# Fiction

... 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.

I marched in a direction of which I knew not, filling me with a positivity that was only matched by its notorious bedfellow, negativity.

Here, the sun never shone. It was blotted out by an eternal fog, a white-grey sheet pulled over a town which had long ago flatlined, but whose body remained here, somehow forgotten and forever awaiting an autopsy.

Today is Ted Dickerson’s 84th birthday. Or his 4,534,119,982,103rd birthday if you count his other lives, which he, of course, does. Either way, he’s determined to make it his last.

pretend you don’t know me ... is that impossible? ... pretend it’s not ... i want to be unknown—

I absorbed nothing, except her last words as she stepped into their car: “Children are easy to lie to. You’re smarter than most of them.”

I knew your mother, she says and your ancestors all the way back, and she shudders remembering what came before.

There are no picket fences high enough, no hill too steep for your fresh heart.