then he appears at the door. He looks into my open eyes and it’s clear he remembers. His jaw has grown square, stronger, cleaner, wiser, but inside he hasn’t changed.

He’s at my side where he belongs.

His hands on my chest, and he’s pumping my heart—as if he’s not always pumped my heart—keeping me alive.

This is what I’m here for, but I can’t respond. I’m fading, dying…

I need more air, he senses this, knows this, for his lips meet mine and he blows air into my body, but it’s not enough. Kiss me again! But instead of him, it’s her, it’s her, this new version of me. She breathes air into me.

I hate the taste of her lips. She doesn’t know me and she doesn’t know him, and oxygen from her will not save a life such as mine.

He bangs my chest, boom-boom, boom-boom, and pumps blood through my body.

Three more pumps, boom-boom-boom.

And my body does come to life.

Another spasm, one last heave where the fire of hell scorches my esophagus, exploding like a dark star in space. I reach out an arm and pull the woman’s head towards me, pressing her mouth against mine, a suction cup of my lips to hers, and the last of my poisoned self explodes into her mouth and down her throat. She has no choice.

This is my blood, drink it. I shed it for you. When you drink of the blood that martyrs shed, you become as one with them.

 

 

Peter at the Hospital

 

“It’s called esophageal varices,” the doctor explained to us in the hospital hallway. “When the liver is diseased, blood flow is blocked and pushed into vessels that aren't designed for such large volumes. Esophageal varices develop in the throat. They worsen, dilate, become taut. When they erupt like this, it requires immediate attention. You kept her alive a bit longer, but the only way to save her was surgery and a blood transfusion.

“You witnessed an alcoholic’s most violent death from end-stage liver disease. With the amount of blood and the unnatural position when the body is found, these deaths often result in murder investigations. Makes no sense for someone to explode with that much blood without being attacked. Of course, if you know their drinking history, it becomes clear. This was certainly not her first symptom—just her last. She’s been living in pain, with bloody, tar-like stools from internal bleeding. Not a pleasant way to live.

“To find such a victim when they die like that must have been traumatizing. We have social workers who can speak to you. Or a chaplain if such is your faith.”

Okay, I know what I saw, I know Luci, and I don’t need to hear this, don’t need to be told any more. I had enough. After hours of waiting in the hospital. I’m ready to go, to leave, but I’m waiting on Kate’s cue, because if I suggest leaving, I’m cold. The type of guy who would ditch a wife if she ended up here. The well-lit sterile hallways feel like a prison. We are supposed to be gone.

Are we still leaving for our trip?

I don’t want to ask her now. She seems sick, her skin pale, sweaty, and one hand holds her stomach. Constantly holding her stomach.

On our drive home from the hospital, she answers my unspoken question.

“We can’t go out west,” she says with a shaky voice, looking away from me out the passenger window. Drizzle is making water beads on the glass. “I know you want to, but she’s a Jane Doe without you. Without us. She deserved better. She never had a chance.

“And Luci was important to you.” Kate turns to stare at the side of my head as I drive, her voice gaining power. “You will not forget her.”

“Of course I won’t forget her.” I shake my head no for her to see that I take connections seriously. “What we had was intense, but so destructive. I got out, but she was stuck.”

“Maybe she’s free now. Maybe she did break away. We all do. But you know she needed you. Why did you leave her if she needed you like that?”

Kate’s words pick up in pace, like she’s pushing her own accelerator, not waiting for answers, but accusing me on the stand, badgering the witness.

“Did you actually love her or just love drinking with her? Because if you really love someone, you stay with them, right?”

I have no answer. I should feel more about Luci’s death, but I’ve seen so many transitions of her life, mutating from one thing to another, this just felt like one more.

“I’ll stay with you,” I promise.

“Just don’t cut and run.”

These are Kate’s last words for a day or more. After that, she stays in bed, sleeping and sweating. Sheets wrapped around her are wet the next morning, stains on her pillow from whatever she was drooling from her lips. Her eyelids full of goop like she had a couple of pink eyes. Her skin’s sludgy, her movements uncertain. She tries to avoid my gaze, and each time I catch her eyes, the colors seemed to be shifting.

What is happening?

