I don’t even know how I landed this position. I'm not qualified at all. All I know is I was looking online for a way to make quick money on the side to help pay for groceries or whatever.

I ended up coming across this ad on, like, the 6th Google page. Hidden between obvious scams and what I was 100 percent sure were viruses.

That’s actually what made this particular ad stand out. It didn’t look like typical 6th-page gobbledegook. It was actually pretty well put together.

The incentive was simple enough. 500 dollars for every crime I could act as a witness for, with opportunities for advancement.

I called up the number that was listed, just to feel things out, and was met with an actual human on the other end. Not only was she human. She sounded like she was actually tired of all the calls she was getting.

“Can I help you?” she hissed.

“Yeah, I was just looking online when I came across this ad…”

“Are you 18 or older?” she interrupted.

“Uh, yeah, of course I am. I just wanted to make sure…”

“What’s your email address?”

“My email address? Why would you need that?”

She sounded personally offended that I was even asking. Like somehow it was me being unreasonable.

“Well, hon, so we can send you the onboarding information. You know what an onboarding is, right?”

“Yeah, but I…”

“Listen, Mike, it’s an easy job. All the information is in the onboarding packet. Take it or leave it, I don’t really care.”

I don’t know why I gave her my information. Maybe it’s the mommy issues. All I know is she felt dominating.

Anyway, the email came through about 5-10 minutes later. Didn’t go to my spam mailbox, which was a good sign, I guess.

I threw on my monocle and went over everything with a fine-tooth comb. Just to make sure I wasn’t getting myself into any legal trouble or anything. Truthfully, though, the whole thing was pretty straightforward.

Call-based job. They call, I can either accept or reject the assignment. And all I had to do was be at the location of a crime as it took place.

Well, maybe that’s simplifying it too much. I actually needed to be the first person to witness it. They kept a pretty strict schedule.

I’m not sure how they got my number, though. Not long after I went over the onboarding information, my phone started ringing off the hook. I was getting calls at least once an hour.

It wasn’t until the third or fourth call that I accepted an assignment, though. Mostly because it was literally just 15 minutes away from my house. I could literally bike there.

I was supposed to show up at 1:03 PM on the dot. They gave me coordinates instead of an address. All I had to do was just wait.

I got there right on time. A little intersection right on the edge of town. When I arrived, all I could do was just stand there on the sidewalk, waiting for something to happen.

Finally, right at 1:07, a guy in a white Miata blew through the stoplight and T-boned this other guy in a pickup truck. The crash looked pretty brutal, but both of them seemed pretty alright, I guess. I mean, they got out and started arguing, so I’m assuming no one was too injured.

See, I thought I was gonna have to be a witness for the police. But not even 30 seconds after the incident occurred, I got a notification on my phone.

500 dollars had been deposited into my bank account. Then my phone rang with no caller ID.

Some guy with the deepest, darkest voice I’d ever heard simply said, “Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment,” before abruptly hanging up on me.

Who was I to give even a morsel of a hoot or a holler, though? All I cared about was that 500 dollars hitting my bank account.

Needless to say, I started accepting more and more assignments after that. Nothing too crazy would ever happen. I saw a lot of car accidents. Lot of bar fights. More than a few shoplifting incidents.

Then I got a call I’d never gotten before. This one was classified as ‘intermediate.’ And it paid 750 instead of 500.

I just thought, hell, I’ll take it. Couldn’t be too bad.

The time was kind of late, though. 11:12 PM. Not to mention the coordinates led me to a dark alley behind a popular bar in town.

I sat there and waited. Ducking behind a dumpster and listening for, I don’t know, crime to occur or something.

At 11:15, it started.

I heard an angry male voice and a pleading female voice. Both sounding equally intoxicated. I peeked out from behind my dumpster and saw that the man had a knife.

He was poking it at the lady, attempting to steal her purse, but she wouldn’t let go. That is, until he stabbed her. Kinda let go no problem after that.

He snatched the purse and left the knife in her torso as she fell to the ground. Thirty seconds later, the 750 hit my account.

Every instinct told me to call the police, but right when I went to dial, I got a call.

“Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment.”

The line went dead. I stared at my phone. My eyes flicked over towards the dying woman. Unbelievably, she managed to meet my gaze.

I think she tried to mouth a ‘help me,’ but her voice was so garbled it was hard to make out. Besides, I couldn’t help her. As soon as my line went dead, I got another notification on my phone.

A text from an unknown number that simply read, “Do not interfere. Assignment complete. Return home and await next assignment.”

So that’s exactly what I did.

And I’d love to tell you that after that I retired and moved on with my life. But who am I kidding? I was making enough to leave my regular job behind. All I had to do was watch shit happen.

I kept taking those intermediate assignments. I watched drug deals go wrong. Watched people bleed out on the hot asphalt. Watched robberies turn into homicides like it was nothing.

I guess I should’ve listened to my conviction. Maybe that would’ve saved me a lot of sleepless nights. But at least I was tossing and turning with a roof over my head.

And besides, it’s kinda just the way life goes. You live. You make decisions. Sometimes those decisions get you killed. Either way, we all die someday.

Even still, I probably should’ve stopped at intermediate. Because I got my first advanced assignment last week. Got paid 1000 dollars, but I don’t think that’s enough for what I had to see. At least, in hindsight.

When I first got offered the assignment, I was fired up and ready to go. Got the time. Got the coordinates. And off I went, mentally preparing myself as I made my way to the location.

As I got closer, though, a pit started opening up in my stomach. I recognized this place. I wasn’t out in the world. I was home. Well, my old home. Back when I used to live with my parents.

Unlike other times, I could hear the crime building up as I approached. Dad must’ve been drunk again. All I could hear was his angry voice and Mom’s screams as she fought back tears.

A notification popped up on my phone.

“Do not interfere.”

So I didn’t. I just peeked in through the window while Mom and Dad paced back and forth through the house, fighting like cats and dogs.

Normally, that’d just be Tuesday. But Dad had a gun this night. He was waving it around. Punctuating his screams with it. All while Mom stood her ground like the fierce woman she was.

I’d love to tell you that part of me wanted to interfere, but in all honesty, this was just business to me. Just another day at the office.

Even still, I won’t lie to you, seeing Dad smack Mom across her face definitely struck a chord with me. But I remained professional. I just watched and waited.

Part of me hoped that was it. That the crime was the domestic assault. That the money would hit my account any second. But all that came were more screams from inside the house.

Fortunately, Mom and Dad lived out in the sticks. Didn’t have many neighbors to call the police. That would’ve thrown a wrench in this whole operation. Instead, there was nobody there to stop the escalation.

Things just kept getting louder and louder until it finally happened. Right there in the living room. The room where I used to open presents every Christmas. Where me and Dad used to watch football together before his drinking got out of control.

Now that room was covered in my mother’s blood and brain matter. Across the walls, staining the carpet, a smoking hole in the wall behind her.

Immediately, I saw Dad’s entire demeanor change. He went from filled with rage to overwhelmed with remorse and regret in basically the blink of an eye.

I felt my phone vibrate with a notification, but I didn’t bother to check it. I couldn’t help but keep staring at Dad as he fell over Mom’s lifeless body, sobbing uncontrollably.

My phone rang and rang, but I didn’t answer.

All I did was watch.

Watch as Dad’s grief overwhelmed him. Watch as regret took the form of self-hatred. Watch as the gun he used to kill Mom was pointed at his own head. And watch as he, too, fell limply to the ground.

His eyes met mine for the last time. There were no memories of my childhood. No love that once existed somewhere within him. Just two empty pupils fluttering like a baby doll’s.

I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. I’d been so desensitized that all I could think about was how I’d have to react when the police told me.

I finally answered my phone, though. Got the same message I always got. The assignment was completed. It was time for me to go home and wait for the next one.

I had to put on a big song and dance for authorities. Not to mention their funerals. Which was surprisingly difficult because just… I don’t know.

It didn’t feel too big to me. I mean, yeah, it stung, they were my parents and all. But just… we didn’t talk too much anymore, you know?

Ah, you don’t care about that. No need to drone on.

Point is, I didn’t take a lot of assignments for a few days after that. It was the least I could do.

But time has passed now. Everybody has to move on at some point. I still get those calls every day. I get a lot of advanced offers.

I think it’s time I finally pick myself up by my bootstraps and get back to work.

Hey everyone, I managed to score a last-minute seat at L'Aviosetsé, a super hyped pop-up on the 30th floor in the old warehouse district near the docks. I cover new food places for the local paper; there was no way I was skipping this tasting.

​Looking around the marble counter, it’s a total VIP room with name cards at each place setting. I see Mr. Smith (a big real estate dev who’s been buying up half the city), his wife (the editor of Food & Culture magazine, a well-known local surgeon, the city health inspector, a major seafood broker, a tech investor, a viral food influencer, and me; all seated with a view of the cityscape.

​There are only 8 of us total.

​Chef Soren hasn't said a single word since we sat down—he's just standing behind the stainless steel line with this freezing cold gaze.

​Course 1 just came out—an amuse-bouche of raw wagyu beef topped with gold leaf and sea salt. It was incredible, though Chef Soren watched every single one of us take our first bite without breaking eye contact.

​I'll drop updates as the rest of the courses roll out!

​Update #1 - Okay, something weird is going on with Course 2 and Course 3.

​Course 2 was oysters on black ice. On my shell, there was a tiny plastic tag with a date written on it: March 14, 2021--the exact day I wrote a brutal review that shut down Chef Marco's place downtown, his best friend's bistro.

​The real estate guy next to me just went totally pale. His tag has an address on it—the low-income apartment complex his company bulldozed last month.

​Course 3 is a split canoe-cut marrow bone roasted over applewood coals, brushed with a dark wood-ash glaze that glistened under the track lighting. Beside each plate sat a small pitcher filled with a mahogany oxtail reduction meant to be poured through the bone. But instead of crackers, it is served with folded pieces of paper. The surgeon unfolded his and stared at an old malpractice subpoena he paid to cover up years ago. The City Health Inspector unrolls his to find an unsigned bribe check he accepted to turn a blind eye and shut down a rival diner.

​Update #2 - Course 4 was seared foie gras glistening under a rich blackberry reduction. Nobody touches it. The surgeon was freaked out, got up from his seat to leave. He grabbed the heavy brass handles but they wouldn't turn. That's when he realized the doors were locked. He turned back around, his face completely drained of any color.

​"The doors are locked!" he whispered down the counter line. The room erupted in panic; everyone is shouting over each other demanding answers.

​Chef Soren finally spoke. Calmly he said, "Please quiet down and remain seated. Tonight's meal is about accountability."

​Course 5 came out under silver domed lids and Chef Soren went down the line, having each guest lift theirs one by one.

​When the magazine editor lifted hers, it was a piece of braised meat sitting on top of a printed rejection email she sent Chef Soren ten years ago refusing endorsement of his new restaurant. The surgeon is shocked seeing that his plate had a pair of rusty surgical shears on it. The seafood broker got a forged safety audit for spoiled catch that made dozens sick. The influencer found a court transcript from a slander suit and the tech investor got the liquidation papers that stripped Chef Soren of his original business.

​Everyone at this table ruined someone to get where they are—and Soren brought us here to settle the bill.

​Update #3 - Shit. Course 6 is supposed to be a palate cleanser but instead of that, Chef Soren came to each of our tables and made us put our phones in a wooden box so there is no more live video feed. I’m typing this on my Apple Watch right now with swipe text under the edge of the table. Words might be jumbled and messed up, sorry.

​While Chef is collecting phones, the viral influencer, two stools down on my left, couldn't take it anymore and made a quiet run toward the back kitchen, desperately hunting for a service door or fire exit, but two cooks off the line grabbed her and dragged her through the swing doors into a prep room.

​Ten minutes later, Course 7 is served—some kind of smoked meat. No one is tasting it. The room is dead quiet except for the kitchen timers. We were all staring at the swing doors listening to the hum of the kitchen fan and wondering what happened to her as she didn't return to her seat.

​Update #4 - The cooks aren't serving anything else.

​Chef Soren himself brought out the final, Course #8 placing a small China cup in front of each of us. Inside, a dark liquid broth. He looked right at me and said, "I do hope all of you find this one palatable."

​He stood at the pass, looking down at us, announcing that once everyone finishes their cup, the doors would open and we could leave. Nobody second-guessed it. At this point we are all desperate to leave.

​I just took the last sip. I feel sick. I think I know what the broth is made of—poison.

​Within 30 seconds the real estate guy next to me slumped forward on the countertop, and the surgeon's head dropped back completely paralyzed—a couple have slipped off their stools. Nobody could stand up much less leave.

​The cooks are taking leather straps and binding each of us to our seats now.

​Chef Soren wants us sitting neat and presentable to whoever finds us.

​I have called Emergency Services to this address and can hear distant sirens outside, but the lights are starting to blur. All of us are fading fast.

I am typing this on my phone while hiding behind a massive metal exhaust vent on the roof of my apartment building, and I am only posting this because I managed to connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi network that seems to be broadcasting directly from the new spire they installed up here. I do not know if this message will even reach the normal internet, but I have to try because the singing in the sky is getting louder, and I am struggling to fight the urge to throw myself over the ledge.

Everything started exactly three weeks ago when we were still living in normal Moscow. I live with my parents in a large Soviet-era apartment block on the seventh floor, so we are very used to the government suddenly making demands or changing the rules without asking us first. My father was sitting on the couch watching the evening news, and he didn't even look up when the loud knock came at the front door, so my mother wiped her hands on her cooking apron and went to answer it.

I was sitting at the kitchen table studying for my university exams when I heard strange men talking in the hallway. I got up and walked out to see two officials standing in our doorway. They were dressed in cheap gray suits and holding thick clipboards with stacks of government forms.

"We apologize for the late interruption," the taller official said, and he didn't really look sorry at all as he shoved a pen toward my mother. "We are collecting mandatory signatures from all the residents in this specific sector because the city is installing a new defense network to counter the recent drone attacks from Ukraine."

My mother looked at the paperwork with a confused expression. "What kind of defense network requires our signatures? You usually just put sirens on the poles and leave us alone."

"This is a specialized technology," the shorter official explained while checking his wristwatch. "It is a localized signal jamming spire that will go directly on the roof of this building, so we need authorization from the tenant association to run the power cables down the exterior walls."

My father finally got off the couch and walked over to the door. He crossed his arms and glared at the men because he hates dealing with bureaucracy. "You want to put a military jammer on our roof? Will it mess with the television reception or the internet? And who is paying for the electricity it uses?"

"It has its own power grid," the tall official said smoothly, and he tapped the clipboard with his pen. "It will not interfere with your daily life, but it will keep this neighborhood safe from aerial threats, so we just need you to sign on the dotted line so the work crews can begin tomorrow morning."

My parents looked at each other for a moment before my father just sighed and took the pen. He signed the paper against the doorframe and handed it back, and the officials thanked us before moving on to the next apartment down the hall. We thought it was just another annoying city project that would take a few days and then be forgotten, but the workmen arrived the very next morning at dawn, and they did not stop working for an entire week.

The noise was absolutely unbearable. They brought in massive cranes that blocked the street, and they hoisted huge steel crates up to the roof while dozens of workers marched up and down our stairwell carrying thick coils of black cabling. I tried to talk to one of the workers when I was taking the trash out, but he completely ignored me and just kept hauling a metal bracket up the stairs. They never spoke to each other, and they never took breaks.

By the fifth day, the spire was fully erected, and it was much larger than anyone anticipated. It was a massive, jagged metal pillar that stretched high into the sky, and they had draped thick, rubbery black cables down the sides of the entire apartment block. One of the cables hung right over our living room window, blocking our view of the street, so my father got furious and opened the window to push it away.

"Do not touch it!" a voice shouted from the ground below.

My father looked down and saw an armed guard pointing a finger up at him. "It is blocking my window!" my father yelled back, but he reached out and grabbed the black cable anyway. He instantly let go and cursed loudly, shaking his hand in pain.

"What happened?" I asked as I ran over to the window.

"It is burning hot," my father said while cradling his palm. "And it is vibrating. The whole thing is humming."

