Safety

safety

Our grandfather was obsessed with safety. Whenever my brother and I went out, he’d tell us to be careful and watch out for cars and slippery spots on the ground. If we were playing around the house, he’d demand we keep an eye out for sharp corners on the coffee table or wires we might trip over. Even when we were going to bed, he’d stand over us and warn about the dangers of our blankets getting wrapped around our necks. He’d demand that we listen to each other breathe if we ever woke up in the middle of the night. Just to make sure.

To make matters worse, he’d follow us in his pickup truck wherever we went, the loaded gun rack dissuading anyone from interfering with us. We could see him when we were in school, always parked outside, just in case anything might happen. As Reggie and I got older, we started to get tired of his nagging. We weren’t kids anymore. We didn’t need to be coddled and watched over.

When we turned 16, Reggie and I got a present very uncharacteristic of our safety-fetishizing grandfather. He’d adopted two adult dogs. Twin brothers, just like me and Reg. They were Caucasian Ovcharkas; apparently the same breed he used to work with when he was stationed in Siberia, back before he and grandma moved to the States. Over the 11 years we’d lived with him, we’d never been allowed to go near any dogs. Even little ones. “They’ll kill your brother,” he’d always say. The guilt we’d feel from that statement would always get one of us to tell the other to leave the animal alone.

The Ovcharkas were truly enormous. I’d never seen such massive dogs. They were both well over 200lbs and neither of them were overweight. When I leaned over and gave one a tentative pat, it felt like there was iron under the thick fur. Its tail didn’t wag and it didn’t look at me. Both animals just stared at grandpa. We were told their names were Mikhail and Sergey.

Reggie looked as uncomfortable as I felt. We thanked our grandfather for our gifts, but it was obvious we were unnerved. Grandpa asked us if we remembered the dog we’d had before our parents had died. Neither of us did. He told us it was a beagle named Chair. “A useless animal,” he informed us.

As our birthday dragged on, grandpa taught us how to care for the Ovcharkas. For the first few hours, they’d only listen to him. Whenever we spoke to them or even tried pushing them in the direction we wanted them to go, they’d wait for him to give the command before moving. By nighttime, though, the dogs had started to accept the commands from my brother and me. Their responses weren’t instantaneous, like they were with grandpa, but it was still progress.

The next day, we realized why we’d gotten our presents. The dogs were never to leave our sides. Rather than grandpa cautioning and watching us all day, every day, he’d simply transferred his authority over to the animals. We were pissed. Reggie especially. He’d always been the more outspoken one, and, as a result, had most often incurred grandpa’s wrath. This time, though, Reggie wasn’t slapped when he called the whole arrangement “bullshit.” Grandpa wrinkled his deeply-scarred face and yelled something in Russian. The dogs leapt at my brother. Reggie screamed and flailed, but the dogs had him on the ground in an instant. They stood over him, growling and frothing, until Grandpa yelled another word we didn’t understand. They backed away and Reggie got up. He didn’t complain anymore.

Since we were on summer vacation, we had a lot of downtime. Wherever we went, though, the dogs followed. We’d walk down the street with the two colossi in tow. They’d growl at anyone who came near, whether it was at one of our friends who came up to say hello or at the cashier at the store who yelled that no dogs were allowed in the place. Anyone who presented even a hit of a potential threat was intimidated by the growling guard dogs. For Mikhail and Sergey, a potential threat was being within five feet of us.

On a hot day in early August, we were at the lake down the street. As usual, no one wanted to be near us because of the two wary, grumpy Ovcharkas. Reggie and I went swimming. The dogs, of course, swam alongside. Out of absolutely nowhere, there was a speed boat bearing down on us. Before anyone, dog or person, could react, Reggie was struck. The hull of the boat crushed his skull and the propeller tore through his skin like wet paper. The driver just kept going.

Reggie’s corpse floated face-up in the bloody water. His face was destroyed. One eye was completely missing while the other draped itself over his left cheek. From groin to chin, there was nothing but a gory channel the same diameter as the boat’s propeller. Tangles of his shredded intestines leaked their contents into the water. Mikhail and Sergey swam in silence, staring at his carcass.

I was beside myself with panic and rage. I screamed and tried to drag my brother’s body toward the shore. As soon as I touched him, Sergey bit my arm. Hard. I let go of Reggie and hit the dog. He stopped biting. Again, I tried to move my brother. Another bite. This time, the dog pulled me away from Reggie while Mikhail swam in a circle around my brother’s body. I felt my radius and ulna snap under the pressure of Sergey’s jaw. I shrieked and started punching the animal. My assault did nothing to release the pressure.

Mikhail’s growl caught my attention. I felt it in my chest before I could hear it. I whirled around and saw something moving inside Reggie. No, not inside. All over. His skin was undulating and stretching while the bones underneath popped and crackled, as if they were all breaking. His ribs spread twice the width of his chest, some puncturing through the flesh as they went. The remains of his guts started slapping and flopping around like a net full of eels poured onto the deck of a fishing boat. A deep, resonant moan rose from the destroyed form of my brother.

I started to back away. This time, Sergey let me move. I swam backward while watching the unbelievable scene unfold. Both dogs watched Reggie while I stood on shore, overcome by fear and confusion. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I yelped and spun around to see the scarred face of my grandfather. He’d been following us again. He held a shotgun. On our sides, bathers were running from the lakeside toward the cars. “Watch,” grandpa instructed.

What I once knew as Reggie flailed and howled. The water, turbid from his inhuman thrashings, was pink and foamy from the release of his blood and other bodily fluids. His moaning intensified, causing me to cover my ears. I turned to run, but he held me by the back of my neck and wouldn’t let me move. “Watch,” he hissed.

