She’s there no matter what I do. Whether I fall asleep or sit awake with the hallway light on, she finds her way into the room. She stands just inside the doorway, or at the foot of the bed, or close enough behind me that I can feel her breath on my skin. And she looks like her too, so much like my wife. I was married to that woman for twelve years. I know her face the way I know my own hands. There’s no way, no possible way, I could forget her. But there is something wrong with this thing, like it’s only wearing her. I don’t know, I just miss her so much. She tells me stories only my wife would know. She giggles the same way too. But when she talks, her voice… I know my wife’s voice and whatever this is, it isn’t hers. I want her to go away just as much as I want her to stay. But what I can’t stomach, is when our daughter comes to me and tells me that she can see Mama. I lie to her, it kills me but I do. She tells me through fits of sobbing that she can see her mother on the ground leaning against her bed. She tells me that Mama is here and that she strokes her hair. I don’t know what to do anymore. I tell her it’s a bad dream, I tell her Mama is in Heaven. I lie so hard that it kills me. It’s gotten to the point now that she can’t even sleep in her own room anymore. Night after night she whispers, “She only sucks on my fingers to help me go to sleep, Daddy.” I lay there listening to it. The wet giggles and sucking sounds. But the giggling isn’t coming from my wife and it almost sounds like a man. What scares me the most is that it comes from my daughter. I can’t sleep and I need help. I just miss them both so much and wish that they had never left me.

Being a mortician comes with some pretty nice benefits. No awkward morning small talk and the price you save on food makes it worth it alone!

“Hurt so much today.”
We hurt everyday, Darling. Why do we keep going then?
"Legs shake. Arms weak. Heavy, heavy, heavy. Stupid legs. Stupid arms. Stupid belly, always crying, always screaming. Always needing. Always ruining."
No one wants us. They all hate us. So why climb? So why More?
"Ain’t nothin’ up there. No food. No fire. No soft things neither. Just sky. Just wind, and stones that crack under me, that break and weep. They like me."
Nothing like you and nothing is like you. Soft things? You mean like those in the village?
“…Shut up."
They run when we come. We will never know the comfort of a man. We will never know the love of a child. Mhmm… Those soft things… So Hungry.
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!"
If we love them like we say we do, then why do we go back? They hate us, they cry and run when they hear us.
"Didn’t wanna. Don’t wanna! Belly loud. Belly louder than them. Louder than their crying. Their begging. What else I s’posed to do?!"
You know what else.
“No!”
Shoulda let yourself starve. Shoulda let the cold take you. Shoulda let the mountain crush you. We could just let go and tumble. We could die. Then Maybe we’d be of some good.
"...Maybe. Maybe still can. Maybe sit here for awhile. Tired. Sad and hurting, hurts so bad. Cold. Let rain melt me. Let dirt drink me. Be part of stones. Part of weeping. Like Me."
No, no, no. Keep climbing. Keep going up. Reach the summit like we promise ourselves we’ll do everyday. Throw ourselves off. Happy. Then we will be loved.
"Tummy hurt. Maybe your right, they all hate me anyways?"
Yes. We are hated. Monster, they scream. But we know us, we love them.
“Yes, we love them. Why no love me?”
You are a monster. A big, ugly, stupid monster.
"I know."
Jump.
"...Dunno. Maybe up there… maybe no hunger. Maybe no pain. Maybe no hatred. Maybe sky will take me. Maybe wind carry me."
Maybe those won’t want us either?
"Yeah. I know."
We won’t do it will we?
“Too hungry to move. To hurting to move. Maybe more soft ones will help us get to summit. To fly.
The stones will still weep. But not for us.
"...Yeah. Me too… So hungry.”

The priestesses warn me of the Drowned Choir and the Moss Man. They beg me not to enter the swamps alone. One of them grabs my arm as I leave. I look down at her, she is afraid, “And if you see a lantern,” she whispers, “don’t follow it.” I smirk at her, this is a good story and I intend to report on it, “Anything else?” I ask. The room tightens. A few exchange uneasy glances, “The Bonebound.” The others hush her instantly, as if the name might invite something listening just outside the door. They tell me he isn’t a myth. They say that swamp elders spoke of him the way old fishermen speak of storms. A king who stitches his servants from the dead. Even the Rougarou, they say, steer wide of his hovel. Still, I won’t turn back, not now. I followed the slow, half-heard whispers of the marsh until the air thinned into bitter cold. Water stilled beneath the reeds. It is so quite, I don’t even hear the frog’s croak. That’s when it came. A shape rose from the wet gray haze, impossibly tall with shoulders bowed beneath its own crooked mass. A nightmare of rootlike limbs, knotted and slick with moss muck. Its skin is stretched thin and clear over a restless tangle of clicking bones that shift and crawl. Where a face should have been was only ruin: cracked skulls fused into one warped mask. I can see leeches thread through the seams. Their dark mouths pulsed, and they whisper my name. I can feel it, something… drawing me in. In one hand it holds a staff made of spines and in the other, it holds a vision of everything I have always wanted. The swamp bends to it. I can feel it. The murk heaves upward; and decayed hands claw through the mud, I know I should resist them, I know I should have listened but they grab at me and I want them to. The Bonebound reaches for me. Its voice drags across the air. I can hear it on the wind, I can hear it in the hum of insect wings and in the ribbits of toads.
But it was the chorus from its chest, that enticed me so. The many skulls bound there, singing to me, just like my mother used to. I am so happy I came.

