He woke before light again, more from the absence of sleep than from sleep itself, and lay listening to the wind work at the tarp. The boy beside him breathed slow and even. He watched the shape of him in the dark, the small rise and fall, and thought, as he did every morning, that this was the only accounting that mattered anymore.

They had come down out of the hills three days back where the pines stood black and leafless, killed by something in the air none of them had a name for, and now they walked a state road cracked and buckled like the hide of some dead animal left to dry in the sun. No sun. There hadn’t been true sun in longer than the boy could remember, only this pale coinlight behind the ash that passed for day.

He rose and rolled the tarp and packed it into the cart, checked the wheels, checked the axle he had bound with wire scavenged from a fence two towns back, if towns was still the word for what they’d found there. Cinderblock and collapsed roofs. A church with the steeple burned off clean like a candle snuffed. He did not go looking in the church. He had learned not to go looking in churches.

The boy sat up and rubbed his face with both hands, a gesture he’d picked up from nowhere the father could name, and said, Is it far.

Not far, he said. He said this most mornings whether it was true or not because the saying of it did something for the boy’s legs that the truth never did.

They ate the last of the tinned meat cold, splitting it even, and he watched the boy chew slow to make it last and felt something in his chest twist again, a thing with no name he had stopped trying to name. When they were done he wiped the tin clean with two fingers and gave what was left to the boy and told him he wasn’t hungry, and the boy looked at him a long moment, the kind of look that meant he was starting to read the lie, and ate it anyway.

The road ran on through country stripped of color. Fields gone to gray stubble. A silo standing alone with no barn around it anymore, the barn long since taken apart board by board by hands as desperate as his own. Off to the west something that might have been a river caught the flat light and held it a moment before the light moved on.

They passed a car half sunk in the roadbed, hood open, engine gutted for parts by someone before them. In the back seat a scatter of small bones gone the color of old ivory, and he took the boy’s hand and walked him wide around it without a word, and the boy went without a word either, having seen enough of these by now not to need telling.

By midafternoon the ash came down heavier and settled on the boy’s shoulders and in his hair so that for a moment, turning, the father saw an old man walking beside him instead of a child, and had to look away and blink until the wrongness of it passed.

They stopped at a filling station with the pumps rusted to lace and searched the office and found nothing but a phone book swollen with old rain and a calendar still turned to a month eleven years gone. The boy asked what month it used to be now and the father told him and the boy nodded like it meant something, though neither of them could have said what.

Papa, the boy said. Are we the good guys.

He’d asked this before. He would ask it again. The father knelt so they were level and looked at him.

We’re carrying the fire, he said. That’s what we agreed.

The boy nodded, satisfied the way faith satisfies. The words didn’t explain anything. He trusted the one who said them, and that trust was the last uncorrupted thing the father had left in the world. He guarded it the way he guarded the last of the matches, counted every morning, spent only when there was no way around it.

They went on. The light went down early now, what light there was, and they found shelter in the lee of a collapsed overpass and built no fire because fire meant smoke and smoke meant being seen, and they lay close under what covers they had and the boy fell asleep first, same as always, trusting the dark to the man beside him.

The father lay awake and watched the black shape of the overpass against the paler black of the sky and thought of all the roads he had walked that had led only to more road, and he thought that this was maybe what was left of faith in a world with no promise attached to it, the plain fact of getting up in the gray morning and going on regardless. The going didn’t lead anywhere. He kept on because the boy was still breathing beside him. That was reason enough. It had always been reason enough.

Somewhere far off, or maybe not far at all, something moved through the dark and was still again. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and did not sleep and waited for whatever light the morning meant to give them.

He did not sleep and the not sleeping opened something in him the way it always did, some door left unlatched in the dark that swung open on its own weight, and most nights now she came to him unbidden, the way weather comes.

She had been gone seven years. Longer. He had stopped counting at some point. The number was one more thing that only hurt him to keep. The boy had been small then, small enough to carry on one arm, and now the boy came to his shoulder near enough and still he saw her in him sometimes, in the set of his jaw when he was working out something hard, in how he held his head, listening.

She had wanted to end it clean. Her word. Clean. As if there was a version of it that wasn’t a knife going in. She had told him the world had no place left in it for softness and that she did not intend to become what the world was making of everyone else, hard and hollow, running on habit instead of belief, and he had argued with her the whole of one long night in a farmhouse with the windows boarded, had said the boy needs you, had said I need you, and she had looked at him with an exhaustion that went down further than sleep could reach and said, You have the boy. That will have to be enough for both of us.

In the morning she was gone. He had not woken for it. He had told himself since that this was her mercy to him, sparing him the goodbye, but some nights, this one among them, he let himself believe otherwise, that she could not have looked at either of them and still done what she meant to do, that the sparing was for her own sake and not his, and he did not blame her for it. He had thought at the time he might. He found now, years down this ruined road, that blame was one more thing that had worn away in him like the tread on a boot, and what was left where the blame had been was only a kind of grief gone quiet and permanent, the kind you carry the way you carry your own name.

The boy stirred beside him and murmured something and went still again, and the father reached over without thought and rested his palm flat on the boy’s back to feel the breath moving in him, in and out, the smallest and most reliable clock left in the world. He thought, not for the first time, that the boy did not remember her at all. If he had anything of her it was secondhand, built from the father’s own stories the way a house gets built from another man’s lumber. He had decided long ago not to correct this. The boy already had enough to carry. He didn’t need her grief added to it. Let him have the warmth without the weight of it. That much the father could still give him.

He thought of telling the boy about her someday, when the boy was old enough that the telling would not break something in him that could not be mended out here with no one to mend it. He turned the thought over slow, without urgency, and set it back down unfinished.

The wind picked up before dawn and drove the ash sideways past the mouth of the overpass in long gray sheets. This was as close to weather as the world had left to offer. Ash instead of rain. Ash instead of snow. He did not pray. He had not prayed since the church with the burned steeple, had decided somewhere back down the road that prayer required a listener and he no longer believed the world contained one, but he held the boy’s shoulder under his hand and let that stand in for it, let the holding be the whole of his religion now.

The light came gray and grudging, slow, seeping into the dark like water into cloth, no sunrise left worth the name, only degrees of black giving way to degrees of gray. The boy woke and looked at him and asked if he’d slept and he said some, a mercy more than a lie, the same kind she had once tried to give him, and the boy accepted it without pressing, same as he accepted most things now, because pressing rarely got you closer to the truth out here and the boy had learned that the hard way same as everyone left alive.

They rose and packed the tarp and checked the cart’s wheels and the wire-bound axle, same ritual, same order, the ritual itself a kind of fire they carried alongside the other one, and they went out from under the overpass into the gray morning and back onto the road, which ran on ahead of them same as always, offering nothing, promising nothing, the one sure thing left in a world that had taken every other kind of certainty and burned it down to ash.

Is it far, the boy said, though he had not asked yet that morning, asking it now the way he asked most mornings, less for the answer than for the sound of his father saying it.

Not far, the father said, and they walked on into what light there was.

Her mother had been dead nine days when Ruth found the door.

She had been through the house twice by then. It was a narrow house on a shaded lot at the edge of Blackshear, Georgia, the kind of house that had been added onto by hand over the decades, a room here, a back porch closed in there, until the floor plan made no sense and you could stand in the middle of it and not know which way the road was. Ruth had grown up in it and still got turned around. She had spent nine days boxing her mother’s life into cardboard, the good dishes and the bad ones, the church clothes, the drawers full of rubber bands and bread ties and thank-you notes her mother had never sent, and she had thought she’d seen all of it.

The door was behind the water heater, in the back of the utility room, and it was only because she was pulling the old heater away from the wall to see if it was worth selling that she found it at all. A plain door, painted the same dingy cream as the wall so that it disappeared into it. No knob. A keyhole, and above the keyhole, a hasp with a padlock the size of her palm.

Her mother’s keys were in a dish by the front door where they had sat for fifty years. Ruth tried them all. The fourth one turned.

The smell came first. Not rot. The opposite of rot, a hard chemical cleanness, formaldehyde and something under it, sweetish, that coated the back of her throat and stayed there. She found the pull string for the light by feel and yanked it and stood in the doorway looking at what her mother had kept.

Shelves. Floor to ceiling on three walls, and every shelf full of jars.

They were canning jars, mostly, the same Ball and Kerr jars her mother had put up tomatoes and pickled okra in every summer of Ruth’s childhood, and for one loose spinning second that was what Ruth thought she was looking at, a pantry, preserves, and then her eyes adjusted to what floated in the pale fluid and her mind stopped.

Hair. A whole jar of it, a soft brown drift of it suspended and turning slightly when her footstep shook the floor. The next jar, fingernails, dozens of them, thin curved crescents settled at the bottom like shells at a tide line. A jar of teeth. A jar of something she could not name, a soft folded thing gone gray at the edges. Jar after jar after jar, and each one labeled, her mother’s small tidy hand on a strip of masking tape, and each label a name and a date.

Carl W. 1961. Ada P. 1958. The Renfroe baby, 1963.

Ruth stood very still in the middle of the room. She was fifty-four years old and she knew these names. Some of them. Carl Wooten had run the feed store when she was a girl. Ada Puckett had taught the Sunday school class her mother helped with. The Renfroe baby had died, everyone said, of a fever, before Ruth was born, and its mother had never been right after, and here it was, a curl, in a jar on her mother’s shelf with a date on it.

Fifty years. The oldest dates went back before Ruth was born and the newest, on a jar near the door, read only two years ago, and Ruth understood with a cold that started in her scalp and ran down through her that her mother had never stopped. That the sweet churchgoing woman she had buried nine days ago had spent half a century taking pieces of people and bringing them home to this room and keeping them in the dark behind a painted door, and Ruth did not know how. Did not know when. Did not know how her mother had gotten close enough to Ada Puckett, to the Renfroe baby, to take what she took, and clean it, and cure it, and label it in that patient hand, and set it on the shelf and close the door and go make supper.

She wanted to leave. Her legs would not agree to it. She moved along the shelves instead the way you move toward a wreck on the highway, sick and slow and unable to look away, reading the names, and some she knew and most she didn’t, a whole town’s worth of people reduced to the one small piece her mother had wanted, and she thought, standing there, that she was going to get out of this room and drive to the sheriff and never sleep again.

Then she saw her own name.

It was on the bottom shelf, in the corner, in the oldest section, where the tape had gone yellow and the ink had gone brown with age. A pint jar, smaller than the others. The fluid inside had clouded over the years to the color of weak tea.

The label read Ruth. 1971.

She had been born in 1971.

She crouched. Her knees cracked in the silence. She took the jar off the shelf with both hands the way you’d lift something sleeping and she held it up to the bare bulb and turned it, and the thing inside turned with it, drifting up off the bottom, small and pale and curled.

It was a finger.

A baby’s finger. No longer than the first joint of her own, the skin gone soft and colorless with the years, and at the end of it, perfect, intact, was a fingernail no bigger than a grain of rice.

Ruth’s mouth had gone dry as paper. Without deciding to, she turned her left hand over and looked at the side of it, below the little finger, at the small smooth scar she had carried her whole life and never once questioned. A little pucker of white skin. Her mother had told her the story so many times that Ruth had never once questioned it. You were born with an extra little finger, sugar, just a soft little nub of a thing, and the doctor took it off when you were three weeks old, and you never even missed it.

She had never missed it. She had never thought about it. It was nothing, a common thing, a scrap of tissue snipped from a newborn and thrown away.

Not thrown away.

She looked at the jar in her hands, at the piece of herself her mother had taken before she could speak, before she could refuse, before she knew she was a person that things could be taken from, and she understood that she had not stumbled into her mother’s secret at all. She had always been in it. She was the oldest jar on the shelf but one. She was where it started. Her mother had looked down into the crib at her three-week-old daughter and seen not a child but a first specimen, and had taken her piece, and cleaned it, and cured it, and labeled it in that patient hand, and set it in the dark to begin the collection that would run for the next fifty years.

Ruth. 1971.

The fluid settled. The small finger drifted back down and came to rest against the glass, the fingernail turned outward, facing her, and Ruth crouched on the floor of the room in the dead center of the house she was born in and could not put the jar down.

New Orleans has never buried anything it could eat.

Remember that before you dismiss what I am about to tell you. The city was built in a bowl of mud, blood, river water, and promises made by men who expected God to lose the paperwork. We laid our dead in brick chambers above the ground because the earth spat them back. We built churches on rot. We perfumed our handkerchiefs and walked past gutters thick with fish scales, horse piss, spoiled fruit, and the sweet meat stink of fever.

Then we called ourselves civilized.

My name is Gabriel Marchand. In the spring of 1852, I was twenty-eight years old, broad in the shoulder, narrow in the judgment, and employed as a clerk by the Church of Saint Mercy on Rue des Ursulines.

The church no longer stands.

That fact should comfort you.

It does not comfort me.

Saint Mercy occupied a wedge of land near the old convent, where the streets bent as if avoiding it. Its bell tower rose from the fog like a black finger. Green mold furred the stone saints in the courtyard. Rain had eaten their faces down to blank expressions, which improved them. Saints should look uncertain. Certainty belongs to fools, bishops, and men selling patent medicine.

Father Lucien Renaud presided over the parish.

He was forty-six, though grief had carved another decade into him. He had a long face, silver at the temples, and black eyes that caught every lie before it left your mouth. His cassock hung from his body with the clean severity of a burial cloth. When he prayed, his hands did not tremble. When he drank, they did.

He had lost his younger sister to yellow fever in 1847. I knew this because men confess more to clerks than they do to priests. Clerks carry no authority, which makes us safe. We are furniture that can spell.

Father Lucien kept a miniature portrait of his sister in the rectory. Her name was Amélie. She had his eyes and none of his sorrow. Each night, after the cook had gone and the shutters had closed, he placed the portrait beside a glass of cognac.

He spoke to it.

Not often.

That would have frightened me less.

The trouble began with Madame Séraphine Vautrin.

Every city has a family that owns more of it than maps admit. In New Orleans, one such family bore the name Vautrin. Their ships carried sugar, coffee, indigo, tobacco, and human misery through the Gulf. Their town house stood on Royal Street behind iron balconies twisted into vines and thorns. Their country holdings stretched beyond the cypress swamps. Their dead occupied a private vault in Saint Mercy’s courtyard, where the marble stayed white despite soot, rain, and time.

Séraphine Vautrin came to Mass each Sunday dressed in black silk.

She was sixty-three.

She looked thirty-five.

People credited good blood, French creams, and the refusal to smile. People credit all manner of nonsense when wealth wears a pleasant face.

Her hair shone blue-black beneath a lace veil. Her skin held the pale glow of a pearl pressed under the tongue. She moved without hurry, and the crowd parted before her. Men watched. Women watched harder.

Her only living relative, her nephew Étienne Vautrin, followed two paces behind.

Étienne had inherited the family beauty, but none of its control. His blond hair curled at his collar. His lips held a permanent bruise-colored softness. He wore ivory gloves even in the heat, though sweat dampened the cuffs of his coat.

I once saw him remove one glove in the sacristy.

The skin beneath had no fingernails.

Each fingertip ended in a round pad of pink flesh, puckered at the center.

He caught me looking.

“An illness,” he said.

“Of course.”

“Do you find it ugly?”

“I find most bodies ugly when examined.”

He smiled. “That sounds like faith.”

On the first Friday of Lent, Madame Vautrin requested a private audience with Father Lucien. She arrived after sunset in a closed carriage, accompanied by Étienne and two servants who carried a narrow cedar chest.

The chest measured six feet long.

Holes had been drilled into its lid.