Reggie stopped moving. The dogs, who’d been paddling close to him, barked furiously. Massive stalactites of bone began to erupt from the remains of my brother. As they burst through, the dogs attacked. They tore at the already-damaged flesh of the creature, ripping out thick chunks before pushing their faces in to get more. As they bit, the Reggie-creature moved toward us. As the water around it grew shallower, more of its body was revealed to us. It walked on five pillars of articulated bone; the segments joined by oozing, fatty tissue. It moved slowly, but deliberately. Bulbous, white eyes squeezed themselves from the cracked sockets of its skull. They rotated and then focused on my grandfather and me. He held me tighter.

As it walked, the dogs were tearing more and more of its body to shreds. Sergey attacked its legs. As the gristle and fat were pulled from between the segments, the creature slowed. Still, it didn’t stop. An ossified spike shot from the rib-area of the monster, impaling Sergey through his chest. The dog was dead. Mikhail, in a renewed frenzy, tore the remaining connective tissue from the other four legs. By the time it had stopped moving, it was only ten feet away from us. Mikhail ripped the creature apart, spitting its bowels and meat from its bulbous eyes all over the sand. And then he stopped. Whatever Reggie had become was dead.

Grandpa let me go. Mikhail ambled over to Sergey and began to lick the mortal wound in his brother’s chest. He whimpered and sat in the sand, panting. I sobbed as the pressure I’d felt released. My grandfather slapped me and held my face in a vice grip between his leathery palms. I stared at the deep latticework of scars covering his face.

“I always thought it would’ve been you,” he hissed. “My grandfather made the same mistake with me.” He traced the facial scars with his fingernail. Then he grabbed my broken arm, causing me to yelp. “At least this’ll heal.”

I glanced over my shoulder. The remains of the monster had turned into a foul-smelling gelatin. Seabirds were diving and collecting it in their beaks before it could absorb into the sand. Those who managed to get a beak full died moments later, falling from the sky into the lake or on the sand.

“I thought your father knew better,” grandpa grunted as we walked. I didn’t say anything. He kept mumbling in frustration when we got into the house. “A fucking beagle,” he murmured. I sat on the couch and cried.

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Rats in the Barn

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When I was 19, I worked for a local exterminator. I wasn’t licensed to use the chemicals, but I did inspections. A potential customer would call the company, they’d send me out to take some notes and pictures, give the property owner a quote, and my boss would come out and kill whatever little critters were causing a problem.

On a particularly busy day, I was scheduled to visit a barn on the far edge of some guy’s ranch that’d been infested with rats. He’d thought about demolishing it and starting over, but I guess there was some sentimental value because he and his dad built the place a while back. Didn’t matter to me.

I was surprised by how big the barn was. Two full floors, also. The place was packed with old equipment, boxes, and whatnot. The owner said the rats were probably attracted to the grain crates that’d sat, unopened, for the last few decades. I told him he was probably right, then he went back to the house while I started looking around.

I went up to the loft first. There were a few droppings, but nothing that made me think of an infestation. It didn’t look like anyone had been up to the loft in a while; lots of cobwebs and dust all over the place. I found a couple dead rats tucked into some corners. I took pictures and noted a few gnawed holes in the walls. When I turned back around to head back to the ladder, without any warning or straining sound, the floor below me collapsed. I fell right through, hit my leg on a tall crate, flipped over, and landed on my head.

For a minute, I thought I’d broken my neck. Thankfully, I could wiggle everything that mattered, but I quickly realized I’d broken my arm. To make it worse, I was wedged, upside down, between two crates. I squirmed and tried to fall to either side, but my pant leg was caught on a series of large splinters jutting out of a crate. The area was very, very tight. Dusty, too. It wasn’t particularly dark, thanks to the barn’s big windows, but I was terribly uncomfortable.

I’ve never been particularly claustrophobic, but not being able to move from my position was terrifying. My broken right arm throbbed and my left, because of the bizarre way I’d landed, was pinned behind me. All I could move was my left leg, but only to kick pitifully at the crates.

As the seconds ticked by, I started praying the rats wouldn’t find me. I was fairly certain I’d panic if they came. I began hollering for help, squirming pretty hard until I realized how it caused pain to explode through my broken arm. The homeowner didn’t come. But the rats didn’t, either. I tried to control my breathing; I was inhaling a lot of dust.

Once my breathing finally returned to normal, I tried to lean in different ways, hoping to dislodge my pants from the wood. Then I felt something which made me gasp. The arm that had twisted behind me, which had been prickling from pins and needles as a result the awful position it was in, was prickling for something else, too. Something was crawling on me. Immediately, I thought of rats swarming and biting my eyes out. I screamed and flailed as agony erupted from the compound fracture. I expected to see the rats any minute.

But I didn’t. I saw spiders. Countless, brown, semi-translucent spiders about the size of my palm were swarming all over my arm and had begun crawling up my shirt. Soon, I felt them on my chest and neck. I screamed and screamed as I watched them skittering in the dirt around my face. I used what little movement I had in my head and neck to crush a couple with my temple and the side of my face, feeling their bodies burst against my skin. But it was useless. There must have been a hundred of them. And the action of killing those two caused the others to start biting.

