First things first
Species: domestic short hair Age: 16 Sex: male, neutered Weight: 5.4kg History: he has kidney disease (stage 2, possibly 3), heart murmor 3/4, mild dental disease, and now Paronychia Clinical signs: Paronychia, swollen nail beds (3 on right front paw, 2 on left front paw and 1 in back right paw) with pus and crust Duration: Paronychia for 1 year Location: London, UK Test results/reports: x rays clear
Hi, my cat has developed a very stubborn nail bed infection. It started one year ago with one nail, and since then it came back every 3 months quite regularly, and for the first 5 times we treated it with antibiotics and antifungal topical drops. It kind of worked but it came back(always on one nail but not the same)
In February i took him to a dermatologist specialist who diagnosed secondary Malassezia paronychia, they think the fungal infection is stubborn because of his age and his other issues. By that time only 2 nail beds were showing signs of infection, even though he had a yeast build up everywhere.
They gave him Itrafungol, so we start the first course of treatment. It gets a bit worse(3 nails infected now), and upon end of treatment i gave him the antifungal drops again(surolan) which worked.
At this point i was happy-ish and i take him to the vet to check things. They said let’s do another course of itrafungol to make sure the infection is properly gone. I am now in the middle of this second course - due to finish in 10 days - but it got worse. Now 6 nails are sore and with discharge. I am going back to the vet on Friday but I know they might suggest to do a biopsy and CT scan to rule out worse case scenarios. We did x rays last august and they were clear btw.
Is it possible that itrafungol is making things worse? Did anyone come across this before? I am quite scared to put my 16yo cat through anestesia 😞and i am feeling so powerless.
There were never talks of allergies and they ruled out autoimmune conditions.
Thank you for whoever can spare some advice and knowledge.

I (19 F) and my Best Friend (19 F) have been lying to everyone we know that we are cousins.
For context, I have a summer birthday and turn 20 in 2 months. I graduated high school early (as did a lot of people in my area due to covid) and came out to college at 17 the winter semester of 2022. I was at college for a year and a half before I met my now best friend from randomly rooming in an off campus apartment at the beginning of this last school year This was her first year at college, as she is almost a year younger than me, and graduated in 2023. We clicked INSTANTLY and have become inseparably close ever since.
Our entire immediate and extended families all know each other, and we will often take trips and stay with her family. And when my family came into town, she stayed with us the whole time. Our families love each other, and meeting her has been the best thing that has ever happened to me, I feel like I have known her my entire life. My cousins who live in the area all call her cousin, and she comes to all the family functions.
Because we lived together, we share all of our belongings and even grocery shop together. Since we became so close so fast, and stayed at her family's house only a few weeks into the school year, people always asked us how we knew each other and would not believe us when we said we were random roommates. So instead, we started saying we were cousins and nobody questioned it. We became curious if we were actually related as we both have pretty large families, and used the app family tree to see if we were. To our surprise, we were somewhere between 3rd and 5th cousins, I can't quite remember. It was through my Grammy, and our moms sides of the family.
We are close with a few of both my cousins on my mom's side and her cousins fromher mom's side, and both of them just call the other "cousin", and have all accepted the other into the family. We even call each other's parents aunt and uncle as we will see or talk to them frequently. We will stay at each other's family and extended family. Everyone has welcomed the other with open arms into the family, and this made our lie seem even more real. This became so normal to us, that we would forget sometimes that it was sort of a lie. Whenever cousins would come to stay with us during the year, they called us both cousin no matter who's it was.
There were a couple other things that inadvertently helped our case too. For one, she was online at a different school the first semester as she had started college the last year of high school and had to finish it but still wanted to live in the college town she would be attending next semester, so people assumed she moved here to live with me. Second, my mom's mom is called Grammy and her mom's mom is called Gammy so whenever we talk about them, nobody notices that we are saying something different as they are super similar. And lastly, all the cousin's that came to stay with us or that we are close to are all from both our mom's sides and the ones we are still both technically related to.
During the year, we would tell all the people we met and it wasn't ever really an issue. The most people would question is that we don't look super alike as she is blonde and I have dark brown hair with tan skin, so sometimes people would ask how we were related and we would say our moms as both our moms are blonde. Early on we met a bunch of guys that ended up becoming our best friends. I started dating one of the guys in the group a few months later. The 3 of us became super close, and we never told him that we weren't cousins. One of the guys in the group that i'll call B, has two cousins in the group but from opposite sides. Because they were actual cousins, they wanted to know how we were related so we said our moms and when they asked if they were sisters we agreed.
Up until about 6 months ago, this was all there was to it and it wasn't really a big deal or that deep, just kind of funny. But things took a bit of a turn when one of B's cousins E had a thing with one of my actual cousin's roommates. Her roommate accidentally let it slip to E that me and my best friend weren't really cousins. Luckily my cousin gave us a heads up, so we knew they might ask. E ended up telling all of the other guys while they were at the gym that day and my boyfriend texted me saying "Bro no way you guys have been lying to me this whole time" when I asked how, he said "yall aren't even cousins" and then added "by blood".
We probably should have come clean then and there, but we had another one of our friends over who also thought we were cousins and didn't feel explaining to him or everyone that we had been lying for months. So naturally, we doubled down. But my boyfriend didn't believe us and asked for proof. When I said I would find a picture (my mom's family is huge so we could have played it off) he said to show him the family tree app. So we took an ss of our relation to each other and put another ss on top of it so it looked like it said we were just cousins instead of 3rd. That ended the debate as E and the girl never became anything so the guys just assumed it was bad intel, and never asked us about it again.
Now here comes the major problem. My best friend decided to do a year and a half long humanitarian trip and is having a party to say goodbye at her house this weekend. Me and my boyfriend are going up on Thursday (which is in 2 days) and her family is all coming into town. Her dad's mom and her mom's parents will all be there. My boyfriend has been with us when we were on a face time call with her family and her Gammy months ago, and has also met my Grammy, and was even at a family dinner this past weekend. However, since talking to Gammy and meeting Grammy were spaced apart so far he never questioned or asked about it, and we never gave it a second thought. The other day when we were at my Grammy's house, he snapped my best friend who is currently home saying "guess where I am", it was clear he assumed that Grammy was our mutual grandparent so she just went along with it.
We have been lying so long that we don't know what to do about this weekend. We talked to her mom and one of her aunts who know about the situation and they think it is hilarious. It started out as an innocent joke and just letting people assume our grandmas are the same person, but we are so deep in it at this point that we don't know if we should come clean or not.
At this point we have 3 options: 1: we come completely clean, 2: we slightly lie and say we are 2nd cousins which isn't that far from the truth, or 3: lie even more and keep pretending to be first cousins.
Her mom thinks we are in too deep to come clean at this point and is willing to go along with whatever we tell him. We came up with a plan that would further enforce the lie that goes as follows: Her Gammy and my (now dead) grandad were married and had 2 kids: the first one died (my mom has a sister that died as a baby) and the second one was her mom. They divorced after the death as it was hard on the marriage and both got remarried. My grandad to my Grammy, and her Gammy to her grandfather. Gammy got custody of her mom, and both couples had more kids and moved on with their lives.
This would make us half cousins and our moms half sisters. You wouldn't really refer to your half cousin as anything but a cousin, and it would explain why we were weird when people asked if our moms were sisters. Additionally, the sister that died is a real thing and asking anyone about it would make our lie seem true. It is messy enough to where it would be like oh we don't talk about it and he won't want to ask questions, but not messy enough with like affairs and cheating to where it makes our families look bad. Her mom and aunt and cousins will all go along with it as the find the whole thing funny. The issue is, this would make us get involved so deep and having lies that include dead family members feels disrespectful.
At this point I don't know what to do, should we come completely clean now? Should we come partially clean and admit to lying about our mom's being sisters and the family tree app ss being fake? Or do we keep lying and go with everything we've said for a year now? I'm worried that my boyfriend will feel betrayed by everyone lying to him, no matter when it is if it's now or if we keeping lying and he finds out later. I don't want him to be hurt and question other things in our relationship, as this is the ONLY thing I have ever lied to him about. There is a chance that if we keep lying he will never find out, but there's also a chance that he will. I honestly forgot about all of this, and when me an my best friend facetimed a few minutes ago we realized we are so screwed.
Please help lol I feel like an idiot and I don't know what to do 😭

