Consumption II

I’d spend all day at Les Mills, building my ass into pure thickness from endless squats and deadlifts. I’d post on Grindr around noon, when the lunch crowd was horny and desperate, 

‘Cake at Les. Steam room. Now.’

They’d show up within minutes. Personal trainers between clients, married guys sneaking away from Midtown offices, finance bros still in their suits. I’d lead them to the steam room, bend over on the tiled bench, and let them feast. Always the same routine. They’d drop to their knees, grab my cheeks, and bury their faces in. For months, it was normal stuff. Moaning, grabbing, the usual. Five minutes max, they’d leave satisfied, and I’d hit the weights. 

Then something changed. 

Bruce first. He pressed his face in and couldn’t pull away. At first I thought he was just really into it, but then he started making these muffled sounds, trying to lift his head but somehow stuck to my ass like glue. I tried pushing him away, grabbing his shoulders and shoving, but it was as if he were being pulled deeper. Then, I felt it. More than a tongue. Like my body was expanding from the inside. 

His struggles got weaker, more distant, his whole form seemed to compress and slide inside. I looked over my shoulder and watched in horror as his feet lifted off the ground, his entire body fading into me like I was swallowing him whole. The sensation was indescribable. Incredible. Then I realized what just happened. My ass ate Bruce. And it was still hungry. As fuck.

Every hookup became feeding time. Locker rooms, steam rooms, showers. Anywhere I went, the hunger followed. My ass started changing. Getting bigger and rounder with every guy that disappeared inside. My shorts got tighter, my bench press weaker, as if I was carrying all these dudes around. So I started hitting the weights harder. Told myself I could work it off. But the thicker it got, the stronger its pull. Guys followed it around the floor like zombies, eyes glazed, walking closer without knowing why. They were hungry for my ass, and my ass was starving.

Every workout drew fresh meat. Crowds gathered around when I squatted, pretending to check it out while fighting the urge to drop down and bury their faces in it. Derek lasted maybe thirty seconds before he got sucked in, his protein shake spilling everywhere as his whole body got swallowed. The Russian guy just plunged inside, Olympic-style. Dozens of dudes got swallowed. That’s when Brad started noticing. 

“Where the fuck is everyone?” he asked, looking around the empty weight floor. Bruce wasn’t at his usual 6 AM slot. Derek’s locker stayed empty. Way fewer dudes than normal. 

Brad kept walking the floor, confused why our regulars just weren’t showing up anymore. And I just couldn’t tell him the truth. He would never understand. My ass eats men whole.

Folks Have Their Ways

They were at a very private event way out in the country at the old Hudson family farm that Lori and Jeff had inherited after her mother died last spring. This was the first Summer Sunday annual family get together without anyone from the older generation present. The recently deceased Mama Lou had ruled over them as a matriarch who laid down the rules and enforced them with her thick wooden paddle or thin hickory switch, regardless of age or excuses. Skinny-dipping as the ultimate rebellion against her old rules and antiquated punishments had begun when Lori and her sister Ruby and little brother Asa had been kids. Mama Lou could not see us at the lake from her house, nor could anyone see it from the road or home.

Mama Lou and Daddy Dale had been farmers who ruled their little farm as aristocrats, and their children and grandchildren were subject to a lifetime of old-fashioned discipline. Daddy Dale’s big palms hurt as bad as Mama Lou’s paddle and switch. Daddy Dale had passed two years before, and Mama Lou had become even more of a disciplinarian. As harsh as her judgements and punishments became, her kids and grandchildren submitted because they sensed it was her way of dealing with grief and their way of physically showing respect. They never discussed family matters outside the family but among themselves it was a source of pride how strict their family was, and they felt they securely belonged to a resilient, decent family they must never disgrace. When it was a family members only affair they did not care what others thought was normal, they followed Hudson ways. 