Pairs of fangs sunk into my skin from the top of my head all the way to my navel. I spasmed with futile panic and a few of them lost their grip on my skin and fell down onto my face and neck. Each of my rasping inhalations before my shrieks forced more dust from the floor into my throat. I felt my tongue get coated with the desiccating stuff, forcing me to stop screaming and close my mouth to try to get enough saliva to spit. The second before I closed my mouth, one of the spiders pushed itself in. I gagged and retched but it remained inside. In fact, it went further back toward my throat.

I flopped my tongue around, trying to get it out. It didn’t budge. So I bit down. The spider exploded in my mouth, coating my tongue and palate with thick, bitter fluid. I retched again, uncontrollably, while dragging my guts-coated tongue against the very dirt I was hoping to get rid of just moments before.

Dirt and dust flooded my throat and lungs while I gasped and flailed. Over and over, the things bit me. The bites were coming fewer and further between, though. The infinitesimal consolation I felt was annihilated after I crushed another spider near my head, however. When I lifted my head from the carcass, tiny babies which must have been riding on its body fanned out all over my face. They crawled into my eyebrows and eyelashes before moving toward my nose. I screamed louder than I’ve ever screamed in my life.

In groups of what must have been at least ten, the spider babies crawled into my nose to seek shelter. I flopped my body back and forth in abject, disbelieving terror. In my thrashing, I freed my trapped arm. Immediately, I jammed my fingers into my nose, trying to scrape the things out of me. Blood flowed as my fingernails destroyed the delicate membranes and I desperately blew dirt-caked snot from my sinuses. I could still feel them. Without thinking, I just starting banging my face into the ground. I felt my nose break immediately and the pain as I continued smashing it into the dirt was incomprehensible.

I felt two hands grab me and pull. Shocked and surprised, I fought against them, striking the person in the groin as he pulled me out of the area where I’d fallen. He yelped and dropped me on my broken arm. But I was free. I scrambled out, blood streaming from my nose, and saw it was the property owner. He’d come running once he’d heard my loudest scream.

He grabbed me by the healthy arm and dragged me to the other side of the barn, where a hose was plugged into the wall. He turned it on and sprayed me with it while I stripped off my clothes. After a minute or two, all the spiders were out of my clothes and off my body. He called for an ambulance as I stood there, naked, directing the stream from the nozzle into my destroyed nose. The ambulance got there 20 minutes later.

I needed plastic surgery to fix my face. My arm took almost a full year to be back to normal. I quit my job at the exterminator from my hospital bed. They told me not to worry about it; I’d already been fired. The barn owner had demanded they pay for the damage I’d done to his loft.

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The Quarry

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I can’t remember the last time we’d had such a hot summer. All the beaches were packed. You couldn’t find a shoreline that wasn’t teeming with people. Most summers, we would’ve been right there with them. This last school year, though, had been rough. We’d had an inordinate number of encounters with bullies, and the last thing we wanted to do was put ourselves in a place where they’d almost certainly be.

That caution came with a price, of course. We were sweltering. Fans did nothing. Every time we opened the freezer to grab a chunk of ice, we’d get yelled at for letting all the cold air out. It seemed like everything we did, it only served to make us hotter and more miserable.

My brother had an idea that sounded pretty great to me. There’d been construction going on near the old quarry that was on hold for some reason. Donny said he’d been snooping around there the week before and he noticed there was still a lot of water from the spring floods that’d gotten trapped and hadn’t dried up yet. Plus, the quarry was deep enough to be in its own shadow; the walls went up at least 30 feet. It’d be a climb to get down and back up, but it was worth the risk if it meant getting a break from the heat.

We hopped the fence and stared down at the water. It looked pretty damn refreshing. The way down was steep and rocky, but Donny and I were both pretty agile at the time. We went slowly, despite dripping with sweat and coating ourselves with dust and bits of gravel. When we got to the bottom, it was already a relief. The air was ten degrees cooler and the shade provided a welcome reprieve from the mid-day sun.

There was a long branch near the edge of the pool. Since the water was murky, we didn’t want to take a chance and dive in. Both of us remembered how Leon Hollis broke his neck back in 3rd grade. Neither of us were going to make that same mistake. I reached in with the stick and pushed down and around. It felt about two or three feet deep. I let out more and more of the branch into the water and felt the soft, muddy ground underneath. We couldn’t do a proper dive, but we sure as hell could jump in. That was all Donny needed to hear.

In the blink of an eye, Donny had stripped out of his clothes. I hadn’t even finished saying, “Jesus Christ, Don, don’t take your fucking underpants off too!” before he was stark naked and mid-air in a bellyflop position. He crashed into the still water, sending out a massive wave to soak the muddy shore. I was untying my shoes when Donny spluttered to the surface. He looked different.

Donny’s pale body was covered in a mosaic of black and brown shapes. I mean covered. He was more brown and black than he was white, and as he staggered toward me with his arms out so they wouldn’t touch his sides and his legs bowed so they wouldn’t rub together, I realized what they were. Leeches. Hundreds – maybe even a thousand – leeches.

He began to scream. It was a shrill, high-pitched shriek that I’d only heard from girls on the playground at school, but with them, it was only while they were playing. The sound coming from my brother was one of abject terror. As he screamed, he formed the words, “help me” and moved closer and closer to the shore, away from the water. By the time I’d gotten over to him, he fell on his back into the soft mud, his head inches from the shore.

I stood over him, unsure of what I should do. He began rubbing his hands over his trunk, trying to unlatch the things from his belly and chest. Blood smeared as their bodies burst under his touch. My horror stunned me for a moment, and as I stared with shock at my brother’s body, I noticed details for the first time.

