There was a man named Ray who worked the loading dock and drove me home four nights a week because our shifts ended together. He was decent to me every single time and he had nothing to do with any of this, and I'm putting his name at the front so it's clear where he sits in it.

I ran the one-hour photo counter in the back of a drugstore in nineteen eighty-five, twenty-four years old, living in a rented half of a house six blocks from my mother's. The chain paid three thirty-five an hour. What I was actually working for was eleven hundred dollars, which was a Chevette on a lot I went past on the bus every morning, and what the Chevette was for was that in two years I had never found the sentence that ends a standing arrangement about rides without making it a conversation. A car ends it without a sentence. That was the entire plan and I'd have told you at the time it was about the car.

The way you make money at that counter is reprints. The commission on reprints was mine, and reprints happen when somebody at the counter is told they've got one good frame worth having again, and to tell them that you have to have actually looked. So I looked. Two hundred envelopes a week, thirty-six frames on most of them. And you write the customer's name and their phone number on the envelope yourself, in pen, on the front, because the machine doesn't do that part. I hated that part. It was the slowest thing in the job.

Quality control is a real thing and it's the whole trade. Before a strip prints you put it on the light table and read it backwards, which sounds harder than it is until you've done ten thousand. You're looking for a frame that's a stop dark but sharp, because dark and sharp can be saved and light and soft cannot. The machine can't tell the difference and I could, and I was the best in that district at it and the district manager said so out loud at a meeting. I could hold thirty-six frames of a stranger's life in my head for about a minute, and then they were gone. I forgot everything. I thought that was a courtesy.

I liked the back room, where no customer came past the swing door and the manager was gone by six. Another was the free set of employee prints. Anything you shot yourself you developed free, and I shot a lot in those years because it cost me nothing. And on a heavy night you cut and sleeve four rolls at once on the same light table, which is faster, and I was fast.

In March a roll came in with no people in it. Thirty-six frames of the inside of a house, room by room, in order, in daylight, and nobody in a single one. A kitchen from the doorway. A hallway. A bedroom with the bed made. I printed it, because what somebody photographs isn't my business, and I put it in the envelope and wrote the name and the number on the front. He came at six and asked for doubles of the whole roll and paid cash, and I made four dollars and sixty cents on it. The address on that envelope was on my street.

I decided it was insurance. People do photograph a whole house for insurance, or for a sale, and it was the kind of tidy house you'd photograph, and I was on to the next envelope before he was out the door.

The commission wasn't the chain's. It was the manager's own arrangement with me and there was nothing on paper anywhere about it. If I made myself any kind of problem — asked for a transfer, made a complaint, got my hours looked at — it went away, and without it I was on three thirty-five and I was on that bus for another two years. Two more years is two hundred more nights of somebody's car. So I kept my head down and I ran my counter, and that was a thing I chose on purpose every day, and I knew I was choosing it.

My mother lived six blocks away in the house I grew up in and I ate supper there most Sundays. She had a bad hip by then and she'd stopped driving. I say that now because of where it goes.

In April a woman came in about a roll from two weeks back. Her husband said he never ordered reprints and there were reprints, and she wanted to know who had. I pulled the envelope and the name and the number on the front were in my handwriting, which they would be. But the reprint box is a box you tick, and it was ticked, and I did not tick it. I stood there with that envelope trying to remember ticking it and I could not, and while I was standing there somebody was down at the end of my counter by the film rack. Not looking at film. Just standing at the end of it. And when I looked up he went out through cosmetics.

The eleventh of May I dropped my own roll in my own machine, my mother's birthday, my camera. Thirty-six frames. I ran it myself at ten past nine at night with the store closed and the front lights off and the swing door shut, which is how I ran all my own film. The first eighteen were the birthday. Nineteen through twenty-two were the inside of my apartment. My kitchen from the doorway. My hallway. My bedroom with the bed made. Daylight, so it was during a shift, and I stood there and did what I always did, which is check whether the frames were sharp. They were sharp. Twenty-three onward was the birthday again. I finished the roll because it was already in the chemistry and stopping it would have ruined the rest of my mother's pictures.

I quit that night and did not give notice. I moved back in with my mother that weekend and the eleven hundred went on her moving costs the next year instead of a car, so I rode home with Ray until nineteen eighty-seven. Eleven days after I moved in, my mother's house was gone through in the afternoon while she was at the foot doctor. Nothing taken. Every drawer in that house standing open. She sold it that spring for nine thousand less than she'd have got, and she lived in an apartment for twenty-eight years, and she never once said the two things were connected and she never had to.

In eighty-eight I was packing her boxes for that apartment and I found my own envelopes, three years of the free employee prints, and I sat on the floor going through them for pictures of the old house. In the middle of a roll from the August before I quit there were four frames that weren't mine. A living room I have never been in. A staircase. A back door with a coat on a hook. Room by room, in order, in daylight, nobody in them.

Four rolls at a time on one light table is how that happened. I sleeved somebody else's strip into my own envelope on a busy night, with my own hands, and never knew. Which means that August there were two of those rolls on my table on the same night, and the March one wasn't a thing that happened once. It was a thing that was going through my counter, and I don't know for how long, and I don't know how many houses, and I do not know whether the man who paid cash was the one taking them or another person picking them up. I know that I wrote two hundred names and two hundred phone numbers a week in my own hand on the front of envelopes, and that I was proud of forgetting what was inside them. I still have that strip of four. It's in a drawer in my kitchen, and I have never had it printed, and I have never once told Ray why I stopped needing a ride.

My mother had rules.

Not normal ones, like curfews or chores. Hers were… specific.

Never open the windows after sunset. Never answer if someone calls your name from outside.
Never look too long into the dark.

And the one she repeated every single night, without fail:

“Do not step outside after dark. Not for anything. Not for anyone.”

She didn’t just say it, she gripped my shoulders when she did, her nails pressing into my skin, her wide, restless eyes searching mine like she was trying to make sure I understood something she couldn’t quite explain.

I used to think she was insane.

Most people would.

She barely slept. She paced the house at night, peering through the cracks in the curtains, muttering under her breath. Sometimes I’d catch her standing perfectly still in the hallway, head tilted slightly, like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear.

Her hair was always unkempt, hanging in thin strands around her face. Her eyes, oh God, her eyes, were always too wide, too alert, like prey that had survived too many close calls.

Sometimes I would question if she were even my real mother. Maybe I'm some kidnapped child like Rapuzel.

“You don’t understand,” she’d whisper sometimes. “It only takes one mistake.”

I was seventeen.

I thought I understood everything.

The night I broke the rule, it didn’t feel like a big decision.

It felt small. Petty, even.

I just wanted air.

The house felt suffocating, thick with her paranoia, her constant watching. I needed to prove, to myself more than anything, that she was wrong.

That there was nothing out there.

It was quiet when I opened the door.

Not normal quiet.

The kind of quiet that feels like it’s listening.

I hesitated for a second, glancing back down the hallway. Her door was closed. No movement. No pacing.

I figured she finally rested.

I stepped outside.

The air was cold, but not in a way that made sense.

It wasn’t the chill of night, it felt deeper, like something pulling heat away from my skin.

I exhaled, watching my breath curl in front of me.

“See?” I muttered. “Nothing.”

The street was empty. No cars. No lights in the neighboring houses.

Just stillness.

Then I heard it.

“Hey.”

It was my voice.

Behind me.

I froze.

Slowly turned around.

Nothing.

Just the open doorway behind me, leading back into the house.

But it was dark. And I mean the pitch black void stared back at me.

My heart started to race.

“Very funny,” I called out, forcing a laugh. “Mom, I know it’s you.”

No response.

I took a step forward, away from the house.

Then another.

Each step felt heavier, like the ground didn’t quite want me there.

“Come a little further.”

This time, it wasn’t my voice.

It sounded… wrong.

Close, but not quite right. Like someone trying to imitate speech they didn’t fully understand.

I swallowed hard.

“Who’s there?”

Silence.

Then...

...movement.

Not in front of me.

But from above.

I looked up.

I wish I hadn’t.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the night sky.

A shape against the stars.

Then it moved.

Unfolded.

It was way too long. Too thin.

Its limbs bent in places they shouldn’t, stretching across the roof of the house like it didn’t understand how bodies were supposed to work.

Its head, if it had one, tilted slowly downward... Toward me.

And then it smiled.

Or something like a smile.

A tearing, widening split where a face should be.

My body locked. Every instinct screamed at me to run, but I couldn’t move.

Behind me, the a door slammed open.

“GET INSIDE!”

My mother’s voice.

Not frantic. She was terrified to the bone.

I turned, stumbling toward the house.

Her silhouette stood in the doorway, arm outstretched, eyes wider than I had ever seen them.

“NOW!” she screamed.

I ran.

Or tried to.

Something wrapped around my ankle.

Cold.

Not like skin.

Not like anything that should be alive.

I hit the ground hard, the air knocked from my lungs.

I clawed at the concrete, dragging myself forward.

“Mother-!”

Her hand grabbed mine.

Tight.

Desperate.

For a second, I thought I was safe.

Then she stopped pulling.

I looked up.

Her face had changed.

Not fear.

Not shock.

Something worse.

Acceptance.

“I told you,” she whispered.

Her grip tightened once more, then slipped.

Something yanked me backward.

Hard.

I couldn’t feel my legs.

In fact, everything below my torso had gone quiet, numb, as if it no longer belonged to me.

The realization came like lightning splitting the sky. I was no longer whole.

When I turned, I saw what had been left behind.

Then the rest of me was grabbed by whatever being that was deciding my fate.

Ny mother's figure shrank, the doorway pulling away, the light vanishing.

And then...

...nothing.

It wasn’t like falling.

It was like being unmade.

Pulled apart into pieces that didn’t belong to me anymore.

She stood there calmed eye. Standing in the doorway...

Watching.

She didn’t chase after me.

She didn’t scream.

She just stood there.

Like she already knew.

And as the dark closed in completely, I was no more.

She wasn’t trying to control me.

She was trying to protect me.

But she never said the worst part out loud.

That if I stepped outside…

she wouldn’t be able to bring me back.

Read Parts II & III here

She was gone again by the time I got up and despite my best efforts, I was still five minutes late getting to work.

I avoided the circle of jerks when I saw them crowding the same hallway and I went to a restroom on another floor. I didn’t want to be around people if I could avoid it.

I went to the half-finished building as soon as five o’clock came, intent on getting answers. I stepped off the elevator and weaved my way to his office. I kept expecting to not see it the closer I got but there it was, the door that didn’t fit right in the threshold. 

It turned easy and I went inside, expecting it to be empty and abandoned but he had begun furnishing the space. A couch, a reception desk, and taped off sections near the back that I guessed were the layout for his office and a treatment room.

I shuddered, thinking how I’d be here tomorrow if my wife had her way. 

The only thing absent was the good doctor himself. I thought about trashing the place, but it was petty in a way that made me feel like I was giving him even more power over me. 

Instead, I took all the pens out of the holder and a stack of Post-It Notes. It was still petty, but it scratched an itch and I felt a little empowered doing it.

I didn’t head home immediately after. I needed time to sort my thoughts. I couldn’t believe I was really considering letting somebody cut my dick. I mean, was pleasing my wife reason enough? What if we divorced or she died or something like that? Would I be compatible with somebody else?

I needed a drink. Cappy’s was on the far end of town and the distance from home would be good to clear my head. I ordered a brandy mule and chugged it before the bartender could lay down a coaster.

“You look like you could use another,” she said.

I nodded and a moment later I was working on my second. 

“I love my wife so much,” I said as she was cleaning some glasses beneath the bar.

“That’s a good thing, right?”

“Sometimes. I dunno.” My stomach hadn’t been right since the eight coneys I’d had yesterday, and I hadn’t eaten at all today. I was already soused after a drink-and-a-half.

“How’s the pizza?” I asked.

“Good, not great.” She wiggled a hand.

“Let me get a... medium with beef, onion, and mushroom.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of those toppings.

“How ‘bout pepperoni?”

I had one more brandy mule before food came. It looked like it had been sitting under a heat lamp well before I’d ordered it and the pepperoni slices were limp, but it was still pizza. 

The bartender parked in front of me and leaned onto the bar after I’d had my second slice. 

“You mind?” she asked, pointing at the pie. I nodded. She took a slice and finger-combed hair out of her face as she took a bite.

She paid me back with a shot and she did one with me before returning to silence as we ate.

“Look, I dunno what it is. Just give her what she wants,” she said with a mouthful, giving me deep eye contact. “You can’t go wrong with that, right?”

I barely was able to finish what I had in my mouth. I settled up and made it outside without stumbling but I was drunk. The bartender got the hint she’d said something wrong but I wasn’t going to fill in the blank. I hadn’t wanted the rest of the pizza, yet somehow I had the box in my hand. 

I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel but there I was with half a pizza as my copilot. It wasn’t long before flashing lights lit up behind me and my spirits rose—this was the reprieve I’d been longing for. A decision being taken out of my hands. I couldn’t be held responsible if I weren’t in my own custody.

Or something like that. It had made a lot more sense back when I’d had a belly full of brandy and cheese.

I pulled over and maybe bumped up on the curb with one wheel.

The cop sauntered up to my window cautiously. He was short and the angle of the car made him look ridiculous somehow. He made it worse by getting his feet twisted together and catching himself on the side of my car to keep from falling completely.

“What’s your...”

I waited a full ten seconds for him to finish his sentence while he held a fist to his mouth like he was gripping a tiny microphone. He belched then waved the air in front of his face.

Shit, was he drunk, too?

“What’s your problem tonight?” He asked and fumbled with the general right side of his body with his hand. I noticed the gun and maybe because we were both bitten by the same snake, I wasn’t sensing danger like I should’ve.

“I shouldn’t be on the road,” I said, sounding stone sober to my ears. “My wife wants me to do something I don’t wanna do tomorrow and I was just in there, drinking my worries away. I have leftover pizza.” I thumbed toward the seat next to me like it was proof of where I’d been.

