But that was how this house acted. At least for him. Was he the only one who could feel something was wrong?
Steven was most sure something was wrong at those moments when he stood at his mark in the house meant to represent his parents’ house—meant to represent his character’s parents’ house—and waited for the scene to be shot. The lighting was adjusted, the camera positioned, and the whole time he just stood there. Soon, he would think, maybe even as early as his next film, someone else would stand on his mark for him, a body double, though for now it was him. This was his big break, he was the lead, but until the break had broken it would be him standing in for himself.
At those moments, standing on his mark, sometimes he felt he could see, there beside him, a flickering, a strangeness in the air. But if he turned his head to look straight at it, he couldn’t see it anymore. And then the cameraman would scold him mildly, coax him back to looking in the direction he had originally been meant to look, and the flicker would begin again. What was it? The rapid oscillation of the ceiling lights, maybe? Something wrong with his brain? He couldn’t say. He didn’t think it was something with his brain, but if it wasn’t, why didn’t anyone else seem to see it?
It happened about three-quarters of the way through shooting, right in the middle of the murder scene. There he was, the dismembered bodies of what were meant to be his parents at his feet. He was still breathing hard, hyperventilating slightly, his vision fading a little, spattered in what would pass on film for blood, and he saw what he’d come to think of as a flicker. Only this time it was more than a flicker, more like a rip in the air, like an animal had torn the air open with its teeth. The cameraman was seeing something too. There was a strange expression on his face, and he was looking at the air right beside Steven’s head with a sort of mute wonder. Don’t move, something inside him said, and he could feel the hair rising on the back of his neck. He held still, very still indeed.
There was a smell like ozone, bitter and deep in his throat, the sound of something unfurling, and then he could feel breath hot on his neck. In front of him, the cameraman moved abnormally slowly, as if walking underwater. And then, abruptly, he was jerked, hard and fast, off his feet, the air knocked out of him.
By the time he had pulled himself up, a few seconds later, the room was empty. The camera was gone, the entire crew as well, the room deserted. How was that possible?
“Hello?” Steven called, but there was no answer.
He got up and walked around the room. No sign, as far as he could see, of where they had gone. No sign, if he was to be honest with himself, which he was not sure he wanted to be, that the production team had ever been here: camera gone, lighting gone, none of the cables or other apparatuses of a shoot. What the hell? he thought.
He walked around the room another time, and then again, growing more and more anxious. He tried the other rooms and found them just as deserted, just as silent. He called out and listened for a response, but there was no response. Finally, he went through the front door and left the house.
Or at least he would have, if there’d been anything to go out into. There was nothing outside of the house, the door opening onto nothing at all.
How long had he been there? How many days? A long time, it felt like, though in another sense it felt like almost no time at all. He had tried all the doors and windows. It was always the same: there was nothing outside the house. He wasn’t hungry, which confused him. He wasn’t sure how he could still be alive. Assuming he actually was.
He sat with his back to the wall, watching, waiting. Looking down at the backs of his hands he could see through them the ebb and flow of his blood. How strange. Had he been able to see that before? It was as if his skin was becoming transparent. He got up and paced, back and forth, back and forth, then sat down again. He slept for a while, woke, slept again, woke, went back to sleep.
He was just stretching, getting up again, when he caught a glimpse of it—that same flickering he had seen before. Immediately he was on his feet and looking for it, searching for it in the air. He swept his fingers back and forth but found nothing: there was nothing there. And yet, when he turned away, there it was, in the corner of his vision, flickering, again.
He moved toward it slowly, not looking directly at it so as not to startle it. He followed it as best he could, backing toward it, head down.
And then, from one moment to the next, his vision shifted, the flicker becoming a line of light, a line that opened until it became a slit and he could see something through it.
He was looking at the house, at another version of the house. This one had the production crew in it. The camera was rolling, and there he was as well, axe trailing from one hand, breathing heavily, his shirt spattered with blood. He watched the scene come to an end, watched as he, his character, killed both his parents, watched until the director said cut.
Only then did the figure that was meant to be him relax and glance his way, looking right at him, straight through the narrow gap. For a moment, they both regarded one another and then the other him smiled in a way that bared his teeth, and Steven realized that what he was seeing not only wasn’t him after all, it wasn’t even human.
Through the slit he’d watched the film wrap, watched them pack all the equipment up, watched whatever it was that had taken his place genially shake hands with everybody and then head out the door, out to live his life. The rest of the crew went too. When the last crewmember had turned off the light, the opening faded.
There followed a long period in which nothing happened, where it was only he himself alone. His body grew longer, leaner. He didn’t sleep anymore, though he sometimes lay down and pretended to sleep. He was hungry all the time but not for food exactly—for what he didn’t precisely know. The flicker maybe, or what it led to. He wandered the house, looking again for that flicker, but it just wasn’t there. Maybe it was still there, though if it was, he couldn’t find it.
Or couldn’t anyway, until something changed. There it was, the flickering, and there he was, slowly moving toward it while trying to give the impression of moving away, until, finally, he had found the slit again. There it was, he could see it, the twin of the house he was now trapped in, dimly lit by the beams of two flashlights flickering their way through the dark space.
