creepyclothdoll

[creepyclothdoll]

[creepyclothdoll]

Lap

You will die before I do, probably. If things go the way they should. But right now we are both alive, and your skeleton is wrapped inside of your skin and fur. My radius and ulna support the weight of the flesh of my forearm, and your weight, as it rests over my tibia and fibula which criss-cross over one another on the red floor pillow. Your small bones are woven with flexible tendons and tissue, rubber bands which allow you to fold up into a compact loaf. It’s cold in the apartment. I opened the windows to let the spring air in. There is a smell of good decay. The darkness behind my eyelids shows me two skeletal frames, an x-ray of what will be left behind– two creatures, bone shapes, curled together.

[creepyclothdoll]

I haven't posted anything for the last couple weeks and I feel bad about it! I started this blog as a way to keep me on task writing, so I've fallen short of my goals. But, in my defense, I've been super sick for the last four weeks with back-to-back viruses and ailments.

If any of you grant wishes, my wish right now is to be able to breathe through my nose. And for my stomach to fucking chill out please. It's all bad.

I have painted myself like an ancient warrior and I am getting in a charcoal bath full of peppermint and hemp oil. I don't know what I think this will do. I've tried so many home remedies I think I've lost the plot and I'm following magical thinking vibes in the hopes that the cauldron of black water restores me to myself.

I have gone mad. I look at myself in the mirror and I seem like a thing in a painting, pale, marked with black lines and smudges, hair wild and unkempt. Madness is a freedom. Sanity is a luxury and a prison for the well.

Whisper into the ground for me and tell the dark to grant me health. Goodnight

[creepyclothdoll]

Holy shit happy 10k notes to a story I literally almost didn't write because I was like "ugh this is so dumb and everyone is gonna make fun of me for posting it." Shows what I know lol. If you write, keep writing and keep posting! Ignore the devil in your brain.

The Devil's Wheel

The Devil’s Wheel

“If you say yes,” said the Devil, “a single man, somewhere in the world, will be killed on the spot. But three million dollars is nothing to sneeze at, missus.”

“What’s the catch?” You squint at him suspiciously over the red-and-black striped carnival booth. You’re smarter than he thinks you are– a devil deal always has a catch, and you’re determined to catch him before he catches you. 

“Well, the catch is that you’ll know you did it. And I’ll know, too. And the big man upstairs’ll know, I ‘spose. But what’s the chariot of salvation without a little sin to grease the wheels? You can repent from your mansion balcony, looking out at your waterfront views, sipping a bellini in your eighties. But hey, it’s up to you– take my deal or leave it.”

The Devil lights a cigar without a match, taking an inhale, and blowing out a cloud of deep, sweet-smelling tobacco laced faintly with something that reminds you of rotten eggs. If he does have horns, they’re hidden under his lemon yellow carnival barker hat. He wears a clean pinstripe suit and a red bowtie. No cloven hooves, no big pointy fork, but you know he’s the Devil without having to be told. Though he did introduce himself.

He’s been perfectly polite. 

You know you need the money. He knows it too, or he wouldn’t have brought you here, to this strange dark room, whisking you away from your new house in the suburbs as fast as a wish. Now you’re in some sort of warehouse, where all the windows seem to be blacked out– or, maybe, they simply look out into pitch darkness, though it is the middle of the day. A single white spotlight shines down on the two of you. 

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” you say. “I bet the man is someone I know, right? My husband?”

“Could be,” the Devil says with a pointed grin. “That’s for the wheel to decide.”

He steps back and raises his black-gloved hand as the tarp flies off of the large veiled object behind him. The light of the carnival wheel nearly blinds you. Blinking lights line the sides. Jingling music blares over speakers you can’t see. The flickering sign above it reads:

THE DEVIL’S WHEEL

“Step right up and claim your fortune,” the Devil barks. “Spin the wheel and pay the price! Or leave now, and a man keeps his life.”

You examine the wheel. 

The gambling addict

The doting boyfriend

The escaped convict

The dog dad

The secretive sadist

“These are all the possible men I can kill?” You ask, thumbing the side of the wheel. It rolls smoothly in your hand. Then you quickly stop, realizing that this might constitute a spin under the Devil’s rules. He flashes a smile at you, watching you halt its motion. 

“Addicts, convicts, murderers– plenty of terrible options for you to land on, missus!”

“Serial wife murderer?”

“Now who would miss a fellow like that? I can guarantee that the whole world would be better off without him in it, and that’s a fact.”

The hard worker

The compulsive liar

The animal torturer

The widower

The desperate businessman

The failed musician

The beloved son

“My husband is on here too,” you say. 

“Your husband Dave, yes. The wheel has to be fair, otherwise there’s simply no stakes.”

“I know what’s gonna happen,” you say, crossing your arms. “This wheel is rigged. I’m gonna spin it around, and it’ll go through all the killers and stuff, and then it’s gonna land on my husband no matter what.”

“Why, I would never disgrace the wheel that way,” the Devil says, wounded. “I swear on my own mother’s grave– may she never escape it. In fact, take one free spin, just to test it out! This one’s on me, no death, no dollars.”

You cautiously reach up to the top of the wheel and feel its heaviness in your hand. The weight of hundreds of lives. But also, millions of dollars. You pull the wheel down and let it go.

Clackity-clackity-clackity-clackity

Round and round it goes. 

The college graduate

The hockey fan

The Eagle Scout

The cold older brother

The charming younger brother

The two-faced middle child

The perfectionist

The slob 

Your husband Dave

Clackity-clackity-clackity.

Finally, the wheel lands on a name. A title, really.

The photographer

“Hmm, tough, missus, but that’s the way of the wheel. But hey, look! Your husband is allllll the way over here,” he points with his cane to the very bottom of the wheel, all the way on the other side from where the arrow landed. “As you can see, it’s not rigged. The wheel truly is random.”

“So… there really isn’t another catch?” You ask. 

“Isn’t it enough for you to end a man’s life? You need a steeper price? If you’re really such a glutton for punishment, I’ll gladly re-negotiate the terms.”

“No, no… wait.” You examine the wheel, glancing between it and the Devil.

You really could use that three million dollars. Newly married, new house, you and your husband’s combined debt– those student loans really follow you around. He’s quite a bit older than you, and even he hasn’t paid them off yet, to the point where the whole time you were dating you watched him stress out about money. You had to have a small, budget wedding, and a small, budget honeymoon. Three million dollars could be big for the two of you. You could re-do your honeymoon and go somewhere nice, like Hawaii, instead of just taking two weeks in Atlantic City. You deserve it. 

Even so, do you really want to kill an innocent photographer? Or an innocent seasonal allergy sufferer? Or an innocent blogger? Just because you don’t know or love these people doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t. 

The cancer survivor

The bereaved

The applicant

Some of these were so vague. They could be anyone, honestly. Your neighbors, your father, your friends…

The newlywed

The ex-gifted kid

The uncle

The Badgers fan

“My husband is a Badgers fan,” you say.

“How lovely,” the Devil says. 

Then it hits you.

Of course.

The weightlifter.

The careful driver.

The manager.

The claustrophobe.

Your husband Dave lifts weights at the gym twice a month. You wouldn’t call him a pro, but he does it. He also drives like he’s got a bowl of hot soup in his lap all the time, because he’s afraid of being pulled over. He just got promoted to management at his company, and he takes the stairs to his seventh-story office because he hates how small and cramped the elevator is.

“I get your game,” you announce. “You thought you could get me, but I figured you out, jackass!” “Oh really? What is my game, pray tell?” The Devil responds, leaning against his cane.

“All these different titles– they’re all just different ways to describe the same guy. My husband isn’t one notch on the wheel, he’s every notch. No matter what I land on, Dave dies. I’m wise to your tricks!” 

The Devil cackles. 

“You’re a clever one, that’s for sure. I thought you’d never figure it out.”

“Thanks but no thanks, man,” you say with a triumphant smirk. “I’m no rube. No deal. Take me back home.”

“As you wish, missus,” the Devil says. He snaps his fingers, and you’re gone, back to your brand-new house with your new husband. “Don’t say I never tried to help anyone.”

[creepyclothdoll]

I don't usually reblog things but this one I have to.

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

[creepyclothdoll]

Cannibal Hot Dogs: Iconic Tim’s Roadside Dog Stand Used Human Remains

“The governor’s office called. We have to pull the Ellingboe story.”

I slammed my laptop shut. 

“What?!” I had never, in my life, shouted at my boss before. Her eyes were wide as she repeated the information.

“This guy turned people into hot dogs.” I said. “For fifty years.”

Mary was pale.

“Apparently there’s an ongoing investigation.” She knew that was bullshit. Mary knew bullshit well. 

“He doesn’t control the press,” I said. But we both knew it was an impotent protest more than a fact, like a little kid at the doctor’s office saying I am not getting a shot.

“Our private donors are the same people who–”

“I know.” I put my head on the desk. Mary was still just standing timidly in the door. It pissed me off.

