Break From Reality. Daily.
“I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with …” The boy searches the surroundings, lifts his face towards the sky, but forgets to use a distractor before blurting out: “C.”
“Oooh, that’s tricky, Porkchop. Er … could it be ‘clouds’?” The second boy punches Porkchop on his chubby arm.
“Ow, Mikey! What d’you do that for?!”
“You know — just because.”
My friend Dylan died today. It wasn’t a quick death; he’d been dying for years. Drugs had taken over his life, and no matter how many times he got clean, the demon always won him back.
I think my boss is a supervillain.
It’s not just the way she looks — though the constant parade of high heels, skin-tight outfits, silver hair, and tight red lips don’t help. No. It’s the way she keeps looking at me when I talk about superheroes.
“Bunch of skinflints,” she’d say. “Leave it to the law to deal with the villains. There’s no place for vigilantes in this world.”
Convenient, when you consider that the entire city’s law enforcement was turned on its head when the supervillain Cascade rolled into town last time. Cognitus was the only thing that stopped her, so why wouldn’t she want him out of the way?
John
Just to warn you in advance: you’ll be shocked by this letter and the news it brings. But me being British, it just wouldn’t be cricket not to explain things to you. So here goes. (I’m not telling you anything new here, of course. I’m just stating it to bring it afresh to the front of your mind, to establish the context for what comes next.)
“Come on, Claire. You can’t be alone on Valentine’s Day,” Lisa insisted over the phone.
“Sure I can,” I said, looking at the box of chocolates on my coffee table. I had a bottle of champagne chilling in the refrigerator, too. I hadn’t picked out a movie yet but it would be something with a Hepburn in it. Probably Katherine. She always made me smile.
“He’s a great guy. I promise.”
“Your boss’s cousin, whom you’ve never met. He might be a serial killer, for all you know.”
“He’s just a lonely guy stuck in a strange city on Valentine’s Day. Be a little hospitable.”
I haven’t seen Penny Arnold since those long, lazy summer days at Brookshire High. She used to wear her hair in a ponytail in the spring, and in pigtails in the fall. She liked ribbons and horses and cheesecake, and I liked hearing her laugh. We had mostly good times, and even on the worst days, I have trouble forgetting them. She had a wide smile, the kind that reached from ear to ear and split her face the way a sunrise splits the horizon, and it hasn’t changed.
“Ben,” she says. Her hair is silver, the skin around her eyes is wrinkled by age and wisdom, and her hands are marred by the work she’s done in her long life, the babies she carried with them, and the things they made. But that brightness is still there. When she smiles, I still see sunrise.
“Penny,” I say warmly. “It’s been a long time.”
Anna Emery’s pregnancy was quite unexpected; not in the Virgin Mary immaculate conception kind of way, but a surprise nonetheless.
She and Mason had been very careful, always making sure they were using protection. But as Anna’s grandmother was often quoted as saying, “If you do the deed, there’s a chance he might plant his seed.”
And three months after their first date, Anna was pregnant. A month later, they were married. Not long after that, they were on the verge of a divorce.
It was the worst food Bernard had ever tasted.
“That lasagna was lovely, Helen.”
“Cannelloni, actually, but thank you anyway.”
January 1
I threw out all the junk food and alcohol in the house today. We had oatmeal for breakfast (mine plain, Darren’s with brown sugar, and Kristi’s with the last of the Christmas candy stirred in). We had salad for lunch (mine with tuna, Darren’s and Kristi’s with chicken nuggets on top). In the afternoon, we snacked on apple slices and almond butter. I made a big pot of vegetable soup with quinoa for dinner. (Darren and Kristi had theirs with grilled cheese sandwiches). After dinner, Darren asked why there wasn’t any beer and I explained that we were going to make some changes around here. He sighed and told me he’d be out in the garage. Right now he’s pouting, but he’ll thank me on his eightieth birthday.
White paper; black ink.
The skyscraper sat empty, silent and still as a tomb. The only sounds that accompanied him were the clicks and clacks of the keyboard as his manicured fingers hit them. Looks mattered, he always knew. His old mentor had taught him that on his first day. Women primp, tuck, and lift, George O’Bryan used to say, and men suck in, suit up, and manicure.
“Most men don’t admit to that last bit, but a polished hand is a hand grasping for success. Money and power don’t go to men with dirt under their nails.”
And his mentor imparted that wisdom, along with many others, right up until the day he took over the man’s job, office, and dignity. He didn’t know where George O’Bryan was now, and once in a while he wondered if he should care.
6:45 am. That’s when I get everybody up. Well, my sons at least. My nine-year-old daughter and I have an understanding. I don’t pester her, and she comes down when she wants. We leave at 8:10 am. She usually shows up around 8:03.