I ask her to see her own doctor because something had sickened her, and she says no by not answering. She stays in bed all day, scratching restlessly under the sheets, making ghostly moans. Frequent trips to the bathroom and back without saying a word.

When I come to bed for the night, the room feels humid. Things move about in the moisture, reality shifting. She gets out of bed in the dark of night, looking around the house for something, and I lay there fighting sleep until she returns.

The next morning, I found two empty vials of vanilla extract in the garbage. 40% proof—the only alcohol in the house, and it was gone.

What is happening?

I’m frozen, waiting with patience and persistence, wondering how to push this process along, for something to happen. I keep the engagement ring in my pocket, moving it from one finger to another like a magician with a coin, wondering if it has magic.

I was going to Luci’s funeral alone, it appeared, and I needed to go, because who else would be there? Her family had scattered long ago. She never had the core I did, or maybe I was her core, and then pulled it out.

And my new love, Kate, my stable love, the anti-Luci, in a sense, was now sick.

The next morning, she does wake, she does shower. She puts on jeans and seems surprised they fit, and she’s coming with me to the funeral at the Church of Eternal Bliss. I’m once again wearing my black, Brooks Brothers suit, and we drive there in silence. I follow her to sit in the front pew.

Why sit up front? I’m not sure, but Kate scans the crowd behind us as if taking inventory. The organ music gives way to the words of Father Patrick, legendary saint of dead addicts. He’s recycled material from Quinn’s funeral, but he speaks with enough passion that Kate cries for both of us, crying not for Luci—that wouldn’t seem right—but crying for life itself, for death, for the inevitable crushing sadness sucking us all down faster than it should.

I take her hand, she squeezes mine back, my palm is a sponge of memories of Luci. Our times at Delray Beach, lying near the surf, tripping on acid and watching stars burn. The tide came and soaked us in foam by degrees, rising higher around our legs, our waists, our shoulders. Luci’s eyes became fish bowls filling with ocean blue. We disintegrated together, taken out to the depths of the sea, brought back again and put together anew. A blood transfusion of sorts, and a moment that burned in us forever.

Luci would have asked to be buried at sea instead of this, could she still speak.

As the priest blesses the wafers and wine for Communion, Kate squeezes harder, her fingers trembling, all bone, all aquiver. When the time comes, Kate pulls me with her to go to Communion. She’s second in line, I’m third, and we accept the eucharist on our tongues.

I take steps back towards our seat, but Kate grabs my hand and pulls me towards the line formed for the chalice of wine.

What is she doing?

I cut free from her grasp. She lets me go, easily, unnoticed, and like a pup fighting for mother’s milk, she’s in the line, shifting weight from left to right, right to left, suffering with anticipation.

I stand alone on the red carpet. I feel the temperature of the room change.

She bows to the priest, in a trance, full deference, and I’m standing there in limbo, not wanting to be in line, wanting to be in line, fighting with temptation, sad I just might win. She takes a gulp, much more than one swallow, a semblance of an Adam’s apple rising and falling.

She turns to me, and I see the wine drip on her lips, such satisfaction, a lion who caught their prey. She returns to me in all her glory and kisses me. It’s a lover’s kiss, standing right there before the priest, before Jesus, before a couple dozen mourners. The kiss starts sensual, then turns erotic. Her tongue flickers on mine and I get a trace of that wine and my God does it make my whole spine tingle.

I fight embarrassment over this kiss before the crowd, when her hand reaches for my pants. First at my belt, then fumbling into a pocket. She reaches deep, digs around, searching. Our breath picks up, so many witnesses now, even the priest stuck there, watching, when she pulls out the engagement ring and slips it on her finger.

“I do. For eternity,” she says, and sings me that lyric I sang to Luci long ago. “Mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.”

The ground below me is no longer solid, it’s a blue sea with endless depth. I’m adrift, crumbling, I feel the spirit of Luci in the room, I see the essence of Luci in Kate’s eyes.

Luci was a dying star, her death an implosion, and her stardust inhaled by Kate.

We drive home in such a mix of joy and death, and as soon as we arrive, she says she has places to go. She begs me to go with her, but I recognize that look in her eye. It will kill me if I succumb, so I decline, and let her leave.

