No one's perfect. No one's clean. Deep down we're all disgusting. It's just that no one wants to admit it.
I used to know a guy who specialized in a really specific kind of... sexual favor. He got one of those split tongue deals, where they slice down the middle of it and make you look like a snake or whatever. Well he had one of those, and he could control each side independently. It was wild, he could tie a cherry stem in about two seconds.
So this friend with the split tongue, he reads in a book about how these guys in the Middle East stick things down their urethras and jack off. And ignoring what the idiot kid in the story did with that information, my buddy wonders if maybe he can put his tongue to good use.
Now, my buddy, he's making about a grand a day from these guys that nobody else is going to touch. So I figured I'd find my own specialty.
You have to be an absolute idiot to not find porn on the Internet. I don't even think it's possible. You can find the wildest shit out there, and that's what I was looking for. One guy, he pays my buddy about two grand a month because he cant get over how my buddy can lick the insides of this guy's dick.
So I start looking around for fetishes that I think I can force myself to do. At this point there's not much I won't but I draw the line at kiddie shit. One of the things I seen was the piss fetish stuff. All these guys wanting to piss in some little fag boy's asshole. I did that for a while but then I ended up getting an infection and I had to stop. As it turns out piss is acidic and it can really fuck up your guts if it stays in there or gets pushed up by a 'foreign object'. After shitting blood for a few weeks I had to find something else.
I'm too fried to really feel pain much so for a while I was going after the guys who are into needles and hammers and pliers. The kind of guys who stick a screwdriver up under that lowest rib while they're fucking you because they can't get off without hurting something. I did that for a while and I actually kind of liked it, but I got into the more hardcore stuff and you've only got so many teeth and toenails before there's not much left of you that anyone wants.
I tried all of it. I tried inflation but it takes a long time for intestinal tears to heal, and the ulcer in my stomach flares up. I tried hardcore BDSM but my rupture spleen ended that. I did castration and got paid a fortune but we all know a fortune is relative and when the Gatsby dream ended I had to think of something else.
A regular of mine, who was really only into vanilla sex, turned me on to an ad he'd seen on some secret board online. The guy was looking to pay someone a damn good amount of money for what he called a 'one-time deal.' I took the deal and the guy sent a driver to my apartment and brought me back. Big house in the country, big garden, big car, big windows. Big man, big dick.
At first all he wanted was sex. Just sex. Not even interesting sex. I got bored. I ran out of heroin and started getting the shakes but the guy was prepared and he shot me up. High quality. I don't remember much, or agreeing to it, but I'm sure I did. I have low standards.
I made him promise that it wouldn't hurt, and he said he couldn't do that but he'd do his best to get me so high it wouldn't matter either way, which was fine. He must have been a nurse. He was very good with his hands. The IV didn't hurt much and I didn't really care at that point. He promised me he'd only take things I wouldn't miss. Just the spare parts.
You don't need an appendix to live. It's a rudimentary organ that serves no purpose. You only need a single kidney to function, as long as you stay healthy. A healthy liver can be divided in two. The third and fourth toes don't contribute to balance, and the third and fourth fingers provide only marginal stability and grip.
You always hear about how loud it is when anything happens to your skull and that's very true. It's kind of like the end of the world but it's inside you, so it's kind of an internal apocalypse. And the brain really doesn't feel pain. All of it's important, sure, but I wasn't really ever good at math to begin with, and deaf people lead normal lives.
I stayed with him for as long as it took me to get healthy. He was right, actually, the brain really does taste a lot like pate, and it's great with sauteed mushrooms. Brings out that iron taste. I've never been a fan of kidney or liver, but it's very good for you. He was generous with his time and money.
Hopefully this time the Gatsby times don't end. There's not a whole lot of me left to go around.
Landslides are common here in the early spring, and that means extra policing of the trails and backwoods areas where we know people go. Most of the time we'll send out a few helicopters, but about three years ago we went massively over budget after a fire in the main lodge and we couldn't afford to bring them out. This meant we had to go in by foot. K.D and I teamed up and headed out to the southwest, which is mostly mountainous terrain and a couple of small rivers. Essentially, we get paid to go out and camp for a week. If we find a landslide, excellent. If not, excellent. Either way, we come out on top.
