"And…what, we’re just supposed to stare at it?” Reggie muttered, each syllable dripping with a childish irritation.

I tried not to let the initiate disturb my own focus on the maypole. By my estimation, the speaker system that ran the perimeter of the town had chimed no more than two minutes ago. At the very least, we had another fifty-eight minutes before the next chime would sound and signal that we should break our gaze. As a restless whistling started to stream from Reggie’s lips, I got the distinct feeling that Yvette’s twenty-something-old replacement wouldn’t be able to put in more than five minutes with the maypole. That being said, Reggie was under no obligation to watch it. The chimes, the reverie, the maypole - they all simply represented a strong recommendation from The Bureau, but they weren’t a demand. No pistol-totting enforcers would arrive on scene if he decided to go twiddle his thumbs somewhere else. They were able to mine useful data about the convergence no matter what Reggie did. In essence, he was free to do as he pleased.

It was for his own safety, though. I can say that from experience, having spent the entirety of the last four years within the confines of Tributary.

”Yes. Think of it like meditation, but with your eyes open”  I responded curtly, hoping that my standoffishness would quiet Reggie.

After a microscopic pause, though, he continued: ”I mean for how long, though?”, underhand tossing a rock the size of stopwatch at the base of the maypole as he said it.

Lacy physically grimaced as it thudded loudly against the wood and the plastic. Out of the five of us currently living in Tributary, she had been here the second longest, about half as long as me. In my experience, there was a definite correlation between total time spent here and respect for The Bureau’s guidelines. Given that, Lacy and I had a very short fuse when it came to disrupting the morning reverie.

”For at least an hour, kid” Lacy snapped venomously, her face contorted into a gaunt snarl like a starving mountain lion. She stood next to me in the semi-circle we had formed around the maypole, on the end of the group and the farthest from Reggie. This struck me as an intentional choice. The four of us - Lacy, Alexis, Harmony and I - were still shaken and on edge after what happened to Yvette. Lacy, having found Yvette's overlapping cadavers, was the most shaken, and likely not ready for someone to come in and replace her.

”Longer if you’re smart” Alexis added, with her twin, Harmony, nodding silently in agreement.

She had followed all the recommendations to the letter, never missed a dose of medication despite the side effects, and she was always on time and present for the reverie. In spite of that, Yvette still amalgamated. Horribly, too. Worst instance of it I've seen since being here.

When she wasn’t at the maypole five minutes after the first morning chime, Lacy took it upon herself to check on Yvette. When thirty minutes had passed and Lacy hadn’t returned from Yvette’s cottage, which was approximately a three minute walk from the maypole, I then reluctantly left to find Lacy. Call it experience or intuition, I knew she was gone long before I found Lacy kneeling over what remained of our Yvette.

If you survive long enough at Tributary, you get plenty desensitized to the tangled, sanguine aftermath of spontaneous amalgamation. But there was something about Yvette’s death - maybe it was the way that Lacy’s long blonde curls were blood-stained from having been draped into the overlapping, repeating viscera or maybe it was the veritable spectrum of terror evident on Yvette’s intersecting faces. Whatever it was, I felt fear form a heavy cannonball in my stomach like it had the first month I was here, the weight of the feeling making movement and thought difficult.

Showcasing his boredom proudly like it was a badge of honor akin to a Purple Heart, Reggie began pacing boisterously around the twenty-foot tall totem, speaking loudly as he did: ”Help me out here Ted - you look old as sin, so I’m supposing you’ve been here awhile and will know the answer. I get paid no matter what I do, correct?” 

I took a moment to pause and consider my response. Initially, I found it difficult to locate the words I wanted to use. With no language hanging in the air, though, I was distracted by Tributary’s profound baseline silence. The town was nestled between two large, forested hills, but there was no natural white noise - no birdsong, no wind through the trees, no distant car horns - nothing. Most of the silence was likely due to seclusion from civilization. The lack of birdsong, however, has always been a little less naturally explainable. Somehow, I think The Bureau keeps animals out of Tributary. Despite being in Vermont, I’ve only ever seen one animal in my tenure here - a deer, or what remained of it. One part of it was dead, its head resting limply on the ground under a pine tree at the periphery of town. The other part of it was in the process of dying, with its head visibly writhing and twisting from inside the first’s over-expanded jaw. As I turned away, stunned and retching, I witnessed various minute but unnatural looking movements coming from inside the original’s abdomen and limbs. I imagine these movements likely represented the superimposed copy of the deer being strangled and exsanguinated from within the restrictive confines of the original.

After a prolonged silence, I finally responded:

”That’s correct, Reggie, but they must have mentioned the impor-“ cutting me off before I could say more, the brown-haired, blue-eyed boy resumed his self-important pontification:

”Great, as advertised. Excuse me then if I don’t erotically gawk at this second-rate modern art piece, like the rest of you sheep. Don’t want to see myself featured on some Japanese prank show a few years down the line with whatever footage they're currently recording” he decreed, gesturing broadly at the many, many video cameras fixed on our position in the dead-center of Tributary, Reggie still obnoxiously treading circles around us and the maypole.

Seemingly every inch of the town was under surveillance. Not that there was that much space to cover. Tributary was essentially one street lined by abandoned buildings with a small park in the center, where the maypole was erected after the disappearance of the people who used to live here. It’s unclear what this place looked like in its heyday - all of the business signage had been removed from the weathered establishments before I arrived here four years ago. The only structure that looked relatively new was the maypole, but even that was starting to show some age and erosion.

Despite his infuriating pretension, Reggie was right about one thing - “modern art piece” would be a very reasonable description for the maypole. At its center was a wooden cylinder with a diameter about the size of a frisbee. It stood approximately two-stories tall in a small patch of grass that interrupted the asphalt at the half-way point of Tributary's one street. The post had been adorned chaotically with thick plastic that shifted in color dramatically every few inches, which protruded from the wood asymmetrically depending on where you looked. Closer to the ground, the plastic looked like dragon scales, oblong and rough. As the material wrapped around the pole and spiraled upwards, however, it transmuted to look more like spikes or stalactites, poking a few feet out from the core. Then, it transmuted again to a glossy sheet with a few thin, centimeter-long tendrils sticking straight up here and there. Then, it looked like ocean waves, and then like stick figures holding hands, so on and so on - innumerable shapes seemingly without coherency or intent in design, from top to bottom. Or, alternatively, maybe the disorder was the design - no matter where you looked, and at whatever angle you looked, the maypole offered a wholly unique image. When I was briefed by The Bureau before arriving at Tributary, the welcome coordinator had mentioned that the maypole was theorized to “counteract the surrounding convergent leyline through its nearly irreplicatable uniqueness, grounding subjects firmly in our current thread through focused perception”, whatever that means. The coordinator, muscular and decked in camo like a drill sergeant, implied that this measure may have saved the original inhabitants of Tributary if they had access to it.

Me and my initial group were not told what had happened to those original inhabitants. That being said, I’m not sure any of us explicitly asked.

Although, sometimes I’m not so sure I’m recalling the words or phrases from the briefing correctly anymore. It’s just been so long. Not only that, but every newcomer I’ve talked to in the last year deny having had a formal briefing before arriving at Tributary, unlike me. Enticed by the ludicrous financial compensation, they did not want the offer to be revoked by asking any prying questions - no briefing required.

Part of me believes that The Bureau stopped briefing people altogether - perhaps it was effecting the data in a way they didn’t anticipate. Alternatively, maybe there was never any briefing and I'm housing a false memory - some retroactive revision of my own internal narrative to make what happens at Tributary even remotely digestible.

”I’m just here to get quick cash to pay-up on a gambling debt. Once I have enough, I’m out. I'm going for a walk, enjoy your shared psychosis.”

With that proclamation, Reggie started to walk away from the maypole. I heard Lacy take a monstrous inhalation, clearly planning on chewing out the young man. Before she could unleash her tirade, I placed a soft palm on Lacy’s shoulder and numbly shook my head side-to-side, which extinguished her fury. Reggie turned back to us when he heard Lacy’s colossal sigh, but only for a fraction of a second.

Implicitly, Lacy, Alex, and Harmony understood - Reggie would not be with us long, and arguing him was not worth the risk. Strong emotion is destabilizing and can make you vulnerable to spontaneous amalgamation.

All of us were promised release once the experiment, referred to in my briefing as the Webweaver Protocol, was completed. Attempts at voluntary early discharge from Tributary, before the completion of the experiment, were met exclusively with rifle-fire and death. Four years into this, I’ve started to believe that The Bureau has no intention of ending the experiment. Whatever they are gleaning from us, it’s clearly valuable - hundreds of spontaneous amalgamations later, the experiment still presses on.

Maybe his replacement will be better.

------------------------------------------------

”Love you sweetheart. I’ll give you another call in a month or so. Say hi to your mother for me” and with that, I heard the call disconnect before I even put the phone back onto the receiver. After confirming my granddaughter, Remi, was no longer on the line with a few pathetic “hellos?”, I let the phone slide out of my hand to its normal resting place on the end table. I closed my eyes and leaned back in my recliner, letting the crackling embers in my cottage’s fireplace soothe me.

The first of each month, we’re granted ten minutes of uninterrupted phone time. A privilege that The Bureau certainly doesn’t need to provide, but it helps everyone keep their heads on straight. I use it mostly to confirm that Remi is still getting the deposits from my bank account, coordinated by The Bureau. Originally, I signed up for this to help her pay for college. Now, the compensation is helping fund her wedding. Breaks my heart that I haven’t met her fiancé, and that I have to lie to her about my absence. The salary given for my continued, honest participation is the only thing giving my life purpose, though. No reason to loose my grip now.

Feeling sleep coming on, I make myself vertical, fighting through the warm vertigo caused by the rum still slushing around in my gut. Lumbering over to the bathroom, I start performing my nightly inspection. Staring at myself in the mirror, I smile for about half a minute and watch for discrepancies in my mirror image. Once I’m convinced it is only me in the mirror, I do the same with a neutral expression. Then the same with a frown.

Breathing a sigh of relief, I turn the faucet, allowing me to splash cold water on my face to help relieve the tension inherent to that inspection.

There was a moment, years ago, when I thought I might be about to amalgamate. I woke up in the middle of the night due to my entire body throbbing with an intense, searing pressure. It was like tiny grenades were exploding in my limbs, clawing into my muscles with microscopic shrapnel. I passed the bathroom mirror on the way to the maypole, momentarily petrified by the crowd of different reflections staring back at me. The images weren't spread out across the mirror, they all inhabited the same position I did, but I could see all of them separately. It was like seeing double, but with complete visual clarity. There was at least ten, each taking a turn to become the most prominent reflection. The more I watched, the more alarmed my reflections became - which, of course, only served to alarm me further.

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK. 

My recollection of that night was shattered by manic pounding on my front door.

”TED. HELP ME - PLEASE HELP ME. SOMETHING…SOMETHING IS...”

Reggie’s voice, bellowing and coarse with strain, started to permeate the inside of my living room. Panic sparked like a live-wire through my chest and down into my legs, mobilizing me.

Without saying a word, I frantically pushed my recliner against the door as a barricade. Then, I used a small bookshelf to block the only window present on the front of my house, in case he tried to break it and enter the living room. Judging by the sounds coming from outside my home, I could tell he was destabilizing and too far gone for my help.

At least, that's what I told myself at the time. Trying to assist Reggie was a risk I wasn’t willing to take. Spontaneous amalgamation is a brushfire - if I got too close, it could just spread to me as well.

As I stepped away from the makeshift palisade, Reggie’s pleas intensified and degenerated from sentences, to singular words, and finally to guttural noise. His screams were eventually joined by other, nearly identical screams. Some of them started muffled, as if they were vocalized from some place deep underwater. But when the pulpy sound of tearing flesh layered into the cacophony, the extra voices became clearer - more audible. By the time his one scream had grew into an unbearable, hellish choir, I had managed to close the bedroom door behind myself. As I did, the screams grew fainter, and fainter, until they became mercifully absent, replaced by Tributary’s uncanny, baseline silence.

------------------------------------------------

In the morning, I wearily pushed the recliner away from the front door, dreading the scene that was undoubtedly waiting for me on the other side. To my relief, however, I found evidence that someone from The Bureau had visited my home under the cover of darkness. There were no bodies propped against the cottage, only a few patches of barely perceptible, recently cleaned blood-stains.

As I approached the maypole, I noticed Reggie had already been replaced by another young man. He eventually introduced himself as Matt, only doing so after the second chime had sounded indicating our protective morning reverie had come to an end, choosing to forgo a formal introduction until after spending that hour intently focusing on the prophylactic totem.

I smiled weakly at Matt's compliance to the recommendations, feeling a flicker of hope as I did. Maybe we would all be afforded some peace, for however briefly that could be possible.

My smile waned as my thoughts drifted back to Yvette - someone who followed every guideline but had still spontaneously amalgamated. Before anxiety captured me completely, I steadied myself with an imaginary photo-collage of Remi’s wedding playing through my mind. She’ll be married by the first of next month, and I need to be alive to hear about it.

"One day at a time", I whispered to my reflection in the mirror that night.

For a second, I thought I saw the barbed curves of a grin overlap my neutral expression, a macabre cosmic friction heralding something even worse than spontaneous amalgamation.

But as soon as it had come, if it had been there at all, it was gone again.

------------------------------------------------

More Stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

A Thousand sorrows are carved in your gaze
The tears serve only to beautify your scarred face
Like a wounded animal you cling onto
My outstretched hand
Mistaking manipulation for compassion
My empty words for empathy
Failing to notice I only seek
To guide you on a path
Leading to a fate worse than death

Confide in me all of your dreams
To have them all broken
Lead me to the source of your calm
To have it reduced to ash
Entrust me with all that you’ve loved
To have it all dragged through hell
For there is no line I won’t cross
To relive the melody of your anguished wails  

The fingers that once brought a comforting touch
Will soon enough dig into your open wounds
Breaking your heart with betrayal and misery
Stripped naked before your deepest fears
Now your world crumbles in front of me

Battlefield
Our funeral ground
Land of the dead
We are those who rise at dawn
Only to fall when the sun sets
Servants to jealous old gods
Whose names you’ve forgotten
We are the spirit of vengeance
A fate worse than death
The devil lurking on the inside

True face of conscience
Cursed are those who dared to take life

Through a sea of recollection
A ship sails loaded with
Fevered nightmares
And languished screaming
Through a sea of recollection
A ship sails maned by
Every man, woman and child
Sent to be slaughtered
Their blood screams from your hands

True face of conscience
Cursed are those who dared to take life

Be damned those still clinging to life
To a destiny of masochistic spiritual rape of the mind

Content warnings for: Mentions of child abuse/mistreatment and mentions of suicidal and intrusive thoughts.

-----------------------

Each and everyday I go out on a walk, and each and everyday I hate it. More specifically, I hate the neighborhood I do them in.

Every single house looks nearly identical; rows and rows of brick infrastructure with the occasional white wood exterior. I’ve had to look at these same plain houses for the entirety of my eighteen years of living. To tell you the truth: It’s mind-numbing. 

I don’t have a license and there isn’t anyone I can ride with to leave this place. Unfortunately, due to this lack of option for transportation, the walks I do around my neighborhood are all I have in regards to going out. I usually choose to do my walks at night after I’m done with most of my daily activities. 

On this night, the routine stayed the same. At six PM I went out the front door and texted my Mother. 

“I’m going on a walk, I’ll let you know when I’m back.”

“Okay, be careful.”

The ‘be careful’ part was never usually added however this night was the first of ten I’d be spending alone at our home. Even as I grew older my Mother remained concerned for me. She still wanted me to text her every time I decided to head out and still worried over the thought of me being alone for any duration over a day. 

With her response I headed from our porch towards the sidewalk. In spite of the time, a dark blue sheet consumed the sky which gleamed only an hour before. Through the darkness a bulbous full moon shined yellow like a second sun. The young night spilled stars like bright specks of glitter upon a canvas. Despite my mood, I had to admit the sight above was pretty scenic. A cool breeze pushed through the street I walked aside, forcing me to stuff my hands into the pocket of my hood.

It was a lonely night, one of many. I was enrolled into homeschool at the age of thirteen. Even after graduating this May, I remain stuck in the home I was working in. For the last five years, I've been completely alone and isolated, stuck in my room doing whatever I can to pass the time. For the last five years, I’ve had no friends and really no one to talk to besides my Mother and frankly, I don't even like talking to my Mother so for the most part I don’t even talk to her. 

To many people, five years doesn’t sound like a lot of time and in all fairness maybe it isn’t, but in all fairness, five years in solitary confinement is long enough to completely change a person's entire life and brain function. My point is, five years can have a lot more of an impact than you’d expect, a lot more of an impact than anyone can handle. 

I think about this impact as I walk down the sidewalk. Thoughts of my circumstance would culminate into one of two emotions: An overbearing sadness or a hatred that clawed at me and tried desperately to get me to act upon every offense conceivable. On some occasions thoughts of my circumstance culminated into a lack of emotion; numbness, dissociation. None of these feelings lasted however. At the flip of a dime I could go from being mopey and pathetic to belligerent and spiteful. 

At this moment I was feeling sad and a little numb. I looked forward, rows of houses at each side ahead of me, shaded by the night sky. Suddenly a weld of tears crept into my eyes. I couldn’t tell if they were a result of the cold sting of the wind or my own self loathing, they were blinked away all the same. I looked down for a second and took a deep breath, I could feel the cool air chill the back of my throat.

I looked back up and glanced to the street ahead, standing in its center was a dog, or at least what looked like one. Its form was dimly illuminated by the white street light above it. Its limbs looked to be slightly elongated, creating something spider-like as it stood on all fours. It didn’t appear to have any fur, it almost looked like it had skin, matching a complexion of my own. The only thing that really had me thinking it was a dog besides its figure and its tail was its absurdly long snout, it looked like the snout you’d see on a horse. It ran off to its left, heading down a conjoining street and through a different neighborhood that branched off from the one I lived in. It was out of sight.

I could lie and pretend like this was the first time I’d seen something like this, but it wasn’t. I can’t even count the number of times I've seen something that wasn’t really there. I usually got faint glimpses, people and vague outlines out of the corner of my eye, disappearing when I turned to try and meet their gaze. But as the days wore on the glimpses became full visions that’d linger for seconds and disappear the moment I turned away.

I kept walking, figuring it wasn’t even there to begin with. The street it went down was on my regular walking path. As I walked along I didn’t even bother turning to where I thought I saw it until I had to cross the street and head down the neighborhood it passed through. I stopped instantly as soon as I turned. The dog wasn’t there, I had anticipated this. However, what I hadn’t anticipated was the large gray cloud of smoke emanating in its stead.

I looked around to see if it had any source, as I did the cloud loomed closer. The wind should have carried it down the street I had been walking on, however the cloud didn’t seem to care. It pulled towards me and seemed to want to suffocate me in its embrace. As it charged forward it’s molten odor burned through my nose. 

I walked away from it towards my right, still crossing the street and heading to the neighborhood on the other side. I didn’t turn back to see if it was following me though the smell lingered until I got nearly half way down the neighborhood I crossed into.

I blocked the thought of it out of my head; mentally separated myself from it. Doing this with anything that made me uncomfortable became a routine sometime in my early childhood.

As I walked down the sidewalk and under a street light I saw my shadow stretch out in front of me, its void figure standing tall against the concrete. I realized that this shadow was about the only companion I could hope to get. 

“The only companion you deserve,” thoughts like these are common, common enough to where I don’t even know if they're intrusive or of my own intuition. Either way I didn’t argue this statement, I didn’t even know if I disagreed. 

The sidewalk looped at the end of the street and took you to the other side of it. As I headed down the other side of the street a realization ran through my mind. I had seen no cars drive by on any of the streets I walked aside, nor had I seen anyone outside their home. This was unusual, not only did I know of two people who walked at around the same time I did, but never once on the hundreds of walks I'd gone on had I not seen at least one car pass, no matter the time of day.  

I blocked the thought of it out of my mind, “Just keep walking.”

As the thought left, an overwhelming scent of perfume consumed my senses. It was so strong my eyes watered and my head throbbed. “Just keep walking,” the voice in my mind wasn’t my own, it was my Mother’s. 

I was eight years old, we were shopping for perfume at the mall. The smell of all the different fragrances made my skull ache. On top of this, my feet like they’d shatter if I walked any further, this pain was typical though, hundreds of hours of walking with her and hundreds of hours of being told to: “Get over it.”, made me know she cared little. 

I looked up at her, “I just want to go.”

Her eyes widened and anger twisted her face, she didn’t bother disguising it.

“Just… keep… walking,” the last syllable of each word rolled sharp off her tongue, she made her point clear. 

The perfume’s scent ceased as quickly as it emerged, the memory flashed through my mind in an instant. I tried to make it leave but it was ringing through my head like a church bell, drawing a congregation of plaguing thoughts.  

“She wouldn’t have said that if you weren’t pathetic.”,  “You haven’t changed at all since then. You’re Just as worthless, just as small."

Each thought played at the same time yet I understood each one all too well. I slumped my shoulders, closed my eyes, and breathed heavily out my nose, breathed as though releasing a cloud of my self judgment.

When I opened my eyes the thoughts were stopped dead, but not by my own efforts. Standing in front of me was yet another brick house, one of the windows had brightened suddenly, yellow and gleaming. The light revealed a dark figure behind its curtain. The figure was that of a woman, standing still as a statue. The only reason I could tell she was a woman and not some mannequin was the fact that her head was fixed on my gaze as I kept walking. As I walked I stared at her, stared at her until I was walking directly by the window she stood behind. Without even knowing it I stood by the window myself, peering in to see a second figure. Another woman identical to the first was knelt down and sobbing. She stood across from the first woman, one hand covering her eyes whilst the other was stretched out in front of her, shaking side to side as if beckoning me to leave. I started backing up when a third figure emerged.

THUNK!, I practically leapt out of my skin. She had risen from under the window quicker than a rocket and slammed both her palms into the glass. She had the same exact features as the rest except she stood taller, she stood at my height.

She kept slamming her hands onto the window. THUNK! after THUNK!, cackling maniacally like a hyena presented with a slab of meat. 

“I WANT YOU, HAHAHAHA, (THUNK!, THUNK!), I WANT YOU!” 

She started to quickly lower and raise her head, each time her head rose the curtain moved up with it. She was licking the curtain. As the curtain moved up I saw that her silhouette was being produced by absolutely nothing, there was nobody behind the window. In spite of this the silhouette continued. 

“I WANT YA, I WANT YA,” the glee in her voice made me shiver. She lowered her hands off the window, her right was akimbo and her left was pointing at me. The arm she pointed at me with morphed and stretched like dough until becoming bigger and noticeably more defined than the arm resting by her hip. 

“Oh and I'm gonna get ya,” I could hear her inflection rise throughout the sentence, she was smiling wider with each word.

“I’M GONNA FUCKING GET YOU,” she stopped speaking after saying this, now crashing her palms into the window so hard I thought she’d break it. I ran, coughing as my breathing was caught in my throat. The sound of her banging grew more and more distant, ceasing once I reached the end of the street.

When I got there I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t block her out. I looked behind me. The window was still lit bright and yellow and she was still there, all three of them were. They weren’t banging the window, desperate to meet me on the other side of the glass. They were all standing in place, watching me as I crossed the street back to my neighborhood. 

With them still present after I turned away came a begrudging acknowledgment of a possibility I didn’t want to accept. 

“They're real?”

I kept walking back to my house, wanting to get the entire scene out of my head, wanting to forget. 

I had become so tired of these occurrences, tired of constantly having to second guess my own eyes. The self induced burden of made up things and made people had been something I had dealt with since around the time I entered homeschool. They had only gotten worse and worse until what was once a thorn on my side every couple of weeks, turned into a constant daily battle to identify reality. 

“I know how we can get rid of them,” the voice in my head sounded sure. Rather than explaining any further the voice chose an approach of visual learning. I saw myself next to the back door in the kitchen. I was reaching atop the bookshelf for my solution, over a dozen pill bottles lined up like models on a catwalk, elegantly boastful in their showing beauty. I grabbed the bottle with the most contents that I could see. I pushed down the lid with my palm and twisted it, it came off revealing the colorful tablets inside. So many tablets, all of them there for me, pleading they’ll release me from everything. One by one they slid down my throat, flooding towards my stomach as I washed them down with water. I saw nothing after that. 

I couldn’t say I liked the thought, but I couldn’t say I disliked it either. Either way, I noticed my hand clenched as the visual of myself grabbing the pills played in my mind. 

The urge to end my life was nothing new to me, I had felt this way for over a decade. By this time there wasn’t a day that’d go by where I seriously didn’t consider committing suicide. I can hardly explain what that’s like to someone who hasn’t shared similar ideations. Imagine being stuck in the moment before you die, your life flashing before your eyes. Thoughts of every single action and sensation felt throughout your entire life. Thoughts of everyone you know, thoughts of every moment you shared with them and everything they’ve ever said to you, thoughts about what they’ll say when they hear of your loss. 

“You don’t know nobody but your Mom, Aaron, you even think she’ll care?” 

I thought for a moment. My mind went to the dog she owned when I was younger. My Mother would spend more time gushing over that dog than she did even considering my existence. When it died she spent weeks mourning it, she even had a shrine set up for it, fitted with a mold of its paw print, a box containing an urn of its ashes, and its toy: A rubber bone that squeaked when you pressed on it. You wanna know something funny? I think my Mother only really started paying me more mind once that dog died, she figured she had all the pet she needed in me.

My eyes squinted and my nose twitched.

“She ain’t gettin’ me no fuckin’ shrine,” it was hardly audible through my gritting teeth, I hadn’t even realized they were bared. It wasn’t meant to be said aloud. 

“I guess not.”

By this point I was already at my house, walking down the driveway and heading towards the porch. I made it to the door and before I could even turn the handle,

“ARF-ARF AROO-ROO-ROO-ROO-ROOF!”

Maybe at any other time, I would have ignored it. Maybe at any other time, I'd've actually been sensical and just headed inside, drowning out the mutt from my mind in the quiet of my home. But this little doggy decided now of all times would be best to intrude on my day, already burdened by the barks of my own psyche. 

I don't even know the amount of times that dog’s barked at me, and it really isn't even the barking itself, it's how long it does it for. My neighbors leash it and send it out their side door, not even bothering to take it in after it starts screaming and crying right by my room, and that’s another thing; I’m lucky enough to live on the far left side of my home, lucky enough to have to lay in bed right next to our neighbor's driveway where that little pooch cries until midnight.  

I turned to my left, I couldn't see the dog where I stood and it surely couldn’t see me, but clearly that didn’t matter. I was so overcome with anger that I could hardly feel myself, I was anchored to the ground I stood on. 

