After school, Micah’s legs take him to Tom’s house without any help from his brain. The movements are out of sync with his body, miserably and pathetically erratic. His mind is cloudy, too: he believes the time between the piercing surrender of the final bell, his hands jittering and clumsy with anticipation, and the gesture of laying out his day’s spoils across Tom’s coffee table pass by seamlessly, altogether unable to identify the beginning of one moment and the end of another.

Tom’s house, perpetually 65 degrees, its linoleum cold to the touch, stands discreetly in a patch of others identical to it. A perfect square near the edge of the main road, heading into the city over. As nondescript and fly-over as the place holding it.

Micah arrives faithfully, the school year’s ritual. The memory of slipping his lank body through the three foot wide divot along the edge of Tom’s backyard fence, hidden behind the dogwood thicket, is soupy and warped, wandering in and out of the frame of his mind. Cool dirt from its sloping edge and the stinking mud which gathers in the chasm’s cradle streak Micah’s shirt and pants. He finds pieces of broken leaves in the soft coil of his black hair. When Tom sees him, a crack appears at the edge of the man’s mouth, not the ghost of a smile but the suggestion of a sneer.

“Wow. Look at that.” Tom, his hands on his hips, his eyes stuck on the plunder spread out below. “You’re good at this.”

Micah wipes his mouth. Sweat pours down his face, meeting his chin and the collar at his neck. Outside, November shuffles maroon and ginger leaves.

Yes, Micah was good. It was important to be good. What happened to Chris had only the distance of a summer. Why the teacher had stopped to look in Chris’ backpack, Micah wasn’t sure. What had they been looking for? They’d found three boxes of staples, gone missing from Ms. Conway’s worn, blue metal desk. The question of their value swims through Micah’s head even as he sees Chris’ face being pushed into the ground, Mr. Desmond hovering over him. He still sees it, though Tom is immediately in front of him.

In a slump beneath the table, Micah’s backpack; above it, through glass, a precarious stack of books at the table’s edge. The book at the top of the stack: triangular, with a monochrome photo of a boy, maybe twelve, older than Micah, as its face, the figure on the cover’s own face scratched out. And spread out over the glass: a half full pencil sharpener, its red transparent plastic tinted black by lead dust; a dogeared notebook, covered in stickers, pink and lavender, its pages full of unsteady letters; a tin of cereal shaped erasers, their edges dull and smeared dark; a broken palm-sized calculator; an empty bottle of white glue.

Tom’s forehead glimmers, a glaze of sweat over his skin, his breath shallow, overwrought. He stares at the pile as if it were items of antiquity, tenderly roused to the surface from their earthen hiding places. He says, “You are gonna make me so much fucking money, kid.”

Micah studies him from the corner of his eye. Hair dark as chestnut, the stream of sunlight through the dirty curtains implying an undertone of pure crimson. Pale sunken cheeks, dark scars at the base of his ears. Tom’s anxiety radiates, simmers like fiery coals, blistering Micah’s skin when it reaches him. Tom turns back to face him, his eyes ablaze.

Adjacent to them, across from a wall of disks, the screen of his computer blinks white, then black again. 

“You gotta be careful.” Tom looks back to the table. “Fuck, you’re so good at this.” And then, his moonlike face finally toward Micah again, vulnerability chasing its tail behind his eyes: “Do you wanna watch something?”

Remembering the promise he’d made to his mother to be home before 3:30, Micah shakes his head. When he passed the clock in the hall, it already said 3:05. Tom nods, on his way to forgetting Micah again.“Some scissors, tomorrow,” he says, absently.

🦷

At school, a rising hysteria. Thick in the air, a threat still and present as death, as a corpse. 

This is happening again. Was it the wrong boy?

“This never used to happen,” the vice principal sighs, pencil between long, thin nails. Not a window in the tiny room. Fluorescent lighting highlights loose dust and grime floating through the space, landing in open coffee mugs.

A murmur of agreement passes around the table. Desmond, standing at the room’s edge, ruffles at the implication. He’d only been brought on last September, the result of an initiative from the state to place more officers in schools. Desmond couldn’t say what happened before; his experience was limited to a single year only. It had been The Staples Incident that threw things out of control; this was something they could all agree on, the sound of cheap backpack fabric still ripping over and over in their minds, in tandem with their breath. 