Hello, people of Reddit! 😊
My dog Mochi, a German Spitz (Mittelspitz), has been suffering from severe itching since March. He licks his paws and scratches his head/eye area frequently. He lost a lot of hair around his eyes.
I hope that someone on here maybe experienced something similar with their dog who can point me to the right direction in where to go from here or give some advice. We’ve already visited the vet a few times because of this and have an appointment for next week as well.
Here are a few photos to show the progression of his hair loss.
As you can see he was completely fine at the start of the year. ☹ It started around the end of March.
He is nearly 2 years old and weights around 10 kg. He has been neutered last year. We’re located in Austria.
Sorry for the long post ahead, but I would like to include as much information as possible.
Information about his food & current medication:

• We have completely switched to Vet Concept Sana Horse (dry and wet food) to rule out a food intolerance
• He gets some salmon hemp oil from Vet Concept every day since the itching started
• He got Bravecto at the start of April for ticks but also as a prevention for mites
• Mochi currently gets prednisolone tablets (5 mg) in decreasing doses. We have an appointment for next week to give him Cytopoint instead. As I understand from my vet, Cytopoint has less side effects and contains no cortisone. We plan to conduct an allergy test (pre-screening) after 4-6 weeks following the Cytopoint injection

The current possible diagnoses are:

• environmental allergy (maybe dust mites?)
• autoimmune disease
• travel diseases (Leishmaniasis?) Info: Mochi has never left the country we reside in (Austria)
• something else entirely

We have also considered:

• Hair loss caused by mites: We had a skin scraping done that came back negative (for mites and fungi)
• a zinc deficiency but if my math isn’t completely off he should be currently getting around 16 mg zinc each day from his food which would cover his need for zinc

Here’s also a short summary of the last two months in case some of these things are important:

• Mochi had bloody diarrhea in early March. We visited the vet for this and got some medicine, and Mochi an injection; he recovered well. Before this point (the diarrhea incident lol) everything was completely okay. He was not itching and his eyes looked normal. I list this point in case the weakened immune system has something to do with the hair loss/itching that followed
• He started licking his paws in mid/late March. At the end of March he started losing hair around his right eye at first, a bit later around his left eye as well
• At the beginning of April we suspected he had mites but the test (mites + fungi) turned out negative. We also changed his food to Vet Concept at this point
• All blood test results so far were perfect (nothing abnormal)

Aside from the itching and loss of hair around his eyes, he is otherwise completely healthy. He still loves to play, has a lot of energy, eats his usual amount and poops like a king.
We are also considering going to a specialist / dermatologist. We actually got a letter of referral from our vet to a dermatologist, but the reviews we saw online were pretty mixed (leaning towards pretty bad) and we will probably try to find another one on our own. Still considering our options here.
I’m feeling pretty lost with all of this since it sounds like it could be basically anything. After each vet visit it went from “it’s probably this” to “actually, it might be this AND this” to “well, we could do this test and this test and…”
The current plan would be to see how the Cytopoint works and do the allergy test and then go from there (and probably look for a good dermatologist). I’m not sure if we should also do a test for Leishmaniasis since most of the other symptoms don’t apply to Mochi.
I also sadly don’t have a pet insurance and now I’m not sure if it’s already too late since Mochi already gets medicine for allergies so I’m not sure if he would automatically get excluded from any future tests even if he doesn't have an official diagnosis yet.
If anyone read all of this – thank you so much! I would be thankful for any advice.