The storm is eternal. Waves hammer the rock and the wind circles the tower like a wounded animal, clawing at the glass, rattling the metal doors until they scream. Inside the lighthouse, though, the darkness is worse. It gathers in the corners like pooled ink, untouched by the lantern’s sweeping eye. And she is always there, waiting inside it. In my first month here, I could hear water dripping next to me, where ever I was and I had assumed it was just the sea threading its way through stone. By the second month, I could see her. I’m making repairs in the lantern room, the light switched off for only a moment. She’s there, pressed into the farthest corner, she is naked and she is still. I freeze. My wrench clatters to the floor, and the sound startles me. My pulse goes wild in my throat. When I flip the lamp back on, she’s gone. “Who are you?” But she doesn’t answer. The lantern turns, and I’m alone again, except I’m not. Something lingers in the shadows, pressed close, threading its fingers through the seams of my thoughts. She’s always there, no matter the hour. I test it once, standing in the kitchen at noon when the sun manages to shoulder through the storm. Where the light can’t reach, she stands. She is soaking wet, she is stunning and she is naked and unmoving. She stares at me with a patience that feels... I don’t know. I guess it feels like a patience that doesn’t belong here. The darkness inside her seems to reject daylight; it writhes behind her like a slow tide. I try not to look at her, but her gaze is attached to me. It follows me from room to room, and into every minute, like a presence hung on a hook behind my mind. I’m terrified, I tell you. I keep to the center of rooms, crowding myself with candles and lanterns, pretending their glow can protect me. But fear bruises into something else over time. The lighthouse is lonely, and she is constant. She doesn’t speak and her silence feels like listening. She doesn’t move, yet her stillness feels like a hand resting just close enough to touch. Slowly, unbearably, I begin to depend on her. I talk to her. At first, it’s small things: the weather, stories of my life and the repairs I must maintain. I find myself confessing pieces of my life I’ve never spoken to anybody. Bad thing’s I’ve done. Things I wish I would have done differently. She never gives me anything in return, but her presence never wavers. I begin to crave it. The lantern starts to feel like a nuisance. Every time its beam passes, she slips away, just an inch, and only for a blink. It steals her back into the dark where I can’t quite see. When the light sweeps through, I’m abandoned. I resent the lantern for taking her. I resent the storm for making it necessary. I stop sleeping all together and I sit in the corners with her. The storms outside become distant rumors. The world shrinks to her shape alone. She is all that matters now. Last night, I made up my mind. The lantern turns above me, its mechanical heart ticks like it counts down to something I can’t refuse. I follow the beam to the top of the tower, and stare into its blinding eye. I hate it. I hate that it takes her from me. I pick up my hammer and swing. The glass bursts outward, scattering into the wind, and the lantern’s rhythm dies like a severed pulse. Darkness floods in. It is thick and alive and wraps the tower, the rocks and engulfs the sea. She is there, I knew she would be. She isn’t hiding in the corners anymore, she doesn’t need to. She fills the room and encloses me. She touches nothing, yet presses close enough that I can feel her, cool as saltwater on my skin. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink. But she is mine and I am hers. The storm still rages, but I no longer hear it. There is only her now and there is only the darkness of the sea.

"Turn left," the voice on my GPS instructed. I eased my car to a stop, squinting at the dirt path it wanted me to take. It was barely visible in the weak wash of my headlights and rain. Ahead, the main road stretched on endlessly, winding like a ribbon through the forest. I hesitated, and listened to the hum of my car’s engine and the wiper blades. The forest and the darkness closed in around me from all sides. The GPS insisted it would save me three hours. It was midnight and I was getting tired.
I glanced at the clock and sighed. Three hours was too much to waste. I pulled to the side of the road and checked my phone; 3% battery. Not enough to argue. I had forgotten my charger back at my friend’s house I was visiting. Meant to grab another at the gas station but forgot. Stupid. Rummaging through my car I found nothing useful. 2%. Reluctantly, I turned and followed the directions.
Gravel crunched under the tires as I pulled onto the dirt path, the forest closed in tighter with every yard. The branches leaned over the road and scraped against my car like they wanted to peel it open. My grip tightened on the wheel. The road stretched ahead as it grew smaller and bumpier, the headlights swallowing more shadow than ground. And then the phone died. Just like that, black screen, no GPS, nothing. I cursed under my breath and slammed the brakes. My headlights caught the edges of a shack. It was crooked and decaying, its windows boarded up and the roof bowed as if the forest itself was crushing it. I threw the car into reverse, eager to get back to the main road, but when I looked in the mirror, my stomach dropped. The road was gone. Behind me was nothing but trees, dense, tangled, and unbroken. No gravel, no dirt, just an endless wall of black, wet trunks. I swallowed hard, my pulse thundered in my ears. Turning back to the shack, I froze.
A light flickered on in the window.

