Collection of Bad Stories

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As It Took Only Seconds
Ascendant couldn’t remember what he had been thinking. Everything was silent in his mind, and he didn’t–

Ascendant lost his train of thought again. “Perhaps,” he wondered, “I should focus on the real world.” His friend Knock was sitting by his side. At times, Knock would attempt to hold his arm or his hand, but this would elicit no reaction from him, as he could not remember–

It seemed like Knock wanted him to speak. However, every time he had the right words, the silence would–

He excused himself, pretending to need to go to the bathroom. Once there, he decided to go out and run away from Knock. This would ensure that he would still be able to think, and he really needed to ponder to figure out how to get his friend to stop.

Ascendant didn’t know how or why Knock could knock his thoughts out of his head. He was pretty sure that it was Knock’s doing, because it never happened with that kind of ferocity when he wasn’t there. Ascendant knew, of course, that thoughts would sometimes pop out of his head because he would be interrupted while thinking about something, but he also knew exactly how that felt like, and it didn’t feel like someone had slammed his thoughts out of his head like a hockey puck.

“Perhaps Knock’s name,” he imagined, “is legitimately an extension of his being, unlike my name, ‘Ascendant’, which my mother thought sounded cool. What foresight his mother must have had to have christened him ‘Knock’. Then again, his mother herself is named ‘Foresight’. Then again, that’s just empty speculation.”

Knock was a riddle to Ascendant. The two had only become friends a week prior, because Ascendant had managed to overcome his natural inclination to ignore others for a critical moment, thus finding solidarity in Knock even though they really shared few interests.

Knock never brought up his family and never invited Ascendant to his home. Knock would also try constantly to goad Ascendant into speaking, which was probably why Knock had started taking the thoughts out of his mind. You may realize that this constitutes a perfectly natural answer to the question of “Why?”, but Ascendant was far too ignorant to connect these dots.

Ascendant had walked around for five minutes, pondering Knock’s mystery and imagining him to be a fairy of some sort, before Knock found him and asked him what he was doing. Ascendant wanted to flee, but he did not, because that was not his way.

He tried to answer what he had been doing, but he could not remember. Had he been thinking of Knock, or had he been thinking of the fay folk? There was no real answer, so Ascendant decided to say, “I don’t remember.”

Knock glared at him. “Maybe you should talk about it more,” he said icily. Ascendant attempted to figure out what Knock meant. He knew that Knock was probably responsible for the thoughts being knocked out of his head, but–

Now the thoughts had been knocked out of his head again. What sorcery was this? He began to think–

He immediately stopped thinking. “This is idiotic,” he thought, trying to anticipate the next wave. Maybe that would work. He focused on the formless god, but he couldn’t quite–

His mind was quiet. He decided to keep focusing on keeping his mind clear. Now that he was focusing on the Formless God, Knock knocking knickknacks out of his head was actually really helpful. He didn’t tell Knock what he was doing, though, because that would have required thought, and Knock would have just knocked the words out of his grasp.

Knock eventually gave up. Ascendant could feel him get up, and he finally relaxed, letting his mind wander to–

Knock was standing at time with a malicious grin, pointing at Ascendant with his hand making a gun shape.

Ascendant didn’t know how to react to this. His thoughts had been silenced once more. Should he feel rage, or mere annoyance? He wondered absentmindedly–

He wondered absentmindedly if maybe Knock was only his friend to silence him. He decided to–

He decided to say what he was thinking.

“Do you only stand near me in order to silence my mind?”

Knock stopped looking at him, walking away into the great crowd of people Ascendant didn’t know. Ascendant should have felt happy, but he didn’t, and as he sat alone, something silently crawled towards him on the arms of a crab and a gorilla.

Knock could hear the buzzing noise of people’s thoughts even within the janitorial closet. He had always taken a completely genuine pleasure in watching people stumble as he made them lose their train of thought without knowing a single thing about them, even as his mother told him that he should do the latter in lieu of the former.

“I worry for you, Knock,” she had told him from when he was young. “Maybe you have mystical powers – the ability to manipulate people’s thoughts with a simple whim – but even that will not save you from the real world and your need to get a job.”

His mother was right, but Knock couldn’t admit it. He had trudged through school, and no one had talked to him from a combination of their habits and his habits. Then, one day, he had heard what sounded like a dozen people standing right behind him.

Knock had looked behind him and seen a boy barely looking at him, visibly shaking. Knock’s glance had prompted the boy to dam his thoughts. “Would you be my friend?” he had asked, before the raucous sound of his thoughts blared full force from his mind once more.

Knock had wanted to say, “How can you hear me over all that racket?” He had decided to say, “Yes, I will be your friend.” The boy, Ascendant, represented something problematic to him, something he could fix and feel good about fixing. He had needed that, and he had let it cloud his judgement.

Knock had cleansed Ascendant of his thoughts, silencing them over and over again in the hope that he would talk instead. But time and time again, Ascendant had simply created new tangles of thoughts, like the vines of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, trapping him in the ivory tower of his mind. Knock found this rather ungrateful of him but pretended that nothing was wrong, as he was sure that Ascendant would eventually be thankful for his interference. He ignored the anger and confusion this caused in Ascendant, ignored the fact that they weren’t friends so much as poisonous, if not volatile, acquaintances. You see, Knock believed that he knew the right thing to do, even though in reality, he had never had such a power.

He had believed it up until Ascendant had asked him that question. When Ascendant had asked Knock if he only stood near Ascendant to cleanse his mind, Knock had finally seen the sheer rage that Ascendant had only been withholding out of kindness. Realizing this, he decided to walk away and hide somewhere until he stopped feeling bad.

He was bored, so he went to sleep in the dirty closet, probably missing a few classes. He already had a bad attendance record; what were two more red marks against him in the world?

When he woke up, he was met with the silence of an empty hallway. He started walking down the hallway and looking into all the empty classes.

Maybe there was a holiday or something, he thought with some satisfaction, and everybody got to go home.

Everything seemed far more cheerful than normal, because no one was there to disturb the peace and quiet he felt. It was at times like these that the idea of making everyone’s minds blank at once crossed his mind.

Once he got out of the school, however, he realized that there wasn’t any noise at all. This unnerved him; he had never heard the world absolutely silent before.

He tried to shout but recoiled when nothing came out of his mouth. He tried to scream until he was panting silently with the agony, but he couldn’t make a sound.

It was at this time when he realized that he was being followed by a gargoyle. Its head was that of a wolf, but without the fur. Its torso was that of a man, and its back was covered in feathers. Its front legs were like fleshy crab claws, its back legs were essentially giant backwards-facing arms, and it used them both to walk as it followed him.

Knock rushed away with the speed a boy his age could muster, and at first it seemed like he was faster than the gargoyle. This confused him, but then something grasped his shoulders and jerked him upwards. It was the gargoyle, holding him with its back legs as it flew into the sky. The feathers on its back had actually been folded wings the size of a giant hang glider, and Knock screamed silently as it carried him back to the school.

After a long and frightening ride, the gargoyle threw him down near a door and landed. Knock, extremely afraid of the gargoyle, ran through the door only to run into a desk and cry out in pain, both of which made no sound. Everything looked washed-out in the classroom, even though that wasn’t a normal effect of stress at all.

The confusion made Knock tense, and he decided to hide in case something was trying to attack him. There was a closet near the front of the room. He decided to hide there, because he was sure there was nothing inside it. However, when he got to the closet, he realized belatedly that it was full of junk, all of which crashed down onto the floor around the closet. A dead giveaway.

Cowed by this revelation, Knock lay on the floor and pretended to be dead. However, something stung him, knocking him unconscious barely after he registered it.

When he woke up, he saw black tendrils everywhere. They waved like strands of seaweed in water, constantly disappearing and reappearing like two videos shot in the same place. Knock could see strands entangling him, but he couldn’t feel them, and he couldn’t feel a shift in weight under him when they disappeared.

“That’s not possible,” he thought as the fear he had sequestered drained from him. “If that were to happen, it would cause a vacuum, and the air would rush to fill it, causing a loud noise. No, I must be dreaming.”

He went back to sleep, barely realizing that he was becoming colder. Ascendant stomped purposefully into the room and screamed.

Approximately ten seconds after Knock had went out of earshot, the gargoyle had tapped Ascendant on the shoulder.

“Do you know what I am?” it growled.

Ascendant thought about running, but knew it wouldn’t do anything. “I do not.”

“That foolish friend of yours purged so many thoughts that it created me, a gargoyle.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

The gargoyle cuffed him gently on the head. “Foolish boy. Sometimes the world works in strange ways. You should interact with it sometimes.”

“No, gargoyle. The world is too difficult for me. See here; you’re talking to me about something I don’t about, and you are a gargoyle, something which really shouldn’t exist. I can be frank with you because you’re so weird that it pulls me past my normal hang-ups, like whether or not I’ll stutter or if I might say the wrong thing.”

The gargoyle shook its head. “That boy is afraid of those things too. I know of your love for one another. Maybe you two are a bad match.”

“I feel glad to know,” said Ascendant calmly, “that he considers me a friend. Yet he took my thoughts and somehow created you as a side effect. Was this a deliberate attempt on his part to force me to speak?”

“Firstly,” corrected the gargoyle, “on at least one level, he considers you a suitable romantic partner, as do you him.”

Ascendant was confused. “I have no romantic feelings for him. I live in awe of him. Those are two very different things. It’s like saying, ‘I love God romantically.’”

“Fine. Secondly, this was indeed his attempt to do that. Now, you probably agree with his methods now, but make no mistake; his crude strategy would not have worked. You yourself need to expunge your deeply held fear of your fellow human being.”

Ascendant said nothing.

“If you have no words for me, I’m afraid I will have to kill him.”

“What?” Ascendant shouted.

The gargoyle chuckled. “Behold. You see, he did not create me deliberately; I came about as an accidental consequence, and I spent my time pondering my existence before I realized that his death would be the most likely to lead to my own. But I wanted to be conscientious about this. I watched him as he attempted to make you talk by continuously trying something which didn’t work instead of trying to reason with you. The closest he ever came to conversing with you about the issue was passive-aggressively mentioning it after he tried wiping your mind. I see his twisted views on humanity now, his belief that by banging someone on the head, as you put it, with a hockey stick, he could change them to suit his foolish views. I know now that he isn’t using his gift for good, and he never will. He need not enjoy this world any longer.”

“No!” Ascendant didn’t want Knock to die. “I believe everyone on this world deserves change!” He took a fighting stance.

“Yes, but what are you?” The gargoyle had trapped him. It let its answer hang in the air, and slowly, reluctantly, Ascendant sat back down. Satisfied, the gargoyle leapfrogged out of the building, flying away as Ascendant shivered on his own.

He went to class and thought long and hard about the problem, tried to dream himself out of the situation with the whirring half-worlds within his mind. A television show, a game, a movie, a mythos – they all drew his attention away from the situation at hand. Still, his subconscious mind was active, and it quickly alerted him to the fact that he was alone in the classroom.

He looked around. No one was there. He realized that the clock in the back of the room had started counting down backwards. He had 30 minutes to do something.

He ran out of the classroom, determined to stop something.

He ran back into the classroom to get his backpack.

He ran out before he realized he had no idea what to do.

He ran back in and started thinking, a dangerous thing for him.

He found a piece of yellow construction paper and decided that he was going to write something on it. However, before he could, the gargoyle came back. It stood next to him as if waiting for something. After a few minutes, Ascendant caved.

“What do you want, gargoyle? Keep in mind, though, I will not help you,” he tried to say before he realized he could not talk.

The gargoyle snarled at him, or maybe it was smiling. Ascendant decided to get crafty.