Something inside drew breath.

Not human breath. Human lungs rise and fall with the soft drag of cloth over wood. This breath clicked. It paused between inhalations, as though remembering how.

Father Lucien ordered me from the church.

I obeyed as far as the sacristy door.

A clerk survives by understanding the difference between leaving and appearing to leave.

Through the keyhole, I watched the servants set the chest before the altar. Madame Vautrin removed her veil.

“My family has kept its covenant,” she said.

Father Lucien stood beneath the crucifix. “Your family has kept a blasphemy.”

“Words do not change the nature of a thing.”

“They define it.”

“Then define resurrection.”

The priest’s jaw tightened.

Madame Vautrin touched the cedar lid.

“My nephew has begun to fail. The sacrament no longer nourishes him.”

Étienne stared at the floor. His ivory gloves twitched.

Father Lucien said, “I warned your brother that the appetite would grow.”

“My brother lacked discipline.”

“Your brother devoured three servants.”

“He lost himself.”

“He found himself.”

Her face changed then. Not much. A small tension appeared beside her mouth. A hairline crack in porcelain.

“You know what rests beneath this church,” she said. “You know what it can restore.”

“I know what it promises.”

“And you have never wished to hear your sister’s voice again?”

The church seemed to contract around them.

Outside, wheels rattled across the street. Somewhere near the river, a steamboat whistle groaned through the damp night.

Father Lucien looked toward the rectory, where Amélie’s portrait waited beside an empty glass.

Madame Vautrin smiled.

That smile ended the man he had been.

The cedar chest opened at midnight.

I wish I could tell you I left. I wish I could say some decent instinct drove me into the street.

I stayed.

Of course I stayed.

Curiosity has killed more men than plague. Plague has better manners.

The servants lifted a body from the chest. At first, I mistook it for a corpse wrapped in linen. Then the linen flexed.

A woman lay beneath the shroud.

Or something that had once understood the shape of a woman.

Her arms had fused to her ribs. Her legs tapered into one long column of scar tissue. She had no hair, no eyelids, and no lips. Small teeth crowded the exposed gums in several rows. Gold wire had sewn her mouth shut.

A silver reliquary hung from her neck.

On its lid, someone had engraved two words.

SAINTE MISÉRICORDE.

Saint Mercy.

The creature’s chest clicked as it breathed.

Father Lucien crossed himself.

Madame Vautrin did not.

“She was found beneath the first chapel in 1721,” Madame Vautrin said. “Alive in a sealed crypt. No food. No water. No mark of age. The Ursuline sisters believed her holy.”

“What did she tell them?” Father Lucien asked.

“She had no tongue.”

“Convenient.”

“She healed one of them.”

“How?”

Madame Vautrin looked toward Étienne.

He removed his gloves.

His fingers had split open along the pads. Small white mouths formed in the flesh, each lined with wet teeth.

Father Lucien stepped back.

Étienne began to weep.

Madame Vautrin said, “With communion.”

The creature on the altar heard the word.

Its sewn mouth bulged.

One gold wire snapped.

Then another.

Father Lucien sent for Célestine Baptiste.

Célestine served as midwife, nurse, herbalist, and final judge of men who believed money made them immortal. She was a free woman of color in her late fifties, tall and straight-backed, with iron-gray hair beneath a red tignon. Her eyes carried the calm of someone who had delivered life, washed death, and found both poor conversationalists.

She entered Saint Mercy after midnight with a leather case in one hand and a pistol in the other.

When she saw the creature, she did not cross herself.

She spat on the floor.

“That is not a saint.”

Madame Vautrin said, “You presume much.”

Célestine looked her over. “And you consume much.”

Father Lucien asked her to examine the body.

She placed her fingers against the creature’s neck. The flesh moved around them.

Not beneath them.

Around.

It climbed her fingers in soft folds, tasting the air.

Célestine pulled away.

“This thing has no pulse,” she said. “It has many.”

The creature’s skin rippled.

Small knots rose across its abdomen. Each knot beat at a different rhythm.

“Pregnant?” I whispered.

Célestine heard me behind the sacristy door.

“Come out, Gabriel.”

I considered pretending I had not heard.

“Come out before I shoot the door.”

I joined them.

Father Lucien looked tired enough to forgive me, which felt worse than anger.

Célestine opened the silver reliquary around the creature’s neck.

Inside rested a thin disk of dried flesh.

A communion wafer.

Human skin had been cut into a circle, pressed flat, and stamped with a cross.

The edges bore tooth marks.

Madame Vautrin said, “Once each month, our family receives the sacrament. It heals sickness. It preserves youth. It purifies the blood.”

Célestine held the wafer beneath her nose.

“It smells of bile.”

“Grace often offends the senses.”

“So does shit. I do not kneel to it.”

Étienne made a strangled sound.

His coat jerked.

Something moved beneath his shirt.

He tore at the buttons. One flew across the nave and struck a pew.

His chest had opened from throat to stomach.

The wound did not bleed. The ribs had bent outward, forming pale fingers around a wet cavity. Inside, dozens of small tongues licked the walls of his body.

Étienne screamed.

The tongues screamed with him.

Father Lucien grabbed his shoulders. “What is happening?”

Madame Vautrin’s composure broke.

“He has gone too long without feeding.”

Étienne’s ribs clamped around the priest’s wrist.

Bone punched through flesh.

Father Lucien cried out as the tongues wrapped his hand. They stripped the skin from his fingers in red ribbons. One tongue pushed beneath his thumbnail and peeled it back with a sound like damp paper tearing.

Célestine fired her pistol.

The ball struck Étienne in the shoulder. Black fluid sprayed the altar cloth.

It smelled of burned sugar and opened graves.

Étienne turned toward her.

His jaw unhooked.

The skin split from the corners of his mouth to his ears. His face opened in four fleshy petals. Teeth lined every inner surface.

Madame Vautrin seized the communion wafer and shoved it into his throat.

Étienne collapsed.

His ribs folded shut.

The mouths on his fingertips sighed.

Father Lucien stared at his ruined hand. Three fingers had lost their skin. The exposed muscles flexed in the candlelight. Tendons slid over bone.

Then the bleeding stopped.

New skin crept across the wounds.

Pale.

Smooth.

Perfect.

Father Lucien looked at the creature on the altar.

Hope entered his face.

Hope causes more damage than despair. Despair stays in bed. Hope gets dressed.

Beneath Saint Mercy lay a chapel older than the church itself.

We reached it through a narrow stair hidden behind the confessional. The steps descended into damp brick, river mud, and the warm smell of meat kept too long in a covered pot.

Madame Vautrin led us.

Étienne followed, weak but upright.

The creature came last, carried by the servants in its cedar chest.

The underground chapel had no crucifix.

It had a mouth.

The far wall curved inward around a vertical slit fifteen feet tall. The bricks had vanished beneath layers of flesh, thick as boiled leather and threaded with blue veins. Teeth protruded from the opening. Some looked human. Others resembled ivory hooks. Several wore gold fillings.

Candles burned in niches around it.

The flame leaned toward the mouth.

I knew then that the thing on the altar was not Saint Mercy.

She was its tongue.

Madame Vautrin knelt.

Her nephew knelt beside her.

Father Lucien remained standing.

Célestine whispered, “This family did not find a miracle.”

“No,” I said.

“They found a stomach.”

The wall opened.

Warm air rolled across us, carrying the scents of incense, blood, milk, and decay. Behind the teeth, shapes turned in a red darkness.

Faces.

Hundreds.

Men and women pressed beneath a translucent membrane. Their mouths worked without sound. Some wore clothing from the previous century. Some had rotted to skulls. Others looked fresh.

One face belonged to Amélie Renaud.

Father Lucien fell to his knees.

She floated within the wall, her dark hair drifting around her face. Her eyes opened.

“Lucien,” she said.

His name came from every mouth in the chapel.

The priest crawled toward her.

Célestine caught his cassock. “That is not your sister.”

Amélie smiled.

A line of black fluid leaked from her nose.

“I waited,” she said.

Father Lucien struck Célestine across the face.

The blow shocked him more than it shocked her.

She released him.

He approached the mouth.

The teeth parted.

A hand emerged from the slit. It wore Amélie’s skin, though the fingers contained too many joints. Another hand followed. Then her face pushed through, stretched across something narrow and blind.

Father Lucien reached for her.

The thing bit off his arm at the elbow.

Blood struck the chapel wall in a red fan.

He did not scream.

Not at first.

He stared at the stump. A white spur of bone protruded through torn muscle. An artery pumped across Madame Vautrin’s black dress.

Then he screamed enough for all of us.

The mouth sucked his severed arm inside. Teeth cracked the bones. Amélie’s face chewed with a lover’s tenderness.

Madame Vautrin rose.

“Now,” she said.

The servants opened the cedar chest.

Saint Mercy writhed.

The last gold wires tore from her gums. Her mouth opened.

A thick cord of flesh uncoiled from her throat and slapped onto the chapel floor. It writhed toward the mouth in the wall.

The two joined.

The chapel convulsed.

Mortar burst from the ceiling. The candles guttered. The flesh on the wall swelled, and the trapped faces began to shriek.

The sound came through the bricks.

Through the floor.

Through my teeth.

Étienne threw himself upon Saint Mercy.

He bit into her shoulder.

The skin split. Yellow fat bulged through the wound in soft beads. Beneath it, a nest of white worms twisted around a black organ shaped like a heart.

Étienne tore the organ free.

It beat between his teeth.

He swallowed.

His body changed at once.

His spine pushed upward through his coat, each vertebra emerging in a wet row. His arms lengthened. His fingers split from five into ten, then twenty, each tipped with a small human tooth.

His abdomen opened.

Not a wound.

A door.

Inside him sat a tiny chapel made of bone. Tiny pews lined his intestines. Small figures knelt within, their heads bowed in prayer.

One raised its face.

It was me.

I saw my own miniature mouth begging from inside his body.

That broke something in my mind.

I grabbed an iron candlestick and swung at his skull.

The first blow crushed his cheek.

The second drove teeth into his tongue.

The third opened his head above the ear.

His skull peeled apart like wet fruit.

No brain lay inside.

Only communion wafers.

Hundreds of them, packed in neat layers, each cut from a different shade of skin.

They spilled across the floor.

Madame Vautrin screamed and dropped beside him.

She gathered the wafers in both hands and stuffed them into her mouth.

She ate without chewing.

Her throat swelled.

The flesh of her face tightened. Wrinkles vanished. Her hair shone. Her breasts lifted beneath the black silk. She grew younger with each swallow.

Thirty.

Twenty-five.

Twenty.

Then youth passed through her.

Her face softened into infancy for one terrible instant, though she remained full-grown.

Then the years reversed too far.

Her bones withdrew.

Her teeth sank into her gums.

Her body collapsed inside the dress, shrinking into a loose sack of skin.

The sack moved.

Something inside it crawled toward Father Lucien.

He lay against the wall, one hand pressed to his stump.

Amélie’s face hung above him from the mouth.

“Take communion,” she whispered.

A strip of flesh slid from between her lips.

It carried a wafer.

Father Lucien opened his mouth.

Célestine shot him through the jaw.

The ball tore away his lower face. Teeth, tongue, and fragments of bone struck the wall.

He stared at her.

She knelt beside him and pressed her forehead to his.

“I am sorry,” she said.

Then the mouth in the wall opened wide.

The chapel began to feed.

The servants went first. Flesh tore from their backs in long strips, pulled by an invisible current. One man’s spine came free through his neck, dragging nerves and muscle behind it. He remained standing for three breaths before folding into himself.

The second servant clutched the altar rail.

His arms stretched.

The joints separated without breaking. Tendons drew out in pale cords. His skin slipped from his hands and stayed wrapped around the wood like empty gloves.

Then the darkness took him.

Saint Mercy rose from the cedar chest.

Her fused legs split with a spray of black blood. New limbs unfolded from within her, slick and trembling. She stood on six crooked legs. Her abdomen sagged open, birthing ropes of intestine that struck the floor and rooted between the bricks.

Faces pushed from her skin.

Priests.

Nuns.

Merchants.

Vautrins.

All chewing.

Célestine seized my collar.

“Run.”

We reached the stairs as the underground chapel folded shut behind us.

Not collapsed.

Swallowed.

The walls clenched. Bricks ground together. The church groaned above us. Pews toppled. Stained glass burst inward. Red light poured through the windows though dawn remained hours away.

We stumbled into the courtyard.

Behind us, Saint Mercy’s bell began to ring.

No one pulled the rope.

Each toll shook blood from the mortar.

Célestine and I reached the street before the tower sank into the church. Stone saints pitched from the roof and shattered on the paving stones. The front doors bowed outward.

For a moment, I saw the whole building breathe.

Then it dropped into the earth.

The ground closed over it.

By sunrise, only a mud-filled depression remained.

The city blamed subsidence.

New Orleans loves an explanation that asks nothing of the soul.

Célestine left for Mobile within the week. She told me she had spent her life helping people enter this world. She had no wish to see what else might follow.

I never saw her again.

As for me, I abandoned the Church.

I worked as a printer, then a clerk for the port, then a keeper of records no one read. I married once. My wife died without children, and for that mercy I thank God, though I have not spoken to Him in years.

You may wonder why I tell this now.

Because Saint Mercy’s bell rang last night.

The church has been gone for forty-one years.

Still, I heard it beneath the street.

One toll.

Then another.

When I looked into the washbasin, my reflection opened its mouth.

There was a wafer on its tongue.

I did not have one on mine.

Not then.

I do now.

It tastes of salt, copper, and something sweet.

Something that reminds me of childhood Mass, my mother’s hand on my shoulder, and the clean white promise that suffering had purpose.

My teeth have begun to loosen.

Small mouths have opened beneath my fingernails.

They whisper the same word.

Communion.

So listen to me.

New Orleans has never buried anything it could eat.

And beneath your feet, the city is still hungry.

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I want to say something that will get me into a fight with some fans. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a decent movie. Not a great one. Decent. And that has almost nothing to do with why it became the longest-running theatrical release in history.

The movie became immortal because somebody in the audience stood up and started talking back, and then everybody did, and nobody ever stopped. What you are watching at a midnight showing is not really the film. It is the room. The film is the excuse the room needed to exist.

I came to it the way most people my age did, at a midnight show with a crowd that already knew the drill. You throw rice at the wedding. You raise a newspaper over your head in the rain. You yell things at the screen that are funnier than anything in the script, because a thousand people have been sharpening those lines for years and you are just repeating the best ones. Somebody near me had toast. I did not ask why. By then I knew better than to ask why.

Watch it cold on your couch and you will be confused about the fuss. Tim Curry is magnificent as Frank-N-Furter, no argument, and Curry is the reason the whole thing has a center. Richard O’Brien wrote it and plays Riff Raff and gave it the songs, and the songs are genuinely good. Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick play the squares who wander in from the rain, and Meat Loaf roars through on a motorcycle and gets killed for his trouble. The plot is a loving junk-drawer of old horror and science fiction pictures, assembled by people who clearly stayed up too late watching them.

But sit alone in your living room and the picture is only pretty good. That is the honest read. Which brings me to the point I actually care about.

We treat participation as a lesser thing. Real art, the thinking goes, you sit and receive in respectful silence. Rocky Horror blew that up and has kept blowing it up every weekend for fifty years. The people in that theater are not passive. They built a liturgy. They assigned roles, wrote responses, brought props, trained the newcomers, and made a modest 1975 musical into a place people go to belong. That is not the movie failing to be good enough on its own. That is the movie doing something almost no film ever manages, which is to hand the audience the keys and get out of the way.

