“Damn it, Benji, it’s missing!”

Benjamin turns, muscles drawing up under his navy jacket like puppet cords. A man preparing to strike another against his own desires, all to keep the teenager in line. Mob violence hardly ever discriminates by age.

At least not here in Boston. Never in Boston.

“You better find the wretched thing, Paul…” His knuckles fatten around golden rings, “I swear on my life, you fuck this up and you’re finished.”

My heart skips a beat. Skips two. And then my palm pushes into my chest to make sure the organ is still functioning.

“What’s the matter with you?” Benjamin cocks his head my way, hard amber eyes oozing suspicion. “Don’t like birthday parties or something?”

I shake my head. “It’s just the clowns, balloons—I don’t know, boss, it’s all… dated. Don’t you think?” Sweat pools around the collar of my dress shirt, and I reach to pull the fabric from my neck on a swallow.

Both men go dead-silent.

Almost as dead as the body on the stainless steel cart between them.

I’d been careless. Wheeling the thing right through the chef’s kitchen on my way to the shed. They’d told me Carmela had stepped out to pick up vanilla frosting, the last ingredient she needed to finish icing the rest of the cake, and it seemed faster than taking the paved road around the mansion. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated all the wrapped boxes in the entryway, the mess of rainbow decor, the bottomless trays of antipasto along the marble island…

Nor the baking tray with creamy batter at the end closest to the oven. Several knuckles deep.

It could be anywhere. Right?

“You saying I’m throwing my baby a lame party?”

Benjamin’s voice crawls to murderous volume.

I swallow again, but this time the lump swells to twice its size. The off-key choir of guests singing ‘happy birthday’ just outside the shed, dragging a shiver into the pit of my stomach. Shaking loose undigested antipasto from the walls. Sending it high up into my throat.

Paul’s alabaster face somehow manages to grow shades paler when he connects the dots. And suddenly all three of us are peering out at Benji’s backyard through the gap between the gray doors.

Mowed grass swipes at moving feet. The ghost of once-lit candles, wafting into the shed with a waxy warning as Maria pulls the striped pink sticks from the cake.

If he spots it when I do, he says nothing.

But I don’t miss the furious anger gripping his brow as Benjamin leans in.

The shriveled beige tip juts out from the white frosting.

A bump in the buttercream, pointing straight at me from the side of the cake facing the shed. The knife pushes in. The folding table jostles, Carmela sawing to a stop.

Guilt snaps my gaze to the stainless steel cart—to the wet stump at the end of the dead guy’s right arm. And all I hear next is the blood-chilling scream of a birthday girl who’ll probably never eat cake again.

He’s a motherfucker.

Always has been, always will be.

For the millionth time this year, I’m wiping sticky yellow stains off the toilet seat because the man I stupidly said ‘ I do ‘ to, can’t be bothered to respect any one of my million requests to lift the damn thing.

A microcosm for the entirety of our marriage, really.

Had I been raised better, I might’ve skyrocketed my standards before meeting him and picked someone I didn’t have to mother—someone I could actually be a wife to. A provider type, one of the men who values the presence and gentle efforts of his woman, and insists on delivering solutions rather than headaches and heartaches like he stands to earn interest off of them.

But alas, my husband, the motherfucker, is not among those men. Nope.

Those were the winning LuckyBall numbers I found last week, a little white square at the back of his cluttered junk drawer. Who would’ve ever imagined?

More likely to be struck dead instantaneously by a little green alien sitting atop a smoking meteorite screaming, “you’re a shit husband!” in some unknown Martian language, and yet this asshole defies the odds with a $5 bill.

Now he’s a certified millionaire, even after taxes.

Oh, and it gets better.

I’m still working. Ten years fighting to keep a clean house and cover the bills for man who duped me when I was still a freshman in college. “Labors of love, Nancy!”

Only they’re not labors of love anymore.

They’re labors of hate.

Well… labors for my lawyers really, because the success of my divorce depends on every detail I can find. And I can’t blow my cover, not until I find the account he’s been hiding from me. He needs to think every thing at home is just “bright orange, Georgia peachy!”

But when I do find it…

God I want to see the twisted look on his face.

I’m thinking I’ll cut this black hair short and bleach it blonde, step into some red bottoms.

I bet he won’t recognize me.

I bet he’ll try to brag to me about the wealth he’s “earned” before he realizes I’m about to bleed it by half as soon as the process server hands him that manilla envelope.