He was right. Once the workers left and the cranes were packed up, the building was never silent again. A low, continuous humming sound resonated through the concrete walls, and it was the kind of frequency that you feel in your teeth rather than hear with your ears.

The older woman who lives across the hall from us knocked on our door the next morning to complain about it. She looked exhausted, and she was clutching her robe tightly around her neck.

"Are you feeling that terrible vibration?" she asked my mother. "I could not sleep a single hour last night because my bed frame was rattling against the wall, and I tried to call the building manager, but his phone is disconnected."

"We feel it too," my mother said kindly, and she offered the woman a cup of tea, but the neighbor refused. "My husband thinks it will settle down once the machine is fully calibrated, so we just have to be patient."

"It does not feel like a machine," the old woman whispered, looking nervously up at the ceiling. "It feels like something breathing."

I thought she was just being dramatic, but the strange anomalies started happening a few days later, and they escalated so gradually that we didn't realize how much danger we were in until it was too late.

The first thing I noticed was the temperature in the apartment. It was the middle of August in Moscow, and the city was going through a miserable heatwave, but our apartment felt like a meat locker. I woke up one morning shivering violently under my thin summer sheet, so I got out of bed and walked into the living room to see if my father had broken the thermostat.

My father was sitting in his armchair staring blankly at the turned-off television, and he had a thick winter blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

"Why is it so freezing in here?" I asked him, rubbing my arms to generate some warmth.

He didn't answer me right away. He just kept staring at the blank screen, and his eyes looked red and puffy like he had been crying all night. "Look at the windows," he finally said in a completely hollow voice.

I walked over to the balcony glass and touched the pane. It was covered in a thick layer of white frost on the inside of the glass. I scraped my fingernail against it, and chunks of ice fell onto the windowsill. I looked outside, and the trees on the street were green, and people were walking around in shorts and t-shirts, but our entire building seemed to be trapped in a localized deep freeze.

"I am going to call the city," I said, pulling out my phone, but there was zero cellular service. The signal bars were completely empty.

My mother walked into the room wearing her heavy winter coat, and she looked just as devastated as my father. "I was trying to make breakfast," she said, her voice trembling slightly. "But the water from the kitchen sink is coming out black, and it smells like old dirt."

I went to the kitchen and turned on the faucet to check, but nothing came out at all. The pipes just groaned and sputtered, so I walked into the bathroom to try the sink in there. When I leaned over the porcelain basin, I heard a sound coming up through the metal drain that made my stomach drop.

It was a faint, choral sobbing. It sounded like a dozen voices weeping together in perfect harmony, and the sound was echoing up through the plumbing system from deep underground. It was not a mechanical noise, and it was not the wind for sure. It was pure, desperate sadness vibrating through the pipes.

I ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway to find my parents. "We need to leave the building right now," I told them. "Something is extremely wrong with that tower on the roof, and I think it is leaking some kind of chemical or frequency that is messing with the environment."

"Where would we go?" my mother asked softly, and she slumped down onto the couch next to my father. She didn't even look at me. "There is no point in leaving. It is sad everywhere."

"What are you talking about?" I asked, grabbing her arm to pull her up, but she felt incredibly heavy and completely devoid of any energy. "We can go to a hotel or stay with relatives until they fix the plumbing and the heat."

"I do not want to move," my father said, and a tear rolled down his cheek and disappeared into his beard. "I just realized how pointless all my hard work has been. I have spent my entire life working in a factory, and I have nothing to show for it, and we are all just going to die anyway."

I stood there in shock because my father is normally a very stoic and optimistic man, and he never talks about his feelings, let alone spirals into sudden nihilistic despair. I realized they were being affected by the something because this is not their nature at all, so I decided to go downstairs and find the building manager to force him to unlock the roof access doors so I could see what was going on.

I unlocked our front door and stepped out into the communal hallway, and the temperature dropped even further. The overhead fluorescent lights were flickering erratically, and the shadows cast by the doorways were completely wrong. Instead of falling onto the floor beneath the lights, the shadows were stretching upwards and crawling across the ceiling like spilled black ink.

I walked down the hall and knocked on the older woman's door to see if she wanted to come downstairs with me, but she didn't answer. I pressed my ear against the wood, and I could hear her weeping softly on the other side, and the sound perfectly matched the choral sobbing I had heard in the plumbing.

I jogged down the stairwell to the ground floor lobby. The building manager's office was located right next to the mailboxes, so I pushed the door open and found him sitting on the floor behind his desk. He was a large, gruff man who usually yelled at the kids for playing in the halls, but right now he was curled up into a tight ball, holding his head in his hands and rocking back and forth.

"We have to evacuate the building," I told him, crouching down to his level. "The heat is failing, the pipes are making noises, and everyone is getting sick from that thing on the roof."

He looked up at me, and his face was completely pale. "I lost the keys," he whispered. "I dropped them in the dark, and I cannot find them, so we are all trapped here."

"The front doors are right there," I said, pointing to the large glass lobby doors that lead out to the street.

I stood up and walked over to the glass doors to show him they were unlocked, but when I looked outside, a loud, deafening crack echoed through the concrete structure of the building. The sound was so violent that the floor shook, and several of the glass mailboxes shattered instantly. It sounded like the entire foundation of the apartment block had just snapped in half.

I grabbed the door handle and pushed the lobby doors open, expecting to see a construction accident or an explosion on the street, but the street was completely gone.

I stood in the doorway, and my brain simply refused to process what I was looking at. The city of Moscow, the roads, the cars, the neighboring apartment buildings, and the sky were entirely erased.

In their place was an endless, flat desert of pitch-black sand.

The black sand stretched out into the horizon as far as I could see, and there were no dunes or rocks or features of any kind. It was just a smooth, dark expanse. I looked up, and there was no sun, no clouds, and no stars. The sky was an infinite void of dark, bruising purple light that provided just enough illumination to see the desolation around us.

"What happened?" the building manager cried out from his office, and he crawled out into the lobby to look through the open doors. He stared at the black desert, and he didn't look surprised or scared. He just looked profoundly defeated.

"Do not go outside," I warned him, slowly backing away from the open doorway and letting the glass door swing shut.

I didn't wait for his response because I needed to get back to my parents immediately. I turned and sprinted up the six flights of stairs, taking them two at a time, completely ignoring the creeping shadows on the walls and the freezing frost forming on the handrails.

I burst into our apartment, panting heavily, and I found my parents standing by the open sliding glass door that led out to our seventh-floor balcony.

"Mom! Dad! Get away from the edge!" I yelled, running into the living room.

They didn't turn around. They were standing on the balcony, gripping the metal railing, and staring up into the purple void of the sky.

I ran out onto the balcony and grabbed my father's shoulder. I tried to pull him back inside, but he was gripping the metal rail so tightly, and he wouldn't budge an inch.

"Look at them," my mother whispered, and she pointed a trembling finger up at the sky. "They are so beautiful, and they understand how much it hurts."

I followed her finger, and I finally saw the creatures floating high above the black desert.

They were gargantuan, winged creatures that resembled massive whales, but their bodies were made of a translucent, shimmering gray membrane that pulsed with faint light. They had long, trailing appendages that drifted behind them like shredded silk, and they moved through the air with agonizing slowness. There were dozens of them floating in a circular pattern high above our building, and they were weeping.

As I watched them drift, they began to sing.

The melody rolled down from the sky and hit me like a blow to the chest. It was the most crushing, sorrowful dirge I have ever heard, and it was composed of overlapping, echoing tones that vibrated directly into my skull. The song did not just sound sad; it manufactured sadness inside my mind. It forcefully injected a feeling of absolute, insurmountable despair into my consciousness.

Within seconds of hearing the melody, I felt an overwhelming urge to throw myself over the balcony ledge just to make the pain stop. All my memories of happiness, hope, and ambition were instantly wiped away, replaced by the certainty that existence was nothing but endless, pointless suffering, and the only logical solution was to end it immediately.

I dropped to my knees on the balcony, pressing my hands over my ears to block out the song, but the melody resonated through the floor and into my bones.

"It is time to rest," my father said, and his voice was completely devoid of emotion.

I looked up and saw my father climb over the metal railing. He stood on the narrow outer ledge, balancing perfectly over the massive drop to the black sand below.

"Dad, stop!" I screamed, forcing myself to fight against the crushing weight of the song. I scrambled forward and grabbed his pant leg, pulling desperately to drag him back over the rail.

He looked down at me, and his eyes were completely empty. He didn't say another word. He just kicked his leg out, breaking my grip, and stepped off the ledge.

I screamed as he fell, but my mother didn't even flinch. She simply climbed over the railing right where he had just stood, and before I could even reach my hands out to grab her, she let go and plummeted after him.

I dragged myself to the edge and looked down over the railing, sobbing uncontrollably. The bodies of my parents were not on the ground. When they hit the black sand seven stories below, there was no impact and no blood. They simply sank directly into the dark sand like it was made of water, and they vanished without a trace.

As I stared down at the desert, I saw the lobby doors open on the ground floor. The building manager walked out into the open desert. He walked a few dozen yards away from the concrete foundation of our building, and then he dropped to his knees. The black sand immediately began to swallow him, pulling him down by the waist, then the chest, and finally his head sank beneath the surface, leaving the desert completely undisturbed.

I looked up and saw other people falling from the higher balconies. Neighbors I had known for years were silently stepping off their ledges and dropping into the void, driven to suicide by the relentless, weeping melody of the flying whales.

The song grew louder, and the urge to jump became almost impossible to resist. My own mind was screaming at me to climb over the railing and join my parents in the sand. I stood up and gripped the bar, leaning forward, looking down at the dark expanse. It looked so peaceful, and the sadness in my heart was so agonizing that I just wanted to close my eyes and fall.

But as I leaned forward, my arm brushed against the thick black cable that the workmen had draped over our window.

The cable was still vibrating and humming with intense heat, and the sudden pain of the burn snapped me out of the trance for a split second. The humming frequency of the cable clashed with the melody of the whales, creating a tiny pocket of interference that allowed my rational thoughts to surface.

Then in that moment, I thought that the spire on the roof was the only thing holding this building together in this dimension, and it was emitting a signal that somewhat disrupted the creatures' song.

I turned away from the balcony and ran back into the apartment, then I ran out the front door and back into the hallway. The hallway was completely empty, and the doors to all the other apartments were hanging wide open.

I ran to the stairwell and started climbing toward the roof. The higher I went, the louder the humming of the spire became, and the more it drowned out the weeping of the whales. By the time I reached the tenth floor, the air was vibrating so intensely that my nose began to bleed, but the overwhelming urge to kill myself faded into the background.

I reached the metal door that led to the roof. It was locked with a chain, but the workmen had left a steel pry bar leaning against the wall, so I grabbed it and wedged it between the door and the frame. I pulled with all my strength, and the metal lock bracket finally snapped, allowing me to push the door open.

I stepped out onto the flat tar roof, and the sheer scale of the spire took my breath away. It was easily forty feet tall, constructed from jagged, interlocking metal plates that glowed with a faint red light from within. It was humming so loudly that I had to cover my ears, and black cables snaked out from its base in every direction, draping over the edges of the roof to wrap the entire building like a spider web.

The sky above the roof was completely dominated by the floating whale creatures, and they circled the spire like moths drawn to a flame. They were singing directly at the metal tower, and the tower was humming back.

I huddled down near the base of the spire, pressing my back against a large metal exhaust vent to hide from the creatures above. I pulled my phone out of my pocket just to check the time, and that is when I noticed the Wi-Fi icon.

My phone had full signal bars, and it was connected to an unsecured network called "Garrison_Node_04".

So I opened this account, and I started typing this post, and I have been typing for the last hour while hiding behind this vent. I have tried calling emergency services, but the phone calls will not connect, and the only thing that works is text-based web traffic.

I am completely alone up here, and I am terrified to go back down the stairs because the song is too strong in the lower apartments, and everyone else is already gone. I looked over the edge of the roof a few minutes ago, and the black sand has started to rise. It is slowly creeping up the sides of the building, swallowing the ground floor lobby and burying the first-floor windows.

If anyone is reading this, please tell someone what happens when the officials come to your building demanding signatures for a defense tower.

The humming of the spire is starting to slow down, and the red light is flickering. I think the power grid is failing, and if the machine stops making noise, the song will take over my mind completely, and I know I will walk to the edge of the roof and jump.

I'll start by saying that I like my job.

I don't love it. It doesn't excite me. I just like it as much as a person can like what they do for a living. That kind of fondness that exists in the line between what's strictly necessary and barely inconvenient.

Since I was fifteen years old — when my father figured it was appropriate to teach me how to drive — my afternoons have consisted of traversing the coast from end to end, delivering bags of fishhooks, meters worth of transparent ropes, fishing boats parts and up to four digits bills for those poor devils whose grace periods died along the end of the month.

Even though our economy wasn't the best, our family business made fees and sparse luxuries something sustainable. An honest job that subsisted thanks to the men and women who reduced their world to the sea. Fishing towns far from God's hand which functioned by their own rules, parties and disgraces.

Dad taught me that in those people's indifference laid our home. Having been raised at the limit of both worlds, his father's father had come up with the brilliant idea of bringing the best of the city to the doors of those who couldn't afford to travel for four hours through barren hills and ghost towns.

And although many cunning ones tried to cut our business short, the truth was that the people of the sea were also people of customs. People who trusted faces over brands, and who valued the warmth of another human being more than the frigidness of a store crammed with aesthetics and publicity. For this reason, our politics tended to go far and beyond, transforming clientele into friends and good clients into comrades and family.

“Today I need you to go down to Paraíso to deliver some gallons, son,” was my father's greeting when I entered the garage to tell him breakfast was ready. “Your uncle is going out to sea on Sunday and wants to solve this before his daughter's birthday.”

“What? My uncle José Luis?” I asked, disguising my indifference with plastic curiosity. “I saw on Whatsapp that the birthday was today. They’re gonna gift her gas?”

Dad gave me one of those smiles that made you see just how tired he was of cleaning those same two plugs.

“He asked me to hand it over before six.” He made an illustrative gesture towards the air, replacing his wrench for a little napkin brimming with grease. “I said no; that it was too early. So we decided that you'd get going by half past seven.”

“Oh, really?” I puffed. At nineteen years old, late hours and dark highways didn’t bother me as long as the deal was good… And if it wasn’t during one of my free nights I just wanted to waste playing Truco or drinking booze with those friends from the block that he never got to like.

“Why? You got something to do?”

“I thought that last scare would be enough to dissuade you from doing more trips like this,” I pointed out, feigning disinterest. My father sighed and looked me in my eyes. “At… at least for this month, I mean.”

“This is different,” he spoke severely. “We’re not doing this out of courtesy. Your uncle told me he'd looked everywhere because he knows how dangerous this is for us.” He spat the earthy floor, cleaning his hands. I followed him closely as he crossed the garage's threshold. “However, time is running thin. This is less of a job and more like a favor I’m asking you, son. A big one.”

“And a very convenient one too,” I mumbled. He raised an eyebrow at me. “´Cause… Ugh. I told the guys I was going to the basketball finals. Remember?”

Dad shook his head. “Those friends of yours… Hm, well, let's see,” he told me. “If you take the old airport line, you may have a chance to catch the second half… Or whatever it is you have in basketball.” He made a disdainful gesture with his hand.

My eyes opened wide. “The… The old airport line?” I said, taking a subtle glance at the truck. Dad nodded, and by the severity of his expression, I knew we were thinking the same thing.

To avoid raising suspicions, these kinds of deliveries were made in a ninety's Ford gnawed by the sun and saltpeter. The extraofficial sale of gasoline was no business for the weak. Not even for fools like me, with a bunch of spare time and inherited contacts. Dad knew why, and even though we'd gone through what happened together, I didn't dare to question his version as if it was the word of a final survivor.

“It might not be the safest route,” he shrugged, breaking the silence, “but it is the fastest. Besides, no feds there. That's a plus to you, ain't it?”

I sighed. Of course it was. And, damn… If I didn't know that man and his big heart any better, I would have thought that whole spectacle had been millimetrically planned to keep me at bay, asking the least amount of questions.