“It’s got to be around here somewhere,” said a voice, one he was pretty sure he recognized.
“Are you sure it’s a good idea?” asked the other voice, also familiar.
He wasn’t the one being asked, he knew, but he was sure it was a good idea. Maybe not for these two men, but definitely for him. Whoever he was, now. He could already feel his body changing, becoming more and more like whichever of the two men he looked at the most.
“Even if we do find it, how are we going to get through it?” asked the second voice.
Steven had an answer for this question too. He waited patiently for them to find the slit. When they did, well, they’d have no problem getting through it, because he would help them. Would help one of them anyway. The problem for that one would not be getting in, as he knew from experience, but getting out again.
Trigger Warnings
Caution: self-harming behavior. Caution: depictions of war. Caution: depictions of self-harming behavior in a war-torn nation, probably Serbia (unless you are Serbian). Caution: severed head. Caution: self-severing of own head, depicted in slow motion. Caution: unrealistic situation of violence, such as is often depicted in manga. Caution: theatrical violence inflicted upon midgets. Caution: ghosts. Caution: flaming ghosts (as in ghosts on fire, not flamboyantly gay ghosts). Caution: gay ghosts. Caution: spiders. If you have a severe spider phobia (talking to you, Debbie—you need help!) you should stay the fuck away from this story. Caution: profanity. Caution: Mormons. Caution: realistic depictions of Mormons, as missionaries, coming to a door much like your own door. If you are afraid of Mormons, please ask for an alternate reading assignment! Caution: depictions of shell-shocked Mormon missionarie
s going door to door in a war-torn nation as bombs fall around them. Nobody opens the door for them. One of them—caution!—sees what he thinks is a ball on the ground, but it turns out to be a human head. Before his mind registers that this is actually a head and not a ball, he has kicked it. Later, he will be haunted by the head of a ghost, potentially gay, that once resided in the head that he kicked, and this ghost-head will summon spiders, thousands and thousands of spiders (stay away, Debbie!). Caution: amputees. Caution: if you are afraid of amputees, please avoid this story. Caution: if you are an amputee, please trust that I did not intend to insult you or your ilk (probably an unfortunate choice of words, since ilk sounds like a part of a word rather than a whole word), and please do not feel obligated to read this story. But, if you, an amputee, do read the story, please know I would gladly welcome any suggestions from you as per what the life of an amputee is really like. Like, how do you tie your shoes, for instance (or shoe, if you only have one leg)? Caution: psychiatrists. There are hundreds of psychiatrists in this story, and each of them has a catchphrase they repeat over and over. Reading this story will make you hate psychiatrists, even if you are a psychiatrist. Caution: flaming ghosts of Mormon amputee psychiatrists. Unless they are in fact psychotherapists. I forget which is the one with the medical degree. Maybe neither (caution: lack of verified medical knowledge). Their amputation is their head, each has had their head amputated, if that’s a word you can use to describe a head being separated from the body, and each carries their “amputated” head under their arm, though sometimes they set down their head and later pick up the wrong head. Caution: references to video games. Caution: excessive violence not unlike that found in the video game you were playing a few minutes before picking up this assigned story. Do yourself a favor: go back to the video game and remain untraumatized. Caution: men in trees. Caution: excessive use of exclamation marks! Caution!!!! Caution: colostomy bags vs. frat boys (hint: nobody wins). Caution: limber, self-fellating Smurfs. Caution: excessive and profane use of the color blue: IF YOU READ MY SMURF PORNOGRAPHY, BLUE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME FOR YOU AGAIN: ONLY READ THIS IF YOU ARE BLUE-CURIOUS AND PREPARED TO JOIN US! Caution: cute kittens. Caution: references to social media. Caution: if you are over forty-five, you will not understand that these references are to actual social media platforms and will judge this story, which is a realistic story, to be some sort of science fiction, thus revealing yourself to be too old. Caution: I am not an SF writer, and if I get any more of your namby-pamby workshop comments saying that I write “sci-fi” I will take you outside and cut your shit up. Caution: profanity. Caution: biologically improbable sexual situations. If you try to reenact these situations at home, you will at best sprain something and at worst wind up in the emergency room with an earnest ER resident explaining the surprising strength (sometimes against its own interest) of the muscle known as the sphincter while secretly taking pictures that he will later post on a social media platform that, mercifully, you have never heard of. Caution: unrealistic characters. Caution: white men from the Midwest. Unless you are Jonathan Franzen (and if so, my condolences), you will find the men in these stories reprehensible. Caution: God, but God’s a woman. Or rather—caution!!!—just became a woman: God in this story is trans, but hell, if you’ve watched pay cable in the last year you’ll probably be O.K. Caution: Colin Hanks depicted trying to act. Caution: midgets. Did I already do that one? No, it was Mormons. Same difference, really. Caution: cultural insensitivity. Caution: republicans. Caution: an army of republican Mexican-wrestling midgets led by Colin Hanks face off against flaming amputee Mormon ghost psychiatrists in my story “Hymn-Off,” with each army trying to sing hymns better than the other, as judged by trans-God. For those who feel they would be wounded by this story, I have included a version that has no Mormons and no republicans and instead takes place in a public high school in California with competing midget glee clubs. Trans-God is still the judge. Caution: eighties music. Caution: feathered hair. Caution: fiction.