The light from the sun had dwindled into a soured gold and the dry branches of the forest behind their home, snapped beneath their boots. The constant whine of summer gnats swarmed at their ears, only increasing the half-panicked, half-resigned, trudge down the overgrown path they dared only once each year. No one spoke. Not even the littlest ones. Thomas leaned hard into his eldest son, Levi. He had just turned seventeen, but he was already built like an ox. He was wide at the shoulder and wore the silent endurance of men twice his age. Levi clenched his jaw so tightly it might’ve been carved from granite. Behind them, Caleb bore the sack of chains, and two shovels. Jonah carried more of the same. Miriam held the keys tight to her chest, and a bag of food. Ruth carried the cloth and water. And Anna, their mother, brought up the rear, one hand cupped around her wristwatch, the other worrying the worn beads of her rosary, incense and another shovel. Thomas’s tongue flicked across his cracked lips. No one saw. He did it again, slower this time, tasting something faint and metallic in the air. “We waited too long this year,” he muttered. No one replied.

A bird wailed deep in the trees, something between warning and lament. Thomas staggered. Levi caught his elbow without looking, steadied him, and kept on. Anna checked the watch again. The second hand spun like a wheel unmoored. Then the barn emerged. Not so much built as left behind, sunken into the hill, half-swallowed by willow and pine. Its roof had collapsed inward, but it held. The door… the door still held too. That door had been welded, braced, and welded again. Thomas broke from the boys the moment he saw it. The limp vanished. He ran. “We don’t have much time!” His voice cut through the hush, sharp with fear, almost jubilant. He crashed through the threshold and the boys rushed after. Thomas fell to his knees in the center of the barn, where the anchor posts pierced the earth like the bones of some buried altar. The concrete pads, poured by Caleb’s own hands two summers past, had not cracked. They would hold. “Do it!” Thomas bellowed, already clawing at the posts, trembling fingers searching for the old grooves. “Lock me down!”

The boys moved without hesitation. Rehearsed. Efficient. Chains to the wrists, tight. Pulled upward to the eyelets in the rafters. Ankles shackled and drawn taut to rings sunk in stone. Four bands across the chest, secured fast to the spine of the post. Thomas bucked once. Levi bore down, teeth gritted, pinning him in place while Caleb cinched the final lock. It clicked shut. And the barn fell silent again, except for the sound of Thomas breathing. “Don’t look at his face,” Anna whispered. She said it every year. But Ruth had already looked and Miriam was crying, silent and doubled over, arms clutched around her waist like she could hold herself together that way. Thomas was foaming. Not spit. Something thicker. Membranous. The froth clung to his teeth, now blood-slick and broken from too much grinding. He convulsed in place. The beams trembled, but the locks held.

He bellowed, “I can smell them, Anna. I smell their blood. I smell the heat on their skin.”
“Turn him away!” Anna barked. “Don’t let him see them!” The boys moved fast. Years of doing this had trained them well. They dragged the cross-chain, hauling Thomas until he faced the back wall. He fought like something half-remembered from a cave painting, then let loose a scream, no words, just sound. Raw, animal, scraped from the root of the soul. “It’s time to go, boys! Now!” Anna shouted. The family fled. Their feet thundered across the earth. Eli stumbled on the way out, hands skimming dirt. He turned, just once, as he pulled himself to his feet. And that’s when he saw it. His father’s arched back, an impossible angle, his spine rearing through the shirt like a jagged ridge of stone. Then it split. A clean, violent tear down the center of his back, like a zipper yanked too hard. Something pushed out. Something wet. Bony and vast.

A wing, though it bore no skin, nor feathers. Only tendon stretched over bone, the width of it dwarfing the man who had been Thomas. Hooks curled from the tip like talons. It slammed down against the barn floor, and the entire building groaned. Thomas turned his head, all the way around. His face had begun to unravel. His jaw had unhinged and his eyelashes had grown into long, jointed fingers that clawed down his cheeks and brow, keeping his eyes pried open, so he couldn’t blink, nor look away. His mouth hung open, a black wound where language had once lived.

And then, he looked at Eli. Not past him. At him. And he laughed. It was not a human laugh. It gurgled, cracked and swelled, a perverted, knowing noise that seemed to mock the shape of love itself. Then Anna seized Eli’s hand and yanked him hard. “No,” she said. “Eyes forward. Don’t you ever look back again.” He didn’t. They locked the barn door’s and ran. It wasn’t long after they reached the ravine. The boys were made to dig. This year, the pit went deeper. It changed locations every time. They were never allowed to tell their mother or father where it had been dug. That was part of the rule. “Six feet’s not enough anymore,” Anna muttered. “We’re past tradition now.” Eli dropped into the pit beside his brothers and looked up. Anna stood at the edge, shadowed in dusk. She tossed down the canvas sack, cans, crackers, two jugs of water, two blankets. The boards were laid over the hole. The girls began shoveling dirt back in. “We’ll be back by dawn,” Anna said. “And not a moment before. You hear me? Just stay quiet, baby. Everything’s gonna be fine.” She smiled then. A trembling, beautiful lie. “I promise I’ll see you again.” The hole closed above them.

