#gitspoopy

Things are so much bigger than we are able to admit. And when you see it all, you see the end.

I originated--born, I guess, but that's wrong too--in Pennsylvania. I'm an adult of 37 years. I weigh 195 pounds. I'm glad they still let me work out in here, but the "nurses" (Ha! Officers with sphygmomanometers) had to help me figure out the dumbbells at the gym. I nearly hurt myself because I couldn't tell I had a 35 in one hand and a 60 in the other. I was balancing them out, but the nurse distracted me and I dropped the 35. I caught it before it hit my head, but now they won't let me go anywhere else without an armed nursifer or a video camera.

I came here from Alaska. I think I can talk about it here because some of the same people have visited so they know. It was a station outside Nome, WAY outside Nome. The bio lab crew called it Nowheresville. I thought I knew half of what was going on there. Now I know better. I was in the physics section. I've gotten to play with HAARP before. It's not all it's cracked up to be, but playing Tetris on Russian radar was pretty fun. They were pissed but impressed. I don't think I could manage puzzles now.

We were working on a particle rail. It's kind of like a supercollider and a cold fusion reactor and a big goddamned gun had a baby. It was meant to explore behaviors of matter and energy at superluminal speeds by allowing them to convert mass and energy back and forth at relativistic speeds. In reality, we tended to either just make big booms or a lot of dust. It's that whole particles get more massive thing. Or rather, that's what it looked like. The first successful test was what put me in here. Calling it successful was a stretch to begin with.

The last time I was at the rail, I was checking the conduit between the accelerators and the target. A small part of it had been removed so I could be sure the magnets were matched and synchronized. That's the last linear memory I have. What I pieced together is that someone triggered the sequence while I was still there, the particle veered, and hit me in the chest, at which point I learned exactly what the speed of light was--tensile strength. The energy required to punch a particle through to another dimension. Like punching a tree branch through a lawn bag. Try running in the ocean. Can't. Drags on your feet. That's kind of like the Higgs field. If you run fast enough, you could kind of skim on top of it, sort of like photons do. But without wings, no escaping the ocean. No hole in the bag.

On the other side, everything was in perfect balance. The entire universe we live in, folded and warped and in its glory. And another. And another. I saw worlds. I saw oceans of universes, and I was between it all. My body was... more. It had waves and tendrils and lights and things that are not possible in our universe but are just as much a part of it as the air we breathe. Everything was more. Everything I knew meant nothing. Shapes and words and everything is simply an illusion created by the multidimensional cosmos. Including time.

I was born. I died. I lived in thousands of realities that were not separate but never equal. I was gone for millennia and lived a mere microsecond. Nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense when I talk about it.

Except time. Seeing time is what put me here. I saw eternity, and I am broken by the knowledge of what is coming and why we are here. I saw the woven interconnectedness of every living thing, and I saw where the whole thing begins to unravel. I saw that a few times, actually, unless it was all the same time. I saw my birth, and the pattern it created in the multiverse. Like ripples in a pond that only get stronger and splash all of the water out. It all ended with me. I am waiting here with the nursifers for whatever the end is supposed to look like here. That's their big question: when? I'm not good with numbers anymore. I can't tell what's real and what's left over from the accident and what's stuff I can see but others can't and what's part of THIS universe. I see everyone and try to tell them how we're all connected by thick and thin strands that have buried quantum entanglement in our genes, how we are woven into the Sun and the planets, how we came from something else not of this universe, and how we will end.

It changes. One day, it's a plague that makes the world bleed. Another, it's a quantum fluctuation that invalidates our section of the universe. The next, a slowing down of time that's like a leaking balloon until everything collapses. The next, a despot who brings untold torture and devastation who looks a lot like me. But it's really just all the same. Books have different writing in them and different covers, but they're all books, you know? It's all a manifestation of worlds and versions of us we never, ever had control over. Except for that microsecond I got pushed through the hole. Or I was the hole. Either way, I grabbed hold of the table when I felt it hit, and that's what's killing us all. I tried to control the multiverse, and by pure accident, I did. By doing that, I stuck a wrench in the works.

I'm here so they can prevent some of the futures I told them. If I'm here, they say, I can't trigger n-dimensional events. So they thought, until I hit the gym. I can concentrate and change mass. Change light. Change time. But I can't change it back. The gym has been cordoned off since I was last there. I can see the dimensional expansion, but they can't. The nursifer who helped me touched the dumbbell and slowed to a stop. You could see the scream forming on his face but never get out. I don't know if he froze in time or time froze around him but it didn't matter. He was dispersed into a thin red film coating the entire gym. Since it wasn't part of this dimension, no one could scrub it off. Shining blood, frozen in time. It's fading now as the rest of the gym loses dimensional integrity. They're trying to wall it off, just like they're trying to wall me off.

They can't. They don't know. I'm not really here. I'm not really anywhere. I'm in Nowheresville waiting to die or be killed, but I'm home in Harrisburg, too. I'm living in British Columbia with a beautiful wife. I'm a child in Eritrea with blue eyes. I'm bleeding to death on the floor of a hospital in Paris. I'm you. I'm tied to you. We are woven together, all the way back to the very first sparks of life, and now I will drag you all with me into a place we do not belong.

We are so much more and we deserve to be so much less. I am the destroyer of worlds. I am the sword that cuts the Gordian knot. I am nothing. I am always. I am the end.

See you soon.

END EXCERPT

For one she was always seeing things and yelling at us. Shoving us down the halls and telling us to leave. I remember one time, I was looking through the fridge for a drink. She grabbed my arm and tugged me halfway across the kitchen, screaming that I was going to suffocate and to stay away from the refrigerator. I was thirteen; I wasn’t stupid enough to close myself inside a fridge. And I certainly didn’t need her to bruise my wrist and throw me. 

And heaven help you if you touched the freezer door.

She would chuck things at us constantly whenever we did something wrong. Running through the house? Incoming shoe. Arguing with my older brother? We both got a lump from wax fruit. If we sang while walking the halls she’d throw a candle at us and tell us to be quiet. Mom said it was old age or dementia. Dad said her attic light was always out.