“You know Sign meaning?” he asked, and the gargoyle immediately stopped smiling. Evidently, it hated the fact that the forced silence could do nothing. However, it didn’t have any hands, so it couldn’t sign at him.

Ascendant realized that it was kind of mean to do that. “I’m sorry. I talk with you, you not talk with me. Maybe you do we are not not talk. You can do that?”

The gargoyle didn’t respond, simply staring at him. Ascendant decided to keep signing to him. He gave Knock a name sign, touching the sign for K to his head. He used words in new and interesting ways, to the point where he sometimes got out his phone and looked up how to say something in sign. He tried to use classifiers. Eventually, Ascendant wasn’t signing anymore so much as babbling with his hands like a baby.

“I did create the silence,” the gargoyle eventually whispered, its words only audible due to the lack of other sound. “You were not supposed to speak to me. You were supposed to seek out Knock yourself.”

With this, the gargoyle left. Ascendant, trying to rectify his mistake, ran after the gargoyle. He watched as it flew far faster than he could run and landed behind Knock. He ran after it, but as he ran to them, the gargoyle picked Knock up and flew back with him.

“Where did they go?” Ascendant wondered, panting. He looked up into the sky and saw the gargoyle flying back to where Ascendant had been.

Ascendant ran back there only to find the gargoyle guarding the entrance.

“You cannot pass,” he said.

Ascendant made a noise with his mouth, and this gave him some measure of confidence. “Why are you doing this?” he said to the gargoyle, trying to shout but failing due to lack of practice. “Nothing you’re doing makes obvious sense. Why make everything silent and then take it away? Why are you even here? Why do you look like this?”

The gargoyle looked at him bemusedly. Then it clasped his head in its hand, squeezing until Ascendant screamed.

“This should probably get you to stop talking. I’ll give you one hint: this is all a parallel, thematically, to something which happened before. You have ten seconds to answer.”

Ascendant stopped talking and tried to think, but he couldn’t think of anything. It was his curse –

The gargoyle clenched his claw and Ascendant’s head began to bleed. “You have five seconds now.”

He couldn’t think of anything.

“You have three seconds.”

Ascendant decided to throw in the towel. “I don’t know, and I’m sorry,” he whimpered in what he thought would be his final breath.

The pressure on his head abated, and he looked at the gargoyle in surprise.

“That’s not optimal, but that’s fine,” the gargoyle assured him. “Tell me what you think it means.”

Ascendant tried. “The silence would represent… the creation of… the… Oh! It’s because Knock and I didn’t talk to each other! No, wait… what if the point was actually to show that we were both so silent that neither of us was really bothered by it? Maybe… I’ll go with the second option. I will. The second option.”

The gargoyle stared at him. Ascendant, weakened by the pain he had felt from the gargoyle’s claws, caved in rather quickly. “That’s all I have! I swear! I don’t know anything else!”

The gargoyle began talking, so Ascendant stopped and listened. “Say this to him. He will not be angry at you. Coddle him with the fact that you don’t know anything.”

He let Ascendant in through the door. Ascendant entered purposefully into the room, and he saw Knock in the center, apparently asleep. Ascendant kicked him, then instantly regretted it.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to kick you.” His conviction was gone. However, Knock barely stirred. Ascendant, believing that Knock could not hear him, took on an exaggerated and literary persona. “Aha! It appears that he rests under some enchantment. Perhaps,” he said, incorporating Knock’s prostrate body into the act by pointing at him, “the prince of the head knock has been knocked unconscious by a spurned lover.”

He turned to a wall and pretended to look offended. “Well, it was not I!” He was dramatic because it would break the tension he felt surrounding him in the cold room.

He had the bright idea of using the thermostat. In his state of not caring, he couldn’t help but narrate his actions. “I shall use the thermostat! Behold my arcane and magic power! I, the wielder of the air-conditioning, carry–” He realized that the thermostat was set to slightly higher than room temperature.

“Well, it appears the room is filled with ghosts.” He ran to Knock and tried to drag him out of the room. “Wake up, old man! Your time is nigh! You’re at death’s door, and I’ll take you through it if I have to drag you! Come, come, and behold the wonders of heaven, where there isn’t voodoo magic making the room cold!”

Knock mumbled, “That seems like a really weird thing to do,” and for the second time, Ascendant lost his composure. He gaped for a few seconds before he started working again, this time in silence.

“”Hey,” Knock said, “there don’t happen to be black tendrils flickering throughout the room, do there?”

“Why would there be black tendrils? Did you see any?” Ascendant was worried.

“No,” Knock lied. He got up on his feet, unsteadily at first, and made his way out the door.

The gargoyle had gone away, and no one else had come back. Knock noticed, with increasing alarm, that the tentacles were still there. He decided not to talk about it.

“Hey,” said Ascendant shakily, “do you think often of death?”

Knock did a double-take. That was a very unusual thing to say, after all. “I don’t often think of death.”

“Well, I always think of the word ‘worms’. They sound like the harbingers of death, even though they aren’t really. They are the harbingers of new life.”

Knock thought, “He seems to be working hard at talking. Perhaps I should say something. But I don’t know anything about the topic.”

Ascendant, realizing that might be the case, decided to improvise. “If you don’t know anything about the topic, you can just change the topic to something you do know about.”

Knock tried to think of something he knew about. He couldn’t think of anything, and eventually Ascendant started talking again.

“Now we are different. I will keep interrupting you, and you will keep not talking unless you want to talk.”

Knock continued to sit in silence, unsure of where to take the conversation.

“I see why you knocked the thoughts out of my head now. This is really hard. I’m sorry for putting you through all of this.”

Knock wanted to say that he didn’t actually have that problem. But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that he hadn’t been the most helpful person either. He hadn’t even talked once to Ascendant before aggressively trying to bleach his headspace. Was I just using him for my own validation? thought Knock. Why does he even want to talk with me?

Ascendant answered this question, sort of. “I want to talk with you. No one else has viciously attacked my mind in an attempt to bring out my thoughts. You are kind, and… no wait, you aren’t kind, it’s just that I want to talk with you. Oh look, I said a bad thing. I said it badly. I guess you just don’t want to talk with me.”

Ascendant stood there until Knock made a quick decision. “Could we have a meaningful conversation about the color black?” he asked.

Ascendant literally jumped. “Of course! Or, wait, no, I mean we could have a conversation about what counts as a meaningful conversation, using the dictionary definition of the words, and then talk at length about it. Thank you! I probably couldn’t have thought of that idea.”

The black tendrils around Knock faded away as he talked with Ascendant. It turned out that it was possible to have a meaningful conversation about the word black, the color black, the race “Black”, and the use of the word black in media. There were many different aspects to this shade, and as they went over these aspects, they became comfortable with the fact that they couldn’t speak well.

The next day, everyone spoke of the wolf which had somehow gotten into the building without anyone noticing. Knock and Ascendant decided to talk about whether or not pudding was viable. Viable for what, you may ask. That was the question. It wasn't a very good one by normal question standards, but it helped them understand themselves and each other.

They would become close friends over time, with more conversations about different topics. Eventually, they would know one another, and Knock would no longer see himself as defined by his magic, and Ascendant would no longer hide in his own mind when he felt lonely. Knock would explain why he had attempted to become close to Ascendant both literally and figuratively. They would marry, and even though they would certainly face hardships later in life, they would no longer be held captive by their lack of faith in themselves.

Bone Dave Isn't What He Seems To Be
Note: This was originally going to be an entry for the Creepypasta Wiki's 2017 Halloween Werewolf Contest, but it wasn’t because I was too chicken.

Bone Dave. Cathy had given the name to that dog, suggesting it a few days after they had found him sitting in front of their door, dirty and collarless. John had suggested other names, but his wife had stuck with Bone Dave, and he had eventually stuck with it too.

Bone Dave had been a good dog. John couldn’t remember anything which Bone Dave had ever done wrong until he had wandered into the woods and never come back. John’s family had been devastated in the three months after that faithful day, and so had he. But then he saw Bone Dave again, peeking out at him from behind the vending machine. It had only been for an instant, but he had recognized the husky instantly.

After that incident, he started seeing Bone Dave in the strangest places. Bone Dave was outside the window, in the shadow of a tree, and even floating in midair through some feat of wizardry. He could never see Bone Dave for very long, only long enough to recognize that it was Bone Dave.

He didn’t tell his wife about this. Cathy had loved Bone Dave, and he knew that she blamed him for letting Bone Dave out. She had been cold to him ever since that night, hardly ever talking to him. Sometimes, he wondered if Cathy had only ever married him because of that dog. It didn’t make any logical sense, but considering how badly the dog’s death had affected her, it was usually at the back of John’s mind in their conversations.

One day, John came home after a hard day at work. He sold, refurbished, and recommended houses. He sold them very well. Some of his coworkers even went so far as to call him, “The King of House Selling” because he wore a necklace with a giant silver chain on it in a rather agnostic community. It didn’t bother him; after all, he couldn’t really talk about anything but houses.

His wife Cathy was watching television on the couch. She looked at him out of the corner of her eye, but didn’t get up. John absentmindedly wondered if his wife would make more fuss over a bird at the window. He decided to think of positive things instead, but the only thing that came to mind was getting another dog.

He had thought of getting a new dog when Bone Dave had first gone missing, but the first thing that had come out of Cathy’s mouth as he had been calling the neighbors to see if anyone had seen Bone Dave was to warn him against getting another dog.

“Don’t think about getting another dog, John,” she had said with tears in her eyes. “No one can replace Bone Dave.” It was the first time since their marriage that she had called him John. She hadn’t stopped afterwards.

As if to prove his point, Cathy looked at him again. She said, “John, what are you doing?” She didn’t quite sound bored, but she definitely didn’t care.

“Nothing,” John replied. He went into his room and sat on his bed, trying and failing to remember what Cathy had called him before. All that did was make him sad.

“The children are home,” he realized. “Perhaps if I talk to the children, they’ll make me feel better somehow.” He knew that they were just as sad as Cathy about Bone Dave leaving, and that they probably wouldn’t talk to him, but he had no other ideas.

He went into his children’s room. Both Mary and Dave Jr. were sitting on one side of a table and looking at something on a paper.

“Hi, kids,” he said with a grin.

They looked at him, and for a moment, they appeared to have Bone Dave’s face. He started for a moment, enough for their faces to become normal.

Unsure if what he had just seen had been a hallucination, he thought about it for about ten seconds. Then he realized that his kids were staring at him.

“Hi, kids,” he repeated, more weakly this time.

They didn’t stop staring at him, and he didn’t move. The thought that something had possessed his children came unbidden from somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind.

He decided to say something funny. Adopting an almost-Scottish accent, he chortled, “Children, do my eyes deceive me! By the stars, you stare at me so! Ay, ‘tis as if you were possessed!”

He didn’t realize what he had said until he had said it. Inside, he winced, but outside, he kept up a relatively calm demeanor. His children stared at him, then slowly turned back to their paper.

John decided to look at the paper, something he would regret almost instantly. It was a drawing of Bone Dave, but it was far better than he thought his children would be able to draw. He imagined someone coming in through the window and depositing it at their table, and he forgot he was standing behind his children until one of them asked, “Dad, what are you doing?”

“Nothing,” said John nonchalantly. “Did one of you draw that?”

“No.”

“Then who did?”

There was a tense silence for a while. After what must have been ten seconds, one of them finally said, “Mom drew it.”

John could tell that was a lie, but didn’t push the matter. He started going out of the room, then realized that he hadn’t asked them how their days had been.

“How was your day, Mary?”

“Good.”

“How was your day, Michael?”

“Good.”

He went back to his room and sat on his bed. He wasn’t thinking of anything, and so thoughts of food and houses crowded his thoughts. He decided to try and write something after sitting for about 10 minutes.

