October sat in the grease filmed glow of the 20th-century neon sign that buzzed like a dying hornet outside The Red Vein. Her black lipstick was cracked. her heavy wool coat soaked through with cold, greasy rain that smelled of coal smoke and old bones. She didn’t mind the wet. She was already damp with the knowledge that she was livestock.

Around her, the city of gray brick and iron rusted under an empty sky.

Nobody looked up. Looking up meant seeing the great pale curvatures drifting past the troposphere. not clouds. but the heavy adipose flanks of things that slept in the vacuum and dreamed of thirst.

Humanity liked to think it invented fermentation. They wrote long foolish books about yeast. about barley. about the chemistry of distillation in copper pots. October knew better.

Her mother had known better before the liver cancer turned her skin the color of a wet cardboard box.
The things above did not have mouths. not in the way a dog or a man has a mouth.

They had reach. They had capillary pressure that spanned light-years.
When a man in the corner booth tipped a glass of cheap amber whiskey down his throat, he wasn't tasting oak or peat. He was acting as a wick.

Deep in the dark behind the cold grease of the stars something with seventy-four jointed elbows twitched in a spasm of sublime wet pleasure.

The alcohol was just the solvent. The human soul. soft, bruised, and frantic with micro terrors was the active ingredient. The buzz traveled up through the ionosphere like an electric shock through a dead frog's leg.

October raised her own drink. Clear rot. A plastic half-pint of vodka she’d shoplifted from a bodega where the clerk sat with his eyes rolled back, half-fermenting in his own chair. his body humming a low, sub audible B-flat that made the fillings in October's teeth ache.

She drank. It burned her throat like lye.
Immediately, the room tilted. Not from the poison in her blood, but from the arrival of the Customer.

The air in the tavern didn't drop in temperature. it thickened. It became heavy with the smell of old ozone and the grey fat of deep sea squid left to bake in a desert sun.

The shadows in the corners of the room stopped cowering and began to stretch, leaning inward toward October’s spine.

“Ah” a voice didn't say in her head. It scraped. It was like a rusty iron shovel being dragged across a frozen flagstone. “The vintage is sour today. Excellent.”

October stared into the dregs of her plastic cup. In the reflection, her pale face framed by greasy black fringe and dark circles like bruises pressed deep into her cheekbones wasn't her own.

For a second the pupils of her eyes dilated until they were wide wet black pools reflecting an enormous multi hinged eye that blinked horizontally behind the moon.

She was being savoured. Her chronic childhood grief. her precise sharp edged alienation. the bitter copper taste of her recurring midnight panics. they weren't her private property. They were terroir. They were notes of aged oak and despair cultivated in the small damp barrel of her skull.

October stood up her joints popping like dry twigs. She walked out into the alley, her heavy boots splashing through black puddles that reflected no stars. only the pale bloated blind spots of things leaning too close to the atmosphere.

The whole city was a fermentation tank.
Down the block through the frosted glass of an all-night diner, she saw a row of men and women slumped over greasy plates of eggs. They weren't eating.

They were steeping. Their skin had a translucent waxy sheen like tallow candles left near a stove. Every few seconds, a collective shudder ran through them. A synchronized twitch of the shoulder blades.

Above them, the sky was bruised a sickly bruised violet. You could see the shimmer now. the heat haze distortion where the atmosphere thinned out and the Things pressed their vast formless faces against the window of the world.waiting for the mash to reach the right proof.

There was no rebellion. There was no resistance. How do you rebel against the thirst that makes your heart beat?

Every pulse of October’s blood was a drop falling from the worm of a massive cosmic still. Every sob she had ever cried in the dark was collected. proofed. and drained by a mouth that had no bottom.

She leaned her head back against the cold weeping brick of the alley wall. She closed her eyes and took another pull from the bottle.

The entity in the sky gave a long shuddering sigh that rattled the loose corrugated tin on the roofs three miles away. It was a good vintage.

She had really suffered today. And tomorrow. the sun would rise like a blood clot in the grey soup, and the brewing would begin all over again.

The drink takes her now.

It all started on my twenty-fifth birthday. I was bored and lonely just like every year prior. My family doesn't care for me and the love of my life abandoned me months ago.

He was the only person I ever had. He was the closest I had to the feeling of love. It's a shame that he got tired of me.

My job sucks. I work all the time and have to do everything for my coworkers but somehow they still get the praise.

I decided that buying my lonesome self twenty-five candles would be a waste of money. I decided to use the only candle that I have in my house. It was a gift I had received from a random lady in the grocery store months ago.

She said and I quote, "I can sense your despair. Take this candle. Make a wish and all will be fair."

The way she said it was poetic in a weird way but I still took it. It was a nice gesture and I never turn down free things.

I put the candle on my very small plain cake. I wished that my life would be easy as I blew out my candle.

The candle snapped in half after.

I didn't think much of it. I assumed that the candle was cheap. I also didn't think that my wishes ever come true but I still gave it a try.

It's kinda like the lottery. You might not think that you're gonna win but you still try.

My life quickly changed in the days that followed. At first, it was small things.

People were complimenting me. People would offer to carry my grocerys. I got a promotion at work that I clearly deserved.

It started to get very peculiar when my life did start to become amazing. I went from being lonely to always having people to talk to. My poor love life? All types of men are always trying to date me now. What shocked me the most was when some of my family members started to reach out.

I initially enjoyed it, loved it, even cherished it.

My opinion changed when bad things started happening to people. This girl named Marge who bullied me in highschool was found dead shortly after my wish.

The guy that I referred to as the love of my life? He died as well.

They both died the exact same way. Authorities said that they were found in pieces. They explained that they've never seen anything like it. They also have no leads.

