Dry branches snapped beneath their boots like brittle bones. Summer gnats swarmed at their ears, a constant whine in the hush between footfalls. The light had gone gold, casting long, aching shadows over their faces as they trudged, half-panicked, half-resigned, 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, just seventeen, carried him without protesting it. Already wide at the shoulder, already wearing 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 were 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. I hear her talking, but she hasn’t come down yet.” Neil wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?”
“A lot 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 down the steps. The children shrieked with laughter outside. Time passed. They knocked on Elin’s door more than once. Each time, she answered through tears. “Just a little longer,” she said. “I’m sorry, just getting ready. Trying to at least.”

So, 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 pressed gently upon their shoulders, warm and tender as the ghost of a hand no longer present. Tea steamed in chipped porcelain. The children laughed and played catch with their father among the tall grass.

Mark missed the catch. The ball struck his chest and fell to the ground. He did not 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 from her frame.

But it was not 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 rusted combs. The hairline did not 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 frame, 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 ruin. 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, arcing 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 flung wetly, 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 bone. “I want to see my grandchildren,” she said, in the best imitation of their mother’s voice, like velvet pulled tightly over broken stone.

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 that smells of rot. They say my hair is made of tongues, tasting the air as I stalk. They aren’t far from the truth. Each tongue slithers and writhes, curling at the nape of my neck before stretching outward, searching. 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 with hunger. 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 padding 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 and the walls sag with rancidity but the back room is darker still. The beast waits there, its bulk 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 as though trying to escape its own body. 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 flaring 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 meal I’ve brought back for it. Ensuring that it is satisfied. But the beast never is.

By the time Reverend Ames returned to Harrow’s Hollow, the town was more rust than wood, more fragmented memory than place. Weeds had burst through every crack in the roads. The windows in the chapel blinked dust instead of light. He didn’t speak to anyone when he came home. There wasn’t anyone left to speak to. His childhood home had been reduced to a place where feral animals had once raised their own young, then moved on themselves as the roots took over. The church was still standing, somehow. Warped and leaning, but upright nonetheless, more like an old man who refused to kneel, than a structure of worship. The pews were gray with age and motes of dirt. A bird’s nest clung to the pulpit like a crown and something had died under the floorboards, the smell had been strong but with the amount of time that had gone by, it too, much like his hometown, had faded, only remnants remained. Ames slept in the back room on a cot that smelled of mold and ashes. He had slept there before, on more than one occasion in his youth, and he didn’t mind the return. He lit no fire, and he used no lights. Each morning, he rose before the sun and worked until it was too dark to see. Quiet work. Lonely work. Careful and repetitive. He patched holes in the roof. Scrubbed mildew from the walls. Hauled away broken glass. Dug into the ground near the tree line with a shovel that had no handle grip. Some nights, he was still digging when the moon was high above the steeple. He dug for a week, he dug until he couldn't, his hands became a congregation of blisters, and he could no longer feel his fingers. Then, he dug some more. No one ever asked what for. Nor did he tell anyone. There was no one left to ask, and there was no one left for him to tell. 
In the chapel, he polished the brass offering plate until it caught the candlelight like a sunken coin. He mended the torn hem of his robe with fishing wire, the stitch work was clumsy but devout nonetheless. Every candle was put to use, even the stubs, blackened and too short to be of service in any other house but this one. On Holy Saturday, he wandered into the overgrown field behind the church, where the meadow spilled into a ravine long forgotten by maps. There, among nettles and milkweed, he found lilies, white and soft as breath. They smelled faintly of soap and something sour, like old rain left in a tin pail. He arranged them on the altar with hands aching from effort and memory. He watered them with his tears, unthinking, as he remembered the sound of laughter beneath a high-beamed ceiling, the shuffling of hymnals and the creak of pews filled with the living. There, he practiced his sermon in fragments, half-murmured, half-prayed, his voice small and aching as it echoed through the hollow nave.

