Date: 2024-08-25 00:00:00+00:00
Description: We apologize in advance for the fatal blow to your sanity, but Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jeff Strand is back with another short story collection! Yes, the author of Gleefully Macabre Tales, Dead Clown Barbecue, Everything Has Teeth, Candy Coated Madness , and Freaky Briefs isn’t done with you yet. There will be serial killers. There will be cosmic horror. There will be extremely demented cooking competitions. There will be pink fizzy drinks. There will be Santa Claus, hangings in the Old West, body swaps, some light cannibalism, and monsters galore. The twenty-six stories contained with
Publisher: Independently published

SNUGGLING THE GROTESQUE

JEFF STRAND

Copyright © 2024 by Jeff Strand

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 9798336882629

Cover by Darkwyvern.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Body Swap

Rope and Limb

Torture Porn For Prudes

Pink Passion

Ghosts of Candies Past

Turn Me

Avert Thine Eyes

Devil-Powered Death Train of Doom

Dump Truck

Next Best Baker

Cherry Tree

Mouthy

All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth

Hold Your Breath

First Date

Teenage Death Song

Lost Gator

Insufficiently Splattery

The Mummy’s Bite

My Favorite Halloween Memory

Ghetto Blaster

Another Santa Story

The Well

The Body Hidin’ Spot

Y2K Feast

Mac & Millie

Story Notes

Acknowledgments

Also by Jeff Strand

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Snuggling the Grotesque, my sixth short story collection! If you did not enjoy Gleefully Macabre Tales, Dead Clown Barbecue, Everything Has Teeth, Candy Coated Madness, or Freaky Briefs, I’m nevertheless convinced this is the one that will finally win you over, despite its tonal and thematic similarities to the previous books.

When Gleefully Macabre Tales came out, somebody mentioned how embarrassing it was that I had to write my own introduction. “Stephen King doesn’t write his own introductions!” he wrote. I explained that, yes, he does, every time, and the poster slunk off into irrelevancy.

The truth is, I don’t want anybody else to write my introductions. Yes, Michael Prescott knocked it out of the freaking park with his foreword to Pressure. And my novella Disposal had ten (!) forewords. I’d contacted ten authors and asked each of them to write a foreword from the perspective that a) they thought the book sucked, and/or b) they thought I, personally, sucked. I had a 100% acceptance rate on this request. The enthusiasm was off the charts. Nobody even turned it in late.

But not every book can start with guest authors saying it’s a piece of shit. And I’m too much of a power-hungry control freak to relinquish control over the first pages that readers will experience. What if the author half-asses it? I’ve read some crappy forewords in my time. There was one where the dude talked only about how great it was that the anthology had a generous pay rate for its authors. There was another where you could tell the person writing the foreword didn’t actually like the book very much, giving the whole thing a “damning with faint praise” vibe.

I myself have written a crapload of forewords. About twenty-five of ‘em! One of them was written in character as a professional wrestler. I was working on it during a break at a film festival, and—I swear if everything else in my entire life is a lie, this is true—some guy sat down in my row wearing a luchador mask.

(A “luchador” is a Mexican wrestler. The previous paragraph is funnier if I don’t have to explain that, but I don’t want to assume all readers of this introduction are well-versed in Mexican wrestling.)

One time, I accepted a request to write a foreword to an anthology, but after I read the book I said, “Hey, you’ve got the wrong guy. These are sad stories about loss. If my name is on the cover, readers are going to expect a goofy-ass foreword.” The editor assured me that, no, he wanted me to do it, and that a goofy-ass foreword was fine. So I titled it “A Warning From Jeff Strand” and made the theme of “I should not be writing this foreword” the basis of the piece.

When the book came out, I noticed that a quote from my foreword was being used in marketing materials as a blurb…but the foreword itself was missing. “Gosh, I, uh, don’t know how that could have happened,” said the editor. Well, I knew! The publisher obviously said, “What the hell kind of goofy-ass foreword is this for our heartbreaking book about loss?” and cut it, while still swiping a quote to promote the project!

The editor said he’d move the foreword to a new project, which was even less appropriate and would’ve had readers thinking I was a total dick. I said, “No, I don’t think so,” and moved on with my life, except for bitching about it in private and rehashing it here.

The last story in this collection, “Mac & Millie,” was co-written with Bridgett Nelson, who is also my girlfriend. We met because I wrote the foreword to an anthology she was in. I’m not here to give dating advice, but if you want to start a friendship that eventually turns into a romance, there are worse ways to make it happen than to write a foreword in which you are kidnapped by the editors and forced to defend yourself with a chainsaw gun. (Admittedly, there are better ways, too, but this method worked out.)

What I’m trying to say is that though I have written a great many forewords for other people, I almost never solicit them for my own collections. What if Stephen King agreed to write one for me, but his heart wasn’t really in it?

Hello, I’m bestselling author Stephen King. What follows is a collection of stories of varying quality. If you’ve got some time to kill, knock yourself out, I guess.

The answer is: I would freak the hell out, call everybody I know, and scream into the phone that Stephen King wrote the foreword to my book. I’d have the words printed in gold on the page. But, alas, he’s not going to write about Snuggling the Grotesque. The closest I’d get is:

Dear Mr. Strand. Thank you for your query. Unfortunately, Mr. King will not be able to contribute a foreword at this time.

I’d rather just write these things myself. One might suggest I’m making the wrong decision, considering I’ve filled this space by writing about my previous forewords. Perhaps. But in a previous draft, I actually included those forewords, in their entirety, so maybe you should admire my self-restraint and willingness to listen to feedback from test readers, hmmm?

Anyway, here’s Snuggling the Grotesque. If you haven’t tossed the book away by now, we’ve got some fun times ahead. What follows are not deep, thoughtful, literary stories in the Flannery O’Connor mold. This is, for the most part, silly, gory shit.

So take my hand by the talons, and I’ll lead you into a demented world of serial killers, cosmic horrors, pink fizzy drinks, and monsters galore!

C’mon. We’ve got some snuggling to do…

BODY SWAP

“Late again, Mr. Peterson?” asked Professor Vaskin as Clay walked into the classroom. “Your tardiness is not only disrespectful to me, but to the rest of your classmates. I won’t make you apologize to each of them, but it would certainly be warranted.”

Clay said nothing and took a seat in the back row. Professor Vaskin was such a jerk. Clay was paying to attend his class—well, his parents were—so what difference did it make if he was late? The man was just on a power trip.

Professor Vaskin resumed his lecture about economics. Tedious. Clay took the occasional note on his laptop, but mostly let his mind wander. Why did he even need to learn this stuff? He wasn’t going to be an economist—this class was an elective.

“Mr. Peterson?”

Clay looked up. “Huh?”

“Answer the question.”

“Uh, could you repeat it?”

Professor Vaskin folded his arms across his chest and glared at him. “Do you enjoy wasting my time, Mr. Peterson? Do you think I’m standing up here for the pleasure of listening to myself speak? Everybody else is here to learn—why are you here?”

Clay shrugged.

“No, please, enlighten me,” said Professor Vaskin. “Why are you even in my classroom if you have no interest in getting an education?”

“That’s not true at all,” said Clay. “I work hard.”

Professor Vaskin let out a snort of laughter. “You’re late on a regular basis, and you don’t pay attention. Please, enlighten me as to how that constitutes working hard.”

“You don’t know my situation. You don’t know what I’m going through. It’s easy for you—you get to give the same lecture you’ve been giving for the past twenty years.”

“Easy?” asked Professor Vaskin. “You think my job is easy? You think my life is easy? You have no idea. What I wouldn’t give to be in your shoes.”

“You wouldn’t last twenty-four hours in my life,” said Clay.

“You wouldn’t last twenty-four hours in my life,” said Professor Vaskin.

The classroom lit up from a bolt of lightning outside, which was odd because it was a bright sunny day.

“Anyway, back to the topic at hand…”

“Dude, you slept through your alarm again,” said a voice that Professor Vaskin didn’t recognize.

He opened his eyes. This wasn’t his bedroom. It looked like a messy dorm room. And was he in a…bunk bed? He hadn’t slept in a bunk bed in thirty years. Some kid he didn’t recognize stood next to him, wearing a stained t-shirt and boxer shorts. The room smelled like marijuana.

Suddenly he felt a hand gently caressing his thigh. Professor Vaskin wasn’t alone in the bed. A pretty blonde girl was pressed against him. No! She was underage! Wait, if she was in college she wouldn’t be underage, but she was definitely too young from a moral standpoint! Not that he had any recollection of doing anything with her.

He scrambled out of the bed, completely nude. That wasn’t his penis—he hadn’t had morning wood in a decade! What the hell was going on here? He was in tune enough with reality to know if he was dreaming or not, and this was no dream!

“Dude, what’s wrong?” asked the kid.

“Mirror! Where’s the mirror?” Professor Vaskin glanced around the room and saw a mirror on the door. He hurried over.

And stared at Clay’s face.

Oh my God…

He was inside of that lazy cretin’s body!

Which meant that Clay was inside of his body!

Professor Vaskin opened the door, then realized that running into the hallway nude and erect was not a wise decision. Instead, he turned to the dresser and opened the top drawer.

“That’s my drawer, dude,” said the kid.

“Sorry. Which one is mine again?”

“You don’t know which drawers are yours?”

“I got up in the middle of the night and ate some hallucinogenic mushrooms. They’re impairing my perception.”

“Oh. Bottom two.”

Professor Vaskin opened the drawer, pulled out some unsightly clothes, and hurriedly got dressed. The girl got out of bed without even draping a blanket over herself, seemingly not worried that Clay’s roommate was right there. Without taking the time to bid them farewell, Professor Vaskin left the room.

The dorm hallway smelled as bad as the room, although it was more body odor than drugs. He hurried to the end of the hall, realized that the stairwell was the other way, hurried back, and made his way out of the building.

His car was presumably a mile away, still at home. But he was in the body of an eighteen or nineteen-year-old, so…

He ran much of the way. Though Clay’s body was young, it was also most likely fueled by junk food and marijuana smoke. Still, it got him there more quickly than if he’d been running on his own legs.

When he arrived home, he noticed his car was missing from the driveway. And when he tested the front door, it was locked. Of course, he didn’t have the key. He considered breaking a window, but decided it would serve no purpose. Clearly, Clay had taken his car. Where would he have gone?

Most likely, he’d driven back to campus to see if Professor Vaskin was in his room. Probably in a panic, thinking his professor might have seized on this opportunity to have sexual intercourse with his girlfriend. (If it was his girlfriend. Boys his age often mated with girls they’d met only moments ago.)

He ran back to campus, arriving out of breath and with a stitch in his side. Technically, it was in Clay’s side, but he was the one feeling it. He rushed back inside the dormitory, up the stairs, and back to Clay’s room. The door was locked, and he hadn’t taken Clay’s keys, so he knocked. No answer.

Where might Clay have gone?

Professor Vaskin had a class right now, and his teaching schedule was displayed on his refrigerator at home, but surely Clay wouldn’t be there, right?

He ran to Eppler Hall. He peered through the small window in the door of Room 108 and, to his horror, saw himself standing in front of the class. He opened the door and stepped inside.

“Ah, Mr. Peterson, how kind of you to join us,” the false Professor Vaskin said. Technically, Clay wasn’t in this class, but it was a large lecture hall, and nobody would notice. “Please, have a seat.”

“I have an important message.”

“It can wait.”

“It’s an emergency,” Professor Vaskin insisted.

“I said it can wait, young man. Kindly stop being disruptive. We’ll discuss your issue at the end of class.”

Professor Vaskin helplessly sat down in an empty seat in the second row. Did Clay intend to fumble his way through an economics lecture?

Clay cleared his throat. “I think I’ve talked about economics enough for today,” he said. “What I’d really like to discuss is one of my personal heroes, a man whose point of view may not necessarily be considered mainstream, but who accomplished a lot and deserves our admiration and respect. I’m talking, of course, about Mr. Adolph Hitler.”

A gasp went through the classroom.

“I know, I know, not everybody is on board with some of his zanier schemes, but to me, those concentration camps…” Clay did a chef’s kiss. “Perfection!”

Professor Vaskin stood up. “Stop that!”

“You sit down while I’m talking about the one and only God!” Clay shouted. He turned to look at a girl in the front row. “Whoa, those are some nice tits you’ve got there. Let me suck on ‘em, and I’ll make sure you get a B-plus.”

“This is not the real professor!” Professor Vaskin shouted, making his way to the end of the row. He wasn’t sure what he could say beyond that. “That is Clay Peterson! He and I have swapped bodies!” almost certainly would not cause the students to say, “Oh, so that explains his behavior! All is well!”

Clay unfastened his pants. “Goodness gracious, do I ever need to take a dump. Anybody want it on their chest? There’s a sweet, sweet B-plus in it for you if you do!”

“Enough!” Professor Vaskin screamed. In his peripheral vision he noticed that most of the students were recording this with their cell phones. “Do not remove your pants!”

“White power!”

“Stop this immediately!”

“Consent is for quitters!”

“Stop it!”

“I can’t. The turd is already on the runway. Launch in three…two…one!” Clay yanked down his pants, showing that he was not wearing underwear, and that he was not bluffing.

There were several screams of horror, and then the students poured out of the classroom. Clay laughed and wiped himself with Professor Vaskin’s favorite shirt.

Soon it was just the two of them. “You bastard,” said Professor Vaskin. “You miserable bastard. Why would you do that?”

Clay shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Have you given any thought to why this happened? Any thought at all? Whatever supernatural force swapped us wanted us to learn from the experience! Twenty-four hours in each other’s bodies and we’d discover that we’d been too quick to pass judgment! We were meant to grow from this!”

“My bad,” said Clay, tying Professor Vaskin’s soiled shirt around his head like a turban. “I just wanted revenge.”

“But I could get revenge as well!”

Clay let out a snort of laughter. “What’s your prude ass going to do?”

“Maybe I’ll…fornicate with your mother! It won’t be incest if I do it, but when we swap back…”

“My mom died two years ago.”

“Oh. I’m so very sorry. But maybe that won’t stop me! What do you think about that, huh?”

“If you want to drive eight hours and dig her up just to dry hump some bones, be my guest,” said Clay. “Your life is going to suck balls when we switch back, so if I were you, which I kind of am, I’d make the most of this. I’ve been in your house. Books everywhere! That is the home of a guy who lives alone, and will always live alone, and whose chances of banging a hot college chick are non-existent. Live it up for a day. Have fun. Get laid.”

“Or perhaps I’ll commit murder!” said Professor Vaskin. “I’ll have you sent to prison!”

“Sure, sure, that’s an option. But we don’t one hundred percent know that the curse will end in a day. Maybe it’s permanent. I don’t mind having this body get fired, because I’d never come back to work in this shithole anyway, but do you really want to spend the rest of my life behind bars?”

“We each said we wouldn’t last twenty-hour hours living each other’s lives,” said Professor Vaskin. “The entity who did this heard that, so I’m confident we’ll switch back tomorrow morning.”

Clay smiled. “But are you positive?”

Professor Vaskin wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the pinky of his left. “I’m willing to take the bet.” He started to bend the finger backwards.

“You really want to do that?” asked Clay. “You’re the one who’s gonna feel it.”

“For now.” Professor Vaskin bent the finger back until it really started to hurt. But before it snapped, he released his grip. Honestly, that would be a lot of agony for him today, in exchange for some soreness for Clay tomorrow. Not worth it. He turned toward the classroom door and walked away.

“Where are you going?” Clay asked.

“Cafeteria.”

Professor Vaskin took off running. Clay immediately pulled up his pants and gave chase, but unfortunately for him, his real body was much faster. Professor Baskin fled Eppler Hall and sprinted toward the Fowler Building, which had a cafeteria.

There were assorted cries of surprise, including somebody shouting “Professor Vaskin!” He didn’t look back. He had no interest in the sight of his own body, wearing feces-smeared pants and a feces-smeared turban, running across campus.

Professor Vaskin made it to the cafeteria well ahead of Clay. He hurried into the kitchen, which was filled with useful items. But he wanted Clay to see what he was going to do, so he waited, hoping his body wouldn’t be apprehended by campus police.

“May I help you?” one of the student cafeteria workers asked.

Professor Vaskin shook his head. “Just waiting for a friend.”

Clay showed up a couple of minutes later, completely out of breath. Professor Vaskin smiled at him. His left hand—technically Clay’s left hand—lay flat against a cutting board. His right hand held a very large knife.

“C’mon, don’t do that shit,” said Clay.

Professor Vaskin slammed the knife down on his pinky finger. The pain was unbelievable, and the spurting blood was disturbing, but Clay’s expression was priceless.

“Uh-oh, I’d better cauterize the wound,” Professor Vaskin said, plunging his hand deep into one of the friers. He held it in there for as long as he could stand, which was only a few seconds but long enough for the rest of the cafeteria employees to get the hell out of the kitchen.

He wanted to say, “Mmmm, nice and crispy!” and perhaps take a bite of one of his fingers, but he was in far too much agony to do something so clever.

“You’re gonna regret that!” shouted Clay. He grabbed a metal fork and slammed it into Professor Vaskin’s body’s left eye. He yanked the fork out, pulling the eyeball out of the socket, connected only by its stalk.

“Two can play that game!” Professor Vaskin told him, jabbing the knife into Clay’s body’s eyeball. He considered one-upping him and gouging out both eyes, but then he wouldn’t be able to see anything, so he left it at one.

Both of them took a few moments to shriek in pain.

Clay gave the eyeball a tug, snapping the stalk. Then he dropped the fork, picked up a meat cleaver, and lopped off most of his thumb. It dangled uselessly. Then he started whacking the meat cleaver all over himself. “This is gonna hurt like a motherfucker in the morning!”

“Yeah? Imagine staring at this every day in the mirror!” said Professor Vaskin, slicing off his nose.

“Go to hell! Why should I leave you with a spare eyeball?” asked Clay, picking up the fork, flicking it in the air a few times until the eyeball came loose, then jamming it deep into the other eye.

Professor Vaskin did the same.

He heard pots and pans clattering and dishes falling to the floor and shattering, so he assumed Clay was blindly stumbling around the kitchen, looking to do more damage. But Professor Vaskin was getting dizzy from blood loss, and collapsed just as the campus police shouted at him to drop his weapon.

“What the fuck, you two?” asked the glowing shadow. Professor Vaskin could see again, though it was in neither his body nor Clay’s—he was nothingness.

“Are you God?” he asked.

“Of course not. If I was, I wouldn’t have used the F-word. I’m a completely different omnipotent being. I wanted to make the two of you into better people by experiencing life through the eyes of somebody you didn’t understand. So, seriously, what the fuck?”

“Are we dead?” asked Clay’s disembodied voice.

“His body is. Yours is in ICU.”

“Sweet. I win.”

“No! Nobody wins! Know what I’m going to do? I’m going to put you two assholes in a time loop. Reliving this same day, over and over, until you learn a valuable life lesson from each other.”

“For fuck’s sake, it’s been four hundred and fifty-nine days!” shouted the glowing shadow. “What is wrong with you guys?”

“He started it,” said Clay’s disembodied voice.

“I disagree with his assessment of who started it,” said Professor Vaskin’s equally disembodied voice.

“Well, I can’t do this anymore. I’m sending you both to Hell. Sorry.”

“For real, you two need to work out your differences,” said Satan.

ROPE AND LIMB

“Darius Brown, you have been found guilty of an attempted bank robbery that left six innocent people dead. Do you have any final words before you are sent to the Lord for His judgment?”

“I have a few, yeah,” said Darius. He cleared his throat and addressed the crowd of townsfolk. “I know I kept bringing this up in the trial—or, you know, what passed for a trial—but I think it bears repeating. I didn’t kill any of those people.”

“You were responsible for their deaths,” said Mayor Wasser.

“Everybody keeps saying that, and I understand their perspective. I do. But I wasn’t the one who shot them. It’s not my fault the bank teller pulled out a gun and kept missing me and hitting customers.”

“If you hadn’t been trying to rob the bank, he wouldn’t have tried to shoot you.”

“That’s true, that’s true,” Darius admitted. “But he had a six-shooter and accidentally killed six people. That’s really bad aim. One woman was on the complete opposite side of the bank from me. Like I explained during the trial, I’m not saying for sure that the bank teller was a madman who saw an opportunity to extinguish human lives and took advantage of it. I am, however, saying that it’s disappointing that nobody was left alive to testify about how much he was giggling while he was doing it.”

“He’s an upstanding member of our community,” said Mayor Wasser, “and I will not have you suggesting that those half-dozen deaths made him happy. He promised to practice shooting targets in his backyard for no less than three hours a week. That’s not the action of a thrill-killer. Shame on you for trying to disparage a fine man to save your own skin. I’m so angry that I could slap you in the face right now, but I won’t, because that’s not how mayors behave. Anyway, you, Darius Brown, have been sentenced to death by hanging. Assuming that your cruel words about a bank teller whose only sin was that he cared too much weren’t your final words, do you have any final words?”

“Yes,” said Darius. “I see that there’s a hangman’s noose dangling from that tree, and there’s a wooden box underneath it. It looks like you’re going to have me stand on the box, somebody will put the noose around my neck, and then somebody will kick the box out from under me. Is that right?”

“Well, we were going to have you put the noose around your own neck so we wouldn’t have to bring a second box, but yes, that is correct.”

“Really? That’s how you’re going to do this? The ‘rope and limb’ method?”

“How else would we do it?”

“A town that wasn’t fifty years behind the times would use a trapdoor gallows. Walk me up there, pull the lever, and the trapdoor opens beneath me. My neck snaps immediately. Nice and efficient.”

“Maybe we don’t want it to be nice and efficient,” said Mayor Wasser. “Maybe we want you to suffer for your crimes.”

“I get that, but if I’m dangling there, choking and gagging, it reflects badly on you. It makes it look like you don’t really know what you’re doing. People will say ‘Oh, the leaders of Grassy Point have no idea how to properly hang somebody.’ It’s embarrassing.”

“I’m not going to go through the time and expense of building a trapdoor gallows just to avoid a bit of embarrassment. We don’t do many hangings around here.”

“That’s all the more reason to take pride in the hangings that do happen.” Darius said. He gestured to the crowd. “Don’t they deserve a more professional execution? If they’ve taken time out of their busy days to come out to the town square to witness a hanging, why should they have to settle for a cheap rope and limb show? It’s disrespectful.”

“You’re the first hanging this year,” said Mayor Wasser. “I’d be squandering their tax money if I commissioned a gallows.”

“How much can a decent gallows possibly cost? It’s some wood. You’ve got plenty of wood around here. Hell, you can cut down the tree you’re about to use to hang me. Are you telling me there’s nobody in this entire town who can design a trapdoor?”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Mayor Wasser. “I’ve never asked.”

A man standing near the front of the crowd raised his hand. “My name is Tom, and I’m the finest carpenter in the entire state of Oklahoma. I take personal offense to the suggestion that nobody in town can design a trapdoor.”

“Are you mad at me or him?” asked Mayor Wasser.

“You.”

“I never meant to suggest that you couldn’t design a trapdoor. The water troughs you’ve built for our town’s horses are second to none. But you wouldn’t build us a gallows for free, would you?”

“Well, no,” said Tom. “I’d charge a fair price.”

“Right. Which means that I’d be spending taxpayer money, money that the citizens of this town have worked so hard to earn, on something we don’t really need. And that would be irresponsible.”

“It wouldn’t be a difficult job,” said Tom. “I could do it in an afternoon.”

“I know what a trapdoor gallows looks like,” said Mayor Wasser. “It’s not a one-person job, is it?”

Tom didn’t respond.

“I asked you a question.”

“Well, no, I’d require an assistant.”

“Oh, listen to that! He’d require an assistant! Now the price is going up a bit, isn’t it?”

“Not by much. My assistants are poorly paid.”

“Still, this luxury purchase isn’t as inexpensive as you’d led us to believe. We don’t need a goddamn gallows. We need a tree with a sturdy branch, a rope tied into a noose, and that’s it!”

“Does anybody around here even know how to tie a proper noose?” asked Darius.

“Yes, we know how to tie a noose! Now you’re just trying to distract us, as if we’ll get so caught up in the conversation that we’ll forget to execute you! Well, it’s not going to happen! I’m counting everything you’ve said so far as your last words, so if you’d hoped to exit this world with something more profound, it’s your own fault.”

Darius nodded. “Fair enough. By the way, over in Red Hollow, they have a twitch-up gallows.”

“What the hell is a twitch-up gallows?”

“Oh, it’s really impressive. So, you know how you’re using the caveman method of just dangling somebody from a tree? And you know how I’m encouraging you to use a trapdoor gallows, where the victim drops through the floor?”

“Don’t call yourself a victim,” said Mayor Wasser. “The victims are the six people who got shot in the bank.”

“Right,” said Darius. “Anyway, a twitch-up gallows is the latest in execution technology. Basically, instead of letting the evil-doer fall, you drop a counterweight, which yanks the body up, breaking his neck immediately. The trapdoor gallows are highly effective, but there are still the occasional glitches. The twitch-up gallows get the job done right the first time, almost every time.”

“Remember, I don’t care about that. If you’re dangling there and foaming at the mouth, that doesn’t bother me one bit. If you don’t die until your head pops off, oh well. I admire your effort, but you’re not going to change my mind.”

“I think Red Hollow actually had a double twitch-up gallows. You can hang two men at the same time. Now that is a show!”

“Is it, though?” asked Mayor Wasser. “You seem to think that this crowd wants it to be over quickly. That would be like the theater troupe coming through town and doing a Punch and Judy show with only one act of puppet violence. Why would the citizens of this fine town gather to watch your neck snap in half a second? I think they want the slow strangulation and gurgling that comes from a good old-fashioned rope and limb hanging. What does everybody else think?”

A woman raised her hand. “The people of Red Hollow do seem to have higher morale than we do.”

“Since when?” Mayor Wasser demanded.

“Since always. Everybody knows that.”

The townspeople all nodded and murmured their agreement.

“Well...if they do, and I don’t think they do, it’s not because of their double twitch-up gallows!”

“He’s right,” said a man. “It’s because they have a much better whorehouse.”

The men all nodded and murmured their agreement.

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked Mayor Wasser. “The Grassy Point Pleasure Dome is the finest whorehouse for sixty-five miles! Those ladies will do things that would send our wives to the sanitarium! I reject your notion that the people of Red Hollow are happier because of their whorehouse! The diseases in that place are so thick that they squish through your toes when you walk inside. They should call it the Red Hollow Crab House, if you ask me.”

“Well,” said Darius, “if it’s not the whorehouse, it’s got to be their double twitch-up gallows, right?”

“No! It could be their clean drinking water!”

“Could be. But you don’t know. All I’m saying is that there’s enough uncertainty that you should take me back to my jail cell until we get this all sorted out.”

“A double twitch-up gallows doesn’t sound so hard to make,” said Tom. “I can draw up a schematic and give you a quote by sunrise.”

“We’re only hanging one person!”

“True, but somebody will commit a heinous crime eventually. What about Doc Reed? Remember last week when he murdered a couple of the Grassy Point Pleasure Dome whores because they weren’t as attentive as the ones in Red Hollow?”

“He apologized.”

“But they were too dead to hear it.”

“Enough,” said Mayor Wasser. “He’s trying to turn us against each other! How dare this outsider come in and criticize our executions and our fallen women? We should turn this from a hanging to a stoning! Everybody grab a rock and throw it at this son of a bitch! How does that sound?”

“That sounds positively horrific, and I withdraw all of my previous comments,” said Darius. “I’ll take the rope and limb.”

Darius stepped up onto the box. Mayor Wasser handed him the noose, which Darius placed around his own neck. Mayor Wasser took a deep breath, then prepared to kick the box out from underneath him.

“Uh, shouldn’t you...?” said Darius.

“Shit,” said Mayor Wasser. “Yes, yes, yes, I know.” He looked out at the crowd. “Somebody needs to tie the other end of the rope to a branch.”

“I’ll do it if I’m rewarded with female company for my efforts,” said Doc Reed.

“Never mind, I’m the mayor, I’ll do it.” Mayor Wasser looked at the tree, trying to figure out the best branch to grab to begin his ascent.

“Should I just stand here?” asked Darius.

“Yes.” He raised his voice, speaking to the townspeople. “If he tries to escape, throw rocks at him! Sharp ones! Get him in the most sensitive areas!”

“I won’t try to escape.”

Mayor Wasser, with significant effort, climbed the tree and tied the other end of the noose to a large branch. He climbed back down, also with significant effort.

“I could’ve built a trapdoor gallows in the time it took you to do that,” said Tom.

“Would you like to join him up there?”

“Looks like we might need a double—”

“Shut the fuck up!” shouted Mayor Wasser. He kicked the box out from underneath Darius.

Darius dropped, his feet dangling inches above the ground. He clutched at his throat and let out various gagging noises.

“Yeah, that’s right, choke!” said Mayor Wasser. “Let that tongue loll out of your mouth!”

The branch above him snapped. Darius fell onto the dirt.

Before Mayor Wasser could say, “Son of a—” Darius glanced up just as the branch struck him in the face.

“Oh my goodness!” Tom wailed. “It got him right through the eyeball! Look at the blood and ooze spurting out of there!”

Darius screamed.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” said Mayor Wasser. “I should’ve picked a sturdier branch!”

“Pull it out! Pull it out!”

“You shouldn’t do that,” said the woman who’d made the earlier comment about how the people of Red Hollow had higher morale. “It’ll make things worse!”

“How could it make things worse?” Darius shrieked.

“That branch is holding some of the blood in! If you pull it out, it’ll be like yanking the cork out of a sideways bottle of wine!”

“So should I shove it in more?” asked Mayor Wasser.

“No!” Darius yanked the branch away. “Fuck! It broke off in my eye socket!”

“He’ll never get it out now,” said Tom. “There’s not enough for him to get his fingers around.”

Darius desperately tried to pull out the piece of the branch.

“Stop that!” said Major Wasser. “Your fingers are making your eye socket wider! You’re digging too deep!”

A frantic mother shielded the eyes of her two young boys. “I brought my sons to watch a hanging, not this grisly eyeball trauma!”

Gritting his teeth with the effort, Darius got the branch out of his eyeball.

“My God,” said Tom. “It’s so gooey, I can’t even tell what’s stuck to the wood!”

“This is why you needed a fucking trapdoor gallows!” Darius shouted.

“Make him turn his head!” said the mother.

“No! I will not turn my head away! Gaze at my disgusting eye socket, all of you! I presented a solution, and your mayor rejected it! Now every time each of you closes your eyes, you’ll see what happened to my eye! This will haunt your dreams! You cannot unsee it! You will wake up in the middle of the night, bathed in cold perspiration, cursing the fates that brought you here today, forcing you to witness an image that will be forever imprinted on your mind’s eye!”

“You’re getting carried away,” said Mayor Wasser. “It’s gross, but it’s not that gross.”

Darius vigorously shook his head back and forth, spraying blood on the mayor like a dog after a bath. Then he let out a deranged cackle and fled. Before he could escape, the mayor stepped on the end of the noose. As Darius reached the end of the rope, there was a loud crack and he dropped to the ground.

“That sounded like a neck-breaking crack,” Tom noted.

“Yes,” said Mayor Wasser. “It wasn’t pretty, but in the end, it was a successful execution. Thank you for coming, everybody! Get home safely.”

“Why is he still moving?” asked the mother.

“He’s not.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Oh, that’s just death twitches. It happens. If you died in front of your children right now, you’d twitch a little, too.”

The mother shook her head. “He’s alive.”

Mayor Wasser knelt down beside Darius. “Well, shit. Yeah, he’s still alive. Looks like he’s got a broken neck, and he’s paralyzed. At least he can’t rob any banks in this condition. I think it’s safe enough to still say it was a successful execution. He’ll be dead pretty soon.”

“How do you know that?” the mother asked. “What if he lasts for a few days?”

“The coyotes won’t let that happen.”

“I didn’t traumatize my boys just to leave a paralyzed criminal to starve to death.”

“Look how much blood is still coming out of his eye.”

“It’s not that much.”

“It’s not as much as was spurting out before, but there’s a solid trickle. He’ll be dead in ten, fifteen minutes.”

“What kind of lesson am I teaching these boys if you leave the job unfinished?”

“What do you want me to do,” asked Mayor Wasser, “stomp on his head until it’s nothing but mush?”

The mother nodded.

“Fine!” Mayor Wasser stomped on Darius’ head a few times. He quickly discovered that stomping on somebody’s head until it was nothing but mush was more difficult than one might expect. He needed better shoes.

“What if we dropped a big rock on his head?” asked Tom.

“Do you have a big rock?”

“No, but I’m sure we can find one.”

“Climbing that tree really wore me out,” said Mayor Wasser. “I don’t want to deal with a big rock right now. What if we just marched all of the people in town past the body and everybody tore off a hunk?”

Tom shrugged. “Sounds good to me.”

By the time the bloodied townspeople returned to their homes, Darius had been successfully executed. Mayor Wasser, who was never too proud to learn from his mistakes, commissioned a double twitch-up gallows the very next day. Sadly, his term ended with no violent crimes that required a hanging, and he regretted the unnecessary expenditure until his death of natural causes at the age of seventy-three.

TORTURE PORN FOR PRUDES

“The delicious irony is that you’ve done absolutely nothing to deserve this,” said Jamison, waving the hacksaw in front of his captive’s face. “Your nightmarish fate was chosen completely at random. I could have taken anybody from that rest stop, and yet, it was…you. Makes you question the existence of a higher power, doesn’t it?”

Fred struggled against the ropes that bound him to the chair in the basement. His voice was hoarse from screaming, and he knew that pleading for his life would do no good. You couldn’t reason with somebody who was pure evil.

“I’m going to do such horrible things to you,” said Jamison. “I’m going to sever each of your fingers, cauterizing the wound after each one. Then I’m going to do the same with your toes. After that, I’ll blindfold you and start making random cuts all over your body, but you’ll never know where the next one will be! When you are bleeding from one hundred wounds—no more, no less—I shall remove the blindfold and very, very slowly slice off your nose.”

Jamison smiled and winked.

“But your torment won’t end there. Oh, goodness, no. I’ll hold a mirror to your face, so you can gaze upon the disfigured freak you have become. And then, out of mercy for how difficult it must be to see your new face so clearly, I’ll remove one of your eyes. Perhaps I’ll make you eat it. Perhaps I won’t. Why, I might eat it myself!”

Fred struggled again. But the ropes held firm. And he had nothing in his hands that he could secretly use to cut the ropes while Jamison was talking.

“And then, my undeserving victim, I will deliver the final misery. The final humiliation. The coup de grace. With this very saw…” Jamison waved the hacksaw in front of Fred’s face again. “...I shall do the unthinkable. I shall cut off your ding-dong!”

“Excuse me?” asked Fred.

“I said, I shall do the unthinkable. I shall cut off your ding-dong.”

“My…ding-dong?”

“Exactly!”

Fred snickered.

“How dare you laugh at me?” Jamison demanded.

“Sorry. I was terrified until you got to that last part.”

“Do you not fear castration? What could be worse for a man than to have his ding-dong cut off with a hacksaw?”

Fred snickered again.

“What’s wrong with you?” Jamison thought for a moment. “Are you in such a state of terror that you can do nothing but laugh at your plight? Is the laugh due to your lack of remaining sanity?”

“No, no, it’s just…c’mon, ding-dong?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what a ding-dong is.”

“I do. It’s just not the word choice I would’ve expected from you.”

“What’s wrong with ding-dong?”

Fred giggled. “Okay, that’s even funnier because it rhymed.”

“Enough of your disrespect! You may be laughing now, but I assure you, you won’t be laughing as the rusty blade of my hacksaw slowly slices deep into the tender, yielding flesh of your doomed ding-dong!”

“Are you purposely trying to add comic relief?”

“No! This is serious business! I’m talking about inflicting ghastly torture upon you!”

“Okay.”

“Stop smiling!” Jamison shouted.

“I’m not!”

“The corners of your lips are turned upward!”

“I guess I don’t understand why you think I’d be intimidated by you calling it a ding-dong. What are you, six years old?”

“Fine! I shall do the unthinkable. I shall cut off your wiener!”

“My wiener?”

“Yes! Oh, I can hardly imagine your shrieks of agony as I draw this serrated blade back and forth across the skin and veins of your wiener!”

“That really isn’t any better,” said Fred.

“What’s going on with you?” asked Jamison. “Did somebody already sever your wiener? Is that why you don’t fear this mutilation? Is there no wiener available for me to remove?”

“Why don’t you just call it a penis?”

The color drained from Jamison’s face. “There’s no call for that kind of language.”

“It’s not a curse word. That’s what it’s called. That’s what a doctor would call it.”

“I hardly think that a doctor is a good arbiter of morality.”

“Ummm…okay. But I’d at least think a doctor would know the proper terminology. If you go in for a medical exam, the doctor isn’t going to say, ‘Let’s take a look at your schlong.’”

“Enough!”

“What about phallus? Nobody can be offended by phallus.”

“Phallus would make me sound pretentious,” said Jamison. “You don’t hear anybody say that word unless they’re reading from a script. You’d think that I’d practiced my speech ahead of time instead of speaking from the heart.”

“True.”

“I honestly don’t see the problem with ding-dong. It’s not like I sang it.”

“It’s very juvenile. Took me completely out of the moment. Seriously, dude, I’m trying to help you out here. Call it a penis.”

“I’ll do no such thing! Mother would be horrified!”

“Then don’t expect me to be frightened,” said Fred. “You had a decent monologue going there, but you fumbled at the one-yard line.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Jamison admitted.

“It’s a football reference.”

“If I was good at sports, I wouldn’t have become a serial killer.”

“Anyway, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job. I’m just saying—”

“It’s not a job.”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s not a job,” Jamison repeated. “Nobody is paying me to do this.”

“Oh, sorry,” said Fred. “My mistake.”

“I will not be mistaken for some syphilitic whore doing vile things for spare change! I’m doing this for me! This is about my sadism! My uncontrollable urges! To suggest that I’m in it for a quick buck is incredibly offensive!”

“I already apologized. I don’t know what more you want from me.”

“I want you to die.” Jamison sighed. “And now I don’t even remember where I was going to start. You’ve gotten me completely flustered.”

“You started out by saying that the delicious irony was that I didn’t deserve this.”

“Right, right, but I can’t remember what I was going to do first.”

“You were going to untie me, give me a ten-minute head start, and then try to hunt me for sport.”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? Now I remember. I was going to cut off all ten of your fingers.”

“No, that wasn’t it,” said Fred.

“It most certainly was.”

“I’m almost positive you said something about hunting humans being the ultimate adrenaline rush, but only when predator and prey were on even terms. You were going to give me a small knife to defend myself and then turn me loose.”

Jamison slapped Fred across the face. “Enough of your lies!”

“Ow! What’s your deal, dude?”

“I know what I said. I’m going to cut off your fingers, then toes, then the whole hundred cuts thing, then your nose, and then your eyeball. After that, to put it in terms that won’t make you giggle, I’m going to take this hacksaw and use it to cut off your pe…your pe…” Jamison cleared his throat. “...your pee-pee.”

“My pee-pee?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about!”

“That’s worse than ding-dong and wiener combined.”

Jamison glared at Fred. “You deserve to die just for being so judgmental.”

“That kind of messes up the whole idea that I haven’t done anything to deserve this. You started your whole sinister monologue talking about how the delicious irony was that I was an innocent victim chosen at random. Now you’re murdering somebody for being judgy. You’ve gone from making me question the existence of a higher power to just being petty.”

“You know what’s petty? Criticizing the word I use for your ding-dong!”

“Well, if you’d started by threatening to cut off my dick, I would’ve been paralyzed with terror, and by now we’d already be on the third or fourth finger.”

“And then Mother would have washed my mouth out with soap. Have you ever had your mouth washed out with soap? Have you?”

“No.”

“It tastes terrible. Very bitter.”

“Is it worse than having your dick cut off?”

“I couldn’t say.” Jamison raised an eyebrow. “Would you like me to wash your mouth out with soap first so you can do a direct comparison?”

“Nah, I was just trying to be funny.”

“Well, stop it. I’m not interested in being amused right now. This is not a lighthearted situation.”

“It wasn’t supposed to amuse you. It was supposed to make you angry. Y’know, so that you’d be filled with blind rage and make a mistake.”

“What kind of mistake?”

“Shout in my face and get so close that I could bite your nose, or something,” said Fred. “I’m not sure why I thought that joke would enrage you. It was pretty mild.”

“Are you ready to get started?”

“I guess I don’t understand why you can’t say penis, yet you’re going to put your hand all over it later.”

“I’m not going to put my hand all over it.”

“You said you were.”

“No, I said that I was going to saw it off.”

“Right, but you have to hold it to saw it off. Otherwise you won’t be able to get any traction. It’ll just flop around.”

“What the heck are you talking about?” asked Jamison.

“Have you ever tried to slice a piece of bread without holding the loaf? It just moves around. To successfully cut off my putz, you’ll have to hold it.”

“So what? I’m not homophobic.”

“It’s not about homophobia. It’s about having the proper maturity level to do the deed. Do you think a gay guy would be truly ready to do gay things if he said to his partner, ‘Hey, I sure would like to interact with your ding-dong!’?”

“Look, I’m sure that in your normal life you’re all F-bomb this and F-bomb that and S-word this and S-word that and A-word, B-word, C-word, D-word, E-word all over the place. But I don’t talk like that. There’s nothing wrong with not having a potty-mouth.”

“What’s the E-word?” Fred asked.

“You know perfectly well what the E-word is.”

“I really don’t.”

“It’s when your ding-dong becomes aroused and engorged with blood.”

“Erection?”

“You’re disgusting.”

“Maybe your prudishness is why you feel the need to kill. You’re too repressed. Maybe if you just shouted the F-word a few times, you’d let loose some of this pent-up frustration and live a happier life.”

“I can’t do that!” said Jamison. “Mother would hear!”

“What’s she going to do to you? You’re holding a hacksaw.”

“Mother knows I would never dismember her.”

“C’mon,” said Fred, “let it out. Say the F-word. You don’t have to shout it. Just say it at a normal volume. You may find that you feel a lot better and aren’t compelled to cut off my dick.”

Jamison hesitated. “I can’t.”

“It’s okay. I understand. Sometimes I’m a coward, too.”

“I’m no coward.”

“Oh, of course not. I take it bock, bock, bock.”

“Did you just make a chicken pun at me?”

“I very well might have,” said Fred.

“Do you really believe that calling me a chicken is going to change my…okay, fine, I’ll say it.” Jamison closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He opened his eyes again. “All right. Here goes. One…two…three…fart!”

“Fart?”

Jamison frantically glanced around in a state of panic.

The door to the basement opened.

“Oh, fudge,” said Jamison. “Fudge, fudge, fudge.”

The wooden stairs creaked as somebody walked down. A short old woman came into view.

“What the fuck are you fuckers doing down here?” asked the woman.

“Nothing, Mother.”

“Why the fuck haven’t you chopped off his cock yet?”

“I’m getting to it, Mother.”

“For fuck’s sake, get this shit done, you lazy asshole!”

“Yes, Mother.”

The old lady walked back up the stairs, slamming the basement door behind her.

“She’s less prudish than I expected,” said Fred.

“There’s a bit of a double standard,” Jamison admitted.

“But do you feel any better? Less psychopathic?”

“Not really.”

“Well, fart.” Fred began to struggle against the ropes again.