“Are you the motherfucker married to Nancy Harrison? You’ve been served.”

“We have to move the bed, Charles, because when this house falls it’s going to crush us into the ground!” The slender woman shouted, pointing a single angry finger behind her.

One… Two…

Three ominous crows in the sky.

Just my luck.

The man’s enormous shadow seemed to draw in a slow inhale, pinching the bridge of his upturned nose as if to stifle a breath of fire… But this man wasn’t a dragon, we didn’t have those in North America.

“Norma! For the last time, woman, the house is not going to fall!”

His last seven words were harsh, punctuated into finality. Because men always just know. Despite being quick to laugh at a woman’s intuition.

It had taken me four days of hiking through the Dark Wood to get to this tilted house, and I’d heard their bickering long before I’d caught sight of their fierce bodies, stomping across the yellow glow spilling through the windows.

A strange site…

Even supernatural beings couldn’t escape the harms of human hands on the planet.

We’d recently been forced to add new ground level lamps and carve a door into the basement brick to keep up with real estate code.

See, the height of the property had always sat on a lovely green hill, but record temperatures caused by global warming had dried and cracked the soil around it, leaving jagged bedrock exposed beneath the part of the house that had once been underground. All within the last three years of the ten the couple had lived there.

“Well if you won’t let me move our bed…I’m going to my mother’s,” her voice peaked with the threat of her scream, which she unleashed anyway, “I deserve piece of mind, Charles!”

The earth trembled with the banshee’s wail and I almost lost my footing.

Her silver hair, whipping as she spun on her heel.

“Norma!”

Two massive hands simultaneously karate-chopped the air between them. “Be reasonable! What are you going to do in Chicago among humans?”

I was close enough to catch my other, much larger, tenant’s fury in the creases of his hairy face. Lucky for the both of us, the full moon was still days away.

“Guys! Hello!” I cried.

My voice carried easily out here.

“Fuck… Our landlord’s come for his rent too— For this piece of shit, no good, rundown…“

Charlie’s grumbling boomed louder as he neared the door, shriveling my stomach like a emptied balloon.

“God dammit, Issac, now’s a shit time!”

The hulking man in loose red plaid and dark blue jeans met me downstairs, thick, black hair covering his exposed arms as they crossed in front of his chest.

Above us, his ghoulish girlfriend peered down from the window, blue almond-shaped eyes, beaming at me. A truly dangerous vision that—

“Isaac! I’m right here!”

“Hi, yes,” I cleared my throat, twirling the long red wires of my beard, “well, unfortunately I have some… news…” Sucking in a breath, my gaze met with the narrowed yellow eyes of the man almost triple my size. “The property has been condemned.”

“What’s that mean, Charles? What’s he saying!”

Charlie pinched the bridge of his nose again between two beefy fingers.

“You see, uh— a city inspector came unannounced at some point last week, not sure if you happened to see someone on the grounds… Anyway… turns out it’s a miracle this thing is still standing, they expect it to… fall. At least that’s what this letter says. I’ve been asked to inform you that effective immediately, the property must be… vacated.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me…”

I could feel victory, cascading from the window overhead before I even managed to look.

“Pack your bags, baby, look’s like we’re going to your Mother’s!”

The werewolf was gone in all of an instant, his growl evident in the undertone of his voice.

Tension evaporated from my body, and I turned my back to the house, patting the white envelope in my coat pocket once as I began my return hike—

Holding in a chuckle of my own when a fit of eerie, vindicated, feminine laughter coiled through the crispy autumn air.

My father once told me that I used to frighten him. I was a baby, and he’d sometimes check on me in the early hours only to find my dark eyes wide-awake, and staring silently from behind the wooden rail of my crib.

Not a lick of sleepiness in my pudgy face.

9:44 PM Is what the birth certificate says.

I’m nearing thirty, and my eyes are still just as dark as ever. Darker actually, black espresso, seasoned by loss and the consequences of watching your father’s casket be lowered into the ground at twenty six.

That does something to you, shifts the chemicals in your brain and fucks with your sleep all together.

If you ask me… I think I was born with a gene, one unexplored much by science and activated by life events outside of our control.

I have more memories than I can account for as an exhausted middle schooler, a thirteen year old slugging her feet over the beige linoleum lining the hall. Just one more class. Just one more hour. Just one more fucking minute.

