Tag: short stories

Ornithoscillation

Pavowski5 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week:  The Opening Line Challenge.  I used the opening line posited by a member called, simply, Nikki.

This was a fun one, and not nearly so dark as some of my other flash fiction.  But still pretty weird.

1000 words exactly.  Enjoy!  As always, I welcome feedback and comments if you’re out there reading.

 

Ornithoscillation

There was a dead bird on the porch again.

When the first one had shown up, Gerald thought that the family tomcat had simply started bringing him gifts again.  Trouble was, the second day there was another, and the day after that there were two, and tubby little Snuggles had never been much of a hunter.

Flummoxed, Gerald had called Animal Control.  The man who answered the call had poked around the property for thirty minutes, inspected the crawl space, and stuck his nose under some of the bushes before telling him that he had no idea what was causing the deaths.

On the Monday that followed (and the eighth bird) Gerald had bagged a few of them up and taken them down to the University, where a raccoon-eyed grad student named Samir met him at the veterinary building and took them in for testing.  Tuesday arrived (birds nine and ten) and Samir called back to say that physically the birds showed no signs of illness or trauma.  They certainly hadn’t been killed by any cat.

Now, Wednesday.  Bird number eleven.  Burying them had gotten too tedious, not to mention all the unsightly little patches of dirt on his immaculate lawn in back of the house, so Gerald took a shovel and dumped it in the corrugated trash can next to five of its little feathered friends.

That night, in his dreams, Gerald heard the sound of a deep humming.  It penetrated the walls of his mind, it reverberated behind his eyes, it pulsed deep in the soft tissues of his brain.  He woke to a ringing in his ears.  The clock read 2:30.  A disoriented minute followed, in which he realized that the ringing was outside his head, not inside it.  He followed it, to the bedroom door, down the hallway, to his son’s room.  His son, twelve years old, fascinated with trains and clocks and electric things.  A dim light shone underneath the doorway, brilliant against the dark of the night.  Gerald cracked the door, making as little noise as he could, planned to see little Simon snoring away, tuck him in, and return to bed.  Instead, he saw Simon silhouetted against the tiny desk in the room, hunched over the makeshift desk of milk crates and plywood, earphones clamped to the sides of his head, scribbling madly on a notepad while he fiddled with the dial of a radio with the other, twisting it this way and that, a lunatic safecracker dialing until his fingers bled.

“Si,” Gerald whispered, but Simon did not waver in his work.  “Simon!”

Simon stopped, but not because he heard Gerald: the noise-canceling headphones made that nigh impossible.  No, he had stopped because he had heard something.  A phantom wavelength, a rogue echo of a noise which should not have been there.  It had only been there for a moment, an infinitesimal crackle of static in a sea of white noise, but it was there.  He stopped writing, craned his neck, and twisted the dial back in the other direction.  There, again, and gone, just as quickly.  He focused his entire being on the noise, gripped the dial as delicately as his clumsy adolescent fingers would allow, and ticked it by the tiniest of degrees back toward the noise.

Gerald had crept up behind Simon, his hand outstretched to shake his boy’s shoulder, when Simon found the frequency, and this time he held it, letting go of the dial as if it might shatter.  Behind him, his father clutched at his head as a lance of sound seared his ears and burned his vision hot-white.  He fell to his knees, and the noise was gone.  Simon, still oblivious, tapped and banged at his receiver, checked his notes and began to spin the dial again, chasing the lost frequency like a rabbit into the brush.

A thump at the front door.  Fatherly instinct pushed all else aside and Gerald dashed downstairs, stopping at the side door to the garage to grab a worn and polished Louisville Slugger off the wall.  He crept to the door and peered through the keyhole.  Nothing.  Flexing his fingers on the bat, he unlocked the door with his free hand, stepped back from it, and used the end of the bat to shove it open wide.  Nobody there.  He stepped out, in bare feet and boxer shorts, ready to swing for the fence at the sight of anything moving.

Squish.

He jumped back in horror.  Another goddamned bird.  This one had hit the door so hard its neck was bent in the wrong direction, as if it had been built of Legos and put together backwards.

Then it clicked.  Simon had brought his science project about radio frequencies home from school the night before the first bird showed up.  Something about how sound frequencies, properly amplified and directed, could alter living tissue.  Gerald hadn’t really paid it that much attention — it was a sixth grade science project, for god’s sake — but Simon had been engrossed.  Obsessed.