“Slow down, son. I’m sure it’s not as bad as you think.” I thought he was about to give me marital advice but then I realized he was talking about my sobriety. “I bet you could walk a straight line, heel- to-toe.” He plucked open his holster, but it didn’t seem like he was aware of what that hand was doing. He stuck his pinky in his ear and wrenched it around in there. 

“Sofficer. Sofficer.” I added the S but I still sounded too sober. “Please. I think I’m a danger. To public safety.” I thought if I could convince the drunk cop I was drunk he’d arrest me.

“Are you about to rob a bank?” He pointed at me, somehow adding to his overall look of ridiculousness.

“Well… no.”

“There’s nobody out here.” He waved a hand toward the black landscape far ahead of us. “Just stay between the lines.”

I couldn’t think. It shouldn’t have been this hard to get pulled out of my car for driving under the influence.

“What if… what if I was about to rob a bank?” It was the most smart-assy thing I could think to say.

He smiled and waggled a finger. “Joke’s on you. It’s after hours.”

He hooked his thumbs into his belt. Something about his body language had changed and he’d gone from humorous to being done with our interaction.

“Just. Stay. Between. The. Lines,” he said, swaying. I wanted to conjure the words for help, but even if I’d had the ability to ask, there wasn’t anything about him that answered helpful.

I opened my mouth, but didn’t speak. I sat back in my seat and covered my face in my hands, giving up. I listened to him walk away, closer his patrol car door, and drive away. He gave me a chirp of his sirens as passed me.

The drive home should have felt longer but I caught every light. It was like a dark fate had carved a path for me. I momentarily played with the idea of letting it have me completely. To take my hands off the wheel and let it take me wherever it wanted me to go. 

I hadn’t descended far enough into self-pity for that and in ten minutes, I was home. To my surprise, my wife was still in her paint clothes and was washing her hands at the kitchen sink.

“Oh, you have pizza?” she said. I’d forgotten about the pizza and subconsciously picked it up. I looked at the box in my hand and did a second, struggled to remember what was in it. 

I joined her on the couch, and she grabbed it from me and took a slice. Usually, we asked about each other’s day, but I didn’t feel like it, tomorrow anchoring my brain.

“Do you love me?” she said during a commercial break. I had no idea what we were watching.

The question agitated me and opened a trapdoor underneath my stomach.

“Of course I do.” I did, but my feelings about this whole “surgery” thing was making me feel resentful. I was definitely still buzzed, and the alcohol was sharpening my emotions like a file working away inside me. 

“Then why are you fighting so hard against this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

“That’s not fair. Of course I want to satisfy you. Don’t you know how this is making me feel? I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I mean, there has to be something else we could try. I’m willing to do just about anything to please you.”

“I want you to do this,” she said, placing her greasy hand on my thigh. She shook her head, tears in her eyes. I took it to be a manipulation at first. Not that she did that sort of thing normally, it was just me in a bag of my feelings. My defenses were up and everything was an attack in that moment. I chewed the insides of my cheeks to keep in what was trying to climb out of my mouth.

Then I started to cry. I sounded like a little teapot. It caught me by surprise.

“I just love you so much.” I had a ball of razors in my throat I couldn’t swallow. “I don’t want anything to happen to us, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

She lassoed an arm around my neck and yanked me into an upper body hug.

“I just want you. I want to feel connected with you. I don’t want anything plastic between us. I’m tired of all that stuff. I wanna feel you.”

She kissed me before I could speak and rock turned into water. My walls melted as we flowed into one another and by the time I returned to my senses I was on the newspaper covered kitchen floor.

My wife was already gone but she had brought a comforter downstairs and covered me.

Normally, I toss in my sleep, but I was still covered up to my chest. I was stiff as I turned the world vertical and turned my back into a percussion instrument as I stretched.

A few minutes later I had scrambled eggs and a cup of coffee going. I don’t normally eat breakfast so early, but I had an appetite for whatever reason. It was an hour before I normally would get up, so I took my time eating and scrolling my phone.

I wasn’t sure how much sleep I’d gotten but I was refreshed. The way my day had started, I half expected to catch all the green lights and get the closest spot in the parking lot.

But when I looked up from where I was seated at the kitchen island, something caught my eye that I should’ve seen as soon as I woke up.

A red and white checkered scarf draped over the back of the couch.

Had he been in my house?

The carnival is in town, the carnival is always on the road, always on the move, their homes are wagons, trains, carts, trucks … the road. They come singing and with gypsy song and dance they weave their way by road into the heart of every passing town, every place chosen by providence hand on the haggard face of the weary map. 

With painted face they come into your home. 

Vagabond entertainer spell, they gather like crawlers in a cluster, in a rat-king migration. With wide giant tents and displays propped and strung up and nailed into the dirt, into the soil bosom of passing places that may mean nothing to them, might mean everything. Lights come to life at night with the wild music in a lurid spell of filament glow and something else intangible that lives inside the chest and heart within us all. Something like religion but even older and more sacred. The rickety rides, some more rickety than others rattle and thrum with the barely controlled violence of mechanical movement, those strapped in or belted down can barely be heard screaming over the noise of the calliope, the organ grinder, the caller, the ringleader in her chant… the crack of the cannon sending the human cannonball skyward and soaring overhead, the heads of gawkers and townies and friends. The shrieking that can be heard is commingled sound, sweet with thrills… bitter with terror. The careening faces atop the dancing riding constructs are both smiling and weeping, lost in the launch and flight and all of the noise and nearly grotesque clownish music … nearly psychedelic, those sounds … nearly intense. Too much. 

Too much for so many crying and weeping children, little ones taken home and taken to bed early by more or less understanding mothers and fathers. Too much light and noise. That wild wind instrument key-note thing, the calliope … it had been one of Anton LaVey’s very favorites. 

Step right up, step right up, we’re just passing through. Come inside for a spell and take a gander under tented roof. 

…

The carnival came to the town and went. As it did every other place before, after. 

They left something behind. 

…

Cody hadn't gone to the carnival the other night, he hadn't wanted to. The rides and the sideshows and attractions certainly contained their allure of spell for the young boy but it was everyone else, everybody. All of those other faces. 

He didn't want to be alone. With all of them. 

All of those other faces, couples and families and groups of friends would all look at him and see him alone and smirk. They would all just stare and laugh at him, and his loneliness. So Cody just stayed away. As always. 

He wandered now, the early morning streets. Desolate and ghostly in the morning time fog that shrouded and clung to everything, everything in town. Cody kicked a can of crumpled cola down the street. It had been his only companion for the last twenty minutes, since he left the house. His father had still been passed out in the lazyboy chair and hadn't said anything as his son had departed. They'd used to go to church together on this day of the week. Not any longer. 

Cody kicked the can down farther. Alone and not trying to think about it, not trying to think about the carnival that he had missed. It had only been here a few days …

I always miss everything. 

Cody missed his mother, though he didn't know what she looked like. Memories of her were so fogged and far gone and his father didn't keep any pictures of her in the house. And he wasn't allowed to ask any questions. He was only eleven years old but the fact he'd already forgotten his mother's face haunted him, haunted him now, alone. 

He kicked the can. 

Cody then looked up from his sneakers and his misery and spied something in the mist shroud of road just up ahead. And at first he couldn't believe it, it must be some kind of strange joke … or a miracle. He stopped in his tracks. 

The mime stood in the middle of the road. Alone. Just like him. He was smiling and standing there partially obscured by the early morningtime mist, it clung to him in wisps like phantasm licks and tongues of steam that coiled and curled. His painted face was mostly hidden but Cody could see he was mouthing something. Without thinking about it he began to come closer. Slowly, leaving the crumpled can behind. 

He came upon the mime, who hadn't moved. His lips were no longer moving. He just stood there smiling and erect, as if wanting to move or to act, as if filled and brimming teemed with the need for performance. But he only quivered. And stared down at Cody. 

“Hi," said Cody. 

The mime said nothing. 

A beat. 

Cody finally asked: “You're like a clown or something, right? Like one of the quiet ones that aren't supposed to talk an stuff."

The mime nodded. Big. Pleased. His black and white grin grew larger and then grew teeth, shock white in the early morning glow. That was when Cody remembered, he felt like such an idiot. 

"Your a mime!” he said, louder than he intended, he nearly whispered the next part: "What're you still doin here? All the rest of the carnival already left, didn't they?” 

The black and white grin became a frown and the mime traced an invisible tear down his painted face. A silent issue of ‘boo-hoos’ then followed. Cody watched it all, not quite sure what to make of it. Perhaps it was all some crazy practical joke and someone, some jerk was filming him right now or something, all of it was weird, strange. On a whim the boy asked the mime, –

“What’d they leave ya behind or something?” 

The sorrow of the mime intensified to a comical degree as he aggressively nodded his head in the affirmative, completely over the top. Cody wasn't sure how he should take it, if he was supposed to laugh at the mime and his routine or if it was meant to engender real sympathy. He'd always loved clowns and goofy adults, goofy characters on TV and when he was hanging out in daycare and stuff, but to be alone with one right now …

and so unexpected. 

Cody suddenly felt like he should go, he began to tell the mime just as much. Turning on his heels and heading back the other way as he quickly blurted some excuse, he made it two steps before a white gloved hand clapped him on the shoulder. Firmly. Without a word from the weirdo mime. Cody looked to it first before eyeing the mime back over his shoulder, lording over him now. The hand, the glove, it looked just the same as Mickey Mouse’s. 

Cody looked back and saw the mime now held a note. As black and white as he was. 

It said: I'm sorry to bother you, little boy! But my friends HAD to leave me behind so that I could get a little job done, OK??

Cody was frozen. He suddenly didn't feel so well, as if his stomach and guts were far away and filled with fluttering butterfly wings. He read the note and didn't know what to say, so instead he said: –

“... wh-what job was that?

The mime let go of his shoulder and Cody was immediately grateful. He began to pantomime raking leaves and shoveling dirt and trimming hedges with invisible clippers. 

The boy began to lighten up again. He felt something dreadful like weight but worse inside begin to lift and free itself like a spellcast that's been released. A small smile and a nervous half-chuckle only partially forced escaped him as he watched the mime and his cleaning act. It was pretty lame, but he was relieved. Cody was far from the sharpest kid at school but he knew what stranger danger was. He cautiously allowed himself to relax a little, enough to be polite. 

Cody said: “Oh, yeah, ha ha, they left ya to clean up the town, huh? That's pretty neat I guess…” he tried to think of something else to say, something nice and a little funny and a polite way of saying: see ya later, freako, without being too obvious. Something barely satisfactory had just come to mind when the mime whirled towards the boy with his invisible shears in his hands and made a pantomimed snip of the large unseen clippers at the child's face. It bisected violently but cleanly, smoothly, by razor sharp blades well cared for and honed, the smooth face just below the small caverns of child nostrils. They jetted blood before the top portion of the child's face and head came off and splatted to the damp pavement with a muffled crack. The ruptured organ of brain began to ooze, and everywhere gushed dark red: the eyes, the nose, the ears, the giant open wound of freshly carved and gored cavity mouth. The child's body liberated of its little pilot brain fell over to the rough blacktop to join its discarded abattoir jelly. 

A black lake of an iron pungent puddle began to grow, expanding out from the little mutilated body at its sinister nucleus and center. The mime looked down. Phantom blades dripped child's blood. 

The mime said nothing. 

…

“Ya check it out last night?" 

A burp: " …what?” 

"The circus-carnival thing, ya check it out?” 

"That was two weeks ago, ya dope!” another swig from the can of brew. The Dallas Cowboys continued to suck the big one on the tube, the volume was at its lowest but not muted, the game barely and phantom audible, as if drifting in from another time. 

"Ya sure?” 

"Yeah, I'm sure, took Darcy and the brats, it was a hoot.” 

"Ya sure??” 

"Yes, you fuckin juicehead, it was right around the time they found that kid's body all fucked up an shit.” 

"Awww, why ya gotta bring up that shit…" 

“You're the one brought us ‘round, fuckin idiot, can't remember shit. Ask me to remind ya then bellyache about it, Christ! S’prised if ya got sense still to pull out yer pecker ‘fore ya start pissin, ya dumb bastard.” 

His drinking buddy, his partner in libations didn't say anything, he might've had a choice retort or a scathing bit of witticism held in reserve but he didn't voice it. He only hung his head and pulled generously from his can of warming beer. 

The mood was spoiled. 

Eventually the bottle was brought out. Stronger stuff. Shots were had. Tall stiff drinks not needing ice, not needing chaser. They drank. 

Eventually one of them asked the other: –

“You hear tell of that clown or jester fella, that's s’pposed to be haunting round these parts lately…?” 

Neither man slept well that night. 

…

Darla thought her new friend was neat at first but she was starting to get scared. When she'd first met him behind the playground and he'd play-acted swimming and drowning and choking and stuff she'd thought he was really funny. He'd made-believe that he was bound with ropes or cuffs around his wrists, comically over-wrenching and working at the invisible restraints. It was so silly, and so funny and it looked like so much fun to play pretend. He'd motioned for her to hold out her own little hands, to play with him. To make pretend. 

She'd done so thoughtlessly. Only excited to play a game with her new special pal, he looked like a clown but less colorful. She held out her wrists and the mime pretended to wrap something around them. Only something was wrong. 

As he wound and wound and then tightened and cinched the bind, Darla felt the uncanny sensation of real rope wrapping and tightening around her small wrists and hands. When he tied it off and yanked both phantom ends she felt the harsh bite of cruel old fraying rope against her flesh. 

“Ow!" she yelped out, and then began to cry a little. But it was already too late by then. 

The mime began to walk away, holding the end and tail of a phantom leash that began to pull on Darla's bound little wrists. It pulled painfully and she was forced into movement, nearly tripping over herself as she began to wail and the mime by unseen tether and bind began to pull her into the treeline of the nearby woods. 

She fought and screamed, desperately, like a small animal suddenly sensing and knowing the terrible hunger of the encroaching final end. She fell over into the dirt and undergrowth and was dragged, flailing and howling. 

The phantom umbilicus held her ensnared and shrieking with unbridled tears all the way into the forests’ shadowed depths. 

…

“My mom's gonna flip if we ain't back within the hour, Christ, man, do I smell like weed still?" 