And holy fucking hell, there was never anything good to eat. She was a vegetarian which meant no hamburgers, no hot dogs, no steaks, no anything that was actually delicious. Just nasty vegetables and bruised bananas. Man, she was bananas. Every month she got a new grocery delivery person. She never left the house for any reason. And since she was insufferable with us, I can only imagine how much of a shrieking banshee she was to strangers. And they never had to put up with her like we did, cause you know, family. According to mom, she used to get a new one every year. But I guess kids nowadays know better than to put up with abusive shit. It was little wonder each and every one of them would quit after their first check cleared. The big thing was her parrot. She hated that parrot, or loved it; I could never really figure out which. If we got too close to the cage she would scream and yell at us in so high a pitch that I couldn’t understand her. I bumped it once and she dragged me out of the house and told me to never touch it again or I would die. But she always kept it covered with a thick cloth. So no one could hear it. So no one could look at it. If she liked it why did she hide it? I got a peek at it once when she fed it, grumbling while she did so. Green with a red beak. Then she yelled at me to go away if I knew what was good for me. She would scold it for doing nothing. And then turn around and ask it to be a good bird today. Bizarre. One time I was singing ‘Sweet Caroline’. I liked singing it because it’s my name. Grandma wasn’t anywhere in sight so i didn’t see the harm in it. It was then that I heard the bird sing back. It was singing the song to me. What a pretty voice, I thought. It was such a shame that grandma was constantly telling it to shut up if it tried to sing or speak. Would it be so bad to lift the cloth and look at it? We could sing together. The bird had to be bored out of it’s skull. “Where it began,” I sang quietly. The bird inside shifted and bobbed its head, whistling at me. It was a plain looking bird. Green or a greenish yellow. A black line traveled around its neck. Its nose was a reddish pink. It bobbed again before speaking. “Hello. Hello. What’s your name?” it asked. “Caroline,” I whispered. “What’s your name?” “Hello. Hello. Caroline,” he repeated. “Asura likes you.” My grandmother screamed, making me jump out of my skin and nearly fall over. She grabbed me by my hair and pulled me into yard. I yelled for my mom who came running to help but not before my grandmother bellowed at me some more. “Don’t talk to it! Never talk to the bird! Never! Stupid girl!” she shrieked. “Get out!” That was the last time we visited my grandmother’s house while she was still alive. Dad said never again. She pulled out some of my hair that day and fractured my arm. Mom decided she would visit alone, once a month, for a year. Then once every three months. Then once a year. And then my grandmother died. Fell down the stairs. There was a funeral. Closed casket. I could count the number of attendees, not including my family, on one hand. And afterwards we went to her house to empty it so it could be sold. When I went into the parlor I could see the cage was still there, covered in it’s tell-tale cloth. She didn’t leave the bird to anyone in her will. The lawyer said we could do whatever we wanted with it. While my parents directed the movers I approached the cage. Grandma couldn’t stop me from looking at it any more. I lifted the cloth completely off and the bird inside shook its feathers, shifted its weight, then looked at me curiously. “Hello. Hello!” it squawked. “Sweet Caroline, good times never seemed so good,” it sang. I remember thinking, holy crap. It remembered me. Good bird, I told it. It flapped and chirped more. How could she cover up the poor thing? It shuffled over to the edge of the cage near my hand. Birds liked cuddles right? Neck scratches? But the cage had a lock on it. So I poked my finger inside through the bars and its red beak nudged my finger. I smiled just before it bit the tip, drawing a little blood. “Ouch,” I winced, pulling it out with shock. “Sweet Caroline,” it chirped. “Hungry. More please.” It was creepy but at least it was polite, I supposed. I decided to walk around and see if I could find anything for it. Food or something. I went through desk drawers. No instructions or books on bird care. No fruit in the fridge, in fact the only thing in there was a container of stewed beef chucks. Raw and bloody. I grimaced at the sight and put it back inside. The freezer was stocked up with similar containers, the contents evenly divided amongst them. “Caroline!” I heard someone scream and my heart nearly stopped. Good god, it sounded like my grandmother! I peered around the corner at the parrot. It ruffled its feathers and stared. It looked different then. Bigger? No, something about the eyes. Larger pupils. Or maybe it was the color. I was having second thoughts about taking it home. It would be better off at a pet shop or something. I went into another room and heard another voice. “Don’t leave me!” it yelled, in my own voice. “Please!” Confusion spread over my face as I reentered the room. It had to be the parrot. What else could do that? It proceeded to say hello a couple of times and then whistle. I hid behind the wall and listened carefully again. Silence. The parrot began whistling Sweet Caroline. Then there were footsteps. Someone tripped, uttered an exclamation, and glass shattered. My mother was moaning in pain. I panicked and turned the corner, to find her on the ground bleeding and crying. I asked, worry in my voice, what happened. “I was just trying to take the bird to the pet shop,” she cried. Blood was pooling under her body. “Since no one wants to keep it…” She began to cough up blood, spraying it all over my skirt. I tried to lift her but sharp pieces of glass stabbed from her into me. My mom sputtered and cried and eventually grew slack in my arms. I didn’t understand. How did it happen? “What are you doing?” someone asked and I looked up. My mother. “Mom!” I looked around at the ground. Confused and frightened. My arms were empty. No blood. No glass. No dying mother. The bird squawked in the other room and flapped its wings. I stood up but said nothing, since I had no clue what happened. “Now what to do with that thing…” she sighed, looking at the cage. “Your grandfather bought it when he visited India for Gram. So she’d have a companion when he left for trips.” I remembered the story. He died a few month afterwards on one of his trips. Accident. I wasn’t even born yet. The bird began singing Sweet Caroline again. “Maybe I should take it to the nearest pet shop?” she mused. “No!” I yelled, a little too loud and a little too quickly. “Don’t touch it. I’ll take it.” “Okay…” Mom quirked her brow. “I’ve got more boxes to get.” I watched her walk away, past the antique mirror and down the hall. My breath caught in my throat as the bird proceeded to laugh the most terrifying, sinister laugh I’ve heard in my life. It chilled my entire body down to my toes. The hair on my neck stood up, something I thought only happened in movies. Turning to face the creature did little to reassure me. It stopped laughing but now there was definitely a strange, eerie gleam in its eyes. I approached it quickly and recovered it with the dark cloth. It made some more noises under the fabric but they were hardly understandable. What was I supposed to do with it? I thought maybe I could take it to a petshop. But then it might make something bad happen to me, since it seemed to know what people were going to do before they did. And it seemed able to cause misfortune to those who possessed it. Even if I could get rid of it…would I be able to live with myself, giving that THING to someone else to torment? I mean, look what it did to my grandmother. I wouldn’t be surprised if it somehow tricked her into falling down the stairs. If she could have killed it she probably would have, which means…it can’t be killed. Only given away. Or passed down. “Sweet Caroline,” it sang underneath the cloth. I shivered just thinking about what other frightening revelations were in for me. It flapped again and I swear on everything I know, it sounded huge. Like it was far bigger than the pigeon sized creature I saw earlier that day. Smoke leaked out from the bottom as it hissed and laughed again. A deep and throaty laugh, reminiscent of an old demonic god. When I blinked my eyes the cage was normal again and my mother was telling me it was time to go. “Hungry, hungry,” the bird peeped under the cloth. “Warm it up, please.” “Better feed it before we leave, it’s a long drive,” Mom sighed. “Where do you suppose she kept the bird’s food?” I think I already knew, looking at my bloodied finger. If it needed to be warmed up…I swallowed nervously, eyeing the fridge and remembering what I found inside. No label. In a Tupperware. And now I was doubting it was beef at all. It’s no wonder she needed a new grocery person each month. I guess a body just doesn’t last as long as they used to.

“I didn’t even know I was tired, babe.” I run my tongue over my teeth and grimace. Yuck.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have had so much to drink. Babe.”

He emphasizes the last word in an ugly way, a way that makes me look at him in mild alarm.

“What? I didn’t—” But then I stop because I don’t remember, I can’t remember, how much I’d had to drink. I can’t remember hardly any of the party, really. Which is not a good sign.

“You think just because you graze on snacks all night you can drink like a fish but Jesus, Rachel, it was a Super Bowl party. Not a kegger.” Oliver is gripping the wheel tightly, his lips set in a thin line that say oh boy am I in trouble.

I don’t think I’d had that much to drink. Maybe it was the migraine medicine I’d taken before we left? Maybe it mixed wrong with the few beers I’d had? Because I’m pretty sure that’s all it was, just a few beers. Only I can’t remember.

Before I say anything else Oliver goes on.

“I mean, there were kids there. Grayson brought their 6-month-old, for god’s sake.” He glances away from the road briefly to give me a look of utter disgust. “It was embarrassing. You embarrassed me.”

Oliver has quite the ego. Well-deserved, but a big ego nonetheless. I’m far from a perfect trophy wife, I slip up from time to time but really? Did I get that drunk?

I’ve been under a lot of stress lately, so, you know. Maybe this was one of those times. A slip-up.

I straighten in my seat and try to surreptitiously check my breath. Yuck. I don’t think it’s booze, though, it smells more like the buffalo chicken dip Heather made that was so good. It just doesn’t smell good anymore.

Oliver embarrasses so easily these days.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but it’s hard to be sorry for something you’re not sure of, something you can’t remember. It’s just easier this way. Better to back down and apologize than cause an argument. Why does my mouth taste so bad?

“Yeah, you’re sorry all right,” Oliver snaps, and I just don’t get it, I don’t get the animosity, the dislike-bordering-on-hate all because I had a few too many drinks at some dumb Super Bowl party.

I’m about to tell him to just drop it already when he stiffens even more in his seat. He leans forward, a tightly-wound wire about to snap.

“What?” I ask, sure it’s something else I’ve done wrong, another tic-mark on the list of mistakes I’ve made for the evening. I open the glovebox to see if I have any gum but there’s nothing, just long-expired insurance cards, an ancient dead GPS, yellow napkins that smell of past Wendy’s meals.

“This guy ahead of us,” he says in a low voice, eyes locked on the road. “I thought he just wasn’t using his blinker but he’s swerving. A lot.”

“Maybe he had too much to drink at the party,” I snap irritably, and that earns me a fresh hateful look.

“Yeah, that’d probably be you if you didn’t have me to cart your ass home.” My husband glances back at the green SUV in the center lane a few car lengths away. “Watch him, he’s all over the place.”

I close the glove box with an unnecessarily loud bang and watch as I’m told. Indeed, the green SUV is all over the place. It lists for a moment in the center lane before drifting lazily to the right, then back to the center again.

“I’ve got to get past him,” Oliver says. He guns it.

I lean back in my seat, guts suddenly rolling. I feel like I’m going to be sick. He’s going too fast.

“You’re going too fast,” I manage without losing the buffalo chicken dip from my stomach into my lap. Maybe I’d had more than a few beers after all.

Oliver ignores me and cuts across one lane, but the green SUV is going faster now too. Maybe he thinks we’re racing?

Oh god, I’m going to be sick.

“Please slow down, Oliver,” I beg, gripping the door handle for dear life. “Please!”

He’s pushing 80, the speed limit is 60 last time I checked but the green SUV now has us boxed in behind another car. In trying to pass him, Oliver has trapped us.

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” Oliver snaps, but I can tell he’s scared too, he’s trying to figure out how to slow down or change lanes or do anything but he’s trapped us and the green SUV is drifting to the right again.

“Just pull over or something!” I cry yet I can see there’s nowhere to pull over, the shoulder here is incredibly narrow and besides he couldn’t stop in time — why won’t the car ahead of us go faster? Why won’t the car behind us go slower?

“I can’t!” Oliver’s frantic now, his hands clenching the wheel so hard his knuckles are white. “I can’t, I can’t—”

I look pleadingly at my husband only to see the green SUV edging in closer and closer, the passenger’s rearview mirror is about to touch our driver’s side window, there’s metal crunching and glass shattering and someone’s screaming then —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I’m startled awake, my body tense and panicked like when you jerk out of a dream of falling. It’s still dark, we’re still driving. My mouth tastes worse.

“Oliver,” I gasp, and he gives me a look that says he’s been mad at me for a while but I’ve caught him off guard.

“You okay?” He’s trying not to keep his eyes on me too long, darting back between the highway and his disheveled wife.

The taste that had been just a few minutes ago merely unpleasant is now pretty disgusting. I sit all the way up, scanning the dark road ahead, the red and white taillights blinking cheerily in the night. No sign of the green SUV anywhere.

“Did I drink too much?” I ask him, alarmed, convinced that the crash had been a bad dream. I mean, truth be told, sometimes when I’m hammered I have pretty vivid dreams.

“You might have,” Oliver admits, his voice much softer this time. Like he’s happy that I caught my slip-up and I’m owning it. “You grazed on snacks all night but you still drank like a fish.”

“I’m sorry.” My heart is hammering in my chest and this time I mean it, that dream — or nightmare, more like — had been awful, our last few moments together saturated in anger like a rag soaked in gasoline just waiting for a match.

“It was embarrassing,” he says in a voice just a little poutier than I would’ve cared for, but I let it slide. “You embarrassed me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again. I smack my tongue off the roof of my mouth, trying to get rid of this awful taste. I check the glovebox for gum but no dice, just long-expired insurance cards, an ancient dead GPS, yellow napkins that smell of past Wendy’s meals.

