Dry Rot
Megan Feehley is a writer from San Diego, CA. She is a graduate student at San Diego State University, deeply enjoys psychological horror, and finds it funny that her blood type is B+. She can be found on Twitter @sadhouseghost.
The bedroom is sticky and warm with stagnant air. We accumulate on the mattress like a mold, her back pressed into mine, spines slotting together like zipper teeth. The green numbers on the bedside clock glare through the haze, declaring it’s four in the afternoon.
The windows are glued shut, the curtains sealed like eyelids. Her clammy toes dig into my flesh, searching for warmth despite us both knowing I’ve never been capable of regulating her body. We expand and deflate like a pair of lungs.
“I have the Sunday scaries,” I murmur.
“We graduated ten years ago,” She says. “And it’s Tuesday.”
The walls gleam with condensation and the comforter has long since been kicked to the floor. My hair sticks to the back of my neck and sends ants crawling down my spine. She sounds apathetic; she always does. I don’t know why I said anything.
We stopped feigning kindness years ago. There are no pleasantries. No spoonfuls of sweetness. These days I choose to just wait and listen for the shifting of rot within her. Her body moves in distinct ways depending on the words fluctuating beneath her skin. Today she swells like a monsoon.
I hear the malice lacing her tone.
“I think you’re just scared.”
We are two continental plates of earth scraping against one another; a long and sluggish collision that never quite stops. Her voice is a tornado warning, a darkening sea, a nasty bout of turbulence. I embody it, and that fear is amphibious, able to expertly relocate to the steadier terrain of anger.
“I don’t love you,” I say.
She stretches with a soft groan. “I know.”
The sting is familiar but the aftertaste of heat is comforting, especially when I know she won’t leave. She never has. When we are on opposite sides of the door I’m the one leaning bodily against it, holding the knob still. She’ll sigh and wander through the night, and I’ll wake in a cold sweat remembering that I never asked for my key back.
It wouldn’t matter regardless. Her essence is everywhere–hair between the floorboards, fingerprints on the walls, words lingering in the air. I would have to burn the house down to be rid of her, and even then it may well not be enough.
I wish it would hurt her. I think I want her to question it, at least. The glass cup on the nightstand is brimming with cigarette butts. They’re crushed like junkyard cars, and smoke leaks out in silver ribbons. The wet air keeps them afloat long enough to stain the ceiling a nasty yellow.
I’m being swallowed by the mattress. The springs puncture my skin and poke bits of foam into empty cavities. I feel her turn toward me; her fingers are spiders creeping over my back and shoulders. She could be trying to hold me, as she tends to do when the sinking sun leaks along the skyline, but the risk is too great. Weapons remain lethal even while dozing in soft hands.
I shift away, unpeeling myself from the sheets, straining one of our butterfly wings. She stills but her eyes are a churning tide, pulling down and out with incredible weight. I can feel them through the back of my head.
A lifetime ago, those same eyes had returned to my doorstep, empty as the moonless night. I was doing so well too–though I’ll admit the months alone had been quiet. Empty. I had been good but I still held the door open. I met her with a frigid glare while I chewed on my tongue to keep from weeping with relief.
“What?” She’d smiled, her gaze like a vulture’s. “You called me.”
I welcomed her like the reaper. She sipped cold coffee and I picked at the scabs on my nailbeds. She’s not one for small talk and I was glad for it. I couldn’t tell her what day it was and I didn’t want to know where she had been. She offered her hands and we cut my body open from sternum to pelvis to remap the interior.
“Here,” She said. “We can look together.”
God’s signature was somewhere along one of my ribs–a haphazardly scrawled second thought. Her initials were carved right above it. The inside of my skin was an oil painting she carefully kept from drying out. This was her role. Mine was to stay pinned to the wall.
Look at me, she’s thinking now. See us. And I can’t—the squirming coward that lives behind my eyes won’t let me. Because when I do, I’ll see my reflection in her blown-out pupils. I’ll see the crawling things, the shrieking things, the long-since-drowned things.
Instead, I sit up and weakly shove my feet into bald slippers. Moss has grown to outline my form and mushrooms have sprouted along the ridges of my pillow. The threat of a mirror is to my right, but I regard myself in the same manner I do old roadkill. Blood drains from my head and straight into pinpricked feet, and I blink black spots off the walls. It’s cloudy outside in a bruised, soothing way.
