One Dapper Inky Nutty Minty Spicy Herbal Cheesy Ice Thick Sour Creamy Candy Nuka Cola Salt Frozen Saké Yogurt Screwdriver Cane Cinnamon Strip Cereal Plant Nut Wheat Rye Bagel Flatbread Bun Donut Ganache Guac Honey Hummus Miso Pesto Jam Fluff Biscuit Barbecue Pizza Easter Eggs & Chowder Mustketch Fried Brown Rice Sprite Mashed Elderberry Prune Papaya Orange Lime Olive Buddha's Hand Persimmon Pear Watermelon Apple Apricot Date Durian Dreamberry Dragonfruit Grape Avocado Gooseberry Honeydew Fig Kiwi Lychee Lemon Mango Melon Peach Quince Kumquat Raisin Yoyleberry Banana Guava Açaí Plum Cantaloupe Jícama Cassava Leek Ube Daikon Ginseng Horseradish Okra Radish Turnip Rhubarb Coleslaw Black Salad Sauerkraut Red Cabbage Carrot Oregano Chive Chard Fava Cauliflower Rutabaga Sweet Potato Basil Cilantro Parsley Parsnip Beetroot Azuki Kidney Lettuce Seed Oat Endive Kale Kohlrabi Watercress Chili Cayenne Bell Asparagus Celery Broccoli Seaweed Water Chestnut Morel Sugar Beet Butternut Sprout Soybean Cocoa Green Vanilla Pepper X Pea Peanut Bean Artichoke Enoki Eggplant Chickpea Onion Squash Licorice Wasabi Leaf Ginger Root Herb Zucchini Corn Garlic Pumpkin Fiddlehead Oatmeal Sussy Dill Pickle Lima Beans on Toast Brazil Cashew Macadamia Almond Hazelnut Walnut Acorn Insect Prawn Worm Venison Mussel Veal Sushi Tonkatsu Hamburger Burger Twice-cooked Pot Pie Churrasco Coffee Tea Tofu Yoylecake Hot Buttercream Relish Salsa Hoisin Gravy Ketchup Mustard Soy Icing Tomato Sauce Sundae Carbonara Spaghetti Minestrone Tuna Mackerel Salmon Sardine Calf Brain Lobster Pepperoni Salami Bacon Goose Horse Kangaroo Beef Lamb Oyster Octopus Pork Squid Ground Meat Rabbit Turkey Spam Clam Cod Duck Goat Ham Herring Fish Crab Anchovy Balut Snail Stew Curry, coming right up! (Infinite Chef)

Just got a new collection in, tons of incredible stuff! Each record carefully inspected and graded. A lot of the VG covers have writing on them but the vinyl is pristine. Anything graded EX is just under being perfect NM. Post includes some stuff from the new collection and some stuff from my previous post. My apologies if the list is difficult to read. Most are original unless labeled RE. I have hundreds more LPs not listed, will be adding more soon. Message or comment to purchase or for more information.
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$6 Unlimited Shipping USPS Media Mail
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FREE SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $75!
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— Graded Vinyl/Cover —
*Cannonball Adderley And His Orchestra - African Waltz 1961 OG Sealed M/NM $35
*Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong Meets Oscar Peterson 1960 MGM NM/NM $70
*Azymuth - Telecommunication 2022 RE Sealed M/M $27

• AC/DC - Back In Black 1980 OG VG/VG $10

*The Allman Brothers Band - S/T 70s RE NM/VG+ $24
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*The Beatles - 1967-1970 1973 Jac 2LP VG+/VG+ $17
*The Beatles - The Beatles (White Album) 2018 RE New M/M $20
*Jeff Beck - Blow By Blow 1975 Pit EX/VG+ $7
*Jeff Beck - Wired Ter NM/VG+ $10
*Jeff Beck - Live 1977 Pit EX/SVG $5
*Jeff Beck - There & Back 1980 Ter VG+/VG+ $5
Blue Öyster Cult - Tyranny And Mutation 1973 Ter EX/VG+ $12
*Blue Öyster Cult - On Your Feet Or On Your Knees 1975 2LP EX/VG- $6
*David Buckland & Blackjack Davey - This One's For You 1981 OG EX/NM $25
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*Ron Carter - All Blues 1974 OG Sealed M/M $45
*Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade - Live Frogs Set 1 & 2 2020 RE Green Splatter Vinyl NM/NM $45
*Eric Clapton - At His Best 1972 Ter 2LP VG+/VG+ $7
*Cream - Heavy Cream 1972 Ter 2LP VG++/VG+ $12
*Alice Cooper - Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits 2018 EU New $14
*Joe Cocker - Joe Cocker! 1969 VG+/VG $5
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*Miles Davis - Kind Of Blue 2017 EU Blue Vinyl Sealed M/M $16
*Miles Davis - Porgy And Bess 1977 RE NM/NM $15
*Miles Davis - In Person, At The Blackhawk 1973 RE VG+/VG+ $15
*Miles Davis Sextet - Someday My Prince Will Come 1961 Mono Pit VG+/NM $88
*Miles Davis - Seven Steps To Heaven 1963 OG SVG/VG+ $28
*Deep Purple - Deepest Purple (Best Of) 1980 Club NM/VG+ $12
*Depeche Mode - Memento Mori 2023 New $17
*The Doors - The Doors 2009 RE New $17
*Bob Dylan - Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II 1970s RE Ter VG+/VG+ $10
*Bob Dylan - New Morning 1970 Ter VG+/SVG $7
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*Earth, Wind & Fire - Gratitude 1975 Ter EX/VG $5
*Earth, Wind & Fire - The Best Of Earth, Wind & Fire Vol. 1 2017 EX/EX $12
*Eagles - Eagles 1976 RE SP VG+/VG $7
*Eagles - Hotel California 1977 RE SRC w Poster EX/SVG $10
*Eagles - Hotel California 2017 EU RE New $15
*Eagles - One Of These Nights 1975 OG VG/G+$3
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*Faces - Ohh La La 1973 OG SVG/VG+ $12
*Faces - A Nod Is As Good As A Wink...To A Blind Horse 1971 Ter VG+/VG $7
*Fleetwood Mac - Then Play On 1970s NM/SVG $20
*Fleetwood Mac - Kiln House 1976 RE Win NM/SVG $14
*Fleetwood Mac - Future Games 1975 RE Win NM/VG+ $15
*Fleetwood Mac - Mystery To Me 1975 RE Win NM/SVG $12
*Fleetwood Mac - Penguin 1973 EX/VG $8
*Fleetwood Mac - Bare Trees 1975 RE Win NM/VG $10
*Fleetwood Mac - Heroes Are Hard To Find 1976 RE Win VG+/VG+ $8
*Fleetwood Mac - Fleetwood Mac 1975 Win NM/VG $16
*Fleetwood Mac - Vintage Years 1975 2LP NM/VG+ $16
*Fleetwood Mac - Rumours 1977 Win NM/VG $17
*Fleetwood Mac - Tusk 1979 Los 2LP NM/VG+ $20
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*Herbie Hancock - Head Hunters 2009 EU RE NM/NM $34
*Al Hirt - Soul In The Horn 1967 OG $22
*John Lee Hooker - The Best Of John Lee Hooker 1962 RE VG+/VG+ $20
*Bobbi Humphrey - Fancy Dancer 2021 RE Sealed M/M $17
*Bobbi Humphrey - Bobbi Humphrey's Best 1976 NM/SVG $7
*The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Axis: Bold As Love 1970s RE Los EX/EX $28
*The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland 1981 Club Car NM/VG+ $30
*The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced? 1980s RE VG+/VG- $14
*Jimi Hendrix - The Cry Of Love 2014 RE New $15
*The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Smash Hits 2016 RE New $15
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*Janis Joplin - In Concert 1972 Ter VG+/SVG $12
*Jefferson Airplane - Flight Log 1966-1976 1977 Ind EX/VG $7
*Journey - Escape 1981 EX/SVG $6
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*B.B. King - The Electric B.B. King 1968 OG VG+/VG+ $15
*B.B. King - B.B. King In London 1971 OG EX/EX $18
*Kansas - Audio-Visions 1980 Pit EX/VG+ $5
*Kansas - Kansas 1974 Pit EX/VG+ $10
*Kansas - Song For America 1975 Ter VG+/SVG $6
*Kansas - Masque 1975 VG+/VG $5
*Kansas - Leftoverture 1976 Ter EX/VG+ $7
*Kansas - Point Of Know Return 1977 VG+/VG $6
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*Led Zeppelin - Hiawatha Express 1977 Unofficial EX/EX $45
*Led Zeppelin - Untitled IV 2023 RE New Clear Vinyl New $16
*Led Zeppelin - Houses Of The Holy 1977 RE VG+/G+ $15
*Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti 2015 RE New $22
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*Malo - Dos 1972 VG+/VG+ $5
*Malo - Evolution 70s RE NM/VG+ $9
*Thelonious Monk - Monk's Moods 2016 EU Sealed M/M $16
*Pat Metheny - Bright Size Life 1979 RE Wak NM/VG+ $32
*Pat Metheny Group - American Garage 1979 Wak EX/VG+ SOLD
Pat Metheny - 80/81 1980 Wak NM/VG+ SOLD
Pat Metheny Group - Offramp 1982 NM/VG+ SOLD
*Mahavishnu Orchestra - Apocalypse 1974 Ter VG+/SVG $5
*Mahavishnu Orchestra - Visions Of The Emerald Beyond 1975 EX/VG+ $8
*The Mothers - Fillmore East 1976 RE LA NM/VG+ $15
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*The Nice - The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack 1973 RE CSP NM/VG $10
*The Nice - Ars Longa Vita Brevis 1973 CSP VG+/VG $5
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*Peanut Butter Conspiracy - For Children Of All Ages 1969 OG VG+/NM $29
*Primus - Sailing The Seas Of Cheese 2013 RE M/NM $38
*Primus - Pork Soda 2009 RE NM/NM $48
*Primus - Antipop 2019 RE Clear Blue Vinyl NM/NM $58
*Primus - Primus & The Chocolate Factory With The Fungi Ensemble 2014 Brown Vinyl EX/NM $20
*Dolly Parton - Heartbreaker 1978 OG Sealed M/NM $12
*Dolly Parton - Just Because I'm A Woman 1976 OG Sealed M/NM $10
*Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds 1972 1st Jac NM/EX $50
*Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds 1972 Jac NM/VG- $28
*Pink Floyd - Meddle 1974 RE RRL VG+/VG $20
*Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here 1975 San VG++/VG+ $28
*Pink Floyd - The Final Cut 1983 Pit NM/EX $19
*Flora Purim - Open Your Eyes You Can Fly NM/NM $9
*Flora Purim - 500 Miles High 1976 EX/VG+ $5
*Flora Purim - Encounter 1977 San EX/SVG $6
*Flora Purim - Everyday, Everynight 1978 Jac NM/VG+ $4
*Flora Purim - Carry On 1979 Los EX/VG+ $6
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*Queen - Queen II 1974 Ter VG+/SVG $21
*Queen - A Night At The Opera 1975 SP EX/SVG $19
*Queen - A Day At The Races 1976 PRC NM/VG $20
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*The Rolling Stones - Some Girls 1978 OG VG/VG+ $10
*Rare Earth - Willie Remembers 1972 NM/VG+ $5
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*Steely Dan - Katy Lied 1975 Pit VG+/VG $17
*Steely Dan - The Royal Scam 1976 EX/SVG $17
*Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill 1972 White Label Promo VG/G $35
*The Smashing Pumpkins - Cyr 2020 OG Purple Vinyl New $16
*Bruce Springsteen - Chapter And Verse 2016 OG New M/NM $10
*Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run 1975 San VG+/VG+ $8
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*Robin Trower - Bridge Of Sighs 1974 San EX/SVG $6
*Robin Trower - Long Misty Days 1976 Ter NM/VG $6
*Robin Trower - In City Dreams 1977 Ter NM/VG $5
*Robin Trower - For Earth Below 1975 EX/VG $5
*Robin Trower - Robin Trower Live! 1976 EX/G $3
*Robin Trower - Caravan To Midnight 1978 SVG/SVG $5
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*Van Halen - 1984 Club NM/EX $26
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*Muddy Waters - The Best Of Muddy Waters 2015 RE Europe VG+/NM $16
*Muddy Waters - The London Muddy Waters Sessions 2016 RE NM/NM $24
*The Bluesmen Of The Muddy Waters Chicago Blues Band - Volume 2 1968 OG VG/G $15
*Muddy Waters - Muddy Mississippi Waters Live 1979 OG Looks VG Plays SVG/VG+ Cover $12
*Weather Report - S/T 1971 NM/VG+ SOLD
*Weather Report - Mysterious Traveller 1974 Pit EX/VG SOLD