At that moment if I decided to turn my back I’d be met with a sixteen-ounce claw hammer laid next to a potted plant at the right end of the porch. It was worn, grime layered across its wood handle and large spots of rust covering its steel head like melting red blisters you’d expect to find on a burn victim. 

“You know you want to. Do it, Aaron.”

My right hand rose slowly without my knowledge, as if detached from my body. It was beckoning for the hammer's embrace. 

“Jesus Christ.”, I immediately shot my hand away from the hammer's direction, now using it to cover my face, hiding myself from the moment, from my own shame, and from the leech within my mind. 

“Pussy.”

I turned back to the dog, still barking. I felt like muttering an apology, instead I exhaled, releasing the weight of sin out of my body. 

I opened the door and was met with a living room darker than the night sky I walked under. The shadowed visions of furniture and décor sat like black spots on my eye lens. 

“You’re in third-grade cryin’ like a baby in the dark. Grow up.”

I sat with my knees clenched to my chest, folded as I sought warmth. Strings of snot ran down my nose and beads of tears streamed across each of my cheeks. My bed sat in the corner of my room facing the door, facing my Mother. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed, staring down at my reddened face intently. 

She couldn’t care less. She couldn’t care less about my insomnia as I slept for just five to six hours each night, she just figured I was being stubborn. She couldn’t care less about the stories of monsters I’d hear from my cousins, instilling me with a fear of my own mortality any time I spent a second in darkness. She couldn’t care less about my desperate cling for any light source as night fell, a small television being all I was allowed to have in that regard. She couldn’t care less about my willingness to hold in my urge to urinate until five in the morning when I simply couldn’t, forcing me to make the daring journey across the dark four-foot wide hallway and directly to the bathroom which was lined up with my bedroom, not even on the other side of the house. And sometimes I couldn't hold it, setting myself up for beratement when my Mother had to clean my clothes. 

She couldn’t care less when she punished me by having me sit by myself for a week- alone in the darkness of my room with no light- after I made some smart comment. She couldn’t care less when I pleaded desperately for her not to do this and she couldn’t care less when I pleaded for my life as the ebony void of my room encased me once night came. 

She couldn’t care less as she walked out the doorway. She wouldn’t care for the three years I'd continue to live like this after that night until I finally ‘grew up’.

As I stood in the living room these thoughts didn’t play as a memory, they played as a feeling of which I knew well. I walked from the living room to the hallway and then towards the door of my old bedroom.

Splotches of dirt and grime covered the top and bottom of its white wood panels. Staring at this barrier had my mind racing mad thoughts of what could be lurking behind it.

“The Boogeyman? The Rake? Bigfoot?” There was only one way to find out. I turned the knob and opened the door, the boob light on the room's ceiling shined instantly as I did so. The light revealed what had been laid there for the past five years, workout equipment. 

I switched rooms with my sister once she moved out when I was eleven, we see each other so little that sometimes I forget we even lived with each other. I converted my previous room to a workout area two years later. 

The light of the room flickered, it was motion sensored to downpour whenever you were inside,  a feature my Mother added nearly five years too late. 

My eyes fixed on the fifty-pound dumbbells sitting abreast of each other on the carpet floor. Workouts have remained my way of relieving nerves every time I get them. At this time I figured it would be all I needed to sooth the worries the day brought.

I took off my hoodie and firmly gripped the bars of each dumbbell, the cold chrome steel burning into my palms. Each one held by my sides, I slowly curled the one on my right to my shoulder. As I did so I saw a thin strand of dark brown hair streaking across the black rubber of its left head. I didn't know who or where it came from but I didn’t focus on it, instead choosing to prioritize the task at hand. 

Seven curls on the right and six on the left, a new record, though the strength imbalance between my right side and my left was noticeable. However it was a new record all the same and I almost chuckled with excitement, but someone wasn’t having it. 

“Your Mother could lift that,” my pride settled to mild contempt. 

I kept exercising until I completed a full upper-body workout. Once I finished I took a shower and brushed my teeth, two things I quite honestly never had the care for doing but forced myself to each and every day. Once I took care of my hygiene I went to bed.

Opening the door to my room I walked to my nightstand and pulled the chain of the lamp that sat atop it, illuminating the room and revealing a familiar sight. Indents, craters, chasms, knife wounds, all littering my wall like shell holes on a battlefield. When I was younger an artillery of kicks, punches, elbows, and stabbings would be flung at that wall anytime I became even a little upset. Four years after those markings were made I hadn’t even bothered pasting them over, they had been there so long that if you told me the wall came that way I'd've been tempted to believe you.

Most of these markings were left right above the pillow I laid upon each night. Resting under that pillow was the corner of a sheet of paper, poking out from underneath it, barely noticeable. I pulled the paper out from under it, as I did the paper released a rattle like that of a maraca. 

A stick man stood in the middle of the road, smiling. Behind him was a crudely drawn car heading towards him. Above him, an arrow pointed downwards. Labeled above the arrow was the word “ME” written in messy handwriting.

I knew this drawing well. I brought it closer to examine it further, as I did the paper rattled once again. I turned the paper to locate the source of the noise. 

A capsule of Zoloft was taped to the back of it, the meds I took when I was seven and the meds I refused to take when I was fourteen.

Memories of my childhood emerged, unsettling me. I closed my eyes and exhaled, as I did the paper became entirely different. The page was streaked with rows of boxes and underlines filled with insightful text. I glanced over all of it and saw the bold writing atop the page: “HOMESCHOOL LETTER OF INTENT”

The voice scoffed, “Actin' mopey like you don’t deserve it, you did this to yourself.”

I was seven. I hated myself and everyone I knew, I pushed everyone away and had no friends.

I was eight. I had punched the only friend I had, sending him backward onto the concrete of the basketball court at recess and sending him backward out of my life for good. 

I was nine. I grabbed the shirt collar of one of my ‘friends’ and threatened to beat him for not enjoying a cartoon I liked.

I was ten. I had hurt so many of my peers that I would have likely been expelled if they had told the teachers.

I was eleven. I was in middle school and had met nobody from elementary, I was starting all over again with new people to push out of my life.

I was twelve. What had been a less than unsteady friendship with someone I met at the beginning of the school year had been reduced to yet another scornful assault by my hand.

I was thirteen. I hated the entirety of everyone at my middle school and made it known. I felt so ashamed of who I was that I tried convincing myself that I was somehow better than each of them. Covid-19 hit just halfway through the school year, leaving me homeschooled and alone, but I actually took to it and decided to be enrolled. As time passed the thought of talking to my peers back at school started dawning in a whole new light. I missed interaction and missed talking with anyone at all. By the time I wanted back into public school my schedule and sociability had changed so drastically that going back would’ve been like heading into a foreign land, unfit for the customs of the natives and not even speaking their language, not to mention I’d made enemies of just about every inhabitant. On top of this even if all those problems were sorted, my Mother still would have firmly kept me in homeschool as she figured it was better for my ‘education’.

And now I was eighteen, sitting on my bed with the entirety of my lonesome life being of my own fault and responsibility- fault and responsibility that I chose to block out to a point where I convinced myself that it wasn’t even my own. Loathing in my misery like I was the victim.

“Friends are for those who deserve it. Life is for those who deserve it. Take the pills, Aaron.”

I stared at the paper and moved my gaze down to the bottle resting on its center. 

“No, no, not today,” I wish I could say it was defiant, triumphant and outgoing against the snake-ish hisses the voice spoke in, but it wasn’t. It was meek and hardly discernible. 

I let the paper drop from my grasp, sending a shattering retort from the shaken tablets. I closed my eyes for a second. Opening them back to face reality and the consequence of my behavior. 

“Hurts don’t it?.”

By that point, I didn’t know what to believe in many regards, especially concerning how that paper ended up under my pillow. My hands covered my face, shielding the world from its sorrowful sight, now near to become a reservoir for my tears. I had sat like this for around half a minute before I finally got up to check the rest of the house in case of a break-in. 

“You know damn well there ain’t been nobody in here, you left that shit yourself.”

I felt ill and labored. By the time the voice was finished, I had already reached the door, turning the knob and not feeling its metal surface burn but rather meeting the chill of the cold surging through my body. 

Looking ahead I moved out the door on autopilot. As I tried to step out, my foot fell forward into nothing. There was no hallway floor, just a wide chasm of condensed darkness. I had only realized this once I was falling into it and plummeting a rapid descent. 

Twenty seconds. I had been falling for about twenty seconds, shouting and flailing, sinking through an abyss so void of light that I couldn’t even see the ground I’d soon splay onto.

I landed on my back, inexplicably I wasn’t dead or unconscious. The wind left my body and I started gasping like a fish on dry land. I had fallen upon concrete, the impact had left me with a jolt of pain so immense I thought I had broken something.

It took twenty more seconds of wallowing to finally get my breathing right and to rise on my feet. Bright white lights flickered all in front of me as far as my eye could see, like stars in the sky. 

They only flashed for one second at a time but this was enough to reveal the landscape in front of me. 

Street lights lined up in rows like marching soldiers, each strip of them sat around twenty-five feet from one another. Each light downcast upon a concrete plain, the scene was reminiscent of an abandoned parking lot. One second the lights would shine and the next the next they’d be out, a cycle that created a sort of strobe effect. 

I turned and saw that the same darkness I fell upon rested behind me. The dead space of color was so consuming that staring into it made me think my eyes were closed. 

I turned back to the lights, my breathing labored. Perhaps I had a psychotic breakdown. Perhaps I was in some parking lot and ended up here after some bout of amnesia. I was insane, I knew this. I could not even hold my own judgment of reality in high regard. 

I had almost known completely that I wasn’t in some parking lot but I was doing everything in my power to convince myself that I was. Despite the fall, despite my aching back, despite the lack of cars, and despite lack of parking spaces, I was in a parking lot because I couldn't bring myself to think otherwise. 

I walked straight down the middle of the concrete path between two rows of streetlights. A reasonable reaction to the events of that day would have been to dart as far as I could until I found some way back home, but I was not having a reasonable reaction. I was more focused on the lack of input from the snake in my head. It hadn’t said anything since I got here and the silence of my mind was almost more unnerving than the path I tread upon. 

Whaling, screaming, it sounded like someone was having the life taken out of her. I looked to my right and stopped. Every single light on my right side was gone, the sight mirrored that of the dark wall behind me. Within the darkness, a woman cried like she had lost the world.

A figure, just out of the corner of my left eye, barely noticeable but all too common. I looked over and a familiar woman stood before me. She did not mutter nor did she advance towards me; she just stood still, her movement being a slow head turn as her gaze fixed to mine. As she stared, the silhouette drowned in the black pool around me each time the lights flicked out, only to reemerge as a reminder she never left. 

My pace down the path slowed. Averting my gaze and looking down, I saw my long shadow stretched in front of me. As I stared my shadow stopped moving, still in front of me as I walked along. It righted itself and stood like a soldier at attention. I stopped dead unsure of what to do and as I did, it slowly drew back its left foot and kicked it through the concrete just a few inches in front of my shoes. 

A bare foot jutted out from the concrete and drew back underneath it. In spite of how its foot came out the hole it left was like a small narrow oval in shape, nonetheless the darkness within the hole matched the same shade as the thing that had kicked it in. In less than a second the hole expanded so large it looked like a tar pit. Out that pit rose yet another silhouette. As the light flickered on I saw it was matching my height. 

“MISS ME?!’’ She swiped a grabbing hand at me, its size noticeably larger than the other. 

I turned and shot backward. I could hear the pit-pats of her soles as they landed on the concrete, their noise growing louder and shattering my hopes of an easy escape. 

She was getting closer and closer until I reached the darkness past where I landed. Her noise stopped entirely. I swung my head to see that she was gone, this did little to quell the fear brewing within me as I saw that every single streetlight had gone dead entirely.

As the void enveloped me one street light just a few feet in front of me began to flicker.

The beam poured a circle of light on the ground. Just on the outer edge of that circle- hunched on all fours- was everything I dreaded as a young boy. 

To describe its skin as pale would be an understatement, its tone matched the paper I held before my arrival. Its body was emaciated and littered unevenly with thin strands of dark brown hair. At the end of each of its gangly limbs stood bony appendages connected to long claws, so long they made the appendages look like fleshy knife handles. Its eyes reflected the light above it and I saw its face was ape-ish like a gorilla. 

As I saw it, it hung its mouth open and ran towards me- still on all fours and strafing to the right.

I ran once more, moving left and hoping this thing would be slower than my previous pursuer. 

Any noise of the thing behind me was drowned out completely as something bellowed a woosh! in front of me. It sounded like something was scraping across the concrete and before I could even guess what it was, two yellow beams of light pierced through the void in front of me.

“Headlights.”

I pulled myself away from the oncoming vehicle, praying the thing behind me wasn’t close. Another pair of headlights appeared and then another and then another until I found myself in what was a game of Crossy Road on a dark busy highway. I zig-zagged every way around until I weaved and suddenly found myself stumbling into a new area. 

As quickly as a snap of my fingers I had entered a dirty holding cell. The walls looked aged with rows of brick on all sides. Directly atop a drawer on the left corner of the room was an old television, its static making my surroundings barely visible. To my right was a bed sat right next to the doorway I entered through. Next the bed was a row of dumbbells ranging from thirty to fifty pounds. Behind me rose a stench of perfume.

When I turned I had expected many things; headlights, the silhouettes, the Boogeyman. But there was nothing, nothing I could see. Growling and snarling bellowed so deep in pitch it sounded like an engine running on empty. Clicking sounds against the concrete reverberated towards me. The snarling turned to revving barks and as the clicking got closer the perfume’s aroma worsened. I looked down to see the cell door I stood in behind had a handle on the inside. As the faint outline of a snout emerged in the corner of my eye, I pulled the cell door shut. 

I looked back up to see the thing’s figure more clearly, but it wasn’t there. Suddenly the feeling of the rusty door handle left my palm. I looked down to see it was not gone but on the other side. 

The static buzz of the TV was all to be heard until someone finally decided to speak up. 

“You never learn.”

A crash and crumble shot from the wall so loud I thought the world was falling apart. Heaps of red brick pieces flew outwards and onto the floor, beneath the soaring bits I saw what had sent them: A hammer head so large it looked like a metallic barrel, at its ends were two long claws. From the hole left by the hammer came something I can only articulate as a culmination of putridity. 

First came its feet, human at their tops but so pink and padded on their bottoms that they rose off the ground like platform heels. Then came its hands, the left dark and of normal proportions and the right pale as milk and with elongated fingers. Next was its head, nothing but one big red oozing infected wound molded into the shape of a skull. Between all the blood and yellow puss leaking from its wound were three slits that opened across its face like gills. Last came its body; faces, mouths, stacked atop each other like Jenga blocks. The mouths opened in wide O’s and jutted out strings of yellow worms. Even from where I stood I could hear the worms slithering out one mouth to the other, moving in sync in a cycle that made me nauseous.

As it entered the cell it raised its hammer, so large it was almost comical. I was barely out of the way before it plunged the hammer straight into the spot I once stood.  

In my evasive pursuit, I stumbled my way into the left corner of the room. I could barely even make sense of the thing as it knelt in front of me with its back turned and lifted its weapon off the floor. There was no way to escape it and I realized this as it cocked its head- its pulsing wound- towards me. Typical inaction and cowardice would do me nothing in this corner, I had to make a move. 

As it approached I grabbed the TV and flung it straight at its head. It dropped the hammer releasing a roaring thud as it hit the floor. Glass shattered against its head and the TV landed and rolled off its foot.

Though the screen of the TV was broken the room was still lit, the source of light looked like it was somehow inside me.

Something screeched in my mind as it fell backward, the pink pads under its feet visible and skinned after scraping the concrete. As quick as it fell it shot up and stormed towards me. 

Now backing myself to the right side of the room, not taking my eyes off it as it approached, I pawed my left hand across the floor until my fingers grazed cold steel. 

Its right hand grabbed my right wrist as I held it up for protection. Its grip was deathly and its long claws plunged into my skin. 

I grabbed the handle of a thirty-pound dumbbell in my free hand and raised the weight straight into its skull. As the dumbbell landed it sent a shard of glass deeper into the side of its head, the shard lodged in place and blood and puss rained so heavy it looked like a cyst had burst from its scalp. 

The screech that rang in my mind sounded like it was bubbling. It held its head and fell backward, landing next to its hammer. As it fell it it loosened its grip and its claws tore lines across my wrists.

Before I could close in on it, the thing shot out a geyser of beads and worms from each of its mouths, their congruent rose nearly four feet above it.

As I approached it I saw the green dots it had spilled across itself. They looked like candies but the tiny imprints on each one of them proved otherwise.

“ZOLOFT”

As I read this I stood above it, then looked right where I drilled that shard of glass. With both hands on the grip, I raised the dumbbell over my shoulder and dropped it onto its head. 

It was like I had let loose an aerial bombardment across its face, crimson red and piss yellow bursts firing from its slits. 

A metallic clink sounded hard against the concrete. 

I turned to see an iron ladder shooting as far as I could see up into the sky. There was no other escape from this cell, I had to climb it. 

As my hands gripped each bar the metal felt warm and soothing like a blanket for my palms.

For minutes I made my ascent and for minutes the ladder stood firm both physically and as a beacon of hope for my escape. My arms started to wear and ache until finally the void I climbed through lit up like a flashbang of white light. 

My head was throbbing and my heart thundered in my chest. I was on the hallway floor, drenched in sweat and shivering. I stumbled to my feet and hobbled into the open doorway of my room, from there I could see a small droplet on my pillow, red and yellow. 

This happened on November fifteenth; at the time of writing this, only fifteen days ago. 

The days after this experience were difficult. I was dazed and sickly, ailments which as of now have slowly subsided. 

Truthfully I have no idea if what I experienced really happened. I still have the wounds on my wrist- now bandaged and healing- but being honest with myself I can’t say that’s definitive. The droplet is more convincing but I was so dizzy in that moment that I could have just made it up. 

Making things up however, has been something that I haven’t done since that day. And a lack of presence from the voice has left my mind feeling almost uninhabited. 

I was never able to find the paper or that Zoloft capsule. I don’t remember what I did with that drawing as a kid but I doubt I actually kept it. 

Things aren’t perfect but they’ve gotten better. Whilst sick I’ve spent more time pursuing my hobbies rather than feeding into negative thoughts. I’ve been trying to think of the things to live for rather than what things dread. The thoughts of suicide haven’t left entirely and frankly, no matter how good things are I don’t think they ever will. 

Though I will say one thing: For today I live, and I’m going to make it count. 

“How much for the oranges?”

“168s/lb.”

Chris paid—feeling the lifespan flow out of him—went home and had his mom pay him back the time from her own account.

//

Welcome to the United States of Chronometry, had read the sign, after they'd cleared customs and were driving towards their new home in Achron.

The Minutemen, some actual veterans of the Temporal Revolution, had been very thorough in their questioning.

//

So this is it, thought Chris, the place where dad will be working: a large glass cube with the words Central Clock engraved upon it. This is where they make time.

It was also, he recalled, the place where the last of the Financeers had been executed and the new republic proclaimed.

//

The pay was generous, once you wrapped your head around it: 11h/h + benefits + pension.

“I accept,” Chris had heard his father say.

//

“Hands in the air and give me some fucking years!” the anachronist screamed, his body fighting visibly against expiration.

The parking lot was dark.

Chris huddled against his dad. His mom wept.

They handed over five whole years.

//

“That can't possibly be,” Chris’ dad said, looking at the monitor and the car salesman beside it. “I'm only forty-nine.” But the monitor displayed: NST (non-sufficient time). The price of the car was 4y7m.

(“Cancer,” the doctor will say.)

//

“Remarkable! The invention of chronometricity makes money obsolete,” announced Chris, playing the role of the future first President of the U.S.C. in his school's annual theatrical production of the Chronology of the Republic.

It was his second favorite line after: “Forget him—he's nothing but an anachronism now!”

//

“You wanna know the real reason for the revolution, you need to read Wynd,” Marcia whispered in Chris’ ear. They were first-years at university, studying applied temporal engineering. “It's about the elites. You can horde all the money you want, understand the financial system, but what does that give you? A rich life, maybe; but a chrono-delimited one. Now change money to time. Horde that—and what do you have?”

“The ability to live forever.”

//

Marcia wilted and aged two decades under the extractor. The Minuteman shut it off. “Do you want to tell us about the hierarchy of the resistance now?” he asked Chris.

“I don't know anything.”

“Very well.”

//

Two months after turning 23, Chris, ~53, held Marcia's ~46-year-old hand as a psychologist wheeled her through the facility. “I'm sorry I don't have more answers for you. The effects of temporal hyperloss are not well studied,” the psychologist said.

“Will she ever…”

“We simply don't know.”

//

It worked in theory. Chris had seen what OD'ing on time did to junkies, but what it would do to a building—more: to an technoideology, a state [of mind]—was speculation.

But he was ~82 and poor. Everything he'd loved was past.

He drove the homemade chronobomb into the Central Clock and—

//

It was a bright cold day in November.

The clocks were striking 19:84.

The god of death has many daughters, one of whom is Sillai, who lives upon the edge of every blade that cuts or thrusts, pricks or slashes…

Gazes, she, into slitted throats and fatal wounds, upon stabbed and tortured backs; and by sharpened, poisoned endings, spoken: speaking softly in the dark.

No mortal is her foil, for her speech is the speech of her father, the speech of death. And death is the end of all men.

Yet there is one who charmed her, a mortal man called Hyacinth, a bladesmith by trade, and an assassin by vocation, who fell in love with her. Let this, his fate, now be a warning, that from the mixing of gods with men may result one thing only—suffering.

Even the oldest of the old poets know not how Hyacinth met Sillai, but it must be he came to know her well in the exercise of his craft, for Hyacinth killed with knives, and on their edges lived Sillai.

In the beginning, he heard her only as he killed.

But her speech, though sweet, was short, for Hyacinth’s blows were true and his victims died quickly.

Yet always he yearned to hear her again, and thus he began to hire himself to any who desired his services, no matter how false their motivations, until he became known in all the world as Grey Hyacinth, deathmaster with a transparent soul, and even the best of men passed uneasily under shadows, in suspended fear of him.

Once, upon the death of an honest merchant, Hyacinth spoke to Sillai and she spoke back to him. This pleased so Hyacinth’s heart that he beseeched Sillai to speak to him even outside the times of others’ dyings, to which Sillai replied, “But for what reason would I, a daughter of the god of death, converse with a mortal?” and Hyacinth replied, “Because I know you like no other, and love you with all my being,” and, sensing she was not satisfied with this, added, “And because I shall fashion for you an endlessness of blades, with edges for you to enjoy and live upon and with which we shall kill any whom we desire.”

From that day forth, Hyacinth spent his days forging the most beautiful blades, and his long nights murdering—no longer as the instrument of others, but for reasons of his own: to hear the voice of his beloved.

But the ways of the gods are mysterious and of necessity unknowable to man, and so it was that, as time passed, Sillai become bored of Hyacinth, of his blades and his devotion, until, one night, Hyacinth plunged a jewel-encrusted blade into another victim, but his victim refused to die and Hyacinth did not hear the voice of Sillai.

He called her name, but she did not answer, and gripped by passion he beat his victim to death with his fists, and the resulting silence of the night was undisturbed except by the cries of Hyacinth, who wailed and professed his love for Sillai, but despite this, nevermore did she reveal herself to him.

And rumours spread among men that Grey Hyacinth had been taken by madness.

And, from that time, existence became unbearable for Hyacinth, for his love for Sillai had not waned, and her absence was a most-profound pain to him, who yearned for nothing but another revelation. Until, one day, he found himself having taken shelter in a cave, deep within the mountains that guard the north from the winds of non-existence, and there decided that his life was no more worth living.

So it was that Hyacinth took the same jewel-encrusted blade and ran it cleanly across the front of his neck, opening a wide and gushing wound.

But he did not die.

Although his blood ran from his throat and down his seated body, and although his vitality poured forth with it, in his desperation Hyacinth had forgotten that it is not man—neither his weapons nor his hands—that kill, but the gods; and Sillai, who lives upon the edge of every blade, was absent, so that even with his opened throat and loosely hanging head and bloodless body, Hyacinth remained alive.

Yet because his body was drained of vitality, he was unable to move or act or end his life in any other way.

And Sillai’s absence pained him thus all the more.

Although he had never done so before, he prayed now to whatever other gods he knew to bring him swift death by thirst or hunger.

Alas, from the mixing of gods with men may result only suffering, and the gods on whom Hyacinth called considered unfavourably the pride he must have felt not only to fall in love with a god but to expect that she may love him back, and every time Hyacinth thought that finally, mercifully, he was about to expire, the gods sent to him food and water to keep him alive. And these ironic gifts, the gods delivered to him by messengers, the ghosts of all those whom Hyacinth had killed, of whom there are so many, their slow and ghastly procession shall never, in time, end, and so too shall Hyacinth persist, seated deep within a cave, in the mountains that guard the north from the winds of non-existence, until awaketh will the god of all gods, and, in waking, his dream, called time, shall dissipate the world like mist.

Lost Media, Now Found:

Excerpt from Strange Worlds, dated to have been published in 2028. Tightly sealed in a small box. Discovered by construction workers as they were excavating - Quebec. No other contents in box.

Written by Ben Nakamura

Calculated Temporal Dissonance*: 45%. Semi-critical. Significant increase when compared to previous finds. (Last Rites of Passage - Earworms - The Inkblot that Found Ellie Shoemaker)

***Post current chronology by multiple years (2028)

**Non-existent location: Ala'hu

*Lingering queries re: Ben Nakamura. First discovered LMNF from 1978. Subject in question would be at least 70 when this was published.

*Activation of WebWeaver Protocol given rising CTD - pending final authorization.

---------------------------------------------------

”Mark my words - when your children return from the sea, withered and bloodless, may my divination sing softly in your ears until the last, labored breath escapes your lungs.”

"Leave - or die.”

Prophecies, clairvoyance, soothsaying - no matter how you choose to label it, humanity certainly has an obsessive fascination with the concept of fortune-telling. As an example, review the plotlines of your favorite pieces of media - how many of those stories rely on a “foretold prophecy” to propel their chain of events? I would predict a majority of them do. Even if there isn’t a literal prophecy, how many of those narratives utilize foreshadowing to give the story dramatic resonance once the plot is revealed in full? From Oedipus to Narnia, the concept of prophecies has always enchanted and captivated us, especially when said prophecy is weaponized against a particular individual or a group of individuals. In other words, a curse- something very much akin to the example listed above, which will serve as the focal point for the narrative I intend to spin.

The way I see it, this fascination with “the gift of the second sight” is deep-seated within our shared nature. It speaks to us, enthralling our imagination in a way very few other concepts do - but why is that? I believe we treasure the idea of prophecies because their existence implies the presence of a broader narrative playing itself out behind the scenes of our lives, even if we cannot always appreciate it. If the future can be predicted, or even manipulated, then the world may not be as sadistically random and chaotic as it often appears. Prophecies can serve to calm our existential dread by indirectly minimizing our fears regarding the cold entropy of the universe.