As a surprising example of this Lori, Ruby and Asa had inducted their children into the annual skinny dip picnic early on. They were secret nudists in a small, conservative rural area and there were fourteen family members and five spouses at this year’s get together. Many of their asses bore the elongated thin scars left from the bare-bottom switchings, and the wider scars that came from blisters raised by the impact of the paddle. Lori and Ruby were sitting in lawn chairs after lunch watching the swimmers when Lori observed that their brother and their male children all had perfectly straight penises unlike the male there, the in-law-spouses present. Lori speculated that the clue to the answer was that the males with straight penises had scars on their asses and the ones with curvatures had smooth buttocks. 

Mama Lou had been a stickler when it came to sexual morality and she demanded obedience and scourged any deviance she caught, so there was extraordinarily little. The prohibition on masturbation had been openly discussed, and she had been known to check on the boys when they might least expect her to pop in. Locked doors were forbidden, and closed doors were cause for a suspicion that had to be tested by an unexpected visit. Although premarital sex was out of the question, one of the quirks of the family was that nudity was acceptable. So given that fact, bare-bottom discipline of adults did not seem particularly shocking to them.

As the family gathered before departing that afternoon Ruby presented her older sister Lori with a box wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with a big red bow, a box the size of one that might hold a large bouquet of roses. Lori looked surprised at this unexpected action at the annual family skinny-dip picnic which had not included any giving of gifts before. All watched as Lori fixed her eyes on the box and tore off the paper and opened the lid. She laughed as she gripped her mom’s old paddle and held it up over her head then waved it in a salute to her family. They lined up single file and as each approached Lori they bowed and bent down until they could grip as close to the ankles as possible and brace for a single stinging paddle swing before exiting toward their cars and clothes. 

One of the younger generation in-laws, a twenty-year-old named Cassie, bent over despite recent lacerations from a switching that were still healing on her buttocks. The family always showed respect when an in-law accepted corporal punishment from a spouse, and Lori gave her a light tap of the paddle to spare her sorely healing welts and there was spontaneous clapping from those waiting in the line. Lori felt good being matriarch and the family was happy about it too. Lori thought she could maintain the family’s ways but with an update now and then, like the day’s skinny-dip which had been a spanking success for the whole family.

No Reins For a Pig Man

It wasn’t enough for Marge to be told that she was the most irresistible catch at Renview – a venue for villainous vagrants with dead mothers and fathers and no chance at redemption. It wasn’t enough for Marge to want to leave – not because of how last time she gave one of those foul fucking freaks a private dance in the neon room, that his hands squeezed a bit too hard. He pleaded that it wasn’t intentional, but they all came to Marge. She made it easy for them and they made it easy for her to afford the lifestyle on Ridgebank, east of that festering shit-hole greasing her up with their desperate stench and scars.

Marge was tough enough to handle her own. She knew how to cut the blood out of someone if they became too ill-mannered. She’d carve them up good – just like the lousy Louie who put a gun to her head and told her not to scream. Louie the loser had broken into her 1976 Pink Pinto and was waiting in the backseat after her saturday-night shift. Marge and the cold chrome and a set of hairy knuckles wedging their way to tighten around her throat. To anyone other than Marge it would be scary, but she just let his clutch grow until his black-clouded skull was beside her cheek and the knife she carried between her breasts found the deepest pocket home inside his right eye. Gouged it down into his brain – the Little, lousy loser Louie fell dead in that backseat.

It wasn’t enough for Marge. She wanted to do it again. The killing. The gouging. She wanted to feel their flaccid meat monkeys curled between her bloody fingers. She wanted the power it gave her. That unadulterated rage of redemption. She wanted to clean out Renview of the vermin. She wanted to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing with her teeth on their veins. Marge knew it would be enough then. She would finally believe them when they told her she was beautiful. That raw confessional where through pain nothing is a lie – and the way Gary the gooner caught his prick between the pavement and her pointed stiletto. It was Gary who confessed his love for her faster than the others. Marge didn’t care. She wanted their blood, their control and their wet tears.

