But what is the guarantee, this smeared luxury, this Tom Thumb shift; is that what it is, in your head? I softened you with what was in your cup. We fell into a tangle of bicycles. What were the pedals like, up into your back?

There are no guarantees, that is one answer to it. When we were very little they told us no fires, white and bright on cloudy days; none if there were clouds in the atmosphere. Enemies waited for clear blue skies, wanting to expose everyone most acutely to the flash. Later, we learned that this was accurate. And we thought about all of the silver pods perched atop some silver spires, each pointed toward an afternoon. Quick and final flash.

Now, out here on the grass. They’re down there, still, waiting in a thousand lost holes. Ten thousand holes forgotten. Listen to the golf cart, plunging into softer ground. The electric whir and the bounce that chimes the keys. One more wilding runaway. The sun wants to set at last. The cart, stopped, a never-noticed-it kind of hush. Sitting in the plush, something must dare to move. A jackrabbit. An ant.

Someone will film you with expensive glassware mounted in toughened carbon steel, but they will not feel it like you did: the bicycle sharp and almost inside of you. The wheel of it, whispering, spun.

There are no patterns in the weather but we look for them, always. Each morning our eyes are hands & are held up & open, receiving. On the bike ride into town you will feel wind, warm or cold. When you don’t know what to say you will talk about it. You will introduce yourself with it & it will be easy, vaporous. What depth your need for escape? How easy is your breath? How are we all still alive together? We could show our limbs & warm them, elsewhere. We make the same things of yesterday, feeling similar.

Sometimes in the house you rent, there gather souls who are a different color of alive, & no weather matters, no weather exists that prevents a consumption underneath it. Then you do not mention it. Then the weather is for your mothers & fathers only, the same as it has been always. Disregard the high clouds or the hot sun. Do not disregard the shapes the clouds make against the blue. Do not disregard the way seeing a cumulo T. Rex makes your heart feel. It will feel that way again.

Sometimes we are drinking in the fog at night or in the daytime & we are high, & the sun & moon are far from us, & we are looking at each other. You can tell the truth then, & people will listen. It will not be about things beyond your control, or maybe. The haze will dissolve & you will go for a walk under the stars & look at the ones tattooed on your sides & you will sigh & the sigh will make it all the way up, unhindered. You will know when you are too close by the sounds the others make, how the next day sobered they will tell you they haven’t talked like that since college, & you will wonder what that means, & nod & look upward & form thoughts, like how the sky is your mood, & what does it mean that things are leaking from it.

Something silver caught Charlotte’s eye. She asked her boyfriend Will to hold up a second. Normally she isn’t the type of person to drop everything for a nickel or a dime, but something seemed important about this thing.

Will was the type of person who would drop everything for a nickel or a dime. Give Will any reason at all and he would drop whatever he had. He was rarely on the receiving end of good things, his hands open for nothing. He worked in a corner pizza shop. One of the perks of Will’s job is that he got to eat free pizza. He met Charlotte because she likes pizza, and one of the perks for her was the free slices she would get from him. Sometimes they got drunk, occasionally watched movies, but most of the time they just lay around having sex and eating pizza.

After a few weeks of casual sex Charlotte had asked him if she could call him her boyfriend, because, as she said, she didn’t know what else to call him. Will had replied that she could call him Will. After a few moments he looked at a person walking by.

“If the only reason you want to call me your boyfriend is for the security that I won’t fuck anyone else, that’s fine. I’m not going to fuck anyone else.”

Will figured this was fine to say because he didn’t know anyone else who would want to have sex with him.

Charlotte crouched over the thing and picked it up. A cross. A miniature metallic Jesus Christ nailed to a silver cross. Will looked at it. “He’s always so dead,” Will thought, and kept walking.

“Wait,” Charlotte said, “what do I do with it?”

“Do with what?”

She held it in the middle of her white palm. “The cross.”

“I don’t know, throw it away.”

Charlotte looked at Will and then down at the little thing. Will walked over to Charlotte and they both stared down at the cross in Charlotte’s hand. Charlotte looked up at Will.

“I can’t throw it away.”

“Yes you can. It’s just stuff.”

“To you it is” Charlotte said. The little silver thing was now wrapped in a fist.

