by Scott Savino
At home, your shape emerged from the things I put together. I got a bag of your hair from the barber. I had to tell a small white lie, that I was making wigs for sick children. It was the only way. They wouldn’t just let me have it, which was odd.
The way the hair framed your face was stunning. All the pictures I took, printed, and pieced together made you whole. Your eyes, your lips, your fingers, fingernail clippings. The more time I spent building you, the more life you had. I poured more of my blood into you, then lay my head on your chest.
I heard your heartbeat.
I was so overjoyed. I wanted to see you.
I panicked when I couldn’t find your dot on the phone.
You had vanished.
I rushed to your apartment.
It was empty.
Your phone was off, the number no longer yours.
I searched for you. The club, the coffee shop, all the places I’d seen you go. All the places I’d taken pictures of you. No one could help me find you.
There was nothing left behind but a hole in my chest.
I took the arms of the sweater and wrapped one around me, laying my head on your chest. Your faint floral scent wafted around me.
Your heart beat beneath me, your chest rose and fell, heat radiated off you. Your arms wrapped a little tighter around me. I didn’t need to move to the bed. You were real now, alive in our corner. Our blood moved through you and I felt your lips on mine. The pieces of you I swallowed danced around my insides.
I pushed play on our playlist. The first track was I Will Possess Your Heart. I like that we keep it on shuffle, so we never know what song is going to start off our time together.
There I lay surrounded by you.
Surrounded by our love.
Mr. Flip
JADA MAES
THE BOY-CHILD’S NAME WAS SKYLAR and his fears looked like black butterflies. Several swirled above his strawberry-blond head as he slept. They fluttered in a drowsy way, sluggish from the sleeping mind that animated them. They were, in no particular order, Skylar’s anxiety about starting the third grade, his fear of the German Shepherd next door, and the suspicion that someone unpleasant had come to live in his house.
Across the bedroom, the closet door clicked open and a chalk-white hand snaked through the narrow opening with screaming-red nails honed dagger sharp.The hand gestured and the black fear-butterflies shuddered, flapping desperately as they fought against an unseen wind. The wind pulled them, mercilessly, toward the closet.When they were close enough, the hand snatched them from the air, whipped back into the closet, and slammed the door shut.
Seconds later, Skylar woke up shrieking. His moms hurried down the hall and into the room where Allison held the crying boy while Shae looked in the closet. But Mr. Flip was clever, and Shae would find nothing more threatening than a pile of clothes, a pair of sneakers, and Skylar’s old rain boots.
He smiled in the dark from his hiding place as Shae closed the door and returned to the boy.
Mr. Flip was left alone with Skylar’s butterflies. He wouldn’t eat the butterflies—no, not yet—but there were other things he could do.
So strange, the sound of screaming butterflies.
oOo
Mr. Flip was his name. Folding was his game.
If he ever felt the need to write the great secrets of closet monsters, the first he would tell would be Folding. It made him and his kind the most powerful creatures of all. Mr. Flip could stretch, flatten, or roll himself into, under, or behind anything. Whenever Shae or Allison looked in the closet at night, Mr. Flip would simply Fold himself behind the clothes hamper or slide between the books on the upper shelf and wait until it was dark again before he came out.
Another secret of the Folding Men was that they weren’t just active at night. Mr. Flip could feel the boy downstairs, slipping on his backpack and kissing his moms goodbye before running off to catch the school bus. Ten minutes later, Shae kissed Allison and left for work on her motorcycle.
Then there were only one set of eyes in the house.
Mr. Flip felt secure.
He slipped under the closet door, flat as a sheet of paper, and capered down the hallway. His black shoes made no sound on the wood floors, his rumpled black suit silent as the grave. Had someone seen him in that moment they might have mistaken him for a shadow. The tiny shadow of a crooked man with long, strong fingers, and a bowler hat perched on his bald head.
In silence, he crept to the second floor landing where he smelled the odor of cigarettes.
Allison was smoking again, the sly vixen!
“Yeah, it’s getting worse,” she said. “He’s waking up five nights a week now. And it’s always about the closet.”
A pause.
“Night terrors, I guess.”
She was on the phone with someone. He slithered up to the ceiling and crept down to the first floor, listening.
“We never taught him about the boogeyman, it’s too scarring. He must’ve picked it up at school or something. If I find the kid who put it in his head, I’ll cheerfully strangle the little bastard.”
