#paranoia

Every Easter, we get ready for Big-Eared John's arrival. No one really knows how long we've been giving to Big-Eared John. Only know it’s longer than anyone in the town or even their ancestors can remember. Once in church a few years back, I saw slack-jawed Sally ask preacher man when Big-Eared John first came to our town, and he backhanded her right there in front of the whole congregation. That’s when we knew never to question how he came to be. Only that he was, and we were to do as we were…

I've always hated my job for one simple, yet insurmountable reason: nothing ever happens. Imagine spending nine hours. NINE freaking hours. Locked inside a concrete bunker, listening to the universe breathe into your head through an oversized pair of headphones. The higher-ups like to pretend this is some kind of essential service. That my job is somehow paramount to the advancement of the human race. It isn't.

Twice a day I change June’s bandage, and twice a day she lets me.

Tap tap tap. James peels his gritty eyelids back and stares up at the blank ceiling. He considers putting something up there. A poster maybe, like he had as a child. It would make sense, given how much time he spends staring at the ceiling above his bed. Sleepless nights, bed rotting, and the three AM wake up call from some animal tapping its way through the walls.

Since so many of you have been trading your own run-ins with the creepy and unexplained, I figured it was time to throw my story into the mix.

At the outset, I should tell you I’m a thief. Not a classless “smash and grab” guy or a lowly pickpocket. Those require no planning or strategy beyond “move quickly and be ready to run.” I’m a fourth-generation cat burglar. I’m very good at my job. If everything goes right, you don’t notice I’ve been there for weeks. If ever.

The job was simple. It paid well enough. Even if it hadn’t, I would have taken it anyway. After nine months of unemployment, choice stops being a luxury and starts feeling like arrogance. I started on a Tuesday. Odd, I know. They said they were in a rush—something about the previous guy leaving without notice. Apparently the guy just walked out mid-week and never came back. A red flag, sure. But red flags fade when rent is due.

Halle and I had only been living in Brunswick, Georgia for a few months. We moved here from Tallahassee over the summer and honestly, we missed home. But hey, the area had grown on us. We liked the beaches and the culture. But one place we hadn’t checked out yet was Jekyll Island. Jekyll had a mystique to it to say the least. It had history given that it once served as a vacation destination for many of America’s wealthy elites during The Gilded Age. The opportunity to visit said island arose…

After they came to our door, my sibling stopped being a “problem.” That’s what my parents wanted, at least. But all I can remember is them being a normal kid. Yeah, they caused trouble sometimes–but they were young. That’s it. That’s all it was. Nothing that wouldn’t have passed on its own. And that’s exactly what those two people promised when they showed up. They didn’t look strange at first. Just calm. Polite. Like they’d done this a hundred times before. Five minutes, they said.

The wind is cold. The late autumn night wind drilled through the battered glass window of the small eatery, scraping against faces with a dull, lingering ache. The diner's old incandescent bulb flickered erratically. Its light fell upon two bowls of steaming rice on the table, and also onto the bowed head of the student. No one knew that this seemingly silent high schooler, always wearing a washed-out school uniform, was already rotten to the core.

The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up. I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting. Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.

The widow, Laura, walked into the garden. Cracked Stone walls surrounded her, their green vines slithering toward bushes plump with blood-red berries. At the center of the garden stood a rectangular stone basin shaped like an angel. It knelt before the pool as if to deliver water from its mouth. Yet what flowed was bleak black water, filled with sticks and the smal bodies of dying insects. When she was younger, she remembered tossing coins and watching them sink into the water's darkness.…

Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she'd added at the DMV and never let anyone drop. I hadn't refilled anything. I hadn't opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.

We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me. Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour's television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.

The listing said SLEEPS 2 in capitals, the way you write a warning before you understand it. Mira found the cabin. Four hours north, at the end of a gravel road that gave up and became a suggestion for the last half mile. No neighbours in any direction. A woodstove, a hand pump over the sink, and two mugs on the shelf. Two chairs at the table. Two plates, two forks, two towels folded to the same width. Two of everything, arranged like an answer to a question nobody had asked.

I I wished it with my whole being, which is to say I wished it with something I didn't know yet was a cage. Let me tell you about Delia first. Not because she's the main point—she isn't—but because you need to understand my obsession. Delia is the kind of pretty that makes pretty people feel plain. She wakes up, and her hair is already in order. Her laugh hypnotizes you and puts you in a trance. People lean toward her as plants do toward light, without even knowing it.

"The last few nurses we've hired have all flaked on me," Jim said with an exhausted sigh. "Please tell me you don't plan on flaking."

It was Halloween in the year 2015. I remember waking up at 7AM, feeling stoked for Halloween and watching Charlie Brown. I saw people from outside my neighborhood decorating at the last minute because a lot of people like slacking on Halloween.

My brother could wear my voice before he could find his own. Our mother would call us down to dinner and he would answer in my throat, and she would set the table for one boy twice. At nine I heard him explaining me to our father. Not reporting. Explaining, the way you explain weather. He used my voice, and the words were mine, arranged the way I would never have arranged them, and he was right about every one. I asked how. He said, I listen. I am always listening.

“That caint be the number. Just caint,” Wes said, taking off his faded John Deere hat and slapping it against his leg. “I dried the corn before I hauled it over. I know what the moisture level is!” “Wes, I’m just the messenger. The machine checks and gives back a level.” “Well, your gosh-darn machine must be broken!” “It’s just recently been recalibrated. I can run another sample if you want.”