Aboveground, Anna lit the incense. She and her daughters circled the trees in the half-dark, arms raised, voices whispering prayers too old and broken to mean anything anymore. The smoke drifted around their dresses, thick with salt, sap, and ash. It masked the scent; of skin, of fear…. of sons. Back toward the barn, something screamed. Not a man anymore. Not entirely. But it still had Thomas’s voice and like every year, it was starved.

The world has gone to shit. As soon as I heard the safe zones were for the wealthy and intellectual elite, I knew my family and I didn’t stand a chance. That’s why I was so excited when they offered me the job. “You’ll be assisting the chef,” they said, “you can even move your family in with you.” It felt like a miracle. It wasn't until they segregated and herded us into their pens that I realized their kitchen was already fully staffed.

They buried their mother in April. The rain hadn’t stopped since. It remained cold and consistent, and it soaked through the bones of the old farmhouse, as though the house itself was mourning too. Elin had barely spoken at the funeral. No one expected her to. She was nineteen, the youngest of three, and the only one still living on the farm when it happened. Their father had passed years earlier, and the question of what to do with the house had remained suspended in silence, like so many things. She had died in the kitchen. A sudden hemorrhage. She’d cut herself badly and the wound, paired with a grand mal seizure, had torn through her like lightning. She bled out on the floor, convulsing. The blood seeped through the floorboards and into the grain of the wood. They never quite got the stain out. Elin had found her curled, stiff and glazed in her own red ruin. By May, the house had quieted. Except for Elin’s voice, drifting through the halls at night. Sometimes laughing. Sometimes singing lullabies in a trembling alto. Sometimes speaking softly, intoning recipes, warnings, bedtime prayers, all in their mother’s voice. The siblings let it be. Grief moves in strange shapes.
Marta, the eldest, drove up from the city. Neil came in from Duluth. They brought store-bought pastries and supermarket flowers, unsure whether they were arriving for Mother’s Day as celebration or a wake. Miriam had arrived late the night before, driven in by her husband, Mark, with their three children who now played in the backyard near the old pig pen.
“Where’s Elin?” Marta asked. Miriam nodded toward the stairs. “Still up in Mom’s room. She hasn’t come down yet.” Neil wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“A shit ton of candles,” Miriam said, “it didn’t smell too good when I showed up.” She shrugged and led them to the kitchen, where Mark was half-watching television in the family room. The children laughed outside. Time passed. They knocked on Elin’s door more than once. Each time, she answered, “just a little longer, dears. I’m sorry, just getting ready. Trying to at least.” They let her be. And though sorrow weighed on them, they laid the table on the back patio, just as Elin had said she would. The spring sun was warm and tender as the ghost of a hand no longer present. Tea steamed in chipped porcelain. The children played catch with their father among the tall grass. Mark missed the catch. The ball struck his chest and fell to the ground. He didn’t move. He was staring at the door. The others turned to follow his gaze; and there, in the doorframe, stood Elin. She was hunched over slightly. She wore their mother’s favorite yellow dress, the one with the lace collar and the pearl buttons, though on Elin it sagged off her body. But it wasn’t the dress that stopped their hearts. It was the thing beneath it. Elin, herself. She had dressed herself in their mother’s own exhumed skin. It hung from her in long, sorrowful folds, withered and puckered. Loosened by rot, it clung to her petite frame in tatters of leather and lace, still damp in the creases, yet papery and yellowing at the edges. Where the flesh had dried, it cracked like porcelain; where it remained wet, it glistened obscenely. The scalp had been laid atop Elin’s own, the thinning hair combed and curled, pinned in place with their mother’s combs. The hairline didn’t quite fit either. Stray strands clung to Elin’s temples. The seams had been sutured with coarse thread drawn tight at the throat, looped crudely through the shoulder blades, cinched at the spine like the lacing of a corset too cruelly pulled. Here and there, the stitching failed. Skin sagged like a too large garment draped across a too small body, drooping in deflated hollows meant for heavier breasts, longer arms and broader bones. The face had been flayed and stretched to fit Elin’s contours. The forehead was too small, the jaw too slack. The lips had been tugged into a grotesque simulacrum of a smile, puckered and stitched at one corner where the tension had torn through. The eyes were ruined. One lid drooped, sealed by age and decay; the other hung open, bone-dry, ringed with a bruise that was not Elin’s. From the socket where her mother’s left eye had once blinked, came Elin’s own eyebrow, poking out through the hollow like a weed growing from a grave. And beneath it all, the neck skin wobbled with each breath, folds of it shuddering with the rise and fall of Elin’s heavy breathing. It hung like a second throat below her own, as though both lives were struggling to speak at once. From her wrists dangled the hands, limp and long, finger-flesh like rotted tulip stems, swaying with the slow, uncertain rhythm of her steps. They were lifeless, yes, but not still: the loosened skin flapped moistly, left to right, with each hand gesture she made. Beneath the hem of the yellow dress trailed the skin of their mother’s feet, flopping grotesquely with each staggered stride. Her mother’s skin hung from her like a child wearing their parent’s night gown. Elin lifted her arms. “Come here, children,” she said. “Don’t you want to hug your mother?” The children screamed. Still, she stepped forward. The skin at her knees tore and one pinned shoulder slipped free. Beneath the flayed mask of their mother’s face, Elin’s own mouth pressed outward, smiling where the dead lips had no strength to follow. The borrowed flesh rippled with every shudder, clinging in some places, peeling in others. And yet she walked. She smiled, and where her teeth met the cheek of the corpse, the skin caved inward, like wet paper pressed against bones. “I want to see my grandbabies.”