It started just the way it was starting again: minor items vanishing, the exaggerated anguish of the victims. It became a cauldron of anxiety, wicked with toxicity. The kids were on edge. And the parents...

Desmond had expected things to be more extreme when he arrived the year before. The first few months had gone by in a whimper, painfully mundane, boring to the point of exhaustion, frustration. Maybe that’s the problem: his boredom made him soft, lacking vigilance. Desmond doesn’t know what they expected from the coffin they inhabited; from his view, they were set outside the city, sure, but the administration couldn’t ignore that they were still at war, that the block was bloodthirsty, and that blood was seeping in through the school’s brown brick.

They want to hear I’ll take care of it, and neither see nor speak of the problem again. The legacy of the Staples Incident attaches itself to them like an indignant haint. Their fear leaks from their pores, making the stained gray table slick with wet and pleading. Over staples! Over pencil sharpeners, scissors. 

Yet…

Someone else, chalk white hair fluffed into a bowl on top of their head, says, “Could it be some sort of initiation?”

Fucking idiots, he thinks, but then, I can take care of it, just as quickly, his confidence building. It won’t be like the staples, this time. He’ll figure it out before it goes bad. It’s just some stupid kid.

He says, “I’ll take care of it,” and before the words have left his mouth he is shaken by their frantic nodding, by voices rising and swaying in relief, the thickness of the air retreating and thinning, the screech of total peril replacing it, preening on their shoulders like flesh-devouring birds.

🦷

Tom keeps talking about his movies. He says half the collection is his own, and half was gifted to him by a friend. Micah sees the residue of this friend everywhere he looks across Tom’s house, but can’t understand what he sees. 

Micah watches Tom from the sofa as he fiddles with the DVD player. Occasionally Tom will glance back at Micah, flashing a look that says, If you try and run, I’ll come after you. But then he stands, beaming. “You’re gonna love this.” In front of him, spread across the coffee table: Jamie’s compass, Manuel’s writing journal, Destiny’s dry paint pallet, a pile of scissors. 

Micah knows this has to end. Manuel and Destiny are his friends, Jamie his neighbor. He knows it’s not right to take their things, but if he stops, Tom will tell everyone what they’ve done together, what Micah let him do.

The television is a flat screen, a fourth the size of the wall, the type his father would shake his head at while they limped through the electronics section of Walmart near the expressway. When its screen pops on, first blue then a dark gray, Micah realizes this will not be like the movies his mother took him to in the summer before the discount theater got shut down. 

First the screen is gray, nothing, then Micah is looking at the face of a boy he feels he should recognize, but cannot place. He doesn’t immediately notice Tom, moving from his place near the TV, sinking down into the sofa next to him, too close. Even as Tom wraps his arm around Micah’s shoulders, Micah can’t look away from the screen. He hears the crackle of Tom’s familiar voice behind the camera.

“Say hi, Chris.”

Tom leans over, his mouth tickling Micah’s ear, his free hand wandering. “You’ll love this. Trust me.”

🦷

In Micah’s bedroom the wall clock reads 8:36pm. The apartment and the courtyard below it are sorrowfully empty, a cloud of gray settling over the complexes, eating away at its brick, its foundations. Brick turns to gray dust and coats Micah’s shoulders like the first layer of a soft snow.

Its emptiness is odd. Micah’s burning curiosity overcomes his attempts to hide himself behind shadows. The courtyard is normally an electric current, every surface alive and dense with sensation, full of bodies moving with the consistency of a river, rhythmic sound floating up from the courtyard and down from the windows. Now it’s dead, empty, lifeless, gray. It’s an hour past when his mother usually comes home, a half hour for his father. Did they wonder where Micah is? Have they already collapsed from exhaustion?

Micah drags the soft tips of his fingers against the layer of gray, pressing them to the brick. They come away with a line of muck, the brick’s original color exposed where his fingers touched it. The only penetrating sound is Micah’s shoes scraping against the concrete, complimenting his breathing, shallow but loud in his skull. Soon, the firm, dense concrete gives way, Micah’s feet heavy like his body, his shoes filling with sand. He glances up at the windows encircling him as he walks, a crown around his head. Curtains that were once yellow, green, beige are now a collective gray. The shadows he hid under move with him now like liquid cutting through air. 