Easter Sunday arrived quiet and cold. The morning light was the color of ash, the kind of gray that forgets spring ever existed. Reverend Ames stood behind the pulpit. His eyes were closed and his robe pressed to his frame like it still remembered the man he used to be. The sanctuary was still. No birds sang. No wind moved through the beams. No one breathed. He let the silence bloom, filling the chapel like incense. He let it fill him. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and smiled. It was not a weak smile. Not a desperate one either. But the kind born from some unshakable joy. The joy of return. Of belonging. As if, for a moment, life had never left this place, and the hollow inside him had not been carved so deep.
“Good morning,” he said softly. There was no reply. There was no footsteps, nor coughs. There was no voice but his. He bowed his head and whispered, “He is risen.”
They sat still and attentive. Upright and dressed in their Sunday best. The townsfolk he had exhumed, his new congregation.
Their faces hung slack and collapsed by rot. Some were little more than bone in moth-eaten coats, others looked halfway to living, with dirt still clinging to their sleeves, and moss curling behind their ears. One had no face at all. The smell was sweet and wrong. Like lilies that had grown in muck and stagnant river water. “I’d like to thank you all for coming,” he said. His voice didn’t tremble. He opened his Bible and the pages fluttered and fell to the floor like brittle leaves. He smiled at his mother, who he had propped up carefully in the front row, held together by wires and dowel rods. Only scraps of skin clung to her bones, like tissue left in the rain. He smiled at his friends and at the faces of the town he once knew. At the empty eyes that watched him with perfect stillness. “It’s so good to be home,” he said, “Happy Easter everyone!”

I came to on the kitchen floor, choking on nothing, my lungs convulsing like they were trying to vomit air. Each breath scraped my throat like glass. I blinked hard against the burning white above, fluorescents buzzing like flies in a jar. I tried to remember where I was, who I was. The lab coats. The needles. Were they a dream? The fragments were there, jagged and shifting, refusing to come to fully show themselves. 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?” I tried to say, but it came out slurred, thick, disturbed. Something wet hit the floor. I turned my head and saw it. My tongue. My own damn tongue, slack and gray, twitching against the linoleum like it was trying to crawl away. Panic swelled. I tried to rise, but my arm folded under me, not broken. Just... folding. Collapsing in on itself like a puppet with its strings cut. The bones were gone. I looked down and my legs were missing. No stumps, no blood. Just... gone. In their place: pale, wet coils of segmented flesh, twitching spasmodically, blind and slick like something born in the dark. My skin, or what was left of it, had gone translucent in places, revealing a grotesque theater underneath: veins turned black and ropy, wriggling like roots through rotting earth. Beneath the surface, something moved. Something tried to push through. I scrambled back, and my palms left a smear, a puddle of something viscous. 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, rolling in their sockets like they wanted out. My nose had collapsed into a flat ridge. My lips had vanished, leaving only a trembling slit of muscle, twitching like it still thought it could speak.

And then, the knock. A calm, almost polite rapping at the front door. And a voice: “It’s time.” I froze. There was a window there, and what looked like a double sided mirror. They were watching. Recording. Waiting for me. And that’s when the betrayal came. Not from them. From me. My muscles spasmed, seized. The slick, segmented limbs beneath me began to writhe with purpose. I tried to resist, but it was like wrestling a river. My hands, clawed now, and wet. They dragged behind me, scraping against my protest as the new flesh took over. Slithering forward. Obedient. Almost Eager. I was being taken somewhere. And I was the one doing it too, against my will. Whatever they turned me into... it remembered how to obey. And it didn’t care that I was still inside, screaming.

The final note hangs over them all, trembling with perfection. For a moment, there’s silence. Then the applause begins. A tidal wave of sound erupts, drowning out my own breathing. I bow, my smile wide and practiced under the heat of the lights, but something feels… wrong.

The clapping doesn’t stop.

At first, I think it’s enthusiasm, but as I squint into the crowd, I see it: their hands slamming together harder and harder, their faces frozen in wide, rictus grins. I stand there with my guitar, trying to catch my breath but the clapping doesn’t stop. Blood splatters from their palms as skin tears and bones crack, but no one flinches. Their eyes shine, fixed on me like I’m the only thing keeping them alive.

Security ushers me backstage, but the applause doesn’t stop. It only grows louder, swelling like a storm battering against the building. The heavy doors groan under the weight of the crowd pressing against them. “You should be thankful,” my manager says, “they’re here for you.” But the fans don’t chant my name. They don’t scream or cry. They clap. And they bleed.

They surge past the barriers, a tide of bodies crashing through the hall, relentless and unstoppable. One girl, her hands stripped of most of her fingers, keeps clapping with raw, bleeding stumps. The sound is sickening, but her face remains locked in an expression of euphoric devotion, her hollow eyes shining with something far beyond admiration. Another woman, her arms twisted awkwardly from fractures that dangle them uselessly at her sides, throws herself against the wall with a force that makes the concrete shudder. Her head snaps back and forth violently, smashing into the surface with sharp, wet cracks. Blood streaks the wall in wide, glistening arcs as she bangs again and again, desperate to replicate the sound of clapping. Her eyes turn to lock onto mine, blazing with an unsettling worship, as though I am her only salvation.