• Weather Report - Tale Spinnin’ 1975 San EX/VG- SOLD

*Weather Report - Sweetnighter 1977 RE NM/VG+ $6
*Weather Report - Mr. Gone 1978 San EX/VG+ $6
*Weather Report - 8:30 1979 San NM/VG+ $7
*Stevie Wonder - Talking Book 1981 Spain RE NM/VG+ $15
*Stevie Wonder - Talking Book 1973 OG EX/VG+ $20
*Stevie Wonder - Original Musiquarium 1982 White Label Promo VG/SVG $18
*The Edgar Winter Group - They Only Come Out At Night 80s RE VG+/VG+ $5
*The Who - Quadrophenia 1976 RE NM/EX w Booklet $20
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*Yes - Relayer 1974 MO EX/VG+ $9
*Yes - Going For The One 1977 PRC NM/SVG $6
*Yes - Fragile 1977 RE SP VG+/VG+ $9
*Yes - The Yes Album 70s RE MO EX/VG+ $7
*Neil Young - Harvest 1978 Jac EX/VG+ $17
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*ZZ Top - Fandango! 1975 Pit VG+/VG $14
*ZZ Top - Tejas 1976 AL EX/VG $14
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*Alain Goraguer - La Planète Sauvage (Fantastic Planet OST) 2014 EX/NM $45
*Steve Marshall - Do What You Will 1978 VG+/VG- $799
*Jimmy McGriff - Black And Blues 1972 OG Sealed M/M $47
*Chet BakeChristopher Mason - Silent Nights 1986 OG VG+/VG $49
*Tony Bennett - The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album 1975 OG EX/VG+ $14
*Paul Desmond - Summertime 1969 OG NM/VG+ $12
*The Gil Evans Orchestra - Into The Hot 1974 RE VG+/VG+ $15
*Gil Evans And His Orchestra - America's #1 Arranger 1961 RE NM/G+ $7
*The Gil Evans Orchestra - Little Wing (Live In Germany) 1982 RE VG+/SVG $5
*Buddy DeFranco Quintet - Cooking The Blues 1958 OG VG+/VG $20
*Grant Green - Easy 1978 OG VG/SVG $5
*Bobby Hutcherson - Now! 1970 OG Looks G+ Plays VG-/VG+ Cover $36
*Gary McFarland /Gabor Szabo - Simpático G+/VG+ $8
*Gabor Szabo - The Best Of Gabor Szabo 1968 OG EX/EX $12
*Lil Green - Romance In The Dark 1971 OG VG/G+ $3
*Taj Mahal - Recycling The Blues & Other Related Stuff 1972 OG EX/EX $15
*Taj Mahal - Music Keeps Me Together 1975 Canada OG NM/EX $15
*Various - The Mike Raven Blues Show 1966 UK OG NM/EX $10
*Jimmy Reed - T'aint No Big Thing But He Is... 1963 OG G+/VG+ $4
*Johnny Guitar Watson - A Real Mother For Ya 1977 OG VG/VG+ $5
*Brian Auger's Oblivion Express - Second Wind 1972 Germany VG/VG+ $12
*The Dean Davis Company - IInd Time Around 1969 OG SVG/SVG (Signed) $90
*Franciscan Sisters - Joy 1962 VG+/VG+ $24
*José José - Vive 1974 OG VG+/VG+ $20
*Elias Rahbani - Mosaic Of The Orient (Näi, Buzuk & Guitar) 1972 Lebanon OG VG+/NM $150
*Middle Tennessee State University- Rimusic III NM/NM 1983 $75
— *Big L - The Big Picture 2019 2LP RE Clear w White Smoke NM/NM $90
*De La Soul - 3 Feet High And Rising 2023 RE Magenta Vinyl Sealed $22
*Ben Harper - Fight For Your Mind 2015 RE Red/Green 2LP EX/NM $45
*Evelyn "Champagne" King - Smooth Talk 1977 RE VG+/VG+ $5
*Kool And The Gang - The Force 1977 OG NM/VG $8
*Kool & The Gang - Celebrate! 1980 VG+/EX $6
*Kool & The Gang - Emergency 1984 OG EX/VG+ $4
*Gloria Jones - Windstorm 1978 OG NM/SVG Signed $28
*The New York Community Choir - Reachin' Out 1982 OG EX/NM $20
*Malo - Malo 1972 OG VG/VG+ $4
*Malo - Evolution 1973 OG Looks VG- Plays VG / VG+ Cover $6
*Malo - Dos 1972 OG VG+/VG+ $7
*Anita Baker - Rapture 1986 OG NM/VG+ $20
*D. J. Rogers - It's Good To Be Alive 1975 OG VG-/VG+ $5
*Al Gee - Rap N' Rhythm (Programs #233 - 236) 1975 OG VG+/VG+ $15
*The Hesitations - The New Born Free 1968 OG NM/NM $12
*Syl Johnson - Back For A Taste Of Your Love 1973 OG SVG/SVG $14
*Syl Johnson - Total Explosion 1975 OG VG+/VG+ $14
*Various - Rosko's Evergreens Back On The Scene 1964 VG/VG+ $4
*The Stylistics - Round 2 1972 OG VG+/NM $8
*Johnnie Taylor - Super Taylor 1974 OG EX/VG+ $7
*Johnnie Taylor - Rated Extraordinaire 1977 OG VG+/NM $6
*Johnnie Taylor - Ever Ready 1978 OG EX/NM $7
*The Temptations - Live At The Copa 1968 OG VG/VG+ $4
*Clarence Carter - The Dynamic Clarence Carter 1969 Sealed M/EX $20
*Ray Charles - From The Pages Of My Mind 1986 OG VG+/NM $6
*Sammy Davis Jr. - Sings What Kind Of Fool Am I And Other Show-Stoppers 1962 RE M/NM $10
*Sammy Davis Jr. - Salutes The Stars Of The London Palladium 1964 OG VG/EX $4
*Cat Anderson - Ellingtonia 1962 VG-/VG $2
*Duke Ellington - Ellington Indigos 1989 RE NM/NM $12
*Duke Ellington - The Early Duke Ellington 1968 OG Sealed M/NM $6
*Duke Ellington - This Is Duke Ellington 1971 OG Sealed M/NM $8
*Duke Ellington & Teresa Brewer - It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing 1981 RE NM/VG+ $5
*Louis Armstrong - Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington 1965 RE VG+/VG+ $8
*Dizzy Gillespie - 16 Rare Performances 1966 RE VG+/EX $8
*Billie Holiday - The Billie Holiday Story 1972 2LP VG+/VG+ $14
*Baby Ray - Where Soul Lives 1967 OG Sealed M/NM $10
*Django Reinhardt - Django Reinhardt 1967 OG VG+/VG $7
*Don Redman And His Orchestra - For Europeans Only 1983 Denmark NM/NM $12
*Charlie Parker And His Orchestra - Night And Day 1960 RE VG/VG $8
*Ernestine Anderson - When The Sun Goes Down 1985 OG NM/EX $8
*George Benson - Breezin' 1976 VG+/VG+ $5
*Art Blakey - Gretsch Drum Night At Birdland 1960 OG VG/VG $10
*The Dave Brubeck Quartet - Bossa Nova U.S.A. 1963 OG SVG/VG+ $7
*Kenny Burrell - Handcrafted 1978 OG VG/VG+$8
*The Eddie Costa Quartet - Guys And Dolls Like Vibes 1958 OG VG/VG+ $5
*Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert 1975 OG VG/VG+ $10
*John Klemmer - All The Children Cried VG+/VG+ $8
*Les McCann Ltd. - Live At Shelly's Manne-Hole RE NM/VG+ $5
*The Modern Jazz Quartet - The Last Concert 1975 OG EX/VG+ $6
*The Modern Jazz Quartet - The Atlantic Years 1973 VG+/VG+ $6
*Johnny Smith - Phase II 1968 OG Sealed M/M $20
*Carlos Santana / Alice Coltrane - Illuminations 1974 OG NM/EX $12
*Weather Report - Mr. Gone 1978 OG VG+/VG+ $9
*Bob Dylan - New Morning 1970 OG VG+/VG+ $8
*Molly Hatchet - Flirtin' With Disaster 1979 OG VG+/VG+ $6
*Heart - Bad Animals 1987 OG NM/NM $8
*Jerry Lee Lewis - Southern Roots 1973 OG Sealed M/M $10
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*James Brown - Body Heat 1976 VG+/VG+ $25
*Oscar Brown Jr. - Finding A New Friend 1966 Mono WL Promo EX/NM $20
*Lewis Clark "Mr. Soul" - Mr. Soul Sings 1971 SVG/NM $38
*Various - Mac And Me (Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) 1988 EX/VG+ $20
*Mother Night - S/T 1972 OG NM/VG- $12
*Donald Fagen - The Nightfly 1982 VG+/VG+ $7
*Johnny Cash - At San Quentin 1969 EX/NM $15
*Baltimora- Living In The Background 1985 VG+/VG+ $10
*Ginger Bates - Refreshingly Country VG/VG+ $18
*Roberto Jordan - Roberto Jordan 1972 Sealed (Torn Shrink) M/EX $18
*Toquinho & Vinícius - Vinícius & Toquinho 1974 Brazil NM/NM $24
*Prakash Vadehra - Magic Flutes Of North India 1969 EX/EX $8
*Father Rivers - Sings The Mass 1966 VG/VG+ $4
*Bill Withers - +'Justments 1974 VG/VG+ $10
*Jacksons - Victory 1984 VG+/EX $5
*Wilton Felder - Inherit The Wind 1980 NM/NM $6
*Wilson Pickett - The Wicked Pickett 1967 MO VG/EX $10
*SPB Ska-Jazz Review - Elephant Riddim 2016 Russia EX/EX $15
*Muse - Will Of The People 2022 Sealed M/M $8
*Listener - Wooden Heart 2014 Green/Cream Vinyl NM/NM $15
*Lamont Dozier - Black Bach 1974 SVG/NM $10
*Antonio Carlos Jobim - A Certain Mr. Jobim 1967 Sealed M/NM $17
*James Williams - Magical Trio 1 1989 NM/EX $7
*James Williams - Magical Trio 2 1988 Sealed M/VG+ $9
*Chilly - For Your Love 1979 VG/G+ $10
*Tina Turner - Private Dancer 1984 Club w Inner NM/NM $12
*Mary Jane Girls - Only Four You 1985 EX/EX $7
*Average White Band - Soul Searching 1976 NM/VG+ $6
*Invisible Man's Band - Really Wanna See You 1981 NM/EX $5
*Dinah Washington - Late Late Show 1963 RE VG+/EX $6
*Dinah Washington - Dinah Jams 1974 RE NM/VG+ $7
*Dinah Washington - For Lonely Lovers 1960s RE Mono $7
*Dinah Washington - Golden Hits / Volume Two 1963 Mono EX/VG+ $7
*Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares - Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares 1987 RE NM/NM $15
*Vasant Rai - Spring Flowers 1976 NM/EX $5
*Aretha Franklin - Aretha Gospel 1982 RE EX/EX $7
*The Dells - The Dells Vs. The Dramatics 1974 VG+/EX $5
*Various - A Quartet Of Soul 1967 Sealed M/M (Comp w Tommy Hunt & Charlie Foxx) $12
*Lord Flea And His Calypsonians - Swingin' Calypsos 1957 VG/G+ $4
*The Swordsmen - S/T 1969 VG+/NM $5
*Funkapolitan - Funkapolitan 1982 NM/SVG $5
*The Flirts - Blondes Brunettes & Redheads 1985 NM/NM $5
*The Flirts - 10¢ A Dance 1982 NM/NM $8
*Vesta - Special 1991 EX/VG+ $10
*Acoustic Alchemy - Red Dust & Spanish Lace 1987 NM/NM $12
*The Floaters - Float Into The Future 1979 EX/NM $4
*Nilsson - Nilsson Schmilsson 1971 OG VG/VG $5
*Johnny Thunder - Loop De Loop 1963 OG G+/VG $3
*Oingo Boingo - Flesh And Blood 1989 WL Promo 12” Single SVG/GEN $20
*Johnny Harris - Odyssey 1980 12” Single VG+/VG+ $20
*Steven Paul Perry - Backseat Lover 1990 EX/VG+ $25
*Marcus Law - Make It Right 1997 UK 12” Single VG+/GEN $17
*Gel-O - Land Of The Buddha EP EX/VG+ $17
*Showbiz & A.G. - Soul Clap EP Promo VG/GEN $28
*Le Pamplemousse - Le Spank 1977 OG (Signed) VG+/VG $18
*Ultimate Spinach - Ultimate Spinach 1968 Taiwan Red Vinyl VG/VG+ $16
*100 Proof Aged In Soul - 100 Proof VG/VG $10 *Peter Brown - Do Ya Wanna Get Funky With Me? 1977 RE EX/EX $5
*Lamont Dozier - Black Bach 1974 OG SVG/NM $8
*Lonnie Liston Smith - Love Is The Answer 1980 OG VG+/VG+ $16
*Lonnie Liston Smith - A Song For The Children 1979 OG VG/VG+ $5
*Stan Getz - Captain Marvel 1975 OG White Label Promo EX/SVG $10
*Stan Getz - The Melodic Stan Getz 1965 OG NM/VG+ $5
*Stan Getz - What The World Needs Now - Plays Bacharach And David 1968 OG EX/NM $6
*Stan Getz - Another World 1978 OG NM/VG+ $8
*Wes Montgomery - The Best Of Wes Montgomery 1967 OG VG/VG+ $5
*Charli Persip And Superband - In Case You Missed It 1985 Italy OG NM/NM $7
*Oscar Peterson - Oscar Peterson 1965 OG SVG/NM $4
*Oscar Peterson - Stéphane Grappelli Quartet Vol. 1 1973 France OG NM/EX $8
*Don Shirley - Tonal Expressions 1955 OG SVG/VG+ $8