“No. To anybody. It’s just stuff.”

“So to anybody I’m just stuff then?”

Will thought for a second. “Yeah.”

“BAGEL & RESTAURANT” read an awning on a storefront behind Charlotte. Suddenly a change came over her face, like at a party when the music stops.

Will didn’t register this, he just felt hungry. He knew a guy who worked at another pizza shop nearby.

“Do you want to grab a slice?”

Charlotte stared angrily at Will, then at the cross.

Will repeated himself.

“Do you want to grab a slice?”

She looked at Will and saw what she was turning into. Saw hours spent in dirty sheets, empty pizza boxes everywhere, a stack of pornography in the corner. She had lost time and gained weight, hated him with the weight of time she will never get back. She had just one question. Her demeanor became acute, her voice quiet.

“Do you or do you not love our lord and savior.”

The wax dries the skin of my fingers, large cracks etch towards my palms. It appears I will live forever. At night I chew the dead skin off and spit it onto the floor. I no longer sweep so the mice eat the pieces during the night. They shit in my kitchen. Today’s weather has rendered me lazy. I drink heavily. I slur insults at the television, the women’s asses smudged and unnatural. I drop multiple candles in the dirt and don’t bother to pick them up. When I try I fall. There is a sharp pain somewhere.

My son visits unexpectedly. He brings guests. He carries a leather bag. He stands over me, tells me he has brought me a woman. My head lolls. She is not the woman I have been dreaming about. She laughs when she tells me her name is Oksana, but doesn’t smile when I choke on a figure skating joke. She kneels in the clay, kisses me. My mouth is too wet and slides all over hers. She knees me in the groin. I am too drunk to be scared. We wrestle for about four minutes. She spits in my face, smacks my head against a stone wall. It is almost my birthday. Three men move further into the shadows.

I say nothing. I see very little. The pain somewhere has spread to my throat. Oksana is gone. My son is gone, my wife is gone, my gold fillings are gone. They have taken my rings and the fingers that wore them. I will not make another candle. I will not squeeze soft wax like breasts. I am sure I am crying but have no idea if I am awake. I lay in the wet clay outside of my front door and wait for nothing. Nothing comes, then dusk.

“What’ll you have?” Sam said, already pouring the beer, sliding it across the bar to that same old spot in the corner.

Norm slumped onto the stool. “The pressure’s getting to me,” he said, taking a swig.

“Still on the job hunt?”

“No. You know how Vera and I have been trying for a kid?”

Sam wiped water from a clean glass. “Not going so well?”

“Doctor says my swimmers aren’t swimming. Low motility.”

“Sorry to hear it. But hey, there are options.”

“I can’t even face going home, Sam. Vera’s always wanted a baby. She’s been yacking about it ever since we started going together in high school. Meanwhile I’m out of work, can’t give her a kid. It’s getting harder and harder to wake up in the morning.”

The door swung open again. “Hey, Cliff,” Sam said, lifting his elbows from the bar, turning to look behind him.

“Afternoon, boys,” Cliff said. “What would today’s topic be?”

Norm shook his head. “Nothing.”

“How’d the route treat you today?” Sam poured another beer, the head sifting off around the rim of the glass, perfectly.

“Never mind the route. I met a woman.”

“Do tell,” Norm said, draining his beer.

“Name’s Candy.”

Sam poured another for Norm, and one for the woman sitting at the side of the bar. “Where’d you meet this Candy?”

“Well, she’s one of them women you talk to on the phone.”

“A phone sex operator?”

“Bite your tongue, Norm. She’s like a companion. Someone to call when you’re looking to talk. That’s all.”

“My bad.”

“She said I’m different from the other men she talks to.”

“That’s for sure,” Carla said, emerging from the pool room with a tray of empties.

“She’s no Vera though, Normie. You got lucky there.”

“I know it.”

“Lucky I didn’t get to her first, that is.”

“Come on, Cliff.”

“Just playing around, Sam. Norm knows I wouldn’t let him stand in my way.”

“Shut up.” Norm slammed his glass on the bar and slid off the stool, pushed his gut against Cliff’s. “Just shut up.”

“Guys,” Sam said, “let’s all calm down. Cliff, why don’t you go shoot some stick or something?”

