#asher gray

There is a house. It is not far from your house, and it seems almost identical to your house, but it is nothing like your house. Its windows yawn like hungry mouths and its roof is drawn like a weary brow. You knock on the door and it echoes for what seems an eternity.

A young girl with dark braids and thick coke-bottle glasses answers the door. She shows you through the house, empty and blank as a canvas forgotten in a dead artist’s garage, and to the backyard. The backyard is a monochromatic wasteland, rose bushes long dead and dried out, crows limp and still with half-eaten worms and bugs hanging out of their beaks. The poisoned suburban scene seems to emanate in a circle from a patch of loose dirt beneath the petrified bottle tree.

Wordlessly, she hands you a shovel and points.

“It’s in there.”

You dig. The ground is surprisingly hard. Sweat soaks through your shirt and drips into your stinging eyes. The girl stands behind you and watches you, her face changed and her hair now light and straight as straw.

Finally, the point of your shovel hits something that is not dirt. It is hollow-sounding. You keep digging around it until you uncover a wooden chest. It is not locked, but the lock is so thickly coated with dirt it may as well be. You strike it with your shovel, again and again, the sound of metal on metal ringing out and piercing your eardrums.

The girl still watches, but she is now neither the one who greeted you at the door nor the one with hair like straw.

The chest creaks open with some difficulty and reveals its contents. It is the body of the girl, curled into a fetal position inside the chest. She is dead. Nothing has eaten away at her flesh but she is still decomposing, her chest cavity yawning open before you and a deep blueish color around her neck. She is the girl who led you inside the house, or maybe she is the girl who is watching you now. Perhaps they are the same girl.

You turn to look at the girl who had been behind you, but she is gone. There is only her lifeless body in front of you, emitting a kind of poison that has left this yard barren and worthless.

You are alone.

The poison, scentless but with a kind of viscosity, enters your mouth and nostrils. You fall forward into the chest. It is bigger than it looks. It closes, and you can almost hear the sound of dirt hitting the top and covering up the hole you dug. But you cannot focus on that.

There was something visually pleasing about a drawer filled with perfectly organized files, each one carefully organized and cross-referenced. Each manila folder, names printed on a small plastic divider tab in a small, clear font, gave Dr. Stephen Atilol a warm sensation—that of pride, of self-indulgent pleasure. He liked being able to see the column of names and the perfectly-organized collection of all of his patients. His projects, he liked to think of them, each one with their own unique challenges. He intended to fix each and every one of them.

He let his eyes glide over the tabs, each name conjuring a mental image of its associated face and person. Dr. Atilol found that names and personhoods were generally linked in his memory, so much so that it was impossible to think of a person’s name without his recalling vividly the salient details of them. This typically included information like their general appearance and age, his relationship to them, and his general feelings about them, be they fondness or disgust or pity.