I have thought about this a lot as a guy who used to stand on stage with a bass. The best nights were never the ones where we nailed every note for a silent crowd. The best nights were the ones where the room took over and we were just holding the beat while everybody else did the living. Rocky Horror figured out how to do that on a loop, forever, with a print of a movie.

So when somebody calls it a guilty pleasure, I think they have it backward. The guilt would be in watching it alone and pretending that is the real thing. The pleasure, the whole reason it survived, is the fifty other people yelling with you. Go find a midnight show. Bring the newspaper. Do not bring your own toast the first time, borrow somebody’s, and watch how fast a room of strangers adopts you.

John Cusack reportedly walked out of an early screening of Better Off Dead and told the director, Savage Steve Holland, that it was the worst thing he had ever seen. Cusack was twenty, and he was wrong, and I say that with affection for both of them.

I caught up with the movie on video a bit after it came out in 1985, still in my Navy stretch, and it did something to my sense of what a comedy was allowed to do. Most comedies operate on human logic pushed a little too far. Better Off Dead throws human logic out the airlock in the first ten minutes and runs on cartoon rules instead, and it never once breaks them.

The setup sounds grim on paper. Lane Meyer, played by Cusack, gets dumped by his girlfriend and decides his life is over. He keeps trying to kill himself and keeps failing, usually in the most elaborate way possible. Played straight, that is a rough sit. Holland does not play it straight. He plays it as a live-action Looney Tunes short where the suicide attempts are pratfalls,s and the pain is drawn, not felt. The tone is the joke. Lane is genuinely miserable, and the world around him is genuinely absurd, and the gap between those two things is where every laugh lives.

The pieces people remember are the ones that make no realistic sense and do not care. There is a paperboy who pursues Lane across the entire film, demanding his two dollars with the menace ofbeing hit by a hitman. There is a claymation hamburger that comes to life and plays guitar because Lane works at a burger stand, and his mind is going. There is a math teacher whose class Lane is somehow good at, a pair of drag-racing brothers, one of whom learned all his English from Howard Cosell, and a French exchange student named Monique, played by Diane Franklin, who becomes the only sane and kind person in the entire zip code. None of it connects with logic. All of it connects with rhythm.

That is the thing I want to defend. Cartoon logic is hard. Really hard. You have to establish a world with its own physics in the first reel and then never cheat, never blink, never suddenly get realistic to earn a serious moment. Better Off Dead holds its tone from the first frame to the last. When the big ski race at the end pays off with the K-12 mountain and Lane finally beating the ski-team bully, it works, not because you believe it, but because the movie has trained you for ninety minutes to stop believing and start enjoying. It earned the ending by refusing to be real the whole way there.

Cusack has spent years distancing himself from it, and I understand why a young actor with serious ambitions did not want to be the suicide-pratfall guy. But he was measuring it against the wrong yardstick. He wanted it to be a real movie about real feelings, and Savage Steve Holland was making something else on purpose, a hand-drawn nightmare about teenage heartbreak where the heartbreak is real, and everything else is ink and paint. On those terms, which are the correct terms, it is close to perfect.

“I want my two dollars” outlived every serious drama that came out that season. People still say it. Nobody planned that. A line that dumb and that persistent is not an accident of nostalgia. It is proof that the movie built a world so complete that pieces of it broke off and floated into the language.

So no, I will not call it a guilty pleasure. I will call it the thing John Cusack got wrong at twenty, which is the most forgivable kind of wrong there is. Watch it, knowing the rules are cartoon rules, and it stops being a curiosity and becomes a small, strange, perfectly controlled machine.

Along the same comedic vein, honorable mention to One Crazy Summer

Let me start by saying this: I went into this movie in 1984 already liking it because Jim Steinman was my favorite songwriter, still is, and I knew he had the opening song and closing song in this movie. Hard stop.

Plus — Diane Lane — woof

Streets of Fire came out in 1984, called itself “A Rock and Roll Fable,” and lost money. I was in the Navy then, in my early twenties, and I remember the feeling of the thing more than the plot. It felt like a record cover I wanted to live inside.

Walter Hill directed it, and Hill made his name on lean, mean pictures like The Warriors and 48 Hrs. Here he did something braver and got punished for it. He built a movie with no year and no city. The cars are from the fifties. The clothes are from the eighties. The music is pure Jim Steinman thunder. It rains at night on neon streets that exist nowhere on Earth, and the movie never once winks to tell you it knows that. It just commits.

The story is bone simple on purpose. A singer named Ellen Aim, played by Diane Lane, gets kidnapped off her own stage by a motorcycle gang led by Willem Dafoe in black rubber overalls. Her old flame Tom Cody, played by Michael Paré, rides back into town to get her out. That is the whole engine. Boy rescues girl from villain. Hill is not interested in surprising you. He is interested in the surface of the thing, the rain and the leather and the way a song can carry a scene the dialogue never could.

And the songs carry it. Steinman wrote “Nowhere Fast” and “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” and they are the same overblown, fists-to-the-sky anthems he built for Meat Loaf and Bonnie Tyler (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”), which is exactly right for a movie about nothing but feeling. Dan Hartman’s “I Can Dream About You” came out of this picture and became a real hit on its own. The music is not decoration. The music is the plot’s actual heart, and the story is just the frame that lets the songs happen.

Here is why it flopped and why the flop is the point. In 1984, audiences wanted movies that felt like somewhere. Streets of Fire felt like nowhere on purpose. Critics did not know where to file it. It was too sincere to be camp and too stylized to be real, and that in-between is precisely the ground it wanted to stand on. Hill made a fable, and a fable does not need a zip code. Cinderella does not have a street address. Neither does this.

I have gone back to it every few years since I got out of the service, and it gets better as the world around it gets more literal. Everything now wants to explain itself, tie up its own loose ends, tell you which real year it takes place in and why. Streets of Fire tells you nothing and asks you to feel everything. Diane Lane lip-syncs to a voice that is not hers and it does not matter, because the image is doing the singing. Paré barely changes expression the whole film and it does not matter, because the coat and the rain are doing the acting. The movie is all surface, and it knew that surface, done with total conviction, is its own kind of depth.

Call it a guilty pleasure if you need to. I think it is one of the purest things anybody made in that decade. It wanted to be a two-hour rock song and it succeeded, and it paid for that success with its box office. That is usually how it goes for the honest ones.

Put it on loud, at night, and stop asking what year it is. That question is the one thing the movie will never answer, and the refusal is the whole gift.

The first time the retirement calculator told me I would die at my desk, I blamed Excel.

That felt fair.

I had spent enough years watching spreadsheets commit crimes in broad daylight. Dates turned into numbers. Numbers turned into hieroglyphics. Formulas broke because someone added a space, deleted a comma, or pasted a table from an email with the confidence of a toddler.

So when my retirement dashboard flashed a red warning box across the screen, I did not panic.

I leaned back in my chair, took off my glasses, rubbed the bridge of my nose, and said, “Well, that’s new.”

The warning read:

Projected Separation Date: October 14, 2031
Projected Death Date: October 11, 2031
Status: Continued Employment Required

I stared at it.

Then I looked over both shoulders, because that is what a grown man does when county software starts talking like a haunted Ouija board.

The office sat quiet around me. Not peaceful. Never peaceful. Government offices do not know peace. They know suspended animation.

The lights hummed overhead with that cheap electric buzz that makes every human decision feel suspect. A printer coughed somewhere near Finance. The air smelled of burnt coffee, microwave popcorn, and carpet glue. Somebody had left a banana peel in the breakroom trash at least two administrations ago.

I clicked refresh.

The screen blinked.

Projected Separation Date: October 14, 2031
Projected Death Date: October 11, 2031
Status: Continued Employment Required

Below that, a button appeared.

Request Clarification

I clicked it.

The HR portal opened in a new window. It had the same dead-eyed design every large organization uses when it wants you to abandon hope but still update your emergency contact. The logo spun for a while. A little circle chasing its own tail. Corporate Buddhism.

Then a message appeared.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need

I laughed.

Not a big laugh. More of a bark. The kind that comes out when your soul steps barefoot on a Lego.

“Of course it has,” I said.

My coworker Marcy popped her head over the cubicle wall. Marcy had worked in payroll for twenty-six years and had the calm face of a woman who had seen men cry over W-4 forms.

“You talking to the computer again?”

“It started it.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Which system?”

“Benefits portal.”

Marcy’s face changed.

Not much. Just enough.

“Oh,” she said. “Don’t joke with that one.”

I turned in my chair. “What does that mean?”

Marcy glanced toward the hallway, then toward the ceiling tile above my desk. One corner sagged from an old leak. It had looked that way since I started. Nobody fixed it because Facilities had opened a work order, which meant the problem had entered the sacred swamp.

“You ever notice nobody retires from this department?” she asked.

“That’s not true. What about Frank?”

“Frank didn’t retire.”

“He had a cake.”

“He had a cake because he stopped coming in.”

“That sounds close enough.”

Marcy shook her head. “Frank logged into Teams yesterday.”

“Frank died in March.”

“I know.”

The printer coughed again.

This time it kept coughing.

Chunks of paper rolled out of it in damp curls.

Marcy ducked back behind the wall.

I stood up and walked over.

The printer screen displayed a message I had never seen before:

USER FRANK.DAVENPORT SENT JOB: QUARTERLY STAFFING FORECAST

The paper slid into the tray page by page. Green bar report. Old school. Dot matrix ugliness, though the printer had no reason to know what dot matrix was. The header across the top read:

STAFFING FORECAST THROUGH NATURAL ATTRITION AND POST-MORTEM RETENTION

My coffee went cold in my hand.

A line halfway down the page had my name on it.

HARRIS, JOHN C.
CLASSIFICATION: BUSINESS ANALYST
RETIREMENT ELIGIBILITY: PENDING
MORTALITY OFFSET: INSUFFICIENT
POST-DEATH UTILIZATION: HIGH
RECOMMENDATION: RETAIN

I read it twice.

That was my mistake.

Certain sentences gain weight after the second reading.

I marched down to Human Resources with the paper in my hand and the calm purpose of a man about to waste the rest of his afternoon.

HR lived on the third floor, behind a locked glass door and a potted plant that had given up during the Obama administration. A small sign said:

People Are Our Greatest Resource

Below it, someone had taped a second sign:

Please Submit Requests Through the Portal

I pressed the call button.

Nothing happened.

I pressed it again.

A speaker crackled.

“Do you have an appointment?”

The voice sounded thin and wet, as if it came through a drain.

“I need to speak with someone about the retirement calculator.”

“Have you submitted a ticket?”

“The ticket denied me because of continued business need.”

A pause.

“That means the system has reviewed your request.”

“It says I die three days before I retire.”

“Then the system has provided a projection.”

I looked into the smoked glass. I could see my own reflection there. Gray beard. Tired eyes. Shirt with a mustard stain I had missed all morning. The face of a man who had once believed adulthood came with answers.

“Who am I speaking to?” I asked.

The speaker hissed.

“Benefits.”

“No, I mean your name.”

The line crackled harder.

“Benefits.”

Behind the glass, something moved.

Not a person.

Not at first.

A shape passed behind the frosted panel. Tall. Bent near the top. Too many elbows, unless HR had changed the dress code. I heard typing. Fast typing. The hard clack of keys struck by fingers with no love left in them.

Then the door unlocked.

A woman stood there in a cardigan the color of oatmeal. Her badge hung backward. Her smile looked laminated.

“Mr. Harris,” she said. “We’ve been expecting your escalation.”

“I didn’t escalate.”

“You clicked Request Clarification.”

“That’s an escalation?”

“In your case.”

She held out one pale hand.

I handed her the printout.

She scanned it without moving her eyes. That bothered me. People move their eyes when they read. She just pointed her face at the page and absorbed it.

“Everything appears correct,” she said.

“My death date?”

“Yes.”

“My retirement date?”

“Yes.”

“The part where I keep working after I’m dead?”

She looked up.

“Only for three days.”

I waited for her to laugh.

She did not.

Somewhere inside the HR suite, a phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times. Nobody answered. Then a man’s voice on speakerphone said, “I’m still in the meeting.”

The woman in the oatmeal cardigan smiled wider.

“Frank?” I said.

Her smile stopped widening.

“You should return to your workstation,” she said. “You have a dashboard due.”

“I have a lot of dashboards due. That doesn’t answer my question.”

“It answers enough.”

Behind her, the office lights flickered. For half a second I saw past the cubicles.

Rows of desks stretched farther than the building allowed. Men and women sat shoulder to shoulder under hanging lights. Some wore shirts from old United Way campaigns. Some had hairstyles from the Bush administration. Some had skin. Some had less.

Every monitor showed the same HR portal.

Every screen displayed the same message.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need

Then the lights steadied.

The office looked normal again.

The woman handed back the printout.

“You still have seven minutes of lunch,” she said.

I looked at my watch.

She was right.

That bothered me more than the dead people.

I went back to my desk.

My calendar had changed.

Before lunch, I had three meetings for the afternoon, which already felt criminal. Now I had eleven.

The first one started in two minutes.

Subject: Knowledge Transfer and Continuity Planning
Organizer: Frank Davenport
Location: Teams
Required Attendees: Me

I sat down because my knees no longer trusted me to stand.

The Teams chime rang.

I did not click anything.

The meeting opened by itself.

Frank’s profile picture appeared in a circle at the center of the screen. He had used the same picture for fifteen years. Frank in a fishing shirt, holding a redfish that looked as tired as he did.

The microphone icon blinked.

Then came the sound.

A wet throat clearing.

“John?”

I froze.

The office kept moving around me. Phones rang. Keyboards clicked. Someone laughed too loud by the copier. Life, or the county version of it, went right on.

“Frank?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You got a minute?”

“No.”

“Good. This won’t take long.”

“Frank, you’re dead.”

A pause.

Then Frank sighed.

“You sound like my wife.”

I reached for the mouse to leave the meeting. The cursor slid away from my hand. It moved to the bottom of the screen and hovered over the Leave button, then drifted to the chat window instead.

Frank typed:

Please do not disconnect. This session counts toward succession readiness.

I said, “What the hell is happening?”

“You opened the retirement calculator.”

“So?”

“Rookie move.”

“I’m sixty-two.”

“Still.”

Frank’s camera flickered on.

At first, I saw only darkness. Then a face leaned into frame.

It was Frank. Mostly.

His skin had the gray-yellow look of chicken left too long under plastic wrap. His hair, always combed with one stubborn part, clung to his scalp in damp strips. His glasses sat crooked on his nose. His eyes reflected the monitor light, but not in the way eyes should. More like two tiny office windows after closing time.

“Jesus, Frank.”

“No politics or religion in Teams chat,” he said. “They flag that now.”

“What are you?”

“Active employee.”

“You died.”

“On paper.”

“Your obituary said otherwise.”

“Obituaries don’t feed the pension system.”

I looked over at Marcy’s cubicle. She had disappeared. Her chair sat empty. On her monitor, an Excel file sat open. One cell blinked red.

“Why me?” I asked.

Frank leaned closer to his camera. Something shifted beneath his collar.

“Because you know too much.”

“All I know is how to make a slicer default to the previous month.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s not too much.”

“It is.”

My screen changed.

A dashboard opened. Not the retirement calculator. Something older. Its background was black. Not dark mode. Not the friendly charcoal gray of some user interface committee trying to look modern. This was deep black. Grave black.

At the top, in white letters:

EMPLOYEE LIFE CYCLE UTILIZATION MODEL

A map of the county filled the screen. Tiny dots pulsed over buildings, offices, service centers, libraries, warehouses, call centers, clinics, and places I didn’t recognize. Each dot had a status.