I say, “I think I might shower.”
She’s familiar with my games and I know she doesn’t like to play house. But she is patient like a cat and as sure as a sinking stone, and there are no hands reaching for us other than our own.
“Good idea,” She says. “You need it.”
She tosses her catch back into the pond and rolls over, pulling gravity around her shoulders. The bed ripples around her body. Algae clings to her back. For a moment she appears waist-deep in the muck, just out of reach.
“I’ll be here.”
knots/bones/ tools
Tom Jenks writes poetry and short prose and makes text art. His books include A Long and Hard Night Troubled by Visions (if p then q) and Pack My Box with Five-Dozen Liquor Jugs (Penteract Press), a pangrammatic novel with Catherine Vidler. He edits the small press zimzalla, specialising in literary objects. More at https://tomjenks.uk/
knots
I found the town changed, the quaint shops selling clocks and shoehorns replaced by outlets selling televisions, portable telephones and varieties of coffee which, different names and pricing structures notwithstanding, appeared identical. I wished I’d stayed in the cabin up the mountain.
I made good progress on my novel and ate stewed cherries. I stood in the falling snow, unsure where the universe ended and I began, a feeling I hadn’t had since school, watching heat shimmer on the boiler house roof whilst old Herr Krueger explained nuclear fission, or knots.
bones
I found part of the house I’d never seen, a luxury suite in the style of a Venetian palazzo.
Wandering about the place was a ghost who seemed familiar: my cousin, perhaps, or her American friend with whom I had brief but intense correspondence. It was trying to communicate, but I could only guess the content, most likely an opinion about the proposed expressway which, whilst connecting the old and new towns and promoting business links, would necessitate the relocation of several monuments and some bones.
tools
They complained about the hammering. They wondered what we were doing in there. Breaking up a piano? Exorcising a poltergeist? Building an ark against the coming flood? I said that whilst none of those explanations was entirely true, neither were they all entirely false. Even in a limited universe, most things are possible, with the appropriate tools.
Dead Faced
John Elizabeth Stintzi is the award winning author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments, the poetry collection Junebat, the short story collection Bad Houses, and the comic The Children of Gulga-Krü. Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review, and Best Canadian Poetry.
My ear pounds, irritated by the radio plug. The static’d voice of the director calls for the first of my dead to rise and amble to set. I stretch and clear my throat. Whenever the cameras are off I strive to make sounds, but I can’t rest for long, because soon Huan plops into my chair.
I move my tongue. Perhaps I greet him. I cannot know. I turn to grab the biggest clear bag from the van, labelled: TheDuke
It is 2:42 AM. Tonight is the third night this week The Duke will die. The climax to the film but Huan’s first scene on set.
The cameras roll again. All else droops to whispers. I fit the silicone prosthetic to Huan’s throat—a gash, The Duke has been undead with for a long time. He shivers, dressed in an undershirt fitted with the remote squib that will cause his chest to burst when the hero shoots him with the shotgun.
“Wish they’d let me live first,” Huan whispers, as I paint the prosthesis—and the rest of his throat, and his face—the grey zombie pallor. “How am I supposed to die well before we shoot the rest?”
Perhaps I answer. It’s too late in my shift, or too early in the morning, to tell. I paint the life out of him, help him fit his blood red contacts. It’s special, giving a face to the dead.
“I was an undertaker once,” I whisper, as I begin to stipple dirt onto his face— filth from the struggle of his final battle with the hero. “You look dead as any of them.”
As Lou emerges from the dark, to bring Huan to costume, Huan stares through me. I imagine myself—in another life—sewing those lids shut.
Finders Keepers
Cheryl Snell’s books include several poetry collections and the novels of Bombay Trilogy. Her most recent writing appeared in 100 Word Story, Does It Have Pockets? Switch, Your Impossible Voice, and other journals. She has work in several anthologies including a Best of the Net, and has been nominated nine times for the Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and BOTN anthologies. A classical pianist, she lives in Maryland with her husband, a mathematical engineer.
A man knows he’s going, but tells no one before he opens his head and feeds his body to his soul. No one knows where he’s gone. His wife looks for him in the yard where she’s digging for treasure. Dandelions wave at her but that doesn’t mean anything; it’s just their thing, even after they go to seed. More so then, seeds flying everywhere on parachutes that open and close with weather. Meanwhile, the man sleeps the way he did when he was alive, with one eye open, watching his wife turn the earth inside out like a pocket.
