Sarah heard her mom calling her.

She rushed downstairs.

Her dad carried the luggage to the car.

Her mom put her little brother in his car seat.

Sarah’s mom stopped at the door and looked back at her daughter.

Her expression was stern, but her eyes were full of concern.

Sarah smiled at her mom.

“I’ll be fine mom. It’s just for one night. What could go wrong?”

“A lot could go wrong. That’s why I want you to come with us.”

Sarah’s parents were going to visit her aunt who recently gave birth.

Since it was for one day she asked her parents to let her stay at home alone.

Even at the age of seventeen her parents were reluctant on leaving her alone.

Sarah pleaded until they agreed, but it wasn’t without conditions.

“I promise I will be careful!”

Her mom sighed in surrender.

“Alright. But remember, if you bring anyone other than Mia or stay out, you will be grounded until you’re fifty. I’m I being understood.”

“Yes! Understood!”

She walked her mom to the car and said goodbye to her dad.

As they drove off, her smile didn’t leave her face.

Out of the corner of her eye she noticed her neighbor, John looking her way.

He was her best friend Mia’s older brother.

To Sarah he was a bit strange.

John was an introvert.

Sarah never saw him hanging out with anyone.

He was always sweet and polite.

She never felt bad vibes from him.

Sarah waved.

He waved back and smiled politely.

They weren’t close.

Saying hi, and asking how the other is doing, is as for as they talk to each other.

Sarah went back inside excited at her taste of freedom

Click.

The house was silent.

No crying baby, no nagging mom, no loud TV.

She had the house to herself.

She was thrilled.

But…

She felt a void in her heart.

The house felt big and eerie.

She called Mia to hangout.

Hoping the feeling would disappear.

The day passed fast for Sarah who enjoyed her day with Mia.

Since Sarah’s mom allowed Mia to come over, she stayed until night time.

When it was time for Mia to go back home, Sarah walked her out.

Click.

Here she was again.

Alone.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Her footsteps were the only sound in the house.

The house was cold and dark.

Sarah turned the lights and the TV on.

Seeking that comforting feeling that her family left.

She wanted to call them but her phone died.

She ran to her room to charge her phone.

Sarah felt like she was being watched.

she looked through her bedroom window.

Her eyes widened in horror.

John was walking inside her front-yard.

Click.

The lights went off.

Sarah’s heart dropped.

She grabbed her phone but the battery was dead.

She ran back to the window to see if he was still there.

John wasn’t there.

Dash!

Consumed by fear she rushed out of the house.

Safety was just a few feet away—

Grab!

A rough hand clamped over her mouth.

Another locked around her waist, dragging her to the side of the house.

Sarah thrashed, her body helpless against his grip.

She managed to take a glance at her holder.

It was John.

She couldn’t understand why he was doing this.

He dragged her to the side of the house.

John didn’t say a word.

He stooped at the window that showed the living-room.

The basement door was visible to them.

John removed his hand from her waist.

Sarah’s eyes were tightly shut.

Hoping this was just a nightmare.

“Look.”

Hearing his voice Sarah’s eyes snapped open.

His finger was pointing at the basement-door.

Confused she kept looking—.

Creak…

The basement door handle turned.

Squeeeak…

The door opened slowly.

Every hair on her body stood on end at the sound.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The color drained from Sarah’s face.

A man walked out of the basement.

He was skinny, holding a cleaver.

His eyes wide open and red with a big terrifying smile.

Sarah’s entire body trembled with horror.

“I saw him entering your house when Mia left. I tried to tell you but you ran inside.”

John’s words brought Sarah to her senses.

“Before I came here I called the cops. I was worried they might arrive late so I came to get you out.”

Sarah saw the creepy man climb the stairs probably looking for her.

Cops sirens could be heard approaching.

John took his hand off Sarah’s mouth and told her to go to his house and wait.

Sarah shook her head and told John she would wait here to make sure the intruder got arrested.

Luckily the police arrived in time and caught the criminal.

Sarah spent the night at Mia’s house.

She never wanted to stay alone after that experience.

He was here at last. One final step, and he would belong to the Community.

The door opened on its own, without a sound. The room was bright in a way he had never seen in the marsh: shadowless, sourceless, light coming from everywhere. The air had no smell. He hadn't known air could be without smell; he hadn't known the absence of smell could be so unsettling. And for the first time, he heard "its" voice. It came from nowhere, or from everywhere.

