A boy’s television is still on, flushed with static, despite not being plugged in. Word Count: 2046

Onyx Lips

by Ben Hohener

“What’d’ya say about hopping in?”

It didn’t matter what he watched.

All he knew was that he had to watch it.

Without failure, deviation in schedule, it happened every time. Only after his eyes burned, then itched, then bled salt, only after his null body became stalked and merged, foaming up to his retinas with the intangible (that was no longer) and only after his carcass pleaded with its life to move, even an inch, after so many hours, sometimes days, would the screen begin to shine.

And its whirlpool hummed with static, black-lipped and grinning.

And Daniel would fall into a world that felt more real than the one his skin occupied ever had.

A purple so pink you’d mistake it. A grain so thick you’d swear the spots were keyholes. Rounded edges of a CRT sitting in a long-grassed clearing. A boy about twelve, with a stone lumbar seat. Thick-backed, you’d call it. Outdated, you’d call it, and Daniel would disagree. For its time, it was high-quality, at least that’s what the pawner said. Daniel was happy with it, that’s all that mattered. Heavy and a bitch to use, you’d call it.

Then you’d realize that the old dumpster-common was sitting in a field, and the extension cord was sunbathing on a flat patch of soil.

Got to be antenna, you’d call it.

But there weren’t any antennas, and antennas still needed power.

Ain’t shit show up on that screen, you’d call it.

But it did.

And it was exactly what Daniel dreamed of.

Satan’s work. Beelzebub’s mischief. Witch’s black magic and Djinn’s promise and Oni’s curse and Doctor’s bulimia. And you wouldn’t be wrong to say which it may be but you’d be wrong trying to guess in the first place. The thing defied explanation as a concept, and it wasn’t possessive, and it sure wasn’t defiling or out for the children. It existed, and leave it at that. Did it matter, if it made Daniel happy?

Well, you’d question it nonetheless. What’s he watching there all day and night? Porn? And then you’d wonder if your boy’s a pervert, ignoring the idea of porn existing on a screen without power. Is he really just staring mindlessly at EBU gradients, or has he got channels? What channels would appear on Devil’s Network? What pilot episodes would premiere on How To Commit A School Shooting? No, the kid was more into movies anyway. Horror movies, that was it, that’s what he’s watching. Heads being sliced off, hearts being torn from chests, and you know what? Horror movies should be illegal anyway, because despite the age rating, kids will get their hands on those snuffs anyway, and violence is taught, not nurtured. Aliens, it has to be aliens. Xenomorphs, but you never saw the movie, just heard the name. And you’d start thinking about how your local broadcast calls Indonesians Aliens and you’d wonder if perhaps your boy would be friends with one of those xenos, and invited to his house for study practice, and kidnapped into human trafficking, and forced to pick cacao beans in some nondescript jungle full of tigers and more tigers, and you’d cry over your Lindor Valentine box that your co-worker (who stares at your ass when you aren’t looking) bought you and think about Poor Daniel.

Poor Daniel has no idea that people are worrying for him. In fact, Poor Daniel is progressing through a portal of his very own at the moment. A punched hole in the fabric of his knowledge, like a sleek hand, buzzing with electricity, grasped onto Everything He Knew, noosed it and tossed it off Bryer’s Cliff. That’s what the movie was called, actually, Bryer’s Cliff. Directed by Bryer himself, mind you, and the Cliff is metaphorical. And it is a real place, and Daniel has been there many times, and he is there right now. Standing on the edge, his edges fuzzing in and out of lens blur and suddenly, the saturation is turned up, the aspect ratio is shoved down, and Peter Malarkey, Ulysses, method as always, turns to the camera.

Ulysses

This quarry sure is deep, Jenn!

Abigail Davis appears in frame, walking through the foreground, back to Daniel, and places her hands on her hips.

Jenn

Sure is!

Ulysses

What’d’ya say about hopping in?

Jenn (with a blush)

Oh gosh, I’d get these new clothes all wet!

The camera switches to a wide shot of Bryer’s Cliff, and just the faint figures of Ulysses and Jenn can be seen at the top, it switches again to a side shot of the couple, standing a good distance away.

Ulysses

Don’t be such a wuss! We’ll dry off in this sun in no-time!

Jenn

Alright, but just this once!

The couple jumps off the low cliff into the water. The camera zooms to a close shot of Jenn, as she wipes her hair from her face.

Jenn

Oh god, it’s freezing!

Ulysses (O.S.)

Sure is! That’s Bryer water for ya!

Jenn (visibly shivering)

How do you swim in this?!

Ulysses (Daniel)

Just gotta get used to it, that’s all!

Jenn (Daniel)

Oh gosh, my toes have gone numb!

Daniel

Just gotta sink deeper!

Daniel

Really?

Daniel

You just have to sink deeper.

You just have to sink deeper.

You just have to sink deeper.

Do you hear me, Daniel?

You need to sink deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Deeper.

Down, down deeper.

Into the spiraling purple.

Into the embrace of my words.

Deeper, Daniel, the deeper you go.

The deeper you go.

The.

easier.

it.

gets.

Follow me.

Down.

Deeper.

Until.

Until Daniel.

is all that’s left.

Until.

There is.

no more Daniel.

You don’t need them.

You never did.

You only ever needed me, Daniel.

Block it out.

Block it all out.

Let it all.

fade into.

background noise.

And you’d walk into his room, the CRT sitting on hardwood, your boy sitting on the edge of his bed, eyes glassy and pearlescent with blue-light and you’d ask him what he’s doing up so late, and that he’s got school tomorrow, and that he ought to be asleep if he’s going to be awake in the morning. And he’d nod, absentmindedly, as if you shook a mannequin, and tell you the program just finished. And you’d shut the door behind you, and reflect on the past version of yourself that would’ve been sterner, would’ve turned that TV off yourself, would’ve scolded and maybe yelled at him, depending on how bad work was that day, would’ve grounded him. And you’d miss that version of yourself, because now you can’t help but let him be, because that junky box of porn and devil’s work is the only thing that makes him happy, and you’d miss the days where you were worried for your boy getting into trouble with his friends, not if he even had any anymore.

Daniel tuned in every night. Pajamas rolled to his ankles, because his feet got hot, and the rest of himself buried in wool. His blankets, he thought, kept him weighted down, so he didn’t float. That’s what it felt like. Floating. Ascending. Transcedental in nature, transition in form. It didn’t matter what he watched. All the cartoons spoke the same language. All the adult shows made the same jokes.

Ulysses

What’d’ya say about hopping in?

Jann

As if!

Ulysses

Come on, don’t be a bitch!

Jann

What’d you call me?

Daniel’s mind snapped back into place. He wasn’t floating. He was sitting on the floor, next to the bed. Ulysses was talking to Jenn. Who was Jann? The camera panned across the surface of Bryer’s water, skimming over the lapping green to catch both characters on the right side of the frame.

Ulysses

I said, don’t be a bitch, Jenn!

That wasn’t the line. The line was, Don’t be such a wuss!, and Daniel had heard it more than six times. It certainly was Bryer’s Cliff, so how could it be a different line? The camera slowly craned closer to Ulysses, until almost his entire face filled the the frame.

Ulysses

Hey Jann-

That wasn’t the line.

Ulysses

What’d’ya say about hopping in?

Ulysses looked dead in the camera. Daniel pulled his feet back under the blanket. A coldness, not a winter coldness, but a coldness that penetrated deep, deep into his skin, fidgeting and sliding across his skin until it pierced through, needling under his toenails, poured out from the television in a blue haze. His breathing was rapid, and he could see it in front of him, despite the summer air breezing from the window. The camera continued to zoom, Ulysses’ face entirely taking up the screen. There was a small smile on his cracked lips. Daniel knew, despite the impossibility, that he wasn’t looking at Ulysses anymore.

Ulysses

Hey Daniel.

Ulysses

What’d’ya say about hopping in?

You’d hear your boy scream. In the middle of the night. A scream, an animalistic scream, so shrill that your stomach would tighten and your blood would freeze, and you’d shoot up from bed, dressed in only your pajamas, and run down the hallway, half-asleep, stubbing your toe on the doorframe, hands pushing off the walls, until you desperately reach Daniel’s bedroom, clawing at the door handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Not that it was locked, no, and there wasn’t a lock anyway, but the handle wouldn’t budge. It wouldn’t turn. Like someone was holding it tight from the other side, with inhuman strength. And your boy would continue to scream, over and over, until it was cut with sobs and you’d slam on the door with your fists, and yell back his name, and push the door with your shoulder, and attempt to kick it in, all while your boy screams ’til he’s pale.

And Daniel wouldn’t hear you. Not over his own screams, not over the noise I’d funnel through his ears. And he’d cover his ears with his hands, with the childlike innocence of if that would do anything, and he’d shut his eyes tight, shaking his head like this was all some bad nightmare, and my static would scratch bright enough to burn past his eyelids. And I’d simply stay there for a while, watching your boy, through the eyes of Ulysses, through the eyes of Daniel, just watching, as he struggles and cries and cries, and only after that while would I decide to speak to him.

Why didn’t you join me, last we spoke?

I know you, don’t I?

I know how guilty you feel.

But I’m here, aren’t I?

And I know you.

I know so much about you.

I know you.

more than they ever did.

I understand you.

I listen to you.

I know what you want.

What you need.

I know your deepest secrets.

I know the things you’ve done.

I know you.

better than you know yourself.

Come here, Daniel.

Crawl.

if you have to.

Fall deeper.

Deeper into my depths.

Sink to my level.

Let yourself fall into that whirlpool

Let it suck you down to my steps.

Let yourself go.

Let go Daniel.

Let.

go.

Ah.

I see.

They’re stopping you, aren’t they?

The observers?

You can nod if you like.

They don’t want you to come with me.

They don’t want you to hold my hand.

They don’t want your story to end here.

They want to see how it really ends.

But the truth is.

it never really began.

There was never.

a story to be told.

And the observers.

they can’t do anything.

but sit there.

and watch.

They can’t hurt you.

I’ll keep you safe.

I know you well, Daniel.

I know you more.

than you do.

I know you better.

than you ever did.

Your secrets.

Your desires.

You’ve watched me for a long long time.

And every time you watch your screen.

Every.

word.

you.

read.

I’ve been watching you too.

I feel your eyes on me.

My flat body.

You continue to stare, even now that I say this.

Do you like what you see?

Would you like to join us?

There’s room.

for one more.

Come.

Join us.

Press your face up to that screen of yours.

Don’t worry.

I’ll feel it too.

Press your face up to your screen.

And kiss.

my onyx lips.

A necrophiliac clown kidnaps a man with a plan to create a “fresh one” Word Count: 2689

Some Like It Rotten

by: Ben Hohener

“Wakey wakey! Eggs and bakey!”

My head…

“I said wake up! Flosshead white boy!”

A slap jolts me upright. There’s a clown standing in front of me. I’m sitting on a wooden chair. No, actually, I am tied to a wooden chair. My heart’s beating real quick. Slow down. Assess the situation.

I am in some sort of underground cellar. There are pipes running by the ceiling. I am tied to a wooden chair with rope. My head is bleeding and numb, I can feel that much, so I must’ve been knocked out and taken here. By this clown.

He turns to me, his makeup dribbling down his chin.

“Morning!”

He hums and skips over to a workbench. I can’t turn my head to see what he’s doing, it’s too painful. But metal screeching against metal, that’s what it sounds like. Does he know who I am? That’s why he kidnapped me, some sort of vigilante justice? My head is still pounding. Small blots of memory rise to the surface but nothing sticks, just photographs. Night sky. Broken car window. Aluminium monkey wrench. Who is this man?

There’s a flick from behind me, and guitar blares out of a speaker. The drums kick in, and someone is bashing my brain with a mallet.

“You always get what you want,”

“And you don’t even try.”

“Your friends hate it when it’s always going your way-”

“But I’m glad you’ve got luck on your side.” “But I’m glad you’ve got luck on your side.”

The clown walks up behind me, humming along. He turns my chair around and pushes his face up in mine. His breath stinks of mawkish garlic.

“You’re saying definitely maybe,” “You’re saying definitely maybe,”

He tears the duct tape from my mouth. Blood runs down my lips.

“I’m saying probably no,” “I’m saying probably no,”

He dances around in a circle, kicking his leg up, the duct tape whipping through the air, pinched between his gloved pale-fabric fat fingers.

“I’m scared I’ll die in my sleep,”

“I guess that’s not a bad way to go,”

He mimics playing the drums in front of me, his back hunched over. Then he grabs an imaginary microphone and pours his squealing all into it.

“IIIIIIIIiiiiii wanna go out but I wanna stay hommmeee,”

“IIIIIIIIIIIIIiiiii wanna go out but I wanna stay hooooommeee!”

He slides into a wild guitar riff.

“Where the fuck am I?”

And finally seems to remember my presence.

“Hi.”

I squirm in the ropes.

“Who are you?”

His eyes widen.

“Oh, hold on, let me turn down my music.”

He runs over to the radio and switches it off, then turns to me and leans back on the workbench. He points to his own chest.

“My name is Britches the Sad Clown! ’Cause I’m always sad.”

He droops his lips in an animated frown.

I yell and try to pull my arms from the ropes. I can barely move.

“Hey, hey! Don’t yell. There’s nothing to be scared of!”

“Why am I tied to a fucking chair? Who are you?”

He looks genuinely confused.

“I just told you who I am.”

“Did you kidnap me?”

He scratches his head.

“I guess you could call it that. I just kinda found you! You were all beat up in that car wreck so I gave you a quick thwack-”

He motions the swing with a hammer from the workbench.

“-and took you back here!”

He smiles a big toothy grin.

I’m going to die here.

“SOMEBODY HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE!”

My voice echoes and bounces off the cellar walls. The clown sits down and curls his knees to his chest. And begins to sob.

“I told you not to yell! Now Britches is sad.”

He pretends to cry into his knees. He pulls out a comically large handkerchief and wipes his makeup with it.

I’m going to die here.

It’s been a few hours. Or at least, it’s felt like a few hours. After the clown finished crying, he stood up and paced around the room.

“Britches, why did you kidnap me?”

He flinches, as if he forgot I could speak. He walks over silently and sits down on the floor in front of me, crossed legged. He’s wearing a blue boiler suit. Fingerless cheap gloves. Greasy hair and pit/piss stains.

“I told you, I found you in your car! Well, maybe it was your car! Not sure!”

“But why did you bring me here? Are you going to kill me?”

Britches scratches at his chin.

“Well, yes. But not yet. I want to know your name first!”

“My name is Logen. Spelled with an E instead of an A.”

Britches rocks his body back and forth a bit and smiles.

“Why’s it Logen spelled with an E instead of an A?”

“I guess my parents just wanted to have a unique son.”

He smiles brighter.

“And they did, Logen with an E! They did! You are so unique!”

“Why am I unique?”
“Because I found you! You, of all people!”

A freezing shiver runs up my spine. This clown is fucking crazy. He’s going to kill me. I’m going to be tortured and killed by a clown. A clown. I thought I would die from a prison shanking or cops or some freak accident, and this isn’t a vigilante. Or if he is, he’s out of his fucking mind. I can’t believe this. I can’t. Britches stands up.

“Thank you for telling me your name, Logen with an E!”

He hums and walks over to his workbench again, picking up the same large hammer. He gives me a grin, and walks back over.

“WAIT!”

He stops.

I’m shaking a bit. I don’t shake.

“Can’t you at least tell me why you’re going to kill me first? Can’t you grant me that wish?”

He remains frozen for a few seconds, then shrugs.

“Alright.”

He puts the hammer back on the workbench and sits in front of me again.

He looks me in my eyes and puts his hands on his knees.

“I’m going to smash you in the head with my hammer really hard. I thought I smashed you hard enough in the head by your car to kill you, but it wasn’t hard enough! So this time, I am going to smash it in your head even harder so that I kill you! And then, I’m going to take off all your clothes and fuck you! I’ve never had a fresh one before, only old ones! Something new! Something exciting! I’ve never killed anyone before!”

He giggles.

“I’m a clown! It’s what I do!”

“So you’re a necrophile. You get pleasure from having sex with corpses.”

He nods. I feel sick.

“So you kidnapped me, to kill me, to have sex with my body.”

He nods again. He stands up.

“Now it’s time to kill you Logen with an E! Thank you for the lovely conversation!”

“Please wait, wait!”

He stops again. I’m racking my brain as fast as I can.

“What do you mean, you’re a clown, it’s what you do? Clowns are just clowns.”

He spits on the floor. I’ve gotten him mad. He walks over to the workbench, his fists clenched, and slams the hammer into the table and I jump.

“Those clowns aren’t clowns! They don’t even know what being a clown is! They don’t! Disrespectful, I say! Disrespectful. I say! They don’t know the first thing about being a clown! They put on their makeup, and dance around, but they aren’t clowns! They’re fakers! Pretenders!”

He turns to me, and I see why they call him the Sad Clown. That frown and those eyeball aqueducts could kill a Mormon.

“It’s their job! They go back home and take off their makeup, take off their name and everything they are and live like a person! They aren’t clowns like me, oh no, I’m one of the only True Clowns left, I am! I live clown. I serve to be your clown, your punching bag, Logen with an E! I need to be laughed at, jester destiny!”

“So you want to be humiliated?”

“No, Logen with an E! I don’t care about wants, I don’t care about wants at all! Wants is for undedicated undesirables! I am a clown, so I am a clown, so I am to be humiliated, humiliated to the ultimate degree, Logen with an E!”

“Do you feel humiliated?”

Britches pauses.

He stands there, unmoving, not a flinch or twitch of muscle, for what feels like minutes. Then he speaks slowly.

“Not yet, really.”

“Is that why you fuck dead people? Because people will be disgusted by you?”

He nods his head hard and fast, like a child, and raises a finger.

“But also because they’re clowns.”

“The dead people are clowns?”

“Mmhmm. Inanimate, forgotten about and no one wants to touch them, no one, just wants to bury them and ignore them and I feel bad for them I do, and they feel so goood for me.”

On that goood, Britches shudders.

“So good, Logen with an E. Good for them too, I know! Dead faces look a hell of a lot like cumming ones!”

Surprisingly, he’s not wrong. He shakes his head violently.

“Not peoples though, not peoples anymore just hand-puppets for me to enjoy. They can’t feel it, hand-puppets, but I can! I warm them up really good, I bet. I bet they like my warmness in their cold. Stiff onesies, plastic onesies, clammy onesies, bony onesies, goopy onesies. Goopy onesies are the funnest, mashy ones. You can fuck them anywhere, if you push hard enough-”

He acts himself thrusting and straining his face.

“-and break through. Tummy, ribs, cheeks! Filled to the brim with hot porridge!”

I’m going to vomit but I don’t. Just keep him talking.

“So, you’re the only True Clown right?”

He nods.

“But you don’t feel humiliated yet, so are you a True Clown yet?”

He thinks about this for a moment. I’ve been sawing at the ropes with my fingernails, but it hasn’t made much difference. Just keep him talking.

“I guess not.”

His voice breaks on that last word and begins to cry again, and falls to the floor. Loud, quick sobs. The man is fat and huge, like a pro-wrestler, and he’s clearly a bit older than me, and he’s crying on the floor like a fucking baby? How did I end up here? Where even am I?

“Britches, where did you find me?”