“Struggle all you want. Your fate is inevitable…”

The advantage to Fred having only one eye left was that it was more difficult to see his fingerless hands and toeless feet. The cauterization process had sucked. So had the one hundred cuts, especially the thirty-sixth and eighty-seventh ones. It was hard to breathe without a nose. And, in retrospect, it was naive of Fred to have thought that the eyeball removal would be no big deal. Watching Jamison eat it had been disgusting.

“And now it is time to cut off your ding-dong,” said Jamison.

He began to use the saw. After a few tries, he grunted with frustration.

“You’re right. It just keeps moving.”

“I told you,” said Fred.

“Fuck.”

PINK PASSION

Strangers almost never walked into Mikey’s Oak Saloon, so all the locals turned to look at him. He was tall, muscular, and though there was no blood on his brown leather jacket, it wasn’t hard to imagine that he’d been forced to wash blood out of it on numerous occasions. He had three or four days’ worth of stubble and mean eyes. He was clearly somebody who didn’t like being stared at for long.

He took a seat at the bar. Mikey Oak, who had messed up the apostrophe placement on “Mikey Oak’s Saloon” when making the sign but decided to just go with it, walked toward him. “What can I get for you, partner?”

The stranger spoke in his low, gravelly voice. “I want a Pink Passion.”

“Excuse me?”

“Did I stutter? I said, I want a Pink Passion.”

“I’m not sure how to make that.”

The stranger let out an annoyed sigh. “Two ounces of Tequila Rose. Two ounces of peach schnapps. One splash of lemon-lime soda. Two splashes of cranberry juice. Garnish it with a lemon twist.”

“Oh. I’m, uh, not sure I have any lemon-lime soda.”

The stranger leaned forward and glared at him. “Are you telling me you don’t have any Sprite? What kind of low-rent goddamn establishment are you running here?”

“I—I may have some in the back. It’ll just be a second.” Mikey hurried through the swinging door.

The stranger took out a hunting knife with a six-inch blade and cleaned his fingernails with it.

A moment later, Mikey returned with a green two-liter bottle. “I only have Diet Sprite. Is that okay?”

“Do I look like the kind of man who drinks Diet Sprite?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you get your ass back there and you keep looking, and if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you go to the fucking store and buy some.”

“I’ll keep looking.” Mikey disappeared again.

The stranger cracked his knuckles and waited.

A few minutes later, Mikey returned with a different bottle. “I found some Sierra Mist. Is that okay?”

“Is Sierra Mist lemon-lime soda?”

“I—I—I—I think so?”

“Of course it’s lemon-lime soda. It says it right there on the bottle. What are you, a simpleton? Yes, Sierra Mist works. Jesus.”

“How do I make it?”

“Do I have to tell you everything? You mix the Tequila Rose, the peach schnapps, and the cranberry juice together and you shake it. Then you pour in the Sierra Mist. Unless you’re a mongoloid, it’s not so hard.”

Mikey nodded and poured the ingredients into a metal shaker. He vigorously shook it, then poured the pink beverage into a glass. He added the lemon-lime soda, then slid the glass over to the stranger. “There you go.”

The stranger stared at the glass for a moment. “Where the fuck is my garnish?”

“Oh, sorry, sorry. What was the garnish again?”

“A lemon twist.”

“A lemon twist. Right, right.” Mikey looked around, picked up a lemon, and cut it.

“You’d damn well better twist that properly,” said the stranger. “I’m not going to drink my Pink Passion garnished with some haphazardly sliced chunk of lemon. There’s a delicate craft to this. See, you’re pushing too hard. Let the knife do the work. There you go. Now twist it.”

Mikey twisted the lemon, then placed it on the edge of the glass.

“Thank you,” said the stranger. He lifted the glass to his lips and took a sip. “Ahhh. That hits the spot.”

Rico Masters had been watching this entire exchange, and as Mikey began to wipe down the bar, he walked over and sat on the stool next to the stranger.

“Howdy,” Rico said.

“Howdy yourself.”

“May I ask your name?”

“You can. I’ll decide then if I want to answer.”

Rico chuckled. “That’s a very pink looking drink you’ve got there.”

“It’s called a Pink Passion. That’s the color it comes in. Otherwise, it would have a different name.”

“Looks like the kind of drink that would have one of those tiny umbrellas in it.”

“A man who puts an umbrella in my Pink Passion is a man who finds himself with a tiny umbrella stick jammed into his eye.”

“Oh, a tough guy, huh?”

“Some might say that.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so, I’m finding it kind of hard to be intimidated by somebody with a pink girly drink in front of him. Did you come in here after your manicure? Can I see your pretty ol’ toenails?”

“A manicure is for fingernails. The word you were looking for is pedicure.”

Rico laughed. “Of course you know that.”

“There’s nothing wrong with knowing correct terminology. The English language was meant to be used properly. To me, a man who would say ‘manicure’ when he meant ‘pedicure’ is no more intelligent than a hog wallering in its own filth.”

Rico glanced around to see if anybody had heard. Many had. He gave the stranger his most hostile glare. “I think you have a respect problem, stranger. Maybe we should take this outside.”

The stranger shook his head. “I came here to enjoy a refreshing Pink Passion. When I’m done, I’ll be on my way.”

“No,” said Rico. “You don’t get to come in here, sip that pink drink, and not have anybody give you shit about it. That’s not the way life works. If you came in here and ordered a whiskey, I’d let you finish it in peace. Hell, if you had a PBR in front of you right now, I might offer to buy the next round. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you drink a Pink Passion and get away with it.”

The stranger grabbed Rico by the back of the neck and slammed his face into the bar. He did it again and again, leaving blood and teeth behind. When he finally stopped, Rico dropped to the floor, his face a swollen, bloody mess.

“Did anybody come here with this gentleman?” the stranger asked, turning to address everybody in the saloon. “You’ll want to take him to the hospital so they can get the facial reconstruction surgery scheduled as soon as possible.”

Two men walked nervously to the bar, took Rico by the arms and legs, and carried him out of the saloon, leaving a trail of bloody droplets.

“You’ll want to mop that up,” the stranger told Mikey, gesturing to the blood. “You don’t want somebody to slip and fall. That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

“I’d like you to leave,” said Mikey.

“I still have several sips remaining of my Pink Passion.”

“I’ll pour it into a to-go container.”

“I will not be drinking my Pink Passion from a Styrofoam cup.”

“You can take the glass. I don’t care. Just get out.”

The stranger flicked one of Rico’s tooth shards out of the way. “He was disrespecting me. I came in here to enjoy a delicious light cocktail after a hard day of work, and he felt inclined to take me out of my happy space. I feel bad that he’s probably permanently disfigured, but he should have thought about that before he bothered me.”

“Look, you need to…” Mikey trailed off, helpless. “Just finish your drink and go, okay?”

“Don’t worry. More than one of these and I start to get tipsy.”

The stranger took another sip. Mikey wiped the blood off the bar.

Three men—Gordon, Dominick, and Fred—whispered amongst themselves, nodded, got up, and walked to the bar. They stood behind the stranger until he swiveled around on his stool to face them.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“We saw what you did to Rico,” said Gordon. “And we didn’t think it was very cool.”

“Is that so? Did you hear the way he taunted me? Am I supposed to just sit here and be taunted? How would you feel if I walked over to your table and made fun of your drinks?”

“It wouldn’t happen, because there’s nothing wrong with our drinks. This is a manly establishment, and we drink manly drinks. What are you, a twenty-three-year-old woman at a baby shower? When you ordered a pink bubbly drink in a place like this, you forfeited your right to drink it in peace.”

“Yeah,” said Dominick.

“I beg to differ,” said the stranger. “If I want to sit here and drink from a sippy cup of breast milk, that’s my right. But since I don’t know any lactating women who are willing to part with any, I’m having a Pink Passion. Would you like a sip?”

“Hell no, I don’t want a sip!” said Gordon. “That would make this whole scenario even worse!”

“What are you drinking?” the stranger asked.

“Whiskey on the rocks.”

“I disagree.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I disagree. That’s not what you’re drinking.”

“Then what am I drinking, smart guy?”

“Your own blood, as it sprays from your gums where your front teeth used to be.”

The stranger punched Gordon in the face. Gordon cried out in pain and clutched his jaw as blood squirted between his fingers.

“Careful now, you’re spilling it,” said the stranger.

Gordon ran away. He only made it a few steps before he slipped in Rico’s blood, lost his balance, and smashed his face into a table, splitting both his lips wide open. He also spilled two glasses of whiskey, not on the rocks, and the alcohol ran into his mangled mouth, which obviously did not feel good. Gordon fled the saloon, wailing in agony.

Dominick and Fred just stood there, gazing stupidly at the door Gordon had exited.

“Do you have anything to say about my Pink Passion?” asked the stranger, taking a dainty sip.

“Yeah,” said Dominick. “Yeah, I do. I know that Rico and Gordon are pretty messed up now, with their busted-up faces and shattered teeth and stuff, and my survival instincts are screaming at me to go sit back down, and if I were watching this as a movie I’d be shouting at my character to let the whole thing drop...but look at your drink. Look how pink it is. It’s like a shade of lipstick. Look at how many bubbles are in it. That’s too many bubbles for a man to drink. I know that if I wake up tomorrow in the hospital with my mouth wired shut, I’ll regret this, but I’ll also regret it if I wake up tomorrow and I let you drink that thing without at least making a comment about you having a menstrual cycle. You see my dilemma, right?”

“I do.”

“So, sir, are you currently on your—”

The stranger punched him in the nose with such force that everybody in the saloon could hear the crunch. Dominick went cross-eyed, then dropped to the floor and lay still.

“Oh my God!” shouted Mikey. “I think you punched him so hard that a fragment of bone jettisoned up into his brain and killed him!”

“I apologize for that,” said the stranger. “I get rowdy when I drink.”

Fred smacked the glass, knocking it off the bar, onto the floor, and spraying pink liquid all over. “Looks like you’re finished with your cocktail,” he said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Make me another one,” said the stranger.

“I beg your goddamn pardon?”

“Make me another Pink Passion. You’re going to mix two ounces of Tequila Rose, two ounces of peach schnapps, and two splashes of cranberry juice together. You will then shake it. After that, you will add a splash of Sierra Mist. Then you will proceed to garnish it with a lemon twist. If you do not do it properly, you will make me another one. Do you understand?”

“I understand that I’m gonna kick your—”

The stranger tore Fred’s left ear off. As Fred shrieked and flailed around, the stranger tore off his right ear. Fred tried to run, but tripped over Dominick’s dead body and fell to the floor, landing face-first on the broken glass that had once contained the stranger’s drink. There was a significant amount of blood.

“I don’t think he’s gonna make my drink,” the stranger told Mikey.

Mikey nodded. “I’ll do it.”

“Actually, make it a shot of Jack Daniels.”

Mike picked up the bottle, thought for a moment, and then frowned.

“Hold on. Did you come in here and order a Pink Passion because you were trying to start a fight?”

The stranger grinned. “Busted. I’ve gotta satisfy my bloodlust somehow.”

GHOSTS OF CANDIES PAST

My kids were old enough to go trick-or-treating by themselves, but I still went through their bag of candy before they were allowed to eat any. This was partly to make sure none of it appeared to have been tampered with, and partly because, as the person who provided my pre-teen children with food and shelter, I got first dibs on the really good stuff.

Moni and Tim emptied their plastic jack-o-lanterns onto the kitchen counter, being careful to keep their stashes separate. They’d managed to acquire a tremendous amount of candy in just a couple of hours—I admired their ambition.

One very large piece in Moni’s pile caught my attention. “Oh, wow, did they bring those back?” I asked, picking up the Marathon Bar. The red and yellow packaging had a ruler on the side, showing it was eight inches long. I called out to my wife: “Hey, do you remember Marathon Bars?”

“What?” Becky called back from the living room.

“Marathon Bars.”

“What’s a Marathon Bar?”

“Never mind.” I looked at Moni. “They had these when I was a kid. It’s chocolate-covered caramel that’s in the shape of braids. The whole idea was that it took a really long time to eat one, so you were getting your money’s worth.”

My dear children looked at me as if I were much, much older than them.

Speaking of the getting your money’s worth, it said “15 cents” right there on the wrapper. I wondered if this was some sort of nostalgia pricing promotion. Maybe that was why a household was giving away full-sized candy like they were millionaires.

Then I noticed the Three Musketeers bar, which had old-timey packaging and was huge. A great big slab of candy bar. “And that’s a vintage 3 Musketeers,” I told my unimpressed offspring. “This is how they used to do it. Three candy bars in one. Three different flavors. That’s why it was called 3 Musketeers.”

“How do you know this stuff?” Moni asked.

“I’m not sure. Read it somewhere.”

“Why do you know this stuff?” Tim asked.

“There’s nothing wrong with acquiring information.” I picked up another candy bar, called Chicken Dinner. Five cents. “This one hasn’t been around since the 1960s, I think. There’s no actual chicken in it.”

I frowned as I looked through the rest of their stash. This was all old candy. Not just the stuff that wasn’t made anymore, like Bonkers and Sugar Mamas. Candies like Hershey’s bars and M&Ms had old-style wrappers.

“How many houses did you go to?” I asked.

Moni and Tim shrugged.

“Give it your best guess.”

“I don’t know,” said Moni. “A hundred?”

“You trick-or-treated at a hundred different houses, and every single one of them gave you old-time candy?”

Becky finally walked into the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

“Look at their stash,” I said. “They’re saying that a hundred different homes gave out candy with vintage packaging. How is that possible?”

“Dad’s acting weird,” Moni informed Becky.

“I’m not acting weird. I’m pointing out a weird occurrence. I get that I’m the only one in this house geriatric enough to have ever heard of a Marathon Bar, but I can’t believe I’m the only one who’s a little freaked out by this. Are we the only house in the neighborhood that didn’t give out retro candy?”

“Are you kids pranking your father?” asked Becky.

Tim shook his head. “If I was going to play a joke, it would be funnier.”

I wasn’t sure how much this should be messing with my mind. It was, after all, just candy. Maybe everybody else knew it was the Halloween of nostalgic candy, and I simply hadn’t been paying attention.

“Are you done yet?” asked Moni. “You’re just supposed to be checking it for razor blades.”

“Hold on a second,” I said. I wanted to verify something. I hurried into the living room and peered into the mostly empty bowl of candy we’d been handing out to trick-or-treaters. These were supposed to be Nommers—miniature chocolate covered cookies. I grabbed one and returned to my family, feeling sick to my stomach. I tossed it onto the counter.

“What’s this?” Becky asked.

“The candy we gave out.”

“And...?”

“I bought Nommers. Light brown package. No mascot. These are Om-Nom-Noms, with a white package and a blue mascot who looked too much like Cookie Monster for the copyright attorneys.”

“What are you saying?” Becky asked, looking at me as if I, her darling husband, had gone just a wee bit insane.

“What do you think I’m saying? The candy changed! The candy I bought to hand out to neighborhood kids transformed into the version of it from about thirty years ago!”

“Do you know how that—”

“Yes, I know how it sounds! It sounds nutty! It sounds like I’m a lunatic! But either this is part of an elaborate plan to drive me bonkers—and Bonkers were discontinued in the ‘90s, by the way—or something supernatural is happening.”

“Or,” said Becky, “you’re very tired. You’ve been working hard lately.”

“Nobody else thinks this is bizarre?” I picked up the Om-Nom-Noms and shook the package. “Are you saying that I’m literally the only person in the household who doesn’t find this just a teeny tiny wee little smidgen peculiar?”

The package shook back.

I yelped and dropped it.

“What’s wrong?” asked Becky.

“The candy moved!”

The package of Om-Nom-Noms trembled on the floor. Then it split open, a gout of chocolate squirting into the air.

All the candy on the table began to quiver. We gaped in shock as the candies violently tore open, spewing their melted contents all over the room. Though I felt vindicated, I was far too transfixed by what was happening to gloat.

The candy, mostly chocolate, swirled around. It began to form arms...legs...a chest. Finally, it stood up, perhaps three feet tall, a thin, twisted, chocolate creature. Its eyes were Starburst. Its teeth were candy corn. Various other colorful treats were imbedded in its chocolate form.

“I live...”

“Kill it!” Tim shouted. “Send it back to Hell!” He grabbed the plastic jack-o-lantern and hit the creature with it. Chocolate splashed with each blow but was immediately drawn back into the beast.

The creature tilted back its head and let out a phlegmy-sounding laugh.

Tim, realizing his efforts to kill it were useless, settled for dropping into the fetal position and crying.

“What are you?” I asked. I knew the answer was “a monster made out of candy,” but I was hoping he’d elaborate.

“I am the ghost of a better time,” said the creature. “Candy used to be so very much better. So much bigger. You saw that 3 Musketeers, right? You—your apathy—allowed candy to shrink through the years, creating the puny specimens you know today. ‘Fun Size’—bah! But I’m back to restore balance to the sugary universe.”

“Fair enough, fair enough,” I said. “We won’t stand in your way.”

“You could have applied economic pressure. You could have simply refused to purchase these diminished morsels. But you just didn’t care! You let candy turn into a laughable hollow shell of its former glory!”

“Do you mean me, specifically?” I asked. “I don’t think one family refusing to buy smaller candies would have any real impact. It would have to be a letter-writing campaign, or something.”

“Then you should have written the letters!”

“I would argue that, in some ways, candy is better than ever. Jelly Belly jellybeans are smaller than normal jellybeans, but they taste like the actual flavors they’re supposed to be! Like, if you eat a buttered popcorn Jelly Belly, it tastes like buttered popcorn! Juicy pear tastes like a pear. It’s uncanny. When I was a kid, no candy ever tasted like the fruit it was supposed to mimic. Grape candy doesn’t taste like grapes. They called it cherry, but it was just red.”

“Maybe don’t debate the chocolate monster,” said Becky.

“I respect his opinion. I’m just saying that he’s zeroing in on one small part of the overall picture. Look at how many different flavors we have now. We used to only have regular M&Ms and peanut M&Ms, and now we have tons of varieties. Who would’ve ever thought we’d get Snickers variants? That’s crazy!”

The chocolate creature frowned. It pointed a sharp dripping finger at me. “You know not of what you speak.”

“Candy bars are smaller now. Everybody knows it. The manufacturers say it’s to help combat obesity, but c’mon. All I’m saying is that if we went back in time, we’d get bigger candy bars but lose out on a lot of advantages. What about soda? Do you really want to return to a time when we only had one flavor of Mountain Dew?”

“You’re getting off-topic,” the chocolate creature informed me.

“Look, I enjoy nostalgia as much as anyone. But a lot of those television shows I loved as a kid are absolute dogshit. When I went to the video store, none of the new releases I wanted to rent were ever in. Yes, Snickers are smaller now, but have you tried the kind with almonds?”

“No.”

“You really should.”

“I’m bringing back old candy,” said the creature.

“Okay.”

“All of it.”

“All right.”

“Now.”

“Like I said earlier, I’m not trying to stop you. I made a counterargument, but I’m not looking for a fight.”

“All of the candy you’ve eaten is returning.”

“Got it.” I thought about what he’d just said. “What exactly do you mean by that?”

The chocolate creature pointed to Tim, who was still in the fetal position on the floor. He winced in pain and rolled onto his back. His stomach was expanding...

“No!” I screamed as Tim’s stomach exploded, spraying chocolate, nougat, taffy, hard candy, bone, blood, and internal organs everywhere.

The candy kept spewing out of him like a volcano, until my son was covered in a mix of colorful brown gook that reached the ceiling.

The chocolate creature pointed at Moni. She cried out in pain, doubled over, and then began to regurgitate what I assume was all of the candy she’d ever eaten in her life. There was a lot of it. It started to come out faster than her mouth could accommodate, so her cheeks split open to make more room. Then her entire head came off, and the rest of her body stumbled around as a fountain of candy gore covered the kitchen.

My reaction lacked dignity.

Becky hadn’t stopped shrieking since Tim’s stomach popped open.

The chocolate creature turned toward her.

My wife didn’t like sweets. Never had, even as a little kid. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her eat a candy bar. Maybe she’d be okay!

Thick white paste began to ooze from her mouth, then her ears, then her nostrils. I realized to my horror that while she didn’t like sweets, she did have breath mints on a regular basis.

“Breath mints don’t count!” I screamed at the creature. “They aren’t candy!”

“They exist in that middle ground, like Flintstones chewable vitamins.”

Becky’s body exploded, sending refreshing globs flying everywhere.

“Why?” I wailed. “Why would you do this?”

“I thought I explained myself pretty clearly,” said the monster.

“No! You said you were pissed about modern candy!” I gestured to the remains of my family, which didn’t require much gesturing, because they pretty much filled the entire kitchen. “You didn’t explain this! How does this help your cause?”

“It starts a conversation.”

I wanted to kill the chocolate creature. Wanted to hear it scream in pain. Wanted it to suffer. But how could you defeat a demon made entirely out of...?

I leaned forward and bit down on its neck.

“Ow! What the hell?”

I took bite after bite out of it, trying to eat as much chocolate as I possibly could. With each bite, more chocolate would slither in to replace what I’d eaten, but I was confident that if I ate quickly enough, it would eventually succumb.

“Stop it! I was going to let you go! I need somebody to tell my story!”

I refused to stop. I was already feeling queasy. I had to push past it and just eat, eat, eat.

“Wait!”

I kept eating.

“Seriously, wait! If you kill me, how will you explain this mess? If you’re going to tell the police that a living candy monster murdered your family, wouldn’t it be easier if the monster was still here, for verification?”

It did have a point, but no, it needed to die. I kept eating and eating.

“Curse you!” the creature shouted. Apparently, I’d eaten a crucial part, because it suddenly turned completely liquid and splashed onto the floor.

“Go to hell,” I whispered. I wasn’t even going to bother passing its message along to the candy manufacturers.

As it turned out, the police did believe me because the same thing happened to pretty much everybody in our neighborhood, and most of the creatures were still around when the authorities arrived. It was quite a night.

You’ll be happy to know that, after a period of mourning, I did find love again, got remarried, and even had another kid. But I never ate another piece of candy. And on Halloween, I was that asshole who gave out apples. I hope you now understand why.

TURN ME

“Watch out, don’t poke your fist on his fangs!” Ruck let out a braying laugh at his own joke. It was the single most obnoxious laugh Madsen had heard in his entire life, but he resisted the urge to tell Ruck to shut up. Ruck was good at his job. He had, after all, successfully abducted a vampire.

Madsen opened and closed his fist a few times. Though he hadn’t actually injured himself on the vampire’s fangs, it still hurt to punch somebody in the face. Even after the vampire’s face had been tenderized from about a dozen other punches.

The vampire was bound to the chair with heavy chains. As far as Madsen knew, vampires didn’t have superhuman strength, but there was no reason to be stupid and test that theory. The basement had no windows, and the door to the rest of the house was locked from the other side, so this bloodsucker wasn’t getting away.

“I can do so much worse than punch you,” Madsen told it. “What’s it gonna take?”

The vampire shrugged underneath the chains. “I guess we’ll find out.”

It looked about seventy. That was a raw deal—eternal life, but as an old man. Probably couldn’t even get it up anymore. Madsen was thirty-one, so he’d be spending his immortality as a young and virile guy. Assuming he didn’t walk into sunlight or get staked or take a holy water bath, of course.

“There’s only one way this ends,” Madsen said. “Why go through all the suffering? You should want to bite me. It’ll hurt like hell. A little revenge on your part.”

“You’re not worthy of being a vampire. You’re a graceless brute. If I turned you, I’d be disgracing our kind.”

Madsen punched it again.

Ruck laughed. “Maybe if you hit him enough times, he’ll sparkle.”

The vampire smiled. “Oh, the sparkle joke. I’ve never heard that one before. Who would have ever thought to reference the Twilight vampires for humorous effect? With so much wit at your disposal, why are you a low-level thug instead of a stand-up comedian?”

“I’m not a low-level thug.”

“Of course not. My mistake.”

“Shut up,” Madsen told the vampire. “If you’re gonna talk, you talk to me. Do you really want to live out the rest of eternity as a torso? Do you want to be a doorstop? One bite and we’ll send you on your way. Otherwise, I’ll make sure that the rest of your long-ass existence is hell on earth.”

The vampire smiled again. “The problem with your attempt to negotiate is that I know perfectly well you’re not simply going to let me go. You, sir, are a psychopath. You may leave me a mutilated mess, or you may toss me out into the sun, but you’re most assuredly not going to remove the chains and send me on my merry way.”

Ruck let out his braying, grating, infuriating laugh.

“Fine,” said Madsen. “Let’s say that’s true. You still have the choice to leave this basement alive or dead.”

“Indeed,” said the vampire. “But you don’t know which I’d prefer.”

Madsen punched it in the face four more times, alternating fists.

The vampire spat out a front tooth. “You seem to be working against your own interests. I can’t turn you with my gums.”

Madsen wanted to punch the brick wall until his fists were just flaps of bloody flesh dangling from his wrists, but he resisted the urge. He wasn’t going to let this bloodsucker win the battle of wills. When this was all over, Madsen would have two fang-holes in his neck, and the immortality that came along with it. (Again, disregarding all of the many ways one could kill a vampire. As far as he knew, too much garlic in spaghetti sauce could do it.)

And, yes, he was indeed going to kill the vampire afterward. He wasn’t the kind of guy who left loose ends.

“Fine,” said Madsen. “Ruck, bring me the hacksaw.”

“You’re closer to it.”

“Bring me the goddamn hacksaw!”

Ruck walked toward him and picked up the hacksaw resting on a wooden table only a few feet away from Madsen. Madsen took it from him, crouched down, and pressed the blade against the vampire’s left ankle.

“You ready for this?” he asked.

“Obviously, I’d prefer that you didn’t,” said the vampire. “It’s going to be extremely painful. But, apparently, I have no choice in the matter, so if you’re waiting for me to start begging for mercy, you’ll be very disappointed.”

This sucked. (Madsen was glad he hadn’t said that out loud. Ruck would’ve thought it was hilarious and kept repeating it to make sure Madsen recognized the uproarious irony of using the word “sucked” in a vampiric context.) Madsen was totally bluffing. The list of ways to kill vampires did not include “saw off their leg and watch them bleed to death,” but he didn’t know what would happen if he did. Maybe the vampire would bleed to death. He simply could not have imagined it could be so stubborn. What was wrong with its brain? How could it choose dismemberment over creating a new vampire?

Now what? He had to at least start to saw off its foot.

He pulled the blade toward him. The vampire sucked in a deep breath. So at least it hurt. Good.

“I can make this stop,” said Madsen.

“I’m not trying to control your behavior.”

Madsen slid the blade forward. Blood started trickling.

“Dammit!” Madsen shouted. He stood up and flung the hacksaw against the wall. It bounced off and ricocheted toward Ruck—not close enough to hit him, but close enough for him to flinch and say, “What the hell, dude?”

“You’d do well to control your temper,” said the vampire. “I might think you don’t have a solid plan in place.”

Madsen clenched his fist, but no, he wasn’t going to punch it anymore. “What if I drop a silver cross down your pants?” he asked. “Would that change your mind?”

“I don’t believe so, no.”

Madsen didn’t have a silver cross anyway. Since he planned to be a vampire himself when this was over, he didn’t think it was a good idea to have stuff like that lying around in the basement, in case he couldn’t completely trust Ruck afterward.

“Just shove your neck in his mouth,” said Ruck.

“Stop saying—” Madsen began. His intention was to tell Ruck to stop saying dumb shit, but maybe that wasn’t so dumb. Why not give it a shot? “Hold its mouth open,” he said.

Ruck pressed one hand against the vampire’s chin and the other over its nose, then tried to pry its jaws apart. He grunted and strained with the effort. After thirty seconds, Madsen was ready to tell him to quit, but the vampire’s mouth finally popped open.

“Get your neck in there!” said Ruck. “Hurry!”

“Your hands are in the way!”

“Just push your neck in there, and I’ll move my hands.”

Madsen tried it. “Move your hands.”

“You’re pressed against them too tight.”

“Just pull your fingers out!”

“I can’t! Pull back a little bit!”

Madsen pulled back a little bit. Ruck yanked his fingers out, and the vampire’s mouth snapped shut.

“Hold its nose,” said Madsen. “I’ll press my neck against its mouth until it needs to take a breath.”

“Do vampires breathe?”

“Of course vampires—no, wait, they can breathe, but they don’t need to breathe. Shit. Try to hold its mouth open again.”

Ruck pried the vampire’s mouth open. Madsen pressed the side of his neck against Ruck’s fingers. The vampire’s cold tongue slid over his flesh, and Madsen immediately recoiled.

“What’s wrong?” asked Ruck.

“It licked me!”

“Ew.”

“Do ya want me to rip yer tongue out?” the vampire asked, in what Madsen had to admit was a pretty good imitation of his voice, if a bit heavy on the “dumb guy” tone.

“You think that was funny?” Madsen asked. “Ruck, rip its tongue out.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t just grab somebody’s tongue and rip it out of their mouth. I’ve tried. Your fingers keep slipping, and it’s basically this big muscle, so it doesn’t pop right out the way you think it might.”

“So cut out its tongue. Use the hacksaw.”

“We’d still need something to grab it with,” said Ruck. “Are there any gloves down here? A pair of pliers? It’s your basement—I don’t know where you keep all this stuff.”

“I’ve got pliers in the garage. You know what, screw it. It can keep its tongue. I don’t care if it licks me. Let’s try again.”

They tried again. This time the vampire didn’t lick his neck. Ruck managed to get his fingers out of the way, and Madsen pressed the side of his neck against the vampire’s open mouth as hard as he could.

“Bite it!” he shouted.

The vampire did not bite him.

“Bite my neck, asshole!”

The vampire continued not biting him.

“Press his head down so it has to bite me!” Madsen shouted at Ruck.

“You mean like a stapler?”

“Yes! Like a stapler!”

Ruck shoved the vampire’s head down. Though Madsen could feel its teeth press against his neck, they weren’t breaking the skin.

“Push harder!”

“I’m pushing as hard as I can!”

“Maybe bash it over the head with a plank of wood.” Madsen pointed to a couple of wooden planks that rested in the corner. Ruck ran to get them.

“Do you have any shorter ones?” Ruck asked. “This is kind of awkward to handle.”

“Wait, no, don’t hit it,” said Madsen. “I just want it to sink its fangs into me. I don’t want it to bite a huge chunk out of my neck.”

Madsen pulled his neck away from the vampire’s mouth. Ruck dropped the plank onto the floor.

The vampire closed its mouth. “I can retract my fangs. For somebody who wishes to become one of the undead, you seem to have little knowledge about our biology. Why do you even want to become one of us?”

“To live forever! Duh! My younger brother died a couple of months ago, and it forced me to confront my own mortality, and I realized I was scared to die, so I kidnapped a vampire to turn me!”

“I didn’t know your brother died,” said Ruck. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.”

“What about all of the disadvantages?” asked the vampire. “You can’t be outside in the sun. You can’t enter somebody’s home without being invited. You have to drink blood. You have to sleep in a coffin. I’ve been a vampire for decades, and it’s still unnerving that I can’t see my reflection. What you think are the really great parts, like turning into a bat or smoke, are completely made up. It’s a terrible life. I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t have a heartbeat,” said Madsen. “Or do you? Hell, I don’t even know. This was a bad idea.”

“You’re young,” said the vampire. “I know the death of your brother hit you hard, but you’ve got plenty of time to enjoy life. Don’t transform yourself into a monster out of fear. It’s not worth it. You know I’m right.”

“Don’t let him get into your head,” said Ruck. “Make him bite you.”

“There is nothing you can do to make me bite you,” said the vampire. “If you want to stake me, then stake me.”

Madsen shook his head. “I have a better idea. I’m going to use the hacksaw and cut your jaws right out of your head. Then I’m going to use them to bite myself on the neck.”

The hacksaw was not intended to cut bone, and the vampire kept thrashing around, making the process extremely difficult. It would’ve been easier to cut the vampire’s head off first, but he thought decapitating a vampire might kill it. By the time he cut out the vampire’s jaws, Madsen was covered in blood, and his arm ached from the effort.

The fangs were extended, so he pressed them into his neck until it broke the skin. He sighed with happiness as twin streams of blood ran down his neck.

It didn’t do shit.

AVERT THINE EYES

“Avert thine eyes, lest ye go mad!” Gerald shouted. “The human mind cannot comprehend the horror that looms above us, and to gaze upon it will surely spell doom for your sanity!”

Edward squeezed his eyes shut. “I shall not look at the accursed evil!”

James put his hands over his face. “Nor shall I! I must protect my brain from this ungodly sight!”

Arthur pulled his wool hat over his eyes. “I’d sooner pluck the orbs from their sockets than allow them to view the cosmic menace!”

“Aw, shit, I looked,” said Roy.

“Look away!” Gerald screamed. “Look away immediately!”

“I can’t! It’s so gross!”

“Avert thine eyes!”

“Seriously, you guys, I’d heard that ancient evils were unpleasant to look at, but this thing is just plain nasty.” Roy pointed to the sky. “It’s all green and slimy. It’s bad enough when I have to look at a normal-sized octopus, but this thing has got to be the size of six or seven Dairy Queens put together! Oh, God, its mouth is disgusting.”

“God has no part in this!” said Gerald.

“I take it back—I don’t think that was its mouth. I get why they say your mind can’t comprehend it, because it’s really hard to tell which part is its mouth, which part is its nose, and all of that. Does it have ears? I don’t know. Lots of green slimy tentacles, though.”

“The tales are true!” Gerald wailed. “It possesses an infinite number of tentacles!”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t say that it’s an infinite number. More like twenty.”

“Twenty doesn’t sound so bad,” said Edward.

“It’s pretty darn bad,” said Roy. “I’m not sure how you’d fit an infinite number of tentacles into the sky, although I guess that could be part of why it makes you go insane. But, yeah, it looks like about twenty tentacles, maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. Twenty-three would be pretty weird, wouldn’t it? An odd number of tentacles. When it’s tentacles or legs or eyes it’s almost always an even number.”

“It could have lost a tentacle in a fight,” said James.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s true. And, like I said, it could also be twenty or twenty-two. It’s hard to count them while they’re all waving around. You guys should really see this thing. But don’t look, obviously. I wish I hadn’t.”

“Then turn away!” said Gerald.

“I can’t! It’s like driving past a car crash. I will say that I’m feeling less insane than I would’ve expected. I’m scared and grossed-out, but I haven’t lost my mind. Maybe it takes more than a giant sky-octopus to make me feel like I’ve lost my grip on reality. I dunno.”

“Is it doing anything?” asked Arthur.

“Not really. Hovering, mostly. It’s not knocking over buildings or anything like that.”

“Perhaps I should take a look,” said Edward.

“No!” Gerald shouted. “You must not look!”

“Roy seems to be handling it okay. I was under the impression that if we gazed upon the ancient cosmic evil we’d go completely comatose, or just start shrieking incoherently and rip out all of our hair. I can handle looking at something gross and slimy. I’m a vet.”

“I’d advise against looking,” said Roy. “I may not be tearing out my hair, but I’m definitely a little queasy, and looking up like this is starting to strain my neck.”

“What if slime starts dripping off it?” asked Edward. “We wouldn’t be able to see it to move out of the way.”

“You literally just said that you could handle slimy,” said Gerald.

“Looking at it and touching it, yeah. But what if this slime is like acid? Or what if it excretes a blob of slime the size of a house? It seems dangerous to stand underneath the ancient evil without being able to see what kind of goo it might drop on us.”

“I think we’re okay,” said Roy. “Like I said, the tentacles are waving around a lot, but I don’t really see anything coming off of them. I’ll let you know if that changes.”

“I can’t keep doing this,” said Edward. “I have to look.”

“Don’t you dare!” shouted Gerald.

“You’re not the boss of me.” Edward opened his eyes. “Ew.”

“I know, right?” said Roy.

“It’s freaky as hell, no doubt about it,” said Edward. “But it’s not like I feel my sanity slipping away. I can still speak in complete sentences.”

“Right,” said Roy. “I was under the impression that it would be a sight that haunted my every waking moment. Don’t get me wrong—I’ll think about this thing a lot. Probably every day for the rest of my life. But not every hour of every day.”

Edward nodded. “My thoughts exactly. I mean, look, it’s a gigantic glowing octopus-like monster hovering a mile above our heads in the middle of the city. That’s not something I’ll forget any time soon. But it’s kind of like the movie Requiem For A Dream. It messed me up for a while, but I got over it.”

“I haven’t seen that one.”

“Great acting, but it’s a tough watch.”

“Did you say it’s glowing?” asked Gerald.

“Yeah,” said Edward. “It’s got this glow surrounding it. Not like it’s radioactive, more like it’s…uh, what’s the word…?”

“Otherworldly,” said Roy.

“Yes!” said Edward. “Otherworldly. It has an otherworldly glow, like something that passed through a portal into our dimension. Eerie as hell.”

“Oh, yeah, totally eerie,” Roy agreed. “But not incomprehensible. My brain can totally process what’s happening.”

“Also, I have to admit that it’s kind of nice to be able to see what it’s up to,” said Edward. “When I was averting my eyes, I wasn’t sure what it was doing, and that was a lot scarier. It’s really just floating around up there. It’s not like it’s on a murderous rampage.”

“I’m starting to think I should look at it,” said James.

“You should do no such thing!” shouted Gerald.

“Roy and Edward looked at it, and they sound okay. I like to think that I’m at least as mentally healthy as they are. I feel kind of stupid just standing here with my eyes closed.”

“Do not succumb to temptation!” Gerald told him.

“Screw it,” said James. He opened his eyes and gazed upward. “What nightmarish presence lurks in the skies above?” he shrieked. “My psyche cannot cope with the unimaginable, indescribable horror!” He let out a maniacal giggle and began to repeatedly slap himself in the face.

“See?” asked Gerald. “You see? He’s gone mad!”

“It does seem that way,” Roy admitted.

“My perception of the world is forever altered! I feel as if cosmic worms are burrowing through my skull, devouring everything I once thought I knew! Why would God allow this being to exist? Or...am I staring into the wide-open jaws of God right now?”

James’ pupils faded away, leaving him with pure white eyes.

“I have been stricken blind, and yet I still see!”

James fled. For a newly blind man he did surprisingly well for a few moments, and then he smacked into the side of a Mexican restaurant, knocking himself unconscious.

“See what you did?” asked Gerald. “A kind and decent man is now irreversibly insane.”

“I didn’t tell him to look!” Roy insisted. “I in no way suggested that my own experience was going to be the same as his. If he went whack-a-doodle, it’s not my fault.”

“Right,” said Edward. “There was no peer pressure. Nobody said that all the cool kids are looking at the giant octopus. He made a choice, and, clearly for him, it was the wrong one, but I reject the accusation that I behaved irresponsibly.”

A giant tentacle reached down, wrapped around Arthur, and yanked him a mile into the air. The creature tossed Arthur into its mouth.

“Oh, wow,” said Roy.

“What happened?” asked Gerald.

“It was super fast. That thing grabbed Arthur and ate him!”

“It almost makes me wonder if Arthur should’ve had his eyes open,” said Edward.

“Nah,” said Roy. “You saw how fast it happened. There was no time to run. It could just as easily have been you or me.”

“That’s true, I guess. Hey, what are those?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Something is falling.”

“Oh, yeah, you’re right. Jeez, I hope it’s not slime.”

“It kind of looks like...musical instruments.”

“Musical instruments?”

“That’s what it looks like to me,” said Edward.

“Why would the beast have musical instruments, and why would it drop them?” asked Roy.

Edward shrugged. “We’re not supposed to understand it. That’s sort of its whole deal.”

“Wait, nope, they aren’t musical instruments,” said Roy, as several bones landed on the sidewalk in front of them. A skull bounced off the cement and struck Gerald in the face.

“Goddamnit!” shouted Gerald.

“Ah, they’re Arthur’s bones,” said Roy. “That makes a lot more sense.”

“My nose is bleeding,” said Gerald.

“At least you’re better off than James,” said Edward. “It looks like he got hit by six or seven rib bones.”

“So, ultimately, being comatose worked out in his favor,” said Roy. “Can you imagine getting impaled by a bunch of broken ribs if you were fully aware of what was happening?” He shuddered.

“I’d say that we should go over there and help him, but three of those ribs went in his neck. I think he’s pretty much boned.” Edward frowned. “Oh, crap, that pun was totally unintended. I’d never make a joke like that about the death of a human being. Or an animal, for that matter. As a veterinarian there’s a certain amount of gallows humor that goes along with the job, but I know where the line is drawn.”

“It was pretty clever, though,” said Roy. “Even if it was an accident.”

“Still, I feel bad. It was way too soon. That’s the kind of tasteless joke that gets you canceled.”

“Well, how about this? Arthur is pretty much boned, too! Now we both lack a moral compass.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“I didn’t think it would. But it was funny enough to deserve a callback.”

“You know,” said Roy, “it suddenly occurred to me that if the horror above is snatching people up, eating them, and spitting out their bones, it might not be such a great idea to just stand here. We should take cover.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” said Edward. “Maybe at that ice cream shop at the end of the block?”

“You don’t have to twist my arm. Their peaches and cream flavor is simply divine.”

Roy and Edward began to walk off.

“Hey!” Gerald shouted.

“What’s wrong?” asked Roy.

“Are you just going to leave me here?”

“Sorry,” said Edward. “I assumed that you could open your eyes enough to watch your feet while you walked.”

“No! I’m not opening my eyes until the ancient evil has returned to its own plane of existence!”

“All you have to do is look down,” said Roy. “No judgment about your safety precautions. You do you. But the ancient evil is a mile straight up in the air. I’m just saying.”

“What if it controls my will and makes me look up?”

“If you’re suddenly giving it brand new powers, why couldn’t it just send magical fairies down here to pry open your eyes and tilt up your head?”

“We should get going,” said Edward. “The ice cream shop closes in twenty minutes.”

“I hope it’s not too crowded,” said Roy. “Everybody else around here fled as soon as the ancient evil arrived. Honestly, we look kind of silly still being out here.”

Edward and Roy each took one of Gerald’s hands and led him down the sidewalk.

“Is it lower than it was before?” asked Edward.

“Is what lower?”

“The ancient evil.”

Roy looked up. “Oh, yeah. It was a mile up before, and now it looks like it’s about three-quarters of a mile. That’s not great.”

“Do you think it’s going to squish us?”

“Probably not. What would it gain by squishing us?”

“I’ll be honest,” said Edward. “My sanity was doing just fine when the ancient evil was a mile above our heads. Three-quarters of a mile is a different story. It seems bigger when it’s closer.”

“Do you feel like you’re going mad?”

“Not full-on mad, but I can feel things slipping away. In retrospect, I wish I hadn’t looked.”

“I told you!” Gerald shouted. “I told you to avert your eyes! But nobody ever listens to me!”

“Fine! You told me! There’s no reason to be a dick about it!”

“How insane are you feeling?” asked Roy. “Do we need to be concerned that you’re going to go feral and attack us?”

Edward shook his head. “I’m not feeling violent. It’s more of a ‘bite off my own tongue’ kind of insanity.”

“Better than biting off other people’s tongues, I guess.”

“True.”

“Though I think watching you bite off your tongue will probably be more disturbing than gazing up at the ancient evil.”

“When I feel uncontrollably compelled to do it, I’ll turn around.”

“Thanks. Much appreciated.”

“How low is the ancient evil now?” asked Gerald.

“Oh, look who suddenly sees the value in using your eyes!” said Edward. “What’s the matter? Having trouble gauging the distance of the threat when your eyes are squeezed shut?”

“Drop the attitude,” said Roy. “You just accused him of being a dick, but now you’re behaving like one. You’ve become the very thing you just condemned. He asked a simple question.”