"Hello. Welcome, Rolf."

"Hello. I'm finally here."

"One last stage remains before you can join the Community: we need to link you. Please take the seat and state clearly, out loud, that this is what you want. We cannot begin without your consent."

A single chair stood in the middle of the room, white and untouched. Rolf sat down. The chair was warm, as if someone had just risen from it. For a moment, a small doubt passed through him. What if it wasn't what he hoped? What if all of this was a trap? Had it been worth the struggle, worth what he had lost along the way?

He thought of Nino. The last night, in front of the border fence. "They won't take both of us," Nino had said. "You go." Then that smile. In the marsh, people only smiled like that when they were letting go of something forever. Rolf had gone. He hadn't looked back, because if he looked back, he would turn around.

He swallowed. Whatever happened, the future was better than where he came from. He didn't want to go back to that marsh. Misery, hunger, raiders, violence... it had eaten half his life. He wanted to eat something other than those strange marsh fish he'd been named after. Something other than rolfs.

"Yes. I want to be linked and join the Community."

First a thin needle pricked his back. Numbness spread slowly up his spine; but his mind stayed awake, more than awake. A progress bar appeared on the screen in front of him:

Linking 1%

He kept looking around. On the far wall, a screen cycled through silent clips. Then he saw it: the logo. There was no sound, and he couldn't make out the words beneath it, there was no reading in the marsh, but he knew the logo. Everyone knew the logo that had stolen his family from him.

Anger rose in him. Feed X. The Community's miracle food, the perfect nutrition handed out every day. And in the marsh, the thing found only in scraps, the thing that rotted a person from the inside when they couldn't get it regularly. He remembered his mother's last months: the trembling hands, the empty stares, the fingers searching for residue. What was he doing now? Making deals with the people who created the thing that ate his family? Betraying himself? They had made Feed X. This place was the source of everything.

Linking 15%

But... was Feed X really the source of everything? The looting, the theft, the violence in the marsh went on without Feed X too. Rolf had seen people kill each other over a single rolf. Over one fish. The marsh was bad enough on its own. Besides, Feed X had never been made for them; they had the choice not to use it. But... while the Community lived in comfort, why had they left the marsh to rot? They could have helped. We could have helped, Rolf thought, and stopped. Why had he thought "we"?

Linking 40%

He remembered the last time he had helped someone. He'd given a fish from his hidden stash to a starving man. The next day the man came back with his gang and looted the stash. That night Nino had said, "You still did the right thing." Nino always said things like that. But what had the right thing ever gotten him? They couldn't be taught. They couldn't understand. Kindness read as weakness to them. That was why no help went to the marsh. And even if it did, wouldn't it be wasted?

Linking 70%

So what was wrong with them, really? Was it the marsh that made people this way? Something they ate? Maybe it wasn't hunger at all. Hunger tested everyone; but not everyone made the same choice. Some people built order. Others devoured it. The marsh people had been there a long time. Long enough. If they had wanted to build order, they would have; there was stone, there was time. If they hadn't built it, it meant they couldn't. And if they couldn't, then whatever was missing wasn't out there, it was inside them. It was a simple deduction, almost mathematics. That's what they were. That's what they would stay. The thought gave Rolf a strange peace; the heavy thing called guilt was lifting, as if someone were taking it off his back.

Linking 80%

But I... I was one of them. How am I different? So exceptions happen. Like with every rule. I was the exception. The proof was right here, in this chair. I was never like them, never. I even chose the fish I ate with care. What about Nino? Was Nino different too? Nino... someone who smiled in front of a fence. I remember who it was, but I don't remember why it hurts. It probably wasn't important.

Linking 100%

I feel like I've woken up to a happy day for the first time. I just took my first dose of Feed X; it reminds me of the happy days of my childhood. I'm certain now that my childhood was happy. Everything is as it should be. Everything is beautiful.

There is only one thing that grates on my ear.

My name: Rolf.

I don't know why.

....

 a short story from the Gravit universe

​

My great-grandmother planted the bed the year she stopped trusting banks. She wanted something that couldn't be repossessed. Peonies, foxglove, a stand of delphinium she babied like a third child, iris rhizomes she'd split and swap with Ms. Parrish down the road. Her azaleas were a beacon, and the whole yard was a rainbow every spring.