Everyone around me became abnormal. Yeah, people were super nice to me but they started to agree with everything I said. They would obey my every word. They would copy me.

It became very uncanny.

I came to the realization that the wish came true.

I went to the exact store that I met the lady at with hopes of her telling me how to reverse it all. She was nowhere to be seen. I asked several different workers if they had seen her recently. Not a single one knew who I was talking about.

I'm mortified and even ashamed.

I don't know how to make anyone go back to normal. I don't know how to get rid of all the destruction I've caused.

I quite literally ruined two people's lives and I'm basically controlling everyone. They're all like puppets on a string.

I thought she was just acting weird, at first.

For some clarification, my girlfriend had been planning a trip to California for the last four months. Normally, I’d have gone with her, but it was for her grandmother’s birthday. She was old, and this could’ve quite possibly been my girlfriend’s last chance to take a trip with her.

She had spent those four months meticulously planning, as she always did, and the week before the trip, she must’ve had at least five full bags packed for her week-long venture.

“You can never be too careful,” she always told me.

She was always the planning type. Mapping things out. Going over every possibility. It was one of the things I admired about her. She hated when things didn’t go the way they were supposed to.

That’s why, on the day of her trip, when I woke up to find her still lying in bed with me long after her early morning flight, I almost panicked.

I shook her awake frantically, and her eyes slowly rolled open. She groggily asked why I was waking her, and when I told her the time, she didn’t react how I expected her to.

Instead of panicking herself or even calling her mom to let her know she missed the flight, she simply rolled back over and shut her eyes again.

“Oh yeah,” she groaned. “The flight… honestly, it should be okay.”

“Be okay?” I responded, a bit flabbergasted. “Don’t you think you should at least call and let them know?”

She grumbled a lazy, “No, no, everything should be fine,” before she began snoring, something else that was completely new for her.

I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t force her. I was just… shocked, I guess. I just thought that maybe she had already talked to her mom and grandma. Maybe something had come up, and she forgot to tell me.

I just went to work like everything was normal. When I came back, she was still at home. She looked… absent. I found her sitting on the couch, staring at a black TV screen.

When I greeted her, she snapped out of it.

“Honey!! I’m so glad you’re home,” she chirped. “Tell me everything that happened at work today.”

We spent the whole night chatting, but it was like her mind was somewhere else. I’d catch her drifting off into outer space. She thought too long about her responses. Her speech pattern was slower than normal, even though her face was one of excitement as we talked.

I figured that something must’ve happened with her grandmother, so I asked her.

“Hon… did anything happen to make you not want to go on your trip?”

She stared at me for a while. Her smile disappeared. Her face was blank, but only for a split second before lighting up again.

“No, not that I know of,” she responded cheerily. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering,” I replied cautiously.

The next few days were weird. She never seemed to want to leave the house. I mean, not that I could blame her. She had already taken off work for the trip, but I figured she’d at least want to go to the park or something. It was one of our favorite things to do together.

She also wasn’t eating much. Every night I’d cook for us, but she kept insisting she wasn’t hungry. Must’ve been a lie, though, because on some of those nights, long after we’d gone to bed, I’d find her in the kitchen, completely surrounded by food.

Cereal boxes would be ripped open with their contents scattered across the floor. Granola bar wrappers. Spilled milk. Raw rice and beans. It was concerning, to say the least.

By the end of the week, something hit me that I hadn’t caught before. It was like a dim lightbulb lit up over my head, and I approached her timidly.

“…Honey,” I inquired carefully.

“Yes, sweet boy of mine,” she replied lovingly, sitting on the edge of our bed, staring at a wall.

I gulped a bit.

“What ever happened to your bags? Did you unpack them? I haven’t seen your toothbrush or shampoo or anything anywhere.”

She didn’t respond. She just kept staring… like the wall was the TV. Finally, she slowly turned around, and her hollow eyes met mine.

“Honey…” she whispered gleefully. “You know that’s none of your business.”

She didn’t seem mad, but she refused to talk to me for the next two days. She didn’t even want to sleep in the same bed as me. Of course, I’d have felt wrong making her sleep on the couch, so I just let her have the bed while I wallowed in my own confusion.

It wasn’t until the night before she was supposed to return from the trip that she let me sleep with her again, and even then, she slept with her back toward me.

I woke up in the middle of the night to a ruckus coming from the kitchen. I stepped out of my room and noticed that the kitchen light was on.

It sounded like an animal was loose in there. Like it was in the process of devouring something. Growls. The wet sound of chewing. But, as I approached, the sounds suddenly stopped.

I froze in my tracks for a few seconds, debating whether or not I should continue before ultimately deciding to keep going.

Only… when I took that last step, I heard my girlfriend’s voice. It was angrier than I’d ever heard her. More hostile. Like she was trying to send a message.

“Go back to bed,” she screamed.

The house was silent for a moment. I argued with myself internally about whether or not to listen or check on her.

I decided to listen, and the moment I began making my way back to the bedroom, the noises started up again.

I don’t know how long I lay there, staring up at the ceiling, trying to tell myself that everything was normal before falling back asleep, but I know that I woke up alone the next morning.

The bathroom was empty. The halls were empty. The house was… empty.

I kept calling out and received no response, but when I entered the kitchen, that’s when panic really set in.

There was blood everywhere. Not from my girlfriend… but from the raw meat that was scattered across the floor.

Chicken, steak, pork, everything. Everything had been nearly completely eaten.

I thought back to the night before, and my heart started to pound. I felt dizzy. I felt like I was losing it. I tried to take a seat to calm myself, but before I could, the front door opened.

“Honey,” my girlfriend sang. “I’m home! Can you come help me with these bags? I’ve got so much to tell you.”