Days that follow, I’m finding empty liquor bottles. I’m losing money out my wallet. I smell her when she comes back. Her breath makes the whole house a mist of vodka and gin. She busts into drunken yoga poses. She plays pranks and giggles, her laughter turns childlike. She scribbles post-it notes and leaves them everywhere. She gathers insects that live in our house, keeping them alive, but stuck in plastic Tupperware with holes poked for air.

I let her be. I watch her metamorphosis. I offer affection and love and she returns a range of joy and ecstasy, then anger and bitterness.

“You going to cut and run?” she asks me, and before I can answer, she responds, “I know you left Quinn to die alone.”

That leads to days of silence. I’m lost. This life is something foreign to me, except I do know what she needs when she’s sick, and I go out to fetch it. I’m a new parent to this needy child on a constant loop of drink, explosive emotion, blackouts, then drink. Every day the familiar ding of a liquor store when I walk through the door, the nasty mop smell, the bulletproof glass like it’s a prison visit, the look you get when you ask for a bottle of Smirnoff at 7:41 a.m. Doesn’t matter my hands are steady, and that I pay with cash, not coins.

One time I even give the ridiculous excuse, “It’s for my wife.”

Every time I hold the bottle of vodka in that brown crinkly bag, every time I scan the rows of beer in the cooler, and then later watch Kate drink, my own mouth waters. My own body feels an explosion of warmth. Voices inside me awake and start to chatter, to sing and chant so loud they make my hands tremble. I’m engulfed by a million needy parts that want to drink, beg me to drink. But I don’t listen, I don’t respond to the chorus of voices. I’m a friend to this monster, this horror.

My dreams are full of bizarre images of me getting high with people from my past, but I resist doing so in the real world.

This holds true when she waves a bottle under my nose. When I find it in the freezer. Even when I wake at night with her smacking my veins with her fingers—thwack, thwack, thwack, ready to shoot some meth into me from the syringe. I pull it away, move my arms under the cover, and she snarls. She smacks her own veins instead, shoots up while I lay there, and then moves about the house chewing her tongue, peeping out windows. Her olive Italian skin becomes tougher, like leather, the hide for the jungle she lives within.

At times we make love, and our skin slides across each other in the sticky, sweaty moisture until a mist fills the room that stinks of the same rancid scent as the blood on our still-stained porch. Every bit of Kate’s body that my tongue explores tastes of the sludge on Luci’s lips that last time ours met.

Kate is now eager to go to church, but I won’t let her go alone. I witness her suffer the anticipation of Communion. Always last in line, always the one to finish whatever’s left in the chalice. Until one final time when the priest gives her the sign of the cross, pulls the chalice away, and leaves her there alone, her thirst unquenched. She falls to her knees in agony. She puts her hands together as if to pray. She stays there begging, waiting for the priest to return with the wine, but he does not.

“He recognized me,” she says. “He knows me. I’m banished. I’m dying. Bury me at sea.”

Her deterioration is rapid. She lies to me about quitting, then apologizes for lying, she says she can’t live like this.

“My brother Quinn… Why did I say those things?”

She’s broken and sick without her drink. When her body has seizures, her eyes remain open but unfocused. Seeing me, not seeing me, I’m not sure which, but she shakes on the ground as if being electrocuted, no cord to unplug to stop the delirium tremors.

I take her to detox with enough clothes for many days, hoping she’ll need them all, but she returns after just one overnight, clothes still folded and untouched inside. Her massive craving needs satiated, and after dancing about the house with the bottle, begging me to join her, she passes out. I hold her hand in mine, talk to her as if she’s in a coma.

“I did this to you. I killed you, Kate. You picked the wrong man.”

The weight of her new burden is now my burden, my cross to bear, my soul to care for. I will pay my dues in time, because she won’t live much longer.

Her skin has turned so jaundice it glows a sickly orange-yellow. Her abdomen is bloated from the rotting organs inside, veins protruding in little blue rivers. She’s shitting out gooky black tar.

Her body can’t take it. Her liver, her stomach, her brain are all sickly. I’ll remember Kate with fondness and bury her with my ring, and try to live my life sober, but with this beast inside me.

While others die, I move on. Alone on this road.