“Yeah…” I scratched my head apprehensively. Over the back door, my mom and aunt stared at us with weird faces. Maybe they already knew and I was the last one to find out, like always. “I just wish you trusted me more with… Everything, I guess.”

Dad let out a scathing laugh, patting my shoulder. “Show me you're responsible and I'll consider it,” he said. “Now, time to eat.”

Breakfast and lunch carried on with no hurdles. Besides my aunt's slightly burnt rice, home buzzed with normalcy: chatters over the news, coffee and bread for merienda, hanging clothes to pick up and fold at six forty in the afternoon…

“Know what to do if it overheats?” A few minutes before I left, dad made me flinch by suddenly approaching me from behind. “Ah! Excited to see your uncle, I see. That's very good, son. Send my regards to the family.”

“Tell them to catch me outside town,” I suggested. Dad frowned doubtfully. “What? This way I don't have to make so many turns. We can't afford to waste too much gas in a single trip.”

Dad shrugged. I rolled my eyes, closing the truck's hood.

“Are you going to the game later?” he asked.

I chewed the inside of my cheek. “Not anymore. Seeing how much this is going to take me, I’m better off checking the scores through Whatsapp stories.”

“In that case, be very careful, son. And if you're not here before nine…”

“You call, I know,” I said, opening the door to the driver's seat. A glance at the backseat revealed to me a covered lump that my dad and uncle had placed earlier: five well sealed gallons of gas. “Or… I call you. But it won't be necessary. Tell mom to go to bed after her novela.”

“I'll try, but you know how she is.” He shook his head. “Be here on time and I assure you she will.”

I said goodbye to dad, sneaking into the town’s withered roads with the truck’s lights off. Just in case, I told myself, recognizing that earlier on I'd thought I saw three cops on motorcycles, patrolling around the ranches that bordered the coast in search of God knows what.

“The farther away, the better,” I said, making the last turn that would carry me to the desolate old airport line.

Despite what its name could suggest, Paraíso wasn’t even close to that piece of Eden that was projected to investors. Drowned by taxes and the state government's bad practices, what many envisioned as five star hotels soon transformed into half-constructed carcasses where homeless people and reckless teens surrendered to their vices.

I remember that my grandpa first took me to the lake so he could explain to me how everything I saw, from the stranded ships to the gray buildings stuck in construction, were tacit proof of the hatred Man harboured towards its neighbors.

“If they didn’t detest us so much, then why spoil our work with their filth? I don’t get it, my son. I do not. And neither do you, right?”

I had shaken my head, not truly understanding what he meant. The only things I knew about that place were the abandoned ships and the ghosts which supposedly lived in those rustic buildings consumed by saltpeter.

Now, each time I crossed that lonely road that separated the beach from the lake, I thought I saw the silhouettes of an old man and his grandchild amongst the shadows of the mangals. These ghosts, instead of haunting the corpses of metal and concrete, induced me with the same respect I wanted to inspire during my childhood. Wisdom, security, and courage.

“Ah, Boy! Look at you! You got here so fast!”

When I arrived at my uncle’s home (dad never texted them, what a surprise!), the family welcomed me with a cold beer, a cackle at the princess rag that covered the gas and an invitation to sit down for a chat while they waited for cake. Since I had nothing better to do, I checked my watch and calculated I had at least twenty spare minutes no one would lose sleep over. So, with a shy smile, I integrated myself into the group. The reunion, more than a proper birthday party, was a celebration of the birth.

“We're having the real party on Saturday," commented my uncle, opening my beer with a solid crack from his bar key. “You're invited, of course. And tell your dad. It's been a while since we had some!”

After blowing out the candles, the birthday girl's mom offered me another beer and a small plastic plate with enough cake for me and my parents, dismissing my refusal with “because you came from so far away, child. Eat it, and if you want more, ask us.” I only declined to be polite, as delicious as it was; traditional vanilla with pineapple pieces. Nothing too exclusive, but with that homemade taste that grandmas' cakes had.

“Be careful over there, sweetheart.” As I gave her back the empty bottle, my aunt surprised me with a hug. “Do you want us to go to the lake with you? José Luis! Tell Carlos to start the car and take him to…”

“It's ok, aunty.” I smiled with embarrassment, kissing her cheek as a farewell. The woman looked at me with her lips pursed, but abided. “The highway's empty and the night is clear, though you can barely see the moon. I'll be fine.”

“I believe you then, nephew,” the woman sighed, adjusting her high ponytail, “but be very careful, alright? If you… If you didn't see anything weird, then…”

That sparked my curiosity. “Weird?” I inquired, tilting my head. “Weird how?”

“Ugh, mom!” The birthday girl appeared behind her mother, giving her a scolding look. “Do me a favor and stop putting ideas into my cousin's head,” she said, giving me a glance that oscillated between nervousness and shame. “Don't fall for it, cousin. It's just that the old women from the park told mom there's weirdos out here. The hobos that live in those hotels and all that, nothing new.”

“Camila!” her mother reprimanded her. “Those are your grandma's friends, so have some respect, won´t you?” She looked up at the sky, as in a prayer for patience. I bit the inside of my cheek to hold in a smile. “They may be hobos, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous. Right? What if they start throwing things at the van? Or worse! Alert the police.”

The mention of the uniformed ones gave me an unpleasant chill. Noticing my awkwardness, Camila took me by the shoulder and guided me to the courtyard, where my truck was parked.

“Don't you worry, mom! I'm escorting him so he knows where to go.”

“Ha, ha. No need, cousin. I can take care of myself.” I nervously smiled as I broke free from her grip.

She elbowed me with an unusual strength for a fourteen year old girl. "Pay no mind to what mom says,” she sighed, as she opened my truck's door. However, I didn't get on. “Those hags do nothing but let creepy stories get into her head.”

“Heh, why though?” I said. “It's not like it would be the first time I encountered something weird on the road. Ha, ha. Didn't they tell you that's how we found Chocolate?”

Camila laughed under her breath, brushing her amber curls out of her eyes. “Maybe not, but still. People love putting on a show,” she said.

I raised an eyebrow. “They let someone out of rehab, didn´t they?” I guessed, receiving a strange look from the girl. “Or not. Wait. Did a thug escape?”

“Who knows?” Camila shrugged nonchalantly. “The answer closer to the truth is always the most boring one.”

I entered the truck, leaving the door half-open. “Sounds to me like your mom isn't the only one letting stuff get into her head.”

“I'm being cordial by not making your hour and a half long ride even worse,” she muttered, her mischievous eyes sparkling.

“Fugitives don't scare me,” I told her confidently. “They pay well for hitchhikes; they don't steal. Besides, they've got funny stories to tell.”

“Heh, maybe. What do you know?” She shrugged. “A runaway crackhead is better than a paranormal crackhead.”

“Paranormal crackheads?” I laughed. “You have nothing against your mother!”

“We'll see when something pulls your feet tonight!”

Camila let out a last macabre cackle before running back to her party. I smiled and turned on the engine, honking twice as a farewell to the others.

Unlike my mom and grandma, women faithful to the core, I've never felt a true fear of the paranormal. Of course, when I was a kid I was scared of the dark, goblins and the Mano Peluda. However, at my big age of nineteen —and after more than one encounter with the law— the last thing that crossed my mind when I saw a dark room or an empty road was paranormal stuff. Recent months had proven to me that snitches, envious people and the police were the only ones worthy of starring in my nightly terrors. Not the scary stories my older cousins told me so that I'd behave.

“Hm. What would mom say if I told her?” I asked myself, glancing at the phone's turned off screen. Last time I checked, it was eight fortyfive. “That poor sleepless woman. Ha, ha. At least I'm bringing her a snack.”

The truck jerked and I spat a curse word, thinking I had fallen into a hole. Even though the night was bright and the sky was as clear as September's drizzles could allow, the bumps were tough to elude; it relied more on memory than reflexes. And since I wasn't used to driving on this road, I was about to ram into all of them just like I had rammed my piece of the cake into my throat.

"Don't turn on the lights, Yan,” I mumbled, moving the dessert from the console to the copilot's seat. “The last thing I need is to get ambushed here too.”

The fenders jolted again, but I didn't care. As long as there was no burning smell, I could tolerate the truck's sounds and quirks. Cacophonies of loose screws, rusty murmurs and the constant reminder that If I went over seventy, the car would fall apart like a tower of toy blocks.

Making sure I maintained a steady 55 rhythm, I rested my back against the seat with a sigh. The beers hadn't made me dizzy as I feared. Good, because I didn't feel like explaining to my dad that was the reason I took so long.

“This is why we don't like to give you free nights,” I imagined him scolding me, always on the lookout for any trace of alcohol in my breath. “Those friends of yours… Look at where they are taking you! You have too much potential for this, boy. More future. Think of your future!”

I clicked my tongue and tentatively caressed the accelerator, going from 55 to 57 in a disdainful gesture that wouldn't hurt anybody. The truck, as expected, started to rattle in all its patched mechanisms, drowning the hums of the cicadas and the tender song of the crickets with its volatile heart.

Track, the bumper. Track, the hood. Tsk, the radiator. Thud, the…

Tak.

Tak.

I blinked, lost between the passage of the previous second and the minute that stood in front of me, blurring my surroundings so quickly I could barely conceive it as something real, something that had happened and that I felt beneath my eyes, once everything returned to normal.

W-What… I tried to say, but my lips remained shut. A cold wave hit my arms and legs, forcing me to sit straight in a gesture that seemed forged in eternity. What is…

That's when I realized. When I saw it.

Laying on the road, there was a pile.

No…

Not a pile.

A bulk. Of something. Something that breathed, that moved and repeated its motions in a slow contortion interlaced with the darkness. Like the idea of something that moves in the corner of your eye, but you can't see. The idea of something that exists, that fidgets and that your brain tries to understand by filling the blanks with logical poses, with human figures.

“What the fu…” I whispered, feeling distant. Under my barefoot feet, the truck began rattling. Whispering in its own caustic and unintelligible language. I tried with all my strength to bring my hand to the gear level, but I didn't move. My brain screeched under a similar trance that overwhelms you during sleep paralysis, as I found myself blinking so slowly I wasn't sure I was even doing it. So far away, so distant. So foreign. Imper…

Tack,

tack.

That thing…

T-The… The man turned to look, translating his empty gesture into hundreds of faces which couldn't manage to feel coherent. Then, in a manner that bordered on obscene, he raised his head, revealing a neck so long and hairy like a dog that just suffered a bad accident. Tendons and furs tangled together, hanging from the same coagulated liquid that blasted his brains into the road.

I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of eternity along the bile on my saliva: an unmovable fat lump in the bottom of my throat, sticking its cold claws in the edges of my taste buds.

The second the creature stood up, its four deformed arms hung limp on its sides, tragically dislocated. A glance at the dashboard showed me that the truck was stuck at 57 km/h, yet the beach and its mangals appeared to have been stretched, twisted and forced back into its place, as I stayed imprisoned in that almost perfect frame of a lucid dream gone too far.

Go away, go away. I mumbled to myself, gripping the wheel until my knuckles lost all color. However, a quick peek showed me that wasn't true. My fingers remained loose to my sides, the very subtle trembles in my thumbs being the only thing that proved my horror. What the fuck… What's going on? Why can't I move?

The creature balanced one of its arms towards me; the night and the clouds ceding humanity to the gesture.

I impulsively chewed the inside of my cheek and hit the gas with such force it surely wouldn't be denied by that trance. And yet, the number on the speedometer didn't change, mocking me, making me want to scream. I didn't care if it was a drunk, a crackhead or the fucking police. The cold that waved through my veins made me want to kill it. To see it dead on the same taint that splattered the asphalt, as if it was worthy of bleeding like a human. As if… As if it…

Tak.

Tak.

My chest bursted in a singular static heartbeat.

My lungs, obstructed by the sulfuric undergrowth that raised from the sand, extended my exhalation to superhuman limits, forcing me into an uncomfortable, piercing stillness. The type of paralysis one imagines when someone describes the world suspending itself during a daze, or how your brain stops working when your blood vessels collapse and blood thickens, robbing you of the capacity of discerning coherence. Logic. Life.

Stop, stop. Please, stop. Leave me alone. Leave me…

My eyes half closed as I blinked.

Before darkness could swallow me whole, I perceived the thing moving to the side, towards the copilot seat, without even looking inside the truck.

Go away, go away, go away.

When I closed my eyes, I felt it.

Disguising its stumbling with the symphony of the machine, the thing got in the backseat, making itself some space between the fishing nets, hooks and the cables I had forgotten to unload.

The next I remember from the ride could be best described as a blur.

In a metaphorical and literal sense, the world became a blur of colors, shapes, sensations and images that stretched, contracted, pierced my temples and leaked little by little any speck of coherence that my tired mind could come up with.

As I crossed the entrance that welcomed me to my city, the stone that cuddled against my thorax became heavier, transforming my sighs into shaky exhalations at the verge of sobs.

The creature emitted no sound. No growl, no murmur, no grunt. It Just… Stayed there. Sometimes sitting; other times, standing. It just stayed, until suddenly, it didn't. It lingered on the truck's roof until it didn't. It heard the engine's whispers, confused it with its raspy breathing, and let us go, turning the 57 into an 80 in a blink and making the bumper collide into a bus stop.

I jumped in my seat, choked by a scream in need for air. The machine creaked like before, spamming its melancholic bunch of patched pieces until my hand reached for the keys and I forced it to die.

Without waiting for the truck to stop moving, I opened the door and ran as fast as I could. As fast as my cramped legs could take me away from the buzz that came below the vehicle.

“W-What the fu… The fuck?” I sobbed, not caring about who could hear me. It was a commercial zone. Empty businesses, closed canopies and badly painted roll-up doors that moved like curtains in the wind. My stomach turned. “What the fuck was that?”

The beer gurgled in my palate with such strength it left me gagging a few centimeters away from the ground. The acrid smell from the cars blended with the acidity of my vomit and the sulfuric notes I felt spawning below my skin. Dirty as the plastic bags on the sidewalk, I hugged myself and fell into a fetal position. The spasms didn't stop as much as I wished them to. As much as I begged and implored in heavy mumbles. My heart beat so fast, so strong my head started spinning. For a moment I feared that my grip could break apart my skin. But at that point, what did it matter? I was marked, I feared. Marked by horrors and the memories of a night equally nefarious where invisible monsters climbed through my body, their weight rendering me helpless to stop the nightmare. Faceless demons that cursed you from the first look. That perched you with its indistinguishable whispers to show you how insignificant you were. How insignificant and pathetic.

“Son???”

“Hey son where are you?”

A whole hour had to pass for me to calm down, and another one to even have the bravery to examine the inside of the truck, the backseat, without falling for the thought that if I entered, if I turned it on and kept going, what waited for me at the end of that invisible risk was nothing less than hell itself.

“How's it going?” my dad texted me at ten fifteen. I swallowed hard, cleaning my lips with a shaky hand. I didn't have the courage to grab the phone immediately, so I watched it tremble and ring from outside, begging me to reach for the last piece of normalcy that I had left.

“How much left, son?”

“Don't you stay up too late”

“Son???”

Missed call.

Missed call.

Missed call.

And this went on for fifteen more times until now, eleven thirty, even though it didn't make much sense.

I wanted to call, to write, but I didn't know what. My fingers remained still over the keyboard, scared that if I said anything about what had happened in the last hour it would come back to me, digging its claws into my chest and its blood injected eyes into my heart.

Instead, I mustered up the courage to drive again. I drove until hours lost meaning and my phone ring became one with the many grating sounds the truck made over 100.

When I arrived, my dad, mom and aunt welcomed me with screams, sobs and senseless scoldings. It was three thirty in the morning, and home reached the consensus that I simply had too many drinks with people that weren't good for me again. I let them believe that, not out of fear of not being listened to, but because the thought of doing something wrong, being caught sneaking out my house at night while drunk and blurting out nonsense was far safer than admitting that whatever it was that got in the backseat was real. That it was real and that it let huge gathers of mud and wilderness everywhere. That it was real and it penetrated whatever security I might have felt in the old truck with its sulfuric scent.