(I posted this in dogs but they have a delay, so I'm cross posting here too - hope that's okay!)
Tater Todd the Dog came to us a year ago through a rescue that plucked him from an Alabama kill shelter at 9mo and brought him to New England, where we took him home. He has obvious angular leg deformity (eg his front legs bend inward at the ankle, not unlike a dachshund), leukotrichia (hair grows back white when damaged) and a slight overbite (his tongue frequently sticks out, yes it's adorable)
Per Embark - where he's so fancy I can find over a dozen first and second cousins - Todd is 100%, purebred Catahoula Leopard Dog. Not what I expected, as he was listed as a "lab mix" in his NE adoption paperwork. CLDs are rare up here, so I'm not blaming the NE rescue. He doesn't have the strong markings associated with the breed.... but if you know what to look for, it's pretty obvious. So why does the original Alabama rescue currently have a lot of Todd lookalikes up for adoption, listed as Labrador Retrievers? Not mixes: just Labs.
I've worked with dogs for 10 years. As we’re far in the north and rarely see CLDs, even I didn't clock his breed until Embark. While he's wonderful, he's not as…. simple, I guess, as Labs are expected to be. He's incredibly high energy and NOT a first time owner kind of pup. The first 2-3 months were tough. He needs attention, tons of exercise and near constant stimulation. Our trainers agree he's one of the smartest dogs they've ever worked with.
(Interestingly, Todd is either the most bulletproof dog ever or someone truly cared for him as a puppy. He's pretty fearless and doesn't care about storms, alarms, fireworks, or murdering small animals. He's full of love for all, especially children and other dogs. In every other respect he's an absolutely stellar dog, just not physically ideal.)
Because of this, I'm afraid the rescue is intentionally obfuscating the breeds under the guise of “we can't prove we knew and there's nothing you can do about it.” But in the wrong environment with people who don't have extensive dog experience, this could have gone VERY poorly. Plenty of people cannot offer the care a CLD needs and (rightfully, imo) filter out the breed as an option. It's a situation ripe for rehoming, with the dog more confused and upset than before and less likelihood of a positive outcome.
Back to the breeder: I've come to the hesitant conclusion there's a possibility he was intentionally bred, but dumped at a shelter when he didn't meet the breed standards - eg the breeder didn't want him associated with their business due to his deformities and is trying to hide their mistakes while continuing to breed from the same stock/lines. How else would a purebred dog with an amazing personality end up in a shelter at 9 months?
So I did a little digging on the ol' internet. There is an active breeder in AL a few towns over from where his original rabies tag was issued, and one of the current mothers bears a pretty striking resemblance... which stands out, as Todd doesn't have average Catahoula markings. Not a silver bullet, but interesting nonetheless. There aren't a lot of CLD breeders out there.
Now for the point (sorry for the rant!): Is there any action you would take with this information? Should I contact the rescue or breeder? Should I reach out on Embark to his first cousins (some still in AL) to get their stories?
I'll be honest, I’m not sure what resolution I'm looking for or likely to achieve. Can I shut down a bad breeder from across the country? Am I losing my mind?? Maybe they're a "decent" breeder who gave or sold Todd to some asshole who was disappointed in how he developed, and rather than go back to the breeder simply dumped him. (I would be very surprised if this was the case; purebreds are fucking expensive and "decent" breeders will take a dog back.)
Additionally, does the rescue know about this somehow? CLDs are common in the South, I can't believe they wouldn't clock one with obvious features. It's pretty shitty to withhold important breed info that could properly inform a prospective adopter. Are they more interested in turnover than a permanent placement? Is there anything to be gained from calling them out? What would you do??
I would love some perspective or advice, this is driving me crazy. Thanks for reading :) Now go pet a dog!!
(edit: I wanted to say I have no problem with people rehoming dogs they can no longer care for, whatever the reason may be. It sucks, but I get it. I do feel this is different, however.)

So I found out a way i can induce some kind pleasurable tingles down the spine. The way I do it is to just focus some kind of insect or bug usually which u r scared of a little (it was a spider in my case).So imagine the insect slowly crawling along back of ur head through ur hairs. Close ur eyes and really feel the terror and tingles may start sometimes or else u can then imagine the insect slowly crawling down along to base of ur spine.This usually does the trick for me. But it do have its refractory period and I cant do it consecutively.So thats there.Hope someone can benefit from this

One year ago mybest friend passed away tragically, leaving his mother and a younger sister behind. His sister is 19, I had met her 3 years ago for the first time, and I thought that she was really pretty and exactly my type (good girl, but also a bit tomboyish and girly at the same time) and I respected her as my best friend's sister, so I kept my feelings for her for myself. I treated her like she was my own sister, instead of thinking about how happy we'd be together.

I went to visit her mother because she was having trouble with the ceiling, needed to put a barrier on the balcony and to install the things that surround the light bulbs. I dont know how you call them in english.
Her husband also passed away, and she's a widow with a low income job and a girl to raise, and my father told me to check in on them once in a while and help them in case they need some help in the house for things to fix
Turns out the issue was that the ceiling leaked in her daughter's room, so I went there. The girl still had a very chilhood sort of bedroom with decorations, and she herself seemed to be so different. I greeted her and shook her hand as we do over here, and she kept studyin g on her desk. I opened the windows to remove the old satellite and install the new receiver, and noticed that there were some crumbs on the side of the window. I asked her about the crumbs, and she said "it's for a little bird that comes to visit me every day"
and I said "ok". Sounds fine... until I found out later, by another friend of mine, that the girl is heavily depressed and hasnt stepped out of home for days since her brother died, and that in college she endured some sort of abuse by some guys, there is a trial going on, this friend said we should do something for her as she is our best friend's sister, and we should protect her, and this also makes sense because I saw in her room packets of a medicine that I looked up and turns out it's an antidepressant. Actually she looked so different from the last time I saw her, she was very pretty, wearing girly summer dresses and long hair and looked so pretty and lovely and now she seems so pale, wears baggy clothes and turtlenecks and seems sort of "without will to live"
and the silly thing she said about the bird worries me too. I feel like that bird is the only interaction she has had in a while. At some point while I was asking her questions about the things to fix, it seemed like she was turning red about to cry. Like, something was very wrong.
I said "I know you miss him, but you have to be strong, for your mom at least" and she said "I dont know... everything is over now. they're not coming back anymore. mom knows that, I know that" (she lost her brother, and also her father a few years earlier).
I did the things I had to do, but I tried to involve her. Like, I asked "where is the hammer? do you have some nails like this one?" and she went looking for things for me in the house in case they already had them, and she tried her best to look for them. even if she didnt find all the things, I always said "ok dont worry, I'm gonna buy them on the store here close to your house"
After I finished, I tried to clean up the place, but she said "no dont worry, I'll clean up. you already did a lot for us thank you" with a very sad face.
I didnt tell her mother anything, I'm sure she's already aware of how her daughter is, but I cant help but think about her. I'm so worried. Should I talk to her mom? Even if I do, what am I supposed to say? I'm just his brother's friend, not someone important for her.