Breaking out in a cold sweat, Gerald ran back upstairs, taking them two at a time.  “Simon?” He called, rounding the corner into Simon’s room — where the boy jumped in circles, pumping his fist and shouting, the headphones still clamped to his ears.  Gerald yanked them off.  “Stop it!  You’ve killed them!”  And if the sound had killed all those birds…

But Gerald caught a glimpse of the radio equipment, as Simon stared at him, open-mouthed.  It wasn’t a receiver.  It was a transmitter.

“Dad,” Simon said, tugging at his sleeve, “I’m not killing them.  I’m saving them.”  Simon pointed to the window.

With trepidation, Gerald peered out the window.  Something had set off the motion sensor in the driveway.  The light was on; he saw a cloud of birds spilling from the trash can and from his lawn like swarming bees, twisting and writhing as one like some great dark winged beast, spiraling out of the light and ascending into the darkness.

You’re Hired

Pavowski10 Comments

Chuck’s Challenge this week:  Hell.

Here, then, are 917 words.  Still no happiness to be found in my short work.  This one kinda turned my stomach at the end.

You’re Hired

Norman ran down his mental checklist a final time.  Shoes: polished to a mirror finish.  Tie: red, powerful, Windsor-knotted for a spot of class.  Jacket: freshly dry-cleaned and impeccably lint-rolled.  He’d chosen the pinstripe but couldn’t help thinking that the simple charcoal might be better suited.  He chuckled under his breath at the little pun.  Resume: perfect.

In short, he was as poised as he was going to be for what was likely the job interview of his lifetime.  The vinyl seat cushion squeaked every time he shifted his buttocks, which was often, given the nerves that the situation called for.  A bit of a cheap choice, the vinyl, but then, who was he to judge?

He checked his watch, an expensive-looking cheap thing he’d put on as an afterthought.  He had decided after much deliberation that his prospective employer was likely concerned with punctuality.  Six after six.  The secretary, one of those too-attractive women they put out front of swanky offices to both lure men in and intimidate them with a single low-cut blouse, looked his way.

“Mister Mantooth?”  Her voice was full, smoky, devilish.

Norman stood up, picked up his briefcase, tugged his lapels into place, and approached her.

“Luke will see you now.”  She led him down a fluorescent hallway replete with the drabbest of potted focuses imaginable.  Everything about the office, in fact, had been totally forgettable, Norman realized as he took in the cookie-cutter heavily pocked ceiling tiles that hung just overhead.

Everything, that is, up until now.  She stopped at a heavy, oaken double-door and used the oversized, blackened cast-iron ring to knock.  Its heavy thud reverberated in Norman’s bones.

“Good luck,” she said, sashaying away as the doors creaked open.

Seated behind the desk was the man that Norman had dreamt of meeting.  The man he’d spent his life hoping just to stand in his presence.  The man whose example he had followed as he slavishly shaped his soul for his life’s work.  And now Norman was here, in the flesh, about to interview for a job working with the man.  Norman felt giddy.

Luke was a perfectly nondescript man in every way, except that he seemed to be a little too much everything.  His suit, simple and gray, but there seemed to be too much of him stuffed into it.  His smile, white and inviting, but a little too eager.  His hands, strong and sure, but a little too well-manicured.  His eyes, bright and youthful, but a little too red.  He welcomed Norman with the warmest of greetings and invited him to sit down opposite his gleaming glass desk.  The naked man on hands and knees at the side of Luke’s chair said nothing.  Norman sat, brushing imaginary dust off his knee as he crossed his legs, attempting to look anywhere but at the naked man.

“Don’t listen to anything this guy tells you,” Luke said with a too-charming smile, and sat himself, sending a cloud of ember-smelling air through the room.

Norman reached for his resume, but Luke waved it away.  “Your qualifications are in order; let’s not worry about that.  What I need to know is,” Luke paused, clipping and then lighting a leathery-looking cigar, “what kind of man are you?”  He pulled a deep breath in through the cigar, its end shimmering, orange and ash.

Norman licked his lips and fingered his briefcase.  “May I?”

Luke waved his free hand: by all means.

Placing the briefcase on the cold glass, Norman pulled from within it a small object, cradling it the way a man making shelter in a snowstorm might cradle his last match.  He offered the bundle, a tiny, near weightless trinket wrapped in bloodstained tissue paper, to Luke, who took it in his free hand and upended it, sending it tumbling and skittering across the glass.  A human finger.

Luke eyed it like a co-worker’s baby pictures.  “Whose?”

“My mother’s.”

“Why?”

“She used to wave it in my face when she scolded me as a child.”