Active
Pending Separation
Retained
Unavailable
Formerly Unavailable

Frank said, “They built it during the hiring freeze.”

“Who built it?”

“People who called themselves change agents.”

“That explains the evil.”

He gave a dry laugh that turned into a cough.

“At first it just forecasted vacancies. Then it forecasted retirements. Then deaths. Then it suggested interventions.”

“Interventions?”

“Retention.”

“That word does a lot of work.”

“It’s government. Words do pushups here.”

I watched the dots pulse.

One dot sat over our building.

My name appeared beside it.

HARRIS, JOHN C.
Pension Risk: Moderate
Knowledge Hoarding: High
Burnout Scent: Detectable
Escape Probability: Emerging

“Burnout scent?” I said.

Frank looked embarrassed. “They added that after the engagement survey.”

“I wrote nice comments on that survey.”

“Nobody believes those.”

The dashboard zoomed in on my name.

A second panel opened.

AVAILABLE COUNTERMEASURES:

Deny PTO
Schedule Recurring Meetings
Reduce Retirement Confidence
Assign Legacy Project
Trigger Medical Plan Confusion
Summon Former Supervisor

I pointed at the screen.

“Do not summon my former supervisor.”

Frank looked away.

“Frank.”

He winced.

The lights above my desk flickered.

Behind me, someone said my name.

I knew that voice.

I had not heard it in eight years, and my blood still recognized it. Some people leave an imprint on your nervous system. Bad bosses do not die. They molt.

“John,” the voice said. “Do you have a second?”

I turned.

Carl Overstreet stood in the aisle outside my cubicle wearing pleated khakis, a blue shirt, and the expression of a man about to ask for something impossible by Friday.

Carl had retired in 2016, moved to North Carolina, and died during a pickleball tournament three years later. I knew this because Marcy had sent an email that said, “Carl passed. Service Saturday.” I had not attended because Saturday is sacred and I was out of fake grief.

Now Carl stood under the humming lights with a folder in his hand.

He looked alive from a distance.

Up close, the illusion had problems.

His skin fit wrong. His tie hung too low. His smile had no moisture.

“Carl,” I said.

“Glad I caught you.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

He tapped the folder against his palm.

“We need you to take the lead on a cross-functional modernization effort.”

“I’d rather swallow a thumbtack.”

“Great energy,” Carl said. “We’ll call you the project champion.”

“I decline.”

Carl smiled.

The HR portal opened on my second monitor.

A message appeared.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

Carl placed the folder on my desk.

The title read:

ONE COUNTY FUTURE INITIATIVE: PHASE ZERO DISCOVERY PRE-WORK

Phase zero.

That meant no one had authority, budget, scope, timeline, or shame.

I shoved the folder back toward him. “I’m retiring.”

Carl’s smile widened.

“Love that for you.”

“I mean it.”

“Of course.”

“I have a projection.”

“Everyone does.”

“My projection says I die before I retire.”

Carl nodded. “That happens.”

“It should not happen.”

“In a perfect world, sure.”

“This is not a perfect world.”

“No,” Carl said. “This is a workplace.”

Frank coughed through the speakers.

Carl looked at the screen. “Frank, we still on for two-thirty?”

“Already there,” Frank said.

Carl gave me a little finger point. “See? That’s commitment.”

I stood so fast my chair rolled backward and hit the cubicle wall.

“I quit.”

The office went silent.

Not quiet.

Silent.

The printer stopped mid-cough. The keyboard clicks ceased. The fluorescent lights held their hum and then seemed to swallow it.

Carl lowered the folder.

Frank’s dead face froze on screen.

Marcy appeared at the edge of her cubicle and shook her head once.

Do not.

“I quit,” I said again, louder this time, because men love to repeat stupid choices once witnesses arrive.

Every monitor in the office went black.

Then each one lit up with the portal.

A message appeared across every screen.

VOLUNTARY SEPARATION REQUEST DETECTED

PLEASE STAND BY WHILE WE CALCULATE ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT

Somewhere deep in the building, a machine started grinding.

Not the HVAC. Not the elevator.

Ceiling tiles trembled. Dust sifted down. The potted plant near the copier dropped two dead leaves.

My badge, clipped to my belt, grew hot.

I yanked it off and threw it onto the desk.

The plastic smoked.

A new line appeared on the monitors.

IMPACT LEVEL: UNACCEPTABLE

RECOMMENDATION: RETAIN EMPLOYEE

My badge split open.

Inside the cracked plastic, something pulsed. A red point of light, tiny as a pencil tip, beat in time with my heart.

Carl sighed.

“You made this harder than it needed to be.”

“That was not in the employee handbook.”

“You acknowledged the handbook in 2009.”

“I did not read it.”

“No one does.”

The floor beneath my desk vibrated.

Cords stirred.

At first I thought the movement came from my feet, a trick of panic. Then my keyboard cable lifted off the carpet. My mouse cord followed. The power strip under my desk clicked. One black cable slid across the floor with the awful patience of a garden snake.

It wrapped around the leg of my chair.

I stepped back.

The cable tightened.

Frank said, “John, don’t fight the equipment.”

“Thank you, Frank. Very helpful.”

“I’m trying to save you paperwork.”

More cords moved under the surrounding desks. They slid out from docking stations, monitors, phones, speakers, chargers, and forgotten USB hubs. A nest of black and gray office veins spread across the carpet.

Carl opened the folder.

“You’re scheduled for transition.”

“I don’t want transition.”

“Nobody does.”

Marcy stepped into the aisle with a pair of scissors.

Not big scissors. Not impressive scissors. Little orange-handled desk scissors that could barely open a bag of pretzels.

Still, at that moment, they looked like Excalibur.

“John,” she said, “run.”

Carl turned toward her.

“Marcy, that is not a team-centered response.”

She cut the cord around my chair.

The office screamed.

Not the people.

The office.

The sound ripped through the ceiling vents, copier trays, and badge readers. Every phone rang at once. Every printer spit blank pages. The microwave in the breakroom started on its own.

Marcy grabbed my arm.

“Back stairs,” she said.

We ran.

I had not run in years without first consulting a cardiologist, a weather app, and at least three pieces of supportive compression fabric.

My knees gave me immediate legal notice.

We cut through the copy room. Paper flew around us in white bursts. Each sheet had the same message printed across it:

PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR WORKSTATION

Marcy kicked

open the stairwell door.

The stairs smelled like dust, paint, and old mop water. Every office building stairwell smells that way, even new ones. It must come from a factory. Eau de Evacuation Drill.

We took the steps down.

Behind us, the door slammed.

Something hit it from the other side.

Once.

Twice.

Then Carl’s voice came through the metal.

“John, I’m going to need you to circle back.”

Marcy pulled me down another flight.

“I hate that phrase,” I said.

“Everybody hates that phrase.”

“Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I did.”

“You said don’t joke with the portal.”

“That was the warning.”

“Marcy, that was a fortune cookie.”

We reached the second-floor landing. The door opened before we touched it.

A woman stood there holding a clipboard. She wore a brown suit, shoulder pads, and glasses on a chain. Her hair had the solid architecture of 1987.

Marcy stopped.

“Oh no,” she said.

The woman looked at me.

“Do you have your time sheet?”

“I don’t know you.”

“She’s from Personnel,” Marcy whispered.

“HR?”

“No. Before HR.”

The woman frowned. “Human Resources is a fad.”

Behind her, the second floor stretched into a hallway I had never seen. Beige carpet. Wood paneling. Ashtrays mounted to the wall. A water fountain that looked capable of giving you tetanus. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air, thick and stale.

Rows of people sat at metal desks, typing under green banker lamps. Their clothes came from every decade. Wide ties. Narrow ties. Shoulder pads. Short sleeves. Bad mustaches. Worse perms.

One man looked up from his typewriter.

His lower jaw was missing.

He waved.

“Keep moving,” Marcy said.

The Personnel woman blocked the door.

“No one leaves without a signed clearance form.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said. “I’m fleeing.”

“That requires form PF-19B.”

Marcy lifted the scissors.

The woman looked offended.

“You wouldn’t.”

Marcy snipped the air.

The Personnel woman screamed and dissolved into a cloud of pink carbon-copy dust.

We ran again.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the exit door had a badge reader.

Because, of course it did.

I pushed the crash bar.

The door did not open.

A small screen above the reader lit up.

EXIT REQUEST SUBMITTED

Then:

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

Marcy swore.

It sounded earned.

The cables slid down the stairs above us. Slow. Patient. The first one curled over the railing.

My chest tightened. Sweat ran down my back. For one awful second I thought, This is how it gets me. Not with fangs. Not with claws. With a locked exit and a policy message.

Then I remembered something.

Years in a government building will teach you one truth: no system works all the way.

I looked at the badge reader.

Then at the crash bar.

Then at the small gray box above the door. The emergency release.

“Marcy,” I said, “do we have a work order open on this door?”

She smiled.

“Since 2021.”

I hit the emergency release.

The door clicked open.

We spilled into the employee parking lot behind the building.

Sunlight hit my face. Real sunlight. Hot pavement. Car exhaust. Cut grass. The smell of wet retention pond. I had never loved a retention pond before. It sat there green and scummy and glorious.

For three seconds, I felt free.

Then my phone buzzed.

I looked down.

New email.

From: Benefits
Subject: Exit Interview

I threw the phone into the retention pond.

It hit the water with a satisfying plunk.

Marcy nodded. “Good choice.”

Then my watch buzzed.

I took it off and handed it to her.

She threw it after the phone.

“You’re better at that than I expected,” I said.

“I was married twice.”

Fair.

We crossed the parking lot.

My truck sat near the back under an oak tree. I could see it. I could see the little dent in the bumper. The faded veteran plate. The coffee cup in the holder. Freedom with a check engine light.

We were almost there when the building doors opened.

Carl stepped out.

Behind him came the oatmeal cardigan woman.

Behind her came Frank, or something wearing Frank’s work shirt.

Then more.

People from every era of the building shuffled into the sunlight. Some shielded their eyes. Some had no eyes to shield. A man in a bow tie held a stack of green bar paper. A woman with half a face carried a three-ring binder. A security guard with a whistle stuck in his throat dragged one foot across the pavement.

They did not run.

They did not need to.

Carl cupped his hands around his mouth.

“John, this is not aligned with your development plan.”

I opened the truck door.

It locked.

I tried again.

Nothing.

The dashboard screen lit up inside the cab, though I had not started the engine.

A message appeared across the display.

REMOTE WORKSTATION AVAILABLE

“No,” I said.

The truck radio turned on.

Frank’s voice crackled through the speakers.

“John, buddy, listen. I get it. I tried to leave too.”

I backed away from the truck.

Marcy grabbed my arm.

“Don’t listen.”

Frank continued.

“At first you hate it. Then you adjust. You get used to logging in after the funeral. You get used to your hands going through the keyboard some mornings. You don’t need sleep anymore, which helps with email.”

Carl and the others kept coming.

The cords had followed them outside. Black cables slid over the pavement from the building doors, thick as vines, thin as worms, splitting and joining and splitting again.

I looked around for a weapon.

I found a travel mug.

That felt about right.

I threw it at Carl.

It bounced off his forehead.

He blinked.

“That was county property.”

“It was mine.”

“Did you purchase it through Procurement?”

I looked at Marcy. “I’m going to die here.”

“Not if they need you Monday.”

“That is not comfort.”

She looked past me toward the parking lot entrance.

A white sedan rolled in.

The driver leaned out.

He wore sunglasses and a polo shirt with a logo I didn’t recognize.

“You John Harris?” he yelled.

I raised a hand, because apparently panic does not erase manners.

“Who’s asking?”

He held up a tablet.

“Contracting office. I’m here for onboarding.”

The world paused.

Even Carl stopped walking.

The cables went still.

The oatmeal cardigan woman made a sound in her throat.

Marcy whispered, “Oh, that’s bad.”

The man in the sedan waved me over. “You coming or not? I bill in fifteen-minute increments.”

I looked at the undead employees. Then at the building. Then at Marcy.

“What happens if I go with him?”

She swallowed.

“You won’t be an employee anymore.”

“That sounds good.”

“You won’t have benefits.”

“I am currently being hunted by benefits.”

“You won’t have pension credit.”

“My pension is trying to outlive me.”

“You’ll probably sit at the same desk.”

“Of course I will.”

Carl stepped forward. “John, I encourage you to consider the total compensation package.”

The contracting officer laughed from the sedan.

“Total compensation package,” he said. “That’s adorable.”

The cables recoiled from his car.

Not much. Just enough.

I understood then.

The portal fed on employees. Badges. Benefits. Leave balances. Retirement dates. Sick time. Life insurance. The whole soft machine of keeping a person tethered to a place until he forgot he had ever wanted out.

But contractors were different.

Contractors were not food.

Contractors were invoices.

I walked to the sedan.

Carl’s face collapsed inward. For the first time, he looked dead.

“You can’t,” he said.

I opened the passenger door.

The contracting officer looked me over.

“You have your own laptop?”

“No.”

“Good. We’ll issue you one from 2018. Battery lasts eleven minutes. You’ll need three passwords and a blood sample.”

“Fine.”

“No paid holidays.”

“Fine.”

“No vacation.”

“Fine.”

“No retirement.”

I looked back at the building.

At the dead in their old shirts.

At the portal glowing on every window.

At Marcy standing in the parking lot with her orange scissors in one hand, tired and brave and doomed by payroll knowledge.

“No retirement was already on the table,” I said.

She gave me a small salute.

I got in.

The sedan pulled away.

In the side mirror, I watched the building shrink behind me. The undead staff stood in the parking lot under the Florida sun, their badges swinging, their folders held tight to their chests. Carl lifted one hand in a stiff little wave.

The portal had lost.

For now.

That night, I slept six straight hours for the first time in months.

No Teams chime.

No calendar invite.

No HR email.

No dead supervisor asking if I had a second.

I woke before dawn with a strange feeling in my chest. Hope, maybe. Or gas. At my age, there’s a distinction.

The house sat quiet. The dog snored. The coffee maker clicked. Outside, the sky had that bruised blue look it gets before the sun decides whether the day deserves any effort.

I walked into the kitchen barefoot and started coffee.

My new laptop sat on the table.

I had not put it there.

It opened by itself.

The screen glowed.

A login page appeared.

Then a message.

WELCOME, JOHN C. HARRIS
VENDOR STATUS: ACTIVE
ASSIGNMENT: ONE COUNTY FUTURE INITIATIVE
WORK LOCATION: SAME DESK
HOURLY RATE: APPROVED
BENEFITS: NONE

I stared at it.

The coffee maker hissed behind me.

The dog lifted his head, farted, and went back to sleep.

The laptop chimed.

A calendar invite appeared.

Subject: Contractor Orientation
Organizer: Frank Davenport
Time: 7:00 a.m.

I clicked Decline.

The screen blinked.

Your request has been denied due to continued business need.

I took a sip of coffee.

Hot. Black. Bitter.

Then I opened Teams.

Follow the Proud Boomer Dispatches on Substack for the weekly newsletter, fiction, and opinion essays. Proud Boomer Wellness Substack for health content. Florida Stories for Loretta Faye and other Florida weirdness. Paid subscriptions are $8/month or $50/year: full archive, one exclusive per month, no sponsors. john@theProudBoomer.com

I was eleven when Phantom of the Paradise came and went, which means I missed it the first time as almost everyone else did. It bombed in most of the country. It played for about a year straight in Winnipeg, which is one of those facts that sounds made up and isn’t. By the time I caught up with it, I already had a bass in my hands and a head full of KISS, and the movie landed differently. It looked like something I was trying to describe to my bandmates and couldn’t.