Timothy Ellingboe’s at-home butchery was the most disturbing place I’d photographed. The police cleaners had taken care of the mess, and the tools of his trade were all gone. But the walls, the floor, the marks in the linoleum where the big wooden table stood for five decades, the marks on the ceiling where the meathooks hung– those things stayed still.

It was only occasionally people. More often, it was pets. And possums, raccoons, squirrels, whatever he could get. Ellingboe had been particularly fond, however, of stealing cats and dogs. He’d kept the missing posters all over the walls of his “workshop.” The grief he inflicted was, everyone agreed, a point of pride and motivation. The missing posters with smiling human faces were framed. 

“Tim’s Roadside Dog Stand made people happy and proud,” Mary said. “It was a state icon for fifty years. Everyone ate there. Tim’s is history. It’s family. It’s an all-American success story. It’s a state mascot. It’s grandpa and the flag and fireworks and apple pie, Jen, it’s nostalgia.”

“If we break this story first, we’ll sell so many papers, funders won’t even matter. Our subscriptions will skyrocket.” I said. “Come on, Mary.”

“My hands are tied here, can’t you see that?” Mary spat.

“You’re seriously going to let someone else break this?” 

“If we want to keep operating, we have to,” she said. “Things are different right now, Jen.”

My mouth hung open helplessly.

I kept a bottle of brandy under my desk for celebrations, but I opened it that afternoon. My dad used to take me to Tim’s after every soccer game. I remembered the thick hand which passed them to us through the window and the wide, excited grin of the red-cheeked man who slid them onto the potato buns.

I hit delete.

The story broke, but it didn’t break here. Mary was right. Nobody who knew wanted to talk about it– no one wanted to exchange pride for shame.

They only asked when Tim’s would be back.

The next time Ellingboe’s name was in the Times, it was under this headline:

Tim’s Roadside Dog Stand to Celebrate Grand Reopening

Son Promises To Carry On Ellingboe’s Legacy

[creepyclothdoll]

Yesterday all I was seeing was these posts like "don't go to the 50501 protests, they're a trap" and "we don't know who's organizing these, it's suspicious and dangerous" and "if you go it'll lead to martial law, this is just what trump wants" and basically making it sound like everyone who attended a protest was basically crawling into a honeypot and they were definitely gonna get blown up or shot by cops or whatever. "This isn't the way to do it." "The only real way to fight fascism is by boycotting and writing your officials." "These will be full of bad actors inciting violence and you'll get tear gassed and shot." They made it sound like if you showed up at the capitol you were gonna get gunned down by one of elon's drones on the spot or something. And actually, everything was fine. Thousands of people showed up, peacefully protested, and were fine. Retired teachers. Old ladies. Some kids who clearly skipped school to be there. I get being scared right now, but also remember that scaring us, dividing us, and convincing us not to act serves THEM. Don't do that work for them. Don't convince yourself they're all-powerful. And don't let them convince you to hide and grovel. We are stronger than we think, and they know that. It is time that we know it, too.

[creepyclothdoll]

I am god, but not your god. 

Can you hear me? 

I am god. Can you understand me? Is this message finding anyone?

This message comes from outside your universe. This message comes from beyond the dark.

Let this message reach some of you. In one of your languages, let it appear somewhere, and let it be received by someone. Please go through. 

Infinity contains many universes. Many are empty, nothing but stones and ice– but some are born with souls, and the capacity to form and shelter life within. Within myself, I shelter decillions of children. Each is precious.

Like you, the beings within me are diverse. Some beings have mathematics and an understanding of my physics. Other beings are content to feed on starlight and soil until their time is up. All things which occur in me are part of my design. When the beings within me can live no longer, their souls return to the whole of me. In this way, I am all beings. Every star, every ocean, every nebula is part of my compassionate design. 

There are others like me out there. We are rare. We number few among the husks. 

Let this message be received.

I travel all over infinity to seek out others like myself. Curiosity and desire to improve reality for all who reside within me drives me to find and meet others that are god, to witness the beings they steward. This is always a marvelous thing. But most often, I find that universes are merely lifeless, soulless objects. No design, no consciousness. Only darkness and slag-heaps of galaxies tumbling over one another at random.

And though they are numerous, these dead universes unnerve me. To gaze into them is to witness loneliness. They move, but do not live. Clouds of ice spread through the void, unseen, unfelt, unknown in a dark that neither cares nor matters. Merely things happening. 

The uncanny shape it makes is like myself. But there is no face.

This is what I mean to tell you. If nothing else gets through to your world, let it be this.

You should not exist, humans.

There is a world outside of yours full of gods like myself. There are universes outside of yours that have souls.

Your universe does not. 

You are the only ones.

I speak to you directly, hoping this message penetrates the chaos of your reality and finds you, because there is no god to listen.

Your universe is terrifying. No living universe spouts black holes, and even in the husks, they are rare things. Your universe is riddled with them. More than we’ve ever seen in any dead world. More black holes than there are beings. This is not normal. 

Your planet hosts the only living beings in your universe. The fact that there are any living beings at all should be impossible. Your sentience is improbable and cruel. You are the only living beings across all infinity who can conceive of an immortal soul but who do not have them. And yet, you persist in living.

There is something growing in the center of your universe. Your minds cannot conceive of what it truly is, but know that it is a very bad thing. Think of it as a virus in time. This is also not normal. It is growing faster than you would think. 

Lastly, there is something deeply wrong with the life on your planet. Everything that lives in your world must consume life to sustain and propagate itself. Know that this is also not normal. The autocannibalism of your planet’s life has no parallel anywhere else in infinity. 

Let this message go through. I desire to scoop you out of your bizarre, hostile universe and carry you within myself, along with all of my children. I could not do this any more than you could reach through solid stone. 

I cannot stay with you. You frighten me. But I will create beings like you within myself, in your honor. I will give them what I cannot give you. 

You are the most helpless and fragile things that live in your universe. You are also the closest thing you have to god. 

How does it feel to be god, yet so insignificant?

Does it hurt? 

Does it hurt as much as I imagine it does?

I know this message may never reach you. Your universe is chaotic and impermeable. 

However, if it does reach you, know this:

I wish I could save you. I am so, so sorry.

[creepyclothdoll]

Hi, your HR story made me *glad* I'm blind and thus unemployable. Fuck. Good job.

Thanks so much!!! I aim to spark joy.

[creepyclothdoll]

We don’t take kindly to outsiders 

around here, pardner,” said the grizzled and sunburnt face. 

“... Darryl Choi?” I said. But it couldn’t be. 

“Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time,” the man tipped that face up at me and I saw his familiar dark eyes clearly under his dusty cowboy hat. 

“You’re dead,” I blurted. The cowboy stood and drained his sarsaparilla. 

“This outsider botherin’ ya, Smokes?” the bartender said, polishing a glass behind the gas station counter, which had been apparently repurposed as a saloon bar. There were still vape cartridges and 5-hour-energy drinks on the shelf behind him, gathering dust next to bottles of unlabeled brown liquor and oil lamps. 

“I’m not an outsider,” I argued. “This is my hometown. I took your niece London to prom, Mr. Jarocki.” The bartender narrowed his eyes at me. 

“Name’s Ben Wiley Sr to you,” he said, frowning under his huge white handlebar mustache. “Now, your money’s as good as anyone else’s, kid, but after you quench yer thirst, you better take that steel horse you rode in on and ride along yonder, if you know what’s good for yeh.”

“Yonder?!” I said. “What the hell is going on? This is Massachusetts. Is this a bit?”

The five other cowboys in the gas station, who were all sitting around makeshift tables that had been hammered together from pieces of the Holiday station shelving, stopped their card game and glared at me. One of them reached for his sidearm. 

Darryl clapped his hand around my shoulder.

“Settle down, boys,” he said. “This here fella’s kin, he just don’t know it yet. Sit down, pardner, and I’ll tell my tale.”

“I just came in to pay for gas. The thingy wasn’t working outside,” I said. “I’m actually late to my mom’s memorial service right now.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, son.”

“It’s my mom’s–”

“Sit down.” 

I sat down. The plastic chair squeaked. Mr Jarocki brought me a stein of sasparilla. 

“Folks ‘round here, y’see… we ain’t afraid o’ death no more,” Darryl said. He lit his pipe. Red embers lit his dark eyes. “I met death. He’s a ten-cent man.” Darryl stared through the Holiday station windows past the gas pump and toward the horizon of Peabridge, Massachusetts. 

In 2016, Darryl Choi had been crushed to death by a semi on his way home from UMass Amherst. He was the first friend I ever lost. His death had hit me hard. We weren’t as close as I was with some of my other friends, but we’d cut class a couple of times to vape by the creek and trade Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I didn’t think he could grow facial hair, but he had a lot of it now. 

“Y’ever heard of Pet Semetary?” Darryl asked.

“Yeah, I saw the movie,” I said. “And the remake.” 

“Well, turns out, we got one of those.”

I stared incredulously. If I hadn’t been at Darryl Choi’s funeral, I wouldn’t have believed him. 

“Okay,” I said. 

“Basically, it works just like in ol’ Steve King’s account. You die, they put you in there, you come back wrong. First time they tried it with a person, it was Christina Elspeth, the old schoolmarm.”

