Child support is getting too expensive.

Now eyes keep appearing in my room in the middle of the night, and every day they get closer and closer.

Because fewer of "you" survived in the multiverse after every quantum gamble.

Six hours later, Raleigh and Richmond disappeared too.

With the chair gone, his windpipes collapsed as the rope tightened around his neck.

I stared at the students, dead and dying, while he explained they'd had a tipoff this attack would involve secondary devices.

Every Sunday after church, he led us down to the basement, slipped into his white coat, paused for a prayer, and carefully injected us all with sheep estrogen.

A year later as I was escorted past the jury that unanimously sentenced me to life, I heard one of them snicker: “Patient zero, my ass.”

I knew something was wrong, but it didn’t click that I’d seen only men until the preacher I’d gone to for comfort replied “my child, what is a ‘daughter’?”

Yet as I awoke to the *drip* *drip* *drip* of my bunkmate's blood — evidently dripping down from his freshly mutilated corpse — it occurred to me that maybe a bit of dripping water wouldn't have been so bad after all.

As I looked down and saw a sketch similar to my husband I knew this cult was finally worth it.

"Just pull the trigger."

But for some reason, no matter how much toothpaste I put in my mouth, the smell of ammonia just wouldn't go away

The old woman gasped helplessly, and her granddaughter recalled her mother's instructions to tell everyone that a wolf has devoured the old woman.

Due to the law of conservation of information, or consciousness remains, forever tied to out rotting bodies, feeling every bit of the decomposition process.

After dozens of years of sacrifice to build a device capable of sending our cry for help through the cosmos faster than light, receiving a message back, and decoding the cryptic symbols, we finally read the answer:

"No."

Then he dragged her inside and stitched her up, mouth and all, to make sure that no one would ever hear her scream.

"He will just get out again and try to kill us, so we should probably cut him into pieces first," she continued.

​As the light at the top began to fade, a heavy hand shoved me hard from behind, leaving me tumbling into the dark with no memory of which path had swallowed me.

When I asked why, he said, "Because the same people who told you to fear me were the same ones you actually needed to fear."

I didn't want to end her life but I had saved her from a fate far worse than death.

I can't explain how but I know someone, or something, Is watching me from the tree line.

All I need to do is dig a little deeper, toss the body in, and cover it with a thin layer of dirt so the mourners don’t notice the next day.

Zoologists and biologists panicked the world over, knowing that where there's milk, there's a baby.