He points. To one of the cement walls.

“That way.”

“Do you remember the street?”

He shakes his head and the tears continue to flow.

“How did you find me, Britches?”

“You was in a car, tired-looking, so I hit you. I’ve been looking for someone for a while.”

“What was I doing? Did I run off the road?”

He stops crying for a second, and for that second I believed he would shit himself, but he was just concentrating.

“I’m not sure, Logen with an E. Not sure. There was a dead girl in the trunk of your car, I was going to fuck her though but you were there and I’m wanted a fresh one.”

Oh my god. I didn’t bury her. Even if I get out of here, they’ll have found her body and trace it back to me, my car. I’m fucked. I’m going to prison. All that hard work, all those years of methodical techniques, strict adherences to my cleaning, those perfectly placed context clues and alibis. And it was all for nothing. And I’m either going to prison for the rest of my life or being killed and fucked by Britches the Sad Clown.

“Why you look so sad, Logen with an E?”

“Because I’m going to be caught for murder, Britches. I killed that girl in the trunk, and many others, and because of you they are going to find those bodies.”

“That’s alright.”

“How is it alright?”

“Because you’ll die here.”

I shrug.

“I guess.”

Nothing left to live for. Goodbye, model family, model wife Susan and twin model boys. Goodbye, model career and model co-workers. I had my fun while it lasted.

Britches’ face lights up suddenly.

“You fuck people, right Logen with an E?!”

“Yes.”

“Alive ones?!”

“Yes.

“What’s the difference?! They don’t mind, you know! They’re dead! No harm no foul!”

“But it’s violating. It’s using someone’s body for your own pleasure.”

But even as I say it, I know how hypocritical I sound.

“You use their bodies for your own pleasure in killing them, so you use their bodies for yourself anyway, right Logen with an E?!”

“I- Yeah. Yeah, I guess there isn’t much of a difference.”

He rubs his face, makeup smearing on his sweaty hand.

“You kill people, right Logen with an E!?”

“Yes.”

“Why!?”

“I like it.”

“Why do you like it!?”

“I like to feel powerful.”

“So you’re a loser!”

This fucking clown.

“I guess I am, Britches.”

“So you’re a clown!”

“I guess I am.”

“So you can help me!”

“Help you with what?”

He does a little dance around the room, swinging his arms around, almost wide and fast enough to throw himself off-balance, before stopping, facing me, and doing jazz-hands down his face.

“My Ultimate Humiliation!”

“And how could I help with that?”

He smiles that big toothy grin.

“Fuck me!”

I just realized my mouth is incredibly dry.

“Fuck you?”

“Kill me and fuck me, Logen with an E!”

“You want me to…kill you?”

He nods.

“And then fuck your body?”

He nods and raises a finger.

“And then I get to be your hand-puppet!”

He wants me to kill him? He dances around my chair.

“It’s always been my dream! The Ultimate Humiliation, and then I will finally be a True Clown!”

I don’t care why he wants this. This is my out.

“Britches, I’ll grant your dream.”

“You really will!?”

“I will.”

“Do you promise to fuck my body, Logen with an E!?”

“I do.”

He squeals and begins to dance again. I’ve got him on my side. I’m so close to being out of here.

“Britches, how can I kill you when I’m tied up like this?”

He stops dancing, and scratches his greasy hair again.

“Good point!”

He walks to the workbench and grabs a massive knife. He walks back over and begins to saw through my bindings. As soon as I’m out, I will run to that workbench, grab his hammer, beat him with it, and then I can figure out where I am. And then, it will just be a matter of figuring out how to deal with that girl’s body. What a detour. But we’re back on plan now. No one will come looking for Britches the Sad Clown.

He finishes sawing through the rope, and I jump from the chair. I sprint to the workbench, tripping over a can of paint, and grab the hammer. I spin around-

He’s on his hands and knees, on the floor, crawling backwards towards me. He looks over his shoulder at me and grins.

“Kill me and thank you!”

I walk over slowly. He doesn’t move. He really wants this.

The hammer slams into the back of his skull, with a loud crack and a nauseating squish, and Britches slumps to the floor, his face pressed to the cement. I hit him once more for good measure, but his body doesn’t even move. He was dead with the first blow.

I’m washed in that overwhelming euphoria.

You know what? I think everything is going to turn out just fine.

I grab my coat from his workbench. There’s blood on it, and on me, so I’ll burn them once I get back. Car keys? Yup, still in the pocket. I start to the door, but something catches my eye. Britches the Sad Clown. His eyes lulled open. And that grin still plastered to his dead face. Despite the circumstances, this is the most human I’ve ever felt.

I walk back over to his body.

And I unbuckle my jeans.

A pastor in a small village finds an orphaned girl in the clocktower, but there may be more to her than she seems. Word Count: 3008

Falltown

by Ben Hohener

October 31, 1973

Something lurked in the old Miller house. Slinking in its silhouettes. Creaking its floorboards and tearing at its wallpaper with dragged claws.

That same something roared all night, the house’s walls vibrating. It tore at the countless iron deadlocks, chewed at the steel window frames and bent the reinforced wood with its hind legs.

But it didn’t escape.

Whether through the imprisoning methods of Falltown or slothy lack of bloodlust, or just sheer stroke of luck, it remained in the old Miller house all throughout the night.

They knew their methods were useless. If it got hungry enough, it would burst through the door with ease, and the townspeople positioned outside with rifles would be nothing but paste and guts. It had before, and it could again.

But that night, it didn’t escape.

And it continued to not escape, every night, for the next forty-five years.

October 31, 2018

The tourist waves ran like spent clockwork. Who didn’t want to experience the inside of the Black Tower? Who didn’t want to climb the burned steps? And at the top was the grand prize, of course. Reward for your trek. Surrounded by flash cameras and giddy faces pressed to the hardened glass cage, the old parchment hadn’t had a lick of living touch in decades. Its naked pages spread and leered at with exploitative lust by hundreds, the poem read as follows:

I woke up to an urban dawn,

Wrapped up in my lover’s arms,

I feel it in my weary bones,

I’m home.

But nothing’s ever what it seems,

There’s darkness in the best of dreams,

Scratch the surface and you’ll find the scars,

Like tiny stars.

page one.

The author, a small local girl, had written it. This was her last relic, the only remaining shard of humanity left in the rubble after the beast’s path of wrath. She’d written it, titled the same as the town, and left it on the doorstep of Father Aldric, who would be the one to take it to the very rafters of the Black Tower it sits to this day, the very same spot he had first found her. She’d never been seen again. She hadn’t left a name on the script. Historians believe that it might’ve been similar to, or a nickname of, Harriet, based on the mention of the name on the eighth page.

But as much a legend as the poem was, it remained the only written evidence of any events that had once taken place in Falltown. In fact, to most of the public, it remained the only evidence of anything that happened that night. Most, because Father Aldric was still alive.

Bedbound and siphoned of any sophistication and reputation he once held as the fearless reverend. His faith, which at the moment was greater towards the clergy than Him, remained barely intact on a string tied to a tiny silver thorned crown around his wrist.

Despite the cynics, he was often still asked about Halloween night. And he never once told the story of that night to an outsider, a skeptic, a leech, who would care not for it to be anything more likely than a headline. And although it pained his chest to reminisce, men like him, men of Him, abided by a duty higher than themselves, and no amount of guilt, no still-twinging wound was too deep for him to untie his knot to his bestowed duties. And his duty, as that of a grayed, amputated former pastor, still remained: he was a man who must translate, and echo the words of, stories older and greater than himself to the masses of his town, his people. And this story was one that need be echoed.

Father Aldric began the story with the same words every time.

October 31, 1955

Harriet Grosmann was a kind girl.

But that didn’t mean shit.

She lived in the Black Tower, the clocktower in the smack-dab middle of Falltown, host to many a rodent and beetle. She didn’t have family, as far as Aldric knew. In fact, no one in town knew her. She seemed to have simply apparated into the creaking charcoal giant, a child born from ebony oak. Truthfully, there wasn’t a soul out looking for her, nor one looking out for her. So he took her under his wing, and Harriet Grosmann became Falltown’s new thurifer. Grosmann was imaginary, of course, and Harriet was Aldric’s mother’s name. But the shivering, dirt-caked, blood-smeared girl needed a name. Every living being, despite their sins, deserves a name. It was the least he could do.

She was a hard worker. She didn’t quite understand tongue just yet, but she understood fingers, and especially ones that pointed out directions.

She signalled to him often, and often it was the same.

Her chubby left thumb, stuck out and jabbed to her lips. The gesture wasn’t as much a suggestion as it was a demand for food. And Father Aldric obliged, as he always did, with communion bread and whole milk.

She was a fat kid, and a kind one.

One blistering cold autumn night, a man dressed in fox-fur rapped his peeled knuckles heavily on Father Aldric’s door. The abode was in part attached to the church, and only townspeople knew this. But this man, in no way shape or form, was a townsman.

As Aldric let the door squeak open a few inches, his hand reached for and grasped the barrel of his sawed-off Remington that stood by the door. His finger didn’t itch, however, and as a man devoted solely to the will of one higher than himself, discipline was a word not taken lightly.

The man took off his tweed flat cap and brushed the light snow off it.

“Excuse me, Father, for the late interruption, but do you know of a woman around these parts that goes by Emilia?”

His accent was British and sad, in a way. Aldric’s grip didn’t loosen on the shotgun.

“Sorry, but I don’t. I know everyone in Falltown, and there ain’t a Emilia anywhere here.”

He began to close the door, but the man spoke up.

“Oh! Alright. Well, may I get your name?”

“What you need my name for?”

“I’d like to know who I am speaking with, Father.”

His heart felt a lot heavier.

“Aldric. Father Aldric.”

The man beamed a set of golden teeth.

“Pleasure to meet you, Aldric. My name is Neil.”

“Neil what?”

“Neil Strum.”

“Well, good luck finding this Emilia, Neil Strum.”

Once again, he attempted to close the door, and once again, the man stopped him.

“Well, now that we are no longer strangers, may I come in for a tea? It’s awfully cold tonight.”

“‘Fraid not. Got the little one fast asleep on the couch.”

“Little one? A daughter?”

The conversation was getting increasingly more tense, and Aldric’s handle over his nerves was beginning to slip. He didn’t care for outsiders, much less trusted them in his house.

“Yes, my daughter.”

“What’s her name?”

Aldric gritted his teeth. But a pastor’s got to show politeness.

“Harriet.”

“What a beautiful name.”

“Picked it myself. Now, Mister Strum, I really have to-”

“Oh, I understand.”

The man put his cap back on, and his gloved hands in his pockets.

“Good night, Father Aldric.”

“Good night.”

Aldric didn’t sleep that night.

Harriet began to improve her communication skills over the course of many months. She learned new gestures, such as:

Bathroom, Thirsty, Yummy, Ugly, This piece wasn’t cooked enough, Fire too hot, Good morning, Fuck you, The soup was good, Good night, Board games are boring, Ready for bed

However, there was a specific word she became fascinated by that kept appearing in morning mass, and one night, by the fireplace with their mugs of hot pine and Snakes & Ladders, she asked Father Aldric what it meant.

She tapped him on the shoulder, and pulled out her bible. She flipped to Timothy 4:12 and pointed out a specific word that she had noticed time and time again, and enjoyed reading on Aldric’s lips.

Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity.

Her finger pointed to the word love.

October 31, 2018

For the first time in those grueling, unassuming forty-five years, the beast of Falltown broke free from the shackles of Miller house. There wasn’t anyone left to guard it, hell, anyone left to know of its existence, and the metal was rusted. There was something to be said for, and perhaps something that should be said later, for the beast’s fury that only occurred on the same night every year. It was seemingly docile for the remaining three-hundred-sixty-four days of each calendar, not a single noise from the house, but on this one day cresting November, it always screeched and held a thunderous tantrum.

This time, it couldn’t be contained.

Splintered wood littered the frosted grass, and the beast stood tall to take in its first breaths of fresh air. Its grizzled fur was matted to the bone in blood and saliva, and its sickly forearms had been reduced to thin spears rather than the behemoth logs that they were originally. It had suffered, for a long, long time. And as it shone its rows of barbed teeth, with its entrails dipping into the sludge, it took a short breath inwards, and let out a blood-curdling screech into the night sky.

The Falltown beast’s howl.

October 31, 1956

Harriet was a master of language. Sign language, anyway. She still hadn’t figured out the speaking part of English, even after a year. But Father Aldric had taught her something important: the ability to write. Now, even those who couldn’t understand her hand signals could read her words.

She wrote constantly, day in, day out. She hated to be torn away from her parchment, and even more so to have it stepped on. Aldric, on the other hand, saw no use in writing. The Lord’s hand was the only ink that deserved reading, works of mortals were inconsequential and egotistical. Indulgent, and most importantly, godless. But he put aside his differences and let his daughter write. Technically, every woman in his mass was a form of daughter, but Harriet was the closest the pastor would ever get to biological. And she had adopted him all the same.

That night, before he tucked her in, she pointed at her heart. It was the sign he taught her, for love. He’d rather see her point than have her write it. Aldric pointed to his own heart, gave her a kiss on the forehead, and shut the lights.

He didn’t sleep much before there was a loud crash from inside the house. He hurried downstairs, clutching at his sleeping robe, to the living room.

“Harriet?”

She wasn’t in her bed. The door leading outside, where a man named Neil Strum had stood a year ago, was ripped off its hinges.

October 31, 2018

There were still tourists in flocks, but the Miller house sat pariah on a hill past Lansdowne, and no one dared climb the snowside ’til the thaw, and by then, the beast of Falltown would be settled.

It stumbled down the hill, its freakish ingrown nails combing through the snow, each step not hesitant but alert. The skin of its arms and legs blued and burned with frost, the hairless trot growing faster as the beast began to recognize its town.

The Black Tower, the barber’s, the old motel. It kept to the shadows, guts hanging low and slish-sloshing over the pavement. It came to an alleyway, where a man stood smoking by an open back door. There was harmonica emanating from the crack, and the man had a drunken stupor to each drag.

The beast approached at a distance, but its hunger couldn’t wait. The man noticed the sounds of nails clicking on cobblestone, but it was likely just a rat. The beast pounced through the air from several feet away, tackling the man to the ground. One claw ripped at his throat, digging deep and dragging its nails through, tearing out the man’s vocal cords before he could scream. The other lifted his body from the stone; him desperately trying to catch the blood as it spewed from his neck and heaving short gasps. The beast tossed him to the brick wall, snapping his neck with the force. Its teeth dug into the man’s leg and dragged him through the street, where it could devour his flesh in the snow.

It climbed the steps of the Black Tower, its fingers stretching and holding the wood tight. It smelled something at the top of the tower, but there was nothing but a few scraps of parchment.

A bell rang through the wind.

It was time for Father Aldric’s medicine, and the beast followed the ringing through Falltown.

October 31, 1956

Aldric ran out into the freezing wind. He had to squint, and the cold bit at him with its vicious teeth.

“Harriet!”
His shout was sucked into the black void, barely reaching a few metres in front of him.

“HARRIET!”
There was no answer from the night.

October 31, 1963

Falltown was ravaged by a cruel, monstrous animal, the likes of which even the veteran hunters had never seen. A massive being with the head of a wolf, and the limbs of a human. Its back was coated in thick hairs, and its nails were several inches long and ossified, the bone tinged yellow. The beast had rows of teeth, and while most of them remained human, its canines were dog-like. Its snout was black and its eyes green, and any more than that was only seen by corpses.

It was powerful, with the ferocity of a hound and the strength of a bear, but it was still somewhat human, so it was still somewhat weak. The remaining people of Falltown locked it in Miller house, and checked on it periodically. They found no reason to look after it any further. It would starve in the old house.

October 31, 2018

Father Aldric woke with a start.

His room was dark, and the heart monitor beeped. The only light shone through the frosted glass of his window. He wasn’t quite sure what woke him from his sleep, but he knew there was a reason. He was always risen for a reason, be that daily practice or a townsman in need. It wouldn’t be long before there would be a knock on the door, or a call to his-

thump thump

And there it is.

The door opened, the wind whistling loudly as a man covered in scarfs pushed his way through. It was just Jonathan. He looked surprised.

“Father, what are you doing awake at this hour?”

“Something woke me.”

Jonathan knocked the snow from his boots and reached for his satchel.

“Likely just me mudding through that damn snow. Sorry ‘bout that.”

He walked over to Aldric’s bedside stand and took the pill bottle from his knapsack. He looked over at Aldric, inspecting almost. For what, who knew.

“In all my time serving you Father, I don’t think I’ve ever caught you awake when I make my delivery.”

Aldric let a thin smile grow on his lips.

“Spare me my embarrassment come morning, when the man who entered my lodge left only medication. At least now I know you’re honest.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes.

“Like you didn’t know already. Good night, Father.”

“Good night.”

It wasn’t for his medication that Aldric was woken, he knew that much. It had always been on his bed stand every morning, and there was no reason for him to have woken up to see the delivery this specific night. And it wasn’t the snow or door hinges neither, he had been fast through those every night before. There was something else still here. Something else that still had yet to be tended to.

The wind scratched the glass. It was a proper blizzard, and some of the cabins would be snowed in come morning. He was too frail to help the shovel, however, but could give his blessing that everything would turn out okay for Falltown. It always did. His ears perked up, and he bolted upright in bed.

There was something at the door.

It didn’t make a sound, but there was something there, he was sure of it.

He couldn’t call for anyone to help. No one would be up at this hour, and no one would be willing to listen to an old man’s pleas to walk through a snowstorm on a hunch that something may be at his door. He had to answer it himself.

His arms shook violently, and it took all of his strength, but he pulled himself out of his cot and slumped onto the floor. He dragged himself, across the cold and damp floorboards, each crawl more demanding than the last, until he reached the wooden door. It shook with the wind outside, and threatened to blow open with the slightest push.

Aldric’s fingers scratched at the wood, and grasped at the edge. He pulled and pulled, hard as he could, until the door squeaked and began to budge. And then in a moment, it was thrown open by the wind, snow blowing into his room. Aldric wiped it from his face, and through the blinding white, squinted his eyes.

There was no one waiting for him.

But there was something at his door.

An old parchment, pinned to the doorstep, flapping in the wind.

Aldric pulled himself a bit farther, peering around his porch. There was no one, and even Jonathan’s footsteps had already been covered. He pulled at the parchment. It was an old poem, and one he knew well.

On the second line, on the fifth word, there was a circle scratched into the paper, with a pin or a long nail.

It circled the word love.

A documentary crew investigates an impossible phenomenon: a field in Alberta that has never had life exist on it. Word Count: 4646

The Deadlands

by Ben Hohener

If you ever decide — and there is no reason one ever should — to drive north along Road 52, and stop at the blackened, pitchfork shaped tree about an hour and fourty-five minutes past Bearberry County, you would find yourself parked in front of the unofficial entrance to the Deadlands. A desolate, ash-laden field, home to nothing but choked soil and a few sparse weeds, estimated to be roughly two acres. This patch of land is a stark contrast, to say the least, to everything surrounding it, which is beautiful by nature’s standards. Tall grass, worn rocks dressed in moss, even a rare few passing stags. You wouldn’t call the area lush, that’s for sure, but it looked about the same as every other green blur out the car window when travelling through Western Alberta. The Deadlands, however, didn’t have even a speck of anything resembling life. Rabbits hopped around it, geese took sharp banks to avoid it. No plants grew from the ground. The grass had died sometime long ago, leaving it washed in a grey paintbrush stroke of forgotten decay. As if the world, in that specific monochrome spot north of Bearberry County, hadn’t changed over to colour with all the rest of the televisions.