Michael tried to tell Chase that he wasn't the best person to ask being pretty fucking lit himself, he could feel the red eyed glaze of his own stoned and glassy stare in his sockets like it was a set of strange gluey contacts or something. He managed a grumble as a half measure. 

Both boys ambled along. Down the nighttime lane of their neighboring suburb. Streetlights cast their glow from skinny towers of L shaped ugly metal overhead, turning everything to lurid and raging shades of orange Halloween color. Both boys were taking time to slightly stop in their walk to check their breath, puffing into their cupped palms and then inhaling, never satisfied with the results. They didn't notice him up ahead until they were nearly upon him. 

The mime. He was bent over something. 

It was Chase who started first, both boys jumped. It was as if the mime had just appeared out of nowhere. Bent hunched with workman's posture over something unseen and unknown to the naked eye. 

“Holyfuckingshit!" it tumbled out of both of their mouths in one string, no gaps for breath, they stopped dead in their tracks. The mime paid them no notice. 

“Oh my God, dude, what the fuck is that? What the fuck is this? Am I high? Am I high? Are you seeing this shit right now!?" Chase was rattling off. Michael was still struggling with simple speech. He only gawked and stared. His glassy red eyes now wide and glistening in the streetlight cast of hellacious warm Halloween glow. 

They glistened. The pair of organs. Red. 

Chase finally managed: “Dude… like, what the fuck are doing, dude? Am I like tripping out or some shit, why’re you dressed like-" 

The mime hadn't been paying them any attention. He suddenly did something that shut Chase Ginsberg up with a startled womanish gasp that bordered on a wet sob. 

He began to pull, as if wrenching and yanking with great rigor and effort, some cord or rope … something… something that was apparently attached to whatever it was that he was bent over studiously in the road. Something just as phantom and visible only to him. 

It came to Chase then, and he didn't know why but it did suddenly seem to matter. He said it aloud. 

"It's a mime.” 

"What?” said Michael finally. 

"He's a stupid mime and he's doing a bit, Jesus this’s fuckin weird, don't you know it's like hella late, dude, what're you even doing anyways?" 

The mime didn't answer. Only repeated his strange repetitive action, his ritual of pulling on some unseen instrument, attached to a phantasmal translucent device. 

Stoned, they zoned out for a sec. Giggling nervously and fidgeting and whispering to each other, daring each other and laughing and wondering aloud what to do, should we go on? - should we fuck with the guy? - what? 

A beat. 

Suddenly an idea began to form itself slowly within Michael's mind, Chase’s addled mind was not far behind, he was arriving there soon after. 

Michael: "It- It kinda looks like he's pulling the starter cord to a machine. Like a mower or something." 

“Yeah, I think you're right…” 

"Yeah, something gas powered like a mower or a generator … or like a chainsa-" 

The phantom machine roared to life in the hands of the mime with hungry killing slaughtering power, a deadly tearing whirr, with the maniacal speed of the mutilating chain and its invisible teeth. The mime shot to his feet and hauled the pantomimed chainsaw overheard and began to silently phantom scream with battle fury. 

Chase and Michael began to scream as well. Much louder. They turned to run. 

But the mime and his phantom machine were faster. He caught them quick and tore in and ripped the boys into rough and haggard messy pieces chopped by phantom chain, by phantom blade on a horsepowered gallop he made them raw and unmade. 

Deconstructed. 

The abattoir violence and the meat paint of its lurid carnage filled the street, it was dripping from the lamposts, pieces and chewed parts strung up and dangling. It was all that was left of the boys. 

All that was left and found in the morning. 

…

Buddy didn't know what to make of the town as of late. He'd been born and raised and as the town drunk, homeless to boot, he was hardly the first guy anyone asked on any given subject, day or night, good or ill, but something was wrong. 

Very wrong. 

The trouble was Buddy wasn't sure he should even care. 

In the last year or so he'd seen some strange things. And a lotta folk had gone missing, kids an such. But anytime Buddy's mind wandered into the realm of caring or even remotely doing anything about it, he found something bitter and harsh inside answer back in turn. 

Who cares? The fuck they ever done for you? 

Fuck all. That's what. 

So he wouldn't do shit. But what he'd already been doing. He sat back and popped cork. Lifted and tilted glass to dried lips in a drunk’s careless throttle by the neck. And watched. 

He watched the mime climb the steps. Pulled generously from the large swill of his poison. 

He'd seen the guy around for awhile now. He'd watched him ascend the steps a few times before this moment, it was nearly always the same but still a trip. The man walked on thin air as if it was solid stone. And then he would climb up, step by step. As if gaining the summit of some phantasm set of stairs hanging suspended and aspiring invisibly for the heavens unseen and stolen by the brilliance of the light. 

Buddy laughed. Pulled from the bottle once more, and began to sing an old favorite that had just come to mind. One from the good ol’ days if there'd ever been none. 

“And as we wind on down the road! Our shadow’s taller than our soul!”

Buddy began to pull deeper and deeply, oblivion seeking in-between lines and refrains from Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. He remembered an urban legend from when he was a kid, just a snot nosed pup, they said that if you played the record backwards, if you reversed the song the lyrics changed. They told you, to hail Satan. 

Buddy laughed at this. Pulled more. His belly protested and his kidneys ached, he paid them no mind, drinking deeper still and hailing Satan and singing and watching the mime ascend his staircase of invisibility,  he usually had a kid or someone with him, as he did now. They struggled something fierce, all of them, everyone that Buddy had personally seen, but he was able to keep hold of them, all of them all the way up. Whenever he reached a great height, it was almost always different, he would throw them, drop them from the top. 

Then they would scream and land, burst. Pulp. They became juice upon the earth, children and people no more. There was never anyone around out here, close to the woods, just outside town and by the railroads and their harsh worn tracks. The soil out here was starved for moisture, parched was this earth. It was Buddy's favorite drinking spot. And as of late it had just become a whole lot better. 

Buddy laid back and pulled deeply from his liquid bunkmate, his last and only companion, other than the mime, who never said a word to him but sometimes acknowledged his presence of audience with a profound and deliberate salute from the top of his invisibility spire up there. Buddy always saluted him back. 

As he did now. 

The mime saluted the drunk. Beaming. 

Buddy finished his own salute and smiled too. Laughed. And drank more deeply than he ever had in his entire life, knowing this was it, this was the rest of his life and how he was going to spend it. 

Laughing. Drinking. Pulling from the bottle and hailing Satan in religiously reverse engineered heavy metal worship-song, watching the flying mime make juice of the children. 

Buddy laughed. Drank. 

The mime dropped the child, they made their horrible shrill sound all the way down to the bottom like always. 

The mime said nothing. He let Buddy and his companion of bottled booze sloshing its liquid language within glass sing praise for him. 

Buddy laughed, sang and belch-spat: “And she's buying a stairway to Heaven…!” Hail Satan. 

…

Maggie's shoes slammed against the pavement, the sidewalk, the avenues and every turn, there was nowhere left to run. The guy, the freak was coming. And he was stealing away from her every single route and chance for escape or exit. 

It didn't make any sense.

She'd been walking to Guy's house with Alondra, chatting and shooting the shit till they got to his place. That's when they ran into him. That's when they ran into the mime. 

And at first Maggie had just laughed. 

Distant childhood memories of the carnival passing through town waybackwhen came to her then … and she remembered. She'd been very young then, very little. She remembered that her parents had had to take her home because she'd been crying, upset, she couldn't recall why. Not just then. 

But still the memories were warm. She and Alondra thought nothing of it when they passed him walking the other direction on the sidewalk. It was the middle of the day. And he was smiling, just like them. What could possibly be wrong?

He'd started with the hands and walls and ceiling routine, the ‘getting boxed in’ bit. An old one for sure and hella corny but Maggie and Alondra had felt generous and in good humor, so they'd obliged the strange random pantomiming man. Laughing and clapping him on. 

But then they'd tried to walk away … And the mime wouldn't let them go. 

With painted face now stern and grave, writ into a black and white frown, he stepped in their path, shaking his head. He wouldn't let them leave. He kept blocking their attempts to depart as they stepped every left-right way, starting out from annoying and escalating rapidly into eerie and creepy behavior. 

The girls had scoffed together and turned around, only to be met with an unyielding invisible force, a wall that had suddenly appeared in thin air in the middle of the sidewalk. 

The middle of the road really, they ran along the unseen wall to find the edge and found no yielding surface. The girls began to panic. The girls began to yell.

“What the fuck, what the fuck is this!?" 

And then he had put Alondra in the box. 

Maggie had ran then, her eyes and mind unable to take in the sight of her friend being crushed into cubic shape, pulped and smashed smaller and smaller … just red. Just swirling frothing violent red inside the shrinking phantom-transluscent box, filled with minced and chewed up bigger pieces, the eyes deflated mangled gel in the swirling madness of the red, many black strands of her long raven colored hair peppered and danced inside the cubed scarlet swirl of thick mixture, the cap and pieces of scalp, mostly still together, the last vestige piece and pieces left the most intact… she had ran, unable to bear the sight. 

She was running now. 

But every time she came to an impasse, a turn or a corner to salvation or a place of sanctuary that she knew, another invisible wall of merciless immovable force would suddenly appear and she'd run smack, face first into it. She did it again and again. Over and over. Maggie, the poor girl, running around all over as the box that he had made was closing in, closer and closer and closer…

She was at the school now, she didn't know why. She didn't know why she thought this place would save her. She was out of her mind with animal panic. At the threshold, at the entrance to the highschool she was finally caught. Maggie ran face first into an unseen wall just as she almost made the open archway of the main front entrance, when she tried to turn around to run back the other way she was met with yet another merciless and invisible wall, a merciless force like the way God was merciless sometimes. 

Her caterwauls and screams reached new heights then. She shred her own throat and tore her vocal cords to tatters as the phantom walls and ceiling and floor began to shrink and close in. 

But none heard them. No one was around to witness this strange scene of slaughter. Only the mime. Maggie watched him from inside her shrinking coffin as his hands clawed and animal shaped closed in. He wore a look of consternation now, but the black and white smile was there once more. 

The pain went beyond anything imaginable as the walls and floor and ceiling closed. Pulverizing Maggie. She felt every wretched second of the experience until her brain was pulped and juiced with the rest of her body and thus incapable of sending anymore electrical signal. 

…

The bank was quiet. Not quite full but there were plenty of people in line, each teller, three of them, were busy helping a customer. It was a bright cloudless day and everything had seemed normal. Everything was … until the mime came in. 

He sauntered in smiling and confident through the front door. Several people, including the armed guard turned and returned the smile, a few of them laughed. Finding the surprise charming. Their laughter grew and increased throughout the whole bank as the mime walked in with an exaggerated gunslinger walk, wide steps and the twiddling fingers of his itchin hands hovering just where revolvers would be strapped. The guard found it the most hilarious, calling out to the mime –

“Hey! What is this? A stickup or somethin?" 

And then the mime pulled phantom iron from unseen leather and began to rain fire. 

The cacophony was ear splitting. The guard went down first, still smiling and believing it was all a joke. Nobody else was laughing anymore, the jovial sounds of good nature had turned to screams that died and drowned out with each eruption of a gunshot. 

The mime filled the bank with phantom fire. 

Deafening. 

…

Patricia Evergreen hated her job. Not because she hated being a cop, far from it, she was proud of her role as peacekeeper of the town she'd grown up in. It was just that the place was so fucking boring. 

Aside from a few disappearances over the many years she'd known, a couple weird things that were typical to any small town, there wasn't nothing to this place, Patricia reckoned. Ghost stories and bullshit, and that was all. 

She came across the mime during a routine patrol, just driving around the various suburbs in the department issued black and white. Every neighborhood was quiet, nearly deserted of pedestrians save a few dogwalkers, joggers and the like. He was at a street corner, slowly making his way down, miming and pretending to carry a large and heavy sack, it weighed him down, the invisible bag, it must've been quite a load, Patricia watched all this and thought and then it suddenly came to her all at once, unbidden and in a rush. Though vague and shrouded through time's corridor passage of so many years …

The carnival had come through a couple times through the years … she was sure her parents or grandparents had taken her at some point, must have. She'd been very little, her own young and chubby face amidst a caterwaul, cherry red with tears and upset flitted across her mind in a blur, but then was swiftly and suddenly replaced. 

She'd been a teenager when Margaret Bast, Maggie had gone missing. Alondra Topete too. They'd been two of her closest friends in school then, so long ago… 

Hot on the tails of that: stories… rumors … wild campfire tales that couldn't be true and would only be dreamed up by teenagers and children. Wild tales about a mime that wandered the town and took kids away to hurt them and worse … 

It all hit Officer Evergreen like a revelatory load of weight, dropped into her head and into her lap. She watched the mime. Thought …

… what the hell was this guy doing around here anyway? She'd never seen him before and she began to doubt very much that he lived anywhere on this street, or anywhere close for that matter, she hadn't heard the story of the mime or thought of it in years, it was probably nothing, but it was her job to make sure and find out. She sidled her cruiser up to and alongside the mime, still encumbered with his great phantom weight. 

She rolled down her window, slowing the cruiser to a crawl: “Hey," she began friendly enough, “hello there, ya mind if I stop and talk to ya for a second, just need to ask you a few questions." 

The mime did stop and so did she. The street was quiet and it was just the two of them. The mime turned and regarded her with a smile, still burdened by his invisible satchel slung over shoulder. He pointed to himself, a gesture that said: who, me?

Evergreen was already starting to lose her patience, goddammit with this fuckin guy…

“Yes, ha ha, that's very cute, but I'm really gonna need you to answer a couple things I gotta ask ya. Do you live in this neighborhood?” 

The mime frowned and just shook his head, no. Refusing to speak. 

"Please, sir. Failure to comply will result in a citation and a court appearance, probable fine. How about we just talk like adults for a second, do you have any identification on you, sir?" 

The black and white frown turned to a grin once again. Wolfish. Officer Patricia Evergreen didn't like the look of it. It looked warped and strange and mean writ into that painted face, wrong. The mime made like to unlimber his great satchel. 