Change the channel and we are no longer looking at Marge, but a large, middle-aged man by the name of Bill Busby hunched over, thumbing through the static-hissing channels on an old box television. The narrator’s voice drones low and muffled with MARGE IN CHARGE in bright bold letters, plastered on the screen. Bill chuckles because of how absurd it is. His sloppy obesity matches the rest of the room. Uncleaned and fetched in trash – a four-hundred pound pig man who only wished he had a shot at becoming one of those that Marge would murder. If she was real, he’d go out and find her in that fictitious venue at Renview. If he had a gun, maybe he’d load it with a bullet. Maybe he’d pull out his prick and let Marge turn it flat. He’d let her.

Maybe he’d find the actress who played her. Susie Reins – the mega star with twelve Oscars and a gold star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Maybe he would go get her autograph at the Zolopoloza Film Festival in Keiser Springs and beg her to cut out his blood. Or maybe, just maybe he’d do all those things to her.

Bill and his broken frontal lobe. That trigger on the brain that had stopped ticking when Bill was still trapped inside his mother’s sticky wet womb – a pig baby squealing for nothing because Bill didn’t feel nothing. Nothing that you and I feel. The pig man with a stone heart and five fat knuckles squeezed the balled up paper magazine with Marge’s face, wrinkled, torn and stained on the cover. The great Susie Reins – the girl with dick blood beneath her heels and dead skin under her fingernails. The girl of Bill, the pig man’s dreams smiling back at him through folded paper and ink. Bill squeezed tighter the way Marge was squeezed around the throat in episode twelve. He closed his swollen pink eyelids tight and with a half open lip moaned the fantasy of being the one doing it to her. Harder and harder until his eyelids weren’t the only part of him swollen. The greasy, gasping, gooning pig man and his busted frontal lobe slouched limp like the dead masked man in Marge’s backseat.

The television static scattered white light across Bill’s pink fat flesh – the glossy sagging portrait of distorted scum laid there to be washed in the projected glow of Marge, wrist deep inside a man – his heart in her hands on the second episode of season four. The one called, No love for a Lousy Louie. Bill knew the episode word for word but the way he recited it altered its genre to a horror show. Slurring sounds stuck behind the fat of Bill’s lips. A pig man’s performance, done through squeals and snorts. He imagined having a golden star like Marge – like Susie and her perfect life up in the Hills. He imagined what it would be like to sleep in her bed, wear her clothes, and bathe in her bathtub. He imagined if it all would fix his broken brain, and that Susie Reins would fall in love with him the way that he loves her. The princess and the pig man. A sore sight it would be for all to see. Bill squinted through his pair of eye holes that drooped the way Marge’s floppy breasts flapped while she rode the dead corpse of John Duke – a B-grade actor with cowboy boots and a bullet wound to the head.

That episode was called, No Horses for Dead Cowboys – the finale to the seventh season.

Pig man Bill and his broken brain would take the bus from Turven Street to the southside of the Hills where they filmed Marge In Charge. The entire seven seasons cheaply shot there grossed enough to transform it into a strip mall that bustled with tourism. Home to the fanatics hoping to have a shot at being shot by the marvelous Marge – those unlucky lousy Louies just like Bill. They all looked the same. A stereotypical sickness that littered the set of Renview. The pig man and the parlor for private dances. Lookalike actresses in the same cut off shorts like Marge. The same hair color and make up as Marge. They were clones – mimics and imposters, and Bill could feel the broken switch in his skull begin to tingle. A dead root that twitched then went dead again. He thought about the loaded gun stuffed inside the rolling slab of pubic fat. He thought about that dead cowboy. He pondered on if any of those other Louies thought the same, or if he might be the only one. The only one brave or dumb enough to reenact it all – until his head was full of bloody holes and his monkey meat mashed smooth. Or the other way around with a wannabe Marge losing color inside five fat knuckles of a left hand. He wondered if he could do it the way they did it in the pictures – all cut into frame. A revival to make that broken link inside his fat head breathe life for the first time.