Falling asleep in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, or on those blue seats of New York City buses.

And in high school, I learned my friend’s deepest secrets after midnight because I was awake to answer her call. Who lost her virginity? Wait, she’s sleeping with Mr. Nicoli? That’s so creepy! Isn’t that illegal? Well, she’s a year off the age of consent, I doubt anyone cares. I still think we should report it.

Mr. Nicoli was in fact fired some time after that.

Every last one of them would fall asleep before me, and I would lie there, sinking into the mattress, nerves prickling my stomach with the fact that I couldn’t seem to get sleepy when everyone else around me did—

Knowing the next day would be a groggy, living-dead nightmare.

A nightmare!

College was a little easier, being that I got through my degree by only taking evening classes. Yes, it did take me a little longer to earn the credits. It was a massive accomplishment, but the day before graduation, I spent my night turning my cap into a bejeweled activist message about making education affordable for all.

And oh was it cute. Everyone wanted a picture of the back of my head. A little rebellion started by a local vampire.

Now I can see the dark circles under my dark eyes, barely awake for that special day, trying to celebrate like everyone else when in actuality I was up way, way, wayyy past my bed time.

They say humans like me evolved from ancient warriors who would watch over the tribe, protecting them from beasts and the sheen of white fangs in the night. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

We’re most energized after lunch at midnight, and after teatime at two in the morning.

And minutes before your 6:00 AM alarm rings, I have fallen into REM.

While you dream, all I want to do is create.

I want to go for a nice jog… And I would, if I’d been born a man, what freedom to not have to worry about who might snatch me off the sidewalk.

Sigh.

Anyway, I don’t need to write a story, because this prompt is me. To a T.

I am the human, evolved to be nocturnal.

I wake at three in the afternoon and pull out my lime colored ear plugs, slide off my weighted eye mask, and do yoga stretches in bed. All in absolute darkness thanks to blackout curtains. After that it’s just a matter of waiting for the sun to set so that my head doesn’t ache as badly from the daylight, and I can get to work.

This has become a way of life for me now, even though I’ve tried trading Night Owl for Morning Lark time and time again. My body doesn’t like it. Never has. I mean I was born this way.

9:44 PM Is what the birth certificate says.

“Where did you get this?”

Momma held up the gun in her freshly manicured hands, the pink and white acrylic clicking nervously down the barrel.

“Some man put it in my bag at lunch, told me he’s going to need it later.” My little girl was only five, yet here she was, calmly explaining to her grandmother—as if I weren’t standing right here—that a stranger had put a firearm in her little rainbow backpack.

“Okay, momma, let’s put it down and wait for the police,” I cleared my throat, “Now, please.”

“What did he look like, Maddie?”

I watched my daughter kick her brown booties together and stare blankly at the ceiling, severely beyond patience with momma, who was eyeing me as though she knew something I didn’t.

“Maddie?”

“Please, momma, put the gun on the damn table and sit down!”

“He looked like…daddy!” Maddie pointed her tiny finger at me and I watched momma’s face go stark white.

The three of us traded glances in the loudest silence I’d ever heard.

Then there was a knock on the door.

My mouth parted but momma cut me off too quickly. “Door’s open!”

Maddie hid herself behind my knees, poking her head out from one side, and then moving to the other.

The officer strolled into the kitchen, nodding at momma once before closing the door behind him and fixing his dark brown gaze on me. Something felt off. Cops in my town always worked with a partner.

“Maddie, go up to your room, okay?” I ushered her toward the staircase but she didn’t move.

“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s the man who gave me the gun.”

My stomach wrung itself at the seriousness of her tone.

“She’s telling you the truth.”

I almost snapped my neck flitting from his strangely familiar face to momma’s. “I’m sorry, what?”

“Darren, there’s no easy way to say this. That man right there is your brother.”

“My what—“

“You heard her, motherfucker.”

“My kid is here. Watch your mouth!”

“You’re speaking to an officer of the law, Darren.” Momma hissed.

Little arms squeezed around my knees, Maddie’s terror palpable in their grip. “Daddy…don’t let him take me. I don’t want a new daddy.”

My jaw locked, teeth gnashing together at the thought. “I won’t, baby girl.”

They came in the night.