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I'm just curious honestly! I can think of only three idols that have curly hair and they're all male idols. I'm talking about Hyunjae from The Boyz and Bangchan from SKZ. I believe L from Infinite also has curly hair, but I could be wrong. Hyunjae doesn't seem to particularly like that his hair is curly, though idk if that's the case for Bangchan or L (hope not, curly hair is lovely, just as much as straight hair is). Interestingly enough, from all of the pre-debut photos I've seen of Hyunjae, he has straight hair so I'm guessing his mom or himself would blow dry it so it wouldn't be curly (again, idk if that's the case with Bangchan or L since I don't follow them closely).
From my understanding, naturally curly hair isn't too rare in South Korea-it's rather they go to greater lengths to keep their hair straight bc curly hair isn't super "in" or whatever. Also, the actual state of curliness varies and Korean people's hair is usually more on the wavy side, probably due to heat damage since they might be straightening it a lot (and not taking care of it properly).
Lmk if I've got anything wrong or you have something to add lol also drop idols who have naturally curly hair down below :)

My husband has a mild/moderate porn addiction and has been relapsing for the last good handful of months. He comes to me when he struggles and he struggled a bit this past week. Today, he got a new phone and set it up but didn’t want to take it anywhere because he didn’t have a case and didn’t want to risk breaking it. So he took his old phone with him and I wasn’t able to contact him. Eventually I grabbed his new phone and was texting a group chat he was in with his friends because he was hanging out with them and I wanted to know where he was for the sake of communication. However, I remembered he had been struggling and got the impulse to browse (horrible idea). I went to his safari and scrolled through his history to see if he kept the history there, and it was all there. I saw names he searched like Mia, Summer, Madison, etc. Some I found OF searches. What bothered me most was that he was looking for specific women. Apparently he liked the redhead Summer. I didn’t know he liked red hair, guess I know now. In conclusion, I don’t think I should have done this. However I did clear ALL the history. I also looked to see if he had downloaded any porn apps and thankfully he didn’t. Why was I such an idiot to do this. I don’t want to ruin our day together. I HATE THIS ADDICTION.

We've had our cat for 9 months
Last October, we were treating him from ringworm which he came with, and it was on all of his body, ears & head. By the time it was January, the vet declared him ringworm free, he didn't have any spots on his skin like he did before
Every month here and there, a localized infection happens, particularly at his ears. We treat it and after and now those spots are gone.
However, this is the main issue. I took him to 3 vets to get different opinions on what we're seeing in the photos.
https://preview.redd.it/z69689id3g0d1.jpg?width=1484&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=67b98acba053b8197f8ef1d0af2c3edeb3843d49
The skin is no longer glowing with circular patches reminiscent of ringworm. Now, only the hair strands are glowing, and in some slightly rare cases, the hair root itself is glowing.

• Vet no.1 said that the ringworm is imbedded within his hair and roots and you have to attack it once again with the full package (Anti-fungal cream, betadene, cone, pills, injections, etc) and gave us a hefty quote, which is what we've done back in October and we really dont want to go through it again.
• Vet no.2 said that the ringworm is only on the hair and doing consistent weekly medicated baths+ shaving the hair will alleviate it, and we shouldn't primarly attack it with antifungal cream because it's not on the skin
• Vet no.3 said the same thing as no.2, that its on the hair and it should be treated with medicated baths and shaving the hair.

We ended up following the advice of vet 2 and 3. It feels no matter how much antifungal cream we use, it doesnt do anything to the supposed ringworm on the hair.
I read online, and people said that the ringworm on the hair rather than on the skin is supposedly the hair recovering or potentially even having recovered fully from a previous ringworm infection. But I dont know whether that's true or not, so has anyone gone through the same issue, and is there any solution for it? Because we are starting to lose hope