There was a leech stuck to his left eyeball. It hung down about 3 inches, its body fat with blood. The eye was red and angry looking and Donny was blinking furiously, and probably unconsciously, to get the thing off. One leech was attached to the head of his penis and there were seven on his scrotum and perineum. Under his arms were the remains of at least six that had been smashed as Donny rubbed and pulled at the ones on his torso.

Finally, I snapped out of it and began raking my nails across the creatures that covered my brother. He was a red mess. I tried to pick up my pace, noticing how, even under the shroud of blood, I could tell Donny was getting increasingly pale and weak. His arms didn’t move much anymore and his screams had devolved into wheezes.

I ran back to where we’d left our clothes and returned with a large beach towel. I wadded it up and scrubbed Donny up and down, not caring if I crushed the things instead of just removing them. They needed to die, and quickly, or else I was certain my brother would be exsanguinated. I rubbed his face and chest and legs and feet until there was nothing left pulp from their devastated bodies and the smeared blood they’d stolen from Donny.

I knelt next to Donny and tried to get him to focus. I told him I was going to run for help and he was going to be okay. His good eye moved to meet my face. “Back,” he muttered.

“Yes, I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I assured him, and got up to run home.

Donny grabbed my ankle in his weak fist. I stopped and looked at him impatiently, not understanding how he didn’t see how time was a factor here.

“Back,” he said again. “My back.” He exhaled a long, low breath. He didn’t move or say anything after that.

A column of frost coalesced along my spinal cord. With great care, not wanting Donny’s face to sink into the mud, I turned my brother over and screamed. On his back were two leeches, each the size of a watermelon. No longer trapped between the mud and Donny, they detached their proboscises, each of which were as long as my middle finger. Then, with their bodies full and their appetites sated, they began the slow crawl back into the water.

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Fireflies

ff

The theory went like this: when confused by nighttime fog, fireflies can congregate into masses of hundreds, or sometimes even thousands. The fog reduces their ability to signal properly; the distance is shortened and the light becomes too diffuse. To survive and attract mates, individual fireflies started banding together. Once a small group is formed, they signal to one another with pheromones, and that triggers simultaneous illumination. It’s brighter, so even through the fog, solitary fireflies can find the group. So if you see a glowing beachball hovering over the lake on a foggy night, don’t freak out. It’s just fireflies trying to fuck.

I moved to the woodsy town in Vermont a couple years ago. During my first summer there, when the pea-soup fog rolled off the lake every evening, I saw those glowing orbs for the first time. That was before I’d learned they were fireflies, so I didn’t know what I was seeing. I watched from my porch as the ball floated across the yard at the edge of the forest. It was beautiful, but haunting.

The following morning, at the local diner, I brought up what I’d seen. The waitress laughed and said they were just the local fireflies. Apparently they’re considered a minor celebrity in the area. My buddy from college, Phil, was an entomologist. Bugs were his thing. So when I got home after breakfast, I called him up. I figured he’d be interested in the phenomenon.

Apparently, “interested” was an understatement. I guess fireflies had never been observed doing something like that anywhere else in the world. I told him he’d be welcome if he wanted to make the drive up from Connecticut and stay for a few days to see them for himself. He did.

The next day, Phil arrived at dusk. Great timing. I gave him a quick tour of the place, then we brought a six pack out to the porch and waited for the fog to move in.

In a steady, slow creep, the fog poured across the lake, into the forest, and swallowed my yard. The moonlight was a dull haze above our heads, and right away we saw individual fireflies trying to locate one another with their bioluminescent shouts.

We waited and drank beer after beer as we caught up on the goings on in our respective lives over the last ten years. After a couple hours, I caught a glimpse of something glowing on the other side of the trees, right by the lake. I pointed and Phil stood up and went to the edge of the porch.

“Wow,” he breathed, and I could sense his genuine excitement. It was contagious. I got up and stood with him as we gazed at the orb of softly undulating light, our beers forgotten.

The mass of fireflies approached the edge of the yard, every one of its members flying in a tight, spherical pattern. “I don’t believe my eyes,” Phil said. “That behavior’s never been documented in that species.”

The sphere’s light waxed and waned, and solitary fireflies all over the yard, disoriented in the morass of fog, began to move toward the group. They incorporated themselves into the luminous mass.

The group turned back toward the forest and eventually went out of sight.

“Pretty cool, right?,” I asked.

“One of the coolest things I’ve seen in my career,” he agreed. “I’m going to write up a report tomorrow morning, then tomorrow night I’m going to see if I can record it with my phone. Might not come out too great in the low light, though.”

“Worth a shot,” I said. He nodded.

The next morning, I made coffee while Phil typed up his report. I could tell he was impatiently waiting for the evening, so I made a list of local stuff we could do to help the time pass more quickly for him. He finished up and we went out and had a fun, eventful day.

The sun drowned itself in the lake while we ate dinner. Individual fireflies right outside the window were already signalling, as if they wanted to do as much talking as possible before the fog made their job harder. I told Phil to go outside and leave the dishes to me. He didn’t argue.

I watched from the kitchen window as Phil dragged a lawn chair out to the line where the yard met the forest. He sat with his phone and his tablet and waited while fog drifted in around him.

He didn’t need to wait long.

An orb of fireflies coalesced no more than 20 feet from my friend. I stopped washing up and stepped out onto the porch to watch Phil get his footage. He held his phone out like he was Spielberg filming his next award-winning movie.

“I don’t know if this is gonna work,” he called to me. “Too damn dark.” He put the phone on the chair and tried to record with the camera in his tablet. “That’s a little better,” he said. “I think the camera in this thing is better in low light.”