Security yanks me toward the exit. Outside, my driver waits by the limo, the door open and ready. The flashes of cameras burst around him like fireworks, cutting through the night in sharp, dazzling bursts. I climb into the car, gasping for breath as he shuts the door behind me.

But they’re already there.

The fans flood the parking lot, pressing against the car, climbing over one another in a frantic, writhing mass. Their arms twist unnaturally as they claw at the windows, their hands shredding down to the bone. The clapping turns to moist, meaty thuds. One man’s arm finally breaks off entirely, dangling by a few threads before it snaps free. But even then, he doesn’t stop. He slams the bloody stump against the window, his face still grinning, his eyes alive with manic joy. The driver floors it, the tires screeching as the limo tears away from the scene. But the sound follows me. The applause. The judgment. It never fades. If anything, it only grows louder, pounding in my ears, vibrating in my chest. And no matter how far I go, I know they’re still clapping.

At home, the silence doesn’t comfort me. The applause isn’t just in my ears anymore, it’s in my chest, my head, and in my phone. A vibration I can’t shake. I check my socials, they’re filled with videos of the crowd, bloody and smiling, climbing over fences and trampling one another just to reach me. One caption reads: “Our queen deserves this.” Another: “We’ll give everything for her.” I turn on the TV to escape it, but every channel is showing the same thing, me. My face, my voice, my song, what I wear, what I eat, if I sneeze and how I walk, all looped over and over. The sound of clapping drowns out the anchors, the commercials, everything. In the corner of the screen is a small logo: #ClapForHer. I realize I don’t know who I am anymore. They don’t either. I’m not a person to them, just a vessel for their obsession. And they’ll destroy themselves and me to prove it.

I turn over in my bed and look out my big glass windows that look over Malibu and the ocean. They’re there too, against the windows, slobbering and clapping… Putting their faith in all the wrong places. But deep down, what really scares me, is I know I won’t last long and their clapping will fade and I will be left not knowing who or what I am. I will wither away and when they see me, like I see myself now, they won’t even recognize the person I inhabit.

I watch them through the cracks in my blinds during the day. Families laughing on their porches, kids racing their bikes down the street or tossing a ball back and forth. I watch the sweat glisten off the back of a man mowing his lawn. I watch a woman’s skin turn golden as she’s kissed by the sun, tanning in her backyard. I see all of them as I watch from this house my parents abandoned long ago. My father died years back, or at least that’s what I’ve heard. My mother still comes sometimes, but she never stays. She tosses groceries over the fence like she’s feeding something dangerous. 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.

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, do I step outside. Balm makes that possible. Thick, greasy, and foul-smelling, like burnt pennies. It coats every inch of my body, swabbing the folds of my flesh. Without it, the cracks deepen, splitting me apart until I bleed and rot where I stand. The balm stings, but it works. It lets me move. It allows me to wander. Barefoot, I roam the neighborhood streets, my fingers trailing over fences and mailboxes as I imagine what it would feel like to be part of their world, to sit at their tables, to call their names… 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 rising to meet mine on the glass. He didn’t scream, didn’t run. His eyes, heavy with sleep, looked into mine, curious and unafraid. 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, pulling him away from the window.

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. Back inside, I smeared more balm over my wounds, but it wasn’t enough to fill my loneliness. It never is.

They called it Marrviðr, the Sea’s Wood, a myth the locals only whispered about. I met Erik, a fisherman, in Istanbul, where he promised riches and fame if we could prove its existence. On Iceland’s black sands, his confidence wavered, but there was something else in his eyes… guilt. “There,” he rasped one night, pointing toward a faint, swaying light near the tide. As we approached, Erik froze. He turned to me, “I’m sorry,” is all he said. His skin bloated and sagged like wet fabric, peeling away from his muscles and bone. He collapsed to the sand like a writhing slug as he squirmed toward the waves.
A deep hum, like the splintering of a ship, rumbled from beneath the sea. Marrviðr rose from the shadows of the waves, its towering antlers scraping the northern lights. Its body an unholy mass of gnarled driftwood, rusted chains, and barnacles that clicked like grinding teeth. Ropes of seaweed pulsed through its limbs like veins while its hollow stomach glowed like a cage of rotted timber and bone that trapped shattered lanterns and the agonized faces of drowned men. Its head was a writhing reef of coral, endlessly pouring water from its pours and its void-like eyes churned with the ocean that watched me with cold precision.
Marrviðr bent low, its jagged limbs creaking as it slurped Erik’s bloated body into its mouth. I watched him slide into its waterlogged belly, as he began dissolving slowly. Marrviðr’s hollow gaze shifted to me, and for a moment, I thought I was next. But it paused, tilting its head as it considered me. Pain shot through my back as my skin split, and gills bloomed along my ribs. I gasped, breathing the water-laden air with ease. Marrviðr looked past me, toward the world beyond the cliffs. I knew then, I was to bring home another.