They say I live in a hidden hut deep within the endless reeds that stretch beyond the riverbanks. They warn their children and travelers alike not to stray too far, not to listen to the reeds’ soft rustling, for fear of what waits within. I watch them from that same place as I wait. Some claim I eat those who wander too close; others insist I take those who sleep too deeply. But they’ve heard other stories too, of a growling that echoes deep in the cattails, like the rumble of a disturbed, ravenous belly.
I can’t remember who I was but I know I’m not from here, and the sun is merciless, baking the sand so hot it blisters my bare feet. It doesn’t matter. The beast won’t let me dress and it traps me under its weight during daylight hours, pinning me against its slick, heaving flesh. They say my hair is made of tongues, tasting the air as I stalk. They aren’t far from the truth. They slap against my bare back, dragging pools of saliva across my shoulders, twitching with anticipation. They only stop when they taste flesh. Only then does the burning on my scalp fade, but the relief is always brief.
Tonight, the beast is restless, I can hear its stomach groaning. I nearly didn’t make it back before dawn. I slipped into the village, gliding between huts and houses where families slept. They don’t know I’m there, licking their bodies, tasting their skin. That’s when the tongues go still. That’s when I know, I've found one. “Shh… Shh…” I whispered to the child. His eyes blinked open, and I beckoned him with a finger. He followed silently, as they always do, his small feet padded against the ground as I led him into the bramble. My hut rests among them, in the water, always shifting, always moving with the wind.
Inside, the air is heavy with mold but that back room is darker still. The beast waits there, sprawling across the floor, its body a mass of fetid flesh. It reeks of decay, and its skin, moist and blackened, shimmers like oil slicks under the moonlight. Half-formed limbs twitch along its sides, clawing at the ground. It doesn’t see me, it has no eyes, only the faint suggestion of hollows where a face might have once been. It smells me though, its nostrils flare as its jagged mouth stretches open, revealing rows of teeth that shift and grind like millstones. The sound vibrates through the walls as it breathes its command. I lay down over whatever face it has left and let my hair dangle in front of its mouth, ensuring it can taste the meals I bring back for it. I try to satisfy it, but the beast never is.

By the time Reverend Ames returned to home, the town was more rust than wood, more remembered outline than place. Weeds split the roads open. The chapel windows blinked dust instead of light. There was no one left. His childhood home had collapsed into a den, first claimed by animals, then abandoned again when the roots finished their work. The church endured. Warped, leaning, but upright. Inside, the pews were gray. A bird’s nest crowned the pulpit. Something had died beneath the floorboards long ago; the stench had thinned with time, leaving only a faint, sour memory, like the town itself. He slept on a cot in the back room. He’d slept there before. He lit no fire. Used no lights. Each morning, he rose before dawn and worked until darkness erased the edges of things. Quiet work. Careful work. He patched the roof, scrubbed mildew, hauled away glass. Near the tree line he dug with a shovel whose grip had long since worn smooth. Some nights the moon hung over the steeple while he still cut into the earth. He dug until his hands blistered, until his fingers went numb. Then he dug more. No one asked why. There was no one left to ask. No one left to tell. Inside the chapel, he polished the offering plate. He stitched his robe with fishing wire. Among nettles and milkweed he found lilies. He set them on the altar with aching hands and as he watered them he thought back on better times. He practiced his sermon in fragments. Sunday came along and Ames stood at the pulpit. He let the silence bloom like incense. Then he opened his eyes and smiled. The joy of return. Of belonging. “Good morning,” he said, “He is risen.” They sat upright and attentive in their Sunday clothes. The townsfolk he had exhumed, his new congregation. “I’d like to thank you all for coming,” he said steadily. His Bible fell open and its pages slipped free, drifting down like brittle leaves. He smiled at his mother in the front row, propped up with wires and dowels, she still had some scraps of skin on her too. He picked up the papers and he smiled at old friends, “It’s so good to be home.”