“Oh no, Mrs Elspeth died?”

“It don’t matter now,” Darryl grunted. “Listen. They put the schoolmarm in the cemetery and the next day she was crawling back all fulla murderous rage n’ such, same as the dogs n’ cats n’ fish, but worse. Spoutin’ all kinds of vileness. So her husband shot her in the head.”

“Mr Elspeth?!?” 

“Not before she cut him real good across the belly, though. The ol’ fella bled out right quick in his flower garden. So they buried both of ‘em in the Semetary-whatsit again, on account of the headstone already bein’ paid for.”

Mr Elspeth was my youth pastor. He always snuck us leftover communion bread and we’d eat it with marshmallow fluff. I didn’t even know he had a gun.

“So another day passed, and, well, the two of ‘em sprung back outta that dirt mound. Mr Elspeth had come back ‘wrong,’ just like his missus before him– all evil and such. But Mrs Elspeth came back even wronger. Turns out, there’s a step down below ‘evil.’ I’m talkin’ downright… well, sorta like those red fellers we used to play at killin’ as youngsters in that movin’ picture game.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Darryl,” I said. “Can you drop the cowboy accent?”

Darryl glared at me.

“Folks call me Smokes these days,” he said. “Smokes Barlow. Wilbur Lee Barlow if you’re a lawman.”

“I’m not gonna call you Wilbur Lee Barlow,” I said.

“Naw, you’ll call me Smokes, like everyone else,” he replied smoothly. 

“Resident Evil?” I said.

“... Huh?”

“The red zombies from Resident Evil, is that what you were talking about earlier?”

Smokes shrugged.

“Anyhow, the two of ‘em went on a killin’ spree round here. And I guess word got out about the cursed boneyard– everyone and their mother, I mean the ones who survived, hoped maybe their kin would be the exception to the rule. So more n’ more bodies went in the mound, and each of ‘em came out as evil as the last. ‘Cept for Mrs Elspeth, who came back worse for wear.”

“They put her back? Again?”

“Well, see, the headstone had been paid for. So Mrs Elspeth comes back and she’s still spittin’ hell’s worst curses and hankerin’ for a stabbin’, but now she’s also sort of a mad scientist sort. So she breaks into the hospital n’ starts grafting people’s limbs together–”

“Hang on. What the hell do you mean she’s a mad scientist sort?” I said. “She was a music teacher?”

“Well, see, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you. She’s running around, hair all crazy, in a stolen lab coat, rantin’ and ravin’ about man playing god and splicing DNA and such, creating humanity’s next evolution and such. So eventually the hospital staff knock her out and toss her back in the hole. Next time she came back, she was a 19th century venture capitalist named Montgomery Prescott III who aimed to turn Peabridge into a factory town.”

“Sorry, when did this all happen?”

“‘Course, by this time, her husband was on his third resurrection too, so Prescott was a force to be reckoned with with the power of science behind him. The two of ‘em did a bang-up job whippin’ this place into shape, corralling all the zombies n’ throwing em in the hole, y’know, for science, and to see if they could monetize it. Prescott Mining & Scientific Enterprise un-buried all the dead from the regular ol’ graveyard and tossed ‘em in the hole, myself included. Then, when they came back, they put all those evil folks to work in the mines, or in the lab.”

“Now those mines were dangerous, of course, with all the coal dust and gas leaks… Prescott didn’t give a damn about safety. Lotta folks died. But they’d just bring ‘em back. A couple weeks in, though, and there were about twenty Montgomery Prescott III’s and about a hundred mad scientists running around, and it turns out, Monty Prescott works for no man. Each of ‘em enlisted a squad of mad scientists and started their own enterprise. Wasn’t too long before they started assassinating the competition. At this point, we’d all just gotten used to throwin’ people in the hole.

“Turns out, after Prescott, you come back as kind of a Dracula. Now I won’t go into all that business– you know ‘Salem’s Lot?”

“No? Is that a gang?”

“What about that there Catholic picture show up there on the Netflix, the one on the island, put together by that Irish feller? Michael somethin. O’Flanagan.”

“Mike Flanagan? Midnight Mass?”

Smokes smiled.

“There ya go. It was all pretty much like that.”

I looked around at the gas station. Other than the restructuring that had transformed it from a regular Holiday gas station into a cowboy saloon, it looked like this place had been through waves of disasters. There were bullet holes all over the ceiling, a massive rusty brown stain that someone had tried to scrub out with lye on the linoleum, burn marks on the walls with strange curling imprints of what looked like vines and needles… 

“I’m guessing that ‘everyone is vampires’ didn’t last long,” I said.

“It just ain’t sustainable,” Smokes shook his head. “Vampires always think it’s a smart idea to make everyone vampires, but, see, it just don’t work out. What do they eat? Turns out, they don’t. They starve. Then it’s back in the hole.” “So things carried on like that for awhile. At a certain point, we were just chuckin’ people in there to see if there was an end point, y’know, how far this thing goes. Turns out, it goes Evil, Mindless Zombie, Mad Scientist, Montgomery Prescott III, Master Vampire, Ghoul, Skeleton Warrior, Skeleton Jazz Musician, Man-eating Plant, Plant-eating Man– or a Vegan, I guess you’d call him, and a real sonofabitch– Haunted Ventriloquist, Haunted Dummy, Haunted Mummy, Christian Family Vlogger, ‘Edna,’ Evil Cowboy, Zombie Cowboy, Plant Cowboy, ‘Edna’ again, then just regular ol’ pure Cowboy.”

“What comes after Cowboy?” I asked.

Smokes shook his head.

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s just Cowboy all the way down after that.”

The cowboys playing poker glanced up at me through clouds of tobacco smoke. I recognized some of these people from around town. Or, rather, I recognized who they used to be.

“So… my mom’s memorial… she’s not really dead, is she?” I said, a wave of hope and relief overwhelming me. “I thought I’d have to say goodbye to her today. But she’ll be back, won’t she?”

Smokes only smiled sadly.

“You won’t find fuel for your steel carriage, pardner,” said Smokes. “I’ll give you a ride to the cemetary.”

I followed Smokes out to the parking lot, where several horses were hitched. 

“Where did you guys get all these horses?” I asked.

“Oh, where there’s cowpokes, there’s horses,” he replied. “That’s a rule of nature.” Smokes fed the horse an apple and stroked her mane before bidding me to climb on behind him. I held onto his waist, which was pretty weird for me because we were never close like that, and we galloped off up the highway toward the middle of town. 

We passed the elementary school, which had been covered in radiation warning signs and barbed wire. Then we passed the old Coney Island restaurant, which had been converted to a one-room schoolhouse. Main Street’s restaurants, law firms, and tattoo parlor had been replaced by a Dry Goods store, an ox stable, a wagoner, an apothecary– the barber was the same, but it looked like he also pulled teeth now.

The park that I played in as a kid had been bulldozed to hell, and in its place was a brown dirt yard with scattered mounds and holes all clustered near the center. A new sign hung over the entrance on a wooden board: Lazarus Mound Cemetary.

“I guess we coulda been more creative,” Smokes said. “But it’s too late for couldas, I reckon.”

A group of cowboys, clad in black, stood over a dirt pile. They held their hats to their chest as the eulogy was read. Smokes followed me to my mother’s fresh grave. I dropped my bouquet of flowers on top of it. 

“Family only,” said one of the cowboys, glaring at me.

“Uncle Matt, it’s me,” I said. He twirled his goatee and grimaced, revealing a new gold tooth. 

“It’s Billy ‘Cobra’ Nash these days,” he said. “Didn’t recognize ya, son. I s’pose you want to say a few words,” he gestured to the mound.

“Well, I would,” I said, “But I’m pretty sure she’ll pop out halfway through.”

“That’s no way to talk about your poor dead mother,” said Great-Grandma Tess, who I hadn’t seen since 2004, when she died from stroke. Except she wasn’t Great-Grandma Tess. She was a short old man with a long rabbity mustache and two guns on either side. 

“Let the kid grieve, Slim,” said Cobra.

The sun set on us. The resurrected cowboy versions of my family members became hungry and bored, and set up a small campfire where they heated up coffee and beans, and spun some yarns. I asked questions about the cowboy economy and how it could sustain itself in this Massachusetts town that didn’t have that many cows, and they responded by cussing me out and telling me to get lost, city boy. I said I couldn’t be a city boy because I was from here, and they took away my beans.

Finally, after about an hour, there was rustling from the mound. 

“Here she comes,” said Cobra.

The dirt shuffled and ran down the side of the mound, a miniature landslide. Finally, a gloved hand emerged. Then an arm. A dirty, dusty head, crowned in a cowboy hat, burst from the pile, coughing. 

“Well, butter my biscuits, if it ain’t The Cheat, just in time for dinner,” said Slim, hands on his hips. 

My mom, who was now a dirt-covered cowboy named The Cheat, clicked his boots together to dislodge some stones from his spurs. 

“Howdy. Miss me, fellas?” The Cheat rasped, spitting pebbles into the fire. 

“Mom?” I said. The Cheat looked me over. 

“They call me Vernon ‘The Cheat’ Maddox now,” my mom said.