A delicate young man with pallid skin and dark circles under his eyes sat on a weathered bench opposite the police station. He held a cup of coffee in his hands—not the cheap synthetic kind available to those in the slums, but genuine plant-based coffee, a luxury usually reserved for higher-ranking citizens. It had cost him nearly all his savings, yet Sunny chose this day for a bit of indulgence.
After all, he was at the end of his road.
Basking in the warmth of the extravagant beverage, he lifted the cup to relish its scent. With a cautious sip, he winced.
"Ah! So bitter!"
Staring down the coffee with a deep sigh, Sunny persevered, taking another gulp. Despite its bitterness, he was set on enjoying the full value of his purchase—regardless of his protesting taste buds.
"I should've opted for real meat instead. Who would've thought actual coffee could taste so foul? At least it'll keep me awake," he mused.
Gazing into the void, he began to nod off, only to jolt himself awake with a slap to the face.
"Such a rip-off," he muttered.
With a shake of his head and a few choice words, Sunny downed the rest of his coffee and rose to his feet. The affluent residents of this part of town hurried by the small park, casting curious glances his way. His haggard appearance, accentuated by cheap attire and sleep deprivation, made him stick out. His thin, pale figure contrasted sharply with the robust passersby. Enviously eyeing their stature, he aimed the cup at a nearby bin.
"That's the difference three square meals a day make," he scoffed.
The cup missed its target, landing on the pavement. Sunny sighed, retrieved the cup, and made sure it went into the bin this time. A wry smile on his face, he crossed the street and stepped into the police station.
Inside, a weary officer cast a brief glance at him and frowned in clear distaste.
"Are you lost, boy?"
Sunny surveyed the surroundings with interest, observing the reinforced armor on the walls and the barely concealed turret nests in the ceiling. The officer appeared scruffy and stern. It seemed police stations were consistent everywhere.
"Hey! I'm speaking to you!"
Sunny cleared his throat.
"Uh, no."
He then scratched the back of his head and continued:
"Under the Third Special Directive, I am here to turn myself in as a carrier of the Nightmare Spell."
The officer's demeanor shifted from annoyance to caution. He scrutinized the young man anew, this time with a sharp gaze.
"Are you certain you're infected? When did the symptoms begin?"
Sunny gave a nonchalant shrug.
"A week ago?"
The officer's complexion turned noticeably paler.
"Damn."
Then, with a swift movement, he hit a button on his terminal and shouted:
"Attention! Code Black in the lobby! I repeat, CODE BLACK!"
***
The Nightmare Spell emerged several decades ago, during a period when the planet was beginning to recover from catastrophic natural disasters and ensuing wars over resources.
Initially, a new ailment causing widespread fatigue and drowsiness didn't garner much attention. However, as people began to succumb to an abnormal sleep from which they wouldn't awaken, even after several days, governments started to panic. By that time, it was too late for any response to make a difference.
As the afflicted began to die in their sleep, transforming into monsters upon death, the world was unprepared. These Nightmare Creatures swiftly overran national defenses, casting the world into utter disarray.
The nature of the Spell, its capabilities, and methods to combat it remained unknown.
Ultimately, it was the Awakened—those who had endured the Spell's initial onslaught and returned alive—who halted its destruction. Wielding extraordinary powers gained through their Nightmares, they reestablished peace and forged a new semblance of order.
Certainly, it was just the initial catastrophe unleashed by the Spell. However, for Sunny, it seemed irrelevant — until recently, when he began struggling to stay awake.
For the average individual, being selected by the Spell could be as dangerous as it was fortuitous. In school, children were taught survival skills and combat techniques in case they were affected. Affluent families employed private tutors to instruct their offspring in various martial arts. Members of the Awakened clans even possessed potent heritages, harnessing ancestral Memories and Echoes during their inaugural journey to the Dream Realm.
The wealthier your family, the greater your odds of enduring and ascending as an Awakened.
Yet for Sunny, an orphan who devoted his days to foraging rather than education, the Spell's choice offered no prospects. For him, it signified an almost certain demise.
***
Minutes later, Sunny yawned as several policemen busied themselves securing him in restraints. Shortly, he was strapped into a bulky chair, an odd hybrid of a hospital bed and a torture device. They were in a room located in the police station's basement, encased by thick armored walls and guarded by a daunting vault door. Nearby, officers stood against the walls, clutching automatic rifles with stern looks etched on their faces.
Sunny was indifferent to them. His only concern was his overwhelming desire to sleep.
At last, the vault door swung open, and a gray-haired policeman stepped through. His face bore the marks of experience, and his stern eyes seemed to have witnessed countless horrors. After inspecting the restraints, he cast a swift glance at his wristwatch before facing Sunny:
"What's your name, kid?"
Sunny blinked several times, struggling to focus, then squirmed in discomfort.
"Sunless."
The elderly policeman lifted an eyebrow.
"Sunless? That's an unusual name."
Sunny attempted to shrug, but his body refused to cooperate.
"What's unusual about it? At least I have a name. Where I come from, not everyone is given one."
He yawned before continuing:
"It's because I was born during a solar eclipse. My mother was quite the poet."
Hence his peculiar name, and why his younger sister was named Rain… at least, when she was still with them. Whether it stemmed from poetic flair or sheer indolence, he couldn't tell.
The policeman gave a gruff sound.
"Should I get in touch with your family?"
Sunny shook his head.
"No need. There's no one left."
For a moment, a shadow crossed the policeman's face before it settled into a grave expression.
"Alright, Sunless. How long can you remain awake?"
"Uh… not very long."
The policeman exhaled deeply.
"In that case, we don't have time for the complete procedure. Resist sleep as best as you can and pay close attention to what I'm about to say. Understood?"
Without waiting for an answer, he continued:
"What do you understand about the Nightmare Spell?"
Sunny looked at him with uncertainty.
"About as much as the next person, I suppose? Isn't the Spell common knowledge?"
"It's not the glamorous stuff you see in dramas or hear about in propaganda broadcasts. How much do you truly understand?"
That question was difficult to answer.
"So, I just enter the Dream Realm, slay some monsters to complete the First Nightmare, gain magical powers, and become an Awakened?"
The veteran policeman shook his head.
"Pay attention. When you fall asleep, you'll be transported into your First Nightmare. Nightmares are trials crafted by the Spell. Inside, you'll encounter monsters, but you'll encounter people as well. Remember, they aren't real. They are merely illusions created to challenge you."
"How can you be certain?"
The policeman fixed him with a stare.
"I mean, nobody really grasps the nature of the Spell or its mechanics, right? So how can you be sure they aren't real?"
"You may have to eliminate them, kid. It's better for you to consider them as mere illusions."
"Oh."
The aged officer paused for a moment, then nodded and resumed speaking.
"Much about the First Nightmare is left to chance. Generally, it's not meant to be excessively difficult. The predicament you find yourself in, the tools at your disposal, and the creatures you must overcome should all fall within your capabilities. After all, the Spell conjures trials, not death sentences. Your particular situation does put you at a disadvantage, but remember, children from the outskirts are resilient. Don't lose hope just yet."
"Mm-hmm."
Sunny's drowsiness was intensifying, making it difficult to keep up with the conversation.
"As for the 'magic powers' you inquired about... indeed, you will acquire them if you endure the Nightmare until its conclusion. The exact nature of these powers will depend on your inherent affinities and your actions during the trial. However, you'll have access to some of them right from the beginning..."
The old policeman's voice was fading into the distance. Sunny's eyelids were so heavy, it was a struggle to keep his eyes open.
"Remember: your first task upon entering the Nightmare is to assess your Attributes and your Aspect. If you're assigned a combat-oriented Aspect, like a Swordsman or an Archer, you'll find things more manageable. If it's complemented by a physical Attribute, all the better. Since Combat Aspects are quite common, there's a good chance you'll receive one."
The light in the armored room was fading.
"If you're unfortunate enough to have an Aspect unrelated to combat, don't lose heart. Sorcery and utility Aspects have their own merits; you just need to use them wisely. There are no truly useless Aspects. Well, almost none. So do whatever it takes to survive."
"Surviving means you're on your way to becoming an Awakened. But if you perish, you'll create a portal for a Nightmare Creature to enter our world. That would mean my colleagues and I have to intervene. So, please, Sunless, don't perish."
Sunny, already drifting to sleep, felt somewhat moved by the officer's plea.
"And try not to perish immediately. It will be hours before the nearest Awakened can arrive, and we'd really prefer not to confront that creature alone..."
'What?'
With that final thought, Sunny succumbed to a profound sleep.
Darkness enveloped everything.
And then, from the shadows, a vaguely familiar voice echoed:
[Aspirant! Welcome to the Nightmare Spell. Prepare for your First Trial…]
****
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Found a sturdy bookshelf, baby bottle sterilizer in the box, Victoria’s Secret totes, 100+ skeins of yarn, a 50 gallon fish tank with a filter and good, kid’s bike in good condition, and $100 worth of unopened luxury hair products, for reselling. Score! Sold the bookshelf for $30 before I even got home.
And for me: tomato cages for my garden, a hand knit beanie from the yarn bag, a massage table carrying case, some unopened popcorn, nuts, and granola bars!
Also… found a $200 “pelvic floor trainer”?? Didn’t know that existed. Don’t think I’ll be doing anything with that given it was out of the package… lol