Something passes through me, not quite a chill.

I check my breath and it’s not booze, but it’s not Heather’s buffalo chicken dip, either. It smells like something… rotten.

“This guy ahead of us,” Oliver says, and that’s when I see it, the green SUV.

“He’s not using his blinker.” I state the obvious as it slides lazily over to the right from the center lane without a turn signal.

“He’s all over the place.” My husband checks his left mirror, ready to make his move, but I put my hand on the wheel in an almost uncontrollable instinct.

“Don’t!” Oliver jumps in his seat; the car jerks left, then right, but we stay in the center lane.

“Jesus, Rachel, what’s your problem?!” he demands, but I barely hear him, I’m watching the green SUV.

“You’re going to try to get past him,” I whisper, and Oliver nods his head hard.

“Yeah, of course I am.” He says this the way you’d speak to an exceptionally stupid child — or a particularly stubborn drunk. “I can’t wait back here and have him hit us, what’s the matter with you? Don’t ever grab the wheel when I’m driving, I mean for god’s sake!”

“Please don’t do this, Oliver. Just let him go, just watch him, don’t try anything crazy.”

He lets out an incredulous laugh.

“Oh, I’m crazy?” My husband takes his eyes off the road to glare at me. “It was a Super Bowl party, Rachel, not a —”

And that’s when the green SUV cuts us off, slams on the brakes, and sends us hurtling into the back of his vehicle. The crunch of metal, shatter of glass, screams —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I am, I’m awake, I’m shaking and my mouth feels like it’s full of blood but no, it’s just an unbearable coppery foulness that makes me heave almost instantly.

I don’t even have to look at Oliver to know he’s angry with me for drinking too much at the Super Bowl party.

My eyes wildly scan the highway for the deadly green SUV but I don’t see it, I can’t see it, I don’t think we’ll ever see it until it’s too late.

“Please,” I beg him, hot tears streaming down my cheeks. “Please be careful, he’s drunk and he’s going to kill us.”

“Look who’s talking,” Oliver scoffs. “Just because you graze on snacks all night doesn’t mean you can drink like a fish—”

“Oliver, please!” I don’t know how to tell him, I don’t know how to get through to him, why doesn’t he remember the crash? The green SUV?

Why does this keep happening?

For the first time I look out my window at a black Mustang as it passes us. There’s no one inside. The car is an empty metal shell, gliding smooth and silent down the highway. I watch it until it disappears into the darkness.

The other cars, they’re the same. No driver, no passengers. They’re all empty.

I want to scream but it’s like my blood has been turned to icewater; I don’t know what to do with this new information. How can they be empty?

“Oliver, watch out for him,” I whisper, because even though I can’t see the green SUV yet I know it’s nearby. I know it’s coming soon.

“Watch out for who?” He turns to me, sounding more confused than angry now. Then he says, “Wait — who are those people?”

“What people?” I look past the impossibly empty cars to the side of the road where Oliver is staring.

“There are people out there, lined up along the highway, like they’re all holding hands or something — a really long line of them — god, they go on forever!”

I can’t see what he’s talking about. All I see is blackness.

And then I remember, it’s soon, we should be paying attention to the road —

Ahead, the green SUV has sideswiped the black Mustang. They’re spinning out of control in the center lane and here we come barreling through, going full speed, Oliver still staring at the people that don’t exist.

Crunch, metal. Glass, shatter. Scream. Scream. Scream —

“Wake up, we’re almost home.”

I’m already awake. My mouth tastes like utter reeking death. I can’t remember how much I had to drink at the Super Bowl party but I know one thing: we’re not almost home, and we never will be.

"It was. It didn't have any character. This house is cool. It has character!"

"What's character mean?" Grey asked from the back seat of the car. We had the windows rolled down in the mild fall weather.

"Like something has a certain way about it. Like it's different than other places or things. More interesting."

"Jimmy Chambers at school said we moved because you lost your job and we couldn't afford to live in our house anymore and we had to move to a crappy neighborhood and a crappy house."

"He said that?"

Grey nodded. "He also said the house we live in now used to be where they drowned witches."

"Really?"

"He talks a lot, Dad."

"Well, he's wrong. We moved because we didn't want to live in a cookie cutter, boring house anymore in a boring neighborhood. We wanted to live in a house with what?"

"With character," Grey said unenthusiastically.

"Exactly."

We were both quiet in the car for a minute.

"Jimmy Chambers is such a dick."

"I'm sure he is. But don't say that word."

Jimmy Chambers might have been a dick, but he was right. The only reason we had moved was because we couldn't afford the house. I had lost my job when my company went under a massive restructuring. That's code for firing lots of people at once. I was one of those people. In an afternoon I went from recently widowed yet still stable dad of two kids to an unemployed and increasingly desperate complete wreck.

All I could think to do was downsize. Sell the house, sell the suv, sell the time share, cancel cable, the internet, anything I could think of to stop the financial hemorrhaging. I bought the house on Patterson Street using my severance for a down payment and, thanks to the hours I picked up consulting, I was still able to keep Grey and his sister Sophie in private school.

Don't let me fool you, it's not like the transition went smoothly. Grey started failing classes and the guidance counselor was politely suggesting to me Sophie needed to be put on medication. On top of that, the neighborhood was lousy and the house needed constant work. Something was always breaking and needed to be replaced or painted or jury rigged into working again. Any free time I had went into trying to ensure the house wasn't going to collapse while we slept.

I didn't mind all the repairs, though. Working on the house all the time stopped me from thinking about Isabelle.

She was dead for a year that upcoming winter. I still hadn't managed to even start to get used to it. Life had just started to make sense and then death came in, obsessed with its need to fuck everything up. So I painted the house after the kids went to sleep. I repaired the front stairs while they played in the backyard. I ripped up carpets and refinished floors and everything I did was an effort to exorcise the ghost of her from my memories.

That's how I found the mold.

Mold is pretty. It's gross, and it's weird, and destructive, but it's pretty. Not pretty like a sunset or a painting, but pretty like an alien would be. It's some kind of life, some sort of aesthetic, that is jarring and foreign but very recognizable. To look at the burst and pink glimmer that is a mold spore is to understand life and death go a lot deeper than you think.

That's what I realized when I pulled out the floor in the bathroom and found the entire space underneath behind was webbed flowery mold.

The bathroom must have flooded, I assumed, and only the top layer was replaced, allowing the mold to flourish in its wet kingdom below. Research online said I wouldn't be able to get rid off it, although it did also helpfully let me know it was a toxin that could irrevocably damage my children. The best part about being a parent in the modern world is to know just how bad your kids are getting screwed and that you can't make it better because you don't have enough money. It's a lovely feeling, I assure you.

I decided there wasn't much I could do about the subfloor in the bathroom. I put down the cheap flooring I bought and tried to not worry about. But at night, alone in my bed, staring at the ceiling, I wondered how much mold was hiding in there? How many strands of ropy growths were blossoming in between the drywall?

Luckily, I had other things to worry about. Sophie had finally gone on Adderal and was sleeping like a gerbil on meth. Every night she would wake me with different scenarios. Sometimes it was with hideous nightmares ("the monster was eating my eyes and they eyes could still see the monsters's stomach as it swallowed me and then the monster pretended to be me and no one could tell!"), sometimes total freak outs ("are all the polar bears going to die before I ever get to see them?") but most often it was just sad ("will I ever see mom again?").

One night, after I put her to bed, I saw a light on underneath Grey's door. I tapped lightly.

"Grey?" I asked. "You ok?"

He didn't answer, but there was the sound of a great scuffling in his room, as if he was trying to quickly move something. Perplexed and exhausted, I opened the door and stepped into his room.

Grey was sitting on the carpet in front of his wall, facing me. He looked guilty.

"Hi Dad," he said. I couldn't get over how much he looked like Isabelle sometimes. The same grey eyes and alert posture. He even loved art like she did. He used some of her old sketchbooks.

"Hi," I said back. I could tell he had been up for awhile. "So. Whatcha doing?"

"Nothing," he said.

"Ok, well let's get back to doing nothing in bed, ok? Tomorrow is a school day."

"I heard Sophie up."

"She was having a nightmare."

"She was still up. That counts."

"Life's not fair, Grey. Let's do this."

He hesitated and then stood up. Behind him, I saw why he had been so reluctant to move.

He had peeled off part of the wall to reveal layers of spongy, black cloud moss.

"Grey," I managed. "What are you doing?"

He shrugged and looked at the ground.

"I'm sorry, Dad."

I walked over. He had been pulling the mold out in fistfuls. It was piled on his blue carpets.

"Let me see your hands, pal."

He held out both his hands. His fingernails and underneath were bluish-black with mold.

I washed his hands with warm soapy water for what felt like hours until the black was gone. After I toweled him off, I asked him why he did it.

"Jimmy told me he had done it in his house. He said he peeled a bunch off and it looked cool."

"Jimmy?"

"Jimmy Chambers."

"I thought you said he was a dick."

"Yeah, but we still talk. And I thought I couldn't say that?"

"You can't. I can."

"That's not fair."

"Neither is life, pal."

I was busy with freelance projects the next few days. Looking back now, that was probably how I missed it. At the time, I didn't think anything of Sophie not waking me up in the night to complain about her dead mother. I guessed it must have just been a phase. Something in her face and manner had changed recently anyway. She acted like she had grown up overnight.

I don't know what woke me that one night. Maybe a storm, some thunder, perhaps. The fall had stayed mild and October felt more like May, with balmy days and long storms flooding the dirt, fattening worms for surprised birds to devour. Everything dies. Nothing is forever.

When I woke, the house felt quiet. Supernatural quiet, cemetery quiet. Church quiet.