He recorded for a minute, then I saw two more orbs coming in off the lake. Perfect. The waitress told me the smaller masses would sometimes join bigger ones, so I hoped that was the case. Phil noticed them too and called out, “that’s so cool!”

The new masses of fireflies converged on the one in the yard. The fog was dense and I was having trouble seeing Phil, but the glow of the bugs had produced a peaceful, pale-yellow haze.

I heard Phil swearing to himself. The filming wasn’t going very well.

“How about a picture?,” I asked. “That might help with the light problem. Try to take a lot of shots in a row and maybe you can animate them in the computer afterward.”

Phil didn’t say anything, but I saw him move the tablet down as if he were changing some settings. He held it back up, and flashes exploded through the fog as he took picture after picture.

“This is gonna screw up the way their illumination looks,” he shouted, “but at least I can show how they’re clustered together.”

Flash after flash after flash bloomed through the thick fog. Above us, the sky lit up as distant lightning announced a coming storm. Indeed, a storm had been forecasted for the early morning hours, but apparently it was ahead of schedule. “You see that?”

“Yeah,” Phil replied. “I’ll get inside before the rain.”

He kept snapping pictures. On the outskirts of the yard, I noticed more light. There were new orbs. Lots of them, ranging from ones the size of a lemon to others the size of watermelon. “Phil!,” I shouted, “check those out!”

More orbs coalesced and moved in the direction of Phil, apparently attracted by the strobing camera. The lightning flashed again. Brighter this time. Closer. There was no accompanying thunder.

Now there were tens of the firefly clusters, and the yard was a blur of pale yellow that threatened to compete with the camera flashes. “This is fucking awesome!,” Phil hollered, and almost as if in response, more lightning lit up the fog. It was almost blinding now, and I said to Phil we should probably go in. “Hang on,” he replied. “I’m almost done.”

All the firefly masses formed one colossal ball the size of mid-sized car, which hovered directly above Phil. There was another burst of lightning, this time accompanied by a gust of wind so powerful it knocked me down. The mass of fireflies scattered. And Phil screamed.

I jumped back to my feet just in time to be nearly blinded by an explosion of intense light coming from where my buddy was standing. I squinted and tried to acclimate my vision. Phil kept hollering. “What’s going on?!,” I shouted to him. There was no reply other than hysterical gibberish.

My eyes slowly acclimated to the light and I when I realized why Phil was screaming, I gasped and backed up to the house. A glowing firefly the size of a school bus was pinning him to the ground. He struggled and thrashed, but the insect must have weighed tons. Its wings fluttered and a hurricane-force wind pushed me against the house and flung leaves and branches from the nearby trees.

“Help!,” Phil shouted, over and over. I was too terrified to move. I could only watch as the hideously luminescent creature held my friend under its bulk.

A small drop of pure, white light fell from the mandible of the monstrous bug. Phil’s scream grew high pitched and inhuman. More of the liquid light drooled from the firefly’s mouth. I smelled burning. Burning clothes. Burning grass. Burning meat. A pool of radiance formed where Phil was pinned. His screaming stopped.

The firefly lurched up and took to the air, the wind from its wings shattering windows in the house and tossing me to the ground. It was gone. The light was gone. The orbs were gone. All that remained was a puddle of horrible luminescence.

I ran in the house and dialed 911, spoke to them for a minute, then stepped warily toward the liquid light. The stench was overwhelming. I gagged and got closer. The fog was making it difficult to see anything with proper resolution. But soon, I was only a couple feet away. It all came into focus.

The acidic light, which was now starting to dim, had destroyed everything it had touched. Tattered, singed clothing still smoked. The skeletal remains of my friend still steamed. And gripped in his bony hand, the melting tablet still sat, its flash strobing with dying pulses as the acid ate it away.

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There’s something very wrong with my parrot.

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I have an African grey parrot named Perry. He’s been part of the family for 25 years. I’ve known him my whole life. When my parents were alive, they taught him a bunch of words and phrases and he’d always make us laugh.

Lately, though, he’s been saying things we never taught him. Certainly not things we’d ever say, either. Nancy, my wife, was in the kitchen with her friends the other day when they all heard Perry squawk, “it bathes in tears and reigns beneath our feet.”

They all laughed and wondered what the hell I could’ve been watching on TV for the bird to pick up a phrase like that. They continued their lunch, but ten minutes later, Perry started again:

“It reigns beneath our feet. It reigns beneath our feet. It reigns beneath our feet.”

Then he squawked and screamed and rattled his cage so hard that he almost fell off the table. Nancy checked to see if he was okay, and he chirped and allowed her to stroke his head with her finger. He seemed no worse for wear.

That night, after I’d gotten home and Nancy had told me about Perry’s weirdness, I let him out of his cage to fly around the house. He was always well behaved and never knocked anything off shelves or shit on things we cared about. He stepped out of the cage and onto the table, but he didn’t take off. He just stood there, looking around.

“Go ahead, Perry,” I coaxed. “Go get some exercise.”

He remained stationary, but he watched me; the pupils wide in his beige eyes.

“You okay buddy?,” I asked. I was concerned for the little guy. He’d always been in great health and never acted weird. This was entirely unlike him.

Perry cocked his head and stared into my eyes. For some reason, I felt a chill run down my spine even before he spoke – almost like I knew he was about to frighten me.

In a deep tone I’d never heard from him in all my years, he uttered, “beneath your feet.”

Something knocked on the floor directly below where I was standing. I jumped about a mile and stepped away from the bird, who hadn’t moved. “Still beneath your feet,” he said.