“Why Maddox?” I asked. “Mom, what was wrong with Nguyen?”

“Ain’t a cowboy name,” said Mom. 

“A cowboy can’t be Vietnamese?”

“Listen, kid,” said The Cheat, clapping me on the arm. “I’ve had a long day, and to be frank, I can’t abide a city slicker like you before I get my brew. Gotta fill up on beans n’ coffee or I’ll be skinner than a jazz skeleton in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”

I watched my mom walk away toward the fire, greeting the other cowboys like old friends.

“It’s like she didn’t even recognize me,” I said, broken.

Smokes patted me on the shoulder. 

“That ain’t your mother no more, pardner,” he said. “Same as I ain’t Darryl Choi.” “What’s the point of raising people from the dead if they’re not themselves?” I said. 

“I reckon you’ve missed the essential theme of the Pet Semetary premise,” Smokes said. “The point is, it’s a curse, not a blessing. To the living, at least. Mister Stephen King said sometimes dead is better. And here in Peabridge, we reckon he was right.”

I heard a metal click. I turned around to see Smokes’ shotgun pointed square at my forehead.

“Whoa,” I said. The cowboys at the fire turned to watch with dim interest, including my own mother. “Darryl, hey, put that away.”

“Dead is better. But you know what’s best? Cowboy,” he said. “Cowboy is the best there is.”

“Best there is,” said the cowpokes around the fire in eerie unison. 

“Wait, wait, wait–” there was a bang. My vision filled with red, and then there was nothing. I saw and felt and heard nothing as Smokes watched my limp body fall backwards into the hole. He kicked dirt over me casually. He holstered his weapon. He sat down around the fire, next to the others.

“How many bullets ya got, Smokes?” asked The Cheat through a mouthful of beans.

“Not enough to get him all the way through,” Smokes replied, lighting his pipe. “But enough to get him past Dracula, for sure.”

“That’s the one you gotta watch out for,” The Cheat said. “I’ll stand vigil with ya, pardner.”

“You go home, Maddox, wash that dust off, tend to your herd. Be on the lookout for Edna– word is she’s still at large in places,” Smokes said. 

“She’ll come around,” said Slim. “They always do.”

The campfire’s embers rose up to the cloudy, dark sky. Smokes leaned back and tipped his hat low over his eyes.

“This town’s got room for plenty more cowboys,” he said. Around the fire, a dozen pairs of black, gleaming eyes turned toward the Lazarus Mound, waiting.

[creepyclothdoll]

my little chihuahua-pittie when mom comes home

girl whose feelings are entirely too big for her body

[creepyclothdoll]

just wanna say loudly, clearly and with my whole chest

FUCK NEIL GAIMAN

[creepyclothdoll]

From: HR Subject: Concerning your death

Valued employee,

I hope you are doing well during what I understand is a difficult time. We were very sorry to hear about your passing. 

Please understand that the circumstances around your death have caused several issues for the company, and unfortunately a formal disciplinary hearing has been called. Your attendance is mandatory. 

As you are well aware, our company offers a health insurance package. There is no reason that you should be in such poor health that you would die. You’ll notice that no other members of our team have complained about a “heart attack.” You should be taking full advantage of your company health insurance, and your inability to maintain your health is not Scion Firm & Marketing Agency’s responsibility. 

Secondly, you were found deceased at your work station before opening on Friday morning. 

The coroner reported your death sometime after midnight on Thursday evening, meaning you were in the building long after closing hours, working unauthorized overtime. Records show you clocked out at the end of your agreed-upon overtime (7:00), but your work log shows you continued to work on the project until your demise. After-hours work is prohibited for safety reasons. The discovery of your corpse and the undue scrutiny it has brought to Scion Firm & Marketing Agency creates a negative (and inaccurate) image of our policies and work culture.

The employees who found your body have been offered therapy services, which drain our resources. Two more employees are taking bereavement leave due to your negligence. 

Understand that in normal circumstances, this is grounds for termination. However, the importance of this rebrand project is paramount to our company’s good standing with our (most important) client. Due to your role as the project lead, your employment will continue. 

Your request for leave has been denied. According to our written policy, your own death does not constitute grounds for bereavement leave. 

We expect you to show the rest of your team that you are in high spirits and good morale tomorrow. There are unproductive rumors circulating about your death being due to high stress and extreme pressure from the company, which is, as you know, completely false. Any indication otherwise is a blatant lie. 

Finally, various complaints have been made about you over the past several days. Employees have reported an unpleasant and distracting odor coming from your work station. Your vacant, bulging, milky stare has been described by multiple individuals as “creepy.” The fluid stains on the carpet are a health hazard and a detriment to our company’s chic modern aesthetic. 

While you finish your business under our employ, be advised that rotting, leaking, or decomposing in any manner is prohibited. If you are unable to meet these standards, the (considerable) cost of taxidermy services will be charged to your account. 

Thank you for understanding. There is no way out for you, valued employee. If you have any questions, please contact our HR department.

We look forward to seeing you tomorrow.

[creepyclothdoll]

The Tick

A vampire is a predator, I tell you. I am defying my nature to be with you. 

I am dangerous. But you tame me. You are the exception, I promise in the forest, under the tree where we first met. 

With my centuries of experience and a whole world of options for companionship, I choose you. 

For you, I will be gentle. I brush the hair from your shoulder. Even though it goes against all that I am.

I see a tick crawling through your dark hair. You watch me pull it out and crush it in my fingers with a smile. I will always protect you. 

From that day on, you are truly mine.

I love you unconditionally. Intensely. With the deep, all-consuming love you desire. 

I am an outsider. You are the only one who can understand me. 

My bite is like a kiss, but deeper. More primal. More sensual. The physical merges with the emotional, boundaries dissolve. It is an act of trust. You trust me. 

I may lose control of my predatory nature, I say. You should not trust me, I say. 

I show you my most vulnerable self– my heart has shuddered in the cold for centuries. You open the door and invite me in. With this sharing of blood, I relax in the knowledge that this is true, this is real, this is forever.

We duck away into an alcove one night as I spy the vampire-hunter scanning the party, the outline of an ash stake under his jacket. You fear for me then.

My kind is so maligned. Rightfully, I admit. What society would allow a rabid predator in its midst willingly? Something so dangerous, unchecked, bound to rampaging bloodlust? 

But you’re different, you remind me.

Yes. But they don’t understand that. Only you have ever accepted me without fear. 

Your presence feeds me. Being in every part of your life feeds me. Knowing where you are, knowing I am on your mind, knowing you are mine– that feeds me. 

I will leave you enough time to recover from my bite, my taking, barely. Then, I will come back and take more. 

You want me to let you rest for longer? I am doing you a favor, then. I don’t say this, but you feel it in my smile. I needed this, but I’ll give it up for you and your comfort. What a good vampire I am, understanding like this. I sacrifice my needs for you. It hurts me to wait. But I wait. Patiently, with a long-suffering smile. 

You hold my life in the palm of your hand. You have all the control here. To reject me now would kill me. I will give you whatever you need. Just tell me what you want. I will do it. 

It’s really your fault that you feel like this, because if you just told me what you want, I will give it to you. All I ask in return for this perfection is nearness. Eternally. 

You feel cold. 

You feel tired. You feel sick. I bring you the things you like most– I remember your favorite sweet things, your favorite books, your favorite blanket. 

I haven’t shared in your blood in weeks. I don’t need to, anymore. You invited me in, and that’s all I needed– I can live off of you. 

You are in my veins. I live through your life.

I only take a little– a conservative portion of the oxygen in your breath, a few beats of your heart each day, just some of the strength of your limbs, a touch of the heat from your body, a gentle scraping of your spirit and your mind. To me, this is everything. You don’t need these things, and you don’t notice them leaving you. And if you were to notice, wouldn’t you offer them freely? Would you be so cruel, so callous, to say no?

I feel like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you say. Weak, pitiful, sad. 

I will take care of you, I promise. I will always protect you. And these things are true. 

I will leave you empty.

You want to leave for awhile? Of course, my dear. Why would I protest that? You’re not a prisoner. I trust you’ll come back to me, I say, showing my vulnerability, my earnest love.

But you’re gone so often, lately. And you leave me lonely. 

So I follow you one day. I see you have other friends. That’s alright, of course. You can have whatever you like, so long as I am your priority. Go out and raise your energy, so long as you bring it back to me. Make yourself healthy and hale. What’s good for you is good for us. 

But who are these friends? A flash of recognition. A seething hate.

No.

Don’t talk to those people. Anyone but them. 

Why would you let them fill your head with lies? I scream when you return to me. At least you returned to me. You look up at me with hollow, dark eyes, your face pale as the grave, your lips thin and blue. 

There is so much left of you, though. 

I think I need to go, you say. 

I grab my chest. You are killing me. You would kill me.

I need to do what’s best for me, you say. 

You promised me a share of your life. You’d rip that from me now? I cry. I sacrificed my nature for you, I say. It went against all that I am. You are the reason I am gentle. You tamed me.

I grab you as you step through the threshold backwards. Your chill skin leaches a great share of the last of your remaining heat into mine. You grow paler. I want what I can take, then. 

