# Fiction

As I watch her struggle down the long, dark hallway to their bedroom, I'm thinking about love and the liars it makes of us all.

Encased in glass at the end of the room, the door pulsed. He gripped the knob that was hot to the touch from the sun. But he managed to turn it and swung open the door, peering into an endless blackness that existed on the other side.

... I was watching the beginning of an addiction seeping through her blood, spreading further and further with each thump of her heart.

When I’d imagined my own death, I suppose everyone does sometimes, it wasn’t like this.

The man’s adrenaline-soaked instincts overrode every other primal urge in his body—like his subconscious had been trained for this very scenario.

It’s her eyes, unblinking, studying me with a warm curiosity. Finally, she takes a breath and speaks …

Erika Fukagawa was in full control of our mental substance, our memories, our minds. We had a parasite living in our brains. A serpent running amok in our souls.

... the decision to kill Maya was easy.

No one’s in the building. The air is thick like dark molasses and the quiet, unnerving.

There is no fear more primal than that of being hunted. It’s primitive, awesome in its simplicity. The sum of your existence condensed into a binary of contingencies.

And for a moment, they were how they once were. Ben, the protector. Mariel, the protected. But no, they weren’t the children they used to be.

She floats on her back in a stream, drowned and beautiful. If she leaped from the side of a ferry, we’ll never know. Snuffed seven days—

Despite his best efforts not to reveal a sliver of vulnerability. There was a flash of love in his dark, almond eyes. And I saw it.

It’s not that he had an outsized personality or strange traits; in most ways he was within the range of what you’d call normal. But there was really nothing normal about him.

The Business Lady pressed her on what her favorite shows and toys were and proceeded to tell her the prospects of the corporations behind them.