Cliff sulked into the men’s room, locked himself in the second stall. He muttered to himself as he unzipped his regulation gray pants. He closed his eyes, thought of Candy’s smoky, lounge singer voice. She had a way of making him forget everything, of making him feel as if he were somebody, maybe even postmaster general material. His mustache twitched as he tugged at himself.

Norm drank his beer, watching the Sox lose one in the bottom of the ninth. For the second night in a row.

“They need your arm, Sam.”

“An arm. Not mine.”

“You might have given up some dingers, but nothing like these hacks they’ve got now.”

“Listen, Norm. You and Vera, you’ll be all right. You’ve weathered a lot of storms.”

“I hate to disappoint her. Sometimes I can’t find a reason why she’s still with me.”

“She loves you, man. You know that.”

“You’re probably right, Sam. How about another brew?” Norm gulped the beer in front of him to make room for the next, to keep his mouth occupied until it could find some way to form the words that would explain to these people, his friends, that Vera had left him. How it had been years, and he’d yet to find the words, was beyond him, was buried somewhere deep in the past under many more failed attempts at the truth. Sam placed a fresh brew in front of him. Norm lifted it, thought of it as a toast, and maybe after this one he’d be able to say it all out loud.

That night, as every night, Sam picked up the stools, one by one, swung them upside down and placed them atop the bar. Carla dimmed the lights on her way out that swinging door. The feeling, the dread he’d never learned to kick seeped in, seemingly from his fingertips and up under the sleeves of his sweater. He was alone, and it crept up the back of his neck, made his spine tingle. He looked at the bottles, row after row of them, and felt the sweat form along his receding hairline.

He reached for the mirror he still kept under the bar. It wasn’t all vanity; sometimes the sight of himself—as unexpected as it always was, no matter how much he prepared for it—was enough to make him feel as if he were not alone. If only for a moment. Sometimes he ended up sleeping on the couch in the office, unable to get his legs to hold him up long enough to make it out the bar, up the stairs, to his car. Let alone survive the drive home and the utter emptiness of his frosty apartment. Sometimes that glance at his reflection was just enough to stave off the loneliness long enough to keep his hands off the liquor. Long enough to remember this bar was the closest thing he had left to the limelight of his career. It was the faintest idea of a home. It was a place where, when it came right down to it, people knew his name.

As he emerged he saw the cat caught on a spike of the fence. The cat whined shrilly. He paused for a moment eyeing the cat and weighing the hammer in his hand, then put the hammer and nails down on a chair and paced over to the fence. He reached his hand towards the cat and she reached back with a hiss.

Small beads of blood appeared in a line down the top of his hand. He pressed his thumb against the cut, pressuring the seeping to stop. He glanced at the hammer, he glanced back at the cat.

He looked around the yard until his eyes fixed on an old towel hanging from the clothesline. As he plucked it from its pegs, he looked up and down the street, checking for neighbors. Seeing no one, he walked away from the clothesline and threw the towel over the hissing cat. He reached down and grasped the cat firmly though the folds of cloth. He pulled.

The tension on the wire increased for a moment, then released as he drew the cat away from the fence. A tuft of bloodied fur was left wrapped around the wire. He lowered the cat to the ground and released the towel. She darted back to the shed where she kept her nest. As she licked her wound, he retrieved the hammer and nails from their chair and climbed up the ladder set against the house. On the roof, he hammered down the loose rattling iron sheet which had kept him awake at night.

Demi Moore says things to Patrick Swayze who turns and says things to the friend who kills him later on. Obviously someone dies. I ask her, the one who always needs to go the bathroom, if Patrick Swayze already died and she says it’s too bad he already did.

Outside the sun is real bright which goes real good with the haze and dust that Demi and Patrick are moving through. The friend focuses in and out. This is how you know he’s bad. This is how you can tell someone dies by his hand. But Demi and Patrick seem real happy so it’s easy to not notice because mostly, you just want to know where all this is going.

