Flash

THE BABY by Jamy Bond

October 28, 2019

One morning, she told me the story of how her friend’s baby died in a car accident.

“They were stopped at a red light. Someone came up from behind and slammed into them. My friend thought immediately of her baby in the back seat, but when she turned around to reach for it, she saw the baby’s head pop off, its arms and legs break, its chest cave in.”

All I could think about at school that day was the baby. Its head popping off. We were supposed to practice writing our letters, but every time I came to the lower case i—with its slender body and bubbly, round head—I thought of the baby, its head ripping away from its neck, flying up into the air. Did it hit the roof of the car, I wondered, or roll onto the floor? Did it cry?

“How was school?” she asked when I got home.

“I keep thinking about the baby.”

“My friend’s baby? Oh, what a tragedy. To think of a baby crushed to death! What an awful thing. Honey, let me sit down for a minute. Put your arms around me. That poor, poor baby.”

I dreamed about the baby. It wasn’t a baby in my dream, but a little girl like me, and I could see her from her mother’s perspective in the front seat: her eyes bugging out just as her head explodes. Blood spouting from her open neck, spraying the seats and windows in bright red.

The next day at school, I kept hearing a baby’s cry. I heard it in the clang of metal lockers, in the slam of heavy classroom doors, in the screams of children on the playground. While I stood at the craft table cutting Valentine hearts out of pink construction paper, my hands started to shake and I broke out in a sweat.

“What’s wrong, do you have a fever?” Ms. Albert said.

“No,” I told her. “I can’t stop thinking about the baby.”

“What baby?”

“The baby my mother told me about. The one in the car accident. The baby whose head popped off. The baby that was crushed to death.”

“Come here,” Ms. Albert said and led me down the hall to the nurse’s office.

I told the nurse about the baby, the dream, my shaking hands.

She called my mother.

I could hear the nurse’s voice go from puzzled to concerned to, finally, empathetic.

“Yes, they do tend to exaggerate. Even make stuff up.”

She hung up the phone.

“Time to return to class, my dear,” she said and pulled me down the hall.

Back in the classroom, it was story time. I lay down on a soft rug and listened to a story about cats.

“What’s wrong with you?” my mother said when I walked into the house. “I never said that.”

“What?”

“I told you her baby died in a car accident. I never said anything about its head popping off or its arms and legs. That’s ridiculous. How embarrassing! You have a very vivid imagination.”

She sent me to my room to wait for dinner, so I played with the Baby Alive doll I’d gotten for Christmas. There were batteries at the small of her back, beneath her pink, lacy onesie, that made her mouth open and close. She came with food and diapers. Her food was a packet of cherry powder that you mixed with water until it turned into goo. I loved feeding her that goo on a tiny pink spoon with a butterfly handle. Soon after she swallowed it, a creamy pink slime would appear in her diaper.

I had used all of the food and diapers on Christmas day, and my mother refused to buy more because it was messy. So for now, I just pretended to feed my baby, scooping air into her pulsing mouth with that tiny spoon.

“Eat up,” I said, “you must be hungry,” and I imagined her emaciated and starving, skin draping from her baby bones.

(IT’S NOT LIKE CLAIRE DIDN’T BRING IT ON HERSELF) by Jennifer Fliss

October 27, 2019

The indigo sky informed all of them that it would soon be time. That the children as clowns and superheroes and princesses would be stuffed full of Reese’s and candy corn and rolling in their little beds positively asphyxiated with the sugar. The teenagers were dressed in threadbare tie dye t-shirts, fringed leather vests. Claire wore bellbottoms and a crop top. She had been about to pull on a long-sleeved shirt. (Ben said don’t.)

Doris’s house was not what you’d expect. A rambler, off-white brick and something that was not brick but just as ugly. The numbers, 10220, hung off nails and threatened to drop and then who would find her then?

It had been raining all week. Moisture clung to the blades of grass and ghost-fingered branches clasped above their heads, as if in prayer. Here the leaves and the apples had fallen early.

Above them, hundreds of crows sang their murderous song. Two blocks away, Eve Lake. If it were summer they would hear the warble of frogs and have their skin lanced by mosquitoes. Late night picnickers would be enjoying the ever sun. Today they could feel the future phantom of winter. Claire chewed her lips and picked at her fingernails.