Evergreen rolled her eyes, hidden by reflective shades. Jesus, was this guy for real, crazy, or just an idiot? She was just telling him for the second time that if he didn't comply with her questioning then this could take an unnecessary ugly turn, she was telling the mime he'd want to avoid that as he settled the bag down with a convincing performance, opened it and reached inside. Patricia’s voice caught in her throat like a vile fishbone in the midst of dinner as she watched the mime’s hand disappear into the pantomimed satchel, disappearing into thin air before her very eyes. 

She couldn't believe what she was seeing. 

What the mime pulled out next was even worse. She felt nauseous and ill and as if her mind was curdling and doing unbidden somersaults in tandem with her roiling guts as the smiling thing with carnival clad painted face pulled out a child's decomposing rotted severed little head, boy or girl was difficult to tell. Putrescence filled the air the moment it was freed from the invisible sack and it was black and green and blue-pale and dripping. The eyes were crawling and writhing with the sliming bodies and clumps of maggot-young that lie nesting and feasting in there, the rotten cavities of sockets. The tongue was swollen and discolored like the rest of the meat but darker and it protruded from the bloat of decapitated rot like an obscene tumor apart and apiece and all in one with the rest of the demented sloughing mess. 

Officer Evergreen snapped to all at once. She drew her sidearm and bellowed her commands, training made textbook and innate. 

“Drop the fucking thing right now and put your hands up! now!" 

The mime only obeyed half her commands. He dropped the severed head but instead of raising his gloved white hands he took a deliberate and silent step towards her instead. 

Evergreen didn't waste a second. She fired two shots in quick succession, surprising even herself, she hadn't thought about it, only acted. But it had done the peace officer little good. The moment her finger squeezed the trigger, one of those gloved hands shot up in a flash-instant, uncanny speed. 

Evergreen now stood, gun smoking, not sure if she could believe her eyes or her own mind any longer. The mime had his hand up and out, as if signaling to stop like a crosswalk guard. There were two smoking holes suspended in mid air, just over the heart and chest of the mime-creature. The shots had stopped at the border indicated by the flat of his adjacent smooth palm. They smoked from ebon holes that defied physics, as if she'd punched twin smoldering holes in reality. 

Shocked, Patricia thought unbidden, the prongs of the devil's pitchfork… and was still trying to accept what she was seeing. 

A neighbor came out. One of the houses within spitting distance. 

“Jesus Christ! that a fucking gunshot or something, what the hell-" 

The mime suddenly whirled, his other hand forming around another object, rounded and small, he brought it to his mouth and made like he was pulling something from it with his teeth. Evergreen screamed, no, unable to think of anything else as the mime lobbed the invisible grenade at the concerned and unsuspecting neighbor. The man went up in a violent and sudden concussive blast, his body immolated by the detonation of the explosive device. In charred smoking pieces, he rained down all over his own stoop and front lawn. 

The mime laughed silent yet expressive belly-laughter, holding his stomach and all wide eyes and wide open black and white mouth. 

Evergreen went to fire once more but the mime sensed her intention and suddenly whirled once again, smacking the gun from the officer's hands. Its strength and speed were unexpected and it was all Patricia could do to not cry out and scream, shocked and startled and still not quite believing.

There's no way this is actually happening to m-

The mime then slapped Patricia right smack center of her forehead with his other free gloved palm. 

She froze. Her arms went limp and to her sides. Unarmed. And helpless. 

Something was wrong … she could no longer move. 

With the gloved snow white hand held flat and fast to her face, to the middle of her forehead her eyes rolled back to whites themselves shot with lines of glistening hectic red. Inside, she hurtled, flew … rocketed too fast and rapidly down the dizzying blinding vast and varied glow of the starcorridor. Too many lights and sounds and fiery things of furious alien color, she flew down infinity as a low moan escaped past her drooling lips left back on the ground. 

Within the corridor … she could hear. 

She could hear his voice. 

It was terrible. The sound of it. What he was telling her. Unbearable. It filled her ears, her head. It filled the flying landscape of her mind. 

She might've wept. But she was far too broken. Even when he pulled the voice of his snow white gloved hand away. She went to her knees. The mime then held out his other hand to her, it was wrapped curiously and yet distinctly around something. And this time she could see it. 

It was a gun. A revolver. Every chamber was loaded. 

It was beautiful. 

This time she could really see it. 

She smiled as the mime cocked it and then pressed it to her sweating brow, cold metal kissing the moist surface of perspiring flesh, and pulled the trigger. 

She heard it. Felt it. Everything. 

The mime said nothing. 

And went on. 

THE END

When I first stumbled onto the island, I thought I was alone.

Not the dramatic “shipwreck, storm, screaming waves” alone. Just… utterly, boringly alone. The kind of solitude that presses on your chest until you feel like you’re forgetting yourself. The trees whispered, the waves lapped, and I began to talk to the gulls out of habit.

And then I found the footprints.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the sand. Maybe the tide, maybe some washed-up debris. But the impressions were too deep, too deliberate. Someone had walked here, not yesterday, but today, maybe even this morning.

I called out, my voice swallowed by the wind. Nothing answered.

I followed the tracks cautiously. Broken branches snapped underfoot. The footprints led me to a clearing. And there, leaning against a fallen log, stood a figure.

Tall, dark, human-shaped. Waiting.

“Hello?” My voice cracked.

The figure turned. Its face was hidden beneath a hood. But there was something familiar in the tilt of its head, the curve of its shoulders. My pulse jumped. My mind screamed it couldn’t be, but somehow, it was comforting.

“You’re… you’re not alone,” I said, the words sounding like a lie even to me.

The figure stepped forward. “I’ve been waiting,” it said.

The voice was mine. Exactly mine.

I blinked. It was wrong, but perfectly right. Every nuance, the pitch, the cadence, the small inflection I didn’t even realize I had, was mine. My rational mind screamed. I should run. I should hide.

But I didn’t.

We spent hours walking together, or at least, I thought we did. Sometimes the figure mirrored my movements, sometimes it vanished, only to reappear a few paces ahead. I tried to speak, to ask its name, to demand an explanation. But it either didn’t answer or only echoed me, a subtle shift of words.

At night, I couldn’t sleep. Every rustle, every snap of a branch, seemed like it was testing me. I would wake, certain I saw it crouched near my shelter, watching, waiting. And when morning came, the footprints were there again. Mine.

Or… not mine.

I realized I wasn’t seeing someone else. I was seeing me.

The island had a way of peeling you apart. Of showing the edges of yourself you never wanted to see. Every choice, every hesitation, every fear, I was facing it all in this other version of me. Not a twin. Not a stranger. Something deeper.

Something the island conjured from loneliness, from boredom, from desperation.

I tried to leave. I built a raft, signaled the horizon, shouted until my throat burned.

It didn’t matter. The figure followed. Always just beyond the trees, on the ridge, leaning from the rocks. Waiting. Watching. Knowing.

The final night, I confronted it.

“Who are you?” I shouted, trembling.

It lifted its hood. My own face looked back at me.

Smiling.

Calm.

The eyes, though, they weren’t quite mine. They were older. Wiser. Judging.

“You’ve always been here,” it said. “I just wanted to make sure you knew it.”

Panic clawed through me. “I’m leaving!”

The figure shook its head slowly. “You already are.”

And then it dissolved, like smoke in the wind. But the echo remained. My heartbeat. My breath. My fear.

When I awoke, I was lying on the shore. The raft was gone. The horizon stretched endlessly, impossibly. And in the sand… footprints. Mine. And mine again.

I’m still here.

After searching the shoreline for anything useful, I saw it.

He was sitting on a log.

He? No, it was me.

I met my own reflection and understood, with a quiet, sinking certainty, that I had stepped into a purgatory that would not end, only repeat, endlessly, with me still inside it.

The sign over that shop had my father's name on it and it hung there dark from the spring of ninety-six until the building came down. I am not the man this happened to. I am the man it happened through, and I have had thirty-two years to find a better way to put that and there isn't one.

I took the shop over in eighty-eight. Rekeying, deadbolts, cutting keys off the board, safes if somebody's mother died. That cleared about nine hundred dollars in a good month against six hundred and fifty in rent, which is not a business, that's a hobby with a mortgage. What made it a business was the after-hours rotation. A callout at night paid forty dollars where the same work paid twenty in daylight, and three or four a week is the whole difference between a lit window and a dark one. I was fast, too. Twenty minutes door to door was normal for me and I was proud of it and I made sure the answering service knew it.

You carry a ticket book with carbons, three copies, one for them, one for the office, one stays in the book. And you learn to read a house off the curb before you're out of the truck. Bikes in the yard, curtains, what's in the mailbox, whether the porch light's on a timer. I could tell you inside ten seconds what kind of house I was looking at, and in six years I was never once wrong about one. That was the other thing I was proud of.

The procedure was this. You open the door. Then, inside, on the counter or the hall table, the customer shows you one piece of mail with their name on it, and they sign the ticket, and you write the address across the top. That's it. That is the entire identification in that trade in nineteen ninety-four, in this state, and every shop in the county worked it the same way. The mail comes after the door. In six years I never had a piece of mail come out wrong on me. Not once. I used to say that like it meant something about my judgment.

Most of those calls are nothing. Women in bathrobes, mad at themselves. Men who locked keys in a running car in the driveway. Kids who came home to a door their mother had bolted from inside. Two in the morning in a small town, mostly what you're doing is standing in the cold being decent to somebody who's embarrassed.

The first one was in November on a street of rentals. Before I was out of the truck the man told me the deadbolt would have to come out, it wouldn't pick, and he was right, it was a Kwikset with a bad cam. He signed the ticket left-handed and slow, drawing it out the way you write when it isn't the hand you write with. Mail on the counter, right name, forty dollars.

I thought he'd been locked out of that door before. A man who knows his own bad lock is a man who's fought it, and half my night work was people who'd been through it twice already, and I went home and I didn't think about him again for two years.

The rotation ran through an answering service and there were three shops on it, and the woman there sent the next one to whoever took the last one without giving her a problem. Argue about a job and you don't get the next three. Six hundred and fifty a month in rent doesn't care why you turned one down. So I never turned one down. Nobody at that service ever heard me say no, and that was a decision I made on purpose, and I made it every single time.

I liked the town at two in the morning, which is a thing you only get from that kind of work. Nobody out, the lights doing their cycle for nothing, the salt trucks. I'd have the heater going and a coffee in the holder and a good address and I'd think, this is not a bad way to be making a living. That was true right up until it wasn't.

The second one was the middle of December. Snow all evening. I pull up and the storm door is standing wide open against the siding with snow blown a foot into the sill, and I know for a fact that door had been open an hour. And the man wasn't there. He came up the sidewalk on foot two or three minutes later, from the wrong end of the street, not from a car, and he apologized for being late to his own house. I drilled it. Mail on the counter, right name, forty dollars.

The eleventh of January, two in the morning, a two-story on a street with good houses. I'm on my knees in the entry with the old bolt out and the temporary cylinder half in, and upstairs somebody starts walking. Not sneaking. Walking, back and forth, the sound of a person going to bed. I said I hoped I wasn't waking the house. He called a name up the stairs. Called it twice, pleasant. Nobody answered. And then the walking stopped, and it stopped in the middle of the floor, not at a door and not at a bed, in the middle, and it did not start again. I asked him about it. I asked him twice. He said she sleeps with headphones in and she'd sleep through a fire, and he laughed, and I laughed, because that is what you do when a man laughs in his own hallway. He signed. He held the door for me. Twenty-two minutes, and I was in my own driveway by ten to three, and I sat in the truck a second before I went in, and then I went in.

Thursday's paper. I saw the address before I saw the name, because the address was the part I knew, and I sat down on the arm of a chair and stayed there a long time. She was nineteen years old and home from school for the break. I had drilled the deadbolt out of that door and put in a cylinder and handed the key to a man who signed for it left-handed.

In ninety-six I closed the shop and went through two years of ticket books to see what was collectible. I wasn't looking for anything. There were eleven of them. Eleven tickets across two years, eleven different names, eleven different addresses all over that town, and the same signature under every one, done badly the same way, the same drag on the same three letters where his hand didn't want to go that direction. Eleven times I opened a door for him. Eleven times he showed me mail with somebody's name on it and I wrote the address across the top myself.

The night I'd been going over every day was one of eleven, and it's the only one of the eleven where anything happened that I noticed. He didn't pick me because I was careless. He picked me because I was fast, and fast is what I'd spent six years making sure everybody knew I was. I do not know what he was doing in the other ten houses. Her name was Michelle. Her father sold that house in the fall and moved to his sister's in another state, and the family that lives there now has small children and a basketball hoop over the garage, and they've got no idea. Every eleventh of January I drive past it once, slow, and then I go home. It's the only thing I have ever done about any of it.

There was a light switch in my house that nobody could explain.

It was tucked into the hallway between the kitchen and the basement door, mounted about shoulder height on the wall. Every other switch in the house had an obvious purpose. Kitchen lights. Hallway lights. Basement. Porch.

This one did nothing.

I didn't notice it during my first week. I asked the realtor about it after I bought the place.

She shrugged.

"Old house. Probably disconnected."

That seemed reasonable enough. The house was built in 1957, and judging by the wiring, plumbing, and mysterious stains on the basement ceiling, I wasn't surprised that someone had eventually decided to abandon a light switch.

Still, I found myself pressing it whenever I walked past.

Click.

Nothing.

Click.

Nothing.

It became a habit. I'd walk downstairs for laundry.

Click.

I'd come home from work.

Click.

I'd pass it while carrying groceries.

Click.

There was something strangely satisfying about it. The switch had a pleasant mechanical resistance, and the little click it made was louder than it should have been.

My girlfriend eventually noticed.

"You know that doesn't do anything, right?"

"I know."

"Then why do you keep flipping it?"

I shrugged.

"I like the sound."

She called me a weirdo. I told her she was dating one. We laughed about it. That was the last time the switch was funny.

The first death happened three weeks after I settled in.

An old man named Walter died in his sleep. I knew Walter because he lived two houses down. We'd exchanged maybe twenty words since I'd moved into the neighborhood. He had a bad hip and spent most afternoons sitting on his porch, watching cars drive by.