Kindred Spirit
1.
At first there is me and there is my sister, and then there is only me. Or rather, to put it more precisely, first there is me and I am observing my sister, for my sister is unstable. It is hard, sometimes, to believe we are siblings, and sometimes I, the stable one, do not believe so. Your task, my father says—if he really is my father—is to watch her, to observe her. If he is my father then he is probably not my sister’s father—which I suppose would make my sister something other than my sister. Perhaps she is my half sister, and we share the same mother. But we have never known a mother. Perhaps, as my sister used to suggest before her death, we were grown in a vat, not a womb.
Perhaps I, the stable sister, am not quite as stable as I have been led to believe.
To return to the matter at hand, my sister sits in a chair that is too large. Or, more precisely, it is a normal-sized chair, even though my sister is too small for a normal-sized chair. I, too, am too small for the normal-sized chair I am sitting in, which is positioned right beside my sister’s. Neither my sister nor myself are normal sized. In this, at least, we are alike.
We both stare at the blank wall. It is a whitewashed wall with a crack wandering across it. Sometimes I feel this crack hides a face. There are two larger holes where perhaps nails were once affixed, presumably to hang a picture. But there has never been a picture hanging on this wall in my lifetime.
My sister and I awkwardly grip the arms of our normal-sized chairs and stare in mutual silence at the wall.
From time to time, I cast a sidelong glance at my sister, to assure myself that she is still present in the chair beside me. It is my task to watch her. So says Father. As far as I can tell, she does not glance at me. Perhaps she does not care if I am still there. Perhaps, unlike me, she does not have a task.
I hear the buzzing of a fly. The creature passes before my eyes, a disruption in the air, and then circles, humming, above my head. It is behind my chair, then beside it, then comes to settle on the chair’s arm.
Carefully, I lift one hand, slowly, slowly. Then I bring it down swiftly, killing the fly, cracking the chair’s arm in the process. I am, as my father has noted, exceptionally strong and exceptionally swift—another sign, so my sister might suggest, that at least one of us—me—was grown in a vat.
I flick the dead fly onto the floor. Half smiling, I turn to my sister, eager for her to acknowledge what I have done.
But my sister is no longer beside me. While I have been engaged with the fly, she has left her chair and traveled to the far side of the room, clambering up into the open window. She is framed in it. As I watch, she throws herself out. By the time I have reached the window myself, she lies in the courtyard below, blood spreading in a puddle around her head.
I do what any faithful sister would do: I leap out after her.
When I come to myself again, I am lying beside my sister. The cobblestones where my body struck are cracked and buckled. I am unharmed, so far as I can determine. How can I be unharmed?
My sister’s eyes are open. For a moment I think she is still alive. But she is not alive. She is dead. I have failed in my task.
I do not know how long I lie there. Perhaps an hour, perhaps two. Long enough for the blood to stop pooling and to become tacky: it sticks to the side of my head and dries there. Long enough for my father to come looking for us and find us no longer in the room. Long enough for him to peer out the window and see us both lying in the courtyard, one of us dead, the other pretending to be dead, and to cry out.
“You had one task,” my father tells me. My sister’s body has been carried away, the blood scrubbed from the stones. I have been washed and brought back here, to this room. As I sit in the normal-sized chair, he walks back and forth, his hands clasped behind his back. “You failed in your task,” he says.
“I failed,” I acknowledge. I bow my head.
“I no longer have a daughter,” he says.
“You no longer have two daughters,
” I correct. “You still have me.”
He hesitates a moment, finally nods. His hesitation is not lost on me, nor is the fact that after I speak he seems confused then afraid, though I am not sure what I am to learn from this.
He walks back and forth. “How am I to know that you did not push her?”
“Why would I hurt my sister?” I say. “She jumped and then I jumped after her.”
“Why would you jump after her?”
“I was hoping to catch her,” I lie. “Absorb her fall.” But I was too far behind her to do that or even believe that it might be possible. The truth is I was hoping to be like her, to be dead with her. But I failed in that as well.
My father stares at me. “I wonder …,” he says absently. “What distracted you? What made you stop watching her?”
“A fly,” I say.
“A fly?” he says, surprised. “But there are no flies in this place. How do you even know about flies?”
I look on the floor for the dead fly, but there is nothing there. Could I have imagined it?
“I saw a fly, Father,” I insist.
“Don’t call me that,” he says sharply. “Impossible,” he adds. Then he sighs. “What shall I do with you? Shall I store you?”
“Store me?” I ask, confused.
“Never mind,” he says. He waves his fingers. “Carry on,” he says, and leaves the room.
But how am I to carry on? I had one task, as my father has always pointed out to me. Now that my sister is dead, I have no task at all. What am I to do with myself?
Song for the Unraveling of the World Page 18