Doris lived with her grandson Jake. Jake flicked his retainer in and out on his tongue and wore a leather duster that he said had been his father’s. (His grandmother told him this lie because he wouldn’t wear a jacket otherwise.)

“I don’t know if I really want to do this,” Claire said.

The crows fell silent. Across from Doris’s house, an automated eight-foot witch cackled. Marcus started humming and Ben added a low growly beatbox. The trio had been stand outs in The One Notes, the school a capella group. Claire added a high note.

“Shut up,” Ben said.

Every year, a senior is selected as lead. (Everyone said Jake was coming out of his shell and weren’t they all so glad about that!?)

A gust of wind unfurled off the lake. A shrill bird.

“The fuck was that?” Ben said.

“An owl, what do you think?” Marcus said and slung the burlap bag over his shoulder. (It was not an owl.) The bag was already heavy. They shuffled along the driveway toward the house.

Shiny wrapped candy waited in a bowl under the stuttering porch light. A shower was running and there was singing. (Jake was an excellent singer, but most people didn’t know that.)

Ben’s father had started The One Notes thirty years earlier.

At the front door, Marcus reached for a candy bar but Ben slapped his arm back.

“Dude, they’re Hundred Grands. We hit the Halloween lottery,” Marcus said.

Claire wheezed and tried to control her breath, as if you could do such a thing, control the thing that keeps you alive. She thought about the kiss she and Ben shared earlier that day. Under the bleachers at lunch, stealing a smoke, like always. But when she said fuck, it’s cold, Ben leaned over, locked his lips on hers, and exhaled the nicotine directly into her throat. She sputtered and he put one hand up her shirt in an instant, the other still held onto his burning cigarette. When she finally got enough air to cough, he pushed her back. Slut. He laughed and Claire was unsure what had changed. The soft parts of her mouth still burned.

They had wandered back to the cafeteria and he said he was looking forward to the auditions for the lead that afternoon.

That evening, on the dark side of the sun on Halloween by a lake, the teenagers stood with a bulky burlap bag at their feet.

“Do it,” Ben said. Marcus rang the doorbell and they fled toward the lake.

No one came to the door. Claire was alone. She didn’t see where Ben and Marcus had gone but she had a straight view of Doris’s door. She thought she saw movement. Her breath grew tight. She heard the creak of the door.

It was Jake, hair wet, slicked back, towel at his waist. Bare chest like snow in the night. He looked up and down the street (don’t they always?) and only after a moment registered the bag. He nudged it.

Doris appeared over his shoulder. “What is it Jakey?”

“A bag.”

“Should we open it?” She didn’t make a move to do so. “Is this from one of your friends?” (No.)

“You should’ve told them to come in,” Doris said and went back into the house. She always wished Jake brought friends home. Jake stood for a long while. Remembering a time before all this. A time when he didn’t wear the not-previously-his father’s coat. (Yes, he knew.)

Jake undid the knot. Pulled at it to open the top. As he did, it frayed as if time moved forward. The bag released an over-ripe peach smell and he pulled back the edges to reveal a tangle of long damp hair.

It was Claire. Claire in a bag and her blond brown wet hair and a red candy bar wrapper in her grip. Her eyes were closed.

Claire was always so kind to him, saying bless you when he sneezed, smiling close-mouthed at him in the hall. Once she offered to get him a ditto from the teacher so he didn’t have to get up from his desk.

Was she breathing? He opened the bag, laying her legs and arms beside her body gently. Her limbs still pliant; no rigor mortis, at least. She was topless and he covered her breasts with the burlap.

Over the lake, the crows took off, hundreds of black smears in the sky. Two figures were running. Then the crows dove. Down, down, pulling at the hair of one figure, then the other, and then all Jake could see was one dark mass and he brought Claire inside.

The house was hot. His grandmother always had the heat on at 85, her collection of salt and pepper shakers covered on every surface. Stifling. He felt trapped, but wouldn’t ever leave.

Claire’s chest rose though her eyes remained closed.

We all are. (Trapped, that is.)

CATOPTROMANCY by A.V. Greene

October 27, 2019

In the instant before Molly turns the light back on, your friends all forget how deep puberty’s teeth have sunk.