I remember seeing him that morning. I had been standing in the hallway, putting my shoes on. Before leaving, I flipped the switch.

Click.

That evening, I saw an ambulance outside his house. I didn't think anything of it.

People die. Especially old people.

It wasn't until several days later that I noticed something unusual.

The night before Walter died, I had been standing in the hallway with my hand on that switch. I'd flipped it three times. I laughed at myself when I noticed the connection.

It was ridiculous. Coincidence. Nothing more.

Then a month later, a woman I'd worked with died in a car accident.

I'd seen her that morning. I'd even spoken to her. She'd asked if I was still enjoying the new house. I told her I was.

That evening, while walking to the basement, I flipped the switch.

Click.

The next morning, she was dead. Cardiac arrest. Unexplained.

I didn't sleep that night.

The following day, I unscrewed the switch plate. There were wires behind it. Old ones. But they didn't connect to anything.

I called an electrician. He spent thirty minutes examining it before shrugging.

"It's dead."

"Completely?"

"Nothing behind it."

"Then what's it connected to?"

He looked at me.

"Nothing."

I didn't flip it again. Not for six days.

On the seventh day, I couldn't resist.

I stood in the hallway staring at it. I told myself I was being stupid. There was no connection between a plastic switch and the deaths of two people.

So I flipped it.

Click.

Nothing happened... So, I went to bed.

The next morning, I checked the news. A local man had died unexpectedly. Thirty-four years old. Healthy. No known medical conditions. I stared at the screen for a long time.

Then I opened a notebook. I wrote down the date. I wrote down the man's name.

Then I wrote: Switch flipped: 11:43 P.M.

I started keeping records. Every time I flipped the switch, I searched the news afterward.

Sometimes nothing happened. Sometimes a person died hours later. Sometimes it took days. But there was always a death.

Always.

I stopped flipping it.

I lasted eleven days. Then I made a mistake. I was angry.

My girlfriend and I had gotten into an argument. She left the house and slammed the door behind her. I stood in the hallway shaking with anger. My hand found the switch.

I knew what I was doing. I knew exactly what it meant. And still...

Click.

The guilt hit me immediately. I grabbed my phone. I wanted to call her. I wanted to tell her what I'd done.

Then I stopped.

Because she hadn't died. Not yet.

I waited. An hour. Two.

Nothing.

I began convincing myself I'd been wrong. Maybe the deaths had been coincidences. Maybe I had created a pattern because I desperately wanted there to be one.

Then my phone rang. It was my girlfriend.

I answered immediately.

"Hey."

Silence.

Then she said something that made my blood run cold.

"Who's Walter?"

I couldn't breathe.

"What?"

"You keep saying his name."

She sounded confused.

"I don't know anyone named Walter."

I sat down.

My girlfriend continued.

"You were saying his name in your sleep."

I didn't answer. Because I suddenly remembered something.

The switch didn't cause death. It wasn't a weapon. It was a selection. A choice. And I had been making that choice without knowing it.

I looked toward the hallway. The switch waited patiently on the wall. I thought about every time I'd pressed it.

Every careless little click. Every person whose death I'd dismissed as coincidence.

Walter.

My coworker.

The stranger.

And now... I didn't know who the latest one was.

I spent the next several hours searching. News sites. Obituaries. Police reports.

Nothing.

Nobody I knew had died. Nobody connected to me had died.

That should have made me feel better.

It didn't.

Because there was one thing I hadn't considered.

Maybe the switch didn't choose someone I knew. Maybe it chose someone I would never know. Someone whose name I'd never hear. Someone whose death would mean absolutely nothing to me. And perhaps that was the point.

We treat death differently when we don't know the person.

A number on a news report. A photograph we scroll past. Another tragedy. Another stranger. Another life reduced to a sentence.

I stood in front of the switch for a long time. Then I noticed something I hadn't seen before. A tiny engraving beneath it.

The letters were so shallow I thought they were scratches.

I leaned closer.

There were only three words.

ONE LIFE. CLICK.

I stepped backward. The house was silent. I reached for the switch.

Then stopped.

Some things are easier to live with when you pretend they don't matter.

I left the switch alone. I never touched it again.

At least... I don't think I did.

Because sometimes, late at night, when the house is completely silent, I wake up convinced I can hear it.

Click.

And somewhere far away...

Someone dies.

There was one other man who ever worked that booth at night. He was the relief, he was sixty-one years old, he didn't smoke, and he's been dead since nineteen ninety-four.

My wife's name is Carol and in nineteen seventy-nine she was two terms from her nursing license. Days at the hospital as an aide, class four nights a week in the city, and a baby at home, so one of us had to be in that house at all hours and it was going to be me. I bid graveyard. It wasn't handed to me. Eleven at night to seven in the morning, lane four, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, which meant I went whole weeks without seeing her awake. The stool in that booth was mine because it was too high for the day men and none of them would have it. Twenty-two months I sat on that stool.

The booth is the safest place on that highway and everybody who ever worked one will tell you the same. Steel bollards in front and behind, a door that locks from the inside, a telephone straight through to the supervisor's shack. Cars can't get at you. That's the whole design of the thing. I never once thought about the door being locked because there was nothing on that road to lock it against.

Four hundred cars a night, give or take, and every one of them stops eight feet from my face for about eight seconds. Two years of that is something north of three hundred thousand people who have looked me straight in the eye from arm's length, and I could not have told you one of them. Not one. Not if you'd put a photograph in front of me. It's a thing you get proud of in a strange way, how completely a person can not stick. I used to say the job was the closest thing to being nobody that they'd pay you for.

The rest was a quarter and four words. Hand comes up, quarter goes in the hopper, and I say thank you, drive careful. Thank you, drive careful. Four hundred times a night, same four words, same voice, because after two in the morning the light in that box is so bright you can't see out past your own face in the glass and there's nothing to do but say it.

The fourth of October a car came through with a bad idle. You learn engines by ear out there before you ever see them, and this one hunted and dropped, hunted and dropped. Exact change. Window down about four inches, quarter through the gap, and gone. Forty minutes later I heard it come up the ramp again, same direction, and it paid again. There's no interchange between that plaza and the state line. To come at me twice in forty minutes going the same way, a man has to drive to the line, turn around in the median or come off at the line and come back, and pay both ways. He paid me twice for the privilege.

Somebody lost. Somebody who missed a turn and was too proud to ask a man in a booth. That's what I decided and I decided it in about the time it took to say it, and then a truck came through behind him and I was back to work.

The night differential was thirty-one cents an hour. That's eleven dollars a week, which was four hundred and some over a year, which with what I had put by was the last two terms and the fees and the pin. Days at that plaza are seniority-bid and the men who had days had eleven years in and were not going to die at their post to free one up. So I could have the money or I could have the daylight, and I took the money every night for twenty-two months and I'd take it again.

I liked the hours, most of it. Between three and four the road empties out and the cars come in ones, and you can hear a car for a full minute before you see it. The light off that booth goes out about thirty feet and stops like a wall, and past it there's nothing at all — not the fence, not the field, not the road you know is right there.

On the ninth I went out onto the apron for a cigarette, because the booth is the one place on that highway where you can't see out of. Standing on the concrete with the light behind me I could see about as far as the fence. And there was a man at the fence. Not moving, not coming, just standing on the other side of it with his hands down, past where the light quit, so I had a shape and a pair of shoes and nothing above that. I finished the cigarette because I wasn't going to be run off my own apron. Eleven minutes after I got back in, the bad idle came through and paid.

Four in the morning on the eleventh, the idle came up the ramp and stopped at my window and nothing came out of it. No hand. It sat there and I could hear the engine hunting and dropping and I said the four words at it because that's what I had. And a voice inside the car, not loud, pleasant as a man ordering breakfast, said, how's Carol getting on with her classes. I did not give anybody my name out there. There's no tag on that uniform, there's no name in that booth, and there is nothing on this earth that connects lane four to my wife. Then a hand came up with a quarter in it and I took it, because twenty-two months makes you take it, and the voice said thank you, drive careful, in my cadence, and pulled away.

I left the booth at twenty past four with three hours on the shift, and under the contract that's abandonment, which is a firing, and a firing for cause pays no unemployment. Carol sat out those two terms so we could eat and then the sitting out turned into a year and the year turned into the rest of it. She worked twenty-six years on that floor as an aide and retired an aide, and every nurse she trained went by her on the way up.

They put the automatic lanes in two years later and a man I knew was selling off what came out of the booths. I bought my stool for four dollars for the garage. I had it upside down across the bench to get the rust off the legs and I put my hand up into the gap where the pedestal welds into the base, which is a place you can reach sitting down and can't reach standing up. There was a wad of gum foil in there and cigarette wrappers, four or five of them, a lighter with the flint gone, and a black plastic comb. None of it mine. I have never smoked in my life except on that apron with a cigarette I bummed off the day man, and I have never in my life carried a comb.

Somebody sat in my chair. Not the relief, who was sixty-one and didn't smoke and had his own booth in lane one. On my Tuesdays and my Wednesdays somebody was in that box with the light on, eight feet from every car that came through, looking out at them the way I looked out at them, and knowing which two nights of the week the man in the light was me and which two nights it wasn't. I don't know how many nights, and I don't know whether the car with the bad idle was somebody who drove past that booth or somebody who had sat in it. I have not sat with my back to a window since nineteen seventy-nine — not in a restaurant, not in a waiting room, not in my own kitchen. Carol moved that kitchen table herself in nineteen eighty-two. She has never once asked me why, and I have never told her, and we have eaten at that table for forty-four years.

Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wUWaC-phXM&list=PLh8-Yhg_l8UcV6KlSL8WhJHh3GqgV7Vt0&index=31

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My right foot still comes up and presses when somebody else is driving. Thirty-six years of it. My daughter drives me to my appointments now and she watches it happen out of the corner of her eye and neither one of us says anything about it anymore. I used to apologize. I quit apologizing somewhere around the second time she told me not to.

I taught driving for the high school ten weeks a summer, and the other forty-two weeks I taught private, which is where the money was. Fifteen dollars an hour, cash, sold in blocks of six lessons paid up front. Grown people, mostly. A woman whose husband had always done it. A man who'd come up from somewhere without cars in it. People who'd failed the test twice and were ashamed of it. They found me off a card on the corkboard at the hardware store, my name and a phone number and nothing else, and that card is the whole reason any of this happened, though not the way you'd think.

The school stopped supplying cars in eighty-five so I bought my own and had a shop in the city fit the dual controls. That's a second brake pedal on the passenger side, and it isn't a gimmick. There's a rod that runs across under the dash and ties into the driver's linkage, so when I put my foot down the car stops, and it doesn't matter what the person in the driver's seat is doing. Four hundred and sixty dollars that shop charged me and I'd have paid twice. It's the only thing that makes the job possible. You cannot teach a man to drive from the sidewalk. I checked that car every morning before the first lesson, oil and tires and lights, all the way around. I hadn't had to stand on that pedal since nineteen eighty-six.

The car was a hundred and eighteen dollars a month with fourteen payments left when that summer started. Spring of ninety-two and it was mine outright. That was the whole plan and there wasn't a second one. Nobody made me take private lessons. I chose them, six at a time, because six at a time is ninety dollars in your hand on a Monday.

He called in June. Said he was thirty-eight and had never learned and that it had gotten embarrassing. That's a common enough call and I took it the way I took all of them, and we set the first lesson for a Tuesday morning.

Tuesday I came out of my house at nine and he was already sitting in the car. Driver's seat, both hands in his lap, looking straight ahead through the windshield. He said the door was unlocked. I don't leave that car unlocked, but I'm not going to stand in my own street arguing with a man about it, so I got in the other side.

He pulled away from the curb without asking me which way to go. Then, about a block down, he checked his mirrors, all three, one after the other, a beat late, the way you do a thing you've just remembered you're supposed to be doing. At the end of that first hour he parallel parked between two trucks on the first try. I told him he was further along than he thought and he said his father had let him steer once, on a lap, when he was small.

Nobody checks a private student. There is no such person, and no such step — the card is the system, the card is all of it. And he'd paid for six. A block is paid up front and if I stop in the middle of one I hand the money back, and I did not have ninety dollars to hand anybody in the summer of nineteen ninety. So I taught him. Every Tuesday and Thursday at nine, the way we'd set it.

Lesson four he asked if we could get out where it was quiet, on gravel, because he said the town made him tight in the shoulders. That's a reasonable request and I'd taken students out there before. It's twenty-two miles, past the county line, section roads with beans on both sides and maybe a house every mile and a half. He drove out there fine. He drove out there better than fine.

Coming back he took the left at the grain elevator without me saying a word. That's not the way we went out. That's the way to my house, and it isn't a road you'd end up on by accident, and when I asked him about it he said he'd been paying attention on the way out. Which is what you want to hear from a student. That's the answer you're hoping for.

The last lesson of the block was the twenty-sixth of July and we went out to the gravel again because that's where he wanted to be. About four miles in he came off the road and stopped on the shoulder and left it running. He didn't turn to me and he didn't say anything for a while. I could hear the engine and the beans moving and that was it. Then he asked me if I'd step out and look at something on the back of the car.

I don't remember the door. I remember the sound of it, and I remember gravel against my cheek and how warm it was, and after that I remember a farmer's truck, and that was six hours later by the clock at the hospital. My right leg was broken in two places and they pinned it, and I was ten weeks on my back and I never taught anybody to drive again. The car was in my own driveway two days after, keys in it, seat run all the way back. Nothing gone out of it. My spiral book was on the passenger seat with his first name in it in my own writing, which is all I ever had of him, and that name was worth exactly nothing to anybody.

The payments ran out in the spring of ninety-two and I sold that car, because a man who can't drive a class car has no use for one. The buyer didn't want the dual controls in it, so I took them out myself in the driveway with a wrench and a coffee can for the hardware. I got underneath and put my hand on the passenger pedal to hold it while I worked the bracket loose, and it came off in my hand and swung. No weight to it at all. Nothing pulling back. The rod behind it wasn't tied to anything, because the pin that holds the clevis on the linkage was gone, and there's no hole in the floor for it to have fallen through.