But therein lies the problem - that cultural reverence for prophecies can make even the most rational person susceptible to unfounded, illogical thought. Combine that irrationality with grief and a dash of impulsivity, and the whole thing can become a powder keg waiting to blow.

A phenomenon that Yuri Thompson can attest to firsthand.

“I just wasn’t thinking straight” Yuri somberly recounted to me from the inside of Halawa Correctional Facility.

“In the moment, it connected all the dots - made my son’s death ‘make sense’, so to speak. It felt entirely too cruel to be random. Of course, it wasn’t actually random. I mean, there was an explanation to how it happened. Certainly wasn’t a damn curse, though.” The forty-five-year-old was feverishly tapping his index finger against the steel table as he detailed the tragic circumstances, betraying a lingering frustration in his actions that I imagine may persist for the rest of his sentence, if not for the rest of his life.

Yuri has another three years to serve. He is more than halfway through his stint for manslaughter, but I’m sure that benchmark is only a meager solace to the bereaved father.

Halfway through our interview, the familiarity of Yuri’s perceptions and mistakes made a figurative lightning bolt glide down my spine. The whole story reminded me of one of my absolute favorite historical anecdotes - the legend of Spain’s bleeding bread.

Bear with me through this tangent - I promise the connections will become clear as Yuri’s story unfolds.

In 1480, the Spanish Inquisition had just started revving its proverbial engines. To briefly review, the aim of the government-ordained inquest was to identify individuals who had publicly converted to Catholicism, but who were also still practicing their previous, now outlawed, religions in secret. On the island of Mallorca, the largest of Spain’s water-locked territories, a local soothsayer would inflame the underlying religious tensions that drove the inquisition to the point of deadly hysteria. Ferrand de Valeria’s prophecy would turn a revving engine into a runaway vehicle.

At the time, Mallorca was suffering through a small famine. In the grand scheme of things, the famine was mild and manageable, but the lack of resources still resulted in significant anguish. Consumed by zealotry, Ferrand theorized that the ongoing practice of Judaism behind closed doors was the root cause of the famine - divine punishment from the almighty for not driving out the heretics. To that end, he repeatedly warned the townspeople to be vigilant for signs of covertly Jewish individuals taking a barbarous pleasure in “tormenting the body of Christ”. In other words, Ferrand believed that these heretics could be identified if they were caught red-handed with “bleeding bread” (In Catholicism, communion is the belief that bread was/is the body of Christ, so from his prospective, torturing it could cause literal bleeding). He then prophesied the following: if the island ignored the infestation of heretics and the “bleeding bread”, the famine would worsen to the point of their extinction.

An insane, albeit darkly comedic, proposition - at least by modern standards. However, as it often does, comedy sadly evolved into tragedy given enough time. One of the island’s clergymen was visiting a family of four’s small home. When offered a slice of bread by the mother of the family, he gladly accepted. Despite the ongoing famine, the mother felt that it was critical to still practice Christ-like generosity. Unfortunately, this generosity would only be met with bloodshed, in more ways than one - as she cut into the loaf, the clergyman noticed what appeared to him as a “latent bloodstain”, present on the interior of the bread. He quickly rushed out of the house with Ferrand’s words echoing in his mind. A frenzied, moral panic ensued once the remainder of the island heard about what the clergyman witnessed. Once the panic hit a boiling point, the generous mother, along with her entire family, were wiped out, even though the Inquisition’s subsequent investigation found no evidence of them practicing any religion apart from Catholicism - excluding the bleeding bread, of course. The famine did not abate after their death, and I would imagine it’s no shock to reveal at this point that the bread in the tale did not actually bleed.

Let that half-complete anecdote simmer in your mind as we review Yuri’s story.

Yuri Thompson moved to the humble coastal town of Ala’hu in the Spring of 2025, with his son Lee (six years old) and his wife Charlotte (forty-eight years old) in tow. With the earnings from a successful tech startup flooding his back account, Yuri had settled into an early retirement, content with living the rest of his days in a serene, tropical contentment.

“Our home had been newly developed”, Yuri recalled.

“We were initially worried about how we’d be received on the island. I mean, Charlotte and I were wealthy tech magnates moving into an estate complex that was otherwise surrounded by more modest costal homes, ones that had been built by the ancestors of the people who lived there, likely with their own hands, upwards of a century ago. But honestly, we were welcomed with open arms, for the most part.”

With that last sentence, Yuri’s expression darkened - blackened like storm clouds crawling over the horizon.

He was alluding to Koa Hekekia, the fifty-six-year-old women who had proclaimed the troublesome warning presented at the beginning of the article:

”Mark my words - when your children return from the sea, withered and bloodless, may my divination sing softly in your ears until the last, labored breath escapes your lungs. Leave - or die.”

Koa was the town’s resident Kahuna. In other words, a priestess who made a living through supplying the more superstitious inhabitants of Ala’hu with alternative medicine and religious guidance. Behind closed doors, she would also provide blessings, fortunes, and curses - for the right price, of course.

“The first time I met Koa, that so-called curse was practically the only thing she said to me” Yuri reflected, with a certain quiet indifference.

“After the full moon had fallen, the sea would ‘swallow my children, bones and all’. As far she knew, I didn’t have any kids - but she did know that I had moved into one of those estates. I think she viewed us as a threat to her business, like our presence would snuff out the town’s superstition. She was trying to scare us away, or at least make us uncomfortable. I asked my next-door neighbor what he thought of her, and he told me not to worry - that she had threatened him and his two kids when they moved in half a year ago. Many full moons had passed, and they were still happy and healthy.”

Yuri paused here, breaking eye contact with me. His frenetic tapping had stopped as well.

“So, I guess I wasn’t worried. At least I didn't let worry show on the outside. I had grown up with a lot of superstitions about hexes and the like from my grandfather and some of my aunts, so internally, it did nag at me a bit. But what was I going to do - move my family back to California because of the ravings from some unhinged loon?”

“A month after we arrived, Charlotte, Lee and I were spending a day at a local beach. Lee and I were boogie boarding, which he absolutely adored.”

Another pause, longer this time. The air in the room became heavy with emotion, thick and difficult to breathe. After about two minutes passed, Yuri began to speak again:

“We were catching a wave together, when I noticed blood on my hand. I turned Lee towards me and asked if he was okay. His nose was bleeding, and he looked like he was going to pass out. I tucked him into my chest and swam as quickly as I could to shore”

By the time EMS arrived, Lee’s heart had stopped - he had seemingly gone into spontaneous cardiac arrest. Despite an hour of CPR, medical professionals were unable to bring Lee back.

“I don’t think I ever said to myself, in my head or out-loud, that I thought ‘the curse had come true’. Maybe if I did, that would have been enough of a red flag to slow me down - to make me realize I wasn’t thinking clearly. It was more subconscious than that, though. My son died while in the ocean, I vaguely recalled seeing a full moon in the previous few nights, and I had witnessed Lee bleed, which was all in line with what Koa prophesied. The neighbor, the one that had reassured me, also lost a daughter that day. Same thing: cardiac arrest out of the blue while in the ocean. Our collective grief played off each other. When he mentioned he knew where Koa’s shop was, I didn’t have to say anything else. He didn’t have to, either.”

Our interview ended there. I knew the full story coming into this, so Yuri did not need to rehash the details of that night to me. My understanding of the events was this: after a very brief interrogation, Yuri choked Koa until she lost consciousness, and then proceeded to toss her down a flight of stairs into the shop’s cellar. The trauma of the fall had broken Koa’s neck, killing her in the blink of an eye.

A total of five people had perished that fateful afternoon - three children and two female adults, all in a manner identical to Lee’s death. When Yuri mentioned that this could have been avoided if he slowed down, I think he may have been right. This wasn’t a pattern of behavior for him - he had no criminal record, and the last proper fight he had been a part of was, per him, in middle school. Not only that, but he had a wildly successful tech career - clearly indicating that he had a rational head on his shoulders. If he had evaluated all the facts, he may have noticed that the circumstances didn’t completely align with Koa’s prophecy.

The most blaring inconsistency was this: the majority of the people who died did not live in the estates. The two adults and the third child were all born on the island. If they died as a result of said curse, this hex was more like a shotgun than a rife - firing broadly and catching island natives in the crossfire. Not only that, but it had been nine days since the last full moon, not the day directly after a full moon like Koa had detailed.

Lee’s death, however, made Yuri vulnerable to disregarding inconvenient inconsistencies. The event felt so inherently heinous, and so exceptional in its cruelty, that it needed an answer more narratively satisfactory than dispassionate chance - more powerful than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Uncaring randomness didn’t carry an equal dramatic weight when compared to the diabolical byproduct of an evil hex.

Koa, to her detriment, had provided that explanation in advance. But in reality, Lee’s death was simply a result of entropy - an unpredictable consequence of being in the wrong place at the time.

So, where does the prophecy of the bleeding bread tie into all of this? I’ll let Dr. Tiffany Hall, senior marine biologist out of the University of Miami, clarify the connection:

“I’ve always loved that story” Dr. Hall said, with a wry, playful smile that quickly morphed into an expression of embarrassment when she realized the potential, out of context implications of that statement.

“I mean I don’t love what happened - that part is horrific. But it is a wonderful example of a supernatural phenomenon becoming biologically explainable, given enough time”

“Serratia marcescens is a species of bacteria that doesn’t intersect with humanity that frequently. It can cause an infection, but only if a person’s immune system is completely non-functional. That being said, it’s pretty abundant in our environment - growing wherever there is available moisture. Hydration is a requirement for the fermentation that allows yeast to become bread, and that moisture allows these bacteria to grow on bread too, almost like a mold. And as it would happen, it expresses a protein called “prodigiosin”, something that gives it a unique quality among other, similar bacteria”

With a wink, Dr. Hall delivered the punchline:

“It’s a red pigment - can almost look like a splotch of spilled blood if there is enough bacterial growth.”

In the end, Mallorca’s famine was simply that - an untimely lack of resources. It wasn’t a punishment inflicted on the island due to the furtive practice of non-catholic religions, nor did the “bleeding bread” have a divine explanation. Ferrand’s prophecy and the subsequent growth of Serrtia on that family’s bread was purely a case of unfavorable synchrony.

Nothing more, nothing less.

After a brief coffee break, Dr. Hall continued:

“I heard about the deaths out of Ala’hu right after they happened - the spontaneous cardiac arrests of a few individuals swimming in the same area. I had immediate suspicions about the culprit. When I heard that every person who died was either a child or a smaller-sized adult, my theory was effectively confirmed.”

“Carybdea alata - more commonly referred to as the Hawaiian Box Jellyfish, was eventually proven to be the killer.”

Before I had researched this story, I had no idea what in the hell a “box jellyfish” was. But it was an excellent remainder of how unabashedly bizarre and terrifying nature can be when it puts its mind to it.

No bigger than two inches in size, these tiny devils are known to inhabit the waters in tropical and subtropical regions - most notoriously Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Their reproductive form is where they acquired their inappropriately cute nickname: the squishy nervous system above its tentacles has a cuboid shape, looking like a bell or a box. Despite being no bigger than the size of a quarter, when injected through the skin from their tentacles, their poison has the potential to end a person’s life in three minutes or less.

“We have no idea why these tiny things are so deadly - I mean we know how they are deadly. Their venom can cause an incredibly rapid influx of potassium into someone’s bloodstream, which can very easily make their heart stop - but what I’m trying to say is we don’t know why they have evolved to host this uber-potent venom. They certainly don’t have the stomach size to eat what they kill” Dr. Hall chortled endearingly.

Not only that, but box jellyfish tend to be the most concentrated in coastal waters seven to ten days after a full moon, in-line with their reproductive cycle as well as with the tragic deaths, being nine days after the most recent full moon. Additionally, it is likely that many other people got stung on the day Lee and the other four died - but the more body mass you have, the more the toxin is diluted, which can make the effects less severe and non-life threatening. The children and the two smaller adults likely succumbed to the venom due to their smaller body size.

“I’ve watched the documentary surrounding Koa’s murder.”

With this statement, Dr. Hall’s playfulness seemed to ominously evaporate, portending the description of an observation that very noticeably made her uneasy:

“They showed clips of Yuri’s and Lionel’s (the neighbor who also lost a child) testimonies. What’s so strange is they were both with their kids right before they died, and they both witnessed their kids have a nosebleed directly prior to their cardiac arrest. That’s certainly not an effect of the jellyfish’s venom. It’s probably just a coincidence, I suppose, but it makes me think back to what Koa said - about them ending up bloodless, I mean.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to the implication, and I think Dr. Hall could tell.

“Look at it this way - to my understanding, the media covered the case to no end. All the way from start to finish. If that media spectacle results in less waspy outsiders moving to the Hawaiian Islands out of concern for the potential dangers, then, in a sense, Koa’s prophecy had its intended effect….” she trialed off. I suspect she had more in her head, but she decided against divulging it.

A forced smile slowly returned to Dr. Hall’s face:

“I’m sure I’m just seeing connections where they aren’t. It does make you wonder though.”

Truthfully, I hope she’s right - that she is seeing connections where they aren’t. Most days, I feel confidently that she is. That there was no real connective tissue between Koa and the children's deaths. Some days, however, I could be convinced otherwise. And that small but volatile part of myself - it scares me.

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More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

Angelic chants and bells ring in the distance
Deafening the pitiful song of gushing tears
Your life bleeding through the artificial cunt
My knife left in your throat

Everything is turning cold
As all things are meant to be
My smile grows wider
Moments before the axe
cracks open the back of your skull
With a swing of my hand
A painful present
Reshaped into memory
Now your time has come
To welcome the end

With undying fascist hate
With crazed fanatic devotion
With the love of murder
I sacrifice this child
Onto you Lord Death
Onto you Endless Sleep
Onto you Transylvanian Night
Assigning a meaning to an otherwise
Empty existence

With a mouthful of my pipe
You welcome the end
The end  

“I’ve a bone to pick with you,” she said.

So we floated tentacle-in-tentacle to one of the many illicit shops of human remains and chose a beautifully polished tibia.

Quite a find.

I’d seen pieces in the Museum of Conquered Species that, to my admittedly non-professional visual sensory input, were not much better preserved, and the MCS had one of the best humanity exhibits in the universe: an entire wing devoted to the conquest of the planet Earth.

(Incidentally, the very idea of a museum made in the hollowed out body of a gigantic insectoid is reason enough to visit!)

“Oh, darling, it’s marvellous. I can just imagine its former owner being torn limb from limb by one of our assault squids,” she said, squealing as she constricted me with her procreative tendrils—in public, no less!

How deliciously erogenous.

After returning to our hive-quarters, we copulated, then she decided to recuperate and I connected to the mainframe to scan for work-related memoranda.

The final destruction of humankind was still a work-in-progress then, so there was plenty to do.

Bases to be constructed. Mining probes to be activated.

Culture to be assimilated—although, let’s be honest, how much more primitive could a culture be than humanity’s?

One of the memoranda was a request for orders.

It read:

“All the lights in sector X75V6 have been hanged. Awaiting instructions.”

“Now the darks,” I responded, still rather bemused by the color-coded human concept of race, but if they had chosen to self-segregate, then who was I to interfere at the twilight of their species’ existence. We could just as well torture, experiment on and execute them according to their preferred ethnic divisions.

I do admit amusement at the time we peeled the skin off one light one and one dark one, then sent them, equally raw, pink and bleeding, to excruciate themselves to death among their dumbfounded racial others.

A confused and screaming pack of humans is the stuff of memes!

Yes, we made lampshades of their hides. And, yes, I do see that, in this particular context, the darker one fit the decor of my kitchen better.

I think the light one ended up with Marsimmius, who even took it with him to the infamous massacre of New Jersey, where we drowned a group of resistance fighters in vats filled with the blood of their freshly-slaughtered kin.

How they made bubbles in it!

No more bubbles, no more resistance.

But, by the Great Old Ones, was New Jersey ever a real visual-input-sensor-sore, as the humans might say (as you can appreciate, I’m trying to assimilate some of their culture: language) and it was a blessing to the universe to dissolve it wholesale.

I think it was later used as industrial lubricant on one of the slave colonies.

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to highlight is that well-preserved human remains make good gifts for one’s femaliens, and a well-gifted femalien eagerly produces strong eggs for the war benefit of the species.

As, returning now, through darkness, to my room, where, aged, my body lies upon its deathbed, “Yes,” the goblin hisses, “we have made it back in time,” and I've a mere few seconds, as his thin green fingers slip from mine, and as the room, very same from which I had departed, so many, many worlds ago, but somehow altered, to wonder what would it be, what I would be, if I had not returned in time…

come rushing back through time…

into

I am. Within the body again. My body. Aching, long unused and foreign now, but mine.

Me.

Through its glassy eyes I stare, like through the befogged windows of the steamer Twine on the river Bagg, I still remember staring, but my memories are fading, quickly fading, and all I see and hear and sense around me are the bare walls and the doctor and the nurse, pacing, patiently waiting for me to die, and from the hallway I hear unknown voices passing judgment on my life.

…childless and alone…

…never travelled anywhere beyond the town where he was born…

…oddly absent…

Yes, yes, tears streaming down my wrinkled face, “He’s alert,” the doctor says, and the nurse bends over me. But tears not of sadness at the passing of an empty life, but of joy at having lived a most fully unusual one. The goblin sits on the bed beside me, although, of course, neither the doctor nor the nurse can see him, as they tend to me at the hour of my passing. Absent. If they only knew

how it began with books in this very same room, after school, when I was alone. Mother, downstairs, making dinner, and father had not yet come back from work, and the weight of the opened hardcover on my little knees and my eyes travelling word to word, my unripe mind merely beginning to grasp their meanings, both individually and of the world which they create. He watched me then, the goblin, but he did not say a word, staying hidden in shadows.

I was perhaps ten or eleven—please forgive an old man his imprecisions in the rememberings of the banal bookends of his life—when it happened, in my room at night, an autumn evening, early but already dark, the artificial lights gone out, the day’s reading done, lying on my back on my bed and thinking about worlds other than the one called mine and real, when, my eyes adjusting to the gloom around me, he first appeared to me, and told me, “Hush,” as, in the so-called bounded space of my bedroom, my house, my town, my country, my planet, my universe, of which I was only beginning to be made aware, I found myself on a bed floating upon a sea in an endless grey expanse, which the goblin called my “imagination,” and, in turn, I too named him the same.

“Do not be afraid,” he said.

But I was, and increasingly, as the sea, which had been calm and flat, became a vortex, and my bed and I began to circle it, being pulled deeper into it, so the grey of the sky was replaced by the grey of the sea, and I understood that both were fundamentally of the same substance, and I was too, albeit configured differently, and the air I breathed and the trees cut down and sawmilled to make the frame of my bed, and the foam in its mattress, and the steel of its springs, and the geese whose down filled the comforter, which in desperation I clutched, and thus was true of all—all but the goblin called Imagination, who, smiling, accompanied and guided me on this, my trip to the lands of inward, in comparison to which the lands of the real and the objective are as insignificant as paleness is to the sun. For each of us is his own sun, shining brightly but within, illuminating not what’s seen by our eyes, though they too may sometimes show the spark of subjectivity, but the eternity inside.

And as I die, and the waiting-dead, the doctor and the nurse, and the speakers in the hallway, attend to me like ants to a corpse, gnawing at the skin, the surface, I tell you that in my death I have lived a thousand lives of which not one an ant could fathom. And when it comes, the end comes not because of time but heaviness, for each experience adds to the weight of the book open upon our knees, and as the ink fills their pages and the pages multiply, we grow tired of holding them even as we wonder what adventure the next might hold.

“I find myself at a loss for strength,” I said to him.

“It has been many vast infinities since last you’ve spoken,” he replied.

“I cannot turn the page.”

“Then it is time,” he said. “Time to return.”

“I cannot,” I said, and felt the oldness of the grey substance of my bones. “Perhaps I may simply rest here for a while.”

But he took my hand in his, like he had done once before and said, “We must hurry. It simply does not suit to be late for one’s own departure.”

And so up the sides of the sea vortex we climbed, and when we were again upon its surface, the sea calmed and I found my wooden bed awaiting me. I climbed onto it, wet with liquid fantasy, and

here I am, soaked with sweat and trembling in this drab little room in this world of drab little people, and he looks at me, and “What happens now—my goblin, my compass?” I ask. Well, he really lived a sad small life, didn’t he? somebody says. Scarcely worth remembering. Imagine having to write his biography, and a chuckle and a shh, and then, like the man on the cross, I endure my moment of profound doubt, for as my eyes cave in, my dear, beloved mind produces a distortion, and I wonder whether the goblin that sits beside me, the goblin called Imagination, is indeed my saviour and my angel, or a demon, upon whose temptations I have sailed away from the truth and beauty of my one real, unknown and self-forsaken, life.

April 25th 1972

Nora:

”What do you think it means, Nora?” Sam choked out, gaze fixated on the cryptic mural that adorned the stone wall in front of them.

Unable to suppress a reflexive eye roll, I instead shielded his ego by pivoting my head to the right, away from Sam and the mural. My focus briefly wandered to the gnawing pain in my ankles from the prolonged hike, to the iridescent shimmer of sunlight bouncing off the lake twenty feet below the cliff-face we were standing on, finally landing on the relaxing warmth of sunlight radiating across my shoulders. It was a remarkably beautiful Fall afternoon. The soft wind through my hair and faint birdsong in the distance was able to coax some patience out of me, and I returned to the conversation.

”Well, I think there could be multiple interpretations. How does it strike you?” I beseeched. I just wanted him to try. I wanted him to give me something stimulating to work with.

Granted, the moasic was a bit of an oddity - I could understand how Sam would need time to mull it over. The expansive design started at our feet and continued a few meters above our heads, and it was three times wider than it was tall. From where I was positioned in front of the bottom-right corner, I slowly dragged my eyes across the entire length of the piece while I waited for his answer, taking my own time to appreciate the craftsmanship.

Despite a labor-intensive canvas of uneven alabaster stone, the work was immaculate. As smooth and blemish-less as any framed watercolor I’d ever curated at the gallery. Hauntingly precise and elaborate, even though the piece was clearly produced with a notoriously clumsy medium - chalk. And those were just the mechanistic details. The operational details were even more perplexing.

For example, how did the mystery artist find and select this space for their illustration? Sam knew of the serene hideaway from his childhood, tucked away and kept secret by the location being a thirty-minute detour from the nearest established trail. Upon discovery, Sam and his boyhood friends had named this refuge “The Giant’s Stairs”, as the main feature of the area was a series of rocky platforms with steep drop-offs. From a distance, they could certainly look like massive steps if you tilted your head at exactly the right angle.

Each of the five or so “stairs” could be safely navigated if you knew where to drop down, as the differences in elevations changed significantly depending on where you positioned yourself horizontally on the stairs. At some points, the distance was a very negotiable five feet, while at others it was a more daunting twelve or fifteen feet. This was excluding the last drop-off, which lead to the hideout’s most prized feature - a lake that served as the boys’ private swimming pool every summer. There was no way to safely climb down that last step.

Between the ninety-degree incline and the larger overall distance to the terrain below, Sam and his friends had no choice but to find a safe but circuitous hill that more evenly connected the landmarks, rather than going straight from step to lake. There weren’t even nearby trees to jump over to and shimmy your way down to the body of water, which was also far enough away from that last stair to make leaping into it impossible. Even as I peered over the edge now, there were no obvious shortcuts to the lake. The closest tree had fallen in the direction opposite of the last stair, making the nearest landing pad a decaying bramble of jagged, upturned roots.

In all the summers he spent at The Giant’s Stairs, Sam would later tell me, he could count on one hand the number of trespassers he and his friends had witnessed pass through the area.

On top of the site being distinctly unknown, there was another puzzling factor to consider: A torrential rainstorm had blown through the region over the last week, going quiet only twelve hours ago. This meant the entire piece had been erected in the last half day. Confoundingly, we hadn’t passed a soul on the way in, and there were no tools or ladders lying around the mural to indicate the artist had been here recently. No signature on the work either, which, from the perspective of a gallery owner, was the most damningly peculiar piece of the mystery. With art of this caliber, you’d think the creator would have plastered their name or their brand all over the whole contemptible thing.

So sure, stumbling on it was a bit eerie. The design felt emphatically out of place - like encountering a working ferris wheel in the middle of a desert, running but with no one riding or operating the attraction. A sort of daydream come to life. The type of thing that causes your brain to throb because the circumstances defiantly lack a readily accessible explanation - an incongruence that tickles and lacerates the psyche to the point of honest physical discomfort.

I could understand Sam needing time to swallow the uncanniness of this guerrilla installation. At the same time, I felt impatience start to bubble in my chest once again.

I watched as he took off his Phillies cap and contemplatively scratched his head, letting short dirty blonde curls loose in the process. Seeing these familiar mannerisms, I was reminded that, despite our growing friction, I did love him - and we had been together a long time. We probably started dating not long after him and his friends had formally denounced “The Giant’s Stairs” as too infantile and beneath their maturing sensibilities. But we had become distant; not physically, but mentally. It didn’t feel like we had anything to talk about anymore. This hike was one of a series of exercises meant to rekindle something between us, but like many before, it was proving to somehow have the opposite effect.

”It makes me feel…honestly Nora, it makes me feel really uncomfortable. Can we start walking back?” Sam muttered, practically whimpering.

I purposely ignored the second part, instead asking:

”What about it makes you uncomfortable? And you asked me what I think it means, but what do you think it means?"

In the past few months, Sam had become closed off - seemingly dead to the world. I recognize that the mosaic was undeniably abstract, making it difficult to interpret, but that’s also what made it intriguing and worth dissecting. I just wanted him to show me he was willing to engage with something outside his own head.

The background was primarily an inky and vacant black, split in two by a faint earthy bronze diagonal line that spanned from the bottom lefthand corner to the upper righthand corner, subdividing the piece into a left and a right triangle. My eyes were first drawn to the celestial body in the left triangle because of the inherent action transpiring in that subsection. A planet, ashen like Saturn but without the rings, was in the process of being skewered by a gigantic, serpentine creature. The creature came up from behind the planet, briefly disappearing, only to triumphantly reappear by way of burrowing through the helpless star. As the creature erupted through, it seemed as if it had started to slightly coil back in the opposite direction - head navigating back towards its tail, I suppose.

As I more throughly inspected the creature, I began to notice smaller details, such as the many legs jutting off the sides of its convulsing torso, all the way from head to tail. The distribution of the wriggling legs was disturbingly unorganized (a few legs here, and few legs there, etc.). Because of this detail, the creature started to take on the appearance of a tawny-colored centipede of extraterrestrial proportions.