Sumerian(Anu) - [Huwana(Sphinx) is unable to move forward, nor is he able to move back", but they crept up on him from behind and the way to the secret abode of the Anu-Naki was no longer blocked
Morphometric study of nonhuman handprint in Wadi Sura "results show that the rock art small hands differ significantly in size, proportions and morphology from human hands. Potential biases between the different samples were quantified, but their average range cannot explain the observed differences. Evidence suggest that the hand stencils belong to an animal, most probably a reptile" -near Egypt, in the Cave of the Swimmers. I find it ironic Dogon tradition describe how the Nummo landed, dug a hole & filled it with water.
The Dead Sea Scrolls- War Scroll :"For the In[structor, the Rule of] the War. The first attack of the Sons of Light shall be undertaken against the forces of the Sons of Darkness, the army of Belial." ( Egypt- Horus v Set)
The instructor mentioned is our The Magnificent Queen, Ninmah affectionately known as Mammi and is the origin of the word mother. She taught Circumcision, and the Omega symbol was the tool she'd cut umbilical cords with.
Enki/Ninti gave us the power of speech, with Foxp2 , a conservative gene which doesnt change much over time. show that the human form of the FOXP2 gene increases synaptic plasticity and dendrite connectivity in the basal ganglia. These results partly explain the enhanced capability of cortico-basal ganglia circuits in the human brain that regulate critical aspects of language, cognition, and motor control." Foxp2 Language Evolution (Homo sapiens-Man the wise)
Previously i recommended this book, the author was present for some rituals while she was researching & was allowed to capture some fascinating accounts to bring to the West. One involves Healing by frequency from a craft, and more. Chap 26 is called "our elders were friends with the Sky People", and other accounts describe a massive ufo that came down & a group of Indigenous elders got on board for a "meeting lasting a few hours" .
DR Ardy Clarke Sky People Mesoamerica -"direct descendants of the Sky People, whose blood remains pure live underground. Some say they serve as ambassadors to the Sky People who live in the heavens. They come back to meet with the ambassadors and to learn about the condition of the Earth and its people.”
The Star Travelers came from the sky. We were mutual friends in the cosmos. They helped us and we helped them. The wise men say that in the old days, some of them married our women and took them away to the stars, but the women chose to go with them. They were not taken against their will. The Star People never stayed on Earth. They visited. We called them ancestors because they are older than us. They were not our relatives. They were the ancestors. Their civilization was older. They had more knowledge. Therefore we respected them for that knowledge
This is my first time posting here, but ive lurked on this sub for a while & theres alot of really entertaining & informative posts. So i wanted to share some of my people's traditions, since theres alot of misinformation on the Dogon & our actual accounts have been sensationalized & misrepresented. I began giving Dogon tradition here Dogon, Hopi, Naga-Maya , I'm sure most see why being a Jaliyaa was relevant. The Sumerians Uruk List of Kings & Sages up until today have been relatives. The lineages of the Children of Enki are Hopi, Dogon, Ainu, Ohum, Shakti, San Agustin, Buddhas(Tibet), Naga-Maya-Itza. (R1b-V88 is Dogon/Yoruba. But ALL of us are Anu/Ainu/Aunu people ) & come from those Sages( Apkallu). Im a descendant of 7 Uttuabzu, “who ascended to heaven".. uttu” = “count, number” “abzu” = “cosmic underground water.” So Utuabzu “kept count of the numbers".I'm the Dogons Jaliyaa, Recordkeeper of the People, it's the same with Inca the "Ka-pac' 'Keeper of the Serpent wisdom'. When Sundiata founded Imperial Mali, one of the first things he was to do was continue the Kings/Sages custom, you can see here. Every Jaliyaa and every Sage has always been Mende. Ive provided genetic,artifacts, linguistics, etc for every corner of the globe and in pt 1 the Ghost hominid who bred with Dogon and 2 population (SW US, China).
In Pt 1 I gave a brief overview of the Involvement of Enki/Ninti & some of the history of the Children of Enki including the war described in ancient texts. Jesus' group the Essenes say the 'company of the Divine Join the congregation of Mortals. Enki had fallen in love with his creation, becoming the freedom fighter for us against the Elohim(Council of rulers) earning that "trickstetraitor" moniker.
The most advanced civilizations were matrileneal, Pharoah was the woman her consort was king. Our customs have always been handed down by them, the BirdMan depictions are all called "mediators" , at E. Island the God makemake gave orders through Tangata Manu(Birdman Cult). The Pyramid was the Great House, woman's house. Isis, Astarte, Ninmah were 'Mistress of the pyramid, Woman who makes towers, etc. In more than 30 cultures. The Snakes are our instructors, demiurges who shaped our bodies, but not our soul, which is not theirs, because it is uncreated. We are born from light, just like them. But our terrestrial vehicle, this triple body of flesh and spirit, we owe it to them. I wanted to make the Gateway Experience threads first to show the knowledge itself, Egyptian “gods” were the very same as the Sumerian Anunnaki, and the ancient Egyptian esoteric texts were none other than complex scientific knowledge of the Anunnaki. THAT was the origin of the Renaissance: ancient and difficult to understand system of scientific knowledge.
Some of the female Pharoah were not human beings. How many are described as having been extremely attractive? How many wore jewelry showing serpents, or female Dieties who are Serpents or "SnakeFaced"?
The Nummo (Phoenician- Numo) craft the Kora-NARs design was the basis for sacred geometry, the shape, design, and proportions of the Ark express all of the principles and science humanity would need. The 7 lineages mission was to cultivate the land and grow the celestial grains so that everyone could live in abundance. They were also supposed to reproduce and spread throughout the world bringing the spiritual technologies contained within the Kora-Na with them. The eight ancestors and their offspring were charged with conducting important ceremonies such as the Sigui ceremony, which was the Henti in Egypt.
"Emissaries of the Serpent culture", we have always been sent abroad.. how many ancient scripts cannot be deciphered today?Ainu Language is said to be an Enigma, or isolated, (Easter Island, Olmec. Egypt -nobody can read RongoRongo, MandeKan, or MeduNtr, the Basque language is one of the clearest offshoots) .. Dogon dialect the Andes this is a Jaliyaa (Brazil Tablet).
Nergal' is "the Healer" in the Sumerian lore. In ancient Sumer, the Anunnaki (Anun-NAKI ) are also called Heavenly Serpent, Sun Serpent, or Serpent and the Rainbow, were the Serpents kings. Sumerian text say Enkis 10 hybrids were made rulers...like Noah, the Kings/Patriarchs were part-Saurian(Lu.Lu-One who's been mixed).. Diodorus Siculus Wrote about Danaan brotherhood of initiates and magicians called Telchines who could shape-shift into any form..
The serpent cults were the first worldwide priesthood, its always been Service to others not service to self.
Healing Temples "They were a hereditary priesthood who at first only admitted family into the medical Brotherhood". Those depicted as Birdmen were seen as protectors of the people & carried water from the abzu that would ward off evil spirits. Their figurines would be placed outside of homes to protect from archons, that feed off negative , dark energies.
Previous posts ive made on this topic Here How Archonic entities feed off human beings
The "Testament of Amram", describes the experience of Amram in which "an angel and a demon" were wrestling over his soul:
"[I saw Watchers] in my vision, the dream-vision. Two [men] were fighting over me. I asked them, ’who are you, that you are thus empowered over me?’ They answered me, ’We [have been em]powered and rule over all Mankind.’ They said to me, ’Which of us do yo[u] choose to rule [you]?’ I raised my eyes and looked"
[One] of them was terrifying in his appearance, [like a s]erpent, [his] cl[oak] many colored yet very dark. ... [And I looked again], and ... in his appearance, his visage like a viper