TUESDAY AT THE MONASTERY by Amy Barnes

October 27, 2019

We reverently chop up Brother Francisco.

Deo Optimo Maximo.

After morning prayers, that’s we do on Tuesday. Laid on the dining room table, our former dining partners resemble dinner chickens we used to eat together, reduced to skeletal bones. We carefully cut away flesh and organs and eyeballs and hair. Stripped of their robes, we leave only skulls covered in skin, brains removed as if we are Egyptian mummy makers, not religious brothers.

I measure a place for my living hands on the arched crypt walls, bits of his skin clinging like gloves. Laid flat. Stretched out. A hand is twenty-seven bones. You can create with a hand. A leg has only two main bones.

On Monday, we make nails that our vows don’t allow us to buy; each piece of iron pounded into miniature crucifixion spikes. Nails ready to be pounded into palms and femurs and skulls. We pray over each nail in our teeth and under the heavy hammers, living spit bathing something for the dead.

Wednesday is bone cleaning day. Bones are exhumed from their graves still reeking of death stench. We put them carefully in buckets ready for creating new forms, some left as full skeletons to recline in the crypts, robed as if they are alive. There are never enough bones. I begin to find joy in administering last rites to my brothers.

I wonder what I will become. Where will my brothers nail me on Thursday, the day of the walls? A pelvis chandelier, light coming from where urine once flowed? Maybe vertebrae circle-nailed like flowers with finger stems?

We are only one step above putting skulls on sticks to frighten towns into not sinning or not disobeying the king. But it is more than that. We pray over these bones, counting them each like rosary beads. I walk the hallway and prayer for my brothers caught in bone purgatory.

Deo Optimo Maximo.

I see myself as more artist than necromanist. My skills as an architect pre-vows gives me the spatial skills to complete these silent tasks. I taste the iron nails and never quite wash the smell of death from my robes. I know they will choose my place carefully, laying out my bone design, my hands creating beauty after I am gone. It will become my penance.

What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be...

GLASS by K.B. Carle

October 26, 2019

I don’t remember the before.

I’m not really sure I want to.

If I went searching for a lost past somewhere in the recesses of a brain that dissolved when I died, would it really belong to me once found? I’m no longer the person I was. In fact, I’m not even a person anymore. Back then, I assume, I had skin, a tongue, a nose. A voice a family might recognize, if I had a family. Fingernails I could paint, or chew when nervous. Eat or spit out of the side of my mouth.

People can be gross or clean. Can inhale, exhale, sigh, hold their breath until their faces changes color. People can roll their eyes, make their tongues look like clovers, pluck their eyebrows, and lick their lips.

No one tells you about the things you lose.

Only you’re dead and here’s what’s left from the before.

I keep my before items in a black pouch Anubis lent me. I didn’t plan on keeping the pouch, but since he never asked for me to return it, I guess it’s mine. He’s good like that. Inside are shards of various sizes that don’t fit together. I used to try to make these pieces make sense, but every time something was missing. Each shard has a unique sequence of blood droplets that sometimes trails over jagged edges. Alone, I use them to perform the Rorschach test. Maybe my memories are connected to the psychological. Sometimes, I see the butterfly humans claim to notice when staring at ink on paper. Mine is red with wings expanding until the glass ends and the wings break at the tips. Sometimes, during the seconds when no one is dying, I see blades of grass tied in knots. They remind me of war, of people tangled amongst themselves over food, safety, the final shot.

Most of the time I see dots.

No one tells you about the things you miss.

Then, there’s the glass eye. I like to place it in my right socket and see how long I can balance it. I pretend I can see the deserts of Egypt where Anubis and his family lives—haunts—I don’t really know what Anubis does in his spare time. I think I’d enjoy observing what the Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife does in his spare time. It’s not that Reapers can’t see, we can, but it always feels nice to be able to look at something rather than just see it. I think it does anyway. I can’t remember the last time I had eyes, other than this one. When my glass eye falls, I slip my hand between my ribs and catch it. It’s a skill I’m not proud of. A constant reminder that I’m literally empty inside and that my body may not have an inside because now there are no walls, just bones and space.

I’m now a being made up of empty spaces.

No one tells you about being alone.