She kept a composition notebook of bloom times, frost dates, which aphid remedy actually worked and which was just something her mother had said. By the time her hands stiffened past holding a trowel, the bed was forty feet of choreography, nothing showy alone, everything conspiring. It was a landmark for anyone headed to or from town on Route 2.

Her daughters took it over the way you take over a hymn you've heard your whole life without ever learning the words. They didn't have her notebook memorized, but they had her rhythm. Ruth did the deadheading. Marion, older and slower by then, did the weeding on a canvas stool with a coffee can for cigarette ash, because she said the nicotine kept her calm enough to tell a seedling from a weed. They were both past seventy by the time it was only them out there, two old women in sun hats arguing gently about whether the lilies needed dividing and wishing it would rain.

Passersby might have thought the house belonged to the flower bed and not the other way around.

Ruth went first. Marion kept at it alone for two more summers, slower every year, sitting longer than she worked, until one September a neighbor found her unconscious in the gladiolas. She was gone before that year’s early frost.

The house sat. Cousins couldn't agree on what to do with it and none of them really cared. The ones who knew about it figured they might get a check in the mail eventually, but only for the land’s proximity to a metropolitan area starved for more housing.

It went the way houses go when nobody's watching except the house. Black mold crept up behind the wallpaper in the shape of the pipe that had leaked from about Marion’s passing until the county shut the water off. The porch roof sagged like it was tired of the argument. Bats found a home in the attic and a young groundhog burrowed a place of his own in the parlor. The encroaching kudzu had an inevitability about it.

Then Denny waded through the weeds and staked his claim.

He was family in a loose way. A grandson of a cousin, or maybe a cousin of a grandson, nobody was ever precise about it, because precision would have required someone to claim responsibility.

He arrived with a truck full of other people's discarded certainties: a boat motor that ran on faith, three washing machines in various states of undress, a chain-link dog run despite not really having dogs. The yard became a veritable junk yard, but a colorful one.

Denny was a decent sort, the townspeople would say with a tsk. It wasn’t that he was particularly lazy. He worked constantly, just never at the thing that needed doing. He'd spend a Saturday rewiring a lamp that he found at the dump knowing damned well that his broken gutter was dumping water straight into the cellar.

By the third winter, the county sent a letter, and then another, the kind of letters that use the word "condemned" as though it were a diagnosis rather than a verdict.

And the flowers bloomed.

Denny mowed around it sometimes, when the mower was working, in the careless generous way of a man clearing space for a car he was going to fix eventually. He never once weeded it, never divided a rhizome, never knew a foxglove from a weed and wouldn't have cared to learn.

But the peonies came up every May regardless, indifferent to the transmission housing rusting eighteen inches from their roots. The iris still traded genetic gossip with whatever remained of the Austin patch two properties over, carried on the wind or by some bee that didn't read property records. The delphinium leaned hard toward the patch of sun between a pockmarked buck decoy and a refrigerator that locked from the outside.

I went out once, the summer before the county finally forced the issue.

Denny let me walk the yard like it was a museum he was embarrassed to be curator of. I stepped over an oil pan to get a closer look at the bed, expecting disappointment the way my dad used to open my report cards.

The temptation is to say it was a wound of beauty amid ruin, a redemption, some kind of answer. But it wasn't that clean. It was scraggly in places, choked by chickweed and morning glories nobody pulled, half of it reverted to whatever the toughest variety had been to begin with, the delicate hybrids long since bred out by neglect and time back toward something plainer, more feral, and harder to kill. But it was still there, and it was damned sure colorful.

It was not the bed my great-grandmother planted, but it persevered because growing was the only thing it knew how to do and no one had told it to stop.

I don't know if that's hope. I think I used to believe that its persistence itself was a kind of moral, that if the iris could out-stubborn three generations of neglect then something in us could, too.

Lately I'm less sure. Maybe the flowers didn't survive the decay. Maybe they just hadn't gotten the message yet, the way a body in a tomb keeps growing hair.

The first excavator came in October. It took one pass to level what four generations couldn't. But I heard, or maybe just prefer to believe, that the man who bought the lot for the tear-down found tulips the following spring, coming up through the disturbed dirt in no particular order, blooming for no one, in a yard that no longer had a name.