“Hey! Hey!” A voice from above cuts sharply through not only the shadows but the tent of fog balanced on Micah’s head. He looks up and sees nothing. 

In front of him, the large metal door opens out of the bleakness and a boy only a little older than Micah falls out of it, stumbling, rushing, round face in a bewildered spiral.

“Hey,” the boy says, out of breath. “The fuck you been?”

Micah does not want to answer. Invisible thumbs press his temples, hard, forcing him into silence. Abraham makes him feel like a stupid child, embarrassed, like when Abraham found Micah cowering in his closet during one of Micah’s parents’ get-togethers, fear and anxiety having overtaken him in the crowded apartment. He avoids Abraham’s intense gaze, blocking his eyes with his hand, squinting against the gray light buzzing above the door. Micah shrugs, and tries to keep walking, pushing past Abraham and toward the entrance of his building, only a few landings away. 

Abraham blocks his way, using his shoulder to push Micah back. The movement is not harsh, but rapid, and just as quickly Micah is paralyzed, his mind empty. When he doesn’t attempt to move again, Abraham keeps talking. “You know your folks are runnin’ round lookin’ for you, right?”

Micah didn’t know. It’s so late, so much later than he should be. As he ran from Tom’s house, tripping over uneven ground and dips in pavement, he imagined the disappointment draped over his parents shoulders, their shaking heads. He didn’t expect them to go wandering into the night looking for him. Why hadn’t he expected it? The invisible thumbs become fists, crashing against the side of his skull again and again and again. 

“No,” he says uneasily. He feels the wind pass by on his skin, the oxygen of the square returning. Had they all gone after him? All of them? He looks above with frantic eyes, searching the gray of the windows. His heart beats hard; it doesn’t seem right, to him, that they would all go, disappear like that. Not for him, just a child.

Abraham stares at him, not understanding. “You oughta go on upstairs,” he says slowly. “You good?”

He isn’t. The dullness which had overlain itself across the buildings slides off in long strips, crashing into the ground and exhaling clouds of dust, revealing its bright brick underside. Just a few paces away, the door to his building is open, its walls a wet, pulsating mouth.

“I—” he starts, but the ghostly feeling of cold, clammy fingers playing at his throat catches him. “Bye.” Micah pushes past Abraham, his backpack slipping off his shoulder and dragging on the ground as he runs to the open door, the flickering yellow light above the entrance like the glowing brightness of a well-shined skull.

🦷

Micah is shaking. A chorus of screaming birds in his head berate him, shame him, the sound rattling behind his eyes, its vibrations both lulling him into lethargy and forcing him awake. He sits at the edge of the sandbox, its dulled blue bright in comparison to the sad, mangled state of the other playground amusements scattered across the fenced in field. Ten minutes before, his fellow students disappointedly herded themselves back into the cramped hallways. 

But Micah hid until the rest were gone, just as he’d hidden inside while they ran and played and yelled. He’s not one of them anymore, he knows. He can only steal from them, upset them. He is a hazard now, unable to think through the screeching and gnashing in his mind.

The sandbox is in an area he doesn’t usually spend time in, as the older children are pushed to the edges of the field. It was safer to hide in the fields, farther away from the windows. Micah can imagine himself lying lost in the tall grasses. But instead he sits near the windows, unable to exorcize himself of risk. He reaches down for a handful of wet sand, soaked in the night’s rain. His backpack sits collapsed at his feet, its bottom damp from the grass. He throws the sand back and reaches for another handful, his hand half submerged in the muck—when he feels a suction, pulling his hand farther into the dirt. He stumbles back in shock, his hand immediately coming free, and a door opens behind him, a flurry of voices filling the space where the birds rested moments before.

A hand on his arm, waking him.

“Are you alright?” It’s a woman’s voice; the secretary, maybe, but he can’t see her face beyond the blinding sunlight, despite her kneeling down in front of him.