K.D and I are both fast in the woods and we made great time. Our designated quadrant was about fifteen miles from the trail head, relatively close, but not frequently used due to the steep incline. Both of us are familiar with the area, and we were in good spirits. We camped out about a mile from our target to eat dinner and turn in early. This was back when I still slept relatively well, so I fell asleep with no real issue.
K.D said it took her about five minutes to wake me up. She was crouched over my bag with her hair in all directions and her eyes slightly unfocused.
"Stop." I said, pushing her hands away. She blinked and frowned.
"Something's yelling." She mumbled. "You got the blinker?"
I didn't understand what she wanted so I tried to tell her she was sleepwalking but she kept insisting on the 'blinker.' She made a sweeping motion with her hand.
"Flashlight?" I asked. I pointed at the bag by the fire pit and she dug through it. "What is it?"
"I dunno." She said. She pushed her bag to the side and turned the light on the ground.
"Something get in there?"
She shook her head. "I dunno. It was weird."
"Well what do you want to do?"
She kept the flashlight trained on the ground. "I dunno."
"Go to sleep." I said. She blinked a few times and dragged her bag back. She kept the flashlight on but I was tired and I shut my eyes.
I'm not sure if I fell asleep or not but K.D was shaking me again and this time she was awake.
"What?"
"Listen," She said.
From somewhere close by, we could hear a strange sound. I heard it in the very back of my ear, and if I even breathed too loudly I drowned it out. I cocked my head to try and figure out where it was coming from but it was coming from all directions. A kind of distant, intermittent tone that I wasn't able to identify.
"What is that?" I asked.
"No idea." She whispered, looking over her shoulder. "But I've been hearing it for an hour and it's not going away or coming closer."
"What do you think?" I asked.
"I have no idea."
We sat on my bag and listened to the sound.
I got up and walked in a wide circle around the camp. It was almost impossible to tell, but I began to suspect that the sound was getting louder when I passed by the north end of camp. K.D got up and grabbed the light and I took my rifle off my pack. The sky was clear so there was a good amount of light and from all around us we could hear deer. Nine times out of ten, the mysterious rustling visitors here at night is the deer. Every so often, the beam of the flashlight passed over a set of eyes low to the ground, and I cut them a wide berth. The females won't generally become aggressive but the males are assholes, especially in the early spring.
We'd gone maybe a quarter of a mile and the sound was definitely getting louder. We started to call out, and the sound seemed to respond. We started to jog and the beam of her flashlight bounced off the trunks of the trees.
We jogged faster and the sound got louder. It was a man's voice, and it was coming from somewhere above us. We called out, identified ourselves as Rangers, but the voice stayed constant, a wordless muffled wailing. The sound got a little louder and K.D made a hard right, slowing down fast enough that I almost ran into her. The sound was right there, right in front of us, but I couldn't see anything. I dropped down and felt along the ground, put my ear to it, but it wasn't there. I spun in a circle, calling out, and K.D grabbed my arm.
"Russ." She said. "What is that?"
She was pointing at something on a large boulder about ten feet from us. The flashlight bled whitewashed the surface and I adjusted the beam. Something on the boulder was moving slightly. Something small and pale. It wiggled as I walked forward, and the sound continued to get louder.
Whatever the thing was, it was firmly embedded in the rock. Nothing about it was familiar, and I was curious. I picked up a stick and poked it very gently. It responded but didn't move away. I leaned forward slowly and carefully, my hands near my face in case the thing had some kind of spray defense.
Something on the back of the pale thing caught the light for a brief moment. Something came together and I moved away very slowly. K.D watched me with wide eyes and I stood in front of her, squinting into the light.
"What is it?" She asked.
I turned and looked at it.
"Russ?"
I led her over and helped her get a closer look. She reacted to the sound, flinched away when she saw the back of the thing, and she fell on her butt and scooted away, her eyes wide.
"That's-"
"We have to get it open." I said.
"He's-" She pointed.
"We need to."
We looked at the boulder, where the sound was still coming from, and where the tip of the man's finger wiggled.
We searched the surface of the boulder, took rocks and rang them against the sides, and the screaming got louder. We yelled at each other and pounded on the boulder and neither of us would leave to get help and the man screamed and screamed from inside the boulder. I kept turning to the rifle even though I knew it wouldn't help and I pounded the surface with my fists.