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.

The world was a boozy whirl of lights and sounds. Images, broken and fragmented, came and went. Voices, laughter, screaming. The ground pitched like the deck of a tempest-tossed ship, and he felt heavy, as though the ground were pulling him to it. C’mere, Dommy. He fell, lay on the pavement, and pushed himself up again, staggering like a drunk on his way home. His head spun, his body ached, and things seemed blurry, like half-formed images glimpsed underwater.
It was the light blue hour before dawn and Dom was…somewhere. He should have recognized the stores and street signs around him, but he didn’t. His head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and a sense of confusion gripped him so strongly that he was beginning to panic. Where was he? What happened?
The world spun away again and the next thing he knew, he was lying in a heap of garbage bags, used needles, and rubbish. He came awake with a jerk and sat up so fast that a bolt of pain jammed into his skull. He winced and pressed his hand to his forehead. He felt hot, clammy.
Something was seriously wrong.
Somehow he got to his feet again and started walking. The sun was up now and the streets were filled with people. They all sneered in disgust as he passed, and he wrapped his arms around his chest like a baby comforting itself. He was getting cold. His muscles were sore. Tears streamed down his face and he wanted to cry.
Going on instinct alone, Dom made his way back home and climbed the steps to his apartment. Exhaustion swept over him and he sagged against the door as he dug in his pocket for the keys. They shook in his hand and he had to focus really hard to get the key into the lock.
Inside, he collapsed onto the couch and his eyelids instantly drooped. He was so weary that he couldn’t lift his head, couldn’t form a single coherent thought. Dom felt himself starting to sink, and snapped his eyes open with a start. Something in his soul told him that if he slept, he would die.
He couldn’t help it, though. He was falling, tumbling, hands reaching up from hell to grab him. His eyes fluttered closed again and the world started to go dark, his heart slamming in fear. He tried to fight, but the pull of darkness was too strong, too alluring. Why was he fighting? Why not just…give up? Hadn’t he thought of killing himself before? Didn’t he hate his life and himself? What was there to fight for? A wife? Kids? A community that loved and respected him? Shit, affordable groceries?
No.
There was nothing.
He had nothing and was nothing.
A sense of peace blossomed from the darkness, and suddenly death didn’t seem so scary. In fact, it was warm…inviting.
It was life that was cold and hateful. Not death.
Death accepted you no matter who you were. It didn’t reject you…it didn’t ignore you. If you sought it, you would find it, and if you embraced it, it would embrace you.
With that thought in mind, Dom gave up.
And died.
***
Bruce Kenner, captain of the 5th Albany precinct, sat behind his desk on the morning of June 28 and lazily leafed through a stack of files as he sipped from a mug of coffee. A roughly built man with a dark goatee and graying blonde hair, he looked more like a small town southern sheriff than a low level public works functionary. In fact, he tended to act like it too. He liked to hunt, fish, and drink beer on his off time. Albany wasn’t a big city, but it was big enough that you never got a fucking break. Run here, run there, arrest this asshole, investigate that asshole. By the time Friday rolled around, he was so ready for the peace and tranquility of a fishing trip he could taste it.
Already this Monday morning, he was looking forward to another one.
Over the weekend, three kids went missing in the Pine Hills and Washington Park area, bringing the total for that summer up to eight. All were teenagers, all were troubled. Most were boys, but two were girls.
Troubled kids run away all the time. They might be gone a few days, sulking at a friend’s house over something their father or mother did, but they’d eventually come home. None of these kids had come back yet and from what he knew, a few of them weren’t the runaway types. They were shits at school and caused problems, but they had no reason to up and leave. Hell, Bruce himself raised hell as a kid, but he always found his way back home, even if he spent the previous night dying in a field from Mad Dogg 20/20 poisoning.
One or two kids going missing…okay, it happens. Eight? Over a span of four weeks?
Yeah, something was wrong here.
But what?
There was nothing on any of these kids. No one saw them, no one knew anything - one minute they were here, the next they weren’t. What could he or anyone else do with that?. The public broke cops’ balls all the time, but if you don’t have evidence, you don’t have evidence. What do you want? Door to door searches? Roadblocks? Dogs and helicopters? Yeah, then when you actually do it, they cry fascism. Guess I’ll just use my Spidey Senses.
Bruce wished he had spidey senses. He wanted to find these kids as much as anyone, and he was starting to get pissed off that he couldn’t. He took another sip from his mug and read on. The latest kids to go missing were three boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.
They were all white, all thin (except for one). If there was a serial killer in town - and Bruce hoped to fuck there wasn’t - he had a type. What, black kids aren’t good enough to kill, cannibalize, and wear like a skin suit? They should charge him with a hate crime for discrimination.
That way he’d actually stay locked up.
The door opened and Vanessa Rodregiez, his deputy, came in. A tall, shapely Hispanic woman with dark eyes and a mouth poised always on the edge of a smile, she wore her black hair in a ponytail that would look stern and severe on anyone else, but on her, looked childlike. She was twenty-seven and had been on the force for three years, but you could be forgiven for thinking her much younger. “Bright and early, I see,” she said with a grin.
Bruce grumbled.
Vanessa held down the fort during the graveyard shift, acting to the night as he acted to the day. She was young and full of energy, which clashed with Bruce, who was old and just wanted to be left alone. Despite their differences, Bruce loved her like a kid sister…an annoying kid sister he wanted to throat punch sometimes.
“You missed all the fun last night,” she said and parked her butt on the edge of Bruce’s desk. He glared at her, but she ignored him.
“Good,” he said. Then: “What happened?”
“Big fight outside of Club Vlad,” she said. “It looked like a WorldStar video.”
For a moment, Bruce was lost. “Club what?”
“Club Vlad,” Vanessa said. “Where the Fuze Box used to be.”
Ah, right. The Fuze Box was an Albany landmark, a night club for punks…or goths…or someone. Certainly not for Bruce Kenner. It was small, dingy, and always had people in black waiting outside. On Friday and Saturday nights, it blasted strange music with lyrics about fighting The Man. Kids had been fighting the Man since before Bruce was even born and they hadn’t beaten him yet. Kudos to them for still trying.
Last year, The Fuze Box closed down and someone else bought it. It reopened last month and looked more or less the same: Posers, shitty music, and spiked hair. So much spiked hair. “Place is still a pain in the ass,” Bruce said.
“Yep,” Vanessa chirped. “It doesn’t know what it wants to be now. One minute they play nightcore, the next EDM. It’s all over the place.”
Bruce raised a quizzical brow.
“Not that I’ve ever been there in my free time,” Vanessa said in a tone that suggested she had,
Bruce gave a judgemental hum.
“Anyway,” Vanessa went on, “you see we have some new missing persons?”
Sighing, Bruce sat back in his chair. “Yeah. I did.”
“People are starting to ask questions,” Vanessa warned.
That brought a terse smile to Bruce’s weathered face. “Maybe they’ll solve it then.”
“Ha, fat chance,” Vanessa said. She got up and stretched. “Anyway, I’m bushed. Here’s my…” she trailed off and looked at her empty hands. “Damn, where’s my report? I just had it?” She turned in a confused circle as if she might be able to spot her report making a break for it. “Huh,” she said. She left the office and came back a moment later holding a folder. “Found it,” she grinned.
Bruce just looked at her.
“Um…here it is.”
He didn’t take it.
Her smile faltered. She carefully sat it on top of the files Bruce was looking at.
And his hands.
“I’ll just leave that right here.” She patted it for good measure.
“Thank you,” Bruce said.
“Okay. Night.”
“Goodnight,” Bruce said as she left through a shaft of morning sunlight. Alone, Bruce sat her report aside and went back to the missing kids. This case was giving him a headache and it wasn’t even nine. With a deep sigh, he slumped back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests.
Was it Saturday yet?
He could really use a fishing trip.