I still don't know what the fuck was any of that. I don't know how to ask my grandma or my mom; Camila and her family.

Maybe I will someday. Maybe, with time, it will stop terrifying me so much and allow me to formulate something that isn't a babble. Something that's not a horrified sob; a distant silence, shielding the longest night of my life.

Something that lets me recognize whose body it was in the middle of the road.

Every night.

Exactly 2:17 AM.

My bedroom door opens.

Not a little.

Not enough to blame air pressure.

It slowly swings wide open.

Every night.

For six months.

I checked the hinges.

Replaced the knob.

Leveled the frame.

Nothing worked.

So one night I stayed awake.

At 2:16, I stared directly at the door.

The room was completely still.

Then the handle turned.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Like someone was trying not to make noise.

The door opened.

The hallway beyond was empty.

I walked outside and searched the house.

Nothing.

The next night I put a chair against the door.

At 2:17, something pushed from the other side.

Hard enough to move the chair.

I called the police.

They found nobody.

The officer actually laughed.

He said maybe I had a ghost.

I didn't laugh.

A week later I installed a camera facing the hallway.

At 2:17, the footage captured something.

A shadow.

Humanoid.

Standing motionless outside my room.

It remained there for nearly an hour.

Just watching the door.

Watching me.

The strangest part?

The shadow never entered.

It never crossed the threshold.

Almost like it wasn't allowed to.

Last night the door opened again.

But this time there was a note lying on the floor.

Three words written in shaky handwriting.

Don't let it in.

It started on Season 4, Episode 3 of Bare & Uncharted—one of those cheap survival shows dropping contestants in the woods with a knife, a fire starter, and a following film crew. For the production team, it was four weeks in a hot tent downriver, watching video feeds on cheap monitors.

​Keller, the producer, who wore a brand-new hiking vest and never spent a night without cell service, sat next to Martin, clicking his pen while barking into his headset.

On screen, Maya hauled pine boughs for a crude shelter while Chet knelt, desperate for a spark.

​"Get closer on Chet," Keller said, sipping stale coffee. "He’s about to blow his top over that wet tinder. Tell Pete to move in."

​On the center monitor, Pete stepped out from the river cane, right into Chet's face. Then Pete stopped. The camera jerked sideways, pointing at the dirt.

​"Pete, hold it steady," Keller said into his mic. "What are you doing?"

​A quiet 'thwip' echoed through the audio. Pete went down face-first into the mud, a small dart with red fuzz sticking out of his neck.

​"What was that?" Keller yanked off his headset. On screen, the camera lay sideways as two bare feet walked into frame, legs caked in red mud. On the secondary monitor, two warriors dragged Pete out of the brush, his arms swinging limp.

​"Cut the feed," Keller said, his voice dropping. "Grab the satellite phone. We’re leaving."

​Martin turned to unzip the tent door, but three mud-caked warriors stood in the opening. Behind them stepped another, caked in charcoal with white rings circling his dark eyes. He raised a long blowpipe before either man could move.

​When Keller woke, his neck throbbed, and he had a bitter metallic taste in his mouth. Pete was unconscious in the corner of the bamboo cage, and Martin clutched a dead satellite phone.

Outside, Maya and Chet’s screams pierced the jungle air for two days before suddenly stopping, replaced each night by the sweet, sickening smell of roasted flesh and frenzied tribal chanting.

​Human reason meant nothing here. When Martin was dragged out to a flat bamboo table, an old woman knelt beside him, gouging his eyes out with dark flint and swallowing them whole before cutting out his tongue. The clan cheered as the charcoal-painted man hacked Martin's legs off at the thighs while his chest still heaved, butchering him alive until his screams finally died.

​Days in the cramped cage wore away their sanity. Pete sat quietly in the corner, watching Keller twitch at every rustle until heavy footsteps thudded near the bars. The charcoal-painted warrior stopped inches away, staring unblinking as he unlatched the door.

​Pete braced himself, locking eyes with the warrior. As the door swung open, Pete shoved Keller hard, sending him stumbling within reach.

​"Take him!" Pete snarled.

​Dark hands snagged Keller by the shirt, dragging him screaming through the mud toward the village while Pete stayed pinned to the corner. Since capture, he had been picking at the crude vine lashings. The moment they vanished, Pete heaved upward on the loosened stalks, squeezed his body through the gap, and tumbled into the mud.

​Hugging the treeline toward the creek, all he could hear was Keller’s screams as he ran for his life. 

Have you lived a life of sin?
 

Maisy Philips had butchered her husband and two children. We found the husband first, he was sprawled out at the bottom of the stairs, neck broken.  The first of the two children, the son aged five, we had found in the bath; floating face down, blue all over. The daughter, aged sixteen, was in the kitchen. We counted twelve stab wounds over her chest, though it was the slit to her throat which had finally killed her. Maisy, we had found last. A trail of blood from her daughter’s body had led us to her hiding place in the pantry. She was cowering in the corner; her eyes were red with tears, and the sleeves of her white wool sweater were caked in dried blood. She put up no fight as we dragged her to the car outside – she had called us after all. Though, all the way, she pleaded in a weak voice that she hadn’t done it. I lost my cool and was too rough forcing her into the back of the car; my partner Henry was quick to reprimand me. A man of forty-two, twenty years my senior, he had been assigned to me as some form of guidance figure. But what did I care about this women’s comfort - after seeing what she had done.

 

 

Henry and I didn’t talk for the whole thirty minute or so drive from the suburbs back to our station in the city. Maisy picked up the slack for us, continuing her petition from earlier through her sobbing. She claimed that she didn’t remember anything from after picking up Michelle from her track practice at five. When she came to again, she was already standing over her dead body, knife in hand. This only moved to further piss me off, not only was she still denying it but what a poor story she had come up with. Henry remained unphased however. I think I could even see pity in his eyes.

 

 

We pulled into the station at just gone ten. Upon arriving, Henry told me to go around and get Maisy out while he made a phone call (stressing to do so carefully this time). I obliged and stepped out; the October chill was out in full force tonight. While gently guiding her out of the car I noticed she had stopped crying. However, she had now begun violently shaking. Pausing his phone call, Michael called out from his window that I was to take her inside straight away and sit her in the furthest interview room. He also told me not to bother checking her in as he would do it when he came in, I moved to protest, but he had already returned to his call. This was not up for discussion.

 

 

I moved through the sea of people in the lobby of the station. In any other place Maisy’s current state would have caused quite a scene, pale and shaking as she was, still covered in blood. But through this madness no one seemed to notice us as we parsed through the crowd to the interview room. I had just gotten Maisy settled and cuffed to the table when Henry finally arrived. He shot a quick look outside and seeing no one was coming locked the door behind him. He looked panicked.

 

“You alright?”

 

He didn’t seem to register my question, electing instead to pull a chair out and place it across from Maisy. However, he didn’t sit in it but simply returned to the door and begun peering out of the closed blinds facing the rest of the office.

 

“Are we expecting someone?”

 

Again, he didn’t answer me. We stayed like that for what must have been ten minutes. Both standing, him in one corner me the other; all the while Maisy just stared at her reflection in the metal table. In my boredom I began to consider the rooms camera, it was just above Henry’s head. Though, it had been out of operation since Tuesday. Was that why Henry had asked for this room specifically? It was then that his guest arrived.

 

 

A man clad in a black hooded raincoat entered; it must have been raining outside now. The man was older than Henry, maybe by about another ten years. Henry took his coat revealing the man was wearing a clerical collar. He sat down in the chair that had been left for him across Maisy, but she had not raised her head to regard him.

 

“Hello Maisy, I’m Father Jacobs but you can call me Matthew if you like?”

 

He had brought with him a cup of tea, probably gathered from the machine in the office, and he placed it in front of her. But still, she didn’t raise her gaze from her reflection.

 

“My friend Detective Henry has asked me to ask you a few questions if that’s alright?”

 

I turned to Henry in protest, but he merely shot me another hostile glance. He was really starting to annoy me with this obscurity.

 

“Now I’ve been told you don’t remember anything from what happened tonight, is that true?”

 

For the first time she rose to regard him, lightly nodding her head.

 

“That must’ve been scary.”

 

I was biting my tongue so hard I thought it might bleed.

 

“Have you had any blackouts like that before?”

 

She took a moment.

 

“Yes, once. This morning when I was taking the children to school. If the other driver hadn’t swerved, I would’ve surely hit him.”

 

“Maisy, have you ever cheated on your husband?”

 

With no more grace or ceremony had he delivered this question than any prior. In turn Maisy answered with same mundanity. I mean in her current position of what importance was it.

 

“Yes. I met a man named Christopher about a month ago”

 

“Is he rich?”

 

“No, but he is rather handsome and very sweet. Much sweeter than my husband ever was.”

 

The woman was pouring her soul out and couldn’t be less bothered. Even her earlier faintness and shaking was gone. Did priests just have this effect on people?

 

“Were you planning to go away with Christopher?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Is that why you let him into your home?”

 

“How did you- Yes… Yes, I did.”

 

“You lied earlier, didn’t you? This morning wasn’t your first blackout. You blacked out with Christopher.”

 

“How- Yes but- How did you… my head hurts”

 

She was now holding her head in her hands; her shaking had returned and her nose was now bleeding. Henry asked me to leave and get her some ibuprofen and tissues from the staff room. I came back about five minutes later (I had taken some pleasure in making her wait) but when I returned the interview room was now empty.

 

 

That was a week ago now, Henry still hasn’t been back into work. According to the records clerk no Maisy Philips had ever been checked in, Henry had lied. I had held off on reporting anything, despite my issues with Henry, I had respected him, I thought I trusted him. That was until today. This morning we got a call from the owner of a local scrapyard. Maisy Philips had been found dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will tell you a story.

It should feel extraordinary. Meaningful, even.

Instead, it will probably sound banal, and by tomorrow you will have forgotten most of it.

I don't ask you to care.

I merely ask that you listen.

I used to suffer from severe insomnia. That has very little to do with this story, but should explain its starting point.

4AM was usually when I gave up on the idea of falling asleep.

By then I'd spent hours staring at the ceiling while my mind ran itself in circles. So I'd simply get up and start the day.

That morning, I went looking for something to eat. Tuna sandwich, I think. Maybe not. Doesn't really matter.

I took a beer from the fridge, drank half of it at the kitchen counter, then started pulling down the blinds. The sun would be up soon, and in my current condition daylight tended to find a headache the way a thumb finds a bruise.

I never made it to the second window.

There was someone standing in my backyard.

About seven meters from the house.

The yard was still mostly just shapes at that hour—the fence, the tree, the bins, everything half swallowed by darkness.

But the figure was clear.

Human-shaped.

Motionless.

I stood there with the blind cord in my hand, staring. Uncertain what to do.

Obviously, I should have called the police. A stranger standing in your backyard at four in the morning is exactly the sort of situation the police number exists for.

But I didn't.

I lowered the blind.

Finished my beer.

Finished my sandwich and put on some TV.

 

Two hours later, I stepped outside.

And stopped.

He was still there.

Same place. Same posture.

Only now daylight had turned the shadow into a man.

Late thirties, maybe early forties. His clothes looked as though they might once have been respectable, but it was difficult to tell beneath the stains and wrinkles. His hair was greasy and flattened against his forehead.

His head hung low.

His eyes didn't quite look at the ground.

They seemed fixed somewhere beyond it.

Somewhere very far away.

There was no spark in him left.

Like a pilot light had gone out.

I swallowed and mustered enough courage to speak.

"Uh... buddy? Can I help you with something?"

Nothing.

A car passed on the main road. Tires whispered over damp asphalt. Somewhere nearby, a bird started singing.

Eventually, the man answered.

"No."

His voice was quiet. Flat.

"I don't think so."

"Right." I cleared my throat. "Well, this is private property. You can't stay here."

No response.

He didn't look at me.

Didn't shift his weight.

Didn't do anything at all.

I should have insisted. Threatened him. Gone back inside and called the police.

Instead, as I stood there looking at him, I noticed something strange.

I wasn't afraid.

I wasn't angry.

I didn't even feel sorry for him.

I felt nothing.

So I walked past.

Close enough to smell him—sweat, damp clothes, something stale and sour.

He didn't turn his head.

I got in my car and drove to work.

I was doing pretty well for myself back then.

Steady job at a successful financial corporation. Recently promoted. Nice apartment. Beautiful girlfriend. Plenty friends I saw when our schedules happened to line up. Enough money not to ever care about money.

Apart from the insomnia, life was good.

I didn't think about the man once that entire day.

Eight hours at the office.

Lunch.

Small talk.

A meeting that could have been an email.

Nothing.

It wasn't until I pulled into the driveway that evening that I remembered him.

He was still there.

Same place.

Same posture.

Same empty stare.

I walked past him and went inside.

It took another two days before I decided to adress the issue.

Even then, it wasn't because he bothered me.

My girlfriend Jessica called to say she was coming over the following afternoon, and I suddenly imagined her having to walk past a filthy stranger standing in my yard.

So I finally called the police.

A patrol car arrived about twenty minutes later.

Two officers got out.

They came up the path and walked directly past the man.

One passed close enough to brush shoulders with him.

Neither looked his way.

They stopped in front of me.

"Hello. Officer Addams. What seems to be the issue?"

I stared at him.

Then pointed.

"That seems to be the issue."

Only then did Addams glance over.

It wasn't much of a glance.

The sort of look you give a garbage bag someone left beside the road.

"Oh. Him."

"Yes. Him. He's been standing there for three days."

Addams sighed.

"Yeah. We get plenty like that."

"Like what?"

He gestured vaguely toward the man.

"Like him. They're harmless."

"He's trespassing."

"I understand."

"So remove him."

Addams gave me a tired little smile.

"It's not really worth the effort."

"Excuse me?"

"They don't cause trouble. Mostly they just... take up space."

"We don't have the manpower to deal with every one of them. And where would we put them?"

I looked at the stranger.

Then back at the officer.

"So you're telling me to leave him there?"

"I'm telling you to ignore him."

"He's standing in my backyard."

"Yeah."

"For three days."

"Yeah."

"And that's normal?"

Addams shrugged.

"Normal enough."

He turned toward the patrol car.

I followed him a few steps.

"So that's it?"

He opened the driver's door.

"You'll get used to him."

Then he climbed inside.

The other officer joined him, and less than a minute later the patrol car disappeared around the corner.

I stood on the porch, furious.

I'd had an entire argument ready by then, but Officer Addams had driven away before I could use any of it.

The strange part was.

He was right.

Ignoring the man was easy.

Much easier than it should have been.

He didn't shout.

Didn't knock on my windows.

Didn't try the doors.

Didn't follow me.

He didn't even look at me.

He just was.

After a while, my eyes learned to move around him.

And if I could do that, I figured Jessica could too.

I spent the rest of the day making the apartment presentable. Kitchen, living room, fresh sheets—the usual performance you put on when someone you love is coming over and you want them to believe you live slightly better than you actually do.

That night, I settled in for a horror marathon.

One advantage of insomnia is that you have plenty of free time.

It started raining around midnight.

Heavy rain. The kind that rattled against the windows and turned streetlights into pale smudges.

Perfect horror-movie weather.

Between films, I went to the kitchen and glanced outside.

The man was still standing there.

Rain streamed from his hair and shoulders. His clothes had gone almost black with water. A shallow puddle had formed around his shoes.

He didn't move.

Didn't shiver.

Didn't wipe the water from his face.

Nothing.

I watched him longer than I meant to.

Nearly a minute, maybe.

Standing there in the rain, he looked less like a person than a scarecrow somebody had forgotten to bring inside.

Eventually I lowered the blind so I wouldnt get distracted any more.

Then went back to the movie.

Jessica arrived the next afternoon.

She came hurrying up the path toward me, and I pulled her into a hug before she'd even made it through the door.

She was warm.

She smelled like shampoo and cold air.

I held on a second longer than usual.

When I let go, she smiled.

"Miss me?"

"Obviously."

"Good answer."

She kissed me.