Deep Well
Thomas Mixon has poems and stories in Variant Literature, Rattle, Metastellar, and elsewhere. He's trying to write a few books.
Deep in the forest, an uncovered hole. The locals called it Deep Well. It attracted superficial visitors, already in the area for the census. This was back when the census was held every twenty-seven days, to align with the moon. Nobody liked the moon, but everybody liked the government less, and the sky was still seen, at that point, as non-partisan.
The census gave the visitors a chance to come back home every month. They were once locals, but had left. They were superficial because, most days, they combed their hair, applied makeup. Some had goatees.
Near Deep Well, the only thing that mattered was feeding the void. Children were used, mostly. Not as food, but for feeding. The locals would hold the feet of their young, as the smaller-limbed bent into the uncovered hole, and shoved in scraps of clothing, shavings from the adults’ armpits. The locals were half-dressed, completely hairless. The visitors were not.
The visitors watched. They knew better than to toss anything down. Even if Deep Well allowed it, which it wouldn’t, the locals would start trouble, mess with the count.
Nobody was happy if the count was messed with, but it was the only leverage the locals had. If they fudged the numbers, an audit would be triggered. The visitors would come back, spend money. The locals would lose what little of their eyebrows had grown in the meantime.
This all came to an end when a young woman, upset for reasons not recorded to history, climbed a tree above Deep Well, spread oil on herself, and jumped straight in. Her head got stuck. She suffocated. Locals tried to pull her out, without luck. The visitors watched.
It was probably coincidence, but that was the week a rogue faction of the government blew up the moon. No more census, no more visitors, no more young woman.
Enough has changed, politically, that I can say she was my older sister. But it hasn’t changed enough, so I won’t name her.
I was the one that gave her the grease. The oil meant for our scalps. They taught us how to use razors, before we could fully talk. Long braids were something the visitors had. Jealousy was my first memory.
Her skull is still wedged in Deep Well. My sister’s. Not as many visitors come these days, maybe one or two a year. I made sure the nearby tree was not cut down. The ones who get too close to the hole never expect to be attacked, from above, my long locks as much a surprise to me as to them, threaded with the weight and glint of something sharp. Many somethings.
The Coconut Crab Ate My Baby
Melissa Llanes Brownlee (she/her), a native Hawaiian writer living in Japan, has work published and forthcoming in swamp pink, Craft, Moon City Review, Fractured Lit, Wigleaf and The Threepenny Review, and honored in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin (2022) and Kahi and Lua (2022) and look out for Bitter over Sweet (2025) from Santa Fe Writers Project. She tweets @lumchanmfa and talks story at melissallanesbrownlee.com.
the headlines read all over the world. Another woman screaming about her baby being eaten when we know she probably killed it. But coconut crabs will eat your baby and so will dingos. Those blue shelled monstrosities that are only supposed to eat coconuts, for god’s sake, but they are omnivores and will eat anything, including the occasional rat, cat, dog, pig, and now human but who can blame them we taste like pork, according to some. All the tourists want to kill and eat all of the crabs, but they are protected and anyway who wants to eat a crab that’s eaten a baby, and what would David Attenborough say to that. If we had killed all of the dingos in revenge, would we have eaten them? Don’t answer that. I know some people do.
Bone Tired
Ly Faulk (they/her) is the Editor-in-Chief of Eco Punk Literary. They are the author of several chapbooks and their latest, I Don’t Think I’d Make A Very Good Borg Drone, is available from Back Room Poetry. They can be reached on Twitter @whismicalraven.
“My boss is meaner than cat piss,” she complained as she reclined on the sofa and cracked open a beer. She was thinner than she had been the day before. Bone thin. The next day, when she came home, a piece of her knuckle jutted up through the skin. I poked at it but she snapped at me to let it alone. She cracked open another beer and started washing the dishes by hand, putting on rubber gloves that she had just bought at the store that day. Every day, the hole in her hand got bigger as she came home later and later. “That man is working me to death,” she said before falling asleep in front of the TV. I just turned it off and covered her with a blanket before putting myself to bed. She started dropping me off at daycare in the mornings where I caught the bus to school. I took the bus back to daycare where she picked me up late at night. I stared at her through drooping eyelids as she drove, a piece of her cheekbone showing through now. Grandma started picking me up from school when the daycare said they wouldn’t let me stay late anymore. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stay up late enough to see my mom come home from work. I felt her lips as if in a dream, thin with her bony teeth sticking through the gaps. That was the last time I saw her. The next morning, she was just a skeleton, resting at last.