The knock came again. It was a hundred times louder and so powerful my ankle twisted under me and I fell sideways onto the couch. The floorboards where I’d been standing bulged upward. One had cracked. Nancy came running downstairs asking, “what the hell was that?” I told her to go in the kitchen and call the police – someone was in the cellar.

Nancy and I waited by the door for the police to arrive. They got there quickly. We let them in and they went into the basement. A couple minutes later, they came back up. “No one’s there,” they told us.

“Wait, then what –”

The older cop cut us off. “Can you come look at something with us?”

“Okay,” Nancy said, “but what is it?”

“Just come downstairs.”

We followed the cops into the basement. Neither Nancy nor I go down there very often. I was a little embarrassed by how gross and dusty it was until I saw marks in the dust-covered floor and countertops.

“Are those footprints?,” I asked, more to myself than to anyone around.

“That’s what we thought,” said the younger officer. “But they look pretty weird for footprints.”

We got to the part of the cellar that was under where I’d been standing. The cops aimed their flashlights at the wood above our heads. An indentation was clearly visible. It almost looked like a punch, but the shape wasn’t of any hand we’d ever seen. It looked like it had too many knuckles; too many bones.

“What the hell?” I traced my finger over the indentations. I shivered.

Upstairs, Perry squawked. The floorboards around the indentation began to leak. Liquid dripped into my mouth and I sputtered. It was salty and reminded me of the taste you get after crying for a long time.

“Did something spill upstairs?,” the older cop asked.

“Yeah, maybe the bird knocked something over.”

“Is that him making all that noise?”

I nodded. “He’s been weird all day.”

We headed back upstairs and the cops told us to call if we have any other concerns about someone being in our house. Nancy and I thanked them, and they left.

I stared at the damage to the living room floor. Perry hadn’t knocked anything over, but there was a small puddle on the wood. He’d gone back into his cage and sat in the corner, quietly clucking. I approached the cage. There were little, wet footprints around it. They were his prints. It looked like he might’ve lapped up some of the water that’d been on the floor while we were in the cellar.

“What’s going on, bud? You having a rough day?” I tried not to think about what had happened. There had to be a reason for it. Maybe the wood had warped. The basement’s always been damp and gross. That had to have been it. The wood warped and trapped moisture was dripping out of the fracture point. But then there was Perry.

Perry stared at the bottom of the cage, still clucking. He didn’t look up. I reached out to pet his head, but he struck my finger with his beak. Not hard enough to do any damage, but with enough force to let me know he wanted none of my affection.

I looked at my pet with sympathy, wondering if he was just getting old and losing his mind. He remained in the corner, trembling slightly. Something caught my eye. There was red on the cage where he was sitting. I looked closer. It was blood.

“What happened, Perry?,” I asked, and reached inside to pick him up, knowing I was in for a pecking. Before I could grab him, he spoke in that same, chilling voice:

“It will bathe in blood and claim the sky.” He paused, then slowly spoke. “Twenty…. seven… days.”

I picked up my bird to see how badly he was hurt. But before I could assess his wound, I saw what was in the corner where he was sitting. Something entirely unexpected.

Perry, my male, African grey parrot, had been sitting on a bloody, black egg.

It’s been 24 hours since all this started. Perry seems no worse for wear, but he fights whenever we try to pick him up. He does everything he can to remain by the egg. I don’t know what’s happening to him and I have no idea what he means with any of the stuff he’s saying. Whenever he talks now, it’s just “26 days” followed by the word “hours.” The number of hours keeps going down. And I haven’t heard it, but Nancy swears she hears soft knocking coming from the basement each time Perry makes his announcements.

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The Only Thing That Matters

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I’m surrounded by corpses. People I knew. People I cared about. For hours, I sat in the stillness of this supermarket-cum-abattoir and waited. The growls and groans outside waxed and waned as each wave passed by. Waves of former friends. Waves of strangers who I never had the opportunity to befriend. Limitless potential gnawed away by the ravages of plague.

After some time, the movement started. Bodies. Body parts. It didn’t matter. That which was once animated got reanimated. A severed head blinked and opened its mouth. A puddle of viscera convulsed in peristaltic spasms. A pile of fingertips and toes wiggled. And corpses, more-or-less whole, stood.

Dylan began to squirm in my lap, still leaking. His bleating, which had been cut off by his father 80 minutes ago, resumed. It was lower. More guttural. The optic nerve protruding from his left eye socket slapped wetly against his soft cheek. My boy was awake, and my last act as his mother would be to feed him. It’s what I was here for, no matter the shape he was in. I put my thumb in his mouth and waited for his few, sharp little teeth to sink in.

His cool tongue prodded at the digit. But his jaw didn’t close. He didn’t bite. I spoke to him, encouraging him to go ahead. He shook his head and tried to spit out my thumb. I persisted. Dylan vomited a pink froth of blood and breast milk onto my hand. Still, nothing.

Three of the reanimated bodies had started lurching toward us. I knew if Dylan wasn’t going to be the one to change me, they would. But they’d tear me to shreds. Just like the others had done to his father while I was locked in the bathroom. I started to panic. I didn’t want to be torn apart and have Dylan left alone to squirm pathetically on the supermarket floor forever.

The three were practically on top of us. I’d failed. Their teeth were coming. An image of Dylan struggling in the dried tangle of my twitching entrails six months from now brought an involuntary sob. I begged him to bite me. He just growled and choked.

The first one moved in to bite. Then he stopped. He stared at me, teeth snapping together over and over, drooling shards of enamel and blood and saliva onto my shoulder. The other two did the same. Then they turned around and walked away. Nothing. They didn’t want me.