The walls they tear through take them somewhere hollow and wide. They’re happy in dust masks. They could be happy in anything because they’re movie stars. For a moment everything in the room feels exactly the way they do. I start to feel like all of them on the TV. Patrick’s tanned abs glow. I think Demi’s tits perk up. No one cares about the friend’s cock or shy parts because most of him seems unfocused and sketchy anyway. I get up and try to move the curtain over the window because it’s a little too bright for a sexy scene.

The brightness coming from the TV seems heavenly. The heavenly brightness is glowing from the nineteen nineties. I sit back down and look over at the one who always needs to go to the bathroom. It seems brightly clear she has not really aged since at least 1990. I look at her every time something sexy happens as a way of getting over a weird shy thing starting to harden in my stomach.

I think Patrick Swayze is the only real thing we have in common, hardly Demi Moore. I wonder if it’s a younger and brighter Patrick Swayze that makes the situation of being here a bit more interesting and tolerable. Obviously there are things, like nostalgia and death, that can lighten or darken any situation, but those things are too awkward to talk about with someone whom you have to take to the bathroom so often.

I think Patrick Swayze died to her and me in 1990 when the movie first came out.

I text someone asking didn’t he die already even though she already told me he did because I need to include a caption beneath a photo of the living room where the TV has the movie playing. Of course I took a cell-phone photo of the situation where there are ghosts that appear from different angles.

Now Demi can’t sleep and she’s alone in her studio. It’s grey on most parts of the screen. It’s grey throughout the new loft apartment she and Patrick live in, even in the spaces and rooms we cannot see. I wonder what the grey looks like and feels like to the one who always needs to go the bathroom. Breaths from an oxygen tank fluff up and down and nothing moves.

Patrick comes down to Demi’s studio. I don’t know why it feels like he walked downstairs from something but the thing hardening in my stomach goes soft.

And he’s got his shirt off. Her legs are wide open with a chunk of soft clay spinning between her thighs. He sits behind her, hands over hers while hers are wet from shaping a grey figure and the one sitting next to me is wet too, but for reasons that have no control like old age.

A record stops. More things shuffle past; men in an office, a life-size angel-sculpture swinging upward several stories, a beaten neighborhood in Brooklyn, and finally we reach Whoopie Goldberg. Patrick Swayze is dead by now and needs Whoopie’s help because being dead he gets to find out all sorts of things.

Some other ghost shows him how to knock and move objects around without a body. That other ghost was weird and jumped into the ditch of an incoming train and I thought of a friend of a friend who dropped his cell-phone and died that way too. The one sitting next to me that always needs to go the bathroom is already asleep.

Whoopie doesn’t want to help Patrick probably because he’s a rich dead white guy but I can’t tell. It’s funny to be racist toward a ghost. He keeps her up all night singing Henry The Eighth I Am. Whoopie is real good at being pissed off and so is the one sleeping, especially when having to get out of a chair and onto the toilet. Most of the time we’re successful in moving between the bathroom and living room and all the time she says is it cold outside and where’s the sun, I love the sun.

But who needs the sun when the TV is real bright and it makes us mostly happy.

I go back and forth between the window and TV feeling the same light and brightness from both and it seems colder in the TV not because Whoopie and Patrick are walking around cold wind in downtown, but because we are indoors and Demi won’t let them in and the one that needs the bathroom often says how cold is it outside.

The weather is a miraculous thing like God because everyone knows how to talk about it and everyone has heard of God and most miracles involve the weather somehow.

A crucifix hangs on the wall by the TV. Whoopie is screaming from Demi’s window to please open the door. I get up to lock the door by the kitchen because I don’t want someone to walk in and see what we’re doing. It’s a little embarrassing because what if the one that always needs to go to the bathroom already went in the wheelchair while asleep and what if someone finds out I let this happen because I wanted to keep watching the movie, wanted to see Demi let them in at the expense of a wet diaper.

No one tries to open the door by the kitchen.

By now, I just want to see the penny already. It happens in exactly the same way I saw it for the first time in 1990, except now it’s a little more miraculous and the one asleep is now awake. Light outside is clouded over and the TV glows copper and pink.

Whoopie slides a penny beneath a door where Patrick is on the same side as Demi.

Patrick concentrates hard with his index finger. The penny slowly slides up and whatever was hardening and softening in my stomach isn’t there anymore. Of course I am reminded of a few things like the Eucharist and those tiny round hosts at Mass and wonder if pennies function the same only because they’re both round and hold some form of currency like survival and faith and now Demi is crying and so are we.