Do Not Disturb
Matt Rowan lives in Los Angeles. He edits Untoward and is author of the collections, Big Venerable, Why God Why, and How the Moon Works (Cobalt Press, 2021). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, X-R-A-Y, BULL, LandLocked, Electric Literature, Gigantic Worlds Anthology, Booth Journal, TRNSFR, Barrelhouse, SmokeLong Quarterly, Moon City Review and Necessary Fiction, among others.
It was a sign, a strange sign that beckoned. Right on the door. He’d never noticed it before because he’d never arrived after the morning school bell rang, after the classroom door had been closed.
“Do Not Disturb,” it read.
But he had seen a strange cloud that he interpreted as signaling a bomb of nuclear proportions was going off and raced through the door to be with his children in this, the end. He would need to disturb their classroom, and he would need to disturb them all.
“Mr. Charles,” his children’s teacher said, visibly surprised by his sudden appearance in the doorway. “We were just practicing our letters. Is everything all right?“
“It isn’t, Ms. Klackerty,” Mr. Charles said, mournfully toeing the floor with his wingtip dress shoe, “I’m sorry to say I’m going to have to disturb you all, in spite of the sign. A bigger sign, the size of a whole nuclear blast, has overridden it, you see?”
She didn’t understand at all but nodded. Mr. Charles gathered all of the children up along with Ms. Klackerty, and they went to the classroom rug used for story hour. There they kneeled in a circle with their heads bowed.
Mr. Charles expected the bomb would overcome them at any moment, and for that reason, he lost track of time entirely. Ms. Klackerty was visibly confused by what Mr. Charles was doing but wasn’t sure how to say so, as things had progressed very quickly and felt quite out of her control, all of a sudden. In contrast, the students were surprisingly cooperative – resigned, even – to whatever it was Mr. Charles was attempting to get them to understand. Each of them quickly settled into a meditative state.
Mr. Charles whispered, on occasion, over the next hours of their encircling, “I am so sorry to have had to disturb.” He was always met with deep and abiding silence, even from Ms. Klackerty who definitely had questions but wasn't willing to disturb Mr. Charles in order to ask them.
Eventually the parents of the children arrived to take them home, including Mr. Charles’s wife for his own. She looked past him, resigned, used to this sort of thing by now.
Mr. Charles remained kneeling on the story hour rug all through the night, head bowed, visibly disturbed.
Atropos, Goddess of Fate, Faces Her Own
Vic Nogay is a writer from Ohio. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction. She is the author of the micro poetry chapbook “under fire under water” (tiny wren 2022) and is the Micro Editor of Identity Theory. Find her online @vicnogaywrites or haunting rural roadsides where the wildflowers grow.
After birth, you are so quiet on my chest. I am aglow. My head’s a dizzy bliss. My heart’s an ocean swell. Each cell is buzzed and humming, euphoric in a summer storm just before the lightning strike.
The midwife placed you here, your skin to my skin, and covered us with muslin. She wipes what’s left of the womb off you, clears your ears and nose. I want to tell her to stop, that it’s no use. I was never meant to be a mother. You are not my fate. But I’m addicted to this open moment when anything is possible, when I could dream of bringing life instead of bringing death.
And so, I dream. I watch her at her work. Her sacred, hopeless work. I try to nurse you, but you won’t. Your mouth, wet and slack, is too lost to latch. Your tongue flickers gently in vain.
My sisters fill the farthest corner of the room like shadows, waiting for their time. They know I can’t do this on my own. For now, the cord is still pulsing—one life becoming two. But soon the flow will stem, and our roseate bond will pale. I have always known how it would end.
So here we are together, so few moments left. Both of us now barely breathing. Your chest trips in weak attempts. Mine catches in time with yours—a primal prayer.
I cup the soft shell of your head in my palm and will your eyes to open, to see me, just one time.
Wake up, I whisper, smiling through a sob. Your eyelids twitch. Unlit suns knead beneath them, and it looks like you are dreaming, like you are searching the dark for me.