But it all starts at 6:45 am. My seven-year-old son is quick to rise. All I have to do is say, Good morning! Time to get up! and flip the light on. He jumps up like he was never asleep. He dresses quickly. The first one downstairs gets to pick the TV show. He really wants to pick the TV show. My almost-four-year-old son is slow to rise. He rolls around on his Hot Wheels sheets, moaning. But I’m sleepy, he says, over and over. Then the questions start. Why is it morning? Because the sun’s up. Where’s Daddy? In the shower. Then, then one I dread. “Is it a Mommy day?”
It all started with a simple glass of water.
Conrad Jacobs woke to see the glass defiantly sitting on his antique dresser. The same glass he asked his wife to move several times. The very same glass that left a water mark so complete, the wood beneath was worn and pale.
“Aubrey!” he called, but she didn’t answer. She rarely answered him these days.
The turkey was in the oven, the potatoes too, most of the veg had been prepared, and Natalie was whistling while she worked.
Then Michael came into the kitchen.
“Anything I can do?” he asked, his question merely a preliminary.
Natalie gave him a look that reiterated an incontrovertible fact: this was her exclusive domain — always had been, always would be.
I have a curious nature. At least, that’s how my grandma phrased it. Sometimes I get a question stuck in my head and I can’t let it go until I find out the answer. It’s like an itch in my brain.
One of my ex-boyfriends referred to it as psychotic. I think he was joking. He was still sore over losing his job. I had noticed a perfect star-shaped stain on the passenger seat of the company car when he picked me up for a date. I wondered how that could have happened. What sort of object would cause an impression like that and why would it stain? Finally, I asked his boss about it. How was I supposed to know my ex didn’t have permission to drive the company car?
I don’t want to talk about the fact that my sister helped herself to my clothes and room the moment she moved back in. I don’t want to talk about the way my mother fawns over her with wet, teary eyes and the way my father holds her and calls her “precious.” I don’t want to comment on her favorite sweets baking in the oven, her old toys dug out and spread all over the house, or her yellow tank top with ducks printed on it, an old gag gift I gave her. I don’t even want to discuss the fact that she’s supposed to be two years older than me, not four years younger.
But I do have to talk about the fact that she died ten years ago.
If you had asked me just a few short weeks before, I would’ve said you were crazy. Yet there I was, standing in line alongside other frenzied shoppers, looking for the deal of a lifetime on Black Friday.
When I told my best friend Tabitha that I was thinking about doing this crazy thing, she screamed. Then the scream turned into a shriek, which morphed into a squeal that just kept getting higher and higher until I couldn’t make out any actual words. My dog Max growled, and gave her the same look he gives the neighbor’s cat every time it runs through our yard.
“Let’s go, Amy,” she said. “Tons of people do it every year, why not us?”
Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a queen — Queen Beyaz by name. She was a good queen, and we know that because she always wore white. Good queens wear white. Bad queens wear black. Or red. Or green, at a stretch. But this queen would never think of wearing anything but white.
And everything around her was white, too, just to make sure that people knew she was a good queen. So she had a white palace, with white walls and floors and ceilings and furniture — a devil to keep clean, but it was a price Queen Beyaz was willing to pay to keep up appearances.
It’s not a holiday until I get into the kitchen with Mom. Even though I live in a different city now and we don’t cook together much any more, we fall back into the familiar rhythms. She places her best knife on the cutting board in front of me. I hand her the salt before she realizes she needs it.
The turkey was in the oven, and we were both sitting at the table peeling potatoes. The picture window in my mom’s dining area gave a panoramic view of the Gunderson property across the street.
Windows are not allowed open in my home, especially the ones on the south side of the estate overlooking the vegetable garden and the orchard beyond.
I’ve lived much of my life in the orchard.
Monsters don’t venture there.
Cook likes to tell me about the faery and boggarts, as well as other creatures I should be wary of in the wilder places of the estate and the surrounding wood. I’ve looked but never seen them. Best to be wary of the monster you know than to fear the ones who have never caused you harm.
Seven years. It’s been seven years and Dom isn’t about to go now, body lost to the Void in the alleyway of an abandoned apartment complex overrun with the Shifted. She loses herself in the grind, chest heaving and lungs burning with effort as she fights until there’s nothing left, until the flashes of light from Shifted eyes fade and she’s surrounded by death, blood and shadow soaking together on the ground.
She’s nauseated but she chokes it down. When she turns around, there’s still one standing, but Dom hesitates, rooted to the spot. The stranger isn’t glitching, and her red hair is matted with sweat and blood but free of shadows. Still, Dom hesitates; she’s been wrong before. There’s silence save for their heavy breathing and the steady drip of blood from axe to pavement.
“Hello?” says Dom warily.
The group stood in a small hallway that led to an old padlocked storage room. Laura, age eight, asked, “What’s this?”