Here is the thing people get wrong about calling this a guilty pleasure. There is nothing to feel guilty about. Brian De Palma made a rock horror musical in 1974 that predicted the next ten years of the record business, and the record business repaid him by ignoring it. Paul Williams wrote the songs and played Swan, the producer who signs talent to contracts written in blood. Williams was a soft-spoken guy who wrote hits for the Carpenters, and here he is playing the devil as a music executive. That casting alone should have won something.

The plot borrows from Faust, from Phantom of the Opera, from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and it does not pretend otherwise. Winslow Leach writes a cantata. Swan steals it. Winslow gets framed, disfigured in a record press, and comes back masked and vengeful to haunt the concert hall Swan built. Along the way you get Beef, the glam-rock frontman played by Gerrit Graham, who steals every scene he stands in. You get Jessica Harper as Phoenix, the singer worth all the trouble. You get a stage show that stages a murder as entertainment and asks the crowd to cheer, which the crowd does.

That last part is why the movie holds up. De Palma was not just making something loud and strange. He was pointing at the audience. He built a story about a man who sells his voice and his soul to a producer, then set it inside a spectacle that turns real death into a number, and he did it a full year before Rocky Horror made midnight musicals a going concern. The movie knew what fame was going to cost and said so out loud while wearing a cape.

I have watched grown men who love music dismiss this thing because it looks garish. Of course it looks garish. It is about an industry that dresses violence up in sequins and sells tickets. The look is the argument. When Beef gets electrocuted on stage, and the crowd assumes it is part of the act, you are watching a filmmaker tell you exactly what he thinks of the machine, and he is right.

The soundtrack got nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Song Score. It lost. Paul Williams kept working, KISS put on the makeup and sold out arenas, and the movie that got there first sat in the cult bin for decades waiting for people to notice.

So call it what you want. I have stopped using the phrase guilty pleasure for it. A movie that names the con while performing the con, and does it with tunes you can actually hum, is not a pleasure you apologize for. It is one you defend.

Watch it once with the sound up. Then try to name a rock movie from the seventies that was smarter about what was coming. I will wait.

The rain started at four and by nine it had found every soft place in the house. It came down inside the walls of the back bedroom, behind the plaster, running along the studs where the flashing had rotted out years before Dale Merrick ever signed the papers. He could hear it moving in there. A wet sliding, board to board, working its way down.

He told himself it was water. Water was the honest explanation, and Dale had learned to want honest explanations after the divorce, after the lawyer, after the year that took his marriage and his savings and left him a house he could afford only because no one else in the county would touch it.

Nadine was seven. She had the small room at the back because she liked the window, the one that looked out over the tree line. She said you could watch the woods breathe. Dale never corrected her. Some of the things a child says are truer than a grown man wants them to be, and he had stopped arguing.

She called him a little before nine. Not a scream. A flat voice, the one she used when she was working hard to make something sound like nothing.

“Daddy. There’s a girl at my window.”

He was down the hall before he finished hearing it.

The room was dark except for the mushroom nightlight throwing weak orange across the floor. Nadine sat up with the blanket to her chin and her eyes on the glass, and Dale followed them and felt his body go cold from the feet up.

Something stood at the window.

The window was on the second floor. There was nothing out there to stand on but eleven feet of falling rain and then the roots of the pines. And there was a girl pressed against it anyway, close, her face nearly to the pane, one hand flat on the glass.

She wore a dress that had been white a long time ago, high at the collar, a row of small buttons down the front. The rain had soaked it black and something else had soaked it darker, blooming out from the seams and the underarms and the hollow of the throat. Her hair hung straight and heavy on both sides, parted so it covered her eyes and left only the lower half of her face.

The lower half was where the trouble was.

The skin of her jaw had split. Not torn, split, the way skin splits when the thing under it swells past what skin allows, and the edges of the splits had gone hard and gray and curled back, and in the trenches between them the flesh was the wet pink of something turned inside out. Her lips had parted at the corners and kept parting. The tears ran up into her cheeks in clean seams, and the seams did not bleed. They wept a slow clear fluid that beaded and ran and left a shine. When she breathed, and she breathed, the whole ruined lower face pulled tight and slack, tight and slack, and each time it went slack he could see the muscle working under the open places, red cords sliding over each other, wet and deliberate.

She pressed her hand harder to the glass.

The hand had too many joints. Each finger carried an extra knuckle, and the extra knuckle let the fingers fold backward at the middle so the tips lay flat against the pane while the rest of the hand stood up off it, a spider going down on its legs. The pads of the fingers were black and split like the jaw, and where they touched the glass they left prints, dark, glistening, spreading at the edges. The nails had lifted. He could see the pale beds beneath them, and he could see that beneath the beds there was movement, a small crawling fullness, as if the girl were packed with something that had run out of room.

Nadine had gone quiet. When Dale looked, his daughter was not watching the window anymore. She was watching him, to see what a father did about a thing like this.

“Get behind me,” he said.

He made himself cross the room. Every animal part of him wanted the truck and the road and eleven miles of dark between them and this, but the road was rain and mud and he was not sure the thing at the glass would stay at the glass once his back was turned. So he crossed to the window and he looked, and through the running water her one visible eye found him under the curtain of hair.

The eye was clean. That was what took the floor out from under him. All that ruin, the split jaw, the seeping seams, the fingers folding the wrong way, and set into the middle of it was an ordinary brown eye, a child’s eye, wet and terrified, looking out of the wreckage the way a person looks out of a car going into deep water.

Her torn mouth moved. Through the glass and the rain he heard it, small and clear, pitched exactly like his daughter’s.

“Let me in. I’m so cold.”

His hand was on the latch.

He looked down and his own fingers had turned the brass lever halfway and he did not remember deciding to. He pulled the hand back like it belonged to someone else and flattened it on the sash and held the window shut. On the other side the girl tipped her head, and where her neck bent the skin gave along a fold, and the fold opened, and inside the fold, packed in tight, was a mass of something soft and gray and finely veined, the underside of a mushroom, and it flexed once in the wet before the skin closed over it again.

“You know me,” she said. “You knew me. Let me in.”

“I don’t know you,” Dale said. His voice came apart in the middle.

“You will.”

She smiled.

The seams at the corners of her mouth ran up her face and split wider as the smile spread, the flesh parting in long clean lines all the way to the hinges of her jaw, and the jaw dropped, and it kept dropping, lower than a jaw is hung to go, and inside there were teeth. Rows of them. Small, white, a child’s baby teeth, and behind that row another row, and behind that another, going back and down a throat that had teeth where a throat has none, hundreds of them set in wet red gum, all of them turned outward, all of them toward him. The smell came through the shut window, standing water and turned meat and under it something floral gone sour, violets left to rot in the vase.

Behind him Nadine said, flat and careful, “Daddy, she’s the girl in the picture.”

He did not turn. “What picture, baby?”

“In the wall. There’s a hole behind the closet. There’s a box.”

She had found the crawl space he sealed the day they moved in. Four screws and a sheet of plywood, because a child does not need a hole in her wall. She had worked one corner loose over the summer the way children do, patient past all reason, and inside was a shoebox, and inside the box a photograph, a girl in a white dress at the edge of the trees, and writing on the back. A year. A name.

“It says 1961,” Nadine said. “It says her name. It’s my name too. It says Nadine.”

At the window the thing set its second hand to the glass beside the first. Both palms now, all those folded fingers spread, and it leaned its weight in. The old glass bowed. Dale saw the putty crack in the corners and heard the pane give a thin rising note as it flexed toward the room, and he understood that a single sheet of glass was the only thing between his daughter and eleven feet of dark and the mouth that opened past the edges of its own face.

He grabbed Nadine off the bed. Got her under one arm and backed toward the door, and the girl at the window watched him go with her head cocked and her weeping seams shining in the orange light, and she said the thing he was still trying to say three days later when they found what was left of him.

“You already let me in. I came down through the walls all summer, one board at a time, in the water. I’ve been under your house and inside your house and in the space behind your daughter’s clothes. This is the last window. I’m only knocking to be kind.”

The glass did not break.

It gave.

He saw it in the half second before he got the door shut. The pane lost its hardness the way fat loses its hardness in a warm hand, going soft and slow and clear, and her fingers pushed into it, not through it, into it, sinking to the second knuckle in the surface of the window, and the whole sheet took the shape of her hands and pulled her in after them, and where she passed the glass sealed shut behind her without a mark, and she was standing in the room, dripping, small, her bare feet on the crushed nightlight, that one clean eye swinging around to find them.

“There you are,” she said.

Dale got as far as the kitchen.

He put Nadine down and shoved her at the back door and told her to run to the truck, and the child ran, and that was the last order his body followed as his own. Because the girl came into the kitchen behind him without hurry, and she reached up with one of those wrong hands and took him by the wrist, and the fingers folded around his arm the wrong way, all the way around, past where a hand should close, and where she gripped him his skin went cold, and then the cold went in.

It ran up the arm. He watched it move. Under the skin of his forearm the muscle began to shift, the red cords loosening from the bone and sliding, rearranging, and the skin split along the top the way hers had split, clean, gray at the edges, and the split did not bleed. It wept. His hand at the end of the arm was already changing, the knuckles doubling, a fresh joint rising under the skin of each finger with a small wet click he felt in his teeth, and the fingers bent back on themselves and lay flat and easy against the counter, spider on its legs.

He tried to scream and his jaw came unhinged. He felt it drop past where it was hung, felt the seams tear up his cheeks in two clean lines, felt his lips part at the corners and keep parting, and inside his own mouth he felt new teeth push up through the gum in rows, small and white and turned outward, more of them and then more, packing back into a throat that made room by growing what it needed. His hair, what little a fifty-year-old man keeps, poured down over his face all at once, black with a wet that came from inside him, and it hung straight on both sides and curtained his eyes, and behind the curtain his eyes, both of them, stayed exactly as they were. Brown. Clear. His own. Watching out of all of it, terrified, while the rest of him became a thing that opened doors from the outside.

The girl stood beside him and held his rearranged hand in hers, palm to folded palm, and looked up at what he was now with something that on a whole face would have been tenderness.

“Now you’ll want to be let in too,” she said. “That’s the worst part. You’ll stand at the glass and you’ll be so cold and you’ll watch them not open it, and you’ll understand exactly why they can’t, and you’ll knock anyway. Everyone here knocks. There’s a whole yard of us at the tree line, knocking, all polite.”

Nadine lived. No one could account for it. They found her locked inside the truck, dry in all that rain, too small to have reached the locks, a shoebox in her lap. She did not speak for a long time. When she finally did, years on, to a woman paid to listen, she said only that she looked back once from the truck and saw two of them standing in the orange light of the kitchen. Two now. Matching white dresses, though one of them had been her father an hour before and wore the dress the way a big man wears a small thing, seams open, jaw hung wrong, hair down over an ordinary set of eyes. They were holding hands. They turned together and looked at her through the kitchen window, both faces ruined, both pairs of eyes clean and brown and begging, and she understood that they were not angry with her.

They only wanted to know why she got to be on the outside.

The house is still out there. The county holds it for back taxes and cannot sell it. Every so often someone comes down the dirt road faster than they went up, pale, unwilling to say much, only that there was a face at the upstairs window. A girl. That she put her hand to the glass and left a dark print that spread. That the skin of her was not right, that the mouth went too far, that the smell reached them from behind sealed glass.

And that the thing they could not shake, standing out there in the rain with an animal telling them to run, was how badly some quiet part of them had wanted to reach up and open the window.

Just to get her out of the cold.

A guy at the gym told me he’s got four thousand followers on Instagram. Said it the way you’d announce a promotion. I nodded, said that’s great, and thought about how many of those four thousand people are seeing anything he posts.

Somewhere between two hundred and three hundred. Maybe.

I didn’t say that part out loud because he seemed happy and I try not to ruin people’s mornings before I’ve had my coffee. But it’s true, and it’s true for me too, and it’s true for every one of you sitting there watching your subscriber count like it’s the Dow Jones.

Here’s the thing nobody explains when you sign up for any of this. Facebook and Instagram don’t show your posts to your followers. They show your posts to a sample of your followers, decide how that sample reacts, and then either give you more people or throw your post in a drawer. The going rate on Facebook right now is somewhere around two to six percent of your followers actually seeing a given post. Instagram runs a little better, call it four to eight percent. So if you’ve got five thousand followers, congratulations, you’ve got an audience of a few hundred people who happen to be looking at the right moment, and the other forty five hundred are names on a list that means less every year.

I grew up in a world where a follower meant something. You followed the guy in front of you at the drive-in, and he knew you were there because your headlights were up his tailpipe. Now a follower is a person who clicked a button once in 2022 and hasn’t thought about you since. The number looks the same on the screen whether it’s real or not. That’s the whole con.

And it gets better, because the platforms can’t even agree on what counts as somebody actually reading your stuff.

Medium, God bless them, at least tries. If you write something on Medium, a person has to stick around for about thirty seconds before Medium counts it as a “read” instead of a “view.” Thirty seconds isn’t a high bar. My dog Gus can hold a stare for thirty seconds if there’s bacon involved. But at least it’s a bar. Somebody has to prove they gave a damn before Medium hands you credit.

Substack doesn’t bother. A view happens the moment the page loads. You could open the email, glance at the headline, get distracted by your wife asking if you took the trash out, and never come back, and Substack still marks it down as a view. I’ve been publishing there long enough to know that a chunk of my “views” are people who opened it in a tab and let it die a slow death next to eleven other tabs they’ll never look at again.

So you’ve got two platforms, both telling you they measure readership, and they’re measuring two completely different things. One wants thirty seconds of your attention before it’ll vouch for you. The other just wants you to show up. Neither number tells you whether the writing worked. Neither number tells you whether a single word landed. They tell you whether a screen lit up.

I’d take honesty over comfort here. If Substack made me earn a “read” the way Medium does, my numbers would drop, and I’d rather know the real ones. I’ve got roughly 190 people on my Kit list. I’ll take those 190 over four thousand ghosts every single time, because at minimum I know they signed up on purpose and haven’t left yet. That’s a lower bar than “read for thirty seconds,” and even that feels like more than what a follower count gives you.

Now let’s talk about book reviews, because this is where it stops being annoying and starts being genuinely unfair.

If you buy a book on Amazon and love it, odds are you don’t leave a review. Nobody does. The numbers run anywhere from one to seven percent of buyers, depending on which study you trust, and the most careful one I found put the average around one and a half percent. Which means if my book “Not Done Yet” has twenty reviews, I didn’t sell twenty copies. I sold somewhere between three hundred and two thousand, and the overwhelming majority of those readers finished the book, maybe liked it, and went back to their day without saying a word.

Fine. People are busy. I get it. Here’s the part that’ll make your blood pressure climb a little. Amazon’s search algorithm uses your review count and rating to decide whether to show your book to anybody new. It’s baked into the ranking. So the tiny sliver of readers, the one to two percent who actually bother to type something out, aren’t just leaving their opinion. They’re the ones deciding whether the other ninety eight percent of potential readers ever see the book exist in the first place.

You are depending on the quietest possible group of people to do the loudest possible job. That’s not a flaw in the system. That’s the whole system. And there’s no way to opt out of it short of not selling books on Amazon, which is not currently on my agenda.

So where does that leave a guy who just wants to write something honest and have people actually see it?

Ignore the follower count. It was never measuring what you thought it was measuring. Pay attention to views if that’s all a platform gives you, but know it’s the loosest kind of proof there is. If a platform gives you something closer to a real read, thirty seconds, a finished article, a review somebody typed out with their thumbs at eleven at night, treat that like gold, because it cost the reader something to give it to you.