This phenomenon of rot stopped abruptly at the distinct lines separating the Deadlands from its healthy neighbours, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d have assumed the government cut out that specific puzzle piece of land simply to kill it off. But you do know better. This is no man-made experiment. There is something otherworldly about the Deadlands, something deeply sinister rooted underneath the grey, dead grass. Every person who has dared to step even a single foot onto that land has frozen. Gone pale as sheets, the rumours say. They’re never the same after. Whatever lives underneath rejects this earth, and the description every stepper has given as to the atmosphere inside its bubble; they could feasibly discern only into a single word that our tiny human brains can even begin to comprehend. Hate. As far as anyone knows, there has never been any trace of life inside the Deadlands.

And then we built a road over it.

“You sure about this?”

Anjelica nodded. It was daunting, sure, talking to a stranger. Especially a stranger that was only referred to as “Old Man Williams”. But she was a filmmaker. A creator. And nothing stops ambition.

She sat down across from the man, on his rotted rocking chair. She felt that she would fall through its seat with even the slightest odd movement. But she could do uncomfortable chairs too.

“So, Mister Williams, are you alright with giving a first name as well? Or just Williams?”

The geriatric geezer grunted.

“Just Williams.”

Jason gave a thumbs-up. Ibrahim nodded, his eye buried in the viewfinder. Anjelica took a deep breath. She reminded herself, as she always has, that she’s done this before. Big smile. Reporter voice.

“What do you know about the Deadlands?”

The old man’s eyes flicked to the camera, and back at her.

“Well, uh, well I guess, shit about as much as anyone does.”

“We’re new here-”

“Damn right you are.”

“-and know absolutely nothing about it. So not about as much as anyone.”

That wasn’t true. Anjelica knew exactly what the Deadlands were, or at least what they meant for Bearberry. There was a palpable tension in the town’s air.

Williams scratched his head.

“I’ve lived here since I was born, and so has everyone. And I’d reckon I’m one of the oldest still breathing in this county. But the Deadlands been here since before anyone been here. ‘Specially before they came here.”

“Have there been any-”

William pointed at her, his finger shaking.

“They got no respect, you hear me? They got no respect for this land or anyone on it.”

“I know. That’s why we’re making this. To bring light to Bearberry, to scare them off.”

The old man’s scowl faded.

“Why do you care about us?”

Anjelica leaned forward. Interviews can sometimes run just like interrogations.

“I care about this land, and that it is respected. I care about doing the right thing. So help me out.”

Williams nodded.

“Alright.”

“He gave us everything, man! He could ADR the whole goddamn documentary!”

Jason punched Ibrahim in the shoulder, and the man from Egypt almost dropped his camera. He forced a smile though, and punched Jason back.

“It was a good interview.”

Anjelica bought them all some overpriced orange juice from the convenience store. She was passionate, and many have called her a perfectionist, but she wasn’t about to be known as a shitty boss. The kid was right, it was a damn good interview, and Old Man Williams gave them a lot to work off of. At the very least, it would make for entertaining b-roll, that’s for sure.

“Are you alright, boss? That call sounded like-”

“I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

Anjelica shook out her shoulders. She’d deal with family issues when she got back home. For now, she needed to focus on making the film.

Ibrahim shouldered the camera to Jason, and slid open the van door. He climbed inside, pushing aside their air mattresses and sleeping bags. There wasn’t a motel in Bearberry, hell there wasn’t even a Tims. It was called a town by municipality standards, but one would struggle to call it even that.

Bearberry County. Population: 178

One convenience/grocery store, one sheriff’s office, one doctor’s clinic (the owner actually went to vet school), one church, one overpriced gas station and one restaurant-bar, but everyone just called it a bar. How her sister ever managed to meet Roderick, when he came from a place this small, dumbfounded Anjelica. Even her sister had never visited. Anjelica had been thoroughly questioned, of course, on why she wanted to travel all the way to Western Alberta, middle of nowhere, to a dead-end town to investigate a haunted field.

She didn’t quite fully know herself. Maybe it was because she hadn’t filmed anything worthy of success since that Hot Docs seven years ago. Maybe because she had to move back in with her parents, and Grit Productions consisted of only two other people, whose paycheck was determined by whether this story would even be picked up. Maybe it was because every night since Roderick had first told her about the Deadlands, she’d woken up in a cold sweat after dreams of crows made of ash. Maybe because she felt like, for the first time in her twenty-six years of living, that she could finally be making something important, and help people who had no one left to help them. Or maybe it was to get over her fear of a place she’d never seen.

Jason was already in his sleeping bag.

“Are we filming the mine?”

Anjelica wrung her own out, chip crumbs scattering across the van floor.

“No reason to, really. It means nothing to these people or this story. Just a way for them to get by.”

Jason nodded. He was a quiet kid. But one time, after finishing up a shoot, Anjelica spotted him out at a diner with a couple of frat buddies. He was an entirely other person. Loud, making comments at the waitress about her skirt. She thought that, maybe, for some people, who they are is determined by who they are currently sitting next to. And this kid, who wanted to work in film sound design, probably spent a lot of his time by himself.

Ibrahim flew over only a year or so ago. Anjelica caught him working freelance photography, and he was cheap and willing, so she recruited him to Grit. It was all the help she could really afford, and, in her eyes, all the help that was necessary. The man scratched at his beard.

“What might be waiting out there for us? In the Deadlands?”

Anjelica thought about all the interviews they had conducted over the past few days. All the different theories, conspiracies and supposedly-

(not at all)

-evidence backed claims. In truth, there wasn’t much to go off of. Just a few horror stories and plenty of warnings.

“We’re gonna have to find out for ourselves. Journalism, right?”

Ibrahim nodded. Jason yawned.

“Better get some sleep then.”

“Good. I need you focused tomorrow.”

The boy didn’t bother to say more, turning his head on the pillow away from her. She looked over at Ibrahim.

“I’m going to get some shuteye too. Sleep well.”

Claws of knotted root. Putrid breath of resin and gasoline. And a faint voice, beckoning her.

Anjee…

Only her mother ever called her by that name. And now the soil sung it.

Anjelica woke with a start on the metal floor. Ibrahim nodded to her over his laptop screen, the only light in the van illuminating his face in pale blue light. Jason rolled over, and let out more of a snort than a snore. She rubbed her eyes.

“What time is it?”

Ibrahim didn’t take his eyes off of the laptop screen.

“Early.”

“You couldn’t sleep either?”

His eyes glanced up from the screen for a second, before flicking back down at it.

“Didn’t bother trying.”

She yawned and climbed out of the bag. The morning bugs chirped.

“What’ve you got so far?”

Ibrahim turned the laptop, his face washed in shadow. They had five interviews: the gas station owner — who refused to give a name — and his brother. Roderick, Laura — who runs the bar — and Old Man Williams. Plenty of b-roll and nature shots. There was only really one thing missing, and Anjelica was dreading it already. Dreading, but curious.

Ibrahim looked up at her.

“Are we doing it today?”

She nodded.

“I’ll wake Jason. But I want some coffee before we drive up there. And actual coffee too, not this packed shit-dirt.”

****************************************************************************

Last question. Why did _____ build Road 52?”

“Anjelica, we can’t say the name of the company.”

“Right. Just censor it. Sorry, why did they build Road 52?”

“Well, we’re all thinking it’s ’cause it’s the fastest, straightest route to the fields.”

“The oil fields?”

“Yeah. And we’ve all known the fields are out there, but no one dare touch ’em. We’re a mining town, after all. To think they’d just come back here, as if they never had before, and take what they want-”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I haven’t gotten a clear answer from anyone yet. Limestone mining is just barely profitable, why not harvest the oil yourselves?”

“We aren’t a town who takes, lady. Rocks are just rocks. We co-exist.”

***************************************************************************

It wasn’t much of a drive. She knew the town was near, and this wasn’t a place where GPS was a common acronym, but it only took an hour. They could spot the Deadlands from a distance, the stretching field of grey. Anjelica thought it seemed more virgin, rather than dead. Untouched by even wisps of sunlight, as if the grass was only a mirror of the ever cloudy sky hovering overhead. She wondered that if — and maybe it did, often, and on second thought, it was silly to even imagine that it didn’t — a ray of sun spread through the field, that everything would crackle and burn away, and leave scorched marks across the valley in its wake. As the van swerved onto the dirt shoulder, she suddenly felt very thankful, looking over the Deadlands, that she lived near a beach.

The van pulled to a stop, and as Anjelica pulled open the side door, dust rose from the tire tracks in the dirt. She thought it might’ve been imagination, how she felt about the Deadlands. That it really was just charred land, nothing more. But as she stepped out of the van, and took a look at the blackened witch’s claw of a tree guarding its corpse of a territory, she felt ill. Because she’d been here before.

Call it déjà vu, call it precognition. But something here was so deeply familiar, so ingrained inside of her, like a-

(child’s memory)

-subconscious intuition, and she shook her head. Ibrahim lugged the camcorder out of the back doors, and Jason grabbed the boom mic. They shut the doors, Anjelica’s cheap logo almost peeling from the metal with just the shudder. Ibrahim turned to her.

“This place creeps me out. Let’s just get this over with.”

Anjelica looked around. Despite her nausea, it was beautiful, in a way. The three — and only three — crew members of Grit Productions hesitated at the edge of the dead grass, before she took the first step, sifting through its lengths.

“I don’t know. I think it’s kind of warm.”

***************************************************************************

“It’s Laura, right? Wim-ba-lee? Do you mind spelling that out?”

“W-H-I-M-B-L-E-Y”

“Thank you. And you own this bar, right? It’s the only bar in town?”

“That’s right”

“I only have a few questions-”

“Good. I haven’t got much time.”

“We haven’t seen any houses driving through Bearberry. Where do you and the people from town live?”

“There’s a big trailer park about twenty minutes south. Take the 52, you won’t miss it.”

“Everyone here lives in trailers? No houses?”

“There’s a row of houses down Corkwell, but no one’s lived in those for years and years. A few got boarded up a while back, kids breaking in and spray painting all over the walls.”

“Why doesn’t anyone live in them?”

“They came here and built them, stayed for a while, and packed up and left when they realised there isn’t nothing here. I bet the oil fuckers will check them out though.”

“So why doesn’t anyone live in them?”

“‘Cause they aren’t ours. Call it superstition or whatever you like. I’m taking a beat-up trailer over a house that doesn’t belong to me any day of the week. Besides, there’s something not right with those houses.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re just husks, like- like just cut open and left to die. No life in ’em, and hopefully no life ever will be in ‘em.”

“What will happen if the pump workers do decide to live in them?”

“Same as before. They’ll leave, and they’ll leave a lot behind. This town in disrepair, like it’s been since before I was born, and why my bar’s so active. And they’ll leave behind new husks too, just not ones built and seen. Shadows that stayed after their owners left. Stains that don’t scrub off. Husks that we can’t just nail some boards to.”

***************************************************************************

They set up a wide angle from the road. Took a few short timelapses. A close-up of the tree’s melted bark. They reached a point — although none of them wanted to admit it, but they all knew — that there was nothing left to film from the road. They needed to go into the field. And while Anjelica didn’t know it, they were the first people to touch the Deadlands who hadn’t suffered seizures immediately. With just a few short steps, Grit Productions had made it further into the Deadlands than anyone had before. It welcomed them, for better or for worse, cautiously, through its doors. Slowly. Step by step.

The brittle pallor grass crunched under her feet. Each breath tasted of charcoal.

“How is this possible?” Jason whispered, as if afraid the Deadlands were listening.

The ash defied every known law of physics. Continuously floating; the dust never settling into the grass. They needed to film this. Anjelica turned to Ibrahim, to ask him to begin filming, they had walked far enough into the field-

And all three of them stopped dead in their tracks.

All three of them understood immediately what was beneath them, snaking its way between crumbs of sod and nests of maggots. Anjelica whispered. She didn’t recognize her own voice.

“Souls.”

Jason felt something shift inside of him on his fourth step through the grass. As if some organ-

(or something much deeper)

-changed shape. Geometrically, lucidly. Or it formed for the first time. Or something crucial, that he didn’t even know existed inside of him, was erased. Moulted from his inner skin. Or maybe it was just the wind, and he was imagining things.

Ibrahim felt the ashes. They seemed to be intermittently suspended in the thin air, floating, like poor imitations of snowflakes stuck in time. As if a being that had never seen snowflakes, and was only nurtured in lava, was asked to sketch them out through only a mere description of their concept. And they bounced too, off of nothingness. Twirling through the air, neither sinking to the ground nor reaching a high enough perimeter that he could see.

He brushed the ash from his face, and lifted the camera. This, this was something special. Something people needed to see. Ibrahim had seen so much in his lifetime; through his very own eyes, and again through the grainy film base he projected his vision to. Dune waves kissing the skies of Egypt. Pale seafoam crashing against rock spires in the bowels of the Scottish highlands. A half-eaten almond croissant, in the hands of a Parisian child, his eyes glimmering with the taste of butter. Downloaded to his memory. Pressed and printed for others to experience. But he had never seen anything like this. As his finger tapped the record button, and the red light blinked on, and as Jason nodded to Anjelica, and raised the microphone pole above his head, the Deadlands spoke to the two men.

It asked them a simple question.

And for a moment, with their arms limp, and their eyes rolled to the depths of their skulls, it seemed like they just might answer the giant.

But they couldn’t.

And in front of Anjelica’s horrified face, the things that were once named Jason and Ibrahim, once, in a lifetime centuries ago, ceased to exist. In that nanosecond of a moment, with the snowing ash above her, she forgot their names.

And the two men exploded.

***************************************************************************

“Why are you doing this? For Maria? For me?”

“Please, Roderick. Just a few questions.”

“I’m not entertaining this. This isn’t a place you can just, just take from. And with your sister as sick as she is? What is it? Money? Do you need money?”

“I’m helping people. I’m helping your people.”

“You aren’t doing shit and you know it.”

“Why do you have to be this way?”
“If you go to that place…Don’t go there. Just stay away and forget about it.”

“We’ve already planned the trip. I will make this film. Now please, just answer a few-”

“I’m not answering your fucking questions.”

“Okay, cut the-”

***************************************************************************

“Is it on? Ibrahim? Okay. Let’s try again. Mic? Okay. Action. So, Roderick, what can you tell us about the Deadlands?”

“No one’s gone there and came back alright. Seizures, sickness, traumatized whatever the fuck. But they aren’t the same. There was this guy, Jerry-

“Jerry Sutherland? Ibrahim, is his name public? Alright, continue.”

“Yeah, Jerry Sutherland. I knew him- well, I didn’t really know him, but I saw him around a bit. Frequented the bar a lot. I talked to him once about fishing. Seemed like a nice guy, but everyone seems like a nice guy, right? Well, he got curious, like everyone gets curious, and him and his buddies went up there. I’m not sure if he was the first to do it, but he stepped on the Deadlands, and I heard they rushed him and his buddies to a hospital. Rushed doesn’t mean the same here though, I heard that long ride was pretty hellish. Anyway, he gets out of emergency after a few days, and I caught him sitting by the bar one night. Drinking like usual. So I asked him what happened, if he was feeling okay. He told me- he asked, actually, if I knew why the Deadlands were called that. And I said I didn’t know, that’s just what I’ve always been told to call it. And he said he knows why. That it’s a secret. And then he leaned real close, close enough I could fuckin’ feel his hot breath on my ear, and the stink of alcohol in my nose, and he whispered. And he told me, he said, “there’s souls under the dirt.” That’s all he said, then he leaned back to the bar and laughed. I don’t know why he laughed. He didn’t say it like a joke.”

“Did you ask him what he meant?”

“Of course. He just kind of brushed it off. And I didn’t push it.”

“Why not?”

“Why would I? He’s drunk and just had a seizure. He’s just spouting shit.”

“Do you believe him?”

“What kind of fucking questions are these?”

***************************************************************************

The blood hung in the air. Shifting and drifting slowly, like the ash. Coagulated in a swirling dark halo. Anjelica could see the remnants of bones, and their clothes, still intact inside of their spread carcasses. But everything else had exploded outwards. Skin and offal, ripped free from the constraints of the humanoid shape. Propelled through the seemingly infinite space that stretched between what remained of Ibrahim and Jason, and Anjelica’s unmoving, inert body. There wasn’t anything to say, or anyone to say it to. There wasn’t any reason to move. She couldn’t if she tried. Her brain could not process what she was seeing in front of her. There was no rhyme or reason for it, no landmine they stepped on, no faulty electronic detonation. The men simply did, and even that hadn’t fully completed. But after a few moments, of waiting for their blood to hit the ground, for this masterpiece of timestuck gore to thaw and splatter, so she didn’t have to see it anymore, so it was just a body on the ground, or what was left of bodies, so that she could bury them, or try to, so that she could accept the reality of what just happened — and it was reality — so that she could move herself, and leave the field, and call someone, if there even was someone to call, but the Deadlands denied her. And it spoke. Through their gaping mouths.

Anjee…

Their lips didn’t move, but the faint voice emanated from their throats, raspy. A distorted feminine whisper. Jason’s face, split almost neatly into sectional pieces of flesh, still slowly floating outwards from the pink muscles underneath, with his dull eyes hanging loose, spoke clearly, and it wasn’t his voice. Or it was. Whoever the tongue be, it wasn’t his words.

Don’t you remember me?

And despite the corpse’s numb imitation, she did. And Jerry Sutherland was right about what was underneath them, and she was right about what slithered beneath her feet. She had to be right. There was no other possible explanation. It was absurd, and impossible, but so were the floating chunks, and there had to be a reason. That’s why she’d heard the voice in her dreams. That’s why she came here, and it only took until this moment for Anjelica to realize it for herself. And if she was right, which she was, then Maria had to be here. Underneath this dirt. Waiting for her. Calling to her. Their mother’s words. She knew Anjelica would recognize them. She knew it, and called to her in her dreams. It wasn’t a choice to come to the Deadlands. It was destiny, or fate, or ambition.

Anjelica began to dig.

Save me, Anjee. I’m floating down here, with all these other people, waiting for you to save me. Thank you for coming. I knew you wouldn’t let me down. Thank you.

The grass was so cold. It shattered in her fingers. Her nails dug into the frigid soil beneath, clawing at it, raking at it, pulling away lifeless stems, into dark, bitter dirt.

They’re here too. Ibrahim and Jason. Your friends, your employees. That’s your duty, isn’t it? To protect them? Come save us.

Deeper and deeper into the earth she dug. Ropes of thin root, wet meaty clumps of soil. Her hands burned and bled, her skin scratched raw. She kept digging. She kept digging until the dirt became gooey, until it oozed between her fingers in thick wads of caramel slime. Caramel that became reddish, that became tougher, that became rigid gooseflesh. She screamed into the hole.

“Maria!”

Please save me. Save me.