Micah shakes his head. Another voice joins the secretary’s; Mr. Desmond, a hand on one hip, saunters towards the sandbox, stopping a few feet away, his eyes darting from Micah to the woman. “What’s the commotion?” he says.

“Micah?” the secretary says, and he’s surprised she knows his name. He can only see Mr. Desmond’s feet through the blinding sun above, hear the unpleasantness in his voice. Micah watches in a daze as Desmond starts towards Micah’s forgotten backpack. Micah crawls the few feet back to it, reaching it before Mr. Desmond has the chance to put a hand on it, wrapping his arms around it, defensively.

“I just fell,” Micah says, breathing hard. Mr. Desmond glances at the secretary, still in a position to remove the bag from him. 

“Micah, you’re supposed to be in class. We were looking for you. May I please see what's in your bag?” she asks, slowly.

No, he wants to say, wants to scream, but he cannot, his throat swollen, closed. 

Mr. Desmond rips the bag from Micah’s arms.

“Why are you out here, son?” he says, shaking Micah’s things onto the grass—a lead and ink stained pencil case, tattered red notebook, and so many missing assignments, a crumpled mass.

Micah says nothing.

“Nothing unusual,” the secretary chirps, staring with her brows knitted at the heap of Micah’s things on the ground in front of her.

“No,” Desmond says, throwing the bag to the ground and turning his bulk towards Micah. “Well, why were you out here?”

Micah thinks. Before he can stop himself, he looks towards the wire fence, and imagines Tom, red-faced, raging, climbing over the gate.

“Back to class with a warning,” the secretary says, kneeling down to grab Micah under his arm and raise him to his feet. Desmond scowls. “Don’t let it happen again. You’re missing important lessons.” The secretary drags Micah forward as he clutches his backpack to his chest, Desmond’s feet striking the backs of his heels.

🦷

Stolen items fall from the ceiling, crawl from the walls, enmesh themselves in the dips between the tile, birth from the drains, and spread themselves like dead flies across Tom’s wooden table. Tins of half used erasers, waterlogged lined notebooks, tiny bottles of tempera paint, brightly colored mechanical pencils, safety scissors, a lunchbox, hair pins and barrettes, someone’s half finished multiplication tables. 

The screaming in Micah’s head is unending, and only intensifies as he looks at his illicit goods. The longer he stares, the more his brown face flushes red, the more fresh, unfamiliar anger and hot embarrassment press themselves against the underside of his skin, violently beating at his flesh, begging to be set free. His heart aches, and he looks towards the sliding doors, wondering how much force it would take to run straight through them.

Tom is bare-chested, pacing the dining room, his long strides passing over a ratty, worn down circle rug. Micah sits at the dining room table, broken nails digging little holes into the underside of the table’s soft wood. A few paces away, a putrid smell rises over the kitchen, staining every surface it touches. Micah can’t be sure whether it’s the mountains of trash circling what was likely once a garbage can, or the piles of dishes which migrate from the full sink all the way down the sticky, dust covered counter. In the middle of the kitchen, a massive gray stain spreads across the sour-yellow linoleum, its fingers reaching over the floor, steadily and without urgency.

“You know the cops came here today?” Tom laughs when he says it, his face twitching uncomfortably. He shakes his head, turning away as he makes another rotation. “They’re all clueless scum. Fucking idiots.” But then he looks Micah in the face, his expression dead, emotionless to the point of serenity, and asks evenly, “Did anyone follow you here?”

In the chair immediately across from Micah is a white, plastic postal box with WARNING: NOT FOR PRIVATE USE across its side like a taunt. Micah’s stomach churns. Yellow envelopes spill out of the box. Stacks of them line the table in the spaces his ill-begotten bounty does not already occupy.

Micah shakes his head no, nobody’s followed him. 

“Fine,” Tom sighs. Looks at the table. “I shoulda had these mailed out a while ago, with the earlier batch, but time got away from me. I’m doing this alone now.” For a moment he hovers over Micah’s chair, his arm stretched out over the table. “Not a bad thing, though. Opportunities.” At the edge of the table is a camera, perfectly square, its lens sunk in the middle.