The other Louies wore all matching sour-sweat-stained shirts with Marge’s faded printed face. Fanatics just like Bill to meet a masked Marge with teeth not as straight and eyes not as green – haunted holograms that played pretend. But they were convincing enough to attract a crowd of those like Bill. Those stinking up the place with their rancid, greasy filth – or that is at least what pig man Bill did when he wandered north through the crowd of lookie-louies jonesin to take a bite from one of those marge mirages with leaking makeup. The wannabes that Bill wanted to ward off even if they made his brain buzz.

“Take one.” A hyperactive hologram with golden curls and a faded mustache appeared, flagging up one of those infamous shirts. All maniacs wore it for Marge but Bill didn’t have enough scratch to buy it. Grunting the way a pig man grunts, he shoved down the mimic until that white shirt became soiled and Marge’s face tore apart on the gravel with a hole Bill could stick his fat fist in. The wannabe lost their golden scalp and their skirt flew up enough to expose thick curls of black hair – an imposter that the others in the crowd glared at.

They pointed and screamed with disdain that the mustache-having, wig-wearing Marge was nothing more than a fraud and that caused more of a scene than Bill did. But it caused the crowd to thin and that is when he saw a pair of Louies that didn’t quite look like Louies, but they wore the same cult-like attire, and waved at Bill the way one does if they want your attention. Bill grimaced and grunted the way a pig man would grunt, and heaved his waddling weight close enough.

“Say fella, you look to be big enough.” The left one spoke – He was a scrawny, horse-shoe balding man with a map clasped in his palms and glared at him the way that crowd glared, but with more desperation than anger. “We need a big guy like yourself to do this.” The other man to his right starred up into the ball of a bright sun as if he was afraid to make eye contact with Bill – the curse of the pig man. Bill just grunted. “We need someone to be the lookout.” The ill-weighted Louie rattled on. Baffled Bill agreed in the way one would agree if they were mute – with a nod. There would normally be no room for a pig man, but those Louies had a spot picked out for him in the back of their 1976 pink pinto. The exact same car as Marge. When Bill sat in that backseat he could only think of Marge and feel that warm chrome that had become slippery from his pubic sweat. The one that was balding drove, while the sun-watching Louie sat next to him, still glaring out into that sweltering yellow heat. The car veered upwards higher and higher than Bill had ever been in those winding hills. Higher and deeper into those Hollywood homesteads that Bill had only ever seen on his old busted box television – but without the white wave of static.

“It’s around here somewhere.” Louie number one muttered, squinting his beady eyes through the windshield at a set of castle-like mansions – tall and glamorous. “There!” Louie number two finally barked, and rammed his stumpy arm out towards the largest of them all. A mesmerizing residence with stained glass cut straight from a movie picture. “Marge livin’ large!” Louie number one cackled. Bill could feel that little wilted worm at the front of his brain wiggle. That flinch of feeling that was ever fleeting, it would be awakened for good if only he could have a squeeze of Marge – the great Susie Reins. “Here’s the deal, big guy, we’re gonna get in there and you’re gonna sit here and keep watch.” Louie number one ordered. “If you see or hear anything… you honk the horn twice but long and slow…just so we know…got it?” Louie leaned in close enough with beady black eyeballs, and a frowning mouth with white spit stuck in the corners. Bill didn’t speak, because a pig man does not speak and he certainly does not get intimidated by a couple of lousy Louies, especially with a dead ball of ground beef inside his skull.

“Do you understand me?” The first Louie continued but angrier. Bill just nodded the way a good pig man would nod, because he knew that when those two Louies left he would follow behind to find his own way inside that castle in the hills. It was like episode twelve, season two, Marge and the Masked Monkeys. The one where Marge gets kidnapped by a gang of masked Louies and forced to eat their hot pudding – but instead she chewed out their blood. Bill would enjoy that more than a stiletto – maybe even more than a bullet hole or a knife to the throat – to have his pink tail gnawed off by the white jaw of a blood-thristy Susie Reigns. All that hot breath and sharp pain. The fantasy made the deep cuts of glass from the downstairs window seem to not hurt as much when he climbed inside.