I came to on the kitchen floor, choking on nothing. Each breath scraped my throat like glass. I blinked hard against the fluorescents. I tried to remember where I was, who I was. The lab coats. The needles. Were they a dream? The fragments were there. Everything hurt. But not in any way I’d ever known. This wasn’t bruising. This wasn’t soreness. This was wrong. Like my body had been repossessed. My skin felt too tight, drawn thin over bones that weren’t mine anymore, like I’d been rebuilt with the blueprints of something else. “Hello?” Something wet hit the floor. I turned my head and saw it. My tongue. My own damn tongue, twitching against the linoleum like it was trying to crawl away. Panic swelled. I tried to rise, but my arm folded under me. Collapsing in on itself. The bones were gone. I looked down and my legs were missing too. No stumps, no blood. Just... gone; and in their place: pale, wet coils of segmented flesh, twitching spasmodically. My skin, or what was left of it, had gone translucent in places, revealing a grotesque theater underneath: veins turned black and ropy. Beneath the surface, something moved. Something tried to push through. I scrambled back, and my palms left a smear, a puddle of mucus. Pain barely registered. It was eclipsed by the deeper horror, that I was inside something I didn’t understand. My body wasn’t mine. It was a costume that had melted in the sun. I caught my reflection in the oven door, warped by grime and heat and horror. And there I was. Or some version of me. My eyes were bulged too wide, they were lidless and raw. My nose had collapsed into a flat ridge. My lips had vanished, leaving only a trembling slit of muscle. And then, the knock. A calm, almost polite rapping at the front door. And a voice: “Hey, big boy. how ya’ doin in there?” I froze. There was a window there, and he was watching me. He made some kissing noises, like you do to call a dog over. I fought it but I couldn’t help but follow him.

The final note hangs, thin as wire, flawless. Silence cups it. Then the room detonates. Applause crashes over me, a surf so loud I lose my breath inside it. I bow, smiling the way I was taught to smile, heat drilling into my face from the lights. Something is off. The sound doesn’t fall away. It thickens. I squint into the house and see what the noise is doing to them. Hands coming together too hard, again and again, faces locked in bright, broken grins. The clapping doesn’t slow; it accelerates. Their skin splits and blood freckles the air. Palms burst and keep going. Bone knocks bone, no one recoils. Their eyes stay pinned on me, like if they stop I won’t exist. Backstage should muffle it. It doesn’t. The applause swells, hammering the doors until the hinges cry. My manager squeezes my shoulder, “You should be grateful,” he says. “They’re here for you.” They chant and they scream and they clap and they bleed. Barriers fold. Bodies pour through the hall. A girl without fingers keeps time with red stumps. Another woman, arms snapped loose at the elbows, can’t clap anymore, so she throws her head into the wall, again and again, painting it dark, trying to make the sound. When her eyes catch mine, there’s relief in them. As if I’ve forgiven her. Security drags me out. The limo door open, cameras burst like flares. I’m inside, but they’re already there too. The lot is a single organism, climbing itself, pressing against the glass. Their hands peel to bone and the applause turns meaty. A man’s arm tears free and he keeps going, they never stop smiling. The tires scream and so do they, they never stop. It lives in my chest now. It judges. It grows. Home is worse. My phone vibrates with it, videos, loops of smiling mouths and ruined hands. Our queen deserves this. We’ll give everything. The TV is only me: my face, my song, my habits dissected and replayed. Clapping drowns the anchors. A corner bug blinks: #ClapForHer. I can’t remember where I end. Neither can they. From my bed, Malibu glassed and black, I see them at the windows, clapping for what they think I am. What frightens me isn’t that they’ll never stop. It’s that one day they will and when the sound dies, I’ll be hollowed out, unrecognizable, holding the echo where a self used to be.

I watch them during the day. Families laughing on their porches, kids racing their bikes down the street or tossing a ball. I watch the sweat glisten off the back of a man mowing his lawn. I watch a woman’s skin turn golden as she tans in her backyard. I see all of them as I watch from this house my parents abandoned. My father died years back, but my mother still comes to toss groceries and garbage over the fence sometimes. On special occasions, like every other few birthdays, I’ll find a letter folded neatly on the front step. Her words are always distant, practical, but her message never changes; I’m something better left unseen and she wishes she never had me. I don’t leave during the day. I wouldn’t dare. Only after midnight, when the world feels emptied and the air is cool and quiet. Balm makes that possible. It coats every inch of my body, swabbing the folds of my flesh. Without it, the cracks deepen, they split me apart and I’ll bleed if I don’t keep it hydrated. The lotion stings, but it works. It lets me get out of the house for a second. I roam the neighborhood streets, and I imagine what it would feel like to be part of their world, to sit at their tables, to call their names… maybe even, I don’t know… to be wanted. Sometimes I stop at their windows. I stand in the shadows, watching them as they sleep. A child curled on a couch under a patchwork blanket; a couple tangled together in bed with their faces peaceful in a way mine could never be. They look so at ease, as if the very air they breathe tells them they belong. I press my hands to the glass and imagine stepping inside. The warmth. The laughter. The way they might look at me with something other than disgust. Last night, as I stood in the shadow of a house at the end of the street, a little boy saw me. His small face pressed against the window; his hand rose to meet mine. He didn’t scream, didn’t run. His eyes looked into mine, they were curious and unafraid and for a moment; I let myself believe. I pictured sitting beside him, helping him build towers out of blocks, reading to him, tucking him into bed. I imagined him laughing with me, maybe even calling me brother. Maybe Dad. But then the light in his room flicked on, and my reflection bloomed in the glass. The sight of myself, patches of oil glistening over peeling, chapped skin and cracks leaking faint trails of pus, ripped the fantasy away. There’s no way anyone could want me. No way anyone could love me. I stumbled back into the darkness as his mother appeared. I ran, each step deepening the crevices in my skin. The salt in the night air burned where it touched raw flesh, and by the time I reached my house, I could barely move. I smeared more balm over my wounds, but it wasn’t enough to fill my loneliness. It never is.