In comparison, the right triangle was much more straightforward. It depicted a moon shining a cylinder of light on the cosmic pageantry playing itself out in the left triangle, like a stage-light illuminating the focal point of a show. As its moon-rays trickled over the dividing diagonal line, the coppery shading of the boundary became more thick and deliberate, extending a little into each triangle as well.

From my perspective, this grand tableau was a play on the legend of Ouroboros - the snake god that ate its own tail. In ancient cultures, the snake was a symbol of rebirth; a proverbial circuit of life and death. More recently, however, philosophical interpretations of the viper have become a bit nihilistic. Instead of an avatar of rebirth, the snake began representing humanity’s inescapably self-defeating nature, always eating itself in the pursuit of living. I believe that’s what the mosaic was attempting to depict: A parable, or maybe a tribute, to our inherent predilection for self-destruction.

After a minute of long and deafening silence, Sam finally took a deep breath. I felt hope nestle into my heart and crackle like tiny embers. Those embers quickly cooled when he sputtered out an answer:

”I…I think it's a warning”

I paused and waited for more - a further explanation of what he meant by the piece being a “warning”, or maybe more elaboration on why it made him uncomfortable. Disappointingly, Sam had nothing additional to give.

In a huff, I dug furiously into my backpack and pulled out my polaroid camera. When Sam observed that I was carefully stepping backwards to get the whole piece into the frame, he briefly pleaded with me not to take a picture. But I had already made up my mind.

He stood behind me as the device snapped, flashed, and ejected a developing photo of the mural. I swung it up and down vigorously in the air for a few seconds, and then I jammed it into his coat pocket with excessive force.

”Kindly notify me once you have something better” I hissed, starting to wander back the way we’d arrived as I said it. Once I heard the clap of his boots following me, I didn’t bother to turn around.

---- ----------------------------------

April 25th 1972

Sam:

”What about it makes you uncomfortable? And you asked me what I think it means, but what do you think it means?"

Nora’s question had immobilized me with an unfortunately familiar fear. No matter how desperately I searched, I couldn’t seem to find an answer worthy of the query stockpiled in my head. Not only that, but any new, burgeoning thought started to lose speed and glaciate to the point where I had forgotten what the intended trajectory was for the thought in the first place. The last handful of months were littered with moments like these.

I know Nora wanted more from me - she wanted me to articulate something authentic and genuine, but I couldn’t find that part of myself anymore. It didn’t help that she had made me feel like I was being tested. Every visit to the gallery eventually mutated into a pop quiz, where subjective questions, at least according to Nora, had objectively correct and incorrect answers. Having failed each and every quiz in recent memory, I was now throughly intimidated about submitting any answer to her at all.

But I always wanted to make an attempt, hoping to be awarded some amount of credit for trying. To that end, I tried to focus on the picture in front of me.

I don’t know what she was so dazzled by - there wasn’t much to interpret and analyze from where I stood. In the top right-hand corner, there was a hazy moon with a pale complexion shining down into the remainder of the illustration, but that was the only identifiable object I could see in the mural. The remainder of the picture was chaos. A frenetic splattering of dark reds and browns, accented randomly by swirls of pine green. I thought maybe I could appreciate one small eye with what looked like a smile underneath it at the very bottom of the piece, but it was hard to say anything for certain. All in all, it was just a lawless mess of color, excluding the solitary moon.

That being said, it did stir something in me. I felt a discomfort, a pressure, or maybe a repulsion. Like the mural and I were two positive ends of a magnet being forced together, an invisible obstacle seemed to push back against me when I tried to connect with the image. It felt like we shouldn’t be here, which is why I had taken the time to advocate for us kindly fucking off before this artistic interrogation.

I was nervous to say anything to that extent, though. I wanted to be right. I wanted to give Nora what she was looking for. More than both of those goals, however, I didn’t want to say anything wrong. This put me into the position of answering the question in a vague and pithy way. The more nebulous my response, the more I would be able to further calibrate the response based on how she reacted to the initial statement.

Despite all the layers of context buried within, I had meant what I said.

”I…I think it’s a warning.”

---- ----------------------------------

May 2nd, 1972

Sam:

”Nora, just drop it. Please drop it” I fumed, letting my spoon fall and clatter around in my cereal bowl as the words left my mouth, sonically accenting my exasperation.

We hadn’t discussed the mural since we left The Giant’s Stairs. Instead, we had a speechless car ride home, which foreshadowed many additional speechless interactions in the coming few days. Neither of us had the bravery, or the force of will, to address the dysfunction. Instead, we just lived around it.

That was until Nora elected to demolish the floodgates.

”You didn’t see anything? No centipede, no moon - no ouroboros? It was a completely bewitching piece of art, masterful in its conception, and all you could feel was uncomfortable?” she bellowed, standing over me and our kitchen table, gesticulating wildly as she spoke.

I felt my heart vibrating with adrenaline in my throat. I was never very compatible with anger, it caused my body to shake and quaver uncomfortably, like I was filled to the brim with electricity that didn’t have a release mechanism, so instead the energy buzzed around my nervous system indefinitely.

”I saw a moon, and I saw some colors” I muttered through clenched teeth. ”That’s it.”

At an unreconcilable standstill in the argument, instead of talking, we decided instead to leer angrily into each other’s eyes, which amounted to a very daft and worthless game of chicken. We were waiting to see who would look away and break contact first.

In a flash, Nora’s expression transfigured from irritation to one of insight and recollection. She abandoned the staring contest, pacing away into the mudroom. When she got there, Nora started digging through our winter gear. Having retrieved the coat I was wearing on our hike, she returned to the table, unzipping the pockets to find the forgotten polaroid, which I had deliberately sequestered and not reviewed after leaving the woods.

She brought the picture close to her face, and I braced myself for the potential verbal whirlwind that I anticipated was forthcoming. Instead, Nora tilted her head in bewilderment, flummoxed to the point where she had lost all forward momentum in the confrontation. With the color draining from her face, she wordlessly handed me the polaroid.

The picture showed both us standing against the stone wall, adjacent to where I suppose the mural should have been. We were smiling, and I had my arm around Nora, positioned in the bottom corner of the frame. This gave the image a certain touristy quality - like we were on a trip aboard, and we had stopped to take a sentimental photo with a foreign monument to fondly remember the associated vacation decades from when the photo was actually taken.

But the wall was empty and barren. The polaroid was framed to include a significant portion of the cliff-face as if the mural were there, but it was as if it had been surgically excised from the photo. We briefly whispered about some unsatisfactory explanations for the absent mural, and then proceeded on numbly with our respective days.

Neither of us had the courage to even speculate out-loud regarding how we were both in the photo.

---- ----------------------------------

May 8th, 1972

Nora:

I loomed over the bed like the shadow of a tidal wave over a costal village, quietly scowling at my sleeping partner.

How could he sleep? How could he close his eyes for more than a few seconds?

I hadn’t slept since seeing the polaroid. Not a meaningful amount, anyway.

Grasping the photo tightly in my left hand, I tried to steady my breathing, which had a new habit of becoming alarmingly irregular whenever I thought too hard about the mural.

There had to be something I missed.

I turned around to exit the bedroom, gliding down the hall and into my office. Flicking on a desk light, I sat down and carefully placed the polaroid on the otherwise empty work surface.

In a methodical fashion, I studied every single centimeter of the photo, which had become progressively creased and misshapen since I had pilfered it from the trash can in the dead of night. Sam had thrown it out, he had made me watch him dispose of it. He said we needed to put it behind us. That it didn’t matter. That it didn’t need to be explained.

What it must be like to be cradled to sleep by such a vapid, unthinking bliss.

My pang of jealousy was interrupted when I noticed something peculiar in the top right-hand corner of the polaroid - I had creased the photo so throughly that a tiny frayed and upturned edge had appeared, like the small separation you have to create between the layers of a plastic trash bag before you can shake it out and open it completely.

I cautiously dug under that slit with the side of a nickel. As I pushed diagonally towards the other corner, the photo of Sam and I standing in front of an empty wall peeled off to reveal a second photo concealed beneath it.

Ecstasy spilled generously into my veins, relaxing the vice grip that the original polaroid had been holding me in.

It finally made sense.

---- ----------------------------------

May 8th, 1972

Sam:

”Sam wake up ! It all makes so much fucking sense now, I can’t believe I didn’t understand before” 

Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I slowly adjusted to the scene in front of me. Nora was physically walking around on our bed, jumping and hopping over me. She was a ball of pure, uncontainable excitement, like a toddler who had just seen snow for the first time.

But Nora’s face told an altogether different story. Her eyes were distressingly bloodshot from her sleep deprivation, reduced to a tangle of flaming capillaries zigzagging manically through her white conjunctiva. I couldn’t comprehend what exactly she was trying to tell me, between the run-on sentences and intermittent cackling laughter. Her mouth was contorted into a toothy, rapturous grin while she spoke, releasing minuscule raindrops of spittle onto her immediate surroundings every ten words or so.

At first, I was simply concerned and exhausted, and I languidly turned over to power on the lamp on my nightstand. That concern evolved into terror as the light reflected off the kitchen knife in her left hand and back at me.

”C’mon now! Up, up, up. I need you to show me to The Giant’s Stairs. Can’t get there myself, don’t know exactly how to get there I mean.” Nora loudly declared.

”I figured it out! Look at what I found under the polaroid! A second photo - the real meaning hiding under the fake one.”

She shoved the photo, the one I was sure I had disposed of, into my face so emphatically that she overshot the mark, effectively punching me in the nose due to her over-animation. I swallowed the pain and gently pulled her hand back by her wrist, as she was looking out the window towards the car and unaware that she was holding the picture too close for me to even view.

The polaroid was weathered nearly beyond recognition. I could barely appreciate the picture anymore. It was scratched to hell and back like a feral monkey had spent hours dragging a house key over the zinc paper. Sure as hell didn’t see any second image.

Nora looked at me intently for recognition of her findings, unblinking. As the hooks of her grin slowly started to melt downwards into the beginning of a frown, my gaze went from Nora, to the knife in her hand, and then back to her. I knew I had to give her the reaction she was looking for.

”…Yes! Of course. I see it now, I really do.”

Her fiendish smile reappeared instantly.

”Great! Let’s hop in the car and go see for ourselves, though.”

Nora shot up, left the bedroom and started walking down the hallway. Before she had reached the bannister of our stairs, her head smoothly swiveled back to see what I was doing. Wanting to determine what the exact nature of the hold-up was.

Seeing her grin begin to melt again, I shot out of bed as well, trying to mimic at least a small fraction her enthusiasm.

”Right behind you!” 

---- ----------------------------------

May 8th, 1972

Sam:

We arrived at The Giant’s Steps forty minutes later.

In that entire time, Nora had not let me out of her sight. I had tried to pick up the house phone while she looked semi-distracted. Somehow, though, she had the knife tip against my side and inches away from excavating my flank before I could even dial the second nine. Nora leisurely twisted the apex of the blade, causing hot blood to trickle down my side.

After a menacingly delayed pause, she simply said:

”Don’t”

My failed attempt at calling the police had transiently soured her mood. Nora remained vigilant and tightlipped, at least until our feet landed on the rock of the last stair. Then, her disconcerting giddiness resumed at its previous intensity.

We had left the car at about 4:30AM, so I estimated it was almost 5AM at this point. Nearly sun up, but no light had started splashing over the horizon yet. I did my absolute best not to panic, with waxing and waning success. My hands were slick with sweat, so in an effort to moderate my panic, I put my focus solely on maintaining my grip on the handle of the large camping flashlight.

Abruptly, Nora squeezed the hand she had been resting on my right shoulder. She had positioned herself directly behind me, knife to the small of my back, as I guided her back to The Giant’s Stairs. In an attempt to decipher her signal correctly, I halted my movement, which caused the knife to tortuously gouge the tissue above my tail bone as Nora continued to move forward.

She did not notice the injury, as she was too busy making her way in front of me with a familiar schizophrenic grin plastered to her face. The puncture to my back was much deeper than the small cut she had previously made on my flank, and I struggled not to buckle over completely from pain and nausea. I put one hand on each of my knees and wretched.

When I looked up, Nora was a few feet in front of me, and she had placed both her hands over her mouth, seemingly to try to contain her laughter and excitement. She nearly skewered herself in the process, still absentmindedly holding the newly blood-soaked knife in her left hand when she brought her hands up to her head.

”Ta-daaaa!” she yelled triumphantly, gesturing for me to point the flashlight towards the cliff-face.

As the light hit the wall, there was nothing for me to see. Blank, empty, worthless stone.

And I was just so tired of pretending.

”Nora, I don’t see a goddamnned thing!” I screamed, with a such a frustrated, reckless abandon that I strained my vocal cords, causing an additional searing pain to manifest in my throat.

She thought for a few seconds as the echos of my scream died out in the surrounding forrest, putting one finger to her lip and tilting her head as if she were earnestly trying to troubleshoot the situation.

”No moon? No centipede plunging through a ringless Saturn? No Ouroboros?”

I shook my head from my bent over position, letting a few tears finally fall silently from my eyes to the ground.

”Oh! I know, I know” she remarked, dropping the knife mindlessly as she did.

She turned around and cavorted her way to the edge of the stair, blissfully disconnected from the abject horror of it all. Nora pranced so carelessly that I thought she was going to skip right off the platform, not actually falling until she realized there was no longer ground underneath her, like a Looney Tunes character. But she stopped just shy of the brink and turned around to face me.

”Okay, push me.” She proclaimed, still sporting that same grin.

”Push you?! Nora, what the fuck are you saying?” I responded, my voice rough and craggy from strain.

In that pivotal moment, I almost ran. She had dropped the knife and had created distance between the two of us - the opportunity was there. But I loved her. I think I loved her - at least in that moment.

”Sam, for once in your life, have some courage and push me” Despite the harsh words, her smile hadn’t changed.

”Sam, for the love of God, push me, you fucking coward” She cooed while wagging an index finger at me, her smile somehow growing larger.

In an unforeseeable rupture, the now cataclysmic accumulation of electricity in my body finally found a channel to escape and release. I sprinted towards Nora, body tilted down and with my right shoulder angled to connect with her sternum.

I did not see her fall. I only heard the fleshy sound of Nora careening into the earth, and then I heard nothing.

As I turned away from the edge, finally having the space to let nausea become emesis and misery become weeping, the flashlight turned as well, causing me to notice something had revealed itself on the previously vacant stone wall.

I stifled briney tears and began to study the image. As I stared, eyes wide with a combination of shell-shock and curiosity, I pivoted my flashlight over the cliff to visualize Nora’s body, then back at the mural, and then back at Nora’s body.

On the newly materialized mural, I saw the planet, the piercing centipede, and the shining moonlight. And as I moved to illuminate Nora’s face-up corpse with the flashlight, I saw one of the jagged roots from the nearby upturned tree had perforated the back of her skull on the way down, causing a tawny, decaying branch to wriggle through and jut out the left side of her forehead, obliterating her left eye in the process. All of it floodlit by my flashlight, or I guess, the moon in the mural.

I think - I think I get it. Or I at least saw it how Nora had described countless times.

My flashlight was the moon, and the bronze diagonal line was the cliff's edge. Her head was the ashen planet, and the piercing centipede was the jagged root.

Huh.

I slumped to the ground as sunlight spilled over the horizon, my mind weightless jelly from a dizzying combination of new understanding and old confusion. I didn’t laugh, I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream. I sat motionless in a dementia-like enlightenment, waiting for something else to happen. But nothing ever did.

Twenty or so feet below, Nora laid still, that grin now painted onto her in death, and she rested.

More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

I beheld the depths of infinity
Behind the hollow stare of a vengeful host
A sea-pitched black eyes as empty
As empathy
Perfectly imperfect human machines
Designed in constant influx of abundance
Deprived of all meaning, reason, or soul
Without a dream
 Million fingers will latch onto
A cause
One sorry excuse for a hope  
Humankind curse
Blinded by the charisma of false prophecy
Embarking on a slow-motion death march
The road to redemption is always
Paved with the wrong intentions
Short term memory
Eclipsing the shame of mediocrity  
Dead man’s glory is the road to notoriety
A headstone carved by my own hand
To last for an eternity
Yet no freedom crawls out of the martyr’s womb
Only a supersonic porcelain horse
Bound to drag my roadkill cadaver
By foreskin of an umbilical cord
to its final destination
Oblivion

I don't know how much longer I will have the stomach for this job. Sure the pay is good, but I find myself more and more troubled by the things I have to collect and the people who I have to interact with. It seemed like a great gig at first but the more I have been at it, the more my concerns mount. I will tell you about some of the encounters I have had as a debt collector, for some, well let's just say strange things.

Oh and if Mr. Salazar asks you about this, just pretend you never saw it. Anyway the first job I took that got me thinking about my reservations for this line of work was just the other day.

I had arrived at the location and parked my car outside the house of another target. A bit further down the road to not attract too much attention. I thought he would be home at this point and I had to make sure I was ready. I looked at the collection notice and almost did a double take. It was another weird one, though I suppose they have all been weird so far. I looked at the list to double check and sure enough it read just the way I thought I saw it.

“One teardrop from a shattered dream.”

The item seems very specific and if I had not been doing this for a few weeks now I might not have known what Mr. Salazar wanted. I read more of the writ of collection on the man I was to extract the item from. I sighed when I saw it was another poor and desperate soul who had made a “Deal with the devil” and lived to regret it. I winced at my own analogy and considered how on point it really was. Something was very off about Mr. Salazar, but he always paid well and I was not going to start reexamining his motives now, not when there was a job to do.

I got out of my car and grabbed my toolkit and walked towards the house. The light was on inside and there was a glimmer of lights and motion in the living room. Likely watching TV or something, I figured. That would make this easier, it would be nice if I could catch them off guard so a fight would not be necessary. I looked left and right to make sure no one saw me lingering on his porch and I pulled out the skeleton key and inserted it into the door. It slowly opened on loud hinges and I winced at the sound. I hoped he had not heard it.

I stepped in and carefully tried to close the door behind me. I paused and thought I heard motion in the living room but it subsides. He might just be shifting in a chair or something. I walked slowly to the living room and sure enough there he was.

Scott Bergman, client of Mr. Salazar and delinquent on an outstanding debt. It never seems to have actual monetary values printed on these collection writs. Only the name, the failure to pay and the strange item that is to be collected.

I took a breath and reached into my coat pocket to produce my Beretta. It might be overkill in this situation but a lot of the people I have visited so far have had firearms of their own and I have been shot at enough in the last few weeks to not take any chances.

I stepped into the living room and my footsteps are masked by the loud volume of the TV showing some college football game. As the sound dies down after a big play on screen, I clear my throat loudly and say,

“Hello Mr. Bergman, who is winning?”

He whipped around to see who was in his house and nearly fell out of his chair. I thought he was about to reach for something when I stepped forward to ensure the sight of my pistol was fully visible. He froze and I took a step and requested that he,

“Please sit down, I am just here to talk for a bit and inquire about what is owed.” He sat back down and glared at me, unsure of what to say and knowing that he was in a bad spot.

Despite the threat I had no intention of shooting him unless he gave me a reason, I was here to collect what Mr. Salazar wanted and it would require a conversation. He finally decided to speak and nervously said,

“Okay, okay. I know what Mr. Salazar said but I just needed more time. I can’t go yet I needed to see her one more time.” I tried to determine what he meant and found myself wishing I knew a bit more about these bizarre deals that Mr. Salazar struck with these people. Though I thought about some of the things I had seen so far and reconsidered wishing to know too much. I needed to find out more about who I was dealing with.

“What sort of work are you in Mr. Bergman? Or Scott, may I call you Scott?”

He nodded his head without responding directly as if he was considering if he should really talk about his work but he looked down at the gun pointing his way and managed a weak,

“Construction, I am in construction.”

I nodded my own head and responded, while looking around his living room to see rows of old high school football trophies.

“Construction, eh? Well, that is a nice honest profession, makes me wonder how you got roped into dealing with Mr. Salazar. No wait, please, don’t tell me I really do not need to know. Though from the looks of things it was not your first career choice.” I told him, while gesturing to the football trophies.

He looked over at them and back at me and did not respond. He was being a bit tight lipped and it was making this harder than it needed to be, to get what I came for. I kept the gun trained on him and set my case down on the ground and reached for the tuner. The tuner was what I called the strange oblong crystal that Mr. Salazar gave me. I did not like to use it every time since it gave me a killer headache afterwards, but I was breaking and entering and did not want to linger here for too long in case someone saw me here and things got messy. I rolled the thing over in my hands and stared intently at the center. Then I threw the tuner to Mr. Bergman and he caught it without thinking about it.

“Good catch, you did play college ball, didn't you?” I told him as I saw the refracting light washing over his face in the hypnotic pattern it always did. Scott Bergman was dead to the outside world for the moment and as he stared dumbly into the crystal. I took it back from him and braced myself as I stared into the object and felt my spatial awareness altering. I saw training, drills, formations and calling plays. Throwing, catching, running and everything over and over again. This guy had been a quarterback.

I continued looking on and saw a pretty girl. He spoke to her at lunch, he walked her home almost every day, they shared a kiss under the high school bleachers. Her name was Clair and Scott thought that he loved her. He wanted to be with her but he had to move away. He had to go, to make his dreams of going pro come true. I felt the guilt emanating from the decision. I saw the tears, the heartfelt appeal and the breakup. Then I saw the injury, followed by depression, then academic failure. The lost hope of what he wanted most in life and I knew I had what I had come for.

I felt bad forcing this man to relive those painful moments, but I tried to steel myself against it. I knew some of his story but not all of it. I am sure if I looked deeper, I would see something less appealing and sympathetic. At least that is what I always told myself.

I covered the crystal and snapped my fingers and Scott came back to his senses. He cried out and then remembered where he was and put his hands up before getting out of his chair. He asked again,

“Please, what do you want? I have nothing left to give. Just tell Salazar I can find a way to repay him without going. Please?” I braced myself for the worst part and spoke again.

“Now Scott I want to believe you, but I know you. I know you are lying to me and to yourself. Just like you did when you said that you would let her go and find her again when you were an NFL star. That is what you told Clair, wasn't it?”

His eyes widened and I could tell he could not believe I had known that. I saw a flare of anger cross his features and I cocked the hammer on the Beretta to cool things down and keep him from making any dumb decisions. Before he could respond with the inevitable, “How did you know?” I cut him off and spoke first.

“You said it would be worth it; you told her you had to try and follow your dream. Your dream was to be a star, Her's was just to be with you. You have achieved something impressive. Most people can only shatter their own dreams but you managed to destroy two for the price of one. Every day you think to yourself, what if? What if I had just stayed? Would she still be here? Well, no one can really know the answer but you wanted to know, you wanted to see. Now there is a price to be paid.”

I saw tears welling in his eyes and the pain underneath was difficult to look at. I found myself wishing I was just here to break his legs and take his wallet. Breaking a spirit is so much worse. I stepped forward and he flinched back but I grabbed his head and put a small vial up to his right eye and collected the teardrop from the painful reminiscence of a mans shattered dream. I stepped back and the man broke down and wept openly.

He continued crying softly and apologizing to the memory of his lost love even as I turned and left the house. His tortured mind too preoccupied with the past to even regard my own departure. I closed the door and walked back to my car clutching my head in pain. That damn thing always gave me the worst headaches. I tried to focus on my own discomfort to not think about what I made that man go through. I had no idea what Mr. Salazar would do with this grim trophy but after this one I felt worse than I normally did.

I tried to banish the guilt and drove away from the house and towards my employer. At least someone would be happy today.

CW: domestic abuse, self-harm

Part 1

*****

While Kate pushed her cart and scrounged for pennies in the Sixth Ward, Kendra lived a charmed life on 5th Avenue with her husband and children.  

Kendra sang in church, painted watercolor landscapes, rode horses, and pursued philanthropic missions, while her husband Lewis and his brothers had assumed control of their father’s business.  The couple birthed three children: Susan, Alexander, and Jeanette.  The happiness of their enviable lives was interrupted only once: in 1868, when their youngest daughter, Jeanette, fell from her horse, broke her neck, and perished.  

Lewis continued his trips to the Fourth and Sixth Wards.  He heard tales of Gabe’s demise and of the disaster at The London Owl, as well as implications his estranged sister-in-law had been the instigator of the chaos.  Dr. Clarence Woods was a neighbor and occasional shooting companion; he knew of poor Temperance's unfortunate demise.  But Lewis Van Wooten never shared these yarns with Kendra.  He knew his wife still grieved the loss of their daughter, and he was loathe to press her nerves further with talk of her monstrous sister.

On Christmas Eve, 1868, Lewis and Kendra Van Wooten hosted a dinner party.  In attendance were a number of prominent citizens - an Astor, a Vanderbilt, and a prominent architect, as well as Dr. Clarence Woods and his new wife, Temperance’s cousin Alice.  Dr. Woods’ practice had only grown larger and more profitable since the death of poor Temperance, and his book, which warned of the many psychical conditions passed from one generation to the next amongst low-born Irish stock, earned him the respect of his peers.   

Later, when questioned at length by the police, all of the dinner party guests corroborated the same story.

Halfway through the braised pheasant, Kendra brought up the topic of her Aunt Molly O’Doul.  Molly had been a midwife and a healer, and it was widely suggested she was also a witch in thrall to the Adversary.  Kendra described her mother’s sister as a homely wench with unsettling ways, whose favorite pastime had been bathing in the lake near the St. Michaels rectory, tempting the loins of the men of God, encouraging them to betray their vows.  

Two local girls wandered into the fields one night to retrieve a lost pet.  They swore they’d seen Molly there amongst the crops, naked, legs in the air.  But Molly’s paramour was no wayward man from the road.  He was no man at all.  According to the girls’ tale, Mary had her limbs wrapped around a black-furred fiend, with cloven hooves and great horns like a ram’s.

Soon, it became known about the town that Molly O’Doul was pregnant.  

The night she gave birth, the midwife emerged from her abode pale-faced and shell-shocked.  For three weeks, she could not speak.  When she finally regained her voice, the poor elderly nurse shared the tale of Molly’s offspring.  There were six of them, ugly things, each the size of a kitten.  The imps bore the limbs and features of men, but each possessed the snout and flopping ears of a dog, and their bodies were coated with thick black fur.  Atop each soft head, two hardened nubs, like the beginnings of horns.

The next morning, the midwife was found cold in her bed.  Molly told everyone her baby had died.  No one believed her.  Because it was well known, around County Kerry, those who crossed Molly O’Doul could expect a visit from her six monstrous children.  And once paid a visit by that vile half-dozen, one would not be alive much longer.

“That’s horrific, Kendra!” Alice Woods breathed.  “Why would you share such a tale while we’re eating?”

“Because,” Kendra said, her voice low and defeated, “I see two of those cursed children right behind you.”

