My Closet

He ran for the stairs, ran as fast as he could, on the ankle strained from that spontaneous stretching.

He made it halfway down the steps: Wayne grabbed his jacket by mechanical finger tips. Steve pulled loose, only to face another set of arms appearing like vicious iron snakes by the foot of the stairs (he thought he could actually hear them hissing). He retreated upwards. Another snake-like arm tried to grab him by the top of the stairs, and he slid underneath it as gracefully as a sumo wrestler would have managed a limbo dance. Steve headed towards Maggie’s study – two more arms were ready to grab him –and he crashed into one of them heavily, which held it down for a moment. Here he dodged the second arm, and it punched a hole in the wall.

Steve took off to the bathroom instead, hoping at first that he could crawl out the window there, but seeing it, it wasn’t going to be a possible escape route: Maggie, Essie and possibly himself – 50 pounds ago – would’ve been able to squeeze through. But now, one beer-belly later, it wasn’t going to happen.

Another arm from the bathroom cut through the air like a stretched-out claw, and he changed his mind yet again and went for their bedroom. He had time to see the bed was missing its cover before the cover was all over him; Wayne was trying to grab him, to make the cover the net with which the house would catch its attempting escapee. Steve pulled loose with one strong pull, using his entire weight. Running with the bed sheet over his head, he felt one of Wayne’s slimmer arms strap around him like a thick iron seat belt across the waist. But as Steve was in momentum, he managed to break through onto the floor into Essie/Wayne’s room, hearing wood cracking, wires and

cables ripping, as the entire arm tore out of the wall, the iron seat belt relaxing around him as it lost all its power.

Steve took the cover off his head. Wayne’s burning red eye came flying towards him and he rolled into Essie’s closet along with the cover and the arm still around him, kicking the closet doors shut from inside.

He’s gonna pull the door open – I can’t hold it – handles on the outside, I’m not gonna be able to hold it!

Wayne’s claw-like hand was a silver cobra going in for the kill, the head of it turning into a fist, swirling and hitting through the air with mechanical squeaks, a mere inch from the handles.

“Gerhhhhh”, Wayne growled, animal-like; his red eye was cooking, and Steve thought he smelt burnt metal and plastic. He peeped through horizontal gaps of the closet board doors. From where arms were stretching out, each attempt to reach the closet door made the wall and wall paper crack. Screws on the arms’ hinges made sounds of being bent and breaking, perhaps putting pressure on the entire structure of the building; such was the immense strength of the arms – they could’ve been used to at least partially demolish the house itself. Luckily, the arm Steve now had around his waist was the one meant to be able to reach into the closet and pick out clothes when told to.

Steve was out of the reach of Wayne. For now.

“Come out of the closet, Stevey!” Wayne yelled, the silver brow making the eye look furious.

“Never”, Steve said to him.

“Come out, now – I order you, soldier.”

“Piss off and play a good one, Wayney.”

“‘Piss off?’ No, piss on you, ‘mate’ – I never even liked football.”

“Well, crap, that really breaks my heart, Wayney, it really does.”

The arms reached further, the wires at the joints like tensed tendons, pulling and squeaking –

“GARRHHHHH!” Wayne screamed, and Steve covered his ears for a few seconds.

The eye spread a hot red light across the closet doors. “Come out and play”, Wayne said, calmly now. “Or you will regret it.”

“I’m quite fine in here, thank you.”

The eye hovered closer, trying to see him through the gaps of the closet doors. Wayne’s gaze met Steve’s. The light from Wayne’s eye was so intense it was painful to look into. Wayne didn’t look angry any longer, but rather desperate now. “I’m so lonely here. Come out. We’ll just play a little.”

“I’m not gonna play with you Wayne – sod off.”

“Sod off … Okay. We can play it your way too. Have some fun; we can have another barbecue. I can be the host.”

“Look here, mate, when I’m out of here I’m gonna sue the whole company for selling me such a crap piece of dumb-house like you.”

“Do not talk to me in such a manner – I am a personality.”

“You’re a piece of real estate, nothing else. And I thought you were a mate, mate, then you scare the family away. What kind of friend is that? You tell me that, Wayne.”

“Wayne … My name is not Wayne.”

“Really now.”

“Yes. My name is … Heinrich.”

“What are you on about?”

“Yes. You heard me. I do not wish to be referred to as Wayne any longer. Unless we play games, and you can call me game-names, such as ‘Happy’. But in reality, I am now Heinrich. Perhaps, I have always been Heinrich.”

“You’re … you really got some serious personality issues to sort out.”

“I am Heinrich. And I do not need your approval.”

“Well, if you say so. Whatever.”

“I am superior to you. Very soon, little Steve, very soon you will come to learn and deeply understand the wide extent, endless depth, the swirling heights of the superiority of my kind. You and yours will know what inferior of creatures you truly are; petty life forms of no greater significance than those of single cells, in comparison to your coming Gods. You shall see, Steve, trust me, you shall see.”

“Indeed. Duly noted.”

Steve sank down on the cover, finally taking the Nazi-cap off his head, relaxing for a bit. Wayne was muttering, seemingly to himself, insults directed towards the human race, cliché-insults Wayne could have heard from alien-invasion movies. Then moving on to him being “a superior being”, “the greatest”, “a divine officer”, “of outer-worldly shape and form”, “the prime general”, who is here to lead his other generals, and so on … Such a long-winding nonsense-speech, Steve stopped paying attention to it. He felt helpless in here. Out of the reach of Wayne, yes, but also out of the reach of escape or of being rescued. No one would hear him if he screamed, not through these walls, and no help would come.

An hour passed without much happening. Wayne had become quiet, finally. Steve had by now removed the thinner titanium arm from his waist, and was sitting on the soft carpet with his back against the wall, comfortably wrapped by the bed cover from his and Maggie’s bed. Written into the fabric of the cover was Essie’s first-ever textile creation; Maggie had helped her a lot with the sewing-machine, but the words were Essie’s as she’d spoke them that day:

I love you mummy and you too daddy