The iris of my glass eye is gray, which used to be disappointing but now this is something I accept. I mean, it would be better if my glass eye contained some kind of color. Blue is my favorite but at least it’s not black like everything else in death. Its glass edges are always smooth compared to the bits of bone that make up my skeletal fingers and I like the sound of it rolling along my arm, the feeling of something looking at me while balancing on bone.

If Reapers had parties, I would show the others a trick. How I can cock my head back at just the right angle and make my glass eye disappear from my right socket. The disappearance would allow the Reapers to remember swallowing, hunger, and chewing. The weight of a stomach. How spit can form rivers collecting on their tongues and drift just below their uvulas. Of course, I’d make my eye reappear, not in the socket, but clenched between my teeth. If Reapers threw parties, they would applaud my creativity, my imagination, notice how the glass eye never blinks or shatters.

But, since they don’t, I keep my trick to myself.

No one tells you what was left behind.

I like to think the eye is mine, even in the before time. That I had gray eyes—or eye—and crafted stained glass windows that people still work hard to preserve. Maybe my creations capture the gazes of many with different colored eyes because they notice the specks of my blood embedded in the clear spaces of my glass workings.

Maybe I bled butterflies.

No one tells you about the before. Only that you died. That you were chosen to be a Reaper.

And they never tell you why.

HER HUSBAND’S WIFE by Joaquin Fernandez

October 26, 2019

Her husband’s wife used to watch them fuck. This was back when it was still fun, back before her husband was her husband, back when her husband’s wife was still her husband’s sick wife, not her husband's dead wife. Her husband’s wife used to watch them, alive and cancer-free, snapshot trapped, posed happy in drugstore frames, from the wall, from the dresser, from the nightstand that they shook and shook and shook. She watched them while she was moved into hospice, coughing blood in deep, primordial growls. She watched them the day she died, sweaty with hunger while his phone rang unnoticed. After her funeral, she watched them play house, aprons and scotch and licked whipped cream. She watched until her husband took her photo off the mantle, replaced with her ashes. For a long time after, she would watch nothing.

It was the third year after his wife died, in the second year of their marriage, when she found the box. She had gotten used to finding him asleep on the couch in the morning. He had gotten used to her turning her phone over when he walked into the room. This was when they had moved beyond the kindness of excuses, bored in their certainty, like an endless day trip car ride, all worn out songs and tapping fingers, fidgeting into morse code how long, how long, how long do we have to do this?

She would have left if she hadn’t found his dead wife's things, basement deep in the cobweb dark, labeled neat and plain like we do to things we intend to forget. She had been getting her suitcase. She stood, looking at the box on box on box of the dead woman’s things. She wiped dust from the cardboard and thought of her husband, of their husband. She ran a fingernail along the scotch tape seam of the top box, letting her curiosity get the better of her. She felt herself cross from tourist to grave robber. She smiled in the dark.

Why shouldn’t I?

She opened one box, then another, then another. She read diaries and love letters and college transcripts, heady with the thrill of a voyeur. She plunged her hand into a box of lingerie, watching it disappear into the penned ocean of silk and lace until she grazed the dead woman’s jewelry box. Inside, her rings and necklaces, pearls and bracelets twinkled in the basement dusk. She tried them on, one at a time, then two and three in gaudy combinations. An hour passed before she heard her husband lumber upstairs. She slinked up to meet him, her suitcase long forgotten.

That night, her husband slept. She tossed and turned, scrolling her phone and frowning at the ceiling. She thought about lingerie and jewelry and her husband’s wife. She thought about all her pictures, staring at her, smiling at her from every room. She thought about the boxes downstairs.

Why shouldn’t I?

In the basement, she drank wine and wore the dead woman’s robe. In the dark, she paced, a ring on every finger, her neck straining under the weight of a dozen chains, gold and silver, the kind her husband had never bought her. She pawed through the lingerie, wishing suddenly for a mirror. She needed to see herself. She looked instead to the pitch black softness of the dead woman’s box, smiling, pleased, as something there began to stir.

She was still smiling when she woke, alone, aching, and exhausted, nude except for the dead woman’s wedding ring. She held it up to the morning light, a rainbow catching on the diamond. She thought, for a moment, about taking it off. Then the moment passed. She walked her house, naked under the dead woman’s robe, seeing it with new eyes. She dragged the dead woman’s ring down the hall, scratching last year’s paint job into a trail behind her. She tapped the ring on the counter, smiling at the pleasant clink of gold on marble while she took her coffee. She knew she couldn’t keep it, even as she held it up, admiring it on her hand.