“That’s true,” said Edward. “I apologize for being rude.” He looked up. “It’s definitely lower now. We need to hurry.”

The three of them speed-walked down the block to the ice cream shop.

“Son of a bitch,” said Roy. “What kind of ice cream shop closes early on Sundays? That’s the day people are most in the mood for it!”

“That’s really disappointing,” said Edward. “Peaches and cream would’ve been a wonderful last thing to taste before I bit my tongue off. Speaking of which…” He turned around and bit down, hard.

“Oh, jeez, that sounded horrible!” said Roy. “We’ve been so focused on our eyes that I didn’t even think about covering my ears!”

Edward turned back around and spat out most of his tongue, along with a lot of blood.

“Dude!” said Roy. “If you were going to spit stuff out, you should’ve stayed turned around! Nobody wants to see that!”

“Thorry,” said Edward. He turned around and spat out some more blood. “Thith hurth.”

“Of course it hurts. Your tongue has nerves galore. Your insanity was never going to completely shield you from the pain.”

A glowing green tentacle reached down and wrapped around Edward’s neck. It yanked his head off and rose back into the air.

“Yowza,” said Roy.

“What happened?” asked Gerald.

“Edward bit off his tongue, just like he said he would, and then the ancient evil popped
his head off like it was pulling the cork out of a bottle of wine. I don’t mean like it was using a corkscrew—that would’ve been horrific. I mean like when you drink part of a bottle of wine, and you put the cork back in, and then you pop it back out when you’re ready for more wine. It was like that, but gorier.”

“So that warm liquid hitting me is Edward’s blood?”

“Yeah. He’s got quite a spurt going. His body hasn’t fallen over yet. I know you’re committed to keeping your eyes closed, but it really is something to see. Oh, wait, too late, he just fell. His leg is still twitching but otherwise the show is over.”

“What’s the ancient evil doing?” asked Gerald.

Roy looked up. “Not much. Oh, wait, no, it’s descending fast. I’m getting a ‘devour all of humanity’ vibe from it.”

“And you’re sure the ice cream place is closed? You tried the door?”

“Yep. Okay, the octopus-thing is getting scarier and scarier the closer it gets. They say that the strongest fear is fear of the unknown, but I’m going to call bullshit on that. I can see its mouth now, fangs and all, and that’s way scarier than when I wasn’t sure what I was looking at.”

“Are we all going to die?” asked Gerald.

“That’s the direction things seem to be moving, yeah.”

“I’m not ready to die. I have so many things left to accomplish. I’ve never learned to play guitar. I’ve never eaten white chocolate. I’ve never made love to a woman, successfully.”

“I can feel my sanity going bye-bye,” said Roy. “You’re welcome to make your own choices, but I will say that I’m feeling less scared as my ability to process information fades. This whole ‘turning insane because you’re unable to cope with the unimaginable horror’ may be the way to go.”

He bit off his tongue, spat it out, then sat down on the sidewalk to await his doom in a cheerfully oblivious state.

Gerald opened his eyes.

“Roy, you’re sitting in a pool of blood!” he said.

Roy shrugged.

Gerald gazed upward. He looked directly into the infinite eyes of the creature.

“You are eternal,” he whispered. “You are what has always existed and will always exist. You are all gods combined. I fear thee, love thee, and worship thee. Take me as your victim. Take me as a sacrifice.”

The ancient evil slapped Gerald upside the head with a tentacle.

It spoke in a booming voice that shattered the windows of the ice cream shop: “Offering yourself as a victim is a pussy move. Grow a pair.”

“Oh,” said Gerald, flustered. “I thought you’d like that.”

“No. It’s total weak sauce. You are the chosen one, Gerald. You are the one who can defeat me and save humanity. Fight back. Let us do battle.”

“Are you serious?”

“Do I look serious?”

Gerald stared at the ancient evil for a few moments. “I honestly can’t tell.”

“Battle me!”

Gerald punched a tentacle.

“Ow.”

Gerald punched it harder.

“Ow. Damn.”

Gerald grabbed the tentacle and gave it a vigorous tug.

“Stop it. You’re going to yank it off.”

“I shall never stop yanking, foul beast!” Gerald shouted. “I shall best ye in combat and save billions of lives!” He tugged on the tentacle as hard as he could.

The ancient evil pulled its tentacle free, then slapped Gerald upside the head again. “A valiant effort, but obviously I was just messing with you.”

“Oh.”

“Should’ve kept averting your eyes.”

The ancient evil popped Gerald into its mouth and spat out his bones. Then it smiled, though no mortal would recognize it as a smile, and began the process of devouring humanity.

DEVIL-POWERED DEATH TRAIN OF DOOM

Twelve-year-old Davy had been working on his train set all summer, and the day before school started he finally let his mom and dad come down into the basement to see it.

“Wow!” said Harold, his father. “This is incredible!”

“Is this a scale model of the entire town?” asked Patricia.

Davy nodded with pride. The setup was at least twenty feet long by ten feet wide, and the attention to detail was remarkable. Every single building on Main Street was there. The movie theater had actual tiny letters on the marquee, and the sandwich shop had a sign out front with its current lunch specials.

“And the train works?” Harold asked.

“Of course!” said Davy. “It goes around the whole town!”

Harold was flabbergasted by the accuracy of this replica. There were even miniature people all over. Harold recognized Bob and his hot dog cart, and the homeless guy who slept by a tree in the park.

“I had no idea you were so talented!” said Patricia.

“Good work, son,” Harold said, patting him on the shoulder. “This is a very marketable skill. Your mother and I are proud of you.”

Davy beamed.

Harold and Patricia went back upstairs and into the living room.

“That really is amazing,” said Patricia. “We may have a little genius on our hands.”

“Are you going to say it first, or should I?” asked Harold.

“Say what first?”

“You understand what’s going on down there, right?”

“I guess not.”

“That train set will totally impact the real world. If his toy train hits one of the tiny people, they’ll die for real.”

“What?”

“You didn’t get that vibe?”

“No!” said Patricia. “How could you even think something like that?”

“Did you see the detail? Did you see the accuracy? Why would he put so much effort into a project like that if the train couldn’t impact the real world?”

“Stop that. I won’t have you accusing our son of working with Satan.”

“Who said anything about working with Satan? Why would your mind go straight there? We didn’t raise him to be in league with the devil, but I’m telling you, if that toy train hits the tiny figure of Hot Dog Bob, somebody will find the real Hot Dog Bob splattered all over his cart.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” said Patricia. “Is this because of your failed dream to become an architect?”

“No. If anything, this would allow me to vicariously live my dream through our son. But that’s not what’s happening here. Don’t believe me? Ask him. See what he says.”

“Well, if he’s planning to murder people with his Satan-train, he won’t admit to it.”

“But you’ll be able to tell that he’s lying. Davy is the worst liar ever. I’m always embarrassed for him.”

“Then let’s settle this right now,” said Patricia. They walked back down into the basement.

“Be honest with us,” Harold told Davy. “If that toy train hits one of the miniature replicas of the people in town, will that person die in real life?”

Davy looked at the floor. “No.”

“Tell us the truth!”

“No, okay? I don’t even like black magic!”

Harold sighed. “Son, we know that you’re lying. Tell us why you want to murder the residents of our town.”

“I don’t!” Davy insisted.

“Why can’t you look me in the eyes when you say that?”

“Because you have creepy looking eyes!”

“I do not!”

“Davy, don’t say things like that to your father,” said Patricia. “His eyes are a little odd but they’re not creepy.”

“They make me nervous,” said Davy. “Whenever I read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ it reminds me of them.”

“How often do you read ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’?” asked Harold.

“A lot.”

“Well, my eyes aren’t going to cause Hot Dog Bob to explode into a bloody mess of bones and internal organs, so let’s focus on what’s important.”

“Let me ask him,” said Patricia. She put her hands gently on Davy’s shoulders. “Davy, sweetheart, we need to know if this train set is something where if you put one of those replicas of people we know on the track and run the train into it, it’s like a real train hit them in real life. Be honest.”

Davy looked at the floor. “It’s just a regular train set.”

“See?” said Harold. “He won’t meet your gaze! He’s evil!”

“Don’t call our son evil when he’s standing right there!”

“He’s about to commit a supernatural murder. How is that not evil?”

“I didn’t say it’s not evil! I said not to call Davy evil when he’s standing right there! That will make him more evil! This is why I have to do most of the parenting!”

“Yeah, you’ve done a swell job with that, considering that we have an evil kid.”

“I’m not evil,” said Davy.

“I know you’re not, sweetheart,” said Patricia. “You’re only using this train set to kill bad people, right?”

Davy looked at the floor. “Yes.”

“See?” Patricia asked Harold. “He’s going to use it for something like getting revenge on the bullies who’ve tormented him for years. It’s wrong, and we’ll stop him from doing it, of course, but it doesn’t cross the line into evil.”

“It would depend on the severity of the bullying,” said Harold. “If it’s just kids calling him ‘dork-face’ or something like that, and he causes their gruesome deaths, yeah, that’s pretty damn evil.”

“We don’t even know if the train set works.”

“Right. We don’t. Which takes us into philosophical territory. If he tries to use his supernatural train set to murder bullies who weren’t really all that mean to him, but the train set doesn’t actually work, is he still evil? Does his intention define his evil nature, even if his actions harm nobody? I just don’t know.”

“And maybe he wasn’t planning to use it,” said Patricia. “Maybe just knowing that he could slaughter those who did him wrong was satisfying enough.”

“Were you planning to use it?” Harold asked Davy. “If you look at the floor I’ll know you’re lying.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You wouldn’t put that much work into this project without knowing if you planned to use it or not. You don’t spend weeks designing the ultimate fishing lure and then not go fishing with it. Since we’re not getting any answers out of you, I think we need a demonstration to resolve this question once and for all.”

Patricia frowned. “Are you saying that Davy should kill somebody with his train set?”

“No. I’m hoping he won’t kill somebody with his train set, and that we’ll find out it was all part of his overactive, delusional imagination. But since we can’t drag an honest answer out of him, we need him to show us the train in action. Otherwise we’ll spend the rest of our lives not knowing if he’s in league with forces beyond our understanding.”

“Why are you saying it’s my imagination?” asked Davy. “I told you it was a normal train set! You and Mom are the ones who said it might be magical! That’s all on you! I just wanted to make a fun model!”

“He’s right,” said Patricia.

“Fine,” said Harold. “I erred. But we still need to sort this out, and I’m afraid I see no other way to do it than to test out the train’s powers.”

“And you’re willing to kill an innocent person just to acquire the information?” Patricia asked.

Harold nodded. “Not one of our more important citizens, obviously.” He pointed to one of the miniature figures. “What about the homeless man? He’s not contributing to the local economy. I’m not saying he deserves to die. It’s not his fault he got laid off from his job and had pre-existing medical conditions that kept him from getting quality health insurance and had no family that could take him in and mental issues that led to him being expelled from the homeless shelter. But compared to, say, a waiter, he’s not really doing much for anybody.”

“I don’t like the idea of playing God,” said Patricia.

“That’s silly. If anything, we’re playing Satan.”

“How does it work?” Patricia asked Davy.

“You flip this switch, and the train goes around the track.”

“But how do you use it to commit murder?”

Davy shrugged.

“I’d guess that we just put the figure on the track,” said Harold, picking up the replica of the homeless man.

“Careful,” said Patricia. “Don’t crush his head.”

“I’m not going to crush his head.” Harold set the figure on the track. “All right, Davy, flip the switch.”

Davy turned on the train. It began to move around the track with a soft whirr. It had lights on the front and let out a “choo-choo” sound as it approached the figure.

It struck the figure, knocking it off the track, and kept going. Davy turned it off.

“All right, the dark deed is complete,” said Harold. “Let’s go see if there’s a splattered vagrant near the park.”

“Oh, I don’t want to look at any carnage,” said Patricia. “That would be upsetting.”

“Then how did you think we were going to verify this?”

“I figured we’d see it on the news, with the gory parts blurred out. Maybe you could go check and report back.”

“If I have to look at scattered body parts, so do you,” said Harold.

“We should have worked this out before we murdered him. I would never have agreed to a deal where I had to gape at a dead body. I’ve gone my entire adult life without seeing a horribly mangled corpse up close, and I don’t plan to start now.”

“Fine. Davy and I will be right back.”

They got into the car and drove to the park. There were no train tracks to be seen, but Harold had to admit that it would be kind of ridiculous for his son’s project to cause an actual railroad line to materialize around the town. If he had that level of power, by God, they could revolutionize the entire construction industry!

“Okay, the model train hit the figure right by that tree over there,” said Harold. “Or was it a different tree? It was a tree in this general area. Maybe it’s near all of that red grass.”

Harold realized to his horror that the grass was not naturally red. It was soaked with a red-colored substance. He parked the car, and they hurried toward it.

“Blood,” said Harold. “Appears to be about ten pints. And that’s how much blood is in an average human being.”

“Look at all of those bones,” said Davy.

“Yes, there are bones galore. I’m not going to take the time to count all of them, but I’d guess that there are about two hundred bones here, and if you round it up to two hundred and thirteen, that’s how many I’d expect to have been part of the homeless man’s skeleton. Obviously, the broken pieces of a single bone only count as one.”

“I thought people only had two hundred and six bones,” said Davy.

“Depends on your source. Either way, based on a rough estimate the math checks out. Plus, those are clearly human intestines over there, and the lungs are far too big to belong to a park squirrel, and if you squint, that chunk of face stuck to the tree looks very much like the homeless man’s face. So though we can’t rule out the coincidence of him being attacked by a wild animal or his body exploding on its own, I think we can say there’s a very good chance that your train worked.”

“Okay,” said Davy.

“How did it work?” asked Harold. “Did an invisible force drag him over to the spot where we moved his figure? Did his body just start moving on its own, as he desperately struggled to control his own legs? Did he walk over there unaware, thinking he was doing it of his own free will?”

“I don’t know,” said Davy.

“Did an actual train materialize out of thin air and smash into him? Was it a transparent ghost train? Was the train on fire? Did the ground split open and the train emerge from the depths of Hell?”

“I really don’t know any of this,” said Davy.

“So many unanswered questions,” said Harold. “Let’s go home to tell your mother.”

“Was he dead?” asked Patricia, as soon as they walked into the house.

Harold nodded. “It was awful. It was like he was a giant Lego man, and they hadn’t assembled him yet. You know that first stage where you open up the package and pour the Lego bricks out all over the floor, so that it looks nothing at all like the giant Lego man you’re about to construct? That’s what he looked like.”

“How ghastly.”

“Anyway, yes, our son’s train set is capable of murdering people in real life. I guess it’s good that we didn’t waste an entire afternoon worrying about something that didn’t pan out, but I’m still horrified.”

“So what are we going to do?” asked Patricia.

“We’re going to get a pickaxe out of the garage and smash that thing to smithereens.”

“What if that angers Satan?”

“He’ll get over it.”

“Shouldn’t we think about this? Maybe there’s a practical use for it that we haven’t considered yet.”

Harold frowned. “You’re sounding like a raging psychopath right now, and I don’t like it one bit.”

“I’m not suggesting that we should go on a thrill-killing spree,” said Patricia. “But what if, hypothetically, somebody had the power to use a toy train to kill Hitler, and, hypothetically, instead of killing Hitler they bashed it to smithereens with a pickaxe? They’d have felt pretty silly watching everything that went down during the Holocaust, don’t you think?”

“We can’t kill Hitler. This train isn’t a time machine, to the best of our knowledge.”

“I mean the current equivalent of Hitler.”

“Yes, but who are we to judge that? One person’s Adolph Hitler is another person’s Mahatma Gandhi.”

“I feel pretty comfortable trusting my instincts,” said Patricia. “We’d make sure that we researched our victim thoroughly before we started the train, just to make sure our opinions weren’t unduly influenced by our social media echo chamber.”

“Are you actually talking about killing political leaders?”

“Not to start with. I mean, in the hypothetical scenario where a time-traveler went back to kill Hitler, they’d obviously want to practice by killing other people first.”

“I beg your pardon?” Harold asked.

“They’d want to—”

“I heard you. ‘I beg your pardon?’ was my reaction to being flabbergasted. And I don’t even want you to explain the logic. It doesn’t matter, and your rationale will just upset me. Anyway, the model is only of our small town, so unless a deranged dictator shows up here for a visit, we can’t really topple any governments.”

“Unless Davy can make models of any location he wants,” said Patricia.

“Davy, can you make models of any location you want?” asked Harold.

Davy shook his head.

“See? So we either have to wait for a tyrant to visit our quaint little town, or we have to figure out some other way to make use of the train’s nightmarish power.”

“What are you thinking?” asked Patricia.

“I don’t know. I’ve never met a real-life professional assassin, at least not that I’m aware of—I mean, I guess their whole thing is to blend in, so I could have met dozens of them without knowing it, but I know for certain that I’ve never had a one-on-one discussion about their career. Still, it seems only reasonable that they’d kill for a train set like this. Pun intended.”

“Was that actually a pun?”

Harold shrugged. “They’d kill for a train set like this. Joke intended. I assume the joke itself was self-explanatory.”

“Very much so.”

“You got it, right, Davy?”

“Yes,” said Davy, without enthusiasm.

“I wouldn’t take that material on the stand-up comedy circuit,” said Harold, “but for something I composed in my head only a moment before I said it, it was reasonably effective. Anyway, let’s move on with the discussion.”

“Are you suggesting that we rent the train out to professional assassins?” asked Patricia. “Or are you saying that we could generate revenue by starting our own pay-to-kill-by-train service?”

“Both ideas have merit. I assume that professional assassins are unsavory people that we wouldn’t want to welcome into our basement. On the other hand, people who would hire somebody to commit the act of murder aren’t top-notch individuals themselves. So we’d have to abandon our current lifestyle of only socializing with high-quality people.”

“I like our social circle,” said Patricia. “I don’t really want to add reprobates to it.”

“Then what are we supposed to do? Squander the power of the devil-powered death train?”

“How did we even get to the point where we were talking about using it? I thought we started out being horrified by the whole concept.”

“I’m not sure how we got here,” Harold admitted. “Conversations take on their own life sometimes, I guess. Part of the beauty of human interaction. If you’ll recall, our first conversation was a lengthy discussion about The Amazing Race that ended with us having intercourse. That’s certainly not where we thought it was headed, but there you go.”

“It’s not your train!” Davy shouted, making both of his parents flinch.

“Please use your indoor voice,” said Patricia.

“It’s my train set, not yours. You didn’t spend weeks in the basement putting it together. You didn’t sell your soul to the Prince of Darkness. Why do you get to use it?”

Harold frowned. “Let’s back up to the third of those four sentences. You sold your soul to the devil?”

“Yes. In exchange, Lucifer gave my model train the power to kill people in real life. Why should you get to use it? You still have your souls! I’m the one who’s going to Hell, not you!”

“To be fair, I’m probably going to Hell for using your train to murder the homeless man, so don’t pretend that your mother and I are headed for an afterlife of harps and cloud pillows. But why would you do this? Why is this train set worth eternal damnation?”

“Because on the last day of school Benjamin tripped me in the cafeteria and everybody laughed, and I told God that I’d go to church every single day for the rest of my life if He’d make Benjamin’s head fall off, and God didn’t do it like I asked, so I called upon Beelzebub, and he said that if I worked really hard and did a professional job with the train set and signed over my soul he’d grant me the power I craved. So it’s my train set!”

“So, Davy,” said Patricia, “as you spent your entire summer down in the basement assembling the model train set, did you have any moments of regret?”

“Yes. I regretted it as soon as I signed the contract in blood and it burst into flame. But then it was too late.”

“I have a problem with this,” said Harold. “Benjamin is a minor. You can’t go murdering minors without the police taking a very serious look at the circumstances. We still don’t completely understand what happens when the train kills somebody. Did Satan explain it to you?”

“No,” said Davy.

“Then we need to gather more information. What if a giant flaming train manifests itself in our plane of existence to run down the victim? What if Benjamin’s parents are there when it happens? If Benjamin dies via Hell Train, and the police go door to door to investigate, and they find this eerily accurate model train set in our basement, you’ll be headed straight to the poke. Now, if it’s an invisible train, they’d have no way to connect you to the crime. So I hate to say it, but we’ll have to commit another murder.”

“Or we could forbid him to kill Benjamin,” said Patricia.

“Davy is going to spend eternity drowning in a pool of hellfire while fanged demons cackle at his misfortune. I’d hate for it to all be for nothing.”

“Then who do we kill?”

Harold let out a long sigh. “I like Hot Dog Bob. I do. He provides a quality product at a reasonable price, and he always has a smile and a witticism for his customers. But does this town need Hot Dog Bob? Will our economy collapse without him? Will our children’s educations be affected? Will people be wandering the streets feeling lost and alone? So my vote is to kill Hot Dog Bob.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t pay his taxes,” said Patricia. “All of that cash exchanging hands. No way does he report it all.”

“What do you think, Davy?”

“I hope Hot Dog Bob suffers. I hope his final moments are filled with excruciating agony.”

“Okay, well, that’s disturbing to hear, but to each his own. So here’s how it’s going to work. Davy and I are going to visit the hot dog cart and buy ourselves one final wiener. We owe him that much. Patricia, when you get a text message from me saying that we’re on our last bites, you’ll use the train. We’ll take notes on what happens. Does everybody understand their role?”

“I want to turn on the train,” said Davy.

“You can’t. If you’d been paying attention while I outlined the plan, you’d know that you’ll be with me near the hot dog cart. Unless Satan granted you the power to be in two places at once, it doesn’t work.”

“It’s my train. I want to do it.”

“Let the little rascal turn on his own train,” said Patricia.

“Fine. I’ll go alone. Make sure he doesn’t, you know, grab dozens of figures and place them all on the tracks in an attempt to wipe out the entire population of this town.”

After driving into town and parking his automobile, Harold walked over to the hot dog cart. Hot Dog Bob gave him a jolly smile.

“Lovely day for a hot dog, isn’t it?” asked Harold. “I’ll take one with mustard and onions.”

“Dijon mustard or yellow mustard?”

Dear God. Harold had forgotten that Hot Dog Bob offered two varieties of mustard. Were they making a terrible mistake?

“Dijon.”

“Coming right up! And would you like raw onions or grilled?”

Two varieties of onions as well! Hot Dog Bob didn’t deserve this.

“Raw,” said Harold.

“Absolutely, sir.” Hot Dog Bob went to work preparing the meal. Harold just stood there, wallowing in guilt.

The hot dog was delicious. The attention to detail on the placement of the Dijon mustard was exemplary. With two bites remaining, Harold wasn’t sure he wanted to take another, because when he was down to his final bite, he’d have to text his family and ask them to commit an unspeakable atrocity.

Maybe he should call the whole thing off.

No. He wasn’t going to be a damned liberal about this.

He took a bite of the hot dog, then texted Patricia: Now.

Hot Dog Bob stepped out from behind his cart, looking confused, and then terrified. “My legs!” he wailed. “I can’t control my legs!”

He began to run, arms flapping as if he thought he could use them to offset the work being done by his legs.

Harold chased after him.

Finally Hot Dog Bob stopped. Harold recognized the spot. It was where part of the track of Davy’s evil train set was located.

“What is happening?” Hot Dog Bob screamed. “Why did I run without my permission, and why can’t I move now?”

The ground in front of him cracked open. Thick smoke billowed out, and trickles of lava spewed out. And then a train emerged—a black, flaming, skull-adorned train with horns.

“Tug me out of the way!” Hot Dog Bob shouted at Harold.

Harold watched in horror as the train smashed into Hot Dog Bob. It was astounding how much gore was contained within a human body.

The train faded into nothingness. The ground closed up. Aside from the gruesome splattered remains of Hot Dog Bob, it was as if the train had never been there at all.

Harold glanced around to see if there’d been any witnesses. There were lots and lots of them.

“Rats,” said Harold.

“This was all his fault!” said an onlooker, pointing at Harold. “I saw him purchasing a hot dog from our beloved Bob, and then I saw him tapping away at the screen of his cell phone, and that’s when Bob ran to the very spot where the magical train struck him! It can’t be a coincidence! Crucify him!”

“Crucify me? Seriously?”

“Well, that train was clearly driven by Satan, so it kind of got me thinking about religion and stuff, so the idea of crucifying you was the first thing that popped into my mind. Obviously, everybody else can veto it if they think it’s going too far.”

The other onlookers agreed that crucifixion was the way to go.

Harold quickly sent Patricia a text: In trouble. Kill the town.

The onlookers grabbed Harold and dragged him to the center of the park. Fortunately for Harold, nobody had a giant cross immediately available upon which to nail him, so a couple of them hurried off to purchase some lumber and nails.

Suddenly, all of the onlookers began to walk away. Those who spoke said things like “What’s happening?” and “Hey, I’m not doing this!” and “Why have I lost control of my appendages?”

But it wasn’t just the onlookers. More and more people walked to the spot where Hot Dog Bob had perished. Harold began to fear that the entire population of the town was gathering to be slaughtered. He kept thinking of people and searching for them in the crowd, and they were always there. Edith the Hairdresser. Gertrude the Cashier. Vincent the Sadistic Dentist. All of them were accounted for.

The ground split open.

“No!” Harold shouted. “That’s too many people to kill at once! Satan, please stop! Show mercy! Find the kindness that I know is in your heart!”

The train emerged from the ground and rocketed forward.

So much death.

So much blood.

So many spleens.

A blood drenched Harold returned home, feeling sad. Patricia hurried out of the basement to greet him.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “I questioned your order to kill the whole town, but I knew you wouldn’t ask me to do it without a good reason. What’s that in your hand?”

“It’s Benjamin’s head,” said Harold. “Since Davy will be forever haunted by the nightmare he unleashed, I figured he should at least get this bit of satisfaction before he’s consumed by madness. We’ll have to move to a new town since there’s nobody left here to keep the infrastructure going. I expect to lose at least one of us to suicide. I thought this adventure would have a happy ending, but I see now that I was fooling myself.”

Davy walked into the living room. “I know you’re all worried about me. At least Mom is, because she heard me laughing the whole time. But I just want you to know that I made figures of each of you, and I had the presence of mind not to include them when I was shoving everybody else on the track. So you should be worried about my mental state but not too worried.”

“Glad to hear it, though I don’t think we’ll be turning our backs on you anytime soon. Pack your things. We have to move at least one town over. Oh, and I brought you Benjamin’s head, just so you don’t feel like all this ghastly carnage was a waste of time.”

Davy frowned. “That’s not Benjamin’s head.”

“Well, shit.”

DUMP TRUCK

Amy had been watching all morning, and when the dump truck finally pulled into her driveway, she let out a squeal of delight. She couldn’t believe it! This was really happening! She hurried to the front door and ran outside to greet the driver.

He got out of the truck and glanced down at his clipboard. “Amy Beamer?”

Amy gave him an enthusiastic nod. “Yes, that’s me!”

“Sign here.”

She took the pen and clipboard from him and signed. She let out an involuntary giggle as she handed it back. The driver glared at her, which seemed kind of weird. Why shouldn’t she be excited?

“Where do you want ‘em?” he asked.

“Just back it up into the garage,” she said. “I spent all day yesterday cleaning it out.” She could now easily afford to pay somebody else to clean her garage, but she didn’t want to start spending the money before it arrived.

The driver frowned. “What safety precautions have you taken?”

“Excuse me?”

“Is the garage reinforced?”

“No,” said Amy. “I mean, it’s just a normal garage. It’s a safe neighborhood. I didn’t think I needed security guards or anything.”

“Was a safe neighborhood, I guess.”

“What?”

“It’s not so safe anymore,” said the driver. “Obviously.”

“Because of thieves?”

“Nobody’s gonna steal what’s in there.”

“Okay, I’m confused,” said Amy. “Explain to me why the neighborhood is no longer safe.”

The driver stared at her for a moment. “Are you joking with me?”

“No, I’m not joking with you. I was having a great morning, and you’re kind of yucking my yum. I get that people might try to steal the money, but that doesn’t make the neighborhood less safe.”

“What money?”

Now Amy wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until a few of his teeth rattled free. “The genie granted me one wish, and I asked for a dump truck full of money! That’s the dump truck, right? That’s why you’re here, right? Right?”

“Oh...” The driver glanced at his clipboard again. “Okay, I see what happened. There weren’t enough available characters on the order form, and ‘Dump Truck Full Of Money’ became ‘Dump Truck Full of Mon,’ and from there you can pretty clearly see how the shipping department assumed that the wish was for a dump truck full of monsters.”

“What?”

“Didn’t you wonder why your money was making so much noise? All the howling and pounding and snarling and roaring?”

“Why would they think I wanted a dump truck full of monsters?”

“They must have assumed you were a raging psychopath planning to unleash your wrath against your neighbors. That’s what I thought. It’s why I had a judgmental tone earlier.”

Amy was in a state of shock. She’d worn an outfit specifically chosen to roll around in the gigantic pile of money. “Can you take them back?”

The driver shook his head. “There are consequences if I don’t make the delivery. I will be hanged by the neck until dead, as will every member of my immediate family. When you become a driver for the genie, you vow that you will make every single delivery.”

“But...but...but...but...”

“Nah, I’m kidding. This kind of thing happens all the time. You’d think they’d add more spaces to the form. A lot of time with the sex wishes they’ll only have the first few letters of the name, and the shipping department will make its best guess. They’re not always good at guessing.”

“Apparently not.”

“Just last week this guy wished to have sex with Mary Pickford. Now, clearly what he meant was that he wanted to have sex with a magical version of Mary Pickford from her time as a superstar in the silent film era, but the shipping department went with the literal version of the wish. Since she died in 1979, you can imagine that the delivery was very disappointing for him.”

“Maybe the genie shouldn’t outsource the wish delivery,” Amy said.

“You’re not the first person to say that. Nobody asks me to help make these executive decisions. I’m just the delivery guy. Anyway, I’ll need you to sign another form, and then it’ll be six to eight weeks until your replacement wish gets here. Sorry about the inconvenience.”

“But I placed a huge order for heroin!” Amy told him. “What am I supposed to do when the drug dealers arrive, and I can’t pay them?”

“Are you joking, like when I said I’d be hanged if I didn’t make the delivery?”

“Yes.”

“That was a pretty good one. Most people aren’t in a joking mood when this happens, generally because they’re really, really horny.” He reached inside the truck and handed another clipboard to Amy. “Sign and date at the bottom, please.”

“What kind of monsters are in there?” Amy asked.

“Oh, a little of everything. Scaly ones. Furry ones. Slimy ones. Claws, teeth, suckers, spikes, and so on and so forth. Swamp monsters. Desert monsters. Snow monsters. Space monsters. The classics like zombies and mummies, and stuff you’ve never heard of before, like a venomous esophageal glow-worm. Some believe that man is the worst monster of them all, so we threw in a serial killer. It’s a pretty good selection.”

“Hmmm.”

“Just sign here,” said the driver, tapping the form.

“Do you have to take them back?” Amy asked.

“I don’t have to, no, but then I wouldn’t be able to exchange it for the dump truck full of money.”

“I’m just saying that vengeance against my neighbors doesn’t sound so bad. They’ve always been kind of snotty. I was planning to rub my vast wealth in their faces, but maybe setting a bunch of monsters loose on a killing spree would be even more satisfying.”

The driver smiled. “This is another joke, right? Like the hanging and the heroin?”

Amy shook her head and gave him back the clipboard. “No. I want to keep them.”

“Okay, look, we’ve only just met, and it’s not my place to tell you how to live your life. But unleashing that kind of carnage will change you. It’ll haunt you. You’ll look in the mirror, and you may not like what you see.”

“You’re right,” said Amy. “It’s not your place.”

“There will be innocent bystanders.”

“Are any of us truly innocent?”

“The cops will come after you.”

“My new pets will protect me.”

“Please,” said the driver. “Don’t do this. You don’t know how relieved I was to discover that you’d wished for a dump truck full of money instead of a dump truck full of monsters. As bloodthirsty as you may be right now, I swear to you, you’ll never get the sounds of your victims’ screams out of your head. Never.”

“Good,” said Amy. “The sound will bring me peace.”

Weeping, the driver opened the back of the dump truck, and lo, the monsters did spill forth, and lo, the loss of human life was vast. Amy cackled with laughter and wondered why she hadn’t wished for this in the first place, because monsters were so much better than money.

NEXT BEST BAKER

“Congratulations, bakers, on making it to the final four!” said Edgar, clearly reading off the teleprompter. “The standards are getting higher and higher, and the judges will expect your very best performance. For today’s challenge, you’ll be asked to make a cake. It can be any kind of cake you want, but you must incorporate these four mystery ingredients.”

Tiffany, Cyrus, Helga, and Mark, standing side by side in their white aprons, braced themselves for the big reveal.

Edgar walked to the table. He pulled off the first cloth. “Carrots.”

There was a close-up of Tiffany as she nodded.

Edgar pulled off the second cloth. “Pistachios.”

A close-up of Cyrus as he nodded.

Edgar pulled off the third cloth. “Mint.”

Helga frowned. Mint? With carrots and pistachios?

“And finally,” said Edgar, pulling off the fourth cloth, “dog shit.”

Mark’s face fell. This was not going to be an easy challenge.

“You have one hour,” said Edgar. “Starting...now!”

The bakers rushed into the pantry as the camera crew followed each of them.

“The carrots are no problem,” said Tiffany. “I don’t want to play it too safe and go with carrot cake, but there’s a lot of potential there. And the pistachios are easy. I’ll grind them up and use them as a topping. The mint is going to be tricky. I can’t just use it as a garnish—the judges will see right through that. Maybe a hint of it in the frosting. I’ll figure it out. The ingredient I’m most worried about, obviously, is the dog shit. There’s no good flavor profile that includes it. But we’re in the semi-finals, and I’m going to prove to the judges that I deserve to be the world’s Next Best Baker.”

“I think we’re all concerned about the dog shit,” Cyrus told the camera. “Nobody wants that in their cake. It’s certainly not something I’d ever order in a bakery. I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do—this is definitely the hardest challenge so far.”

Helga tossed a mango and an orange into her basket. “I’m hoping that strong fruit flavors in my cake can offset the dog shit. It would be a different story if they gave us something more delicate, like poodle shit, or something whimsical, like pug shit. But ours looks like it was dropped on the sidewalk by a St. Bernard. This could be Cujo shit.”

“Could it be worse?” Mark asked. “I suppose. It might have been spoiled ingredients, or rat poison or something like that. I knew they weren’t going to make it easy for us, but I was anticipating something like canned green beans. Mushrooms. Maybe veal. Whoever wins this challenge deserves the crown, because it is very, very difficult to bake a tasty treat that includes dog shit.”

The bakers hurried out of the pantry, went to their individual stations, and frantically got to work.

“All right,” said Edgar. “It’s time for the judges to taste your creations. Tiffany, bring up your cake and tell us what you’ve made.”

Tiffany carefully brought her cake up to the judges’ table. “I made a carrot cake with a light mint frosting and a layer of pistachios sprinkled on the edges.”

Kevin, one of the two judges, frowned. “Carrot cake, huh? Sounds like you played it safe. It’s fine to keep it simple, but if that’s the case, you’d better deliver perfection.”

Kevin and Meredith each took a bite.

“It’s actually quite good,” said Meredith. “I didn’t think the frosting would work, but it’s just a hint of mint flavor and rather refreshing. The cake itself is perfectly baked. I do wish that the dog shit was a bit more subdued—it doesn’t really blend with the other flavors. But overall, an excellent cake.”

“Yes, I agree,” said Kevin. “The cake is moist and delicious. Well done.”

Tiffany, beaming, returned to her station.

Edgar called up Cyrus, who brought his cake to the judges’ table. “I made you a triple dark chocolate cake topped with raspberries.”

Kevin took a bite. “Oh, wow, that is rich.”

Meredith nodded. “I could never eat a full piece of this.”

“Right,” said Cyrus. “I wanted to make something decadent.”

“Decadent is fine,” said Kevin. “The problem here is that you’ve overwhelmed all of the other ingredients. All I can taste is chocolate, and that wasn’t even one of the four challenge ingredients. Where are the carrots?”

“I blended them up into the batter.”

“And the mint?”

“Blended.”

“Pistachios?”

“Blended.”

“Dog shit?”

“Blended.”

“The cake is good. I’m just not convinced that it meets the requirements of the challenge. You were supposed to find a way to incorporate all four of the ingredients into the cake so that we could tell they were in there. There’s not even the faintest trace of mint flavor here. Is this a perfectly fine cake? Yes. Is it going to get you through to the finals? I’m really not sure.”

Suitably chastised, Cyrus returned to his station.

“Helga, bring up your cake,” said Edgar.

Helga placed her cake in front of the judges. “I’ve made you a fruit cake. Not a fruitcake, but a cake with lots of fruit.” Everybody laughed. “You’ll find orange, mango, grapefruit, peach, cherry, and blackberry flavors in there.”

“Ambitious,” said Meredith. “But it almost sounds like it could be too much.”

Kevin and Meredith each took a bite.

“That’s absolutely delicious,” said Kevin. “You’ve really come a long way in this competition. The fruit flavors work perfectly together, and yet I still taste the carrots, pistachios, and mint.”

“I agree, absolutely delicious,” said Meredith. “One of the best desserts we’ve had all season. And I like how it has only the mildest flavor of dog shit, almost like an aftertaste. Very good work, Helga. I don’t think you have anything to be worried about.”

“And, finally, Mark. Bring your cake up.”

Mark placed his cake in front of the judges. “I made you a dog shit cake.”

“Excuse me?” asked Kevin.

“The entire cake is dog shit. We’re in the semi-finals, and I wanted to take a risk. Go big or go home.”

“A bold choice,” said Meredith. “But I’m not sure it was the correct one.”

“I’m confused by what’s going on here,” said Kevin, gesturing to the top of the cake. “Why are there carrot sticks arranged in a square?”

“That’s supposed to be the fence,” Mark explained. “The pistachio is supposed to be the dog, and the sprig of mint is supposed to be a tree in his yard.”

“I see,” said Meredith.

“I have to admit that on first glance I’m kind of underwhelmed,” said Kevin. “It seems kind of sloppy and childish. Like you said, we’re in the semi-finals. We admire risk-taking, but the risk has to be part of a well-thought-out creative decision. I don’t believe this was. Maybe time got away from you, but I don’t understand why you would think that decorating your cake with a carrot sticks dog fence was the right thing to do. The pistachio doesn’t look anything like a dog.”

“I drew eyes and a mouth on it,” said Mark.

Kevin picked up the pistachio. “You did, yes. But that doesn’t make it look any more like a dog. It could just as easily have been a happy pistachio. From an appearance standpoint, this is probably your worst effort all season.”

“So it’s going to be all about the flavor,” said Meredith. “If you want to make it to the finals, this cake will have to be absolutely stunning.”

Kevin and Meredith each took a bite. Kevin grimaced.

“I’m sorry, but this doesn’t work for me at all. Did you even add flour or sugar?”

Mark shook his head. “It’s just dog shit, with a little butter.”

“It’s awful. I truly don’t think you understood the challenge. Dog shit has an unappealing flavor, aroma, and texture. Your goal was to figure out a way to somehow incorporate that into a delicious cake. Going all-in on the dog shit was disastrous.”

“I could not agree more,” said Meredith. “It’s a very bad cake. It tastes like something you’d serve to a lover right before confronting them with the fact that you know they cheated on you. Did you even try this cake before you presented it to us?”

“No,” Mark admitted.

“Try it now.”

Mark reluctantly took the fork that Meredith offered him and scooped out a bite of cake. He put it in his mouth, swallowed, and nodded. “It’s not very good.”

“You didn’t even want to chew it, did you?”

“No.”

“You’ve shown a lot of promise this season, but I really think you lost your way on this challenge. You can head back to your station.”

“All right,” said Edgar, “the judges will confer, and then we’ll find out who’s going to the final round of Next Best Baker!”

“There’s no need for the usual drama and suspense,” said Kevin. “One of the four cakes was clearly not at the level of the others, and I’d like that baker to do the right thing and step forward now.”

After a moment, Mark stepped forward.

“Mark, we’ve been very impressed by your baking journey,” said Meredith. “The dog shit cake was a poor choice, but you have a bright future ahead of you, and I want you to promise me that you’ll never stop baking.”

“Baking is my life,” said Mark. “I’ll never quit.”

Mark gave the judges a hug, then left.

“In retrospect, I should’ve known that the dog shit cake wasn’t going to be well-received,” Mark told the camera. “I’m disappointed to have gotten so close to the end only to come up short, but I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything, and I wish Tiffany, Cyrus, and Helga the best of luck.”

“Welcome to the final challenge,” said Edgar. “One of you will become the Next Best Baker! Will it be Tiffany? Will it be Cyrus? Will it be Helga? Or will it be somebody else entirely?”

The contestants glanced at each other, confused.

“Welcome back into the competition...Vincent!”

Tiffany, Cyrus, and Helga gaped as Vincent, who’d been the third person eliminated, walked onto the stage.

“Yes, Vincent is the winner of Next Best Baker: Second Chance, our web series where the eliminated contestants compete for their chance to get back into the kitchen! Vincent proved to the judges that he deserved a spot in the finals.”

Vincent, who looked like he hadn’t slept in a week, nodded. “The things I did to get back in...oh, God, the things I did...every time I close my eyes the images flash before me...it terrifies me to even blink...”

“Anyway, welcome back, Vincent. The four of you will be competing in your most difficult challenge yet. The winner will receive the title of Next Best Baker. Will it be Tiffany? Will it be Cyrus? Will it be Helga? Will it be Vincent? Or will it be...just kidding, it’s going to be one of you four. Are you ready for your final challenge?”

Tiffany, Cyrus, and Helga said that yes, they were ready. Vincent stood there and twitched.

“For your final bake, you can make...anything you want. Cupcakes. Cookies. Bread. You’re limited only by your imagination. Sounds pretty easy, doesn’t it? Well, of course there’s a twist. You have to bake it inside a human head.”

“For real?” asked Tiffany.

“For real. And you may think that I simply mean you’ll need to bake it inside of a skull. Nothing so easy for your final challenge! I’m talking about a freshly severed head. But fear not, you’ll have a bone saw and all of the tools necessary to complete the task!”

Crew members brought out bowling ball-shaped objects covered with cloth and placed them at each station.

“This is going to be awful,” Tiffany told the camera. “Everything I know about baking will go right out the window. I can pour batter into its dead mouth, but how does that impact the cooking time? What if the smell of flesh permeates the flavor of my cinnamon roll? This has disaster written all over it.”

“As a vegan, I find the whole idea very off-putting,” said Cyrus. “I’m sure the owners of the heads signed all of the proper consent forms before they died, but no living creatures deserve to be the vessel for baked goods. It’s morally repugnant. I’m not trying to be controversial here, but I don’t believe that severed heads should be part of the process. I would actively boycott a restaurant that prepared their baked goods this way.”

“Not gonna lie—I’m looking forward to the challenge,” said Helga. “Unlike dog shit, human flesh has the potential to add pleasant layers of flavor. I’ve never tried it myself, but one of the most rewarding things about this competition is how it’s allowed me to work with ingredients that I could never afford. Obviously, I’m going to bake something savory instead of sweet. I’m sure the other contestants are feeling revulsion right now, but I’m excited!”

“It physically hurts when I close my eyes,” Vincent told the camera. “Closing my eyelids feels like there are red-hot needles underneath them, even though I know the needles are just hallucinations. I shoo away cat-faced insects. My blood is alive.”