***
Dom came awake in the cold purple twilight with a shocked gasp like a man coming up seconds before drowning. His eyes strained from his sweaty face and his mouth hung slack, twisted in a gruesome parody of The Scream. His mind was muddled, murky - he didn’t know where he was or even who he was, but he knew this,.
He couldn’t breathe.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, but his lungs did not fill with air. A great, unseen weight seemed to bear down on his chest, and panic gripped him. He tried to move, but his arms refused to heed his brain’s command. The weight seemed heavier, all over, crushing him like a bug. Confusion filled him and he started to pant.
Without warning, his bowels and bladder loosened, and horrible wetness filled his pants. He tried to sit up, but his body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. His chest rose and fell with the frantic labor of his breath, but his lungs remained inert. A cry of fear bubbled up inside of him, but escaped his mouth only as a breathy groan.
A bust of adrenaline shot through him and he tried to stand, but succeeded only in falling off the couch instead, landing face first against the cold tile floor. He felt his nose crunch, but the pain was muted.
Dom thought he lost consciousness after that, but wasn’t sure. His next memory was of shivering so violently that his teeth clacked together. A phantom chill - perhaps from the floor - had settled into his bones, and was colder than he had ever been in his life, colder even than the time he fell into a snowbank and got lost when he was two. Shudders racked his body, and though he tried to turn over, he was too fucking heavy. It was like every muscle in his body had turned to dead weight. Fragmented thoughts swirled in his head, faint colors in the dark, but he couldn’t put any of them together.
With great effort, he managed to push himself slightly up, but a wave of lightheadedness crashed over him and he lowered his head once more. He stopped trying and simply lay there. Shortly, his eyes began to burn and he realized that he wasn’t blinking. Jesus Christ, he wasn’t blinking.
For some strange reason, that brought a fresh bout of panic. He started to hyperventilate, but his lungs still wouldn’t work. He wasn’t blinking…he wasn’t breathing…what was happening to him?
A whimper burst from his throat and he started to cry.
He must have cried himself to sleep, because he woke sometime later to the most intense headache he’d ever had. It felt like something was eating his brain from the inside out. He was sore all over, and could feel his muscles twitching, as though a thousand living things were burrowing through his body. A cramp shot down his right leg, and the toes of his left foot curled involuntarily. Slowly, his jaw clenched closed, and the muscles in his neck began to strain…then to burn. His panic turned to terror, and Dom wiggled across the floor like a worm, his limbs screaming in red agony and his brain filling with heat. He somehow wound up on his right side, and his arms curled slowly up to his chest, crossing at the wrists like a mummy. He tried to pull them apart, but the slightest movement sent waves of excruciating pain cutting through his body. His knees began to draw up to his stomach, and his fingers clenched tightly.
Cramps and spasms attacked every muscle in his body. He screamed through his teeth and shook, resembling a man in the electric chair as 40,000 volts of justice coursed through him. The pain grew gradually, getting worse and worse as minutes ticked by like hours. Higher, higher, higher - he clenched his eyes closed and shrieked as it became unbearable. Disjointed thoughts flashed through his mind - prayers, threats, curses, Jesus fucking…FUCK.
What was happening? God, what was happening to him? Was it fentanyl? He’d seen videos of people high on fentanyl, and they leaned in weird positions. He didn’t do drugs but maybe he ingested it somehow.
His panic may have returned if all of his muscles hadn’t picked that moment to contract as one. His eyes bulged from their sockets and his jaw unclenched just enough for him to utter a high. Agonized scream that echoed through his empty apartment like thunder.
A human being can only take so much before giving out. When the pain reached a crescendo, and Dom mercifully sank into consciousness once more. The sun rose and cascaded through the apartment’s sole window, falling over his huddled form. Slowly, it tracked across the sky before setting again. As the last rays disappeared behind the horizon, Dom’s eyes opened. The pain of the night before was blessedly gone, replaced by a feeling of numbness - the cool ash after the hot fire. His thoughts were slow and thick like molasses, but he could actually think again. Nightmare memories flooded back to him, but he wasn’t sure they were real. He was lying on his side, his arms wrapped around his chest as if for warmth, and his teeth lightly chattered against the icy chill. He was so cold that he didn’t want to move, but he couldn’t stay here forever. He needed help. He needed…
A shower.
Yeah, a hot shower. That would warm him up.
Gritting his teeth, he slowly sat up, ready for a burst of pain.
But none came.
He did, however, feel heavy. Getting to his feet, he stumbled and nearly fell, catching himself against the counter. His limbs had no feeling. It’s like they weren’t even there. Head hung, Dom tried to catch his breath, but it felt like he wasn’t breathing at all. His eyelids drooped closed and he felt like he was going to fall down. Summoning all the might he could, he shuffled into the bathroom with the stiff gait of an old man. He snapped the light on, and cold, white brilliance filled the space, blinding him.
Leaning heavily against the sink, he gripped the cold porcelain. Suddenly, he was afraid of looking into the mirror. He was sure that whatever reflection he saw, it would be of something else, something monstrous.
Dom lifted his head and faced the glass.
His heart shrank.
The man in the mirror was him but different. His skin was white as milk, lacking all color whatsoever save for the ugly purple patch on the left side. IResembling a giant bruise, it started at the temple and extended down to the slope of his neck, disappearing beneath his T-shirt. He gingerly lifted the shirt, and moaned when he saw that his entire left side was discolored, the purple edged with a puffy shade of pink. His sallow skin clung tight to his ribcage, and his hip bones stuck out so much it looked painful. Back in the mirror, his cheeks were sunken, hollow, and his eyes were a hazy, dishwater gray. His skull seemed bigger, his hair longer. Dom wanted to whip his head away from the phantom before him, to never see it again, but he was transfixed.
There was no way that thing was -
Dom looked away, cutting that thought off before it could finish.
A shower.
He needed a shower.
Slowly, stiffly, Dom undressed, peeling off his shirt and his soiled pants. He dropped them in a heap on the floor and stepped under the spray. He could feel the water pounding against him, but it provided no heat. It was neither hot nor cold. It was simply there.
Dom pressed his head to the slick shower wall and stood there for a long time. He was spent, tired, and fried - he had no more emotions left to give. He got out after a little while, dried off, and put on a clean pair of shorts. He settled into bed and lay there with his hands folded over his chest and his eyes open. They felt gritty, dry. His stomach felt bloated, gassy. He was drowsy now, the weight of the past two days (or was it two weeks?) coming down on him all at once. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He was still asleep - but aware - when the knocking on his door started the next morning. Time was funny in this state of being, fast and jerky but also slow and echoing. Keys rattled the knob turned. The landlord came in with a cop. They saw him on the bed, laid out like a corpse for a viewing, and the cop radioed in a code 35. Soon, cops were all around him, making noise and touching things. He had the vague sense of discomfort and embarrassment at the intrusion. A baling man in a suit stood over him, a cop who looked like a redneck beside him. “He didn’t die here,” the medical examiner said.
The cop looked at him questioningly. Dom caught the name KENNER on his name tag.
“See this?” the M.E. said and gestured to Dom’s face. “That’s livor mortis. When you die, your blood pools at the lowest point. If you’re on your left side, for example, it pools on the left.”
Kenner looked at Dom and then back to the M.E. “Someone moved him?”
“Looks like it,” the M.E. said.
“When did he die?”
The M.E. examined Dom as though he were nothing more than a side of beef. “At a glance? Three days. I won’t have a better answer until I open him up.”
Dom was still awake when they put him into a body bag and zipped it up. He felt a stirring of fear beneath the cold numbness, but he was too tired to worry about it now.
Later, he thought.
He would panic later.
For now, Dom slept.