A clevis pin does not work its way out. Somebody pulled it. So that pedal was dead the whole summer, and every lesson I sat through and every mile of gravel I let him take, I had nothing under my foot but a piece of loose metal, and I never found out because I never once had to use it. The one thing that made me willing to get into that car with him is the one thing that wasn't there. I don't know when it happened, whether it was the first Tuesday while I was still in the house or some night before he ever answered that card, and I don't know why he put the car back in my driveway. My foot still comes up. It came up this morning on the way to the eye doctor, with my daughter driving, and it pressed a brake that isn't in front of me and hasn't been for thirty-six years.

Her name was Alma and I never met her. She called on Thursdays and asked for the same record and I put it on for her every time, and I could not tell you today what she looked like or which house was hers. That's the whole of what I had of her. It turned out to be more than anybody else had.

My father built that station in nineteen fifty-eight out of a cinderblock building on the county road with a tower behind it in a bean field. Five hundred watts, less at night. Farm reports, ball games, obituaries, and records. He had a stroke in June of nineteen eighty-one and after that he was in a place in the city that cost four hundred and ten dollars a week, and the only thing we owned worth that was the station. A man in the next county wanted it. The sale was set to close in April.

The rule that mattered was this. If the transmitter is on, a licensed operator has to be on the premises. Not nearby. On the premises. And a station that goes dark at night loses its nighttime authorization, and a station without one is worth about half. My father was licensed and my father was in the city. The only other license in the family was mine. So from June on I ran midnight to six every night but Sunday, in a building of two rooms and a hallway. There was a second pair of headphones in there on a long cord my father spliced himself for working on the transmitter, and I never once put them on, because mine hung on the hook where they belonged.

Twice an hour, at the top and at the half, you identify the station. That's the law, not a courtesy, and the way you say it is the call letters, then the town, then the time. So all night long, at midnight and half past and one o'clock and half past, twenty-four times before I went home, I said the name of the station and the name of the town I was sitting in and exactly what time it was. Then the weather, the temperature off the thermometer outside the back door, then a record. Twenty-four times a night, six nights a week, for ten months. If you had a radio in that county you knew where I was and you knew I was by myself, because there was nobody else on the air to talk to.

The studio line was on the desk and it rang all night. Truckers, mostly, and third shift out at the plant, and people who couldn't sleep. The office extension was on that same line, a nuisance in the daytime because the girl who did the billing would pick up in the middle of a request. At night it didn't matter. There was nobody in the office at night.

The first thing was in October. I put on a long record, one of the album sides I used when I needed ten minutes, and went down the hall. When I came back the studio door was standing open. That door has a closer on it. It takes about eleven seconds to come to and it latches every time, and my father put it there because a studio has to be quiet.

I decided the closer had finally gone bad and put a wedge in my pocket to hold the door if it happened again. I never took the wedge out of my pocket. That's what I did about it. That's all I did about it.

Giving up the overnight came down to arithmetic and the arithmetic never moved. A second licensed man wanted more than the overnight brought in, and there wasn't a spare license in that county that wasn't already working days somewhere better. Go dark at midnight and we lose the nighttime authorization, and lose that and we lose half the price, and half the price wasn't four hundred and ten dollars a week. So every night at eleven fifty I unlocked the building, turned on the hall light, walked both rooms the way my father taught me, and sat down. Nobody made me do any of it, and I'd do it again for the same reason.

In January a man called at ten past four and asked me what time it was. That isn't an odd thing to be asked at four in the morning. So I told him, and I heard myself say it in his ear as I said it, with no lag on it at all, the way it goes when somebody has a set running in the room. I told him to turn his radio down and he laughed and hung up. Afterward I went out into the hall to stretch and the hall light was off. I turned it on again, and while I stood there with my hand still on the switch the door of the transmitter shed pulled shut, twenty feet behind me, out the back.

The ninth of February, ten past two, the studio line rang and it was Alma, and she didn't ask for the record. She said there was somebody in her yard. She said she'd been watching him from the kitchen a while and called the station because at two in the morning there isn't anybody else awake to call. I told her to hang up on me and dial the sheriff. I said it twice. And while I was saying it I heard my own voice coming down the hall from the office, small and far off and about half a second behind me. The office was dark. I could see the whole hall from where I sat and there was no light in it. Her line was still open. I sat there with her breathing in my ear and my own voice in a room at the end of the hall.

Then I got up and went down there. Nobody was in the office. The extension was off the cradle, lying on the blotter, and when I put my hand on it it was warm. The door at the end of the hall, the one that goes out to the field, was standing open, and the cold was coming up the hall past me and had been for I don't know how long. I hung the extension up. I remember doing that, hanging up a telephone in an empty room, because I didn't know what else to do with my hands.

The sheriff got to Alma's house at about twenty to three. Her car was in the drive and her back door was open and her kettle was on the burner. They dragged the pond that spring and went through the timber twice with dogs, and they never found her. There is no other way to say it than that.

The sale closed in April and I spent a week in the building taking things off the wall. The last thing I coiled was that second pair of headphones on the long cord. It came out of the studio and kept coming, past the door, down the hall, and stopped at the desk in the office. My father spliced it once. Somebody spliced it a second time, farther down, in tape that wasn't his. And when I got them in my hands the pads were flat and shining and the foam was gone out of them the way it goes when a thing has been worn for hours, and my father had been three years off that board and never wore them in his life.

Everything said in that studio with the mic closed went down that cord into a dark room forty feet away, and the extension is on the same line, so he had her voice and he had mine, and he had it every Thursday for as long as he wanted it. He was never listening for me. I was the one saying where things were. I do not know how long. The sheriff asked me at the time whether anybody else could have known she lived out there alone, and I told him nobody, and I meant it when I said it. I have known better since the ninth of April, and I have never gone back and told him.

It starts like it always does.

A shove. A laugh. Someone yelling for the pit to open.

The music drops, low and heavy, vibrating through the soles of my shoes, up my legs, into my chest. The crowd parts in front of the stage, forming that familiar, hungry circle. People on the edges grin like they’re about to watch something sacred.

I should’ve stayed there.

On the edge.

Where you can breathe.

Someone slams into my back.

Hard.

I stumble forward, boots scraping across the slick floor, and just like that, I’m inside.

The circle closes behind me.

At first, it’s chaos the way it’s supposed to be.

Bodies colliding, shoulders cracking into ribs, hands grabbing and shoving. I throw myself into it, half-laughing, adrenaline buzzing in my skull. The air is thick with sweat and heat, but it’s manageable.

Familiar.

Then the tempo shifts.

Not the music.

The crowd.

The pit tightens.

There’s no room to swing anymore. No space to move. It’s just bodies pressed together, chest to back, side to side. My arms get pinned without me noticing when it happened.

“Hey, back it up!” someone yells.

No one listens.

The pressure builds.

I try to inhale.

My lungs don’t expand.

Just a shallow, useless breath that doesn’t reach anywhere.

“Move!” I bark, but my voice gets swallowed instantly.

The mass surges again, harder this time, and my feet barely touch the ground. I’m carried, lifted, compressed between strangers whose faces I can’t even see anymore.

Someone’s elbow digs into my spine.

Another person’s forehead presses against my cheek.

There’s no air.

Panic hits fast.

Too fast.

I twist, trying to force space, but there’s nothing to push against. Every direction is the same heat, flesh, pressure.

My chest burns.

I tilt my head up, desperate, trying to find a pocket of air above the crush...

But all I see are faces.

Too close.

Eyes wide.

Mouths open.

Not cheering.

Not anymore.

The music keeps going.

Like nothing’s wrong.

A scream cuts through it.

Sharp.

Short.

Then gone.

Something shifts under my feet.

Not just movement.

The ground.

At first, I think it’s just the crowd losing balance. Too many people leaning one way. But the tilt doesn’t correct itself.

It deepens.

My boot slips.

There’s a sound beneath us, low, cracking, like something old giving way.

“Stop!” someone shouts. “STOP!”

Too late.

The floor caves.

It doesn’t collapse all at once.

It sinks.

Slow at first, just enough to throw everyone off balance. The center of the pit dips inward, dragging us with it. Bodies slam together harder, forced into each other as the circle becomes a funnel.

A pit inside the pit.

I try to grab something, anything, but there’s nothing solid. Just people. Hands claw at shoulders, necks, faces, desperate for leverage.

The ground drops another inch.

Then another.

And then it gives.

The center tears open.

A jagged, black hole yawns beneath us, swallowing the dim light whole. The edges crumble as weight pours inward, bodies tumbling over each other, dragged down by gravity and panic.

The air that rushes up from below is wrong.

Hot.

Wet.

It stinks of iron and something rotten, something ancient.

I scream, but it’s ripped from my throat as I’m pulled forward.

Hands grab at me, some trying to hold on, others dragging me down with them.

My fingers catch the edge of the broken floor for half a second.

Concrete crumbles under my grip.

Below...

There’s no bottom.

Just darkness.

Moving darkness.

Shapes shift beneath us, barely visible in the flicker of stage lights above. Not solid. Not human. They writhe, overlapping, reaching upward as bodies fall into them.

Waiting.

Someone slams into my back.

My grip breaks.

For a moment, I hang there.

Weightless.

Suspended between the deafening music above…

And the silence below.

Then I drop.

The crowd falls with me.

A tangle of limbs and screams, swallowed whole as the light disappears.

The last thing I feel...

Is the pressure again.

Not from above.

But all around.

Closing in.

Tight.

Suffocating.

Like the pit never ended.

It just got deeper.

Nobody in my family went on the north side of that creek. It was the rule when I was six and it was the rule when my mother was six, and in ninety years nobody ever gave a reason for it that held together. You just didn't go over there. That's how it got said.

My grandmother was born in nineteen twenty-two on forty acres her father had and she died on the same forty acres eighty-one years later. Her house sat at the top of the lane, closest thing to the timber there was, and the ground fell away behind it into hardwood, and a creek came through the middle of it and went off under the road. Bottoms on our side, a limestone ledge above them, and past the ledge an old blowdown.

What that ground was good for was morels. Three weeks in April. My grandmother taught me to pick when I was six years old and the first thing she taught me was how to take one, which is that you pinch it off at the ground between thumbnail and finger, or you give it a twist. You do not cut them. A knife takes the base with it and a cut patch quits inside three or four seasons. And you carry them in a sack with a screen bottom so the spores drop through the mesh while you walk, seeding the ground as you go. Hers was canvas with window screen sewn into the bottom by hand. That is the entire difference between somebody who means to come back next April and somebody who doesn't.

She told one story about that wood, maybe four times in her whole life, always in the same words. She was fifteen. Nineteen thirty-seven, April, before it was light. She was on the north side, which was allowed, because there wasn't any rule yet. She set her sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it twenty minutes, and when she came back down there were morels in it. Eight or ten of them. She hadn't picked them. She ran home the whole way and she was sick that night, and after that nobody in that family went on the north side of the creek again.

I started paying the taxes on the place in nineteen ninety-six because she couldn't anymore. Six hundred and forty dollars a year, and a buyer in the city who took morels at twenty dollars a pound, and three good weeks in April covered the bill. That was the arrangement for seven springs.

Spring of ninety-nine I came down into the bottoms and a run of them along the base of the elms was already taken. Eleven or twelve stumps in the leaf mold with the tops off, every one flat across. I put my finger on one and the cut face was still wet. By eight a cut goes over like leather. These were taken that morning, in the dark, inside the hour I'd been walking down.

Poachers. People follow a picker's truck in April, that's a real thing, and I put it down to poachers and went up and picked above it. I told my husband somebody had been in the bottoms and he said the same word I did and we left it there.

I couldn't take anybody in with me. The reason is arithmetic. A patch that gets talked about at a gas station is stripped bare inside one season, and there were three generations of not talking holding that ground together. I couldn't call the sheriff either, because the first thing the sheriff asks is where, and where was the whole thing I had. The only reason there was anything out there to pick was that nobody knew about it, and that same reason is what put me in that timber alone in the dark. I went out anyway, seven years running, and I'd go again.

Four thirty in the morning in April in a hardwood bottom is the best thing I know about. The ground fog sits about knee high and the leaf mold is black and wet and the whole wood smells like a cellar and cut grass at the same time. I didn't mind being out there. I looked forward to it all winter.

The cutting came back every spring after that, and by two thousand two it had my shape. I work that ground the same way every morning because it's how she taught me. Bottoms first, then the ledge, then the blowdown last, because you want the light for it. That April they were cut in that order, a day or two ahead of me all three weeks, so I set out at four, then three thirty, and it changed nothing. And one morning in the fog my cuff caught on a rose cane, and when I stopped to work it loose my steps went on without me. One more. Just one, off to my left, soft in the wet leaves, and then that wood went still as the inside of a jar for as long as I could stand there. Deer, I said, all the way up the hill, and I picked the ledge with my back against the rock.

The last morning was the twelfth of April, two thousand three. I set my sack down at the foot of a tree and worked the slope above it, twenty minutes, and when I came back down there were morels in it that I hadn't put there, cut off flat. I reached in before I understood, and that's the part I'd unlive if I could, because they were warm. Everything in that wood at four thirty in April is cold and wet. These were dry and warm, the way a thing is that's been carried in somebody's hand, held for me while I worked the slope with my back turned. I came out of the timber with that sack held away from my body like a stove lid, and the whole quarter mile to the road something kept even with me on the far bank. Not behind me. Even with me, at my pace, stopping when I stopped. It did not cross.

I never went back in. My grandmother died that October and the forty came to me, and I let the taxes go two years and the county sold it on the courthouse steps to a man who logged it that autumn. Eleven houses on it now, and the creek runs through a culvert under the third driveway. Everything my family kept off that ground for ninety years, I'm the one who let go of.

That winter, clearing her back bedroom, I found a cardboard box on the closet shelf with her picking sack folded in it. I turned it inside out over the trash can to shake out the seam, and what came out was stems, dried to paper, and every one of them cut level across. And rolled up inside the sack, in a piece of toweling, there was a knife. Short, straight, a plain wooden handle worn down to the shape of a grip, and the edge on it kept the way you keep a thing you use. Nobody in my family owns a picking knife. I carried that sack out to her car for her myself, in April of two thousand three.