A pig man’s paradise. A promiseland for all those like Bill with stiff monkey meat and broken brains – or just Bill alone, because those other two lousy, loser Louie’s stomped around upstairs and it made a racket.

Broken objects and squeaky sneakers and low raspy whispers that hummed through the lavender painted walls and ceilings. It would be enough to get caught. Captured by the teeth of a blood thirsty Marge – but that’s if there was a thing as the real Marge. Bill had begun to believe that the Marge on his old busted box television was just a mirage like all those wannabes at Renview with their false faces and hairy legs. That she wasn’t real at all and would be cowering in the corner of a closet, screaming while thrashing a butter knife into the air.

The imposter. The marvelous marge, a mimic to break a pig man’s pink heart. But the way that ball of brilliant orange light cut through the stained glass – that simmering heated knot of fire Louie-the-second marveled at, seemed real enough – therefore Marge had to be the same. She just had to, and that is what Bill came to believe there inside that living space of high art and odd portraits, sculptures alike, and monkey masks – the same ones those Lousy Louies wore in episode twelve, tugging on their uncut bananas just before the blood came crashing down like a tsunami. The red tide of revenge and Marge would be the victorious queen of carnage – sucking it all up the way a leech sucks – powerful-like with puckered lips and rolling eyes.

Bill stole the fat and hairy one with big ears that stunk of expired latex, and stretched it over his fat pig head. He even beat his chest and grunted the way a monkey does before it kills with those big hairy paws that clutched the warm weight of loaded chrome. It shined with pubic grease beneath that ripe orange sun as Bill aimed it for the first time at himself through an overgrown mirror. The pig man in a playpen with unregistered metal between his fingers. He thought he might kill those two Louies that bumped around above with it. Rid them of marvelous Marge’s mansion so that he could have her all to himself when that rotten knot in his head awakes to do what it has never done – to make him feel more than just a pig man. More than a monkey-masked maniac with blood lust ready to lay down those two Louies with smoking gunfire – to win a competition for the only love he had ever known. And he would do it, with his mad monkey cap stuffed with salty fur. He’d make them go away for good.

Only a pig man like Bill could have his blood cut out by Marge, not those loser Louies. Bill pulled back the hammer on the pistol – wedged his finger down hard on it until it clicked, then met the faded outline of two bleeding louies at the bottom of the stairs. One shot straight through the cheek and another through the groin with dick blood beneath him like Marge and her sharp stiletto. Bill was a shitty shot but it worked. Both limp Louies were crumpled over one another with pieces of Marge’s undergarments squeezed tight in their knuckles. Bill grunted the way a pig man would grunt with the monkey mask stretched funny over his fat face – warped, with the snout pushed too far from the center, but it didn’t matter because Bill could now do all those things he desired to do with Marge’s magnificent wardrobe full of iconic lace and leather that fit like that monkey mask – bundled and torn when Bill stretched his fat pig skin through it. A grotesque gorilla soaked in the white foam of a four foot lion-clawed tub – that squeaked like Louie’s wet sneakers. The robust ape in pink skin no longer stunk the way a pig would stink, instead he bore the same scent as Marge – the succulent Susie Reins whose shrill, shrieking scream could be heard below where the two dead Louies’ were. Bill bolted upright to drip across the bathroom – the damp pistol still held tight inside his fat fingers. He could feel that tingle again at the front of his thick skull, and it lasted a bit longer with his eyes bulging out through that monkey mask that only suffocated.

Susie Reins, the superstar, starlet, sex-symbol saw Bill peeping through that bathroom door and ran screaming while the cross-dressing ape chased her. The ravenous fear and hyperactive thrill chilled both their bones as they played cat and mouse around that mansion up in the hills – but bill was all wet and couldn’t keep his slippery pink pig meat from falling and cracking his broken brain hard enough to fracture the earth, and it rumbled the way an earthquake would rumble to bring forth the end of the world – or perhaps awaken something dead like the wilted root, Bill kept inside his head. As he laid their belly down with the torn leather exposing all that skin poking out, and his blood that began to run, it was obvious to a mortified Susie Reins, who didn’t look anything at all like the marge he knew. Anything at all like the girl of his dreams – anything but an illusion that only broke a pig man’s pink heart.