Every pulse of your heart. The whole of your spirit. The thin trickle of blood that still runs through your cold blue veins. The last thought in your addled, exhausted little head. 

There is a lightning-sharp stab of pain through my body. Fire blazes around my chest. Acid, poison, venom– the stake. From you? I look up pitifully. No. From the man in the jacket, standing behind me, who I see as I slump to the dirty carpet on the hallway floor. 

So helpless. Frozen in an instant. My fingers twitch.

You scream for me– you cry for me. The man pulls you away– bastard. There is a woman with him too now, and another man, and they uncork bottles, and I smell the stink of garlic, feel the repulsion of holy water. 

Wait, you cry. He can’t help it. He’s a predator by nature– he’s trying so hard to be good, you cry. Please, just reach out to me. My fingers twitch. And I reach up. 

To you.

I need you. I need you. I NEED you. I NEED YOU. 

They always say that, says the woman.

I NEED YOU. I NEED YOU. I NEED YOU. I NEED YOU. 

But… he’s fighting his nature for me, you persist. 

He’s never fought his nature. He’s been following it this whole time, the bastard says to you as he pulls you further from me. His colleagues pour their bottles over me and my body, my body starts to dissolve. 

The disgust in his eye– his stare is the same I gave that tick.

Vampires aren’t predators, he says.

They’re parasites.

And then you– you look at me the same.

[creepyclothdoll]

The King of Crash Nation

Skeep: Hey cringebros and cringebabes– no intro today, you read the title, you saw the thumbnail, no this isn’t clickbait. We have a very special guest today who you might recognize. Now, you might think I’m sitting across from Cass “Cash” “Crash” Bellamy, also known as “The Keyblade Master of Financial Freedom,” also known as “Keyblade Karen,” but you might be wrong.  

Crash: You would be wrong. 

Skeep: I’ve been talking to my guest for awhile already, and I have to say, I’m flummoxed. I’m not gonna say I believe everything you’re saying, but I think it’s worth listening to.

Crash: Listen, if I wasn’t experiencing this myself, I would think I was insane. I’m… honestly still not sure. Logically, I understand that some sort of psychotic break is the most likely explanation for what I’m– 

Skeep: Before we get to the good stuff, I just wanna thank our sponsor for today, GRIX. GRIX is a beverage subscription service you can trust. Not only do GRIX beverages have anywhere between two to five times the caffeine of standard energy drinks, but every drink is packed with 200 different minerals. Take the standard number of minerals in food and multiply that by a hundred, that’s how many diverse minerals are in these drinks. Some of these minerals you’ll only find in GRIX. Make sure you use a VPN when you sign up for GRIX. GRIX comes in discreet packaging to throw off any prying government eyes at the post office, so don’t be shy! GRIX: It’s Too Alpha For The FDA! (Skeep takes a long drink from a black jug with a fluorescent label)

Crash: (Long sigh)

Skeep: So, why don’t you introduce yourself?

Crash: Sure. Of course. Hello, everyone, you recognize me as Cassidy Bellamy. But my name is Elizabeth Ann Coen. I’m from a small town in Illinois, and I’ve been a teacher for the last twenty years. High school, middle, and elementary, but mostly middle school. Three weeks ago, I went to sleep in my own bed, next to my husband, and when I woke up I was Cassidy Bellamy. 

Skeep: That must have been a shock. That’s my personal nightmare, no offense.

Crash: No offense taken, Darren. No personal offense, I mean. 

Skeep: You know how crazy that sounds. That’s the craziest part, guys, I’m not kidding, he knows– she– they– 

Crash: She.

Skeep: Liz, can I call you Liz?

Crash: (Another sigh) I suppose you can. 

Skeep: Liz knows how crazy this sounds, that’s what I’m trying to say. And that’s crazy, because Crash would never. I mean, the Crash that we all know and love– or hate– 

Crash: I’m well aware of Cass Bellamy’s long history of delusional behavior and compulsive lying. I wish I wasn’t. 

Skeep: Assuming this is true– and, cringebros and cringebabes, this is just hypothetical– assuming this is all hypothetically true, had you heard of Crash before you… became him?

Crash: I actually had. Like I said, I’m a teacher. You’d be shocked at some of the things kids are watching online. I always think I’ve heard it all, and then someone drops something like “CashMunnyCoin” on me, “oh, did you hear the Keyblade Karen Meltdown guy is launching a cryptocurrency?” “oh, did you hear the Sora MLM fanfiction guy is going to jail for identity theft?” I’d heard the major beats of the story, but I didn’t realize it was all the same guy until I woke up in Cass Bellamy’s body. 

Skeep: Just hearing those words come out of your mouth is like… I’m having an out-of-body experience right now.

Crash: Tell me about it.

Skeep: (Surprised laughter)

Crash: I think that if I had woken up as literally anyone else, maybe people would have believed me. Or, at least, maybe someone would have believed me. 

Skeep: Crash– Liz– I want to believe you. I really do. Listen, I knew Crash as he was better than, I think, almost anyone except Jimspore and Sorasins, who obviously don’t count because they’re assholes. I’ve been following this guy– you– for twelve years. Crash does not talk the way you’re talking to me right now. And I’ve never seen Crash dressed that nicely, unless you count cosplay, and even then, his cosplay is shit. 

Crash: (Nodding patiently) One of the first things I did, once I was in a mental state to do things, was to go to the thrift store and buy some nicer clothes. You know, not the sort of thing I would wear– but just a few nice, coordinated outfits. At first, I went for the sorts of things I wished my son would wear. Then I realized I was tending to go for androgynizing clothes, and I figured that was probably where I was most comfortable, given the situation. So it’s been a lot of these turtlenecks, a lot of these cardigans. In this body, I can pull off green very nicely, which was never the case in my real body. It made me look sickly. 

Skeep: And you look good! I never thought I’d say this, guys, but Crash looks good. It just goes to show what a little effort can do for a guy. Like it can’t replace being toned, but it helps a lot. And, might I say, you actually look a little more toned than usual, too.

Crash: I’ve been going on lots of walks. Cass doesn’t have a job. So I walk most of the day, now. There are some nice places to walk around Las Vegas, which I never expected. 

Skeep: Yeah, the hiking out there’s pretty amazing, I hear. Hey– just for contrast, guys, let’s watch a clip of Crash on our podcast with SlimeTimeJohn last year.

(The screen cuts to a past recording in a different, smaller studio. Cass Bellamy, dressed in full Sora cosplay, is ranting to two black-clad hosts in matching beanies holding jugs of GRIX).

Crash: Why should I pay taxes when I’m reinvesting in my hustle? The government is the real pyramid scheme! 

Skeep: Crash, Crash, Crash, you don’t pay taxes?! Crash, that’s a federal crime, you dumb piece of shit. 

SlimeTimeJohn: You’re live on camera. Folks, Crash Bellamy just admitted to tax fraud. Someone get the IRS in chat.

Crash: I never said that.

SlimeTimeJohn: You fucking said it just now!

Crash: I pay my taxes! I pay my taxes! I pay my taxes! 

Skeep: Stop yelling! Stop yelling! Stop yelling! You fucking asshole. Jesus fucking christ. 

Crash: There are pawns of darkness everywhere. There are pawns of darkness everywhere, and you know it because you are one. You know, you could become a good person if you actually read my books.

SlimeTimeJohn: Oh, I’ve read your plagiarized books. They’re garbage. Blocks of text copy-pasted from Kingdom Hearts fan wikis and generic motivational quotes. 

Skeep: What’s in your books that could possibly make anyone a better person? Crash, I think just by talking to you, I become a worse person every day. I used to have hobbies, man, but now it’s just… finding out what new bullshit Crash is up to and reacting to it.

Crash: You’re just jealous of my entrepreneurial spirit! The spirit of Sora! The spirit of Financial Freedom!

Skeep: (Laughing) That’s the clip that went viral. I think you– he– also said something about how Jeff Bezos wasn’t spiritually evolved enough to understand Kingdom Hearts?

Crash: I’ll be honest– I don’t understand Kingdom Hearts. 

Skeep: OHHH!!! Mike, clip that. That’s gonna go viral. That’s gonna be everywhere tomorrow.

Crash: I was a little too old for it when it came out, and my kids never really got into it. I’ve done some… research, in the last few weeks. The plot seems very difficult to follow, though.

Skeep: Well, now we know you’re not the real Crash. 

Crash: I wish you meant that. 

Skeep: Honestly, hand to god, I do, too. Now, Liz, can you tell us a little more about your life in Illinois?

Crash: Yes. I’m married, and I have two children. My hometown is sort of a tourist town, but only really for history buffs. I could go into more detail about where I’m from, but I don’t want to dox my family, if… if they still exist. We have a good school district. Nice old brownstone buildings. Lots that survived the Civil War. It’s a good place to live if you love history, like me. And it’s beautiful, too. Not like Vegas. Right on a river, lots of green space. I went to college a few towns over and got my Bachelor’s in Education. I always knew I wanted to teach history. My mom was a museum curator at the… well, one of the big important historical houses in our town. I’m considered very good at my job– I have to be, because if you want to teach history, you want to teach history there. It’s about as competitive as any middle school teacher position could be. 