I thought about cubic inches and how much the man was screaming and I told him to conserve his air but all he would do was scream and when we realized there was nothing we could do we sat with him until the next afternoon, when the screaming finally stopped, and the finger was still.
We packed up camp and kept going to the target area and spent days searching the land. On our way out, we passed by the boulder, and the finger was gone, the rock around it clawed and chipped.
I haven't really thought about it much ever since.
I don't sleep. That's almost not an exaggeration. I average around two hours a night on a good night. That's two hours of deep sleep, REM sleep. The kind that your body uses to fix itself. It's been getting worse for a while, but it'll go away eventually. It always has before. I just have to ride it out. Keep my strings from unraveling until I can get myself glued back together.
They say it's better for you to lie in bed the hours that you'd be asleep and just pretend to sleep, because it helps get the body's natural circadian rhythm back. So every night I lie in bed for eight hours, and I spend six of them watching the man on the top of the radio tower.
There is a window above my bed, and when I'm sleeping in it I have to sit up to see out of it. I like to be aware of my surroundings, so I installed a mirror on the opposite wall to allow me to see out of it. I have blackout curtains to ensure that my "sleep" is as genuine as possible, but some nights I like to leave them open so I can watch the sky.
Down the road from me is a radio tower. It's the largest thing on the horizon, and at the top is a little maintenance balcony. The tower is close enough for me to see this balcony clearly. On this particular night, the blinds were cracked so that I could watch a storm approaching in the mirror, safe in bed. Heat lightning started to strobe across the sky, and it illuminated something moving on top of the radio tower.
I sat up in bed and looked out the window. On the top of the tower, on the little balcony, I could see the very small shape of a man waving something. He was moving his arms in strange, rhythmic jerking patterns, facing toward the storm. I had never seen anyone on the tower before, and I couldn't think of a single reason that this man would have been there at midnight while a storm was coming. I called the police and they sent someone out, but at some point the man left. I don't know how I missed him. He didn't come back the next night, or for weeks afterward. I thought about him a lot though, and I kept watch every night for him. Something about it bothered me deeply and I thought of his strange jerking arms, the things he'd been holding. I wasn't sleeping anyway so I invested in a pair of binoculars and I kept a vigil for him, every single night.
I didn't see him come up the tower but he was there as soon as it got dark. I'd already gotten my two hours of sleep and now I was awake and ready. I grabbed the binoculars and brought him into focus.
He was an older white man in a casual jacket. He reminded me of every single cubicle worker I'd ever seen. Nothing about him was remarkable except the cloth he was waving, which was an almost stunningly bright white. He stared vacantly out at the skyline and moved his arms in those odd, sharp movements. His mouth hung open and even from here I could see he hadn't shaved in some time. He blinked occasionally but most of the time he just stared, mouth open, looking at nothing.
Even though I was watching him the whole time I didn't see him leave.
He went away again for almost two years. The insomnia faded and I slept very soundly without the mirror, which I had thrown out not long after the last sighting. I wasn't afraid of seeing him again. I threw it out because I couldn't stop myself from waiting for him. I could not get the man out of my thoughts. I did research into the company that owned the tower and I knew, with concrete certainty, that the man did not belong to anyone in the city. He was not employed with any government agency or department.
So what was he doing on the radio tower?
My suspicions about him began to grow. I researched nearby airports and he didn't belong to them, or at least no one who looked like he did that night. But I felt certain that somewhere, someone would know him.
I found his family in Topeka. The address on the missing persons report was still current. He had a wife and four children and was loving and loved deeply. He had vanished on the way to his car one morning and hadn't been seen since.
The night he came back, I was reading, pretending that I was choosing to stay up, and I saw the orange flag out of the corner of my eye.
He was back, illuminated on the radio tower by the light of the moon. His orange flags stood out like beacons and I grabbed my binoculars, my other hand gripping a pen.
I waited until he reached the end of the message and started over again.
He raised his arms as if to signal ten on a clock. I wrote down the letter 'T'.
He held his right arm straight out to the side and the left crossed over to hip level. I wrote it down.
Left at knee level, right raised above the shoulder. Five till three. Arms out at the sides. Hands at knee and shoulder again. I wrote them all down.
When he started over, I read the message.
They're coming back again.