Bill grunted and snorted through that hemorrhaging monkey mask, reaching with a quivering hand for the pistol next to Susie’s feet. The pistol with one bullet left inside. The pistol he planned to kill her with if she was anything other than the Marge he knew and loved. The Marge dressed in leather. The Marge with a taste for blood. The Marge who ruled Renview. And perhaps she was what Bill imagined afterall, as she held that slick loaded pistol up to that bulbous broken brain of a pig man and pulled the trigger.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters? You know, ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night. Or do you think they’re just those cartoon characters your neighbor decorates their yard with every Halloween? Truth—real monsters don’t look or act like those caricatures in the franchise series. Sitting here on the metro, looking out my window, I feel slightly amused that others can’t see what’s reflected.  

We’re not spawned in cold, damp castles in foreign countries with names that start with Vee. Personally, I’m not fond of caskets and would prefer cremation. Maybe one of those new burial plans where they plant a tree in my ashes. If I’m in a cemetery, it’s to bury evidence, not because I enjoy the ambiance. Actually, chances are, you’ve passed me more than once without knowing.

It’ll be tonight—after dark, probably before midnight. I still have to work tomorrow. My target has no idea I’m on the way. It was an accidental bump in a store. I only wanted to pass. He wanted to impress his girlfriend. At this moment, he’s at home, doing the quotidian things that make him whoever he is, unaware that Death is riding to his door.      

For the record, I’m not all evil. I’ve helped the feeble cross the street—saved kittens and kites for children. I’ve been a hero in a fire. I hold doors and say thank you. I can be silent as the grave, strike swiftly as a mamba. But when I take your breath, it won’t come back. The people who see me don’t write memoirs—you call them victims.  

Whether my kind are born or created, I can’t say. Maybe each of us is sui generis, with a different backstory. It’s not as if we share confidences or trade craft secrets by the water cooler. By preference, we’re solitary hunters. When I speak, it’s only for myself.  

Sometimes I watch television. One night, bored, I was watching Animal Planet. There were two monkeys, doing monkey things in a tree. Suddenly, a reticulating anaconda surged up the tree. One monkey fled while the other sat there, frozen in terror. It just stared blindly in the face of death, never moving. Nietzsche was right. Stare into the abyss long enough, and it might look back. 

The subway car smells like an ancient ashtray, with vape flavors struggling for ascendancy. A fragrance catches my attention. Yves Saint Laurent, Black Opium. Her face is framed in black ringlets, her wide, brown eyes lost in the glow of her phone screen. I imagine how she would look, mouth open, eyes vacant, with ruby droplets across her neck. 

She reminds me of a kitten my parents gave me for a pet when I was five or six. Warm, fuzzy, mewing until I began playing with it. What stands out in my memory now is the looks of horror on my parents’ faces. Their mouths open, eyes bulging in disbelief. They tried making excuses. I was clawed—maybe it nipped me. I never had a pet after that. Over the years, neighbors occasionally came looking for theirs. By tacit agreement, my parents and I never spoke of those missing animals in our home.  

We always remember that first time. Whether it’s love, sex, victory, or death, those profound moments remain with us. My first was a punk in my class. Being a natural loner made me an easy target, I guess. He tried to bully me into letting him use my baseball glove in P.E. I refused. 

Too small or cowardly to do the job himself,  he reached out to an older family member who came to our school, caught me alone, and gave me a beatdown. As always, snitching was considered weak, so I told no one. But inside, I felt a blinding rage I could taste. The details are probably too lurid for your taste. Suffice it to say, my first was a package deal—a twofer. 

The train hisses to a stop, and a middle-aged man boards. He has broken veins across his nose and under his eyes. An alcoholic. He’s one of those people who were old when they were twelve. Stoop-shouldered, unshaven, in a brown trench coat, he looks like a stereotypical pervert. He would be an easy kill—no stamina, and the nicotine stains on his fingers tell me he has no wind. His death would probably be a mercy rather than murder.  