Every phone in town could be heard, screeching with the emergency alert we’d been preparing to receive for weeks:

HUMANOID THREAT. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

No one knew what they were. There hadn’t been a crash. Or a UFO sighting. They simply took New York City overnight, moving from borough to borough before they spilled into New Jersey through the tunnels, taking county after county until the North went dark.

By then it was too late.

I’d heard news reports about bodies by the thousand—no, million, humans and their pets too. Of eerie silence, unlike any ever known on Earth.

Before we lost connection, momma said they’d been unleashed from hell, and that these were the end times. I was starting to consider the possibility. Their movements were so sporadic, so unexpected that our military hadn’t been able to stop them, let alone see them. The last time the President spoke, he warned every U.S. citizen alive that we’d been left to fend for ourselves however we could:

“America, you are the last bastion for true freedom on the planet, I still believe that to be true. If we do this right, the world will never forget the American sacrifice. Now, the time has come for me to say thank you to the great people of this brave nation, may God bless you all, and may he save our souls from what is to come.”

D.C. fell some hours after that.

No one was coming to save us.

I had to remind myself of that as I tucked the panel into place overhead and crawled myself flat beneath the floorboards.

The ground soon began to shake with grave force, as if a stampede were charging toward my house. My eyelids squeezed tight in my face as I awaited certain death.

And I heard it.

A howling, almost shrieking moan growing louder—LOUDER.

“ALIEN MOTHERFU-“ My neighbor fired his rifle.

Automatic weapons began drilling just outside, makeshift bombs blaring in frantic succession, rattling the walls and kicking up dust.

The front door burst open and something bellowed, fast feet pounding over the wood above as I mushed my palm over my lips to keep from breathing.

I listened to the screaming of familiar human voices, and the firing soon quieted to a heart-sinking stop.

My ears were ringing with terror.

Still, it couldn’t blot out the scratching of something knifelike, inches from my eyes. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip.

I stretched trembling fingers to reach the pistol at my waist, finally managing to take it in my hand and aim it at the floorboard in front of me, when it shredded down the middle and was ripped off.

Fuck me!

Hot, metallic breath smeared my cheeks and I could’ve sworn I’d peed myself as I winced, momentarily blinded by the lamp I’d carelessly forgotten to turn off.

But I couldn’t bring myself to shoot.

All I could focus on were rows of jagged shark teeth in a bloody open mouth…that was also nearly transparent, like the rest of its body, except for the curved lines of muscle and the bulky round shapes in its core resembling organs.

“Wh-what are you?” Shaking, I almost dropped my weapon onto my face.

And, it froze.

“What d-do you want!”

My nail clicked, grazing the trigger.

Its mouth snapped shut. I could practically see through to the plastic ceiling fan behind his head. Then it spoke.

“Eaaaaaat.”

The throaty word rippled down my spine and I hollered, popping shot after shot into its hideous face right between two beady black eyes, until it fell forward, crashing on top of my chest.

The impact forced all the air from my lungs. Its body went limp. And then—

Milton knew she was more loved than he.

For who else could know more about love for the lady than the man who had maimed and slain their neighbor’s daughter, Emily.

And though she suspected he’d had something horrible to do with the girl’s disappearance and their eternal aging, Annie had never asked—she was too frightened to know; better to carry on with Sunday slices of cake, and cups of tea above white satin.

But Milton had other plans for his secret, you see, they’d grown too late into age, and the witch had warned Milton that while he would never die, he could still be killed, of course, there had been another caveat too: his wife and he would continue to age in body, forced to watch their limbs turn to ash and bone, and feel their eyes shrivel within their skulls.

“Oh Milton,” Annie Lou cried, “You’re so much older than I am, what will happen to me when you’re gone?”

He slowly crossed the parlor to where she sat at the table, setting a fresh bouquet of roses down in front of her, his hand coming to rest over her shoulder as she wept.

Today, little children tell the tale of another immortal man with the face of Theodore J. Ives, said to have once lived beside Milton and the most cherished Annie Lou. One night he crept into their cottage by the forest, and the candles were blown black, the couple, never seen again.

They say sometimes you can see her ghost, sitting atop her husband’s coffin, and that roses only bloom in Vinebrooke whenever she’s near.

I am alone most days, except for when it rains and he comes to visit.

In truth, I don’t know much about Mr. Higgins.

We only ever meet for coffee.