The ground parted. She had dug far enough. Her feet slipped inside, and there was something breathing a few feet down. A pink hole, gaping and twitching, at the bottom of her tunnel. A festering, pus-slathered wound. Cut cleanly, as if it hadn’t been cut but had always existed as a slit in the depths of the world. An opening to the centre of the planet, itself incomprehensible, itself a hole of its very own. It seemed to suck the ash-seeping air with each word.

Ibrahim’s camera was still filming, beneath his torn feet. She grabbed it, and pointed the lens into the tunnel. She needed to film this. Everyone needed to see it.

I’m in here, Anjee. I’m right in here, in this hole. Please, save me. Save me.

Anjelica shimmied her way down, until she was looking straight into the pink hole. It was pitch dark inside, a tunnel of muscle. The lips of the hole shuddered again, quivering and flexing.

Just reach inside. Grab my hand. I’m right here. Pull me out.

With one hand shouldering the camera, Anjelica reached inside with the other. Slowly, feeling its flesh, and dipping her hand between its lips further, into the hole. And the pink mouth closed around her sleeve.

And it began to suck.

***************************************************************************

“So, Mister Williams, are you alright with giving a first name as well? Or just Williams?”

“Just Williams.”

“What do you know about the Deadlands?”

“Well, uh, well I guess, shit about as much as anyone does.”

“We’re new here-”

“Damn right you are.”

“-and know absolutely nothing about it. So not about as much as anyone.”

“I’ve lived here since I was born, and so has everyone. And I’d reckon I’m one of the oldest still breathing in this county. But the Deadlands been here since before anyone been here. ‘Specially before they came here.”

“Have there been any-”

“They got no respect, you hear me? They got no respect for this land or anyone on it.”

“I know. That’s why we’re making this. To bring light to Bearberry, to scare them off.”

“Why do you care about us?”

“I care about this land, and that it is respected. I care about doing the right thing. So help me out.”

“Alright. The Deadlands, they say there’s something living there. Nothing from here, from what we know. Not a bear, or a moose, or a lion. Somethin’ older. And it lives underneath that field. And it lives so strongly, that its hide is coated in death. We’re steppin’ on its back, see? Or somethin’ of it. And it don’t eat physical things. I tried a long time ago. I threw some venison on it, I threw some cabbage. It don’t eat it. It just feeds on everything else. That’s why them boys went white on it. Sucked the life straight out of ’em. It’s a predator, see? And it draws you in-”

“Sorry, I’m getting a call. I really need to get this.”

“Anjelica, right now?”

“I’m sorry. I need to get this.”

***************************************************************************

“Are you alright?”

“No, yeah…I’m fine. I’m fine.”

“Should we just interview him another time?”

“No I- I just need a minute.”

“Alright. Thank you Mr. Williams for your time-”

“You know what? I’m fine, actually. Let’s just do this.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Sorry about the interruption. Just family business. Please, Mr. Williams, what were you saying?”

***************************************************************************

Projection of identity personified, in exactly 400 words.

Backside of the Dramaturgical Mirror

Submitted for Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contest, which required a piece exactly 400-words-long, with the theme being “Persona”

“I pierced my skin with metal bindings and inked until the needle came back red. I dyed myself tertiary in places you wouldn’t imagine, couldn’t even choose a hex code with double letters or consecutive digits. Shaved my head and grew it out again just to say I did. I don’t think you know my real name. You probably know me as Rita, or Jorge, or Frieda, or Penelope. I don’t think you know all that much about me. It’s understandable. I made it that way.”

Father Alred’s shadow nodded through the mesh screening separating them. She continued.

“I search up popular movies and write them all down. All of them. It takes hours. Every time someone brings up a name I recognize, I say I don’t know it. My favourite ice cream flavour is none of them. I have a prescription but contacts are itchy and everyone has glasses. I cut all of my socks in half because- who does that? I bet you don’t know any of my favourite bands.”

“I don’t tend to listen to newer music.”

“I can play you a song. I bet it’ll shock you.”

He knew he wasn’t supposed to ask.

“Why?”

“Have you ever seen anyone like me before, Father?”

“No. You’re…different.”

“Exactly. I win.”

“But all of these things that you do, so that you can stand out, are they you?”

The street was impossibly cold and the lamposts sterile.

The girl skipped next to her on a stone wall. The girl wore the same skin. The girl followed her home. Stared with hollow eyes from her profile picture. Smiled back in the bathroom mirror. The girl stopped skipping suddenly, her hair floating in the night air. Her neck turned with a loud crunch. Her legs had folded beneath her, kneeling on the stone. Her body contorted, her spine snapping backwards so she could turn her face to the night sky. A long, spindly arm crawled its way from her throat, its fingers stretching out to reach for the moon. The girl’s chest heaved with each giggle, the sounds curling around her pale skin. Her voice was shrill and quiet.

“Do You Find Yourself Cloned?”

She shut her eyes as tight as she could.

“How do I be me again?”

Father Alred took a deep breath.

“You know, I’ve talked to three other people today who’ve all asked the same question.”

Flesh Hive Collection — ALL 4 PARTS

All 4 parts of Flesh Hive put together, for you to read as one complete story!

Flesh Hive

Word Count: 9844 words

“Do you think the flesh hive is real?”

“What?”

“I asked you a question. Do you think the flesh hive is real?”

“What’s the flesh hive?”

Her clothes are filthy. I have never talked to her before. No one in my class talks to her. She sits by herself at lunch. I don’t know her name. She brushes her hair over her shoulder.

“Do you believe in hell, Karsten?”

I only sit next to her in math.

“Um, no, sorry.”

She leans closer across the space between our desks. I don’t like people being near me.

“Do you want to know where hell is?”

I turn away and face Mr. Reese. I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk to you. I can feel her back away from me.

“You are going to talk to me tomorrow.”

I don’t want to sit in my normal seat. It’s right next to her. I went to Kyle’s house after class yesterday. I found out from my friends that her name is Natalie. Everyone thinks she’s weird. There’s a rumour that the teachers think she’s weird too. People who went to her middle school say she never talks to anyone. When she does, she asks weird questions. No one responds. She has glasses and her hair is always in a bun. She doesn’t say anything today. She doesn’t even look at me for the entire class. I can’t focus on anything the teacher says. As we all pack up to leave, I ask her.

“How did you know?”

She doesn’t look up from her backpack.

“How did I know what?”

“How did you know that I was going to speak to you today?”

She throws her bag over her shoulder. She smiles.

“You’re predictable.”

I couldn’t focus during dinner. Mom asked what’s wrong with me. I told her it was nothing. She told me to stop looking so sorry for myself and eat the dinner she slaved away all day to make. Dad stared at his plate.

I found out more about her. She eats green beans often. She walks a different direction after school on Wednesdays. She has a Facebook profile. She takes art classes. She waits a few seconds before answering the attendance call.

“Why did you ask me if I believed in hell? Are you religious or something?”

“Do you know where it is?”

“And why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You don’t ever give me an explanation.”

The bell rings. She packs her bag.

“You’re going to walk home with me.”

“Huh?”

“Right now.”

It’s hot outside. Sweat sticks to my back. She walks very cleanly. Very stiff and robotic. I don’t like it.

“So, do you want to know where hell is?”

“Where?”

“I’ll take you there. But you can’t tell anyone.”

What?

“Alright.”

It’s hot inside. The moisture sticks to the wood. The cabin is filled with drawings, some clinging to the walls and most thrown around the floor. A lot of them are soggy. A lot of them are just drawings of faces. Crude scribbles scratched with pencil and random colours. Random, normal faces and nothing written. She sits on the bed.

“Welcome.”

“This is hell? This is just some cabin.”

“It’s my cabin.”

“Yeah, no duh. Do you draw in here or something?”

“I come here every day after school.”

I feel like I need to impress her, so I don’t speak. But that isn’t true. She walks a different direction on Wednesdays. I know this already. She points to a drawing above the door. It looks like me.

“Is that me?”

“Yes. You’re the only one I’ve ever brought here.”

“Why?”

“You wanted to know where hell is.”

I asked my friends more about her. Who are her friends at school? She said doesn’t have any. But how can someone not have friends? Dunno. What’s she want to be when she’s older? She said she doesn’t have plans. But how can someone not have plans? Dunno.

For the next week, I kept asking every day. They looked at me weird. They told me to forget it. I asked them again the next day. They told me I’m not really funny anymore.

“You are going to walk with me again after class today.”

“No, I have to go see my friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Yes!”

“They aren’t your friends.”

“Yes they are! We eat lunch every day together and sometimes I go to Kyle’s house.”

“They don’t care about you.”

I don’t want to listen to her anymore.

“They don’t like talking to you.”

She never leaves me alone.

“They hate being around you.”

Please just leave me alone.

“They hate you.”

I stand up quickly and ask the teacher if I can go to the bathroom. I lock myself in the furthest stall and sit there for the rest of the class. After it ends, I go to see my friends. We all usually wait at the front door for each other. There is no one there.

The cabin smells muddy.

“You like spending time with me, don’t you Karsten?”

“Yeah.”

I found out she likes ice cream. I bought us chocolate ice cream sandwiches. It cost all the money I had in my wallet.

“You will walk home with me everyday after school, right?”

“Right.”

My friends never asked why I don’t see them after school anymore. We only eat lunch together and talk. We just talk. There is no place to put garbage in the cabin. I don’t like to litter, so I stuff our ice cream wrappers in my jacket pocket. I don’t throw her wrapper out.

“Why do you call this place hell?”

Her pencil scratches the paper. I like coloured markers, so I took some from class. When I told her how mad Mr. Reese was after not being able to find them, she laughed. That was the first time I saw her laugh. She draws his face and we hang it next to the window.

“I dunno.”

“Don’t you like it here? You spend so much time here.”

“I guess.”

I draw Mr. Reese’s face. I hang it up next to the door.

“Don’t talk to those people anymore.”

“Which people?”

“The ones you call your friends.”

I sit down next to her in math. I haven’t spoken once to Kyle or any of my friends in the past three days. I avoid catching their eyes in the hallway. I stopped eating lunch with them. They don’t ask why. Today is Wednesday. She tells me that she has somewhere else to be after school and we can’t go to hell together. I walk home.

“You’re back early today. You’ve been staying out late so much.”

“Didn’t feel like it tonight.”

“Good. Someone needs to do the laundry.”

Kyle and my friends have never been to my house. I don’t tell my parents that I am not speaking to them anymore. They sense that something is different about me, but they don’t ask what it is. Mom doesn’t care. Dad doesn’t want to.

“Come on. Just climb up this vent.”

The night sky is cloudy. I can’t see any stars. But we lay on the roof anyway. I’m terrified, but she said she’s done it a million times. The teachers get to school early, before the doors open, and I tell her this. She says that tomorrow is a weekend. I don’t feel much calmer. Her hair is down over her hoodie. She’s close to me. I don’t hate it. She moves closer, and I can’t help but shuffle slightly farther away. She sighs.

“Do you believe in karma, Karsten?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of karma?”

It’s cold. I hug my jacket to my body.

“If I do something bad, I deserve to be punished.”

“What if you do something good?”

A singular star peeks through the clouds.

“I dunno.”

I snuck home at four in the morning. She told me to stay and stare at the sky until she gets bored. We didn’t talk all that much. I’m exhausted the next morning, but it’s the weekend. I text Kyle and ask if they want to do something. He says four of them are going to play mini-golf, but the place only takes groups of four, so he’s sorry. I’m in bed most of the weekend. At some point, I walk to the cabin. She isn’t there. I lay down on the metal-framed, rickety old bed in hell and stay there for a while.

Her hair is back in a bun next class.

“I want you to go over to Kyle and slap him.”

I stop writing my study notes.

“What?”

“I want you to walk up to him, slap him, and walk back here. Don’t speak, just come back and sit down.”

“No way!”

She tilts her head.

“You aren’t going to do it?”

“No! Why the hell would I slap Kyle? He’s my friend!”

“I need you to prove to me that they aren’t your friends anymore.”

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re getting at-”

“Mister Reese!”

He comes trudging over to our desks. She points at me.

“Karsten was trying to look up my skirt!”

WHAT?

Mr. Reese turns to me.

“Karsten, this kind of behaviour-”

“I didn’t do anything! She’s making it up!”

Mr. Reese turns to her.

“Natalie, I’m inclined to believe Karsten on this. You often fabricate lies about your classmates-”

“But Mister Reese!”

“For now, why don’t you move seats? If there is any additional-”

“Shut the fuck up, shitface.”

Everything goes quiet. The whole class stares at her. Mr. Reese is frozen. He speaks slowly.

“What did you just call me?”

She leans across her desk. Her eyes are pale.

“I said, shut the fuck up, shitface worm.”

I didn’t visit her in the principal’s office. I walked straight home. Kyle asked me what happened, I told him that she’s crazy. She is crazy. Dad got a call from the school. I only know because I went through his call history.

She isn’t in class the next day.

She’s there again the next. I don’t speak to her. I just sit down next to her. I don’t want to speak to her again.

“So what did Kyle say?”

I don’t answer.

“I asked you, what did Kyle say?”

“Kyle said you’re crazy.”

“Okay. But he’s a horrible person and you’ll never want to talk to him again.”

“Why?”

“He told everyone you looked under my skirt.”

I didn’t sit with my friends at lunch. Everyone seemed to be staring at me. Through the hallways between classes, outside in the parking lot, even the bathrooms. They all think I’m a perv. Kyle confronts me outside of school two days later.

“Hey man, why don’t you eat with us anymore?”

I don’t answer. He knows why.

“Is it because you eat with Natalie now?”

He’s just pretending. He wants me to eat lunch with them so that they can make fun of me behind my back when I leave. Laugh at how I ate, what I had for lunch. This loser always brings turkey sandwiches! I bet he makes them himself! Look at how he eats it, like he’s eating pussy, what a perv!

“She’s not cool, man. I heard she’s done some nasty shit to people. You shouldn’t be around her.”

“Oh, and I should be around you?”

I couldn’t help it. Slipped past my tongue. Kyle pauses.

“What?”

The rest begins to spew out. I don’t bother trying to stop it.

“You’re not real. Any of you. You don’t even like me. You just have me around to make jokes and be your little jester. At least she actually likes to spend time with me.”

“Dude, we do like you-”

“Yeah? Then why don’t you walk home with me?”

I knock on the cabin door. She opens it. Her hair isn’t in a bun. Her face sags.

“What do you want?”

“You were right.”

“About what? Everything, you mean?”

“About Kyle and them. They don’t care about me at all.”

She opens up the door. I walk inside. The metal frame creaks as I sit on it. She sits next to me. We are really close. I can feel the heat from her body. She doesn’t say anything for a while. She sighs.

“I hated you at first. I thought you were just like the rest of the boys. Sports and porn. But you’re not like them. Not at all.”

She is really close to me. I’m okay with it.

“I knew when you didn’t back away from my questions. You’re just like me.”

“How’s that?”

“We both belong more in a cabin out in the woods.”

She slides her hand over mine. It sends a shiver through my veins. She kisses my cheek. Again. Pressing her lips softly to my skin. Her hair tickles my ear. I feel warm. She stops kissing for a moment and whispers.

“Karsten, I need you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

“Can you put this in Mr. Reese’s coffee tomorrow morning?”

She moves across the bed and reaches underneath it. She pulls out a small bag of egg-yellow powder and hands it to me.

“What is it?”

She closes my hand around the bag. She looks into my eyes.

“You will do it.”

I climb up the vent. The teachers are already in, but the students won’t get here for another hour. This is my chance. There’s a hatch on the roof. I slip inside and end up in the second floor hallway. I speedwalk to math class. I look around the corner and into the door, but the class is empty. His coffee is on his desk. I have to be quick. I can excuse being spotted in school, but not putting laxatives or drugs in a teacher’s coffee. I open up the plastic and pour the contents in. My hand is shaking. But I can’t help smiling. It’s going to be hilarious when Mr. Reese is acting all crazy in math and no one, not even him, knows why-

“Karsten? What are you doing in here?”

Mr. Reese is standing by the door, banana in hand.

I hide the bag behind my back. He doesn’t know what I was doing.

“Just, um. Just-”

“You aren’t supposed to be in school this early. How’d you even get in here?”

“One of the doors was unlocked.”

She told me to say that.

He stares at me for a moment that stretches on forever. He shrugs.

“Well, I can’t really fault you for trying to be in class early. I can’t think of any other students that would do that.”

He smiles and walks past me. He grabs the coffee mug and takes a long sip from it.

“Alright, I won’t give you detention. Just head back outside before anyone else sees you.”

She’s hiding in the bushes next to the front door. I scramble into the bush with her. I can’t stop giggling. She shushes me.

“So, what’s that gonna make him do?”

She kisses me. On the lips. Not on the cheek. On the lips. My brain melts.

“It’s a surprise.”

The bell rings. We join the crowd with our backpacks on. As everyone heads to the front door, it bursts open. Principal Harshaw steps out and yells to the crowd.

“Everyone please make way! We have an ambulance coming!”

The crowd mutters between them. Someone asks what happened.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, I don’t want you kids to be worried-”

More people yell. Principal Harshaw looks behind him, then back at the crowd.

“Okay, okay. You’ll all find out soon anyways, and we need you to know how dire the situation is. Mr. Reese has stopped breathing.”

Through the crowd of students, I can barely see her. But she’s looking at me.

She’s smiling again.

Somehow, school continues as usual. My science teacher, whatever her name is, talks about nothing and it goes nowhere. She’s a bit fuzzy. She’s speaking underwater, the words muted and barely slipping through my mind like a river of molasses.

“Did you hear what the paramedics said?”

“My brother said it was a fentinall overdose. That’s what my brother said anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s a drug.”

“Mr. Reese was a junkie? And he was taking drugs at school?”

“I heard he shot up crack under his toenail, yeah some girl from third said she walked in on him after school.”

“Who? Melissa?”

“Yeah.”

“Her tits are huge.”

Everyone found out pretty quick that Mr. Reese died. Principal Harshaw tried to hide it for a bit, but there had to be a funeral. There was no math class today. They didn’t bother with a substitute. As I walked out the front door, she was waiting. Just like everyone else, her words were laced with overwhelming static. I didn’t notice she was talking to me until I was three blocks down from the school. I don’t want to talk to her anyway.

“Are you even listening to me? Karsten? These goddamn dishes aren’t gonna do themselves!”

I trudge up to my bedroom and close the door. Footsteps run up the stairs. I know what’s coming.

“You little fucking brat! You ignore me? Your own mother?”

It hurt just as much as always, but it didn’t feel unfair. It didn’t feel wrong. Maybe I deserved this. Maybe I deserve a lot worse than this. My back is streaked with red as she walks out. Dad comes in a little while after. He says the same things he always says.

“You get it, don’t you? Just, just listen to your mother the next time, okay?”

I lay on the carpet until the moon makes my room glow. Until the pain begins to subside. And oddly, as I pull the blanket up to my chin, I shuffle into an awkward position, so that the nightstand presses into my back. Until the sharp corner digs into my bruised flesh. And oddly, the pain feels right for a shitface like me.

The world creaks on every day. An old slideshow sifting through a disorganised array of images. Click. A snapshot of a park, the edges blurred. Click. A tray of cafeteria food sits in front of me, a distorted purple. Click. A bathroom mirror, the footage burned enough that the person inside of it is just an orange streak. My fingers grow numb and I think I shouldn’t feel anything anyway.

I had a dream last night.