The heads of the guests collectively snapped towards Alice, and then to the Van Wooten’s sitting room behind her.  The room was dim; the servants hadn’t lit the candles.  But they all saw enough. 

Two creatures lurked there.  Black, hairy things with powerful legs, balancing atop hooves like abominable goats.  They loomed, taller than the men in attendance.  Their golden eyes caught the light like the eyes of a cat.  Each horrific face was accentuated by a fat, fleshy snout, and framed by flopping, canine ears.  From their temples spouted gnarled horns, filthy and twisted, like those of a mountain ram.  They grinned, too wide, and licked their jagged chops.  They extended five-fingered, human hands.  They crept towards the party.

The screams were immediate.  Alice Woods turned pale and fainted into her husband’s arms.  A mad dash commenced towards the servants’ quarters, the kitchen, or the Van Wooten’s ballroom - anywhere that promised an escape from the mansion without the necessity of crossing the path of those accursed monsters.  

From the kitchen, Jane Mortimer howled.  Her husband barreled in to save her - and nearly collapsed himself.  Two fiends, coated in malodorous black fur, crouched on all fours.  The Mortimers registered their cloven hooves - then how, exactly, the mouths of blasphemous horrors were occupied.  Entrails dangled from their blood-flecked horns and doglike snouts.  On the dirty kitchen floor lay the disembowled corpse of the Van Wooten’s middle-aged housekeeper.  

Leonard Carr, the architect, climbed through a window.  Once he’d escaped to the Van Wooten’s well-kept yard, he realized he had not yet skirted danger.  For three additional creatures lurked in the garden.  Two danced in the moonlight, thick black fur glistening with dew, enticing the learned man to join them.  Then the third fiend emerged from the shadows and locked its cold, human fingers around his wrist, as though to drag him toward their revelry by force.  He broke away and ran like a besieged rabbit.  The mark the creature left on his arm, five greasy fingerprints, did not fade - even with repeated washing - for another week.  

Lewis Van Wooten, brave man he was, did not intend to allow the sublime spawn of his wife’s kin to invade his home and his family.  He strode right into the sitting room, ready to confront the fiends.  

But the creatures had vanished.  In their place stood Kate McCleester.  

Kate, stringy-haired and filthy, had only grown uglier since Lewis’s beautiful wife left her, fifteen years before.  Her one eye radiated fury and violence.  Her cracked lip curled up into a mocking smile.  

“I have missed you, Lewis,” she purred maliciously.  “I see the dogs have come for you and your blushing bride.”

Lewis dove for her - and tripped over a stool.  Kate dashed away.  Cursing his incompetent staff for failing to light the candles, Lewis stumbled to his feet.  He could no longer see his hag of a sister-in-law.  Feeling his way forward, though, he heard her voice.  It echoed from the walls.  

“Lewis!” It screamed.  “Come join the Lord of the Day!”

Lewis cupped his hands over his ears.  He found the staircase and trudged upward.  He hadn’t heard the front door open and shut; Kate must’ve climbed to the second floor.  Two candles did burn astride the long second-story hallway.  Lewis likely thanked God and all the saints for this small bit of light - and for the good fortune his fourteen-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son had been spirited away to an aunt’s house before the dinner party.  

He came to the dark doorway of his bedchambers.  There, he saw her.  Kate.  Black shawl over her head, malicious eye laser-focused on him.  

He threw himself upon the cursed wretch. He clutched her like a rag doll. He wrapped his fingers around her slender neck and squeezed.  And squeezed.  And squeezed.

“Unhand her!”

Lewis whirled around, allowing Kate’s limp form to slide from his grasp.  Torches blazed.  Dr. Woods stood in the hallway with a corps of police officers.  In the lead: a brawny young man, revolver in hand.  The doctor’s face paled.

“Good God!” He screamed.  

He ran past Lewis Van Wooten, to the broken woman sprawled across the bed.

Lewis turned.

It wasn’t Kate McCleester who lay dead.  

It was his wife, Kendra.  Her long black shawl matched that of her sister.  Angry black bruises dotted her pale, graceful neck.  Dr. Woods clutched her wrist.

“She’s dead,” he breathed.  

At the doctor’s words, Lewis became a monster.  His eyes might’ve glowed like the eyes of the unearthly black dogs.  His hands balled into fists.  No.  He’d slain the horrific creature who’d coveted his family’s happiness and loosed malicious fiends upon his wife, the terror of the Sixth Ward, the witch of the New World.  He’d stolen the breath of Kate McCleester; done what he should have done - what he’d desired to do - fifteen years before, upon first sight of the hideous thing that had once been Kendra’s kin.  He hadn’t killed a woman.  He’d put down a beast.  

With a mighty roar, he seized a heavy candlestick and swung it at the police, then turned his malicious intentions towards the crouching doctor.

“You’re lying!” He screamed.  “It’s not Kendra!  It’s Kate!  Kate, the witch!  It’s Kate!”

He lifted the candlestick above his head.  

POP!

With a flick of the young policeman’s trigger finger, Lewis Van Wooten collapsed.  

The rest of the posse didn’t have time to ponder the deadly turn of events.  Peals of smoke wafted up from the lower floor, as did the low-pitched crackling of flames.  The living fled the conflagration.  By the time the fire brigade arrived with water, the Van Wooten mansion was beyond saving - as were the bodies of the lord and lady of the house.  

Word of the demise of the beautiful Kendra McCleester and her rich, adoring husband made its way to Five Points; for days, it was all that anyone spoke of.  It had been poetic, Kendra’s death - at the hands of her savior, before her body was engulfed by flames, so much like the flames she’d escaped years before.

And Kate.  

Kate McCleester, it seemed, had instigated the destruction she desired.  Her malevolent urge satisfied, she must have been swallowed up by the flames herself.  She’d returned to the Lord of the Day.  She’d taken her horrific, dog-shaped cousins with her.

Because after the night of the Van Wooten Manor fire, Kate McCleester was never seen in Five Points again.

*****

Lewis Van Wooten had been eulogized in glowing terms: a shrewd businessman, devoted husband, loving father.  But as the statute of limitations ran out on Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead, tongues began to loosen.

Those who did business with the Van Wooten brothers claimed Lewis was a tempestuous man, prone to dark moods and fits of leonine rage, during which he’d procure a heavy object and aim it violently at anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves within striking range.  Mr. Van Wooten clearly trusted few people.  His attorney reported Lewis would appear outside his office, caught in a monsoon of anger, twice a month to demand his will be adjusted, his wife and children removed.  

Lewis Van Wooten, it seemed, had become convinced he’d been made a cuckold.  He claimed his beautiful wife bedded every low-class groom and butler on Fifth Avenue.  He swore his children weren’t his - in fact, his wife and daughter were likely plotting with their Irish peasant bedfellows to murder him and plunder his riches.  

The lawyer spent many an evening calming his temperamental client.  He’d engineered a compromise.  A stipulation was written into Lewis’s will: if he came to his demise through homicide - at the hands of his slag wife, bastard children, unscrupulous brothers, or any other individual, known or unknown - Kendra, Susan and Alexander would receive nothing.  This, the lawyer explained, guaranteed his wife could not hire some cuckolding groom or opportunistic slum-dweller to dispose of him.  Doing so would all but guarantee destitution, for herself and her son and daughter.  

But Lewis Van Wooten’s death had not been a murder.  He’d been shot by a police captain - a certain John Staub - in the process of committing a crime.  Susan and little Alex were placed in the custody of a doting aunt.  When they reached the age of majority, they would inherit their father’s entire estate.  

*****

In 1889, a Bostonian journalist named Thomas Norris made a pilgrimage to Five Points.  A grandson of Sixth Ward Irish immigrants, he felt inspired to record the oral history of the neighborhood, as the gangsters who’d survived their heyday were aging and dying and Italian newcomers displaced the sons and daughters of Erin.  He came across the tale of Kate McCleester, the Lady Poisoner of Mulberry Street. 

Thomas Norris found himself particularly intrigued by Kate.  Not only because he found it fascinating a maimed beggar-woman could inspire such fear in a neighborhood so famously derelict.  

But also, because he knew of a dry goods store in Boston that sold green-tinged cold cream in misshapen bottles.  The shop was owned and managed by two spinster sisters.  One, quiet and scarred, mixed potions in a back room.  The other, possessed of an ageless beauty, sang old Irish songs to unruly children.  

The two went by the names Kate and Kendra O’Doul.  

*****

“You’ve found me,” Kate said to Thomas Norris.  “Whadd’ya want?  A medal?”

“I want to know how you did it,” he replied.  “What poison did you use?”

Thomas had approached the store as the sisters were sweeping up for the night.  He confronted the two with their Five Points identities - then mollified the angry thornbacks with a bottle of fine Irish whiskey.

Kate took a long sip.  Her wrinkled face broke into a smile.  

“Boy, I never poisoned no one.” 

She pointed to her cold cream, stacked in pyramids at the window, and the bottles of tonic on shelves behind the cashbox.  Her ingredients were simple.  She’d brought some seeds with her  from Ireland, rented space in Rebekah Kleiner’s yard for a penny a day and grew herbs.  She paid a river pirate to bring her pilfered cinnamon and turmeric.  And she’d purchased beeswax in bulk from Temperance Woods’ family; her father, a farmer, kept hives.  The recipes had been her Aunt Molly’s.  

“Then how?”  Thomas insisted.  “Your sister… multiple people claimed they saw bipedal black dogs lurking around the manor.  They must’ve been drugged!”

Kate shot Kendra a sidelong glance.  Kendra grinned like a schoolgirl, beautiful green eyes sparkling like emeralds.  Thomas leaned back in his chair.  It was story time.

“When everyone thinks you’re a poisoner,” Kate began, “a peculiar thing happens.  People start coming to you and asking for poison.  And once you know who’s tryin’ to poison who, you’ve got power that would strike envy in the richest bosses of Tammany Hall.”

The Mud Ghouls came first.  They knew of a hefty load coming into harbor, and wanted a drug stiff enough to silence the roughest German ship’s crew.  Kate lied and told them she’d have their poison in two weeks’ time.  

Next, she was approached by her old friend Gabe Callahan.  

“I never wanted Gabe in that way,” she clarified.  “I never had much use for men in the bedroom at all.”

Gabe found himself in a spot of hot water.  He’d taken up with the wife of the Mud Ghouls chief, and the two had been caught in a compromising position.  He’d only managed to save himself from a bloody end by promising to lead the pirates to the church where the Blue Bell Dogs hid their loot.  But this ruse wouldn’t keep him alive for long - the Blue Bell Dogs’ stash was much less impressive than the treasure trove he’d advertised.  And even if the sole ruby pendant hidden there had impressed the Mud Ghouls, it wouldn’t take long for his own compatriots to realize it was Gabe who’d betrayed their secret.  Jig Cleary enjoyed nothing more than discovering a rat amongst his ranks.  Because Jig dispatched of enemies quickly, with a bullet or a blow to the back of the head.  Traitorous friends, on the other hand, perished at Jig’s bare hands - slowly, painfully, and creatively.  

So Gabe urgently needed poison - either to do away with Jig, or his lover’s pirate husband.  Before one of the two rendered him an ugly, mutilated corpse.

Not a minute after she’d told Gabe she’d “see what she could do” and he’d scurried away, Kate was approached by a young police officer, John Staub.  John wanted to know what Gabe, a known criminal, wanted with poison.  

Kate tracked down her own river pirate associate.  She asked how many ships operated on the East River with primarily German crews.  The pirate said he knew of only one: the Sunshine Jane.  Then, Kate summoned both Gabe and John Staub, and proposed a mutually-beneficial solution.  Gabe would provide John Staub with all he knew of the Mud Ghouls and their hiding holes.  In exchange, John Staub would tell everyone he’d pulled Gabe’s waterlogged body out of the East River and buried him in a pauper’s grave.  

“So Gabe…” Thomas started.

“The madness was all an act.  He’s still alive,” Kate said.  “He started a new life in Brooklyn, mixing cocktails at a society bar in the Heights.”  

Next, Kate had been propositioned by two sets of women.

First, a trio of Dropper Wallace’s hired harpies: Scarlett, Delilah, and Sally Joan.  Dropper no longer wished to drug his marks with chloroform - it was too unpredictable, and too often left him with a worthless corpse to dispose of.  Instead, he desired a drug with hallucinogenic properties.  The girls thought this was something Kate could arrange.  Soon, though, they revealed there was one specific worthless corpse they longed to look upon: that of Dropper himself.  Dropper kept their earnings and paid them pennies.  He demanded sexual favors nightly.  He ordered the girls to rob their customers, then let them take the beatings if they were caught in the act.  

After the prostitutes came the Mags.  The waifs, between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, were no longer precious kittens in Jig Cleary’s eyes.  He’d made it abundantly clear they’d need to offer up their womanly charms to earn their keep - to him, his lieutenants, and any man willing to pay for the privilege.  They couldn’t run; Jig was their gatekeeper to food and shelter, and he had eyes all over Manhattan.  He’d find them anywhere.  Unless he were dead.

Again, Kate brought the two factions together.  And she did manage to procure what the prostitutes requested: from Rebekah Kleiner’s shop, a bottle of New Orleans absinthe.  

The morning of the brawl, the three Mags approached Dropper Wallace.  They confessed their patron, Jig Cleary, planned to rob his business that night - and requested payment for this information.  Instead, Dropper seized the prettiest Mag, the dark-haired lass, and had his men tie her up.  If Jig Cleary wanted his lovely pet back, he would pay a hefty ransom.  

The bordello girls served their companions food and drink laced with absinthe.  At the agreed-upon time, they feigned madness.  Whether by the absinthe or the power of suggestion, their clients became caught in the fantasy and saw the giant black dogs themselves.  The girls lured them into the street, leaving the London Owl unguarded.  Then the Blue Bell Dogs - summoned by the remaining two Mags - ensured Dropper Wallace and his thugs remained duly occupied.

Meanwhile, Gabe Callahan - alive and well - snuck into The London Owl.  The dark-haired Mag, who’d undid her ties, led him right to the safe, and Gabe made short work of it.  They split the money - Gabe, the Mags, and Dropper’s stable of girls.  Gabe started a new life in Brooklyn. The London Owl girls split off to seek their fortunes.  And the Mags secured their freedom - which they guaranteed by toppling a statue right onto Jig Cleary’s head.

*****

Thomas Norris couldn’t contain himself - he laughed heartily.  Then he caught Kendra’s eye, and his mirth withered.  If Kendra Van Wooten was alive, he shared a drink with a woman who’d cruelly plotted the execution of her husband.

Kendra’s husband’s discretions started small.  He’d polish off too much bourbon every once and awhile, then hurl cruel insults at his wife.  His drunken stupors soon became a nightly occurrence, and his insults escalated to slaps.  Before she could process what her fairy-tale marriage had become, Kendra found herself regularly pummeled and set upon with heavy objects.  She wore long sleeves and heavy make-up to cover the bruises that marred her pale skin.  Some days, her wounds left her unable to rise from bed.  Lewis would laugh at her, mock her laziness.  She fell pregnant twice between Susan and Alexander.  Both children died inside her womb, at the hands of their furious father.  

Once a month, after her husband passed out from drink, Kendra took a horse and stole away to the Sixth Ward to visit Kate.  She’d bring her sister money and food.  Fifteen years before, after the tenement fire, Kate fell to her knees and begged Kendra to leave her behind - to marry her rich sweetheart and be happy for the both of them.  Now, she begged just as fervently for her sister to gather her children and escape.  But both women knew this proposal was useless.  Men did terrible things to women in the Sixth Ward as well.  At least in her Fifth Avenue mansion, Kendra and the children could count on full bellies and warmth and medicine.  

Then Jeanette was murdered.  

The girl abandoned a doll in the parlor - a doll her father, unsteady from drink, had stumbled over.  To discipline his daughter, he flung her down the stairs.  Kendra heard her neck snap.  As she screamed, her husband hoisted their limp child and carried her to the stables, where he discarded her like garbage.  He told the staff she’d been thrown from a horse.  

To rescue Kendra, Susan, and Alexander - and ensure the children would inherit their father’s estate - Kate raised an army.  

Rebekah Kleiner, it turned out, did have space in her black heart for charity, and the culling of men who beat women was her altruistic contribution of choice.  Ms. Kleiner, mistress of disguise, designed monstrous costumes with odds and ends from her shop.  Curled horns.  Shoes made from horse’s hooves.  Horse hair, grease paint, pig’s snouts.  Six women donned the wretched suits: Scarlett, Delilah, Sally Jane, and the three Mags.  The Van Wooten servants - as much targets of Lewis' rage as his wife and children - let the six into the mansion.  They “forgot” to light the candles.  The middle-aged chief maid slaughtered a chicken and placed entrails on her chest, which two of the Mags pretended to eat.  

As the six costumed actresses put on a show, Kendra and Kate made use of the servant doors and hidden corridors.  Kate lured Lewis upstairs.  Kendra snuck to her room and donned a shawl that mimicked Kate’s.  

All the while, a short distance away, Police Captain John Staub prepared to repay what he owed Kate McCleester.  It had been hers and Gabe’s information that allowed his successful raid of the river pirates, which secured him a promotion, a raise, and a hero’s reception.  So he’d gotten himself on a patrol of the neighborhood that night.  He’d ensured his platoon remained near the Van Wooten manor, in time to be summoned by the frantic cries of the horrified dinner guests.  And he kept his loaded revolver in his coat.  

“But…” Thomas stammered, “what if… Lewis could’ve actually killed you, woman!”

Kendra offered a gentle jostle of her head.  “He was gonna kill me, one way or another.”

After the police and remaining guests fled the fire, set by the servants and the Mags in the kitchen, Kendra leapt to safety - for the second time in her life - out an open window.  

Thomas nodded.  Then, he narrowed his eyes.

“The doctor!” He announced.  “The doctor confirmed you were dead.  If you weren’t, then…”

Kate grinned.  “The doctor lied.”  

Dr. Clarence Woods lied.  He was in on the plan as well - except, like so many unfortunate Five Points carousers, he’d been Shanghai’d.  If he didn’t play along and accuse Louis Van Wooten of murder, then Kate would’ve told everyone what he and his new wife did to Temperance.  

Before Gabe, before The London Owl, before the fateful Van Wooten dinner party, Temperance Woods had confided in Kate.  She suspected her husband was carrying on an affair with her younger cousin.  He’d as much as said he wanted her - and the child in her stomach - gone, but would never risk his reputation for a divorce. Temperance found Clarence’s prescription pad, on which he’d practiced forging her handwriting.  She gave the prescription pad to Kate.  It was her insurance policy.  And after her death, it became Kate’s.  

“He started it all, really,” Kate mused.  “Clarence Woods, the wife killer.  He accused me of poisoning Temperance.  He stole the story of my Aunt Molly - a story I’d told him.  I’d laid out the people who talked loudest about being moral were often the least.  Like the pious gossips back home who accused my aunt of bein’ a witch and birthing monstrous dogs with horns and hooves, just because she’d been pregnant out of wedlock and her baby was born dead.”

*****

Thomas Norris recounted his night with Kate and Kendra McCleester in his journal, but he never revealed their secrets.  It’s unclear what became of the sisters, or any of the other characters that populated their story.  And as the years have passed, memories have faded, and the old guard dies off, we’ll never know which parts of the tale are truth, fiction, or fiction within fiction.  

To this day, the young boys and girls who play on the streets of the old Five Points district sing this song:

Don’t say the name of old Kate McCleester

Her creatures will rise, and her creatures will feast.

They’ll chew on your face, an they’ll chew on your toes, 

Then they’ll drag you away down some Mulberry hole.

Don’t say the the name of old Kate McCleester

The bride of the dark, the mother of beasties.

Her beasties know lies, and her beasties know truth

And sometimes, the beastie might even be you.  

CW: self-harm, domestic abuse

*****

On March 3rd, 1868, Mrs. Temperance Wood twisted her bedsheet into a rope, tied a noose, threw it over a rafter of her 5th Avenue manor, climbed atop her mother’s favorite chair and stepped off.  Her cold body was found hours later - found, unfortunately, by Miss Alice Newberry, Temperance’s twenty-year-old cousin, recently arrived in Manhattan from London and residing within the household.  

Temperance’s husband, Dr. Clarence Woods, was overcome by grief.  A devout Methodist and son of a minister, Dr. Woods publicly expressed disbelief his beloved could have despaired so.  To those close to him, however, he revealed his wife had been experiencing frightful delusions in the weeks preceding her death.  Mrs. Woods - previously a great lover of animals - developed a strange phobia of dogs, crossing the street or fleeing whenever she happened upon a canine.  Then, she began seeing black dogs in the shadows, gnashing their teeth and growling menacingly.

The extent of Temperance Woods’ madness became achingly clear upon discovery of her diary.  Pages had been torn out, seemingly at random, but her last entry - penned by an unsteady, trembling hand - was a nightmare-scape worthy of the Book of Revelations.  The black dogs followed her everywhere, she wrote.  The black dogs were blasphemous things: they stood on two legs, like men.  Goat-like horns erupted above their flopping ears.  Their eyes glowed like the fires of the Adversary.  

Her last written words, nearly illegible, struck fear in the hearts of the New York police investigators.

I shall return as a spook to haunt the deformed hag Kate McCleester, who pushes her cart down Mulberry Street.  For it is her witchery that so doomed me to my fate!

Her room was searched, and one of Kate McCleester’s misshapen jars of cold cream was found amongst Mrs. Woods’ belongings.  The opaque cream had an odd, pea-colored tinge to it.  Dr. Woods, grief once again inflamed, went on a war path. 

Sadly for the doctor, his fiery accusations came to naught.  A platoon of coppers found Kate McCleester - an impoverished cripple of the notorious Five Points slum - and confiscated her cart, on the (accurate) grounds her wares were stolen property. Her misshapen jars of cold cream were tested in every way conceivable, and no poison was detected.  Dr. Woods claimed his late wife’s bowels, upon autopsy, had been riddled with an odd green sediment.  But Dr. Aaron Cogg, the physician who’d performed the procedure, refuted this account.  He stated Mrs. Woods’ organs were largely normal for a woman her age.  

He also noted that Mrs. Woods had been pregnant.

*****

A perusal of the limited records available suggests James McCleester arrived in Manhattan around 1845.  Roughly two years later, in 1847, Mr. McCleester’s family arrived to join him.  They are reported as: Ann McCleester, aged 35.  Katherine McCleester, aged 12.  Kendra McCleester, aged 10.  Michael McCleester, aged 8.  William McCleester, aged 6.  Arthur McCleester, aged 4.  The family hailed from County Kerry, Ireland.  

Ann’s sister, Molly O'Doul, had been something of a healer in their hamlet.  She’d fixed broken bones and cared for the infirm - but also assisted young girls desperate to make a pregnancy go away quietly.  As well as married women with a desire for the same of their drunken brute husbands.  She’d cultivated a reputation for witchcraft amongst the pious town gossips - perhaps even necromancy; communion with those fiends hidden beyond the veil.  

James McCleester, a skilled carpenter, found some success in New York.  After summoning his family to the New World, he provided them a life that made them the envy of their fellow Kerry brethren.  The McCleester clan lived in an apartment amongst the Germans on Rivington Street.  The boys attended grammar school, while Kate and Kendra became pupils of the Miss Julie Clay Academy for Foreign Born Girls, a small institution in the Eleventh Ward that purported to provide an English-style finishing school education at a bargain rate. 

The family lived happily until 1850.  That year, rough scaffolding collapsed beneath James McCleester’s feet.  His head split open on the hard dirt. 

After James’s death, his widow and children were plunged into the harsh existence intimately familiar amongst their countrymen.  No longer able to afford their apartment, the family relocated to a room on the third floor of a wooden tenement building on Mulberry Street, in the middle of the infamous Sixth Ward.  Kate found work as a seamstress; Michael and Willy, as newsboys and street-sweepers.  In 1852, Arthur joined his brothers’ operation and Ann followed her daughter to the workshop.

Kendra, however, continued her schooling at the Miss Julie Clay Academy.  The McCleesters frequently fell asleep with empty bellies, but Kendra never missed a tuition payment.  This aberration can be understood under one overriding condition: Kendra McCleester was beautiful.

Kendra wasn’t the comeliest girl in her small country hamlet.  She wasn’t the most delectable creature trawling a Tenderloin District dance hall.  No.  Kendra possessed a beauty that rivaled the sculptures of ancient Greece; the marvels of the Renaissance masters.  Her form was nymphlike and willowy; her hair, a shining river of golden curls.  Her green eyes sparkled like emeralds over high cheekbones, a delicate patrician nose, and plump lips the color of cherries.  A beauty so singular and radiant, she would have her choice of suitors - suitors who could pluck her from her life of poverty, her family clinging to her ankle.  

Ann McCleester, a woman with an eye for investment, refused to risk her daughter’s pale skin to the wrath of the beating summer sun, or her slender fingers to the maw of a Singer sewing machine.  

Kendra did contribute to the family's finances in her own way.  On warm nights, she and Kate took to the crowded streets of Five Points, buckets of hot corn under their arms.  Kendra - possessed of a voice rivaled only in beauty by her cotton-clad form - sang Irish hymns to lure customers.  It was said Kendra could quell an alehouse brawl, tame the meanest of the Sixth Ward bullies, and stop a riot in its tracks with her angelic voice.  

Kate, aware of the danger faced by a woman alone, took to dressing as a man and posing as Kendra’s brother. She was extremely convincing, former student she was of Rebekah Kleiner - the notorious fence, confidence woman, and mistress of disguise, whose Germantown dry goods store was then a bastion of the underworld.  Mrs. Kleiner had also taught Kate the art of pickpocketing.  As Kendra hypnotized the bruisers and gamblers with her siren song, Kate slipped soundlessly through the crowd, relieving the men of their ill-guarded belongings.  

Tales of the beautiful Hot Corn Girl traveled beyond the filthy, diseased streets of the immigrant neighborhoods to the mansions of Fifth Avenue, where they found a certain Lewis Van Wooten, son of Jakob Van Wooten, the materials and real estate magnate whose family owned half of Brooklyn.  Lewis fancied himself as an amateur anthropologist, and embarked on occasional - proctored and guarded - trips to the Lower Wards, where he observed the habits of the ignorant, filthy and destitute.  

He got it into his head to find this legendary goddess of a hot corn girl - a pursuit towards which no expense was spared.  Lewis fell in love with Kendra McCleester at first sight.  She became equally enamored with the handsome young gentleman.  He escorted her to the opera, bought her beautiful European garments, instilled in her a taste for wine and sweets.  The hot August of 1855, Lewis Van Wooten proposed.

He’d take her away, he swore to Kendra.  Her life in the slums would be forgotten - but her family would not.  Lewis promised he’d find Ann and Kate well-paid work as personal attendants for two of his many female relatives.  He’d send the boys to the finest academy in Manhattan.  In one month’s time, he promised his beloved, he’d come with a carriage to collect her and her kin.  