After waking, I realized I had to use the bathroom and I would be unable to get back to bed until I did. Sighing, I rose and walked to the bathroom, moving as quietly as I could.

Walking back to my room, I paused. From far off down the hall, I could see Grey's light on. I knew it was way after midnight, probably two or three in the morning. What on earth, I thought, could he be doing?

As I got closer to the door, I could hear Grey whispering. And then another voice. My head reeled with terrible possibilities until I recognized the other voice as Sophie's. Although it didn't sound quite like hers. It sounded almost older. But what was she doing up? And in her brother's room?

Before I rushed in the door, I paused. I guess I was trying to hear what they were saying.

Their whispers were buzzy like wasps. I couldn't understand anything they were saying. I kept hearing one word over and over again, popping out from the gibberish: "coburn." The more I listened, the more it sounded like they were speaking a foreign language. Then, I realized, they were.

Grey and Sophie were only 11 months apart. Grey was first and Sophie second. As children, they did everything together; even the development of speech for them was a shared accomplishment. They were almost like twins and, like twins sometimes do, they developed cryptophasia, a secret, private language that only the two of them understood. It was unnerving to see one babble a strange collection of vowels and the other respond in an obvious conversational manner, like they were aliens in the familiar bodies of babies.

Isabelle and I were both bothered by the twin talk and relived when it faded away. To be honest, I was a little more troubled ("Izzy, this is super creepy") while she seemed fascinated. She would watch them play and talk to each other from her rocking chair, a small smile on her thin lips. At one point, she even attempted to track their words, going as far as to compile a handwritten dictionary she planned on giving them when they were older.

To hear the two speak it now, to realize they must have always been speaking it secretly with each other, filled me with a strange sort of terror. If something like that could happen, what else? What other worlds existed unseen all around me?

I shook off the strange epiphany and rapped at the door as I opened it.

"It is the absolute middle of the night," I was saying as forcefully as I could, "and what in the world are you two -"

My voice trailed off. Grey and Sophie were in the middle of the room. A section of wall had been very carefully pushed aside. Grey must have rigged it to look like he hasn't been tampering. Mold from inside the wall trailed into the middle of the room and had been sorted into the crude shake of a person. My two kids looked up at me in fear.

There hands and mouths were covered with mold.

I took them to doctors after that. First the pediatrician and then a psychiatrist who prescribed medications and saw them in individual and group therapy. They're making progress, the doctor assured me. Stuff like this takes time. We have to figure out why they're doing it to stop them from doing it. Everything, he told me, smiling broadly, is working backward.

I didn't mind the doctors. The office visits were just something I added to my day. Pick the kids up for school, grab some food, take them to appointments. I sat in waiting rooms and emailed clients and tried to pretend everything was normal.

It wasn't.

I had found the dictionary my wife made, the one of their secret language. "Coburn" was in there. According to what Isabelle had been able to figure out, it meant "to return, come back." It was what the children used to say when the goldfish died and had to be taken out of the tank and flushed. The two would stand above the toilet in the bathroom, little tears in their eyes, waving at the bright yellow body spiraling away to the sea.

"Coburn" they would see, in eerie harmony.

"Coburn."

This was when I began to see it everywhere. At the top of a wall. At the edge of a door. In bread. On fruit.

Mold.

It wasn't really there, of course. If I actually looked at the object, there wouldn't be any mold on it. But everything seemed contaminated and rotting. If I touched bread it felt furry and trembling with spores. If the kids were getting better, like their doctor insisted they were and like they seemed to be, I wasn't. If anything, I was just getting worse.

In early December, my phone rang. It was the school. Grey had been in a fight. Could I come down and discuss it?

No matter how old you are, being in the principal's office sucks. I squirmed in my chair as Principal Garrison went into a lecture regarding the vastly inappropriate behavior of my son.

I stared at his mustache as he droned away. Grey didn't sound like the kid he was describing, hitting another kid in the face with a tray in the cafeteria. He must have been pushed. Maybe the other kid had been bullying him?

When I suggested that, Garrison hm raised his not inconsequential eyebrows.

"I must say, Mr Stevens, that Grey has not been bullied."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because we've been keeping an eye on the situation and had been planning to talk with you soon. You see, it isn't that Grey is being bullied. In fact, Grey is the bully."

He rattled off stories after that, kids falling by Grey, kids returning from the restroom with black eyes but refusing to declare who hit them, kids complaining of their toys missing, their money stolen, but all refusing to say who was doing it. Principal Garrison told of Grey relentlessly targeting weaker children in dodgeball until they cried. All the stories were of a brutal, awful kid. Not mine. Not the kid I had.

Right?

In the end, I apologized to Principal Garrison and said I'd take care of everything. Garrison said Grey would be suspended for one week, and if anything happened like that again, Grey was gone.

The two of us drove home in silence. Sophie was still in class. We'd go back to pick her up when school was out.

When I was nearly home, I turned to look at him in the back seat.

"Why'd you do it?" I asked.

He sighed and looked at his feet.

"Jimmy Chambers told me to do it."

"Jimmy Chambers? Jimmy Chambers?" My voice raised an octave. "Goddamit, why are you listening to Jimmy Chanbers?"

"I don't know, dad..."

"Jimmy Chambers can eat a bag of dicks and I am going to tell his father that." I slammed on the brakes and turned around to face Grey. "Now, how do I get to his parent's house from here?"

I parked in front of Jimmy Chambers' parents house and stormed across their massive green suburban lawn. I wasn't really sure what I was going to say but the inchoate rage that had been building in my for months felt primed for release.

I saw a kid Grey's age shooting hoops in the basketball court they had at the end of driveway. Jimmy fucking Chambers. He waved. Unbelievable. I waved back.

Once I got to the door, I began pounding on it as hard as I could until someone answered. Finally, Mr. Chambers did.

He was a big guy. I had met him before at back to school nights and baseball games, but I had never really realized the size of him. He took up a lot of space there in his doorway, staring at me. He blinked, then smiled in recognition.

"Grey's dad? Am I right? Sorry, I totally blanked on your name. Isn't that all we are as parents anyway? Just somebody's dad?"

He smiled a middle management smile.

"I'm glad you brought up kids," I said, "because I want to know what the hell your kid is doing with mine."

He looked blank. "I don't think Erin is in Sophie's grade? Am I missing something?"

"I'll say your fucking missing something. I'm not talking about Erin. I'm talking about your son. Jimmy. About how he's a huge dick."

I can't quite describe what happened to his face, the shift. The nice, confused guy who had been so polite with me became an enraged monster with veins bursting out of his forehead. His eyes widened.

His punches hit me in the eyes, the nose, the mouth. I tasted blood. I felt teeth shift. When I was on the ground, he stood over me.

"How dare you say that about my son?" He was vibrating with rage. My head throbbed.

"He's been messing with my son —" I started to say but he cut me off.

"He's dead, you asshole. Jimmy is dead. He can't mess with your son. Are you happy?"

"What do you mean, he's dead? I - I, my son said —"

"Your son is either a horrible person for lying to you or you are a horrible listener. I can't imagine having to decide which is worse." He took a deep, furious breath and exhaled. He was trembling. "My son drowned in the river this summer. He's been buried for months," he paused to look at me. I can't imagine what I looked like, other than a terrible version of myself. "Get off my property before I call the police. I hope I never see you again."

I walked back to the car. I could see Grey in the backseat, looking straight ahead. He had his earbuds in. I looked over at the basketball court.

No one was there.

"Dad? You ok?"

I didn't say anything. I just started the car. In the rear view mirror, I could see him staring at me. He had taken out his earbuds. I pulled out into the quiet street and drove off. After a while, I spoke.

"Jimmy Chambers."

"Yeah, dad?"

"He's been talking to you?"

A sigh. Then, "Yeah, he has."

"He's dead. That's what his dad said. That he drowned."

"Yeah. That's what Jimmy told me too."

I looked in the backseat. Grey looked the same as he always did. Almost.

"But he talks to you?"

A nod. "It started when we moved into the new house. I would hear a voice late at night. In the walls. He made me guess who he was."

"Has Sophie heard him talk?"

"No. Not him."

The way he said "not him."

"Someone else."

Another head nod.

"Who?"

"Jimmy said..." Grey started, then paused, then tried again. "He said he could hear other people down there. In the river. Not just him. There were others. Some of them missed us. Some of them just wanted to come back. Some of them — the worst ones, the one Jimmy called the Nightmare Ones —wanted to hurt us. But Jimmy said all of them kind of wanted to hurt people. He said the water changes you. Things get in you that weren't there before."

"Who did Sophie talk to?" My voice was too loud, I realized.

"We should go home," he said, quietly. "I think she's been there for awhile."

"What are you talking about? Who's been there?"

"Sophie," he leaned back in his car seat. "She left school after I hit that kid in the cafeteria. We knew in all the confusion, it's be harder to know she was gone and it'd be harder to get in touch with you. It would give her enough time. We hoped."

I was driving as fast as I could. Grey's little speech was over and he put the earbuds in again. I noticed the edges of them, the ones he plunged into his ear canal as far as he could, were covered with blotchy red orange mold.

I told the kids Isabelle died in a car accident. It had been a wet day in April. She lost control of the car and plunged into the river.

She hadn't lost control.

I found the note clearing up her things after we moved, the same night I found the dictionary of the secret language. It was an apology as well as a declaration of her intent, although it didn't explain her reason, or at least it didn't explain it well.

She said she had been ha ring nightmares.

She wrote obsessively of them. Horrible and constant dreams of an awful woman and a strange, terrible house filled with disease. She said the dreams kept happening. That they felt they would never stop. That she wanted to tell me about it, but every time she tried her words went missing. I remember her in the weeks before she died, complaining that she kept forgetting what she was going to say.