 

Kate’s Final Days

 

There is no death. Our bodies carry on. Fluids dehydrate into the sky to become rain clouds and fall back to earth. We decay into the soil, descend into the ground, and then resurrect into dandelions and tulips. We dissolve in the ocean, eaten by fish, become the ocean, become the fish.

When you drink the blood of the martyr, you become the martyr.

Since that blood shot down my throat and soaked into my body, I can see it with my mind’s eye, watching my plasma as if under the microscope of some viral outbreak movie, the host and its parasite.

My skin itches. I scratch each spot until a new spot demands my attention, and then scratch some more. Dead skin gathers under my fingernails. I want to shed my skin like a snake as something underneath grows. My spirits sweats out my pores and soaks into the sheets.

I have a pounding desire to drink, to break free from human sensations, to expand my body into an outer layer. I want drink, I want drug, I want oblivion and bliss. Everyday pleasures are senseless, dissatisfying, hurtful.

How could I not know until now? Why do I have to find this out now? The engagement ring on my finger a forever loop that I twirl and twirl and twirl.

Everything hurt, nothing was okay, my eyes in the mirror change colors. A rainbow of hazels, a kaleidoscope of blue, a cold arctic sea.

The world is full of harm, threats to my existence, so I seek refuge in alcohol wherever it can be found. In vanilla extract, in the Communion cup. It starts with drunken joys and passions aflame, but soon…soon they turn to sickening despair that I wish I could vomit out of me. I wish I had vomited that day I tried to save her, and now she’s in me.

If only Peter would join me. I kiss him with vodka breath. I kiss him with Communion wine on my tongue. I get meth to shoot in his veins. I wave liquor under his nose. I do everything I can to waken the beast I know is inside him, but he refuses to unleash.

The shitgibbon has betrayed me. He left Quinn to die alone, I know this now as if the knowledge has penetrated my skull through tiny capillaries, popping knowledge into each thought.

So I betray him in return. I leave out and lay with other men who will indulge with me, share moments of adventure and joy, forgetting about what comes next—and what comes next is I return to my Sweet Pea.

I understand now the secret war my brother Quinn was fighting. His need to get high, his need for bliss, something so innate, so tragic. I forgive him for his lies. I visit his gravesite to apologize. I pour vodka by his cheap headstone that first puddles in the green grass, then soaks into the ground and all that lies below. I tend to him in death like I never did in life, in ways Peter is tending to me now.

The blood of Christ is my greatest joy of the week. Wine so rich it reaches places inside me nothing else can find. The day Father Patrick recognized me and declared me unworthy, I was Lucifer cast from Heaven.

Whatever has taken me over does not want to rest. It’s intent to make my body rot, to destroy my liver and inflame my pancreas. My stomach is a bleeding ulcer. I’m too sick to leave the house anymore, and my home becomes my hospice. Peter is my nurse. His love is endless. The engagement ring and the bottle of vodka beside me are proof. I wish he’d go hand in hand with me, but he will not, so I get drunk as I dream—alone.

I throw up often, and my vomit turns the color of orange juice with red bits inside. It’s sour, rancid, and seems to sizzle. I shit out a black tarry gook, the digested blood from my stomach lining. Whites of my eyes are blood shot, tiny red veins surrounding an iris of arctic blue.

I’m dying. I want to die, because God, does life hurt. It burns you, it bleeds you, and best you can do is try to escape it with some God-given chemicals. But our God is a jealous God and will punish you.

I wake from sleep and reach for the vodka my Sweet Pea has placed for me bedside. I take a sip. It’s my last drink, I’m sure of it, because then I feel an explosion of acid, of fire, of blood, my body convulses—it’s called “esophageal varices.” Peter remains sleeping through it all. So tired of life, tired of me, flat on his back with his jaw slack and mouth open.

Just as my body spasms, I press my lips onto his, attach them in one succulent last kiss, and then vomit volumes of blood down his throat, into his stomach, into his soul.

So much blood. A rich, bloody, rancid wine. It spills on his face, onto his pillow, onto the sheets, but so much more into his mouth. He wakes in shock, coughing and spitting, but it’s impossible for him not to swallow the poison.

He will carry me forward, he will take me back to the Communion line, to the party stores, to all the blue oceans and every dark gutter.