Tom says, “It’s your lucky day,” and makes a full circle around the table, taking the hand-held camera in his hand in a graceful gesture. “You’re gonna be famous, Micah. Say hi to the camera.” Sweat leaks from the base of Tom’s hairline to the dip of his brow and down his nose.

Micah’s eyes grow wide, his mouth slack. The impression of Chris’s dead eyes still presses itself against his mind on Tom’s TV.

“Not yet,” Tom says quickly, trading the camera for a pair of scissors, and in the other hand, a yellow envelope. “It’s easy. You’ve probably done stuff like this in school, right?’ When Micah doesn’t say anything, Tom rolls his eyes. “It’s just stuffing the envelope, yadda yadda, a baby could do it.” He lays the scissors on a sheet of packing bubbles, rolling the plastic around them once. His speech slows a little as he chooses his words more carefully. “I’m going to record you as you do this. But first,” he pulls out the chair adjacent to Micah at the head of the table, the scissors still in his hand. “Remember what I told you about the scissors?”

Sitting so close to him, Micah can see that Tom’s dull eyes match the color of the fungus eating away at the kitchen floor. 

He doesn’t remember, not really; over months, Tom’s voice became redundant, so many of his words slipping past Micah without any consideration at all. Tom speaks in cascades, filling rooms with those words. Somewhere in the distant past, Micah remembers Tom telling him that the work they did was in high demand; that eventually, people would start asking for blood.

“Okay, good.” Tom stands, disappearing into the hallway and coming back with towels, antiseptic, and a large trash-bag. “If I had a better place to do it,” he starts, but allows the sentence to die while he places the trash-bag around Micah’s chair. “Oh, wait—come sit up on the table. Better lighting, better angle, and then we can really see you.”

Micah pushes back his chair, the wood scraping unpleasantly against the floor, making Tom huff. As Micah is about to climb on the table, Tom says, “Don’t take your clothes off till I get the camera on, I want to get that.”

The clouds in Micah’s head storm. He leans against the side of the table, unbalanced, his hands grasping at the damp wood. The expression of terrified bewilderment returns. Tom catches his expression, his silent refusal, and at once his face turns a shade of dark purple. “Don’t be a fucking idiot, you’re not a baby. I told you about this, it’s not a big deal. And listen,” his voice softens and he’s at Micah’s side again, to wrap his arms around the boy’s shoulders, his sweat soaked shirt pressing against the side of Micah’s face. When Micah tries to pull away, Tom’s grip hardens, but the tone of his voice remains a mockery of empathy. “I’ll give you your share, okay? I know I should have before, the whole time, and that’s on me. Alright?” A shallow pleading rests in his eyes, masking simmering rage and solidifying paranoia.

Micah shakes his head, pulling himself free of Tom’s embrace in the brief moments of shock between the proposition and Tom’s realization Micah would continue to refuse. “I can’t,” Micah says, voice trembling.

“You fucking tease. I ask you to slit your wrists and you don’t even care, but you’re too good to take your shirt off for the camera? God, I could fucking—” Tom lunges forward, arms out, attempting to grab at Micah’s shirt. Micah trips but does not fall, the gulf between them only inches. He runs for the dining room’s sliding glass door to the backyard, feels fingers hooking themselves between the fabric of his collar and his skin, pulling him back.

But then he is free, the fingers removing themselves as quickly as they appear, and he is running and running and running and panting, attempting to dodge mole holes and sunken places in the yellowed backyard. And then, the thing he misses: another sandbox, scorched by the sun, appearing under his feet, forcing him face forward into clumps of rancid earth, cat piss. He coughs, yells. Expects to feel Tom’s hands on him. But when Micah flips over, defensive, he sees nothing, no one. The space in front of the sliding glass door is empty, the door closed.

🦷

Under the warmth of the comforter, only Micah’s eyes are visible. A cartoon turtle’s vibrant eyes stare back at him from the comforter’s fabric. From under the window, Micah sees ribbons of gray licking at its edges, curling the wallpaper which meets the molding. Micah feels feverish despite the winter crawling across every surface. Sweat pools in cold puddles around the small of his back, but under the comforter the gray cannot touch him. He wonders if it has already eaten away at the walls, at the foundations of the building, so if he presses his bare foot to the flattened carpet, the whole building might collapse upon him, signaling the rest of the complex to do the same. 