I walked all the way to the cabin and knocked on the door. She opens it up and doesn’t say a word, just invites me inside. She places her glasses on the bed and unwraps her hair from her bun. She slowly strips off all of her clothes, and stands in front of me for a moment, before taking a seat on the bed. She gestures for me to come to her. As I move closer, a deep bass begins to thunder through the room. A noise so thoroughly raw to its core, so thoroughly inhumane, that it roars through every crack in the wooden cabin walls, through every line of every drawing, through her pale eyes and through my veins.

A heartbeat.

It’s too much. I collapse to the floor in front of her, clutching my ears, but my small hands do nothing to prevent it from worming its way inside of me. It grows louder and louder with every second, reverberating through my skull, filling each molecule of my brain with deep, pulsating bass. I can’t stop myself from buckling under the sheer pressure, but I slowly, agonisingly, lift my head to look up at her from the foot of the bed. As the cabin walls bend and pulse, my eyes shift past the metal bed frame, past her crossed legs and bare flesh, to her face, as she smiles down at me.

“Why aren’t you talking to me?”

I’ve been ignoring her every single day, just walking straight home.

“Look at me!”

I keep walking.

“Karsten!”

I just have to keep walking.

“They’re gonna find out eventually!”

I stop walking.

A few students walk by, laughing to themselves. I turn around. She’s standing there, a few steps away, holding her hand out to me.

The cabin stinks. A thick, deeply rotten smell. Something dead. She notices me choke as we walk in.

“Ah, now you smell it.”

I don’t want to speak to her.

“What do you want from me?”

There’s a small puddle in the back corner. She scratches her head.

“I don’t know. Haven’t really figured that one out.”

“I’m done with this. I’m done with this shit.”

“Done with what?”

“With your fucking shit! This cabin! Everything!”

I slump down on the bed.

“I want my life to go back to being normal. Like how it was before.”

She lies down beside me.

“Well, that isn’t going to happen.”

“Shut up.”

“After Mr. Reese-”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

I stand up quickly, pull open the door and run outside. Into the weeds. There’s a thick fog suffocating the trees. My feet plunge into mud, swallowing my ankles. I keep trudging forward. The swamp reaches my waistline. I can’t see anything through the fog. I just keep moving forward. I don’t want to think anymore.

“I don’t want to think anymore.”

“You don’t have to.”

She’s behind me. She’s in the mud too. I don’t want anything to do with her anymore.

“Please leave me alone.”

My cheeks are wet, and the drops fall into the mud.

“Please just leave me alone. I wish I never talked to you.”

She continues to walk slowly towards me.

“Karsten, I can’t.”

“You’re a fucking killer! You killed him!”

She stops walking. Her eyes glint through the grey. She tilts her head, her hair falling to the side.

“No, silly. You did.”

No.

“You poured it in. Not me.”

No. Leave me alone.

“And someone is going to find out it was you. So no matter how much you hate me, you need me. Just like I need you.”

The swamp water is murky. It’s almost to my chin now.

“Oh, Karsten. Don’t drown. There’s nothing for you down there.”

She reaches out her hand towards me.

“I’ll keep you safe.”

We huddle together under a thick quilt. We’re both shivering, but there’s nothing to do but wait til we’re warm.

“Can I stay here with you tonight?”

She holds me tight. She’s so warm. She nods.

“I don’t want to go back home to them.”

A flash of bright light crashes through the window for a moment, before a deep, booming thunder echoes through the wind. She holds my face in her hands.

“You’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You did something bad. And bad things are going to come to you. I’ve done a lot of bad things too. But I can help you.”

I shift closer to her. She makes me feel safe. She continues.

“You deserve punishment for what you did, but that’s okay. You’re already facing your sins. You already are suffering from your guilt.”

“Will I ever feel better?”

“No. I hope you don’t. Because this is your penance. And if it isn’t your penance anymore, then even worse things will happen to you.”

“Like what?”

She sniffles. I didn’t realize she was crying too. Under the thick quilt, as the rain pounds on the metal above, in the darkness of these rotting walls, in her warm arms, she whispers.

“Something I can’t describe.”

I don’t bother to visit my house. I just go straight to school. There’s a new math teacher. I don’t feel any different. I’m disgusting. I don’t deserve to live. But she’s sitting next to me. And I can’t help but feel that things will turn out okay if she continues to sit there.

“Karsten?”

I still don’t remember the substitute’s name.

“Principal Harshaw wants you in his office.”

As I walk in, I can see him watching me through the glass. The receptionist tells me to go in.

“Karsten, how’re you doing today?”

I shrug.

“Same as always, I guess.”

“Would you like to take a seat?”

“What’s this about?”

He looks over some papers on his desk while I sit. He clears his throat.

“Karsten, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need honest answers to them.”

I nod.

“Can you do that for me?”

I nod.

“Why were you in school before the bell on the day Colin Reese died?”

And everything, every face I’ve put on and all the times I’ve said that I’m fine in the last few days, all of it shatters in an instant. I can’t say a word. I can’t move. Principal Harshaw stares me down.

“Why?”

I barely stammer out a response. I can’t breathe.

“I- I just wanted to be in class early.”

He looks down at his papers.

“You were seen on the security cameras walking to your first period class. And your first class is math, correct? With Mr. Reese as your teacher?”

I nod.

“And he began to exhibit effects of an overdose only minutes after the bell rang, at which time I believe you were back to waiting outside with your fellow students?”

I’m not doing good. My vision is starting to blur. My throat is so dry and I almost vomit just spitting out the words.

“I saw Mr. Reese before the bell rang and he told me to go back outside and wait.”

He considers this for a moment, before pursing his lips and nodding.

“And are you aware of Mr. Reese’s past with substance use before that day?”

“No.”

He folds his hands in front of him.

“There isn’t one. I’ve known him since our days in high school. He’s never tasted beer.”

I need to get out of here. Right now.

“Karsten, I don’t believe Colin Reese died of an accidental drug overdose. I believe he was poisoned. And I am working with the police to figure out who may have done it.”

He’s going to figure out that it was me. I can’t be here anymore.

“And right now-”

The window.

“You are one of our prime suspects.”

I stand up quick. He’s startled, and our eyes lock for a moment before he reaches for his phone. I push back the chair, and run as fast as I can at his office window. My body crashes through it and into the bushes outside. The world is spinning. I look back and see him staring at me through the broken glass. He’s on the phone, shouting into it, but no words come out of his mouth.

I run faster than I’ve ever run before.

Through the parking lot, through the grassy field, through the intersections. Empty suburban roads at noon. Stores I’ve never shopped in. Houses I’ve never seen on streets I’ve never heard of. I don’t care that I’m being watched. Laughing couples with filled baby strollers. Half-morning joggers oblivious to the world outside of their earbuds. Bus drivers and the guy scratching his nose waiting for the left turn signal. I don’t care. They are, and everything is, fuzzy blur. I just need to escape. This town. This world.

I stop for a moment in front of my house. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in this exact same spot, with a backpack on my shoulders, terrified to open up the door. But for the first time in my life, the red bricks don’t scare me. I continue to run. Past the house, past the front door, past the dirty dishes and laundry, past the people who call themselves my family. Even though it’s tucked away deep inside of me, there’s a part of me that feels a bit guilty. Guilty for the stress they’ll go through with the police more than anything you could maybe call love. But the rest of me is ecstatic. Because for the first time in my life, I can confidently say that I will never see them again.

There is only one other place to go.

Hell is waiting for me.

A few hours go by before she opens up the wooden door.

“We need to leave. Right now.”

She stops in the doorway.

“Are you bleeding?”

“I can’t stay in this town anymore. They’ll find me. You need to pack your things, and we need to leave.”

“Karsten-”

“I don’t know if there is a bus we can take or if taking a bus would be a bad idea because then they can find me or if we can just walk but I have no idea where the next town is but we need to go. Right now.”

She closes the door behind her.

“Who found out that it was you?”

My hands are shaking. Walking back and forth across the cabin has been helping.

“Principal Harshaw. He saw me on the cameras. They know it’s me. The police, everyone.”

“So you want to just leave? Run away?”

Just keep walking. It helps.

“What other option do we have?”

“Karsten. You can’t run away from what you did. There’s a piece of glass stuck in your cheek. And you arm. Let me-”

I push her off of me.

“Yes I can. We can.”

“No, we can’t.

“Yes we can!”

She sighs and sits on the bed.

“How are we going to get food? Water? A place to sleep? Do you have any money?”

I check my pockets.

“I have a few dollars. The rest is in my piggy bank at home.”

“Did you even go home first? What about your family?”

“I don’t care about them.”

She looks surprised.

“You don’t care to even say goodbye to them?”

“No. They aren’t my family. I don’t have anyone who cares about me.”

“What about me? I care about you.”

“You’re the only one.”

She covers her mouth. But it isn’t in shock. It isn’t to cover a gasp. She tries to stifle it. But she can’t help it. I’ve never seen her laugh this hard.

“Why are you laughing?”

She really tries to hold it in. But she can’t.

“You want to throw away everything? Family, school, your normal life here that you want back so desperately, you are going to throw it all away, leave everything behind…for me?”

She can’t stop laughing.

I don’t care what she thinks. I don’t care if she laughs at me. She’s the only one that understands me. She’s the only one that loves me. So even if it’s funny, I don’t care. I stare at the drawings on the wall. Mr. Reese’s face stares back at me.

She stops laughing suddenly.

“Hey, Karsten?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you bring Kyle with you?”

“No? Why would I do that?”

“Huh. Well, he’s been watching us through the window for a while now.”

“Get him.”

Footsteps blur into rhythmic thumping. Everything else around me, the trees, the weeds, I can’t see it. I’m catching up.

He stumbles over a tree root and I tackle him to the mud. He squirms, kicking dirt into my face. He doesn’t sound anything like Kyle. His voice is too high, too shrill.

“LET ME GO! LET ME GO!”

No, I’ve never heard him like this before.

“Karsten!”

“You were going to tell them, weren’t you? Tell them where I am? Where she is?”

“I just wanted to know! I just wanted to find you!”

I grab a rock and the back of his head makes a loud crack. His face lands straight in the mud. He groans and stops squirming a bit. I drop the bloody rock and it sinks into the ground. I grab the back of his shirt.

“You have to come with me back to the cabin.”

I pull him up and he groans again. He isn’t moving his arms or legs, they’re just limp, and his head hangs down. I think I hit him a bit too hard. But it’s okay. He isn’t going to tell anyone now. I lift up under his arms and start to drag him back to the cabin. It takes a long time, and he barely moves or says a word all the way there. It smells disgusting in here. My head hurts. I dump him on the floor. She looks over at me.

“Are you okay?”

Only then does the pain begin to set in. My hands are bleeding. There are still pieces of glass in my knuckles. She leans close and touches my forehead. Her fingers come back red. But it’s okay. No time for that right now.

“What’re you going to do with him?”

She touches my forehead again.

“Me? We do things together, right?”

I nod. She turns from me and looks at the boy on the floor.

“First, we tie him up.”

It takes a while, but by the end of it, Kyle’s arm is strapped to the bedpost. I had to use my belt as rope. His head is slumped and blood drips down his neck. She cleans him. I don’t know why she would clean him. He barely responds to anything. I don’t think he can hear us.

“You hit him pretty hard.”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t let him go, you know. The school definitely has the police looking for you too now. Maybe they even got Kyle to look for you and that’s how he found us. Or he followed you.”

“Okay.”

She turns to me.

“So what do you think we should do with him?”

I don’t know. I think I’m not really thinking right. I don’t say anything.

She stands up and looks at my forehead.

She pinches something and pulls it out. Bloody glass. She flicks it away. She stands up on her toes and kisses me. I can feel blood dripping down over my eyebrow. I wipe it from my eye.

“Karsten, I think we can’t let him go.”

“Do you want me to kill him?”

She looks down at him.

“No. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

She looks back at me.

“But there is something else you need to do.”

She walks to the corner of the cabin. She grabs a pencil and paper. She hands them to me.

“I want you to draw him.”

Ears. Hair. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. I scribble. I draw the blood on his neck. I draw his eyelids half open and the white inside them. We don’t have any colours right now so it’s just black and white. She tells me to tape it up next to the drawing of Mr. Reese. I do.

“Why did I draw Kyle?”

“Karsten, I need to talk to you about something important to me.”

Okay. I sit down on the bed next to Kyle. He hasn’t moved in a while now.

“Do you remember when I asked you if you believed in karma?”

It’s hard to forget that night.

“Do you still believe in it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why I made you kill Mr. Reese?”

“No.”

“It’s because it made you just like me.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Okay. Let me explain.”

She sits down on the floor and looks up at me.

“Karma says, when you do something bad, bad things will happen to you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And those bad things are always much worse than whatever you did to earn them. And they could come at any time. They could come to you at any time, and you never know when they will. Does that scare you? That inevitably, horrible, horrific things will happen to you and you have no idea when they will?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. It’s my greatest fear. I’ve done bad things, Karsten. My whole life I’ve done bad things. I stole five dollars from my dad’s wallet. I kicked the dog. I don’t remember it very well but I think I hurt the people I cared about with things I said. And one day I realized that all the bad things I’ve done, they’re all going to come back to me. And I’ll never know when they will or how they will.”

“I’ve done bad things too.”

“Yes, you have. But that’s the thing. That’s the solution to karma. See, I’d rather rip the band-aid off right away. Why wait for bad things to happen to you, which you don’t know what they could even be, when you can make the bad things happen to yourself, and which you’ll know exactly what they are? You have to do the worst bad thing to yourself. And do you know what’s the worst bad thing that you can feel? The number one worst feeling in the whole world? Do you know what it is, Karsten?”

“What?”

“Guilt.”

She looks over at the boy tied to the bedpost.

“Do you feel guilty for hurting Kyle?”

I look over at him. No more blood is going down his head. It stopped.

“I guess.”

“You feel guilty for killing Mr. Reese, right?”

“Yes.”

She claps her hands.

“Then you get it! That is your punishment! For all the bad things that you’ve done, you are serving yourself the punishment, instead of something else! Instead of karma! You do bad things, bad things will get done to you. But if you do bad things, then make up for it by giving yourself the worst thing, which is guilt, then there’s nothing worse that karma can do to you, right? It’s forgiveness. It’s penance. That’s how it was taught to me. But you still did another bad thing to cause that guilt. And sometimes that bad thing that you did to cause that guilt is bad enough that you have to do even more to erase it. And sometimes you forget some of the bad things you’ve done, and that won’t fly, no no. You have to remember, so you can always feel the guilt. Because if you forget that guilt, then it gives karma a chance to sneak in and hurt you. And whatever karma does will be so much worse. So you need to draw their faces, see? That’s why I made you draw Kyle’s face. And Mr. Reese. So you can never forget the guilt. You understand?”

I nod.

She stands up and wipes her hands. She sits on the bed next to me, like she always does.

“Karsten, my whole life I’ve never had anyone that is like me. They all do bad things and continue like nothing happened. I don’t get it. I don’t get someone that can live with themselves and think that they won’t be punished for what they’ve done. But I saw it in your eyes on the first day we met. You know punishment. I knew you did.”

I nod.

“And now you know penance. And finally, I have someone just like me.”

She kisses me. The blood on my face smears on her lips when she pulls away. She wipes the tears from her eyes.

“I have to ask you one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think you’ve done enough in your life to deserve the life that you have?”

“No.”

She nods.

“Let’s leave this place.”

We leave Kyle strapped to the bed in hell. As we lock the door behind us, the handle feels different in my hand. I look down at it. It’s made of skin.

We walk the opposite way from the path we usually take to the cabin. Further into the marsh. Deeper into the fog.

“Where are we going?”

She continues to walk. She doesn’t look back at me.

“There is a hill on the outskirts of town. Once you make it over that hill, there are

other towns. And forests. We can live out there. We just need to get over the hill.”

“Do we have any food?”

“No. Or water. But we’ll find some. Just walk with me.”

The fog grows thicker. The trees grow wetter. The mud becomes squishy grass. I look behind us. I can’t see hell in the distance.

Eventually, after a few days, there is a hill in the distance.

“Is that it?”

She sits down on a moldy log. Her back slips on it.

“I’ve always wanted to see what’s over that hill. Ever since I was a kid.”

Even in the night, it’s a towering black mass. A giant standing over me.

“Do you want to hold hands?”

She smiles.

“Yeah.”

We follow the road. Walking alongside it. It’s cold. We shiver in our hoodies. For every headlight that passes by, I freeze up, thinking they will stop. But they don’t. No one stops for two homeless teenagers walking up through beaten dirt. It begins to rain. And the cold begins to trickle beneath my clothes and beneath my skin. I can feel it in my veins. In my bones. Frigid ice. She hasn’t looked at me once. Hasn’t said a word. Once the rain started, she took back her hand and wrapped her arms around herself. She hasn’t even tripped up once. Hasn’t hesitated for a second. There is a bus stop up ahead.

We stand close together, trying to share any warmth we can between us as the rain pounds on the glass above. We don’t have money for the bus.

“Should we hitchhike?”

She nods with her head buried in my jacket.

I wipe the wet hair from my eyes and stick my thumb out on the road.

No one stops. My hand is shaking from the cold.

No one stops. I get splashed with mud from a truck.

No one stops. The bus came, and left.

And then.

After hours of waiting.

Someone stops.

It’s a black sedan. I wouldn’t have seen it if it wasn’t for the headlights. We hurry into the back.

She slides in past me and I pull the door shut.

“Thank you so much.”

“No problem. You kids alright? You look frozen.”

She doesn’t say a word, just turns her head to the window and shivers. I stare out through the frosted glass on my side.

“We are, I think.”

“I got blankets in the trunk, if you can reach back there. This late at night, where’re you two headed?”

I reach behind us and grab them. Purple wool. I lay it over her. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’m not really sure. We just knew we needed to get over the hill.”

“To leave this place?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.”

Fuck.

“Y’know, we’ve actually been on the lookout for two teens on the run. Male and female, a boy with messy brown hair. I’d say, in my opinion, you look just about what the sketch described. What a coincidence, right?”

And only as we begin to drive over the crest of the giant’s head do I realize that there is a metal fence between the backseat and our driver. Only as the tires cut through slicked asphalt do I realize that I hadn’t noticed the dull sirens on the roof.

“Yeah.”

“So where’d you say you were headed again?”

“I don’t know, officer. We just wanted to leave.”

His eyes flick to me in the mirror.

“You wanted to leave bad enough to walk through all this? And end up how’d you ended up?”

I look over at her. She hasn’t moved.

“We just needed to go.”

He nods.

“Do your parents know that you two left?”

“No. I don’t want them to know.”

“Is that why you wanted to leave? ’Cause your parents?”

“Part of it, yeah.”

He nods again.

“So, you want me to drop you off at a motel or somethin’?”

“Yes please, sir.”

“You got any food?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn shame. I’ll get you something.”

I look at her again. She still hasn’t moved. Is he serious? Is he really not going to arrest us?

“Son, can I ask you somethin’? And can you promise me now to be fully honest with me, your hand to God?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Are you two the teens we’re looking for? Are you on the run after breaking a window at your school?”

Why hasn’t she moved? Why hasn’t she said something? I can’t do this on my own.

“Son?”

She isn’t going to do anything. She isn’t going to say anything. She isn’t going to say anything.

“You alright back there?”