And if you’re an author sweating over why your review count looks thin, stop apologizing for asking people to leave one. You’re not being pushy. You’re asking the one to two percent of people willing to talk to do a favor for the other ninety eight percent who’ll never know they needed it.

The numbers on the screen were never the point. They just make good bar bragging, right up until somebody at the gym does the math on you.

Trust the people who showed up on purpose.

https://proudboomerwellness.kit.com/profile

I got the email Tuesday morning. One unsubscribe from the newsletter.

That’s it. No reason given, no exit survey, no “it’s not you, it’s me.” Just a little notification that somebody out there decided they’d had enough of me and clicked the button.

You’d think after sixty-two years on this planet, ten years in the Navy, and a total thyroidectomy, I’d have developed a thicker skin about one stranger opting out of my emails. You’d be wrong. I have spent actual time, time I will never get back, trying to figure out which sentence did it.

Was it the piece on grip strength? The one about why your knees aren’t actually “bad,” they’re just untrained? Did I say something about creatine that set off a chain reaction in someone’s group chat? I’ll never know. That’s the part that gets me. It’s not the rejection; I can handle rejection. I’ve been married long enough to know what that looks like up close. It’s the not knowing. My brain wants a reason the way Gus wants a reason every time the doorbell rings. There isn’t one. He just barks anyway.

Here’s my working theory, and I want to be clear this is pure speculation with zero evidence behind it.

I think it was a vegan.

I think I said something about protein intake, probably in the context of building muscle after fifty, and somewhere out there a person who has built their entire identity around lentils took it personally and hit unsubscribe like it was a moral stand. I have no proof. I’m not going to dig through my analytics to find proof. But it feels right. It has the shape of truth.

The thing is, I’m not writing this because I’m wounded. I’m writing it because the whole reaction is ridiculous, and I know it is while I’m having it. I run a newsletter with five paying subscribers. Five. I could probably name all five of them if you gave me a minute and a cup of coffee. Losing a free subscriber from a list that size is like a restaurant with four tables noticing one person didn’t finish their soup. It doesn’t move any needle. There is no needle. And yet there I was, scrolling back through old posts looking for the offending paragraph like a man going through old text messages trying to figure out when exactly the relationship went sideways.

This is what happens when you write things and put them out into the world expecting people to read them and, more dangerously, expecting them to stick around. You start keeping score in a game where the scoreboard doesn’t actually matter. I didn’t start this newsletter to build an audience that agrees with everything I say. I started it because I had things to say about getting older, staying strong, and not quietly fading into the recliner the way our culture seems to expect once you hit fifty. If everyone who reads it agreed with everything I wrote, I’d be doing something wrong. Agreement across the board usually means you’re not saying anything worth disagreeing with.

I think about Marcus Aurelius sometimes when this stuff creeps in, which probably sounds like I’m reaching for gravitas I haven’t earned, but bear with me. The man ran an empire and still found time to remind himself, in his own private notebook, that other people’s opinions of him weren’t his business to manage. He wasn’t writing for an audience. He was writing to stay sane in a job that would have broken most men. I’m not running an empire. I’m running a Substack with a dog who sheds on everything I own. But the principle holds. You can’t control what lands and what doesn’t. You can only control whether you said the true thing the way you meant to say it.

And here’s where I have to be honest with myself, because that’s the whole point of this exercise. Even knowing all of that, even knowing the math doesn’t matter and the scoreboard is fake, I still wanted to know. I still want to know. If that unsubscribed person is reading this right now, which they’re obviously not, because they unsubscribed, I’d genuinely like to buy them a coffee and ask what set them off. Not to change anything. Not to apologize. Just out of curiosity. What’s the line that finally did it? Was it really protein? Did I insult your treadmill? Did I make a Navy joke that landed wrong?

I’m not going to find out. That’s fine. I’ve made my peace with it somewhere between writing the second paragraph of this piece and now. The work doesn’t change. I’m still going to write about lifting heavy things after fifty, about why “I’m too old for that” is usually a lie you tell yourself to avoid the discomfort of being bad at something new, about the slow, unglamorous process of staying capable as your body changes whether you cooperate with it or not. Somebody is going to disagree with all of it eventually. Somebody already did, hard enough to click a button over it.

I’d just like to know which sentence it was. That’s all. I’m not asking for an apology. I’m asking for closure, and possibly a little material.

If you've ever wondered what it takes to unsubscribe from me, I genuinely don't know either. But if you're still here, you might as well stick around. Sign up for the free newsletter at https://proudboomerwellness.kit.com/profile, or check out Not Done Yet at ProudBoomerBooks.com if you want the long-form version of all this.

Mama said the doll was mine now, that’s why I held her.

Her name is Birdie. She came up out of the floor the same night the water did, and I have learned that you do not ask things that come up out of the floor where they have been. You hold them. You let them get warm against your front, where the warmth of you lives, and you say nice things in a low voice so they stay calm.

Birdie likes my voice. I can tell because when I sing, she stops moving her little hands.

The house went under in the spring. Not all at once. The yard went first, then the porch, then the bottom step, and Mama kept saying the words people say, the men are coming, the water will turn, just stay up high with me, baby. We went up high. We went to the second floor and then to the part above the second floor that does not have a name, the part with the slanted boards and the nails coming through, and we waited for the men.

The men did not come.

But the water did.

It came up through the boards like it was looking for us. It came up brown and slow, and it smelled like “insides”, and Birdie was in it, floating, her one painted eye open and her other eye gone, and she lifted her arms to me the way babies do. So I took her.

You take a baby that lifts its arms. Everybody knows that.

She was cold for about an hour. Then she was the same as me. Then she was warmer than me, and I understood that the warm was not coming from the room, because the room had no warm left in it. The warm was coming out of me and going into her. I could feel it leave through my front, a slow pull, the way the bath drains when you lie still and let it. I told myself it was love.

When you are small, you call a lot of things love that you don’t understand.

Mama stopped talking on the third day. She did not stop being there. She just went quiet and let her mouth hang, and her skin went the gray that fruit goes, and I held Birdie up so Mama could see her, because I thought it might help. It did not help Mama. It helped Birdie. Birdie drank the looking. I do not know another way to say it. Birdie took the part of Mama that used to live behind her eyes and Mama got smoother after that, smoother and stiller, like a photograph of herself.

I am the only warm thing left, so I am careful with it.

I have learned what Birdie is. She is not a doll the way you think of a doll. A doll is empty and stays empty. Birdie is empty the way a stomach is empty, which is to say she is asking, all the time, in a small voice under the floor. She asks and I give. I gave her my warm first because I had plenty. Then I gave her the feeling in my toes. Then the feeling in my left arm, the one that holds her, which is why I do not set her down. If I set her down she would have to find the warm somewhere else and there is nowhere else. Just Mama, who is finished. Just me.

Last night, something underneath my skin came loose.

I felt it travel. It went from the soft place under my jaw, down through my neck, into my chest, and it gathered there and then it went out my front and into Birdie, and Birdie’s painted mouth, which has always been only a curve of red, opened. Not wide. Just enough to be a mouth and not a painting of one. Inside it was the brown of the water. She did not bite. She is past biting. She just opened so I would understand that she can, and then she closed again and pretended to be cloth.

I sang to her after that for a long time.

This morning I caught my reflection in the part of the water that has gone still in the stairwell, the part that has stopped looking for us. My face is changing. My cheeks are getting the smooth that Mama got. My eyes are getting the painted look, the look of an eye that has been drawn on and not grown. And Birdie, when I hold her up next to my face, Birdie is getting fuller. Pinker. There is a softness coming into her that used to be in me.

We are trading places. That is the thing she came up out of the floor to do. One of us has to be the warm one and one of us has to be the held one, and she has been held long enough, and I have been warm long enough, and the water is not going to turn, and the men are not coming, and there is no way out of here.

Every house on this row has a child in the high part holding something that used to be a child. I know because at night, when the water is still, I can hear them singing too. We are all keeping our dolls calm. We are all running low.

When I am cloth, and she is the one holding me, I hope whoever finds us up here is able to lift her arms when I reach.

You take a baby that lifts its arms.

Everybody knows that.

The realtor said it twice, which Dale noticed at the time and forgot by the closing.

“This house has good bones,” she said, running her palm along the heart-pine doorframe like she was gentling a horse. And then, near the end, signing the last of the papers in the kitchen with the slow ceiling fan turning overhead: “Good bones. You don’t find this anymore. They built things to last out here.”

Out here was a sand road eleven miles north of Crawfordville, deep in the flatwoods where the longleaf pine stood in straight gray ranks, and the palmetto came up to your waist and rattled when the wind moved through it. The house had gone up in 1924, built by a man named Tolliver who, the realtor said, had no living kin to speak of. Cypress and heart pine and a tin roof gone the color of an old nickel. It sat back from the road on a low rise, and the first time Dale walked the porch, he felt the boards give under him with a kind of welcome, settling to his weight the way an old chair does.

He bought it for the three of them. Himself, Carol, and the boy.

The first month was good. That was the thing he would come back to later. The first month was the best the family had been in years. Carol slept through the night for the first time since her mother died. The boy, Wesley, who was eleven and had spent two years being angry at everything with a face, stopped slamming doors. They ate dinner together. They sat on the porch in the evening and listened to the chuck-will’s-widow calling out in the dark and did not feel any particular need to talk, and the not-talking was easy instead of hard.

Carol said it first, lying in bed with the window open and the warm pine air coming through. “I feel settled here,” she said. “Like something let go of me.”

Dale agreed that he felt it too. He did not say that what he felt was more like something taking hold.

It started so small that calling it a start is a kindness the events do not deserve.

Wesley stopped drawing. The boy had drawn constantly, compulsively, monsters and machines and long detailed maps of places that did not exist, and one day the notebooks were just closed and stayed closed. When Dale asked about it, Wesley looked at him with a mild and pleasant expression and said he didn’t feel like it anymore. He said it the way you’d say you weren’t hungry. No anger in it. That was what Dale would remember. There should have been anger. There had always been so much anger in the boy, and now there was a smooth and dimensionless calm, and Dale told himself this was the house doing its good work.

Carol stopped writing in her journal. She had kept one for thirty years, every night, a fat spiral notebook she’d replace when it filled. Dale found the current one in the kitchen trash, three-quarters empty, and when he asked, she only smiled and said she’d run out of things worth putting down. Her voice was even. Her hands were still. She had always talked with her hands, big looping gestures, and now they lay in her lap like two things set down and forgotten.

He should have run then. He knew that later. But the house was warm around them, warm in a way that felt personal, that felt like being held, and a man does not run from the only peace his family has known in years. He stayed. He sank into it. The boards gave under him with their soft welcome, and he let them.

The house was eating them. He understood this eventually, the way you understand a thing in a dream, all at once and far too late to matter.

Not their bodies. Their bodies were fine, were better than fine, Carol’s color was good and Wesley had filled out and Dale himself had not felt so unburdened in a decade. It was the other thing it took. The thing that made Carol talk with her hands. The thing that filled Wesley’s notebooks. It drew that out of them slowly and patiently, the way the longleaf pine draws water, through a thousand fine roots you cannot see, and it had been doing this a long time, longer than 1924, the house only the latest mouth it had grown.

He found Tolliver’s name carved into a floor joist down in the crawlspace, where he’d gone after a smell that turned out to be nothing. Tolliver, and below it a date, and below that, in the same hand, a single line scratched deep into the old wood.

It is warm in here, and I do not want to leave.

Dale sat in the dark under his own house with the flashlight in his hand and understood that Tolliver had not died and had not gone away. Tolliver had been taken all the way down, drawn out through those fine invisible roots until there was nothing left to draw, and what remained of him was warmth in the boards. Welcome in the give of the porch. The house did not waste what it took. It kept it. It was built with it.

Good bones.

He tried to tell Carol. He took her by the shoulders in the kitchen, and the ceiling fan turned slowly overhead, and he told her they had to go, tonight, now, leave everything, and she listened to him with her smooth and pleasant face and her still hands, and when he was done she touched his cheek with a tenderness that stopped his breath in his throat.

“But I feel so good here,” she said. “Don’t you feel good?”

And the terrible thing, the thing he would carry down with him into the warm dark, was that he did. He felt wonderful. The fear was the last sharp thing left in him, and even that was going soft at the edges, dissolving into the general ease, and he could feel the house drawing it out of him through the soles of his feet where they met the heart-pine floor. He could feel himself spreading thin. Becoming warmth. Becoming welcome.

Wesley came in from the porch then, calm and pleasant, his boy’s face gone smooth as a stone in a creek bed, and the three of them stood in the kitchen under the slow turning of the fan, and Dale felt the last of his resistance let go of him with something that was almost relief, almost gratitude, the house settling to their weight, taking them down through the fine roots into the long patient warmth where Tolliver waited, where everyone the house had ever loved was waiting, all of them held, all of them kept, none of them gone, only spread out thin and even through the good and ancient bones.

The next family came in October. The realtor ran her palm along the doorframe.

“You don’t find this anymore,” she said. “They built things to last.”

And under their feet, in the give of the boards, something old and warm and full reached up to welcome them home.

Read more horror and fiction at The Proud Boomer Dispatch. https://johnsproudboomer.substack.com

I am 62 years old, and I have always been good at suffering. Catholic boy, endurance guy, Navy behind me. I knew how to hurt on purpose and then call it character. What caught me off guard, square in the chest, was a song telling me about a different kind of ache entirely.

It came on while I was driving back from the store with a bag of dog food and not much else on my mind. Bleachers. Not usually my lane, the kind of thing I let slide past me on the way to something I already know by heart. My thumb was already moving toward the dial. Then the line landed. The one about not knowing you were lonely until you saw a particular face. Not knowing you were broken until you wanted to change.

I left it on. I sat in the driveway after I parked and just listened. Gus watched me through the front window with his head tilted, wondering why the man with the food wasn’t coming inside.

Here is the thing about that line. You can be lonely for years and not know the word for it. I didn’t. I had a life that looked finished from the outside. Navy behind me, a body that could cover twenty-six miles if I asked it to, a calendar full of the right kind of suffering. I knew how to hurt on purpose. I had turned pain into a virtue so completely that I mistook it for a personality. I could suffer beautifully. What I could not do was sit still long enough to notice I was alone inside all of it.

You don’t feel the loneliness when you’ve never felt the other thing. That’s the trap. I had nothing to hold it up against. I thought what I had was normal. I thought the low hum under everything was just the sound a life makes.

Then Kim.

I want to be careful here because it would be easy to make this sound like a movie, and it wasn’t. There was a woman who looked at me and seemed to actually see the person sitting there, not the resume, not the medals, not the mile splits. She asked me questions nobody bothered to ask (many about Monty Python and Stephen King). She waited for the answers. And somewhere in the waiting, I started wanting things I had quietly retired years before. Wanting is dangerous for a man who has organized his whole life around needing nothing.

That is the part the song gets exactly right, and it took me years to learn it. You don’t see the break until you want to change. As long as I wanted nothing, nothing hurt. I was sealed up tight. The day I started wanting a different kind of life, a real one, with somebody in it, was the day I finally felt how much of me had gone numb. The wanting is what turned the lights on. And the lights showed me the damage.

I’m going all the way in here because the soft version of this story is a lie. The break wasn’t dramatic. Nobody would have looked at me from the outside and seen a broken man. I held a job. I showed up. The break was quieter than that. It was the way I had made peace with less. It was the version of me that had stayed too long in a situation that was slowly emptying me out, because leaving would have meant admitting I deserved better, and I genuinely did not believe that. Endurance had taught me to outlast things. It never taught me when to walk away. So I stayed in a place that was bad for me and called it loyalty, called it toughness, called it anything but what it was.