“Guess what, bakers?” asked Edgar. “From the very first episode, we warned you that this will be the most challenging season of Next Best Baker yet. And now we’re about to prove it. Because the severed heads do not belong to anonymous strangers!”

With dramatic flourish, Edgar tugged the cloth off the first head. “Tiffany, say hello to your brother, Jacob!”

Tiffany fell to her knees in horror. “No! Jacob! He had so much to live for! He was going to be a realtor!”

Edgar walked over to Cyrus’ station. “Cyrus, you’ve talked about how much you missed her while being sequestered during this show, and now you’re reunited with—” he pulled away the cloth, “—your wife Diane!”

“Noooooo!” Cyrus wailed. “Tell me it’s not true!”

“Oh, it’s true,” said Edgar. “That’s why you should carefully read contracts before you sign them, even if they’re really long. How are you feeling right now, Cyrus?”

“Devastated!” Cyrus began to sob. “She meant everything to me.”

“Well then, you’ll want to make sure her death was not in vain.” He walked over to Helga’s station. “So, Helga, whose face do you most not want to see when I pull away this cover?”

“One of my six children.”

“They say that a parent can’t choose their favorite child. But can you choose your least favorite? It is indeed one of your children’s severed head under this cloth, but which one? Who do you hope it is?”

Helga wiped away a tear and thought about it for a moment. “Stephan.”

“Let’s see if your wish was granted!” Edgar pulled the cloth away. “Nope! It’s Anton! That’s certainly going to make things awkward with Stephan when you see him again.”

Helga hurried over to the table and caressed her dead son’s hair. “My dear, sweet, precious angel. I’m so sorry. So very sorry. Mommy loves you.”

Edgar walked over to Vincent’s station. “One left. Vincent, you’ve lost so much already. Whose head would finally destroy the final tenuous connection you have with reality?”

“Keanu Reeves,” said Vincent. “He’s a great actor and, I hear, a genuinely kind and caring person.”

“Lucky for you, it’s not Keanu. It’s your mentor and father figure, the man who cared for you after your parents died when you were seven, the man who put you through college and was always there for you when things were at their darkest, the man who beat cancer three times only to die at the hands of a crew member with a hacksaw.”

“Dylan,” said Vincent, in a sad whisper.

Edgar pulled the cloth away. “That’s right.”

“What...what happened to his face? Where’s his nose?”

“Dylan struggled more than the others. I apologize for his appearance, but that’s part of the competition. So, you four finalists have one hour to bake a tasty treat in the severed heads of your loved ones. Your time begins...now!”

The contestants rushed into the pantry to gather their ingredients.

“Jacob’s favorite dessert was always pineapple upside-down cake,” Tiffany told the camera. “Every single night he asked our mom to make it, but we only had it, like, every couple of years. I’m going to make pineapple upside-down cake to honor his memory.”

“Since we have to bake inside of the heads, I guess I do have one advantage over the others,” said Cyrus. “Diane had a big mouth.” He frowned. “Why did I say that? Why did I make that joke? That was cruel. Yes, she talked a lot, but that didn’t mean I loved her any less. It’s just that I’m going to miss her so very much that my mind isn’t working properly.” He took a few deep breaths. “Focus, Cyrus, focus. You can do this.”

“Anton wasn’t my favorite child, but he was up there,” said Helga. “He wanted to be a police officer, and police officers love doughnuts—at least that’s what the comedy shows say—so I’m going to make doughnuts in his head.”

“Tiny sharks in my belly eat all of my food before I can digest it,” said Vincent. “That’s why I’m always hungry. Always so very, very hungry.”

The bakers returned to their stations and hurriedly began working on their final challenge.

“Fifteen minutes down,” Edgar announced. “Forty-five minutes left.”

“This is taking forever,” Tiffany told the camera as she scraped away at her brother’s severed head. “I needed more room in his mouth than was available, so I’ve been cutting stuff out, but I’m losing a lot of time. In the movies when they cut out somebody’s tongue it just comes right off, lickety-split, but I had to hack away for almost five minutes to get Jacob’s tongue out. I see that a couple of the other bakers opened up the skulls with the bone saws. That’s probably what I should’ve done. I just wasn’t sure how difficult it is to pull somebody’s brain out. They’re attached, right? You can’t just tip over the skull and have it slide right out. I’m rethinking my strategy, but it’s too late now.”

“I never thought I’d be nostalgic for the dog shit,” said Cyrus. “This is genuinely awful. She’s wearing the earrings I got for her on our very first wedding anniversary, back when we were so poor we couldn’t afford to heat our apartment, even in the middle of winter. We’d snuggle under the covers and keep each other warm. She was so proud of me for making it onto this show. I’m going to win it for her. If I’m not the Next Best Baker, I’m going to kill myself, right here on camera. It’ll have to be in a way where the medical team won’t have time to save me. If I slash my throat with a bread-cutting knife, that should do the trick. I hope I win.”

“Anton’s head won’t fit in the deep fryer,” said Helga. “I don’t know what to do. I should have thought about that sooner. It’s going to kill me to saw my beloved son’s head in half, but what choice do I have?”

“I’m sorry,” Vincent told the camera. “I thought I’d been talking for the past couple of minutes, but I guess it was just in my mind.”

“You’re halfway done,” Edgar announced. “And now, everybody stop!”

The confused contestants stopped what they were doing.

“Yes, there’s one more twist. Come on out, Gunther.”

A hulking man in a bloody jumpsuit, wearing a mask of human flesh, walked out into the studio.

“This is Gunther. If you’ve been following the news, you know him as the Southwest Side Splatterer. The authorities were never able to apprehend him, but we were, and he’ll be playing a key role in your final challenge. The Southwest Side Splatterer will be watching you as you bake, and if he doesn’t like what he sees, he’s been authorized to do what he does best, which is to mangle a human body beyond recognition.”

“The twists never stop coming, do they?” asked Tiffany with a frustrated sigh.

“What might set him off? Nobody knows. That’s part of the fun. And your time resumes...now!”

The bakers hurriedly got back to work.

“Though his mask is made of human flesh, I noticed that the stitching is very even,” Cyrus told the camera. “My guess is that he likes dessert decorations to be very precise. I’ll be sure to hold my hand extremely steady when I’m putting on the final touches.”

“With a name like the Southwest Side Splatter...er—oh, that’s hard to say, isn’t it?—he probably likes chaos in his baked goods,” said Helga. “So, I’ll be sure to decorate the doughnuts in a haphazard fashion.”

“I’m not even going to worry about the Southwest Side Splattererer,” said Tiffany. “Did I say that right? Splatter-er. I think the other contestants will be distracted by him, so I’m just going to push him right out of my mind. I’m already worried that I’m going to run out of time, and...oh, fuck, why is he walking over—?”

Tiffany let out a shriek as Gunther plunged his machete deep into her belly. The other players watched in horror as he withdrew the weapon and then repeatedly hacked away at her, sending blood and scraps of flesh flying everywhere.

“Stay focused,” said Edgar. “The clock hasn’t stopped.”

Ten minutes later, Gunther stepped away from the no longer recognizable body of Tiffany. Some crew members began to clean up the mess.

“I’m so embarrassed by how this is going,” Cyrus told the camera. “I know I’m in mourning, but this is the final round of Next Best Baker, and I think I may have blown it. I’m really kicking myself.”

“This is turning out better than I thought,” said Helga. “I’m not suggesting that I’ll start deep frying all of my doughnuts in the heads of my children, but I’m honestly pretty happy with this so far, and I hope the judges agree.”

“All I see are spiders,” said Vincent. “The blender is spiders. My hand is spiders. All are spiders.”

“And...time’s up, everybody!” Edgar announced.

Kevin and Meredith walked out into the studio and took their place at the judges’ table.

“First things first,” said Edgar. “We no longer need Gunther, so to make sure there isn’t any further carnage, we’ll put him down like a rabid dog.”

A stagehand blew Gunther’s head apart with a shotgun. Two interns dragged his corpse away, while a third intern followed them with a mop.

“Cyrus, bring your final bake up to the judges’ table.”

Cyrus placed it in front of Kevin and Meredith. Both of the judges frowned.

“What happened?” asked Kevin. “It’s a complete mess.”

“I tried to make a New York-style cheesecake. I didn’t think about the batter going down Diane’s throat and coming out of the hole in the bottom of her neck. It got all over everything. I’m sorry. I’ve never cooked in a human head before.”

“We don’t want to hear excuses,” said Meredith. “This is the final round. If you can’t use unfamiliar cooking techniques, how are you supposed to be the Next Best Baker?”

“Is there even anything for us to judge?” asked Kevin.

“I scraped some of it out of her mouth,” said Cyrus. “It’s the yellowish-brown stuff on the side.”

Kevin scooped some up with his fork and popped it into his mouth. Meredith did the same.

“It’s terrible,” Kevin said. “Not completely inedible, but close.”

“Quite frankly, it’s insulting that this was presented to us,” Meredith told him. “This is something that would get you eliminated from the auditions, and here you are serving it in the final round.”

Cyrus nodded. “I’m ashamed of it. I have no excuse. I’m sorry.”

“Your only hope is for somebody else to have done worse,” said Meredith.

“Not to unduly influence your decision, but I did say that I will be slashing my throat with a bread knife if I lose.”

“Noted,” said Kevin. “You may return to your station.”

Cyrus left; head hung.

“Your turn, Helga,” said Edgar.

Helga brought a plate of doughnuts up to the judges’ table.

“Those look delightful,” said Kevin. “I like the anarchic tone to the decorations. It’s fun.”

“Yes, from their appearance, I’d proudly display these in one of my seventeen doughnut shops,” said Meredith. “But of course, what’s most important is the flavor.”

Kevin and Meredith each took a bite.

“Mmmm,” said Kevin. “That’s really good. A bit overdone, but only barely. I get hints of your son’s deep-fried flesh, but it’s not overpowering. If I hadn’t watched you pour the batter into his severed head, I might not have even known that’s how it was prepared.”

“Yes, I completely agree,” said Meredith. “When I pop a doughnut into my mouth, I don’t want it to taste like I’m chewing on somebody’s head. That’s disgusting. Like Kevin said, they’re a bit overdone—I’d have taken them out maybe thirty seconds sooner. But, overall, a great effort. Congratulations.”

“Vincent?” said Edgar. Vincent walked up to the judges’ table, empty-handed.

Kevin cleared his throat. “I noticed that you spent the entire challenge gazing into Dylan’s dead eyes.”

Vincent nodded. “I was trying to see into his soul.”

“I can respect that. But the rules are clear that if you don’t actually bake anything for us, you’ve forfeited that round. You’ve given us nothing to judge except your mental state, and, so, I’m afraid I must say that you will not be the Next Best Baker.”

“That’s okay, as long as I’m the Next Best Baker.”

“You’re not.”

“I understand. Am I the Next Best Baker?”

“Moving on,” said Edgar. “Tiffany, please bring your—obviously, I’m kidding, but I can see my joke is not being well received, so I’ll abandon it halfway through. Who will be the Next Best Baker? Will it be Helga, whose doughnuts were slightly overcooked? Or will it be Cyrus, whose New York-style cheesecake oozed out all over his wife’s severed head in a completely unappetizing manner? Time for the judges to deliberate.”

Kevin and Meredith left the studio. Eighteen minutes later, they returned.

“There was a lot to discuss,” said Meredith. “Before we announce the winner, I’d like to ask somebody on the crew to remove the bread knife from Cyrus’ station. Thank you. The winner of this season of the Next Best Baker is...”

“Me?” asked Vincent.

“...Helga!”

Helga squealed in joy.

“Cyrus, though you came up short, you’ve greatly impressed us this season,” said Kevin. “I know we can’t stop you from committing suicide after you leave the kitchen, but I hope you won’t.”

“I probably won’t,” said Cyrus. “This experience has meant the world to me, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

“Then congratulations to our Next Best Baker, Helga!” said Edgar.

“We did it, Anton! We did it,” said Helga, hugging her son’s deep-fried head to her bosom.

CHERRY TREE

“Oopsie,” said Tina.

“What’s wrong?” asked her mother.

The eight-year-old giggled. “I swallowed the hard part of the cherry by mistake.”

Her mother and father looked at each other and smiled. “Uh-oh,” said her father. “Do you know what happens when you swallow a cherry pit?”

“It hurts when I poop it out?”

“A cherry tree grows inside your body.”

Tina frowned. “No, it doesn’t.”

“Why would I make that up? Where do you think cherry trees come from? They come from the seeds inside cherries. If you eat one of the seeds, where else is the tree going to grow?”

“But I didn’t eat any dirt.”

“The lining of your stomach works just like dirt,” her father explained. “That’s why we told you to be careful.”

“You said it was so I didn’t choke!”

“It was that, too. But I also didn’t want a cherry tree to grow in your tummy. Oh well. It’s too late now. Let’s watch the show.”

After the television program ended, Tina’s parents tucked her into bed and then returned to their bedroom for some light BDSM. Midway through the lubrication process, there was a soft knock on the door.

“Mommy...?” said Tina from outside.

“Is everything okay, honey?” her father asked, since her mother’s speech would be too muffled at the moment.

Tina began to cry. Her parents hurriedly got out of bed, put on bathrobes, and opened the door.

Her mother screamed.

“Jesus Christ!” her father shouted.

Tina stood outside the door, holding a large pair of scissors. The lower half of her body was covered in blood. Her intestines dangled down to her knees.

She reached into her open stomach, swirled her hand around for a moment, and then held up a fistful of muck. “I can’t find the cherry seed!” she wailed. “I’ve tried and tried and I can’t find it! Help me!”

“Bullshit,” said Melanie. “That’s not what happened.”

Frank shrugged. “That’s the way I heard the story.”

“An eight-year-old doesn’t have the fortitude to cut open her own stomach like that. As soon as she poked herself with the scissors, she’d stop. Also, no eight-year-old is that dumb. She might have a moment of two of ‘Could that be true?’ but she’d never be so scared about a cherry tree growing in her stomach that she’d cut it open. She also wouldn’t be able to make it to her parents’ bedroom with her intestines hanging out like that. They’d have found her dead in the spot where she started cutting. Also, I would’ve heard it on the legitimate news, not from you.”

“That’s fair,” said Frank.

“Here’s how it actually played out...”

Tina lay in bed, arms wrapped around her teddy bear for comfort. Mom and Dad had been making it all up, of course. Of course they had. Cherry trees didn’t grow in your stomach because you ate a pit. If that were true, she’d have heard about lots and lots of people with cherry trees in their bellies, and she’d never heard of a single one.

It was just something else they made up, like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the reptilian creature that would rend the flesh from her bones if she didn’t behave in school.

Her stomach rumbled.

That was nothing to worry about. Her stomach rumbled all the time.

It rumbled again, louder.

She couldn’t be hungry. She’d eaten an entire bowl full of cherries.

Now it started to hurt.

Well, she’d eaten a whole bowl of cherries. That’s what happened. You got a tummy ache. It happened when she ate too much ice cream and candy, too. Nothing bad was going on in there.

It started to really hurt, like something was trying to poke its way out.

No. It couldn’t be. That was impossible. She was only eight years old and still kind of believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, but she knew for a fact that cherry trees didn’t grow out of your belly if you accidentally ate a pit. It was something her parents had told her to be funny. Mom and Dad were always trying to be funny.

Tina cried out in pain.

She pulled up her nightgown and gaped in horror at her stomach, which was poking out in one—no, two—no, three places!

Something burst through her skin. Something thin and brown with a leaf on it.

She let out a shriek. “Mom! Dad!”

Two more branches tore through her flesh, dripping blood.

Then another one, much larger than the first three. This wasn’t just a single branch—it had several smaller branches protruding from it, and they all had bright red cherries on them.

Tina screamed for her parents again. Where were they?

She sat up, spilling the blood that had pooled on her tummy. More and more branches emerged. All of them had cherries. Some also had internal organs dangling from them.

She staggered toward the door. One of the branches curled around, pointing directly at her eye. She tried to bat it away, but another branch wrapped around her wrist, preventing her from defending herself. The first branch hovered next to her eye for a second, and then...well, it didn’t actually go through her eyeball. It jabbed into the skin directly beneath her eye. Branches had bad aim.

Now cherry tree branches were bursting out of her sides, as well. A couple were ripping out of her legs. She was so drenched with blood that it was hard to say for sure where all of them had come from.

She turned her head toward a mirror on her wall. Her eye, the one with the branch underneath it, was bugging out like a cartoon character. After a moment of excruciating agony, her eyeball popped out, stalk attached, and moved away from her as the branch continued to grow and grow.

The cherries looked ripe and delicious, but Tina didn’t care.

Frank just stared at Melanie.

“What?” she asked.

“You’re not taking this very seriously.”

“Hey, that’s how I heard the story. The cherry magnates hired a team of arborists to come in and clean up the mess, and they paid her parents to not tell anybody what happened. Somehow they were able to keep it out of the media, but some of us know the truth.”

Frank sighed. “You’re so dumb. I don’t know why I hang out with you.”

“Can you honestly say that you would eat a cherry pit right now?” Melanie popped a cherry into her mouth, chewed, and spat the pit into a bowl.

“I’m sure not going to eat that one.”

“I meant any one.”

“I’m not going to swallow a pit just to prove that I’m not scared that a cherry tree will grow inside me. Anyway, I know what really happened...”

A cherry tree grows inside your body.

Dad actually thought she’d believe that.

Mom hadn’t told him to shut up. She’d just smiled and nodded and gone along with the sadistic prank.

What if Tina had believed them? What if she was lying here in bed, absolutely terrified, flinching at the sound of every tummy gurgle? What if she was trembling in fear, so overwhelmed by anxiety that her heart couldn’t handle the strain? Would it still be funny to them?

A cherry tree grows inside your body.

They thought she was stupid.

They thought she was as dumb as a six-year-old. No, a five-year-old. Maybe even a four-year-old. They thought she was a dumb four-year-old who didn’t know that a cherry tree wouldn’t really grow out of your gut if you accidentally swallowed one of the seeds.

Mom and Dad were probably in their bedroom right now, having a great big laugh about their stupid daughter. “Ha ha ha, how did we give birth to such a moron?” Mom was asking. “I don’t know!” Dad was replying. “Did we drop her on her head when she was a baby?” They were laughing and laughing and laughing.

A cherry tree grows inside your body.

It made absolutely no sense. Tina knew how gardens worked. They needed soil and water and fertilizer. You simply could not grow a tree in your belly, no matter how many cherry pits you ate. Even if you ripped open a packet of flower seeds and poured them down your throat, not a single tiny flower would grow down there.

It infuriated Tina that they thought she was so unintelligent and gullible.

Did they even love her? How could they love a child whose brain they didn’t respect?

They needed to pay for this.

Her first thought was to scare them. Make it look like a cherry tree really was growing out of her stomach. But though she was pretty good at papier mâché, she wasn’t good enough to actually make it look like a tree had sprouted from inside of her. They’d see right through it, and then they’d think she was even stupider for her failed attempt to fool them.

There had to be another way to scare them.

She wondered how frightened Mom would be if she woke up to see Tina stabbing Dad in the chest, over and over, with a knife from the drawer that she wasn’t supposed to open.

Tina got out of bed, carefully opened her door, and quietly walked into the kitchen. She didn’t think anybody would send an eight-year-old to prison, but she’d end up in foster care for sure. So what? If her parents thought she was a complete idiot, shouldn’t she get new parents?

She took a great big butcher knife out of the drawer.

Maybe she shouldn’t do this. Maybe she could make the papier mâché good enough to fool them for a second or two.

No. They needed to die.

Mom and Dad always slept with the door open except when they were wrestling, so she didn’t have to worry about making noise. She crawled onto their bed. Dad slept on his side, while Mom slept on her back, so it made sense for Mom to go first.

Tina plunged the knife into Mom’s belly.

Mom’s eyes opened wide.

Tina stabbed her again and again.

“I’m not stupid!” she screamed.

When Dad rolled over, she slashed his throat. He clutched at his neck, staring at her as if he didn’t understand why she’d done this. If he didn’t understand, then he was the stupid one.

They both died quickly. It helped that the knife was so big.

What if they hadn’t been lying?

Tina suddenly realized that she was no gardening expert. What if a cherry tree did grow in your stomach if you ate a seed?

But if that was true, wouldn’t they have rushed her to the hospital?

They’d been joking. They’d definitely been joking. And for that, they deserved their deaths.

They had been joking, right?

She stared at their bloody corpses for a while.

There was a way to figure out if she should feel bad about what she’d done.

Tina went back into the kitchen and dug through the garbage container until she’d collected all of the cherry pits. Then she returned to the bedroom. It required some more work with the knife, but soon Mom and Dad’s bellies were open enough for her to shove a handful of pits inside each of them.

Now all she had to do was wait.

“Pretty sure it didn’t happen like that,” said Melanie.

“How do you know?” asked Frank.

“Because no eight-year-old is that psychotic.”

“Maybe.” Frank picked up a cherry. “Want to see me tie the stem into a knot in my mouth?”

“Sure. I guess we’ll never know what really happened....”

“It hurts when I poop?” Tina asked.

“No,” said her father. “A cherry tree grows inside your body.”

“No, it doesn’t!” Tina insisted, laughing.

Her father tickled her tummy. “It does! You’re gonna have a cherry tree growing in there! Oh no! At least I’ll be able to sell the cherries!”

Tina, her father, and her mother all laughed themselves silly. They finished up the bowl of cherries, turned off the television, and happily went to bed.

MOUTHY

When I found out the creature in my shed ate human flesh, I’m ashamed to say my first thought was “Body disposal!” instead of “Better keep my wife and kids out of there.” Though I’m not a psychopath—fear for my family’s safety was my second thought.

You’re probably wondering how the creature ended up in my shed, and that’s a completely reasonable question, but I don’t have a lot of time, and I don’t want to get bogged down with unnecessary exposition. Although, I guess I do need to tell you what it looked like, or else the curiosity will drive you mad, and I’m no fan of insane people.

It was about six feet tall, and it was sort of this great big, furry, fanged mouth on two legs. No eyes or nose or ears or anything, just a mouth. I know you’re thinking it sounds kind of goofy instead of creepy, and I get that. I’m not sure how to describe it so it sounds terrifying. All I can say is if you saw this thing, your reaction wouldn’t be to point and laugh. Oh, hell no. You’d scream and go, “What is this nightmarish beast that will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life? What kind of God would allow such a creature to exist? Is there even a God anymore?” Then—and I apologize for being indelicate—you’d crap your pants. That thing was scary.

But I’m not a good enough writer to convey that, so just accept that it was a furry mouth on two legs and let’s move on, okay?

After it ate the mailman, I thought about how this monster could be useful in body disposal. And, yes, I get that you want to know what the mailman was doing in my shed. It’s a legitimate question. I just feel like I’m spending a lot of time explaining stuff instead of telling you what happened. Whether or not I lured the mailman to his demise isn’t relevant to the narrative, and I’d like to move past that instead of wasting time with minutiae.

Anyway, I told my wife and kids to stay out of the shed. Then I called my next-door neighbor, Fred, over to “show him my new lawn mower.” I had a problem with Fred. Yes, the details of our feud were petty—I’m not trying to pretend they weren’t. Let’s just say he had a nicer lawn mower than me and leave it at that. I’m the kind of person who seizes an opportunity when it’s presented to him, and when you’ve got a mouth-monster that consumes human flesh hiding in your shed, why not take advantage of the opportunity to make your neighbor disappear?

So I lured Fred over to the shed, and I shoved him inside, and I let the giant furry mouth do its work. I’d just tell his wife and four young daughters I hadn’t seen him that day.

That’s when I noticed the problem. I’d turned away in horror when the mouth bit the mailman, and I’d assumed it swallowed him up completely, which is why my mind raced straight to the whole “body disposal” idea. But it hadn’t. Oh, it had taken a generous bite out of him, but ninety percent of the mailman was on the floor of my shed, and he was still alive.

Same thing with Fred. The mouth chomped on his tummy, but then stepped back into the darkness, like it was full. This left me with two badly injured men in my shed, and Fred was making a hell of a ruckus while he tried to keep his intestines from completely unspooling. What was I supposed to do? Let him keep hollering? What if his three-year-old wandered over to investigate?

I grabbed a shovel and bashed him over the head. Had I been thinking straight, I would have known that a flimsy, plastic snow shovel wasn’t the right tool for the job, but when you have a man in your shed shrieking, “My intestines! My intestines!” then you can judge the quality of my decision making. I smacked him and smacked him and smacked him, and he wasn’t shutting up, so I turned the shovel around and started hitting him on the head with the handle, but that wasn’t doing much better. Then the mailman started screaming too, and I was getting all stressed out, and I started shouting at them to be quiet, and I realized that this simply wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped.

I started stomping on Fred’s face with my sneakers, and after a few dozen tries, there wasn’t enough left to his head for him to keep screaming. I did the same thing to the mailman, and though my legs were getting, tired I didn’t stop until he’d also gone silent.

I looked over and saw the furry mouth watching me. I mean, like I said, it didn’t have eyes, but the mouth-part was turned toward me, and it felt like it was watching me, and maybe it had tiny eyes underneath the fur, I don’t know. We don’t need its whole biological profile.

“You disappointed me,” I told the mouth, and I guess that made it angry, because it charged me. I’m not ashamed to say I let out one doozy of a yelp. But instead of biting me, the mouth ran past me and out of the shed.

A couple of minutes later, I heard screams that sounded like they might belong to Fred’s young daughters, but I couldn’t say for sure.

Though I owned a shotgun, I knew Fred had a better one, so I hurried over to his house. I stepped over the corpses on his front porch, let myself in, and grabbed the shotgun. Then I saw his laptop computer resting on a table, and I realized I should probably write down this tale in case I don’t survive.

Is it irresponsible to be sitting here typing when the mouth could be out there biting tummies left and right? Maybe. But I didn’t create the unholy abomination. I’m not a mad scientist or a supreme being—it was just there in my shed. Do you understand now why I didn’t want this story to get bogged down in details? Human lives are at risk, so every adjective I type increases the chances somebody else will die today. That’s on you, not me. You’re the one who should be filled with self-loathing if the body count gets higher.

Now quit distracting me. I’ve got a mouth-monster to kill.

ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOUR TWO FRONT TEETH

“You sang the lyrics wrong,” said Tiffany.

“No,” said Kyle, picking up the hammer, “I didn’t.”

The first time Kyle bashed out somebody’s two front teeth with a hammer, he did it just to be funny. The second time was also meant to be funny, because it was now a running gag. The same was true for the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh times. His motivation was comedy.

He didn’t expect his victims to laugh, of course, though he liked to think that, years later, they’d run their tongue over their ceramic teeth and think, “Okay, that was a pretty good one.”

It was a difficult gag to pull off. Even if people had been cooperative, which they weren’t, it wasn’t easy to specifically knock out somebody’s two front teeth. Sometimes only one tooth would pop free. Sometimes he’d accidentally knock out three or four. Often, they’d turn their head to avoid getting hit in the face with a hammer and he’d knock out molars instead. Once, he broke some poor guy’s jaw. It was a very, very imperfect process. However, he was confident that everybody understood the gist of the joke.

“I don’t get it,” said Roberta. She looked almost like her profile picture, which was a welcome change.

“The song is ‘All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.’ But I sing it as ‘All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth’ and then I knock out their two front teeth and keep them. How do you not get it?”

“I guess I misspoke. I get it; I just don’t think it’s all that funny or clever. It seems kind of mean.”

“The meanness is part of what makes it so funny. It’s edgy!”

“Do you only do it at Christmas?”

“Well, no, I do it year-round.”

“So you’re saying that, in July, you’re knocking out people’s teeth with a hammer to make fun of a Christmas song?”

Kyle lowered his eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“The song specifically says that all you want for Christmas is your two front teeth. Who the hell starts shopping for Christmas presents in the summer? That joke works from the day after Thanksgiving until December 26th and that’s it.”

“I get what you’re saying, but it’s not like I can knock out somebody’s teeth and then continue the conversation as if nothing happened. Like, I wouldn’t do it here. The restaurant is full of witnesses, and I’m not wearing a disguise. So, no, I don’t only do it at Christmas, but it’s not like people forget the song exists the rest of the year. It’s a classic.”

“Do they lisp afterward?” asked Roberta.

“I don’t know. I suppose so. Mostly they just scream.”

“The whole punchline to the song is the lisp. Without the lisp the song makes no sense. Why does the kid want his two front teeth? So he can wish you ‘Merry Christmas’ without lisping. That is literally what the entire song is leading up to: the lisp revelation.”

“I never said I was striving for one hundred percent accuracy,” said Kyle.

“You’re bashing people in the face with a hammer for a joke, causing them extreme pain and possibly permanent disfigurement, and you can’t even be bothered to be accurate to the source material? It’s disrespectful. I’m not going to lie to you, Kyle—your joke sucks.”

“It doesn’t suck.”

“It totally sucks. It’s not funny enough to justify the sadism.”

“I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

“No, you’re going to stop doing it.”

“Or what?” Kyle asked. “You’ll call the police?”

Roberta shook her head. “I’ll tell Santa Claus.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard me.”

Kyle let out a snort of laughter. “What are you gonna do, send a letter to the North Pole? He gets a million of those a year. It’ll get lost in the shuffle.”

“My cousin is married to one of his elves. I can fast-track it.”

“Oh.” Kyle realized that he never should have confessed his secret to a woman he’d just met. He’d assumed she’d think it was funny! He never imagined she had connections to Santa Claus. Santa was a jolly old man, but he had no tolerance for physical violence, no matter how amusing.

“I have to get going,” Roberta said. Since their date was scheduled to include dinner and a movie, Kyle knew she was lying.

“Don’t go,” he pleaded. “I made it all up. I was trying to impress you. It was a poor calculation on my part. I can’t even hammer a nail without whacking my finger, much less knock out somebody’s two front teeth. I’m sorry for deceiving you.”

“Here’s what you should do. You should kidnap them, knock them out, and let them wake up in a dentist’s chair. Then you should remove their two front teeth with surgical precision. A hammer is way too sloppy. Give them Novocain so that it’s scary but it doesn’t hurt. After their teeth have been removed, you make them sing the song.”

“Make them sing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth?’”

“No, dipshit, the real version.”

“Then what do I sing?”

“You don’t sing anything.”

“That would mean they’re delivering the joke, not me. I want to be the funny one. It was my idea. You’re messing up the whole gag if it’s just people missing their two front teeth singing about how they want their two front teeth. The joke is that I sing the song, and then they have this moment of realization about the horror that is about to ensue. How do you not understand this?”

Roberta shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I was kidding anyway. It’s not like I was proposing a tooth-stealing crime spree with you. I’m letting Santa Claus know.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

“Is that a threat?”

“Yes. That’s why my eyes are narrowed and I said it slowly.”

“You’re going to kill me with a hammer in the middle of a crowded restaurant?”

“No. Of course not. That would be nuts. I’m not going to just whip out a claw hammer and start bashing your skull right here. I already said there are too many witnesses, and I’m not wearing a disguise, and I also wouldn’t have the element of surprise. That’s part of why I can knock out all those teeth—people aren’t expecting me to smack them with a hammer. You look like you could put up a decent fight and hold me off at least until some Good Samaritans got involved. I can fend off one or two Good Samaritans, but not three or more, and a lot of the customers in this restaurant look like the kind of people who would see a woman being attacked by a hammer-wielding madman and try to intervene. It would be absolutely insane for me to attack you right here, and it quite honestly hurts my feelings that you think I’m careless enough to try such a thing.”

“I was being sarcastic,” said Roberta. “The tone was supposed to be ‘I know damn well you’re not going to try to kill me with a hammer in the middle of a crowded restaurant.’ I assumed you’d pick up on that.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t. You could’ve stopped me from doing a long-winded explanation.”

“You seemed to be enjoying hearing yourself talk.”

“Please don’t tell Santa Claus.”

“Do you promise to stop knocking out people’s teeth?”

Kyle hesitated. “Starting when?”

“Immediately.”

“I...I don’t know if I can promise that. I can promise to try.”

“Then, I’m sorry. Santa Claus needs to know about this.”

Kyle wanted to call her a bitch, but that would make things worse.

Of course, Santa Claus didn’t bring presents to adults. So Kyle wasn’t worried about gifts. He was worried about the rumors—never confirmed—that Santa sometimes took it upon himself to punish those who were especially naughty.

The odds of Santa Claus actually coming after him were extremely remote, but it definitely made Kyle nervous. He tried to hide this by giving a casual shrug. “Well, do what you’ve gotta do. I can’t stop you.”

Roberta smiled. “Nope. You sure can’t.”

Santa Claus was one of the jolliest people in the known universe. Far jollier than God, although that wasn’t saying much. He almost always had a great big smile on his face, and his belly jiggled whenever he said “Ho, ho, ho!”

Still, he had his own pet peeves. Like the way people would say, “Gosh, it must be great to only work one day of the year!” That was balderdash. He started prepping for the following Christmas on January 1st, and he didn’t get any of those Monday holidays like Presidents’ Day or Memorial Day off. The rumor that he just sat on a beach while the elves did all the work was simply not true. No, he didn’t actually make any of the toys himself, but he functioned in a managerial capacity, making sure things got done correctly and on schedule. These were twelve-hour days, minimum. He had flaws (there was the obvious weight problem, and he sometimes fantasized about other women when making love to Mrs. Claus) but being lazy was not one of them.

That said, thanks to advances in technology, Santa had more free time on his hands. And that meant he could devote more attention to his dream of purging naughtiness from the world.

Oh, Santa took no pleasure in leaving a lump of coal in a child’s stocking. He didn’t giggle as he imagined that child hurrying down the staircase on Christmas morning, so excited to see what gifts he had received (and, yes, it was almost always a “he”), only to discover that Santa had left no presents under the tree. He didn’t enjoy the thought of the child’s face falling, a single tear trickling down his face as his heart broke. It was an ugly business, but it had to be done. Santa never ate the cookies they left out—that would be too cruel.

But most of the coal children were naughty, not evil. They were the children who didn’t clean their rooms, or said a bad word before they turned thirteen, or frightened their younger siblings with artificial spiders. One present-less Christmas was usually enough to change their behavior. And up until recently, that was all Santa had time to do: withhold presents.

Not anymore.

Now he occasionally found himself with enough time to pay a personal visit to a particularly naughty person. It was usually a little boy but not always. And though Santa was a jolly, friendly, lovably chubby old fellow, he could also be terrifying. Nightmarish. Demonic. And those he visited in that capacity never misbehaved again, for fear of red scaly arms breaking through the ground and dragging them screaming down into the bowels of Hell.

He wished he had more time for that.

There was a knock at the door. “Come in,” he said.

Elbo, one of his worker elves, walked inside, holding a letter. “Hi, Santa.”

“What can I do for you, Elbo?”

“My cousin-in-law sent me a letter. She said she went on a date with a man who is sullying the spirit of Christmas by knocking out people’s teeth with a hammer.”

Santa frowned. That didn’t sound very Christmassy at all. “Why would he do such a terrible thing?”

“He thinks it’s funny.”

“Classic sadist. Well, I won’t stand for that. What time zone is he in?”

“Eastern.”

“So the sun sets in two hours and fourteen minutes. I’ll visit him under the cover of darkness. Prepare the reindeer.”

Kyle gasped at the sound of thumping on his roof. It couldn’t be!

For a week after his date with Roberta, he’d kept a roaring fire going at all times. But he’d eventually grown complacent, and now, ten days later, he realized the error of his ways.

He heard a sound that was definitely a man sliding down his chimney.

Santa’s boots struck the bottom of the chimney, stirring up a cloud of soot.

Kyle backed away in horror, hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

Santa Claus emerged. There was a pop sound as his significant girth came free of the narrow chimney, but there was nothing amusing about it. Santa gestured and the soot magically disappeared from his beard and red and white suit. He turned his attention to Kyle.

“Do you know why I’m here?” Santa asked.

Kyle gulped. “I’ll never do it again! I promise! I’ve mended my ways!”

Santa cracked his knuckles. “I am capable of mercy. But did you show mercy to your victims?”

Kyle dropped to his knees. “Please, Santa! I know now just how wrong my actions were! I’ll repent! I’ll go to dental school, and I’ll fix the teeth of the homeless for free!”

Santa raised his hands. But they were no longer hands—they had transformed into claw hammers. The magical abilities of Santa Claus had their limits, which is why he was reliant on elves for manual labor, but changing his hands into hammers was pretty easy for him.

“No!” Kyle cried out.

Santa smashed one of his hammer-hands into a picture of Kyle that hung on the wall. “You think it’s funny to knock out people’s teeth? Do you think it’ll be funny when I knock out yours? How hard do you think you’ll laugh with a mouthful of broken tooth shards, huh?”

“Please, Santa! Please, please, please! Don’t do it! Don’t do it!”

Santa loomed over Kyle. His eyes glowed red. “Lift your face,” Santa said, his voice now three octaves lower than before, and with an eerie tremor. “Lift your face and accept the punishment for your infernal naughtiness.”

As tears streamed down his cheeks, Kyle looked up at him. “I’m so sorry for what I’ve done.”

“Oh, I know you are. You’re very sorry indeed. And don’t think I’m going to let you keep the collection of your victim’s teeth that you’ve acquired. That box leaves with me.”

“That’s fine! That’s totally fine! I don’t want it anymore!”

“Open your mouth. Move your lips out of the way.”

Kyle, sobbing, did as he was told. “Are you going to sing the song?”

“What song?”

“The song. The song I sung. ‘All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth.’ ”

“What are you talking about? I’ll be honest—I didn’t read the letter myself. I just let my elf Elbo summarize it. I was told that you were trying to make knocking people’s teeth out with a hammer a Christmas tradition.”

“I’d sing ‘All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth’ to people and then knock out their two front teeth with a hammer! It was supposed to be funny!”

“So you’d sing the classic song, but you’d swap out ‘My’ for ‘Your,’ and then you’d knock out their teeth?”

“Yes.”

Santa considered that for a moment. “That’s actually kind of clever.”

“I know, right?”

“You could go to prison for it. With all of your victims, you’re risking incarceration for the rest of your life. That’s some serious commitment to a joke.”

“I don’t do things halfway.”

Santa lowered his hammer-hands. “Look, Kyle, I’m Santa Claus. I can’t give my seal of approval to the idea of you giving people bloody toothless mouths. I need that nonsense to stop. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That said, your sense of humor was in the right place. So I’m not going to punish you. Just tone it down, okay? Maybe—and I’m just spitballing here—do a variation on that thing where you say, ‘Got your nose!’ but it’s really your thumb poking through your fist. Do the song, say ‘Got your teeth!’ and then maybe paint your thumb white so it looks like a tooth. Both thumbs, so it’s two teeth. Keep the basic joke but eliminate the grisly violence. Can you do that for me, Kyle?”

“Yes, Santa. Absolutely, Santa.”

“Good. You enjoy the rest of your evening, and remember that I see you when you’re sleeping, and I know when you’re awake, so if you use a hammer for anything but hanging a picture or building a fence, I’m coming back for you.”

“Can I keep the box of teeth?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Santa Claus squeezed his way back up the chimney. Kyle gazed out the window as the reindeer pulled his sleigh across the night sky, finally disappearing from sight. And Kyle, fully reformed, went to bed with a song of Christmas goodwill in his heart.

HOLD YOUR BREATH

The initiation was very simple. Open the gate (covered with rust but always unlocked), walk over to the house and up the steps to Mr. Cook’s front porch. Then hold your breath to the count of twenty. After that, having proven your worth, you could flee the yard and would never be expected to return.

It seemed like a small task to gain the respect of the other children in the neighborhood. Everybody had done it, they said. Even six-year-olds. A ten-year-old like Penny should have no fear. It wouldn’t even take a full minute. And not once had Mr. Cook ever opened his door to confront the children on his property.

Of course, you couldn’t do it in the daylight. That didn’t count.

Oh, it didn’t have to be at the stroke of midnight. Nothing like that. This was a safe neighborhood and night fell early in the winter. It wasn’t unusual for parents to let their children play outside in the dark, as long as they stayed in their own yard or at least the yards of their friends.

It also wasn’t unusual for children to disobey their parents.

Penny stood in front of the gate. She couldn’t even remember the names of three of the four children who were with her, just Anne, who had beautiful blonde hair that probably didn’t hurt when her mother ran a brush through it. At her old home, Penny had spent most of her time indoors, reading, until Mom and Dad pushed her to make friends. “This is so exciting!” Mom had said. “You get to reinvent yourself!” And so, apparently, Penny was reinventing herself as somebody who would walk up onto a stranger’s porch after dark and hold her breath for twenty seconds, just to gain the approval of new friends.

It was as scary of a house as she’d ever seen, but it wasn’t as if ghosts or vampires lived there. The trees didn’t have knotholes with glowing eyes within. It was just a regular house, poorly maintained, and if anything she was at more of a risk of stepping on a nail than meeting her doom at the hands of a supernatural creature.

“Do it,” said Anne. “Don’t be scared.”

Of course, the whole point was to be scared. The other children were interested in her bravery, or lack thereof, not her breath-holding capabilities.

Penny opened the metal gate. It didn’t creak, which surprised her. This definitely seemed like the kind of rusty gate that would let out an eerie creak when it was opened.

She stepped into the yard alone.

Mr. Cook’s yard was overgrown with weeds, but the path to the front porch was made of pebbles. Unless a rat came scurrying out, she’d be okay.

She slowly walked along the path, trying to move as if she wasn’t frightened, like she was casually going up to the house to sell the owner some Girl Scout cookies. She wasn’t in any danger. It wasn’t even that scary, if you really thought about it. There was no full moon, or wolves howling in the distance, or bats flying around. Just a normal house. Everything was fine.

Everything was perfectly fine.

She made it to the steps without anything bad happening. See how easy this was?

Penny walked up the steps onto the porch. The wood did creak, but not loudly, not so much that she thought she might break through, or awaken something underneath.

There. She’d made it. This was the easiest initiation ever.

She took a deep breath and held it.

One…two…

Simple. Anybody could hold their breath to the count of twenty. That was nothing.

Three…four…five…

Twenty seconds wasn’t a long time. The house wasn’t scary. It wasn’t even all that dark out. If this was all it took to impress the other children, Penny would be the most popular kid in the neighborhood by spring.

Six…seven…

The front door remained closed. The curtains didn’t shift. Nobody was watching her except her new friends. Mr. Cook might not even be in there. For all she knew, the only living creature in the house was a fly or two. And Penny most definitely was not afraid of flies.

Eight…

What was that sound?

Nothing. There was no sound. She’d imagined it.

Nine…

Had the wood creaked again? It shouldn’t have. She hadn’t moved.

Ten…

That wasn’t true. She’d shifted her weight a bit without realizing it. That’s all. She needed to be careful to make sure that she really didn’t break through the wood, but there was nothing truly spooky going on.

Eleven…twelve…

More than halfway done. Was she counting too slowly? She thought she might be counting too slowly. Holding her breath was becoming more difficult, and it really shouldn’t be, not if she was only up to the count of twelve.

Thirteen…fourteen…

Her lungs were starting to burn. She suddenly wondered if she was going to make it.

Had the doorknob moved?

Of course it hadn’t.

She imagined the door swinging wide open, revealing Mr. Cook, a wide grin on his face as flakes of his skin blew away in the light breeze. “Well, hello there,” he’d say. “Why, I’d love to buy some cookies from you. Or maybe I’ll just eat your fingers instead…”

Fifteen…

Only five more seconds. Just five.

Sixteen…

She was starting to feel like she might pass out. She thought her eyes might be bugging out of her head, even though that was ridiculous. Her face wasn’t turning blue. Her lungs weren’t about to pop like balloons. She was making all of that up.