A surge of relief combined with confusion and sadness. My boy didn’t want me, either. No one did.

Time went by and waves of fresh dead entered the supermarket. They inspected me, and, like the others, rejected me. I gave up on trying to make Dylan bite. He’d never eaten anything that solid before in his life. I knew it was useless. He seemed content to thrash and flail and leak and cool.

During the quiet moments between waves, I heard soft crying. I knew who it was. As I was running out of the bathroom after the initial attack to check on Dylan and my husband, I saw a young store employee shutting herself in a small closet near the floral department.

Dylan drooled and moved his jaw as the sounds of the teenager met his ears. It had been hours since he’d eaten. It was then I realized what I had to do. It’s what any mom would do for her son.

A couple minutes later, I had control of her. She was easy enough to knock unconscious. Easy enough to tie up. But I knew if she changed, Dylan wouldn’t want to eat any more.

She yelled very loudly as I cut off a piece of her calf. I placed it in Dylan’s mouth. He tried to chew, but it was just too cumbersome. He wasn’t used to something that solid. I sighed and gazed into my son’s eye. I took the chunk from his mouth and cut off a fresh piece.

After I’d chewed and spit it into his mouth, I could swear he smiled at me. And that was when I knew our mom/son connection wasn’t broken. Even though the rest of the world didn’t want me, Dylan still did. That’s the only thing that matters.

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Rediscovering the Newness of Sex

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The problem with sex is it eventually becomes mundane. Do anything enough and it’ll become boring and repetitive. It’s silly to think fucking might be different. Obviously, there’s quite a bit one can do to spice things up, and it works – for a little while. Then it stops. Years go by and exciting, new fetishes become dull, standard procedure. By the time I hit 44, I was in a rut. Nothing did it for me. But the desire was still there.

To say I’ve done it all is a bit of a stretch, but I’d gotten pretty close. I’ve shied away from the illegal and illicit, despite frequent temptation. I don’t want to hurt anyone, and I certainly don’t want to end up in jail. There’s no fun in that.

For a little while, I’ll admit to being depressed. I went through the motions – one joyless, soulless fuck at a time. Men and women of every sort passed between my sheets. It always ended up in disappointment.

Then I met Carson.

I’d been with other men countless times, so Carson initially wasn’t anything more than a blip on a radar full of traffic. After we’d finished, however, he sensed my despair. He sensed my unfulfillment. Before he left, he scribbled an address, a date, and a time on a sheet of paper. 27 Hallsworth Hill. October 9th. 11:00pm. He wouldn’t tell me what I’d find there.

My interest was piqued for the first time in as long as I could remember. Two days later, on the 9th, I drove across town to 27 Hallsworth Hill.

The address was the location of large, old, stone house that was in need of some upkeep. Ivy ran unchecked across the gray slabs of its granite face, and bushes, perhaps once sculpted, grew wild and threatened to obstruct the view from the large, first-floor windows. A heavy wooden door with an equally-massive iron knocker stood at the top of the steps. I knocked twice and waited.

The door opened and Carson stood, shirtless and smiling, and asked me to come in. I obliged and followed. The house was beautiful, but very, very old. Nothing appeared to have been touched or moved in decades; when we passed under a dusty, hanging chandelier, part of me was surprised it had electricity running to it.

“I want you to meet my friends, Daniel, Lucy, and Eileen,” Carson told me, and before he opened the door in front of us, asked “I want you to have an open mind, ok?” I nodded as anticipation and mild concern set butterflies in motion within my stomach.

Carson opened the door and we walked into a spacious, sparsely-furnished room. A man, who I assumed was Daniel, was tied to a marble pillar stretching from the stone floor to the ceiling. Lucy and Eileen stood in front of him, kissing one another. All were unclothed. I jumped slightly and almost started to laugh when I heard a goat bleat from the corner behind us.

“How open does my mind have to be?,” I whispered to Carson, as I studied the goat staring mindlessly at the five of us. Carson laughed. “Not that open, don’t worry.” I sighed with relief.

The others in the room didn’t acknowledge Carson’s and my entrance. The women writhed against one another while Daniel, bound tightly to the pillar, watched with lust in his eyes.

“Right now,” Carson told me, “you’re not allowed to do anything but watch.” He pointed to the sofa. “Have a seat. You can get comfortable if you’d like.” With that, he stripped off his clothes and incorporated himself into his friends’ action.

I joined them in their nudity and sat on the remarkably-comfortable couch while the four engaged in basic, moderately-kinky sex. It was pretty vanilla for me, but not unpleasant to watch. Time went by and the four brought one another to the peaks and plateaus they’d desired. For my part, I was getting a little bored. The first half hour was fun because of the newness of the people involved, but with nothing to do other than jerk off, I was ready to hit the road.

The goat bleated again. I’d forgotten about the fucking thing. I turned around and saw it shitting on the floor, effectively killing my arousal in its entirety.

“Thanks guys, it was nice meeting you – I’m going to be hitting the road now,” I called out. Carson extricated himself from Eileen and rushed over.

“Wait, please. We’ve almost started.”

“Started?”

Carson put his hands on my shoulders and gently pushed me back down on the couch. “Started.”

“Can you at least get rid of the goat?,” I asked.

He laughed and rejoined the group and they finished one another off with a decent enough show that I actually found myself getting into it. The four of them knew what they were doing – there was no doubting that.

Lucy untied Daniel while Eileen walked to the small table next to the couch to pour herself a drink. She winked at me and said, “didn’t Carson offer you a drink?” I shook my head. “Jesus, Carson,” she muttered under her breath, as she poured a whiskey-looking liquid out of the bottle into a wide glass and handed it to me.