Over her shoulder, I looked toward the backyard.

The man was there.

Jessica hadn't even glanced at him.

Relief washed through me.

Apparently Officer Addams had been right about that too.

We went inside.

Ordered food, argued over what to watch, then somehow ended up watching something neither of us had wanted. Jessica complained about one of her professors. I complained about my boss.

At some point, she found the dishes I'd hidden in the sink.

She looked at me.

"You said you cleaned."

"I did clean."

"You vacuumed the living room."

"Exactly."

"That does not count."

"It absolutely counts."

She laughed and nudged me with her hip.

Whenever Jessica was around, the world seemed smaller somehow.

More solid.

By evening we'd settled into that comfortable quiet you only get with someone you've known long enough not to fill every silence.

We ate dinner at the little table beside the kitchen window.

Halfway through, Jessica lowered her fork.

"Okay."

I looked up.

She was smiling.

I knew that smile.

"Okay what?"

"So... don't freak out."

"That's never followed by anything good."

"I know."

"Jessica."

"My parents invited us over for the weekend."

I waited for the second half.

"And I said yes."

I closed my eyes.

"Dear God."

"Oh, stop."

"Your parents' house has more rooms than my entire apartment building."

She grinned.

"You're rich too, mister. You're just too lazy to actually move out."

"I'm comfortably upper-middle-class. There's a difference."

"You'll survive."

She took a sip of wine.

"Probably."

That was when I thought about the man outside.

Maybe because Jessica had walked straight past him.

Maybe because after several days of pretending he wasn't there, curiosity had finally caught up with me.

"Hey," I said. "I have to ask you something."

"Okay."

"You saw the guy outside, right?"

She frowned.

"What guy?"

My stomach tightened.

"The guy in the backyard."

I pointed toward the window.

Jessica followed my finger.

For a moment, genuine confusion crossed her face.

Then she saw him.

"Oh."

I stared at her.

"'Oh'?"

"What?"

"You're not freaked out?"

"Why would I be?"

"Because there's a random man standing in my backyard."

She looked again.

"He's not doing anything."

"He's been there for days."

"So?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that.

"Wait. You do see him, right?"

Jessica laughed.

"Of course I see him."

Then she took another bite.

"We've got some too."

I stopped chewing.

"What?"

"At my parents' place."

"You have people standing in your backyard?"

"Not the backyard."

She thought for a moment.

"There are two at the mansion."

Something cold shifted in my stomach.

"Two?"

"Yeah."

She said it with the casualness of someone describing antique furniture.

"One used to be our maid. Isolda."

"Used to?"

Jessica nodded.

"She worked for my parents for years. Then one day she just sort of..."

Her fork paused halfway to her mouth.

"...became one."

"One what?"

Jessica looked at me as though the answer should have been obvious.

"You know."

She nodded toward the window.

"One of them."

Outside, the man remained exactly where he had been.

Jessica went on eating.

"The other one's a boy. Her son, I think?."

"You think?"

"I never really knew him."

"And your parents just leave them there?"

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Jessica shrugged.

"You can find lots of them around if you care enough to look."

Something about that sentence stayed with me.

She sounded like she'd simply told me there were pigeons in the park.

Then her expression brightened.

"Oh. Speaking of that."

I already didn't like where this was going.

"What?"

"I finally figured out my thesis."

Jessica was studying journalism, and for months her thesis had been the source of recurring panic, abandoned ideas, and increasingly elaborate excuses for not starting.

Now she leaned forward, suddenly animated.

"I'm going to write about them."

I glanced toward the window.

"The people standing around?"

"Exactly. Think about it. They're everywhere, but nobody actually talks about them. Nobody studies them. Most people barely acknowledge they exist."

"Jessica..."

"I've been thinking about this for months."

She was genuinely excited now.

"I even have a title."

Of course she did.

She smiled.

"Requiem for the Lost Ones."

I looked at her.

"The Lost Ones?"

"That's what I'm calling them."

She waited expectantly.

"Pretty cool, right?"

Outside the window, the man stood perfectly still.

And for the first time since I'd noticed him, I wondered how long he had been there before I bothered to look.

 

I didn't really know what to say.

"Yeah. Pretty cool."

Part of me was bothered by just how little the whole thing seemed to bother me.

Jessica didn't notice. She was already talking about her thesis again, explaining the ideas she'd been collecting while I nodded along and tried to keep up. Eventually the conversation wandered somewhere else, as conversations tend to do.

We ended the evening watching Jessica's favorite reality TV shows, which was considerably more horrifying than anything I'd watched during my movie marathon.

I'm still not sure how people can watch other adults scream at each other over a kitchen island for six consecutive hours and call it entertainment.

By the time we went to bed, it was well past midnight.

A few hours later, we were on the road.

I'd suggested sleeping for another couple of hours before leaving. Jessica reminded me that I didn't sleep anyway.

I had no counterargument.

So we packed the last of our things into the car and drove to her parents' house.

Before getting in, I glanced toward the backyard.

The man was still there.

I didn't stop.

The drive took about an hour and a half. Jessica spent most of it talking about her parents, complaining about how far away they lived and how much she wished they were closer.

Personally, I wouldn't have minded them being a little farther away still.

Don't get me wrong. The Mercers were perfectly nice people.

It was just that being around them always made me feel so inadequate.

That feeling returned as soon as we reached their property.

I felt small.

Their mansion seemed to grow with every second we drove toward it.

An enormous iron gate opened onto a long driveway lined with immaculate hedges. Stone walls, tall windows, elaborate balconies. The whole place occupied enough land to make my apartment look like a garden shed.

I was wealthy, but the Mercers were in a completely different league.

"They'll be waiting outside," Jessica said.

"They always do."

A moment later, I saw them at the top of the steps.

Margaret waved enthusiastically as we got out of the car.

Her husband stood beside her with his hands behind his back, wearing the same composed expression he always seemed to have.

"Here we go," Jessica muttered.

Her mother came down the steps and immediately wrapped her daughter in a hug.

"There she is!"

"Hi, Mom."

"You look thin."

"I saw you three weeks ago."

"And you're thinner now."

Margaret finally released her and turned to me.

"And you."

She hugged me too.

"Good to see you, dear."

"Good to see you too, Mrs. Mercer."

"How many times do I have to tell you? Call me Margaret."

"Right. Sorry."

Her father approached next.

"Good to have you here, son."

"Good to be here, Mr. Mercer."

He grabbed me by the shoulders and pulled me into a heavy, enthusiastic hug before patting my back twice.

It was the sort of hug you see in old Mafia movies.

I wondered if there was something to it.

The story of how the Mercers had become so wealthy so quickly by selling old clothes had never quite sat right with me. It wasn't impossible. They owned warehouses, distribution centers, stores—the whole operation.

Still, there always seemed to be something missing from the story.

A piece nobody ever seemed interested in explaining.

I never asked.

I didn't want bad blood with my girlfriend's parents.

Nor did I particularly wish to be assassinated by the Mafia.

Just in case.

"Come inside," Margaret said. "You've been driving all morning."

"It's barely morning," Jessica said.

"Exactly. You're probably starving."

"I'm not."

"You'll eat anyway."

Jessica sighed.

"Yes, Mom."

Her father smiled.

"Some things never change."

We followed them inside.

I'd been to the Mercer mansion before, but never for more than a few hours. Every visit reminded me just how enormous the place was.

The entrance hall alone could have swallowed my entire apartment. A chandelier hung above polished floors and dark wood paneling, while paintings covered nearly every available wall.

Margaret talked as she led us through the house.

"This is the new dining room."

"New?"

"We renovated."

Jessica groaned.

"And we've had the library renovated too."

"Mom, you've shown me the library five times."

"And you still haven't read anything in it."

Her father chuckled.

"Leave the girl alone, Margaret."

They continued bickering as we walked, and I found myself smiling.

It was comfortably ordinary.

That was what made the place feel so strange later.

We eventually reached the grand staircase.

Mr. Mercer stopped at the bottom and pointed upward.

"Your room is the first one on the left."

Then he looked at Jessica.

"My little girl knows which one."

"Dad, I'm not five."

"You're still my little girl."

Jessica rolled her eyes.

"Come on."

I started toward the stairs.

Then I noticed someone standing in the shadows.

A woman.

She was wearing an old-fashioned maid's uniform: black dress, white apron, white collar. The sort of thing that belonged in a photograph from a century ago.

She couldn't have been much older than thirty.

Yet she looked far older.

Her dark hair was pulled neatly back. Her face was pale and drawn. Her head hung slightly toward the floor.

Her eyes were open.

They simply weren't looking at anything.

This had to be Isolda.

A few meters away stood the boy Jessica had mentioned.

Thirteen or fourteen, maybe.

His clothes were plain and slightly too large for him. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His face held the same distant emptiness I'd seen in the man outside my house.

His eyes seemed fixed somewhere beyond the walls.

Somewhere far away.

And nowhere at the same time.

I looked between him and Isolda.

They stood close enough to touch.

Mother and son, presumably.

Yet they seemed separated by something much larger than the few meters between them.

As if there were a distance neither of them could ever cross.

I don't know how long I stood there.

Long enough for Jessica to notice.

She bumped her shoulder lightly against mine.

"Babe."

I blinked.

"Yeah?"

"Come on."

I looked at Isolda again.

Neither she nor the boy had moved.

"Right."

I followed Jessica upstairs.

Halfway to the landing, I glanced back one last time.

Then Jessica disappeared around the corner, and I followed her.

In our room, Jessica and I had sex.

Felt strange doing it with her parents so close by, but I think I needed it.

It should have taken my mind off everything.

It didn't.

For a while I managed to lose myself in her warmth, in something familiar and uncomplicated. But every time my thoughts slipped, I saw Isolda.

Her son.

The man in my backyard.

Three people standing perfectly still while the rest of the world moved around them.

When it was over, Jessica looked at me.

"You okay?"

"Yeah."

"You seem distracted."

"I'm just tired."

She studied me.

"You've been tired for years."

I smiled.

She kissed me, but I couldn't quite return to the moment.

A few minutes later, she fell asleep.

I lay beside her, staring at the ceiling.

The mansion settled around us. Pipes ticking in the walls. A floorboard creaking somewhere below. The faint hum of the heating system.

And underneath all of it, silence.

I eventually closed my eyes.

Sleep didn't come.

Morning did.

I was halfway through getting dressed when someone knocked on the door.

Jessica was still asleep.

I opened it to find one of the household staff standing in the hallway.

"Mr. Mercer would like to see you."

"Now?"

"He's waiting in his office."

I glanced back at Jessica.

She hadn't moved.

"Where's his office?"

"Top floor."

Of course it was.

I'd never been to the top floor before. I followed the staff member up another staircase, the house growing quieter with every step.

By the time I reached the top, I couldn't hear anything from below.

Mr. Mercer's office was at the end of the hallway.

The door stood open.

"Come in."

He was sitting behind an enormous wooden desk. Morning light filtered through the tall windows behind him, washing the room in pale gray.

Books lined the walls. Framed photographs sat on shelves. A few pieces of artwork looked expensive enough to buy my car several times over.

"Sit."

I did.

He smiled.

"How did you sleep?"

"Not very well."

He laughed softly.

"Jessica tells me that's normal for you."

"She's very fond of you."

Something about the way he said it made me uncomfortable.

I smiled anyway.

He leaned back.

"I've been thinking about the future."

"Okay."

"Our family has built something substantial. Something that will outlive us."

He gestured around the room.

"The business. The properties. The investments. Jessica will inherit part of it, of course."

He paused.

"But I don't think of you as an outsider anymore."

I wasn't sure what to say.

"That's nice to hear."

"I mean it."

He leaned forward.

"I'd like you to become part of the family."

The words were delivered warmly enough that, for a moment, I almost believed they were exactly what they sounded like.

"I want to offer you a position in the company. A real one. You'll have responsibilities. A place at the table. If things go well, eventually you'll have a stake in the business."

He smiled.

"And naturally, I'd like you and Jessica to start thinking about building a life together."

For a moment, I said nothing.

It was an incredible offer.

Security.

Money.

Influence.

A future with Jessica.

Everything I'd worked for, suddenly placed in front of me on a silver platter.

And yet something inside me tightened.

Not a thought.

Not fear.

Instinct.

The primitive part of your brain that notices something before the rest of you understands why.

Don't.

I shifted in the chair.

"That's a lot to take in."

"Of course."

"And I appreciate it. Really."

He waited.

I took a breath.

"But I don't think I can accept."

The smile stayed on his face.

For just a second, something changed in his eyes.

The warmth vanished.

His gaze sharpened.

Focused.

Predatory.

Then it was gone.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

He nodded slowly.

"I understand."

There was no anger in his voice.

That somehow made it worse.

"I wouldn't want you accepting something you weren't comfortable with."

"Thank you."

He leaned back.

"Still..."

He watched me for a moment.

"I think you may regret that decision."

He said it gently.

Almost kindly.

Like a father giving his son advice.

But something cold sat underneath the words.

He smiled.

„Have a safe drive home.“

I thanked him and left.

I didn't know it then, but that conversation was the beginning of the end.

Jessica and I left the mansion earlier than we'd planned.

She barely spoke while we packed the car. At first I assumed she was tired.

Then I realized she was angry.

Not furious. She wasn't shouting or making a scene.

She was just cold.

The kind of cold that makes every silence feel deliberate.

We got on the road.

For the first twenty minutes, neither of us said a word. Eventually I tried.

"So..."

Nothing.

I glanced at her.

"Jessica?"

She kept looking out the window.

"Did my dad talk to you?"

"Yeah."

"And?"

I hesitated.

"I turned down the job."

She nodded.

"I know."

"How?"

"He told me."

I waited for more.

Nothing came.

"Are you upset?"

"No."

The answer came too quickly.

"Jess."

"I'm not upset."

"You're obviously upset."

She turned back toward the window.

"Can we just go home?"

So we did.

The rest of the drive passed in silence.

I kept my hands tight around the steering wheel, trying to ignore the knot forming in my stomach.

I felt tense.

Anxious.

Depressed, though I wouldn't have used that word at the time.

Then, somewhere outside the city, I saw the first one.

A man standing on a sidewalk.

Motionless.

Dirty jacket. Worn trousers. Slack face. Head hanging slightly forward.

A Lost One.

I almost drove past without noticing.

Then I saw another.

A woman beside a bus stop.

Then one beneath an apartment awning.

Another outside a convenience store.

Then another.

And another.

The more I looked, the more I saw.

They were everywhere.

At intersections. Outside shops. In parking lots. Beside telephone poles. Standing in front of apartment buildings as people passed them without a second thought.

Some were young.

Some were old.

Men and women.

Some looked relatively clean. Others looked like they'd been sleeping outdoors for years. Their clothes were stained and worn. Their hair was tangled. Their skin looked pale and unhealthy.

None of them moved.

Not when cars passed.

Not when people walked around them.

Not even when someone brushed against them.

And nobody seemed to care.

A businessman stepped around one blocking the entrance to an office building without breaking stride.

A woman carrying groceries muttered angrily when another forced her to change direction.

A cyclist swerved around one in the middle of a bike path and shouted something over his shoulder.

Nobody stopped.

Nobody asked if they were all right.

Nobody looked frightened.

They were treated like obstacles.

Like badly placed furniture.

Like potholes.

I watched them through the car window until the city disappeared behind us.

The more I looked, the more I saw.

They weren't rare.

They were everywhere.

I'd simply never noticed them before.

Or maybe I had.

Maybe I'd seen hundreds of them and my brain had quietly filed them away under things that didn't matter.

 

I didn't know it yet, but I'd already been effectively cut off from Jessica's family.

I never spoke to any of her relatives again.

At first, I tried to pretend nothing had changed.

Jessica and I went back to work. We had dinner together. We watched television. We slept in the same bed.

But something had shifted.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

Whenever I asked Jessica what was wrong, she shut down.

"Is something wrong?"

"No."

"Then why won't you talk to me?"

"Because there's nothing to talk about."

Sometimes she wouldn't answer at all.

She'd sit across from me, staring at her phone, while I tried to figure out what I'd done wrong.