“Was once the second bedroom,” Dudley said. “But now it’s just fer storage.”
“Can we see inside?” Laura asked.
“No can do, little lady. Employees only.”
If someone was looking at Dudley closely, they would’ve seen him shiver slightly. Just being near the room gave him the chills, and he did his best to never go inside. But if you asked him after his shift, and plied him with a few glasses of his favorite scotch, he just might tell you the real reason why that room was padlocked.
“It wadn’t the fog that caused the lighthouse to close,” he’d say, enjoying the smoothness of the scotch as it went down. “The real reason it closed is inside that old storage room.”
It had happened every Midsummer’s Eve since Fira’s grandmother had been a girl.
A beautiful woman would come walking out of the forest at dusk and take a single girl from the village.
“It’s an honour to be chosen,” the elders would say, but it didn’t seem that way to Fira. For no one knew where the girls were taken, and they were only ever seen once again: the following Midsummer’s Eve when it would be them walking out of the trees to take the next girl.
This bruise-eyed boy hauling a box, heavy as the world. Straining under snickering rain and cratered sky. Stop. Old man breath. Feels like the thousandth time he’s walked this route, the first time he’s felt this way. Adrenalin like rumbles of thunder all through him.
The morning winds rush down the hill behind Tim, catching the sound of wood on concrete, so it reaches along the concrete path under the line of birch trees, the path brings it through the gates into the playground, where it reaches the ears of waiting chattering children, who turn and see Tim, see the weight of the box, see the scribbled warnings Privet, Danjrus, Dont touch, and come circling in towards him. They all clamour to see what’s inside. They plead. They cajole. They bribe with offers of friendship and parties. Their words tinkle and crash around him like shattered glass. Theo says “Show me.” In this little corner of the universe, nobody says no to Theo McKenzie. But Tim does, and time stops for a moment.
As the reader is most definitely aware, small rural towns love their monster stories. In the town of Hogan, there had only ever been one.
The monster, which came to be known as the Hogan Pine, was a tree. The story, as most people tell it, goes that in centuries past the tree would lure travelers into its forest (by night, naturally). They would catch a sudden, deep aroma of pine and become absolutely helpless in resisting its pull — everyone loves the smell of pine. Then, if they hadn’t been alone, they’d be found the next morning — or on a different, more distant morning — lying dead at the base of the tree, body covered in its needles.
“Ready?” I held the rope while Mary gripped it with her hands and legs.
“Ready!” she giggled, her lovely green eyes sparkling.
I let go and she swung out over the pond, shrieking now. She hung above the water for a split second then returned.
“Jump!” I yelled.
“No fear!” she yelled back.
“I assure you, Mr. and Mrs. Huston, we are doing our best to locate your daughter’s missing limbs.” Lieutenant Matthew Collins watched the mother’s fingers shake as they hovered above her daughter’s shoulder, inches from the wound. Behind her, her husband stood tight-lipped and silent.
“What kind of monster would do something like this?” The woman’s voice wavered but echoed easily off the morgue’s metal interior. “We can’t bury her in … in pieces.”
When I died, I found myself standing in the middle of the sick room staring at my body. It should have been disorienting, but it was not like my death was a shock. The me in the bed looked hollowed out and shrunken, engulfed in layers of blankets. Thankfully, the me looking at the body stood straight and proud, dressed in navy linen slacks and a crisp white blouse. I felt restored and calm.
Wasn’t there supposed to be a loved one beckoning me toward a light? I glanced around, but the room was empty.
And where was Jeffrey? He had promised to be here holding my hand when my time came. I wandered the house until I found him, and the nurse. They were in the kitchen. More specifically, on the kitchen table.
They married six months later.
I’m not an unprincipled man. But he just kept wearing me down. Like he was dismantling a monument, brick by brick.
I was in the Dominican Republic doing work for my dissertation. This was in 2003 when the peso plummeted like a rock, but I loved struggling, lively Santo Domingo. I was working with gay male prostitutes — bugarrones as they were called — interviewing and following thirty of them. They came from nothing, and paying them for research didn’t trouble me.
Even as little Montgomery climbed from the back seat, David still hadn’t come to terms with the situation. He couldn’t believe Patrick trusted his son to his care, even for one day. Just keep him alive for twenty four hours, David told himself. That’s all you need to do.
“Alright Montster, I’ll be back to pick you up tomorrow. I promise we can do whatever you want for the rest of the weekend,” Patrick said, kneeling in front of Montgomery.
“Ok.”
“Now I need you to behave for Uncle David. Can you do that for me?”
“I guess so.”
“The realtor said Castle.”
“Well, this must be what they call a castle around here.”
John and Jane surveyed their new home and acknowledged disappointment in their different ways. John said, “Let’s get in, away from the rain.”