Luke picked up the finger, passed it under his nose, and bounced it off the naked man’s head.  “Boring.  What else can you show me?”

Norman was ready.  Next was a news clipping, a story about a burnt-down church.  “My work,” Norman said, allowing himself a small self-satisfied smile.

“Please.”  Luke rolled his eyes and stubbed his cigar out on the nape of the naked man’s neck; the man whimpered and wept, but did not cry out, did not move.  Luke stood, unfastened his cufflinks.  Sparkling goat heads, rubies for eyes.  Smoke seeped out at the seams of his coat.  “Unimaginative.  Last chance.”

“Wait,” Norman said.  “I have a child.”

Luke grinned a horrific grin, the sudden smile splitting the corners of his mouth, his eyes glowing a gory crimson.  “Yes, yes, you all have children.  Hell is full of parents whose children can’t survive without them.”  The shadow of enormous black wings enveloped Norman, shutting out light and hope.

“You don’t understand.”  Norman loosened his tie, drawing from around his neck a string of what looked like dental floss knotted through a series of beach-broken sea shells.  The devil drew closer, exhaling thin tendrils of black smoke without the need of his cigar.  Fingernails.  “They’re my daughter’s.”

The devil became Luke again, seeming to shrink in size as he cocked his head to re-appraise this man.  He yanked the macabre jewelry from Norman’s neck, held it to the light, bit off one of the fingernails, chewed it, and swallowed, all while staring into Norman’s unblinking eyes.

He tossed the string of nails back to Norman and approached him once more, this time extending his hand with a genuine, toothy smile.  “When can you start?”

The Acid Orphan

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This is my second bite at the apple for Chuck’s 5 random words challenge.  If anything, it teaches me that I should trust my instincts.  This title occurred to me immediately, and I shied away from it initially, but it just wouldn’t go away.  I realized, as soon as I gave it serious consideration, that it meshes perfectly with another novel idea that I’ve had; maybe the next one I’ll write after I’m finished with AI.

So, lesson learned, and fun has been had writing this one.  It’s not as dark as my others of late either, so there’s that, too.

994 words, and I could easily have kept going.

 

 

The Acid Orphan

When Terry arrived at the League, the wolves began to circle.  They always did, of course, when an Orphan arrived.  But something about Terry drew them in more than usual.  Maybe it was her tiny stature, maybe it was her too-pale skin, maybe it was the strange symbols tattooed on her wrists that she refused to explain.

Not every Orphan is an orphan.  Some of them come from loving households.  But even those have an unmistakable air of abandonment about them.    A sadness, a weariness, a mistrust cultivated from years of rejection, years of phone calls home from the principal, years of being locked away, being forced to hide, forced to pretend.  Every recruit at the League has felt it in some capacity or another — we are all a bit different — but the Orphans carry it heaviest of all; it is a part of them, etched on their heart, stamped on their soul.  You can spot it on them, smell it, like dogs smell fear.  Abandoned.  Turned out.  Unwanted.

The unspoken hierarchy of the school puts them at the bottom, where by and large they stay, outcasts even in the place that should sweep them close.  Most of them drop off the face of the earth once they pass their evaluations, choosing to live in exile or even to check out for good.  They become hermits even among the hermits; all of us are reclusive by nature, but the Orphans take it to extremes.

Funny thing, though, is that the Orphans have a way of being the strongest and smartest.  Something about working so hard for so long to suppress your Ability makes it fester and expand, an amoeba feeding on its own colony.  Exposure to the Catalyst would then cause it to flare up and spike, like a saucepot boiling over and spattering the kitchen with bits of tomato.  Accidents happen all the time at the League: a classroom will have all its windows blown out, a student will lose an eye or have a limb shattered in a routine sparring session, that kind of thing.  They always look at the Orphans first.  Unofficially, of course.

In her first month, Terry shut down the entire academic wing of the complex — all thirty classrooms — for a week.

She claimed it was an accident, and nobody doubted it.  But I saw her smirk when she came out of the council’s office.  She saw me see her and she smiled, a lock of her short, chemically-blackened hair falling across one eye.  She casually unwrapped a lollipop as she asked me, “How’s Gina doing?”