My house is a bit unique. I live in a highly mountainous area of the country, and most of our houses are built into hills, as it's easier to do that than to have them supported. My house, though, is almost entirely built into the earth. I designed it that way. It's a tiny house, only 400 square feet, and the impact on the environment was minimal. Being mostly encased in earth, it stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Local wildlife feels comfortable approaching the yard, so I see a lot of amazing animals. It's a really great situation for the most part, with only one major exception.
Something has been eating into my house.
I figured it was mice when I noticed that a small hole had been eaten through the west wall of the den area. I patched it up and set out traps, as I've had mice living in here before. But over the next few days, the hole just kept getting bigger. I also noticed that there weren't any droppings in the house, and there isn't exactly a lot of space for anything to hide in. I checked all the corners of the house, went from ceiling to floor looking for any holes, but I couldn't figure out how anything was getting in. Or getting out.
Then one night, right after I'd turned the lights out, I heard an odd grinding noise coming from the kitchen.
I climbed out of the loft and checked it out. As soon as I moved, the noise stopped, and in the kitchen I couldn't find any signs of damage. Nothing had been moved except the clock, which was slightly askew. I fixed it and went back to bed. I put out more traps and figured a mole must have tried to burrow into the wall. It came back again the next night, and I wondered if I'd need to do something to prevent the mole from hurting itself, or actually managing to break through. It didn't stop this time when I got up, and I put my ear to the wall to listen.
What immediately came to mind was the sound of someone crushing hard candy in their teeth. That kind of glassy sound that makes you wince. It would stop from time to time, and something would shuffle before the sound started again. And it was loud. Almost loud enough to force me to pull my ear away. I didn't know how big moles could get but this one sounded big. Too big. The way the wall shuddered, I gave the animal on the other side a few days before it broke through. And suddenly more than anything I did not want that to happen. Absolutely could not let it happen.
But the problem, of course, was the mountain. I had no access to the other side. There was no way for me to find the thing on the other side by any means other than...
Opening the wall before it had a chance to.
The thing was nocturnal, I was almost sure. So I waited until the sun had been up for about an hour before taking a hammer and clearing everything in the area away from the wall. Even now, just a day later, I could see that the mole was making progress. The paneling was slightly bowed, and there were cracks where there hadn't been any before. It only took a few taps to break apart what little of the wall was left. The hole was big.
Way too big. And deep.
It led straight into the mountain far past where I could see. It was easily two feet in diameter, and uneven in places where the dirt had partially caved in. From the tunnel came a strange smell. Not entirely unpleasant, but strange. Musky apple cider vinegar. I bent a bit closer to try and make out anything in the dark and I heard a sound.
Something in the darkness moved.
I saw the shadows swell and shift and whatever was back there made a strange, keening whine. There was the unexpected and implacable impression of the tunnel growing shorter and something caught the light and sparked briefly in the dark.
Something large and yellow and cracked.
A huge gray thing, covered in slime and dead patches, slithered out of the darkness and moved over a pile of dirt. It rolled around, covering itself, and shrank back into the dark. Something smacked and the tunnel shortened again as whatever it was moved closer, making that kitten keening sound.
The grey thing darted out again, felt blindly along the ground, picked up rocks and brought them back into the dark, which consumed them with that glass candy splintering. By now I had backed up but the thing kept coming closer, and the keening grew louder. It was only a few feet away when I backed up, my mouth opening and closing.
The grey thing slithered back into the cavity it had come from. The tombstone teeth came together and there were no lips, only cracked edges that oozed a blood redder than any I'd ever seen before. It dripped down the surfaces of the teeth, pooling in the cracks. One tooth had broken in half and as the mouth opened and closed around the rocks the dangling nerve was crushed over and over, prompting the keening. The tongue flopped out, slithered out of the tunnel and crept along the surrounding wall, and I shrieked. I grabbed a knife from the block and sliced at the tongue, and whatever it was connected to let out a rusty scream. The tongue retreated, bleeding profusely, and deep in the mountain I could hear something moving. Something huge. Something that I didn't care to learn any more about. I packed a suitcase and drove into town with no intention of coming back to find out what that mouth was attached to.
I knew a really fucked up kid when I was growing up. His name was Bradley. His family was that family. No one really knew where they were from, but judging by their accents were confident it was somewhere where inbreeding was considered acceptable. The children were all towheads, with identical cowlicks swirling up off the back of their skulls. It only added to the general aura of poverty they gave off. When they moved to the vacant house at the end of the block near the culvert the neighborhood collectively sighed and braced itself.