This has been a long time coming! There are a couple hundred bottles available for purchase and just as many decants from my collection. I enjoy so many of these but I really need to downsize and just want these to find new homes! Full spreadsheet here :)

• All prices in USD. Payment through Paypal G&S - I can send you an invoice!
• Tracked shipping to US/Canada is $9 USD for orders $15 and more.
• Anywhere else, I'll need to get you a quote!
• What I listed below is only a small selection of what's available. Full list of goods, with sizes and descriptions, is here.
• Decants from my collection are here. Prices vary $3-$6 per ml (with 1ml and 2ml bottles available). Lots of discontinued and LE perfumes with harder to find samples:
  • Arcana (Haint, Four Days, layering notes and Craves);
  • Sorcellerie (UFO Disco, Your Girlfriend is a Badass);
  • BPAL (Jareth, Schrödinger's Checkmark);
  • And a large selection from shops that don't offer in-house samples like Darling Clandestine, Eliza Cosmetics, seasonal LE Possets, and so many others!

Houses available:

• Alkemia, Alpha Musk, Arcana Wildcraft/Craves, Area of Effect, Astrid/Blooddrop, BPAL, Black Violette, Cocoa Pink, Darling Clandestine, Deconstructing Eden, Eliza Cosmetics, Fantome, Fyrinnae, Haus of Gloi, Lou Lou's, Lunar Life Apothecary, Montagne, Morari, Nocturne Alchemy, Nui Cobalt, OHWTO, Osmofolia, Poesie, Possets, Pylies, Scents of Wood, Sixteen92, Smell Bent, Smelly Yeti, Sorcellerie, Sereoplasm, Ten Three Labs, Wild Hybrid.

Here's a selection of what you'll find on the spreadsheet:
Alkemia -

• Big Sur - 5ml - $16 - A Pacific coast road trip of fresh ozone, sea salt, Jasmine tea, lime leaves, magnolia, green amber, saltspray rose, sweetgale, bay, and paperbark.
• Carmen 7 - 5ml - $16 - An indecent proposal of succulently spiced pear, exotic lychees, decadent french pralines, bourbon vanilla, and crushed almond blossoms leads to a ménage à trois of gardenia, star jasmine, and magnolia illuminated by the afterglow of a sensuously musky amber.
• Cherry Blossom Alchemy - 5ml - $9 - A springtime haiku of cherry blossoms, sakura tea, delicate floral musk, and warm cherry wood. Decants available!
• The Kissing Bough - 5ml - $16 - Pomegranate gin cocktails and rose-rhubarb punch ensorceled by a dark fae enchantment of olibanum, opoponax, black amber, and Guaiac wood kissed with pink pepper and clove.

Alpha Musk -

• Cool - 5ml - $10 - Soft clean cool af iris and a long cashmere sweater with some soft suede boots and vanilla woods to frolic upon.
• Egyptian Amber Cashmere Cream - 5ml - $10 - It’s a sweet Egyptian amber blended with some custom cashmere cream and sandalwood incense and just a bit more fuzzy woodsy imported musk to make it super soft and luxurious.
• Famous Blue Raincoat - 5ml - $10 - Silver musk, Arabian white oud, dry balsam accord, bergamot, Bulgarian rose essential oil, vanilla c02 essential oil, mandarin essential oil, and a grounded Buddha wood.
• Frida - 5ml - $10 - Frida is sipping on that fine pekoe while eating pumpkin bread off season and showered by rich apothecary rose with some gunpowder residue lingering around because she’s a badass.
• Hangover Juice - 5ml - $10 - Salty, unwashed, dragged out of bed skin musk, with strangely perfect duality of banana and basil.
• Hymn - 5ml - $10 - Polished oak and mahogany woods, drifting alter incense, holy water and the warm resonating echos against the high ceiling of an empty church.
• Pearl Hart - 5ml - $10 - Heavy on the sandalwood musky dirty skin, styrax, liquid concentrated Shea, indian sandalwood eo, seriously demanding liquid golden amber with a nutty vibe, all upholding the badass represented in heady cardamom.

Arcana Wildcraft/Craves -

• Layering Notes: Buttercream Frosting, Chocolate Cake, Pistachio Gelato, Whipped Cream - 5ml - $16 each.
• Peaches Crave Vanilla - 5ml - $15 - Sugared peach, glorious vanilla, marshmallows, sweet milk, and sheer musk.
• Strawberries Crave Nyx - 5ml - $15 - Drunken honey, lavender-laced mallow, soft amber, night musk, and hints of strawberry and nectarine.
• Little Lully - 5ml - $15 - Tender new blossoms of lily of the valley and honeysuckle are kissed with coconut milk, copaiba balsam, and butter CO2 extract.
• Idun - 5ml - $25 - Crisp pears and ripe pink apples dripping with juice, loamy black earth warmed by the sun, sacred lotus, young rosemary, fresh green clover, and a primeval forest of conifers: pine, spruce, and fir. Decants available!

Astrid -

• Jasmine Lemonade - 8ml - $20 - Jasmine sambac and lemonade.
• Pumpkin Panettone - 8ml - $20 - Pumpkin custard, Italian brioche, pumpkin spice, vanilla bean, and butter.
• Woodland & Orchard - 1.5ml - $5 - Woods under a warm sun accord, apple orchard accord, and some very happy pumpkins.
• Merci no. 22 (2021) - 8ml - $12 - Caramel apples.

Deconstructing Eden (Canada only) -

• Birthdayface - 5ml - $9 - Vanilla birthday cake, flecked with vanilla bean, drenched in orange-flower syrup, topped with peaches, Jasmine Sambac, and lit birthday candles

Fyrinnae -

• Labrador - 5ml - $10 - Dominant dark chocolate and cocoa absolute, sooty woodsmoke, a touch of warm salty caramel, and the slightly misty, briny breeze from the cold harbor.
• Wicklow Wildflowers - 5ml - $10 - Various blooms such as wild orchids, thyme, and clover, easily found among fields of greenery throughout spring.
• Mirthful Indulgence - 1.5ml - $3 - Pandan milk tea! Fresh pandan leaves crushed and steeped with just a tiny bit of ceylon, topped with sweet cream and sugar. Sweet, but still very "green".

Morari -

• Crone - 5ml - $10 - Fir Needle, Egyptian Sandalwood, Pumpkin, Amber, Vanilla.
• Languid - 5ml - $10 - White Musk, Green Tea, Honeysuckle, Elderflower, Magnolia, Sage.
• Lemon Scone - 5ml - $10 - Sweet Lemon, Batter, Lemon Zest.

Nocturne Alchemy (NAVA) -

• N4 - 2.5ml - $12 - Magnolia Blossom, Egyptian Blue Heather Musk, Blue Sandalwood, Muguet; all beautifully blended into the most delicate Egyptian Musk by NAVA.

Nui Cobalt -

• Apple Picking - 5ml - $14 - Barely-ripe apples, green leaves, rain-soaked soil, wicker baskets, and golden hay.

Osmofolia -

• Waxing Crescent - 2ml - $7 - Night-blooming tuberose and gardenia flowers opening in cool night air, three varieties of lavender oils in a snuggly white musk, and wafts of warm spices with chilled vanilla bean.

Pineward (Canada only) -

• Coastal Veil - 4ml - $20 - Juniper Berries, Juniper Needles, Sea Water, Bladderwrack, Coastal Cypress, Oyster Mushroom, Water Pepper, Blue Gum Eucalyptus, Pacific Ambergris, Irish Sea Moss, Sandalwood.

Poesie -

• Village Bakery water-based mist - 2oz - Stacks of delicious Japanese milk bread.
• Dragon's Blood water-based mist - 2oz - A spicy, resinous blend with a hint of floral, earthy patchouli, and warm vanilla inspired by the scent of natural dragon's blood resin.
• Dracula Collection (Autumn 2022) Complete Sample Set - 7 x 1.15 ml sample vials - $25

Salmonberry Origins -

• Noon Fire - 5ml - $14 - Willow smoke, pipe tobacco, coffee, the heat from the fire warming our clothes, and a whisper of vibrant plants.
• Wild Alaskan Rose - 5ml - $12 - This rose is embraced by untouched flora, hardy trees, and snow kissed foliage.

Smell Bent (Canada only) -

• Bad Guy EDT- 1.7oz - $30 - Tiare, jasmine and orange blossom over suntanned skin.
• Dr. Dreidel 3000 EDT- 1.7oz - $30 - A "vetiver oud" fragrance with oud, Malaysian sandalwood, guaiac wood, and hiba (Japanese cedar) blended with designer musk, vetiver and amber incense.
• Jasmine Tobacco EDT- 1.7oz - $30 - Jasmine, tobacco, musk, sandalwood.