She wrote that she didn't understand what was going on, but she felt she had to escape. She begged me to forgive her.

A few weeks we moved, I found a notebook she had occasionally drawn in. I flipped through, smiling at some of the sketches. Most of it was drawings of trees, flowers, cloud. Then, halfway through, a new subject appeared. The house we had just moved into after her death.

There were hundreds and hundreds of drawings of the house. Over and over again. Bigger and smaller. Sometimes abstract, sometimes hauntingly realistic. In one drawing an unknown woman's face was superimposed over the architecture, almost as if it was part of the bricks and glass and wood bones of the house. The face was strange and familiar all at once, all long nosed and seaweed hair. Even though I turned the page as fast as I could, it seemed as if her strange pink and black eyes were watching me. In some of the drawings, a spongy mass of delicate spores billowed out of all the windows and doors, like fungal clouds desperate to take flight. In other photos, the door was a mouth, swallowing the remains of humans. Little legs dangled from the mail slot and blood dropped off the doorknob.

I pulled the car up to the house. The sky above was winter grey, a metal ghost. The air felt wet and moist.

In spite of the cold, the windows on the upper floor were wide open. The breeze waved the curtains in and out of the house, a fluttering growth.

I had steeped out of the car and Grey was standing next to me. I didn't look at him.

"Jimmy Chambers said in the water everything is alive and it wants to live forever. He sounds like an ocean when he talks to me."

"Is she in there?"

"Do you mean Sophie?"

"No," I said. "Not her. You know who I mean."

He pointed. In the window above us there was a silhouette shaped like a woman. Shaped like Isabelle. It — she? — stood for a moment, illuminated in the frame of the window. Her body was all webbing, tendrils of mold and decay and death held together by the delicate network of feathery growth. It looked like her, like a pale pink and orange and black fabric in the shape of her.

Sophie stepped from the shadows beside her, her hair longer than I remembered. Her nose looked long and strange in the dead winter light. What may have been Isabelle opened a hole in her face. She was trying to speak. A long, watery rattle came out, the sound of a smashed waterlogged fruit.

Then she tried again, and her children spoke with her.

"Coburn," they whispered into the strange, damp breeze.

"Coburn."

Ten minutes later, a trusted research assistant who was present at the meeting suddenly doubled forward and sprayed vomit across the board table. His nose began to bleed profusely and he stumbled around the room, bellowing profanities. The scientist whom he assisted, a small Japanese woman, rushed over to quiet the man, and was smashed with lethal force in the face by a metal stool. The raving man was subdued, but he continued to thrash and snap his teeth, and was finally chemically sedated.

All the others that had been present for the playback were starting to feel very odd by then, themselves.

II.

Morning traffic was as thick and slow as always. Tim hated how the drive to work was always at least twenty minutes longer than the drive home. To add to the aggravation, there was some sort of annoying static interference on the radio, an awful squawking that hid low in the mix. He snapped it off and impatiently crept forward with the rest of the poor dummies caught in this shit.

Abruptly, a big Chevy Silverado jammed on its breaks in the right lane a few vehicles ahead of him, stopping the lane dead. Horns blared in protest. Bemused, Tim tried to get a good look at the idiot behind the wheel of the truck as he crawled past. As his car drew abreast of the truck, Tim was treated to five surreal seconds of a heavy-set blonde woman, staring straight ahead with a bizarre grin on her face, cutting the fingers off of one hand with a pair of garden shears.

He didn't believe what he just saw. The shears sliding shut with little resistance, the fingers tumbling down, the spray of blood that hit the dashboard and splattered the windshield. One finger had stuck to the blades of the shears and Tim was sure that he saw her shake it free absently, staring straight ahead and grinning insanely the whole time.

I didn't see that, he decided. No freakin' WAY that happened.

His head was starting to hurt.

III.

A man stood on the sidewalk across the street from a restaurant called Giorno's and watched the waitress work her section of the patio. The man had caught sight of her ten minutes previously, as he had been walking, dazed and uncomprehending, down the street. She was pale, pretty and possessed a cascade of red hair that shimmered and flowed onto her rounded shoulders and down her broad back. Impassive and unmoving, he watched the waitress as she hurried back and forth from her customers to the fancy glass door that led back into Giorno's. She appeared attentive and jovial, a hint of earthy sexuality in the tilt of her impressive chest and the toss of her hair. A tall girl, big ass and tits and hips. Full, red lips. The man stood and watched and hungered.

The man wore a tailored suit from Ralph Lauren, his hair shaved impeccably close to his scalp. His eyes were covered by mirrored sunglasses of the sort that one might see being worn by celebrities in photographs taken on the red carpet of an awards show, glasses that would cost your average working man a month and a halfs' worth of wages. He did not care about their monetary worth, nor that of the designer suit he wore, or the patent leather shoes that clad his feet. Just a few short hours ago, the man had been very close to obsessed with his appearance, and material things. Now, he couldn't recall why something like that would matter. There was a hum in the back of his head, a harsh and alien insectile buzz. His brain felt like it was vibrating, itching, thrumming. The jagged pitch eliminated all sane thoughts from his mind. It was obvious to him now that only important thing in his present existance was to attack this girl and kill her.

After a few more minutes, the girl caught sight of the man, her eyes lingering a few moments too long as she scrawled an order given by a young couple having a late supper. Her expression seemed unsettled, as though she could feel a vibration of the black desires that roiled, like a sewer whirlpool, behind those sunglasses. The man felt that he couldn't wait much longer. It was getting hard to think. His teeth ached, his head buzzed. His hands longed to rend and tear the girl to shreds.

IV.

Shyla was ten. She lived across the city from where the man was presently eyeing his prey and thinking his murky, primordial thoughts. Shyla's family was as poor as the man was wealthy. She lived with her mom and younger brother in a townhouse complex that had been erected many years before, to house young families just starting their journey through life together, and seniors who didn't want to have to take care of a lawn anymore. Now it was government subsidized housing for low-income families, crumbling and shoddy.

Shyla sat on the cracked steps to her front door and played with something in her lap. The parking lot and common area before her swarmed with the complex's residents, mostly black and latino youth and young adults, but the crowd was peppered with some decidedly drunk-looking older folks, too. They all milled in large, loose groups; arguing, laughing, drinking cheap beer and passing ill-concealed joints in the hot, fading sunshine. Spontaneous dancing sometimes broke out as people were suddenly compelled to jive, grind and gyrate to the sounds pumping from a car stereo. No one took notice of quiet, chubby little Shyla. She hummed a popular song tunelessly and toyed with the pathetic, horrible thing that was balanced on her already-expanding lap. Shyla was introverted, and well on her way to being the whale-like woman that her mother was. As a rule, she was universally ignored by the other kids in the complex (excepting the odd occasion when jokes were told about how fat her three hundred-plus pound mother was, or about how black she was), so it was not unusual that it took so long for anyone to notice her or the small, dripping object that she held. Shyla's face was an expressionless mask as she studied the awful thing, eyes unblinking. She turned and manipulated it in her hands. Her hands and arms were smeared to the elbow in maroon, but it was not very visible against her dark skin. The black T-shirt and dark blue jeans that she wore were stiff with drying blood. Flies were beginning to find her.

Rakim, a teenager who lived in the unit two doors down with his sprawling extended family, ambled past where Shyla sat on the steps. He had extremely red, glassy eyes, and a mean smile on his acne-pocked face.

"Yo, Shyla, where your moms at, gettin' baptized at Marine Land? She better get back before tha sun go down, they lose that big black bitch in the dark." Rakim snorted laughter at this witticism, then noticed the flies buzzing around the girl, and the smell. "Man, you a stanky lil bitch, flies an' stink lines like yo moms." He hissed air between his teeth in disgust, and his nostrils flared disapprovingly at the sour, meaty odor wafting from the girl in the thick summer air.

There was no response. The girl stared vacantly down at something on her lap. Her face was ... strange, blank, emotionless.

"You fuckin high or some shit? You too young, girl, yo moms 'ud slap yo ass up if you was gettin' high an shit," he intoned seriously, completely unaware of the irony in his statement.

Still no response. Rakim took four big steps forward and stopped dead. He had finally gotten a good look at what Shyla held in her hands, and his drugged mind struggled to process what he saw.

"Ahhh shiiiiiit. Tha fuck?" he choked. "That a ... doll? Tha fuck is dat shit?"

"It's my baby sister," she muttered. Her voice was thick and slow. Shyla looked up from the bloody, torn fetus in her lap and fixed her enormously dilated pupils on Rakim. The teenager froze and involuntarily squirted a thin stream of urine down the left leg of his sagged jeans. The girl's round face was a mask of insanity. One cheek twitched spastically. Up close, he could see the blood smeared up Shyla's arms, around her mouth and chin and neck. The smell was sickening. Her eyes rolled wildly, then focused on his terrified face again.

"She isn't ready yet, but I got her. Got her outta my momma so I could ... play with her ..." The little girl trailed off, and seemed to consider the fetus in puzzlement for a moment.

Rakim tried to speak but could only manage to feebly breathe out "... whaaa ...". This couldn't be happening. This was a fucking horror movie, right out of nowhere, in real life, right now.

Shyla picked something up that lay beside her on the top step ... a paring knife. She jabbed it into the fetus' torso, right up to the handle. Rakim felt his mouth drop open, and a high-pitched scream tore itself out of his throat. He turned to run, and felt the blade slam home between his shoulder blades.

V.