Why shouldn’t I?

Days passed. Then weeks. She began to laugh at her husband’s joke’s again, though they still weren’t funny. She brought him scotch in the den, clinking the dead woman’s ring on a sweating glass. She did that thing he liked with the whipped cream, and always had to shower afterwards. She began to meet his hungry eyes at dinner, recoiling inwardly.

In the night, she slipped downstairs with a glass of wine, the dead woman’s favorite vintage, and dressed in her clothes. In the night, she couldn’t help herself. She lit candles and unpacked old photos. She began to mimic her make-up, perfecting the dead woman’s smokey eye before wiping herself bare with a tissue. Some mornings she woke in the basement, curled on a chair. Some mornings she woke alone in bed, with her husband still on her breath, sour and intimate, running her thumb over the ring, mouthing silently:

Did he know?

Did he notice the ring?

Would he help?

She stopped working. She spent whole afternoons pacing the house in the dead woman’s lingerie, tight at the belly, loose at the bust. She stared at a stranger’s face in the bathroom mirror, lost in the metronome of her own tapping finger.

He smiled the day she put the dead woman’s pictures up. He smiled when she served him dinner, bland, demure, and screaming on the inside. He smiled when, at last, she reached for him with one hand while her other tapped a frantic protest on the kitchen table, too loud to ignore unless he was trying. That night, after the scotch and the whipped cream, after the dishes were done, she sat staring at a glass of the dead woman’s wine and he called to her from the bedroom, with a laugh in his voice.

Are you coming to bed?

She stood without hesitation and fingered her ring. She checked her makeup and frowned at the stranger in the mirror before she slid off the dead woman’s robe. Her husband’s wife beamed at her from a dozen different picture frames as a smile crept onto her face and she opened the bedroom door, chirping in a stranger’s voice:

Why shouldn’t I?

WOMEN’S RUGBY by Krys Malcolm Belc

October 26, 2019

We were big, and we were rough, with our tough hands our tough faces our knotted knees caked with dirt our mouthguards we spit into our hands to yell at each other between plays, and we found each other, all the women like us, here, where we could hit each other, were supposed to hit each other—again and again we hit—arms against legs, shoulders into torsos we ripped each other to the ground again and again, this hitting we’d been waiting for our entire lives, this conflict, this violence that our bodies felt like they were meant to do, violence our brothers the guys in the neighborhood the men on our hometown football teams got to do earlier, easier, than us, but we’d earned our hitting—waiting for a time when we, too, could have bodies meant to hit and rip, without mothers sneering without girls in our classes snorting and whispering at us as we lumbered by in the hallways as we crushed everyone in gym class flying around tracks flying up ropes, here in women’s rugby we could hit each other—which was really an excuse to touch each other—over and over again on those long Saturdays, getting up in the morning together shoveling down cereal in the dining hall together taking turns lying back on the athletic trainer’s table to get our knees our shoulders our heads taped up warming up lazily in the September sun tackling hitting touching stripping down to our sports bras after the game to shake our filthy jerseys into the washbag, and then we partied together, still caked in mud dirty and stinking we could be like men then, all day on Saturday, no showers, burgers off the grill no plates no napkins ketchup out of a slobbering bottle we passed around, endless cheap beer in red cups, all those songs, brownies lifted out of cafeteria trays with muddy hands, standing around the courtyard in our filthy rugby socks and sandals, touching each other there at the party we’d been waiting for for years—we were people who hit other people for fun and because we had to, because the more we hit the more being people who hit other people defined who we were—and we’d found each other, finally, and sang until the end of the day when we could finally go to bed with each other, laughing at the men who designed our dorm showers, where we got clean together, in the cold industrial communal reminders of architects and engineers who could never imagine us.

NOTHING IS EVER MISSING IN THE TOWN OF MISSING GIRLS by Meghan Phillips

October 25, 2019

There is a town where all the missing girls end up. They wander in from the surrounding woods, dark-eyed and dirty, holding one bloody tennis shoe like a prayer. They thump in the trunks of parked cars, duct taped wrists sticky and raw. They appear in grocery store aisles, storm cellars. It always takes time to convince them they’ve been found.