The shadows shift as my sisters make their way to me. The saturnine hush and sweep of their skirts spark a panic at the base of my throat—a bird’s winged beating against the backs of clamped teeth. My eyes pour beseeching tears.
Bedside now, my sisters’ sighs quiver a wisp of your hair. My frantic eyes meet theirs. They clasp my hand, and it rises like a marionette’s. I cocoon myself around you and disgorge a withered howl.
They measure your thread with solemn eyes and weave my fingers into the shears.
Good Talk
Travis Flatt is an epileptic teacher and actor living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in JMWW, HAD, Flash Frog, Bending Genres, and other places. He is a Best Small Fictions nominee. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs.
Kaylee’s started poltergeisting again at soccer practice. Coach Cunningham wants to talk to us. This I learn as I walk in from work.
The kid sobs upstairs in her room. “When,” I say, meaning meeting with the coach.
“Friday,” Amy says.
The therapist says we need to find “healthy outlets” for her “gift.” Doctor calls it an “affliction.” Our priest stopped speaking to us so calls it nothing.
I say I’ll go upstairs and talk to our wailing daughter.
“Don’t act afraid of her,” Amy says.
I am afraid of her.
Kaylee’s lying on her bed, facedown, teddy bears, Xbox controllers, notebooks tornadoing the ceiling.
“Hey kiddo,” I say. Add, “What’s wrong?” out of habit.
Muffled, she says, “Everyone thinks I’m a freak.”
I plop in her rolly chair. “What happened today?”
Kaylee sits up. Her mascara runs down her cheeks. “That stupid bitch Brianna.”
I hold up a hand, “Whoa, whoa.”
She sends a graphic novel thudding against a window. I jump.
“Brianna called me ‘Jane Doe.’”
I wheel closer. “That’s a horror movie, I’m guessing?”
Kaylee flops onto her back. “Mr. C made her goalkeeper. She sucks. I threw all the balls at her. At once. And some cones.”
I perch on the corner of her bed. “You need to stop showing off, Kay. People don’t like that.”
Kaylee punches her pillow, which turns her TV on, rapidly flipping channels and spiking the volume. She shouts over some Japanese cartoon. “They’re just jealous.”
When the volume lowers, I say, “They are.”
She flips the rolly chair. “They’re stupid.”
I stand, say, “They are,” and edge for the door. “Okay. Well. Try to be nicer. To Brianna.” I slip out the door as something glass explodes. I stagger down the stairs.
Amy’s waiting at the foot. “You’re pale,” she says. “Did you have a good talk?” I nod, say, “Your turn, babe,” and make a tag gesture, like a high five, which she ignores.
I grab two beers from the fridge, go to the garage and drink them, one after other, a gulp and a gulp. I sit and stare at my feet.
“Good talk,” I say to my New Balances, “you’re killing it, dad.”
Three Devil Stories
Becky Robison (she/her) is a writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. A graduate of UNLV's Creative Writing MFA program, her work has appeared in Salon, Passages North, Juked, and elsewhere. When she's not working her corporate job or walking her dog, she runs My Parents Are Dead: What Now?—a website documenting her journey through the legal, financial, and bureaucratic aftermath of her parents’ deaths in order to help others do the same. She also serves as a contributing editor for Split Lip Magazine.
I Saw Goody Proctor Shilling for the Devil
Madison Ave. Yeah, I was there—not from there, but that’s where I ended up. Not as dramatic as that TV show. The booze, yes, the women, no. The revelations, yes. They really do come to you that way, hungover in a cab or cramming devilled eggs at Larry’s wife’s Christmas party in a house older than God near Tarrytown. That was the candy bar. Needle skips on the record, a bite of paprika, silver bells, a little alliteration and boom—a slogan that stayed on radio and TV for thirty years. You know the one, or your parents do. He did.
I met the Devil where I was from: Indiana. Another Christmas, Ma’s party—not sure how he got on the guestlist, seeing as Ma never skipped a Sunday service in her life, but he gets where he wants to go. Said he knew my work, and I laughed, because nobody knows it’s my work. We’re not artists, we don’t sign our names. Maybe win an industry award, put it on your desk where nobody sees it but you. Ma told you? No, he says—says he needs some good advertising. Old business, changing times. He wants people to believe again.