Someone is trying to open the door by the kitchen. Demi lets Whoopie in.

I wipe my eyes to ignore the miracle on TV because no one would believe it, not even if you paid them.

Half an hour goes by.

I turned to the one asleep and said, wake up you’re not dead yet, this is the part when Patrick goes to heaven.

He feels the efficiency of laying down without any thought or feeling obliged. His face is against the cold tile.

B Boy Darkness says, I am sinking.

I am sinking because I am happy.

He extends his hands and meditates. His body is a star. He weighs less than a pound on the plain tile. The room turns blue when the sun sets and a strange unknown sound like a growl perhaps from the pipes vibrates the ground. For a moment he falls asleep.

–

There is an unknown disaster happening down hill. Small great fires. All the cars drive in unison with red ambulances together on the visible highways away from the cities. She sees people collapsing in clumps down the hill on the streets. B Boy Darkness feels a scream as though it were coming from his own throat coming from someone down the hill. A few people are screaming faintly at arguably the same thing. They are all feeling arguably the same way, in a minute widespread panic. He stands next to the girl on the train, together with her looking at nothing but city lights. They are holding hands. Each finger has an independent tremble and coercion. He says, I am going to see what’s happening. He says, I can dance so symmetrically for so long it can feel like nihilism. I can make my body a catastrophe.

–

He sees her every day when he rides the trains to practice. She tells him she admires him in a low dress. In his head, there are only a few things worth living for. He can no longer describe why the weight of his gym bag on his shoulder makes him feel good and intimate and tapped into the world. He explains to her, My hands are veiny from routine. He says, There is something peaceful about routine and letting go over what comes back to you. When the train car slowly brakes, and the automated female voice bleeds over the intercom from passenger car to passenger car, he feels unbridled glee when she comes a little closer to him. She moves away from the horror she sees from down the hill in the window, where the people are obviously stressed or screaming or afraid of death and she says, I was scared but now I’m better. I was scared but now I’m better.

–

The mess she leaves is all in his head. She is amassing, still waiting on the train car in her own afterglow where he just left her, right next to the automatic sliding glass doors. She is holding the plastic railing with her might. Her body is getting smaller and smaller in the distance while he paces his breath and heads down the hill. B Boy Darkness is running down the hill in the middle of the street since no traffic is coming even through the tunnels. He runs until he gets there.

–

Sometimes the crowds share one mesmerized face during a B Boy show. He has danced every day for the past few years with a signature presence. All the muscles in his arms glow in open tension. It’s as if his body grows heavier after a performance when he is being watched but lighter when he is touched.
It will dawn on him to stop talking about love over and over again and rather just sit across the table from her in silence or stand closely next to her for a minute. He feels both. His face is still when he imagines the future with the girl from the train car, staring out her window down the hill.

–

Right away he starts breakdancing in his running shoes. There are some people lying on the pavement unconscious in the sunlight. A fire hydrant is one giant geyser of water. He finds his center of gravity and starts to spin around and around again on his palms. While more red ambulances continue to arrive, and heat shimmers in the air in ribbons with black smoke and nearly blinds visibility, the scene inside the noise is calm and simple: Everyone is watching B Boy Darkness breakdance in the street, clumped in dozens down the hill, unable to describe how they feel, but they are all together. They are dozens and hundreds feeling emotional for once. Every window in the buildings all around them has a face.

–

“I think the biggest misconception about breakdancers or B Boys with the people out here in the world is that, they’re not dancing, that everything they’re doing is just happening at the moment. And they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just doing it. They just going crazy.

Breaking is a legitimate dance. As legitimate as any other dance that has existed.”

— Ken Swift on a megaphone, standing next to B Boy Darkness while he dances down the hill.

Not everything is a metaphor.

Jack Ruby beatified himself with a revolver. Lee Harvey Oswald did it with a bolt-action rifle. The cat ate the canary. There are saints everywhere.