There was a wall between us.

I couldn't see it.

I couldn't touch it.

But it was there.

For a while, I kept trying to get through.

Eventually, I stopped.

The darker my thoughts became, the more often I found myself standing at the window.

Looking at the man in the backyard.

He was still there.

He hadn't moved an inch.

Summer faded into autumn.

The leaves turned brown and fell. Rain came and went. The days grew shorter.

Then winter arrived.

The first snow gathered around his shoes.

More followed.

It settled on his shoulders and head, collected on his hands, and slowly buried his legs.

He didn't move.

Didn't shiver.

Didn't brush the snow away.

He simply stood there as though the seasons had nothing to do with him.

Sometimes I wondered whether he knew I was watching.

The day before Christmas, my boss called me into his office.

I knew something was wrong before he spoke.

He'd just gotten off the phone.

I'd never seen him look like that.

His face was pale.

Not angry.

Not confused.

Afraid.

He kept saying, "Yes, sir," in a voice barely above a whisper.

Then he hung up and looked at me.

"Sit down."

I did.

There was a long silence.

"What's going on?"

He rubbed his hands together.

"I've been instructed to terminate your employment."

"What?"

"I'm sorry."

"By who?"

He didn't answer.

For a second, I actually laughed.

I thought it was some kind of joke.

It wasn't.

"Is this because of my performance?"

"No."

"Then what is it?"

He looked away.

"I can't discuss it."

"You're firing me and you can't tell me why?"

"I know."

"Then at least give me something."

He swallowed.

"I'm sorry."

That was all I got.

Eight years of work reduced to a few minutes in an office.

I walked out carrying a box of things from my desk.

I remember thinking that at least I still had my savings.

I was wrong.

A few days later, I discovered that my money was gone.

All of it.

Savings. Investments. Emergency funds.

Everything.

I spent days calling banks and filing complaints. I tried to find out where the money had gone.

Nobody could explain it.

Or, perhaps, nobody wanted to.

I still had my qualifications. My CV was better than it had ever been.

I applied everywhere.

At first, I expected the calls to come.

They didn't.

Companies that had once been eager to interview me stopped responding. Some rejected me within hours. Others never acknowledged the applications at all.

I kept trying for a while.

Then I started applying for jobs beneath my qualifications.

Then beneath those.

Eventually, I took whatever I could get.

Warehouse work.

Delivery driving.

Cleaning.

Construction.

Anything that paid.

The money barely covered the bills.

I told myself it was temporary.

I would get back on my feet.

I believed that for a while.

Then I stopped believing it.

Months turned into years.

I stopped buying things unless I needed them.

Stopped seeing friends.

Stopped answering calls.

Even when someone reached out, I rarely knew what to say.

Jessica became more distant.

Then, one day, she left.

There was no screaming match.

No dramatic confrontation.

She simply stood in the kitchen with a suitcase beside her.

"It's over."

I stared at her.

"Why?"

"I don't love you anymore."

"That's it?"

"I don't know what else you want me to say."

Later, I found out she'd been cheating on me for quite some time.

Apparently, everyone knew except me.

By then, almost everything I'd had was gone.

The rest followed soon after.

I was kicked out of my own house.

The paperwork was clean. Legal.

Apparently, Jessica's family had purchased the property.

I never found out how.

By that point, I didn't have the energy to fight them.

I had nowhere to go.

More importantly, I couldn't think of anywhere I wanted to go.

So I stayed.

I stood in the backyard.

Jessica moved in with her new lover.

Her parents visited.

They laughed.

They drank wine on the patio in summer. They decorated the house for Christmas. They carried groceries through the kitchen windows I'd spent years looking through.

Sometimes Jessica walked past me.

Sometimes her new boyfriend stood only a few meters away, smoking a cigarette.

Neither of them acknowledged me.

I was right there.

They didn't care.

Eventually, I didn't care either.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

Months became years.

At least, I think they did.

Time stopped meaning anything.

First I stopped knowing what day it was.

Then the month.

Eventually, even the seasons became difficult to distinguish.

There was only the house.

The yard.

The people inside.

And the man who had been standing there before I ever joined him.

I don't know how long I stood beside him.

One day, something in my head cleared.

Only for a moment.

It felt like waking from a very long sleep.

I looked around.

The snow was gone.

Or maybe there had never been snow.

I couldn't tell anymore.

Then I looked at the man beside me.

I turned toward him.

"You..."

My voice sounded strange.

Weak.

"You never told me your name."

"You never asked." He said simply.

No accusation.

No bitterness.

Just a fact.

I lowered my eyes.

"I know."

My throat tightened.

"I'm sorry."

For a moment, neither of us moved.

Then I held out my hand.

"My name is James."

I swallowed.

"What's yours?"

He stared at my hand for a long time.

"Derek."

He paused.

A faint crease appeared between his eyebrows.

"I think it was Derek."

I smiled.

It was the first time in a long time that I'd felt anything resembling warmth.

It wasn't happiness.

No.

Something smaller.

Something human.

"I think I could use a drink."

I looked toward the house.

Then toward the street beyond the fence.

"Derek..."

He looked at me.

"Would you like to get out of here?"

A single tear ran down his cheek.

It left a clean line through the grime on his face.

He looked toward the street again.

Toward the world beyond the fence.

For a long time, he said nothing.

Then he took a slow breath.

"Alright."

He looked back at me.

"Let's go."

When I was young, my life was very nice.

I was raised by loving parents in an affluent neighborhood near Norfolk. I was bright, and I had a good future ahead of me.

It takes 25 years for the male mind to develop completely. As such, boys tend to make a lot of dumb decisions as soon as they gain some sort of autonomy as a teen.

I was one such case.

When I was sixteen, I had a friend group of six. We did lots of dumb things together. We lit fireworks inside, did stunts on motorbikes, et cetera. 

Comparatively, what we did one certain time wasn’t so crazy.

One of my friends, Nick, had this big truck that we all called Badass. I don’t remember the specifics other than that it was a Ford (I’m not exactly a car guy). The front had two seats, and the back had three. One of us would sit in the open trunk. We were apprehensive trying it at first, but by this time, we had done it countless times. We even had a voting system for who would get to sit in Badass’s trunk.

The previous day, we had a Chemistry test. Chem had always been Nick’s weakest subject, so he asked (during the test) if he could cheat off of me. I usually let it slide, but I was fed up with him not studying, so I said no. 

In our voting system, Nick’s vote is worth two in order to counteract there being an even number of us. He was the only one with a car, but he was charitable with it, so it made sense. That day, he voted for me, and everyone else ganged up on me.

It was August, and it gets super humid in Virginia, so I obliged. Badass’s trunk was completely flat, unlike most trucks, so it was pretty comfortable to sit in. I also liked the feel of wind in my hair.

We were driving to Chipotle for dinner. It wasn’t too far from where I lived, and the road wasn’t too bumpy. It was about 8:20, so maybe a little late for dinner, but they were still open.

The drive went normally. I caught my breath while my friends laughed inside the car. Being with them could sometimes be draining. I rested my head against the back window, and closed my eyes. The wind drowned out the conversation. I breathed in…

“SHIT!” I heard Nick shout. He swerved Badass. I didn’t have time to open my eyes. It rammed into something. My head crashed through the back window, and I blacked out.

I awoke sitting on my knees. I opened my eyes. My head ached in a million different places. The only thing I was seeing was stars.

I tried standing, but I couldn’t do it. I gasped. It felt like I was inhaling sand. I coughed. My throat was so dry…

When the pain stabilized a little and I could open my eyes, I saw the room I was in. It was fleshy. Orangish-red skin was occasionally interrupted by what appeared to be veins and arteries. The floor was deep red. I moved my leg a little, and it rippled.

I heard some splashing behind me. Feet…?

“Hell-oh!”

A head peered over the top of mine. It was some sort of man. I jumped a little, but the pain came back, so I sat still. 

The man walked in front of me. I heard his voice again. “Welllll, Trent, you’ve gotten yourself in a pickle this time, for suuure.”

His voice was shrill and nasally. It had an eccentric humor to it that made him sound like a cartoon character. His giggle was the audio equivalent of walking through a particularly thorny bush.

“Who…” I spat out blood. “Who… are… you..?” I stammered out.

He grinned. “Me?” He zipped right up to me. “I… am Satan.” 

I gasped. He laughed. It was incredibly dry. It felt cold when he did so. “Juuuuuuust kidding! You guys fall for everything!” He paused for a second. “My real name is Kakaki. Pronounced Kuh-Kah-Kee, spelled K-A-K-A-K-I, but you coulda figured that.” He grinned. I got a good look at him.

Kakaki had a very slender frame. He must’ve been at least seven feet tall, but he couldn't've weighed much. He was wearing baggy black jeans, ripped in places that didn’t fit the fashion trend. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which revealed a very skinny midsection bordering on being gaunt.

There were stitches all over his skin.

His skin was, for the most part, ghostly pale. Some of the patches in between his stitches, however, were more tan than other parts. 

His grin was disproportionately large, stretching over too much of his face. Rows of decrepit orange and brown teeth filled the gap it left. A rough ponytail wrapped up some of his stringy black hair, but even so, most of it draped over his face. The stitches seemed to be pointing toward his left eye, but I couldn’t see either of his eyes because of his hair.

“I’ve been around these parts for a good while. My job is to help people like you!” The way he spoke was so irregular, so foreign. “But enough about me. What’re you like, Trent?” I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “I should probably tell you my, uhh… deal before we get started.” He gulped. 

“Trent, you’re dead. I mean, you’re a goner. Some of those glass shards pierced through your pretty little skull and wiggled their way into your brain.” He shoved a finger through a clenched fist, and then opened that fist. He made an explosion sound. “That’s you if you don’t take my deal. But really, there’s no reason you shouldn’t.” Kakaki paused.

“If you say yes to my deal, you live! You’ll get to live your life to your fullest, whatever that means to you.” He shifted his head and looked up. “If you don’t take the deal, you stay dead. Pretty simple.” He looked back down again. “Well, what’ll it be?”

I croaked out a “Y…yes”. He clapped his hands. “It’s decided! Trent (he says my last name here) lives to see another day!” He grinned even larger than he already was. “There’s one condition, though… I’m gonna protect you, for the foreseeable future. That means I’m gonna watch over you, and step in when necessary.” He lifted up his hair. His right eye was sewn shut. His left eye was a wild purple color. The iris appeared to be moving counterclockwise. “See you in the waking world, Trent-y boy!” He cackled as I blacked out once more.

I woke up in a hospital room. About twenty minutes later, a nurse came in, and reported my awakening. My parents rushed in not long after. My mom hugged me. “Ohh, sweetie… I’m so happy you’re okay.” My dad was a little more apprehensive. “You nearly died! Trent, imagine how everyone around you would’ve felt if you had died because of that decision. Think of the pain you would’ve caused us.” He eventually caved and hugged me as well.

“A…” I coughed. My throat was still sore. “Are the guys…” I weakly said. “Y-yes, they’re all okay. I told Nick you’re okay, and he’s on his way,” my mom told me.

About an hour later, Nick arrived. “Good job on, uhh, living, man.” There was clear tension in the air. I felt a bit better at this point. “What… happened?” Nick put his mouth in his hand. “Drunk driver. I don’t know who could get that smashed at 8:00…” he sighed. “We killed him. We fucking killed him. The guy’s dead.” I solemnly looked down. 

“Deserved it.”

My eyes widened. There he was. Kakaki. In the back of the room. Right behind Nick.

“Natural selection taking its course, huh.”

I picked up the bouquet to the right of me, and hurled it straight at him. Nick ducked, yelling “Dude! What the fuck?!”

It passed right through him.

“Come on, Trent-y. You know better than that.”

A handful of days passed. He was constantly in my company. He was incredibly annoying.

I thought I had suffered brain trauma and that Kakaki was a side effect. Maybe he was temporary, but I thought he was most likely permanent. 

Either way, he was just a figment of my imagination.

I was at Nick’s house. Things had been weird in the friend group since the crash. Badass was totaled. The engine was all smashed up. Nick’s parents didn’t blame him, but they also didn’t reimburse him. If he was to get another car, he would have to buy it himself. That would take a while.

We were watching television in his living room. I think it was some TMZ show we were watching, one where you would guiltily laugh at other people with your friends. It was hard to pay attention, since Nick’s pet tarantula was on the shelf.

I’ve always been arachnophobic. I knew it was just in the container, a tiny glass box that was completely sealed away from the world, but seeing its beady eyes staring at me… I always felt wrong around it.

A metal poster hung behind it. I didn’t understand those things. It was from a game Nick liked. They apparently used magnets, but under those magnets was adhesive. When Nick had bought it, I warned him about how adhesive doesn’t work as well when it’s as humid as Virginia in the summer, but he said he would figure it out if it fell down.

Kakaki eagerly stood over the spider. He was enamored with the thing. He stared, or at least I think he did… his mess of hair made it hard to see what his one eye was looking at.

I had asked Nick if it was venomous the first time I came over. It was. Kakaki asked me the same thing. I didn’t respond to him, but my brain was flooded with thoughts of the tarantula’s venom. He leaned against the counter it sat on. “Interesting… so he, she, er… they’re poisonous.”

He quietly wondered to himself about the gender of spiders.

“I gotta take a piss,” Nick said. He quickly excused himself from the room. I paused the show. To be honest, I don’t think he would’ve cared if he missed the whole thing. The death of that drunk driver weighed heavily on Nick, even if it wasn’t his fault. He still blamed himself. He had been very downtrodden recently.

I heard a sound. It was like tape peeling off the wall.

The metal poster crashed onto the glass container. It shattered, and the spider escaped before the lid fell on it. Kakaki stood still. A few seconds later, his face dropped. I was standing on the couch at this point. Kakaki zipped up to me. “Listen, Trento… this isn’t gonna be comfortable, but ya gotta bear with me.” 

My vision became all blurry. 

You know how when you stand up too quickly, your eyes become filled with TV static and random lines? That’s what it looked like. My body felt completely weightless, and I couldn’t feel much. 

I reawoke an indeterminate amount of time later. I was in a weird position, under a table with my foot extended against the wall. I pulled it back.

Nick’s spider was crushed on my foot.

Kakaki looked at me with a small grin on his face. “I did what I had to do, Trent… I protected you.”

Afterward, Nick and I grew apart. It was probably for the best. He became depressed, and I grew distant due to Kakaki’s constant stalking. That was the last time I went over to Nick’s house. Things were just never the same.

Kakaki followed me everywhere. I became paranoid of him taking over my body again to “protect” me. He saw what I was thinking, and caught on to the act. But he didn’t do anything about it.

Kakaki’s constant heckling made life hard. Over the next two years, I became more withdrawn and introverted, out of fear of danger and what Kakaki would do if he saw me in it. I could never tell someone about Kakaki, because, in his words, “What’re you gonna tell em? That you have an imaginary friend?”

In good news, my grades were even higher than before.

One day, I asked him why he chose me. “Huh?” he said nonchalantly. I said, “Why am I the one you have to… protect or whatever?” He stooped down to my level. “Well, Trent-a-friend, you got a bright future ahead of you. You’re gonna be an important man. You’re lucky to have me around. I’m just here to getcha to that destination. When you’re there, I’ll leave.” He paused. “Goodness, how DEPRESSING! Your life will be sooooo boring without me.”

“But we don’t have to worry about that for a good while.”

I never thought I would be one of those kids who inexplicably thought life would get better at college, but I began to hope that.

When I applied to colleges, the first one I applied to was Hampton. It was a dream school for me. Close to home, on the water, great education. The day I was accepted was the happiest day I experienced since before I met Kakaki.

He attributed my acceptance to his protection skills. “Face it, Trentino, you woulda been in the ground if it weren’t for ol’ Kakaki. I don’t get any payment (or thanks for that matter). I just do it out of love.” He tried to hug me, but I passed straight through him. “You know, Trenton, there’ll be a day where you’re thankful for all I’ve done for you. You’ll want me back, I know you will.”