His twin bed is tucked into the corner of the room. Through the wall, Micah hears his father’s voice, then his mother’s, their hushed tones like the ones he’d first heard the night he’d been late, and so often since. Concern, fear, frustration. The ever present exhaustion, which colors their lives and confines them to the perfect symmetry of the black hole. Around his mother’s brown eyes, lines of worry have unkindly carved themselves, deeper than Micah has ever seen. He caught his father once, eyes wet, his face pressed against the coolness of the basement washer, unable to see his son in the shadowy darkness. He was speaking to himself like he would into a microphone, but his words were a whimper. But when his father said his name, it was perfectly clear.

The gray blotches out the window, and threads of pale ivy wind through the hairline cracks in the plaster and towards Micah. He knows what this means, and he thinks he might die. Before ash smeared the window, Micah had stood at attention, peeking out the side of the glass every few minutes, careful not to be seen, waiting, waiting, waiting.

He’s never seen Tom come to this part of town, where his neighborhood is. Tom lurks out on different edges, the two sections of landscape being separate entities. Micah is only vaguely familiar with the edges Tom inhabits, despite the discomfort, the sneaking. The lack of familiarity didn’t stop him from going where Tom demanded; and now, too, Micah is sure a lack of familiarity with the complexes won’t stop Tom from coming to find him. If not at the school, where else would Tom find him? Micah won’t go and see him anymore, hadn’t in almost a week and a half. To think of continuing, his backpack weighted down by guilt, makes him feel ill, vomit tickling the back of his throat. He can’t be sure Tom knows where he lives, but he can’t be sure Tom doesn’t. He can’t be sure Tom never followed him home, ducking in between buildings and under cars, behind rotting old newspaper boxes and Salvation Army Santas.

The hallway wood creaks underfoot. Micah pulls the comforter up, the drumming, pounding in his head unbearable, his eyes shiny with tears. His father’s round, melancholic face is first to push through the crack in the door, then his mother’s, the same gloomy mask she always wears. The pungent odor of machine oil fills the room, bringing a familiar, strange comfort.

Micah’s father sits on the edge of his bed. His mother kneels there too, rubbing Micah’s forehead. In the gray light, his mother’s hand looks sickly, withered.

“Micah.” 

Clouds of gray roll in through his window, crowding the square room with their smoky haze. A tickle starts in his throat, the tenderness before the burn. Micah pulls the covers over his face, casting himself into darkness. His mother whispers something to his father before she attempts to pull the cover back down. 

“Micah, baby, let me see you.”

The sound of a wet slap outside Micah’s window. Smoke seeps in through the crack between the glass and the frame, so much that he can barely make out more than his mother’s chin, her soft lips, and the beginning of her neck, before the rest of her body fades into the storm cloud around them. He can’t see his father at all, but his voice resounds from every part of the room. His father says, “Your mother and I have been so scared. We…” His father’s hands are always stained from the machines, from days so hot the metal sweats. His father’s words sound stuck in his throat. “We love you. We want you…” he sighs, rests his hand on his son’s covered foot, “…we just want you to feel safe.”

“We have been so worried about you, baby,” his mother says.

Micah cannot sense them at all, now. His father’s voice, which had been so prominent, fades out of reach, and Micah no longer feels his mother’s touch.

🦷

Weeks pass and the gray square in the middle of his eye now follows Micah everywhere, the world fading smoothly into its fuzzy edges. Through all this time, he hasn’t seen Tom.

He’s been able to convince his mother for the last few days to let him stay home sick, forcing one of the stolen pencils he’d forgotten at the bottom of his bag down his throat, tasting the chalk of the pink eraser and vomiting soot-colored paste. But it only works for so long before his mother wants to take him to the hospital.

He takes his place near the school sandbox, within easy view of the fence. Micah has envisioned Tom scaling the brick of his apartment and throwing himself through the window, body a boneless mass, overpowering and consuming him in revenge. He has envisioned Tom chasing him down the road, forcing him into the street, under the tires of some massive truck whose driver can’t see him. And he’s envisioned Tom climbing over that fence, slow and steady, his eyes trained solely on him.