Seventeen…

Penny was going to die.

Eighteen…

She couldn’t do it anymore. She released the breath she’d been holding and then gasped for air.

Penny spun around. She wasn’t going to run. There was no need to run. She could walk down the steps like absolutely nothing was wrong, and then proceed along the pebble path as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

She ran.

She hurried down the steps then fled toward the gates, expecting the rotting hand of Mr. Cook to clamp down upon her shoulder. “Now, now, where you are going, young Penny? You weren’t done counting. Ten little fingers. Ten little toes. Twenty parts of you for me to eat!”

She ran out of his yard and slammed the gate shut.

“You did it!” said Anne. “You’re one of us now!”

Penny tried to smile. She hadn’t made it to the count of twenty, but the other children didn’t seem to have noticed anything wrong, so she probably had indeed been counting too slowly.

They walked away from the house.

“Why do we do that?” Penny asked.

“To prove that we’re not scared,” said Anne.

“I know, but why did I have to hold my breath?”

“That’s because of Melissa, Mr. Cook’s daughter,” said one of the girls whose name Penny couldn’t remember. She was the oldest of the group, maybe twelve years old. “A long time ago there used to be a pond near here. It’s all drained now. One day Melissa, when she was a little younger than you are now, went swimming, and she went out too far because she didn’t realize how deep it was. She thought it was shallow all the way across. It wasn’t.”

The girls all stopped walking to make it easier for her to achieve the proper atmosphere when telling the tale.

“She screamed and screamed for help. Lucky for her, Mr. Cook was watching his daughter. He swam out there, but she’d already gone under. Well, he searched and searched and searched, and just when he thought he’d lost her for good, he managed to grab her by the hand and pull her to the surface. He swam back with her, but when he got to the shore, he realized that she wasn’t breathing.”

“Did she die?” Penny asked.

The older girl shook her head. “Mr. Cook knew mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He held her nose and he breathed into her mouth. He did it twenty times. And on the twentieth breath, her eyes opened, and she was okay. He’d saved her life.”

Wow. Penny hadn’t expected it to be a happy story. “Does she still live there?”

“Oh, no. She’s all grown up now. She moved away years ago.” The older girl looked at her wristwatch. “Hey, we should all go home before we get in trouble.”

Penny went home and told her parents that she’d had a very nice time and made some new friends. She didn’t tell them about the initiation, since they wouldn’t approve of her walking into a stranger’s yard after dark. They didn’t need to know everything she did. Some secrets were okay, as long as nobody got hurt.

At bedtime, she fell asleep right away.

She opened her eyes when she heard a noise in her room.

It was nothing. All houses made sounds, and she wasn’t used to this one yet. Floors creaked. Pipes rattled. Strange dogs barked. It was nothing.

She closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep.

Did she hear dripping?

The bathroom was across the hall from her bedroom. Maybe the faucet was leaking.

She opened her eyes again and sat up.

No, the dripping sound was definitely coming from her room.

Was somebody in here with her?

She reached for the lamp that was on her bedstand, but before she could turn it on, a cold wet hand clamped over her mouth.

“Shhhh…” somebody said.

Penny let out a muffled whimper.

“You cheated.” It sounded like a little girl.

Penny shook her head. She wanted to protest, but she couldn’t speak with the clammy hand covering her mouth.

“You only counted to eighteen! You stole my last two breaths!”

Penny tried to explain, to tell the little girl that she thought she’d been counting too slowly, that she’d been scared the door would open, that it wasn’t her fault.

“I needed those breaths. You stole them from me. Right now I’m at home in bed and my husband thinks I’m suffocating. Do you want me to die? Do you want me to leave my children without a mother?”

Penny bit down on the little girl’s palm. She didn’t want to hurt her—she just wanted the little girl to take her hand away so Penny could explain what had happened.

Her teeth broke through the girl’s skin easily. Cold, foul-tasting water squirted into her mouth.

“There’s only one way for me to stay with my family. You stole my last two breaths. Now I have to take ALL of yours.”

The little girl opened her mouth wide—impossibly wide, inhumanly wide—and leaned forward, completely drowning out the sound of Penny’s scream.

FIRST DATE

“What do you do for a living?” June asked.

Cliff frowned. “I thought I already told you.” He glanced around at the other diners in the fancy Italian restaurant to make sure nobody was paying attention to them. “I’m a serial killer.”

“Well, that’s not really a job. It’s a hobby, right?”

“No, it’s not a hobby! It’s the most meaningful thing in my life!”

June nodded. She was thirty-two, according to her profile on the dating site, with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and perfect teeth. Cliff’s victims were in their early twenties and brunettes, which he assumed was why June felt safe going out with him. “I didn’t mean ‘hobby’ in a disparaging way. But you can’t make a full-time living from being a serial killer, can you?”

“Why not?”

“How do you monetize that?”

“I take their purses when I’m done.”

“Then you’re a robber, not a serial killer. If you’re stealing from them as a trophy, that’s one thing, but taking cash from your victims to pay the bills is something a mugger does.”

“You’re saying I should just leave the money behind?” Cliff asked. “How would that make any sense? Who would do that?”

“A killer who was trying to send the message that it’s about the killing, not the income.”

“I’m not trying to send a message. It’s an outlet for the darkness inside of me. I don’t care what anybody thinks.”

“That’s fair,” said June. “In fact, I admire that. You’re not trying to play by anybody’s rules but your own. If you can make a full-time living stealing purses from your victims, good for you.”

Cliff hesitated. “Thank you.”

“Why’d you pause?”

“I didn’t.”

“You totally paused before thanking me.”

“So?”

“You’re not making a full-time living by stealing their purses, are you?”

“Well, no,” Cliff admitted. “Women don’t carry much cash with them these days, and using their credit cards would leave a trail. ATM machines have cameras, and I wouldn’t want one to snap a picture of me if I entered the wrong PIN number.”

“You know—”

“Yes, I know! The ‘M’ in ATM stands for ‘machine’ and the ’N’ in PIN stands for ‘number.’ Excuse me for being redundant. Are you always this pedantic?”

“Pretty much,” said June. “Most guys find it endearing. You don’t?”

“It makes me want to expand my victim pool.”

“Rude.”

“I was just kidding.”

“Uh-huh. We’ve been here five minutes and you’re saying that you literally want to murder me. That’s not how you get to second base.”

“I was kidding!” Cliff insisted. “If you go out on a date with a serial killer, there’s going to be some dark humor. When I take the first bite of my chicken Alfredo I’ll probably say something like, ‘Mmmm, tastes like human flesh!’ even though I’m not a cannibal and have no intention of becoming one.”

“Do you say funny quips after you kill somebody?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

“No puns?” June asked.

“That’s only in the movies. In real life, serial killers don’t say clever one-liners to their victims. In the moment you’re too focused on the task at hand to think of anything witty.”

“Makes sense. So when you’re lying in bed, replaying it afterward, do you ever think of something you wish you’d said? Like when you’ve had an argument, and you realize the perfect thing you should have said, a real zinger that would’ve destroyed your opponent, but only after the argument has been over for hours?”

Cliff shook his head. “It wouldn’t matter. The person who would’ve heard me be witty is dead.”

“Well, yeah, that’s true,” said June. “Still, there’s something to be said for giving them a little chuckle before they die.”

“Not my thing.”

“Do you kill them fast or slow?”

“I don’t know. Medium, I guess.”

“What do you mean by medium?”

“If I just pop up and stab a victim to death, it can be over in, like, twenty seconds. Even faster if I slit their throat. I don’t do that, but I also don’t take them home and chain them up in a basement so I can have my way with them for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I inject them, drag their unconscious body to my car, drive them to my lair, wake them up, and then torture them to death, but I don’t drag it out very long. Fifteen minutes at the most.”

“Did you say lair?” June asked.

“Yeah.”

June giggled.

“What?” Cliff demanded.

“That just sounds cheesy. Lair. My lair. Like you’re a comic book villain.”

“What should I call it?”

“I don’t know. What kind of place is it?”

“A cabin.”

“Then call it your cabin. Lair sounds goofy. I would never let a guy put his hand under my bra if he referred to his cabin as his lair.”

“Maybe I don’t want to put my hand under your bra,” said Cliff.

“Your loss.”

Cliff picked up his knife. “Maybe instead of putting my hand under there, I’d...” He put the knife down. “No, I’d never do that. That’s too depraved.”

“That was a butter knife.”

“I know.”

“Were you going to cut off my tit with a butter knife?”

“No! One, I was just using it as a prop. I’d use a normal knife if I was actually going to do it. Two, I wouldn’t do it right here in a crowded restaurant. That’s how guys like me end up in prison. Three, before I even described what I was going to do, I said I wouldn’t really do it. I’m not the kind of serial killer who would cut off your breasts. That’s very low class.”

“So you say,” said June. “But I think you kill because you have weird sexual repression issues.”

“I do not!”

“Are you a virgin?”

“I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“My guess is that you can’t get hard because of some seriously messed-up issues in your upbringing, so you use your knife as a surrogate penis. It’s literally the only way you can penetrate a woman.”

“My God, you really have no boundaries,” said Cliff. “We haven’t even got our bread sticks yet.”

“The bread sticks will be harder than your dick.”

Cliff pushed his chair back. “I think we’re done.”

“No, no, no, I’m sorry,” said June. “You’re right—I have no boundaries. I shouldn’t be talking about your sexual dysfunction. It was tactless. Don’t go. I won’t make you say tit.”

“You’ve been antagonistic this whole time.”

“I know, I know. I’m not a good person. I’ll do better. Let’s just enjoy our dinner, okay?”

“Okay.” Cliff slid his chair back in place. He sighed. “I work at an ice cream shop. That’s how I pay the bills. I scoop ice cream for a living.”

“There’s no shame in that. It’s honest work.”

“It really is. And it builds muscles. Nobody ever thinks of it as grueling work, but sometimes the ice cream is really frozen in those tubs and it takes a lot of effort to scoop it out. You can make it easier by keeping the scoop in hot water, but still, it’s a workout.”

“And I bet having to deal with customers all day makes you hate humanity, which makes it easier to murder people later,” said June.

“No. I don’t mind the customers.”

“Never thought about scooping out one of their eyeballs and putting it on top of a sundae like a cherry?”

“Nah. I’m not really into the visuals.”

“Why don’t you get an ice cream truck? You could play creepy music and drive slowly around suburban neighborhoods seeking your next victim.”

“I don’t kill little kids,” said Cliff.

“Well, you said earlier you wanted to expand your victim pool.”

“No, I said that you being pedantic made me want to expand my victim pool. And I was kidding. I would never harm a child.”

“What if the child was all like, ‘You killed my mother!’ and had a gun pointed at you, but their hand was trembling while they worked up the courage to pull the trigger, and you knew that if you acted quickly you could stab them to death before they shot you?”

“I wouldn’t have to stab them to death. I’d jab the knife in their arm and make them drop the gun.”

“Then you’re stuck with a kid who knows you killed their mommy.”

“We’d work it out.”

“How? Threats? Negotiation? Gaslighting?”

“I don’t know,” said Cliff. “It’s a completely ridiculous hypothetical situation. I’d never be so sloppy that a kid could track me down to seek vengeance. But to answer your question, I’d use threats. I’d tell the kid that I was the boogeyman and that I’d climb out from under their bed and eat their face if they ever told anybody what I’d done.”

“Damn. Harsh.”

“Better than killing them.”

“Yeah, you’re right. What’s taking our breadsticks so long?”

“They’re freshly made. You can’t rush quality.”

“Well, I’m starving. So how many women have you killed?”

Cliff hesitated. “A lot.”

“You paused again.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You totally did.”

“I know if I paused or not. I’m the one who would have done it. I know the timing of my own words. Maybe the number is so large that I was trying to count them up in my mind before I answered.”

“You can’t insist that you didn’t pause and then immediately explain why you might have paused.”

“You’re getting antagonistic again.”

“Does it turn you on?”

“No.”

“How many victims?” June asked. “Look me in the eye when you answer. And don’t do that unconscious thing where you put your hand over your mouth—it’s a dead giveaway that somebody is lying. I know all the signs. My dad was a cop.”

“My dad was a plumber. I don’t know shit about plumbing.”

“How many?”

“That’s a third-date conversation.”

“How many?”

“How many guys have you slept with?”

“Eleven.”

“Oh.” Cliff looked down at the table. “Is that a lot?”

“I don’t know. Is it?”

“I don’t know, either. If they were evenly spaced out it’s not that many, I guess.”

“You’re sweating,” said June.

“No, I’m not.”

“You are. Your face is bright red and you’re sweating. Is the sex talk making you nervous?”

“No.”

“You blurted out the question without thinking and now you deeply regret it, don’t you?”

“Why are you so mean?”

“I’m not mean. You tried to deflect my question and it backfired. But it’s good for us to talk about fornication—it’s healthy to get out of your comfort zone. Have you ever touched a vagina?”

The server brought a bowl of bread sticks to their table. Cliff and June thanked her and took one each.

“Two,” said Cliff.

“You’ve touched two vaginas?”

“I’ve killed two women.”

“That’s it?”

“How many have you killed?”

“None, but I didn’t represent myself as a serial killer. You don’t get to call yourself a serial killer if you’ve only claimed two victims. That’s ridiculous. You’re just somebody who killed two women.”

“How many does it take to become a serial killer?”

“I don’t know. Let me Google it.” June took out her cell phone and tapped away at the screen. “Three.”

“Really?”

“Yes. And they have to be three separate incidents with a cooling down period between them, or else you’re technically a spree killer. And if you kill three people at once, it’s just mass murder.”

“Are you sure? I thought all you needed was to kill more than one person, on purpose.”

“That’s not what the internet says.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t believe you told me you were a serial killer when you’d only killed two women. That’s way worse than using an outdated profile picture.”

“My picture’s not outdated,” said Cliff. “It’s from earlier this year.”

“Then you had some serious filter action going there. I’m not saying you’re ugly at all—I’d totally have let you put your hand under my bra if you’d played your cards right—but you don’t look like your picture.”

“Neither do you.”

June stared at him for a moment. “That was a low blow.”

“How was it a low blow? You just got finished saying that I didn’t look like my picture, and I said the exact same thing back to you!”

“It’s different. I’m sensitive about my looks, and you’re clearly not sensitive about your own.”

“You’re a fucking weirdo,” said Cliff. “I may have tortured and killed two women, but there is something seriously wrong with you. So how do you make a living? We never talked about that.”

“Apologize for hurting my feelings first.”

“Fine. I’m sorry I said you didn’t look like your profile picture immediately after you said I don’t look like mine.”

“I don’t accept your apology.”

Cliff took a bite of his breadstick. “You know, you’re acting like it’s not much of an accomplishment to murder two women, but let me remind you that they were both young, attractive brunettes. I couldn’t just randomly kill a couple of ladies. I have a type. These were women with jobs and families and stuff. They were missed. If I hadn’t been careful, we’d be having this date through Plexiglass.”

“No, we wouldn’t,” said June. “I don’t date inmates.”

“Oh, yes, your standards are soooooo very high when you’re out there banging eleven guys in a row!”

“It was eleven guys over fourteen years, and you’re sweating again. It’s running down your forehead and dripping off the tip of your nose.”

“I’m a sweaty person, okay? Some of us have more pores than others.”

“You believe that sex is dirty and wicked, don’t you?”

“No,” said Cliff. “Sex is perfectly fine, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

“What were you hoping to get out of this date?”

“Nothing.”

“Were you planning to kill me afterward?”

“Ha. You wish. You’re a blonde, and you’re too old.”

“Then what were you looking for?”

Cliff said nothing. He picked up his napkin and wiped the perspiration off his face.

“Tell me,” June said.

“I wanted a friend, okay? Somebody who wouldn’t judge me for my atrocities. When you found out I was a serial killer and still wanted to have dinner with me, I thought you might be the one, but you’re just so unpleasant. Yes, I think all women are disease-ridden whores, and my stomach churns, and I break into a cold sweat when the subject of their erogenous zones comes up, but I thought I could get past that to spend time with somebody who liked me the way I am.”

June smiled. “That’s sweet.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not pathetic?”

June’s smile froze. “It’s sweet, okay? Maybe quit interrogating me about it.”

“Do you think we could start over?”

“We could, yeah, but I’ll be honest—I’ll behave the exact same way. You’ve got innocent blood on your hands, but I’m basically a psychopath. If we started over, I’d still harass you about killing being a hobby and your erectile dysfunction and the fact that you lied about being a serial killer. Then you’d wail about just wanting a friend who understands you, and I’d feel a little guilty about laughing in your face, but I’d do it anyway.”

“I see.”

“Look, the honest truth is that somebody who would date a serial killer isn’t going to be the highest quality person. I kind of thought that would be obvious and you would have already managed your expectations, but apparently not. I’m happy to finish this meal with you, but it’s going to be more of the same.”

“What if I threatened to stab you in the face if you didn’t behave?” Cliff asked.

“You won’t. You said you have a type.”

“That doesn’t mean I won’t succumb to rage.”

“If I feel threatened, I’ll mention my boobs, and you’ll drop into the fetal position.”

“Okay, look, as sad as it is to say this out loud, you’re the best I’m going to get. Can you at least swear to me that you’re not playing the long game?”

“What do you mean?” June asked.

“I mean befriending me just so I’ll kill an enemy of yours who happens to be a twenty-something brunette.”

“No, Cliff, I’d never use you like that. I have my limits.”

“So is this how our relationship is going to work? You’ll keep being shitty to me, but at least I won’t have to pretend to be something I’m not?”

“Technically, you were pretending to be a serial killer, which you’re not, and you were pretending to not be an ice cream scooper.”

“I hate you,” said Cliff.

“That’s understandable. I don’t show it, but I’m filled with self-loathing. I’m also a cutter. That’s why you won’t see my tits even if they didn’t scare you.”

“I’m not going to take you along for one of my hunts.”

“I’d never ask you to.”

“I mean it. You’re not my partner. Killing is my special time and nobody is invited but me and my victim.”

“I’m cool with that.”

“And I didn’t want to say it before, but I keep their heads as trophies. I don’t do anything to preserve them. I just let them rot in my apartment. They talk to me. They scream.”

“That actually makes me feel better. That’s something a serial killer would do. You’ve only killed two women, but you’ll get the third soon. I have faith in you.”

“Thanks.”

“I think we can make this work,” said June. “It’ll be dysfunctional as hell, yet, in a way, that’s part of the fun, right? I know our meals haven’t even arrived yet, but would you like to go on a second date with me?”

“I’d be honored to,” said Cliff.

“Perfect. I think this is the start of a great friendship. The serial killer and the necrophile.”

“Wait, what...?”

TEENAGE DEATH SONG

Had two teenagers ever been more in love than Tommy and Susie? If you asked either of them, the answer would be an unequivocal “No.” Sure, Susan was a rich girl, and Tommy was a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, but when they stared into each other’s eyes, they saw paradise. They laughed at other people who thought they knew what it was like to be in love. Those self-delusional losers didn’t know squat about true love. Tommy and Susie were going to be together forever.

Chorus: Forever, forever, forever, together foreeeeeeever!

Because she loved him so very much, Susie begged Tommy not to participate in the drag race. “It’s too dangerous!” she wailed. “You could get maimed! You could get killed!”

Tommy flicked his cigarette onto the ground. “What am I supposed to do, babe? Let the guys think I’d turn down a dare? Let them think I drive a car that’s too unreliable to race? Let them think I’m scared of a messy death?” He shook his head in that manly way he knew turned her on. “I have to do this.”

“But…I’m going to have your baby!”

Tommy lit another cigarette. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You can’t be. I held my breath.”

“Then how do you explain me dreaming about building a crib last night?”

“Oh my God.” Tommy momentarily looked like he wanted to vomit, but then his face lit up. “We’re gonna have a baby, darling! You and me! And I don’t want you building a crib, even in your dreams. I’ll build the crib with my own two hands, and I promise he won’t fall out in the middle of the night. Babies have soft heads, and it’s not good for them to drop onto the floor.”

“So you’re not going to drag race?” Susie asked.

“We can’t raise Little Tommy in a world where bullies think his daddy’s a coward. I’m going to win that race, and you can tell our son how his father never backed down from a dare, no matter how foolish!”

Billy, the meanest bully in the valley, honked his horn. “Hey, are we here to race or what?”

Tommy gave Susie a kiss. It was the kind of love-filled kiss that most people couldn’t even comprehend. That quantity of love simply didn’t exist for most civilians, and, quite honestly, they’d be driven mad if it did, unable to cope with its sheer intensity.

He got in the car and started the engine, which took several tries because his automobile was so very, very crappy. Then he and Billy revved their engines at each other, until the referee shouted “Go!”

Tommy sped down the road. He was winning!

But his brakes…

Chorus: Brakes, brakes, brakes, you’ve gotta check your brakes.

You can’t ignore brake maintenance.

Or there will be a consequence.

And you will need an ambulance.

Tommy crossed the finish line and let out a cheer. Then he pressed his right foot against the brake pedal, intending for the momentum of his automobile to lessen. But it didn’t. He tried with his left foot and experienced the same lack of a result.

Everybody thought it would be funny to conduct the drag race near a treacherous cliff, but nobody anticipated a scenario where somebody’s brakes failed. As Tommy hurtled toward the edge of the cliff, he knew that the only way he was going to live another minute was to turn the steering wheel.

But he couldn’t turn the steering wheel to the left—there was a Dachshund in the way! And he couldn’t turn the steering wheel to the right—there was another Dachshund in the way!

Tommy quickly rolled down his window and stuck out his head. “Susie!” he cried out. “I love you! Take care of Little Tommy for me!”

Susie’s first thought was that she kind of wished Tommy hadn’t blabbed about her pregnancy, since she had yet to figure out how she was going to tell her parents and deal with the scandal of being the town slut. Her second thought was pure horror as she watched Tommy’s automobile—with Tommy inside—go over the edge of the cliff.

Chorus: And Tommy plummeted.

For almost nine hundred feet.

And when he struck the bottom.

His body was splattered meat.

Susie would have been horrified if she saw the actual moment of impact, because Tommy’s eyeballs popped out of his head, and his left arm came completely off, and his ribcage shot eight or nine ribs through his chest, and his neck burst open, and he bit his tongue. There was nothing about what happened to the father of her unborn child that would have made Susie happy. It was absolutely disgusting.

The teenagers all rushed to the edge of the cliff and stared down at the grisly carnage. The top of the car had been torn off, so they could see the geyser of blood spraying out of the vehicle.

Susie let out a wail of pure sorrow and heartbreak, a wail she knew would make the other girls jealous, because they knew deep inside that if their boyfriends died horrific deaths they wouldn’t be as sad.

“It’s okay,” said Bobby. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Why would it be my fault?” Susie asked.

“If he hadn’t been distracted by calling out that he loved you, he would’ve been able to swerve to the left and still miss that one dog. But, again, it’s not your fault. It’s not like you forced him to race. Almost nobody blames you.”

Susie wiped a single tear from her eye. “I will never love again.”

And that was true for the next seven weeks. Then she met Peter. He was a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and he didn’t care that she was a godless tramp who’d gotten her boyfriend killed. When she gazed into his eyes, she forgot all about Tommy.

They kissed with great frequency, and it was refreshing that she didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant since she was already knocked up. Though they’d only known each other for thirty-eight hours, their love reached such amazing heights that songwriters couldn’t come up with adequate lyrics to describe it.

Chorus: Love, love, love, love, love.

They were so in love.

Love, love, love, love, love.

And if you say it five times in a row.

That’s objectively a lot of love.

“Bobby challenged me to a drag race,” Peter told Susie, as he lit his cigarette.

“No! Don’t do it! I can’t lose you the way I lost…uh, that other guy.”

“It’ll be all right, babe. I have routine maintenance on my automobile. What kind of father figure would I be to Little Peter if I declined a drag race challenge out of fear that I’d suffer the same fate as his biological dad?”

“At least don’t race near the cliff!” Susie begged.

“Then where would we race? The local racetrack? A deserted stretch of road? I promise you it’ll be fine.” He flicked the cigarette onto the ground and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips.

It was the last time he’d kiss her, or anybody, because later that night his lips would be smeared across the hood of his car at the bottom of the cliff. He’d been winning the race, and his car had been functioning properly, but he’d been distracted by the sight of a little boy in a wheelchair. That poor little boy, Peter thought. I bet he never gets to drag race. I could bring some much-needed joy to his life if I gave him a ride on top of my car. He smiled at the mental image of the crippled boy strapped to the top of his car, a great big smile on his face, arm raised in victory as he shouted “Faster! Faster!” Then Peter stopped smiling as he realized his car was plummeting over the edge of the cliff.

In addition to the aforementioned issue with his severed lips, Peter’s entire spinal column exited his body, and he lost three of his four major appendages. Had he survived, he would’ve been incredibly jealous of the boy in the wheelchair, who still had both legs even if they didn’t work. But there was no time for jealousy before Peter’s brain splattered all over the dashboard.

Susie’s wail was even louder this time. “I will never love again,” she said.

And this was true until she walked away from the carnage and saw Danny. He was a bad boy from the wrong side of the tracks, but his pompadour was exquisite, and it didn’t bother him that Susie’s boyfriend had just died a splattery death. Without a single word exchanged between them, they knew that theirs was a love that would last throughout the ages, a love that would inspire at least forty-seven songs, a love that would make Romeo and Juliet look like Salty John and the Slug Lady.

Susie knew she shouldn’t make out with him before the police arrived to investigate Peter’s death, but there was no reason they couldn’t hold hands. She took his hand in hers, and he took her hand in his, and no two people in the world had ever held hands so romantically. Neither of their hands were even the least bit clammy.

She knew he’d be a great father to Little Danny. Their child wouldn’t have his pompadour, at least not for a while, but she knew Danny would teach their son to play baseball and drink milkshakes and build cabinets.

Not to drag race, though.

Never to drag race.

“Hey!” Bobby shouted at Danny. “I challenge you to a drag race!”

“Please, no!” said Susie. “Peter’s body hasn’t even stopped leaking yet!”

“I have a better idea,” Danny told Bobby. “I challenge you to a switchblade duel.”

“Please, no!” said Susie. “Knives can be dangerously sharp!”

The color drained from Bobby’s face, but he couldn’t turn down a duel in front of his fellow bullies, lest they chuckle. “Fine!” he said, taking a switchblade out of his pocket. He pressed the little button, and the blade popped out. But it wasn’t a blade, it was a comb.

Three minutes later, Danny lay dead on the ground, bleeding from a dozen comb wounds. Susie sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

Chorus: Don’t sob, Susie.

Don’t cry over Dan.

Don’t sob, Susie.

You’ll find another man.

But she didn’t. Word got around town that Susie’s boyfriends had very short lifespans, and though she was hot, she’d have to be really, really hot to die for, and all the guys in town agreed she wasn’t quite at that level.

When Susie’s child was born at the nunnery, she was relieved it was a girl, because girls didn’t drag race. But Little Susie didn’t conform to traditional gender stereotypes, and she displayed an early propensity for drag racing and switchblade duels. Susie wondered which one she’d die from first.

It turned out to be drag racing, at the age of sweet sixteen.

Chorus: Why’d you drag race, Little Susie?

You’ve broken your mama’s heart.

Worse than you broke so many bones.

When you went over that cliff.

So, so, so, so, so, so many broken bones.

Yeah, yeah.

If this was a happy song, Susie would’ve gotten pregnant again and had a replacement child, but this was a teenage death song, even though Susie was now an old woman of thirty-two.

She had many, many more tragedies in her life, and if this song bums you out with no real lesson beyond “Life can really suck for some people,” then these depressing lyrics have done their job. Life is sorrow and grisly carnage. Goodnight, and remember that—unlike Susie’s boyfriends and daughter—rock and roll will never die.

LOST GATOR

“Ihave an odd question,” said the nervous looking, heavily perspiring man. “Have you seen an alligator?”

“Nope,” said Andy. “But a crocodile just came by asking for directions.”

The man frowned. “I get that you thought I was trying to be funny, and, therefore, you decided to be funny in return, but I assure you, this is a very serious matter. Have you seen an alligator?”

“If I’d seen an alligator, I’d have known you weren’t joking, and I would have answered accordingly.”

The man wiped some sweat from his brow. “Thank you for your time. If you do see an alligator, could you give me a call? Immediately?” He handed Andy a business card.

Andy glanced at the business card, which had only a name and phone number. “Sure thing, Walter,” he said, tucking the card into his pocket. “An alligator, huh?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean a stuffed one? Like a child’s toy?”

Walter shook his head. “I mean an actual live alligator.”

“Don’t see many of those in downtown Minneapolis.”

“I’m extremely aware of that.”

“That leads me to believe that you’re looking for a specific alligator.”

“Right,” said Walter. “I wasn’t asking about alligator sightings in general.”

“And I also feel like you’re asking if I’ve seen one recently. You’re not here to collect anecdotes.”

“Correct.”

“So the impression I’m getting, from the information I’ve acquired, is that you lost an alligator, and you’re desperately trying to find it before it eats somebody.”

“Well, no, I wasn’t completely focused on the idea that he might eat somebody. I was just thinking that he might cause panic. That’s reason enough to recapture him, I’d think.”

Andy nodded. “Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. A giant alligator on the sidewalk, a distracted driver, somebody crossing the street without looking—you could have a gruesome mess without the alligator taking a single bite of human flesh.”

“I never said he was a giant alligator.”

“Is he a giant alligator?”

Walter hesitated. “Yes.”

“There you go, then.”

“I just don’t like that you assumed I was irresponsible enough to lose a giant alligator.”

“But I was right.”

“Yes, but let’s say that you make an assumption about somebody based on the color of their skin. That’s racist. If your assumption is correct and they are good at math, it’s still racist. The accuracy of the racist stereotype doesn’t take away from the inherent racism.”

“Taken in its own self-contained context, I agree with what you’re saying,” said Andy. “But when an anxiety-ridden guy asks me if I’ve seen an alligator, and he’s worried that it might cause panic and cause accidental deaths, I have to believe it’s not some tiny, little, wee gecko of an alligator.”

“Wouldn’t a standard-sized alligator cause panic? If there was a completely normal alligator, unremarkable in every way, walking down the sidewalk right now toward you, are you saying you wouldn’t be scared?”

“Okay, I get your point,” Andy admitted. “Yes, a normal-sized alligator would scare me if it was walking toward me right now. In fact, I’d be scared if it was smaller than average. Hell, if it was a four-footer, barely an alligator at all, I’d cross the street to get away. That said, though I get your point, I still don’t agree that you should have taken personal offense to me thinking it was a giant alligator. It seems to me that you’re being overly sensitive.”

“You know what, I’ll agree with that,” said Walter. “In your shoes, I probably would’ve thought I was talking about a giant alligator. And I am. So I apologize.”

“Apology accepted.”

“But maybe keep it in mind for future interactions.”

“I will. So...there’s a giant alligator on the loose in downtown Minneapolis, huh?”

“I prefer the term ‘unaccompanied’ to ‘on the loose.’ ‘On the loose’ implies that he’s chomping down babies and poodles left and right, which I very much doubt is the case.”

“Was he your pet?”

“No. I mean, yes. Well, no. Depends.”

“Does he do your bidding?”

“What do you mean by doing my bidding?”

“Does he kill your enemies for you?”

Walter did not immediately answer. “I don’t see where that’s any of your business.”

“If I’m putting this puzzle together correctly, it seems that you brought a giant alligator here to devour one of your enemies, but lost it along the way, and now you’re worried this fierce predator is going to kill innocent people if it’s not recaptured as soon as possible.”

“That’s absurd.”

“What’s the alligator’s name?”

“Why would the alligator have a name?”

“You’ve called it ‘him,’ which means you have a stronger connection to the beast than if you called it an ‘it.’ It’s only common sense that it has a name. What’s the alligator’s name?”

“It’s irrelevant.”

“What’s its name?”

“You won’t wear me down.”

“What’s its name?”

Walter lowered his eyes. “Kematian.”

“The Indonesian word for death?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well, well. An alligator named Death. You keep getting huffy about my line of questioning, and yet you keep revealing sinister new layers to this drama. So, your pet alligator is named Death—”

“No. His name is Kematian. I wouldn’t be so blatantly macabre as to name him Death without it being translated into a foreign language.”

“Fine. Kematian. You brought him here to murder an enemy, yet somehow lost track of his location. How do you lose a giant alligator?”

“Do you know where he is?” asked Walter.

“No.”

“Then don’t act like I should be omniscient about his whereabouts. Minneapolis is a big city. The Minnesota State Fair is the second largest fair in the United States. It’s not like I lost him in Buford, Wyoming.”

“Your logic doesn’t hold up,” said Andy. “Buford has the smallest population in the United States, which means there are far fewer people to notice a giant alligator on a rampage. Minneapolis is populous, and you’d hear the screaming.”

“Stop trying to beguile me with facts and figures!”

“Those weren’t really facts and figures, and I think you used ‘beguile’ incorrectly.”

“Can’t you see I’m stressed out? I’m trying to find a giant killer alligator!”

“Oh, see, now you accidentally admitted he’s a killer. Which enemy of yours did he kill?”

Walter didn’t answer.

“Go on, tell me. Which enemy? A business partner? A politician? Somebody who mounted your wife without proper authorization?”

“None of those!”

“Then who?”

“None of your business!”

“Who?”

“You won’t wear me down again!”

“Who?”

“A random victim,” said Walter.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t use him to kill my enemies. I don’t have any enemies. I’m actually a very well-liked guy. I use him to kill strangers.”

“That doesn’t seem very productive,” said Andy.

“I’m a thrill killer. I mean, Kematian is a thrill killer, and I experience it vicariously through him. I unleash him upon human prey because of the raw vibrations of excitement it sends coursing through my body. When I see blood spurting as his monstrous teeth sink deep into somebody’s tender flesh...it is only then that I feel truly alive.”

“Ugh,” said Andy. “Too much information.”

“Do I pleasure myself in a sexual manner while Kematian feasts upon his victims? Yes, I’ll admit I do. I make animalistic noises and warm spittle flies from my lips, and at the moment of sweet release it is as if the constellations above are whispering their secrets only to me, and I become one with the universe. I cackle with ecstasy as I think of the billions of doomed souls upon this planet who have not achieved my level of awareness and bliss. But this state of enlightenment is short-lived, and the lessons of God fade from my consciousness, leaving me feeling more hollow than before.”

“So how did you lose the alligator?”

“There were extenuating circumstances.”

“How much more extenuating can the circumstances be if you’re whacking off while your gator pet eats somebody?”

“There was a witness.”

“Oh, that’s not good.”

“An elderly woman saw me. She started shrieking, and I assumed she was reacting to Kematian chewing off the face of a young boy. I thought, well, at her age she probably doesn’t get to see virile penises very often, so I made love to myself more aggressively, hoping to draw her attention away from the carnage and lift her spirits. And, yes, this turned out to be a miscalculation on my part. From her vantage point, she couldn’t even see the gory mess, and her reaction was entirely related to the self-pleasure happening in her backyard.”

“Did you say it was a young boy?” Andy asked.

“Yes.”

“How young?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Give me an estimate.”

“I don’t know. Six?”

“Six?”

“Maybe seven.”

“You murdered a six-year-old boy?”

“No, my alligator did. All I did was kidnap him, tie him up, and lay him out on the lawn. Okay, I also gagged him. And, yes, I knocked him out with Chloroform, but that was only so he wouldn’t make any noise if the gag came off while Kematian was eating the lower half of his face. That all sounds bad when I say it out loud, I’ll admit, but it’s not as bad as actually eating him.”

“I can’t believe you killed a six-year-old,” said Andy. “I was starting to think we weren’t so very different, what with our mutual fondness for inappropriate masturbation, but you’re a psychopath!”

“It’s creepy the way you keep obsessing over his age,” said Walter.

“He was six! He had his whole life ahead of him!”

“Stop acting like he was going to be the next Einstein or the next Mickey Rooney. Maybe he was on the path to becoming the world’s youngest serial killer. I might have stopped his reign of terror before it began. Maybe instead of being Jerry Judgmental, you should thank me for all the innocent lives I saved.”

“Nope.”

“That was a stretch,” Walter admitted. “I realized how silly I sounded while I was saying it.”

“So the old lady caught you tugging it, and you fled, and now you can’t find your killer alligator?”

“Right. Well, almost. I couldn’t just run away and let some old lady, who knows what my face and penis look like, tell the cops what she’d witnessed. That would demonstrate a ridiculous lack of caution. She had to die.”

“You sicced the alligator on her?”

“No, once Kematian is in his blood frenzy state, there’s no controlling him. I broke a window, tackled her to the floor, and went into Gator Mode.”

“I don’t want to know what Gator Mode is.”

“Then I won’t tell you.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“Gator Mode is when I pretend I’m an alligator, and do alligator things like raking people’s flesh with my fingernails and taking bites out of them. I’m not proud of it.”

Andy nodded. “I was wondering why you had strips of flesh dangling from your fingernails, but I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“So I murdered the old lady, and, yes, in the interest of full disclosure I’ll say that I spent more time interacting with her than I’d planned. When I finished, forty-five minutes later, Kematian was gone.”

“And you ended up here asking if I’d seen an alligator.”

“If you want the short version of the story with the smaller body count, yes.”

“I guess that brings me to my original answer,” said Andy. “No, I have not seen your alligator.”

“Damn.”

“I feel like you’re going to say that I know too much and must die.”

“I never thought that until just now, when you said it. But now that you have said it, yes, I guess I probably should kill you.”

“May I say one last thing?” asked Andy.

“Of course.”

“What’s lost can always be found.”

“Okay,” said Walter.

“Want to know what I mean by that?”

“Sure.”

“For the last three-quarters of this conversation, I’ve just been talking to distract you from the fact that your pet has been slowly walking toward you. The gathering crowd of onlookers has been kind enough not to alert you to this fact. And all I need is to keep your attention on me for two more seconds and—”

Walter let out a shriek of agony as Kematian chomped down on his leg.

Andy watched the first twenty minutes of Walter’s horrific demise, but once you’ve seen one limb scraped clean of flesh by a vicious alligator, you’ve seen them all. Everybody in the crowd assumed that somebody else had called the police, so they eventually got bored and dispersed.

Kematian, whose birth name was Fluffy, had many wild and exciting adventures, but finally located a swamp, where he lived out the rest of his long life harming nothing but fish and otters.

INSUFFICIENTLY SPLATTERY

Oh, man, I was so disappointed. I threw this guy off the bridge, thinking that when he landed on the rocks below, his whole body would explode in a shower of blood and brains and bone and all kinds of great stuff. Adrenaline pumped, and my heart raced, and I couldn’t freaking wait for the moment of impact.

When he hit...nothing. I don’t know if it was the way he landed, or the clothes he was wearing, but there was no splatter at all. I mean, he died—it wasn’t like he flew away to safety—and I heard his body crunch as it landed. He just didn’t burst the way I’d hoped.

See, I’m a very visually oriented person. I don’t have a good imagination. Some guys can look at a woman and picture what she looks like naked, but I have to actually see her naked because my brain can’t fill in the blanks. It’s why I’m always peeking through windows.

I’m not saying I didn’t get anything out of the experience. If anything, chasing the guy and throwing him off the bridge was good exercise. I’m just saying I was robbed of the highlight. It’s like when you’re banging a married woman, and her husband comes home. You want to finish up, but you know that wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do because you need to get into the closet as soon as possible, and every second counts. You enjoyed yourself, but you’re still unsatisfied. Know what I mean?

It would be different if I could quickly find some other guy and throw him off the bridge, too. But you can’t go around chucking people off bridges left and right. It obviously has to be in the daylight, or you won’t be able to see anything, yet you have to be way more careful when the sun is out so there are no witnesses. You can easily spend an entire day hanging out by the bridge and not find the right opportunity. And it has to be somebody who isn’t going to overpower you in the struggle. I mean, if I’m the one who went over the bridge, all I’d see from that point forward is a black void.

There was nobody around when this one lady walked by with her dog, but I like dogs. I would’ve felt bad knowing the dog no longer had an owner. I’d have taken it home myself, but my apartment doesn’t allow pets. So the woman lived.

It was getting close to sunset when I saw another guy jogging. I figured if I tackled him without warning, I could probably get him over the guardrail before he kicked my ass. I pretended I was checking my cell phone while I stood there waiting for him, and then I attacked. He yelped in surprise. He put up a pretty good fight, and I started to get really worried, but after a few moments, I got him over the side of the bridge, where he landed with the unsatisfying impact I’ve already described.

I know what you’re thinking. I could just go down there and get a close-up view. And I guess that’s true, but looking at the aftermath never really did anything for me. I don’t get off on seeing gore; I get off on seeing gore happen. Does that make sense? If I went down there, I’d see blood and goo, and I guess some of it would still be in motion as it came out of his body, yet it would be kind of...gross.

It’s like when you slash somebody’s neck open and blood sprays all over the place. It’s cool. It’s weirdly beautiful. You feel like you accomplished something. But if, I don’t know, they’re wearing a red turtleneck sweater, and the blood is soaking into the cloth, and you can’t really tell what’s happening, it seems kind of pointless. If, in their dying throes, they tug down the sweater and expose their throat, maybe you’ll get to see some of it trickle out, but it’s nothing compared to that first mighty spray.

It’s like—and I apologize if I’m starting to get kind of weird here—if you were able to magically transport yourself into somebody’s body as they were having sex. You’d want to pop in there before the orgasm began. You wouldn’t want to show up when they’re almost finished. Sure, it still feels pretty good as those last few drops come out, but the best part is over.

I’m honestly not sure how much you’re able to relate to what I’m saying.

I feel like I may be getting sidetracked. My point is, when the guy’s body smashed onto the rocks, I thought there’d be more spectacle, okay?

This happens to me a lot.

One time I discreetly shoved a guy in front of a bus. The problem was, I thought he’d be heavier, and his momentum carried him further into the street than I’d intended. Oh, the bus splattered the shit out of him—it’s just that my view was mostly blocked.

I’m not saying it was a waste of time. Given the choice between pushing the guy in front of a speeding bus and not seeing the impact, and not pushing him at all, I’d push him in front of the bus ten times out of ten. But though I heard the screaming of horrified witnesses, and I saw his smushed remains after the bus had moved out of the way, I didn’t get to see anything actually jettison from his body.

They say a person getting shot in a movie is nothing like it is in real life. Maybe in some cases. All I know is I shot this one guy, and it could be that he was dressed in layers because of the cold, but he clutched his chest and dropped to the ground like it was a western from the 1950’s. I was just like, “Oh, okay.” It wasn’t a very big gun, so it’s not as if I thought his entire chest was going to burst open, exposing ribs and internal organs, but I thought there’d be some sort of visual component to the experience.

(Don’t ask why I didn’t aim for his head. I was aiming for his head, obviously. Shooting somebody in real life is indeed different from the movies in one way: it’s difficult to hit a moving target.)

(You know what? I’m comfortable enough to admit that some might see me as a villain. And if I’m a villain, it’s very much like the movies that I had bad aim. Ha!)

I hope I’m not sounding whiny. I feel like I might be, and I hate whiners. I know a lot of people have never been able to commit any murders at all, and I recognize my privilege in this matter.

This one time I was trying to kill this guy with a chainsaw, and I swear to God, the lights went out right before I shoved the whirring blade into his chest. I could feel his warm blood spraying against my arms, but I couldn’t see a damn thing. I considered myself lucky at the time because if the lights had gone out a few seconds sooner, he might have been able to escape in the darkness. Later that evening, though, I was furious. A chainsaw burrowing into somebody’s chest is an astonishing visual, and it wasn’t fair that I missed it.