We never saw the father, but we knew he existed because we could hear him yelling at night. Our parents tried to cover up the gunshot-loud slaps with our televisions but we knew he was slapping her around. Their mother was a doughy woman with small eyes and a perpetually stained apron who seemed to perpetually be wandering the house touching things. It was highly contested what her actual function in the house was, as anyone who ever went in there reported it filthy beyond all imagining.
I never had cause to interact with six out of their seven children but Bradley crashed into my life one summer afternoon when I was sitting in the garden reading a book. I'd created a space inside the hedge bordering our yard and I sat in there most days. It kept cooler than any other place and no one could see me, so I went mostly undisturbed.
I was on the third chapter of Huck Finn when the branches around me rustled and a dirty freckled face peered into my little cave. He grinned and there were two red pits where his front teeth had been.
"Hey." He said.
I didn't know how to respond. I pretended I hadn't heard him.
He broke a branch and started poking me with it. I ignored him. He moved the branch up my face and almost poked me in the eye before I swatted it away.
"What?" I snapped.
He grinned wider. "Wanna see something?"
I shut my book and left it in the cave when I crawled out. I brushed off my pants and crossed my arms. He had one arm behind his back and he was giggling a little.
"What." I said.
He brought his arm forward and held up the fuzzy white thing he was clutching.
I recognized the rabbit as one of the angoras the Jacobsen family raised in hutches in their back yard. What he had done with the body I wasn't sure, but he held the head cruelly by the ears, and the stump of the neck dripped occasionally into the grass. I froze in place and stared at the red eyes, which hadn't grown dull yet and seemed so painfully alive.
"Watch." He said. He flipped the head upside down and shoved two fingers into the neck and up through the base of the skull. When he had them as far in as they could go, he spun the head so that it faced me. "Watch."
The jewel eyes suddenly bulged out and moved in opposite directions. He laughed and one eye deflated as the jaw opened and closed.
"Help me, I'm dying!" He squeaked. "Help me!"
When he closed the jaw with a snap and one of the long teeth broke with a tiny crack, I turned and fled up the porch, urine trickling down my leg and I ran. Behind me I could hear him giggling.
"Help me! Oh no! Help!"
I slammed the door and ran up to my room. From my window I watched him duck into my cave and when he came up he didn't have the head. He wiped his hand on his jeans and wandered away.
I didn't say anything that time. I wanted to forget about it. Even after two more rabbits vanished, I kept my mouth shut and avoided Bradley at all cost.
The Jacobsens eventually moved their hutches into the barn and we never heard about the rabbits again. I kept track of the other neighborhood animals but none went missing. The school year started and neither Bradley nor his siblings attended. We weren't sure where they went during the day, but one boy reported seeing them out in the fields harvesting corn and pumpkins during class and we suspected their father wasn't bringing in any income.
Their mother grew rounder and more doughy and we learned that she was due to have another child soon. Our parents shook their heads over dinner and told us to stay away from those children. We happily obliged.
As the fall began to turn to winter I started hearing Bradley outside at night. He would wander the front yards, going through mailboxes for any unclaimed mail or putting his face to peoples windows, leaving spade shaped oil stains on the glass all around the neighborhood. When snow was available, he built strange snow sculptures. Odd shapes stacked together in riddles we couldn't solve. I heard him break into sheds and steal whatever he could find inside. His mother began to look healthier and we heard stories of people hearing him speak to strangers when he was out with his mother. He was possessive of her, would stand in front of her belly and refuse to let anyone disturb the child growing inside her. He used that phrase frequently. He seemed to attach some kind of importance to it that remained a mystery when his mother finally left to give birth in the town clinic.
There were complications, and she was gone for a long time. In her absence Bradley grew restless and we almost never saw him at home anymore. No one knew where he went until I found him in the library, devouring an endless stream of books with an almost manic concentration. I read the titles. They were books on trees, plants. Soil and minerals and how to plant and where and when. Every day he woke up at dawn and went to the library and stayed until the doors closed. I never saw him eat. His skin was tight and his freckles began to fade.