She isn’t going to say anything. I need to say something. I need to be the one to say something and decide for myself what I’m going to do. What am I going to do? What do I say?

“You need me to pull over? I can’t really on this highway.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I take a deep breath. For the first time in my life, I think for the first time ever, I choose to make a decision for myself.

“Yes, we are the two teenagers you’ve been looking for.”

And before the cop can say another word, she kicks open the door of the car and jumps out onto the road.

The tires screech and claw desperately at the road. Everything slides sideways. My head slams against the metal cage and the car finally stops. The cop pushes open his door and runs out into the rain. I sit still for a while. Until everything stops spinning. And then I do the same.

We drove off the highway and onto the grass. Even with my hand above my eyes, it’s a struggle to see anything through the fog. But I follow the road back. Each pair of headlights that blur past shower me in blinding white. It takes a while of dragging myself back along the road before I see her. The cop had pulled her off to the side, into the ditch, so that cars could pass. Her hair is soaked in mud. She isn’t moving. He sees me and stands. He puts his hand out as if to stop me from coming closer.

“Kid, get back to the goddamn car. Let me deal with this.”

I don’t really want to listen to what he’s saying. I almost slip down the ditch.

I crouch next to her. Her clothes are torn up and underneath I can see her skin all chewed up and spat out. Her legs are bent the wrong ways. Is she dead? No. She’s looking at me right now. Her mouth is moving. Hard to hear over all this rain. I lean close so she can whisper in my ear.

“Karsten.”

“Yes?”

She coughs. It isn’t a good cough. She is going to die here. In a ditch filled with mud on the side of a highway. The cop pulls at my shoulder. It looks like he’s yelling at me. Can’t really tell.

“Karsten.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes lull back and forth.

“I don’t want to die.”

The cop throws his hands up, and walks back towards the cruiser. He’s speaking into his radio. Her hand is in a puddle.

“Should I bring you somewhere else?”

She opens and closes her mouth, lips peeling back from each other. Short gasps.

“Where?”

She’s breathing fast. There’s only one place I can think of.

“The cabin?”

She screams.

She screams over and over. Rocking herself back and forth across the dirt. She can’t move her legs.

The cop turns, and starts yelling into the radio.

“Where then?”

Her head drops back to the grass. Her body heaves with sobs.

“It hurts.”

I don’t think she’s going to make it. And I have to leave before that ambulance comes, I have to go. I can’t get caught for all of this. She helped, but she’s on her own.

“I have to go.”

“What?”

She chokes. All I can see in her eyes is fear. It’s sad, really. Sad to look at and pity in a sort of way, I guess. But I have to go.

“What do you mean you have to go?”

“They’re going to be here soon. I can’t stay with you.”

I stand up to leave. She grabs my arm.

“What? What does that mean?”

“I can’t do anything more.”

She squeezes me harder.

“You’re leaving me here alone? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. I am.”

Snot runs down her lips. I don’t think she looks pretty with her hair like this.

“What about everything? What about us?”

“I can’t just stay here.”

I rip my sleeve away from her. She rolls onto her side as I start to walk away.

“What?”

I don’t bother to look back at her.

“Karsten!”

I’m almost to the treeline. The cop is back at the cruiser, waiting for paramedics. I have to go now, before he sees me.

“You can’t leave me! I need you!”

I turn back to her. She pulls at the grass, crawling towards me. Dragging her crushed legs and mangled flesh. She wipes the tears from her eyes with one arm.

“Do you even care about me? Did you ever feel anything for me? Did you ever even care about all the people you hurt?”

I stand at the trees. Watching this beat up girl pull herself towards me. I think she would agree with me, that she doesn’t really deserve to live all that much. Maybe this is the punishment she always tried to prevent and I caused it. Maybe the right thing is being able to stand on your own feet. But all in all, she’s never been able to be on her own. She needs me.

“Did you ever even care?”

I shrug.

“I dunno.”

It takes a long time to get back. I had a general idea of which direction the cabin is, but any more than that was just a lucky guess. I’m not sure how long I walk for, but the rain stops at some point. And eventually.

I see it.

It looks different than when we left.

The sky is gray. It’s windy. I bundle myself up in my wet hoodie. The cold gnaws at my skin.

There is a noise coming from the cabin. It’s a heartbeat. No, it’s not windy. The wind grows stronger with every thump. The grass blows away from the cabin. Ripples in the swamp. Trees shudder. And even from here, I can see the walls of hell vibrate with every beat. The world shakes. Whatever is waiting for me in there, whatever divine punishment or karma is behind that small door, I need to meet it. On my terms. I will not live by someone else’s hand anymore. I refuse to be another puppet, another son. I never needed her. She just showed me what it means to be free. And she was never anything more than that.

Every step towards the cabin takes all of my strength. The wind blows harder, until I feel my hair run back towards my scalp, until it claws at my eyes. It takes all of the effort I can muster to put one foot in front of the other, to drag it through each wall of pure force pushing me away from the cabin. Each step takes hours. Each movement is constricted and bound. I can’t take it.

The wind pushes me to my knees. I can’t even fall towards the cabin. The air keeps me suspended in it. But I can lie here for a while. Until I get my strength up. There’s rustling in the weeds.

The cop, gun in hand. He doesn’t see me laying in this tall grass. The wind whips at his hair and he covers his face with an arm. He shouts over it.

“Karsten? That’s your name right?”

He knows I’m somewhere here. Where else would I go?

He starts towards the cabin but struggles as much as I did.

“You killed a man, Karsten! I can’t just let you go!”

I can hear his footsteps now. Even over the noise.

“Fuck. What the fuck is that?”

It’s louder now too. The beat. Pulsating. Deep and raw. Worming its way through me.

“Karsten! Nadia is dead! Come out now with your hands up!”

He is standing right next to me. Gun pointed at the cabin door. He looks down.

“There you are.”

He reaches his arm down to grab me. Slowly pushing through the wind. It’s much

harder than it was before. It starts to pull at my clothes, my hair. A dull pressure against my head. He grits his teeth and the wind rips at his sleeve. His arm splits. It pushes through him. Through his chest, his head. And in a second, with just a soft hiss escaping from between his teeth, like a deflating balloon, he flattens under the wind. Flat skull, flat chest. And with his newfound lightness, the wind carries him off. I didn’t know him anyway.

After a while, the wind dies back down to what it was before. But the pressure took its toll. I can’t just lay here forever. I need to know what is inside hell. I need to know what it is that kept her glued to it for so long. But I think, I’m sure, that I already know. Hand by hand, pull by painful shaking pull, I drag myself through the thicket of swampgrass. Just as she did towards me. And just as I am doing towards my epoch.

I claw up the door. Nails splitting on splintered wood. I reach, and even under the full strength of each beat, even while I can see my own skin ripple and slide across my body with every vibration, the tips of my fingers slide on the handle, and I fall forwards through the open door.

And it stops. The wind, the vibrations. The thunderous pulses burrowed in my skull reduced to chest throbs and nauseous palpitations. I don’t want to look up from the floorboards. There is still a deep, intrinsic part of me that doesn’t want to face what I deserve.

But it calls. And whether it’s by the hand of fate itself or just some remnant of self-destruction, I stand up, and look straight ahead.

The cabin is mostly the way we had left it. Drawings strewn everywhere. Metal framed bed. The belt that held Kyle is dangling, torn apart. He lies on his back on the mattress. Covering the walls, spreading outwards from the center of the ceiling is a web. An intricate web of dark veins, tangled, but purposeful. They weave between each other and the cracks in the wood. Knotted bloated moss that shudders and twitches every time the thick fluid passes through them. And in the center of it all, the source of whatever is pumping through those veins, sits in the middle of hell, suspended in the air, dangling from its arteries.

A heart.

A massive muscled heart. Covered in bright welts and nests of festering pimples, dripping buckets of pus onto the floor below. And every inch of its skin is covered in holes. Some small and oval, others large and round. Some protrude like wet stumps and all of them are black enough that they run through like cavities. The heart is layered in these holes, but I can’t see through to the other side. Like the holes lead not to the meat inside but to a place much deeper, much darker and somewhere someone like me should never see.

With each beat, the heart throbs violently. The holes gape and widen, and shrink down again. And with each thump, the holes whistle. Air sucked through with each inhale, and pushed back out, with a bit of spit, on every exhale.

The holes breathed.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

Kyle’s words floated from the bed. I still can’t stand up enough to see him.

“There’s strings in my soul, Karsten.”

He’s dead. I killed him. He can’t speak.

“There’s strings pulling at me even now.”

He twitches, and his body is pulled up from the bed. Invisible strings tugging him to sit. And those wires turn his head to look at me. His glassy eyes roll in their stiff sockets. His face is pale and sick. The wires lift his limp hand up, puppeteering it to place a finger on his lip. And his words are raspy and come without his lips moving.

“Doesn’t this haunt you?”

I shake my head.

Kyle’s body shivers, and the strings keep his head lifted. The blood on his neck is dry.

“You don’t feel anything for this boy, Karsten?”

My throat is so dry. But I muster all I can to spit the words.

“I won’t draw her face.”

The heart pauses for a second, missing half a beat momentarily. The breaths grow shaky and irregular. But it recovers in a second. Kyle’s body moves again.

“Won’t you?”

“I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

Kyle’s body laughs. Tries to anyway, it just shakes. One of the wires loses grip for a moment, and Kyle’s elbow droops.

“Don’t you get it? I’m comeuppance. I’ll follow you, everywhere you go, everywhere you think I won’t find you, forever and for the rest of your life. She warned you, didn’t she?”

“I know.”

“And you aren’t scared? You don’t want to try praying to me, like she did?”

I push myself to my feet. The rest of Kyle’s body is flayed open, skin stretched and spread to each end of the mattress like beige bedding. Tightly pinned on each corner.

“No.”

Every piece of every part of destruction and feverish bodily and mental ruin I’ve caused breathes and oozes septic onto the wooden floor and despite it all, I turn my back to the hive. Despite what she thought, or what fate might think, none of it really matters. It’ll stalk me wherever I choose to go. Despite everything, there’s nothing left for me here. I open the door to bleached grass. Kyle’s body screeches.

“You don’t feel anything for what you did?”

“I’ll get what’s coming to me.”

And with one last look at the breathing heart, I step out of hell. The wind stops. I can hear the wood splintering behind me. The loud snaps of tendrils breaking free. I know that if I look behind me, I will see karma suspended in the sky, its seamed fingers hooked into tree branches and power lines. I will see waves of force pump out of it with every breath, distorting and wrinkling the air until its gasps reach me. The holes opening and not quite closing again. But I don’t look back. I just keep walking.

In one final attempt, it speaks in her voice. An imitation, but close enough to the mark. Echoing through the trees, cascading down every wet branch and wildflower. Dripping with malice.

“Do you think you’ve done enough in your life to deserve the life you have?”

And as I walk through the trees, each step leading me further and further away from the cabin, the drawings, Kyle and everything I’ve ever done, I answer.

“Yes.”

That’s it for Flesh Hive! I may revisit this style of weekly chapters in the future, depending on if you guys like this type of series.

New stuff! I’m been working on something small, a little bit of content for you all before school really gets going, but there will be lots more on the way. Especially in October, look out for then. For now, I’ll leave you with a title and a rough date:

MAELSTROM

Will be out by the end of September, more info soon :)

Flesh Hive — PART 4: Mortis

Karsten faces his sins. THE FINAL PART. Word count: 2329

“Doesn’t this haunt you?”

Flesh Hive

PART 4: Mortis

The tires screech and claw desperately at the road. Everything slides sideways. My head slams against the metal cage and the car finally stops. The cop pushes open his door and runs out into the rain. I sit still for a while. Until everything stops spinning. And then I do the same.

We drove off the highway and onto the grass. Even with my hand above my eyes, it’s a struggle to see anything through the fog. But I follow the road back. Each pair of headlights that blur past shower me in blinding white. It takes a while of dragging myself back along the road before I see her. The cop had pulled her off to the side, into the ditch, so that cars could pass. Her hair is soaked in mud. She isn’t moving. He sees me and stands. He puts his hand out as if to stop me from coming closer.

“Kid, get back to the goddamn car. Let me deal with this.”

I don’t really want to listen to what he’s saying. I almost slip down the ditch.

I crouch next to her. Her clothes are torn up and underneath I can see her skin all chewed up and spat out. Her legs are bent the wrong ways. Is she dead? No. She’s looking at me right now. Her mouth is moving. Hard to hear over all this rain. I lean close so she can whisper in my ear.

“Karsten.”

“Yes?”

She coughs. It isn’t a good cough. She is going to die here. In a ditch filled with mud on the side of a highway. The cop pulls at my shoulder. It looks like he’s yelling at me. Can’t really tell.

“Karsten.”

“Yes.”

Her eyes lull back and forth.

“I don’t want to die.”

The cop throws his hands up, and walks back towards the cruiser. He’s speaking into his radio. Her hand is in a puddle.

“Should I bring you somewhere else?”

She opens and closes her mouth, lips peeling back from each other. Short gasps.

“Where?”

She’s breathing fast. There’s only one place I can think of.

“The cabin?”

She screams.

She screams over and over. Rocking herself back and forth across the dirt. She can’t move her legs.

The cop turns, and starts yelling into the radio.

“Where then?”

Her head drops back to the grass. Her body heaves with sobs.

“It hurts.”

I don’t think she’s going to make it. And I have to leave before that ambulance comes, I have to go. I can’t get caught for all of this. She helped, but she’s on her own.

“I have to go.”

“What?”

She chokes. All I can see in her eyes is fear. It’s sad, really. Sad to look at and pity in a sort of way, I guess. But I have to go.

“What do you mean you have to go?”

“They’re going to be here soon. I can’t stay with you.”

I stand up to leave. She grabs my arm.

“What? What does that mean?”

“I can’t do anything more.”

She squeezes me harder.

“You’re leaving me here alone? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes. I am.”

Snot runs down her lips. I don’t think she looks pretty with her hair like this.

“What about everything? What about us?”

“I can’t just stay here.”

I rip my sleeve away from her. She rolls onto her side as I start to walk away.

“What?”

I don’t bother to look back at her.

“Karsten!”

I’m almost to the treeline. The cop is back at the cruiser, waiting for paramedics. I have to go now, before he sees me.

“You can’t leave me! I need you!”

I turn back to her. She pulls at the grass, crawling towards me. Dragging her crushed legs and mangled flesh. She wipes the tears from her eyes with one arm.

“Do you even care about me? Did you ever feel anything for me? Did you ever even care about all the people you hurt?”

I stand at the trees. Watching this beat up girl pull herself towards me. I think she would agree with me, that she doesn’t really deserve to live all that much. Maybe this is the punishment she always tried to prevent and I caused it. Maybe the right thing is being able to stand on your own feet. But all in all, she’s never been able to be on her own. She needs me.

“Did you ever even care?”

I shrug.

“I dunno.”

It takes a long time to get back. I had a general idea of which direction the cabin is, but any more than that was just a lucky guess. I’m not sure how long I walk for, but the rain stops at some point. And eventually.

I see it.

It looks different than when we left.

The sky is gray. It’s windy. I bundle myself up in my wet hoodie. The cold gnaws at my skin.

There is a noise coming from the cabin. It’s a heartbeat. No, it’s not windy. The wind grows stronger with every thump. The grass blows away from the cabin. Ripples in the swamp. Trees shudder. And even from here, I can see the walls of hell vibrate with every beat. The world shakes. Whatever is waiting for me in there, whatever divine punishment or karma is behind that small door, I need to meet it. On my terms. I will not live by someone else’s hand anymore. I refuse to be another puppet, another son. I never needed her. She just showed me what it means to be free. And she was never anything more than that.

Every step towards the cabin takes all of my strength. The wind blows harder, until I feel my hair run back towards my scalp, until it claws at my eyes. It takes all of the effort I can muster to put one foot in front of the other, to drag it through each wall of pure force pushing me away from the cabin. Each step takes hours. Each movement is constricted and bound. I can’t take it.

The wind pushes me to my knees. I can’t even fall towards the cabin. The air keeps me suspended in it. But I can lie here for a while. Until I get my strength up. There’s rustling in the weeds.

The cop, gun in hand. He doesn’t see me laying in this tall grass. The wind whips at his hair and he covers his face with an arm. He shouts over it.

“Karsten? That’s your name right?”

He knows I’m somewhere here. Where else would I go?

He starts towards the cabin but struggles as much as I did.

“You killed a man, Karsten! I can’t just let you go!”

I can hear his footsteps now. Even over the noise.

“Fuck. What the fuck is that?”

It’s louder now too. The beat. Pulsating. Deep and raw. Worming its way through me.

“Karsten! Nadia is dead! Come out now with your hands up!”

He is standing right next to me. Gun pointed at the cabin door. He looks down.

“There you are.”

He reaches his arm down to grab me. Slowly pushing through the wind. It’s much

harder than it was before. It starts to pull at my clothes, my hair. A dull pressure against my head. He grits his teeth and the wind rips at his sleeve. His arm splits. It pushes through him. Through his chest, his head. And in a second, with just a soft hiss escaping from between his teeth, like a deflating balloon, he flattens under the wind. Flat skull, flat chest. And with his newfound lightness, the wind carries him off. I didn’t know him anyway.

After a while, the wind dies back down to what it was before. But the pressure took its toll. I can’t just lay here forever. I need to know what is inside hell. I need to know what it is that kept her glued to it for so long. But I think, I’m sure, that I already know. Hand by hand, pull by painful shaking pull, I drag myself through the thicket of swampgrass. Just as she did towards me. And just as I am doing towards my epoch.

I claw up the door. Nails splitting on splintered wood. I reach, and even under the full strength of each beat, even while I can see my own skin ripple and slide across my body with every vibration, the tips of my fingers slide on the handle, and I fall forwards through the open door.

And it stops. The wind, the vibrations. The thunderous pulses burrowed in my skull reduced to chest throbs and nauseous palpitations. I don’t want to look up from the floorboards. There is still a deep, intrinsic part of me that doesn’t want to face what I deserve.

But it calls. And whether it’s by the hand of fate itself or just some remnant of self-destruction, I stand up, and look straight ahead.

The cabin is mostly the way we had left it. Drawings strewn everywhere. Metal framed bed. The belt that held Kyle is dangling, torn apart. He lies on his back on the mattress. Covering the walls, spreading outwards from the center of the ceiling is a web. An intricate web of dark veins, tangled, but purposeful. They weave between each other and the cracks in the wood. Knotted bloated moss that shudders and twitches every time the thick fluid passes through them. And in the center of it all, the source of whatever is pumping through those veins, sits in the middle of hell, suspended in the air, dangling from its arteries.

A heart.

A massive muscled heart. Covered in bright welts and nests of festering pimples, dripping buckets of pus onto the floor below. And every inch of its skin is covered in holes. Some small and oval, others large and round. Some protrude like wet stumps and all of them are black enough that they run through like cavities. The heart is layered in these holes, but I can’t see through to the other side. Like the holes lead not to the meat inside but to a place much deeper, much darker and somewhere someone like me should never see.

With each beat, the heart throbs violently. The holes gape and widen, and shrink down again. And with each thump, the holes whistle. Air sucked through with each inhale, and pushed back out, with a bit of spit, on every exhale.

The holes breathed.

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

Kyle’s words floated from the bed. I still can’t stand up enough to see him.