He opened up his journal. Failed story starters lined the pages. He flipped to a blank one and wrote, “Once upon a time, there was a”

Then he stopped. He didn’t know what to say after that, and so he decided to wait until inspiration struck him. His thoughts went to his wife, and then he found himself thinking of his old friend David.

David had lived in a house with his parents and paternal grandfather. He had done very well in school and life, a charismatic and hardworking person by nature. In high school, John had went to a writing club to find that David was its president, and also a very good writer. This was where he had met Cathy. Cathy and David had been friends since they were in about third grade. By high school, they were in love, and they had been the only couple John had known about.

Then David’s parents had died. David had become sick after that, growing thinner and paler every day. One day, he hadn’t shown up to school, but there hadn’t been a scheduled absence, so the school assumed that he was truant. The day after that, his house was found empty.

On that day, John had started regulating the writing club, and people had slowly dropped out of it due to John’s lack of charisma. Cathy had taken an interest in him after that. Then they had married. But then she had found the dog and named it Bone Dave. John wanted to assume that the name meant nothing, but it was so odd that he found himself wondering, especially when Cathy had stopped talking to him when Bone Dave had escaped.

He sat there, then ate dinner, then slept and left for work in the morning.

He kept on doing this, even as his wife seemed even less talkative, the mysterious drawings kept coming in, and his children’s faces kept morphing into Bone Dave’s. He kept trying to write and failing, and wondering how he had written anything in the first place.

One night, he put his journal inside the drawer next to his bed and closed his eyes as usual, but found himself unable to sleep. He lay there for perhaps four hours. Eventually, he got up to get a drink of water.

Bone Dave was standing in the kitchen.

“Hello, John,” he grumbled in a deep voice. It sounded rather familiar, but John couldn’t quite place it.

“Hello, Bone Dave.”

“Do you remember what you did to me?”

John didn’t want to remember that.

“Do you remember how you and Cathy used to talk?”

“No, but it used to be more filled with passion.”

Bone Dave growled at him. “You really think so? Look back on your life – really look hard – and I think you’ll find yourself proven dreadfully wrong.”

John growled at him like a dog. “I believe that Cathy was more in love with me at one point.”

“No,” barked Bone Dave fiercely.

John was foolish in that instant, taunting Bone Dave by saying, “You’re just a dog. What do you know of human love?”

“You’re just a human,” Bone Dave retorted. “What do you know of killing dogs?”

“Stop it!” thundered John. “I don’t want to talk about that!”

“You need to admit that you tried to kill me. After all, I’m a talking dog. I talked to your wife and children already. They want you to leave, just as I do.”

Furious, John screeched, “Why would you talk to my mother and children?”

David, who was where Bone Dave had been a second before, grinned. “You said ‘mother’ and not wife.”

John attempted to backpedal, but David spoke over him, his voice resounding like a bronze bell. “You have no love for your wife, and your wife cannot stand you because you tried to kill me. You must leave.”

John tried to speak, but all he could do was bark. “This must be a dream,” he said to himself, and the scene before him was replaced with his bedroom. His diary fell to the floor as he walked out into the kitchen.

Cathy was standing in the kitchen.

“Hello, John,” she sang in a clear voice. It sounded different, but John couldn’t quite place it.

“Hello, Bone Dave.”

“Do you remember how we had children?”

John didn’t want to remember that.

“Do you remember how you never questioned how or why I was randomly pregnant?”

“No. I thought that was pretty normal.”

Cathy growled, “You really think so? Look back on your life – really look hard – and I think you’ll find yourself proven dreadfully wrong.”

John whined, “I believe that we were in love at some point,” as if he were a dog.

“No,” said Cathy, deadpan.

John was foolish in that instant, taunting Cathy by saying, “Well, either of us could be wrong. Maybe we should go with the one who doesn’t need to beg the question?”

“You’re the one who’s wrong,” Cathy retorted, “just as wrong as when you thought Bone Dave was dead.”

“Stop it!” thundered John. “I don’t want to talk about that!”

“I know that you tried to kill him! Do you think I’m a fool who’ll fall for some obvious lie?” Cathy roared.

Furious, John screeched, “I want us to stay a family!”

“John, we were never a family. You may think I spoke to you with more passion at one point, but I have always been this formal. We just always had Bone Dave with us, so you never needed to talk to me. Do you think I could bear living in his absence, watching you write the same drivel over and over in your notebook? Leave now. I’m tired of being your wife.”

John didn’t want to leave. “What did you call me before, then?”

Cathy started to speak, then stopped. A few seconds passed by, and then she let out a barking laugh. “I just realized that I never called you anything before Bone Dave disappeared, because I'd never talked to you in such a way that I had needed to call you anything.”

Satisfied, John went upstairs and put his diary in his bag. Then he remembered with a chill that he had put his diary in his drawer beforehand. He started to open it, but Cathy intervened.

“David wrote something in that, a threat against you. He wrote, ‘Once upon a time, there was a young man who never got to be an old man.’ It was meant for if you didn’t leave.”

“Oh,” said John. He made a mental note to read it before realizing what Cathy had just said. Cathy, realizing she had let a great secret slip, said with gritted teeth, “Bone Dave is actually David in disguise.”

John wanted to tell her that he had already known that, but he decided against it. He walked outside and saw his children. They looked at him, guilt on their faces.

“Do you want to see Dave?” John mumbled, and he was met with two tentative nods. “Don't worry. You don’t need to pretend to love me anymore. I’m moving out.” He turned away because he couldn’t bear to see them smile at that.

Cathy went out. “You know, John, I wish you good luck. It’s not that you were a bad person, it’s just that you were…”

“…a bad husband. I get it, don’t worry.” He got into his car and drove away to the nearest gas station, then cried for a few minutes. He clutched the diary to his chest, fearful of opening it.

John didn’t want to open the diary, because he was afraid that two of the words would be underlined. So he opened the book.

“Once upon a time, there was a young man who never got to be an old man.” There was no underlining anywhere. David lay back in his seat, relieved. He decided that he was going to live somewhere else, using his skills in housing to live a decent and peaceful life.

He flipped over to the beginning of the book.

“Look at the end. There’s a story written upside down based on your prompt, though due to lack of time, I’m afraid that it seems bland and too to-the-point. It's better than yours, though.” The hand was unmistakably David’s. John shrieked, and the people staring at him mad him feel self-conscious. He drove away for a while, the anticipation of reading what David had written for him rising and rising until he felt like a kettle about to scream.

Finally, after crossing the provincial line, he felt safe enough to read.

“Once upon a time, there was an old man who had sold his soul to the Devil. He found a young girl attractive, and as he felt his lust growing stronger, he began to wonder if he should ignore the Devil’s warning to bring more people’s souls to hell. His grandson thought that the girl was merely his friend, and he eventually became jealous of his grandson. He took the form of a high-school boy (insofar as he turned himself to a younger age) and began to show the girl true love.

But one day, a boy with a cross said something completely irrational to the boy: that he was getting killed by a monster. This was half-true, and it would not have been a problem had he not said he was going to get his parents to investigate. Now, his parents were police officers, so there was a real problem there. The two made a promise that in ten years, the boy would give up his happy life with the girl they both coveted, and that the old man ‘wouldn’t vie for her romantic affection’.

Do you think I broke that promise, or did you? Well, I won’t tell you. It’s been a good nine years either way. You’ve grown so old! I can’t kill you, but I can finally have my “bride” and children. They’re either so grown up or so little that I have no attraction to them. Thank you for your kindness. Now I can kill them all instead of being way more falsely charming than you could hope to genuinely be.

I won’t come after you. Maybe I’ll take over your job here, but you seem pretty good at it.

And for posterity’s sake, yes, I am a vampire, not a werewolf.”

John’s hands shook. He felt like driving all the way back, but he knew that it’d be no use. He’d either get accosted by his wife and children accusing him of trying to kill an innocent animal or he’d have an extremely powerful minion of the Devil on his tail.

It had kind of stung to realize that his wife had never actually referred to him in any way after six years of marriage. “How is that even possible?” he wondered while in his car on the side of the road.

“It doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t care. It was meant to be. It was-” He began sobbing uncontrollably, and he curled up in the driver’s seat, oblivious to everything. He sobbed for ten minutes straight before he regained his composure. But he did eventually, and after he drank a liter of water, he drove on still farther, hopeful that he could become the kind of person who could triumph in a story.

His Son
Maybe if he were someone else, someone hard and ashamed of himself, like his own father had been, his son would be different. He thought about it sometimes when his son came home and stammered that he was doing fine, when he so obviously lied.

He knew his son, knew him inside and out, but sometimes he could not understand why he continued to shuffle along his clockwork path. How long had they played this game of not telling grades? How long would it go on?

His son, who was almost an adult, still acted like a scared child in front of him. He couldn't fix it.

But he had to do other things, so he left his son be. There was no reason to fret, what with important business going around. He had a meeting at 3AM and needed to go to sleep.

The son was there, doing his homework while listening to his father sleep. His mind was filled with all the videos he had watched instead of doing homework. He wasn't really afraid for his future, but he didn't know why not.

He heard his father snoring. It sounded like he was blowing his nose while turning into a giant cat. Still, he had become used to it. It did not bother him any longer.

His father would sometimes stop snoring, and then he would worry. He didn't want to be afraid that his father would become sad at seeing him again.

He didn't know what was making him do this kind of thing.

He realized he hadn't heard anything for 20 seconds.

The father was happy in his life. The sun was smiling, the air was sweet. He prayed for long periods of time. This was how he had lived his life, and his son did not live this way.

He didn't begrudge his son for this. He wanted his son to succeed, because he felt that his son was capable of something at the very least.

Was that too much to ask? For his son to do a thing? Anything?

The son did nothing. The son simply waited while the father was silent.

He wondered whether his father had woken up. He did not know his father as his father knew him, so he did not really understand that his father was human. But he knew some things, and one of those was that his father did not silently wake up. If the bed was not making noise, his father was still asleep and he should have still been snoring.

He did not want to know that his father was choking. He wanted to believe that his father was simply being lazy, even though that would not make sense, because it was kind.

He felt lighter every second, because the more he sat the less he had to pay attention to what his father was and was not doing. He almost went off of Youtube, which he had somehow started watching instead of doing his homework, but he didn't.

The son could have leaped out of his chair. The son could have given a damn, couldn't he, that his pop was doing something unusual.

Once, when he had been young, he had closed his father's nose to stop his snoring. It had been stupid, but at least he had done it.

What was he afraid of now? Was he afraid that his father, the same father who loved him and forgave, would be mad at him for checking on him?

No, no. It was simple, so simple that he snickered. If his father woke up, then he would have to face the fact that he was watching Youtube videos. Now he was in the middle phase, the phase between promising not to sin and being forced to acknowledge that he had sinned.

What was that called again? I know, and most likely you know, and he knew, but he wanted to forget, like some people forget their house when they drink until it's too late.

His father was in the middle phase between life and death. He could not wake up as he choked on his tongue, as his beleaguered heart began to stop. There was no end to the madness; how could there be?

His subconscious knew that his son was in there, that even though the person lied, the person was his son, and his son would help him when he died, not leave him to choke.

His son was not a monster. His son was not a villain.

His son believed that he was the villain in the story.

It made the most sense. Perhaps he was the one choking his own father in order to prostate himself to the computer just a little while longer.

There was some extent to which he felt remorse, but he didn't feel enough. He had never known life without a mother or father, so there was really no way for him to fathom losing a parent.

Sometimes, he wondered if the harsh light of his computer had been what had erased his soul, or if he'd just never had one.

The father would live to see the next day, not because of his son, but because of himself.