I wasn’t supposed to take gigs outside the agency, but Indiana’s about as far from New York as Hell. He hands me this black book—huge, thought it was a photo album at first. He wants me to sign my name, and that’s what did it. My name, my credit.
The revelation came when he pricked my finger. One of those tiny cocktail swords.
Bubble of blood, socks on shag carpet, ragged clumps of tinsel glinting on the tree: HELL IS REAL. Bet you’ve seen that billboard. Highlight of my career, and the end of it.
I Saw Goody Proctor with the Devil, a Jar of Peanut Butter, and a No-Kill Trap
“Are you sure?”
He doesn’t look how I expected, not that I expected horns. He’s not remotely seductive—I don’t know how he’s spent centuries convincing people to sign over their souls.
Fortunately, I don’t need to be seduced. I just need the Devil, who apparently resembles an accountant on the wrong side of middle age, to get these squirrels out of my attic.
Sitting on the edge of my unmade bed, the summoning candle I made with my own blood still burning on the nightstand, he scrunches the fabric of his trousers so he can more easily cross his legs. “Most people come to me for uglier stuff,” he says. “Like they want someone dead, or they want piles of money.”
“I don’t want the squirrels dead,” I say. The candlelight casts stark shadows against the prominent veins in my own hands. Who am I to judge the Devil for his appearance? “They’re only trying to keep warm. But if you could get them out and permanently seal the holes—that’s the big thing. The repairmen give me guarantees, but the squirrels always chew their way back inside.”
Four years of this now, since Danny and I bought the house. Three years since Danny left for Brazil and left the house to me. After the second year, I bought a ladder and tried to trap the squirrels myself, nearly broke my neck. The house requires so much upkeep—more than my HGTV fantasies had prepared me for when I sunk my savings into the place. I don’t want to sell it. It’s mine, more mine than anything else has ever been. I stayed and I gave it everything.
The Devil takes my worn hands in his. “It must be tiring,” he says.
“Yes.” I lean into his sweater vest. “Lonely, too.”
I Saw the Devil Beg Goody Proctor
The Devil accused me of playing hard to get, wouldn’t believe me when I said I was just happy.
“No one is happy,” he said. He presented the open pages of his book, names on names, as evidence. It was raining, and I watched the rusty signatures swirl and bleed.
We’d had this conversation dozens of times—outside the grocery store, in the office bathroom, in the backseat of a Lyft. He’d come at it from every angle—sex, fame, power, revenge.
“I’m sorry those people were having a rough time.” I thumbed open a plastic bag to pick up Rufus’ poop. “But not sorry enough to join them in Hell.”
“You’re having a rough time,” he insisted. A wave of his hand and the poop disappeared, which was, admittedly, convenient. “You must be. You live alone. You work an entry-level job. You have no lover.”
“I get to do whatever I want, my job is easy, and I have a vibrator,” I said. “Plus, I have a dog. Why should I be sad?”
I felt bad for him—I could see real disappointment brimming in the horrible fathoms of his eyes. If he’d found me fifteen years ago, he probably would have convinced me to sign on the first try. Between my parents’ divorce and my undiagnosed anxiety, I had a difficult time as a teenager. I even went in for some Satanic stuff—local metal shows at the Civic Center, corpse paint. But I got therapy, grew out of it. The Devil missed his window.
I squeezed his skeletal shoulder. “I have to get Rufus inside, or it’ll smell like wet dog.
But you can keep trying to convince me, if you want. Do you like tea?”
He took Rufus’ leash and walked with me.
The Watchers
Alyssa Jordan is a writer living in the United States. She likes to make surprise balls and drink coffee. In 2020, she won The Molotov Cocktail's Flash Monster contest. You can find her on Twitter @ajordan901 or Instagram @ajordanwriter.
In the house with a face, Shae moved from room to room.
Closed the blinds. Turned on the lights. Descended steps like flat, yellow teeth. Walls sunk sharply on either side of her. Peach paint had begun to crack along the seams, too. Some of it protruded from the walls in narrow ridges before curving downward. Shae traced these cheekbones with the tips of her fingers.
On the staircase landing sat a flesh-toned couch with a divot down the middle.
Squeezing past it, Shae gagged at the generic taste of body soap. She hurried toward the ground floor. All the windows were closed to the dark. Off white and shuttered by blinds, they formed a ribcage around the kitchen, which was dominated by a chunk of red granite.