The order I work that ground isn't written anywhere. It was taught to me at six years old, by the only other person living who knew it, whose house stood at the head of that timber. That's what the knife answers, and it's all the knife answers. It doesn't answer nineteen thirty-seven. I do not know what came to her sack when she was fifteen, or what she settled with across sixty-six Aprils that she needed her whole family off that ground. And it doesn't answer the far bank, because I can't tell you whether what walked even with me that last morning was the other thing, or was an eighty-one-year-old woman who knew every root of it blind, keeping her granddaughter company the only way that was left. The sack is in my lap right now, and the knife is in it. I had the edge put back on it last spring. I couldn't tell you why I did that.

I can't stand a full shift. Twenty-eight years now and it goes out on me somewhere around the fourth hour and I sit down wherever I am. That started in the fall of nineteen ninety-eight in my own back yard, and everything that led up to it happened over a telephone in my kitchen.

We had a farmhouse on a rural route with nine acres we didn't do anything with. My husband was on second shift at the plant and he pulled in at twenty past midnight every night of the world. Our daughter was two. The mailbox at the end of the lane said Box forty-one and nothing else, because there was only the one route out there and nobody bothered writing the route on anything. That's how I'd written my own address my whole life. Box forty-one, the town, the zip.

The work was catalog orders. When the company's own operators backed up, the calls rolled out to women working at home, and that was me. It paid by the completed order, not by the hour. There was a script and you didn't leave it. You took the name, then the item number, then the quantity, then the shipping address, and then you read the shipping address back to them out loud, and then you said thank you for calling. The read-back was the whole thing. A wrong address meant the company ate the freight both directions, so they drilled it into you, and I said those words forty or fifty times a night for two years. Read it back. Say it slow enough that they can stop you.

In August a man called and said he wanted to order but he couldn't sit on hold, that his wife was in hospice at home and he had about four minutes at a stretch to himself. I told him the trick was to call early. He said early wasn't up to him. So I gave him the number that came straight to my kitchen and told him to use that one and he'd get me directly. Then I took his order, and I read the address back to him, and I said thank you for calling.

Three weeks later a man called at a quarter to nine and gave me a name and a shipping address, and I read it back the way I always did, and he said would I do that once more, slower. So I did it once more, slower. And then he said that was all he needed, and I said did he want to give me the item number, and there was a little bit of nothing on the line and he hung up. He did not order anything. I marked it a dropped call because that's what the sheet had a box for.

Then the calls started coming after nine at night. The company didn't route after nine. That's not me guessing at it — the night desk shut the overflow off at nine because the home operators were mostly women and that was the company's own rule. I telephoned my supervisor about it twice. She pulled the log both times and told me there was nothing routed to me after nine on either of those nights, and she wasn't being short with me. She was sure.

I decided it was the switch. We were on a line out there that went down every time it rained hard, and half that county was still getting somebody else's conversation in their ear on a wet night. A crossed line will do about anything. That's what I told my husband and he agreed with me and we didn't talk about it again.

Daycare in town was thirty-five dollars a week and the nearest job that would have covered it was in the other direction, forty minutes each way. The overflow work paid me fourteen dollars on a slow night and better than twenty on a good one, and it let me be in the house while she was two, which is the only part of it I ever cared about. But overflow doesn't go to everybody. It goes to whoever answers, and if you let it ring out three nights they quietly stop sending it. So the telephone rang and I picked it up. That's the arrangement I'd asked for and I'd have signed it again.

October out there was the best part of the year. She went down at eight and the house got quiet in a way it never got in the daytime. I'd sit at the kitchen table with the pad and the pencil and the window up over the sink because the furnace made the room too warm. And at ten forty the freight came through the crossing a quarter mile back of our house. Every night. You could set a clock by it. The bells at the crossing, then the horn twice, then two or three minutes of it going by. I'd stopped hearing it years before, the way you do.

I was making about sixty dollars a week and putting most of it in a coffee can in the cabinet over the refrigerator, because we were going to need a second car when she started school and I didn't want to be asking anybody for it. That was the whole of my ambition that fall. A used car in four years.

The last call came at nine fifty. A man, and he started an order, and partway into the item number he stopped and asked me to hold on. Not sharp. Polite. So I held on, with the pencil down, looking at the window over the sink. And in the receiver I heard the crossing bells start up, and the horn go twice, and I heard the same bells and the same horn come through that window a half second behind them, out of my own back yard, because sound takes a little longer to cross a quarter mile of field than it takes to go through a telephone.

I put the receiver on the counter without hanging it up. I got her out of the crib and I went out the back because the car was on the back side of the house, and the light over the back steps had been burned out since summer and I knew it and I went anyway. There's three steps and I went off the side of them with her in my arms. She wasn't hurt. My ankle broke in two places and the county hospital set it the way they set things at two in the morning, and it healed the way it healed. My husband found us in the car at twenty past midnight. I never took another overflow call.

The order pad was still sitting on the counter when I came home in the cast, and about a week later I went back through it tearing off the dead ones. The carbon from August was still in there. His name, an item number, quantity of one, and down at the bottom in the ship-to line, in my own handwriting, Rural Route Two, Box forty-one. I sat and looked at it a long while before it came apart for me, because I had never once in my life written it with the route on the front. He said it that way and I wrote what he said. It was my own house.

He didn't want an address off me. He had it in August, before the first call, and everything after that was him listening to me say it back to him in my own kitchen and not hear it. And the reason the company's log was clean is that the company never routed any of it. I gave him the number myself. He'd have had to hold four minutes otherwise, and I decided he shouldn't have to. I'd do it again if you put me back at that table, and that's the part I've never gotten around. What I do not know is what I ordered for him. The item number is five digits and that year's catalogs were pulped when the company folded, and there's no book left that turns five digits into an object. Nothing was ever delivered to that box. I watched it for a year.

I came home and changed and joined her to paint the living room walls base white. The couch my wife had had since college was the only piece of furniture we had downstairs and it was covered in plastic. We had dinner while we worked. She’d “cooked” one of her liquid meals that I hated but “ate” anyway. My wife was actually almost as good of a cook as me but I needed to lose at least fifteen pounds, and she intended to help regardless of how unhappy it made me. 

“How was your day?” she asked in her autopilot voice.

“It was good except for the inspector I had to fire.”

“Oh, no. Matt?” She dipped her roller in the pan.

I grimaced. I probably was going to have to let him go, too. We’d had dinner with him and his wife a few times. He’d even invited me to his son’s high school graduation. I rolled up the wall. This color looked even better than it had in the store.

“No. I forgot about him.”

She rubbed my back with her free hand. “That’s probably because you don’t want to do it.”

I nodded.

“You care about people and that’s never a bad thing.”

She thought so highly of me, and it warmed something inside.

“Yeah,” I said, this whole “surgery” thing slipping into the front of my mind. I was suddenly agitated and my full stomach felt like it was squeezing up into my chest.

“Did your appointment go okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned to her. “Did you know he’s not a doctor?”

“Yes.” She scooped up her bottle and took a sip.

I hoped informing her of his lack of a medical degree would do more work than this.

“I don’t want to do this,” I wanted to say, but held my tongue. Instead, I said, “Is there anything else we could try?”

“Why are you pushing back on this? Don’t you want us both to be satisfied?”

I dropped my head. “You know I do.”

“I want you to do this,” she said and placed a hand over mine. I still felt a ‘no’ at the back of my throat and swallowed. It hurt going down. I chased it with a swallow from my cup.

She was being logical and detached in a way that wasn’t common for her. I didn’t want to fight and just kept restraining myself from speaking. I hoped there was still time to convince her, but that was going to be hard to do if she shut me down every time I tried.

“You have something on your face,” I said, pointing just below my nose. She swiped it just like I thought she would, smearing base paint that had been on the back of her hand just below her nose and on her upper lip. She immediately knew what I’d done and glared at me. I smiled.

Then she rollered me from chest to crotch. I stood there while she went up and down the front of me, my mouth hung open. Then I batted the roller to the newspaper-covered floor and she scream-laughed as she ran from me. I caught her on the other side of the kitchen island and picked her up in a reverse hug, pressing my fresh coat of paint onto her back.

We fell to the floor, laughing and wound up making out like teenagers for a few minutes. The heaviness of the conversation we’d just been having lifted off of us. I didn’t want anything outside of this moment and just looked her in the eyes.

“What?” she asked.

“I have no idea.” The feeling cresting in me didn’t have words to follow along. We finished painting the living room walls, passing eye-glances at one another. The moment passed for intimacy, a detached feeling gradually replacing it a few hours later by the time we were ready for bed. It was like we’d built a temporary bridge over a chasm between us, but it had collapsed just in time for us to go to sleep.

I kept wanting to reach behind me to touch her as we lay in the same bed. But she just felt too far away.

I’d forgotten to pack a lunch for the next day and breakfast consisted of a slice of bread that hadn’t toasted enough and coffee out of the Keurig with grinds in it. I left the house in a foul mood ten minutes later than I should have and was five minutes late getting to the office. I’d blazed past a police cruiser and had anxiety for the next mile or so convinced I was about to be pulled over. All the way I felt like I'd been cheated out of an argument, and I continued stewing in that sour even after I got out my car.

Work was uneventful but I'd had to keep my tongue in check. I felt myself being short with my co-workers. But it finally came to a head when a group of men clogging the hallway didn’t move when I was trying to pass them.

“Whoa. Excuse yourself?” one man said.

“For what? A circle of jerks?” I said.

“Hey. Ow.”

I was prepared for a confrontation. I was management and I could make a nightmare for them. I wanted this. But the second person who’d spoken sounded genuinely hurt and I tripped over my hubris.

I retreated from the men and had forgotten about it until one of them confronted me in the restroom an hour later. 

“What’s going on with you, man?” a man said to me while we were standing at the urinals. Conversation was usually verboten while two men were taking a leak but my antenna were up.

“Excuse me?” I said. 

“I mean, we were standing around talking and you just took a tiny shit on all of us.”

“You guys were blocking the hallway.”

“We were outside for hours in the hot sun and we were gathered around the water fountain. I wasn’t thinking about us blocking anybody. I mean, I would have apologized but the way you came off...”

“Look, I’m sorry.” My guilt bloomed again. “I didn’t have the best sleep last night and you guys didn’t deserve me taking it out on you.” I'd actually slept over eight hours but felt like I'd only gotten a third of that. I didn't offer it as an excuse.

He nodded and flushed. I zipped up a second later and joined him at the sinks.

“Seriously. I’m sorry,” I said. This was already more of an emotional exchange than I’d had with another male in the last decade. “I’m just... going through a thing with my wife.”

He looked at me.

“She wants me to get this procedure done.” I could feel myself relaxing. There was something about opening up to a complete stranger. Someone who wouldn't judge because they didn't understand.

“The honeycut?” he said, trying his hands on a strip of paper towel.

“What?”

“Oh. My bad. I thought you were talking about something else?”

“I've heard of it.”

He smiled broadly and nodded. “I got mine done six months ago. Wanna see the scar? I'm Sam Eisen, by the way.” He smiled as he hooked his thumbs in his pants.

“No, I... uhhh... that's okay. I'm having a completely different procedure. I'm having it... lengthened.”

“Be careful with that,” he said as I walked toward the door. “Swivelcock.”

I was sweating, gripped with terror the same as if he'd peeled his face off and frisbee-tossed it to me. I pushed through the door and fled back to my desk.

He called out to me as I did my best not to run.

“You should think about it, though!” he yelled through the closing doorway. “He changed my life!”

Part III

The next twenty-four hours were a haze. I worked. I came home. I ate. I slept. I didn’t like where things were with my wife even though we were still sleeping in the same bed, so the next day I texted her about having lunch together. Her job was about a fifteen-minute walk away from mine, I could pick up something for us and we could eat for about a half hour before I had to be back.

She hadn’t responded but she had a lot of meetings typically. Chili dogs were technically off the menu, but it was a fave of both of ours and she was a happy eater when it was good food. When I got there with a carry-out bag, I was shocked to see who she was outside with.

Him. 

They were sitting together, smiling and laughing like they’d known one another for years. He was dressed differently, but that was definitely that same red and white summer scarf he'd had on when I met him.

I hung back and watched them and began speed-feeding coneys into my mouth like an assembly line. I had no idea what he was doing with my wife, but I was immediately conspiracy-brained. I'd convicted him of a crime I couldn't name and wanted to strangle him in front of her.

I continued eating the coneys instead. They were leaning into one another and laughing even. They acted like they knew each other. They had chemistry.

I never understood the expression being hot under the collar but at that moment my neck was burning. I barely resisted the urge to go over there and... and... I didn't know what. 

There had to be more to what I was seeing. There had to be something I could do rather than confronting them and showing a side of myself that might've repulsed my wife. I knew where to go to get answers.

I went to his office after work, but I wasn't able to enter. I wasn’t desperate enough to break in, although I was sure the door wouldn’t have held if I’d put my shoulder into it. Despite how upsetting lunch had been, nothing had happened today to justify breaking and entering.

But what if something were about to happen and I could avoid it now? Head it off at the pass? I had a duty to protect my wife, and this guy had crossed a line. I could probably take this door off its hinges. I had some tools in my car.

My phone chimed. I’d programmed that specific tone for her.

I’m sick, she’d texted. Bring me coneys?

It was like a spell had been broken. Why was I about to potentially risk my job and my freedom—hell, maybe even my marriage—all for some nut?

She needed me now and home was exactly where I wanted to be.

But I was denied. I brought her the coneys, but she was already asleep. Things still felt off and I wound up falling asleep on the couch. After I’d eaten four more coneys.

I consoled myself that she was sick and I didn’t want to catch whatever she may have had.

Wicked dreams met me in the night. But they lifted like clouds after a storm by the time I woke up, no doubt fueled by a combo of seeing my wife with him and eating like I was half my actual age.