Smelly Yeti -

• Blackest Tuesday - 7.4ml - $12 - Green tea with blackcurrant and a hint of mint.
• The Lantern Bearer - 13.8 ml - $24 - A strong cup of coffee, a thick slice of rye bread, and lightly singed oak wood.
• Passing Through Pottsfield - 7.4ml - $12 - Buttery corn cakes, pumpkin bread, and candied hazelnuts and pecans.
• Pumpkin Cheesecake - 1.3ml - $3 - Pumpkin, pumpkin spice, and creamy sweet cheesecake with a buttery crust.

Solstice Scents -

• Black Mallow - 10ml - $15 - Bold notes of anise and licorice root, a touch of sweet fennel, fluffy marshmallow and vanilla.
• Cellar - 5ml - $18 - Damp Earth, Stone, Wooden Casks, Cool Fall Air, Apple, Pear, Broom Corn.
• Flintlock - 5ml - $18 - Saddle Leather, Evergreens, Virginia Cedar, Tobacco, Black Pepper, Bayberry & Woods.
• Grey's Cabin - 5ml - $18 - Smoked Cocoa, Cedar, Embers, Black Musk, Copal Bark, Tobacco, Spice.
• Guardian - 5ml - $19 - Natural Amber Forest Chypre Blend With Amber, Sandalwood, Vetiver, Patchouli, Oakmoss, White Sage, Desert Sage, Pinyon, Spikenard, Oud, More.
• Island Blackstrap - 5ml - $18 - Coconut, dark rum, pineapple, sugar cane, simple syrup, blackstrap molasses, caramelized sugar, oak barrels, tropical flowers, splash of sea spray, vetiver, tonka.
• Sea of Gray - 5ml - $18 - Vanilla rain, saltwater, seaweed, ambergris (vegan), white amber, roasted seashells, white sandalwood, frangipani
• Snowshoe Pass - 5ml - $18 - White Amber, White Musk, Vanilla Accord, Peppermint Cream, Cold Winds.
• Sweet Clover & Wood Smoke - 5ml - $18 - Sun-baked sweet clover flowers, coumarin, green clover leaves, mimosa flowers, moringa blossoms, limerock road, sweet delicate wood smoke.

Stereoplasm -

• Divine - 7.5ml - $10 - Gooey cherry cake batter, burnt marzipan, fresh cinnamon leaf, orange zest, warm chai cream and roasted hazelnut.
• Mischief Mass - 7.5ml - $10 - A wooden bowl carved by moonlit fae, steel-cut Irish oats, dragon’s milk, an ambrosia raisin or two, brown sugar walnuts toasted on a dusty wood stove.
• Schnooker & Schnapps - 7.5ml - $10 - Drowsy autumn peaches, spindly scarecrow cotton, bitter ale and smashed pumpkin.

1994 is a famously (but also infamously) wild year for music... which I was more than a decade too late to experience lol. So why not go thru the year... from what ik (feel free to tell me more abt the year that I missed. But for now I'm gonna try to retrospect the year as best I can) Imma mainly delve into releases in 94 but will include some major US events.
Anyway- releases were insane this year and not just grunge releases (hell not JUST rock) which were pretty prominent (its the only year where all of the big 4 [+ STP] released something]... so why not list a lot of them starting with
Purple by STP
Jar Of Flies by AiC
Vitalogy by Pearl Jam
Superunknown by Soundgarden
Unplugged by Nirvana (which I'll get back to later trust me)
Sixteen Stone
Illmatic by Nas
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik by OutKast
Weezer's Blue Album
Dookie by Green Day
Rubberneck by Toadies
Ready 2 Die by Notorious B.I.G
The Sign by Ace of Base
Grace by Jeff Buckley
Dummy by Portishead
Throwing Copper by Live
No Need To Argue by Cranberries
Diary by Sunny Day Real Estate
Smash by Offspring
Pisces Iscariot by Smashing Pumpkins
Without a Sound by Dino Jr.
Stranger Than Fiction by Bad Religion
Korn's debut
Punk In Drublic by NOFX
American Thighs by Veruca Salt
Definitely, Maybe by Oasis
Parklife by Blur
Monster by REM
Too High To Die by Meat Puppets
Mellow Gold by Beck
I'll Communication by Beastie Boys
Live Through This by Hole
American Recordings by Johnny Cash
Downward Spiral by NIN
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain by Pavement
The Holy Bible by MSP
Under the Pink by Tori Amos
Selected Ambient Works II by Aphex Twin
Division Bell by Pink Floyd
Far Beyond Driven by Pantera
CrazySexyCool by TLC
Let's Go by Rancid
II by Boys II Men
Under the Table and Dreaming by DMB
Age Ain't Nothing But A Number by Aaliyah
His N Hers by Pulp
6ft Deep by Gravediggaz
Youthanasia by Megadeth
Split by Lush
24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Jawbreaker
For Your Own Special Sweetheart by Jawbox
Jimmy Eat World's debut
¡Viva Zapata! by 7 Year Bitch
Magnified by Failure
Stoner Witch by Melvins
Rotting Piñata by Sponge
Buddha by Blink-182
The Crow OST
Grassroots by 311
Cracked Rearview by Hootie & the Blowfish
Merry Christmas by Mariah (the one with the demon song that approaches one month every year)
Brandy's self-titled
Second Coming by Stone Roses
The Diary by Scarface
Amor Prohibido by Selena
Universal Mother by Sinead O' Connor
Robbin the Hood by Sublime
And last but not least Betty by Helmet
Look at all those releases- absolutely insanity in how much 1994 helms. 1994 was also when classic like The Crow and Clerks hit theaters to become classics themselves. However not all was great. OJ happened. The Pearl Jam-Ticketmaster debacle had commenced. However most saddening and also most infamously... 1994 was the year the world lost Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain to a gunshot wound. Kurt's impact cannot be denied nor ignored, his and Nirvana's general influence was just extreme and spectacular and Kurt will always be missed.
1994 was a very influential year release wise and event wise in music, for better pr for worse. Grunge was becoming less prominent especially after Kurt died, but post-grunge was just getting started. Nu Metal was birthed and started dominating. Punk saw a poppy revival and also began to truly thrive. Emo while still not mainstream was getting some recognition especially midwest emo. Rap was hitting its stride. 1994 was just a eventful year in terms of- well- everything.
Thank you for listening to me blabber on abt this year and have a nice day 😊

Revised cecklists of all favorite foods and the ingredients needed for them. I would have loved something like this when I was just starting!
Fav foods
Amira
-Fesenjan
-Jeweled rice
-Zeytoon parvadeh
-Oatmeal raisin cookie
-Honey mint cooler
—
Angus
-Whiskey
-Rumbledethumps
-Skirlie
-Black pudding
-Pierogi
—
Aryel
-Caipirinha
-Malasada
-Brigadeiro
-Pacoquinha
—
Bruno
-Beer
-Schnitzel
-Fried flounder sandwich
-Sauerkraut
—
Cameron
-Pumpkin spice latte
-Sweet potato and coriander pizza
-Avocado toast
-Sweet potato fries
-Pumpkin bread
—
Cleocatra (cat)
-Tuna
-Milk
-Salmon
—
Damon
-Sweet potato vodka
-Cape Malay curry
-Bobotie
-Chakalaka
-Slap chips
—
Emmi
-Chocolate cupcake
-Chocolate milkshake
-Fish fingers
—
Eury
-Pikliz
-Praline cookie
-Jambalaya
-Chicken fricassee
-Spanikopita
—
Finn
-Strawberry shortcake
-Strawberry milkshake
-Spaghetti bolognese
—
Francis
-Pina colada
-Flan
-Arroz con grandules
-Empanada
-Asopao
—
Giva
-Chai
-Prawns koliwanda
-Chicken tikka masala
-Vada pad
-Pad bhaji
—
Gloria
-Apple Martini
-Coconut rice
-Capricciosa pizza
-Lemon square
-Truffle mac and cheese
—
Juliet
-Tiramisu
-Banana smoothie
-Lasagna
-Mushroom pizza
—
Kai
-Blue Hawaii cocktail
-Haupai
-Poke bowl
-Loco moco
-Managua
—
Kim
-Rice wine
-Ramen
-Buddha’s delight
-Sushi
-Miso soup
—
Lina
-Apple cider
-Pumpkin pie
-Snickerdoodle
-Lobster roll
-New England chowder
—
Marty
-Banana bread
-Carrot cake
-Danish
-Hot chocolate
—
Natalia
-Vodka
-Syrniki
-Beef stroganoff
-Chicken Kiev
-Golubtsi
—
Mayor Otto
-Cheese souflee
-Fruit punch
-Lobster Thermidor
-Beef Wellington
—
Parker
-Coffee
-Pepperoni pizza
-Bagel
-Cream cheese bagel
-Chopped cheese sandwich
—
Peri
-Baklava
-Persian love cake
-Turkish delight
-Honey lemon tea
—
Sebastian
-Pancakes
-Orange juice
-Cheese pizza
-Peanut brittle
—
Shelby
-Bread pudding
-Goulash
-Fish stew
-Tomato soup
—
Sophia
-Strawberry daiquiri
-Precipizi
-Seafood Fra Diavolo
-Smoked salmon bagel
-Chicken soup
—
Thomas
-Lemonade
-Succotash
-Three sisters stew
-Corn bread
-Cabbage soup
—
Vanessa
-Fruit salad
-Spinach smoothie
-Quiche
-Fennel salad
—
Violet
-Rice pudding
-Churros
-Berry smoothie
-Spanish omelet
-Arroz con huevos
—
Westley
-Wine
-Roast beef
-Roast pork
-Roast salmon
-Scottiglis
—
Zephyr
-Mint julep
-Coconut macaroon
-Nougat
-Texas brownie
-Carmel popcorn
Ingredients (items in parenthesis are already included in the item totals)
-Almond 4
-Animal fat 6
-Apple 6
-Avocado 1
-Banana 2
-Beef 8
-Blackberry 1
-Black tea 2
-Blueberry 5
-Bread (flour, yeast) 8
-Butter 14
-Cabbage 6
-Carrot 6
-Cauliflower 1
-Cheese 13
-Chicken filet 7
-Chili 10
-Chocolate 7
-Cinnamon 7
-Coconut 6
-Coffee 4
-Coriander 7
-Corn 8
-Cream cheese (milk) 1
-Egg 34
-Fennel 6
-Fish 3
-Flounder 1
-Flour 51
-Grape 5
-Green bean 4
-Honey 5
-Hops 1
-Italian sausage (fennel, pork) 3
-Lemon 7
-Lime 3
-Lobster 2
-Maple syrup 1
-Meat 4
-Milk 22
-Mint 4
-Mushroom 5
-Noodles (egg, flour) 5
-Oats 3
-Olive 4
-Olive oil (olive) 1
-Onion 8
-Orange 3
-Paprika 4
-Parsley 3
-Peanut 2
-Pineapple 5
-Pistachio 3
-Pizza dough (flour, sugar, yeast) 5
-Pomegranate 3
-Pork 6
-Potato 13
-Pumpkin 4
-Rice 16
-Rose water 2
-Rum (sugar) 5
-Saffron 3
-Salmon 2
-Seaweed 2
-Shiitake 2
-Shiner 1
-Shrimp 2
-Soybean 9
-Soy milk (soybean, soybean) 3
-Spinach 4
-Strawberry 6
-Sugar 38
-Sweet potato 4
-Tofu (soy milk) 3
-Tomato 21
-Truffle 1
-Tuna 1
-Vodka 1
-Walnut 5
-Wheat 4
-Whiskey (wheat, wheat) 3
-Wine (grape) 2
-Yeast 17