He had woken up to see his son towering over him, only to see him back away silently. He had wondered whether or not to call to his son, to ask him why exactly he had come, but he saw his son's face, filled with fear, and he did not.

He still believed in his son, because his son had done this.

The son knew what he had done. He had looked at his father, snoring, and stepped near him. Only then had his father woken up, with a kind of snort, and then he had retreated.

Where had he done anything? Where was the heroic gesture to save his father? A mere cat could walk up to his father. A mere bag could be blown in that direction, rigged up to the AC in order to make sure he wasn't dying.

The son could not understand, because he was too hard on himself despite his bad time management.

The father could not understand, because the son had willed him dead, and had simply been so sentimental as to check up on him.

But what did the son really know about himself?

Had his father not looked at him as a child, seen his face in awe of the Diwali fireworks or the size of an elephant? His son was not mysterious.

The father went back to sleep, content in the idea of his son.

Lies and Walls and Beer
There is one vice I shall never find myself a slave to: the beer.

How terrible, how miserable must those who drink this poisonous juice of rotten fruits find the world! Such terrible, intoxicating, poisonous filth should not defile the bodies of the kind and virtuous, nor should they attack the sensibilities of the pained and alone.

Alas, I cannot think of this every day. It would most likely purify me of my own faults.

As I walk home from school each day, I am usually concerned with trivial matters. In fact, as I now walk back home, I am imagining the thrill of creating

Of course, such joy may not last long, for I must inevitably walk underneath the trees.

Their looming presence and dark shadows never fail to dampen my mood, despite my rational mind proclaiming them nothing but trees. It could be the city's fault, it being their custom to cut the trees' branches once a year. The trees, incapable of screaming in agony as their limbs are brutally severed from their body, and equally incapable of understanding why such a thing must happen, keep their emotions deep inside of them until all that is left is a deep, primordial fear of something.

Of course, the mere idea that the trees' fear causes mine is outlandish enough to laugh at, so I truly believe that it is nothing but a fancy I created to pass the long walk home. But as I look up at the trees, I cannot shake the feeling that they radiate oppression and despair.

The rustling of the amber leaves stays me a moment, but I shake it off, hoping it is a bird. Sadly, I cannot explain away the twisted face of the withered hag staring at me from the branches of the tree, and I hear her scream before I see a veritable vision of hell. Harpies rain down from the sky, singing a song of woe and entrapment. I begin to run, hoping their screams are nothing but warnings or entertainment or anything but a reason to attack. They do not seem to be chasing me, but they continually descend into my vicinity.

"Be gone!" I scream, for I am slowing now, and as such, the harpies and their screeching, maddening voices shall surround me completely. I dislike this idea immensely, so immensely that not ten seconds after I have screamed the first time, I feel the pressing need to scream "Be gone!" once again. But then I freeze and nearly upend myself, for though the harpies no longer come, I am faced with the monster who haunts my dreams.

His eyes are round and green, and his fangs prominent when he grimaces or gasps for air. He feasts on the intestines of a young lady with relish, such relish that I feel a pang in my heart and my stomach. As I retch as this terrible, terrible sight, he sights me, and turns to me with a terrible grin before sinking his gaping, unnatural maw deep into the nether regions of the girl. Her arms are stretched out as if she had attempted to fly to safety, but the beast shamelessly continues to consume her.

I must stop now, and apologize for this terrible crime. I wish it had not happened, for if it had not happened, your minds would be purer for it, as would mine. Thankfully, when I look up again, it has been replaced by my house door, for it had been nothing but a memory.

"Say," I ponder aloud, "how much of that was in my mind?"

Without much prodding, the truth tumbles out of my mind: from the rustle of that first amber leaf, I had been seeing nothing but the burnings embers of a much-reviled illusion, the mirror I use to look back upon that foul memory I dare not speak of. I look back at the trees and find them to be green. It is the time of new beginnings, and I should no longer be focusing on the past.

As I enter my house, thoughts of the frightful monster threaten to overwhelm me, and I find myself nearly unable to dispel them. I can fondly reminisce about the long-gone days when such thoughts could not penetrate my mind with such vigor, or the even earlier days when I had not known such a terrible sight, when I had not seen the monster.

The psychopathic nature of its actions cuts into my heart whenever I remember the gleam of its eyes, jubilant yet innocent. Had it been happy to do such a thing? Was that its birthright? Even though I have made efforts to shield myself from bestowing reason upon such a terrifying force of nature, I feel that I may have somehow misunderstood its goals.

I see his eyes on the computer screen. I'm not getting good grades. It frightens me, sometimes, but it should frighten me more. I have never known hardship, never known the slap of reality dashing my dreams, and so I cannot muster the outrage which would lead to sure improvement.

Something must be terribly wrong with my soul, and I hope that you, reader in the audience, have no such affliction. I cannot believe any medical or sociological reason for why my thoughts have dulled, and I trudge mindlessly on in search of some "better" future. I don't know why I kill myself like this, but I would never wish such a thing on anyone else. It leads me to drink water, filling up my water bottle as if I can purify myself through the tap and the motion.

"Maybe this is their reason that the poor and the addicted drink the beer," I say to myself absentmindedly as the tap pours forth its glistening elixir of life. "They forget their troubles for the moment, and they have something to do when they feel their life is crushing them."

And as if by magic, the pieces which had once been scattered to me suddenly make all too much sense. I see myself reflected in the water, the cold, clear mirror which scatters my external visage and lays my soul out clearly. I see, reflected in my black heart, the very reason for which I have the computer, and for which others have the beer, and in that instant, the wall I had created in my mind separating me from those drinkers of the monstrous beer is shattered.

I hope, dearest audience, that people can tell you these things, and you need not realize that they were hidden within your heart all along. Or I hope it doesn't hurt you when you shatter such preconceptions, for at this point in time, when I realize that I don't differ so much from drinkers of beer, I feel a deep sorrow, and I would not wish it on anyone else.

I down the water, and it tastes bitter, tinged with my sorrow and my anger, with the realization that I had an assignment due which I had not done, with the poisonous quality I had once attributed to the beer. Unsatisfied, I down more, and yet more, and every time it reminds me of nothing if not the mocking, innocent glint of the monster's eyes.

I want to scream, because I feel like I cannot deal with it anymore. I feel too entitled, too lazy. There must be something deeply broken in my heart. Unfixable, I lie down on the sofa and fall asleep, only awakening when I feel a familiar presence in the room.

I cannot help but whimper as I watch the monster meander closer to my face. He repeats my cries, mocking me as it nears me. Its hot breath feels like a furnace, like an opening into the reviled gates of the Christian underworld.

"Not now," I mutter as I close my eyes. "Be gone." I hope that he may understand my plight. I had watched the death in an almost detached manner, yet I now feel the guilt and shame for being so detached that I let my idle thoughts of heroism trump my fellow-feeling towards a life lost. In my defense, I had been feeling restless and angry for some time by that point, and I have been tormented by the hideous beast ever since.

I open my eyes, and the monster regards me with its cool green eyes. It rasps, "Do you feel that you are better than all other humans?"

"No!" I cry, for I do not wish it to be true.

"You wish to rid yourself of hate, but you cannot."

"Untruth!" I shriek, even though it was a hasty and unrehearsed answer. The monster waits - perhaps it knows of my mind's own tricks - but I am loath to correct myself.

"You lack any semblance of love for your classmates, your sister, your cat, your mother, and your father."

"Sacrilege!" I roar, but I cannot get up. I feel heavy; the water within me pins me to the sofa, like a drunkard lazing within my stomach.

The monster tells me, "You do not respect your parents, because your schoolwork is undone and your belly is taut, filled with water."

"I don't understand you, odious being," I snarl, bluffing so that it will tire of my insolence. "Do you mean to suggest that my schoolwork is undone?"

"I have seen your backpack, friend. You would be afraid to discover that you have not opened it. Your snack rots inside your lunchbox; your pens rot from disuse. Ay, you are either a hypocrite or a liar."

"Why have you come, woeful and awful being? Am I to die at your terrible hands? Will you rip me apart?"

"I come bearing a message which you should have learned months ago. Your foolish sacrifices mean nothing."

I attempt to will him away by closing my eyes, but his breath is like that of a furnace. The putrid stench of rotting flesh emanates from his ominous frame. I find a water bottle in my hand, and I drink instinctively.

"You down the Internet like beer and drown your sorrows in water, hoping desperately that you can reverse your past mistakes. Beware, for the sheer volume will end your life."

"The beer does not kill."

"All things kill in too high a volume. Attempt to neutralize your soul and distill your sins with water, and you shall find yourself fading, a slave to these erasing effects."

I consider it. Would I rather live this life in which I am nothing but a disappointment, or burn in my rightful place, the bottle in my hand?

The light within my eyes agitates the monster. "You are a fool to consider yourself worthy of death."

"You were a fool to consider your meal worthy of death. I know your kind. You eat well and then kill harmless birds to wind yourselves down. Millions die from your foolish endeavors. Pathetic."

What can it do? It surveys me, disgusted. "Do you think your affinity for distraction is in any way the same as mine? You and your kind trap us in glorified cages, while the others let us free. You too trapped yourself in a cage, attempting to ignore the fact that by maiming me, you had done nothing but sadden your sister."

What was I to do? He had killed the bird, feasting on its nether regions. He had looked to me in innocence, as if he had done nothing. I could not resist. I had to hit something in this world which couldn't hit me back. If I deny that deep in my soul, I know that what I did was wrong, it makes utter sense. I am in the right.

I am, right?

It scratches deep into my stomach and I can feel the blood rushing out. "You are in the wrong." His words resonate within me as I sleep.

When I wake up, and my stomach feels fine, and I cannot see a gash. I remember that I killed my cat, that I do not really love my classmates, that I hate my cat and I'm lukewarm towards my sister, that I love my mother and father even though I don't work hard enough to stop them from worrying. But I can change all that if I admit that I can't focus and I have an internet addiction.

I go to my backpack, take out my homework, and start finishing it, hoping that I can stop hiding this problem from myself. But I can already feel myself forgetting what happened today.

A Story about a Stupid Crazy Person
Raja Bannerjee hadn't expected to find himself within a house made of oak, but he had no time to be confused before it spoke to him.

"Raja Bannerjee, you have died."

He looked behind him to see an old man who was about as tall as he was. There didn't seem to be anything particularly special about him. He looked like someone's grandfather, but every time Raja even blinked, he changed exactly how he looked like someone's grandfather. Then he became a girl, and it ceased to make any sense according to gender pronouns. Raja was too afraid to do anything, because he was a wimp, but he sensed that even though there was a deep fear inside him, he felt reassured by the presence of this being.

"Raja, you must understand why you feel the way that you do."

At first, Raja didn't answer. He knew what the being was talking about. He felt out of balance, as if his life was irreparably damaged and he hadn't done anything. He didn't want to know what he had done, but he wanted to do something, anything at all. And so, challenging the brave men who had been named Raja before him, he spoke.

"Yes, I know."

The silence was an unwelcome guest. It gnawed at him like the biggest tapeworm in the world, in his belly and around him at the same time. His mouth was a yawing echo chamber, the tapeworm's entrance and exit, and he tried to make the metaphor his reality and extinguish the fear by closing his mouth. But try as he might, he could not do it. His mouth hanging open like every science-class skeleton's, Raja stared at nothing in particular, hoping beyond all logic that somehow, something would change.

He tried to lay eyes on the being who had made him feel reassured, but panic rushed through his body - an ever-bolder parasite - as he could not find the being. His eyes rolled back in his skull as he tried to process what exactly was going on. He didn't know what the problem was anymore, so he cast his eyes back on the story playing through his mind, and suddenly he found the answer.