“Yes, why has it never stopped?”
They’d come a long way, and purchased Balmore Castle through an online auction, on the other side of the ocean from their old home among golden cornfields. They were accustomed to a lot of flat, open spaces, and the dips and lumps of Ireland confused the eye at every turn. The rain, too — it seemed endless.
Alan Maple is old and tired.
He loves his work. Few people spend their life working for their passion, and he’s always considered himself a lucky one. He loves what he does, and he’s good at it.
And it was easy until recently. He’d evaded that old detective for years, and even enjoyed it. He was younger then, fast and slick. But time has passed, and so had the old detective. Now, his good times are quickly nearing their end, and it began with the arrival of Christian Stanford.
It was a dark midnight. The howling dogs broke his sleep. As he opened his eyes, a floral green face with blood red eyes and dark brown hairs verged upon him.
“Oh! Go away, please,” yelled trembling Amar.
“There is nobody here, honey. Why are you scared?’’ his mother inquired in worry.
“A wild monster, Mom. He was about to smash me.”
The benches were full today, the paths crowded. Kelsea flowed through, her rhythm unbroken, her eyes soaking up the reds and oranges and coppers and yellows. Her shoes crunched in the gravel, adding a new dimension to the rhythm of her strides, the count of her breaths. In, out.
Until her breath caught.
That guy was up ahead, again. Lurking, again, a haze of cigarette smoke clinging to the hood of his oversized sweatshirt.
The sign on the marquee at the Loma Theater read, “The Fog, starring Adrienne Barbeau.” My best friend Becky and I thought it would be the perfect movie to see on Halloween since our parents told us that at fourteen, we were too old for trick-or-treating.
After what happened at that movie, I wish I’d just stayed home with Mom and handed out candy to the kids in the neighborhood. But you know what they say about hindsight.
First impressions can be deceptive. Take the building in which I’d rented an apartment, for example. The rather elegant façade belied the sorry state of the common areas inside, with paint peeling from the mouldy walls and the wooden stairs rotting in places. Then there was the concierge. Madame Fournier seemed sullen but it turned out that she was essentially a kind-hearted soul, if overly interested in the lives of others.
It was a sign.
I almost missed the faded billboard for the Hummingbird Café, partially hidden by an overgrown elm. My dad had always requested hummingbird cake for his birthday, so I knew he was telling me to get off at that exit. But when I finally located the little café, it had been boarded up. Most of the town looked like it had been abandoned.
It started to rain. After all the turns I had made, I couldn’t find my way back to the highway in the dark, and my phone didn’t have any bars. According to my maps app, I was in the middle of a big fuzzy spot somewhere near my designated route.
Lisa, a personal assistant, developed a knack of turning sideways and vanishing like an angelfish. It was an illusion, of course: if you looked closely, she was still there, but less than an inch thick. Most people did not look closely and this was her victory.
She discovered this talent outside the stationery cupboard on floor 7 — the Directors’ floor. She had been restocking their gilt-edged letterhead, a regular task because the Directors enjoyed sending out notes on fancy paper. She emerged from the cupboard and saw Pietr, twenty yards away in the squelchy-carpeted corridor.
Twenty-One does not enjoy scouting missions. Even less so when they end with a splitting headache and a crashed ship on a primitive planet. He makes a mental note to file a complaint about this particular flightpath, then adds a note to find a new job as soon as that complaint goes through. Shaking the stars from his eyes and rubbing the spot where his skull met the dashboard, Twenty-One puts in a signal for pickup. As the irritatingly pleasant operator puts him on hold, he pulls up intel on the blue planet that might be his temporary home for the near future.
Luckily for him, the planet is inhabited. Unluckily, the master race has not mastered space travel, nor have they established intergalactic diplomacy. Also unluckily, their language and physiology are too far removed for Twenty-One to make contact without rousing massive public panic. Luckily, they have discovered alcohol.
Granny sat heavy in my stomach. She tasted of garlic and pickles, not unpleasant, but I knew she’d give me indigestion later. I was still hungry, and after the savouriness of Granny, I was looking forward to the sweetness of Red. There’s nothing like finishing off a big meal with a sweet treat.
I was still picking my teeth when I heard her skipping up to the front door, so I had to think of something quick to keep Red in the house long enough to corner her.
The pedestrian walkway under Rideau Street smelled of weed, beer and urine. Shannon hesitated, then walked on with brisk steps.
This route would get her to the bus stop a good fifteen minutes faster than the crosswalk. Nerves spurred her on. Let’s go, let’s get this done. Her heart sang her hope. Hurry, hurry, hurry and see the grandbabies!
She knew this place. She’d been here often, sleeping off a bender in a dank corner, invisible. She’d hated the people who walked by, unaware.