His mother came home alone. No one talked about it. The house was quiet at night and there were rumors. The baby had been deformed. It had been born without a brain. Her husband was gone and now it was her and her surviving children and the house deafened all of us with its silence.
At night Bradley wandered the neighborhood with a shovel and wheelbarrow and dug up flower beds, leaving the crushed blossoms in favor of the soil they grew in. He carted load after load down the block and a peek over his fence one afternoon proved that he was taking it to his backyard and leaving it in chaotic piles. I could not imagine what he was planning. As soon as he had what he needed, he vanished, and I never saw him out at night again.
Then animals began to go missing.
He was smart enough not to take pets. He went after the wildlife instead. Whether they were alive or dead when he took them appeared to be irrelevant. The streets were clear and all around the neighborhood the cats wandered in search of any living thing. After he shot down a crow with a rusty pellet gun and planted bug bombs in the hollow trunks of trees, even the birds stopped coming. Our neighborhood was clean and quiet and all of us held our breath and waited for the countdown to come to an end.
As it turned out, I was there when it happened.
I woke up because I could hear him crying.
The wind carried his voice to my window and I listened for a while. He keened, and intermittently there was the sound of metal against metal. I slipped on my robe and padded down the hall. I held the screen so that it wouldn't creak and when I slipped out the world was quiet and still except for that soft broken sound. I followed it to Bradley's yard, where I knew it would be coming from, and I peered through a hole in the fence at him.
He was hunched over the wheelbarrow, which was full of sod. His hands were buried up the to his forearms, and he held them still as the rest of him hitched and shook. Abruptly he kicked the wheelbarrow and the sound caused me to flinch. He heard my sound of surprise and before I could get very far he had exploded out of the back gate and was at my heels. He closed his hand around my hair and dragged me back to the yard. The pain stunned me into silence and the only sound I made was a whimper when he held my head above the wheelbarrow and forced me to look at what was inside.
It was half buried in the dirt and I saw that he had been lifting it out of the dirt slowly. A soccer ball sized pouch made of some kind of animal tissue. Stitches bit at the surface, roped across it in every direction. In places the bag was split, and where he'd torn it open it oozed something foul and black. The smell was unimaginable. I gagged and he cried harder.
"It didn't work! It should have, I read everything! I got it right but it still didn't work!"
He took my hand and wrenched it down into the black tar. It was cold and thick and when I began to scream he clapped a hand over my mouth.
"Just feel it, maybe you know. Do you know why?"
Deep in the bag where my hand had been thrust I could feel the porcelain surface of bones and the bristle of hair. I struggled and he held me tighter.
"I put all the right minerals in. It's got bone for calcium and everything."
He pressed against me and I could feel the sickly fever heat radiating off of him.
"Homunculi don't even need it but it didn't hurt, right? Is that why it's dead? Is that why?"
Something in the bag shifted as I struggled and with a final heave I managed to break free. I shoved him into the wheelbarrow and he caught himself but the barrow tipped. The contents cascaded onto the lawn and the bag exploded with a wet pop. He wailed and fell to his knees, trying to gather the contents to his chest, and as she fled she looked back to see him staring after her, his eyes dark and wide.
"I was going to give it to her!" He called. "Why didn't it work?"
The entire way home, I could hear him screaming. Even after all the lights came on and I was running my hand under scalding water I could hear him scream and scream.
"Why didn't it work?"
I promise I won't come inside. I really won't. I promise I won't come inside if you leave the window open, I won't go all the way, just a little. All of you are so soft, you're so soft and I really won't hurt you, I promise. I just want to look at you a little.
Curtains. Please don't replace the blinds, it was hard to get them open, and I promise I won't be around too much if you'll just let me come and look once in a while. I just get lonely. I just get really really lonely and it would mean so much to me if you'd just leave the blinds broken where my face is. It won't even bother you, it's too high up for you to see anyway.
Really, you won't even notice me. I'm quiet. I really am sorry about the dog, I know he's not supposed to be outside but it really wasn't his fault, I didn't want to hurt him so I put him out of the way. I'm really very nice. I can introduce myself if you want.
I'm Tag. That's what she called me. Tag.