They call it Marrviðr, the Sea’s Wood, a word spoken sideways, like you don’t want it to hear you. In the harbors it’s a joke told with dry mouths, a fisherman’s fable meant to scare children away from night tides. I meet Erik in Istanbul, where the water is all commerce and promises. He smells of salt and old nets. He tells me there is money waiting at the edge of the map, and a kind of fame that doesn’t wash off. He smiles as if he’s already been paid. Though, his eyes don’t join in. Iceland’s black sands swallow sound. The beach looks burned, as if the earth tried to cauterize itself and failed. Erik’s certainty thins out there. He stares at the surf as if counting breaths. Something crouches behind his confidence, something that keeps touching the back of his throat. Guilt has weight. You can see it pulling him forward. The night splits open with aurora. Erik stiffens. He lifts a hand and points toward a pale sway near the tide, a lantern’s ghost bobbing where no boat should be. “There,” he says. We walk and the light wobbles closer. Erik stops. The apology comes small, like something he practiced until it lost meaning. “I’m sorry.” His skin gives first, it balloons and sags, sloughing down his arms in sheets, exposing muscle that twitches like hooked bait. His face collapses inward. The man pours out of himself. He hits the sand and moves the way a thing with no spine moves, contracting and releasing, dragging what’s left of him toward the surf. He makes a sound like air leaking from a tire and the sea answers.
A hum crawls up through my boots, it is a deep and timbered noise, the sound of a ship breaking. The water parts and Marrviðr rises. Enormous antlers lift out of the water. The body follows, a cathedral of wreckage: knotted timbers fused with rusted chain and clotted barnacles. Kelp ropes swell and tighten as it loops around its limbs. Its belly is a cage. Rot-soft beams glow faintly from within, lantern glass trapped between ribs of wood and bone. Faces press against that light, men flattened by water. The head is a reef, coral layered on coral and water seeps constantly from its pores. Its eyes are holes full of moving sea, and its glare pins me in place. Marrviðr bends. The beach slopes up into it like an offering. It draws Erik in with a wet, patient pull. What’s left of him slides across the sand and disappears into that glowing hollow. The gaze finds me. For a breath I am certain I will follow, that the beach will tip and I’ll be fed forward like everything else. Instead, the great head tilts. It considers. Pain lances my back. My skin opens along my ribs in neat, decisive seams, and something new pushes out; gills. I choke, then breathe. The air tastes of metal and rain and depth. My lungs learn a different way. Marrviðr looks past me, toward the cliffs and the world beyond them, where lights still promise safety. I understand the bargain as clearly as if it’s been carved into my bones. I turn inland, the tide whispering approval behind me, and begin the walk home, carrying the sea’s hunger where my breath used to be.

I know it’s December, but the house feels colder than it should. Even with the fireplace roaring, the cold has crept into the walls, into us. Dad tries his best, he really does. He’s cheerful when he can manage it, setting up games and baking cookies, turning up Christmas movies so loud you can’t hear much else. But I see the cracks. The worry in his face. I hear him crying at night when he thinks we’re asleep, with his sobs that’re muffled against the couch where he now sleeps beside us instead of with Mom.
Mom’s sickness started small, like a shadow creeping in. “Just a fever,” Dad said, but it didn’t leave. Her skin turned pale and her breath became shallow, her voice began slipping away into a rasp that didn’t sound like it came from her at all. The doctors didn’t know what it was, and Dad followed every instruction they gave: soup, medicine, tea. Nothing worked. By the second week, her hair started to fall out in clumps, her nails too. Her eyes sank into her skull, and sometimes she stared right past me, her lips twitching, like she was trying to remember who I was. I loved her. I was scared of her, but I loved her. “Hi, Mommy,” I would whisper, sitting by her bed each night, dampening a cloth for her forehead. “You’re so beautiful tonight.” At first, she’d nod, even squeeze my hand. But then, one night, her lips parted, and her tongue slid out. I’ll never forget the way she looked at me then. Dad stopped letting us into her room after that. “She just needs rest,” he said, but I saw the tears in his eyes. I saw the chains too, and the padlocks, though I never dared ask what they were for. By Christmas Eve, the house was silent, too silent, the banging and wailing that had been coming from her room had been placed by an eerie stillness. Dad didn’t feed her that night. “She’s sleeping,” he said, locking us all in the room we now shared. I tried to sleep, but I woke to the sound of footsteps down the hall and Dad’s whispered voice. “Go back to bed,” he told me. “Santa’s here.”
I believed him.
Christmas morning came, and I threw off my blanket in excitement. “It’s Chri—” My words died in my throat. My brother’s bed was soaked in red, the sheets clinging to his small, limp body. Mom was hunched over him, her hair stringy and matted, her jaw slack as she dropped him to the floor. His face, or what was left of it, was unrecognizable. She looked at me then, and for a moment, there was something in her sunken eyes, something almost human.
“Mom?” I croaked, stepping back off my bed. Her head twitched, the bones in her neck cracked as her mouth opened impossibly wide. I bolted for the door, screaming for Dad, but tripped over him in the hallway. His rib cage and been ripped out and his chest and stomach fell all over the floor. I ran into the snow, barefoot and screaming. Behind me I could hear her labored breaths growing louder. She tackled me just outside the neighbor’s house, her hands clawing into my shoulders, dragging me deeper into the snow. I twisted, kicked and thrashed, but she was too strong. “It’s me, Mama!” I sobbed, reaching for her face. For a moment, I thought she stopped. Her eyes flickered, her hands loosening. “Please, it’s me.”
Then her jaw snapped shut around my nose, I screamed as she chewed it off. I don’t know how I lived. I crawled back inside as blood dripped from my face, watching her stumble toward the neighbor’s house. I thought I was safe. I thought it was over. But now, I’m not so sure. My skin feels cold, and my head hurts so badly. I’m not sure why I did, but I wrapped the chains in my mom’s room around me. I don’t know why, but there weren’t any fireworks for the new year this year… I’m just so hungry.