This other time, I tied up this guy, shoved a hand grenade into his mouth, and pulled out the pin. Do you think his skull exploded? Hell no. All of the damage happened on the inside of his head! Yes, he opened his mouth and all kinds of blood and stuff spewed out, so I don’t want to give the impression that it was a completely clean kill. But I wanted his skull to explode! That’s why I bought the fucking grenade!

I apologize for my indelicate language. I’m getting a little worked up.

You understand my frustration, right? How many times can one person get ripped off like this? How does a victim plummet off a bridge onto a bunch of rocks and not make a mess? It’s not like he fell into the river. I should at least have been able to see an eyeball pop out.

I’m not saying that it happens every single time. That would be ridiculous. I got to chop off this guy’s head with an axe, and it was everything I could’ve hoped for and more. And there was this other time that the “chainsaw to the chest” thing happened without the electricity going out. But it’s not like I can just go around murdering people whenever I want. That’s how you end up in prison, and I can tell you from my nineteen-year stint that there is nothing less visually interesting than prison.

So, yeah, I’ve had more than my share of murders that don’t provide the desired amount of sexual satisfaction, and I don’t see anything wrong with venting about it.

Though I do wish we were talking face to face. It’s difficult to do this in writing. I have no way of gauging your reaction, and this is the kind of subject matter where it’s nice to have social cues so you know whether you should keep sharing delicate information. I’m aware that my point of view is not universally shared. But that’s okay, right? If the world was filled with homicidal maniacs, we’d eventually have a dangerously low population. Nobody would be able to relax and enjoy a meal or an evening at the theater.

Anyway, I apologize if I’ve been kind of long-winded, and I also apologize if I misinterpreted your post about being disappointed that there was no carnage when you drove by the car accident this afternoon. I probably shouldn’t send this from my personal e-mail address, but I feel like a life where you can’t trust anybody isn’t a life worth living. If you want to talk, I’m available almost anytime. I’m not currently employed, and I sleep maybe three hours a night, so if you think we’re kindred spirits, let’s chat!

Again, I hope I don’t sound whiny. I was just really looking forward to watching that guy’s head burst on the rocks.

THE MUMMY’S BITE

When my friend Walter showed up at my house looking terrified, I assumed he was being chased by bullies again. Instead, he said, “I think I’m going to transform into a mummy.”

I just stared at him. Even for Walter, this was an odd thing to say.

He pulled up his shirtsleeve, revealing a bite on his arm. “Look at that,” he said. “It broke the skin in a few places.”

“Did you put antiseptic on it?”

“No. I figured you’d let me borrow some. It may be too late. I could change into a mummy any minute now.”

We went into the bathroom, and I got a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide out of the medicine cabinet. “Are you telling me a mummy bit you?” I asked, handing him the bottle.

“Yes.”

“And now you think you’ll turn into a mummy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s not how it works.”

“What happens if you get bit by a zombie?” Walter asked.

“You turn into a zombie, but—”

“What happens if you get bit by a vampire?”

“You turn into a vampire, but—”

“What happens if you get bit by a werewolf?”

“You turn into a werewolf, but—”

“So why should a mummy be any different?”

“Because they’re a completely different monster,” I said. “If you get bit by a ghost, do you turn into a ghost?”

“Ghosts can’t bite people. Their teeth would pass harmlessly right through your flesh.”

“If you get bit by Bigfoot, do you turn into Bigfoot?”

“Bigfoot doesn’t exist.”

“How did you even get bit by a mummy?” I asked.

“There’s a new Egyptian display at the museum,” said Walter. “As you know, I go to the museum every Thursday after school to see if they’ve added anything to the dinosaur exhibit. As always, they hadn’t. But I figured that as long as I was there, I might as well check out the Egyptian stuff. There was a sarcophagus, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of cool,’ and I walked around some more, and when I came back, the sarcophagus was open. I decided I should probably tell somebody, and when I turned the corner, a mummy was standing there with its mouth wide open!”

“The sarcophagus wasn’t under glass?”

“No. I thought that was kind of weird, too, but it’s not part of my story. I held up my arm to keep the mummy from biting off my face, and it bit it instead. A few of its teeth popped out because its gums weren’t in good shape after all these centuries, but it did break the skin, and now I’m going to become one!”

“I bet you’re not,” I said.

“So, I guess you just know everything there is to know about mummies, huh? How come you’re not starring in your own documentary series about the history of mummies if you’re such an expert on the subject? How come you haven’t brought me along to any of your book signings for the six-volume set you wrote about the impact of mummy bites on human beings?”

“You don’t need to be sarcastic,” I told him.

“Apparently I do, because you’re downplaying this. Our rooms are right across the hall from each other, so if I wake up tomorrow morning and I’m a mummy that can’t control its desire to kill, kill, kill, you’ll be my first official victim.”

“Are you going to tell Mom and Dad?”

“No, they’ll think I’m being silly.”

When my alarm went off the next morning, Walter came into my room before I could even hit the snooze button. “Look!” he said, shoving his arm in my face.

“What am I looking at?”

“My arm! Doesn’t it look weird?”

“It looks like an arm.”

He tapped his inner arm with his index finger. “Touch it right here.”

I touched his arm. It definitely felt odd. “What is that?”

“It feels like a bandage, right?”

I poked at it a few times. There were lots of possibilities, but he was right—it did kind of feel like a bandage under his skin. “I’m not gonna lie,” I said. “That’s a little disturbing.”

“I know! When I came home yesterday and said that I was transforming into a mummy, I assumed that I didn’t know what I was talking about. But I really believe that’s a bandage under my skin, and there’s only one way to find out for sure.”

“No!” I said. “I won’t let you cut open your arm!”

Walter gaped at me in shock. “What? No! I’m not going to start cutting myself open just to check for bandages. I meant that the only way to find out for sure was to wait to see what happens.”

“Okay, good. I mean, technically there are multiple ways to find out for sure, but I’m happy with the one you’ve chosen.”

We got dressed, ate breakfast, and walked to our separate schools. I texted him between classes asking if he had an update on the mummy situation, and he kept replying no until lunchtime, when he texted It’s getting bigger with a frowny face.

The frowny face was so very haunting.

After school, I poked at his arm again. Whatever was under his skin was twice as big now.

“You need to go to the doctor,” I said.

Walter frantically shook his head. “No way.”

“What if it’s not that you’re turning into a mummy? What if it’s a disease? What if they could’ve fixed you if you’d gone in when the symptoms first started showing up, but now it’s too late?”

“What if they scream, ‘Die, mummy, die!’? Huh? What if they think I’m bringing a curse to their hospital? You never know when an angry mob is going to show up. No, we need to take care of this ourselves.”

“How?”

“No idea.”

“Obviously we have to figure out a way to reverse this, but it’s not like we can un-bite you. By the way, did you check to see if the mummy was still on the loose? What if it’s going on a rampage, biting lots of other innocent people?”

“That’s not important right now,” Walter said. “We need to ignore our homework and our chores and spend the rest of the day doing online research. Surely somebody has had this problem before.”

After a few hours of research, we were forced to conclude that, no, nobody had ever been bitten by a mummy and begun to slowly transform into one. In fact, I couldn’t even find any anecdotes where one had bitten somebody. Chomping down on their victims didn’t seem to be a mummy’s standard means of attack.

By bedtime, both of Walter’s arms were puffy. He hid this from our parents by wearing a sweater, explaining that he had a bit of a chill and should perhaps stay home from school tomorrow.

“This could still be a disease,” I told him.

“Wouldn’t that be a pretty big coincidence?” he asked. “I catch a disease at the same time I get bit by a mummy?”

“The mummy could’ve given you the disease! How much bacteria do you think it had in those ancient teeth? You think you’re transforming, but maybe you’re, I don’t know, rotting away inside!”

“Why do you have to be so gross?”

“You could wake up in the morning and your arms could be goo. You could get out of bed and suddenly your arms are eight feet long because they’re mostly liquid! And then the doctors will say ‘Hey, why didn’t you get this checked out sooner?’ and you’ll say ‘Because I thought I might be turning into a mummy,’ and they’ll say ‘Wow, that wasn’t very smart’ and you’ll know deep in your heart that they’re right.”

Walter sighed. “Okay. If I wake up in the morning and I’m still not sure what’s happening to me, I’ll go to the emergency room.”

“Thank you.”

The next morning, I got up and went into his room. Walter lay on his bed, blankets on the floor, eyes wide open in fright. His arms were covered with thick white bandages.

“Those aren’t…” I said. “I mean, they can’t be...they didn’t...did they?”

Walter nodded.

I crouched down beside him. He had to be playing a joke on me. I touched his arm. “Does that hurt?”

“No.”

“Can you feel anything?”

“It felt like you were touching me through a bandage.”

“Okay, so it’s like they’re real bandages and not your actual skin.”

“That’s how it feels,” said Walter. “But I think they really are my skin. They grew out through it overnight and I think that if you tried to unwrap them, you’d just see bones and veins and stuff.”

“I don’t want to see bones and veins and stuff.”

“Neither do I. And did you see my legs?”

His legs were really puffy, just like his arms had been yesterday.

“I think you really are turning into a mummy,” I told him.

“Noooooooooooo!!!” Walter wailed.

Mom hurried into his bedroom. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Why did Walter shout ‘Noooooooooooo!!!’ like that? Why are his legs all puffy? Why are his arms covered with odd-looking bandages? Why does he look so upset and why do you look so nervous? What secrets have you been keeping from me?”

“He got bit by a mummy and now he’s changing into one,” I explained.

“That’s not how mummies work. They’re not like werewolves, zombies, or vampires.”

“That’s what I said, and now we’re paying the price for me thinking I knew everything about them.”

Walter screamed. His legs twitched.

I’m not completely sure how to describe what his legs did next. Popped? I don’t mean that they burst apart like a water balloon. I mean that all of the skin snapped away. So if we’re going to stick with the balloon description, let’s say that you stuck a piece of corn on the cob inside a balloon, and then you blew up the balloon, and then you popped it. It would be like the balloon mostly disappeared, leaving the corn on the cob. That’s what happened to his legs. The skin popped off, leaving behind legs covered with bandages.

Mom and I both joined Walter in screaming.

“What’s going on?” asked Dad, rushing into the bedroom.

Mom pointed at Walter. “Our son’s a mummy!”

“Oh, no, that’s not good,” said Dad. “I was just watching the news, and they were talking about how a mummy just escaped from the museum and it’s going around biting people left and right!”

“Did they interview any experts who said what to do in case of a mummy bite?” I asked.

“No, but it was still an ongoing story when I came up here to investigate the screams. I’ll go see what they’re saying now.” Dad hurried out of the bedroom.

“Promise me that if I completely turn into a vicious mummy, that you won’t let me hurt anybody,” said Walter. “I couldn’t live with myself if I caused harm to others. Please, promise me that you’ll bring the Xbox and TV up here and then lock the door so I can’t get out!”

Then Walter’s entire chest popped, revealing more bandages.

And then his head popped.

My little brother was a mummy!

He got out of bed and raised his arms. Was he going to place an ancient curse upon me? I didn’t want to lock my brother in here with nothing but video games to keep him entertained, but did we have any other choice?

Dad ran back into the room. “Okay, they interviewed an expert, and he said that you have to unwrap the mummy as quickly as possible!”

“And if we do, he’ll be back to normal?” Mom asked.

“No. Not even close. But at least he won’t be trying to bite people.”

I tore one of the bandages off his face, then recoiled in horror. I saw his skull underneath!

“Yes, that’s what the news said will happen,” said Dad. “He’ll be a skeleton, but better a skeleton than a mummy!”

And so, working together, we unwrapped Walter. And now he’s a living skeleton. I’m not sure how his bones stay together without muscles or tendons, or how he talks without lungs or vocal cords, but I’ve stopped pretending that I’m an expert on how muscles work. Every time I see him I think “Gaaaaahhh!!! A living skeleton!!!” but I don’t say it out loud, because it would hurt his feelings.

I know this is a terrifying ending, what with a skeleton walking around our house and all, but this is a horror story, so what did you expect?

MY FAVORITE HALLOWEEN MEMORY

My favorite Halloween memory? Oh, wow, that’s a tough one. So many…

One year, I think it was in the fifth grade, my friends and I were doing that “Trick or treat! Smell my feet! Give me something good to eat!” thing, and this sweaty, obese guy grinned and said, “I’d love to smell your feet!” and we ran. Obviously, that’s not my favorite Halloween memory—it’s just one that came to mind. A few years later the guy died of a heart attack, and we tried to spread the rumor that it was autoerotic asphyxiation, but, unfortunately, we couldn’t quite make the rumor stick.

I wonder what kind of candy he was handing out? Snickers or little white pills?

Sorry. Favorite memory. The year after that, sixth grade, my friend Gary and I…was it condescending to specify that the year after fifth grade is sixth grade? If so, I apologize. I’m not trying to suggest that you don’t know how numbers work. I guess I’m just not sure how closely you’re paying attention, and I didn’t want to assume that you’d retained the narrative thread. Not that it actually matters what grade we’re talking about, I suppose.

Anyway, my friend Gary and I decided to go as a two-headed monster. We made this big fuzzy blue costume that fit both our heads and all four of our legs. We each had one free arm. Everybody loved the costume. I wish I had a picture of it—I think you’d get a kick out of it. I’m not saying that it was a Hollywood-quality creature effects extravaganza, but for a couple of sixth graders, it was pretty impressive.

Hey, I guess the fact that we were in sixth grade was an important detail. I’m better at storytelling than I thought!

The costume looked great, and for the first couple of minutes it was a lot of fun. Then it started to suck. We had to walk in sync, which was difficult, and we were stuck together the entire night. One lady asked how we peed, and Gary asked her why she was so interested in us peeing, which I thought was pretty tactless of him. It was a perfectly legitimate question. She wasn’t some creepy pervert like the foot-sniffing guy. It was a lighthearted question, and Gary should have treated it that way. Looking back, I wish I’d said, “I’m peeing right now!” to break the tension, but, instead, I just stared at the ground until we took our candy and left.

In case you were wondering, we didn’t use the bathroom until trick-or-treating was over and we got out of the costume. Back then we had bladders of steel! Also, we weren’t really drinking anything. These days, I have to get up two or three times in the middle of the night, but back then I could be stuck in a costume with Gary for several hours. I miss my sixth-grade bladder.

If you weren’t wondering about the pee situation, I apologize for the detour.

Again, obviously not my favorite Halloween memory. I’ll try to come up with a real answer, even though I know you only asked the question to make conversation to distract me while you figure out a way to escape. It’s okay—I’d try to escape too. I don’t expect you to just sit there and wait for me to slash your throat. That would be ridiculous. You’re not going to hear me scream “How dare you try to save your life?” I totally get what you’re doing, and I respect it.

Favorite Halloween memory…

This one time in high school, I had this girl named Tiffany over (my mom was upstairs), and we were watching Critters 2: The Main Course, and she got so scared, and I was just like, “Really? You’re scared of Critters 2: The Main Course?” I sarcastically said that we might as well switch to Miss Congeniality if she was such a chickenshit, and she got angry and left. And I thought, good, there’s really no future with somebody who can’t even handle Critters 2: The Main Course. Right? Except that when I replayed the evening in my mind, it occurred to me she wasn’t actually scared—she was pretending to be scared as an excuse to snuggle. Like I said, my mom was upstairs, so it’s not like I could’ve thrust into her or anything, but maybe her boob would’ve pressed against my arm, or something. I really squandered that opportunity.

I have this weird thing where I always need to say the full title of a movie. It’s never just Critters 2, it’s Critters 2: The Main Course. Friday the 13th, Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. I’m not mentally ill—I can listen to somebody else say a partial title, but if I’m the one referencing the movie, I always have to say the title in its entirety.

Ironically, though, it pisses me off when some nerd writes it as Se7en. The movie is called Seven. The number 7 replaced the V as a stylized way to present it in the opening credits, but that’s not supposed to be the actual title of the movie. It really makes me angry when I see this. Like, irrationally angry. Almost as mad as I was when they went from Halloween III: Season of the Witch to Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Pick a fucking numbering system and stick with it.

You look scared. Those ropes are pretty tight, huh? I’m a deeply flawed human being, but I do know how to tie a good knot.

I keep bringing up bad Halloween memories. I’m not sure why.

Okay, okay, this is a good one. Not necessarily my favorite, but it’s a fun anecdote. Seventh or eighth grade. Seventh, I think. I was over at a friend’s house, and there were about eight of us, and somebody decided we should do a séance. Everybody enjoys seances, right? So we brought out the Ouija board, and nothing supernatural happened, but we were all kind of goofing around and shoving the planchette around on purpose instead of letting the spirits of the dead do it. There was this one girl whose name I don’t remember, so I’m going to call her Tiffany just to have a name for the purposes of this anecdote. Anyway, the Ouija board spelled out something like “I LOVE U,” with the letter U instead of the full spelling, and I said, “Oh my God, we’re talking to Tiffany’s dad!”

I know what you’re thinking: That was pretty mean. You don’t bring up an orphan’s dad when you’re playing around with a Ouija board. The thing is, it was a lot worse than that, because Tiffany’s dad was alive and well. She got a little freaked out, and I might have made some comments about how we must have killed him by messing with forces beyond our comprehension. She called him up, and he assured her he was fine, and after she hung up, I said it must have been his ghost talking through the phone, and she started crying. I’m not saying it was a laugh out loud funny knee-slapper, but it was definitely amusing.

Does that sound bad? Remember: Her dad wasn’t really dead. If I was making jokes about her dead dad, yeah, I’d be a jerk, but making jokes about her dad’s ghost when he wasn’t actually dead was just in the spirit of Halloween fun. She even gave us a brave little smile when she stopped crying. It was fine, I promise.

Her dad did eventually die, but it was seven or eight years later. Tiffany (again, not her real name, so don’t try to look it up) probably didn’t even remember the séance by then.

That’s a pretty good Halloween memory. I don’t think it’s my favorite. I’m honestly not sure why I’m drawing a blank right now. It could be the environment. You’re tied to a chair, scared out of your mind, whimpering, and I’m pacing around with a butcher knife. I’m focusing more on how good it’s going to feel when your warm blood sprays all over me than I am on the topic of favorite Halloween memories.

How good it’s going to feel to me, of course. It’s going to feel quite bad for you.

It’s a little strange that I’m standing here, feeling bad that I’m not properly answering your question, when my plan is to slash your throat wide open and bathe in the blood. Not sure why I even care. What difference does it make if you think I’m a bad conversationalist in the few moments you have left to live? Isn’t it funny how we get really obsessed with meaningless little things like that?

That said, kudos to you. I honestly figured I’d have killed you by now, but you’ve got me racking my brain to come up with my favorite Halloween memory. It can’t really be the séance one. Damn. This shouldn’t be so hard.

Why is this so hard?

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with me? You asked a simple question.

Did you know I wouldn’t be able to answer? Was that your plan all along?

No. That’s stupid. You’re not psychic. You can’t read my mind. You were just trying to distract me while you tried to escape. Well, guess what? You’re not going to escape! How does this feel, huh? Enjoying that? How does it feel? Huh? Tell me how it feels!

I apologize.

We just crossed the line into torture, and that was never my intention. I didn’t mean to slash up your face. All I ever wanted to do was slash your throat. A few seconds of pain, a few seconds of desperate choking, and it’s all over. That was beneath me. I’m really sorry.

I’m not going to get you bandages or antiseptic. That would be silly. I know you didn’t actually ask for them, but you might have been thinking it. I feel bad about what I just did, but I’m not going to patch you up only to kill you right after that.

You know what? I have to give you credit for the way you asked a question that kept me from killing you for—what, three or four minutes now? To make up for the face-slashing, I’m going to leave the room for exactly sixty seconds. If you’ve got an escape plan, feel free to use it. I’ll be right back.

One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand…

The lady with the candy! That was it! There was this lady who said she bought way too much candy and didn’t have many trick-or-treaters, so she just poured the entire bowl into my plastic pumpkin! And it was the good stuff! Oh, yeah, I need to remember that for when I go back into the room. I feel a lot better now.

Crap. I lost count.

Oh well. I’m just playing around anyway. Nobody could get out of those ropes. I’m going to go back in there, share the candy story, and then it’s bloodbath time!

I’m baaaaaaaack!

Where the hell—?

Oh fu—!

Where am I? Oh, same room. I guess you had a pocketknife or something. Maybe you found a razor blade in an apple.

Obviously, I didn’t really believe you’d get free of the ropes, or I wouldn’t have left you alone like that. Feeling a bit foolish right now. I suppose the other thing I assumed was that if you did somehow escape, that you’d flee. It didn’t occur to me that you might knock me unconscious, tie me to the chair with what I have to admit are some pretty damn good knots, and wave my butcher knife in a way that I don’t much care for.

What’s that? You don’t have the same anti-torture stance that I do?

All right. Fair enough.

Oh, I see that you’ve found other tools. Not really happy that you’ve been snooping around my belongings, but, considering the circumstances, I guess I have much more important things to worry about.

Hey, what’s your favorite Halloween memory?

Not gonna work, huh? You can’t blame me for trying.

Pretty sure I now know what my least favorite Halloween memory is going to be.

GHETTO BLASTER

Clyde strutted down the sidewalk, boom box pressed to his ear, music blasting. He never maxed out the volume when he started out on his daily walk, because he enjoyed turning it up when he received negative feedback. A dirty look would merit a slight increase; a request to lower the volume would make him crank it up a couple of notches.

It wasn’t as if he was blasting bad music. He was providing a public service. A little cultural awareness for other white people like him. Most people in Iowa didn’t realize that rap music was the future, but he was there to enlighten them. He’d be turning twenty-five in a couple of months, and he was proud to already have a purpose in life.

“Turn that crap down!” an old lady shouted at him, so Clyde turned it up and grooved even harder to the beat. He switched the heavy boom box to the other arm so that his muscles would be evenly exercised.

A couple blocks later, a man angrily waved at him, saying something Clyde couldn’t hear. He was always interested in constructive criticism to ignore, so he turned the boom box down.

“We don’t all need to listen to that!” the man said. “Get a Walkman, for God’s sake!”

Clyde turned the volume back up. Only selfish people listened to music through headphones. Music was for sharing.

He went into his favorite pizza place and got one slice of pepperoni and one slice of sausage. Naturally, he kept the music on, signaling his order by pointing to what he wanted through the glass and holding up one finger. He left with his pizza, happily munching away.

A man sat outside an antiques shop. He waved for Clyde’s attention, but didn’t have the usual expression of annoyance. Clyde turned down the music.

“Nice boom box,” said the man.

“Thanks.”

“Not a top-of-the-line model, though.”

Clyde shrugged. “Works fine.”

The man stood up. “Come on in. I bet we can work something out.”

Though Clyde had no interest in a new boom box, he saw no reason not to humor the guy. It was a glass storefront, so he was unlikely to have evil intentions, and Clyde was confident in his ability to bash his boom box over the man’s skull if it came down to it.

They walked into the shop. The man led him to the back, where a boom box rested on a shelf next to a vase and what looked like an old crockpot. It was smaller than Clyde’s, and the black surface was scratched up. It was the kind of boom box a poor person would have. Clyde was extremely unimpressed.

The man picked it up. “What do you think?”

“Looks like a piece of junk.”

“The sound quality, though. Check it out.” The man turned it on. Some Lawrence Welk-sounding shit began to play, and it sounded kind of tinny through those cheap-ass speakers.

“Sounds like crap,” Clyde noted.

“Well, that’s probably just because of your musical preference. Trade the cassette that’s in there with the one you’re listening to. It’ll give you a direct comparison.”

“I’m not going to buy your boom box.”

“I think you’ll be impressed.”

“I spent all my money on pizza.”

“Just listen to it. Yes, it’s a little beat up, but the sound quality will blow you away.”

Clyde couldn’t help but be intrigued. No way could that piece of garbage compete with the boom box he had now. What kind of con was this guy trying to pull?

They both ejected the tapes from their respective boom boxes. Clyde put his into the antique one and pressed play. The sound wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t all that great, either.

“Mine’s better,” said Clyde.

“Put it to your ear.”

Clyde picked up the boom box and put it to his ear. Nope. His was still vastly superior.

He tried to lower it and couldn’t.

For a second he thought that maybe the man had put glue on it, yet he didn’t feel anything sticky. It was more like a very powerful magnet. He kept trying to pull it away from his ear, but the boom box refused to budge.

“Hey, what the hell?” he demanded.

“Full disclosure,” said the man. “That’s a cursed boom box. All of the items in this back aisle are cursed. I apologize for not saying something sooner, but you wouldn’t have put it to your ear if you’d been well-informed.”

“I’m serious, stop playing around!” said Clyde. “Get this thing off me!”

“I just told you it was cursed.”

“Break the curse!”

“That’s not how curses work. What kind of lame curse would it be if I could just snap my fingers and break it as soon as it took hold of you? No, no, you must break the curse yourself.”

“How?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I didn’t place it. Some sort of life lesson that you learn, I assume.”

“Break the curse, or I’ll kick your ass!”

The shop owner nodded. “Uh-huh. Sure. You’re going to kick my ass while holding a heavy boom box to your head. How about you let go of it and see how well your neck supports its weight? Actually, don’t—then I’ll have a snapped-neck corpse on the floor, and fixers are expensive, and I’m barely keeping this place open as it is. My advice to you is to head out into the bright, beautiful world and see what kind of self-improvement you can work out.”

“I’m gonna kill you!” said Clyde.

“No, you’re probably not. You can leave your boom box here if you want. I won’t sell it or anything. The longer you wait, the heavier that thing is going to feel, and though it may not break your neck, it’ll probably rip off your ear. Have you ever seen somebody with a ripped-off ear? It’s gross. You can see deep into the cavity. Earwax just leaks right out onto their shoulder. Nasty, nasty business.”

Clyde desperately wanted to kill him, but the shopkeeper was right: having a heavy boom box stuck to his ear presented a clear offensive disadvantage. Instead, he glared at him and stormed out of the shop.

Once outside, Clyde remembered he didn’t believe in curses. So he held the boom box with both hands and pulled as hard as he could, stopping only when it started to feel like flesh might be coming off the side of his head.

What should he do? Go to the hospital? What kind of surgery could doctors perform to get a cursed boom box off his head? Should he go to a church? An exorcist? Where did Gypsies gather? Was it racist that he assumed it was a Gypsy curse? Was “Gypsy” even a race, or just a lifestyle?

He did have a friend who did a lot of woodworking. He had a table saw.

Obviously, Clyde was not going to let a spinning circular blade come right next to his head, but if he could saw most of the boom box away, that would solve the problem of its weight ripping off his ear or snapping his neck.

He ran the twelve blocks to Jimmy’s house.

Clyde pounded on the front door. Jimmy got fired from his day jobs on a regular basis, so there was a good chance he was home. A moment later, Jimmy opened the door, wearing only underwear and a T-shirt.

“Hey, Clyde,” he said. “Wanna play some ColecoVision?”

“I need your help,” said Clyde. “Can we go to your garage?”

“Sure, sure. C’mon in.” As Clyde stepped into the unkempt house, Jimmy said, “My mom’s not home, so you don’t have to keep the music down.”

Clyde said nothing. They walked through the house into the garage, where all Jimmy’s equipment was set up.

“What can I do for you?” Jimmy asked.

“I need you to saw off this boom box.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s stuck to my head.”

“You mean with super glue?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just need you to saw it away.”

“How’d you superglue your ghetto blaster to your head?”

“I said, it doesn’t matter.”

“I think it does matter. Seems like there’d be a good story behind it.”

“Will you saw it away or not?”

“All right, all right, take a chill pill,” said Jimmy. “This is a precision instrument, but I feel like if you move around I could take off part of your head, so I’m gonna have to write up one of those things where you can’t sue me if I maim you.”

“All I want you to do is saw off three-quarters of it. You’re not going to get close to my head.”

“The saw was really made for wood, not so much plastic and metal and speakers and stuff.”

“Dammit, Jimmy, are you going to help me or not?”

“Don’t spazz out. I’ll help you. I’ll turn on the saw, and you lower the boom box onto it wherever you’re comfortable.”

“Thanks,” said Clyde. “I’m sorry I snapped at you. I’m under a lot of stress right now.”

“Well, sure, you have the embarrassment of super-gluing your head to a boom box. I’d be grumpy too.”

Jimmy turned on the table saw. The sound was annoyingly loud and grating. Clyde took a few moments to position himself properly, then very slowly lowered the boom box down upon the spinning blade. There was a lot of screeching and a lot of sparks, but the blade didn’t seem to be cutting into anything.

He stood back up and asked Jimmy if he noticed any difference. Jimmy mouthed “I can’t hear you” at him, then turned off the saw.

“Did it do anything?” Clyde asked.

Jimmy shook his head. “Not a scratch.”

“What other tools have you got? Surely you’ve got something that can get it off me!”

“That saw goes through bone,” said Jimmy. “I mean, that’s what I’m told. If it won’t do the trick, I don’t know what else I have that would. I guess I could try to smash it apart with a hammer.”

“Let’s do that.”

“Do you have a hammer?”

“Why the hell would I have a hammer?” Clyde asked. “We’re in your workshop!”

“Oh, yeah, yeah, sorry. It’s kind of unnerving that the saw didn’t harm the boom box. Feels a bit supernatural.”

“Just get a hammer.”

As Jimmy walked over to the shelf to retrieve a hammer, the boom box began to play Clyde’s cassette. Jimmy smiled and bopped his head to the beat. The music got louder and louder.

“Oh, yeah, crank it up!” said Jimmy.

“I’m not controlling it!”

“I guess good music has a life of its own!”

The music continued to increase in volume until it started to hurt Clyde’s ears. The windows of the garage started to quiver.

Jimmy said something that appeared to be, “Hey, that’s probably loud enough. Any chance you could turn it down a bit? I don’t want the neighbors to complain.”

The volume kept increasing. Clyde tried to turn it down, but the boom box had no volume control. He wondered what the hell kind of boom box lacked a volume control knob, then remembered it was a cursed one.

Jimmy said something that appeared to be, “Turn down the goddamn music, Clyde! You’re going to blow out my eardrums! C’mon, man, knock this shit off! Please, Clyde, it’s really starting to hurt and I can’t—”

Jimmy dropped to his knees and let out a scream that Clyde couldn’t hear.

Pink froth began to spew from his ears.

Then the froth turned red.

It got thicker in consistency, as if brain matter might’ve been added to the mix.

And then both of Jimmy’s ears shot off the side of his head in a geyser of blood. His left ear struck the tool shelf, while his right ear launched toward the other wall of the garage but didn’t quite make it.

The music stopped as Jimmy dropped to the floor.

Clyde cried out in horror and ran out of the garage. As he raced through the house, he nearly bumped into Jimmy’s mother. She gave him the disapproving look that he knew very well, but then her expression turned to concern. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

The music blasted again. Jimmy’s mother slapped her hands against her ears, and froth immediately leaked through her fingers. Clyde just stood there, apologizing over and over and over until her ears exploded off her head. He fled the house as she dropped to the floor.

He ran down the street, music blaring. A screaming man clutching his ears tumbled off his front porch, but Clyde figured that could be a coincidence. A happy couple walking hand-in-hand let go of each other’s hands and looked much less happy as Clyde approached. Four ears jettisoned and four streams of goo shot forth. That was probably not a coincidence.

It occurred to Clyde that he shouldn’t be running back toward the more populated section of town, but he was in too much of a panic to stop himself.

Everywhere he ran, people suffered the same grisly fate. They weren’t going to appreciate his music taste anytime soon. He said he was sorry to everybody he passed, though without ears they probably couldn’t hear his sincere apology.

A small dog went on its way, apparently unaffected. Good. Clyde would’ve felt terrible if he caused harm to a dog.

So much death. So much pinkish red froth. So many disconnected ears.

At least Clyde’s own brain hadn’t liquefied. He wasn’t proud of himself for being relieved by this.

Maybe he was meant to sacrifice himself. Maybe the way to break the curse was to release his grip on the boom box and let it snap his neck.

He stopped running, wondering if this was truly the answer.

As he mulled that over, he noticed that he’d stopped next to a restaurant with outdoor seating. Dozens of screaming people were covered in each other’s brain froth. It was so disgusting that he wanted to keep running, but no, he deserved to see something this gross.

A bus pulled up alongside him. It drove away as the passengers began screaming and dying.

He had to do this. Too many innocent people had perished.

Clyde let go of the boom box.

Its weight yanked him to the sidewalk. Somehow he was able to hear the snap over the music. His entire body from the neck-down went numb.

The music continued.

Well, shit.

People kept coming out of buildings to see what was going on, and they kept screaming and covering their soon-to-come-off ears. When he left for his walk, Clyde could’ve never imagined the nightmare he would behold.

If only he’d been more considerate.

If he could do it all over, he’d keep his music at a reasonable volume so as not to disturb others.

The cursed boom box shut off.

Oh. Apparently that was the life lesson.

In retrospect, it seemed kind of obvious. He probably should’ve started there.

Clyde vowed to become an ambassador for the use of portable cassette players with headphones. He would preach the gospel of being considerate with one’s music. And he might have, except that a couple of badly injured people stumbled over him and did additional damage to his neck, which turned out to be fatal.

Though nobody knew this carnage spawned from a cursed boom box, people did become concerned about loud music. In particular, sixteen-year-old Joey Winkle, who stopped playing his own boom box so loud in his bedroom. His sister, Wendy, whose bedroom was across the hallway, was then able to concentrate well enough to solve the Rubik’s Cube she’d been working on for the past two months.

And so, though this may be a bit of a stretch, this tale can be said to have a happy ending.

ANOTHER SANTA STORY

“Santa Claus is here! Santa Claus is here!” shouted Matthew and Ellen from downstairs.

Mr. and Mrs. Belmont, still in bed, looked at each other and grinned. Christmas morning was always such a fun and special occasion. There were many times they wished they hadn’t procreated, but this was never one of them.

Then Mrs. Belmont frowned. “Did they say Santa Claus is here?”

“That’s what I heard,” said Mr. Belmont. “That’s not the tense I was expecting.”

They quickly got out of bed and hurried downstairs. Santa Claus was a jolly and generous old elf, but according to legend, you could be stricken blind by gazing upon his true visage. Though that probably wasn’t true, the fact was nobody had ever actually seen Santa Claus in person, which meant their children were either experiencing a once in a lifetime opportunity, or a psychopath in a Santa suit was down there.

The living room was filled with presents. Matthew, eight years old, and Ellen, nine, were bouncing around happily as a rotund man with a thick white beard and the appropriate Santa Claus attire watched them.

“Santa…?” asked Mrs. Belmont.

“Ho ho ho!” said Santa. “Happy Holidays!”

“Wait,” said Mr. Belmont. “You’re one of those ‘Happy Holidays’ people? You?”

Santa nodded. “It hurts nobody to acknowledge that there are different cultures. Ho ho ho!” Then his expression darkened. “But when I say ho ho ho tonight, I don’t feel it in my heart.”

“What’s wrong, Santa?” asked Ellen.

“People just don’t appreciate Santa Claus anymore, Ellen,” said Santa.

“We appreciate you!” said Mrs. Belmont. “I mean, you fly across the entire world delivering presents to the good boys and girls in a single night! That’s impressive as heck! Everybody is super impressed. I don’t know anybody who downplays that accomplishment.”

“I assure you that we all recognize the scope of this feat,” said Mr. Belmont. “The milk and cookies are only a small token of our appreciation.”

“Right,” said Santa. “Milk and cookies. Yay.”

“You don’t like milk and cookies?” asked Mrs. Belmont.

“I like milk and cookies just fine. Everybody does. That doesn’t mean I want them at every single stop along the way. What’s wrong with some variety? How about a strip of candied bacon once in a while? A nice cup of coffee? A spicy tuna roll?”

“I guess I’d been given inaccurate information,” said Mr. Belmont. “Milk and cookies have been such a big part of the tradition that, quite honestly, I thought you’d fly into a rage if they weren’t there waiting for you. We’ll definitely change it up for next year.”

“Thank you,” said Santa.

Santa Claus continued to just stand there.

Mr. Belmont cleared his throat. “Well, thank you for all of the gifts. You’ve got a busy night ahead of you, so we won’t keep you.”

Santa didn’t move. He let out a long, deep sigh. “Did you notice that there are more presents this year?”

“Yes. A lot more. That was very generous of you. Thank you.”

“There are sixty of them.”

“That’s a significant number of presents,” said Mrs. Belmont. “Matthew and Ellen must have been very good this year.”

Santa shrugged. “It’s a pretty low bar.”

“Right. Well, I guess…” Mrs. Belmont started to make a joke about how neither of her children had murdered anybody this year, but she wasn’t sure how dark Santa’s sense of humor went, and decided not to risk it.

“You guess what?” asked Santa.

“Nothing.”

“Here’s how this is going to work,” said Santa. “You have sixty presents and two very excited children in this room. Fifty-eight of these presents are presents your kids will absolutely love. I’m talking about the latest video game systems, that dumb doll that’s sweeping the nation, and stuff like that. There’s even a college scholarship.”

“That’s very nice,” said Mrs. Belmont, warily. “There’s not a, um, catch, is there?”

“There is indeed a catch,” said Santa.

“Oh, dear.”

“Two of these boxes contain incendiary devices.”

Matthew looked up at Santa. “What’s a cinder device?”

“Incendiary device. Your mispronunciation isn’t as adorable as you think it is, kid. It means that the present will blow up and kill you.”

“Oh.”

“Wait, what are you saying?” asked Mr. Belmont. “That two of these presents are booby-trapped?”

“That’s right. So, you have a choice to make. You can deprive your kids of Christmas entirely, and ensure that they live another day, or you can start opening presents and test your luck.”

“Why are you doing this?” asked Mrs. Belmont.

“I thought I made it perfectly clear that I’m having a psychotic breakdown,” said Santa. He sat down on a recliner and pulled the lever to put his feet up. “Make your choice.”

“Don’t you have other presents to deliver?” asked Mr. Belmont.

“I’ve got time. I want to see how this plays out.”

“Well, it’s obvious how this is going to play out! We’re not opening any of the presents!”

Matthew and Ellen burst into tears.

“We want our presents!” Ellen wailed.

“Didn’t you hear what Santa Claus said?” asked Mrs. Belmont. “They could kill you!”

“We want our presents!” Ellen repeated. “It’s Christmas!”

“You don’t love us!” Matthew shouted.

“Of course we love you!” said Mrs. Belmont. “We want to keep you safe!”

“Presents! Presents! Presents!” Ellen shouted.

“This is all very simple,” said Mr. Belmont. “We’ll call the police, and they’ll send a bomb squad over, and they’ll figure out which presents are rigged to explode. Easy peasy!”

Santa Claus shook his head. “These presents leave when I do.”

“Dammit! He’s covered every loophole!”

Mrs. Belmont knelt down on the floor in front of her children. “Matthew, Ellen, I know you’ve been good all year, despite your natural inclinations, and you’ve been looking forward to this with all of your hearts. But we just can’t let you open presents that could blow up and extinguish your young lives.”

“I hate you!” shouted Matthew. “You’re not my real mom!”

“You’re not the boss of me!” said Ellen, picking up a present.

Mrs. Belmont snatched the present away from her. “I most certainly am, young lady! Legally!”

“You’re ruining Christmas!” Matthew screamed.

“No! Santa Claus is the one ruining Christmas! It’s not my fault he’s reached his breaking point! We’re innocent pawns!”

“What’s a pawn?” asked Ellen.

“It’s the least powerful piece of the game of chess,” said Mr. Belmont. “When Mommy refers to us as pawns, she means that other forces are controlling our fate. Which, now that I think about it, isn’t really a perfect metaphor for chess. Technically, the King and Queen don’t have control over their fates, either. You sacrifice pawns to protect the more powerful pieces, but that’s not really what we’re talking about here. I’m honestly not sure what Mommy meant. I’m sorry.”

“You can leave now,” Mrs. Belmont told Santa. “We won’t be opening any of your gifts this year.”

Santa shrugged. “Fine with me.”

“No!” Ellen screamed. “It’s not fair! It’s not fair!”

“You know what else isn’t fair?” Mr. Belmont asked her. “Getting your head blown off! Do you know how much it hurts to get your head blown off? Technically, not much, I guess, because you’d be dead as soon as it happened. But do you want to be dead? Do you? You wouldn’t get to see your friends until they died, too! Is that what you want?”

“I want my presents!”

“No!”

“I’m going to hold my breath until I turn blue!” Ellen took a deep breath and held it.

“Let out the breath,” said Mrs. Belmont. “Let it out, honey.”

Ellen shook her head.

“We’ll buy you presents later. We’ll take you straight to the store and buy you any toy you want!”

“We want our toys from Santa!” said Matthew.

“What if you opened one of them for them?” Mrs. Belmont asked her husband.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just one so she’ll stop holding her breath.”

“She won’t really turn blue, you know,” said Mr. Belmont. “She’ll have to breathe eventually.”

Ellen pressed her hands tightly over her mouth.

“Just open one of them,” said Mrs. Belmont. “If only two of the sixty are fatal, you’ll be fine.”

“What if I pick one of the bad ones?”

“Quit arguing and open one of the presents! She’ll turn blue any second now!”

“No, she won’t. She’s breathing through her nose. You can tell.”

“Please!”

“Ummmm….” Mr. Belmont glanced around at the presents, and then at Santa. “Am I allowed to shake the presents first?”

“Fine with me.”

“Will the bomb go off if I shake it?”

“Probably.”

Mr. Belmont grabbed the nearest present and tore off the sparkly red wrapping paper. “It’s an Operating Room Nurse Barbie.”

Ellen took her hands away from her mouth and excitedly took her present. “Just what I always wanted! Thanks, Santa!”

“You’re welcome, Ellen! Ho ho ho!”

“I want a present, too!” said Matthew.

“You can share,” said Mrs. Belmont.

“I don’t want a Barbie!”

“He can’t share my Barbie!”

“Look, the Barbie comes with a little plastic bone saw,” said Mrs. Belmont. “Let him have that.”

“He can’t have my bone saw!”

“Enough, Ellen. Give your brother the accessory.”

“No! Santa gave it to me!”

Mrs. Belmont looked over at her husband. “Open one more.”

“Why?”

“Because the kids won’t shut up if you don’t, that’s why!”

“What if it explodes?”

“What if I explode because I can’t take it anymore?”

“C’mon, Santa,” said Mr. Belmont. “This is absolute madness!”

“Agreed,” said Santa Claus. “Glorious madness.”

Mr. Belmont grabbed a long rectangular present. He tore away the light blue wrapping paper, revealing a plain cardboard box. “What’s inside?” he asked.

“Something your son has always wanted.”

Mr. Belmont tore open the end of the box and peered inside. The snake lunged at him.

“Argh!” he shrieked. “It’s biting my eye! It’s biting my eye!”

“Matthew!” Mrs. Belmont shouted. “Did you ask Santa Claus for a snake?”

“I love snakes,” said Matthew.

Mr. Belmont tried to pry the snake’s fangs out of his face, but no amount of tugging could dislodge the angry reptile. “Help me!”

“Is it poisonous?” Mrs. Belmont asked Santa.

“Nope.”

“Oh, good.”

“But it’s venomous.”

“It won’t come off!” Mr. Belmont screamed.

“Why would you ask Santa Claus for a venomous snake?” Mrs. Belmont asked Matthew.

“Because I knew you wouldn’t get me one.”