Wild speculation: the text hinting at Snape having the same father as Andromeda (and Bellatrix?)
It's genetically impossible for a blonde woman and a black-haired man to give birth to a child with any other hair color than brunette. This isn't a well-known fact, but something to bare in mind. A blonde haired, blue eyed daughter by a black haired, black eyed father isn't possible.
In the infamous scene where Narcissa talks to Snape, she notes that his eyes look like Andromeda's. So, I wonder if they're only her half sisters, and also Snape is their half brother?
Eileen Prince Snape was born eight years before Cygnus Black, so they did not go to school together. If they did get together, they met some other way. Snape was born five years after Narcissa, which, if she was the product of an affair, may have made Cygnus retaliate and have his own affair.
It's also possible that Tobias Snape was impotent (he did drink a lot), and might have eventually figured it out, and that might have been part of the abuse in the family. Or perhaps he knowingly married a single mom? Maybe she even had to leave the Wizarding community to avoid scandal? Maybe she needed him to help her navigate the Muggle world to survive?
Finally, if this was the case, as evidenced by Snape's Half-blood Prince pen name, he didn't know about being a pureblood while he was at Hogwarts, and probably found out later.

Well, I was kinda worried that this would happen eventually but I was just using a downloaded CAW of Je'von Evans / Jay Malachi from NXT / DPW and I realised that he was bald, and I know that he's certainly not bald.
So I've decided to look through all of the CAWs that I've downloaded, deleting the ones that have the issues with specifically hair being deleted, like there's a Katsuhiko Nakajima one where he's got a shaved head instead of the longer hair that he has in the image used.
I didn't want to say that it's the image replacement glitch because the attires look just fine and it doesn't even seem to be all of the CAWs, but it has put me right off using any of these downloaded CAWs in case a worse issue springs up.