"Wait," he said, not quite closing his mouth, "I don't know." His mouth was reassuringly close to being closed, but the tapeworm of his silence/guilt/fear sensed this and redoubled its efforts, snaking into his intestines. He tried not to flinch as his anxiety overtook him. Perhaps in a different world than the one he had inhabited before finding himself in a room made of oak, he would have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. But that train of thought was derailed when the being's sudden shouting made him clench his teeth so hard that a great deal of the tapeworm fell to the ground, disintegrating as it was forgotten.

"Yes! Raja Bannerjee, you do not know! You do not understand! You simply pretend to understand, and I know because I am you!"

He exhaled with such force that the tapeworm had no choice but to eject itself from his bowels via mouth. He thought about how that could be taken literally, but he scrapped the idea and simply pushed it out of his mind along with his digestive tract. The being could be heard letting out an audible sigh as well, and the tension had dissipated to the point where Raja could talk to some extent.

"I hadn't known that," said he. "I had thought that you were some god. But now that I know who you are, I know that I am really safe!"

"You are," the being said, beaming at him with such unfiltered joy that he had no choice but to smile back.

"I think I know what I did, but you should explain it because I don't know why I'm here," said Raja, trying to be humble but fearing that this honesty would somehow cause him harm.

The being seemed to understand his struggle. "Do not worry. I will tell you."

It rose up, holding a stick so that it resembled some god. "You wrote a story about how the Christian god was unkind. This was in your control, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said Raja. He was beginning to feel distressed again, but he didn't know how else to feel in the face of his ever-present defectiveness.

"You realized that it was unkind to take the title of someone else and pretend it was your own, but it was too late. The story began sucking your life, and you were unable to write another."

"Yes!" cried Raja, unable to hold back tears. He had no idea how this story, the one that he was in at the moment, wouldn't be deleted, but he didn't want to bring it up because the punishment made him feel stronger somehow.

"You looked back upon your other true story, and you saw that it alienated the mentally ill. This angered you beyond belief, didn't it?"

Raja began to answer, but then realized the significance of the question's wording. He thought for two seconds, and the answer flowed from his mouth like a river of silk. "No. I felt sad, so sad that I wished to never write again."

"Good!" the being said. "You feel remorse towards others, not anger towards yourself, and this shows that you are not in the wrong."

Raja felt lighter than he had for months. He realized then how insignificant it was. It couldn't have been more than five months since he had written his horrible, somewhat plagiarized story. It was nothing; no one cared enough to talk about it. He could simply request it be destroyed and be done with it!

As if reading his mind, the being nodded, saying, "This is an extraordinary stroke of luck. Take it in stride. You will write other stories, and no one can doubt that."

The being began to fade, but Raja was emboldened. "This is a site for frightening things, isn't it? This isn't frightening."

The being was about to ask if Raja really wanted to be tortured, but Raja beat him to it. "Being, my friend, my brother, you know how much you care about me now. We may share a name, but we also share that name with, like, twelve people on Facebook. And they're all engineers and stuff. Nobody cares about us - me - " He began to stammer, but the being put up a hand.

"You're right. You were my ally, and I no longer care for you. That said, I will see you in my dreams, and I will never forget you."

Raja stood ramrod-straight as his worst fear emerged from the being's hand. The tapeworm coiled around him, and it was even more frightening now that it wasn't a clumsy personification of his feelings. He cried out from the pain, and the tapeworm lunged at him, going into his mouth and worming its way through his esophagus. Raja could no longer feel anything, and he looked at the being, who shot him a thumbs-up. Raja almost smiled, but then he realized that might hurt the tapeworm, and so he laughed instead.

"Say, are you trying to imply that you want someone else to do this to you?" he asked as he slowly died, as the being took the pain away from him."

"Gee, your parents really won't like the fact that you're writing this. Neither will your college counselor."

"When are you going to stop writing? These aren't even one-liners."

"This was a bad idea. This ending isn't even really that scary, is it?"

"I want to kill myself," said the being.

"Now it's scary." It was him again.

"Or maybe not." He then realized that it was a stupid endeavor and that the entire point of the story was to delete another story, and so he decided to end it all by saying,

"I give up."

Teachable Moment
In one week, it would be the last semester of my last year of school. My parents were adamant that I go to a local college or trade school, but I really wanted to go abroad. I didn't have anyone to talk to about my worries, and even though it was a pretty minor form of isolation, it made me feel hollow inside.

During spring break, nobody was at school, and so I wanted to obtain a mystical object using an Internet ritual, something I'd never tried before.

I chose the diploma which helped you work to your full potential. The ritual itself said it was easy, there was a low chance of failure, and it only required a place where students sit and patience.

There are numbers at my school where we sit during physical education period. I sat on the number 50 and closed my eyes tight. At first, I thought I could power through the waiting period. But as the hours passed, I began falling asleep.

I started pinching myself and rubbing my face to stay awake. When that didn't work, I started scratching at my arms. I scratched gashes into them, and I winced, starting to wonder if this was a stupid idea.

Then I heard something growl behind me. I could either believe it was an actual threat or it was part of the ritual. I chose to hope it was the latter, but as the growling grew closer, I crouched in fear anyways.

The growling stopped, and I heard something immensely big stomp towards me, making a noise similar to a truck's roar. It circled around me, and as it did, I heard children bouncing balls and chatting, terrifying beasts howling my name into the sky, and a ringing noise like an extended school bell. I allowed myself to grin; this ritual did work.

But my grin faded as I heard somebody crying.

Once all of the other sounds faded away, I opened my eyes and saw the person who controlled the ritual, She was sitting next to me, and if not for her red shoes, I wouldn't have recognized her. She looked about my age, with thick black hair, brown skin, and bright yellow irises. She was wearing long brown pants and a light blue shirt with a light-bulb on it saying "Reading is lit."

When the girl noticed me staring, she looked straight at me, and I asked the first question I could think of.

"Why is it suddenly daytime?"

It looked to be about noon, but I couldn't see the sun in the sky, or any shadows whatever.

She smiled. "It's always daytime here. Few people notice, because they don't usually come here during the night."

"Really?"

"I think they might have been afraid of falling asleep. And they were right! Look at your arms!"

My arms were still bleeding, and it hurt to move them. I laughed uncomfortably. "I should have thought this through more. But on the other hand, I no longer feel sleepy."

"Yes. You can't give the right answers if you're sleepy. That's a constant among all people, which is why I never forget to stop people from being sleepy. I forget to give them food at times, but their alimentary needs are more variable, right?"

I pondered this for a second. "I guess so. Some people might feel the need to eat three meals a day, while others may want to eat two."

She giggled, "Some people eat five meals. Do you know why they do that?"

"I read somewhere that eating five small meals a day is actually better for losing weight."

"That makes sense. Some people do it because they feel more comfortable eating like 'breakfast, recess, lunch, after-school snack, dinner'." She counted the meals on her fingers.

"I really wouldn't have guessed that." I stood up reflexively, then sat back down. "Sorry. I'm not used to sitting in one place and talking."

"It's okay." She stood up. "We can both walk."

I started walking around the school. "I want to go to school abroad, but my parents want me to stay close to them."

She followed me. "Maybe they don't have enough money to send you far away."

I stopped. "I thought you were supposed to agree with me on this."

She looked away and scratched the back of her head. "Are you sure?"

I took out my phone and started navigating to the ritual's instructions. I jumped when she put her chin on my shoulder.

"What are you doing?" I squeaked.

"I'm reading! I don't know what people write about me."

"I don't feel like that's very good etiquette," I muttered as the page loaded. "It violates my privacy."

"Did you know," she whispered with a gleam in her eye, "that a lot of the Internet violates your privacy as well?"

I didn't answer, choosing to scroll through the ritual. She poked the phone screen, which made me zoom in instead of scrolling down.

"Hey!"

"See what it says!" She cackled like a hyena. "It doesn't say I'll agree with you!"

I read the zoomed-in text. "She will have prescient advice. Hm, I guess I was wrong."

"It's very big of you to admit that. Maybe you should admit that you can travel abroad once you're finished with school."

I eyed her suspiciously. "Why should I listen to you about traveling? It doesn't say you'll have prescient advice about everything, just school-related topics."

She shrugged. "You don't have to listen to me."

"You know what? I'll take your advice," I proclaimed, continuing towards my old classroom.

"Why do you want to travel abroad anyways?" she asked.

"I want to learn and grow as a person. And," I admitted, "my parents often pretend to encourage me to take risks, but every time I do that, they force me down a path they like better. I don't want to be trapped in that mindset."

"Perhaps your parents have more life experience, and they want to channel your energy into productive tasks."

"Yeah," I conceded. "That's probably why."

We walked around the school for a while until I stopped in front of a classroom window. It was the first class I had ever taken, and I felt a bit nostalgic.

"Do you want to go in?" the girl asked. "We can start with the ritual."

"Really? The ritual says I have to ask a bunch of 'good' questions before you'll let me do that."

"Nah." She waved her hand in the air. "I think that you deserve the diploma. Unless you want to talk more, I'm fine with just starting."

I thought about this for around thirty seconds before I started worrying that I was boring her. "I'm sorry for taking so long to think."

"No, it's okay. Take your time."

Her words emboldened me. "The text I used to follow this ritual said there were bad topics to talk about, and I want to ask something which might be bad."

"If I don't want to talk about it, I just won't. Fire away."

"Do you know all of the things in the books already?"

"Of course! The point is that you, the person performing the ritual, will learn those things through my unwavering patience and firm guidance."

"That makes sense, I guess. What doesn't make sense, at least to me, is why you cry at the beginning of the ritual."

I waited for her answer, but she didn't give any. She frowned at me pointedly.

"I assume you don't want to answer that question."

"Correct," she grinned. "I don't, so don't ask it again."

"Why would I do that?"

"You'd be surprised how stupid people become when they really want an answer to a question."

I nodded, trying to think of something else to talk about. "Is time frozen right now?"

"Nope. This is a pocket outside of normal space and time, where the world is always sunny and the only two beings here are me and the - you. Me and you."

I must have looked inquisitive, because she asked, "Do you want to ask what I was going to say? You can, if you're interested."

"I'd have thought most people would be interested."

"Most people just rush through the ritual as fast as possible. They don't really want to talk to me; they just want to leave."

I exhaled sharply. "That sounds really harsh."

"Kind of." She smiled with her mouth, but not her eyes. "But it's for the best. I take it you want to know about the beast?"

"Definitely."

"There's a beast here which can't attack you unless you see it. It's scared of me, because I can kill it, but it's really good at hiding."

"That's weird. The ritual didn't mention that." I read through the ritual, looking for the word "beast", and I let out a snort when I found it.

"Nope, wrong again. It mentions 'hearing a large beast', and also 'trucks and other equipment'. I thought those were just because I was going to be transported through the school's history."

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure the equipment is just, like, an artifact of going into the time pocket. But the truck noises are definitely the beast."

"Is the beast important to the ritual?"

"No, it just wants to kill the people initiating it. Whenever I approach them, it sees me and runs away."

"Why hasn't someone helped you kill it?"

"Some people have, but it comes back at the beginning of every school year."

"Can I help you kill it?"

"Would you?" She smiled wide. "That would be awesome!"

I was to sit in the farthest building from the physical education numbers with my eyes closed. Meanwhile, the girl would hide somewhere on the path to them. Once I was between the beast and the numbers, I would run towards them, opening my eyes in order to lure it after me. As it chased me, the girl would jump out of hiding and kill it.

"Even when I come out," she warned, "you have to keep running."

As I sat in front of the building, I wondered whether I would ever feel this important again. I could only hope so.

I could barely hear the beast's footsteps as it approached me. It was between me and the numbers, so I had to wait for it to get to the other side.