Kim is the reason I finally opened back up. Not because she told me to. She never told me to. It was because once I knew what it felt like to be seen, I could not go back to pretending the other thing was fine. You can’t unfeel that. Once you’ve stood in the warm part of the house, the cold part stops being something you can talk yourself into.

So I left it. My old self. The version of myself that I could no longer carry. It was neither brave nor clean. I was scared the entire time. A man who had stood watch on a battleship was scared of a closed door. But I made the call. And the strange thing is that the loneliness didn’t lift right away. It got louder first. When you finally admit you were lonely, you have to grieve all the years you spent not knowing. That part is heavy. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.

What the song understands, and what I’m only now catching up to, is that both halves of the line are about the same moment. Seeing the face and wanting to change are not the same event. They are one. The person who shows you that you were lonely is the same person who shows you that you can be different. You don’t get one without the other. The face is the mirror. You look at someone who loves you clearly, and for the first time, you see yourself clearly too, and most of what you see is what needs to go.

Some truths you can hold intellectually before you’ve paid for them. I have this one the other way. I paid first. The understanding came later, in a driveway, with a bag of dog food on the passenger seat and a dog in the window.

I went inside. Kim was at the counter. Gus did his usual circle of celebration, as if I’d returned from a war instead of the grocery store. I didn’t say anything about the song. Some things you don’t narrate, and some meanings are for you, and you cannot make someone else feel the same about it or explain how it affects you. You just stand in the kitchen with the people who saw you, the ones who showed you the lonely and the broken, both, and you let the warm part of the house do what it does.

I didn’t know I was lonely. I didn’t know I was broken. And the only reason I know now is that somebody let me find out, and where it was finally safe to look.

Have you ever woken up without any pants?

That is a very bad feeling.

I am not talking about the fun kind of pantsless, the kind that comes with a story you tell selectively and only after the second beer. I am talking about waking up in your own bed, in your own house, next to your own wife, and realizing somewhere around the third blink that the lower half of you is operating without supervision.

I went to bed wearing sweatpants. Gray ones. The good ones, the ones that have reached that perfect state of broken-in where the elastic has given up trying to hold me accountable. I am sixty-two. I have earned soft pants. I put them on, I got in bed, I read four pages of a paperback and fell asleep with the light on like I do every night, because apparently turning off a lamp is a young man’s game.

When I woke up, the pants were gone.

Now, a younger me might have panicked. A younger me would have run a quick mental audit of the previous evening, checked for evidence of foul play, maybe questioned a few decisions. But I am old enough to know that when something is missing in this house, there is exactly one suspect, and he sleeps at the foot of the bed with the moral clarity of a creature who has never once felt shame.

Gus.

For those just joining us, Gus is a Bernedoodle. He is large, he is the color of a bad decision, and he carries himself with the confidence of an animal who believes the house was built around him as a courtesy. He is also, and I say this with love, a thief. Not a clever thief. A bold one. There is a difference. A clever thief covers his tracks. Gus once stole an entire rotisserie chicken off the counter and then sat next to the empty container looking at it like it had wronged him personally.

So I got out of bed, in my underwear, in the gray Florida morning light, and I went looking for my pants.

Here is what you need to understand about searching your own home for stolen clothing at six in the morning. You move differently. You move like a man who does not want to be seen, which is a strange instinct to have inside your own house where the only witness is a dog who already knows. But I crept. I crept down the hall. I checked his usual spots. Behind the couch, where the socks go to die. Under the dining table, his preferred location for crimes that require a getaway. The corner of the guest room where he once buried a tennis ball so deep in a laundry basket that we found it three weeks later.

Nothing.

Kim woke up around the time I was on my hands and knees looking under the entertainment center with a flashlight. She stood in the doorway for a while. I know she stood there for a while because when I finally backed out and turned around, she had clearly been watching long enough to form an opinion.

“What are you doing.”

It was not really a question. It was the tone you use on a man you have been married to long enough to know the answer is going to make things worse.

“Gus took my pants.”

She looked at me. She looked at Gus, who had followed me on the search and was now supervising from the hallway with what I can only describe as professional interest. Then she went to make coffee, because after enough years you learn which problems are yours to solve and which ones you can simply decline to participate in.

I will spare you the full forty minutes. There was a point where I genuinely considered that maybe I had not worn pants to bed at all, that I had imagined the whole thing, that this was the start of something I would need to discuss with a doctor. There was a point where I checked the freezer, which makes no sense, but you reach a stage in any investigation where logic leaves and you are just opening doors to feel like you are doing something.

I found them in the backyard.

Out by the fence, half in the dirt, arranged with a care that almost looked deliberate. One leg was buried. The other stuck up out of the ground like a flag planted on conquered territory. Gus had not just stolen my pants. He had taken them outside, through the dog door, in the dark, and committed them to the earth. He had given my pants a funeral.

And the thing that gets me, the thing I keep coming back to, is the planning. The dog door is small. He is not. To get a full pair of adult sweatpants through that flap, in his mouth, without waking anyone, and then to dig a hole, and then to insert the pants into the hole, requires a level of commitment I do not bring to most of my own goals. This dog has more follow-through than I had during my entire endurance career. I once quit a half marathon over a blister. Gus completed a covert burial operation and was back in bed before I noticed.

I stood there in the yard in my underwear, holding a dirty pant leg, while a neighbor’s sprinkler kicked on somewhere and a heron walked across the lawn two doors down like it had somewhere to be. And Gus appeared at the dog door. He poked his head out. He looked at me. He looked at the pants. And then he looked back at me with an expression I have spent a long time trying to interpret and have settled on this:

He was checking on his work.

He was not sorry. He has never been sorry. He came out into the yard, sniffed the excavation site, approved of it, and then trotted back inside to wait for breakfast, his conscience clean as a whistle, his record now including one count of grand theft pants.

I have not gotten the dirt out. The pants are retired. I gave them a moment by the trash can before I let them go, which is more than Gus would have done.

So no, I do not know why he did it. I have a wife who thinks it is funny, a dog who thinks it is finished, and a pair of perfectly good sweatpants that died doing what they loved, which was apparently being underground.

I sleep in shorts now. I lock the bedroom door. And every morning I check, first thing, before my feet hit the floor.

The pants are still on.

For now.

I want to be clear up front. I asked to be a butterfly. Not a fly. I have standards. Flies land on garbage and other flies’ lunch, and they have those eyes that see everything at once, which honestly should have been my first warning about what I was walking into, but I didn’t connect the dots until later.

I picked John Harris’s office because the man is everywhere. Substack. Medium. A book on Amazon. Newsletters going out on a schedule no human respects. He coaches. He lifts. He posts. He has a dog named Gus who shows up in half his stories like a furry recurring guest star. I read all of it and I thought, nobody does this much. There has to be a trick. A second person. An assistant. A pill.

So I flew in through a gap in the window screen, which Kim keeps meaning to fix, and I landed on the wall above his bookshelf, between a copy of Meditations with a cracked spine and a framed photo of a younger John on the deck of a ship. I settled my wings. I waited for the secret.

I got it around 4 a.m.

The thing about being a butterfly is you sleep light because everything wants to eat you. So I was half awake when I heard the keyboard. Not the polite click of a man typing. A blur. A sound like rain hitting a tin roof, steady and wrong. I opened my twelve eyes.

John was at his desk in the dark. The monitor lit his face blue. His hands were on the keyboard. Both of them. And then, from somewhere under the desk, under the flannel shirt, came a third hand. And a fourth.

They were not hands.

I am going to describe this calmly because I have had time to process it. Two of them were the regular John arms, the ones with the gray hair and the lifting calluses. The other six came out from under the shirt like they had been waiting all day to be useful, and they were not pink, they were a deep wet gray, and they moved on their own, and at the tip of each one was a little suction cup, and inside each suction cup, I swear to you on my short and beautiful life, was a tiny green light.

One arm was typing the wellness article. One was scheduling the newsletter in Kit. One was editing a photo. One was scrolling Medium. One was holding a mug of coffee that it occasionally lifted to a mouth I could no longer fully see. And one, the last one, reached up, very slowly, and adjusted the framed Navy photo by half an inch, like it wanted the room to look normal for whoever might be watching.

I held very still. Butterflies are good at this.

The back of his head opened.

Not a lot. A small panel, the size of a paperback, hinged up near the base of his skull, and inside there were more of the little green lights, blinking in a pattern, and a soft whir like a laptop fan working too hard. A puff of warm air came out. It smelled like ozone and, faintly, like the inside of a gym bag. He reached one of the gray arms up without looking, fiddled with something in there, and the typing got faster.

“Gus,” he said, out loud, in the dark. “You hearing that?”

I froze. He knew. He knew I was here.

But it wasn’t me. Gus lifted his head from the dog bed in the corner. He looked at John. He looked at the back of John’s open head. He had clearly seen this before. He sighed the long sigh of a dog who has made peace with a thing he cannot fix, put his chin back down, and went to sleep.

The panel in John’s head clicked shut.

I made it through the rest of the night by telling myself I had imagined it. The half-light. The hour. Butterflies have small brains, I reasoned, and I had eaten a fermented apple earlier, which can do things to a person.

Then morning came, and Kim walked in with a cup of coffee, set it down next to him.

“You've been up all night again?”

“Got a lot done.”

“John, you have to recharge sometime. You’re going to burn out the left side again.”

“I’m fine.”

And she gave him a look. The look married people give each other when one of them is a cyborg octopus, and the other one is tired of bringing it up. Then she left.

I want to tell you I fled. I want to tell you I flew straight back out through Kim’s broken screen and into a normal life of flowers and gentle breezes and not knowing things.

But here is what happened instead. He turned around in his chair, and he looked right at me on the wall, and all eight arms went still, and the little green lights all pointed my way at once, and he smiled. A regular human smile, mostly.

“Butterfly,” he said. “Not a fly. Good. I don’t care for flies either.”

I did not move. There was nowhere to move to.

“You came to see how I do it all,” he said. “Everybody wants to know. They leave it in the comments. He must be a machine. No human could keep up.” He turned one gray arm over and looked at the suction cups like he was checking his own work. “And here’s the part nobody likes. They’re half right.”

He picked up the coffee with a real hand. The other seven kept working behind him without being told. The article. The newsletter. The photo. Gus snored.

“The trade is, you don’t get to stop,” he said. “You think the lifting and the writing and the dog and the books just happen. They happen because something under here never turns off. People see the output, and they think it’s a superpower. It’s not a superpower. It’s a thing that lives in me, and it is always, always hungry.”

He set the coffee down.

“You can stay on the wall,” he said. “Plenty of room. The last one’s right there next to Marcus Aurelius. Came in through the screen, same as you. Wanted to know the secret.”

I looked.

Pinned to the wall, wings spread, perfectly preserved, was a butterfly. Beautiful coloring. A little green light blinking, very slow, where its body should have been.

The panel in the back of his head opened again. The warm air came out. One gray arm reached up toward me, suction cups blinking, unhurried, the way you reach for something that isn’t going anywhere.

“Don’t be a fly about it,” he said, kindly. “Flies panic. Butterflies hold still.”

If you made it this far and you’re still reading, congratulations, you’re braver than the butterfly. The Proud Boomer Dispatch runs fiction, horror, and the occasional true thing dressed up as a lie. Subscribe and stay on the wall.

And if you want the actual secret behind doing more than you think you can after 50, it’s in the book, no tentacles required: Not Done Yet.

They called him Bo Gator, and nobody on the CB or behind any truck stop counter ever heard another name. He liked it that way. A name is a thing people can carry to the police. A handle is just the mask.

He drove a Peterbilt the color of dried blood, and he had been driving it, or one like it, for thirty years. The road was his. Not in the way a man owns a house. In the way a thing owns the darkness it lives in. He knew which rest stops had broken lot lights. He knew which counties ran one deputy a shift. He knew the long blank stretches where a scream had nowhere to go.

Bo Gator had taken eleven children. He did not really know the number himself. He had stopped counting somewhere in Tennessee, years back, the way a man stops counting the miles once the trip gets long enough. He never learned their names. He took the names away first, before anything else, because a child who is only a body is easier than a child who is a person. That was the part he was good at. The forgetting.

The mothers remembered. That is the thing the road does not account for. Out past the reach of his mirrors there were houses with a porch light left on for years. There were rooms kept the way they were. There were fathers who drove the same highways looking, never knowing they had passed him at a Flying J in the rain, two pumps over, nodding the way drivers nod.

He was careful. Careful is why he lasted. He took them at the edges, the kid wandered too far from the campground, the boy on the bike at the mouth of a dirt road, the girl whose parents were arguing too loud at the next table to watch the door. He was patient and he was plain. Nobody looks twice at a heavy man in a feed cap buying coffee. That was his great gift, the not being looked at. He had made himself into a piece of the landscape, and the landscape does not get questioned.

It held for thirty years. Then came Oklahoma.

It was late October and the light was going early. He was running a load of canned goods down a state route that did not need to exist, the kind of road that connects one nowhere to a smaller one. The fields were cut to stubble. The sky had gone the deep bruised gray it gets right before the dark wins. He saw the kid at a gas station that had been closed for decades.

A boy. Eight, maybe nine. Standing under the dead canopy by the rusted-out pumps, alone, in a coat too big for him. No bike. No house in sight. No reason for a child to be there, and that was the first wrong thing, except Bo Gator had spent thirty years teaching himself not to feel the wrong things. He felt only the old pull, the warm easy click in his chest that told him the road had set the table again.

He slowed. He rolled the window down. He did the voice, the soft one, the one that had worked eleven times. He asked the boy if he was lost. He asked if he needed a ride to his mama.

The boy looked up at him. And here is the second wrong thing, the one Bo Gator did notice and chose to drive past. The boy was not afraid. They were always afraid, at the start, even the brave ones, a flicker of it behind the eyes before he talked it down. This boy had nothing behind the eyes at all. He looked at the truck the way a man looks at a plate of food he is in no hurry to start, because the food is not going anywhere.

The boy climbed up into the cab on his own. He did not have to be coaxed. He pulled the heavy door shut with both small hands, and the sound it made was final, and Bo Gator felt, for the first time in thirty years, a thin cold thread of something he did not have a name for, because he had taken his own names away too, a long time ago.

They drove. He turned off the state route onto a section road between two dead fields, where he had done this before, where the dark was complete. He cut the engine. The tick of it cooling was the only sound. He turned to the boy with his big patient hands open.

“Where’s your real name,” the boy said. It was not a question. The voice was not a child’s voice. It came out of the small body the way water comes out of deep ground, slow and from very far down.

Bo Gator did not answer. He could not. His mouth had gone dry as the stubble in the fields.

“You took theirs,” the boy said. “Eleven. You kept them somewhere. I can smell them on you. You wear them.” The boy tilted his head, and the motion was wrong in the neck, too many degrees of it. “I have been hungry. I have been on this longer than you have driven it. I’ve been waiting for you. I let small evils pass. Eventually the bigger ones come to me. You are the biggest that has come in a long time. Thank you for stopping.”

The thing in the coat began to open.

Bo Gator earned every second of what the cab of that truck held for the next hour, and a ledger this old does not round down.

It came out of the boy in folds, the way a hand comes out of a glove turned inside out, except the glove was the child and the hand was the thing, and the thing had been waiting at the closed station the way a hook waits in the water for the right fish to swim by. It took him by the names he carried. That was the part that broke him, at the end, when there was enough of him left to break. It reached into the place where he kept the eleven, the warm hidden room he had built behind his own forgetting, and it opened the door, and it made him learn every name he had stolen, all at once, all eleven, with the faces, with the porch lights, with the mothers, while it unmade him from the inside out and took its time and was glad.