Shae stopped at the island. Beyond it, the sink vibrated beneath a large window. It was difficult not to peek through the blinds and see the latest moving trucks. Shae stared at the shuddering jump of synthetic wood.
It had been over two years since she left this house.
Outside, a high-pitched laugh echoed in the neighborhood. It sounded like a man and a woman responded in kind. Maybe there was even the low murmur of conversation, the crinkle of foil over pie.
Shae tried not to remember the taste of blood.
“So many deliveries already, darling?”
Gloria—or “Glory of the morning, that’s what momma called me”—greeted Shae on her third day in the neighborhood. She was a short woman with springy blue-grey hair and dark eyes.
She stood on Shae’s doorstep with a pie in one hand and a box in the other.
By her feet, three other boxes waited for Shae.
“Well, let me in. I’m here to welcome you to the neighborhood.”
In the kitchen, Gloria served her a thick slice of cherry pie. First, Shae tasted sour sweetness, then butter and salt. Metal was quick to follow. She pursed her lips and glanced at Gloria, who watched her with a slow, creeping smile.
She spat out her mouthful of pie. In the pulp of half-chewed cherries, there was one rotten tooth.
Shae’s breathing sped up. She ran her tongue along her teeth but found nothing amiss.
Across the table, Gloria reached for Shae’s fork and scooped up the tooth. She held it out to Shae. As if in a daze, Shae swallowed the tooth whole.
Gloria watched her with a gap-toothed smile.
When she held out a papery hand, Shae leaned forward and, without a thought, yanked a tooth from her mouth.
Had it always been so loose? She marveled, staring at the veiny tissue that clung to it.
Gloria plucked the tooth from Shae’s palm and filled the hole in her smile. Now that Shae allowed herself a closer look, she saw that none of Gloria’s teeth matched, not in size or shape or color.
Her former tooth began to flatten and settle into its new owner’s mouth.
Slumping in her chair, Shae realized that she couldn’t feel anything. Her legs and her arms burned with numbness.
“Tell me what you fear,” Gloria said.
Shae’s head lolled sideways. “Everything.”
“Not good enough.”
Her jaw clenched. The space around the missing tooth didn’t explode with pain. It felt like nothing.
“I don’t want to become my dad,” Shae said. “But I think I already am. He never left his house, either.”
Gloria tapped the pie plate. “Is that so bad?”
“He was a black hole. No one liked him.”
“No one got close enough to like him,” Gloria corrected.
“No one got close,” Shae confirmed in the same flat tone. Distantly, she was aware of blood staining her lips, the bits of purple cherry that stuck to her shirt.
Shae remembered how it felt to sit on her dad’s warped couch. How his face fell when she wanted to go home, or the rare smile when she came back. The ebb and flow of a relationship that never really was. Shae wondered if anyone would remember her that way. If anyone would remember her at all.
After she met Gloria, Shae saw the truth of the neighborhood. No one left their homes outside of commuting to work. No one spoke loudly or used lawn mowers early in the day. There were no parties, no noise complaints.
Across the street, one house filled with poker chips. Thousands of them must have lined the carpet and added a “clink-clink” to the resident’s every step. Soon, Shae barely heard them at all. Another house looked normal but carried such a heavy stench of whiskey that Shae lit extra candles.
Now, she only ordered one delivery per month.
In the days leading up to it, Shae would tongue the space where her tooth should be, poking the gums till they bled. She started grinding her teeth at night and went through a new mouthguard every six months.
Any time she answered the door, Gloria would appear two houses down, standing on her porch with a mismatched smile.
The scent of cherries made Shae gag. She never smiled at a new neighbor; not because she didn’t want to, but because she knew they would smile back, even on reflex, and match her gap-toothed smile.
Instead, Shae spent more time in the attic. Her head hurt less when she slept there, warm from the sun and covered in dust. It reminded Shae of younger days, before her dad had left.
They used to go to the park and eat in the grass. Sometimes, they’d swim in the lake, slippery with sunblock. Shae could still feel that brightness on her skin.
She understood, now, why her dad had changed from a normal person into a shadow.
What scared Shae was that it already felt so familiar.
She knew the way down, too.
Red Heart
Charles Michael Pawluk’s fiction appears in Witness, Faultline, and MoonPark Review, and his poetry is forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review. He has a Ph.D. in English from SUNY Buffalo and teaches in Annapolis, MD.