There is a town where no one can sleep. A terrible smell seeps into the homes at night, finds sleepers in their bed. No one cannot find the source.

There is a town with a lake. Things wash up on its shore. Fish skeletons and bundles of vegetation. Car tires. Tennis shoes. Bottle upon bottles, green and brown and clear as a cry. Once, an antique pearl necklace. Once, a cloth bag stuffed with severed human hands.

There’s a town where every girl is given a whistle, useless as a bell on a house cat’s collar. By the time someone hears the shrieking, it is already too late.

There is a town surrounded by fields of wheat. A town surrounded by fields of corn. A town with a stone altar at its center where people leave apples and pebbles and little corn husk dolls, the names of the chosen tucked under their skirts.

Sometimes other missing things show up in the town of missing girls. Usually just socks without mates or small toys or the backs of earrings. Sometimes keys or rings. Dogs and cats will wander down the main street, hackles raised. The missing girls sooth them, feed them, take them in. The missing know how to care for their own.

There’s a town where everyone is missing a hand.

There is a town that holds the gates to Hell. Only the first gate is visible in daylight. The other six appear in darkness. The people of the town don’t like the Hell gates or the hell-seekers that tramp through their gardens or the satanic cults that burn rings in their fields performing dark masses. They have taken down the daylight gate, and a group of volunteers has promised to seek the other six and destroy them.

At night by the lake in the town with a lake, beautiful girls line the road that hugs its shore. They wait in their taffeta skirts and grandmother’s pearls for a ride. Sit with hands in laps and look out the window at the moon bobbing on the water, a perfect golden apple, and when the driver stops to let them out, there’s nothing but the damp outline of a skirt, the sweet-rot of dried apple blossom.

There is a town underwater. There’s a town that’s been burning for sixty years.

There is a town where the radio only plays one song no matter the frequency. One where televisions only play one film. There’s one where all broadcasts stop in the night, and the awake listen for messages in the static, watch for signs in the electric snow.

In the town of missing girls, the streets are wide and lush with trees. Sidewalks are even and lit by streetlamps that never burn out. Missing girls walk home alone at night. They don’t look behind them or start at the crunch of leaves under their shoes. They don’t curl their hands around keys spiked through fingers or pucker lips around plastic whistles. They know no one will follow. They are already missing. They are already home.

ROOM 321 by K.C. Mead-Brewer

October 25, 2019

You’re late. That’s what he says when she sits down at the crowded hotel bar. She doesn’t recognize him, but his smile, well. All women recognize that smile. She smiles back, a curve plucked from a well-worn catalogue of Please Leave Me Alone Please Don’t Ruin My Night Please Stop Please

You’re late, he says again, leaning closer. But don’t worry, your ice hasn’t melted yet.

He slides a sweating glass of something red as a red red rose in front of her. The drink leaves a slime trail in its path that makes her think of slugs and snakes, though she knows—lord, her sister never let her forget—snakes aren’t slimy, they’re just smooth. Smooth like feathers, smooth like lace, smooth like the pillow pressed down on your

Shit. She hasn’t turned away fast enough, hasn’t demurred with Sorry not interested or waved across to a stranger Honey, there you are, so now he’s smiling wider at her, showing teeth. He’s got something black caught between two of them.

She can already smell his offered cocktail, candied and cloying, clogging the air like the stink of Bluebeard’s lilies. Bluebeard would’ve had a time, a time, a time at a hotel this fine. So many heavy wooden doors with so many old-fashioned skeleton keys. A misting of soft, shushed maids to clean up the messes.

He nudges the drink closer. It isn’t poison, Alice, don’t worry. Just something to make you feel small, so small. I could fit you in my pocket, my sweet little doll.

Sometimes she wonders about things that make no sense, like maybe she really did have a date with this guy but contracted amnesia, and can people even “contract” amnesia, is that the right word? A headache buds just between her eyes.

Thank you, she says, hating herself because THANK YOU, really? Thank you, she says again, but I don’t drink.

Great. Smooth. Now he can lean in even closer, his breath on her cheek, and say, But you came to a bar?

She lies, I’m waiting for someone.