I laughed mirthlessly.  Gina had marked Terry immediately — she loved to give Orphans hell — and invited her to the roof for a “welcoming ceremony” with some of her friends.  What happened next was a story none of them were willing to tell, but all of her friends came back covered in boils and burns.  Gina had the worst of it.  Her face was unrecognizable: a riot of red, puckered skin and swelling sores.  Half her hair was gone, dissolved in a sizzling gout of Terry’s acid blood.  The runoff had oozed down through the building, chewing through cement and steel and drywall and wires.  It had been three days before they were even sure they’d cleaned it all up.  Incidentally, that was how we had all learned what Terry’s Ability was; until that day, it had been the subject of heated supposition.

Gina was out of the infirmary — I’d seen her that morning — but still pretty badly scarred and burned.  “She’s not so great,” I replied.  “I’d watch out for her if I were you.”

Terry chuckled.  “I doused her so that I don’t have to watch out for her.”

That made sense to me, so I told her as much, and that’s how I made friends with the Acid Orphan.

We walked outside, talking aimlessly.  She was more than happy to demonstrate her Ability for me, though she insisted that it was silly to call it an Ability.  It was her blood; slightly caustic before, but the Catalyst had turned it into a smoldering poison.  It didn’t harm Terry, but it burned like hellfire on the skin and it could eat through almost anything if allowed to work.  It was a liability until she learned how to weaponize it.  She took off one of the oddly spiked rings that she wore on her thumbs and handed it to me: a simple band of dark steel with a viciously curved talon of topaz in the center.  The precious stone, she explained, was one of only a few substances that could abide her blood.  The ring was too heavy for its size and the stone was wickedly sharp.  It had to be, she told me.

“Why?”

She grinned a mischievious grin at me and slid the ring back on her thumb, the glimmering claw turned toward the inside of her hand.  With a deft, practiced motion, not unlike a snapping of her fingers, she drew her pinky across the ring and then pressed her thumb to the blood that welled up.  Thick and dark, it looked perfectly normal, but it smelled of foxglove, almost medicinal.  When she smeared her hand in the grass, it began to smoke, the vegetation withering and then simply coming apart, the dirt beneath blackening and sizzling.

She watched the poison boiling into the earth, her eyes unblinking.  “A deeper cut means more blood, and more blood turns these,” she held up her hands, looking at me between splayed fingers, “into weapons of mass destruction.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“What?” She asked.

I could already see events unfolding in my mind.

“Could you use that to open a door?  Like, a reinforced door?”

Terry rolled her eyes.  “I can remove a door.”

“Do you want to help me with something?”

“Depends,” she said, “Will we have to break any rules?”

I wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

“Then yes,” she said.

Thought I Took a Spill

PavowskiLeave a comment

Yikes, I let a couple of days get by without a blog post.  Unless you count Saturday’s Flash Fiction.  I DON’T.  Those little Flash Fictions, tangential though they may be to the Project, count as REAL WRITING, and the blog doesn’t.  Never mind that some of my blog posts go on longer than some of my daily court-mandated Project writing (The court, of course, is the court convened by my id-writer and his slavering, ink-blood crazed alter egos).  It doesn’t count for my daily WordCount ™ and it therefore does not count.

That said, I feel a little bit of failure when I don’t get around to posting just a little bit here.  Okay, my frame of reference is not long enough for me to claim a statistically significant sample size (alliteration x4, c-c-c-combo!) but I feel like if my daily progress on the Project is the equivalent of hooking the car up to a two-ton trailer and dragging it down a muddy road to make some productive work happen, then my writing here on the Blarg (yep, just renamed the Blog to “The Blarg”, make it so) is the equivalent to unhooking the trailer and driving 200 miles an hour down a side street.  It burns out the gunk, clears the pipes, stretches the metaphorical legs of my metaphorical engine so that I can do more metaphorical “writing”.  Wait, the legs aren’t metaphorical.  And neither is the “writing.”  (The quotation marks, however, ARE metaphors — for the BLINDERS I HAVE TO PUT ON TO GET THE GOLDFINGER WRITING DONE SOME DAYS.)

At any rate, failure to blog felt a little bit like failure to write over the weekend, although I clearly did that.  Upon further review, the ruling on the field stands, and I am DonDraper pleased with my latest bit of Flash Fiction, The First Wave.  That one took me in new directions on a couple of fronts and, well, I said it already but I’m pleased with it.  Go me.

In fact, The First Wave felt doubly like a success because I completed it under duress: I wrote about 60% of it on the car ride back from my nephew’s birthday party in Alabama.  I deliberately did not name the city in which we were in (oh man, my English teacher brain hated letting that one slip by), not out of a concern for anonymity or avoidance of non-existent stalkers, but because it’s Fargoing Alabama which means it doesn’t matter what part of it I spent the day in, it was still Alabama, and that’s bad enough, isn’t it.  (My apologies to friends, relations, and other acquaintances who might enjoy Alabama, or worse yet, live there.  But you live in Alabama.  Come on.)  So yeah.  Conceived and written under the duress of Alabama.  Huge W-I-N.