On August 28th, 1855, seven days before Lewis returned to retrieve his bride, a fire broke out in the McCleester’s tenement.

Kate and Kendra lay closest to the window.  They’d remained awake long after nightfall, giggling about flowers and horses and wedding dresses.  Kate awoke first, nostrils singed by smoke, and found the walls of the family’s abode torn apart by angry red flames. 

As fate would have it, a cart from the nearby dry goods shop sat in front of the window, loaded high with fabric and sacks of grains.  Woken by her sister’s frantic shaking, before she shook the sleep from her head, Kendra must’ve felt herself fall - as Kate pushed her unceremoniously out the window.  Kendra landed rough, atop the cart, but out of further harm’s way.  She picked herself out of the assorted detritus that broke her fall.  Seconds later, she heard a thud.  

A smoking creature of nightmares, charred black and red, arose from the same dry goods cart.  Kendra screamed as the creature revealed itself to be Kate, with twelve-year-old Arthur’s blistering body cradled in her arms.  

Arthur McCleester perished before dawn broke.  His brothers, and Ann, had already succumbed to smoke and flame by the time Kate found them.  Kate herself, unmercifully, survived.  The fire melted the right side of her face, leaving a wrinkled mass of scar tissue that resembled uncooked bacon and a blinded eye welded closed.  Her right arm had to be amputated above the elbow, her flesh reduced to moist char the consistency of mud.  Forever after, even during the hottest days of summer, Kate wore ankle-length skirts and shawls to hide the extent of the abuse the fire had done to her body.

We don’t know whether Kate thanked God she was able to save one sibling, or if she resented Kendra for her untouched beauty.  Kendra may have revered Kate as her savior, or recoiled in fright from the monster who was once her sister and closest confidante.  We don’t know if the two cried together for their lost mother and brothers, or if Kate cursed her more-beloved younger sister for the fortune that had favored her since birth.  

We don’t know how the sisters’ relationship ended.  But a week later, Lewis Van Wooten returned to the Sixth Ward in a carriage drawn by white horses.  When Kendra McCleester left with her fiancee, she left alone.

*****

Sometime during the post-war years, around 1865, Methodist minister Peter Woods heard the Almighty whisper in his ear.  For one week each month, the good reverend would forsake his respectable Fulton Street church.  He’d travel, with a dispatch of disciples, to the bowels of the Sixth Ward, where he’d hold daily sermons and save the souls of the wretched thieves, prostitutes, and river pirates in the main room of Dropper Wallace’s dance hall.

Dropper Wallace was an odd choice for a business partner.  A compact, big-bellied fellow with a crooked nose and scarred-up fingers - souvenirs of decades spent bare-knuckle brawling - the closest Dropper had ever come to religion was taking the Lord’s name in vain.  His dance hall hussies were infamous for, at Dropper’s direction, feeding Johnnies cheap whiskey laced with chloroform, then selling these unfortunate marks to the Blue Bell Dogs gang for three dollars a pop.  The poor wretch, if he woke at all, would wake to find himself Shanghai’d, onboard a ship halfway to South Carolina.

But Reverend Woods offered Dropper two dollars a day for the exclusive use of his establishment, and two clams was two clams.

A handful of beggars and bullies from the neighborhood did filter in, by accident or out of curiosity, while the good Reverend preached.  Those who stayed cackled and jeered in amusement at all the wrong parts of the Bible - David’s lusting for Bathsheba, or Lot and his daughters in the cave.  Only a precious few earnestly took to Reverend Woods’ teaching.  One of that precious number was scarred, scrawny, filthy cripple Kate McCleester.

*****

The tenement fire had been a master thief, one that put even the wiliest Five Points gip to shame.  In minutes, the fire had stolen from Kate McCleester all she’d ever had, and all she ever would.  It stole her family.  It stole her profession - down one eye and one hand, she couldn’t operate a Singer machine or pick a pocket.  It stole her beauty.  Though she paled beside her sister, Kate had been a handsome woman in her own right, with a quick wit and sturdy, child-bearing hips.  After that terrible night, Kate would never bear children.  It became a joke amongst the Five Points youths: that Kate McCleester’s female parts had been… welded shut.  Cauterized.  But no one could say for certain, because any man who caught sight of Kate with her clothes off would immediately turn to stone.  

For months after Kendra’s departure, Kate wandered the streets, crying in pain, surviving off coins dropped by charitable citizens moved to pity by her ugliness and tears.  Finally, she became desperate enough to seek out the assistance of Rebekah Kleiner.  

Rebekah told everyone who’d listen she’d offered Kate a floor to sleep on - free of charge - but Kate’s pride wouldn’t allow her to accept such charity.  Everyone who’d listen knew Kate’s refusal of Rebekah’s generous offer had less to do with pride than the well-known fact Rebekah never did anything out of charity.  But Kate did enter a business relationship with Mrs. Kleiner.  She’d pay a wholesale rate for bits of fabric, jewelry, and assorted odds-and-ends from the Kleiner Dry Goods shop - items liberated, by Rebekah Kleiner’s army of child pick-pockets, from careless newcomers at the ferry terminal.  Kate would then load her wares into her cart and walk the streets of Manhattan, selling to businessmen and aristocrats and criminals and anyone else whose heart softened at the pathetic sight of her.  

*****

Reverend Wood believed he’d caught Kate McCleester’s Irish Catholic soul, and he paraded her around like a trophy.  His flock, more observant, believed Kate’s interest in Protestantism was considerably less than her interest in Reverend Woods’ handsome thirty-year-old physician son.

Dr. Clarence Woods accompanied his father to Five Points, where he’d bandage wounds and dispense ointments.  He thought he may write a book about the distinctive physical characteristics of the criminal immigrant class, and his father’s venture provided him a ripe opportunity for research.  He’d successfully swallowed his distaste for Kate’s scarred, lopsided face, and kindly took the time to ask questions about her life.  Kate, who’d spent years courting only pity or scorn, lapped up Clarence’s kindness like a kitten laps a bowl of cream. 

She told him tales of her Aunt Molly O’Doul, the village midwife around whom rumors of dark sorcery and otherworldly communion circled like flies around dung. Molly had been an ugly wench: rough and bony, with a beak of a nose and mismatched eyes.  But she must’ve cooked herself a potent love potion, because her bed was seldom empty: she procured the amorous attentions of men traveling through town, at least one of whom brought her ‘round the family way, not that he stuck about long enough to find out.  The whisperers in the churchyard suggested Molly O’Doul did not birth a human child, but a furry black beast that gnawed at her breast with canine teeth.

Kate was likely attempting to stir Clarence Woods’ loins with her talk of depraved copulation.  Clarence urged on her yarn-spinning to another end altogether: she proved a goldmine of the sort of provincial blathering he hoped to include in his book.

When Kate McCleester learned the quiet, dark-haired beauty who accompanied Clarence to sermons was his wife and the daughter of prosperous Westchester farmers, Kate embarked on a strange campaign to befriend the sweet young woman.  Temperance Woods, a sympathetic and delicate creature, treated the dirty cripple with cordiality matching her husband’s.  The attendees of Reverend Wood’s sermons - witnesses to Kate’s evolving relationship with Clarence and Temperance - couldn’t decide whether Kate was so delusional as to believe she could tempt Clarence away from his lovely, pious bride, or if she simply resented the pair for enjoying the marital bliss she’d forever be denied.  

One cold Sunday, Clarence Woods allowed Kate to lead him to a secluded spot in the bowels of the dance hall.  Ten minutes later, young Dr. Woods’ voice cut through the walls to the assembled congregation.

“You distasteful wretch!” He screamed.  “Goodness and holiness cannot exist in such a hideous monster as you!”

Dr. Woods reappeared, red-faced and sweating.  In front of his dumbstruck father and the sniggering flock, he clutched Temperance’s hand and lead her away.  The two never attended a sermon in Five Points again.  By nightfall, the whole Sixth Ward knew Kate McCleester had propositioned the minister’s son - and been spat out like sour milk.  

That, it was later agreed, was the night Kate McCleester broke.  

Paddy Goode watched her slip a coin to a lieutenant of Rebekah Kleiner, before he led her to a back door of the dry-goods shop.  Red Mary, a street-walking owl who found customers amongst sailors along the East River, swore she saw Kate take a wrapped package from a shifty-looking river pirate.  And The Mags - a trio of feral waifs under protection of the Blue Bell Dogs gang - reported witnessing Kate, alone in the burned-out former gambling hall that was her occasional home, madly stirring some concoction in a metal pot.  

The Mags swore, upon their dead mothers’ graves, whatever Kate had in that pot glowed with an unnatural light.

The next day, Kate obtained a crate-full of misshapen glass bottles and jars.  She began selling, along with her pilfered trinkets from Rebekah Kleiner’s shop, off-colored white cold cream, tonic for sore throats, and a blue-colored something she swore cured the barrel flu with only a drop.  

Four weeks after that, Temperance Woods was dead.  

She wasn’t the last.

*****

Gabe Callahan was the best safe-cracker east of Philadelphia.  If you asked Gabe Callahan, he was the best safe cracker in the country.  He told tales of bank vaults cleared in San Francisco, Chicago, and New Orleans.  He swore he was a wanted man in six states - but, thanks to Rebekah Kleiner’s disguises, his wanted posters looked like six different men.  In fact, his disguise had been so convincing New Jersey authorities were convinced he was a black man.  And Boston thought him Chinese.  

Gabe liked to talk.  But, despite his tendency to inflate his own infamy, he'd proved a valuable addition to any criminal enterprise.  He sworn his allegiance to the Blue Bell Dogs and to Jig Cleary, the gang’s leader.  Gabe had impressed Jig Cleary, and Jig was not an easy man to impress.  A burly bruiser who stood over six feet tall and weighed at least two hundred pounds, Jig earned his moniker because he - pistol in hand - enjoyed forcing beaten opponents to dance a little jig before he thoughtlessly dispatched them with a bullet or a hard knock to the back of the head.  

Gabe, orphaned young, met Kate McCleester when they were both fifteen, both students of Rebekah Kleiner’s Sunday school for young pick-pockets and sneak-thieves.  Gabe had been a criminal prodigy.  He masterminded the successful heist of the Bank of Savings on Chambers street - with nary an ounce of blood spilled - before his eighteenth birthday.  But the young maestro was not without his Achilles heel.  

Once, Gabe attempted to snatch a police officer’s copper badge from right under his nose as he sipped coffee at Rona’s Cafe - earning himself a sound thrashing by nightstick.  A gang lieutenant, Frank Greely, carried the foolhardy youth to Hearn’s Greengrocer, the Blue Bell Dog’s unofficial clubhouse, and tended his wounds.  When Gabe recovered his senses, he confessed to the older man that his unwise choice in marks was inspired by the desire to impress a certain Moira Doolan, the lovely fiancé of a notorious police captain.

“You’d do best to watch yourself around broads,” Greely warned.  “They’ll be the death of you.”    

A rumor was stated, through the Five Points gossip channels, that Gabe and Kate McCleester were affianced.  The two young criminals delighted in ribbing and challenging each other.  They’d compete over who could break into a shop faster, or whose bounty would command the greater compensation from Rebekah Kleiner.  However, it’s unlikely Kate harbored any intention to marry Gabe.  For if her sister married Lewis Van Wooten, and Van Wooten - as promised - found Kate a position as a ladies’ maid, she could’ve snared a mate of much higher status than a scrawny Five Points gangster.  A young tradesman, perhaps.  Or a clerk or bookkeeper.  But after the fire - after her sister’s abrupt departure - Gabe Callahan became Kate’s last remaining option.

As it turned out, she was left with no options at all.  Gabe, horrified by her monstrous appearance, wanted nothing to do with his childhood fancy.  

*****

Four months after Temperance Woods’ death, Gabe Callahan became terrified of dogs.

One night, he’d stolen away to St. Bridget’s Church, by the Seaport, with Frank Greely and James Shannon.  The priest there had been Jig Cleary’s childhood confessor back home in Sligo.  Out of lingering affection, he allowed Jig’s companions use of a hidden compartment behind a portrait of St. Michael fighting the dragon for… well, the gangsters never specified their exact need of a discrete stashing spot, and the priest wisely didn’t ask questions to which he didn’t desire an answer.  

In actuality, the Blue Bell Dogs didn’t use the compartment for much - only short-term storage of goods, when they had them, too conspicuous to fence immediately.  That night, they’d been sent to retrieve a ruby pendant liberated from the safe of an Astor cousin, a love token for his Swedish mistress.  

Stray dogs slept in the church yard, as the priest had a soft spot for the creatures.  The Blue Bell Dogs typically ignored their animal namesakes.  But, as the trio moved stealthily through the dark graveyard behind the church with the ruby pendant, Gabe Callahan let out a violent cry.

“The dogs!” He shouted.  “They’re the size of horses!”

His two compatriots found him thrashing about, knife in hand, engaged in shadowboxing with a mangy brown mutt.  They disarmed their companion and dragged him away, desperate to quiet him before they drew the attention of the coppers - or worse, marauding river pirates.  Gabe insisted the three had been stalked by a monstrous black dog with jaws like an alligator’s, a ram’s horns sprouting from its head.

Soon, Gabe had been all but pushed out of gang business, and for good reason: his fits of delusion became more frequent, and more dramatic.  He could be found wandering the docks of the East River, lunging at the air with his dagger and screaming curses about “the black dogs with human arms and yellow teeth.”  He almost met a bloody end at the hands of the Mud Ghouls gang, river pirates who took offense to his yelling his head off outside the hiding-holes where they lurked, stalking ships at the docks.  

Gabe was saved, however, by a patrolling police officer named John Staub, whose presence prompted the pirates to scatter.  Staub, an ambitious young man hoping to advance his position within the police force, spent most of his evenings pacing the docks.  On July the 5th, the day after Independence Day, he watched Gabe sprint towards the water, howling like a banshee.  He started after the disturbed man, but couldn’t catch him before he disappeared below the dark, murky waters.

An hour later, Officer Staub pulled Gabe’s cold body off a pile of discarded timber, where it had washed ashore like wreckage.  

News of Gabe Callahan’s death seized the Sixth Ward in its mighty maw and didn’t let go.  Five Points dwellers recalled the tale of Temperance Woods; her husband and father-in-laws’ insistence she’d been poisoned.  Those sober and of reasonable intelligence connected the two demises - the pious beauty and the thieving gangster.  Both died at their own hands.  Both were haunted by monstrous black dogs.  And both incurred the vengeful, jealous wrath of Kate McCleester.

*****

Whenever Dropper Wallace’s dance hall wasn’t being utilized as a makeshift church for Reverend Woods, it existed as an establishment called The London Owl, a den of pleasure.  Wallace employed only the most beautiful and charming girls to serve as paid companions to his wealthy clients.  He paid the procurers better than other proprietors; they allowed him first pick of their stock: young women, lured to the city with promises of money, love, or adventure; destined for betrayal, brutality, and destitution. 

Once, Dropper Wallace had his sights set on Kendra McCleester.  He promised a princely bounty to any procurer who attained the beautiful Hot Corn Girl; he knew, once his lustful clients were teased with a glimpse of the angelic beauty, he could name his price.  The thugs tailed Kendra to and from the Miss Julie Clay Academy, waiting for an opportunity to snatch the pretty girl like wild game.  But Kendra never strayed from well-populated streets unless escorted by her brothers, a trusted friend like Gabe Callahan, or her sister Kate, whose skill with a knife rivaled any man.  

One afternoon, Kate McCleester appeared on the doorstep of The London Owl and insisted the hired goons take her to Dropper Wallace.  He received the young woman in his office, where he'd busied himself counting the money his girls had charmed out of their nightly companions and stacking it in his safe.  Kate implored Dropper to let her sister be.  Kendra, she explained, was being courted by a young man who wished to marry her.  As a trade, Kate offered her own services as a lady of the night.  She could make more money separating men from their money than she could as a sweat shop girl or a pickpocket.  

Dropper considered Kate’s offer.  Then, he undid his trousers.  If Kate desired employment at his establishment, she needed to prove to him she could perform her duties to his satisfaction.

After Dropper had been satisfied, he laughed in Kate’s face.  He had no use for a plain Irish peasant.  Kate should scurry along now and secure herself a husband while she still could, before the scant womanly charms she did possess withered away with age.  She was already twenty years old.  Practically an old maid.  

*****

September of 1868 was an unseasonably cool one in Manhattan.  At The London Owl, coquettes-for-hire in short dresses sat at golden tables with their paying paramours of the night, watching a traveling French burlesque troupe kick higher than their heads.  Scarlet, a red-headed German girl, poured another glass of Italian cabernet for Iron Jaw Patrick McDonald, the leader of The Thumper Crew, a Bowery gang specialized in thuggish enforcement for hire.  

Iron Jaw revealed, barely concealed glee in his voice, he’d seen two of the three Mags lurking about like Irish alleycats.  The Mags, three orphaned girls all called Maggie, lived as wards under the protection of Jig Cleary.  Jig provided them sustenance and shelter; they provided him with their earnings from pickpocketing and flower-selling and street-sweeping, and information gleaned from networks of street boys and girls who pursued similar employment.  Iron Jaw had caught sight of the blonde Mag and the red-haired Mag spying on Dropper’s marks; he didn’t know what had become of their raven-haired third, but he knew the presence of two Mags signaled Jig Cleary planned to claim a portion of Dropper’s nightly earnings, by threat or by force.  

Delilah, a sensuous quadroon who’d migrated north from Mississippi after the war, fed sliced oranges to Ned Worther, a New York Commissioner of Sanitation.  Or Commissioner of Safety.  Delilah didn’t know, and Ned didn’t, either.  A loyalist of Tammany Hall, his sole job duty was the prompt collection of bribes.  He regaled his comely companion with a tale of heroism and civic duty: the New York City police force, supported by Tammany Hall, had busted up a gang of pirates looking to rob a brig called the Sunshine Jane, docked in the East River.  The hero of the day had been a young officer named John Staub, who’d silently stalked the Mud Ghouls for months and planned the entire operation. 

Sally Joan, a Westchester farm girl with a halo of auburn curls, massaged the chest of Andrew Darlington, heir to a timber fortune. They watched the French dancers finish their set with a rowdy shaking of their breasts.  

The music stopped.

Scarlett dropped her bottle of Cabernet.  It shattered across the floor, splattering Iron Jaw McDonald with red wine.  She leapt from his lap and stood stock-still, her face a mask of horror, one finger pointing towards a dark corner.  

“The dog!”  She cried.  “The black dog!  He’s staring at me.”

Delilah let out a wail.  “The black dog has horns, and he’s grasping for me with human hands!”

Sally Joan strengthened her grip on Andrew Darlington until she practically strangled the man.

“They speak!”  She screamed.  “They serve the Lord of the Day!”

“The black dog is standing on two legs!” Another woman added.

“The Lord of the Day desires us as his brides!” 

And then, the men of the London Owl saw what the women saw.  They saw great dogs, the size of elephants, standing on filthy hooved feet.  They saw their hands, five-fingered like those of a man, beckoning.  They looked into the black dogs’ glowing eyes; their ram-like horns, their matted fur.  

With a cacophony of screams, the girls fled the brothel, tearing at their clothes as they went.  The French minxes and their musicians, confused, dashed out after them.  The customers - not wishing to lounge around a prostitution den infiltrated by monstrous black dogs - followed the women.  The London Owl staff, watching their paychecks walk out the door, gave chase.  Finally, even Dropper Wallace was drawn from his office and into the street; he barked and threatened as the women, in various states of undress, clasped hands and, still wailing, began to dance.  

The men, simultaneously aroused and repulsed, fell into a state of reverie.  Some swore, later, they saw giant horned-and-hooved dog men, bodies covered with black fur, writhing and twirling along, human hands pressed against the girls’ gyrating bodies.  This fantasy was crushed by the arrival of Jig Cleary and seventeen Blue Bell Dogs, summoned by The Mags, armed with brick-bats.  Lured by the promise of delusion and disarray, Jig intended to exploit the situation for all it was worth.  

It’s said that Iron Jaw McDonald took down three Blue Bell Dogs with only his belt as a weapon.  That a giant black wolf walking on two feet lifted Dropper’s bullies, one by one, and smashed their heads against the hard dirt ground.  That Jig Cleary beat Dropper to death on the floor of his own dance hall, splattering his brains into every nook and sinful cranny.  That Jig Cleary himself fell when a counterfeit Roman statue toppled from its pedestal and landed on top of him.  That the police, when they arrived to break up the brawl, found men lying in pools of their own blood, exsanguinating from gashes that resembled the bite of an African lion.

Apparently, one rascal or another had managed to rob The London Owl - Dropper’s safe was found open and empty.  Jig Cleary survived his injuries, but he was never the same.  His mind regressed to that of a child.  He took to wandering the streets of the Sixth Ward, earning the pity and disgust of travelers by begging them to locate his mother.  

This time, even the simple and drunken denizens of Five Points could draw a straight line between Kate McCleester and the monstrous black dogs of The London Owl.  On the streets, people discussed Kate’s Modus Operandi - had she, a transient who lived between abandoned buildings, managed to cook up a poison so potent it drove its victims to madness and despair, while remaining tasteless and undetectable?  The name of Molly, Kate’s medicine-woman aunt, danced about the lips of every Kerry migrant.  Was Kate, in fact, a witch out of sixteenth-century delusion, who could unlock the gates of the underworld and command its fiends to do her bidding?

Then, the gossips began to speculate over Kate’s next target.  She aimed her witchery at those whose beauty she coveted, or who had betrayed her in some fashion.

Speculation was barely necessary.  Only one woman satisfied both criteria.

Kate’s sister, Kendra.

*****

Part 2

Given life through the hangman’s mouth
Digging into the infertile soil of a casket wall
My heart is merely a weeping bullet wound
A hollow eye stained with tears of human excrement

Sick and tired of that one great sorrow
I carve with rusted steel pressed against my insides
A masturbatory ritual to expel excessive black bile
The long-awaited exodus of miserable thoughts
From my wandering mind

A stillborn child dragged across hell
To witness the rise of empires and their eventual fall
One single moment in time immortalized on canvas
With the crimson language screaming from my veins

With shattered glass, I flayed my soul
After sinking my teeth into the broken neck of God
To savor the aftertaste left by the secrets of the universe
Before reaching the point of existential climax
Watching as the army of chthonic scavengers finds nourishment
In the last vestiges of my memories

Forged within eternal glow of divine fires
With open arms I welcome death
Sailing westward into the horizon
A devoted disciple of heaven's blaze
Blindly I follow his dying flame
Into the stygian below  
Without a moment’s doubt
For I am destined to rise
From the ashes of my funeral pyre
Ascended beyond the bonds of man
Reborn in the likeness of my god
The rising sun

“It’s called a grief doll” Dr. Ramos said.

I stared at him like he’d grown a second head. 

“A what?” I asked.

I’d agreed to this session to get my mother off my back. Provided, of course, that she also foot the bill. And, truth be told, it hadn’t been an easy couple of months. The word “stillbirth” sounds a lot more peaceful than the reality of it all. You get all the same blood and screaming as a regular birth but with none of the joy afterward. Things are, I guess, “still,” in a way. The silence of the grave.

“I know it’s a little unconventional,” Dr. Ramos said. “But, there’s been some really solid research to back it up recently. My colleague down in Camden–”

I cut him off. “You want me to buy a lifesized recreation of the dead baby that I just gave birth to?”

He looked slightly chastened by this. “I want you to process what happened, Mary. It can help. Look, if what you were already doing was working you wouldn’t be coming here, right?”

I sighed. “Alright. You’re the doctor. Who am I to argue with science?”

We talked a bit more after that, but it’s not really worth recounting here.

The next day I went to the address Dr. Ramos had texted me. It was a little building tucked away downtown between the huge tech skyscrapers and offices. When I walked in, the owner, a short man with a scruffy beard, smiled at me and said “You must be Mary.”

I nodded.

“Would you like to sit down? Do you want anything to drink? Anything to eat?”

I shook my head. “I don’t really want to stay here any longer than I have to, if that’s alright with you,” I said to the Rasputin-looking gentleman sitting behind the desk.

“I get it,” he said, nodding gravely.

“People come here to get away from something, not to settle down. Do you have the pictures?”

I took them out of my bag. It had been quite a while since I’d needed to get photographs printed out. Ever since the world had gone digital we’ve all become allergic to paper.

“Here they are,” I said to him. These would serve as the model for the doll. He reached out and took them from me, examining them carefully.

“I think I’ve got what I need. I will let you know if I need anything more,” he said, stroking his long beard hypnotically.

I left and drove home. It was a quiet ride. Much more quiet than I’d been used to. Ever since Tim had left there were these little dead spaces throughout the day. He used to fill car rides with excited chatter about protons and leptons and all the -ons he got to work with as a physicist. 

My brain had begun to fill these spaces with grim reflections on the past and future: 

It’s your fault.

You don’t deserve a baby.

This is God’s way of telling you that you don’t deserve to be alive.

Over and over again these thoughts would run through my mind like the world’s most depressing tape recorder. Vicious, hateful, unbelievable things kept popping into my head as I drove the short distance home, making the trip feel far longer than it actually was.

I had taken to staring at the ceiling and crying myself to sleep most nights. The big, empty house felt suffocating at 3 AM, like all the open space was sucking the air out of my lungs every time I opened my mouth. This had been the way I spent most nights since the stillbirth. I tried to fill the silence any way I could. At all hours of the night, one could hear my TV blaring or my phone playing some podcast or another. Anything to avoid the little dead spaces between one task and the next.

But it was most difficult of all when I tried to sleep. I saw images of my little girl when I closed my eyes. I saw the blood and heard my own screams when it became clear that she would never take a breath. There were also subtler forms of self-inflicted torture. 

Exactly one month after the worst day of my life, I came home from work to find Tim’s things cleaned out and a note on the kitchen table. It read:

“I’m sorry Mary. I can’t imagine how hard this month has been for you, but every day I stay here is like a knife to the heart. You’re just so sad and I can’t take it anymore.”

That phrase “You’re just so sad” played in a loop in my mind’s ear.

Eventually, I won the battle against consciousness. It was a fitful, restless sleep pregnant with terrible things. I felt like I’d lived an entire life come morning. I dreamt that I’d held little Sarah in my hands, that I’d been able to feed her from my own body just like I’d wanted to do for so many years. But as I held her against my chest she melted into a puddle of flesh and blood, yet never ceased to suck, to draw whatever life she could from me, and I was desperate to give it to her. Eventually, she was little more than eyes in a puddle of fleshy blood, staring at me from the ground and whispering “Why didn’t you save me, Mama?”