I looked around for Carson. He was cleaning up after the goat. “You guys aren’t gonna fuck that thing, right?,” I asked Eileen. She looked horrified for a second before erupting with peals of laughter.

“No,” Eileen said, still practically hysterical, “we’re not going to fuck the goat.”

I laughed at the absurdity of it all, but I still needed to know. “Then what’s it doing here?”

Eileen didn’t answer. She just grinned and grabbed me. I jumped a little in surprise, then allowed her to lead me to the pillar like a dog on a leash.

“Do you consent?,” she mewled into my ear.

“Consent to what?,” I grinned, allowing her to tie me to the pillar. It was still warm from Daniel.

“Do…you…consent?,” she whispered, tracing her knuckles over my anatomy.

“I do,” I told her.

“Good,” Eileen smiled. My hands and feet were bound to the marble. I couldn’t move. Eileen dropped to her knees, and my world began to blur.

I closed my eyes and relished the sensation of her mouth and hands, entirely oblivious to the rest of the universe as I departed in a solipsistic whirlwind of hedonic bliss. I felt new pairs of hands and more mouths on me. Sopping, salty fingers pushed insistently at my lips and I allowed them inside to stroke with my tongue. Everyone was moaning. Everyone was sighing. No sounds existed except breaths of ecstatic need.

No sounds other than gasps of pleasure.

Not even bleating.

The unwanted thought of the goat took me briefly out of my haze and I opened my eyes. Then I screamed.

The four friends stood or knelt around me, covered from head to toe with blood and gore. The carcass of the goat was sprawled out on the stone floor, eviscerated and twitching. The scent of its guts hit me a second later, and I retched and struggled to break out of my bindings. The four wouldn’t let me, though. They continued trying to pleasure me, glistening and growing sticky as the hot blood on them cooled and grew tacky.

Daniel took his mouth off me and stood up.

“Trust us,” he said, looking directly into my eyes.

“What the fuck are you doing!,” I shouted at him. At them. The two women worked to keep me in the moment as Carson licked smeared blood out of my navel.

“Trust us,” Daniel instructed again, holding my head in his hands. I stared at his gore-streaked face. There was concern in his eyes.

“Please untie me,” I told him.

Eileen slid a finger inside me and I shouted with surprise and indignity. “I promise you’ll thank us soon,” she whispered.

Helpless and hating myself, I felt my arousal grow as lips and tongues and fingers forced my biology to betray me. The haze descended again and I closed my eyes as the stink of entrails permeated the room and combined with the heavy scent of sex.

A minute or two later, my climax ended the assault.

My eyes snapped open and I glared at the four. They all stood up and smiled. Wide, unsettling smiles.

“Let me the fuck out of here,” I pleaded, my voice quivering.

The smiles took on a patronizing, sympathetic quality. Drooling the contents of her mouth into her palm, Lucy said, “Honey, we’re finally ready to start.”

For a second, I was certain I was about to be killed. This was it. My quest for new and interesting sex had led me to the end of the road. Death. Snuff. My own end for their twisted pleasure. Then the goat screamed.

I yelped as the disemboweled animal’s mouth wrenched itself open. I heard its jawbones crunching and splintering as its mouth widened, its angle continuing to grow until it was a straight line up and down. It screamed again – now a deeper, groaning sound that I felt in my stomach and intestines. I watched in terror as the animal shuddered and convulsed. A series of red, knotted ropes exploded out of its throat and slapped wetly on the bloody stone.

“Fucking let me out!,” I howled. I glared at the four with panic. They were still smiling and staring at me. The goat’s body shuffled across the floor like a hairy, osseous caterpillar; its pulverized bones sounding like gravel with every peristaltic push. It reached my captors and stopped at their feet, almost as if it were a dog awaiting a command.

Finally, one of them moved. Lucy. She held the palm filled with her saliva and the product of my stolen orgasm out in front of the goat’s destroyed mouth. Its nose twitched, and one of the smaller tubes crawled across the woman’s hand. With a disgusting, wet sound, it lapped up the contents. Before before I could blink – before I could shout – the goat erected itself on its hind legs. Its ribcage exploded outward like a metal gate hit by a truck. More tubes, thicker, heavier tubes, writhed inside. And in a blinding instant, it lept against my face.

Everything went white. I floated, disembodied, free from fear. Free from disgust. Free from violation. I was in a pool of warm, white mercury flowing in lazy currents around formless porcelain and glass. It was heaven.

The world returned with a gentle shudder. The carcass of the goat was on the floor, its ropes and tubes deftly manipulating the erogenous zones of my four captors. All animosity I felt for them was gone. All indignity had evaporated. I tried to move my arms and realized I’d been untied. Legs, too. I stretched and watched the spectacle in front of me without any sense of revulsion.

A tube branched off and approached my ear. “Do you consent?,” it whispered. The voice was soft and sexless. Seductive. I hesitated as a remaining pang of concern shot through me. What did all this mean? What was happening? The questions were endless, but the sensation was undeniable. It was the feeling of newness – of blushing, virgin uncertainty. I looked at my four friends and saw the expressions of boundless ecstasy on their faces.

The knotted, red rope was waiting patiently for my answer. Was this what I’d been searching for? To my right, Eileen shuddered as an orgasm passed through her. She looked more beautiful than anyone I’d ever seen. They all did. Each one-upping the beauty of the other with every passing glance. The tube twitched and I smiled.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I consent.” And I opened my mouth.

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