A short humorless laugh flavored with smoke.
“Mister Flip. How weird is that? He showed me a picture last week. You know Sky and his pet monsters.”
A picture? Curious …
Mr. Flip hungered as he listened. He wanted nothing more than to drop down and pin Allison to the floor, to drink the fears out of her head until he bulged like an overfilled leech. Alas, adult fears were hot and quick, too jittery for even a Folding Man to catch with any ease.
A child’s fears, though … slow and sweet.
For a moment, Mr. Flip allowed himself the notion of Harvesting the sweet little morsel.
But there were other, more pressing matters.
First, there was the matter of the conference. The other Folding Men would be waiting to hear from him, and once he had conversed with them, he would deal with the supposed picture.
Tempted, but ever the professional, Mr. Flip left Allison to her call and skittered up the wall, returning upstairs to wait under the bathroom sink until he heard the front door open and shut. Once he was sure Allison was out of the house, he unfolded himself from the little cabinet and crouched hands-and-feet on the edge of the sink, his sharp nails skittering across the bone-white porcelain. Mr. Flip’s back heaved up and down, his beady eyes closed, and he leaned forward, vomiting a stringy black liquid into the sink. His rib cage swelled and shrank as he forced out more and more, until the bowl was full to the brim. Then he waited. And watched. And soon enough, he saw white faces peering up out of the black liquid.
“Hello, brothers,” he said.
The other Folding Men nodded.
There were seven like him, let loose from the catacombs in the black earth to drink all the fears they could catch.
Mr. Shade said, “Ahh, Mister Flip. Word has been sent from Below. A message from the elders, concerning you.”
“But—but, too early, my brother,” whined Mr. Flip. “The boy-child is not ripe enough. I haven’t drunk nearly enough of the fear he has to offer.”
“Time flies, brother,” said Mr. Glove. “A true Folding Man plays his games silent and quick. Your love of the chase has prevented the elders from receiving their sustenance.”
“Still,” said Mr. Wall, “the message was one of good tidings. Believe it or not, you have been chosen.”
A sudden, delicious chill crawled down Mr. Flip’s spine. “Surely, you can’t mean—”
“The moon is at the appropriate angle,” said Mr. Glove.
“The gates of Below are open for your return,” said Mr. Shade.
“You and one other, we should say,” said Mr. Cold.
“Harvest,” said Mr. Flip, as if tasting the word.
“Harvest,” his brothers echoed. Their voices were the wind in a field of dead grass.
The excitement was so great that Mr. Flip struggled to suppress the urge to vomit again. Only one Folding Man
in a thousand was chosen to Harvest when the moon was bloated and orange. On those rare, wonderful days it was possible to pass through the spiky stone gates of Below.
And with a passenger in tow.
And when the passenger—a boy-child with strawberry-blond hair, for example—came below, all those delicious fears would be extracted from his head with the old, rusted machines the Folding Men had found centuries before. There would be a flood of black butterflies, not just a tiny trickle, and when they were done, the passenger would be given a fresh black suit and a shiny black bowler hat, and then he would be taught to Fold.
Mr. Flip looked up into the bathroom mirror and smiled at what he saw. A wrinkled white face pulsing with spidery blue veins and a perfectly circular mouth ringed with yellow peg teeth. Pleased with himself and with his new duty, he pulled the sink’s plug and let the black fluid gurgle away down the drain.
oOo
Mr. Flip needed time to prepare. The Folding Men were taught to keep their work tidy, which meant leaving no trace behind, and that meant Mr. Flip needed to retrieve the picture.
He danced back to Skylar’s room to start his search.
The writing desk was under the window, piled high with coloring books, loose papers, and stacks of binders with unicorns on the covers. About a hundred different colors of crayons, most broken and worn down, cluttered the spaces between.
The unicorns were a sweet, sweet lie.
Mr. Flip opened the binders and found a paper zoo filled with monsters. Cyclopes and griffins, lurching scarecrows, rotting zombies, crabs the size of Volkswagens, and werewolves fighting vampires. In one, Skylar had drawn himself holding one end of a chain. On the other end was some hulking thing covered in dark fur with ram’s horns curling from its massive head and long teeth grinning from its menacing maw. Something about the picture bothered Mr. Flip, so he took the time to tear it apart and stamp on the shreds again and again for good measure.