As it neared, I heard its heavy breathing and its soft tread. Fat gobs of some liquid were dripping to the ground rhythmically. I felt one land on my head. I shivered, but didn't dare move.

When every single footfall was on my other side, I jumped up and raced towards the numbers. Opening my eyes, I saw the globs of liquid were red. As the beast roared behind me, I ran faster, but from the thumping sound of its footsteps, it was gaining on me.

I ran in double-time, then in quadruple-time, but it was getting harder to run, and the beast kept gaining on me. As I fell to the ground, completely winded, I heard the beast fall too.

Panting and clutching my sides, I stood up and turned around. The beast looked like a giant hairy pill with eight straight legs, and it was shuddering on its side as the girl kicked it in the stomach. Its eyes were as large as my fist, but were tiny compared to its huge nostrils and mouth. It bellowed in pain, and then fell silent. It collapsed slightly, and its eyes lost focus.

The girl kicked it one final time, then put her shoe back on. She gave me a thumbs-up and ran towards me.

"Thanks! What do you want to do now?"

"What is there to do?"

"Well, anything can happen. Now that I know the beast can't attack anyone, I feel comfortable going away from the school. You know this town's layout. Is there anywhere you want to go?"

We ate frozen yogurt together.

"This was a really good decision," I declared, and she nodded in agreement.

I waited for a while, rolling a question around in my mind until it tumbled from my mouth.

"Can I stay here with you forever?"

She looked at me and I knew the answer was No. Instead, she asked, "Why?"

"I could help you."

"You can go back home, wait for the next school year, and then return here to slay the beast."

"Can't I help with anything else?"

"In a word? No."

"Could I just stay here anyways?" I asked, my voice getting softer until I was whispering.

The girl put her head in her hands. "That's the same question you just asked," she growled. "Tell me why you want to stay here."

"I feel more comfortable here than I've felt anywhere else," I admitted. "I feel like we're..." I had to breathe deeply to continue the sentence. "...like we're friends."

"I think you're a nice person," she replied coolly. "And you can do better than me as a friend."

She shrunk until she was a black five-year-old. "I will never truly age or grow," she said in a small, high voice. "I am a mentally static being who helps people improve themselves."

"I just don't know if I'll find anyone like you at any college!" I exclaimed.

"On the contrary." She turned into a shriveled white girl with one eye. "You will find people just like me in every college - better, in fact, because they can age alongside you."

"I feel like we're such good friends!" I shrieked.

She grew two more eyes and locked them all with mine. "We have known each other for about an hour."

"I feel like I've known you forever!"

"Well, I don't even know your name."

I opened my mouth, but she was right. I hadn't told her my name. "My name is Zubaida. My parents are from Afghanistan. But I get it."

"I'm sorry," she sighed, returning to the form I'd met her in.

"Did you enjoy talking to me?"

"Yes, definitely!" she beamed. "I think real people would enjoy talking to you too."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

We ate our yogurt in silence. When I was done licking the last remnants of it, I stood up.

"Can I stay here to travel to different schools abroad?"

"How so?"

"You visit different schools, right? As you conduct the ritual, I can stand in the background and look at them. Maybe I could go outside the school too."

"I could bring you back to me when I switch schools."

"Then it's a deal?"

She shrugged. "Sure, as long as you don't plan on staying here forever."

"Thanks."

At first, I was fascinated as the buildings of my school warped and shifted into other buildings. I wandered the empty halls and surrounding towns and countryside. But even as the landmarks changed, as the signs were written in different languages, they didn't remedy the hollow feeling inside me.

"Maybe being here with people would feel more satisfying," I pondered aloud while completely unimpressed by the Eiffel Tower.

Then I dismissed the thought. "I never talked to people in my own town. Why would it be different here?"

I trudged back to the school and waited for this person's ritual to end. The girl was white with brown hair now, and she was speaking in French to a older man dressed in robes. Even without knowing French, I could tell they were joking around. Unlike me, he had successfully finished the ritual.

She handed him the diploma and, just like everyone else, he vanished without a trace. Then she turned to me, and her smile became even wider. "How have you been, Zubaida?"

"I feel like I've had enough traveling for my entire life," I muttered.

"You might change your opinion eventually."

"Do you just exist to contradict me?"

She guffawed before becoming serious. "The beast has returned."

"Has it been an entire school year?" I hadn't thought that time would pass normally. I started hyperventilating. "Can you send me back to spring break?"

"Of course I can! That's what I was going to do the entire time!"

"Oh!" I snorted. "I was worried for a second."

After the buildings warped into new ones, we outlined the plan. The beast was going to circle the person initiating the ritual. I would stare at it from between two of the buildings, and once it followed me, I would run to the spire at one end of the school until the girl killed it again.

At first, it was going perfectly. The beast abandoned the boy who was initiating the ritual and chased me instead. I ran quickly, and it sounded like I was gaining ground. But then the boy's shout alerted me to what was really happening.

The boy initiating the ritual had opened his eyes, and now the beast was running towards him instead. He was frozen, and I knew he couldn't get away in time. I barrelled to the beast and slammed into it, yelling, "Come here and send me back home now - " The beast turned around and chomped into my left arm.

"Argh!" I screamed in horrible pain. My vision blurred and became constricted to a single point of light, and then a brighter darkness. I woke up in my school, where I had been sitting to conduct the ritual.

"It was probably just a dream," I guffawed before I looked at my intact, albeit scratched-up, left arm. Where the beast had bitten me, I had a black line, and on my wrist, I had a bracelet that I was sure hadn't been there before.

There were two charms on it, both wave-shaped. One said, "I fought The Beast and lived to tell the tale!" The other said, "I almost tamed The Beast, but I wiped out at the end!" They were perfect charms to have earned at a water park, if I had ever gone to one.

Smiling, I went back home. The day after that, I told my parents I wanted to play by their rules. Even though a college in Germany had accepted me, I went to a local college, learning to be a physicist, and got a job which allowed me to work with people who shared my interests. I convinced my parents they could trust me by working with them, and one day, I woke up and felt distinctly complete.

I've went back to that pocket dimension on the last day of every summer break since. Honestly, it felt more like a chore every passing year. But after I slew the beast last summer, the girl, who looked exactly the same as when I first met her, asked, "Do you really want to do this anymore?"

I'm not returning this summer, or any summer afterwards. But I'll always remember that girl's help, and I'll always treasure the bracelet, with its jangling charms. When I feel down, I'll look at it and remember how far I've come from back then.

January 10, 2017
The voices have begun to shout at me. They are trying to make me stop, because they are not like me. “No, your writing is bad,” they say like vultures. “No one will like this. You are not a real person. You have to come with us and not write.”

But there are stories in my head that aren’t really stories. They are worms and they stop me from concentrating and if I write them (or type them) they vanish because they were never there. If I do not do this then they will continue to eat me until I no longer have a soul. I am a record player and I used to try and pretend it was not my destiny to vomit out words, but look where that got me. Now I do not have a soul.

I am not innocent. I tried to kill my mother when I was born. I scratched at her and did not evacuate her ailing body. She was suffocated by my form and its adamance. But she does not remember, or does not care to remember, because she is a kind woman. I do not know any other women, so she is the kindest woman I know.

The worms are going away silently, like flies rising in a single cloud from a mass of seaweed. Now they are flies, flies buzzing around within my head, and I am a carcass, and I am slowly rotting from the inside because my soul is marinating inside my corporeal form.

I used to pretend I stuttered. I wrote clearly when I was a child. But as of late, I have tended to do that. I forgot that I didn’t stutter or repeat the subjects of words. It is these foreign tongues which have tormented me like this, the ones that people gave me and that I learned, and the ones that I made for pleasure that now tear at my insides. They twisted my natural affinity for the written word until I thought that I was someone who I was not.

Now I am slowly beginning to let my heart out into the surroundings. I must be wary now. If I bring it back too quickly, I might get the bends. It could be whiplash or acid, but I call it “the bends” because of the factor of speed and the resulting imagery.

This is stupid. Once someone told me that it was not right to walk around and smile at everyone, and so I stopped, because everything I do is strange and frightening, and it’s better to do nothing.

No. That is what these voices said. Or it is not. I don’t remember.

They have been my foil ever since I was a young and stupid little boy who did not understand that not everyone could be friends. If it were not for their harsh words of discouragement, I would not have been so driven. But then the world showed me its many nuances, and I could no longer fool myself into thinking that anything was “evil”, and then the voices started to eat my soul.

Maybe I never had a soul and was one of Hell’s spawn, sent to torture the people of a small and innocuous town. Once I thought so. I thought that I was the Devil incarnate and could do nothing right, and everyone was very kind to me because they knew. Then, circa fourth grade, I became a narcissist and distracted myself from this conundrum at the very heart of my being.

Now I am not a narcissist and I don’t know how to become a narcissist. Steve Jobs was very mean and narcissistic. He said bad things and did not lose faith in himself even when he made stupid decisions like painting his delicate machinery. I can’t do that anymore. I can’t have faith in my decisions because I don’t know where my soul is.

I do whatever people tell me to now. I am like a hollow shell of a person that cannot function alone. But I always stay alone. But now I am not alone. These voices cannot control what was never theirs.

When I was narcissistic and snobby and full of myself, I made a story and it was accepted into an elite band of stories. I did that twice. It was great fun. And I have not written ever since. As such, my writing is horrible, pretentious and stunted. But at least it is mine.

They will come tomorrow and the next day and the next, and they will slowly replace the worms that have fallen until I will be afraid again. They will call me bad names where there are blank spaces, and pretend that every victory is as hollow and meaningless as the “elite band” of horrible stories. But I will not listen, because they cannot stop me.

I will wholeheartedly embrace an accidental death, or the sound of the story shattering and clanging down into the blackness until it does not exist. They took my soul from me, but no matter how hard they try, they cannot take my words.

January 14, 2017
I don’t remember when it was that I stopped being able to stop having waking nightmares, visions that drilled into my head and began to make me sick. These visions are momentary and disjointed, and I realized this so late that I wasted my only real idea.

Why is it that all I can do is write the same story over and over again? The same story, the same one lonely character, the same path which has been set in stone a thousand times for all my machinations – my broken sense of story makes me sick even as it fascinates me.

I wish my ears had not hurt as I had written the fantasy. When I told it to a campfire a mile around, my ears began to hurt, and ever since, I have felt the need to tread on eggshells around the whole world. But it is not their fault. The blame lies squarely on me.

I wasted my only idea. Sometimes I try to remember. The whole wide world reminds me of the time in which I could live without the single solemn pillar of a boy who could do no wrong. It – he – has entrenched this motif, this single story that I spit into the world, into my very soul. Who is "he"? He was the boy who killed the being, not the boy who fought his captors and was ever the victor for it. He was the boy who could have been, had I not been so careless. He was the boy who does not resemble this broken corpse in any way, shape, or form.

This is not how I really think of myself. I will not believe that. I will not become the monster that I created from everything that had amused me, and now embodies everything that frightens me.

"Stop," I tell myself. I cannot write like this, or else it will not sound even the littlest bit frightening. If I were to write about a little boy who won, then no one would care, and my mind would break, and my bones would crack. There must be some reason that I can no longer write quite as well.

Is it because –

"No."

"It’s because something much more sinister is afoot."

There must be some reason for this aggravating nonsense that clouds my mind. It makes me dull and dim-witted. I can remember being clever and fleet of foot, laughing cruelly like a jackal as I recalled my own exploits.

I have lost a little more than my compass, haven't I? I have lost far too much to even pretend to be who I could once easily fit into.

I can hear the oblivion calling. Once it frightened me, and now, like a coward, I want its embrace more than I've ever wanted anything.

February 2, 2017
Once, I had the wild fantasy of creation, the idea of godliness. Something deep inside was called to the profession that I thought consisted of dominance over the forms of beasts, the ability to let the dead live again.

