A single mother sneaks beneath the bleachers during her kid's football game to meet the father of her child's worst enemy. Then her phone explodes with texts: his son just hit hers.

A parent tucks their seven-year-old into bed after a long day. The child asks if they're okay. A small question that lands heavy.

…The dome sat in its column of moonlight, gleaming with a cold and patient light; the thing beneath it showed how violence is present when the hand above it hasn't yet decided….

…Leo eased the door open with his shoulder and stepped inside. Stood still. Let the darkness settle around him. The house breathed its sounds back at him, a refrigerator somewhere, a clock, the deep, specific silence of a place where someone was asleep. He'd learned to read that silence years ago. It had a texture. A weight….

“How often? All the time. Constantly. Every Tuesday and Thursday, watching for when Bernard would walk through those doors. Every time he came to the gym on Saturdays hoping Bernard would be there, or hoping he wouldn't be, Will could never decide which. Lying in bed at night replaying their arguments, thinking of better comebacks, getting angry all over again at something Bernard had said hours earlier.”

“Bernard had been living in Will's head rent-free for a year and a half and Will had told himself it was because he hated him.”

“They'd warned him about a lot of things, actually, their weathered faces pale with terror as they'd pressed a purse of coins into his palm. The witch who lived in the old castle, they'd said, was a monster in human form who stole children in the night and poisoned wells with her dark magic. She communed with demons, danced naked under blood moons, possessed eyes like a serpent and a tongue that dripped venom. Death itself, they claimed, draped in woman's flesh.”

“Charlie felt the dread the moment he crossed the threshold. It pressed in on him, heavy and suffocating, like a hand closing around his throat. His heart pounded in his ears, loud and irregular, as though the house itself were listening.

For a brief, terrible moment, he considered turning back.

Then the music swelled, the lights flashed, and the feeling vanished, leaving only the certainty that something had noticed him.”

I wrote this for my sister in honor of her wedding, mostly because I got drunk in the days leading up to it. I am releasing it now because I completely forgot it about months ago.

I should have felt alone. I should have felt afraid, wandering an emptied city like a body after the soul leaves. But instead I felt summoned, as though my whole life had been a long-distance phone ringing and this was the moment I finally picked up.

Something was missing. Something vital. My chest ached like someone had removed a rib, or maybe all of them, leaving me hollow, fragile, waiting to collapse.

Friends? What a laugh. They’re all fake. They want his name, his power, his family’s status. But me? I want Henry. The real Henry. The boy who took my banana. The boy who will one day be my knight in shining armor. The boy who will turn to me and say, “I hereby commit myself to you, forever and ever.”

Their weapons crashed into each other like vengeful planets colliding over some ancient grudge, and the walls of the Maze trembled, not with fear, but arousal. The floor, slick with ichor and something that felt dangerously like saliva, pulsed beneath their boots, sticky and alive, a living tongue tasting the fight.

Every corner of this impossible place, an ever-shifting, geometry-defying, logic-denying hell cathedral of malice and erotic tension, responded to their violence like a violin under bow: it sang.

Nathan followed them, one foot after the other, the banister gently weeping in his palm. As they climbed, the wallpaper mouths grew louder, chanting, laughing, spitting teeth like popcorn kernels.