Eventually, though, he found what he was looking for in the back of the notebook. A page with the closet door drawn on it. The door was slightly ajar, and a pair of wicked little eyes could be seen peering out. He grinned, tore the page out, then folded it up and put it in his jacket pocket.
Perhaps he’ll autograph it for me, the Folding Man thought. There will be time enough Below. Forever and ever and ever enough.
And with that, he slipped back into the closest to wait.
And to dream.
oOo
When Mr. Flip opened the closet door a crack, he saw the bedroom bathed in moonlight. The harvest moon hung outside the window like a well-fed tick, pulling at him. Time, time, time at last. To take, to feed, to welcome another Folding Man into their hallowed ranks.
Take him now, some voice in his strange blood demanded, perhaps the voices of his brothers Below.
As Mr. Flip slithered out of the closet and across the bedroom floor, Folded flat as shadow, an old rhyme from his long-ago childhood echoed through his mind:
When you get some repose in the form of a doze,
With hot eyeballs and head ever aching
Your slumbering teems with such horrible dreams
That you’d very much better be waking
The Folding Man hunched over the boy-child’s sleeping form with pride as he watched the black butterflies flutter. All those delicious fears were now Mr. Flip’s: his property, his morsels.
He reached out with one moonlit hand, and as his crimson nails dug into Skylar’s shoulder something much bigger wrapped itself around Mr. Flip’s leg.
Mr. Flip looked down, utterly perplexed.
A hand gripped him from floor to mid-thigh, its hairy-knuckled fingers tipped in long, cruel claws. It was attached to an arm covered in dark, shaggy fur that jutted out from under the bed like a fallen tree trunk.
The hand squeezed, and Mr. Flip’s leg bones were crushed to splinters.
He shrieked and tried to leap away, to Fold, to do anything, but the hand’s grip was iron. It yanked his destroyed leg and Mr. Flip fell on his back, gibbering and weeping bloody tears. Then he looked under the bed, at the thing that had grabbed him, and forgot all about his pain.
Under the bed, there wasn’t a cluttered space of unwanted toys. Instead it was a cavern of stone, with walls stretching back and back into forever. In the dark of the cave, he saw two glowing red eyes, a shaggy head topped by two curling ram’s horns, and a sinister mouth lined with dozens of razor-sharp teeth. The floor was littered with broken skeletons, some still draped in tattered black suits. A half-eaten head had been tossed aside with a look of terror on what was left of its face.
It wore a shiny black bowler hat.
“Oh no,” Mr. Flip whined.
The thing under the bed leaned in close and sniffed him. Its breath was the air of a slaughterhouse.
“Picture … was … pretty,” it snarled. “Not … yours … to … break.”
Before the beast pulled Mr. Flip under the bed wailing and screaming, before the screams stopped and the eating began, the Folding Man looked up and saw the real monster of his tragic little life.
A boy-child named Skylar, with strawberry-blond hair and fears that looked like black butterflies, watched with a smile as Mr. Flip disappeared beneath the bed.
The Last Chance Diner
L.P. HERNANDEZ
THE DESERT NIGHT STRETCHED BEFORE them. Occasionally, the swath cast by the headlights gave them a glimpse of roadside detritus. Tumbleweeds waiting for new wind, carrion turning to dust. There were mountains somewhere in the distance, far beyond the reach of the headlights, and very little else.
Beneath the tires, the road thrummed, a steady drone interrupted by the occasional jolt from unseen potholes. The sky glittered above, split into halves by the champagne-colored band of the Milky Way. There was no moon, only stars, and too many of them to count before sunrise.
“I’m getting hungry,” Zac said, his voice barely audible over the drone.
“What’s that?” Josh risked a casual glance over to Zac for a change in scenery.
He’d been drifting for miles, muscle memory and a dim awareness of reality keeping the Tahoe in its lane. There were no opposing headlights to track and no radio to distract, just a crackling sound coming through the speakers. It would have been so easy to just fall asleep. Zac’s comment was well-timed.
“Do we have any road-food left,” Zac said, unbuckling his seatbelt to inspect the backseat.
“No clue,” Josh said, checking the dashboard clock for the time. It was just past midnight. Josh did not remember if he’d adjusted it when crossing time zones. Regardless, if there was nothing left in the Tahoe to eat, they were probably out of luck.
“Find anything,” Josh asked as Zac settled back into his seat.
“Just a bag of garbage,” Zac said, wiping his hand on the red checkers of his shirt before buckling back in.