“There’s strings in my soul, Karsten.”

He’s dead. I killed him. He can’t speak.

“There’s strings pulling at me even now.”

He twitches, and his body is pulled up from the bed. Invisible strings tugging him to sit. And those wires turn his head to look at me. His glassy eyes roll in their stiff sockets. His face is pale and sick. The wires lift his limp hand up, puppeteering it to place a finger on his lip. And his words are raspy and come without his lips moving.

“Doesn’t this haunt you?”

I shake my head.

Kyle’s body shivers, and the strings keep his head lifted. The blood on his neck is dry.

“You don’t feel anything for this boy, Karsten?”

My throat is so dry. But I muster all I can to spit the words.

“I won’t draw her face.”

The heart pauses for a second, missing half a beat momentarily. The breaths grow shaky and irregular. But it recovers in a second. Kyle’s body moves again.

“Won’t you?”

“I’m going to burn this place to the ground.”

Kyle’s body laughs. Tries to anyway, it just shakes. One of the wires loses grip for a moment, and Kyle’s elbow droops.

“Don’t you get it? I’m comeuppance. I’ll follow you, everywhere you go, everywhere you think I won’t find you, forever and for the rest of your life. She warned you, didn’t she?”

“I know.”

“And you aren’t scared? You don’t want to try praying to me, like she did?”

I push myself to my feet. The rest of Kyle’s body is flayed open, skin stretched and spread to each end of the mattress like beige bedding. Tightly pinned on each corner.

“No.”

Every piece of every part of destruction and feverish bodily and mental ruin I’ve caused breathes and oozes septic onto the wooden floor and despite it all, I turn my back to the hive. Despite what she thought, or what fate might think, none of it really matters. It’ll stalk me wherever I choose to go. Despite everything, there’s nothing left for me here. I open the door to bleached grass. Kyle’s body screeches.

“You don’t feel anything for what you did?”

“I’ll get what’s coming to me.”

And with one last look at the breathing heart, I step out of hell. The wind stops. I can hear the wood splintering behind me. The loud snaps of tendrils breaking free. I know that if I look behind me, I will see karma suspended in the sky, its seamed fingers hooked into tree branches and power lines. I will see waves of force pump out of it with every breath, distorting and wrinkling the air until its gasps reach me. The holes opening and not quite closing again. But I don’t look back. I just keep walking.

In one final attempt, it speaks in her voice. An imitation, but close enough to the mark. Echoing through the trees, cascading down every wet branch and wildflower. Dripping with malice.

“Do you think you’ve done enough in your life to deserve the life you have?”

And as I walk through the trees, each step leading me further and further away from the cabin, the drawings, Kyle and everything I’ve ever done, I answer.

“Yes.”

Thank you so much for reading this series! It’s the first I’ve ever done of this kind, and it was really fun! I’m looking forward to possibly doing another chapter-per-week style in the future. For now, I will go back to posting short stories, at a much more frequent rate than they were before (likely bi-weekly).

Also, for the month of October, I’m planning on challenging myself to post a ton of Halloween-themed stories. Not sure what the challenge will be yet (a flash fiction every three days? An anthology with a story every week?) but I will update you all when spooky month starts.

Again, thank you so much (yes you, specifically) for reading through this whole series. I really appreciate it and I hope you enjoyed :)

Flesh Hive — PART 3: Karma

Karsten chooses for himself how to deal with the situation at hand. Word Count: 2381

“Do you think you’ve done enough in your life to deserve the life that you have?”

Flesh Hive

PART 3: Karma

“Get him.”

Footsteps blur into rhythmic thumping. Everything else around me, the trees, the weeds, I can’t see it. I’m catching up.

He stumbles over a tree root and I tackle him to the mud. He squirms, kicking dirt into my face. He doesn’t sound anything like Kyle. His voice is too high, too shrill.

“LET ME GO! LET ME GO!”

No, I’ve never heard him like this before.

“Karsten!”

“You were going to tell them, weren’t you? Tell them where I am? Where she is?”

“I just wanted to know! I just wanted to find you!”

I grab a rock and the back of his head makes a loud crack. His face lands straight in the mud. He groans and stops squirming a bit. I drop the bloody rock and it sinks into the ground. I grab the back of his shirt.

“You have to come with me back to the cabin.”

I pull him up and he groans again. He isn’t moving his arms or legs, they’re just limp, and his head hangs down. I think I hit him a bit too hard. But it’s okay. He isn’t going to tell anyone now. I lift up under his arms and start to drag him back to the cabin. It takes a long time, and he barely moves or says a word all the way there. It smells disgusting in here. My head hurts. I dump him on the floor. She looks over at me.

“Are you okay?”

Only then does the pain begin to set in. My hands are bleeding. There are still pieces of glass in my knuckles. She leans close and touches my forehead. Her fingers come back red. But it’s okay. No time for that right now.

“What’re you going to do with him?”

She touches my forehead again.

“Me? We do things together, right?”

I nod. She turns from me and looks at the boy on the floor.

“First, we tie him up.”

It takes a while, but by the end of it, Kyle’s arm is strapped to the bedpost. I had to use my belt as rope. His head is slumped and blood drips down his neck. She cleans him. I don’t know why she would clean him. He barely responds to anything. I don’t think he can hear us.

“You hit him pretty hard.”

“Yeah.”

“We can’t let him go, you know. The school definitely has the police looking for you too now. Maybe they even got Kyle to look for you and that’s how he found us. Or he followed you.”

“Okay.”

She turns to me.

“So what do you think we should do with him?”

I don’t know. I think I’m not really thinking right. I don’t say anything.

She stands up and looks at my forehead.

She pinches something and pulls it out. Bloody glass. She flicks it away. She stands up on her toes and kisses me. I can feel blood dripping down over my eyebrow. I wipe it from my eye.

“Karsten, I think we can’t let him go.”

“Do you want me to kill him?”

She looks down at him.

“No. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”

She looks back at me.

“But there is something else you need to do.”

She walks to the corner of the cabin. She grabs a pencil and paper. She hands them to me.

“I want you to draw him.”

Ears. Hair. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. I scribble. I draw the blood on his neck. I draw his eyelids half open and the white inside them. We don’t have any colours right now so it’s just black and white. She tells me to tape it up next to the drawing of Mr. Reese. I do.

“Why did I draw Kyle?”

“Karsten, I need to talk to you about something important to me.”

Okay. I sit down on the bed next to Kyle. He hasn’t moved in a while now.

“Do you remember when I asked you if you believed in karma?”

It’s hard to forget that night.

“Do you still believe in it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know why I made you kill Mr. Reese?”

“No.”

“It’s because it made you just like me.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Okay. Let me explain.”

She sits down on the floor and looks up at me.

“Karma says, when you do something bad, bad things will happen to you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And those bad things are always much worse than whatever you did to earn them. And they could come at any time. They could come to you at any time, and you never know when they will. Does that scare you? That inevitably, horrible, horrific things will happen to you and you have no idea when they will?”

“Yes.”

“Me too. It’s my greatest fear. I’ve done bad things, Karsten. My whole life I’ve done bad things. I stole five dollars from my dad’s wallet. I kicked the dog. I don’t remember it very well but I think I hurt the people I cared about with things I said. And one day I realized that all the bad things I’ve done, they’re all going to come back to me. And I’ll never know when they will or how they will.”

“I’ve done bad things too.”

“Yes, you have. But that’s the thing. That’s the solution to karma. See, I’d rather rip the band-aid off right away. Why wait for bad things to happen to you, which you don’t know what they could even be, when you can make the bad things happen to yourself, and which you’ll know exactly what they are? You have to do the worst bad thing to yourself. And do you know what’s the worst bad thing that you can feel? The number one worst feeling in the whole world? Do you know what it is, Karsten?”

“What?”

“Guilt.”

She looks over at the boy tied to the bedpost.

“Do you feel guilty for hurting Kyle?”

I look over at him. No more blood is going down his head. It stopped.

“I guess.”

“You feel guilty for killing Mr. Reese, right?”

“Yes.”

She claps her hands.

“Then you get it! That is your punishment! For all the bad things that you’ve done, you are serving yourself the punishment, instead of something else! Instead of karma! You do bad things, bad things will get done to you. But if you do bad things, then make up for it by giving yourself the worst thing, which is guilt, then there’s nothing worse that karma can do to you, right? It’s forgiveness. It’s penance. That’s how it was taught to me. But you still did another bad thing to cause that guilt. And sometimes that bad thing that you did to cause that guilt is bad enough that you have to do even more to erase it. And sometimes you forget some of the bad things you’ve done, and that won’t fly, no no. You have to remember, so you can always feel the guilt. Because if you forget that guilt, then it gives karma a chance to sneak in and hurt you. And whatever karma does will be so much worse. So you need to draw their faces, see? That’s why I made you draw Kyle’s face. And Mr. Reese. So you can never forget the guilt. You understand?”

I nod.

She stands up and wipes her hands. She sits on the bed next to me, like she always does.

“Karsten, my whole life I’ve never had anyone that is like me. They all do bad things and continue like nothing happened. I don’t get it. I don’t get someone that can live with themselves and think that they won’t be punished for what they’ve done. But I saw it in your eyes on the first day we met. You know punishment. I knew you did.”

I nod.

“And now you know penance. And finally, I have someone just like me.”

She kisses me. The blood on my face smears on her lips when she pulls away. She wipes the tears from her eyes.

“I have to ask you one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“Do you think you’ve done enough in your life to deserve the life that you have?”

“No.”

She nods.

“Let’s leave this place.”

We leave Kyle strapped to the bed in hell. As we lock the door behind us, the handle feels different in my hand. I look down at it. It’s made of skin.

We walk the opposite way from the path we usually take to the cabin. Further into the marsh. Deeper into the fog.

“Where are we going?”

She continues to walk. She doesn’t look back at me.

“There is a hill on the outskirts of town. Once you make it over that hill, there are

other towns. And forests. We can live out there. We just need to get over the hill.”

“Do we have any food?”

“No. Or water. But we’ll find some. Just walk with me.”

The fog grows thicker. The trees grow wetter. The mud becomes squishy grass. I look behind us. I can’t see hell in the distance.

Eventually, after a few days, there is a hill in the distance.

“Is that it?”

She sits down on a moldy log. Her back slips on it.

“I’ve always wanted to see what’s over that hill. Ever since I was a kid.”

Even in the night, it’s a towering black mass. A giant standing over me.

“Do you want to hold hands?”

She smiles.

“Yeah.”

We follow the road. Walking alongside it. It’s cold. We shiver in our hoodies. For every headlight that passes by, I freeze up, thinking they will stop. But they don’t. No one stops for two homeless teenagers walking up through beaten dirt. It begins to rain. And the cold begins to trickle beneath my clothes and beneath my skin. I can feel it in my veins. In my bones. Frigid ice. She hasn’t looked at me once. Hasn’t said a word. Once the rain started, she took back her hand and wrapped her arms around herself. She hasn’t even tripped up once. Hasn’t hesitated for a second. There is a bus stop up ahead.

We stand close together, trying to share any warmth we can between us as the rain pounds on the glass above. We don’t have money for the bus.

“Should we hitchhike?”

She nods with her head buried in my jacket.

I wipe the wet hair from my eyes and stick my thumb out on the road.

No one stops. My hand is shaking from the cold.

No one stops. I get splashed with mud from a truck.

No one stops. The bus came, and left.

And then.

After hours of waiting.

Someone stops.

It’s a black sedan. I wouldn’t have seen it if it wasn’t for the headlights. We hurry into the back.

She slides in past me and I pull the door shut.

“Thank you so much.”

“No problem. You kids alright? You look frozen.”

She doesn’t say a word, just turns her head to the window and shivers. I stare out through the frosted glass on my side.

“We are, I think.”

“I got blankets in the trunk, if you can reach back there. This late at night, where’re you two headed?”

I reach behind us and grab them. Purple wool. I lay it over her. She doesn’t seem to notice.

“I’m not really sure. We just knew we needed to get over the hill.”

“To leave this place?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.”

Fuck.

“Y’know, we’ve actually been on the lookout for two teens on the run. Male and female, a boy with messy brown hair. I’d say, in my opinion, you look just about what the sketch described. What a coincidence, right?”

And only as we begin to drive over the crest of the giant’s head do I realize that there is a metal fence between the backseat and our driver. Only as the tires cut through slicked asphalt do I realize that I hadn’t noticed the dull sirens on the roof.

“Yeah.”

“So where’d you say you were headed again?”

“I don’t know, officer. We just wanted to leave.”

His eyes flick to me in the mirror.

“You wanted to leave bad enough to walk through all this? And end up how’d you ended up?”

I look over at her. She hasn’t moved.

“We just needed to go.”

He nods.

“Do your parents know that you two left?”

“No. I don’t want them to know.”

“Is that why you wanted to leave? ’Cause your parents?”

“Part of it, yeah.”

He nods again.

“So, you want me to drop you off at a motel or somethin’?”

“Yes please, sir.”

“You got any food?”

“No, sir.”

“Damn shame. I’ll get you somethin’.”

I look at her again. She still hasn’t moved. Is he serious? Is he really not going to arrest us?

“Son, can I ask you a question? And can you promise me now to be fully honest with me, your hand to God?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

“Are you two the teens we’re looking for? Are you on the run after breaking a window at your school? And being involved in an investigation concerning the death of a teacher at that same school?”

Why hasn’t she moved? Why hasn’t she said something? I can’t do this on my own.

“Son?”

She isn’t going to do anything. She isn’t going to say anything. She isn’t going to say anything.

“You alright back there?”

She isn’t going to say anything.

I need to say something. I need to be the one to say something and decide for myself what I’m going to do. What am I going to do? What do I say?

“You need me to pull over? I can’t really on this highway.”

“No.”

“Okay.”

I take a deep breath. I’m freezing. My hands are still bleeding. And for the first time in my life, I think for the first time ever, I choose to make a decision for myself.

“Yes, we are the two teenagers you’ve been looking for.”

And before the cop can say another word, she kicks open the door of the car and jumps out onto the road.

THE FINAL PART

PART 4: Mortis
COMING OUT NEXT SUNDAY!

Flesh Hive — PART 2: Penance

Karsten’s guilt consumes him. He only has one person he can turn to. Word Count: 2514

“Oh, Karsten. Don’t drown. There’s nothing for you down there.”

Flesh Hive

PART 2: Penance

Somehow, school continues as usual. My science teacher, whatever her name is, talks about nothing and it goes nowhere. She’s a bit fuzzy. She’s speaking underwater, the words muted and barely slipping through my mind like a river of molasses.

“Did you hear what the paramedics said?”

“My brother said it was a fentanyl overdose. That’s what my brother said anyway.”

“What’s that?”

“I think it’s a drug.”

“Mr. Reese was a junkie? And he was taking drugs at school?”

“I heard he shot up crack under his toenail, yeah some girl from third said she walked in on him after school.”

“Who? Melissa?”

“Yeah.”

“Her tits are huge.”

Everyone found out pretty quick that Mr. Reese died. Principal Harshaw tried to hide it for a bit, but there had to be a funeral. There was no math class today. They didn’t bother with a substitute. As I walked out the front door, she was waiting. Just like everyone else, her words were laced with overwhelming static. I didn’t notice she was talking to me until I was three blocks down from the school. I don’t want to talk to her anyway.

“Are you even listening to me? Karsten? These goddamn dishes aren’t gonna do themselves!”

I trudge up to my bedroom and close the door. Footsteps run up the stairs. I know what’s coming.

“You little fucking brat! You ignore me? Your own mother?”

It hurt just as much as always, but it didn’t feel unfair. It didn’t feel wrong. Maybe I deserved this. Maybe I deserve a lot worse than this. My back is streaked with red as she walks out. Dad comes in a little while after. He says the same things he always says.

“You get it, don’t you? Just, just listen to your mother the next time, okay?”

I lay on the carpet until the moon makes my room glow. Until the pain begins to subside. And oddly, as I pull the blanket up to my chin, I shuffle into an awkward position, so that the nightstand presses into my back. Until the sharp corner digs into my bruised flesh. And oddly, the pain feels right for a shitface like me.

The world creaks on every day. An old slideshow sifting through a disorganized array of images. Click. A snapshot of a park, the edges blurred. Click. A tray of cafeteria food sits in front of me, a distorted purple. Click. A bathroom mirror, the footage burned enough that the person inside of it is just an orange streak. My fingers grow numb and I think I shouldn’t feel anything anyway.

I had a dream last night.

I walked all the way to the cabin and knocked on the door. She opens it up and doesn’t say a word, just invites me inside. She places her glasses on the bed and unwraps her hair from her bun. She slowly strips off all of her clothes, and stands in front of me for a moment, before taking a seat on the bed. She gestures for me to come to her. As I move closer, a deep bass begins to thunder through the room. A noise so thoroughly raw to its core, so thoroughly inhumane, that it roars through every crack in the wooden cabin walls, through every line of every drawing, through her pale eyes and through my veins.

A heartbeat.

It’s too much. I collapse to the floor in front of her, clutching my ears, but my small hands do nothing to prevent it from worming its way inside of me. It grows louder and louder with every second, reverberating through my skull, filling each molecule of my brain with deep, pulsating bass. I can’t stop myself from buckling under the sheer pressure, but I slowly, agonizingly, lift my head to look up at her from the foot of the bed. As the cabin walls bend and pulse, my eyes shift past the metal bed frame, past her crossed legs and bare flesh, to her face, as she smiles down at me.

“Why aren’t you talking to me?”

I’ve been ignoring her every single day, just walking straight home.

“Look at me!”

I keep walking.

“Karsten!”

I just have to keep walking.

“They’re gonna find out eventually!”

I stop walking.

A few students walk by, laughing to themselves. I turn around. She’s standing there, a few steps away, holding her hand out to me.

The cabin stinks. A thick, deeply rotten smell. Something dead. She notices me choke as we walk in.

“Ah, now you smell it.”

I don’t want to speak to her.

“What do you want from me?”

There’s a small puddle in the back corner. She scratches her head.

“I don’t know. Haven’t really figured that one out.”

“I’m done with this. I’m done with this shit.”

“Done with what?”

“With your fucking shit! This cabin! Everything!”

I slump down on the bed.

“I want my life to go back to being normal. Like how it was before.”

She lies down beside me.

“Well, that isn’t going to happen.”

“Shut up.”

“After Mr. Reese-”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

I stand up quickly, pull open the door and run outside. Into the weeds. There’s a thick fog suffocating the trees. My feet plunge into mud, swallowing my ankles. I keep trudging forward. The swamp reaches my waistline. I can’t see anything through the fog. I just keep moving forward. I don’t want to think anymore.

“I don’t want to think anymore.”

“You don’t have to.”

She’s behind me. She’s in the mud too. I don’t want anything to do with her anymore.

“Please leave me alone.”

My cheeks are wet, and the drops fall into the mud.

“Please just leave me alone. I wish I never talked to you.”

She continues to walk slowly towards me.

“Karsten, I can’t.”

“You’re a fucking killer! You killed him!”

She stops walking. Her eyes glint through the grey. She tilts her head, her hair falling to the side.

“No, silly. You did.”

No.

“You poured it in. Not me.”

No. Leave me alone.

“And someone is going to find out it was you. So no matter how much you hate me, you need me. Just like I need you.”