I woke with a start. Never, not once in my life, had I experienced a dream like this. I sat huddled in my bedsheets, shaking with tears as I saw the image of my melted little girl swirling around on the floor, asking why I hadn’t helped her. Reality seeped back in stages, penetrating the veil of sadness, and shocking me to my feet with the blaring intensity of my phone’s alarm. It was always turned up to full volume because anything lower risked my sleep-addled mind resisting its call to return from the deep. It had always been difficult to tear myself from the land of dreams, and more so after my life began to feel like a nightmare. But lately, sleep offered little respite.

I pulled on my clothes, brushed my hair so that it was halfway presentable, and poured myself a bowl of oatmeal. It was a gray, soggy pile at the bottom of my bowl. In a flash of unwanted connection, my brain superimposed the image of little melted Sarah onto my field of view. I nearly vomited into my bowl, but just then there was a knock on my door. 

“Package,” the deep baritone on the other end intoned. 

I opened the door and saw the mailman walking away. It occurred to me that nothing was stopping me from asking him out now that Tim had wandered out of my life. But, immediately, my brain stepped in to fill in the blanks:

Why would he want someone like you?

What the hell is wrong with you?

I don’t even want you and I am you.

These thoughts came as easily as my breath, and I had long since stopped trying to challenge them. In all likelihood, they were right. I picked up the package and saw that it was the grief doll. As soon as I got home from work I’d figure out what the hell I was supposed to do with the thing.

As I stepped into the bathroom, the mirror joined my inner voice in confirming my lack of romantic prospects. Deep, black circles formed rings under my eyes. Deeper wrinkles stood out on my forehead and my double chin and – was that a gray hair? Already? Immediately, the thoughts returned.

You’ll be dead at 50 by this rate.

The world won’t miss you.

Why not make it tomorrow?

Again, these suggestions were difficult to challenge with the evidence inches from my eyes.

It was hard to care about work. Even at the best of times, it hadn’t been the most fulfilling job in the world, but these days my cubicle felt like a tomb. My job was to call people who had filled out negative reviews for the phone company (I’m sure you know which one, but it’s probably best to leave that unsaid) and ask why. 

This was a doubly depressing task because it was both neverending and pointless. How many times in the past month have you picked up a call from a number you didn’t recognize? I’m guessing the answer is lower than one. Almost nobody picked up, and those who did invariably did one of two things: hang up instantly upon realizing who I was or scream invective at me that I would hesitate before repeating to the devil himself. 

One particularly creative gentleman suggested I fold myself in half seventeen times to create a black hole and then have intercourse with said hole while my company’s headquarters were sucked into the event horizon. Points for creativity. Deductions for misogyny. Although, in fairness to the man, I have no trouble believing he’d have said something similar to a male rep.

That day only two people picked up. One hung up immediately. The other launched into a tirade of such intensity and fervor that I was worried he wouldn’t make it to the end of the call.

“And another thing!” the man shouted as I quietly ate a sandwich on the other end. “Your website looks like it was designed by some rock monkey with shit for brains and feet for hands!” he screamed at me. This was an insult I hadn’t heard before. Variations on it appeared with some regularity, sometimes with racial overtones. I’m not entirely sure why this was, given that I had no accent identifying me as anything other than white, and in fact I wasn’t. The assumption seemed to be that because I worked in customer service I must be Indian. This leap in logic went unquestioned by a surprising number of my interlocutors. The average consumer of cellular services in this country is a few rocks short of an avalanche themself. 

“I’m sorry that our services did not meet your quality and reliability expectations,” I said dryly, reading from the part of the script labeled “negative responses.”

“And I’m sorry that you people haven’t gone back to where you come from!” the man shouted.

“I’m from Omaha sir,” I said.

“Where you’re really from!” he shouted back.

“I’m really from Omaha sir,’ I responded tiredly. “And so is my father and his father, and before that we came over from England.” This prompted a string of racial epithets I’d rather not repeat. The rest of the day went like this, and after a while I defaulted to flatly repeating “I'm sorry that our services did not meet your quality and reliability expectations.” 

My faith in humanity dimmed with each passing call. I decided to slip out at 4:00. I figured no one would notice. I figured right.

It was Wednesday: trash day. The walk from my apartment to the dumpsters was a dismal affair. Despite gray skies, cold fog and a pounding headache, the excursion did at least deliver the best part of my day. A few guys catcalled me on the way to the curb, and for a moment I felt like something other than a disgusting blob of flesh. 

But then the thoughts started back in and made me realize that the men’s comments had not been compliments but acts of aggression. As I dragged the empty trash cans back to my apartment, the men once more yelled out their opinions on my face, my tits, my ass. In response, my mind conjured scenes from my dream – melted flesh, the endless unanswerable question: “Why didn’t you save me, Mama?”

By the time I’d made it back to my apartment I was practically in tears. At that moment, however, I remembered that the doll had been delivered earlier. It was time, I supposed, to open it. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the package yielded its contents, and I nearly fell over when I saw it for the first time. It looked exactly like Sarah. Her little, premature hands. Her closed, screwed up eyes. Everything.

I held the tiny plastic facsimile against my chest and sobbed into it. I apologized to it over and over again:

“I’m sorry Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

But nothing could have prepared me for the moment that it spoke back:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama?

I screamed and fell backwards. The floor flew up to meet me and struck the back of my head with overwhelming force, driving the tears out even faster through a combination of momentum and pain.

“What did you say?” I asked, with a shaking voice.

For a moment, the doll was quiet, its little eyes still shut against the world. Then, they snapped open. Its little mouth opened and flopped around like a fish before repeating:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama?

I threw it across the room. It was an instinct, but a second later, I felt bad. It was like seeing Sarah’s death all over again. The doll screamed and cried.

Why did you hurt me, Mama?

It asked in its sad, childlike voice.  I ran to the bathroom and threw up. I threw up again and again, my body shaking uncontrollably. This couldn’t be happening. It wasn’t possible. That thing was nothing more than a hunk of colored plastic. When there was nothing left to expel from my stomach except bile, I returned to the front room and slowly approached the doll where it lay in the corner. 

Its eyes snapped to mine.

Why did you leave me, Mama?

I picked it up and hurled it out the window. For a moment, I thought that I should try and call the short Russian man who had sold me the monstrosity but then I remembered that it was 8:30 on a Wednesday. Not even Russians have that kind of work ethic.

Instead, I poured a glass of wine with shaking fingers and turned on the TV, desperate for something, anything to break the silence. As the news blared and the alcohol entered my veins, I was almost able to convince myself that the last few minutes hadn’t happened. But then the screen began flashing images of babies in incubators – victims of some war halfway around the world.

Protestors marched through the streets, holding images of the poor, malnourished infants, and listing out those they felt were responsible. Before I turned it off, I could have sworn that one of them turned to the screen and said my name.

When I did fall asleep, it was only after many hours of crying and shaking. As returned the silence, so returned my certainty that I had heard the doll speaking. But human frailty won the day, and my brain surrendered to darkness once more.

In my dream, I saw Tim holding little Sarah and crying. He held her close and put the tiny baby girl to his face, kissing her again and again. Then he turned to me with an eyeless face and spoke with a toothless mouth:

Why didn’t you save her, Mary?

I tried to scream but in this world I could not make a sound. My mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water, and I felt like I was breathing in the ocean. Then, little Sarah looked at me with her little melting face and said:

Didn’t you love me, Mama?

When I didn’t answer, the tiny melted eyes burned with rage.

I hate you Mama. Everybody hates you. You throw me out the window?! You should jump out yourself and do the world a favor you worthless sack of human garbage forgotten by God. Why are you even alive you heartless bitch?

I kept trying to scream but nothing would come out. I tried to apologize but could only feel the sensation of water rushing into my lungs. Sarah began to say, over and over:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama? Why didn’t you save me, Mama? Why didn’t you save me–

I woke with a start to find the doll inches from my face. It was shouting at me:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama?

This time, I did scream, and batted it away from my face. The horrible thing, which somehow had reappeared in my house after I’d thrown it out of a 7th story window, began to sob in the corner where it fell. It looked up at me with its tiny heartbroken eyes and quivering lips as it asked me:

Why did you hurt me, Mama? Do you hate me?

Without thinking, I said, “Of course I don’t hate you, sweetie. Mommy loves you very much.” I froze. What was I doing? This thing wasn’t Sarah. It wasn’t even a person.

Then why did you hurt me, Mama? Why didn’t you save me?

I buried my head in my hands. “I couldn’t save you! I’m sorry!” The tears continued to pour from my eyes in rivers, soaking the arms of my shirt.

You didn’t deserve me, Mama. You coldhearted cunt. You shouldn’t even be alive.

I looked at the thing in shock. Hearing those words in a child’s voice was somehow far worse. It couldn’t stay in my house. Not one second longer. But throwing it out the window hadn’t worked, so I had to come up with another plan. I grabbed the hateful thing and carried it to the fireplace. It screamed all the while, sobbing just like a child in pain.

Don’t burn me Mama! Don’t hurt me! Why are you doing this?

I was undeterred. The fire roared to life, and I hurled it into the hottest part of the blaze as it hurled insults back at me.

Nobody’s ever loved you! Why do you think Tim left, you stupid bitch? If he really loved you, he’d have stayed!

Slowly but surely, the thing melted in the flames. Its little face turned to mush, then to liquid, then to ash. The smell was atrocious, but at least it was gone. I lay panting on the floor, crying but relieved. 

Later, I called the Russian man and told him that something was terribly wrong with his doll. He listened to my story, then said, not without empathy:

“Maybe you should go back to this doctor? The one who referred you here?”

It was the most polite way that someone had ever called me crazy. Seeing that this was a mistake, somewhat too late to avoid it, unfortunately, I hung up.

Work was no better than it had been the day before. I listened as people berated me over the phone, and read from my script in a monotone voice. I was no more useful than a robot. As the insults went on and on, I began to dissociate from my body. My mouth said the words in the script, but my brain had no say in the matter. The words simply spilled from me like tears from my eyes.

At lunch, I sat next to Jim. I’d always liked Jim. Had a huge crush on him since the day we’d met. Normally, we took our lunch breaks at different times, but that day the stars aligned. The biggest problem with talking to Jim had always been that we had zero interests in common. But that day, the TV in the break room happened to flip to a channel playing a soccer match. We discovered that we were both huge fans, and finally I had something I could say to him.

Things couldn’t have been going better until I looked down and saw, under the table, something that made me jump a foot in the air.

The doll.

It was staring up at me with its cold eyes and sneering mouth.

You can’t get rid of me, Mama. No matter how much you want to.

Jim looked at me strangely, and I apologized, making some halfhearted excuse that I probably wouldn’t have believed coming from him. 

What makes you think he’d be interested in someone like you? Have you looked in a mirror sometime this decade? Unless he’s got a corpse fetish I’d say you’re about two decades too old for him.

I stared down at the doll so long, Jim asked me what was going on. I picked it up, and showed him. When he asked what it was, I hesitated before answering. Eventually, I lied and said that it was a present for my daughter.

“I didn’t know you had a daughter,” Jim said.

“Yeah, I gave birth a couple of months ago,” I replied, which was not technically a lie.

Of course it’s a lie you worthless bitch. If you told him the truth he’d run screaming into the street. The only reason he’s stuck around this long is because there’s only one break room. Nobody will ever love you. Nobody.

“Stop it!” I yelled, before remembering that Jim had no idea what this thing was. He looked at me strangely and I bolted out of the room, sobbing and cursing the malevolent presence in my arms. It cursed me right back:

What the fuck’s wrong with you? Why would you even talk to him? You’re a disgusting pile of shit and vomit unworthy of life. You know what you could do to make Jim’s life better? You could slam your fucking head through a plate glass window and spray the side of the building with blood until you fucking die.

“Stop it!” I shouted, and threw it onto the floor as I ran to my car. But, there it was inside, waiting for me, its hateful sneer plastered onto its tiny, childlike face.

What’s the matter Mary? Can’t handle the truth? Can’t handle knowing that you’re a failure as a mother and the ugliest bitch who ever lived?

I sank to my knees and screamed, holding my head with both hands and begging the hateful thing to stop. But it didn’t. It kept pummeling me with insults and threats until I couldn’t take it one second longer. I got into the driver’s seat and floored the accelerator, taking the car onto the freeway, then to the nearest exit, then right off the edge of a cliff. As the car soared through the air, there was a tiny moment of quiet before gravity took over. It was only an instant, but in that instant I realized that I was going to die. So for the first time in weeks, I smiled.

The next thing I can remember is tremendous pain. My eyes hadn’t even opened yet, but even though the world was dark, it was still full of suffering. Then, in the next instant, my eyes flew open. There, at the edge of the bed, looking at me with all the hate in the world, was a familiar hateful face.

Welcome back to the land of the living, bitch. Couldn’t even get suicide right, could you?

I had no energy left to sob. Instead, I hung my head in defeat, looking at the tiny hunk of plastic staring up at me and wishing to God that I’d chosen a higher cliff. Soon, a man in a white lab coat walked in and smiled.

“Hello Mary,” he said.

“How do you know my name?” I asked.

“They checked your wallet when they pulled you out of the car. Your driver’s license was right on top,” he replied, still smiling.

“Right,” I said, not smiling back.

“I’m not going to lie to you, that was a close call there. But you’re going to be okay. Would you mind answering a few questions?”

I immediately became wary, but nodded my head.

“Before the accident, do you recall feeling lightheaded or dizzy?

I shook my head.

“Any alcohol or drug use?”

I shook my head.

“Okay, good. And have you had any thoughts of hurting yourself in the past week?”

This was the question I’d been waiting for. I shook my head again, knowing that an affirmative answer would mean at least a 3-day psychiatric hold. As soon as they learned about the doll, God knows how long it’d last.

“Excellent. You should be able to get out of here in a couple of days. You’ll have to be careful with those casts, but everything will be okay.” I nodded again, and he left. The doll popped its little face back off the bedsheets and set itself right back to its task: destroying my mind and soul. As the night wore on, I sat there, frozen, as it continued to pound me with reminders of my inadequacies, my faults, my failures. From time to time, I had to stand and it stood with me, clinging to my hospital gown as I made my way to the bathroom, to the cafeteria or to have one test or another performed. From that moment on, it was never quiet, though I seemed to be the only one who could hear it. Whether it was reminding me of that time in 3rd grade when Johnny Welkins had rejected me in front of the entire class, or the time that I’d sat through an entire date before realizing my shirt was on inside out, or berating me about letting the original Sarah die, it was always saying something degrading and humiliating.  By then, I’d become numb to the abuse. I never responded or argued. I never fought back or tried to get rid of it. Once or twice, I accidentally crushed it under my foot, but it always ended up right back where it had started: on my hospital bed, eyes burning with rage and lips firing off insult after insult.

The last night I was in the hospital, I dreamt of Tim. I dreamt of the last time that I’d seen him before he disappeared forever. He stood in the doorway, blocking it with a stern face and large hands. I kept trying to push past him, but he wouldn’t let me. Eventually, we fought, and he threw me to the floor. I landed on my stomach so hard all the air flew out of my lungs. 

When I woke, the doll was standing over me, and it had gone back to its familiar mantra:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama? Why didn’t you save me, Mama?

I sighed and focused on filling out the discharge forms that the nurse had left. They were long and boring, and it was no simple task to complete them with the doll repeating its horrible question again and again and again. Eventually, I finished, and an orderly wheeled me out to my car, the doll clinging to my shoulder and shouting abuse into my ear. 

A single tear fell from my eye and rolled down my cheek as I climbed in to the driver’s seat and started the engine.

When I arrived home, I collapsed on my bed and began to weep. I wept like a child. I wept so loud in fact that I couldn’t even hear the doll as it broke down my door and resumed berating me. But I ignored it. I ignored it as I made dinner. I ignored it as I took out the trash. I ignored it as I returned to bed and tried to sleep. But it wouldn’t stop. Finally, it got close to my face and screamed right into my ear:

Why didn’t you save me, Mama? Why didn’t you save me, Mama?

And, for the first time since the accident, I replied, shouting: “What do you want from me?! I couldn’t save you, Sarah! I couldn’t!”

Liar! You could’ve saved me! You know you could’ve!

In that instant, it finally pushed me past my breaking point. I picked it up and shook it as hard as I could, screaming:

“What could I have done? What was I supposed to do? What do you want from me?! Why are you doing this to me?!” The doll looked at me with cold, hateful eyes and said:

You could’ve stopped Tim.

I froze. “What do you mean?” I asked.

You know what I mean, Mama. You know what he did. Why didn’t you stand up to him? Why didn’t you stop him?

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I shouted.

Yes you do. You know exactly what I’m talking about.

“No!” I shouted. “No, I couldn’t stop him!” But even as I said it, I knew it was a lie.

We both know why the stillbirth really happened, don’t we, Mary?

I shook uncontrollably and ran into the backyard to get away from the doll, but it only appeared right in front of me, scowling down at me as I tripped and fell. It pointed to the ground and began to raise its little arms. The ground shook and trembled and I shouted at it, begged it to stop, but it was too late. In one enormous burst the ground split open and a body fell next to me.

It was Tim.

Why didn’t you save me from him, Mary?

The doll asked. I continued sobbing, but managed to respond, “I couldn’t save you Sarah. But I could get you justice.”

The doll’s face softened a little, and for the first time, the fire went out of its eyes. It crawled up next to me and buried its little face into my chest, and let me hold it, just like I’d always wanted to do. 

I stroked its hair and whispered to it, over and over again, “I would’ve saved you if I could.”

And in its tiny, childlike voice, the doll replied, “I know.” Then it closed its little eyes, nuzzled close into my chest, and heaved a heavy sigh before never moving again.

I suppose we each have that memory, that one thing which reminds us of our childhood, our innocence. Perhaps it's a beloved campsite, or playing baseball mid-July with your dad, or the sweetness of your grandma's cherry pie. For me, that thing was Adam's Apple Sauce.

Every year, as far back as I can remember, my hometown held an end-of-summer harvest festival. There were games to play, music to enjoy and homemade goods to buy.

One of those was Adam's Apple Sauce.

Crafted by one guy, it was sold in little glass jars with a label on which a comically long pig ate fruit from a wicker basket.

Quantities were always very limited and people would line up at dawn just to purchase some. This included my parents, and in the evening, after we'd returned home, we would open the jar and eat the whole delicious sauce: on bread, on crackers or just with a spoon. It was that good.

The guy who made it was young and friendly, although no one really knew much about him. He was from out of town, he'd say. Drove in just to sell his sauce.

Then he'd smile his boyish smile and we'd buy up all his little jars.

//

When I was twenty-three, he stopped coming to the harvest festival.

Maybe that's why I associate his sauce with my childhood so much. Mind you, there were still plenty of homemade goodies to buy—tastier than anything you might buy at the store—but nothing that compared to the exquisite taste and texture of Adam's Apple Sauce.

//

Three years ago, my dad died. When I was arranging the funeral, I went to a local funeral home, and to my great surprise saw—working there—the guy (now much older, of course) who'd made Adam's Apple Sauce.

“Adam!” I called out.

He didn't react.

I tried again: “Adam, hello!”

This time he turned to look at me, smiled and I walked over to him. I explained how I knew him from my youth, my hometown, the harvest festival, and he confirmed that that had been him.

“How long have you been working here?” I asked.

“Ever since I was a boy,” he said.

“Do you still make the sauce?” I asked, hoping I could once again taste the innocence of childhood.

“No,” he said. “Although I guess I could make you a one-off jar, if you like. Especially given the death of your father. My condolences, by the way.”

“I would very much appreciate that,” I said.

He smiled.

“Thank you, Adam.”

“You're most welcome,” he said. “But, just so you know, my name isn't Adam. It's Rick.”

“Rick?”

I thought about the sauce, the label on the jars with the pig and the three words: Adam's Apple Sauce. “Then who's Adam?” I asked.

He cleared his throat.

And I—

I felt the sudden need to vomit—followed by the loud and forceful satisfaction of that need, all over the floor.

“Still want that jar?” he asked.

I am a good man.

I know I'm a good man, but I've got a gun and I'm going to kill a man who meant a lot to me, who at one time was my pastor, my mentor, my uncle.

What's the saying about when a good man goes to war?

When I arrived at the church I work at after my two-day absence, it looked like the whole church was leaving. From some distance away, the perhaps one hundred other workers pouring out of the grand church looked antlike compared to the great mass of the place.

Their smiles leaving met my frown entering, and they made sure to avoid me. No one spoke to me, and I didn't plan on speaking to them.

I made my way to the sanctuary, hoping to find my uncle, the head pastor here. He would spend hours praying there in the morning. Today he was nowhere to be seen. No one was. I alone was tortured by the images of the stained glass windows bearing my Savior.

I'm not an idiot. I know what religion has done, but it has also done a lot of good. I've seen marriages get saved, people get healed, folks change for the better, and I've seen our church make a positive impact on the world.

My faith gave me purpose, my faith gave me friends, and my faith was the reason I didn't kill myself at thirteen.

Jesus means something to me, and the people here have bastardized his name! I slammed my fist on a pew, cracking it. It is my right to kill him. If Jesus raised a whip to strike the greedy in the temple, I can raise a Glock to the face of my uncle for what he did. I know there's a verse about punishing those who harm children.

"Solomon," I recognized the voice before I turned to see her. Ms. Anne, the head secretary, spoke behind me. Before this, she was something like a mother to me. A surrogate mother because I never knew mine. Her words unnerved me now. My hand shook, and the pain of slamming my hand into the pew finally hit me. Then it all came back to me, the pain of betrayal. I hardened my heart. I let the anger out. I heard my own breath pump out of me. My hand crept for my pistol in my waistband, and with my hand on my pistol, I faced her.

"What?" I asked.

She reeled in shock at how I spoke to her, taking two steps back. Her eyebrows narrowed and lips tightened in a disbelieving frown. She was an archetype of a cheerful, caring church mother. A little plump, sweet as candy, and with an air of positivity that said, "I believe in you," but also an air of authority that said, "I'm old, I've earned my respect."

We stared at one another. She waited for an apology. It did not come, and she relented. She shuffled under the pressure of my gaze. Did she know she was caught?

"I, um, your Uncle—uh, Pastor Saul wants to see you. He's upstairs. Sorry, your Uncle is giving everyone the whole day off except you," she said. With no reply from me, Ms. Anne kept talking. "I was with him, and as soon as you told him you were coming in today, he announced on the intercom everyone could have the day off today. Except you, I guess. Family, huh?"

I didn't speak to her. Merely glared at her, trying to determine who she really was. Did she know what was really going on?

"Why's your arm in a cast?" Her eyebrows raised in awe. "What happened to you?"

She stepped closer, no doubt to comfort me with a hug as she had since I was a child.

These people were not what I thought they were. They frightened me now. I toyed with the revolver on my hip as she got closer.

Her eyes went big. She stumbled backward, falling. Then got herself up and evacuated as everyone else did.

She wouldn't call the cops. The church mother knew better than to involve anyone outside the church in church matters. Ms. Anne might call my uncle though, which was fine. I ran upstairs to his office to confront him before he got the call.

Well, Reader, I suppose I should clue you in on what exactly made me so mad. I discovered something about my church.

It was two days ago at my friend Mary's apartment...

It was 2 AM in the morning, and I contemplated destroying my career as a pastor before it even got started because my chance at real love blossomed right beside me.

I stayed at a friend's house, exhausted but anxious to avoid sleep. I pushed off my blanket to only cover my legs and sat up on the couch. I blinked to fight against sleep and refocus on the movie on the TV. A slasher had just killed the overly horny guy.

Less than two feet apart from me—and only moving closer as the night wore on—was the owner of the apartment I was in, a girl I was starting to have feelings for that I would never be allowed to date, much less marry, if I wanted to inherit my uncle's church.

Something aphrodisiacal stirred in the air and now rested on the couch. I knew I was either getting love or sex tonight. Sex would be a natural consequence of lowered inhibitions, the chill of her apartment that these thin blankets couldn't dampen, and the fact we found ourselves closer and closer on her couch. The frills of our blankets touched like fingers.

Love would be a natural consequence of our common interests, our budding friendship—for the last three weeks, I had texted her nearly every hour of every day, smiling the whole time. I hoped it would be love. Like I said, I was a good man. A good Christian boy, which meant I was twenty-four and still a virgin. Up until that moment, up until I met Mary, being a virgin wasn't that hard. I had never wanted someone more, and the feeling seemed mutual.

The two of us played a game since I got here. Who's the bigger freak? Who can say the most crude and wild thing imaginable? Very unbecoming as a future pastor, but it was so freeing! I never got to be untamed, my wild self, with anyone connected to the church. And that was Mary, a free woman. Someone whom my uncle would never accept. My uncle was like a father to me; I never knew my mom or dad.

Our game started off as jokes. She told me A, I told her B. And we kept it going, seeing who could weird out the other.

Then we moved to truths and then to secrets, and is there really any greater love than that, to share secrets? To expose your greatest mistakes to someone else and ask for them to accept you anyway?

I didn't quite know how I felt about her yet in a romantic sense. She was a friend of a friend. I was told by my friend not to try to date her because she wasn't my type, and it would just end in heartbreak and might destroy the friend group. The funny thing is, I know she was told the same.

"That was probably my worst relationship," Mary said, revealing one more secret, pulling the covers close to her. "Honestly, I think he was a bit of a porn addict too." Her face glowed. "What's the nastiest thing you've watched?"

I bit my lip, gritted my teeth, and strained in the light of the TV. Our game was unspoken, but the rules were obvious—you can't just back down from a question like that.

I said my sin to her and then asked, "What's yours?"

She groaned at mine and then made two genuinely funny jokes at my expense.

"Nah, nah, nah," I said between laughs. "What's yours?"

"No judgments?" she asked.

"No judgments," I said.

"And you won't tell the others?"

"I promise."

"Pinky promise," she said and leaned in close. I liked her smile. It was a little big, a little malicious. I liked that. I leaned forward and our pinkies interlocked. My heart raced. Love or sex fast approaching.

She said what it was. Sorry to leave you in the dark, reader, but the story's best details are yet to come.

She was so amazed at her confession. She said, "Jesus Christ" after it.

"Yeah, you need him," I joked back. Her face went dark.

"What's that supposed to mean?" she asked.

"What? Just a joke."

"No, it's not. I can see it in your eyes you're judging me." She pulled away from me. The chill of her room felt stronger than before, and my chances at sex or love moved away with her.

"Dude, no," I said. "You made jokes about me and I made one about you."

She eyed me softer then, but her eyes still held a skeptical squint.

"Sorry," she said, "I just know you're religious so I thought you were going to try to get me to go to church or something."

"Uh, no, not really." Good ol' guilt settled in because her 'salvation' was not my priority.

"Oh," she slid beside me again. Face soft, her constant grin back on. "I just had some friends really try to force church on me and I didn't like that. I won't step foot in a church."