Two separate checklists for all favorite foods, and all ingredients needed to make the foods. having something like this would have been so helpful for me, so I wanted to pass it along! I just copy paste into the notes app, adding the checklist feature
Amira Honey mint cooler Fesenjan Jeweled rice Zeytoon parvadeh Oatmeal raisin cookie
Angus Whiskey Rumbledethumps Skirlie Black pudding Pierogi
Aryel Caipirinha Malasada Brigadeiro Pacoquinha
Bruno Beer Schnitzel Fried flounder sandwich Sauerkraut
Cameron Pumpkin spice latte Sweet potato and coriander pizza Avocado toast Sweet potato fries Pumpkin bread
Cleocatra (cat) Tuna Milk Salmon
Damon Sweet potato vodka Cape Malay curry Bobotie Chakalaka Slap chips
Emmi Chocolate cupcake Chocolate milkshake Fish fingers
Finn Strawberry shortcake Strawberry milkshake Spaghetti bolognese
Francis Pina colada Flan Arroz con grandules Empanada Asopao
Giva Chai Prawns koliwanda Chicken tikka masala Vada pad Pad bhaji
Juliet Tiramisu Banana smoothie Lasagna Mushroom pizza
Kai Blue Hawaii cocktail Haupai Poke bowl Loco moco Managua
Kim Rice wine Ramen Buddha’s delight Sushi Miso soup
Lina Apple cider Pumpkin pie Snickerdoodle Lobster roll New England chowder
Marty Banana bread Carrot cake Danish Hot chocolate
Natalia Vodka Syrniki Beef stroganoff Chicken Kiev Golubtsi
Mayor Otto Cheese souflee Fruit punch Lobster Thermidor Beef Wellington
Parker Coffee Pepperoni pizza Bagel Cream cheese bagel Chopped cheese sandwich
Peri Baklava Persian love cake Turkish delight Honey lemon tea
Sebastian Pancakes Orange juice Cheese pizza Peanut brittle
Shelby Bread pudding Goulash Fish stew Tomato soup
Sophia Strawberry daiquiri Precipizi Seafood Fra Diavolo Smoked salmon bagel Chicken soup
Thomas Lemonade Succotash Three sisters stew Corn bread Cabbage soup
Vanessa Fruit salad Spinach smoothie Quiche Fennel salad
Violet Rice pudding Churros Berry smoothie Spanish omelet Arroz con huevos
Westley Wine Roast beef Roast pork Roast salmon Scottiglis
Zephyr Mint julep Coconut macaroon Nougat Texas brownie Carmel popcorn
Ingredients needed The items in parenthesis are included in the item totals already
Almond 3 Animal fat 6 Apple 5 Avocado 1 Banana 2 Beef 8 Blackberry 1 Black tea 2 Blueberry 5 Bread (flour, yeast) 8 Butter 12 Cabbage 5 Carrot 5 Cauliflower 1 Cheese 11 Chicken filet 6 Chili 9 Chocolate 7 Cinnamon 7 Coconut 5 Coffee 4 Coriander 7 Corn 8 Egg 32 Fennel 4 Fish 3 Flounder 1 Flour 47 Grape 5 Green bean 4 Honey 5 Hops 1 Italian sausage (fennel, pork) 1 Lemon 5 Lime 3 Lobster 2 Maple syrup 1 Meat 4 Milk 18 Mint 4 Mushroom 4 Noodles (egg, flour) 4 Oats 3 Olive 3 Olive oil (olive) 1 Onion 7 Orange 3 Paprika 4 Parsley 3 Peanut 2 Pineapple 5 Pistachio 3 Pizza dough (flour, sugar, yeast) 4 Pomegranate 3 Pork 4 Potato 11 Pumpkin 4 Rice 14 Rose water 2 Rum (sugar) 5 Saffron 3 Salmon 1 Seaweed 2 Shiitake 2 Shiner 1 Shrimp 1 Soybean 9 Soy milk (soybean, soybean) 3 Spinach 3 Strawberry 6 Sugar 35 Sweet potato 4 Tofu (soy milk) 3 Tomato 19 Walnut 5 Wheat 4 Whiskey (wheat, wheat) 3 Wine (grape) 2 Yeast 16

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

Something has been wearing my dead son’s body
My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

I’m selling two full size soaps and a sample lot of soaps, frags, and aftershaves. Please comment on this post before PMing me. There are over 100 samples total so I’m asking $100 shipped. If you buy one of the full sized soaps you can add in one sample for free. It’s first come first serve, so if the samples sell first you won’t be able to claim one. If a sample is sold along with a soap order I will let the buyer of the sample lot know which samples were claimed. If you live outside of the US we can discuss shipping. Comes from a smoke free home.
Full size soaps: (shipping included) -Southern Witchcrafts: Labyrinth scooped 3x $12 -Summer Break: Woodshop $14 I will to trade the soaps above for the following: -Zingari Mousse Illuminee soap -Chiseled Face Midnight Stag soap -Author's Ridge Double Trouble soap or splash -T&S 150 soap or splash
Samples: Some samples have been used and I did my best to approximate what is left, every soap has at least one shave left. All frags were opened to smell and dab on but none are below 80% used. The Surrender to Chance sample labels are all covered with scotch tape as without that they get destroyed. Soaps: -Catie’s Bubbles Irish Coffee 90% 2oz, Le Marche du Rasage 50% -Through The Fire Fine Craft: The Man 1oz, Thunderbird 1oz, Deuces Wild 95% 1oz -B&M: War (smush), Famine (smush), Dickens Revisited, Lyssa, Vespers, Smoking Bishop, Presto, Amazelnut, Petrichor 75%, -Chiseled Face: Guy Noir (smush) -Reef Point: Espresso 50% -Wickham Soap: Buddha Wood -La Toja Stick -Mammoth: Rumble 60% -Stirling: Island Man 90% transplanted into a hand creme container, Frankincense & Myrrh -CBL: Back-Alley Barbershop, Bay Rum -Wholly Kaw: Man From Mayfair 70%, Entropy Man 50%, Merchant of Tobacco 60%, Project Leather 70% -Summer Break: Valedictorian 60%, History 101 -Declaration Grooming: Apogee, Daemon -Noble Otter: Two Kings 50%, Lonestar -Paragon: Sunlit Forest 60% -Chiseled Face: Ghost Town Barber 50%, Pine Tar 70%, Sherlock 75%, Summer Storm 80% -Southern Witchcrafts: Fougere Nemeta 75%, Tres Matres, Lycanthropy 70% -Proraso: Green 40% -Zingari: The Wanderer 80%, The Gypsy, The Master 40%, The Rambler 60%, The Royal 75%, Bon Moniseur, The Nomad 50% -Oleo/Chicago Grooming: Seibo 60%, Gatsby, Windy City Barbershop 75%, Grand & Union 2x, Fiera, Smoke on the Water 50%, -Le Pere Lucien: Apricot -Lather Bros: Take Out Night -Maggard: Tobacco & Leather 75% -Murphy and McNeil: Bad Mor (transplanted to a Henri et Victoria Cognac and Cuban Cigars sample labeled with Bad Mor written on it) -Abbate y La Mantia: Ishtar -A&E: Cacao Lussuria 50%, Asian Plum -Oz Shaving Co: Tik-Tok, Oil Can, Tornadic, Jack Pumpkin Head 40% -Mickey Lee: The Drunken Goat 50% Aftershaves: -Stirling: Pumpkin Spice, Varen, Waves of Grain, Evergreen Forest, Texas on Fire -PAA: Shave Chaser, Space of July, 11235, Miami Libre, Vloid, Aqua D/G, Harvest Moon -West Coast Shaving: Oriental 30%, Chypre 30%, Pear-Brrr Shoppe 20%, Fougere 30%, Cologne 50% -Frags: ml listed is the original amount bought -Penhaligons Castile 1.5ml -Givenchy Gentleman Only EDT -Dior Eau Sauvage 1ml -Thierry Mugler A*Men Pure Leather 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors A City on Fire 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors Waffle Cone 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors The Cobra and the Canary 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors Memoirs of a Trespasser 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors Whispered Myths 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors Soft Lawn 1/2ml -Imaginary Authors Every Storm a Serenade 1/2ml -Amouage Jubilation XXV Man 1/2ml -Maison Martin Margiela Replica Sailing Day 1ml (the label is damaged) -Maison Martin Margiela Replica Autumn Vibes 1ml -Azzaro Wanted by Night 1ml -Calvin Klein Obsession for Men 1ml -Zoologist Tyrannasaurus 1/2ml -Zoologist Rhinocerous 1/2ml -Zoologist Tiger .7ml -Zoologist Moth 1/2ml -Ralph Lauren Polo 1ml -Aramis Calligraphy Saffron 1ml -Maison Francis Kurkdjian Baccarat Rouge 540 .7ml (around .5ml left) -Penhaligons Terrible Teddy .7ml -Penhaligons Castile 1.5ml -Comme des Garcons Series 3: Kyoto .7ml -Comme des Garcons Serpentine .7ml -Comme des Garcons Odeur 53 .7ml -Comme des Garcons Odeur 71 .7ml -Comme des Garcons Monocle Scent One: Hinoki 1/2ml -Comme des Garcons #2 .7ml -Comme des Garcons #2 Man .7ml -Molton Brown Coastal Cypress & Sea Fennel 1ml -Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche 1/2ml -YSL Y EDP Rollerball 1ml -Ormonde Jayne Tolu 1/2ml -Papillon Spell 125 1/2ml -Nasomato Black Afgano 1/2ml -Lalique Encre Noir Pour Homme 1/2ml -By Kilian Back To Black 1/2ml -Viktor & Rolf Spicebomb 1/2ml -Viktor & Rolf Spicebomb Night Vision 1ml -Cartier Declaration Parfum 1ml -Frederic Malle Rose & Cuir 1/2ml -Frederic Malle Portrait of a Lady 1/2ml -Dior Sauvage Elixir 1/2ml -Armani Musc Shamal 1/2ml -Mancera Red Tobacco 1ml -Dana English Leather 1ml -Gucci Guilty Pour Homme EDT Rollerball 1ml -Gucci Guilty Black Pour Homme EDT Rollerball 1ml -Zara Amber Ego EDT Rollerball 1ml -CREMO Palo Santo EDP Rollerball 1ml -Mercedes Benz Club Black EDT Rollerball 1ml -Carolina Herrera CH Men Prive EDT Rollerball 1ml -Halloween Man X EDT Rollerball 1ml -Fragrance Oil: -Quality Fragrance Oil Impression of: Bleu by Channel, YSL L’Homme