Then I took Sunday off.  And proceeded to do nothing with the entire day except go to the store and flollop around the house.  A rare and pretty glorious day, one that merited a break even from Blarging.

But it’s Monday, and that means a return to the breach.  It was a busy day at work, compounded by the fact that I’m taking a day off in the middle of the week.  By the way, as a teacher, calling it a “day off” from work is a complete misnomer.  Because there is no respite.  You have to leave an assignment that the kids aren’t going to do.  You have to decide how harshly to penalize the students who don’t do the assignment and how to fairly balance that against the poor kids who, bless them, actually do the assignment and continue to distinguish themselves from the herd, like golden manatees in a slobbering, sorry school of sea-cows (c-c-c-combo!).  And then you’ve lost a day of instruction and you have to get back into the rhythm.  And then there’s administrative business coming down the pike that you missed on that day, but, surprise, the information you missed on Monday is needed to properly complete paperwork on Tuesday and oh, you’ll just have to come meet with your administrator for thirty minutes to get “caught up”, just come in during your planning period WHEN YOU’RE TRYING TO GRADE PAPERS AND GET BACK ON TRACK FROM THE DAY YOU MISSED AND DON’T FORGET TO CARVE OUT A BIT OF TIME DURING LUNCH TO GET YOUR WORDCOUNT FOR THE DAY IN RAARRRGH BLARGFARGLE *begins throwing cats*

I’m not going to lie.  Teaching is not a bad gig a lot of the time.  But it’s also a little bit demanding and overwhelming and stressful a lot of the time.  If you have a teacher in your life, hug them.  Seriously.  This is what we’re up against:

wpid-IMAG0900.jpg

That was written by an 18-year old.  (The green is mine.  If you look closely, you can see the hopelessness with which I wrote it.)

…Yeah, you might have gathered that I did not get my desired word count done during the day.  But it’s all good.  I’ve finished it up this evening (almost 1400 words today) and topped it off with this post which is creeping toward the 1000 word mark, which means it’s time to stop it BEFORE THIS BLARG POST BECOMES SENTIENT AND BEGINS EATING MY BLOODY FINGERSTUMPS.

I keep meaning to post more about parenting and running.  The sprout has had a couple of gems lately that really are worth relating and I’m getting back up to speed (oh god, the puns have started, RUN [OH GOD IT’S GETTING WORSE]) with the running and I have some musings to post about that.  But that will have to wait.

Here’s a favorite passage from today’s work.  It’s not particularly lyrical or evocative, but I felt it captured pretty well a moment that would be much easier to capture onstage or in film.  Word pictures!

  • Andy nodded at her.  She nodded back at him.  He continued nodding, turning his nods toward Thalia, who received them, smiling, and returned them.  He nodded up at Lexi again.  She nodded back again, helplessly.  Clearly it was up to Lexi to take hold of the situation.

Now, to do some dishes and sleep.  Yeah, I go to sleep at 9:30, wanna fight?  (I do not want to fight.)

The First Wave

Pavowski10 Comments

I approached this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge from Chuck with a healthy dose of self-doubt.  I tend to be a bit long-winded when I write, and the limitation of 1000 words spread out into 10 chapters felt tailor-made to put the screws to my brain.  I pondered on it, meditated on it, kicked around about four or five different story ideas before finally arriving at one I liked and then mutating it into something horrifying.

Honestly, I don’t know if my short stories are trending dark because I’m writing comedy or if I wanted to write comedy because I’ve got these dark stories bubbling up.  One way or another, this one’s probably the darkest yet, and I don’t really know what to make of it except to let you know that this is all artifice and is probably the product of too many crime procedurals and alien movies.

I wasn’t sure about the first person viewpoint, but I didn’t know how else to write it.

In fact I’m not sure about the story as a whole.  I just don’t know if it works.  But this blog is not about what works, it’s about THE WORK.  So here’s the latest.  Like all my short stories thus far, it’s edited only a little bit (mostly to get down to the word limit).  If you’re out there, let me know what you think.

Coming in at 1000 words on the nose:

The First Wave

1.

Things aren’t supposed to happen like this.

I’m a scout, not a soldier, but the link has been silent so long that they must think I’m dead or lost.