Not that I’m ever remorseful. I felt no guilt over the boys I’d killed. My concern now was covering my tracks. For the first time, I knew I didn’t need to fear the dark because it was already inside me. Taking my bloody clothes outside, I burned them in our fire pit behind the house. I sat a long time in the dark, looking up at the stars. I didn’t feel lonely, just alone. I wondered if there were more like me or if I was a one-off, a prototype? 

In the weeks that followed, no fingers were ever pointed at me. It was intoxicating. In my hubris, I was still a caterpillar breaking out of its chrysalis, not yet in my final form. For the time being, I returned to my regular routines and locked that part of me in a compartment inside my psyche. I started watching a lot of police shows, often with my parents.  But I was especially interested in procedural programs, which detailed how they caught killers. Know your enemy.

I had been living on my own for several months when a new neighbor moved into our apartment complex. He was loud, aggressive, and generally obnoxious. It was high school again, only now the students were adults who never grew up. It was a bully, beating me again. I saw him as just another glitch in the universe that needed to be addressed.  

I had learned that environmental conditions in the small hours favor surprise while reducing the risk of detection. As part of my self-training, I had practiced picking locks. It seemed like a helpful tool. Finally, on a moonless night, I made my move. 

After gaining entrance to his apartment, I listened for sounds. I heard only snoring from his bedroom. The architects who design modular buildings have no idea how much they help people like me. Every unit is a fractal of the whole. He lay on his back, snoring. Probably dreaming of all the people he’d bullied or would bully the next day.  

That was his final dream. It wasn’t a stellar performance—I was still new to the art in those days. That was long ago, the trail of corpses in my wake only beginning. Since then, I’ve honed my skills, my planning, and my reflexes. In my world, it only takes one mistake. 

We emerge from a tunnel into the night. There’s a fine mist, making the air damp and chill. My window begins to fog over. Good. Perfect weather for a killing. One day, on a bus (or was it a train or an airplane?), I felt another passenger’s eyes on me. Staring back, I felt a prickling sensation along my arms and around my neck. They were my eyes, looking back at me. When two magnets with the same poles are brought together, their forces repel each other. So it was with us. We are by nature solitary creatures. After disembarking, I never saw him again. But now I knew. I wasn’t alone.  

I feel the weight of eyes watching me again. Her face is cherubic, with golden hair and eyes the color of periwinkles. She looks to be three, at most four. Her expression is full of wonder and inquisitiveness. At the next stop, she and her mother get up to exit. I give her a wink and a grin. She giggles, and her mother gives me a grateful smile. I already have a target. Maybe another night, another train.   

I believe the universe has a purpose for all its creations. Perhaps we’re the apex predators of this planet’s dominant species, and it’s our job to take care of what nature doesn’t want around anymore—its aberrations. There could be a million explanations and rationalizations. Or maybe people should smile more. 

Sometimes, like tonight, I remember the faces, the sounds, even the smells. Looking out my window, I see the cold night for what it is—my domain, the hunter’s realm. I feel the tingle of expectation, the thrill of the act.     

Finally, the train reaches my station. Stepping out into the night’s chill heightens my senses. The shiver I feel isn’t the cold, it’s anticipation. I know the way to my destination, through alleys foul with the smell of stale booze, piss, and vomit. Through an empty lobby with peeling paint and stains on the shabby carpet. Up two flights of stairs to the first room on the right. He has no idea that death is only minutes away.    

Maybe I live far away—or next door. I may be riding this train to your residence at this very moment. What are the odds? Right now, you’re telling yourself that chances are, we’ve never met. And you’re probably right. But an unexplained noise in the dark startles you. You debate whether to investigate or stay in your warm, safe bed. Reason tells you it couldn’t be me. My advice? Pull up the covers and go back to your dreams in blissful ignorance. 

Because if you start looking, you might find me. Now, tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters?