“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.

His voice began to fade into the whine of a sharp ringing, and a heralding storm of tinnitus filled Rose’s ears. Her eyes stood cold, and her hands became solid as the chill sank to her heart.

She gaped at the covered food before her with a wooden stare, like a castaway staring off into the open sea from a lone raft on the edge of oblivion. She doesn’t even see the water anymore, except an endless nothing.

She pressed the pen into his palm. It was warm. The warmth was wrong. The warmth was recent, mammalian, arterial. The warmth was a shared secret he did not want. It throbbed. No, it didn’t. Yes, it did.

He walked backward without turning, the way you leave a room with a sleeping tiger inside, and when he finally faced the field of cubicles again, everything wore a new face. The furniture grimaced. The ceiling exhaled. The carpet was a tongue.

He put the black pen on his desk and watched it like it might bloom teeth.

An amnesiac husband becomes increasingly worried about his wife's dark secret in their idyllic, isolated life.