"Oh, sorry to hear that."

"There's one in particular I hate. Calgary."

"Oh, uh, why?" I froze. I hoped I didn't show it in my face, but I was scared as hell she knew my secret. Calgary was my uncle's church.

"They just suck," she said, noncommittal.

Did she know?

"What makes them suck?"

She took a deep breath and told me her story—

At ten years old, I wanted to kill myself. I had made a makeshift noose in my closet. I poured out my crate of DVDs on the floor and brought the crate into the closet so I could stand on it. I flipped the crate upside down so it rested just below the noose. I stepped up and grabbed the rope. I was numb until that moment. My mom left, my family hated me, and I feared my dad was lost in his own insane world. The holes in the wall, welts in his own skin, and a plethora of reptiles he let roam around our house were proof.

And it was so hot. He kept it as hot as hell in that house. My face was drenched as I stepped up the crate to hang myself. I hoped heaven would be cold.

Heaven. That's what made me stop. I would be in heaven and my dad would be here. I didn't want to go anywhere without my dad, even heaven.

Tears gushed from my face and mixed with my salty skin to make this weird taste. I don't know why I just remember that.

Anyway, I leapt off the crate and ran to my dad.

I ran from the closet and into the muggy house. A little girl who needed a hug from her dad more than anything in the world. It was just him and me after all.

Reptile terrariums littered the house; my dad kept buying them. We didn't even have enough places to put them anymore. I leaped over a habitat of geckos and ran around the home of bearded dragons. It was stupid. I love animals but I hated the feeling that I was always surrounded by something inhuman crawling around. It hurt that I felt like my dad cared about them more than me. But I didn't care about any of that; I needed my dad.

I pushed through the door of his room, but his bed was vacated, so that meant he was probably in his tub, but I knew getting clean was the last thing on his mind.

I carried the rope with me, still in the shape of a noose. I wanted him to see, to see what almost happened.

I crashed inside.

"Mary, stop!" he said when I took half a step in. "I don't want you to step on Leviathan." Leviathan was his python. My eyes trailed from the yellow tail in front of me to the body that coiled around my dad. Leviathan clothed my dad. It wrapped itself around his groin, waist, arms, and neck.

And it was a tight hold. I had seen my father walk and even run with Leviathan on him. Today, he just sat in the tub, watching it or watching himself. I'm unsure; his mental illness confused me as a child, so I never really knew what he was doing.

I was the one who almost made the great permanent decision that night, but my dad looked worse than me. His veins showed and he appeared strained as if in a state of permanent discomfort, he sweat as much as I did, and I think he was having trouble breathing. The steam that formed in the room made it seem like a sauna.

He was torturing himself, all for Leviathan's sake.

"Dad, I—"

"Close the door!" My dad barked, between taking a large, uncomfortable breath. "You'll make it cold for Leviathan."

"Yes, sir." I did as he commanded and shut the door. Then I ran to him.

"Stop," he raised his hand to me, motioning for me to be still. He looked at Leviathan, not me. It was like they communed with one another.

I was homeschooled so there wasn't anyone to talk to about it, but it's such a hard thing to be afraid of your parents and be afraid for your parents and to need them more than anything.

"Come in, honey," he said after his mental deliberation with the snake.

And I did, feeling an odd shame and relief. I raised the noose up and I couldn't find the right words to express how I felt.

I settled on, "I think I need help."

"Oh, no," my dad said and rose from the tub. So quick, so intense. For a heartbeat, I was so scared I almost ran away. Then I saw the tears in his eyes and saw he was more like my dad than he had been in a long time.

He hugged me and everything was okay. It was okay. I was sad all the time, but it was going to be okay. The house was infested, a sauna, and a mess, but life is okay with love, y'know?

He cried and I cried, but snakes can't cry so Leviathan rested on his shoulder.

After an extended hug, he took Leviathan off and said he needed to make a call. When he came back, he told me to get in the car with him. I obeyed as I was taught to.

We rode in his rickety pickup truck in the dead of night in complete silence until he broke it.

"I was bad, MaryBaby," he said.

"What?"

"As a kid, I wasn't right," he said. My father randomly twitched. Like someone overdosing on drugs if you've seen that.

He flew out of his lane. I grabbed the handle for stability. The oncoming semi approached and honked at us. I braced for impact. He whipped the car back over. His cold coffee cup fell and spilled in my seat. My head banged against the window.

It hurt and I was confused. What was happening? The world looked funny. My eyes teared up again, making the night a foggy mess.

"I wasn't good as a child, Mary Baby. I was different from the others. I saw things, I felt things differently. Probably like you."

He turned to me and extended his hand. I flinched under it, but he merely rubbed my forehead.

"I'm sorry about that," he said, hands on the wheel again, still twitching, still flinching. "You know you're the most precious thing in the world to me, right?"

"Yes, I know. Um, we're going fast. You don't want to get pulled over, right?"

"Oh, I wouldn't stop for them. No, MaryBaby, because your soul's on the line. I won't let you end up like me."

There was no music on; he only allowed a specific type of Christian music anyway, weird chants that even scared my traditionally Catholic friends. The horns of other drivers he almost crashed into were the only noise.

"What do you mean, Daddy?"

"I was a bad kid."

"What did you do?"

"I was off to myself, antisocial, sensitive, cried a lot, and I wasn't afraid of the dark, MaryBaby. I'd dig in the dark if I had to."

His body convulsed at this, his wrist twisted and the car whipped going in and out of our double yellow-lined lane.

I screamed.

In, out, in, out, in, out. Life-threatening zigzags. Then he adjusted as if nothing happened.

"Daddy, I don't think you were evil. I think you were just different."

This cheered him up.

"Yes, some differences are good," he said. "We're all children under God's rainbow."

"Yes!" I said. "We're both just different. We're not bad."

"Then why were we treated badly? We were children of God, but we were supposed to be loved."

"We love each other."

"That's not enough, Mary Baby. The good people have to love us."

"But if they're mean, how good can they be?"

"Good as God. They're closer to Him than us, so we have to do what they say."

"But, Daddy, I don't think you're bad. I don't think I'm bad. I think we should just go home."

"No, we're already here. They have to change you, MaryBaby. You're not meant to be this way. You'll come out good in a minute."

We parked. I didn't even notice we had arrived anywhere. I locked my door. We were at a church parking lot. The headlights of perhaps three other cars were the only lights. He unlocked my door. I locked it back. Shadowy figures approached our car.

"It's okay, honey. I did this when I was a kid. They're going to do the same thing to me that they did to you."

BANG

BANG

BANG

Someone barged against the door.

"They made me better, honey. The same thing they're going to do to you."

My dad unlocked the door. Someone pulled it open before I could close it back. I screamed. This someone unbuckled my seatbelt and dragged me out. I still have the scars all up my elbow to my hand.

Screaming didn't stop him, crying didn't stop him, my trail of blood didn't stop him.

"And that's it. That's all I remember," she said and shrugged.

"Wait. What? There's no way that's all."

"Yep. Sorry. Well..."

"No, tell me what happened. What did they do to your dad? Does it have to do with the reptiles? What did they do to you?"

"I just remember walking through a dark hallway into a room with candles lit up everywhere and people in a circle. I think they were all pastors in Calgary. They tried to perform an exorcism. Then it goes blank. Sorry."

"No, that's not among the criteria for performing an exorcism."

"Excuse me? Are you saying I'm lying?" she said with a well-deserved attitude in her voice because I might have been yelling at her.

I wasn't mad at her, to be clear. Passion polluted my voice, not anger. My church had strict criteria for when people could have an exorcism, and suicide wasn't in it. You don't understand how grateful I was to think that our church was scandal-free. I thought we were the good guys.

"No," I said, still not calm. "I'm just saying a child considering suicide isn't in the criteria to perform an exorcism."

"Oh, maybe it's different for Calgary."

"No, I know it's not."

"And how do you know that?"

"No, wait, you need to tell me what really happened."

"Need?"

"Yeah, need. It's not just about you; this is important." I know I misspoke, but for me it was a need. I could fix this. I could take over Calgary in a couple of years; I had to know its secrets.

"It's never about me, is it?" she asked.

"Well, this certainly just isn't—"

"It's always about you because you're good, you're Christian, and you're going to make this world better or something."

"What? No, come on, where is this coming from?"

"It's always okay because you're Christian."

"That's not fair. I just want to know what happened because it wasn't an exorcism. What happened?"

"It's getting late. I think I want you to leave."

"Hey, no, wait. I'm doing the right thing here. Let me help you..."

"Oh, I do not want or need your help. You think you're better than me and could somehow fix it because you're Christian."

"No, I think I could fix it because I have the keys to the church."

"Oh..." she was stunned, and that mischievous grin formed on her face again. "Well," she swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "They took something from me, something that's still down there. And I'm not being metaphorical; I can feel it missing."

"If you lost something, let's go get it back."

There was another possibility I hadn't thought of between sex or love that I could have tonight: adventure.

That night we left to have our lives changed forever.

Mary and I waited for the security van to go around the church, and then we entered with my keys. Mary used the light from her phone and led the way.

Mary rushed through our church. It is a knockoff cathedral like they have in Rome with four floors and twists and turns one could get lost in. With no instructions, no tour, no direction, Mary preyed through the halls. Specterlike, so fast, a blur of light and then a turn. I stumbled in darkness. She pressed on. Her speedy footsteps away from me were a haunting reply. I got up and followed, like a guest in my own home.

How did she know where to go?

Deeper. Deeper. Mary caused us to go. Dark masked her and dark masked us; everything was more frightening and more real. We journeyed down to the basement. A welcome dead end. As kids, we had played in the basement all the time in youth group. Maliciousness can't exist where kids find peace, or so I thought.

"Could you have made a wrong turn?" I asked, catching my breath.

Mary did not answer. Mary walked to the edge of the hall, and the walls parted for her in a slow groan. This was impossible. I looked around the empty basement which I thought I knew so well. Hide and seek, manhunt, and mafia—all of it was down here. How could this all be under my nose?

Mary walked through still without a word to me. She hadn't spoken since we got here. Whatever was there called to her, and she certainly wasn't going to ignore their call now. She pulled the ancient door open.

Mary swung her flashlight forward and revealed perhaps 100 cages full of children... perhaps? I couldn't tell. The cages pressed against the walls of a massive hall, never touching the center of the room where a purple carpet rested.

Sex trafficking. A church I was part of was sex trafficking. My legs went weak, my stomach turned in knots.

Mary pressed forward. I called her name to slow her down, but she wouldn't stop. She went deeper into the darkness, and I could barely stand.

"Oh, you've come home," a feminine voice called from the darkness. "And you've brought a friend."

I do not know how else to describe it to you, reader, but the air became hard. As if it was thick, a pain to breathe in, as if the air was solid.

"Mary," I called to her between coughs. She shone her light on a cage far ahead. I ran after her and collapsed after only a few steps. I couldn't breathe, much less move in this.

Above us, something crawled, or danced, or ran across the ceiling. The pitter-patter was right above me, something like rain.

"Mary," I yelled again, but she did not seem interested in me.

"Mary," the thing on the ceiling mocked me. "What do you want with my daughter?"

"Daughter?" I asked, stupefied, drained, and maybe dying. She ignored my question.

"Mary, dear," she said as sweet as pure sugar. "Don't leave your guest behind."

And with that, my body was not my own. It was pulled across the floor by something invisible. My back burned against the carpet. My body swung in circles until I ran into Mary.

We collided, and I fought to rise again because this was my church. A bastardization of my faith. This was my responsibility.

I rose in time to see Mary's phone flung in the air and crash into something.

Crack. The light from the phone fled and flung us into darkness.

I scrambled in blackness until I found her arm to help her rise.

"Mary," I said between gasps for air. "Have to leave... They're sex trafficking."

"Sex trafficking!" That voice in the dark yelled. "Young man, I have never. I am Tiamat, the mother of all gods, and I am soul trafficking."

By her will, the cage lit up in front of us, not by anything natural but by an unholy orange light. Bathed in this orange light was the skeleton of a child in the fetal position. The child looked at me and frowned. At the top of it was a sign that read:

MARY DAUGHTER OF ISAAC WHO IS A SERVANT OF NEHEBEKU

FOR SALE.

"Wha-wha-wha," it was all too much, too confusing.

I didn't get a break to process either. An uncontrollable shudder of fear went through my entire body, as if the devil himself tapped my shoulder.

I lost control of my body. My body rose in the pitch black. I was a human balloon, and that was terrifying. I held on to Mary's arm for leverage, anything to keep my feet from leaving the ground. She tried to pull me back down with her. It didn't work. That force, that wicked woman, no creature, no being, that being that controlled the room yanked my arm from Mary. It snapped right at the shoulder.

I screamed.

I cried.

That limp, useless arm pulled me up.

This feminine being unleashed a wet heat on me the closer I got, like I was being gently dripped on by something above, but it didn't make sense. I couldn't comprehend the shape of it. I kept hearing the pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter of so many feet crawling or walking above me.

And how it touched me, how it pulled me up without using its actual hands but an invisible fist squeezing my body.

I got closer, and the heat coming from the thing burned as if I was outside of an oven or like a giant's hot breath. I was an ant ready to be devoured by an ape.

I reached an apex. My body froze in the air just outside of the peak of that heat. It burned my skin. The being scorched me, an angry black sun that did not provide light, nor warmth; only burning rage.

"Did you know you belong to me now?" the great voice said.

I shook my head no twice. Mary called my name from below. Without touching me, the being pushed my cheeks in and made me nod my head like I was a petulant child learning to obey.

"Oh, yes you do. Oh, yes you do," she said. "Now, let's make it permanent. I just need to write my name on your heart."

The buttons on my flannel ripped open. The voice tossed my white T-shirt away. Next, my chest unraveled, with surgical precision. I was delicately unsewn. In less than ten seconds, I was deconstructed with the precision of the world's greatest surgeons.

All that stood between her and my heart were my ribs. She treated them as simple door handles, something that could be pulled to get what she wanted. One at a time, the being pulled open my ribs to reveal my heart; the pain was excruciating, and my chest sounded like the Fourth of July.

The pain was excruciating. My screams echoed off the wall like I was a choir singing this thing's praises. Only once she had pulled apart every rib did she stop.

"Oh, dear, it seems you already belong to someone else. Fine, I suppose we'll get you patched up."

Maybe I moaned a reply, hard to say. I was unaware of anything except that my body was being repaired and I was being lowered. I landed gently but crashed through exhaustion.

"Daughter, get him out of here. It's not your time yet."

I moaned something. I had to learn more. I had to understand. This was bigger than I was told. I wasn't in Hell, but this certainly wasn't Heaven.

"Oh, don't start crying, boy. If you want anyone to blame, talk to your boss."

Oh, and I would, dear reader. I stayed home the next few days to recover mentally and to get a gun to kill that blasphemous, sacrilegious bastard.

Ecstatic with a newfound sense of hope
I am dressed in a neatly designed beige suit
Overwhelmed with the joy-bringing excitement
I admire the imperfections in my reflection
Before my reunion with an old friend
One I haven’t seen in over three decades

Completely lost in the moment my gaze shadows his movement
I remain utterly oblivious to the concerned stares of onlookers
For I have waited and I have longed and I have begged for this exact moment
And now my prayers were finally answered and my dreams materialized
Dreams to welcome my beloved with open arms
To welcome the midnight sun and disappear into its wonderous flames

The memory of a bygone era immortalized
Immortalized ss shadows carved into dull concrete structures
Dull concrete structures beautified with a heavenly blaze

Focus, Marty. This is all about focus. 

Think about Alice. Keep driving. Eyes on the road. 

The hitchhikers will step out eventually. They always do. 

Just don’t look back at them. Don’t ever look back, for that matter.

Don’t think, just drive. 

—-----------------------------------

I have a lot of love for my parents, having the generosity to take Alice and me in after her leukemia relapsed, but goddamn do they live far from civilization. Or maybe there just ain’t a lot of civilization in Idaho to go around - not in a bad way; the quiet is nice. I’ve been enjoying the countryside more than I anticipated. That being said, they could stand to spend some taxpayer dollars on a few more Walgreens locations. 

Feels like I’ve been driving all night; must almost be morning. They have to be worried sick. Alice may actually be physically sick without her antinausea meds.

I shook my head side to side in a mix of disbelief and self-flagellating shame. Took a left turn when I should have taken a right - a downright boneheaded mistake. The price for overworking myself, but I mean, what other option do I have? Chemotherapy ain’t exactly cheap. 

For a moment, I forgot where I was and what I was doing and looked in the rearview mirror at the five hitchhikers in my backseats. Silent and staring forward with dead and empty eyes at nothing in particular from the back of my small sedan.

Furiously, my eyes snapped forward, not wanting to linger too long on them - wasn’t sure what I’d see. 

Can’t be doing that on this road. Maintaining focus is key. 

—-----------------------------------

Despite my near-instantaneous reaction, I did see the new hitchhikers, but only for a moment. No surprises this time, thankfully. They wore suits like all the others, monocolored with earthy tones from head to toe. Same odd fabric, too - rough and coarse-looking, almost like leather. Honestly, never seen anything like it before tonight. 

But I haven’t ever been in a situation like this before, either. Whatever backwoods county I got myself turned around in, it likes to follow its own rules. 

For example, I didn’t pull over to pick up these hitchhikers. Somehow, they just found their way in. Or maybe I did pull over and let them in? Been so tired lately; who could even be sure. And they don’t say much, no matter how many questions I ask. Would love to know where I am, but I guess it isn’t for them to say.

My gaze again drifted, this time from the road to the car’s dashboard, and I let myself see the time. Big mistake.

7:59PM.

Nope, that ain’t right. I rapidly blinked a few times, adjusted myself so I was sitting up straighter, and then looked back to check again.

Now, it didn’t show any time at all. 

Marty, Jesus. Focus up. 

I blinked once more, this time for longer. Not sure how long, couldn’t been longer than ten seconds. If I close my eyes for too long, they become hard to open again. Requires a lot of energy.

4:45AM. 

See, there we go. Now that makes sense. By the time dawn arrives, I’m sure I will have found a gas station to pull over in. Ask for directions back to…whatever my parent’s address is. I’ll figure that out later, right now I need to focus. 

—-----------------------------------

Funny things happened in this part of the country when you didn’t focus. Sometimes, the yellow pavement markings would change colors - or disappear entirely. Other times, the road itself would start to look off - black asphalt turning to muddy brownstone at a moment’s notice. 

At first, it scared me. Scared me a lot, come to think of it. Made me want to pull over and close my eyes.

But Alice needed her nausea meds, and judging by the time, I had work in two short hours. I needed to make it home soon so I can check on her, give her a kiss before school. Hopefully, I’ll have time to brew a pot of coffee, too. 

But my eyes, they just don’t seem to want to stick with the program. Dancing around from thing to thing like they don’t have a care in the world. They have one job - watch the road for places that might have a map or someone who can tell me where I am. Well, two jobs. Watch the road and focus on the road. 

At least the road wasn’t treacherous. It has been pretty much straight the whole night after the wrong turn. 

—-----------------------------------

Initially, Alice was nervous about starting at her new school. And I get it - that transition is hard enough without factoring in everything she has had to manage in her short life. We’d been lucky though, finding a well-reviewed sign language school - in Idaho, of all places.  

She’s amazing - you’d think that the leukemia and the deafness from her first go with chemotherapy would have crushed her spirit. Not my Alice. She’s tough as nails. Tough as nails like her dad. 

I smiled, basking in a moment of fatherly pride. Of course, you can’t be doing that on this road. You’ll start to see things you don’t want to see. 

When my eyes again met the rearview mirror, I noticed there was now only one hitchhiker now, but he had transformed and revealed his real shape.

His face was flat like a manhole cover, almost the size of a manhole cover, too, but less circular - more oblong. He was staring at me with one bulging eye. It was the only one he had, the only one I could see at least. No other recognizable facial features. Just the one, bloated, soulless eye. 

What’s worse, I saw what was behind him. Behind the car, I mean. 

I closed my eyes as soon as I could, but my mind was already rapidly reviewing and trying to reconcile what I had seen behind the car. There was a wall a few car lengths away. No road to be seen, just an inclined wall with tire tracks on it. The atmosphere behind me had a weird thickness to it. Lightrays shone through the thickness unnaturally from someplace above. The ground looked like dust, or maybe sand, why would the ground look like -  

FOCUS. Think of Alice, and focus

When I finally found the courage to open my eyes, it all looked right again, and I breathed a sigh of relief and chuckled to myself from behind the wheel. Straight road in front of me, framed by a starless black sky. Everything in its right place. Until I saw something snaking its way into my peripheral vision. 

The hitchhiker was now in the passenger’s seat.

He turned to me and leaned his body forward over the stickshift; his lips were pursed and nearly pressing against my ears, rhythmically opening and closing his mouth but making no sound. I could have sworn he was close enough to touch my ear with his lips, but I guess he wasn't because I couldn’t feel it. Instead, I felt my heartbeat start to race, or I imagined what it was like to feel your heartbeat race. 

Why did I have to imagine...?

Don’t turn. Don’t look. Don’t think. Just focus. 

But I couldn’t. Something was wrong. I thought about closing my eyes. For a while, not just for a little. To see what would happen. I was curious what would happen. Had been all night, actually.

But then, like the angel she was, Alice’s visage appeared on the horizon. She was standing at her second-story window in my parent’s home, watching and waiting for me to return from this long night. I wasn’t getting closer for some reason, but she wasn’t getting any further away either. 

She was far, but even at that distance, I could see her doing something in the window. When I squinted, it looked like maybe she was waving.

Alice was waving at me. Alice could see me.

Must mean I'm close.

Eyes on the road. Focus

—-----------------------------------

Every night around 8PM, Alice would stand and watch the road from her bedroom on the second story of her grandparents' home. What she was waiting for didn’t happen as often anymore, but her birthday was a week away - the phenomenon seemed to be more frequent around her birthday. As the clock ticked into 8:03PM, she saw a familiar sight - two faint luminescent orbs traveled slowly down the deserted road in her direction, creating even fainter cylinders of light in front of them. 

Like headlights from an approaching car.

The first time this happened, Alice was nine. To cope with her father's disappearance, she would watch the road at night and pretend she saw his car returning home. One night, she saw balls of light appear in the distance, and it made hope explode through her body like fireworks. 

The balls of light turned into the driveway. And when they did, Alice noticed something that made her hope mutate into fear and confusion.

The headlights had no car attached, dissolving without a trace within seconds of their arrival.

For months, this was a nightly occurrence, and only she could see it, which scared Alice. But when she formally explained to the phenomenon to her grandfather for the first time, how they looked like headlights without a car, a weak and bittersweet grin appeared on his face, and he carefully brought up his hands to sign to her:

I’d bet good money that’s Marty making his way home, sweetheart. He just loved you that much.

From then on, the orbs comforted Alice and made her feel deeply connected with her long-lost father, wherever he was. But in the present, at the age of nearly seventeen, she had modified the purpose of her vigil.

Originally, she liked the idea of her father’s endless search for her. It made her feel less alone. But as she lived life and matured, she realized how alone he must be looking for her from where he was. Now, all she wanted was for Marty to stop looking. She wanted her father to finally rest. 

Now, when the orbs passed by, she would sign to them from her window, desperately hopeful that even from where he was, he could see her hands move and communicate an important message to him:

I love you, and I miss you. But please, Dad, let go. 

More stories: https://linktr.ee/unalloyedsainttrina

Driven into the gaping jaws of madness
By the consequence of every idiotic choice
The truly regrettable search for nauseating
Pleasure lurking behind anguish and angst

I crawl again into your open grave
Burning in the flames of delirium
Seeking the comfort of your hollow remains

Now that the crippling weight of every suicidal decision
Has left me too weak to even escape from this life

He comes to me in my darkest hour
Disguised in the pale glow of lunar light
Powerless before the promise of a better tomorrow
I am a child eternally bound to the night

Cursed with moments of painful clarity
Between bouts of calming delirium

Falling into a tunnel of madness
Carved with unending bestial thirst
Deeper into the ashen chasm
Where the hunter is haunted
By visions of his unbearable loss

Walking along the monotone road of repetition
Possessed by the uncaring nature of the moon

The breeze picks up. We stay inside. Behind shut doors, watching as it passes, hearing it snarl, we pray, Dear Lord in Heaven, spare us, your humble servants, for one more night, so that we may continue to give you thanks and praise, and protect us from the world's apex predator: the wind. (The prayer continues but I've forgotten the words.)

We light a candle.

Sometime during the night the passing wind will force its way inside the house and snuff it out.

We'll light it again, and again—and again—as many times as we must, for the symbol is not the flame but the act of lighting, of holding fire to the wick. This is the human spirit. Without it, we would long be disappeared from the Earth, picked up and filled, and detonated by the wind.

I saw a herd of cattle once made into bovine balloons, extended and spherized—until they burst into a fine mist of flesh and blood, painting the windows red. A rain of death.

I saw a man picked up, pulled apart and carried across the evening sky, silent as even his screams the wind forced back down his throat. His head was whole but his body dripping, distended threads hanged above the landscape. In the morning, somebody found his boots and sold them.

We don't know what caused it.

What awakened it.

Some say it came up one day from the depths of Lake Baikal before sweeping west across the globe. Others, that it was released by the melting of the polar ice caps. Perhaps it arrived here like life, upon a meteor. Maybe somebody, knowingly or not, spoke it into existence. In the beginning was the Word…

The wind has a mouth—or mouths—transparent but visible in its shimmering motion, gelatinous, ringed with fangs. What it consumes passes from reality into nothing (or, at least, nothing known,) like paper through an existential shredder.

The wind has eyes.

Sometimes one looks at us, as we are huddled in the house, staring out the window at the wind's raging. The eye most resembles that of a great sea creature, considering us without fear, perhaps thinking our heads are merely the pupils of the paned eyes of the house.

We do not know what it knows or does not know.

But we know there is no stopping it. What it cannot penetrate, it flows around—or pushes until it breaks: into penetrabilities.

What's left to us but to pick up the pieces?

By mindful accelerated erosion, it sculpts and remakes the surface of the planet—and, we believe, the inside too, carving it and hollowing, cooling it, and, undoubtedly, preparing—but for what? Who has known the mind of the Lord?

As, tonight, the wind hunts in the darkness, the trees convulse and the glass in the windows rattles against their frames, the candlelight begins to flicker, and I wonder: I truly, frightened, wonder, whether it would not be better to go outside and cease.

It’s so cold here in the glow of the freezing moon
Bitter winds claw underneath my open wounds
Here the darkness beautifies this barren land
Blanketing everything in a shroud of Elysian mists

Can you hear the melody of the wild?
Its whispers urging the wolf inside to break free
from the human skin and return into the Sylvian night
Unto the funeral ground beyond the gates
Obscuring the path to immortality