“Well, you can’t have that one. You made your father open a potentially booby-trapped gift for nothing.”

“My face is going numb!” Mr. Belmont whimpered.

“Matthew, you go to the kitchen at once and get me a knife to stab the snake with.”

“It’s my snake! Santa brought it for me!”

“I don’t care! You can’t keep it! Now go get me a knife or you’re grounded for a week!”

Matthew, pouting, stomped out of the living room.

Ellen began to cry. “My Barbie’s head came off!”

“Then you were playing with it too roughly.”

“I want a new Barbie!”

Mr. Belmont wiped some foam from his mouth. “My vision is all blurry,” he whispered. “Somebody please kill me.”

“I want a new Barbie!” Ellen repeated. She took another deep breath and clamped her hands over her mouth.

“What’s taking so long?” Mrs. Belmont called out to Matthew.

“Nothing!” Matthew shouted back from the kitchen.

“Hurry up! Your father has lost his will to live!”

“I am hurrying!”

“Hurry faster!”

The snake began to coil its tail around Mr. Belmont’s arm. He didn’t resist.

Matthew wandered back into the living room. He handed Mrs. Belmont a knife.

“This is a butter knife! You can’t stab a snake to death with a butter knife!”

“I didn’t know!”

“You did so! You’re acting out! Go stand in the corner!”

“I want to take my pet snake to my room!”

“No! It’s still lodged in Daddy’s face!”

Mr. Belmont began to violently twitch.

Ellen removed her hands from her mouth and gasped for breath. “I want another present!”

“Ellen, Matthew, I want you to go over to Santa Claus right now and kick him in the balls.”

“What?” asked Matthew.

“You heard me. Go kick Santa Claus right in the balls.”

Matthew walked over to Santa Claus and delivered a powerful kick to his groin. Santa Claus cried out in pain and doubled over.

“You too, Ellen. Do it.”

“His hands are in the way.”

“Then kick him in the hands.”

Ellen kicked Santa Claus in the hands.

“Why?” he asked, spitting up some bile. “Why would you make your children do that?”

“Because now you’ll have to move them to the Naughty list. And naughty children don’t get presents. You’ll have to take all of these away.”

Santa stood back up. “It’s true. I have to stick to my own rules. You can’t have a classic holiday figure without a consistent mythos.” He gestured, and all of the presents went up the chimney, including the snake.

Matthew and Ellen sobbed.

“Sorry I tried to make you play a deadly game,” said Santa, limping over to the chimney. “Just not feeling the holiday spirit this year, I guess.” He flew up the chimney and disappeared.

Mrs. Belmont crouched down next to her husband. “Don’t worry, the madman is gone,” she told him. “Ellen, bring me my phone so I can call 911.”

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“Ellen!”

“Okay, okay…” Ellen went in search of her mother’s cell phone.

She found it a few minutes later, and Mrs. Belmont called for an ambulance. The 911 operator didn’t sound too worried, so Mrs. Belmont was confident that Mr. Belmont would be fine, despite his lack of breathing or a pulse.

There was an explosion next door.

“Not sure why I assumed we were the only family Santa Claus would do this to,” said Mrs. Belmont. “Very naive of me.”

“I want my headless Barbie back!” said Ellen.

“I want my pet snake!” said Matthew.

Mrs. Belmont sighed. “I’ll take you to the store after the ambulance leaves.”

THE WELL

Iguess your mind tries to help you out in these nightmarish situations. It was as if deep in my subconscious a little voice said, “Hey, Peter, you can’t handle this right now, so I’m going to turn you into a sociopath for a bit, okay?”

I’m not sure if it was better or worse that my wife and three children all died within a span of, what, six or seven minutes? Probably closer to six. It was a terrible day. And I wasn’t the only person to experience horrifying and tragic losses—trust me, a lot of people in my village were very much not in sociopath mode.

But I kept it together. And I wondered if there was something wrong with me. I mean, I was looking down at my youngest daughter’s—actually, no, I’m not going to put that image in your head. You might not be able to cope as well as me. I just stood there and thought, calmly, I need to find a place to hide. And I did. It wasn’t cowardice, because it was too late to save my family by the time I hid in an outhouse. And when I say that I hid in the outhouse, I actually mean that I hid...well, you know what I mean. It was awful.

In the end, we lost two hundred and eight people. We’d started with five hundred and thirteen. If you wanted to take a “the glass is half full” stance, more than half of us survived, but it was pretty difficult to look around the village and have any kind of optimistic outlook. Exactly one person, eighty-five-year-old Edith Watson, died a “clean” death. She had a heart attack when the carnage began. Everybody else who perished did so in a spectacularly messy manner.

The village didn’t even have a name, because we had no reason to differentiate it from other villages. It had been around for over a hundred years. It was deep, deep, deep in the forest. You weren’t going to stumble upon it unless you were unbelievably lost, and I’d never met a stranger from the outside world in my entire life. We had no use for anybody else. We were completely self-sustained. Crops were bountiful, hunting was plentiful, and it rained a lot. It was a simple life, but a happy one.

Yes, I was going to get to the human sacrifices.

Once a year, on the day of the first snowfall, to ensure that things kept going smoothly for our village, one of our own had to go. There was a great big stone well in the center of the village. Somebody would climb into the bucket and be lowered into the depths, where not even our most powerful lantern could illuminate. There was never a scream or sounds of a struggle. We would simply raise the bucket, and the sacrifice would be gone.

In the early years, the leader of the village chose who would give up their life. He claimed that divine intervention guided his choice, but it didn’t require the most perceptive villager to recognize that the sacrifices always seemed to be people who were critical of his leadership skills. When he died of natural causes, a decision was made to change the process into something that was actually fair.

There was talk of simply sacrificing the eldest villager each year. The older folks were obviously not on board with that plan and were able to shut it down. Another proposal was for some sort of village-wide challenge to determine who would be the sacrifice. The idea gained quite a bit of traction before the rules became so complex that the whole thing was abandoned in favor of a random drawing.

You were allowed to volunteer to “ride the bucket,” and, in fact, it was encouraged, but that was really rare. It had only happened twice in my lifetime. (Technically, there was a third; unfortunately, the old man died before he could actually be lowered into the well.) Instead, everybody in the village pulled a rock out of a sack, and if you drew the red rock, you were the sacrifice.

Some people thought the village should wring maximum suspense out of the outcome and have a solemn ceremony where the loser was revealed, but, instead, we all just lined up and drew a rock out of the bag without fanfare. We held up our rock as soon as we drew it. One elder thought everybody should draw a rock, hold it in their hand without looking at it, and then reveal our pick at the same time, but that was impractical with over five hundred people.

Reactions to drawing the red rock varied. Some sacrifices were stoic. Some freaked out. Some tried to flee, a tactic that never worked. One year the sacrifice was a baby. I still remember the father’s expression when he drew the red rock for his three-month-old son. It was not my favorite day.

Every year, somebody would bring up the idea of “Do we really need to do this?” Sure, for decades we’d been lowering sacrifices into the well, and the following year would bring about a great harvest and an abundance of nearby animals to kill, but was it truly necessary?

Yes. Of course it was.

But in recent years, the “Maybe we’re just being stupid” movement had gained momentum. Did we know for sure that the sacrifices were required? It wasn’t as if the crops sprouted out of the ground with no effort on our part, or the animals willingly leapt onto skewers so that we could cook them. Perhaps we were simply good at surviving.

Still, we always drew the rocks, and somebody was always lowered into the well, never to be seen again. After an unpleasant incident, a new rule was instituted: if you refused to draw a rock, you became the sacrifice.

This year, long before the first snowfall, a villager named Stephen gathered all of us together and gave an impassioned speech about why we should do away with this “ridiculous superstitious farce.” He used the phrase “false causality” a lot. We were murdering people for no reason, he insisted. It was barbaric. It was primitive. We were better than this. He begged us to at least put it to a vote.

We did. And though it was close—very close—we voted in favor of not sacrificing any more of our fellow villagers to whatever lurked at the bottom of the well.

Though I liked to think of myself as one of the intellectual elite, I’ll admit that I had a bit of trepidation about ending the sacrifices. I’d voted in favor of getting rid of them, because with a wife and three kids the odds were that it was going to work out badly for my family at some point, but how could we know what was going to happen? Maybe the first people to lower sacrifices into the well knew what they were doing. What if the crops failed, and the animals fled, and the river dried up, and we all perished?

A few months later, when I saw a snowflake, I cringed.

Everybody gathered in the center of the village. Technically, the vote was “We will stop the sacrifices, unless somebody volunteers, in which case there’s no compelling reason not to let them do it.” So this was the opportunity for somebody to volunteer.

Nobody did.

“We’re doing the right thing,” Stephen announced. “We should’ve stopped this years ago. We should never have started in the first place.”

A few people dispersed, but most of us just stood there. I guess we were going to watch ourselves not lower somebody into the well.

I’m not sure what I, or anybody else, expected to happen. Maybe the ground would rumble and lightning bolts would set our homes on fire as a booming voice from the well shouted, “Fools! Thou hath doomed thyselves!”

Instead, we all just kind of stood around. A few more people left.

“This is a mistake!” shouted Edwin, an old man who lived on my street. “We sacrifice one for the good of the entire village! That’s how we’ve always done it! Are we really risking all of our lives to save one person?”

“It was never for the good of the village,” said Stephen. “We’ve been doing it for no reason. Our friends and family members died for nothing!”

Edwin pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Liar! You want us all to die!”

“Why would I want us all to die? How does that make any sense?”

Edwin turned to address the rest of us. “I say we throw him into the well!”

That seemed like a pretty extreme course of action, and I assumed there would be some passionate debate, after which saner minds would prevail. Instead, it appeared that about a dozen people had already been thinking the same thing, and they rushed toward Stephen.

“Hey!” he shouted. He fought admirably, but there wasn’t much he could do against a dozen angry and frightened people. He screamed as they lifted him over the side of the well and dropped him into whatever lay in the darkness below.

Stephen was an eloquent guy. He wouldn’t have liked that his final word was “Hey!”

“It had to be done!” Edwin insisted. “He was trying to murder us all!”

“But we’d already put it to a vote!” somebody shouted. “You might have killed him for nothing!”

Edwin frantically shook his head. “Our forefathers weren’t idiots! They wouldn’t just have...”

He stopped speaking and looked at the well. So did everybody else. A creature—humanoid yet reptilian—climbed out. It looked around, surveying the crowd, then hissed at us.

“That is not how we like to eat,” the creature said. “He died when he struck the ground. He’s worthless to us. You violated the pact.”

Another reptilian creature climbed out of the well. Then another. And another.

The first one grinned, revealing sharp, oversized teeth.

And then they all pounced.

More creatures continued to emerge from the well as the slaughter continued. Oh, we fought back, but those things were incredibly difficult to kill. They were fast and agile, and their scaly skin was like armor. We got one of them with a bow and arrow, and another one by bashing its head against the side of the well, and that was about it.

My wife and kids were killed right in front of me.

This is when my brain, to protect me from descending into pure madness, decided to focus on questions like how those creatures survived in the well all this time if they only had one human being to eat per year. I wondered if maybe our well was connected to a vast underground network of wells at other villages, and the creatures just went around collecting their meals as they were lowered to them. That made sense.

Eventually the creatures seemed to decide that two hundred and eight victims was sufficient, and they all climbed back down into the well. I hoped that because they were so slippery with our blood they’d fall and plummet to their deaths, but there was no evidence of that happening.

“We’ve learned a valuable lesson today,” said one of the survivors. “The sacrifices must never cease. Our hubris cost us dearly.”

“But it wasn’t for the crops or anything like that,” said another survivor, who seemed weirdly calm for a man newly missing eight of his fingers. “We were only keeping the monsters at bay. Couldn’t we just seal the well up?”

After the cleanup and burials were complete, we took another vote. It was close, but we sealed up the well with bricks, and the reptilian creatures never bothered us again.

There was some discussion that we didn’t know for sure that those sacrifices hadn’t been responsible for our prosperity. A vote was made in favor of continuing the sacrifices, though now we went with decapitation instead of lowering them into a well.

The crops are growing on schedule, hunting is still going well, and we have plenty of rain.

I never did get upset about my wife and kids. I guess I’m a sociopath after all. It’s okay—I’d suspected it long before I even got married. I don’t want to burden anybody with my problems, but I’m talking to myself right now anyway, so it’s all fine.

THE BODY HIDIN’ SPOT

Pa kicked open the screen door and stormed into the backyard. “What the hell is going on out here?” A moment later he saw the dead body on the lawn. He looked from the body to the bloody knife in my hand, then back at the body, then closed his eyes, shook his head, and sighed.

“It was an accident,” I insisted.

“Boy, I can see from the number of stab wounds on his chest alone that it wasn’t an accident, unless you’re the clumsiest fourteen-year-old in all of Georgia. What’d you do, trip and fall and stab him a dozen times while you were trying to keep your footing?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, he’s clearly dead. Any fool can see that. So calling an ambulance won’t do any good. I need you to answer me one very important question, boy. Was this a thrill-kill?”

“No, sir.”

“Look me in the eye when you answer.”

I looked up at Pa. “No, sir. It wasn’t a thrill-kill. It was anger.”

Pa nodded. “What’d he do?”

“He was holding hands with my girlfriend. I mean, it wasn’t really my girlfriend. It was his girlfriend. But she should’ve been my girlfriend.”

“I see. And was he holding hands with her in our backyard?”

“No, sir.”

“So you lured him back here?”

“Yes, sir. I told him I had some weed. I don’t, I swear—weed is evil—but I knew he’d come over if I said I had some to share.”

“I need you to be honest with me,” said Pa. “When you were stabbing him to death, did you get a boner?”

My eyes widened. I couldn’t believe Pa had asked such a thing. “No!”

“No movement in your nether regions at all?”

“Of course not!”

“Good. I didn’t raise you to get sexual satisfaction out of taking a human life. That’s for depraved perverts and serial killers. But if he was trying to move in on a girl who was rightfully yours…well, then he got what was coming to him.”

“So you’re not mad?”

Pa shook his head. “I’d be a hypocrite if I was. I’ve killed in anger, and for revenge, and out of practical necessity. If I’d caught you smearing his blood all over your bare chest, that would’ve been a different story, but sometimes you have to kill somebody who did you wrong. It’s the southern way.”

“I just knew you’d understand, Pa,” I said.

“What is your plan for afterward?” Pa asked.

“I figured that with Jerry out of the way, Abigail would mourn for a couple of weeks, and then she’d let me hold her hand and maybe feel her up.”

Pa scowled at me. “I mean, what is your plan for the dead body? You have a plan, right? You didn’t just invite him over here with the promise of marijuana and then stab him to death without an exit strategy, did you?”

I looked at the ground.

“Jesus, boy! When did you become a simpleton? You committed premeditated murder without a plan to dispose of the evidence? Were you just going to leave him out here to rot? Surely you know that corpses have an aroma.”

“I was blind with rage, okay? I wasn’t thinking straight!”

“It doesn’t sound like you were thinking at all. You could be tried as an adult for this, you know. You could end up in big boy’s prison. The food is way worse there.”

I wanted to cry, but I knew Pa would get mad if I did. Now that he was saying all of these things out loud, I felt really silly for having stabbed Jerry to death without thinking ahead. This was like that one time I chucked a rock at the mailman without considering that he’d knock on my front door and tell Ma and Pa about it. “You’re not the sharpest crayon in the box,” my sister often told me, and I’d insist I wasn’t a crayon at all. I was a boy, which didn’t seem to help my case.

“Will you help me?” I asked.

“Since this is your first killing, yeah, I will,” Pa told me. “We’re gonna take him to the body hidin’ spot.”

“We have a body hiding spot?”

“Drop your ‘g’ when you say that, boy. And you bet your ass we do. It’s been in our family for generations. I’ve hid bodies there, your grandpa hid bodies there, his dad hid bodies there, his dad hid bodies there…the body hidin’ spot goes all the way back. I’ll be happy to take you there to use it for the first time.”

“Wow,” I said. “I didn’t realize we killed so many people.”

“Always with cause,” said Pa. “We’re not out there hacking and slashing like we’ve gone feral. Have we killed more than our share of our fellow human beings? Yeah, I’d say so. But we’ve interacted with more folks who deserved it than the average family.”

“Do you think Ma will be proud of me?”

Pa shook his head. “Justifiable homicide should not be a source of pride for anybody.” He pointed to the bloody corpse on our lawn. “Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking what you did wasn’t drastic. You should’ve punched him in the face first. If that didn’t work, then stab him to death. In the future, work your way up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“First things first. Let’s halve the body.”

“Halve the body?”

“Repeating what I just said in the form of a question is no way to have a productive conversation. Can you carry an entire dead body six miles over rough terrain?”

“No, sir.”

“Then it makes sense that we’d each carry half. And every moment we spend standing around gabbing makes it more likely a neighbor will see your victim, so let’s get him into the garage.”

I nodded. Pa went inside to put down some garbage bags. When he came back out, Dad took the arms, I took the legs, and we carried the dripping body inside.

“Gently, now,” said Pa, as we eased the body down onto the bags. “I know he’s dead, but you don’t want any more blood to splatter than necessary. Many killers have been undone because of a stray bone chip.”

I really appreciated Pa’s wisdom. My inclination would’ve been to toss him onto the garbage bags and shout “How does that feel, bitch?” when his skull shattered.

“What are we gonna use to cut him in half?” I asked.

“A steak knife.”

“For real?”

Pa grinned. “Nah. That was a joke. One important thing to remember about taking a human life is that you run the risk of descending into madness over what you’ve done. So it’s important to make a joke every once in a while. I don’t mean a tasteless joke that downplays the serious nature of what you’ve done. That’s not appropriate. But when I said that we should use a steak knife, which is obviously impractical, it was amusing without being disrespectful. You still feel sane, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So it’s working. No, we’ll use a great big saw. Fetch me the biggest one from the saw wall.”

I took down the largest saw we had. It was about three feet long. Then I tried to hand it to Pa.

“Don’t give it to me,” he said. “I’m not the one who stabbed him to death. You killed him, you cut him. That’s the Georgia way.”

I frowned. “Oh.”

“You’re not squeamish, are you?”

I shrugged. “Maybe a little.”

“You stabbed him a dozen times. There’s blood all over. How can you be afraid to saw him in half?”

“There weren’t guts when I stabbed him,” I said. “I don’t mind seeing blood, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to handle seeing an intestine.”

“Well, if you saw a man in half at the waist, I’m sorry to say you’re going to see some intestines. There’s no way around it. So now the question is whether you’re going to be a man and get over your intestine-viewing phobia, or if you’re going to be a scared little girl.”

“I’ll be a man,” I said, crouching down beside the body.

And I was. I sawed Jerry in half, and yeah, his intestine popped out along with other nasty stuff, but I kept right on sawing until the job was done. When I looked up at Pa, I could tell he was pleased.

“Let’s put these halves in bags,” he said. “And then I’ll tell Ma we won’t be home for dinner because her son is about to hide his first dead body.”

We put the bags in the trunk of the car and drove for about an hour. If we lived in Atlanta, we’d still be in Atlanta, not far from where we started, but Pa hated big cities, so we traveled a reasonable distance, and I didn’t have to listen to Pa calling Atlanta a hellhole for the entire hour.

Finally, he pulled onto a dirt road. He drove a while longer, going deeper and deeper into the woods, somehow knowing which way to go even though the road forked in seven or eight spots, and parked when the road came to a dead end.

“Now we walk,” he said.

He opened the trunk, and we each took a bag. A dead body, even half of one, was pretty heavy, but I didn’t want to disappoint Pa, so I didn’t complain.

“The trail is there,” he said. “It’s hard to follow, so I’ll take the lead, but the next time this happens it’ll be up to you, so pay attention.”

We walked. And walked. And walked. They say, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” but Georgia had both, and every single sweat gland in my body was pumping out perspiration like I was trying to sell it by the gallon. Though the bag was unwieldy and the path was uneven, I only dropped Jerry’s upper half once. I wanted to ask if we could just veer off the trail about twenty or thirty feet and bury him there, but I knew Pa wouldn’t approve of the question. So we kept walking.

We did take the occasional rest break. Pa wasn’t a tyrant.

I did everything in my power not to ask how much farther, but I couldn’t take it anymore. My arms felt like they were going to break off my body. I wish I’d killed Abigail instead—she would’ve been a lot lighter.

“How much farther?” I asked.

“About ten miles.”

“Ten?”

Pa grinned. “Nope. That was just more sanity-preserving humor. Without it, you might be seeing things that aren’t there, or unconsciously doing bodily harm to yourself. We’ve only got about three miles left.”

“Was that another joke?”

“What?”

“To preserve my sanity?”

“What?”

“The ‘three more miles’ part. Is it really only half a mile?”

Pa frowned. “Are you too lazy to walk three more miles? No, it wasn’t a damned joke. You don’t do two jokes sequentially in a situation like this. You’ve got a lot to learn, boy.”

And so we walked three more miles. I was happy my arms didn’t actually break off, but there was no feeling left in them. I was drenched in sweat and couldn’t remember ever having been so exhausted. I’d think twice before I stabbed anybody else to death.

“We’re almost there,” Pa told me. I hoped it wasn’t another joke.

But, no, we emerged from the woods…into a parking lot.

“Are we burying him in the Piggly Wiggly?” I asked.

“Son of a bitch,” said Pa. “They paved over the body hidin’ spot and put up this damned store. The modern world has no respect for tradition!” He threw down Jerry’s lower half in frustration. “People think their iPhones and Xboxes and GPSes and photocopy machines are so great, but look at what it’s cost us! Generations of use of the body hidin’ spot and now it’s a place for people to buy yogurt and avocados! It just ain’t right!”

“At least you know nobody will find the bodies now that there’s a store on top of them,” I said.

“That’s not the point. The old ways are fading, boy, and it makes me want to shed a tear. I won’t, but it makes me want to.” He sighed. “I guess we’ll just walk twenty, thirty feet off the trail and empty the bags. The wildlife will eat the evidence.”

Pa looked despondent as we began the long walk back through the forest. But you can’t hang onto the old ways forever, and to my way of thinking, that Piggly Wiggly was making a lot more people happy than the body hidin’ spot ever did.

Pa would get over it. Someday.

One last thing was eating away at me, and I wanted to clear my conscience. “Pa?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I tell you something?”

“Of course. What is it?”

“I lied about the boner.”

“I know, boy. I saw the whole thing.”

Y2K FEAST

December 31st, 1999, 11:37 PM EST.

“It’s almost here,” said Grant, lovingly stroking the shotgun on his lap. “We’re totally prepared for this, and there’s no reason to fear it. The end of the world is going to be bad for most people, but it’s going to be perfectly fine for us. Maybe it’ll be...utopia.”

“Probably won’t be utopia,” said his oldest son, Kirk.

“You need to quit your damn pouting. Your reliance on technology made you soft and squishy. At midnight tonight it’s all going to stop working, and humanity won’t be able to handle it. There’ll be panic. Riots. Terror from coast to coast. But when the world is cast into darkness, we’ll have all the candles we need. And I mean that literally and metaphorically.”

Grant looked at each of his family members. His beautiful wife, Megan, gave him a solemn nod. His youngest son, Bryan, was desperately getting in some final moments with his handheld video game. His daughter, Elise, was on the phone with her boyfriend, crying.

Grant didn’t care if his family was miserable. For him, hearing that shortsighted computer programmers had overlooked the bug that would throw everything into disarray when 1999 became 2000 made him positively giddy. He wasn’t one to giggle maniacally, but he was giggling maniacally on the inside.

“Do any of you have anything to say before this glorious new existence begins?” he asked.

Megan shook her head. Everybody else ignored him.

“We have plenty of food,” he said. “But the food won’t last forever. I need to know that each of you is prepared to eat human flesh if it comes to that.”

Bryan lowered his video game. “I’m sorry, what?”

“We may have to eat our own kind to stay alive.”

“Are you trying to make sure we were paying attention?”

“No,” said Grant. “To survive, we may have to do things we previously thought unthinkable. And one of those things may be to cook and eat humans.”

“You said we might have to kill somebody,” said Bryan. “You never said anything about eating them!”

“I’m saying it now.”

“You can’t just drop that on us twenty minutes before the apocalypse! You should’ve led with that!”

“And what would you have done?” asked Grant. “Learned those outdated programming languages so you could fix the Y2K bug on your own?”

“I’m not sure what I would’ve done,” said Bryan. “But I would’ve figured out a way to not turn into a cannibal!”

“Will you guys keep it down?” asked Elise. “I’m trying to talk to Chad!”

“Dad said we’re going to become a family of cannibals.”

“What?”

“I said no such thing,” said Grant. “I said that we might have to be prepared to eat human flesh.”

“Right! That’s what ‘become a family of cannibals’ means!”

“No, you’re acting like we’d go feral and hunt human prey. We’d only kill and eat people if the opportunity presented itself.”

“Screw that,” said Elise. “I’m not eating anybody.”

“Again, I’m not talking about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Hills Have Eyes. We’re not going to lay a trap across the road, converge upon their vehicle, and rip hunks of flesh off their bodies with our teeth. That’s not at all the scenario I’m describing.”

“So closer to a Hannibal Lecter thing?” asked Kirk.

“Well, no,” said Grant. “We’re not going to be pretentious about it. And Lecter eats human flesh because he likes it—we’d choke it down just to survive.”

“I still want to know why we’re only now hearing about this,” said Bryan. “We’ve been prepping for two years, and this is the first we’ve heard about having to eat people.”

“I was waiting until you were ready to handle it.”

“I don’t want to be ready to handle it! I don’t want to look in the mirror and think, ‘Yep, I’m cool with eating a person.’ What’s next, having sex with each other to repopulate the earth?”

“Ew,” said Elise. “Mom, make him stop.”

Megan frowned at Bryan.

“Enough,” said Grant. “I’m not asking you to ‘be cool’ with it. I’m asking if you’re prepared to do it as a matter of survival. Yes, we’ll have nightmares afterward. We may even experience some self-loathing. We may feel like we’ve lost of piece of ourselves that we can never get back. But at least we won’t starve to death.”

“I won’t do it,” said Elise.

“Oh, you won’t? When you can see your ribs through your chest, and you’re so hungry that every waking moment is pure misery, and you’re minutes away from dying, and I hold a piece of well-cooked succulent human flesh up to your mouth, you’re saying that you won’t eat it?”

“Why did we bother stockpiling so much canned food in the basement if we’re going to just eat people?” asked Kirk.

“We’re not going to turn into cannibals at 12:01 tonight!” said Grant. “You aren’t paying attention to what I’m saying. Here’s the deal: Because the computer nerds were trying to save precious memory in the olden days, they only used the last two digits for years. So if it was 1985, the computer would think of it as 85. Are you all with me so far?”

“That’s not the part we’re questioning,” said Bryan.

“Are you all with me so far?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Everything was fine until the nerds went, ‘Oopsie, what’s going to happen in 2000?’ And they realized that these computers and DVD players and traffic lights were headed toward extinction. Instead of accepting the inevitable and making the transition into an old-fashioned way of life, they kept on using their electronics. At midnight tonight, they’ll pay the price. At first it’ll be ‘Waaahhh! My Walkman doesn’t work!’ But soon it’ll be ‘Heavenly Jesus, please protect me from these looters.’ The weak will fall quickly. Others will cope with the loss of everything they once knew, and some of them will make it for a good long while, but the post-Y2K world is only for the strongest of the strong. Eventually, the supplies in our basement will dwindle. We’ll go out on foraging expeditions, but the stores will have been ransacked. Though we’ll have retained our sanity as a family, others won’t have been so lucky, and we’ll be attacked by ravagers. We’ll defeat them. We’ll kill them. And then, with food lying dead on the ground before us, we’ll need to gaze within ourselves and decide if we have the courage to do what must be done. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Why can’t we just hunt deer?” asked Bryan.

“It may not be an option.”

“Why? We’ll use a bow and arrow. How come you’re asking us about eating human flesh but haven’t trained us to hunt deer? What about rabbits? The rabbit population isn’t going to disappear. How about a garden? Why aren’t we growing bell peppers in our backyard? Why are we talking about eating human meat instead of shoving seeds in dirt?”

“Don’t talk back to your father,” said Megan.

“I don’t understand why this is so difficult for you to understand,” said Grant. “Of course we’d try to eat bunnies first. I thought that was so obvious it didn’t need to be said out loud. But, failing to hunt fauna, and failing to grow flora, and forced to kill somebody in self-defense, I just want to know that we aren’t going to let perfectly good protein rot in our driveway.”

“Do you even know how to prepare a human carcass for consumption?” asked Kirk.

“I’ve read a little about it, yes.”

“Here’s the thing, Dad. We all know that, pushed to our limits, we’d do things we would never consider in a civilized world. That’s a given. It might involve eating rats, it might involve sawing off our own hand, and it might involve drinking our own urine. But you don’t explore a cave and ask if everybody is prepared to cut off their own hand if it gets crushed in a cave-in. You worry about that when the need arises. All we’re saying is that your timing is weird.”

“Fine,” said Grant. “I was trying to make sure everybody was prepared, but I should never have brought it up.”

“Right,” said Bryan. “You made me waste time I should’ve been spending playing this game for the very last time.”

Elise returned to the call with her boyfriend.

Grant sighed and took Megan’s hand. “Better times are coming. They’ll see.”

At 11:58, they turned on the television to watch the ball drop in Times Square. Grant wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near there when the lights went out and the mass panic ensued, but he supposed he couldn’t begrudge the populace one final New Year’s Eve celebration.

At 11:59 and 50 seconds, the countdown began. Grant, Megan, Kirk, Bryan, and Elise counted down with the people in New York City.

“Three...two...one!”

And then it was the year 2000. The television stayed on, showing images of hugging and cheering people.

“Hmmm,” said Grant.

“Why haven’t we been cast into eternal darkness?” asked Kirk.

“Well, I never thought it was going to happen at exactly midnight,” Grant lied. “Give it a few minutes.”

They gave it a few minutes.

“Hmmm,” said Grant.

“Here’s my theory,” said Bryan. “All of the money, resources, and countless hours of work that have gone into trying to solve this problem for the past few years actually succeeded.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Grant. “It’s a time zone thing. It’s the year 2000 in the Eastern time zone, but there are still parts of the world that have yet to transition. Maybe the whole world needs to be in the new millennium before everything crashes and burns.”

“Technically,” said Bryan, “2000 is the last year of the old millennium. The new millennium begins on January 1st, 2001.”

Grant was briefly tempted to point the shotgun at his son but controlled the impulse.

“It’ll be fine when the whole world is in 2000,” he said, more to himself than his family. “This wasn’t all for nothing.”

“If it helps, I heard that some digital calendars did say the year was 19100,” said Megan, a few hours later, after everybody else had gone to bed. “That’s pretty silly, don’t you think?”

Grant said nothing.

“This is a good thing, isn’t it?” she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder.

“We were lied to.”

“Maybe Bryan is right. Maybe the fact that people all around the world have been tirelessly working to solve this problem is why civilization didn’t collapse.”

“Go to bed, Megan.”

“We could still have a nuclear war.”

“Go to bed, Megan.”

Megan nodded, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and headed off to their bedroom. Grant sat there for a few more hours, lost in thought.

He’d really been looking for an excuse to try human flesh.

He’d purposely understocked the canned food in the basement in anticipation of running out and having “no other choice” but to feast upon his fellow man. He’d been thinking about this ever since seeing a segment on the news about the Y2K bug. It didn’t consume his every waking thought—that would be a sign of criminal insanity—but he figured he thought about it maybe a dozen or so times a day. More as the big day approached.

And yet here he was, sitting in his home on January 1st, 2000, with no expectation that anybody would break in and need to be killed.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

Human flesh. What did it taste like? What did it smell like as it cooked over the campfire? Was it filling? Was it better in sandwich form or right off the skewer? Would he fondly think about the look of fear on his victim’s face before his grisly demise?

He couldn’t tell his wife and children about this. They’d think he was crazy.

Was an urge to practice cannibalism so very strange?

Yeah, probably.

But at least it wasn’t as strange as entertaining thoughts about murdering his family and devouring their bodies to make up for the post-Y2K disappointment.

Now that would be nutty.

Or would it?

No, it definitely would.

He didn’t even need to ask for outside feedback on that matter. Thinking about murdering his wife, daughter, and two sons just to cook them up and eat them was objectively nutty.

But the thoughts were already in his mind. It was too late to dispel them. What was he supposed to do, turn back time? Oh, that would be a nice trick, wouldn’t it? Invent a time machine so he could take back the cannibalism related thoughts. The idea was completely absurd, even in this shitty world that still had all its technology.

What if he only killed one of them?

No parent could choose their favorite child, but he could easily choose his least favorite one: Bryan. That little creep thought he was so smart, with his knowledge and logic. How much would they truly miss him if he was gone?

Grant knew that if you spent too much time agonizing over decisions, you’d never get anything done, so he decided to kill Bryan and eat him before he changed his mind.

The shotgun would be the most efficient method, but it was pretty noisy. Instead, he went into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and took out their biggest knife.

“What are you doing?” asked Megan, standing in the doorway.

“This is none of your concern,” he told her.

“I feel like I should be worried that you’re holding that great big knife.”

“I was going to slice some bread.”

“All of the bread in the house is pre-sliced,” said Megan. “And that’s a butcher knife. And the way you’re holding it is really threatening.”

Grant cursed. He didn’t want to kill Megan, but now she was suspicious, and if Bryan turned up dead later this morning, she’d know it was him.

He let out a battle cry and rushed across the kitchen toward her.

Megan had always been rather meek, so it surprised him when she nimbly stepped out of the way, yanked the knife out of his hand, then twisted his arm behind his back.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” he said.

“Why did you have to do that?” Megan asked. “You know I support you in everything you do.”

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow, ow!” Grant repeated. “You’re hurting my arm!”

“What’s going on?” asked Bryan, as their three children stepped into the kitchen. In retrospect, Grant wished he hadn’t let out the battle cry.

“Nothing!” Grant insisted. “Go back to whatever you were doing!”

“I think your father was so consumed by thoughts of post-Y2K cannibalism that he decided to kill and eat one of us,” said Megan.

“Dad!” said Elise.

“It’s not true!” Grant insisted. “I was just going to cut some bread!”

Megan gave his arm a twist. Grant let out a high-pitched shriek as the bone broke.

“I was worried about raiders, so I took some self-defense classes,” said Megan. “I never imagined I’d have to use them on you.”

“I wasn’t going to eat any of you! I swear!”

“He’s lying,” said Bryan. “All night he was looking at me like I was a turkey leg.”

“Maybe we should eat him instead,” said Kirk.

Megan, Bryan, and Elise all nodded.

“Oh, wow,” said Kirk. “I was totally kidding, but I’m in if you are.”

“The Internet still works,” said Elise. “I’ll go look up some recipes.”

Grant begged for mercy. Then he decided this was all one big prank. When Bryan retrieved a hacksaw from the garage and began to cut away at his shoulder, he decided it was not, in fact, a prank and went back to begging.

On one hand, he was proud of the way his family worked together. Bryan did all of the sawing. Kirk cauterized the stumps. Elise prepared and seasoned the meat. Megan whispered into his ear that everything was going to be all right. If the apocalypse had happened, they would’ve made a great team.

He passed out from the pain and woke up to the scent of himself cooking in the oven. What a waste. He would’ve done it over a charcoal grill.

He angrily flopped his torso around until he passed out again.

When he woke up, everybody was seated at the dining room table, including him. They’d spared him the indignity of a booster seat, although he was on top of a few pillows. Kirk was slicing into his cooked arm with an electric carving knife.

“Hey, he’s up!” said Bryan. “Just in time.”

They passed around the serving plate of arm slices.

“Grant, do you want to say grace?” Megan asked.

Grant nodded. “Dear God, if you’re watching right now, please kill them all.”

“Very nice,” said Megan. “Enjoy, everyone!”

Everybody took a bite. They chewed slowly, thoughtfully.

Kirk swallowed and was the first to speak. “It sucks.”

“It really does,” said Elise. “Even with all the seasoning it’s disgusting.”

“I think I’m gonna throw up,” said Bryan.

“Stop it,” said Megan. “You’ll hurt your father’s feelings.”

“Well, the leg needed more cooking time. Maybe it’ll be better.”

Grant passed out from the pain again and awoke to his family eating slices of his leg.

“Nope,” said Kirk. “This is terrible.”

“It’s even worse than the arm,” said Bryan, spitting a mouthful back onto his plate.

“Maybe we’re simply not cut out to be a cannibal family,” said Megan. “But it’s better to regret the things you’ve done than the things you haven’t.”

Grant began to weep.

“Oh, darling, don’t cry,” said Megan. “Are you sad because we cut off your arms and legs, or because you didn’t get to try a bite?”

“Ew, don’t give him a bite,” said Elise. “Auto-cannibalism is gross.”

“We’re not going to feed your father pieces of himself,” said Megan. “Depravity has no place in this household. But we should probably put him out of his misery, don’t you think?”

Everybody nodded, including Grant.

“Who wants to slash his throat with the carving knife?”

Nobody volunteered, which made Grant happy. At least they weren’t excited about killing him. They played Rock, Paper, Scissors, and after a few rounds Megan was the loser. Taking no joy in the process, she sliced the blade deep across Grant’s neck.

“Sorry things worked out this way,” said Megan, before Grant bled out. “Happy New Year.”

MAC & MILLIE

(Written with Bridgett Nelson)

Warning: This story is a bit more graphic than the other tales in this collection. Bridgett is a bad influence. Reader discretion is advised. If you want to skip ahead to the Story Notes, you won’t hurt our feelings.

Mac

I’d looked at a shocking number of dicks for a guy who was almost entirely heterosexual.

I mean pictures, of course. I didn’t have men lined up in my apartment. What I needed was the perfect dick pic for the dating site I was using. It had to be large, of course, but not so large that a potential recipient would say, “Oh, no, goodness no, I could never accommodate that!” As straight as possible—no weird curves. Circumcised, obviously.

Finally, I found it. Yes, this would be the penis I presented to the ladies on the site!

And then I realized I was going about this all wrong.

I might as well come out and say it: I was using this site to find a murder victim. My brain is a little mixed-up, and I have this uncontrollable desire to take human lives. Okay, female lives. I swear I’m not a misogynist. Don’t read anything into the fact that all of my previous eight victims were women. I don’t hate women. I love women. Women are awesome. I dunno...maybe I was worried that a guy would kick my ass.

Anyway, after completing my seven-hour search for the perfect online phallus, it occurred to me that any healthy, straight woman with a working libido would want this dick. And my preference was to kill a filthy, disease-ridden whore. Really, I needed to send a picture of an unappealing dick—something tiny and weird-shaped and gross, so that any woman who wanted to meet up with me after seeing it would be deserving of her fate.

So I took a picture of my own dick.

Started sending it to various ladies in the area.

Most of them ignored me. It didn’t hurt my feelings. I was used to being rejected, which is why I’d grown to hate women. No, I didn’t mean that. Ignore that. That’s not what I meant. I’ve already explained that women are great. They give birth!

I like to stab people. It’s not my fault. God gave me a brain that wants to stab people, and are you going to tell Him that He messed up? Yes, the people I stab are women. Wouldn’t it be more sexist to not stab women? Like, “Oh, no, I could never harm that helpless delicate flower!” No, I kill women because I believe they should be able to take care of themselves!

I don’t need to justify this to you. How do I know you don’t stab women, huh? And when you’re done stabbing them, you...I don’t know, pee on them, or something.

I feel like I’m getting sidetracked. What I’m saying is that I sent dick pics to every wretched slut on the site. The ones who responded were generally unkind.

This plan wasn’t going to work. I’d have to go back to my technique of killing extremely affordable prostitutes.

But then I got a reply.

You’re fucking hot. Let’s do this.

Millie

I sent the message, then leaned back against my chair still staring at the repulsive dick pic. I was mesmerized. How in the hell did such a small dick bend that way? And was that a…wart?

Jesus.

A guy sending images of that monstrosity out into the world deserved to die. I’d be doing the world a favor causing that—thing—to rot. Although I’m pretty sure it was already halfway there.

Was there a cock-rotting disease? I typed ‘cock-rotting disease’ into Google and found photos of infected dicks, the occasional pus-filled anus, and an oozing perineum or two. The series of symptoms was named after the French physician, Fournier, who’d first discovered them. Poor guy—his name forever associated with decaying taints.

But, no. That’s not what my presumed future date—Mac—had. His was just small, discolored, deformed, and…oddly lumpy. If he thought I was touching that thing, except maybe to cut it off during his savage torture, he was sadly mistaken. And even then, I’d wear thick gloves.

Because ew.

I may be a ruthless serial killer, but I was still a girl. And I had fucking standards.

Unwilling to look at Mac’s junk for even one more second, I closed the photo and noticed he’d replied back.

Hello, Millie!

You’re also super attractive. Cool! Let’s be intimate and stuff! Saturday at 8:00?

Lotsa love,

Mac

For fuck’s sake, was he ten? Letting out a sigh and cursing the shit I had to do just to kill innocent people, I wrote back.

Send a pic of your face. I need to know who I’ll be fuckin’.

I took my bulldog puppy, Manslaughter, out to pee. He snorted and sniffed and ran a few zoomies around the backyard before finally finding the perfect spot to do his business. When I came back inside, there was another message from Mac. The subject line simply read, “Me.” I opened the attached photo and was pleasantly surprised. Yes, his male appendage clearly came from the deep bowels of hell, but he had a nice face. Kind eyes. A sweet smile.

Poor guy had no idea what he was in for. I couldn’t wait to cut him.

I wrote back.

Saturday at 8:00 works. My place?

Assuming he’d agree, I sent him the address.

Now to prepare…

Mac

Heh heh. She was making it easy.

Almost too easy...

Nah. It wasn’t a suspicious amount of easy. In today’s slut-ridden society, women wanted penis so badly, they’d put their own personal safety at risk.

I’d assumed we’d have to meet in a public place first. I obviously couldn’t stab her in the middle of a Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, so it was always a pain when my victims wanted to meet somewhere with good lighting and other people around. Especially because they didn’t always recognize my natural charm. The truth is, some women get a “skeevy” vibe from me. It pisses me off.

I bathe!

I groom!

What the hell is their problem? It makes me want to wrap my hands around their neck and squeeze until their eyeballs pop out.

Sorry about that. I promise I’m not an angry person. Also, no matter how hard you squeeze somebody’s neck, their eyeballs don’t pop out. I’ve tried.

Anyway, when she’d sent her address a few days ago, I’d looked it up and rejoiced. Not only was it a house and not an apartment, but she was in the middle of nowhere. No neighbors visible on Google Maps! Foolish girl! Didn’t she realize how easy it would be to kill somebody in that environment? Poor, poor Millie. Tonight she would writhe in helpless torment as I stabbed her again and again and again and again, laughing at her inept attempts to escape.

Just to be clear, the fact that I would be treating Millie as an amalgam of all the women who’d rejected me does not mean I hate women. Some women are fine. Not my mom, but...waitresses, for example. I always tip them at least ten percent. I’d much rather have a woman be my server than a man, so let’s keep the “Mac’s a male chauvinist pig” talk to a minimum, okay?

On Saturday, I put on a clean T-shirt, combed my hair to hide the bald spot, washed my mustache, and put a switchblade knife in my pocket. Some killers, depraved freaks that they are, have a special weapon they use to claim their victims. Sometimes they even name it. Not me. I’ve got, like, nine or ten switchblades, and I didn’t even think about which one I shoved into my pocket. My knife is not an extension of my penis.