Hello all,
I come to you all today with yet another review of Smyth, Chicago's newest 3 star restaurant. While u/MrSpiderisadomme just left a review from the same menu (picture attached), I will go ahead and offer my review of the service, menu, and overall feelings, and hopefully offer a different perspective for anyone considering the restaurant.
Service: We arrived to a complementary champagne, as well as a note congratulating us on a major life event that we had experienced. The staff was quick and efficient to start the service, particularly in getting our drink plan established for the rest of the service. The staff was on the kinder end of many of our American service experiences, but lacked in many ways compared to our Asian and European experiences.
Personally, I enjoy learning about each dish and interacting with our service staff. At this service, the staff was quick to leave us alone after delivering their items. So much so, that when it did come time to pick a wine for the start of the meat courses, we had problems getting someone to linger long enough to have that conversation. Additionally, while we had discussed our server returning with a wine menu after the sixth course, he did not do so until he was prompted at the 8th course. I thought that perhaps Smyth just did their service a different way compared to many other restaurants, but I noticed that several other tables were receiving the more casual and warmer service that we had been hoping for. My best guess is that they assumed we were looking for a close, romantic night together, when it was certainly the opposite.
Overall, the service was still very good. There weren't any real blips besides the wine service issue, and everything was done in a very clean and efficient way. All of the usual high end service factors were there, including staff opening the bathroom doors as you walked up, or replacing a napkin you didn't even realize you'd lost.
Food: The food service can be easily divided into a tale of two halves. After reading many, many reviews, I was aware that there can be quite a bit of variance in opinions about Smyth. After a very strong first course, the next few left me concerned that I would simply be another Smyth reviewer who couldn't understand how they had one star, let alone three. But after those courses, I was truly blown away by what I was presented. I know this was the case for several other people who were as well.
Smoked Quail Egg - 8.6 Osetra Caviar, Cannoli, and Cured Osyter - 5.0 Uni and Mamey Sapote - 6.8 Kakigori Clam - 7.1 Crab Soup - 9.2 Dungeness Crab and Kani Custard - 9.5 BBQ Butternut Squash - 8.3 Trout and Blade Kelp - 9.1 Wagyu, Cherry, and Doughnut - 9.0 Lemon Leaf and Beeswax - 7.5 Potato and Cacao Ice Cream - 9.9 Macaron and Black Walnut - 8.8 and 7.1
The real stars were the Crab Soup, the Crab with Custard, the Trout, and the Potato Ice Cream.
The Crab Soup was outrageously intense, poured over a bed of two types of seaweed, and mushrooms. While they didn't give us utensils to eat the seaweed and mushrooms, my partner and I both found that the parts soaked at the bottom were some of the tastiest things we'd had that night.
The Crab with Custard was another winner. Light Dungeness Crab, served with what might be the best butter I've ever had. Following the first few seconds after eating the butter, you don't notice much flavor. Suddenly, it explodes with what is one of the best flavors I've ever experienced. Alongside this, the Custard was really excellent, and helped set the palate with intense flavors.
The Trout was cooked very well, served with a sauce that I can only describe as an extremely light and luxurious Japanese bbq sauce.
Finally, the New Potato ice cream. Absolutely incredible. They suggested it was like a refined version of dipping fries in a Wendy's Frosty. Absolutely incredible. Might be my favorite dessert I've ever had.
Overall: The first 1/3 of the experience left my a little disappointed. The final 2/3 left me thinking it was one of the best meals we've had in the last few years, as both service and food improved. At this price point, as well as the service charge and tip (if you choose), it's probably not the best value we've had in the US, but it's certainly not out of line with what others are charging. I went in expecting great service and some really unique and excellent courses, paired with some that we weren't fans of. While the food met that expectation (and had highs exceeding what I'd hoped for), the service did lack when comparing to others we've experienced.

price : $1400 total for three people, that included the $325 pp tasting menu, and 5 cocktails (plus tax and 20% tip)
winners - * the carrot cocktail is a MUST, it tastes like liquid carrot cake. The other cocktails were .. meh, fine. * smoked quail egg * potato and cacao ice cream
service - felt just okay
Overall it was delicious with inventive flavors, but I felt both the space and overall experience didn’t match with my other 3 star experiences, and that the price was a bit high