It doesn’t matter what happens, Micah thinks. He looks down at the sandbox, pristine, a mass of rippling waves. He steps forward, nervous. Leaning over it, he scoops sand into one hand, then the other. The grains are minuscule, perfect. Micah sees each one individually. He straightens himself, breathes in, and throws the sand back.

A slight wave. A ripple, so gentle and unnerving. The sand swallows itself and settles. 

He has come prepared. He’s practiced so often, with his classmates, that taking the heavy, shiny pair of silver scissors from the teacher’s desk didn’t faze him. Micah knows they’re dangerous, but he struggles to discern what that danger means. 

For a while he held them to his chest, seeing them his only lifeline. Imagining that, across town, his mother’s hand is crushed between heavy metal, mangled, gray-blue steel upon steel becoming formless, flat red. Every day her limbs are made bankrupt and soft, until she is hung as decoration among red railings and industrial lights. In a different place, closer, he imagines his father’s lungs crackling and sizzling like rubber. Envisioning these things that took them away from him. All he has now is scissors, fear. 

Noticing his untied laces, Micah kneels down, facing the blue wall of the sandbox. He balances the scissors on the edge, and then glances up at the afternoon sun.

🦷

At this moment, in Tom’s kitchen, there are hundreds of yellow packages, opened and unopened, stuffed and unstuffed. Many of them are covered in blood, soaked through with his malice and bitterness. 

And one of them is missing. The little fucking thief.

After Micah ran off, Tom lost his mind, screamed bloody murder, beat his head against the wall, broke dishes, and slashed his arm with the pieces in a half-hearted attempt to kill himself.

He’d been so sure he had things under control. Now Tom’s sanity is whittled down to dust, his paranoia like a cobra around him. His rationality abandoned him before Micah struggled out from under him, but now. Now all is truly lost. 

His subscribers trickle slowly, then like a landslide under his feet, into the void. This was a customer base nurtured over half a decade, made strong by consistency, grown by assurances fulfilled. It is not really a surprise to Tom that it can all fall apart so easily. He held it together once before, but he always knew this position was fragile.

He maxes out his credit card then drains his bank account, fifty thousand over the course of a week, before the branch tells him they can’t give him anything else. It’s a dire situation. His packages have gone unfinished, unsent, sitting in the middle of his kitchen floor in dry pools of red. He paces the house, breaking more things. His most constant concern, though not his most immediate, was who would replace Micah, where he would find another boy. The thought of going through that song and dance again makes Tom feel sick with exhaustion.

It’s his fault for letting things get out of hand. He let his customers ask too much. The original operation was much smaller, easier to manage. The trouble with Josh had left him with only a few clients, twenty or thirty maybe. Not three or four hundred. Not thousands. And still, not all the addresses, PO Boxes mostly, were so far away. Yet it still grates on him. He isn’t able to do his best work, hasn’t in a while, not since Josh fucked off, got himself fucking arrested, leaving Tom to do everything on his own.

Tom always felt it would end with Micah, but had hope, before, that things could be different. Had hope he could skip town and forget about it all until he was ready to kill himself in thirty years, when he was fat and satisfied, and could remember only a faint impression of this time. That’s all it is, really: a scheme. It's about money, nothing else. Tom believes this, despite his weak flesh.

The path to the school is well worn. His feet take him there naturally. Not simply because this is where it all began, but because the connecting joints of the square complexes had once also been his own. Things have changed so dramatically Tom doesn’t recognize it anymore; he looks at every building and sees infestation, structure bursting with unearned life. Once, his family had abandoned all they knew to flee from this, when they were still in the city. He supposed it hadn’t worked, and hadn't mattered at all.

Despite this, the school’s  skeleton is as familiar as when he was a student, seeing it over his shoulder as he skipped class in the middle of the day to smoke shit weed. The back fence is new, improved, but still simple wire, easy to scale, easy to overcome—but the metal is hot, digging into Tom’s calloused palms. The ragged edges catch on his shirt, pulling at it and ripping minor holes in the soft blue fabric. He reaches his arm over the top of the fence to steady himself, and a bright red wound opens in the tender skin under it.