Take my blood and drink it, for my soul’s bliss has killed my body, but has not satisfied itself.

 

 

 

About the Author

Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a licensed professional counselor who has worked in behavioral health for over 20 years. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, All Smoke Rises, and Milk-Blood, as well as the editor of Lullabies for Suffering and Garden of Fiends. His newest work, The Hobgoblin of Little Minds, was published in January, 2021.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also from Wicked Run Press

 

On the Lips of Children

“A sprint down a path of high adrenaline terror. A must read.”

—Bracken MacLeod, author of Stranded

 

Milk-Blood

“An urban legend in the making. You will not be disappointed.”

—Bookie-Monster.com

 

All Smoke Rises

“Intense, imaginative, and empathic. Matthews is a damn good writer, and make no mistake, he will hurt you.”

—Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door

 

Garden of Fiends

“What fertile ground for horror. Every story comes from a dark, personal place”

—Josh Malerman

 

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

"As a new take on the werewolf story, it is a fascinating read, but as a deep dive into the realities of mental illness, this book is an absolute triumph."

—IndieMuse.com

 

Lullabies for Suffering

Shirley Jackson Award Finalist—Best Anthology of the Year

This Is Horror Award Finalist—Best Anthology of the Year

Includes the Bram Stoker Award Finalist Story “Beyond the Reef”

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

 

So many have helped and contributed along the way since I started publishing this trio of Addiction Horror anthologies. Trying to create such an expansive list of people to thank is dangerous, because with such a wide net, I fear I’ll leave someone out, so please accept my apology in advance.

Thanks to John FD Taff, who gave me the initial push I needed to start editing and publishing, and for being a constant source of feedback. Thanks to Kealan Patrick Burke, another writer who has been there from the beginning, and has inspired and amazed me.

Thanks to all the writers not yet mentioned who’ve appeared in previous anthologies, including Jack Ketchum, Caroline Kepnes, Mercedes M Yardley, Max Booth, Jessica McHugh, Johan Thorson, and Glen Krisch.

Thanks to Julie Hutchings, for the editor always needs an editor. Thanks to Becky Spratford, for her support and advocacy of indie horror. Thanks to Horror Writers Association members such as Brian Matthews, Lee Murray, and James Chambers, for their work in mental health initiative.

Thanks to so many bloggers, reviewers, readers and fellow authors. Sadie and Ashley of Nightworms, for the addiction horror subscription box and for all their support. Thanks Jim Mcleod of Ginger Nuts, Beth Griffith, for her support and proof reading, Janelle Janson, Hayla Richards, George Daniel Lea, Michael Fowler, Andrew the Bookdad and Horror Oasis, Roxie V, Kendall Reviews, Ben Baldwin, Nasar Masoom, Monica Drake, Brandi the Bibliophile, Lauri with Ladies of Horror Fiction.

Thanks to Samantha A and LeeAnn O’ from the fantastic land Canada, ‘Steph the Horror Mama,’ the fantastic folks at Horror DNA, Divination Hollow. Miranda the Wee Devil, Yvonne the Coy Caterpillar, Justin J, Ella of Iceland, Emily M, Wayne Fenlon, Leeann of Grumplestilskin, Ben Walker, Rich Duncan, John Quesstore, David Spell, Jennifer at the book den.

Thanks to a host of writers including: Alma Katsu, Richard Thomas, Jason Parent, Chad Lutzke, Steve Stred, Eric Guignard, Anthony Rivera, Erin Al-Mehair, Matt Weber, V. Castro, Monica Kuebler and Rue Morque, Tabatha Woods, Cindy O’Quinn, Aiden Merchant, Brenna LaFaro, J.M Van Horn and all the folks at the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers.

Charlene thank you for all your support through the years, since back when I was just a Stray, and to your friend Andi R, who I’ll never forget. Thanks to the voice of Linda Jones and the support of John Foster. Thanks to cover artists Zach McCain, Dean Samed, and Marcela Bolivar

Thanks to my wife for her support in pursuing this project, for as most books do, this one took over much of my life. Thanks to my brother Kevin, passed well before his time, who introduced me to horror. We shared a common burden.

Thanks to you, dear reader, for making it this far, and for being a part of the addiction horror family.