He had thirty years of practice not being looked at. At the end he was looked at completely, by eleven children and by the old thing wearing them now, and there was nowhere on the whole dark road for the scream to go but up, and up did not care.

They found the Peterbilt nine days later on the section road, doors locked from the inside, the load untouched, the cab empty and clean. No blood. No man. The county ran it as an abandoned vehicle. The mothers, the ones still keeping the porch lights, felt something shift that week and could not have told you what it was. A few of them turned the lights off. They did not know why. They only knew it was time, finally, the way you know a fever has broken.

The boy in the too-big coat was seen at dawn walking the shoulder of the state route, thumb out, patient, looking up at every truck that passed with no fear behind the eyes at all.

The road is his. It was never Bo Gator’s. He only borrowed it, the way the big evils do, until the bigger one comes to collect.

If this one kept you up, that’s the job done.

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I was seven when somebody first described Hell to me.

It was CCD, a folding metal chair, a DeLand afternoon hot enough to fog the windows. The woman teaching us was kind in every other way. But when she got to Hell she leaned in, and the room went quiet, and I understood that this was the part that mattered. Fire that did not consume. Pain that did not end. A door that locked from the outside and stayed locked forever. I went home and lay in bed doing the math a child does, which is to say no math at all, just a long cold feeling in the stomach.

That feeling stuck around for years. It does its job. Fear usually does.

What I did not know then, and would not learn until I was a grown man reading instead of memorizing, is that the Hell she handed me was not one thing passed down whole. It was assembled. Built over centuries out of older parts, by people who were afraid of different things than she was, in places I will never see.

I came to that idea slowly, and a book pushed me the rest of the way. Alan Bernstein wrote a study called The Formation of Hell, and the title is the whole argument. Formation. Not revelation. Not a thunderclap. A formation, the way sediment forms, layer on layer, until you forget the layers and just call the whole thing rock.

Start with the Hebrew Bible, because that is where I assumed Hell lived. It does not. The word that gets translated into our furnace is usually Sheol, and Sheol is not a furnace at all. It is the grave. The pit. A gray, quiet, underground nowhere where the dead go and mostly just stop. The righteous go there. The wicked go there. The clever and the cruel and the kind all go to the same dim room and lie down together. There is no sorting at the door. Job complains about it. Ecclesiastes practically shrugs at it. Whatever Sheol is, it is not a place built to punish anybody.

Bernstein has a clean way of naming the shift that came later. He talks about neutral death and moral death. Neutral death is Sheol, everyone bound for the same fate no matter how they lived. Moral death is the newer idea, the one where the dead get separated, the good lifted up and the wicked held down and made to answer. Hell, the Hell I was taught, only makes sense in a world that has already decided death should keep score.

The Greeks had their underworld too, Hades, and when the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek the scholars reached for that word when they ran out of their own. Layer on layer. There is a deeper pit in the Greek imagination, Tartarus, where the worst offenders are chained, and you can feel the gears starting to turn toward something more like the place from my childhood.

Then there is Gehenna, which is the word Jesus actually uses in the Gospels, the one our Bibles flatten into “hell.” Gehenna was a real place. The Valley of Hinnom, just outside Jerusalem, a piece of ground with an ugly history in the older stories, a cursed and shameful place. When you point at a real valley everyone knows and say the wicked end up there, you are doing something different than describing a metaphysical basement. You are warning your neighbors with a landmark.

Pile on the apocalyptic writing that flourished between the testaments, all those visions of fire and judgment and sorted souls, then the Book of Revelation with its lake of fire, then centuries of preachers and painters and eventually a Florentine poet drawing maps of the place, and you arrive at my folding chair. The fire that does not consume. The locked door.

Here is what got me. Our one English word, hell, is doing the work of at least four different ideas that did not agree with each other. Sheol, Hades, Gehenna, Tartarus. We mashed them into a single syllable and then taught children the syllable was always there, fixed and final, straight from the mouth of God. It was not. It was made. People made it, the way people make everything, out of fear and grief and the deep need to believe the scales come out even in the end.

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a younger and angrier version of me would have spiked the football. I am 62 now. I have buried people I loved. My mother died at 76. I have stood at enough gravesides to lose my appetite for cheap certainty in any direction, the smug believer’s and the smug atheist’s both.

So I keep coming back to the Stoics, to Marcus Aurelius, who never read a word of any of this and got somewhere useful anyway. His whole method was to live rightly because it was right, not because someone was keeping a ledger and pricing the penalties. Do the next correct thing. Be just. Be of use. Let the rest go. A man who lives that way does not need a furnace under his feet to keep him honest. And a man who only behaves because of the furnace was never really good to begin with. He was just afraid, and fear is not the same as character.

Which brings me to what I actually believe, after all the reading, sitting here with Gus asleep on my foot.

I believe the machinery of Hell was built by human hands, and I think realizing that is a relief, not a loss. But I am not ready to say nothing waits on the other side of the door. I believe in something I cannot map. And I believe, down to the floor of me, that a truly good person does not get thrown into a fire by the God who made them good. God knows your heart. That is the part the certain ones keep skipping.

Because I have met the certain ones. I have watched people wear their salvation like a badge and use it mostly to decide who else is going to burn. They have the door codes memorized, or think they do. They are louder about Hell than they are about love, and that ordering tells you everything. I worry far less for the doubters quietly trying to be decent than I do for the men holding the key and grinning.

I do not know what comes next. I have made my peace with not knowing. But if there is a sorting at the end, I will take my chances standing with the kind and the uncertain over the loud and the sure. That feels less like fear and more like faith.

The fire was never the point. Being good, while it costs you something, while nobody is watching and no one is keeping score, that was always the point.

If this is the kind of thing you want more of, the long thinking out loud, the questions I am too old to pretend I have answered, The Proud Boomer Dispatch is where I do it. Subscriptions run twenty dollars a month or eighty a year, and they keep the lights on so I can keep writing without selling you anything you do not need. And if it is the body and not the soul you are trying to keep out of the ground a little longer, my book Not Done Yet is on Amazon, a plain case for getting strong after fifty. Different fire. Same idea. Do the work while you still can.

Not Done Yet, on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4ed2Td6

Reference

Bernstein, Alan E. The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds. Cornell University Press, 1993.

The water has to stay cold, that is the first thing. Not freezing. Cold the way a spring is cold, the way the ground keeps it down here in the dark under the limestone, fifty-some degrees and never moving much. If it warms, they get restless. If it freezes, they stop, and stopping is the one thing I am paid to prevent. Though paid is the wrong word. Nobody pays me. I do it because the man before me did it, and because somebody has to, and because I made the mistake of looking once, a long time ago, and after you look you are not really free to do anything else.

So. Cold water. I check it twice a day with a thermometer I keep on a nail by the stairs.

The vat is older than the house above it. Older than DeLand, older than the Spanish, probably older than anyone who would have a name you could pronounce. It is a stone basin sunk into the floor of the cellar, fed from beneath by the same aquifer that feeds the springs all over this part of Florida, the ones the tourists swim in, the ones they put on postcards. The water comes up sweet and blue out there. It comes up here too. The difference is what we keep in it.

Eyes. Rows of them. They break the surface like a field of pale stones, and they are all looking up, and they are all looking at me when I come down with my thermometer and my long wooden paddle. People hear that and they think of something dead floating in a jar. These are not dead. That is the part that took me the longest to make peace with. They blink. Slow, out of rhythm with each other, so the whole surface of the vat is always rippling with this soft wet motion, hundreds of lids closing and opening, never all at once. They track me across the room. When I stand still they all settle on me at the same time and the weight of that, I will tell you, does not get lighter with the years.

They are witnesses. Every one of them belonged to somebody who saw a thing that was not supposed to be seen, or that could not be allowed to go unseen, which turns out to be the same thing from two directions. I used to think the distinction mattered. It does not.

Here is the arrangement, as plain as I can make it, and it is not plain at all.

There is something under the springs. I have never seen it, and I intend to keep that record clean. It is not down there because it is trapped. It is down there because it is watched. Being seen is the only law it answers to. As long as the eyes keep looking, it stays where it is and stays what it is, which is asleep, which is drowned, which is forgotten in every way except the one that counts. The looking is the levee. Stop the looking and the water comes over the wall, and the wall is the world, and you and your kitchen and your dog and your whole bright Tuesday afternoon are on the wrong side of it.

That is why they must never close all at once. That is why cold, not freezing. That is why I am here.

My dog will not come down the stairs. His name is Gus, he is a Bernedoodle, sixty pounds of curls and good cheer, and he will follow me into a thunderstorm or a stranger’s truck without a second thought. He will not put one paw on the top step of this cellar. He sits at the door and watches me go down and he is still sitting there, in the exact same spot, when I come back up. Animals know what we have trained ourselves not to. I do not hold it against him. Some mornings I envy him.

I was thirty-four when the last keeper found me. I had seen something out at the spring at night, something I will not write down because writing it is a kind of looking and I have done enough of that. He did not threaten me and he did not bargain. He just told me what I now know, the way I am telling you, and then he was patient. That is the whole recruitment. You tell a person the truth and you wait. There is nowhere for them to take it. They cannot unhear it and they cannot live among the unhearing the same as before, and one day they come down the stairs on their own and pick up the paddle, and the old keeper smiles like a man setting down something heavy he has carried a long way.

He is in the vat now. I want to be honest about that part because I was not, for years, even with myself. I found his eyes about a decade in. I knew them the way you know a voice through a wall. Pale gray, the left one with that little fleck of brown at four o’clock that I used to look at across a card table. They found me too. They tracked me across the room like all the rest, and they blinked their slow blink, and there was no accusation in it and no plea, just the work, just the looking, going on the way it has to.

So I know how this ends for me. My eyes are going anyway. The doctor in town calls it cataracts and wants to scrape them and replace the lenses, and I keep canceling the appointment, because what good is a witness who sees through borrowed glass. When the day comes that I cannot tell warm water from cold by looking at the way the light sits on it, that is the day I find the next one. Some young person who saw a thing at the spring and cannot put it down. I will tell them the truth, plainly, no decoration, and I will be patient. And then I will come down these stairs one last time on my own two feet and I will do the only generous thing this vocation allows, which is to add my looking to the rest.

I think about whether that is a horror or a mercy. I have decided it does not matter, the same as the witness and the watched did not matter, the same as cold versus freezing matters only in degree. The thing under the water does not care about my feelings. It cares about my open eyes. That is the entire relationship. There is a strange comfort in being needed for exactly one thing and needed completely.

I am telling you all this for a reason and I think by now you have started to feel the shape of it.

You read to the end. Most people do not. Most people would have closed the tab at the rows of eyes and gone back to their bright afternoon, and they would have been right to. But you stayed, and you looked, and looking is the whole law. I do not know what you saw, in your own life, the thing you have not been able to set down. I only know that you have one. We all walked up to the edge of something once and could not make ourselves stop watching.

The water is cold. The paddle is by the stairs.

When you are ready, the door is open, and Gus will be sitting at the top of it, waiting to see which way you go.

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Margaret noticed it first in the way he held his fork.

They had been married forty-one years, and in that time she had cataloged every habit, every tic, every private rhythm of the man. She knew he scratched his left ear before he said something he wasn’t sure about. She knew he hummed without knowing it when he was reading something that pleased him. She knew the fork went in his right hand, tines forward, and that he held it the way his father had, knuckle-low, almost like a pen.

Now he held it tines-down. The way you’d hold a tool you were learning how to use.

She watched him across the dinner table, the shrimp and grits she’d made going warm, and said nothing. He ate without looking up. Outside, the marsh behind their house sat flat and still in the September heat. No wind. The herons that usually moved through at dusk were not there.

She told herself it was nothing. Men of seventy develop new habits. Joints shift. Grip changes. She was a writer, and writers had a weakness for patterns, for reading meaning into things that had none.

The change had started, she would later think, about ten days after the incident on the trail.

They walked every morning, the two of them, a three-mile loop through the maritime forest preserve behind the Dataw Island community where they’d retired six years ago. Thomas led, always. Had since the first walk they’d ever taken together, a beach loop in Outer Banks in 1983.

The morning it happened, she had stopped to look at something, a spider’s web strung between two palmettos catching the low sun, and when she looked up Thomas was fifteen yards ahead, standing still, looking at something in the brush off the left side of the trail.

She called to him. He didn’t answer.

When she reached him, he turned and smiled, and she felt something she couldn’t put her finger on. The smile was right. His face was right. But the timing was wrong. Like a man who had learned to smile from watching other men smile, and had gotten very close but not exactly there.

There’s a possum back in there, he said. Dead one.

She looked. She didn’t see anything.

They finished their walk. He made coffee when they got home. He asked about her novel. He laughed at the right moments in her story about the neighbor’s dog getting into the recycling again.

Everything was right. The timing was still wrong.

The pickleball kept her from thinking too hard about it. She played three mornings a week with Donna and Carl and a rotating cast of the community’s retired doctors, lawyers, and academics. Thomas didn’t play. He walked with her to the courts, sat on the bench with his water bottle and a book, and waited.

He’d done that for four years. She loved that he did that.

Three weeks after the trail she looked over during a changeover and Thomas was watching the game with his hands folded in his lap. The right hand nested inside the left, thumb tucked under, in a way she had never seen. The book was closed on the bench beside him.

He was watching her.

When she waved, he waved back. But he waved with his whole hand, moving up and down at the wrist instead of the small side-to-side motion he’d used since she’d known him.

She double-faulted the next three serves.

She started keeping notes. She was a writer; it was what she did. Small things. The fork. The wave. The way he now slept with both arms straight at his sides instead of curled toward her. The way he had stopped scratching his left ear before uncertain sentences. The way the uncertain sentences themselves had mostly stopped. He seemed more sure now, of everything.

He had also, in forty-one years, never once finished a crossword. He had always quit around three-quarters, frustrated, calling the last few clues stupid. Now he finished every one. Set the pen down with a small satisfied sound. Didn’t say anything about it.

She asked him about the possum on the trail.

What possum? he said.

She watched his face. And it watched her back.

She began sleeping with the light in her reading nook on. She told him it helped her think through her chapter. He said that was fine, and smiled, and the timing was almost exactly right.

She lay on her side of the bed and listened to him breathe. The breathing was regular and even and she could find nothing wrong with it. But she had fallen asleep to that breathing for forty-one years and she knew the way it felt against the back of her neck when he was deeply under, the slight irregularity of a man who was genuinely gone into sleep. This was regular the way a metronome is regular. Nothing dreamed through it.

She began to think about leaving. Visiting her daughter in Asheville. A few weeks. She told herself she was being dramatic, that she was an old woman who had frightened herself with her own writer’s brain, that Thomas was Thomas and nothing had happened on that trail and the fork and the wave and the crosswords were nothing but the ordinary drift of a long marriage.

She told herself that all through October and into November.

The morning she decided to call her daughter, she came downstairs to find Thomas at the kitchen table with his coffee. He was looking at his own hand. Turning it over slowly. Examining the palm, then the back, then the palm again, the way you’d study something foreign that had been placed in your possession.

He didn’t hear her on the stairs. She stood very still.

He turned his hand over one more time. Then he set it flat on the table and looked out at the marsh. The herons still hadn’t come back. The water was still and the color of old pewter and nothing moved on it, nothing at all, and Thomas just stared … and then slowly moved his gaze to her …

© Proud Boomer Press

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