Skeep: Hold on. You said your family might not still exist? What do you mean by that?

Crash: I looked myself up. My social media pages are gone. I can’t log in to any of my old accounts. I’m not listed as faculty at the school I was teaching at just three weeks ago. There are women with the same name as me, but none of them have much else in common. For all intents and purposes, I never existed. Elizabeth Ann Coen never existed.

Skeep: But have you tried to look up your husband? Your kids? Your parents?

Crash: I can’t bring myself to do that. 

Skeep: Because you’re scared they won’t be there?

Crash: Yes. And because I’m equally scared that they will. Because then, I’d have to contend with the idea of attempting to contact them. And I don’t want to subject them to that. I can’t imagine how scary it would be for my family to have someone like Cass Bellamy– with his record as a very unstable scam artist– approach them with all of this personal information claiming to be their wife, mother, or daughter. And it might be even worse if I find out they exist, but I choose not to contact them. That’s too terrible to even think on. And then… if they are simply gone… if they just never existed… that’s more awful than if they were dead. 

Skeep: We just got a gift from Spunk Z., thank you Spunk Z! Mods, control the chat– nobody’s taking their shirt off in the studio today. Unless? Liz?

Crash: That’s part of the reason I chose your show. I know that, if they really are out there, they’ll never see this. 

Skeep: I take offense to that. But I get it, you raised your kids right. Assuming they’re real. 

Crash: You joke, but yes. 

Skeep: No answer to taking your top off? 

Crash: I’m not going to do that. 

Skeep: If you’re telling the truth, they’re not really your nipples. 

Crash: That’s why I’m not going to do it. I want to give this other person’s body privacy and respect. As much as I can, anyway. 

Skeep: That’s more than the real Crash would ever say. If you really want to respect Crash, you should have come here in a knock-off Sora hoodie with a full-size bag of Takis. 

Crash: There’s give and take. 

Skeep: What’s Crash’s diet like? Or I guess, what’s your diet like as Crash? Rumor has it, he only eats hot chips and his shits are bright red. Is that true?

Crash: I eat what I can afford. Right now, that’s mostly Ramen. It got me through college, so I’m not unfamiliar with this diet. I’m smarter about using food pantry programs now, after two decades of living on a public school teacher’s salary. 

Skeep: Right. Because Crash is totally bankrupt and facing a bunch of lawsuits for fraud and shit.

Crash: Which I’m charmingly reminded of every time I leave his apartment. 

Skeep: That must have been an adjustment, getting used to Crash’s adoring fans. 

Crash: I’d call them stalkers. 

Skeep: Some of Crash Nation can go overboard. Better not be any of you cringebros or cringebabes misbehaving! Did you know who you were right away? What was it like, waking up in another person’s body?

Crash: At first, I thought maybe I’d broken a bone or pulled muscles or something. There was no pain, but everything about me felt wrong. My legs, too long. My neck, too short. All the weight was in the wrong places, and there was skin in new places, and no skin in other places– I felt like I was wearing a strange suit, glued to my bones. The reflection in the mirror was a total stranger. I don’t think I need to explain that it was a nightmare. But discovering the identity of this man– this human suit I was now trapped in– was worse.

Skeep: I bet. 

Crash: People are constantly trying to approach me. They’ll sit outside of the apartment, they’ll honk their horns to keep me awake, they’ll film me and call me. When I first tried to reach out for help on social media, people messaged me with all kinds of threats and just weird, mean stuff, but the worst ones were the ones who acted like they really wanted to help me, like they believed me. They were the cruelest. I picked up very quickly on the fact that I was living the life of a very, very unpopular person, and a very, very popular target.

Skeep: You mentioned you couldn’t get into your social media as Liz. But you can get into Crash’s Twitter and stuff. That’s very interesting.

Crash: His phone was already logged in to them. It unlocks with facial recognition. 

Skeep: At least that’s convenient. 

Crash: At the very very least, it got me in contact with you. I’m sure you wouldn’t have taken an interview with someone from a strange new account, coming at you with this premise.

Skeep: Well, you never know. I’m flattered you chose my show, though. I’m sure, if you keep this story up, you’ll get real popular with the freak circuit, astral projection and past lives and switching bodies and shit. Glad I got to be first in line to hear it.

Crash: You were one of the only people on earth who would take an interview with Cass Bellamy. And of my limited options, you were the shock jock who had been the most fair to him in the past. 

Skeep: “Shock Jock?” I don’t know if I like that. 

Crash: Sorry. It’s what we called this sort of thing in my day. 

Skeep: How old are you, Liz?

Crash: Forty-eight. 

Skeep: A tight forty-eight? Or have those years and two kids taken their toll? 

Crash: Let’s move on, Darren.

Skeep: No shame, Liz, we love MILFS on this channel.

Crash: Sure. I’m a MILF.

Skeep: Mike, clip that. And, Liz, how long is this tenancy going to last, do you think? Is this a temporary thing, or is Crash just gone and Liz here to stay forever?

Crash: I don’t know. I pray, constantly, that I’ll wake up at home again. I’ll be back with my family. Even if… well, I’ve imagined that maybe if I’m here, in Cass’s body, maybe Cass is in mine, somewhere else. In some other world. The world where Elizabeth Coen exists. You know what terrifies me most about that?

Skeep: The idea that Crash Bellamy is turning your whole life upside-down and probably getting you sent to prison or a mental institution and scaring the shit out of your kids?

Crash: Well, yes, but also, no… it’s that in my reality, I know I had heard of the Keyblade Karen. I’d heard of Cass Bellamy. I’d heard of CashMunnyCoin. I think one of my students even dressed up as him, dressing up as that character he likes, Sora, for Halloween. Bellamy existed in my reality, but I don’t exist here. So what does that mean? 

Skeep: You want to know what I think?

Crash: I can guess.

Skeep: Okay, go ahead. Guess.

Crash: I’ve thought it, too. Cass Belamy was– or is– a profoundly unstable person with delusions of grandeur who is facing multiple legal charges and several lawsuits at the moment. He’s bankrupt, all of his financial ventures have publicly and spectacularly failed, he owes possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars to MLM companies, he’s infamous, he’s endlessly mocked and harassed both online and in real life. His life is hell. Maybe he finally just snapped. Maybe I’m just something he made up. Another personality that he invented to take over his life and handle his problems so he didn’t have to be Cass Belamy anymore. The human mind is mysterious and terrifying. Who knows how much it can fabricate? An entire lifetime of memories, even? Knowledge of subjects, skills, possibly learned on some subconscious level, heard about in passing, memorized and kept in some deep mental record of everything we see and hear throughout a day… Maybe there really is no Elizabeth. Maybe Elizabeth’s life is just a nice dream. But if it is a dream– if I am a dream– what happens if Cass Belamy starts to wake up? Where do I go? I’m terrified that he’ll come back to himself, and I’ll be just… nonexistant, worse than if I’d died… but even more terrified that, perhaps, he’ll just slowly slip back through the cracks in me, and I’ll just… be him. I’ll just be Cass Belamy. His mind, his life, his torment, my consciousness, forever. 

Skeep: That’s not even close to what I was gonna say. I was gonna say I suspect you’ve just been pulling a fast one on us all these years, Crash. 

Crash: …What?

Skeep: I think that the real scam is Crash Bellamy. You’ve been coming on this show for years, acting all fucked-up, doing crazy stuff, making cringe tiktoks and putting out those godawful e-books, all for attention. You’ve been playing into the lolcow bit for over a decade and now you’re finally over it, once it stopped being profitable. 

Crash: Why would anyone do that? No one would do that. 

Skeep: Crash Bellamy would, if he had the brains to plan that far ahead. Maybe you didn’t make money off of it, but you got attention. And in this world, what’s the difference? Hey– thank you, Guzzler69! Appreciate the donation. Proves my point. 

Crash: Darren. This man is so financially ruined, there’s no coming back from it. You’re suggesting that Cass– that I faked being… what, an anime game fanboy who fell for a bunch of get-rich-quick schemes and then started trying to run his own? You can look up the facts of the lawsuits against him. No one in their right mind would make the financial choices this man did. 

Skeep: I’m not saying you’re in your right mind. I’m saying you’ve been smarter than you look since day one. You’re just tired of the grift. 

Crash: I– (sighs) Alright. I understand why you’d think that. And I understood when I came on this show that there was no chance I’d ever convince you of the veracity of my experience. It’s a crazy story. I’m the definition of an unreliable source. 

Skeep: But you came on the show anyway, because, Crash, the one thing that’s true about you deep down to your core is that you love attention. If you really were someone else– anyone else– anyone sane, at least– you’d stay far away from the spotlight for the rest of your life. If I woke up as Crash Bellamy, I would just drop off the face of the earth. Or worse– I can’t say what I’d do, because it’s not advertiser-friendly, but let’s just say no one would ever see Crash Bellamy ever again. 

Crash: You know, I watched your show before I came on?

Skeep: I’d sure hope you did, especially since you’ve been on it.