The bells are what woke me, jingling in the dark like a predator circling its prey. My eyes snapped open, and before I could reach for the light, they were there—thin, gaunt figures hovering at the foot of my bed. Their bodies and limbs were unnaturally long, their faces smeared with soot and their skin was stretched thin over hollow, sunken eyes. They moved like smoke, binding me with thick, frayed cords before I could scream. The last thing I saw was the dark mouth of the chimney as they hauled me upward, the rough stone scraping my head before everything went black. When I woke, the air was damp and cold, reeking of iron and mildew. I was strapped to a metal slab. Beside me, a man just as large as me thrashed weakly on his own table, his eyes bulging in terror. To my right, a heavier-set woman sobbed into her gag, her body shaking as the room filled with wet, sucking sounds. The searing fire in my gut pulled my attention downward, and I gasped, craning my neck to see a thick rubber tube writhing beneath my skin like a parasite, draining me. The creatures moved around me, pressing into my folds as they guided the pipeline further up my body. My eyes followed the conduit as it snaked above us, weaving through dozens of others, each carrying a stream of thick, yellow gelatinous grease, dumping it into a suspended glass globe, like a grotesque ornament. From the bottom of the globe, a hose branched off, winding its way toward another table at the center of all of us. Draped over a nearby chair and next to a pair of large brown leather boots-a red coat, pants and a crimson sash. The hose split into smaller tubes tipped with large needles, each plunged deep into the body of a man on the gurney. His flesh and belly jiggled like jelly as the injections pumped our stolen oils into him.

I would never purposefully make them mad. I’m just a kid after all, but it’s like walking on eggshells around them, one wrong word, one slow response, and it’s over. I try so hard to make them happy, I want their love like any child would. I try my hardest to be a good boy for them, I try so hard to avoid what comes next. “Just for a couple days,” they always say. This morning, I made a pretty big mistake, I broke my mom’s favorite dish. I tried to glue it back together but I'm no good at stuff like that. It was an accident, but that didn’t matter to them. When I look into their eyes begging for their love, I don't know... I don't even know if they've ever even wanted me.
This time though, it almost sounded like she was sad. My father lowered me into the ground. I could barely make out her words through the dirt hitting the wooden slats: “It’s the only way you’re going to learn.”
It’s dark down here, darker than normal. So dark it feels like the shadows are squirming on my skin. I used to scream and bang my fists against the coffin until they bled, but I’ve learned better, that only makes it worse in the end. I don’t know how long it’s been this time, but I know that I'm starting not to feel very well. My voice cracks as I try to whisper, “I’m ready to come out now,” but it’s so faint I’m not even sure it’s real. This time, I'm getting really scared that they meant what they said: “Next time, we’ll leave you down there for good.” I pray they don't mean that. "I'm sorry mama, please don't leave me.”

I don’t know who to believe. When the lights aren't on, Mr. Giggles never stops whispering that my mom's a liar. My mother insists he’s just a figment of my imagination, something I’ll grow out of. But I can’t ignore how much he resembles the man in the photo by her bed, the one she says is my father. She told me he gave his life for us overseas, that he’s gone forever, and there’s nothing more to it. But if she’s telling the truth, if the man in the picture is dead and he really was my father… then who’s tickling my feet at night?

This Thanksgiving feels heavier than ever—my younger brother passed a few months ago, and this’ll be our first holiday without him. I dreaded seeing Mom, knowing how heartbroken she’d be. I took a hit from my pipe, tucked it away in the console, and walked up to the house, putting my dad’s shovel to the side before stepping inside.
I was surprised to find my sisters already there, laughing in the kitchen with my mom. My dad gave me an absentminded wave from the couch as he watched the game. I walked over to my older brother, threw a playful punch, kissed my sisters on the cheek, and pulled Mom in for a long hug. “You doin' okay, Mom?” I asked, noticing the slight tremble in her smile. She rubbed my arms, took a steadying breath, and nodded. “I’m okay,” she said softly, quickly glancing at the oven. When the timer buzzed, I grabbed the oven mitts and pulled out the meat. It was already carved and taken off the bone. "Smells good, Mama," my dad said, walking over to the sink to wash some dirt from underneath his fingernails.