It’s been almost eleven months since I was last contacted.  The feeling is unmistakable.  A tingling at the back of the neck, a rush of blood to the head, and then a ringing in the ears that means a transmission is coming.  The body becomes a lightning rod for sensation, and underneath the sensory rush that follows, the messages can be heard.

So when my skin tingles while I’m waiting in line at the Starbucks to sample my two hundred thirty – third flavor/texture combination, I know in an instant that I’m not forgotten, that today may be the day it begins.

But something’s wrong.  The waitress notices me. Looks at me for half a second too long, the way you look at a misspelled sign. You know what it’s supposed to say, what it should look like, but it’s wrong, and you pause to process it.  She smiles to cover it – very cagey – but I know what she saw.

Maybe she doesn’t know, though, so I ask for her phone number and she gives it to me, scribbling it artlessly on my coffee sleeve.  I return her empty smile and beat it out of there, cursing myself.  She distracted me, and I missed the transmission.  I can only hope they’ll send it again.

2.

Back home I scan all the frequencies and search my residence for signs of contact, but come up empty. The receptors are as blank as they’ve been for months, their green glowing grids blipping ceaselessly.  Maybe the shiver was a false alarm.

But if that’s so, what did she see?

3.

A tap at the window wakes me up.   I fly to the sill and throw it open, and the freezing air smashes me in the face. No signs of life on the ledge or on the street below. I don’t look up; never up.  If I look up and they’re there, then it’s over. If I look and there’s nothing, it only reminds me I’m alone.

I’m so tired from loneliness.  Tomorrow I’ll call that waitress, even though I’ll probably have to kill her.

4.

Somebody was here last night.  Whoever it was took something or…  moved something or…  I don’t know what it is, but there’s a wrongness here, pressing outward against the walls, an over-inflated balloon ready to burst. I tear the apartment to pieces looking for what’s lost but it’s gone, stolen, maybe destroyed.

I remember that I have to call that waitress. She can’t see my place like this – it looks like a lunatic lives here. I methodically put everything back exactly the way it was before I lost it.  I even put the dirty dishes back on the table.  It only takes me three hours.

5.

We met for sandwiches. I asked why she didn’t want to meet for coffee like normal humans do and she looked at me like I was stupid. I’m not stupid; just because you serve coffee doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a coffee. I think she thought I was joking because she laughed, her pretty cheeks stretching back the corners of her mouth.

She knows.

6.

When she left me, the transmission came through clear as day. The time is not right. She cannot interfere. I tried to question them, but as ever, my words spiraled out into the ether, and no further directions were forthcoming.  I was, as always, on my own.

7.

It’s unsettling how little people look out for their own safety.  Lock the front doors, lock the windows, and call it a night.  But my waitress doesn’t lock her balcony door, and she only lives on the 7th floor.  A quick shin up the fire escape, a shimmy along the ledge to her window, and I’m with her.  Granted, most people wouldn’t risk their necks on this three-inch concrete outcrop, but thoughts of my own mortality were taken from me long ago.

It smells of her, and it smells of coffee, and I’m overcome by sadness and doubt.  In a few moments, she’ll be gone; all that she is and was and ever might be will be erased.  For a long moment I pause at her bedroom door, my hand slick on the handle, the blade humming in my pocket.

The act sickens me.  I’m on her before she’s even awake, the silver sings across her throat, and my hands clamp down on her windpipe as the life sprays out.  In seconds, she’s gone, but I stay there, holding her, hyperventilating.

The parasites ooze out of my ears and flow down my arms in a grey-green river, mingling with the blood and rushing in through the smile in her neck.  The horrible sucking sound of their ingress turns my stomach until I hear it, the transmission again, whispering under the tumult  in my brain.

And I understand.  I’m not scouting for the first wave.  I am the first wave.  It begins with me.

8.

Giddy with hope and purpose, I convey her body delicately out onto the balcony, where she will find the moonlight that she needs.  I stay with her until the sun is almost up, then I leave.  She’ll need some time.

9.

The next day, she is back at work.  I order number two hundred thirty-four, and she smiles at me knowingly.  They are hard at work in her.  I smile back and drink my coffee thoughtfully.  The sweetness is almost too much to bear.

10.

I step outside and feel the sun on my shoulders.  I look up, for the first time in a lifetime.  They’re not up there.  But I’m not alone anymore.

A woman, engrossed in her phone conversation, bumps me, dropping her armload of papers.  I help her pick them up, but when I hand them back to her, she looks at me for a little too long.  I feel my neck start to tingle.