The swamp water is murky. It’s almost to my chin now.

“Oh, Karsten. Don’t drown. There’s nothing for you down there.”

She reaches out her hand towards me.

“I’ll keep you safe.”

We huddle together under a thick quilt. We’re both shivering, but there’s nothing to do but wait til it passes.

“Can I stay here with you tonight?”

She holds me tight. She’s so warm. She nods.

“I don’t want to go back home to them.”

A flash of bright light crashes through the window for a moment, before a deep, booming thunder echoes through the wind. She holds my face in her hands.

“You’re going to be okay.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You did something bad. And bad things are going to come to you. I’ve done a lot of bad things too. But I can help you.”

I shift closer to her. She makes me feel safe. She continues.

“You deserve punishment for what you did, but that’s okay. You’re already facing your sins. You already are suffering from your guilt.”

“Will I ever feel better?”

“No. I hope you don’t. Because this is your penance. And if it isn’t your penance anymore, then even worse things will happen to you.”

“Like what?”

She sniffles. I didn’t realize she was crying too. Under the thick quilt, as the rain pounds on the metal above, in the darkness of these rotting walls, in her warm arms, she whispers.

“Something I can’t describe.”

I don’t bother to visit my house. I just go straight to school. There’s a new math teacher. I don’t feel any different. I’m disgusting. I don’t deserve to live. But she’s sitting next to me. And I can’t help but feel that things will turn out okay if she continues to sit there.

“Karsten?”

I still don’t remember the substitute’s name.

“Principal Harshaw wants you in his office.”

As I walk in, I can see him watching me through the glass. The receptionist tells me to go in.

“Karsten, how’re you doing today?”

I shrug.

“Same as always, I guess.”

“Would you like to take a seat?”

“What’s this about?”

He looks over some papers on his desk while I sit. He clears his throat.

“Karsten, I’m going to ask you some questions, and I need honest answers to them.”

I nod.

“Can you do that for me?”

I nod.

“Why were you in school before the bell on the day Colin Reese died?”

And everything, every face I’ve put on and all the times I’ve said that I’m fine in the last few days, all of it shatters in an instant. I can’t say a word. I can’t move. Principal Harshaw stares me down.

“Why?”

I barely stammer out a response. I can’t breathe.

“I- I just wanted to be in class early.”

He looks down at his papers.

“You were seen on the security cameras walking to your first period class. And your first class is math, correct? With Mr. Reese as your teacher?”

I nod.

“And he began to exhibit effects of an overdose only minutes after the bell rang, at which time I believe you were back to waiting outside with your fellow students?”

I’m not doing good. My vision is starting to blur. My throat is so dry and I almost vomit just spitting out the words.

“I saw Mr. Reese before the bell rang and he told me to go back outside and wait.”

He considers this for a moment, before pursing his lips and nodding.

“And are you aware of Mr. Reese’s past with substance use before that day?”

“No.”

He folds his hands in front of him.

“There isn’t one. I’ve known him since our days in high school. He’s never tasted beer.”

I need to get out of here. Right now.

“Karsten, I don’t believe Colin Reese died of an accidental drug overdose. I believe he was poisoned. And I am working with the police to figure out who may have done it.”

He’s going to figure out that it was me. I can’t be here anymore.

“And right now-”

The window.

“You are one of our prime suspects.”

I stand up quick. He’s startled, and our eyes lock for a moment before he reaches for his phone. I push back the chair, and run as fast as I can at his office window. My body crashes through it and into the bushes outside. The world is spinning. I look back and see him staring at me through the broken glass. He’s on the phone, shouting into it, but no words come out of his mouth.

I run faster than I’ve ever run before.

Through the parking lot, through the grassy field, through the intersections. Empty suburban roads at noon. Stores I’ve never shopped in. Houses I’ve never seen on streets I’ve never heard of. I don’t care that I’m being watched. Laughing couples with filled baby strollers. Half-morning joggers oblivious to the world outside of their earbuds. Bus drivers and the guy scratching his nose waiting for the left turn signal. I don’t care. They are, and everything is, fuzzy blur. I just need to escape. This town. This world.

I stop for a moment in front of my house. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in this exact same spot, with a backpack on my shoulders, terrified to open up the door. But for the first time in my life, the red bricks don’t scare me. I continue to run. Past the house, past the front door, past the dirty dishes and laundry, past the people who call themselves my family. Even though it’s tucked away deep inside of me, there’s a part of me that feels a bit guilty. Guilty for the stress they’ll go through with the police more than anything you could maybe call love. But the rest of me is ecstatic. Because for the first time in my life, I can confidently say that I will never see them again.

There is only one other place to go.

Hell is waiting for me.

A few hours go by before she opens up the wooden door.

“We need to leave. Right now.”

She stops in the doorway.

“Are you bleeding?”

“I can’t stay in this town anymore. They’ll find me. You need to pack your things, and we need to leave.”

“Karsten-”

“I don’t know if there is a bus we can take or if taking a bus would be a bad idea because then they can find me or if we can just walk but I have no idea where the next town is but we need to go. Right now.”

She closes the door behind her.

“Who found out that it was you?”

My hands are shaking. Walking back and forth across the cabin has been helping.

“Principal Harshaw. He saw me on the cameras. They know it’s me. The police, everyone.”

“So you want to just leave? Run away?”

Just keep walking. It helps.

“What other option do we have?”

“Karsten. You can’t run away from what you did. There’s a piece of glass stuck in your cheek. And your arm. Let me-”

I push her off of me.

“Yes I can. We can.”

“No, we can’t.

“Yes we can!”

She sighs and sits on the bed.

“How are we going to get food? Water? A place to sleep? Do you have any money?”

I check my pockets.

“I have a few dollars. The rest is in my piggy bank at home.”

“Did you even go home first? What about your family?”

“I don’t care about them.”

She looks surprised.

“You don’t care to even say goodbye to them?”

“No. They aren’t my family. I don’t have anyone who cares about me.”

“What about me? I care about you.”

“You’re the only one.”

She covers her mouth. But it isn’t in shock. It isn’t to cover a gasp. She tries to stifle it. But she can’t help it. I’ve never seen her laugh this hard.

“Why are you laughing?”

She really tries to hold it in. But she can’t.

“You want to throw away everything? Family, school, your normal life here that you want back so desperately, you are going to throw it all away, leave everything behind…for me?”

She can’t stop laughing.

I don’t care what she thinks. I don’t care if she laughs at me. She’s the only one that understands me. She’s the only one that loves me. So even if it’s funny, I don’t care. I stare at the drawings on the wall. Mr. Reese’s face stares back at me.

She stops laughing suddenly.

“Hey, Karsten?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you bring Kyle with you?”

“No? Why would I do that?”

“Huh. Well, he’s been watching us through the window for a while now.”

PART 3: Karma
COMING OUT NEXT SUNDAY!

Karsten sits next to the weird girl in math class. She asks him if he knows where hell is. Word Count: 2645

“Do you believe in karma, Karsten?”

Flesh Hive

PART 1: Hell

“Do you think the flesh hive is real?”

“What?”

“I asked you a question. Do you think the flesh hive is real?”

“What’s the flesh hive?”

Her clothes are filthy. I have never talked to her before. No one in my class talks to her. She sits by herself at lunch. I don’t know her name. She brushes her hair over her shoulder.

“Do you believe in hell, Karsten?”

I only sit next to her in math.

“Um, no, sorry.”

She leans closer across the space between our desks. I don’t like people being near me.

“Do you want to know where hell is?”

I turn away and face Mr. Reese. I’m sorry. I don’t want to talk to you. I can feel her back away from me.

“You are going to talk to me tomorrow.”

I don’t want to sit in my normal seat. It’s right next to her. I went to Kyle’s house after class yesterday. I found out from my friends that her name is Nadia. Everyone thinks she’s weird. There’s a rumour that the teachers think she’s weird too. People who went to her middle school say she never talks to anyone. When she does, she asks weird questions. No one responds. She has glasses and her hair is always in a bun. She doesn’t say anything today. She doesn’t even look at me for the entire class. I can’t focus on anything the teacher says. As we all pack up to leave, I ask her.

“How did you know?”

She doesn’t look up from her backpack.

“How did I know what?”

“How did you know that I was going to speak to you today?”

She throws her bag over her shoulder. She smiles.

“You’re predictable.”

I couldn’t focus during dinner. Mom asked what’s wrong with me. I told her it was nothing. She told me to stop looking so sorry for myself and eat the dinner she slaved away all day to make. Dad stared at his plate.

I found out more about her. She eats green beans often. She walks a different direction after school on Wednesdays. She has a Facebook profile. She takes art classes. She waits a few seconds before answering the attendance call.

“Why did you ask me if I believed in hell? Are you religious or something?”

“Do you know where it is?”

“And why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You don’t ever give me an explanation.”

The bell rings. She packs her bag.

“You’re going to walk home with me.”

“Huh?”

“Right now.”

It’s hot outside. Sweat sticks to my back. She walks very cleanly. Very stiff and robotic. I don’t like it.

“So, do you want to know where hell is?”

“Where?”

“I’ll take you there. But you can’t tell anyone.”

What?

“Alright.”

It’s hot inside. The moisture sticks to the wood. The cabin is filled with drawings, some clinging to the walls and most thrown around the floor. A lot of them are soggy. A lot of them are just drawings of faces. Crude scribbles scratched with pencil and random colours. Random, normal faces and nothing written. She sits on the bed.

“Welcome.”

“This is hell? This is just some cabin.”

“It’s my cabin.”

“Yeah, no duh. Do you draw in here or something?”

“I come here every day after school.”

I feel like I need to impress her, so I don’t speak. But that isn’t true. She walks a different direction on Wednesdays. I know this already. She points to a drawing above the door. It looks like me.

“Is that me?”

“Yes. You’re the only one I’ve ever brought here.”

“Why?”

“You wanted to know where hell is.”

I asked my friends more about her. Who are her friends at school? She said doesn’t have any. But how can someone not have friends? Dunno. What’s she want to be when she’s older? She said she doesn’t have plans. But how can someone not have plans? Dunno.

For the next week, I kept asking every day. They looked at me weird. They told me to forget it. I asked them again the next day. They told me I’m not really funny anymore.

“You are going to walk with me again after class today.”

“No, I have to go see my friends.”

“Your friends?”

“Yes!”

“They aren’t your friends.”

“Yes they are! We eat lunch every day together and sometimes I go to Kyle’s house.”

“They don’t care about you.”

I don’t want to listen to her anymore.

“They don’t like talking to you.”

She never leaves me alone.

“They hate being around you.”

Please just leave me alone.

“They hate you.”

I stand up quickly and ask the teacher if I can go to the bathroom. I lock myself in the furthest stall and sit there for the rest of the class. After it ends, I go to see my friends. We all usually wait at the front door for each other. There is no one there.

The cabin smells muddy.

“You like spending time with me, don’t you Karsten?”

“Yeah.”

I found out she likes ice cream. I bought us chocolate ice cream sandwiches. It cost all the money I had in my wallet.

“You will walk home with me everyday after school, right?”

“Right.”

My friends never asked why I don’t see them after school anymore. We only eat lunch together and talk. We just talk. There is no place to put garbage in the cabin. I don’t like to litter, so I stuff our ice cream wrappers in my jacket pocket. I don’t throw her wrapper out.

“Why do you call this place hell?”

Her pencil scratches the paper. I like coloured markers, so I took some from class. When I told her how mad Mr. Reese was after not being able to find them, she laughed. That was the first time I saw her laugh. She draws his face and we hang it next to the window.

“I dunno.”

“Don’t you like it here? You spend so much time here.”

“I guess.”

I draw Mr. Reese’s face. I hang it up next to the door.

“Don’t talk to those people anymore.”

“Which people?”

“The ones you call your friends.”

I sit down next to her in math. I haven’t spoken once to Kyle or any of my friends in the past three days. I avoid catching their eyes in the hallway. I stopped eating lunch with them. They don’t ask why. Today is Wednesday. She tells me that she has somewhere else to be after school and we can’t go to hell together. I walk home.

“You’re back early today. You’ve been staying out late so much.”

“Didn’t feel like it tonight.”

“Good. Someone needs to do the laundry.”

Kyle and my friends have never been to my house. I don’t tell my parents that I am not speaking to them anymore. They sense that something is different about me, but they don’t ask what it is. Mom doesn’t care. Dad doesn’t want to.

“Come on. Just climb up this vent.”

The night sky is cloudy. I can’t see any stars. But we lay on the roof anyway. I’m terrified, but she said she’s done it a million times. The teachers get to school early, before the doors open, and I tell her this. She says that tomorrow is a weekend. I don’t feel much calmer. Her hair is down over her hoodie. She’s close to me. I don’t hate it. She moves closer, and I can’t help but shuffle slightly farther away. She sighs.

“Do you believe in karma, Karsten?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of karma?”

It’s cold. I hug my jacket to my body.

“If I do something bad, I deserve to be punished.”

“What if you do something good?”

A singular star peeks through the clouds.

“I dunno.”

I snuck home at four in the morning. She told me to stay and stare at the sky until she gets bored. We didn’t talk all that much. I’m exhausted the next morning, but it’s the weekend. I text Kyle and ask if they want to do something. He says four of them are going to play mini-golf, but the place only takes groups of four, so he’s sorry. I’m in bed most of the weekend. At some point, I walk to the cabin. She isn’t there. I lay down on the metal-framed, rickety old bed in hell and stay there for a while.

Her hair is back in a bun next class.

“I want you to go over to Kyle and slap him.”

I stop writing my study notes.

“What?”

“I want you to walk up to him, slap him, and walk back here. Don’t speak, just come back and sit down.”

“No way!”

She tilts her head.

“You aren’t going to do it?”

“No! Why the hell would I slap Kyle? He’s my friend!”

“I need you to prove to me that they aren’t your friends anymore.”

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re getting at-”

“Mister Reese!”

He comes trudging over to our desks. She points at me.

“Karsten was trying to look up my skirt.”

WHAT?

Mr. Reese turns to me.

“Karsten, this kind of behaviour-”

“I didn’t do anything! She’s making it up!”

Mr. Reese turns to her.

“Nadia, I’m inclined to believe Karsten on this. You often fabricate lies about your classmates-”

“But Mister Reese!”

“For now, why don’t you move seats? If there are any additional-”

“Shut the fuck up, shitface.”

Everyone goes quiet. The whole class stares at her. Mr. Reese is frozen. He speaks slowly.

“What did you just call me?”

She leans across her desk. Her eyes are pale.

“I said, shut the fuck up, shitface worm.”

I didn’t visit her in the principal’s office. I walked straight home. Kyle asked me what happened, I told him that she’s crazy. She is crazy. Dad got a call from the school. I only know because I went through his call history.

She isn’t in class the next day.

She’s there again the next. I don’t speak to her. I just sit down next to her. I don’t want to speak to her again.

“So what did Kyle say?”

I don’t answer.

“I asked you, what did Kyle say?”

“Kyle said you’re crazy.”

“Okay. But he’s a horrible person and you’ll never want to talk to him again.”

“Why?”

“He told everyone you looked up my skirt.”

I didn’t sit with my friends at lunch. Everyone seemed to be staring at me. Through the hallways between classes, outside in the parking lot, even the bathrooms. They all think I’m a perv. Kyle confronts me outside of school two days later.

“Hey man, why don’t you eat with us anymore?”

I don’t answer. He knows why.

“Is it because you eat with Nadia now?”

He’s just pretending. He wants me to eat lunch with them so that they can make fun of me behind my back when I leave. Laugh at how I ate, what I had for lunch. This loser always brings turkey sandwiches! I bet he makes them himself! Look at how he eats it, like he’s eating pussy, what a perv!

“She’s not cool, man. I heard she’s done some nasty shit to people. You shouldn’t be around her.”

“Oh, and I should be around you?”

I couldn’t help it. Slipped past my tongue. Kyle pauses.

“What?”

The rest begins to spew out. I don’t bother trying to stop it.

“You’re not real. Any of you. You don’t even like me. You just have me around to make jokes and be your little jester. At least she actually likes to spend time with me.”

“Dude, we do like you-”

“Yeah? Then why don’t you walk home with me?”

I knock on the cabin door. She opens it. Her hair isn’t in a bun. Her face sags.

“What do you want?”

“You were right.”

“About what? Everything, you mean?”

“About Kyle and them. They don’t care about me at all.”

She opens up the door. I walk inside. The metal frame creaks as I sit on it. She sits next to me. We are really close. I can feel the heat from her body. She doesn’t say anything for a while. She sighs.

“I hated you at first. I thought you were just like the rest of the boys. Sports and porn. But you’re not like them. Not at all.”

She is really close to me. I’m okay with it.

“I knew when you didn’t back away from my questions. You’re just like me.”

“How’s that?”

“We both belong more in a cabin out in the woods.”

She slides her hand over mine. It sends a shiver through my veins. She kisses my cheek. Again. Pressing her lips softly to my skin. Her hair tickles my ear. I feel warm. She stops kissing for a moment and whispers.

“Karsten, I need you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

“Can you put this in Mr. Reese’s coffee tomorrow morning?”

She moves across the bed and reaches underneath it. She pulls out a small bag of egg-yellow powder and hands it to me.

“What is it?”

She closes my hand around the bag. She looks into my eyes.

“You will do it.”

I climb up the vent. The teachers are already in, but the students won’t get here for another hour. This is my chance. There’s a hatch on the roof. I slip inside and end up in the second floor hallway. I speedwalk to math class. I look around the corner and into the door, but the class is empty. His coffee is on his desk. I have to be quick. I can excuse being spotted in school, but not putting laxatives or drugs in a teacher’s coffee. I open up the plastic and pour the contents in. My hand is shaking. But I can’t help smiling. It’s going to be hilarious when Mr. Reese is acting all crazy in math and no one, not even him, knows why-

“Karsten? What are you doing in here?”

Mr. Reese is standing by the door, banana in hand.

I hide the bag behind my back. He doesn’t know what I was doing.

“Just, um. Just-”

“You aren’t supposed to be in school this early. How’d you even get in here?”

“One of the doors was unlocked.”

She told me to say that.

He stares at me for a moment that stretches on forever. He shrugs.

“Well, I can’t really fault you for trying to be in class early. I can’t think of any other students that would do that.”

He smiles and walks past me. He grabs the coffee mug and takes a long sip from it.

“Alright, I won’t give you detention. Just head back outside before anyone else sees you.”

She’s hiding in the bushes next to the front door. I scramble into the bush with her. I can’t stop giggling. She shushes me.

“So, what’s that gonna make him do?”

She kisses me. On the lips. Not on the cheek. On the lips. My brain melts.

“It’s a surprise.”

The bell rings. We join the crowd with our backpacks on. As everyone heads to the front door, it bursts open. Principal Harshaw steps out and yells to the crowd.

“Everyone please make way! We have an ambulance coming!”

The crowd mutters between them. Someone asks what happened.

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you, I don’t want you kids to be worried-”

More people yell. Principal Harshaw looks behind him, then back at the crowd.

“Okay, okay. You’ll all find out soon anyways, and we need you to know how dire the situation is. Mr. Reese has stopped breathing.”

Through the crowd of students, I can barely see her. But she’s looking at me.

She’s smiling again.

PART 2: Penance
COMING OUT NEXT SUNDAY!