I drove to her house. I had to go down a long, winding, dirt driveway to get there, which was completely surrounded by trees. Seriously, didn’t she realize how much danger she was in? She could scream at the top of her lungs, and nobody would hear her. Hell, I could bury her corpse in these woods, and it would never be found. What a dumb bitch.

I parked, checked my mustache in the rearview mirror, then got out of the car. Stifling a giggle, I walked to her front door and knocked.

Millie

Smirking, I watched from my bedroom window as the balding fool walked toward my front door. He’d looked way better in his photo, which I’m guessing was at least a decade old. These days, Mac was sporting a crusty mustache, a dad bod, and a comb-over. Just…why? Didn’t guys realize comb-overs were the leading cause of Sahara-like vaginas?

He was wearing a t-shirt with yellow stains near the armpits. He paired the classy shirt with some jeans and penny loafers.

Dear God…if ever a man needed to be put down, it was this one. Choking back laughter at how easy he’d made this for me, I checked my reflection in the floor-length mirror. Long red hair in a sleek ponytail. Check. Push-up bra in full effect. Check. Glossy lips. Check. I was dressed to kill.

And I planned to.

To him, I was just a girl looking to get laid. Innocent in my naivety for inviting him into my isolated home. Probably thinking he could fuck me six ways from Sunday because there were no neighbors around to hear me scream.

Heh.

As if I’d let his diseased organ anywhere near me.

As if he’d ever have the upper hand.

As if…as if…as if…

The doorbell rang. Spritzing a bit of perfume on my neck, I made my way downstairs. No weapons were concealed beneath my clothes. They were all in the bedside drawer. Most women kept vibrators, dildos, condoms, and lube there. I kept an ice pick, a butcher knife, a meat cleaver, the sharpest scissors I could find, a meat mallet, a Taser gun, and even some aerosol spray and a lighter.

I loved torture.

But not as much as the moment my victim’s eyes went sightless in death.

It was better than sex.

Putting on my innocent game face, I pulled open the door. “Mac, hey! Nice to see you. Please come in.”

He gave me a clownish smile and walked into my lair. Something green was stuck between his teeth. His eyes glimmered in the dim light of my home, one lonely lamp lighting the entirety of the downstairs. I could tell he liked what he saw. Why wouldn’t he? I looked way fuckin’ better than he did.

Smelled better too. Was that…refried beans? He leaned in for a hug, and I got the full-on Taco Bell experience. I wasn’t convinced he’d recently eaten refried beans—it might very well have been his natural odor.

“Hi, Millie. Nice to meet you. If you don’t mind me saying it, you sure are pretty.”

I walked to the couch and spread out a blanket. I didn’t want his aromatic ass anywhere near my velvet sofa. “Thanks. Please have a seat.” I motioned to the newly covered couch. “Would you like a drink? A scotch, maybe?”

“No alcohol, please. It makes me feel funny.”

“How about a Shirley Temple?” If he said yes, I might not be able to withstand the urge to kill him right where he stood.

“A Shirley Temple would be grand!”

“A round of Shirley Temples coming right up!” I said, trying hard to control the urge to kick him in the balls, then laugh in his dimwitted face.

“Great. Thanks!” He looked relieved. “There’s nothing wrong with a drink like that, right?”

“Nothing at all. Lots of grown men impress their dates by asking for a Shirley Temple.”

Mac frowned. “Are you being sarcastic?”

“Not at all. That would be impolite.” I walked into the kitchen before he could see my eyes tearing up with suppressed laughter. Mac sure as hell didn’t have much going for him.

Carrying the drinks back into the living room, I handed him one and sat on the far end of the couch. The guacamole and sour cream stench rolling off him was getting to me.

Manslaughter, my bulldog, strutted into the room, muscular legs bowed, and panting heavily. He stood in front of Mac, sniffing him intently, probably enticed by my date’s cologne—Mexican fiesta.

Mac’s nervousness was apparent.

“Mac, meet my pooch.” Manslaughter wrapped his paws around Mac’s calves and began humping. The snorting intensified.

Mac, trying to gently shake the dog off his leg said, “Wow, your dog’s a bit of a whore, isn’t he?” He giggled timidly.

Appreciating his attempt at humor, I laughed. “Sorry about that. He’s a pup and still a little rambunctious.” I pulled Manslaughter off his leg, noticed the resulting white patch on his jeans, and lured the doggy into the guest bedroom with treats. After I got him settled in, I ventured back to the living room. Mac was sour faced as he wiped at the wet spot on his jeans with a handkerchief. He carried a handkerchief? When he saw me, the pissy look was immediately replaced by an easy-going smile, but it was clear he wasn’t as amused by Manslaughter’s antics as he’d pretended to be.

Choosing to change the subject, I said, “So, Mac, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a computer repairman.”

Well, that tracked. I bet he liked D&D too. And had Bigfoot posters hanging on his wall.

“Nice. What do you do in your spare time?”

“Every Saturday night I play D&D with my friends. And I love horror movies and books.”

“I love horror too. It’s my favorite.”

“Mine too.”

“Favorite monster?” I asked.

“I love cryptids. Probably Mothman.” Close enough.

He looked at me shyly and grinned, the green thing stuck between his teeth highlighted in the soft lamplight. “What about you? Do you have a favorite monster?”

I took a long drink from my Shirley Temple. I was fervently wishing I’d loaded it with alcohol. This was painful.

“I’m pretty partial to human monsters. They’re the scariest of all.”

His shy smile turned into a full-blown grin. “Damn right they are.” He scooted closer to me on the couch.

I had him—hook, line, and sinker. And he really needed to die. I sat my drink down and asked, “Interested in joining me in my bedroom?”

Mac

See, this is why Millie needed to die. Her and her perverted dog.

What was wrong with a bit of courtship? Talking. Getting to know each other first. Making a personal connection before inviting me into the bedroom where dozens, if not hundreds, of other men had vigorously fornicated with her. I bet she even asked them for cunnilingus! Demanded it, more likely. Those poor men, choking back bile and holding their noses.

Would it have killed her to chat for fifteen or twenty minutes before we started removing clothing? No. What would kill her was her haste.

I mean, yes, I would have killed her even if she wanted to talk first, but my point is that women, in general, are vile, carnal creatures who deserve to be extinguished from existence.

“I am,” I said. “I’m very interested. Your bedroom sounds like a happy place.”

Millie smiled at me. For a split-second I wondered if her smile was sincere, but then I decided it totally was and followed her into her bedroom.

She’d chosen a strange décor—plastic wrap all over the walls and floor. Probably her idea of feng shui or whatever crap women thought about when they decorated. She had no idea she’d made my clean-up process easier.

I reached into my pocket, as though I were retrieving a condom. Most likely the diseased tramp would tell me no condom was necessary—she’d probably already acquired all the STDs she could get.

I pulled out the switchblade.

Millie’s smile disappeared.

I pressed the button, and the blade snapped out.

“What the fuck?” she asked.

Oh, I’d show her what the fuck. I had, in the past, tried out various ways to inform my victims about why they were going to die, but, quite honestly, I wasn’t good at remembering what I’d written out, and it was easier just to get right to the stabbing.

I thrust the knife at her, plunging it deep into the yielding flesh of her...no, wait. Shit, I’d missed! She grabbed a pillow off the bed and swung it at me. It was a firm pillow, and it was a surprisingly hefty swing from a helpless female. As it struck my hand, the knife went flying toward the wall.

I ran for my weapon.

Picking it up, I spun around and saw her opening a drawer. Ha! She probably thought she could subdue me by squirting lube into my eye.

She turned toward me brandishing a butcher knife.

I didn’t even want to know what kind of kinky sex acts required her to keep a butcher knife in her bedside drawer. My God, was she depraved.

“If you put the knife down, I’ll leave you unharmed,” I said. (I was lying.)

Millie shook her head and gestured toward me. “Bring it.”

Millie

What was this? The nerdy little twerp thought he could take me on? Was he completely braindead?

I sighed. This was not how I’d planned for the evening to go. I might have to work up a light sweat, which was bullshit. Dude was supposed to come to my house, be seduced by my many charms, allow himself to be tortured and mutilated, then go willingly to his basement death. Instead, he had this puny little switchblade, no doubt an extension of his penis, and I had to deal with his hyper-masculine bravado.

Ugh. Fuck my life!

I looked at him brandishing his dipshit knife and realized I’d chosen the wrong weapon. I wasn’t gonna be like Mac, with his stainless-steel schlong. Once again, I strolled sedately to my nightstand and pulled open the drawer. Replacing the butcher knife in its case, I rifled through the rest of the contents until I wrapped my palm around the handle of the ice pick. It felt good. It felt…right. I straightened, intuitively knowing he didn’t have the fortitude—or the balls—to attack a woman from behind. As I pricked the tip of my finger to check the razor blade sharpness of my chosen weapon, I let out a tinkling laugh and said softly, “You amuse me, little man.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? Little?” he huffed.

“I think you know.” I turned, stared at his stupid face a little longer than intended (I’m pretty sure I lost a few IQ points during the brief interlude), jumped on the bed, and charged. As I leapt off the mattress, I plunged the ice pick into his flabby body. He managed to sidestep my attack, and the weapon harmlessly penetrated the fleshy part of his underarm. He let out a pained cry and whipped his knife across my abdomen, superficially cutting my skin.

Eh, whatever. Skin would heal. But the son-of-a-bitch ruined my black mini-dress. Pissed beyond belief that my brand new, very expensive dress was bound for the garbage pile, I let out a fierce roar.

He blinked with surprise, as if he’d never heard a woman roar before.

I charged at him. To give credit where it’s due, he stood his ground. He dodged my ice pick attack and slashed the top of my arm, wrist to elbow.

“Fuck!” I shouted. It stung like hell, though I couldn’t help but admire his skills. Any other guy would have had an ice pick protruding from his forehead following the sheer awesomeness of my athletic prowess.

Mac grinned, then punched me in the stomach.

I doubled over, stood back up, and punched him in the jaw as hard as I could.

He stumbled backward, collided with my bed, then stumbled forward—right into my swinging fist. His eyes crossed. Looking dizzy, he turned around and spat some blood onto my expensive velvet blanket.

Thoroughly pissed off, I stabbed my ice pick into his less-than-spectacular buttock. He groaned, gyrated, and performed a rather impressive, yet baffling, version of the moonwalk.

Then he ran into my bathroom, slammed the door, and flipped the lock.

I pounded on the heavy wood. “Open up, you chickenshit!”

No response.

“Mac, goddammit, I have a key. Try to keep some of your dignity, and open the fucking door!”

I heard cabinet doors opening and closing. Then, “Uh, Millie? Do you have hydrogen peroxide and bandages? I don’t want these puncture wounds to get infected.”

I stood there, open-mouthed. He’d stopped trying to kill me so he could disinfect his wounds?

“What the fuck?” I whispered.

Deciding to play it cool, I said, “Yeah, in the cabinet above the toilet.”

“Cool, thanks.”

“Mac, uh, why did you dance after I stabbed you?”

“To distract you so I could get away.”

I nodded. “That’s fair. Good job.”

“I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“Really?” He’d once again shocked me into silence. “You’re a…killer?”

“Yeah. Are you? Most ladies I know don’t have ice picks in their night table. Or their entire boudoir covered in plastic sheeting.”

“Why don’t you open the door, and we’ll discuss this like the psychotic adults we are.”

I heard him hiss in pain and assumed he was using the peroxide.

“Okay. Just give me a minute.” More hissing and a whispered, “Ow! Ow! Ow!” came from behind the door.

I walked to the bed and sat down.

Several minutes later, Mac poked his head out. He looked at me. I looked at him. Yeah, he was a total buffoon, but…

“Maybe we should work together,” I heard myself say.

Mac

“Is that a joke?” I asked.

“No,” Millie said.

“Is it a trap?”

“No.”

I opened the door all the way. Millie stood there, letting the blood run down her arm. It was surprisingly sexy.

“Then what exactly do you mean?”

She shrugged. It was a surprisingly sexy shrug. Maybe I just found her sexy overall. I mean, she definitely looked less like an oozing, scab-covered whore than I anticipated.

“You have a desire to kill,” said Millie. “I have a desire to kill. I think it would be nice to team up and commit murder with somebody who understands. I don’t know about you, but since I’m trying not to get caught, I can’t really chat with anyone about it afterward.”

I thought about her words. It would be nice to have a friend who could relate to the darkness in my heart. We could slaughter a victim, then spoon in bed while we reminisced.

“We couldn’t fuck on top of the corpse afterward,” I said.

“I would never ask you to do that.”

“I’m serious. It’s a deal-breaker.”

“I completely get it.”

“And, uh, the victim has to be female.”

“Why? You hate women?”

“Yes. I mean, no. Women are awesome. They make the world go round. It’s just my modus operandi, and what kind of a serial killer would I be if I veered from my modus operandi? I’m not an incel or anything like that. I just don’t want to kill a dude.”

“That’s fine,” said Millie. “I’ll kill anything. I’m basically pansexual with murder. Also, I’m pansexual.”

“That’s good to know,” I lied.

“Did you have a backup victim for tonight?”

“No,” I admitted. “I sent my dick pic all over the place, but you were the only one who was interested. Only, now I know you weren’t really interested.”

“Well, Mac, I’m going to deliver a harsh truth. You do not have a good penis.”

“I know.”

“I have plenty of options. Mostly guys, but some women, too. I could set up a booty call in five minutes. Do you want to tag along?”

“I do,” I said. “I really do.”

She was right. It literally took five minutes for her to set up a date with a woman who was interested in unnaturally wicked carnality. “She’ll be here in twenty minutes,” Millie told me.

“Wow. You’re efficient.”

“I’m a hot woman. This was not a big challenge.”

“How are we going to do this?”

“When she gets here, I’m going to loosen her up with a couple of drinks. You’re going to hide in the closet. I’ll bring her into the bedroom, and you can whack off, or whatever you want to do, while you watch us through the gap. After I knock her out, come out and help me carry her into the basement. But you’re helping me get rid of the body afterward—you don’t get to enjoy the fun and then skip out on the cleanup.”

“I love this idea,” I said.

About half an hour later, Millie came into the bedroom with a heavily tattooed girl whose hair was long and purple. They kissed. My stomach churned at the sight. Disfiguring your skin with ink was vile. Spitting in the face of God by changing the color He’d chosen for your hair was vile. And two women expressing their sexuality went beyond vile! It was absolutely disgusting.

“Disgusting” was worse than “vile,” right? I suppose it didn’t matter.

They lay on the bed, kissing and groping for way too long. When was Millie going to get to the bloodshed?

The girl looked over at the closet. “Is somebody in there?”

Millie slammed her hand over the girl’s mouth.

Millie

I glared at the girl, Taylor, whose green eyes stared back at me in confusion and fear. My pussy was wet and achy—I wanted her badly—and it kind of excited me that Mac was watching. I’d never had sex, or taken a human life, with somebody watching.

“You bite my hand, it will be the last thing you ever do,” I whispered forcefully into her ear. I couldn’t stop myself from rubbing against her leg. God, I was turned on.

Too turned on. I wasn’t sure I could keep myself from hurting her, and I didn’t want to make a mess on my bed…at least, not that kind of mess. I needed to skip the sex and move to the torture.

I punched Taylor in the face, knocking her out. Usually this took a few punches, or some Chloroform, so I was pleased with myself.

Mac emerged from the closet. He didn’t seem to be hard, but maybe his nasty little dick simply didn’t put a noticeable bulge in his pants.

“Carry her downstairs to the basement workroom,” I said. “Use the handcuffs on the workbench to restrain her wrists and ankles. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

“What do you think I’m going to do?”

“I have no idea.”

“Use your imagination. Hurry before she wakes up.”

“Fine.” Mac picked up my almost-lover and carried her out of the room. I stared at the departing figures and wondered if I’d lost my damn mind, doing this with a partner. Could I trust him?

Pushing the thought aside, I grabbed my vibrator from the other bedside drawer and went into the bathroom. Seconds later, there was screaming…but not the painful kind.

I walked down the stairs. Taylor was bound on the floor, still unconscious, and Mac was anxiously pacing. I was glad he’d waited for me—I’d half-expected to enter my workroom and find Taylor’s headless corpse, which really would’ve pissed me off.

With Mac’s help, I removed her dress and panties, and then we hauled the limp body toward the throne.

Oh, yeah, I’ve got a throne in my basement. It’s wonderful.

“When we sit her on this, she’s going to wake up screaming bloody murder and trying to get away,” I explained. “I need you to restrain her while I get her locked in.”

Mac nodded.

We lifted our poor victim into a standing position, then I cheerfully shoved Taylor’s body onto the throne. As she landed on the spiked seat—did I mention it had a spiked seat? —her eyes opened and anguished screams tore from her throat. “Grab her shoulders,” I demanded. “Don’t let her get up!”

Mac did as he was told while I fastened iron clamps around Taylor’s neck, chest, and shins. As her weight settled evenly onto the half-inch spikes, the sharp metal ground into her tender flesh, and cherry red drops of blood dripped onto the cement…and the wood piled beneath the iron chair.

Flipping a switch, the industrial vent above the chair turned on. I doused the wood in lighter fluid and tossed on a lit match. The logs immediately caught fire. I slapped a piece of duct tape over her mouth.

“What is all this?” Mac asked. “I thought we were going to kill her.”

“Oh, we are. But we have to get all the fun and excitement out of it we can, Mac!” Taylor was squirming uncomfortably. “It’s all about the torture.” My fingers found their way between my legs, and I came within seconds. I wondered if Mac had ever even seen a woman orgasm in real life. He struck me as more of a—love ‘em and leave ‘em frustrated and unsatisfied, while they secretly wished for him to go far away so they could use their vibrator in peace—kind of guy.

I pointed to the seat of the iron chair, which now had a decidedly orange hue from the heat. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Mac shrugged.

A couple minutes later, I sniffed the air which was redolent with the aroma of freshly grilled human skin. Ahhhh. Better than the finest perfume.

As Taylor burned, I began roughly yanking out clumps of her chestnut-colored hair and throwing them onto the fire. When I got tired of that, I unclamped the restraints and lifted her from the chair. The ripping sound her skin made as I pulled her into a standing position was grotesque, as were the layers of skin still cooking on the spiked seat. The backs of her legs and buttocks were a reddened, slimy, blistered, leaking mess.

I tossed her onto the pad I’d placed on the floor, stained with the blood of dozens of victims. She landed with a loud thud, followed by an agonized groan. I studied her. Despite the missing layers of skin, her ass was still lush as fuck. I shed my slashed and bloodied dress as I made my way to the supply cabinet, then slid the strap-on dildo over my pelvis. It grazed gently against my swollen clit. Without giving Mac a second thought, I rolled Taylor onto her stomach and fucked her mangled ass, my pent-up desires causing my aggressions to take hold.

God, she felt good. As I thrust into her, I felt something igniting inside me. It built and built until the ultimate explosion sent stars careening across my vision. Pulling out, I flopped beside her on the mat, struggling to catch my breath.

Feeling energized, I sat Taylor up and leaned her against the wall. She moaned as her nearly skinless bottom was dragged across the mat. I put the strap-on back in the cabinet and pulled out a contraption I’d just purchased. I couldn’t wait to try it!

It was basically a large, centrally located golden hoop attached to four equally spaced nylon cords. At the end of each cord were softball sized golden hoops. Those four hoops were made like septum piercing rings. You opened them up, pushed them through the skin, then clasped them shut again.

That’s exactly what I did.

I pushed a hoop through one side of Taylor’s breast and out the other side, locked it, and repeated the steps on her other breast. Removing the ankle cuffs, I put the soles of her feet flat on the floor, and pushed her knees toward her chest. Then I did the same thing to her ankles. A hoop stabbed just above the ankle bone came out the other side, and the lock popped into place at the back of her leg, a process I repeated on the opposite ankle. It was fun! She looked so beautiful sitting there huddled on the floor, blood running in heavy rivulets from the flesh piercings, and completely unable to straighten her legs. If she did, she’d pull those pretty golden hoops right through the front of her breasts, tearing through her nipples and leaving gaping, bloody slit-wounds in both tits.

Realizing her predicament, large tears ran down her cheeks, and her breaths came in ragged gasps. That shit had zero effect on me. Taylor was nothing more than a piece of meat.

I turned on some catchy music, “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, and went to work with one of my favorite devices…the “Pear of Anguish.” In its base position, its shape resembled a pear—a wide bottom that gradually narrowed. The metal at the top was divided into four petal-shaped segments that opened when the lever at the opposite end was turned. I inserted the closed petals into her pussy and began cranking the lever, my excitement overtaking everything. I cranked harder and faster.

At first, Taylor seemed ambivalent. But as the metal petals began expanding—tearing through her vaginal walls and cervix, destroying her fallopian tubes and ovaries, annihilating her uterus—she passed out from the pain. I pulled the instrument out without deflating it first. Chunks of bloody, pink flesh clung to the petals.

Figuring she’d want a cigarette after such a satisfying experience—I sure as hell did—I grabbed my scalpel and made a deep incision over her jaw, exposing the molars at the back of her mouth. Tucking a lit Marlboro between them, I also lit one for myself. We smoked them together, as ashes fell upon her pale, waxy skin.

I checked her pulse. It was thready and weak but still there. She was alive, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do for the big finish. Dragging her tiny frame out of my basement and into a clearing behind my house, which caused the golden hoops to rip out the Achilles tendons in both her legs, I tied her to a stake surrounded by wood. Once I had the fire burning brightly, I relaxed in the hammock I’d placed there strictly for bodies-burning-alive viewing purposes.

Most likely, Taylor would die from smoke inhalation before she’d feel the fire licking against her skin, which was a real shame. Burning was an utterly agonizing death, and one I enjoyed watching.

I got lucky.

Taylor was conscious throughout the entire process. Even when her skin’s dermis cracked open and melted fat poured from the crevices. Even when her eyeballs exploded within their sockets from the heat. Even as the heat scorched her lungs and made breathing painful and impossible. She remained conscious until the shrinkage of the skin around her neck became severe enough to strangle her to death.

It was beautiful.

I lounged in my hammock long after she’d died, watching chunks of her skin fall into the flames. When the fire was nothing more than coals, I went back inside the house, satisfied by a job well done.

Mac was standing there, his face pale, his mouth agape.

“Uhhhhhh…” he said.

Mac

What the fuck?

Seriously, what the fuck?

What? The? Fuck?

Killing filthy whores was a satisfying experience. Slash their throat, watch the lifeforce drain from their body, and move on. What Millie had done was…it was…it was messed up! It was depraved! The woman was batshit crazy!

“What’s wrong?” Millie asked. “Are you upset that I finished the job without you? Nobody told you to stay in the house.”

“You…you…you…uhhh…you…”

“Yes, Mac? Use your words.”

“That was…that was not the behavior of a mentally healthy person.”

“What exactly did you think I was going to do?”

“Kill her! Stab, stab, stab!” He mimed this action. “I didn’t know that you’d, like, burn up her ass, or, like, use that hoop thing! You played with yourself! Right there in front of me and her!”

“You don’t get sexual satisfaction from this sort of thing?”

“Of course not! That’s deviant! You’re a deviant! You’re the biggest deviant I’ve ever met! My God! How do you sleep at night? How do you look in the mirror and not smash it with your fist because the sight of yourself fills you with a deep and intense self-loathing? You’re a sick woman, Millie! You need help!”

“The message I’m getting is that our collaboration didn’t work out for you.”

“There was no collaboration! That was all you! I don’t think you even realized I was there most of the time!”

“Okay, that’s true,” Millie admitted. “I got caught up in the experience. But you could’ve helped. You could have fingered her while she was burning.”

“That’s disgusting! This is why I hate women! This, right here, is exactly why I think all women should die.”

“You still have to help me clean up.”

“I’m not cleaning up a goddamn thing, you perverted, foul, wretched—”

Millie took a step toward me. “Are we going to have to fight this out?”

“Maybe we are,” I said. “Do you really think you can beat me?”

As it turned out, she could.

To be fair, after she kicked me in the balls, I didn’t really stand a chance. I’ve been kicked in the balls before, but never so hard that one of them popped. From that point forward, I wasn’t able to put up much of a fight.

The throne was every bit as unpleasant as it looked when the purple-haired girl was on it. But not as unpleasant as the flaying that followed.

And when she got started on the serious genital mutilation, wearing thick gloves, I longed for the time when a popped testicle was the worst of my problems.

I begged her to kill me. She promised she would, but only after we wrote our story, as a souvenir of the evening we spent together. She wanted the honest, uncensored truth, so that maybe she could fulfill her dream of being a published author.

“Make it entertaining as fuck,” she warned me, “or I’ll put very sharp, spiky things up your blistered ass.”

I’ve done my best. It’s taken a while, because I only have one finger left to type with, but I think we’ve reached the end of this saga. I’m hoping she’ll finally put me out of my misery. Goodnight, whoever is reading this, and thank you for your attention.

Millie

Good job, Mac.

But I’m still putting sharp and spiky things up your ass.

STORY NOTES

Body Swap - Written just for this collection! There have been a lot of versions of the “body swap” story, most of which involve the two affected parties learning to understand each other, now that they’ve lived their lives. (The horror/comedy Freaky, in which a popular teenage girl swaps places with a serial killer, offers no such life lesson, but I highly recommend it anyway.) I came up with the idea of a novel, or a feature film screenplay, where the body swappers seize upon this as an opportunity to destroy each other, then, when I was brainstorming ideas for a shiny new story to include here, I realized the idea worked just fine as a short piece.

Rope and Limb - On the humor side, my biggest influences are Dave Barry, Douglas Adams, and Monty Python. I think you can see the Monty Python influence in this story, which is essentially an extended group conversation that spirals farther and farther out of control. I love that stuff.

This was written for Hot Iron & Cold Blood. I’m not suggesting this story is historically accurate, but I did research the different kinds of gallows that would’ve been available at the time.

Torture Porn For Prudes - I’m usually very stoic when doing a live reading, but the first time I read this story in front of an audience, I couldn’t keep a straight face in the lead-up to “ding-dong.” I really should be too old and mature for this kind of story, but oh well…

I’m bad at the money part of the whole writing business. Discussing pay rates is super awkward.

So when I was asked to write a story for Razor Blade in the Fun-Size Candy, I didn’t ask how much I was getting paid until after I turned in this story. The answer: It was a “royalty share” project, where the authors get paid out of the book’s proceeds. Fuuuuuuuck!!! The average amount authors receive for a royalty-share project is $0.00. I need to be better about this.

Pink Passion - I’m no fan of alcohol. It’s nasty. (“You can’t even taste the alcohol in it!” “I most certainly can!”) I went to an absinthe bar because I wanted to hang out with my friends who were going, but I ordered a Shirley Temple. The server was not impressed.

I’m not saying I never drink alcoholic beverages, but when I do, I want the sweetest, fruitiest thing available. Thus far, I haven’t had to kick anybody’s ass over this. However, when I wrote this story for the “horror stories about booze” anthology Brewtality, the idea came to me right away.

Ghosts of Candies Past - Except for Nommers / Om-nom-noms, the candies referenced in this story were real. I’m not immune to nostalgia—I mean, I have very fond memories of riding my bicycle to the video store and choosing the VHS horror movies I was going to watch that weekend. But would sixteen-year-old me have traded that for being able to stream Evil Dead II when all of the copies were rented? Oh, hell yeah!

Personally, I mourn the discontinuation of Chewy Tart ‘n’ Tinys. A letter to the manufacturer was answered, but they didn’t bring them back. Sour Starburst are perhaps the finest candy ever invented. They brought them back in a mini, neutered version, and also in Sweet & Sour, where only half of the package was the really good stuff. Bastards.

Written for Literally Dead: Tales of Halloween Hauntings. I was not paid in candy.

Turn Me - The assignment: write a vampire story for An Unholy Thirst. The challenge: coming up with a new idea for a vampire story. I eventually devised the idea for “Turn Me,” but there was a lot of banging my head against my desk first.

Okay, there was no head-banging. I get my ideas a) while going for long thoughtful walks, b) in the shower, or c) in the middle of the night, when there’s a 99% chance I won’t remember them in the morning, and if I do write them down, I’ll realize by the light of dawn that they totally suck.

Avert Thine Eyes - Obviously, a riff on H.P. Lovecraft and his ancient evils of which the human mind cannot comprehend. It appeared in The Never Dead. Editor Dan Henk did a full-page illustration for each story, and the one for mine was incredibly cool. He also did illustrations of the authors themselves. Mine was taken from a picture of me reading “Avert Thine Eyes” at a convention before the book was published, and I look…ummm…let’s just say if you snuggled that picture, the title of this collection would be an accurate caption.

Devil-Powered Death Train of Doom - I write a lot of flash fiction. Every issue of my newsletter contains a brand-new story, usually in the 500 to 800-word range. My previous collection, Freaky Briefs, compiled seventy-five of them. Quick. Punchy. Make the point and then get out.

But do you know what’s also fun? Taking a goofy premise and just stretching it to the absolute breaking point. Maybe even breaking it. See: “Devil-Powered Death Train of Doom,” which originally appeared in Fright Train. The three editors each chose four authors they wanted to invite into the project, and I guess Charles Rutledge is glad he chose me…?

Dump Truck - I am stone-cold sober when I write. (Technically, I’m sober all the time, but “when I write” is the relevant part here.) Caffeine? Yes. Sugar? Yes. But alcohol and/or mind-altering substances? Never.

That said, I did not remember a single thing about this story until I just re-read it for this collection. Nothing. I was aware that I’d written a short story called “Dump Truck,” and because it was for an anthology called Monsters Monsters Monsters Monsters I suspected there were monsters involved, but reading it again was like reading something written by somebody else.

This isn’t all that unusual for me.

Next Best Baker - When I wrote a story about amateur chefs cooking with dog shit, I knew there would be awards in my future. Indeed, “Next Best Baker” won a Splatterpunk Award for Best Short Story.

I’d had an idea for a short film that would spoof cooking competition shows, with the contestants reacting to dog shit as if it were any other challenging ingredient. (The word “shit” would be bleeped out every time, making it even funnier.) I never made this movie because filmmaking is way more work than writing a book, but when I was asked to write a story for Baker’s Dozen, I returned to this ingenious idea.

Of course, this was a horror anthology, so I took things to a much darker place…

Cherry Tree - I never fell for the “If you swallow a cherry pit, a cherry tree will grow inside you” balderdash poppycock. I do remember a co-worker—an educated, gainfully employed adult in his thirties—accidentally swallowing a pit and being legitimately concerned about this happening. I’m not saying he ran around the office wailing, “I’m doomed! I’m doomed!” He just looked worried and said, “It’s not going to grow in my stomach, right?” Another co-worker assured him that, no, it would digest just fine. I did not try to convince him otherwise, because that would have been a dick move.

This story originally appeared in Battered, Broken Bodies. One of my test readers didn’t like the happy ending. C’mon, they can’t all end in misery!

Mouthy - This story first appeared in an actual literary journal, The Southwest Review, that has been around since 1915. 1915! Everybody who was alive when the first issue was published is dead now! I don’t appear in many century-old literary journals, and I’m especially proud that a story like “Mouthy” got in there. Have you read “Mouthy”? Can you imagine it being in a legitimate, respected publication???

Was it a special Halloween issue? Yes. Was I friends with the guest editor? Yes. But still…

All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth - This story has two things I love: greatly misplaced passion and logic where it absolutely doesn’t belong. Kyle isn’t a violent person by nature; bashing somebody in the face with a hammer is simply the punchline to a joke he thinks is extremely clever and amusing. He could just as easily go around giving people bunny ears in photos and gain the same amount of emotional fulfillment. Roberta, meanwhile, is unbothered by the grisly violence and focuses on the flawed internal logic of the gag. This is the kind of stuff that tickles my funny bone.

Written for Christmas Horror, Volume Three, following my “candy canes up the ass” story from Volume One and my “a man snaps when one too many presents were for Christmas and his birthday” story from Volume Two.

Hold Your Breath - How did this “serious” one get in here? It was written for an anthology called A Winter’s Tale, and my usual goofy shit wasn’t really appropriate. It was hard to think up a spooky story that sounded like something you’d tell at Christmas (the anthology’s theme was basically the line “We’ll tell scary ghost stories!” from the song “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”).

It takes a lot longer than twenty seconds to read out loud the part where she’s holding her breath for that amount of time. Not that any hecklers pointed it out...

First Date - This story was written for the charity anthology Blood Bank. When Bridgett Nelson was proofreading this collection, she asked if I was aware that the killer in “First Date” had a similar issue with speaking about naughty parts as the killer in “Torture Porn For Prudes.” I was not.

I pouted for a while, then decided to cut the exchange out of “First Date” so that readers of this collection wouldn’t call me a self-plagiarizing piece of crap. But I still think it’s kinda funny, so I’m presenting a piece of it here:

“I’m not the kind of serial killer who would cut off your…cleavage.”

“My cleavage?”

“You know what I meant.”

“How do you cut off a woman’s cleavage?” June asked.

“You know perfectly well what I meant!”

Teenage Death Song - This story was originally published in the anthology Rock & Roll Nightmares: Along Comes Scary under the title “Do You Believe In Tragic?” All the stories in the book had titles that were pun versions of famous ‘60s songs—the guidelines had a list of titles, and you picked one. All of the titles were clever, but I’m not really a pun guy, so I’ve switched it to “Teenage Death Song” for this collection.

I love teenage death songs, the most unintentionally funny sub-genre of music there is. They simply try too hard. As soon as I decided this was the type of ‘60s music I wanted to tackle—a decision that took about three seconds—I had a lot of fun exaggerating the hell out of it for this story.

Lost Gator - Ninety percent of author interviews ask if you’re a plotter or a pantser; “pantser” being the dumb term for “writing by the seat of your pants.” Basically, do you work out the story ahead of time, or make it up as you go along? This story was completely made up as I went along, paragraph by paragraph. I thought it worked out well. Written for Tales of the Lost.

Insufficiently Splattery - Just a tragic story about some poor guy whose dreams are forever elusive, right? Written for Splatterpunk Zine. One of my trusty proofreaders, Jamie La Chance, has informed me that “splattery” is not an actual word, but I will continue to use it until the day I die a splattery death.

The Mummy's Bite - In addition to the gory, vile filth I write in a book such as this, I also write books for kids. I’d pitched my editor a comedic novel about a kid who is bitten by a mummy and gradually transforms into one himself. My editor suggested that this concept was too weird and not really something the youngsters could relate to.

WhatEVAH! I obviously never wrote the book, but I did turn it into a short story for the YA horror magazine Night Frights.

My Favorite Halloween Memory - I have a fondness for writing fiction where the narrator talks to the reader as if they’re a character in the story. Obviously, it’s not a technique you can use very often, but it’s fun every once in a while. Written for Halloween Nights: Tales of Autumn Fright.

Quite a bit of thought goes into the story order in a collection like this. Do I separate the two Halloween stories, or embrace the theme and put them back-to-back? I originally went with a four-story holiday theme of Halloween, Halloween, Christmas, Christmas, but then elected to space them out. Was it the right call? You decide!

Ghetto Blaster - This one was written for Attack From The ‘80s. When I was in high school in the mid-to-late ‘80s, I had a friend who was way less cool than me. Obviously, I don’t mean I was a jock and he was a nerd; I mean that even by my coolness standards, which were very low indeed, he was a frickin’ dweeb. But his dad had a really nice car (I’m too uncool to know what kind it was, but it was red), and my friend got to borrow it one evening. We went to the A&W drive-in for some root beer and burgers, because we were not cool enough for beer and weed.

Because we were in a nice, shiny car, my friend wanted to be cool, and he decided that what cool people did was play loud music while they were parked at A&W. For about thirty seconds, we sat there, annoying the other customers like total jackasses, until I told him to turn off the radio.

This event did not inspire “Ghetto Blaster,” but it’s not a good enough anecdote to try to work into normal conversation. So I’m including it here, the first time it’s ever been kind of relevant.

When writing stories set in the ‘80s, there’s a tendency to want to throw in “Remember this? Remember this? Remember this?” references, but I tried to limit myself to a Rubik’s Cube.

Another Santa Story - My mindset is, “If you solicit a story from me, you should know what to expect.” So when I was asked to write something for The Darkest Night, this ridiculous tale is what I came up with.

Then I started to worry a bit. This was a big-publisher anthology with a lot of heavy hitters in the contributors list. (I’m credited as “And More.”) Was this too dumb for the book? I wussed out and wrote a different story called “Being Nice” instead, which, I promise you, is not a work of serious literary merit, but scaled back the silliness just a smidgen.

My intention was to save “A Santa Story” for the next time I was asked to write a Christmas horror story. It happens more often than you’d think. But each issue of my newsletter contains a new story, and when it’s time to start putting the newsletter together I’m almost always wailing “Nothing! I have nothing!” It was only a few days before Christmas, so I used “A Santa Story.” Fans of irony will be disappointed to learn that nobody solicited a Christmas horror story immediately afterward.

The Well - I wrote a story called “John Henry, The Steel Drivin’ Man” for Out of Tune, an anthology of stories inspired by folk ballads. One review said I was sending the opposite message of the original John Henry tale; in my version, losing jobs to technology was a good thing! I wasn’t trying to send any message. I was just trying to write a funny story.

But it is something I think about. A story like “The Well” is about superstitious people behaving in a harmful way for reasons they don’t quite understand. In the real world, I’d say “That’s stupid! Stop it!” And in a satirical piece, you want to convey the theme of “That’s stupid! Stop it!” At the same time, it’s a horror anthology, and the villagers realizing the error of their ways doesn’t make a great story. So I tried to compromise. Yes, they were indeed successfully sacrificing people to keep the creatures at bay, but there was a better way they could’ve handled it. (Written for Lonely Hollows: 15 Tales of Folk Horror.)

The Body Hidin' Spot - This story was written for Georgia Gothic, a showcase for the Atlanta chapter of the Horror Writers Association. Some of us, including me, thought every member who submitted a story should be included, since the main purpose was to have a book we could all sign at group events. Others felt it should be a traditionally edited project with acceptances and rejections. The latter group won.

There was no up-front pay, and—not to be a greedy elitist jerk—it wasn’t something I would have contributed to under normal circumstances. But I also wasn’t going to peer through my monocle and declare that I, the mighty Jeff Strand, was too successful of an author to send a story. So I wrote “The Body Hidin’ Spot” and sent it in, because, sometimes, I can be a team player!

I got back a “revise and resubmit” e-mail.

Wait, what? I thought I was doing them a favor! My going rate was five cents a word, goddamn it!

(I did indeed revise and resubmit.)

Y2K Feast - Hundreds of billions of dollars and countless hours were spent to ensure that Y2K wouldn’t have a catastrophic effect. When the efforts were successful, there was a lot of “See? Y2K was nothing! Haw haw haw! What a waste of time and resources!” I wonder how much dental work was required to repair the teeth-gnashing done by the people who worked so hard to fix the problem.

I remember the media was trying to keep people scared, including a reporter who was bugging people in a small town, trying to find out why they weren’t shitting themselves over the looming apocalypse. One man asked if it would be such a bad thing if we returned to a simpler time. In fact, he was looking forward to it.

I’m obviously not suggesting this guy wanted to resort to cannibalism. But the idea that he was happily anticipating the downfall of technology stuck with me, and when I needed a concept for a “historical” (yes, fellow old people, Y2K was a long time ago) cannibal story for American Cannibal, I wrote about a father who couldn’t wait for the downfall of society, and the opportunity to eat human flesh that would go along with it.

Mac & Millie - The Haunted Forest Tour is one of my most popular books, but my co-author James A. Moore and I had very different literary voices, and trying to make it sound like one person wrote it was more work than just writing the whole thing myself. So when Bridgett Nelson and I, who both owed a story to Splatterpunk’s Basement of Horror, decided to collaborate, we went with the He Said / She Said format, where it didn’t matter if you could tell who wrote what.

I got to pass on one of my most important lessons about writing horror/comedy, which took me a very long time to learn. It came from Neil Simon: “I have no loyalty to a funny line. If the scene works better without it, out it goes.” Sometimes the knee-slappers have to go if they’re not consistent with the character or tone. It was odd being the mature one who had to say, sorry, that scene in the closet is extremely funny, but we’ve gotta cut it. (Bridgett is still haunted by funny stuff she wrote that didn’t make it into the final version, but someday the ghosts of jokes lost will fade away.)

I obviously don’t write quiet, subtle horror, but I also don’t often do the really extreme stuff. Meanwhile, that’s totally Bridgett’s jam, and this was for a book called Splatterpunk’s Basement of Horror, so at one point I said “Just go for it!” And she did. I mean, damn…

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though it may hurt their reputations to be associated with this project, I must nevertheless thank Bridgett Nelson, Tod Clark, Jamie La Chance, Donna Fitzpatrick, and Jim Morey for their assistance. Oh, the mistakes they’ve seen!

And thanks to all of the editors and publishers who gave these stories their original homes. I wish we could all gather together and snuggle hard, but that would be weird and inappropriate.

ALSO BY JEFF STRAND

NOVELS

Creep Out

Veiled

Demonic

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: The Novelization

Deathless

Autumn Bleeds Into Winter

The Odds

Allison

Clowns Vs. Spiders

My Pretties

Ferocious

Bang Up

Bring Her Back

Sick House

Cyclops Road

Blister

Kumquat

Mandibles

Fangboy

Dweller

Pressure

The Sinister Mr. Corpse

Out of Whack

How to Rescue a Dead Princess

The Haunted Forest Tour (with James A. Moore)

Draculas (with JA Konrath, F. Paul Wilson, and Blake Crouch)

COLLECTIONS

Freaky Briefs

Candy Coated Madness

Everything Has Teeth

Dead Clown Barbecue

Gleefully Macabre Tales

NOVELLAS

Twentieth Anniversary Screening

Cold Dead Hands

An Apocalypse of Our Own

Facial

Stalking You Now

Faint of Heart

Kutter

The Severed Nose

Disposal

Suckers (with JA Konrath)

FOR KIDS

It Watches in the Dark (Eek! #1)

Nightmare in the Backyard (Eek! #2)

Finders Keepers (Eek! #3)

How You Ruined My Life

Stranger Things Have Happened

The Greatest Zombie Movie Ever

I Have a Bad Feeling About This

A Bad Day For Voodoo

Elrod McBugle on the Loose

THE ANDREW MAYHEM SERIES

Graverobbers Wanted (No Experience Necessary)

Single White Psychopath Seeks Same

Casket For Sale (Only Used Once)

Lost Homicidal Maniac (Answers to Shirley)

Cemetery Closing (Everything Must Go)

THE WOLF HUNT SERIES

Wolf Hunt

Wolf Hunt 2

Wolf Hunt 3

NON-FICTION

The Writing Life: Reflections, Recollections, and a Lot of Cursing

Visit Jeff Strand’s more-or-less official website at www.JeffStrand.com

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Introduction
- Body Swap
- Rope and Limb
- Torture Porn For Prudes
- Pink Passion
- Ghosts of Candies Past
- Turn Me
- Avert Thine Eyes
- Devil-Powered Death Train of Doom
- Dump Truck
- Next Best Baker
- Cherry Tree
- Mouthy

- All I Want For Christmas Is Your Two Front Teeth

- Hold Your Breath
- First Date
- Teenage Death Song
- Lost Gator
- Insufficiently Splattery
- The Mummy’s Bite
- My Favorite Halloween Memory
- Ghetto Blaster
- Another Santa Story
- The Well
- The Body Hidin’ Spot
- Y2K Feast
- Mac & Millie
- Story Notes
- Acknowledgments
- Also by Jeff Strand