I am cooking scrambled eggs. At first it was an omelet but then I experienced failure. Then I decided that I did not like the color so I added salsa. I am feeling proud of myself for being adventurous as a cook. But I also now remember that it is ten in the morning and I am eating eggs and nothing about that is bold or courageous.

om·e·let /ˈäm(ə)lit/

Noun: A pile of scrambled eggs that has its act together.

On the television there is a war. We are at war in Iraq. They keep replaying the video of the statue of Saddam Hussein being torn down over and over. They are telling us that they are average Iraqis. Occasionally they speak of looting and riots elsewhere.

I am eating my eggs. I am done eating my eggs. I am taking a shower and getting dressed. As I slide my shoes on I realize that I have nowhere to go and slip them off.

The television is still on.

My parents are dead. I stare outside looking for a skyline and see nothing. I am in the middle of rural Missouri. I am going to go drunk driving, I think.

It was the first plane that killed my parents. Now there is a war. They are vaguely related in the fact that the people who killed my parents were brown and the people in Iraq are brown and if you are white and they are brown that it is good enough in a metaphorical sense.

Everything in my apartment was bought by their death and when I look around I see pretty little gravestones from Apple and Sony.

I had a dream that my parents were still alive. There was nothing remarkable about the dream other than dead people were alive in it. I was having dinner with my family and I was eating a pot roast and they were sitting across from me smiling. There was no reference to them being alive again. I think I forgot they were dead. My sister was eating some kind of weird Mexican style lasagna, filled with black beans and rice.

I watch a war on television and remember that they are dead. They. My parents. There are not towers where there once were towers. The statue of Saddam is coming down on television again. Everything is falling down so I stand up. It is a metaphor. But also I am standing now and walking towards my car.

I am driving to the grocery store, I am deciding. I am going to buy groceries.

I walk back into my apartment and put on my shoes and then I leave my apartment for the second time.

All of my actions are framed within the idea that my parents are dead from nine eleven. My sister is now a fundamentalist. She used to drink a lot and then they died and she drank a lot and went to rehab and found God. God was not hiding. Now she is married to some guy and she takes painkillers because my parents’ ghosts are swirling around in her brain. She likes that we are in two wars and she has a bumper sticker on her ninety nine Pontiac that says she supports the troops.

I was in junior high and they pulled me out of class to tell me that some guys flew a plane into my parent’s job. I sat in the principal’s office watching cable news and the billows of smoke bleeding from the towers and the men in dusty suits struggling through everything solid turning into air. I watched the images and said nothing. I did not object when the principal turned off the television.

Everything that was solid was turning into air and my head felt dense and strange and my feet seemed like I was gliding along the ground and that my weight was repositioning itself inside of me to make room for something foreign.

I am in my car driving to the grocery store. I am in the grocery store. I am buying tortillas. I am buying a lot of eggs. I am buying milk and peanut butter. I am buying whiskey. I am looking at scotch. I am thinking about scotch.

Scotch /skäCH/

Noun: Arrogant whiskey.

They brought my sister to school to pick me up and we sat in our empty house and waited for anything to happen.

We don’t know anything, my sister told me. She was crying and I was crying but we weren’t crying. I did not know if they were dead but I did not think that they were alive.

They are still digging people out, my sister told me.

We lived with aunts and uncles.

I am driving home. I am home. My home is an apartment. I am sitting on my couch in my apartment. I feel satisfied with myself for being occupied for an hour. I think wistfully about going to bed and sleeping until I have something to do. I realize that I have nothing to do tomorrow or on most days. Sleeping would not accomplish anything so I do not do it.

I am thinking about going back to college.

My sister calls my phone and I do not answer it. She does not leave a voicemail.

My sister delved headfirst into nationalism. She began to put American flags in places she had not put American flags before. She hugged troops and I went into my room and read conspiracy literature. I got tired of nine eleven conspiracies and started researching the JFK assassination.

Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald were the same man. Metaphorically. Not really. They were not a singular person. They were both lonely men craving positive affirmation. Oswald filled this void in his life with communism. Ruby did it with dancing women.

Oswald did it alone.

I watched the video of JFK being shot over and over. I was fifteen years old. My sister called me morbid. She cooked and cleaned as I sat in front of my computer. The bullet was not magic and JFK was not King Arthur.

I am cooking my second meal of the day. It is the same as the first meal. It is an omelet. I am cooking the eggs and flipping it very carefully.