And you’re sure it isn’t me? He smells worse than the drink, sliding the glass in closer, himself, the glass, himself, until they both threaten to fall into her lap.

She should stand up and leave, and she almost does, she almost does, except she sees then what she missed upstairs in her room.

That crust around her fingernails, down deep in the cuticles, coiled and red and how did I miss this? She scrubbed everything so carefully.

She’s always thought fingernails looked like scales, a wink from some distant reptilian ancestor no one dares acknowledge. She curls them into her palms as calmly as she can. Snakes are vital, her sister told her. They keep rodents from overrunning the world.

I’m sorry, she says for the second time tonight, I’d really rather be alone.

But here he is leaning in closer with his smile and his drink and that thing between his teeth, and she wonders, she really does, how much more she can swallow.

TOOAFRAIDTOASK by Steve Gergley

October 25, 2019

_{Posted by u/samuraijake14 - 2 hours ago}

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me?

ok so i know this is going to sound super weird and stuff but please just try to bear with me becuase ive never asked strangers on reddit for advice like this but i swear this is a serious question and im not trolling because this is a real thing that happens to me all the time now and i dont know how to fix it and im too scared to ask my friends or parents about it because of what they might say. Ok so what i wanted to ask is if anyone else gets too scared to poop because they are afraid that a snake will crawl up out of the toilet hole while their sitting there with nothing to protect their bits. im asking because a few days ago i saw a story online (it was on msn or yahoo or someother place that talks about real news, so i think its true) about this woman who was in the bathroom of her house in florida and then she lifted up the toilet lid to do her business but before she sat down she saw a big snake crawling up out of the hole in her toilet where the poop gets flushed away and it turns out that something had happened to the pipes under her house and the snake got in from there and then it crawled all the way up into her toilet from the back. so i guess my question is if anyone else ever sees something like that and gets so scared and cant stop thinking about it to the point that they now cant do even the most normal things in their life like pooping because ever since i read that story i get really scared when i feel the need to poop because what if something like that happens to me? BTW im 14M and i live in northern florida (tallahassee area) so its not like i live right next door to the toilet snake lady, but i do live in the same state so i cant stop thinking that if something so scary like that can happen to a random lady who lives kind of close, then whats stopping something like that from happening to me? now anytime i even think about pooping my mind goes crazy on its own and instantly imagines the most horrible thing that could possibly happen like the other day when i was at my friend terrys house and i needed to go to the bathroom, but then right after i got there and closed the door i saw a mind movie of me sitting on the toilet and getting bitten on the butt by a snake coming up out of the toilet hole and it was really scary because my mind showed me all the horrible details even tho i didnt want it to and even after i tried really hard to think about something else i couldnt and instead i just kept seeing the horrible mind movie of me getting bitten and my body starting to shake and jerk from the poison and me smashing my face against the hard floor and my teeth hitting the tiles really hard and breaking all over the place and it seemed so real that i could almost feel it happening and then in the mind movie i started throwing up uncontrollably and blood was everywhere and in the movie i knew i was dying so i started yelling for my mom because i was so scared and then no matter how hard the real me tried to think of something else, like fortnite or the new slipknot song or that awesome fight with levi from attack on titan, i couldnt stop seeing myself dying horribly and it was so awful to the point that in real life i started crying and i could barely breathe and it was so embarrassing because terry had to call my mom and ask her to come pick me up and even after mom was there i couldnt stop my body from shaking so i just spent the rest of the day in bed and i didnt go to school the next day. i only ask these things because that day was one of the worst in my entire life and im shaking right now just thinking about it but a similar thing happens now every time i have to poop and i dont know what to do or how to make it go away. i know this post has been rambling on for a while and im sorry about that but i just get so incredibly scared sometimes about all the awful stuff in the news and about all the terrible things that could happen to me and my friends and family and i cant stop wondering why everyone is always arguing so much about stuff that seems really obvious like how the other day when my english teacher mrs collins told the class that men and women are exactly the same in every single way, but how is that even possible when girls have lady bits and guys have dongs and girls can get pregnant and guys cant? literally everyone already knows that stuff so why would she even say something that everyone already knows is wrong? so i guess my real question is just why is everything in the world so confusing and scary? also any tips re: my pooping dilemma would be cool thx