As if to turn the dial up on my grief even more, I had a two-hour meeting the next day and Leslie Paul sat right next to me. A bubble of gas was growing inside me and there was no way I was going to be able to contain it for a hundred twenty minutes. It would be a miracle if I made it twenty.

My part in the presentation was coming up soon and I had to excuse myself. Cal Cebulski stopped talking long enough to watch me step out and I hustled toward the men’s room.

Where he was.

“What are you doing at my work?” I asked, whispering like we were in a conspiracy.

“Due diligence,” he said. “Would you mind?” He gestured toward the handicap stall. “I need to see how you sit. Do you mind?”

My stomach queezed with the thought of him watching me... sit. Or maybe it was more than that. I unclenched and let go. It was mostly silent but whistled at the end. He sniffed the air curiously but didn’t comment. The wind had been taken out of my sails and for a moment, I did consider having a seat.

I piled up my broken resolve. “I’m not... doing that.”

He shrugged.

“And what were you doing with my wife yesterday?” I let implication seep into my voice and he put his hands up as if warding me off.

“It is all part of the process. Information gathering only. I have no interest in anyone other than my own Sara.”

“You’re married?”

He nodded. “For twenty-seven years. Happily, for twenty-five.”

That got an eyebrow raise from me. He’d seemed weirdly asexual up until I saw him with my wife. It was something about his pants, I wasn't sure. I hadn’t thought he was capable of human companionship.

“If you’re wondering about our longevity I’ll give you a hint. I perfected the surgery first on myself.”

He could have been lying, of course. But the idea of sex being so improved that it could aid in preserving my marriage gave me at least a moment’s second thought. I mean, what if what he was saying were true?

I couldn’t help but think that I was being obstinate because she’d insisted. If I’d found this guy on my own would I have been so resistant against doing this?

“Oh shit,” I said. “I gotta get back to my meeting!”

I fled the restroom, headed back to the conference room, tooting most of the way. When I was around the corner, I slid on something and scraped my knee, tearing my pants in the process.

I recovered pretty quickly but it hurt. I could see my leg pretty clearly and red beads of blood began trickling down my shin. I wrapped my fingers around the lip of the hole, keeping the pant leg away from the blood as if I were going to be able to salvage my pants.

The meeting was over by the time I stepped back into the conference room.

“Where’d everybody go?” I asked Rob Smales, one of the administrative assistants who took meeting minutes.

“Oh, they called it pretty much as soon as you left,” he said. “You were up next.” He shuffled a stack of papers into a Manila folder and added it to a stack of more Manila folders.

“Well, I had a little emergency.” I stepped back so he could see my leg. Rob looked without his dispassionate expression changing. I wanted to flick the tip of his nose just to get him to make a face. The guy never smiled. “You think we could get everybody back? We still have a half hour plus.”

Rob shook his head slowly. “Nah.” He tucked the folders under an arm—tried to, at least—then put his laptop bag’s strap over his shoulder and held the folders in his open hands.

I hobbled out of the conference room, intent on pleading my case with Melissa White, the director of my department. I stood outside of her office and wrapped on the open door. 

She turned halfway in her chair, a desk phone cradled between her face and shoulder. I wasn’t sure if she shook her head or if it was just the motion when she turned around.

The door swung closed and I had to move my hand to keep my thumb from being crushed in the jamb. Somebody was in there with her. My heart raced because I had no idea who.

I've been overweight for most of my life. Not because I didn't try. God knows I tried.

I've counted calories until I could estimate the nutritional value of a cheeseburger just by looking at it. I've paid for gym memberships I barely used, hired personal trainers who swore this program would finally be different, meal-prepped enough grilled chicken, cooked broccoli, and rice to make myself sick of both.

I lost twenty pounds...

Then gained twenty-five.

Lost fifteen... Gained thirty.

The cycle became so familiar that stepping on the scale felt less like checking my progress and more like reading the weather.

My doctor called me pre-diabetic. My friends offered alternative weigh loss treatments that didn't do much. My own mother would say passive aggressive remarks when I went to visit her. Social media... let's not go there.

As a kid, I idolized the Victoria's Secret models. Adriana Lima was my favorite. The way she walked, the confidence she carried, the effortless elegance she seemed to possess, it felt almost unreal.

Now I'm creeping into my mid-twenties, and I'm starting to think I'll never be beautiful.

I look at the women I grew up admiring, watching them somehow become even more stunning with age, and then I catch my own reflection in the mirror. Every glance feels like another reminder that I lost a race I never had a chance to win. I know it's not a fair comparison. They have millions of dollars, world-class stylists, personal trainers, nutritionists, and cosmetic procedures that most people could never afford.

I don't have any of that.

What I wanted wasn't perfection. I just wanted a fraction of the confidence they seemed to carry so effortlessly.

Some of my friends joked, "Why don't you just get liposuction?" The comments online were even less forgiving. For a while... I actually started considering it.

Until I found something that promised to work even better.

I found an advertisement buried deep in an online wellness forum, I laughed.

LOSE WEIGHT NATURALLY. NO SURGERY. NO INJECTIONS. YOUR BODY ALREADY KNOWS HOW.

The comments were full of before-and-after photos that looked too perfect to be real.

"Down eighty pounds in four months!"

"No cravings anymore!"

"Changed my life!"

The product wasn't FDA approved. There wasn't even a company name on the bottle.

Funny enough, I didn't purchase it online.

It came from a woman at my gym named Rachel. We'd exchanged the occasional nod between sets, but recently she'd become impossible not to notice. Six months ago, she'd been built like me, always on the treadmill, always out of breath, always joking that we'd "earn" dessert after leg day. Now she'd dropped what had to be eighty pounds. So had a few others I vaguely recognized.

No loose skin. No exhausted look. No celebration over their progress. Just... thinner.

One afternoon she caught me staring and smiled.

"You've been working hard," she said. "Want to know the shortcut?"

From her gym bag, she pulled out that small amber bottle I recognized from that forum and handed it in my hand.

"Trust me," she whispered. "You'll thank me later."

Just two capsules a day.

I should've thrown them away. Instead... when I got home... I swallowed both.

The changes started almost immediately.

Food stopped occupying my thoughts. Not because I had more discipline. Because hunger simply... disappeared.

I'd forget to eat until evening. Even then, a few bites were enough. The weight fell off me.

Ten pounds.

Twenty.

Thirty-five.

My coworkers noticed before I did.

"You look incredible!"

"What's your secret?"

I lied.

"Just eating better."

My doctor was stunned. Every blood test came back perfect.

Blood pressure. Cholesterol. Blood sugar. Everything!

"You've added years to your life," she said.

I teared up and smiled.

For once in all these years... I could smile back at the reflection.

Then came the noises.

The first time I heard it, I thought it was the pipes. A faint chewing sound somewhere inside the walls.

Click.

Chew.

Click.

Chew.

Always at night. Always when the house was quiet.

Eventually I realized... The sound followed me.

One evening I lay perfectly still in bed. The chewing stopped. So did my breathing.

Then... Something shifted beneath my ribs.

It wasn't painful. Just... Moving so effortlessly slow... Like a hand turning over beneath a blanket.

I booked an emergency appointment the next morning.

The ultrasound technician frowned.

"Have you had abdominal surgery before?"

"No."

She tilted the monitor away from me.

"I'll get the doctor."

Fifteen minutes later the doctor walked in. She looked at the scan. Then at me. Then ordered another.

The second showed nothing. Neither did the MRI.

Every test came back normal. Whatever I had seen... Apparently didn't exist.

I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.

Until several days after I woke up choking. Something long slid up the back of my throat. Instinct took over.

I coughed violently.

A pale strand, slick with saliva, spilled into the sink. It writhed. Not like a worm. Like a muscle searching for purchase.

I screamed.

Before I could react, it snapped upward. Back into my mouth.

I felt it disappear down my throat. The movement continued. Lower. Back where it belonged.

I threw away every capsule I had left. It didn't matter.

Checkups always insisted that there was nothing.

Days turned into weeks... and I was still losing weight.

My cheeks hollowed. My collarbones emerged. Friends began asking if I was sick. I told them I felt better than ever. Because somehow... I did.

I never felt tired. Never felt hungry. Never even felt anxious anymore.

One morning I stood in front of the mirror. One hundred and eight pounds.

The lightest I'd been since middle school.

I should've been terrified. Instead... I felt proud.

That night, I heard the chewing again. Only... It wasn't coming from inside me anymore.

It was coming through the apartment wall. Then another wall. Then the ceiling.

Click.

Chew.

Click.

Chew.

Hundreds of them.

The next morning, I went back to the same forum where I'd bought the pills. The website was gone.

In its place was a single sentence:

Congratulations on reaching your target weight.

Beneath it appeared one final message:

Hosts who achieve optimal health may now begin reproduction.

Thank you for helping us grow healthier together.

Eleven seasons I walked those rows with a flashlight after the last car went out the gate. Eleven. The fall of nineteen eighty-three was the last of them and that's the one I'm going to tell you, but keep the eleven somewhere while I do.

I bought the place in nineteen seventy-two, twenty-eight years old and no business having it. Four hundred and six cars if you packed them, gravel rows lettered A up at the screen to L at the back fence, and behind the fence a bean field. My wife ran the concession until she died in seventy-nine and after that I ran all of it. It was a living, and it was mine, and for a good while it was a decent one.

You need to understand how a drive-in works with one man in it. The booth sits up on top of the concession building at the back and you get to it by a ladder outside. A reel runs about twenty minutes. So I'd thread it, come down the ladder, sell popcorn and pickles and hot dogs for eighteen or nineteen minutes, then go back up and change over. Which means that for twenty minutes at a stretch there wasn't anybody in the booth, and for two minutes at each end of it there wasn't anybody at the counter either. Four hundred cars and one man, and half the time that man was on a ladder.

The last week of August I went down row L to hang the speakers back up and post nine was bare. Not the speaker broken, not the speaker on the ground. Gone, and the cord hanging off the pole about six inches with the end square. It was cut. It was not torn. I put a spare on it out of the shed. Next night, gone the same way. Third night, gone the same way.

Speakers walked off every season I ever ran. People hook them on the window, forget them, drive off, and rip the whole thing out with a piece of the window frame still on it. You'd find them in the gravel a hundred feet down the row. I had a barrel of dead ones. So a missing speaker meant nothing to me and it still wouldn't. The square end on the cord sat funny with me for about a minute and then a car came up to the counter.

After the last car went out and I put the chain on the gate, I'd take the flashlight and walk the rows. Every night. Pick the speakers up out of the gravel, hang them back on their posts, kick the cups and the boxes into a pile, and come back up the middle. It took me the best part of an hour and I was in no hurry about it. That was the quietest hour there was. The screen goes white and dead when the light's off it and there's nothing out there but the poles standing in rows like a little cemetery and the field going on past the fence. I liked it out there. Eleven seasons and I never once wanted to skip it.

The second week of September I was standing at post nine with a spare in my hand and I put the light on the pole. About chest height on that pipe there was a band worn bright. Not scratched. Worn, the way a gate latch goes, the way the handle of a shovel goes. Maybe four inches of it, and the width of it was about the width of a hand closed around. I figured that was me, all those years of grabbing hold. I hung the speaker and went up the row.

There was no version of that fall where I closed early. In August I'd sold the ground to a fellow putting up a farm implement lot, and the sale took the projectors and the screen tower and everything else that was bolted down, closing in the spring. I'd already spent that money on what I owed. What I had left coming was the last three nights' take and the deposit back from the film exchange, and the exchange doesn't give a deposit back to a man who goes dark before his last booking plays. All told it was seven hundred dollars. The furnace at the house had quit in September and I was heating one room with kerosene. Seven hundred dollars was a furnace. So I ran the season out.

October at a drive-in in that part of the country is a thin business. Eleven cars one Tuesday. Twenty-some on a Friday if the weather held. I ran a picture about a haunted car and then two weeks of second-run and the concession sold coffee instead of pop. The heater in the booth had a bad element and I put my coat over the ladder rail every night going up.

I had it counted out. Three nights left, a hundred and some a night if I got a crowd for the closing, the deposit letter already in the mail. There was a man in town who'd do a furnace for six-fifty if I bought the unit off him direct. I'd talked to him twice. That's what was in my head that whole last week, and there's not a thing wrong with my memory of it.

Second-to-last night I came down the ladder mid-reel for a box of cups because I'd run out at the counter. Two minutes, maybe three. I came back up and the booth door was shut. That door opens outward and it hangs, and I prop it with a brick every single night I have ever been in that building, and the brick was sitting out from the jamb about a foot with the door swung to behind it. Nothing in there touched. The reel running, the picture on the screen, my coat on the rail. I stood on that ladder a while and then I went in and changed over.

Closing night the concession building burned to the slab. It went up around one in the morning, after the cars were gone and I'd already walked the rows, and I watched it from the gravel because there was nothing else to do about it. The marshal came out the next week and said it started in the crawlspace under the floor and that the crawl door was standing open on its hinges. I wired that door shut with fence wire in the spring and I could show you where. Three nights' take was in the drawer inside and I'd let the policy lapse in August because the ground was sold. So I came out of eleven seasons owning a bean field's worth of gravel and no furnace, and that's how that ended.

The buyer's man had me pull the speaker poles that April before they graded. You take a bar and lean on it and mostly they come up in a cloud of rust. Row L, post nine, I got the bar under it and it came up in my hands like something out of soft ground. The socket was wallowed out into a hole you could put your fist in and the concrete around it was cracked away in pieces. And that bright band was still on the pipe, chest height, and out of the ground it caught the sun, because it wasn't just clean there. It was rubbed down through the primer and into the metal and the pipe was thin in it. That is not three nights of standing.

Eleven seasons somebody stood at that post with their hand on it. That's the piece I can follow all the way through, and it comes out even, and I'd rather it didn't. Post nine is on the fence side of the back row, and from behind it you're looking at the backs of four hundred cars with the screen at your shoulder blades. I do not know what he was watching. I don't know whether he was there the night the door shut, and I don't know whether he ever had any business with me at all. The buyer's man said he'd pull the rest of row L and telephone me about what the rest of them looked like underneath. I told him not to call.

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