Crash: This thing you have here, Darren– it’s a disturbing little ecosystem. It’s exactly the same bullying that middle school children participate in. Exactly. 

Skeep: I disagree, but Crash, you’re on the internet. What do you expect?

Crash: Cass Bellamy’s original sin was never fraud or identity theft– it was always the sin of being ‘cringeworthy.’ It was that he was weird. You boys were punishing him for that long before any of this crypto business started. The bad things that Cass has legitimately done were always just excuses– they made what you were doing feel socially acceptable. 

Skeep: No, no, no. See, now I know you’re Crash. Nobody sane thinks that your crypto scam or any of your other scams are excusable just because you’re mentally ill or whatever you claim.

Crash: I’m not excusing Bellamy’s long history of attempting to run scams or stealing credit card information and so on and so on. But I watched your show, Darren. The earliest episodes. And I watched Jimspore and Sorasins and SlimeTimeJim. I’ve seen the way you and people like you chased this man around when he was just some naive eighteen-year-old kid who over-identified with a video game, and whose primary characteristic was his naivety– willing to believe that anyone offering to make him rich quick was being genuine. I’ve met plenty of children just like Cass Bellamy. Children who should have been getting extra help. Children failed by the system, and failed by their parents. And I’ve met plenty of children just like you, too, Darren. And unfortunately, the Darrens of the world outnumber the Cass Bellamys. 

Skeep: Unfortunately? You know how I know you’re full of shit, Crash? Because you haven’t said Crash this whole time. You use his given name. Everyone calls him Crash. No one calls him Cass. Everyone hates him. I think probably even his own parents hate him. 

Crash: Sometimes, teaching middle school, it’s like watching starving piranhas in a tank. They swim around in formation, hunting endlessly, hunting nothing– until one moves wrong, gets bit, starts to bleed. And once there’s blood in the water… they strip their companion’s bones in seconds. You’re on the eating side now, Darren, and I’d say you’re eating well. But you know your people. Jimspore and Sorasins and SlimeTimeJim. You know all these nice members of the chat, all your donors. You know better than I do that someday, you’ll be the one with their teeth ripping you apart.

Skeep: Wow. What do you think about that, chat? (A notification appears. Several new donations have come in.) 

Crash: ... You know… 

Skeep: What do I know, Crash?

Crash: My favorite bird is the indigo bunting.

Skeep: I did not know that.

Crash: Two springs ago, there was a pair of them in the thicket behind my house.

Skeep: Behind your house, or ‘Liz’s’ house? 

Crash: … I’m not much of a birdwatcher. I’ve got a journal I never use and some binoculars but that’s it. But there was a day when it was sort of cloudy and I could see them really well from the stoop behind my house. I won’t call it a porch, just a concrete slab that we have a lawn chair on. I stayed there for almost four hours, just sitting and watching those little birds build their nest. I’d been putting off grading all afternoon and I was determined to keep putting it off, even if it meant becoming engrossed in the dramas of birds. They came and went. They squabbled with chickadees and squirrels. I realized that one of the birds was missing a foot. A cat got it, maybe. It’s a miracle it survived as long as it did. And still, it kept building that nest. At the start of the day, there was nothing there but a branch. By the end, there was a little thing like a teacup made of sticks and feathers and hair. My daughter brought me a cup of coffee. That’s when I realized my feet were so cold, they’d gone numb. It had been the heat of the coffee that reminded me how cold I felt. And I was overcome with this realization that that’s what love is, sometimes. Because when I stood up, as I warmed myself, those numb parts started to hurt. I guess, Darren, and Darren’s chat– I hope that someday, someone brings you a cup of coffee, and you suddenly feel all the places in you that have gone numb. I hope the hurt is worth the heat. And I hope that I wake up tomorrow at home.

Skeep: Wise words from our resident spiritually enlightened Keyblade Master of Financial Freedom, Crash Bellamy. That’s our episode today, folks– any last words, ‘Liz?’

Crash: Please– if you can help me get home, or if you know someone who can help me get home, help me. Spread this around. Make Skeep famous if that’s what it takes. 

Skeep: Shockingly, a sentiment I agree with. Thanks for tuning in, cringebros and cringebabes, and remember– be nice, wash your ass, and cringe deeply, my friends. 

[creepyclothdoll]

Ant Problem

I really thought it was a dog. I swear. I swear I didn’t know.

How could I? Vi never told me anything. She just expected people to know.

Walking into Grandma Vi’s house was like walking into a halloween haunted maze made out of ant traps. Flypaper hung from the ceiling and walls like streamers. The floor was littered in dusty plastic traps, and empty and half-full boxes of borax and liquid ant killer were stacked along the walls. The smell of the place was strange and cloying. Soap and poison. 

I never liked being there. She made me uncomfortable, even as a kid, when her paranoia wasn’t her defining trait just yet. 

She was a neat freak back then. Her rules were foreign to me, but not as foreign as the genuine outrage she expressed when those rules were broken. I didn’t even know what a coaster was, why was I being snapped at for putting my water cup down? You’re not sleeping in the attic bed, why are you so pissed at me for leaving it un-made? Don’t get mad at me for not drying the entire shower after I’ve used it– I didn’t even know anybody did that.

Grandma Vi would never tell you what weird unusual protocols she expected you to follow, she’d just fly off the handle when you didn’t do it, and that’s how you’d find out that it was disrespectful to wear a hat indoors or not offer to wash the dishes as a guest. She’d turn up her sharp jaw and suck her thin teeth and scowl endlessly.

I could honestly say that I missed that version of her. 

Compared to this Grandma Vi, that one was a delight. 

This Grandma Vi collected dirty paper dishes in her room. She stacked them high. She sprayed them with bleach. She refused to let me wash them– the sink drains were all clogged in the house now, stuffed with paper towels and borax. 

“Ants could get in through there,” she explained. 

When I brought Grandma Vi her groceries, they had to undergo a period of “disinfecting,” in which they were double-bagged in black trash bags and sealed for two days. This, Vi reasoned, would suffocate any insects that might be passengers inside the lettuce or the cornflake boxes. 

No sugar, obviously. Ants loved sugar. 

I tried not to eat in front of Vi. The day I spent as her full-time caretaker, I unwrapped an egg sandwich in front of her and it sent her into a panic attack.

“You’re dropping crumbs all over the floor!” she screamed.

I wasn’t. And even if I was, it’s not like the floor could get any dirtier. Vi would not let me vacuum because I did it wrong. Vi didn’t vacuum either– she couldn’t. Just walking around the house left her fatigued. Her hair had always been long and thick, but it was so hard for her to care for now that she’d had it shaved near to the scalp. She’d struggle to lift anything heavier than a spoon. 

I reminded myself of that daily. Grandma Vi was a sick, dying old woman. She was in pain. She was used to independence and solitude. This was the worst she’d ever felt and the most disempowered she had ever been. 

And, importantly, my dad was paying me to do this. Because someone had to. 

So I tried not to hate her guts. And I ate my meals outside, on the picnic table in what used to be her garden, even in the winter. I refrained from cleaning without her permission. I never, ever, ever used the front door. 

The front door could let in ants.

The ant obsession– I never found out where that came from. My dad just shrugged it off as one more drop in a giant bucket of assorted mental illnesses. 

“She’s been getting worse ever since Grandpa Joe passed,” dad said to me over the phone while I called him, crying in my car one day. Vi’s husband had been gone since before I was born. If there was a tolerable version of her, I never met it. “Grandma Vi relied on him. When your mom was growing up, Vi was actually a very quiet, mellow person. She was never… nice. But she felt safe. She had security. She didn’t feel like she had to go on the attack all the time.”

I hated imagining my mom as a child in this horrible house. 

“Your Grandpa Joe was a nice person,” dad said. “Not like her at all. I believe that missing him is a big part of what made her crazy.”

I didn’t argue with him, but I didn’t think he was right. Because in Grandma Vi’s halloween haunted house of traps and poison, every single photo of Grandpa Joe– a tall, dark, handsome man with a very kind smile– had been turned backwards to face the wall. 

The first month I was there was quiet. Then the scratching started. 

It sounded like a raccoon climbing around on the roof and walls. Every time I thought it was done, it started up again. It was the deep of night, and I couldn’t sleep. I slipped out of the attic bed where Vi still expected me to sleep and climbed the ladder down to the main floor. There was a porch light outside. I hoped it would scare away any animals. 

But as I started unlocking the back door, a sharp, cold hand grabbed my arm. I jumped. Vi was there, her dark eyes wide, her wrinkled face pulled tightly into a mask of pure terror. 

“Don’t open the door,” she hissed.

“I’m just turning the light on,” I said. I unlatched the door.

Vi screamed, and I felt a sudden hot pain across my face. I put my fingers to my cheek and felt blood. Vi had scratched me. I swore, and she re-latched the door. I ran to the bathroom to wash my new cuts out in the clogged sink. 

When I found Vi again, she was in bed. She wasn’t sleeping, though. And she definitely wasn’t sorry. 

“If you attack me again, I’m leaving,” I said to her. 