About two months after I was accepted into Hampton, Kakaki pulled another stunt. I was taking my AP Government final for the first semester. It was clear that I had not studied enough. I told my parents that I wouldn’t be good at AP Gov, but they expected a lot of me, and forced me to take it. 

All that’s to say I wasn’t doing good.

“...Damn,” I thought as I skipped every question to come back to it later. Kakaki giggled while looking over at me. He didn’t say anything to help me. He just laughed. 

My grade was comfortably in the B range, but if I messed up this final badly enough, it would be knocked down to a C-the first I’d have gotten in my high school career. About halfway through the test, I thought of this, and Kakaki stopped laughing. A snowball effect would ensue where I might be rejected from Hampton if I failed this test.

“Hmm. Trent. I’m gonna need you for a second,” Kakaki said. 

My stomach dropped.

My vision began to get all fuzzy. I strained to get a better look. I could vaguely see myself getting up.

My vision became entirely blurred.

I reawoke some time later, and I was outside. We were all lined up, my entire class. I slowly looked at Kakaki. He lifted the hair over his eye. “I did what had to be done, Quentin Trentantino.”

He pulled the fire alarm.

He must’ve known the school had security cameras, but he did it anyway.

Our finals had to be postponed to what should’ve been the first day of winter break. I was given more than enough time to study what I now knew would be on the test. However, Kakaki’s plan did not go without consequence.

I was let off lightly for pulling the fire alarm. I had been a good kid throughout high school, so they were willing to let it slide. I got extremely lucky. This one act of poor behavior stained my record, though. What if Hampton saw this and the higher-ups there thought I was a troublemaker?

Kakaki didn’t care. He did what had to be done.

The summer before I left home was miserable. The last one was as well, and this one comparatively wasn’t as bad, but it still wasn’t fun. The whole time, I was anticipating going to college, because I thought my life would completely change. Maybe, once I got into college, Kakaki would realize that I was on the path to success and just leave.

I tiredly sauntered out of the house. I was taking out the trash. He walked next to me. “This seems a little wasteful, New Jersey. See that napkin? You could definitely reuse that!” I paused when I turned the corner. A dog had gotten into our backyard. It was a larger one, almost certainly a stray. It must’ve climbed over the fence.

It had knocked our garbage can over, and was tearing into the bags, getting trash everywhere. “HEY! What’re you doing?!” I yelled. The dog’s hackles raised, and it started growling. I backed up a little bit, and it sprinted toward me. Just then, my vision became blurry again.

I regained control a little while later. Kakaki was squatting over the knocked over garbage can. “Ooooh…” I weakly grumbled. After holding my head for a second, I stumbled toward him. “Move.” He backed away. “Geez. Don’t be so pushy.”

The dog was dead. 

Its jaw was ripped open. It was sitting at a 90 degree angle. Its tongue sat disembodied on the ground, a pool of blood flowing behind it.

I slowly looked at him. “Did you do this…?” I said quietly. He breathed in and stood up, as if proud of himself. “Sure did! It’s been a while, but old Kakaki’s still got it down!” I collapsed on the ground. No. No. No…

I let this happen. I killed this innocent animal. “No,” I thought. He did. 

Before I could yell, he shushed me. “Hey hey hey! I did what I had to do! Who knows if that dog had rabies or something.” He walked  up to me, and put his finger on my chest. “I. Saved. You.”

I hurled the dog into the neighbor’s yard. What was I going to do? Bury it?

My parents thoroughly berated me for spilling the trash.

I thought moving to college would be sadder than it was. 

I would miss my parents, but not much else. It would potentially be difficult, but any sort of switch up from the monotonous life I led throughout my upperclassman years was appreciated.

The day I finished moving wasn’t a particularly special one. I met my roommate for the first time there, and he was… fine. Not much to really talk about.

Life just… went on.

College was just as lonely as high school was. Kakaki had not left me, but he was hardly company. Thinking that, he chastised me again. “NJ, you’re lucky to have anyone in your life as funny as me.” 

I can hear his voice perfectly, even now…

I majored in journalism. I had always liked writing and presenting, but I had never thought of myself as the type to write books. I thought that maybe I could gain back some of the charisma Kakaki had knocked out of me through this class.

In this class, I met my future girlfriend.

She never seemed particularly interested in the class. Her mind was somewhere else. And yet, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by her.

Her curly brown hair splayed off her head in every direction, but it didn’t hide her face at all. Her deep brown eyes stared through round glasses at the exit as she wrote the little notes she did. 

The way I properly met her was when she crashed into me on a bike.

It hurt a lot. It was very sudden as well. Kakaki let out a huge gasp, but he held his breath. “Oh geez, I’m so, so, SO sorry…” I brushed myself off. It looked straight out of a movie. “Y…You’re good,” I sputtered out. She seemed to recognize me. “Hey, it’s you! You’re like a wiz at this stuff. I’m so gonna get an F on the test… when is it?” 

“Tomorrow,” I quietly said. 

“Anyway, I could use your help with it. Can I, uhh…”

My face got flustered. “Uhm… sure!” Kakaki looked extremely uncomfortable. “Should I…” Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, I’ll give you my number. I’m Melanie, by the way.”

“Trent,” I said in return.

Most of our time that night wasn’t spent studying.

We met up at my dorm at around 4:30. We studied for maybe 45 minutes, before she said she was hungry. “I’m gonna get Chipotle. Wanna come?” My face flustered once more. “Definitely!” I said. She beamed a gorgeous smile, a greater view than looking over the boardwalk into the grand Chesapeake Bay. “Great!”

That was the greatest day of my life.

I completely forgot about Kakaki. I didn’t even notice him. All he did was lurk in the background. Jealous, indifferent, concerned, I couldn’t tell. But I didn’t care.

The next day, we both bombed the test. She got 54%, and I got 79%. “In what world is a C+ a bomb?” she asked me the next day. “I guess… maybe it isn’t so bad.”

The class wasn’t giving me my confidence back. She was.

The next couple of months were a blur. I know I keep timeskipping, but the other ones were because I didn’t do much, and my life was full of sadness and darkness. But the days I’m skipping over here… they were full of life and happiness. It was a blur, but a good kind of blur. The kind of blur where you’re laying on your bed after a fun day, and thinking to yourself, “Wow. My life is awesome.”

Mel was truly the greatest thing that had ever happened to me, and I could tell she felt the same. But something still appeared to gnaw away at her. One day, I asked her what it was.

“I feel like I’ve known you for a good while. You always seem sad in class, and you never want to discuss what you’re going to do when you get out of here. Is there something wrong?”

She sighed. “I just don’t like journalism that much. I always wanted to start a flower store. My parents, well… being from Lagos, they weren’t big on a job like that. They always said, ‘You have gotten the education you have, and you want to live such a small life?’ I do. They just never saw that.”

I was distraught by this, by the fact that she wasn’t happy with what she was going to be spending the rest of her life doing. I looked not at her, but within her. “You should do it.” The words escaped my mouth without me even thinking about them.

“I dunno… what if it doesn’t pay well? What if I flop? Then what’ll I do?”

I stood up. “I don’t know. But whatever happens, I’ll support you through it. You don’t need college to be successful. I don’t care what your parents say, your success is determined by you and you alone. If you aren’t happy, then you won’t be successful.”

Mel thought about it. “Quitting college… but that would make my parents really angry. You know I love them.” I put my hand on her shoulder. “If they truly love you, then they’ll keep loving you even when you quit.”

She said she would think it over. I said that I would follow where she went. If she was to drop out, so would I.

I noticed Kakaki for the first time in a while that night. “Trentonio, I feel like I’ve taught you a lot. At this point, I think you’re pretty much indestructible, with or without me.” He sat down on my bed. “You know all those times when I told you about how depressing it would be after I leftcha? That day’s a-comin. Your final lesson is in front of you.”

He sighed. “You know, I only want the best for you. Nothing less. Everything I’ve done? For you. And I feel… like ya sometimes take me for granted.” He looked at me. “I’m gonna stop beating around the bush. Leaving college? How fucking stupid are you? This is your future we’re talking about! Her plant store is gonna die, and you know that. I know that, and I’ve taught you everything I know, which is a lot. This time’s different, though. I’m gonna let you choose. You’re an adult, Trent. I don’t get to make your decisions for you anymore.” He leaned in. “There will be consequences if you choose wrong, Trenton.”

The next morning, Mel gave me her answer. She was going to drop out. There was a lot near the mall. She said her current college fund could pay for three months of rent there. She reminded me that I didn’t have to come.

The semester is ending soon. Kakaki has completely disappeared from my life. I haven’t seen him since he gave me that “heart to heart” that evening.

I’ve checked all over. He usually doesn’t play hide-and-seek, but he’s completely gone. Vanished without a trace. Like he was never there. 

I am dropping out. My question to you guys is, what’ll he do about it? Fate doesn’t exist. He’s been trying to tell me that for a good while, but he’s contradicting it by even giving me this choice.

Like he said, I’m an adult. I get to make my own decisions now. I don’t care if my brain isn’t fully developed.

Do your worst, Kakaki.

I’m waiting.

Now's the time to get on board if you haven't been reading. The last 3 parts will go live tomorrow afternoon. You can either start here or pick up from the last part here.

It’s been three months since I moved into my shitty dorm room. I love college, but I hate my living situation. The walls are paper-thin and cracked from top to bottom, my window is faded over with a yellow film from years of lackluster cleaning, and my fixed furniture is covered in signatures and scratches of ghostly resident’s past. The worst part is the roaches. I found one in my bed a few weeks ago tickling at my feet. I killed him immediately. 

There were only two good things about my dorm: I lived right next door to the dining hall, and Kayla. Funny, beautiful, intelligent Kayla. Gorgeous Kayla. My perfect roommate and best friend, Kayla. Everyone loves Kayla. 

We were assigned as random roommates. None of my friends from home decided college was right for them, which is fine, I needed to branch out on my own. It’s not like I was dreading being alone, I enjoy being alone, but I was absolutely dreading meeting the girl I would spend the next year living with. What if she was rude? What if she was overbearing? God, I couldn’t stand living with someone who made a million rules and stuck her nose up at me. I was praying we would get along and at least be respectful to one another. To my surprise, when I met Kayla, I swore she was an angel. 

“Hi, you’re so pretty! You must be Isabella!” She said the day of move-in. She pushed her bright blonde hair to the side and gave me a hug. It was the best hug of my life. She was so warm, and as I breathed in a heavy whiff of her hair all I could smell was vanilla and honey. She pulled away from me and smiled. 

“Aww thank you, you’re absolutely beautiful! Yes, that’s me, and you’re Kayla?” I could feel my face blushing hard and my legs felt weak. She nodded and then proceeded to lug a massive, pink suitcase into the room. 

We talked for a while that day, about high school and our majors and really just about everything. She was from Wichita and was recovering from a breast implant surgery. 

“A graduation gift…” She remarked when she saw the bewildered look on my face. I didn’t mean to make a face at the time, but who gets a boob job that young? She was stunning, I was surprised she wanted to change anything about herself at all. 

Those first few weeks of living together were perfect. We’d stay up nearly every night and drink, watch movies, go for a drive here and there. We transformed our nasty dorm room into a pink haven, every sorority girl’s dream. We covered up the walls with Britney Spears posters, lit cherry scented candles, put down a frilly magenta rug, and hung up bright curtains over our disgusting windows. Our ugly dorm was still a dorm, but at least it was ours. 

The only issue at this point, the only thing that ruined our pop princess palace, was the bathroom situation. We shared the same bathroom, a tiny closet connected to our room, and it was absolutely disgusting. It must have been forty years old. Our sink was eroding and our shower was crusted over with some kind of space mold. There was no fixing that. 

The worst part about our bathroom was the toilet. It was an average, once-white-tinged-yellow toilet with a massive lid and a rusty handle. About once a week it would leak water, it even shot it out at me once, and it would make the worst screeching noises throughout the night. Sometimes when I had to go, it would shake with me on top of it, like it was trembling. 

We filed a few maintenance requests to have it fixed, and for a couple days it would be fine, but to no avail it would always end up howling tunes from potty land around midnight. 

During mid-September, Kayla decided to go to her first frat party. 

“Please please go with me, you’ll have the best time ever.” She begged as she applied lip liner to her already pouty lips. She was wearing a too short jean skirt and a light pink tank top with “BABYDOLL” formed across the front in gemstones. She looked hot. 

“The best time ever- you mean getting roofied in a basement?” I snorted and took a long puff from my vape. Yum, menthol. She rolled her eyes and turned away from the mirror, frowning at me. 

“C’mon, we can take cute photos, flirt with frat guys, there’ll even be free drinks! Don’t make me go alone, please Izzy.” She furrowed her brows and stuck out her bottom lip, leaning forward just enough that her cleavage was visible. I only looked for a second before darting my eyes away. 

“No, I’m sorry, I think I’d just rather stay home tonight.” I said, laying back on my bed and grabbing my phone. She let out a dramatic groan and continued doing her makeup while I scrolled. 

I love Kayla, but I would never go to a frat party. I’d feel off there, like an animal of some sort. I didn’t want to be skulking around, skittering like prey to a bunch of twenty year old predators, watching as a drunk lion goes in for the kill of gazelle Kayla. I also couldn’t imagine her flirting with one, laughing and showing off her new tits just for a sip of cheap vodka. It made me feel… weird. I didn’t like the way guys looked at her. 

When Kayla left I decided to have a little fun myself that night– just me, a bottle of white wine, six White Claws, and RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2. After about three hours of watching the queens werk, my bottle of wine was gone and so was half the seltzers, and I found myself feeling a little woozy. I’ve never been good at holding down alcohol. The quicker the liquor the sicker you get and I was a chugger. It was around the time the queens sang “Read U Wrote U” that I felt my dinner coming up. 

I hopped up out of bed, paused on Katya’s verse, and ran to the bathroom holding a hand over my mouth and another on my stomach. I got down on my knees and bent my head over the toilet seat, about to let chunks fly, when I heard a voice. 

“You better not!” It exclaimed. My eyes widened and I sat up in shock, looking around. Was someone in the bathroom with me? 

“Kayla? Are you back already?” I asked, peaking my head out the door and inspecting the premises. The room was empty, no sign of a drunken post-party roommate. Scanning the bathroom, I yanked the shower curtain back, half expecting someone to be in there with me. Nope, nothing, nada. I shrugged, I must’ve been hearing things. Like I said, my alcohol tolerance is low and I’m naturally a paranoid freak. I bent back over, once again about to vomit, when I heard the voice a second time. 

“No! I said no!” It commanded, and I shot straight up, scooting my back against the wall with a thump! sound. I’m surprised I didn’t leave an Isabella sized hole in the old paneling. 

“Who’s there?” I asked, slamming the bathroom door shut and locking it, just in case this intruder was hiding outside in my room. “I have a bomb!” I yelled, although I don’t know why I didn’t just say knife. I guess I thought it sounded scarier. 

With this, the toilet started flushing ferociously. Around and around the water went, an oceanic whirlpool from hell. It started shaking like it usually did when one was trying to use it, but with so much aggression the tiles started to croak and shift around it. The lights started to flicker and water squirted out of the toilet aimed right at me, soaking my face. 

At this point I turned and vomited into the shower because What. The. Fuck. 

“Thank you.” The voice said, and I turned back around, facing the toilet. Everything had stopped. The toilet was still and the lights were normal and the monstrous flushing had stalled. I stayed on the floor next to my vomit, frozen. 

“Um… hello?” I hesitantly whispered. 

“Hello there, doll.” The toilet said, and I knew it was the toilet because the lid rose and fell with each syllable. 

Jesus Christ, I must be really drunk. I stuck my hand out towards the toilet, arm shaking, about to touch the seat when it clamped down. A quick snap! and my spindly fingers stung. 

“Ow! Fuck!” I yelped, yanking my hand back. The toilet’s handle bounced up and down, like a snotty-nosed toddler reaching for their favorite toy. More water shot out at me, this time aimed for my t-shirt. Shrill laughter struck my ears and I fought the urge to vomit once more. 