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.
Her voice was softer this time, almost sad, as 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 been 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.

My kids tease me every Thanksgiving, both for my collection of air-fresheners and for hoarding all the leftovers, but they don’t understand—it was passed down from my Grandpa. Just like I do now, he’d grin and say, “Leave it here; I’ll put them to good use.” I had to have been about ten when I left my Gameboy inside after everyone else had gone. The door was unlocked, so I slipped back in, calling, “Just grabbin' somethin', Grandpa!” He didn’t respond—just a low, heavy breathing drifted up from the basement. Curious, I crept down the stairs, surprised to find it too, unlocked; it was never unlocked. The smell hit me first, sour and putrid, like spoiled meat. At the bottom of the stairs, I froze. Grandpa was sprawled out naked, lying on a mound of rotting turkey skins. Stuffing, congealed gravy and slick tendons, all piled up into his throne, how did he get so much of it? His eyes were half-lidded and his chest rose and fell with peaceful breaths. I backed away with my stomach churning. That memory forever seared itself into my mind as I quietly slipped out of the house and into my parent’s car. My mom looked back at me, "What's that smile for?" she asked. That same smell follows me now, but I’ve made sure to buy more than one lock.

The engine sputtered and died, leaving me stranded on the loneliest stretch of I-80. I was heading to Cali, chasing the same dream so many had before me. “Gonna make it big,” I’d told my folks before I left, but like always, they just laughed at me. The salt flats stretched endlessly around me, and under the full moon, it looked like a frozen ocean. I stepped out of the car, cursing my luck as the salt under my boot crunched. Smoke billowed from the hood, curling into the night, and that’s when I saw it—just beyond the haze. Maybe someone had stopped to help? I checked my phone, no bars. "Hey!" I called, forcing a smile. "Any chance you’ve got service?" The figure didn’t move, didn’t answer. It just stood there, swaying slightly from left to right, like a pendulum. My chest tightened, but I stepped toward it, the beam of my phone’s flashlight trembling in my hand. The air grew heavier, and the salt beneath my feet seemed to shift, alive with anticipation. Then I heard it: a wet, dragging sound, followed by gurgling, like something savoring the moment. My heart pounded as I turned to get back to my car. But it was already behind me. An old man with wisps of hair barely clinging to his scalp. Its body crusted with salt that glittered like shards of glass embedded in rotting muscle. The salt preserved what was left, but patches of decay clung to its body, the flesh peeling away like wet paper. Its wings—if you could call them that—were enormous, grotesque hands sprouting from its back. The fingers dragged on the ground, the nails scraping deep grooves in the salt, twitching and curling as though they had a will of their own. Its face had no eyes, just sunken pits burned shut like withered raisins. Yet, I felt its gaze—a suffocating weight that rooted me to the spot. It convulsed as it spoke, its words rasping out like a grandfather that knows his time is coming soon, “You... shouldn’t... be here.” The wings snapped open with a sickening crack, the fingers curling and flexing like claws. Before I could scream, they wrapped around me, their leathery touch searing my skin as the salt bit into my flesh. It cradled me like a child and flew into the night, the air rushing past as I struggled uselessly. I tried to scream, but it only patted my head and hummed. When we landed, it dragged me across the dunes, my body limp, the salt scraping against me with every pull. The mouth of its lair yawned before us—a black cavern, jagged and glistening, like the throat of a beast that had just swallowed something whole. With no hesitation, it snapped my legs. The sound of bone breaking and tearing through my skin rang through the cavern as it tossed me aside like garbage. I screamed for help, but the only answer was the creature rummaging through its collection—a pile of broken toys, tarnished trinkets, and other mementos from those it had taken before. It brought over a slinky and played with it in front of me, watching intently, waiting. I know now, I should have played along. There are others here too, tied and pinned to the walls, their bodies crusted in the salt. It doesn't like it too much when we try to talk but it feeds us, keeps us alive, even strokes our heads as if it cares. But still, after all this time it doesn't quite feel like home. He doesn’t laugh at me though, so that’s something.