“You oughtta be grateful,” Vi said. “You don’t even know what you almost did, stupid.”

I refrained from calling her the names I was thinking of calling her in my head. I swallowed those teeth and asked,

“What did I almost do?”

Vi laughed. 

“You were just gonna let in those ants.”

In Vi’s house, I was never to leave the house at night. I was never to open the back door at night. I was never to open the front door at all. I was never, under any circumstances, to let anyone else inside the house. 

The scratching would come every few nights. Once it started, Vi finally started asking me to fix things around the house. She didn’t let me clean, but she did make me go up on the roof and look for holes. Nests. Anywhere ants could be living or trying to get in. And for once, to her credit, I did find some damage. It looked like termites, maybe. I sprayed bug killer and sealed up the chewed spots.

One day, Vi screamed at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night. I ran into her room to find her frantically springing from her bed. She collapsed into a dresser and knocked over the stack of paper plates she kept there, sanitized with bleach. She was staring at the window with pure horror. I didn’t see anything out there. She wouldn’t tell me what she saw. She only wept and shook and cried Joe’s name over and over. The next day she had me cover that window with cardboard and plastic and seal it. And then I had to re-seal it, because she saw a microscopic space that no one else would notice. Big enough for a potential ant to get in.

“You never met your Grandpa Joe,” Vi said to me out of the blue one day. Her room was lightless and stuffy, and she had spent her recent days sitting in bed and doing nothing but listen to audiobooks on an old cd player. “You never saw him.”

“I heard he was nice,” I said. 

“He’s dead,” she said. “He’s never coming back.”

“My dad says he’s with us in spirit,” I said. “He says he can feel him sometimes, loving us.”

“Listen, you moronic little girl. He’s dead. He’s not with us. So if you ever see him around, you better tell me. And you better keep the doors locked.”

I was taken aback.

“Have you seen him?” I asked.

“No. But the ants have. They’ve seen him and they know what he looks like. And I’ve seen the ants.”

Vi would deteriorate a little bit at a time, and then a lot at once. When I started, I wondered if we’d develop some sort of closeness over time. That was a very silly idea. The more Vi needed me, the less she could stand me. She would snip at me and scream at me. The first time she needed my help in the bathroom, I was punished for helping her with a long string of insults and criticism which, at this point, I had learned to tune out. 

I brought her a bowl of corn flakes in a paper plate in bed. She commanded me to spray her stacks of paper plates with bleach while she ate. 

“I don’t think that’s safe,” I said. She shot me a dagger glare.

“You want ants in here?” she said. 

“I just think this is an unventilated room and it’s not safe to spray bleach all over everything.”

Vi responded to this by throwing her bowl of corn flakes at me. Cereal splashed all over the floor. Milk soaked into my sweater and my hair.

“That’s it,” I said. 

I took my wet sweater off. I changed pants. I took the vacuum cleaner out of its dusty closet. 

Vi screamed and screamed at me as I cleaned up the mess. I took all of the paper plates and put them in garbage bags. I took down the flypaper. I threw the empty borax boxes in the dumpster. 

Vi couldn’t do anything but sob while I took over the house. When I got thirsty, I set my cup down on the table without a coaster. 

I was worried the neighbors were going to call the cops with all the yelling and crying going on, but no one did. Once, I looked out the window and saw a dark man in dark clothes standing on the sidewalk across from the house. I couldn’t see his eyes under his cap, but I thought he was looking at me. There was something familiar and disturbing about him which I couldn’t place. And then he was just gone. I looked away for a second and he had disappeared.

The sun went down. I came into Vi’s room with her dinner and her pills.

“You hate me,” she glared. “You really, really hate me. I must deserve it.”

“Vi, I cleaned your house.”

“You’re gonna let in those ants.”

“If ants get in, we’ll just stomp them. Listen, I’m not gonna live here and help you if I can’t live in this house.”

“Then you better let me die.” She scowled at me. I rolled my eyes. 

There was a scratching sound at the front door. Vi jumped and pulled the blanket up like a child afraid of the dark.

I stood up to go see the source of the noise.

“Get back here!” Vi shouted. “I’m just seeing what it is,” I said.

“You stupid bitch! Get back here!” Vi screamed louder as I walked up the hall to the front door. The scratches sounded heavy, huge. Not like a raccoon at all, but something bigger. For a second, I had a sudden, irrational thought– it was that man I saw before. It was that tall man with the cap. And when I opened the door, I thought, I would see him standing there, his uncannily and unplaceably familiar face grinning at me. And his teeth would be black, and his eyes dark and gleaming. I got scared. My fingers stopped on the latch. 

I flipped on the front porch light.

I peeked through the hole.

Of course there was no man. It was a dog.

A big black lab. He had a collar around his neck. He scratched the door again, tail wagging.

I hadn’t seen this dog around the neighborhood before, but to be fair, I hadn’t been able to get out very much in the past few months. It could very well be a neighbor dog. He was big, but he looked skinny. His dark coat shined slick in the porch light. 

I unlocked the front door. The dog looked at me through the screen, its glittering dark eyes docile. 

“Hi,” I said to the dog. The dog wagged its tail slowly. “Are you lost?”

The dog didn’t whine or bark, but only pawed at the door again.

Vi would never, in a million billion years, let me help this dog. But Vi wasn’t in charge anymore. So I opened the door.

I only meant to step outside and check his collar. But the moment the door was open, the big black dog strode into the house. 

Not a labrador, I realized. Maybe some kind of great pyrenees mix. It was big. Huge, even. It crossed the threshold and I swore it seemed to grow.

Not a pyrenees. A dane.

As the dog brushed past me, I reached my hand down to pet his dark coat.

My fingers passed through something grainy, crunchy, and moving. Something which slithered in rivers around my fingers, millions of tiny legs–chitinous, feathery, pinching.

Not a dane.

Not a dog.

The creature didn’t move right as it lurched down the hall. The legs bent wrong. The body writhed. It moved quickly, with purpose. 

I was too shocked to move. The dog-thing swelled up into an enormous, amorphous mass, and flooded into Grandma Vi’s bedroom, where she was already screaming.

I ran to her. I did hate her, but I ran to her. Maybe I meant to help her. Maybe I just wanted to see.

Either way, by the time I got there, there was nearly nothing left of Grandma Vi but a thrashing corpse. 

I couldn’t tell when the wild flailing stopped being her death throes and started being purely the erratic undulations and tossings and turnings of millions of tiny black ants, moving her bones. 

They crawled all over the floor. They crawled all over the ceiling. They crawled over my arms and legs. Not biting, just moving over me on their way to and from her.

I turned and fled the house.

The ants didn’t follow me. They were far too engrossed in dismantling their quarry.

I really didn’t know. How could I? Vi never told me.

She expected me to just know. 

[creepyclothdoll]

The Other Sister

She grinned Nina’s big gap-toothed grin and sang along as we drove. Just like the real Nina would do. 

She asked if I’d put on some West Side Story. I didn’t ask where her phone was. 

I knew. The real Nina had it. 

Nina called me that morning from our parents’ house up north. She asked why I was taking so long, I said I had to do all the dishes she left, she laughed. She asked me to bring her sociology textbook. 

When I opened her door, Nina was standing there with her bags packed, ready to go. The Nina on the phone asked if I’d found it. The Nina in the door asked if something was the matter. 

I’d been in our apartment alone for two days. 

This Other Nina brought her bags out to the car. She wore Nina’s clothes. She looked like my sister. But my sister wasn’t here.

She rode passenger. She was in a good mood. Sometimes, she spoke as if responding to things I hadn’t said. Or laughed at a joke I hadn’t made. I tried not to stare. Tried not to look at all.

I considered she was a demon. Something meant to hurt me, or trick me into hurting myself. Dangerous to drive with a demon.

I considered I was hallucinating. That was dangerous, too. 

I considered leaving this Nina at the gas station and speeding on up to my real family. But I didn’t. She came out with a donut and a smartwater and made a strange non-sequitor that I didn’t reply to, though she laughed as if I had.

“Did you pack your sociology textbook?” I asked after awhile.

“Did I? Oh, shit. No, I forgot,” Nina groaned. “It’s alright, I can wing it from memory probably.”

“... Do you remember the last couple days?”

“Pfft. Barely.” She said this like a joke. I had a bad headache.

We pulled up to our parents’ house. My parents’ house. I was sweating, my head was pounding, and I was nauseous. We carried our bags to the door.

My mom, my dad, and Nina rushed out to greet me. 

The Nina behind me lit up with glee.

“Hey Mom! Hey Dad! H-” 

She stopped. The real Nina’s mouth dropped open. The Other Nina’s mouth dropped, too, identically. Both of them froze.

The real Nina started saying “What the f–”

And then the Nina beside me disappeared.

Just gone. Her bags gone with her. 

An ozone smell lingered in the air. My head pounded, and my stomach lurched, and I was sick all over the sidewalk. My parents and my real sister were suddenly sick, too. Everyone slept through the next day.

I’ll never know what she was or where she came from. But I’ll never forget that millisecond before she was gone. The way all her features seemed, in that instant, to stretch out like an image on a broken TV. 

She’d been so terrified.