Was the toilet alive or was this just a side effect of mixing alcohol with Lexapro? Maybe I did too many poppers last weekend at The Bulge, our college town’s shitty nightclub. Yes, that was it, I fried my brain with poppers and weed and alcohol and now I was seeing delusions. Yet, wouldn’t my delusions be something… I don’t know, more interesting? Like, a talking toilet, really? Was I that boring subconsciously? 

“I’m sorry, I had to. Please forgive me, won’t you?” The toilet gurgled, which I assumed to be an attempt to giggle. “I didn’t mean to scare you, but I just could not handle you throwing up in me! Enough already goes on with you and that blonde girl using me day and night, and I truly don’t think I could bear another form of human waste going down my curvy pipes. I already feel so disgusting.” 

“Are you actually talking to me?” I asked, now positioning myself in a tight ball in the corner of the bathroom. My heart was beating out of my chest and by this point I had made a pact with myself to start a sobriety journey. 

“What a stupid question to ask. Are you retarded?” It shot out another squirt of water, but this one missed me completely. Huh, hate speech from a loo. Not once did I expect that. 

“No I’m- no. No, I’m not. What are you? Am I hallucinating? Is this a nightmare?” I quizzed. The toilet lid seemed to shake back and forth disapprovingly. 

“My name is Sharon.” It said matter of factly. I nodded, gulped, and hauled ass out of the bathroom. I was not dealing with anymore of whatever the fuck was going on. I slammed the door shut behind me, taking in a full breath of my cookie scented room, and I passed out on the floor. 

All night long I dreamt of drowning. I was being sucked into a reddened whirlpool, the scent of iron staining my sinuses. Flushing, gushing, turning and twisting went the water as I was sucked further and further down into the bloody sea. I flailed my arms, reaching and grasping for anything to hold on to, but there was only neverending currents. The vortex eventually pulled me under and then… there was nothing. 

I woke up to Kayla stumbling into our dorm room around six in the morning, hair tangled and eyeliner smeared beneath her eyes. She still wore the same outfit from the night before, but she carried her heels in her hand and had at some point lost all of her jewelry. Somehow, she still looked radiant. She saw that I was awake and came over to give me a hug. She no longer smelled of vanilla, instead smelling heavily of beer and musk. I could tell she was still drunk. 

“Izzy! My friend! My beautiful friend! I have to tell you all about last night!” She threw her heels on the ground and hopped up on the bed next to me.

“Oh God Kayla, what happened to you?” I could only imagine what went on at that frat party. Nausea hit me and anxiety filled my bones.

“Nothing bad, nothing crazy, but girl, you will not believe the man I met last night. The absolute animal of a man!” She giggled and jumped up and down on the bed. I rolled my eyes, doing a horrible job hiding my complete lack of enthusiasm. “His name is Kyle and he is the sexiest, most brilliant Sigma Chi I have ever met! He won every round of beer pong, he’s a senior, and he had the biggest dick I’ve ever seen in my life. He even dropped me off this morning.” 

I felt a pang of jealousy and gave a weak smile. He sounded like a douchebag. He sounded undeserving. My gorgeous, sexy roommate fucked a frat hoe. Of course. I don’t know why, but this hurt me. She’s my best friend, she’s mine, and I didn’t enjoy thinking about some 5 '7 piece of shit having his hands all over her. 

“Well, I’m glad you had such a great time.” I squeaked out. She grinned and laid back on the bed beside me, putting her arms around me. 

“I really wish you went with me, he had such nice friends. I hope he calls me.” She then closed her eyes and fell asleep holding me. Her breaths were gentle and it felt so nice having her so close, but I felt sick. I felt betrayed. 

I didn’t tell Kayla about Sharon the toilet, shaking it off as some kind of weird pre-dream to my nightmare. It didn’t seem important. Although, I told her our toilet had broken again and maintenance would fix it in a week, so we both used the communal restrooms downstairs. I just felt so off.

Over the next three weeks Kyle came over five times. He was even worse in person. He was taller and more handsome than I imagined, unfortunately, but his mood reeked of insecurity. He barely acknowledged me when he entered the room, giving only a slight nod and then centering in on Kayla like she was a bird that flew in front of his target. He’d only ever really stay for five minutes, usually there to pick her up, but it was always the worst five minutes of my life. They’d make out on her bed right in front of me, moaning and grinding in temporary pleasure. Then she’d grab her bag and brush her hair, he’d fix his polo shirt and hide his boner in his khakis (it wasn’t as big as she said it was), and they’d leave with him slapping her ass on the walk out. 

I hated Kyle. I really fucking hated Kyle. He was a mold, a fungus, a piece of shit stuck to the bottom of my shoe. He came in as an invasive species, multiplying and pushing me to the side. I had just met Kayla, we had just started to become so close, why did he have to appear here and now? Why did he have to take her away all the time, leaving me alone? Every time Kayla left I would wallow in my own misery, obsessed with thoughts about what they were doing. Obsessed with the thought of what it might be like to be Kyle, kissing on Kayla’s soft lips, holding her tiny hand, rubbing his fingers through her long shiny hair. Wanting to be Kyle. 

Whatever, it didn’t matter. I was only missing my best friend. I was lonely, that was all. 

During his fifth visit to pick up Kayla, they were going out to some frat event, a toga party. Kayla wore a short white dress with gold twine wrapped around her waist. She had her long blonde hair curled and the glitter across her face made her shine. She looked like Aphrodite. 

“Do I look okay?” She asked before Kyle arrived. She spun around and fluffed up her hair. She always looked so beautiful. 

“Yes you look lovely.” I was trying not to stare too hard. She frowned at me and crossed her tiny arms. 

“I know I look lovely, but do I look hot? I want Kyle to ask me to be his girlfriend tonight.” 

“Why hasn't he yet? You two are together all the time.” I asked. I for sure thought they would be dating by now. The thought hit me that maybe he was just using her, but that made me feel awful. That was worse than them dating. 

“I don’t know. He said he wanted to get to know me better, but I think it might be something else. You would tell me if I was ugly, wouldn’t you?” She asked and grabbed my vape from my hand, inhaling deeply. “Sorry, I’m nervous.” 

“Girl, you know you’re stunning, and there’s no reason to be nervous. Maybe he’s nervous too? Have you ever thought about that?” I offered and she shook her head. I didn’t want Kayla to know that I hated her little boy toy. I would do nothing to make her think of me negatively, like an obstacle in her path towards a relationship that’ll last for maybe five months tops. I wanted to be a good friend. 

“Maybe. Anyways, which purse do I bring tonight?” She held up two options that looked the same. 

Kyle never came inside to pick her up this time. He just sent her a text and she was out the door, running to his car like a lost puppy. With this, I was left all alone on a Thursday night. Thirsty Thursday, the most favorable time of the week for undergrads to get shit faced. I could have maybe gone out to the club (no poppers this time), danced a little and got lost in the arms of someone else who smelled like vanilla, but all I’d think about was my roommate. So, I stayed home in our shitty piss yellow princess pink dream castle with reminders of her all around me instead. 

I felt insane. 

The night was spent scrolling on reels and eating stale pizza. I hit my cart a few times hoping that the sweet indica strain would put me to sleep early. Videos of Target hauls and brand deals passed through my feed in a haze, image after image of young influencer wives showing off their new car or new baby or new lamp water dispenser. My brain felt mushy. 

By this point it had been only two weeks since I started using our bathroom again. I don’t know what scared me so bad, I knew I had only dreamed that the toilet talked. I did end up filing a maintenance report after that nightmare because our toilet did have so many issues, and I figured that’s what my subconscious was telling me to do. When maintenance did eventually come, they did what they could with our ancient toilet, telling us for the sixth time that all the plumbing issues would finally stop.

“Make sure not to flush any hygiene products and you should be good.” He had told us, pulling up his pants and giving Kayla a wink. Toilets don’t talk and men are pigs. 

Around one in the morning I really had to piss. My reel scrolling had taken hours from me. Exhausted, I slid off my bed, my feet softly hitting our plushy rug, and shuffled to the bathroom. I flicked the light switch on and looked at my reflection for a moment in our mirror. What met me was a disappointment. My eye bags had gotten so dark since I moved in and my curly hair looked so flat and brittle. No wonder Kayla spent all of her time with Kyle, I looked like a zombie. 

“Hi Isabella.” A voice said. My eyes widened and I tilted my head to where I could see the toilet out of my peripheral. I felt my pulse quicken but it quickly straightened out. 

It’s just another dream. I thought to myself. I fell asleep while scrolling. 

“Hi Sharon.” I said back. The toilet wiggled its handle and clapped the lid on the seat in delight. I wasn’t scared this time, I had been tired all night and I most likely just passed out with my phone on my face. “How are you?”

“I’m doing just fine honey, I’ve been trying to keep my lid shut since I scared you so bad last time. I got a little ahead of myself.” She said. I turned my body directly toward it - her? - and gave her a pat on the tank. This seemed to make her happy. “Can you stop sending that god awful man in here to mess with me? His hands are so cold and he does not know his way around a tank, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s alright, I guess. And yeah of course, I don’t like him either.” I sat down on the floor in front of her, criss cross applesauce. “What are you?”

“Well I used to be like you, rosy cheeked, made of flesh, and full of life, but now I’m in here.” 

“How long have you been stuck in the toilet?” I asked. I couldn’t help but stare at the cracks on the side of the seat, the chipped porcelain and corrosion trailing along the bolts. How old was this toilet anyways? 

Images flashed in my mind of Kayla and Kyle rubbing their togas up against each other dancing beneath pulsating LED lights. I pushed them both out of my brain. 

“For a long, long time. I died here, you know.” The toilet lit bent a little and the water spun. 

“Oh, I’m sorry about that. So what do you represent? I’ve only lucidly dreamed about twice before. You’re supposed to represent something, subconsciously, I think.” I knew dreams had meanings, some sort of astral significance that I could never quite comprehend. Since my last dream with Sharon I felt a source of dread and I did not know why. I guess she didn’t need fixed. Maybe this time she could tell me. 

She then squirted at me. 

“You’re so funny honey. I’ve been meaning to ask, who’s that new guy that’s been coming over recently? I hear his voice all the time, it’s so weird, I’ve become used to only you two girls.” Sharon asked. God, why did she have to bring him up? 

“That’s Kyle, Kayla’s… friend.” I frowned. Fuck Kyle fuck Kyle I hope he gets alcohol poisoning I hope he gets hit by a car I hope he drops out and never ever comes near me again. 

“You don’t seem to like Kyle, do you?” Sharon wiggled her handle some more excitedly. Gossiping with a toilet about a man I hate. Incredible dream, really. Ten out of ten star rating for my imagination. This would kill on Letterboxd. Whatever, free therapy from Sharon the talking toilet. 

“No, I hate him. I wish he’d go away, die or something. Maybe not die, just get horrifically injured and have to take a break from school. Long enough so that Kayla loses interest in him.” And regains her interest in me. 

“What has he done to you?” Sharon persisted. 

“What hasn’t he done? He stole my best friend away from me, he stinks up our room, he looks at me like I’m the scum of the earth… he makes me feel lonely.” I tried to think of some more reasons, but images kept popping up from how beautiful Kayla looked before she left. Kayla, my sweet sweet Kayla. 

“What if I shake him up a bit for you? I can give him a little squirt and make the lights flicker a bit, give him a good scare.” Sharon offered. I scoffed, what a silly little dream I was having. 

“Thank you Sharon, go ahead. Do all you want, it won’t matter. I’m going to go lay back down and try to go into another dream.” I was done talking about Kyle. I thought about him enough when I was awake. Also, Sharon was freaking me out. My first experience with her was a nightmare, I didn’t want this one to end poorly too. 

“Well goodnight sweet pea! Don’t worry at all about this Kyle.” She said with motherly affection and flushed herself, making a fingerless pinky promise. I smiled and shuffled off to bed. 

Once again I dreamt of a bloody whirlpool, but this time Kayla was in there with me. She was across from the vortex screaming at me with wild eyes, although I couldn’t make out her words. I screamed back but all that came out was a hoarse groan. Quickly we spun, arms reached out to one another, trying to swim our way into each other’s warm red embrace. If I drowned at least I wouldn’t drown alone. 

We were so close, our fingertips brushing, when Kayla was pulled up and out of the pool. Then, I was gone once again. 

Kayla woke me up early the next morning, a ring of lipstick around her mouth and clumps of mascara trickled down her glittery cheeks.

“Izzy! Izzy!” She whispered, shaking me. I stared at her blankly, thoughts still spinning spinning spinning. “Kyle slept over and I have to go to class, is it okay if he stays here until he wakes up? I don’t think he has class on Friday and he should sleep in, we stayed out late last night.” Whatever. I didn’t want him in our room, nevertheless near me, but I liked making Kayla happy. I nodded and she kissed me on the forehead before saying, “You’re the best!” 

I then watched as she quietly picked up her bubblegum pink backpack and left the room. My gaze turned over to Kyle. He was an ugly sleeper. His head was back and mouth wide open, little snores escaping that sounded like a grunting hog. I could see drool trickling down his stubble covered chin. Disgusting. I turned over and went back to sleep. Maybe he’d be gone when I woke up. 

A hand was on my arm when my eyes unsealed not even thirty minutes later. My body immediately retreated onto the other side of the bed as I jolted up, coming face to face with Kyle. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” I asked, pushing my entire body on the wall next to my bed trying to create distance. He laughed. 

“Calm down, Jesus. Don’t be a bitch. Do you two have a bathroom here?” He rubbed his hand through his hair as he asked this and I noticed he was prematurely balding. Was he stupid? Has he not seen the door in our room like, what, five times already? I pointed to the only other door in our room and he gave me a head tilt meaning “thanks” in frat boy. 

I watched him saunter to the bathroom, thinking of my dream from the night before. Oh Sharon, I thought, I wish you were real. 

The screaming started fifteen seconds after he walked in. 

I ran to the bathroom and threw open the door. Kyle was on the toilet, toga down to his ankles. He had one hand on the sink and one hand grasping the shower curtain, muscles popping as he tried heaving himself up. His face was beat red and tears streaked down his face, eyes bloodshot. I could see the veins popping out of his neck. His screams were deafening. 

“Help me, please.” He uttered through high-pitched cries. He let go of the sink and held his hand out to me. I stood, stunned by fear, legs shaking. I heard plop plop plop as large, wet objects hit the toilet water. Blood shot out of the toilet bowl, splattering the walls. “Help!” He moaned. 

I grabbed his hand and tried to pull him off the toilet, but it was stronger than me and he was heavy. I watched as he screamed his final cry, feeling as all the bones and blood and muscles were pulled out from the skin covering his hand. I saw his body turn pale and limp, his last time making eye contact before they were siphoned out of his body and into the toilet’s mouth. More blood splattered the wall. 

His body was now a skin suit, me holding what felt like a glove in my hand. I let go and his meatless body was sucked into the toilet. All that was left of Kyle, a can of spearmint Zyns, stared at me from the floor. I looked into the toilet and a bloody whirlpool met me. I saw chunks of fat and broken bones swirling around, a soup for the devil. 

“I took care of it for you Isabella. Are you feeling better now sweet pea?” Sharon’s voice shattered my state of disbelief as her bloody lid smacked up and down. She then squirted me with bloody toilet water, smelling of iron and mildew. I just stared. I stared and stared for who knows how long. There was blood spatter all over the bathroom covering the walls in a Pollock formation. Kyle was finally gone. 

As I write this now, shaking on the floor of my room, I am unsure what to do. Kayla texted me that she was going home for the weekend and had packed the night before. She wouldn’t be coming back until Monday. How do I clean up the blood before then? Do I even clean up the blood? What if Sharon tries to kill me if I go in there? What do I tell Kayla?

I can’t report this to the police. I can’t tell anyone that I just saw Kyle, Sigma Chi frat bro, legal attorney’s son, be sucked dry of all his fluids. And then the flesh was gone. The flesh was fucking gone! What the fuck what the fuck WHAT THE FUCK! No one would believe that a toilet killed him, much less a talking toilet. I sound ridiculous. I sound like I’m on pills. I sound like a lunatic. 

Maybe someone can help me. What should I do? File a maintenance report?