#ashergraywrites

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.

He sat next to her on the couch, right in the middle. She slid away, to the very edge of the couch, body poised to leap away. But that wouldn’t do. How would she become accustomed to men like that? He put his hand on her knee.

“You know, I’ve always been very impressed by you.”

“Tha-thank you,” she said, still moving further away from him. He grabbed her more firmly, just above the knee. She wasn’t about to squirm away from a treatment that would fix her.

“You’re a very beautiful young woman. Any man would be lucky to have you.”

“Please take your hand off of me,” she said, attempting to pass for calm, but he knew she was flustered. Nervous. How adorable.

“I’m not immune to your charms, you know,” he told her. “I am a man, after all.”

“Darn, I just realized that I left the lights on in my car. I need to go fix that so the battery doesn’t die.” She pried his hand away and stumbled to her feet, jittery as a newborn foal. She was still wild, badly behaved and skittish. He’d break her in, though.

“You don’t have a car,” he reminded her, standing. She backed away, towards the door. He got there first. Locked it. “You don’t even have a license. Your mommy drops you off and picks you up, remember?” He said mockingly. She took a step back, away from him. He took a step towards her.

“Right, and my mom is picking me up early today,” she said. Her voice was fast, breathless. Her face was pale, her eyes wide with fear. “She accidentally scheduled a dentist’s appointment for today instead of tomorrow. I forgot to tell you.”

“You and I both know that you’re lying. You’re a bad liar.”

“Please,” she switched tactics from lying to pleading. “Just leave me alone. Let me go.”

“But we still have thirty minutes left in our session.”

“Great, have an extra lunch break,” she suggested. “Don’t work yourself too hard.”

“And yet I’d much prefer to have you join me on this break. Off the record, of course.”