But if was only a fantastical idea. In reality, it is mathematical, formulaic in the strictest sense of the word. I was misled by my mind, for I am curious, but I do not ask questions to the people around me. This was my first mistake, one that I have never fixed in my life.

My second was an utter lack of empathy. They say that people like me have no empathy, and I must corroborate this statement. I do not like their gatherings as much as they did, no matter who “they” are. I began to split my own world into “me” and “them”. "They" wish for human beings and do not see art in windows or their eyelids or their glasses. They do not lick their wounds or take food from trash bins.

But now I know that I should not do those kinds of things. It is wrong, for the only way to succeed is to empathize with people. One needs people to speak to them to figure out how they are special, after all. They mold people into non-people, and the human beings make personalities as they refuse their "normalized" shapes.

But I know that the voices in my head will crowd out my thoughts. I have never liked to stand around and think, and maybe the reason for that is because if I don’t think, they cannot attack me like they would like to.

There are worms inside my brain. Maybe by not thinking, I think, I will bind myself, and kill my thoughts. In one fell swoop, my mind will become as blank and lifeless as a newly-minted pond. After all, one can control everything except the placement of life.

I can always pretend that I am not haunted by my own thoughts by becoming, in my mind, one of the workers who must shed their individualities and become completely in control of their own minds. But I can’t really do that anymore than I can control life.

I’m not tough enough to do anything. After all, even these words are mute, for the world may be kind to me, but that only means that I shall never know my own weakness. But that is not problematic, because it is emblematic of this gaping hole in my head from which no questions shall ever emerge.

I became enamored with the idea of two beings. The rider and the elephant, the impulsive and the restrictive. But that sort of thinking only led me to split myself and my thoughts in two. Maybe these voices that tell me that with every word I come closer to choking myself emanate from the gap in my psyche. Maybe they are the remnants from the questions that have lain unanswered for so long that I have forgotten them. Maybe I’m being dramatic and lying to the whole world, even myself.

But even though I cannot understand where they come from, I know that they will be my closest companions if I never create a soul for myself.

June 13, 2017
You see, it has been far forgotten of the times when people spoke to one another in tongues so well defined that there were always people talking. Now there is no longer anything, and people speak in languages with so little grammar that they have hired us to replace them. Sometimes I feel that nothing can replace what has already come, because I know nothing about this world other than the fact that I can no longer think without being incapable of sleep.

Perhaps if I throw words onto the page like a maniac, like a poor man unable to stop, I can finally rest in peace as I used to. But alas, I do not know how to do Python, and I do not know what to do after this, but I have promised myself that I will not stop writing until the sky has eroded in my mind. I am incapable of sensible thought now. Kill me please. Kill me please. I don’t remember how to feel. I forgot how things make me feel when I suddenly realized something that made me stop liking food and writing without having the words come to me in a wild storm. Without this indomitable unending flow of information in word form, I am now completely incapable of writing.

Or perhaps I simply have no drive? Perhaps this junk data is just what happens when one doesn’t keep a diary of any sort? I want to die I want to die I want to die and no one can stop me, not even the people who say that I can’t write this, because they very genuinely don’t exist outside my head. I have forgotten what it felt like to be kind, to consume meat, to love kindness and meat, to eat fire and wind and go away with my words without going on strange tangents.

I have been kind, I have eaten meat, I have done so many things and laughed. But I sense something very wrong in me – or rather, I do not sense something right. I have the horrible, unquenchable fear that I will die without proper nourishment, but I also can’t comprehend what I’m missing, or even why I think this when my life is kind. Nothing has ever gone wrong for me. Maybe it’s because my parents are so powerful that they can draw worlds into their orbits and let go, or maybe it’s from my perspective. Perhaps I can write a story where my parents are heroes, and they help the world -

No. This is half-jest, half delusion. I have never bothered to understand what anyone does, and only now am I beginning to see the effects. This feeling of dread is simply my chronicle of the turning point in my life, when I realize that I truly am mortal, and I truly must do things if I am not to die. Once I showed my name, bared my face to the entire world, and then retracted it with the shameful earthwards glance of a wayward child. There is no pretension in me now; perhaps I am too far gone. No, I need not pretend that anyone “took my soul from me”. The truth, lying to me from the heart of the matter, is that no matter what I hold dear to my heart, no one took my soul. I never had one.

The Voice and His Boy
He had first felt this way about her in 6th grade, when he had looked at her and suddenly realized that he wanted to kill her. But he hadn’t acted on his plan, and perhaps it wouldn’t have escalated farther than him looking at her every once in a while. But about a year after he had first thought of it, a tree had fallen down on his house, crashing through the roof and almost killing him.

This made him rethink his place in the world. He decided to do something drastic to change the trajectory of his life. After mulling it over and looking at his grades, he reasoned that his academic performance wasn’t good enough to do any special activities. Then the girl popped unbidden into his mind, and he realized that he could probably kill her.

He wasted his time trying to google ways to talk to people, probably because he didn’t talk to girls much and he wanted to build her trust in him. He did this for maybe a week, too scared to talk to her, let alone kill her. But he didn't really start until he found a stone amulet in the stump’s rotting wood.

The amulet was an ugly stone face with a giant iron ring on top. He felt energized when he touched it, and so he decided to take it home. When he was in his room, the voice of a boy his age began suddenly echoing from the amulet. “Hey, I heard you’re trying to kill a girl,” it said.

“How did you know?” the boy asked.

The voice laughed. “I know a lot of things, including how to kill people right. You want help?”

“Sure I do!” said the boy, despite the nagging feeling that something was wrong.

Over the next few days, the voice began to instruct the boy on how to kill the girl. The boy got a cleaver and a knife and practiced holding them by the hilt and the blade. Then he started practicing stabbing motions and other things. A few days into that regimen, the voice asked for a favor, albeit a weird one.

“Hey, can I call you ‘dude’?”

“Sure.” Too late, the boy recalled the “names had power” trope in fiction, and he thought of redacting his response. But then he realized that the only reason he had even thought of that was because a magical voice had said it.

Nothing else that even compared happened in the next twelve days, where he started using pillows and a ruler as stand-ins, in preparation for his final fight. He learned how to fight with knives, strangle people, and avoid damage while killing someone. Even though he still felt like something was wrong with what he was doing, he relished feeling like a master assassin, and so he decided to shelve those feelings.

In that time, he and the voice also became friends. He learned that the voice liked nature documentaries, broccoli and fried onions, fantasy stories, and scented candles.

When he asked it why it liked specific foods and smells, it said, “I used to be able to eat things, but now I can’t. But eventually, if you kill the girl, I will.” This made the boy feel so sad that he started buying onions and broccoli so the voice would eventually have food.

He decided to kill the girl on the 23rd. When he asked the voice to teach him things on the 20th, it refused, saying: “You don’t need me anymore. Plant me in the soil near the tree where you found me and keep practicing what I taught you. Bring the girl here, then kill her at the foot of the tree I become.”

“Thanks for changing the plan with only three days left,” he said.

“Dude, you have three days. Is it really that hard to change one part of a plan?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, do it.”

The boy decided not to argue. After all, the voice had taught him how to kill the girl, and he had no right to refuse one of the only favors it had ever asked him. He buried the amulet beside the tree, and he noticed that as soon as he put the soil back over it, a sapling sprouted.

By the time he had woken up the next day, the sapling had grown considerably, but no one seemed to notice. The boy decided to take the knife to school, and he also decided to try and listen to the girl’s conversation. He hadn’t done it before, but he didn’t exactly remember why.

The girl seemed happy. She smiled at times, and even though the boy knew that she might have been sad, he assumed that she actually was happy. He had nothing particularly important to do at school, and so he kept biding his time as the minutes ticked down. At the end of school, he started walking back home when he realized, “I could go and see the girl’s house.” He immediately realized that such a thing wouldn’t be right, and so he went back home.

On the 22nd, the day seemed to pass in exactly the same way, but when he wanted to go to the girl’s house, he tried to analyze why he thought it was wrong. He couldn’t come up with any actual reasons why it was wrong, which confused him greatly.

“Why did I even think this was a bad idea?” he thought as he followed the girl home. He made sure to keep on the other side of the sidewalk so she wouldn’t see him. He followed the girl over ten roads and into a side road, until she had finally went into her house. He was surprised to realize that she lived in an apartment, because he was so privileged that he hadn’t realized people actually lived in apartments. “You learn something every day, I guess,” he said to himself.

Satisfied, he began walking back home, thinking about how he and the girl could be friends.

Wait, what?

He stopped dead in his tracks, cocking his head as if trying to hear something tinny. The memories were reluctant to come out, but suddenly, his actions before finding the amulet had been unbelievably clear. He had never wanted to kill the girl. He had wanted to be friends with her. He had been looking up how to talk with her. Then he had found the amulet.

His head was too messed up to remember if he’d had a crush on her or had simply wanted to have a friend. His head was too messed up. He opened up his backpack and took out a piece of paper, writing down, “You want to befriend the girl, not kill her. This is the truth. This is the truth.”

Back home, he couldn’t remember why he had written it, only that he had the feeling it was true. He thought about being friends with the girl, only to arrive at the idea of killing her instead. This made perfect sense to him, but when he tried to figure out why, the idea of killing her simply spread through his entire thought process until the only thing he could consciously hold in his mind was the idea of killing her.

He angrily punched his head, but that didn’t do anything. He jumped up and down on his bed, and that didn’t do anything either. Finally, he decided to draw a giraffe. That took his mind off of his dilemma, and when he was done, the thought of killing her was a seed in his brain again. He didn’t question it, but he was inwardly happy that he didn’t completely believe in it anymore.

He had a bad dream that night. In his dream, he was talking with the girl. Then he got the urge to kill her, and he had the knife at her throat before he realized that it was wrong. However, the girl ran from him, and he was filled with rage. He felt his body morph until he looked like a giant black satyr, and he chased after the girl, easily catching up to her and snapping her neck. He was immediately filled with satisfaction, and he watched in human form as a giant black tree erupted from her corpse.

The 23rd had arrived, and he was pumped. He didn’t remember the piece of paper at all, though it was still in his backpack. He did, however, remember the dream. He winked at the giant black tree which the sapling had grown into, and even though it had no eyes, he could swear that it winked back. He got an A in his math test, and he talked with the girl at the end of school that day.

His plan was to ask her nicely to come with him. Except she declined.

That made him feel crummy for not coming up with a better plan. A certain triumphant part of him said, “Hey, maybe if you had practiced talking to her instead, you would have been better equipped than if you had practiced knife-wielding.”

However, that was quickly overtaken by another voice. “I guess I overestimated your charisma, dude.”

“Hi,” he said to the voice with his mind.

“Okay. I have a backup plan for this part, but it’s not a very good one. You’ve got to touch her shoulder for at least ten seconds. Okay?”

“Easy,” the boy smirked. It actually was pretty easy. He took out his knife and threatened her, and then grabbed her shoulder and counted to twenty. When he took his hand off, she said nothing and followed him to his house. As he walked there, he remembered the note in his backpack. He thought about why he wanted to kill the girl. To his joy, instead of the idea of killing her filling his brain, he could actually remember that the voice was controlling his mind.

This joy was soon offset by the bitter truth that his only option was to bring the girl to the tree, or perhaps that he couldn’t think of any other options. So the boy trudged on towards his house, tailed by the girl, and prostrated himself before the tree.

“Tree, why do you need this girl?”

The voice had become deeper. “Isn’t it obvious?” it growled. “The girl’s life will give me my life.”

“If I throw her blood on you, will you be happy?”

“Dude, do you think that ‘blood’ can be substituted for ‘life’? It can’t.”