It falls apart.

I turn it into scrambled eggs.

Snickers. Twizzlers. Candy Corn. Gobstoppers. Goobers. Skittles. Milky Way. Payday. Kisses. Kisses. Kisses. Reese’s Pieces. Jelly Bellies. Bazooka Joe. Almond Joy. Mounds. Baby Ruth. Charleston Chews. Bit-O-Honey. Butterfingers. Twix. Crunch. Starburst. Sweethearts. SweeTarts. Fun Dip. Tootsie Pops. Chuckles. Nerds. Kit Kat. Sugar Daddy. Razzles. Gummi Bears. Junior Mints. Jujyfruits.

COSTUMES

Monsters. Superheroes. Zombies. Humble mummies wrapped in toilet paper, slowly unraveling as they trick-or-treat. Vampires. Ghosts. Adorable dinosaurs looking both ways before crossing the street. Princesses. Witches. Robots. Demons. Teens too cool for costumes, drunk and stoned and horny. The Boogeyman. The Babysitter.

SETTING

Evening. October. Midwestern suburbs. Dead leaves. Tee-peed trees. Egged houses. Jack-O-Lanterns dashed against curbs. Orange brains splattered over asphalt.

KNIFE

Forged. Stainless. Eight inches. Satin finish. Full tang. Ergonomic handle. Breakproof. Razor sharp. Dishwasher safe. Lifetime warranty.

VERBS

Stalk. Hunt. Hide. Watch. Follow. Sneak. Stare. Strangle. Murder. Stab. Stab. Stab. Stab. Cut. Slice. Hack. Poke. Chop. Slash. Slit. Thrust. Gouge. Rip. Dig. Tear. Bury.

SMELLS

Sticky candy. Burning leaves. Rotting pumpkins. Teenage pheromones. Cheap beer. Dank pot. Vanilla candles. Latex condoms. Pungent bloodlust. Impending doom.

HOUSE PARTS

Doorbell. Windows. Bricks. Pipes. Drywall. Closets. Grout. Tile. Sinks. Stairs. Furnace. Floorboards. Screws. Nails.

BODY PARTS

Entrails. Hair. Blood. Bone. Bile. Skin. Fat. Cartilage. Spleen. Ribs. Eyelids. Trachea. Vertebrae. Cornea. Cuticles. Knuckles. Knees. Nipples. Toes. Ass. Elbows. Brainstem. Tendons. Teeth.

PLOT POINTS MIXED WITH CANDY

Twix. I stalk Babysitter and her two friends as they walk home from school. Payday. The teens are so young and pretty. Mounds. I want to kill them all. Skittles.

One of the friends I strangle from the backseat of her car before slitting her throat. Snickers.

The other friend fucks her boyfriend in a neighbor’s house. Sweethearts. When the boyfriend comes down to the kitchen, I lift him off the floor and impale him to the wall. Jujyfruits. Then I costume myself with a bed sheet and head upstairs. Chuckles. The girlfriend thinks I’m her boyfriend, being silly. Nerds. I strangle her with a phone cord. Gobstoppers.

Babysitter is disturbed by the moaning, dead sexy phone call. Jelly Bellies. She comes to the neighbor’s house and discovers her friends’ dead bodies. Starburst.

I attack. Kit Kat. Babysitter falls down the stairs and escapes back to the kids. Fun Dip. I like it when women play hard to get. Goobers.

I break in. Crunch. Babysitter jabs a knitting needle in my neck. Bit-O-Honey. She tells the kids to hide, then locks herself in an upstairs closet. Gummi Bears. I tear down the door. Reese’s Pieces. Babysitter sticks a clothes hanger in my eye. Tootsie Pops. I drop the knife. Butterfingers. Babysitter stabs me in the chest. Twizzlers.

Psychiatrist sees the panicked children running from the house. Junior Mints. Still I rise, resurrected behind Babysitter. Baby Ruth. I begin choking her. Sugar Daddy. Psychiatrist fires his revolver, sending me crashing through a window. Bazooka Joe. Psychiatrist tells Babysitter that I’m the Boogeyman. Razzles. When he looks outside, I’m gone. Kisses.