He takes his black, with a dusting of cane sugar, and after one sip, his shoulders slouch beneath his coat and he waits calmly for me to finish my chai. Sometimes he tilts his head toward the door, and I know he means for a leisurely stroll through the botanical gardens. A shared favorite spot of ours.

Today we walk together beneath his large umbrella, with the tapping of rain over black nylon above our heads. It’s quiet otherwise, peaceful in a sleepy sort of way. And I’m entirely unprepared to hear him speak.

“It’s been very cold of late.”

His voice is a weak whisper from behind the overstretched turtleneck covering his mouth.

My gaze flits to the notched lapels of his coat before falling to the concrete below. “October usually is, Mr. Higgins.”

He says nothing.

But it’s not like him to have much to say. Usually he’s the best kind of listener, some nods, and hmms, and ahhs in between my pauses. His tone, always reassuring, the kind of friend who reminds you the sun will rise again without having to tell you. I only wish I could learn more about him; where he lives, why he never visits in fair weather …why his nose is missing from his pale face.

Because it is.

The triangular hole doesn’t bother me much, neither do his huge, clouded eyeballs, never blinking from within their sockets. I know Mr. Higgins to be a genuine soul—one undeserving of superficial judgment and invasive questions.

I spot it from the corner of my eye, soft and subtle, blue and lined.

The butterfly crosses the air before us, landing on Higgins’ curled knuckles. He and I slow our steps, appreciating the delicate majesty of the paper-thin being sharing our umbrella for a suspended moment.

Its wings blink once, and then a second time.

“Will you take a photo of us, Maury?”

I’m so stunned and deeply moved that the urgency of his request almost misses me. But I pull my phone from my pocket, sliding the camera into view.

Click.

The memory is captured.

“Oh, isn’t it a delightful one!” I call out, turning the screen so he can see.

But in the same instant, I find that Mr. Higgins has vanished, along with his blue friend.

And my arm falls slowly to my side as I scan the garden in every direction, searching for my dearest friend who is nowhere to be seen.

It had been fifteen years since the sun had last risen.

You took it with you.

And ever since then, the world has existed in darkness. No color. No warmth. Only the icy air of a dying planet. Sometimes I ask myself if you knew what you were doing—if you knew the consequences all your calculating and all your theorizing might bring… Maybe something happened to you in that lab, I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

Isolation enjoys creating monsters of human beings.

In my dreams you still come to me, screaming. The terror palpable in your bulging red eyes and shaking hands, reaching for me as if to warn of some unimaginable evil. Evil only you had seen. Perhaps it was the same evil then as the evil I see now, this darkness. You turned our world into a graveyard.

Millions have died. Even under ground, millions more are set to freeze. To starve. And I will be among them.

So great was your love.

After the incident, a few fortunate souls left the rest of us behind for other solar systems, in hopes of a new Earth.

Matthew secured a spot for me on the Goldilocks-9 despite my…affiliation to you and your horrible crime. I could’ve gone with them, I could’ve left this rotting place, but I chose penance. On your behalf. On my own even, for the second-hand shame of having ever said ‘I do’ to a man like you.

Now, I wear the damned rings to remind myself of the Wesley Gable who would’ve never let something like this happen. You were our carbon emissions hero, once upon a time. The man on every newspaper, every news station, boasted about on NPR and several Tonight Shows… You were good with them, with people. At some point they grew to love you more for your character than your science.

Now, I sit here beneath the glass in this bunker by the sea, scanning the stars for the fire of your return. And when it gets lonely, I twist these bands around my finger and listen to the cracking of ice, shifting below the ocean surface, imagining you’ll bring the sun and your cheeky grin to the world once again.

I think I just met the happiest person in the world. And I don’t trust it. No one is actually that happy deep down. How can they be? It just doesn’t make sense. Isn’t she paying attention? Doesn’t she read the news, or see the hungry, lining the streets, oozing economic loss and addiction? There is suffering in every crevice.

Every apartment, every cubicle.

I mean the planet is literally dying—coastal flooding, coral reefs teeming with colorful life are collapsing into bleach-white decay. None of us can afford our dreams without losing sleep and grinding our health along with our meat. And sometimes even then.

Anyone that happy is either delusional, or so self absorbed that they see no one else. Their walk on the sunshine blinds them of reality. Their bubble is so thin I worry what might happen the day it finally bursts. Pop.

So what is she hiding? What is her secret?

Oh I hate it. And I don’t trust it for one bit.