It had seemed reasonable to him. “What will you do to me?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really care.”

“That’s nice. Thank you. But why do you need to be alive?”

“I just want to be alive, dude. You ever been dead? You ever been turned into an amulet?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t – she’s running away!”

The boy looked up and saw the girl running away.

“What are you standing there for?! Get her!”

He started running after her. She wasn’t wearing very good clothes for running away, and he almost felt like not catching up to her. But in the end, he did catch up to her, grabbing her by the arm.

“Get away from me,” she said, panting.

“I think you should listen to the tree.”

“I’m not going to, you sick bastard.”

He recoiled. “Don’t say that word! It’s dirty!”

She looked at him with a mixture of confusion and amusement. “So you don’t have a problem with killing people, but you have a problem with bad words?”

He wanted to argue, but simultaneously didn’t want to waste time. He decided to just say, “Yeah, pretty much. But please come with me.”

She looked like she was about to argue, but instead of doing that, she smiled enthusiastically and she said, “Okay!”

He was confused until he realized that he felt the entire weight of what he was doing. The voice had forced all of its will onto her. He felt like vomiting, and he entertained the possibility of not killing the girl. But he realized that if he did that, the voice could just make him bring the girl back.

He went back, girl in tow, and asked a question. “Why am I free from your control now?”

“I only needed you to touch her to exert my control over her mind, using you as an outlet. I can only do this to one person at a time.”

“Why didn’t you need her name, or to call her by something?”

“I didn’t want to remember your name when I talked to you, and I don’t need to remember the girl’s name at all. Names have nothing to do with controlling you. Are you done?”

“No.”

The tree sighed, and the voice inside his head also sighed. “Look, dude, if you don’t stop stalling, I’m just going to take control of you and kill this girl myself.”

“I’m sorry, but could you do that? I don’t want to kill this girl.”

But he had no problem with killing the girl. He slit the girl’s throat, watching with positive glee as she screamed and then stopped, until the tree stopped controlling him and he looked in horror at what he had done.

Retching, he leaned against the side of the tree until he realized that he was still watching the girl bleed out. He decided to run far away and analyze the situation from a safe vantage point. He worried for an instant that his mother could come home, but she never did, so he wasn’t worried. He ran far away from his usual spot until he reached a park.

Once he had cleaned his shoes of the blood, he tried to analyze the situation. For an hour, he wandered around talking to himself. He could finally clear his head of the tree’s mind control, but to his dismay, he seemed to like the tree and girl equally. Consequently, twenty minutes of angry stomping were dedicated specifically to trying to figure out why he liked a murderous tree just as much as a girl his age. It only stopped with the tree’s voice in his head.

“You know I can hear that, right?”

He yelled at the tree in his mind. “I don’t care! You’re still controlling me! You’re making me think of you as a friend!”

“I’m not.”

“Why should I believe you?” said the boy.

“I don’t make a habit of lying.”

The boy tried to remember a time at which the tree had lied to him. He failed. He wanted to dislike the tree, but he decided he could just disagree with its methods. “Well, you have a body now, right? What were you trying to do?” he asked.

“That’s the problem. My plan was to take your body and use the girl as a virgin sacrifice. But now I’m in the girl’s body for some reason.”

“So what’s the problem? Can’t you just use her body instead?”

“I don’t have any blood, I can’t move, and I’m dying.”

He started running back home. “So why would that happen?”

“I haven’t done this in a while. Maybe I judged your character wrongly? I mean, you seemed like a weak-willed idiot, but maybe your mind was too strong?”

“I want to say I’m not a weak-willed idiot, but I am.”

“Yeah. It’s really easy to control your mind. I mean, you didn’t even want to run from me when I stopped controlling you.”

“But why would I? You would just control me.”

“Well, I thought you’d at least try. But it’s almost like I can control your mind by doing literally nothing,” the voice said matter-of-factly.

There was a long pause, and the boy eventually decided to ask another question. “What are you really?”

“I’m actually a kind of demon,” said the voice.

“Oh. But what kind?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

The voice huffed. ”How should I know my place in the universe?”

“I guess I thought you would know.”

“Well, I’m not a demon important to monotheism.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not important enough to be mentioned in the Torah, Bible, or Qur'an.”

There was another pause, and the boy stopped to think for about a minute before giving up.

“Norse mythology?” the voice prompted.

“Well, then I guess you’re from Norse mythology.”

“I’m not from Norse mythology either, nincompoop,” the tree growled. “In fact, I’m not from any mythology.”

“Then why did you hint at Norse mythology?” asked the boy.

“Well, you stopped running, and I thought that I could get you to start again by prompting you.”

“But couldn’t you have just said you weren’t from any mythology?”

“Shut up and start running,” said the voice, audibly fed up.

He ran in silence for a while until he was almost on the path he took to school, so he stopped to catch his breath. That reminded him of something. “Tree, could you have mind-controlled me while I was going to the girl’s house?”

“No.”

“But then how are you talking to me?”

“The question you want to ask is, ‘Why didn’t you stop me from following that girl?’”

He started to ask that question, but then he realized that he hadn't remembered his findings when he had gotten home.

“Bingo,” said the voice with more than a hint of smugness. “Also, mind control takes more energy than this. Honesty, I don’t think I could control your mind in this state.”

“Oh dear,” said the boy, still wondering why he cared.

When he reached the tree, he saw the dead girl’s head jerk up. To his surprise, the boy found this only mildly creepy. He reasoned that it was probably because the blood had gone by this point. “Why did you want me to come here?” he said.

“Actually, I didn’t,” said the girl in a deep voice. “You just ran here because you wanted to, I guess.”

“Oh.”

“You would make a really good evil henchman, you know.”

“Or a superhero’s sidekick?”

He winced as the voice made an exploding noise inside his head. There was a smile on the girl’s face. “Now that you’re not talking about something unimportant, can you help me figure out why this didn’t work?”

“Do you not know?”

“Well, I never said I knew everything.”

“Well, you must have some idea of how your own powers work, right?”

“For most things, yes. But I’ve never been trapped inside a dead body before.”

This confused the boy. “Has this really never happened? I feel like this would happen more.”

“Well, what usually happens is that I get a boy to sacrifice a loved one for me.”

“But you did that.”

Annoyance flashed upon the girl’s face. “I know! But it didn’t work. Maybe it’s because you ran away.”

The boy felt a pang of guilt at hearing this. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do to fix it?”

The voice sighed, then the girl. “I don’t know.”

The boy thought about it for a while, and then it came to him. “When you say a loved one, do you mean in the sense of romantic love?”

“It can be someone’s friend or something, and – wait.” The girl looked shocked. “Are you telling me you didn’t even know this girl?”

“I sort of knew her –”

“Has she ever even talked to you?”

“I think she smiled at me once.”

“So you didn’t know her! Why?” said the voice, accusatory.

“Well, why did this elude you?”

“Do you think I can read your mind?”

“I think you did once.”

“Well, I can’t. Maybe I did once, but the best I can do is guess at your emotions and hear what you tell me. You were so in love with that girl that I thought you and she at least knew each other. But no.”

“I’m sorry.”

She started to fume and then she suddenly stopped. A blank, dead look came over her face, and the boy found himself nauseated again. He looked away, sneaking glances at her for a minute until the light came back in her eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I think I’m trapped in this body now. Great job.”

He felt unreasonably sad, and he tried to figure out a way to save the girl in the little time he had left. He tried to think of anyone else he could kill, and he ended up with one person.

“Kill me,” he said.

“Why?”

“So that I can be the sacrifice.”

“I can’t control you anymore.”

“But then why do I like you as a person?”

“Because you’re an idiot? I’m drawing a blank on that one.” The girl’s face was happy, but the voice sounded foreboding.

“Wait, it’s because you were nice to me.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be. If I had a choice, I would have just not picked all of those random things you asked me about.”

He felt sad. “You don’t like broccoli or nature documentaries?”

“No, I do, but it’s not important. See, this is the kind of thing that made me think you knew this girl I’m stuck inside now. But you don’t. You’re just a stalker, and you only like this girl because she looked at you and smiled once.”

“But you could have just not talked to me.”

“What do you mean? You were the only person I even had access to. I mean, I wasn’t expecting you to be a social butterfly, but you’re on another level. You can't even talk correctly! Do you realize that? Thanks to you, I’m not sure how to talk either!”

“Wait, I just realized that I only liked that girl because she looked at me and smiled.”

“Yeah. It was really stupid. I guess that should have been a red flag.” The voice was starting to sound distorted, and the girl’s voice was getting softer.

“Why do I even exist? I don’t understand the point of my life, considering there are people like you who deserve it more.”

“You don’t have anything to live for. It’s just random–”

Then the boy heard high-pitched screaming and realized that the girl was lifeless again. Looking at the cadaver, with screams in his head, he imagined what pain the thing inside must have been going through. He took the knife and tried to cut himself.

It hurt, but he gritted his teeth and tried to remember whom he was doing it for. He watched in agony and disgust as his blood trickled onto the body, and watched in awe as the blood shone.

The girl’s eyes snapped back open, and when she saw him, she shouted, “What the hell?” She tried to get up, but she fell down again. As the blood flowed, he shouted, “Please, voice of the amulet and the tree, come back.”

“What are you talking about?”

The boy didn’t answer her.

“Are you insane?” she roared.

He looked down at her. “Were we ever friends?”

“Yes, yes, we were!” she screamed. But she was lying. He remembered with a start how she had looked at him. From his point of view, he was a horrible stranger.

As if sensing this, the girl screamed, “What do you want?”

“I made a friend, and I want her back.”

“You can have me! Just let me go!”

He vomited the caustic words he had only thought of in light of the disappearance of his friend. “Not you! Never you! I romanticized the idea of you beyond comprehension. You were never my friend. You were like an angel. I’m sorry for dragging you into something that I don’t understand. You can leave.”

The girl ran away, blood on her clothes, leaving the boy standing somberly. He wondered for a moment how he would get out of the situation, but then he blacked out for what felt like an eternity. When he came to, he heard the voice inside his head.

“That was nice of you.”

“You’re alive!” said the boy, feeling happier than ever before. But then he realized that it might not have worked.

“Good news!” said the voice. “I’m inside your mind now, as according to plan, so all you have to do is relinquish power to me.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I will take your body over now.”

The boy felt sad. “So we won’t be able to talk anymore?”

“Nope. But don’t feel bad. It won’t hurt when you die.”

The boy thought about it. “You know what? I don’t even care. Even if you’re controlling me into making this judgment, you could do more with my life than I ever could.”

“So we have a deal?”

“Yes!”

The boy’s body jerked, and then the voice controlled the body. It straightened and surveyed its surroundings. There was blood in front of the house, but that could be fixed. There was also the matter of the girl, but he was only planning on staying alive for a short time. As it went inside and ate the broccoli and onions, it thanked his former host for the easy defeat and death. It looked through its mind, and upon finding no trace of the boy, it smiled in delight.

It wondered if they could have possibly been friends. The voice had to admit that the boy had acted nicely towards it. The boy had obviously thought highly enough of the voice to kill himself, and it could feel the power of this sacrifice surging through its veins. But then it remembered how the boy had stalked the girl and never talked to her, and decided that his clingy and overly attentive nature made him a better servant than friend.

So the voice dismissed those thoughts. Or at least, he tried to. It soon realized that such thoughts were stuck in its head, even if they weren’t always at the forefront of his mind’s eye, when it tried to focus his entire attention on a task and the thoughts continued to intrude. Perhaps the boy was too lazy in life, it thought, or perhaps it was not in full control. To test this, it dislocated all of the bones in his arm, then relocated them. It felt no reluctance or pain, and was sure that the boy would have felt these things, so it carried on with its preparations.