That was her idea. I liked it so I let her but usually I don't. And she was very nice but no one really liked her much you see because she and we we're both just a little different is all. But we're very nice once you get to know us. And this girl, I think her name was Molly. And I lived above her bed and I watched her sleep because that's what she made me for was to watch her sleep. But one night I got too far away and now I'm a little different, is all. My head doesn't hurt at all it really doesn't it just looks funny and for a while she called me 'Sockhead' but then when I got good at running she called me Tag.
But then Molly went somewhere and I can't find her. I'd really like to find her but really I just need you to see me just for a second. I know I'm a little different but I promise I'll just watch you for a little while and you'll think you were dreaming. I really don't want to hurt you. I just don't want to get more different, you understand right? I really don't mean to be a bother but...
...can you please leave your curtains open tonight?
I think it's a bullshit excuse and if you use it to get out of something you did I'm going to think you're a dick. But that being said, I really honestly do not know how this happened.
There were a lot of other dogs that I liked more. I passed over him three times before I saw him sitting in the darkest corner of his kennel. I literally could not see him until the light reflected in one of his eyes and I stopped.
"Holy shit..." I mumbled. I crouched and got a better look at the dog.
It was a little black Pomeranian, and it was sitting rigidly in the corner watching me. It appeared to be covered in some kind of growths. Odd things bulged out of every surface of its body.
"Jesus." I said. "The hell's wrong with it?"
The attendant shrugged. "Dunno. He just came in today. Can't get near him, and if you try to touch him he bites. Honestly I wouldn't-"
But I was standing up, my eyes locked on the dog's. It watched me with curious intensity.
"I want him." I heard myself say. I was surprised, but I had to admit there was something... weirdly endearing about the ugly dog. The attendant reluctantly opened the cage, and the dog got up and walked calmly out and sat at my side. It looked up at me with its weird black marble eyes and I bent down. I wrapped my hand under its hind legs, supporting it in one of the only places the tumors hadn't grown. The attendant just started at me until I turned and walked calmly to the front of the shelter. I bought him for $150 with the understanding that I was fully responsible for anything that might go wrong with him. I put him in the front seat of the car, buckled him in, and we drove home.
I really, honestly do not know what happened.
For the first few days he acted like a normal dog. Whoever had owned him before had clearly trained him very well. He was smart. I didn't have to force a leash over his lumpy neck because he never left my side. He kept close, always in my shadow, and even when squirrels crossed our path he never budged.
He ate like a horse, though. I could not give this dog enough food. I worried about it at first and I tried to cut back but he'd look at me with those weird eyes and I'd watch myself give him a double serving. He never put on weight but the tumors seemed to grow. As with the eating, though, it didn't seem to concern me.
But I noticed other strange things too. I was missing a lot of time. I came home from work and in what felt like an instant it was time for bed. These episodes always seemed to be preceeded by the dog coming into the room and sitting at my feet.
God he was an ugly thing. Barely dog shaped anymore, the tumors took up most of his body mass. His skin was black as well, so it was hard to notice the hair loss, but it was there. I never really looked at him when I could help it. I decided there definitely was a correlation between the missing time and the dog. I just didn't know what to do with the information. I couldn't explain it.
That is until one night when he walked into the living room, sat at my feet, and spoke to me.
I was watching the weather and there was a tornado warning in Topeka. I felt bad for their big grain silos that were currently hurtling through houses and barns. The dog came and sat at my feet, and I ignored him until the television went out. He was watching me with a somehow much more casual demeanor. He cocked his head and spoke in a deep baritone voice that I heard as much as felt.
"I apologize for taking up so much of your time. I understand you live tragically brief lives. How cruel."
I blinked at him and opened my mouth but he continued.
"When the others come, I trust you will be as hospitable. It will prolong your life a great deal."
A completely foreign sensation rippled through me and I grabbed my skull and tried to keep it from coming apart at the seams. I managed to open one eye enough to see the growths on the dog tear open in great sprays of a thick yellow-gray fluid that soaked what little fur it had left. The tumors uncoiled themselves and, trembling, rose to hook onto the air itself and tear it apart. Behind reality I saw endless flashing shapes in every color that could ever be and to look at it made something in my brain pop until I fell to my knees and passed out.
When I woke up I was alone, and there was no sign he'd ever been there. It's like he never even existed. It's been about a year since then and I don't have any other animals, but every time I leave the house I can't help but think about what he said to me about being hospitable. It also occurs to me that he never specified who those others were. I wonder when the next one will show up.