The playground and field are empty, save one. As Tom lunges his body over the fence, he sees Micah, only a few paces away, on the other side of the sandbox. 

This, Tom’s never done before. It’s one thing to watch the boy from beyond the fence, far off on the other end of the field where he can’t be seen. But now everything is over and the boy stole from him… 

Tom is so sure, so confident, that Micah has already gone to the school, to the teachers, to whoever was indoctrinating them now, that he’d told them everything, that they’ve gone to the police, who are probably already on their way. That the boy had taken the bloodied package days ago was no matter. His motivation is malicious poison, the vitriol running through his veins, keeping him alive.

Micah’s back is turned  to Tom when he lands on the ground, jumping from the top of the fence. The wound under his arm stains his shirt dark with blood. For a moment, before Micah turns, the sun is on him in such a way that Tom is overtaken by a wave of regret.

The wave morphs quickly into volcanic fury. A light so bright he neither sees nor hears the metal door open, the puff of gray smoke from inside, a man stumbling out of it. Only Micah is in Tom’s sights, and he takes off running, his body erratic, animalistic, quickly closing the gap between them, the fresh, wet grass crushed underneath heavy footfalls. 

Tom approaches the sandbox, stretching out his arms to grab the boy—but he falls forward, face first, into the box, crashing hard on his open mouth. The top row of his teeth are forced upward, ripping and tearing at his mouth’s commissures, leaving a shredded grin in its wake.

🦷

Micah sees this. Tom groans, loudly, sorrowfully, and attempts to turn onto his back, but his ripped, weak arm fails him and he falls back to his stomach. Tom’s mouth is a bloody chasm, where he can make nothing out, dark shapes tumbling together. And next to Tom, a bright speck of white: broken teeth against the bloodied sand. Behind him commotion: stomping feet, the school’s back door opening and closing. Paralysis holds Micah tight, unable to even turn his head. 

For a moment, Tom is able to hold up his aching head and look Micah in the eye. When the boy opens his mouth to speak, his words are replaced by the sound of a roaring horn, a deafening rush from elsewhere. Micah covers his ears and the sound morphs into a groan, an excruciating cry. 

Tom’s voice rises up to match it, and as his agony reaches its crescendo, it is punctuated by the sickening snap of his spine backwards, the back of his legs meeting the soft of his neck for the first time. 

At Micah’s side is Mr. Desmond, holding his weapon limply, a congregation of people building behind him, from the administration to students pressing their bodies and faces against the windows of the long hallway.

A voice screams pitifully, “Jesus Christ, someone get him out!” 

In the sandbox, a hole opens. Micah is sure Tom is dead, but his gray, slack face is still home to eyes, which search for Micah, full of hate. A vacuum opens itself up around him.  

Tom is pulled into the sandbox, sand funneling like a snake’s mouth, falling in around him. Behind Micah, someone is crying. Micah stands still, so still. 

Voices explode and merge behind Micah, but it’s no matter. Tom’s body doesn’t struggle. His face, though, his eyes, sunken so far into his head but still painfully alive, held together by the sand sucking the life from him. A thunderous crack, and the sand detonates into a tornado. Sand rips at Tom’s exposed skin, lashing and cutting and spraying blood across sand, as well as the green and yellow grass surrounding the box. Bits of blood touch Micah’s face, soft skin burning at the contact. He puts his hands to his eyes, covers his face, unable to take anymore, unable to see anymore. The pleading from behind him grows louder; then, as he opens his eyes, a gunshot. 

He turns to see Mr. Desmond holding a pistol, but only for a moment, as the bullet ricochets against the side of the sandbox, its plastic becoming steel, and Mr. Desmond’s head explodes over the crowd, viscera coating every surface: polyester, cotton, skin, brick. Desmond’s body collapses into a heap of nothing, three feet from Micah. When the wind-tunnel of sand disperses, only Tom’s foot is left, slowly sucked down into the sand, his shoelace making a final, sad loop before becoming lost with him.

Despite the crowd, Micah hears only silence. The fuzzy gray at the center of his eye vibrates, but does not move. Micah’s skin is a layer of blood. He steps forward, falls. In the blue-rimmed sandbox, the dirt is as clean as ever, without even a tint of red.

🎒🔫