I could barely see past the fog of my own breath. The wind howled through the snowy peaks as I trudged through the drifts. The villagers below had warned me of "the Hollowback," but I laughed it off—until I saw the enormous footprints, impossibly deep, with no beginning or end in the snow. My lantern flickered as the mountain fell silent, and then I saw it: a hulking figure crouched low, its spine arched grotesquely upward, hollowed out like a frozen cave. Its head turned slowly, revealing empty sockets that dripped black, frozen tears, and its mouth split wide in a silent scream. As it moved closer, I realized the hollow in its back wasn’t empty—it was filled with the half digested, frozen bodies of others who had ignored the warnings. My last thought, before it reached for me, was that no one would ever find my footprints in the snow.

I sit in my rocking chair, gripping my wrist to steady the tremor, willing myself to hold on to something, anything, that will keep me grounded. The little girl beside me looks up, her eyes are so full of a love that I know she has misplaced, and her voice is so soft as she calls me “Grandma,” a name I’ve never known. I know that I'm told I'm supposed to want to know her. But I just don't. The nurse tells me they come and visit me often, but I know that nurse has lied to me before. She tells me I know them, but I can’t trust her, she won’t listen to me when I tell her that I don't know who they are. The woman beside the child, maybe her mother, smiles gently, hiding her tears, “It’s so good to see you, Ms. Grace," she says. I fake my smile and turn my head to see a woman I don’t know stare at me through the mirror. She calls me Ms. Grace, but I don’t know that name either. I can feel the love in her eyes, I can feel the pain hiding there too, and it breaks my heart to know that I am nothing more than an intruder on a life that I will never get back to. When the nurse wheels me back to my room, I feel a hollow ache settle deep within my stomach. I am full of guilt and shame and I cry myself to sleep, fearing that I will wake up tomorrow. As I move to blow out the candle I glance down at my wrist, the faint lines of scars catching my eye, and my heart stumbles; carved deep into my own skin, the words stare back at me: “They aren’t who they say they are.”

The streets of the neighborhood were dark, save for the soft, flickering glow of jack-o'-lanterns lining the porches. On her back deck, the woman sat sipping her coffee. She admired her three pumpkins, their carved faces grinning in the candlelight, while she casually flipped through a worn paperback. She barely registered the blue and red lights flashing against her front windows, and soon a firm knock echoed through the house. Opening the door, two police officers stood on her porch, the taller one pulling out a photo of three children, their young faces hauntingly familiar. "Have you seen these kids, ma'am?" he asked. She studied the photograph for a moment, furrowing her brow before shaking her head. "No, I’m sorry, I can’t say that I have." The officers thanked her and politely asked her to call if she heard anything. Turning to leave, she stopped them, reaching for a bowl of candy. "It’s Halloween," she said sweetly, extending the bowl. "I made them myself. Added a bit of crunch to them this time." They smiled, each taking a piece of chocolate before walking back to their patrol car. She shut the door softly behind her and settled back into her chair. The pumpkins flickered warmly, and she leaned in close to them, "Well aren't you popular" she whispered tenderly.

This year, my parents finally let me go trick-or-treating on my own. They said I was too old for them to tag along anymore, and honestly, I didn’t want them to. The night started out perfect: just me, my wizard costume, and my candy bag. Around the sixth house, I noticed him—a kid about my age, trailing behind me. He wore a mask that looked leathery, like dried, sun-bleached skin. It clung loosely to his face, sagging around his cheeks, and the eye holes were dark and hollow, as if the mask itself had swallowed up whatever lay beneath. I figured he might be shy, maybe nervous being out alone, so at the next house, I turned and said, "Hey, wanna trick-or-treat together?" He nodded but didn’t speak. When I saw he didn’t have a candy bag, I offered to share mine. He still said nothing, just smiled faintly beneath that rotting mask. His wide, glassy eyes were barely visible through the deep, shadowed sockets, but I could feel them—locked on mine, unblinking and too still. As we knocked on the door of the last house on the block, I finally asked him, "Do you live around here?" But before he could respond, the old woman at the door spoke first. "Trick or treat!" I blurted out, but she ignored my greeting. She looked around, her eyes scanning the empty street, then down at my new friend with concern. "Sweetie," she asked him softly, "why are you out here all alone?"