June was worried and frightened of how her husband was behaving tonight. He had come home from work looking pale and distant. Not acknowledging her at all, Harry had walked right by her and into the living room, where he'd sat on the love seat and stared at nothing. It was beyond strange. She let a few minutes go by and when she had finally asked him what was wrong, he ran over and seized her painfully by the upper arms, screaming "AHHHHH FUCKING FIRE ANTS! IN MY FUCKING HEAD!" right into her face at full volume, his eyes bulging. She had flinched back from this sudden and entirely unexpected outburst, cringing as far away as his iron grasp on her would allow. He immediately let go, his mask of hatred now eerily blank, and had said, "I'm sorry honey, but this weasel in the hen house won't fucking stop killing my brain chickens, you know?", and walked away. She had leaned against the kitchen counter, stunned and trembling, and listened as her usually gentle and placid Harry plodded up the stairs and into the bedroom. She had heard the bedroom door lock.

This happened three hours ago, and it was getting dark out now. The street lights were on and supper was cold on the table. Somewhere in the distance there echoed the pervasive and howling sirens from police and various emergency response vehicles. The sound kept rebounding and swelling, instead of fading away. What was going on out there? June sat in the gloom of the stairwell, back to the wall, looking up the stairs into the darkness above. Up there, Harry was making strange sounds, muffled by the bedroom door but audible. Crying? Keening like an injured animal? Her neck and arms prickled with goosebumps. Should she check on him? Call ... somebody? The sounds were freaking her out very badly. They did not sound sane. Was Harry having some sort of nervous breakdown? He could be dangerous ...

She summoned her courage and called out, "Harry? Honey, you're scaring me. Please talk to me?"

The keening sounds stopped dead. Silence for a long second, then a BANG against the bedroom door that made her jump and shriek. Another BANG and she heard the bedroom door fly open and slam into the wall. June immediately leapt from carpeted floor and ran for the front door, scooping her purse and keys up off the coffee table as she ran past it. There was a rapid pound of heavy feet as Harry charged out of the bedroom and thundered down the stairs. He was roaring like a monster out of a horror movie. She wrenched open the door and ran like hell down the steps and to her car, jumped in, rammed the key into the ignition. She was dimly aware that she had no shoes on, but that was unimportant right now. As the engine kicked over and caught, Harry exploded through the open front door of their modest home and ran down the steps at her. He was naked save his dress socks, his penis erect, his face contorted horribly. The unreality of her naked husband attacking her in their driveway threatened to freeze her, and she barely locked the doors in time.

Harry slammed into her door and wrenched futilely at the handle. He peered in at her through the driver's side window, and to June his eyes looked like dead fish eyes, all black and glassy.

"GET AWAY!!! I DON'T WANT TO RUN YOU OVER HARRY STOP IT!!" Why was this happening? How? Harry slammed his fist into the window hard enough to crack it, and June put the car into reverse, squealing the tires as she tore backwards out of the driveway. She ran over and snapped Harry's leg in the process. June belatedly looked to the left in time to see a pick-up truck bearing down on her, accelerating. For a split second she could see the driver's face behind the windshield, and it was a visage of madness identical to that of her husband's. She stomped down on the gas pedal in an effort to accelerate back and away, but it was too late, and the truck's impact was terrible.

VI.

At the Coventry Estates Nursing Home, all but two members of the staff on shift had also succumbed to the insanity that was spreading across the world like wildfire. The two sane staff members had tried barricading themselves in a supply closet once they realized what was happening to their co-workers (and many of the residents), but the ones who had turned were very energetic door-kickers, and within minutes they had demolished the barricade and dragged the two screaming people out by their hair. With unspoken lunatic agreement, the insane held down the two terrified souls and bit them over and over and over, until their shrieks had faded to gargles and then silence. In the background there was considerable havoc, as the more ambulatory of the insane old folks attacked and feebly murdered other residents. Finished with their unfortunate colleagues, the staff joined the psychotic elderly in their hunt for the remaining survivors that cowered in bathrooms and closets.

VII.

Two young teenage siblings, a brother and sister, hid the attic of their family's home amidst boxes of old clothes and discarded appliances. They were watching a newscast online, on the sister's Iphone, their faces drawn with terror. Downstairs, their parents were smashing the place apart and howling and screaming. The sounds of destruction they wrought echoed the chaos outside. The world they had always known had turned into hell in a matter of hours.

On a CNN newscast, an official-looking man spoke of an epidemic, of martial law, and a situation rapidly getting out of control. A reporter asked if the madness was caused by a genetically engineered virus. The official-looking man replied that no one knew yet. Avoid contact with anyone and everyone, he said, and lock yourself indoors. Turn out the lights and hide. Wait for rescue.

There was a resounding crash on the second floor, and cackling laughter. The girl silenced the Iphone and they huddled together, staring at the trap door in the center of the attic room. They had slipped away to the attic a couple of hours ago, when their parents had been out shopping, after seeing the first news reports online and observing the psychotic behaviour of their neighbours through the windows. The kids had called Mom and Dad's cell phones repeatedly, but there had been no answer. Half an hour ago the kids observed their parents arrive home from their shopping trip through a small slit in an attic window curtain. The family minivan now had a large dent in the front end, and a scrap of bloody cloth fluttered on a sharp point along the edge of the dent. It rolled too fast up the driveway and smashed into the garage door. Mom and Dad had lurched out of the still-running van and ran like cavorting demons into the house, to begin their murderous search for their offspring. In the meantime, the siblings preyed fervently that their parents wouldn't find them, and quietly watched any news report they could find online.

"Kids, come out here. Come out, pig shit fucking fucks." This was from their mother, somewhere below them. Her voice was a cracked, evil hiss. The kids looked at each other with wide wet eyes and shivered.

"Listen to your mother, kids, I want to fuck your skulls, get out here, get out here getoutHERENOW!" Their father's bellow shook the house. Both teens sobbed quietly. On the silenced Iphone, the official-looking man was now grappling with someone in a highly-decorated military outfit, who had previously been standing in the background in a small line of other official-looking men. There was a sense of pandemonium in the shakiness of the camera's image, the people running through the frame in frightened blurs. The official looking man was being overpowered, bitten repeatedly on the face and neck by the military man. His face was twisted into a scream. One of his eyes appeared to be missing. They fell into the microphone-laden podium and tumbled out of sight. Someone knocked the camera over, or it was dropped, and all that could be seen now was running feet.

"Oh holy fuck," the brother whispered.

A sharp knock made the trap door jump, and the kids shrieked in unison. The brother had screwed it shut with a drill and three-inch wood screws, and the screws held.

"Ohhhhh, you're up there. Pig fucks, Opiggieeeeeessss." Mom crooned on the other side of the door. The daughter curled up into a ball on the dusty plank floor, and started to rock.

Another heavy thud against the trap door. Another. They came in rapid succession now, WHAM-WHAM-WHAM-WHAM, and the old wood groaned and cracked. The brother grabbed the baseball bat he'd brought up with them and advanced, slowly, toward the splintering door, bat poised to strike.

VIII.

A big-screen television in a sports bar informed the empty room that the madness had spread world-wide, and that there was no known cause or cure as of yet. Stay tuned for upcoming developments, stay indoors, keep the lights off and do nothing to attract the attention of the wandering maniacs, whose numbers were growing rapidly.

IX.

Missile silos in China spat nuclear death. The resulting mushroom clouds and associated devastation could have been seen in all its awful detail from the space station, had there been anyone left alive on board.

theworldisgrim

Note: this story was generously included in the Season 2, Episode 2 /r/nosleep Podcast, which is an excellent source of auditory terror.

Alot of nights drinking cheap whiskey and taking on an argument from separate sides. He was one of my closest friends. So, when he had to move to Texas for a job, it broke my heart. The thing was, we may have had different perspectives, but we both respected the perspective of the other one. I respected his out there thinking. He respected my history is a wheel ideology. I'm sorry if I seem to be rambling on. I just need you to try and understand why when Mike saw military personnel in his small Texas town, he decided to call me. I got his phone call last night. I picked it up and we had the usual catch up before he got to why he was calling. This is the gist of that conversation.

“Have you heard about Jade Helm?”.

“No, I can't say I have. What is it?”.

“Major military exercise down here in Texas”.

“Oh yeah. I did hear about that. Jade Helm? Really? That's the name they went with?”

“Yeah. What do you know about it?”.

“Well, its either an exercise with the special forces or a plot by Obama to turn everyone gay. Depends on what side you listen to really”.

Mike chuckled at that one. “Yea a lot of people down here are freaking out. Religious groups saying it's the beginning of the apocalypse. Militias calling it a coup. The kind of things you'd expect. I have to admit though, I've seen some weird shit”.

That explained the phone call. If you're a horror writer and you hear a bump in the night, your first thought is ghost. If you work animal control, your first thought is a critter. If you're a cop, your first thought is someone breaking in. You can easily push it to the back of your mind and come up with a more rational solution, but those thoughts will remain. So, when a guy who's entire political view stems from “The government is evil” sees tanks; their first thought isn't “military exercise”. That's what this call was about. His way of going, “That noise couldn't have been a serial killer. Right?”.

“What kind of weird shit?”.

“Helicopters mostly. Not the type you'd usually see”.

“Makes sense. They used those stealth choppers to take out Osama. If it's special forces they're not going to train on old school Hueys”.

“Huh. Yeah. There's also been a couple of Wal-Marts that closed down. Fences got put up. Conspiracy is they got closed down so the military could use them”.

“Probably right. I mean, throw a rock and you'd hit a Wal-Mart. They're all pretty much set up the same too. I could understand why the military would want to train around them when they're everywhere”.

“Yea I get that. Ok. Another question. Is there any reason why the military would want to takeover an elementary school?”.

“A lot of schools were built to be disaster shelters. If their running realistic training they're probably going to use one as a pretend base or refugee center”.

“...But what if say...what other reasons would a military want an elementary school for?”

“Seriously?”

“Look, let's just pretend here. As I said. I've seen some weird shit”.

“I really don't want to feed your paranoia”.

“Just indulge me”.

“Fine...Depends on what you're talking about. Actual military forces, you have emotional leverage. Don't want to blow up a school even though you'd get at the enemy because of the headlines. That sort of thing”.

“What about covert shit?”

“Playing pretend....Easy access to records. Depending on the district you'd be able to see whether or not the child has access to firearms. Sure you could find that information through the police department but those places have much better security. You know...the cops...Actually, depending on how the systems set up you might even be able to access police records from a school computer....why do you ask? You seeing flashlights inside of schools?”.

“...No...I'm not...Final question. Why would the military block social media?”.

“Jesus Christ”.

“Just answer me. I can't get on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Why would the military block social media?”

“For the love of god. There could be a hundred different reasons”.

“Just tell me the reason why!”.

“Oh for shits sake dude. If you really want to know. To stop information from getting out. There! You want to be paranoid. Well, there's the reason I know you're looking for! But there could be a hundred other reasons why you can't get on Facebook. A shit computer. Overloaded servers. Even if it was the military, there are actual non-evil reasons for withholding information...Shit....There are non-evil reasons for every question you asked!”.

“What are those?”.

“The opposite end of the spectrum? We're being invaded. Shut down social media and you stop misinformation from spreading. All you need is one guy tweeting he saw a Russian or a Korean or even a damn alien to panic a city. Thus fucking up the war effort. The Wal-Mart thing. Where else are you going to get bulk supplies if you're suddenly neck deep in refugees? Shut down one Wal-Mart and you have more in food, guns, and clothing than shutting down a small town main street. Even the school break in. Look at the medical records and you could, in theory, figure out about how much medication you'd need. 'If X amount of kids have diabetes, and each kid has two biological parents who may carry it; you need Y amount of insulin'. Even if they're there for gun records. They could be looking for allies. 'These are the guys with guns. These are the guys we can train'. Shit. That's actually what we did in Afghanistan, and Iran, and Vietnam, and Cuba. We even used special forces for that. See? Using the same events you listed, you can construe that the government may not be waiting to launch an assault against Texas but actually defending it fr-”

The Socratic Method. Asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. A great way to get someone to see your point of view without flat out saying it (For whatever reason that may be). A method known to every philosophy student. This call wasn't about me calming him down. It was about him warning me. “I've seen some weird shit”.

There was long pause on the phone.

“Good luck Jake. Be Safe”.

“You too Mike”.

The light flashes. I press accept and I type as I ask questions. Name. Location. Incident category; assault, suspicious package, burglary etc. I take all the details I can, and categorise the incident by level of urgency. If someone’s come home and found their house broken into that’s not as urgent as a robbery in progress.

I work ten hour shifts with call after call after call. If I need to take a piss I have to raise my hand to get excused by the supervisor. They time you too.

We get a huge variety of calls. Sometimes it’s something and nothing timewasters, sometimes you hear some fucking awful things. My third shift, I got a call from a woman who was just screaming. She’d woken up from a nap and found her baby dead in its cot. I will never forget that, as long as I live. Losing a child is something you never get over.

I know a few of the guys have started to drink a bit too much. Not alcoholics or anything, but every time they come home, they come home to a few drinks. It’s the only way you can sleep. If I’m totally honest with myself, I can tell I’m slipping a little down that road.

Last week I was working the night shift. It has a rep for being pretty bad. You get a lot of violent calls on the night shift. I’d been working for about eight hours at that time. Two more to go. I was surviving on coffee, shoving one call after another to the guys in dispatch.

Then I got this call.

The light flashes. I take a drink and click ‘answer’.

“Police 999, what’s your emergency?”

All I hear is breathing.

Now, this isn’t that unusual. We sometimes get people who are running, panicking, confused. Sometimes people are injured. Sometimes they’re trying to make a call without being heard.

“Police 999, my name is Laura, can you tell me the nature of your emergency?”

No response. The breathing sounds like a woman, or maybe a child.

“I need to know your location and what’s happening, then I can get help to you as soon as possible. Are you able to speak to me?” There’s a soft sound that comes then. Like a scratching. Like someone scraping their fingernail on the mesh surface of a microphone.

I pause for a second, then collect myself.

“Are you unable to talk out loud?”

The scratching sound comes again. Scratch.

“Okay. Let me see if I can help. One scratch for yes. Two scratches for no. Do you understand?”

Scratch.

“Great. Like I said, my name is Laura. I’m going to get officers to you as soon as I can. Please stay on the line.”

I start waving my supervisor over, who spots me straight away. I point at the screen where he sees my typing – CALLER IS UNABLE TO SPEAK ALOUD. ATTEMPTING OTHER COMMUNICATION METHODS.

He nods, understanding straight away and jogs over to the bank of IT guys.

“Are you injured?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Are you in fear for your life or your physical safety?”

Scratch.

“Are you able to get to a safe place?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I can see my supervisor talking to the computer guys, who are trying to trace the call. From the time it’s taking it seems to be a mobile so they have to go through the phone masts.

“Is it a person who is causing you to fear for your safety?”

Scratch. And… a small intake of breath?

“Are they there with you now?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“But you are afraid that they will hear you?”

Scratch.

“Are you restrained in any way?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Don’t worry.” I tell her, “We’ll find a way to get you help. Are you in a house?”

Scratch.

“Is it their house?”

Silence.

“Do you know where you are?”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Can you see a window to look out of?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I was starting to panic a bit now. I’m highly trained, but you only get a few calls a year which strike you like this. I was starting to worry about my ability to help. If they don’t know where they are, and they can’t speak to me… How can I send a car if I can’t find out where she is?

Then I hear something. The breathing gets quicker.

“Are you still there?” I ask.

There is no response.

“Can you let me know you’re okay?”

There’s a scraping. A scrabbling sound and then the line goes dead.

The call light flicks out. Just an empty dial done.

I swear. Not quite as under my breath as it should be. Looking straight over to the IT lads I see them shaking their heads.

No luck. No trace on the call.

I work the rest of my shift feeling sick. It’s mostly routine, but I just can’t get that out of my head.

See, as a Comms Officer, when something comes up like that, and you can’t manage to find out where that person is, you feel responsible. If that woman is hurt, or killed then surely a lot of that’s down to me?

On the drive home, through empty city streets, I run that conversation through my head over and over again. I think what I could have done differently. I worry about that woman. Where she is. What’s happening.

I get home, throwing my bag on the sofa. I pull a bottle of beer out of the fridge and pop off the cap, fixing the cat her dinner as she rubs around my ankles.

That woman could be being raped, or tortured, and we had an opportunity to find her, and we didn’t manage it.

I had visions of a woman locked in a cellar somewhere, at the mercy of some pervert.

I flopped down on the sofa, stuck the TV on and slumped.

I woke up half an hour later to the phone ringing.

I stirred, blinking. It was dark still, just starting to get lighter. It was the home phone. Now, I almost never use the landline. I mostly just have it because it’s the only way I can get wifi. This has got to be something bad. My mum maybe, who hasn’t been well.

I drag myself to my feet and head as quickly to the phone as I can, fumbling with it and pressing it to my ear.

“…Hello?”

There was nothing. Just breathing.

My stomach drops.

“Hello?”

Without the background noise of the office, without the tapping keys and the voices of the other officers, I can hear more clearly. My stomach knots, I feel like I might vomit, the beer churning.

“A…Anna?” I ask.

Scratch.

“Are you…? This… This isn’t funny.”

Scratch. Scratch.

I swallow, mouth dry.

“Is it…? Baby, are you safe?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I feel the panic bubble over. I can barely form my words.

“Baby, please, tell me, wherever you are, whatever I can do, please tell I me.”

Scratch. Scratch.

“Where are you?”

Scratch. Scratch.

I can hear her, those tiny, soft, whispering breaths. Then one catches. A sound of panic. A scraping on the floor.

“Anna!”

And then she replies;

“Mummy.”

And then the phone cuts out.

The caller withheld their number.

She’s called back every night since.

Every night is the same. No answers, just her little breaths and the scratches on the floor.

However many times she calls, I will answer. Every time. Perhaps one night I will be able to find some way to help her.

Seven times, she’s called.

One call for every year of her life.

One call for every year she’s been dead.

December 6, 1980

Pops got a new job. He works at the counter of a tow yard. People get mad they have to pay because their cars got towed, so they yell at him all day. It makes me happy. He works late. That makes me happy, too. Maybe he will work so late he won’t come home until I am in bed.

December 10, 1980

Christmas is soon. Mom and I put up the tree and the decorations. I am happy dad has been working so late

December 13, 1980

Christmas is less than two weeks away. I am excited. There is a new decoration, its name is Elf on the Shelf. I don’t like it. It has a huge mouth, long arms, and red eyes. Mom says it goes in the living room where it can see me. There is lots of stuff in the living room for it to sit on.

December 15, 1980

I don’t like the Elf on the Shelf. He stares at me no matter where I am in the living room, and I have bad dreams. I asked mom to throw him away, but mom says he has to watch me and report to Santa if I am bad. But I don’t believe in Santa since last year. Santa sucks.

December 18, 1980

One more week until Christmas. Mom says the Elf on the Shelf can go up in the attic after that. She keeps moving it around the living room. Today, I was running between all the stacks of newspapers, and I almost bumped into it on the couch. It was right in my face. I screamed. Mom laughed. I hope Santa starts another fire and burns him up.

December 20, 1980

My wrists hurt, so I won’t be writing much. Pops made me clean the carpets with a lint roller. It took all night.

I don’t know how I got caught, either. I needed an old newspaper for history in school. So I took one from the piles in the living room. There are thousands there, so I thought he wouldn’t notice. I even put it back, right where I got it, before he came back from work. But he knew! HOW DID HE KNOW?

December 22, 1980

I got hurt today. I bled a little. At dinner, I pushed my peas and carrots into my lap. I thought Pops didn’t see, he was too busy watching Barney Miller. But later on he yanked me out of bed and told me he knew. I think the Elf on the Shelf told him.

December 23, 1980

Mom says I get one present, under $5. I want a new journal. This one is only half filled, but it has blood on it. But then pops would know I keep a journal. I don’t know if he’d laugh at me and call it my diary, or read it and explode, or what, but I don’t want him to know I have it. I don’t want the Elf on the Shelf to see me writing and tell him I have it. I’m glad Christmas is almost over.

December 4, 2003

Hello, old friend! I was alphabetizing the junk in my attic, when I found you. Before I file you under “J,” I decided to take a stroll down memory lane. I really hated my dad, and only you knew it, huh?

Well, you’ll be glad to know he’s dead now. The things he did have shaped the way I am raising Oliver. Things are alright. Honestly, the kid leaves a lot to be desired, but the whole goal is to do better than your own parents. To pick the ball up where Pops left it and move it further toward the goal line. And on that score, I’m doing quite well. Unlike my hoarder father, I keep our house neat and clean, and make sure Oliver does the same.

I still smoke and drink, but I don’t use it like my father did. It’s just a way to make all the cleaning much more bearable. Nothing like a few shots every hour to make scrubbing the baseboards interesting. It’s definitely not how it was with Pops. When the people from Child Protective Services show up, now, it’s always for some big misunderstanding. Not like it was with Pops, where they would show up because a teacher had reported the bruises I always seemed to bring to school.

Yep, I’m definitely moving that ball closer to the end zone than Pops ever did. Not like I’ll ever score a touchdown, I don’t even know what the metaphorical equivalent of that would be. I just want my kid to be smarter than me, to make better decisions than I did. Maybe I’ll keep you posted.

December 8, 2003

Had another blast from the past today. Found the Elf on the Shelf in a dusty old trunk of Christmas decorations in Pops’ basement. Remember that horrible thing? It was supposed to report to Santa, mom said. But I hadn’t believed in Santa since I was nine, when “Santa” passed out under the tree, and his lit cigarette burnt up all my presents. I asked for more, but Pops said the elf labor union forbids making toys after Christmas. Santa sucks.

The first thing I did was unscrew it, to see if there was some sort of recording device inside. Nope, just plastic, no room to put a camera in there or anything. At least not one of those 1980s cameras. I guess I always just imagined it. Tossed it on the living room bookcase: Oliver has been getting sloppy in his second hour of daily cleaning, and I’m usually working too late to catch him and make him do it over. Maybe this will be just the thing to keep him motivated.

December 10, 2003

Came home, chugged a few shots of Evan Williams and poured some on the rocks. Settled into my usual chair to watch my UFO shows. I realized something about the Elf on the Shelf: I always thought it was my imagination that made its features seem so scary. Nope, it is actually really freaky. It’s got a huge red mouth that looks more like it’s about to open up and bite you than it does a smile. It’s arms are really long, which gives it a sort of monster-like look, like that made-up boogeyman those girls stabbed that other girl over. And the eyes: Good God, who gives an elf doll red eyes? Those parts make me think there are other things wrong with it which certainly aren’t. Like how it seemed to have its head turned right at me, staring me down from the bookcase. I downed a few glasses, but it was still pretty creepy, so I took it and shoved it face-first into the Christmas tree.

December 12, 2003

It’s happening again.

I came home from a double shift to find the elf doll sitting upright on the floor underneath the Christmas tree. I told Oliver he had to be more responsible about picking up toys off the floor every hour, on the hour. To make sure he got the point, I sent him to bed without dinner.

Then I went to get a drink. I opened the liquor cabinet, and there he was. The elf was sitting right in front of the open Evan Williams bottle, staring at me with those freaky eyes. I checked the tree, nope, no elf. Had I imagined the whole thing? I couldn’t have, my son’s full plate of food was still sitting next to his unoccupied place at the table. What the hell?

I went out and bought a lock for the liquor cabinet. Felt kind of silly, as nobody else in the house even likes Evan Williams, which is all I keep in there. And over what? An elf that I thought I stuffed under a tree, but I must’ve actually put in the cabinet? But locking up the liquor is something I needed to do eventually, to make sure Oliver doesn’t get the notion to start trying liquor. The longer I can keep him from tasting the sauce, the more “yards” my family’s team gains. I’m just trying to make him smarter at life than Pops made me, to keep moving that ball down the field.

December 13, 2003

Oliver tracked dirt into the house again. When he does this, I make him sweep it up, then clean the floors with lint roller. Not like my dad used to do to me- that was carpet. These floors are wooden, so using the lint roller is actually smart because it gets them extra clean.

When I opened the cupboard with the lint rollers, that damn elf was staring right at me. Thing is, I hadn’t been in that closet since the last time Oliver dirtied up the floors, which was months ago. HOW DID IT KNOW?

I took the damn thing out to the back yard and tossed it in the trash.

December 15, 2003

I unlocked the liquor cabinet and it was in there. Staring at me with those damn evil eyes. I took it out, placed it on the table, and hit it with a hammer until it was in about a hundred pieces. Took them outside and burnt them. The whole thing must’ve startled Oliver, because he started crying, so I made him organize the tool shed.

December 17, 2003

It’s back. Sitting right there in the liquor cabinet. I give up.

December 22, 2003

Oliver forgot to salt our driveway, today. I slipped and damn near burst a hemorrhoid falling on my keister. Kid's ten years old, but he’s pretty dumb.

I may not have raised a boy that’s smarter than me, but I sure seem to have an elf that is. No matter what I’m about to do, it knows. I come home from a double shift, it’s in the liquor cabinet. Oliver forgets to rinse out the tub after a shower, so I make him clean the grout with a toothbrush, and it’s there in my cleaning bucket. I’ll even try to fool it. I’ll come home from a double shift and go get the lint roller, it’s not there. It’s in the liquor cabinet. It knows what I’m about to do. I can’t even open the liquor cabinet without my stomach tying in a knot because I know it’s going to be there. Unless of course, I’m trying to fake it out, and not really planning on drinking because I have to go to work, in which case it’s never, ever there.

December 25, 2003

I’ve had enough. I stopped opening the pantry with the cleaning supplies. The place is getting messy, but I don’t care. Forget about moving the ball down the field, I just can’t take the sight of that damn elf. I woke up the other day and he was on my chest. Staring straight into my eyes. And then… and then it laughed! Twenty-five years and I never heard the damn thing laugh. HOW DID IT LEARN HOW TO LAUGH?

I’m pretty sure it’s going to kill me. I don’t even drink anymore, I know he’ll be waiting there in the cabinet. I drink a lot of coffee and smoke a lot. For some reason it never seems to care about that.

November 29, 2015

Found this journal in with the Christmas decorations. Right next to that damned elf. Since I’m a completionist, I might as well fill out the last few pages.

The elf stopped showing up after that Christmas. Turns out it never did kill me, I guess he knew God would take care of that. Got back from the doctor today, there’s a huge mass in my lung. 12 years completely sober, and this is the reward I get. Doctor says I got maybe a few months left, so I’m cleaning out my attic. Gonna show Oliver when he gets back from his trip. He’s setting up a clean water reservoir in Africa. See if he wants any of this garbage. I guess I’d better warn him about the elf, too.

December 1, 2015

Well, that was a kick in the head.

I was having one of my bad days when Oliver came over earlier. I could barely get out of bed. Death sucks, sure, but what they don’t tell you is that before you die you get sick and stay that way. You don’t get to live out your last days in peace, but in agony. For me, the agony is definitely settling in to stay.

In between coughing spells, I pulled out various boxes of Christmas decorations to show to Oliver. If he wanted the box, we marked it and put it aside. If not, we put it in a pile to give to Goodwill.

After a few boxes I came to the Elf on a Shelf. Oliver’s eyes grew wide, I didn’t expect him to remember it, but I was obviously wrong.

“Maybe in Africa you learned something about curses, I dunno,” I began, “but this thing’s cursed and I’m scared it’s going to take it to you.”

“Wait, what?”

“It’s been after me for decades. The worst was when you were little. No matter what I did, it would come back and be there, waiting to pop out wherever I went. I thought it was going to kill me.”

At this, Oliver let out a long hiccupping sound. I’m not into men getting emotional, but this was a special case with me dying and all, so I waited for it to pass. But instead of stopping, it grew. And it wasn’t crying, it was a laugh. Soon, Oliver was doubled over, guffawing louder than I’d ever heard him before.

“You think it’s funny, your old man croaking?” I spat.

Oliver took a second to compose himself, “Dad, I… I really thought you knew.”

“Knew?”

“It was me. I kept hiding this dumb doll.”

My jaw dropped. There was no way. “It… it would be in my locked liquor cabinet.”

“You were a drunk, I copied your key one time when you were sleeping off about a fifth of that cheap whiskey.”

“N-No, but I threw it away, and it came back,” I’m surprised my heart didn’t just give out there, “I smashed the damn thing to bits and burnt it!”

“I got a new one on ebay!”

“It was on ebay?”

“It wasn’t the exact same one. It looked the same, but the new one I got was more modern. I think it had a chip in it that made it laugh.”

“Why?”

“No offense, you were an awful dad. The drinking, the obsessive-compulsive cleanliness. I saw how afraid you were of this thing, and I used it to trick you so you would stop all that.”

My vision swam. My son went on about how hilarious this was, and how it would probably make a great tale for one of those “scary stories” places they have on the Internet. But I couldn’t register any of it, my entire field of consciousness was filled with one thing.

One… single… word…

Touchdown.