My son, Robbie, had been going through a rough patch. His girlfriend had left him and his cat of fifteen years had just died. He loved that cat as if it were his own child. It slept next to him every night, curled up in his arms like a teddy bear. I knew he was using opiates as well, and no matter how much we tried to help him, he simply couldn’t stop.
But a couple weeks ago, things started getting better. Robbie looked a lot happier. He seemed to have hope again. I saw him smiling and laughing, and I figured he had gotten over the hump.
“I see things clearly now,” he said to me and his mother over breakfast one morning. I smiled.
“That’s good. Suffering makes you a stronger man,” I said. “No great man has ever lived without great suffering to first harden him.” He nodded. I went to bed early, confident that things were looking up.
I was sleeping that night when I heard the gunshot.
***
“Noooo!” I heard my wife shriek in an agonized voice, the voice of a mother losing her child, her only child. The sound seemed to go on and on, and I think I still hear it sometimes when I close my eyes, that maybe it never really stopped. She screamed like a woman on fire. I sprinted towards the noise, my feet feeling as heavy as cinder blocks.
“Alexis?” I cried into the dark hallway. My heart felt like a cold chunk of ice in my chest. I ran blindly through the shadows, knocking a vase off a table as I passed. It exploded on the floor with a sound like bones shattering. “What’s wrong?” My voice sounded like someone else’s. Everything seemed slow and dreamlike. I wasn’t sure whether this was really happening to me. I felt totally dissociated from everything, a state that would continue for days afterward. The only response that came to my calls was more hysterical sobbing and incoherent screaming.
I flew through Robbie’s open bedroom door and saw a scene from a nightmare. A shotgun was sprawled at his feet, thrown onto the hardwood floor like a discarded toy. Robbie sat in a recliner, and his face… His face was almost entirely gone.
I saw deeply into his skull and brain matter. He had blown off everything from the top of his mouth to his nose to his right eye and right cheek. His forehead had imploded like a smashed pumpkin. The left eye gazed sightlessly ahead, wide open and as blank as a statue’s.
I felt a tight constriction in my chest. I grabbed at it, falling over. I remember the darkness interspersed with flashing lights and voices from a thousand miles away piercing the void. I reached out, trying to escape, but the darkness seemed eternal.
***
I woke up in the hospital surrounded by the sounds of beeping machines and soft footsteps. I opened my eyes and found myself in a hospital bed.
A few minutes later, a doctor came in and told me I had suffered a mild heart attack and would undoubtedly have some permanent heart damage. However, my wife, even though physically unscathed, was in even worse shape.
***
I remember walking to the psychiatric ward a few days later. My heart still felt tight and constricted as if the cage of bones around it had clenched down with their finger-like ribs.
The nurse was a large woman dressed in faded green scrubs and had a face like a tired weasel. Her brown eyes looked out at me from drooping facial features. Her many chins wriggled and danced as she led me through the hallways of madness.
I passed by a schizophrenic man in his early 20s. He talked to himself, walking in circles. He reminded me of people I had seen on bad acid trips, except his trip never ended.
“I saw the birds… green birds in the mountains… sightless eyes are green too… why do they always drink from the poisoned stream! A lunatic god with sightless eyes, I see, I see…” I passed on by, extremely interested. I wanted to ask the young man more, but the nurse kept hurrying me along, and then I remembered the grim circumstances I was actually there for.
My wife was in the room at the end of the hall. It was Spartan. Only a desk, dresser and bed stood there, all nailed to the floor. Laying on the bed, I saw my wife. Her arms were extended up towards the ceiling like a child asking to be picked up by a parent. She didn’t move or speak. She appeared as an eerie, living statue, laying there with open eyes. Her breath came in slow, steady rasps.
“She is in a catatonic state,” someone said from behind me. I turned, seeing a doctor in a white lab coat entering the room. He had striking blue eyes the color of an Arctic glacier and deep wrinkles around his aristocratic mouth. His hawk-like nose gave his face a serious, reflective character.
He walked over to Alexis. Her once-golden skin looked pale and lifeless. Her eyes had sunk deep into her face like the last bit of water at the bottom of a deep well.
“She has what we call, ‘waxy flexibility.’” He took her left wrist and, like moving the joint of a mannequin, pushed her arm down towards the bed so it was at a 45 degree angle to the mattress instead of a 90 degree angle. Her arm hung there, unmoving. It was eerie seeing my wife turned into a doll, her mind apparently shattered.
“How long…” I said through a hoarse, choked voice. I felt drained from my stay in the hospital and the trauma of the last few days. “How long will she be like this, doctor?” He looked away.
“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible to say,” he said. “We are doing everything we can, however. We are giving her electroshock therapy.”
“Electroshock?” I asked, aghast. He nodded grimly.
“This is usually a sign of schizophrenia. Does she have a history of mental illness?” I shrugged.
“Not that I know of,” I said.
“Traumatic incidents can sometimes trigger it in people who are genetically predisposed,” he said in an impassive voice. “It’s possible she has had symptoms before and simply hid them. You never noticed strange behavior like paranoia or disordered speech or hallucinations?”
“Well…” I said, thinking back to the incident last month. “She did say something about seeing a ghost in Robbie’s bedroom.”
“A ghost?” the doctor said, his mouth hanging open slightly. He quickly regained his regal bearing, giving a slight smile. “That could certainly be a sign of hallucinations. Did she physically see the ghost standing there, did she talk to it or have contact with it?” I thought back to that strange night. Thinking of Robbie again brought back a sick, empty feeling in my heart.
***
“I saw someone peeking in through the window,” Alexis whispered in a quivering voice, her dark eyes wide and afraid. “The window of Robbie’s room.” I jumped up from the chair, taking out my phone and keeping 911 on the screen, so that I could press send and start the call immediately if necessary.
I ran into the master bedroom, pulling clothes up from my dresser to reveal the rifle hidden there underneath. It was a beautiful gun, a Springfield 2020 Redline. I always kept it loaded in case of an intruder. Taking it out, I flicked off the safety and, with my phone screen still turned on in my pocket, sprinted into Robbie’s room.
Robbie’s room was on the third floor, but I never second-guessed Alexis. She was brutally honest, almost to the point of absurdity. She wouldn’t even use her sick time at work unless she was actually sick, because she felt bad about lying to her manager. So when she said something, I instantly believed it.
My mind raced. I wondered if someone had a ladder against the side of the house and was trying to break in. It was the only thing that made sense, after all, unless Jesus had decided to descend back down from the clouds and fly around for a while.
I looked in Robbie’s empty room. For a moment, I thought I saw something skeletal peeking over the edge of the sill. It seemed to have eyes like a possum caught in the headlights, glowing an eerie cataract white. I thought I caught a glimpse of writhing snakes twisting lazily in the breeze, their eyes open and mouths tightly pressed together as if in expressions of disapproval.
I blinked and found the window empty. I strode over and looked down, seeing nothing. I went back and told Alexis there was nothing there.
Her lithe body felt light and free as I wrapped my arms around her, hugging her. She began to cry, her shaking chest pressed tight to mine.
***
After getting home from visiting Alexis in the psychiatric ward, I found myself alone in the sprawling house. It felt eerie. My footsteps seemed to echo far too loudly in my ears. I had decided to investigate Robbie’s room.
In the silence, I could always hear my own damaged heart, each beat like a sand grain in an hourglass flowing toward death. But perhaps that was a good thing. Perhaps I would see my mother and father again, my grandparents, my old dog, my son and all the others I had lost.
I remembered a story my friend Angela had told me after she had converted to Buddhism. She had lost her daughter in a drunk driving crash a few years earlier. She had started to lose her mind in worsening waves of depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation. Yet a few months later, when I had talked to her, I found her eyes bright and her mind recovered. She had the look of a true fanatic, yet she also emanated a peace I had rarely seen. She told me a story I would never forget.
“The Buddha once had a similar case in the ancient scriptures. A woman had gone mad with grief over the loss of her only son. She would walk the town, her mind shattered, screaming for her boy.
“So the Buddha was in the area. The woman came to him, weeping, asking him to bring her son back. The Buddha said he would bring her son back, but that he needed her to find an ingredient for the ritual first. She had to find a grain of rice from a house that had never lost a loved one.
“She wandered the area, asking every person she could find if they had never lost a loved one. But they all told her, ‘No, I lost a mother… a father… a brother… a sister… a son… a daughter…’
“The woman went back to the Buddha and told him she could not find a single house where death and loss had not taken place. She began to realize that death and suffering was universal for all beings in every moment, and her mind began to clear.
“‘So it is,’ the Buddha said, ‘so it is. Grief, suffering, lamentation and stress come from one who is dear, from those who we love. But true bliss comes from not clinging, from not craving, from non-attachment to all things.’”
Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the freshly-painted white door to Robbie’s room. The place looked Spartan now. The blood and gore had stained many of his possessions. I had a professional cleaning company come in and throw them away. The hardwood floors had also been ripped up and replaced in the worst areas where massive puddles of blood had dripped through the cracks.
Tears came to my eyes. I inhaled for a long moment, blinking my eyes fast to try to clear them. I saw his notebooks on a bookshelf in the corner. I went over, looking through them until I found a slim, black volume titled, “Diary”. As I flipped to the first page, a drawing of Robbie sleeping as something hideous with melting skin and glowing eyes lay next to him. This abomination wasn’t sleeping, however. It stared right at Robbie with excited, lidless eyes and grinned.
Next to it, I saw some verses scrawled in Robbie’s spiky, copperplate handwriting. It was an old poem written by one of his favorite poets, Jean Jones. I had heard Robbie recite it from memory a while back, and it had given me the creeps.
On top of the page stood the title in large, slashing letters: “The Angel of Death sleeps beside me.”
At night, her black hair, and dark eyes
Stare at me like photographs I have
Hanging from the wall, she is a skull
Grinning constantly at me, she is smiling
And her eyes flash every time she stares at me
I am in love with her
I want to go where she goes,
Where normal women can never go,
The place where we all meet in the end
The harvest ground, the wet, cold earth…
There is tiredness to this land
And everything in me feels it,
From the way I pour sugar in my coffee
Every morning to the time it takes
For me to close my eyes and remember nothing…
Everything is nothing to that smile you have, though
I want to go and find out where it comes from
Show me.
***
I sat on the couch in the living room, looking at the empty ashtray sitting on the table. One doctor with a face like a shriveled grape had told me I needed to quit smoking. His ancient eyes looked like chips of flat sapphire as he reiterated over and over how lucky I was that my heart attack was mild and didn’t require surgery.
Instead, they had given me aspirin, nitroglycerin, morphine and blood thinners. Though the damage to my heart was permanent, it was fairly minor, but he stated that if I kept smoking a couple packs a day and not exercising, it would very likely be serious or even fatal next time.
I sighed, nervously taking some nicotine gum and chewing it as Robbie’s journal lay on the coffee table in front of me. Its cover looked shiny and dangerous like the black skin of some venomous centipede. Steeling myself, I opened it and continued reading.
“She comes in different forms,” he had written, and that was very nearly the last thing he had written in the entire diary. All of the unlined pages had drawings after that. He was a very talented artist, and I had often encouraged him to continue drawing and painting.
The first drawing showed a van. Its headlights looked like staring, cataract-covered eyes. In its interior, teeth hung down from the ceiling, dripping saliva. More razor-sharp fangs stuck up from the floor. A couple and a young child sat huddled in the back seat, their mouths opened in silent screams as the back of the van had started to crush and close in on the family. I flipped to the next one.
It showed an abomination hovering over the ground, its shadow reaching out like prodding fingers behind it. Its head was twisted around backwards, so that I couldn’t see its face. It had giant, reptilian wings stretching out on both sides of its body like the wings of a bat, spiky and sharp and framed with narrow, curving bones. It wore a shimmering black robe and had dozens of eels or snakes growing out of its skull. Each of them had dead, white eyes and sharp, dripping fangs. Sickened, I kept flipping, finding more and more disturbing images.
Finally, I got to the last page.
I saw what might have been a self-portrait of Robbie, but everything looked wrong. His teeth were colored black. His eyes shone like polished silver, full of sadistic glee and lunacy. The fingernails had become dark talons. A forked tongue peeked out through the thin lips. Underneath, in small letters, he had written:
“The Angel of Death is a scream wrapped up in a dark, sickly thing. She is eternity.”
***
I couldn’t sleep that night. I stood pacing, watching TV and chewing nicotine gum. I wanted a cigarette very badly. I kept thinking of my wife, wondering if she had woken up from her catatonic state yet. A small voice in the back of my head wondered if she would ever wake up from it, but I quickly banished it to the darkness of my subconscious.
At 3:33 AM, I heard a crashing sound at the front door. I jumped, sending my water glass shattering on the floor. It sounded as if someone had taken a sledgehammer to the door. The wood bowed inwards as if it were made of cardboard.
Another knock came, sending deep cracks skittering through it like the fault lines of an earthquake. I got up from the living room couch and ran upstairs, grabbing my rifle and some extra magazines. A minute later, the third knock came, and I heard the wood give a tortured shriek as the door splintered into a thousand pieces far below. My breath caught in my throat.
“Daaaad?” Robbie’s voice cried. It sounded sickly and diseased as if he had been gargling with razor blades. His voice came out distorted and eerie, but I still recognized the voice as my son’s. I didn’t answer. I hid in the master bedroom with the door locked and the rifle pointed straight at it.
I heard heavy, plodding footsteps smashing against the first floor, circling around and looking for something. Looking for me. I looked in the bedroom mirror, seeing myself- a pale, thin man with black circles under his eyes, his body trembling and weak. The gun felt like a paltry piece of junk in my shaking hands.
Whatever was impersonating Robbie started to ascend the stairs. I heard the wood groaning and straining as his inhumanly heavy footsteps shook the house, coming closer and closer. Finally, he arrived at the other side of the door.
“Daaaad?” Robbie gurgled. “Open uppp. It’s tiiiime…” Something smashed against the door as if an anvil had been thrown at it. The door broke along the middle, sending spidery cracks searching up and down the sides of it. I knew one more good hit would break it. Inhaling deeply, I opened fire.
The ear-splitting cacophony of emptying an entire chamber as quickly as I could instantly deafened me. The smell of gunsmoke hung thick in the air. But behind it, I smelled something else- something much fouler, almost like tomatoes and roadkill left out to rot together under a hot summer sun.
The tinnitus in my ears had begun to subside as I took out the empty magazine, throwing it and slamming another one into the chamber. Like a man waking up from a dream, I remembered the phone in my pocket. I quickly took it out and dialed 911.
It rang for what seemed like an eternity, but then finally someone picked up.
“Oh thank God!” I screamed. “Please send help! I’m under attack at…”
“Daaaad?” the distorted voice hissed through the phone. “Is that you, daaad? It’s so dark and cold here. I don’t know where I am.” I froze, the phone slipping out of my numb fingers and hitting the floor.
“Go away!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Leave me alone!” I could feel my heart tightening, an anxiety rising in my chest. I was supposed to be relaxing after my heart attack. For a long moment, I wondered if this would cause another one, one that I would never wake up from.
Without warning, the door shattered inwards, raining splinters of wood down on my head. Standing on the dark threshold, I saw my son.
But his eyes were white and covered in pale cataracts. He grinned, showing a mouthful of black teeth. I saw a forked, blood-red tongue in that horrible face. He oozed over the threshold. I was too stunned to react for a long moment.
Abruptly, he ran at me, his mouth opening far too wide as if the tendons and ligaments in his jaw had been sliced. The snake-like tongue flicked from his unhinged mouth, a hissing emanating from deep in his chest. The smell of rotting meat became overwhelming.
I raised the gun, but he smashed into me at full speed. The rifle went sliding under the bed. Unbalanced, I fell on my back, my arms pinwheeling. Gnashing his obsidian teeth, he landed on top of me. He bit at the air like a rabid dog. I had my elbow against his neck, but his strength seemed overwhelming. He slowly lowered his gnashing, biting mouth towards my face. The smell from his breath nearly made me sick, a rank odor of sulfur and infected wounds and fetid swamps.
I couldn’t fight his strength as he came within inches of my face. I tried to pull away, wrenching my neck to the side. In a blur, he snapped down and his jaw slammed together with a sound like a pistol going off. I felt a cold, searing pain where my right ear used to be. Warm blood gushed out of the wound.
With a spike of adrenaline, I reached into my pocket with my left hand and grabbed my house key. Screaming an insane battle-cry, I brought it up and into the thing’s white, blind eye.
The eye exploded. Something cold and squirming with maggots ran over my fingers. The creature pulled back suddenly, and I used the movement to my advantage, pushing at it with all of my strength. He fell off me and I jumped up, my adrenaline spiking. Blood continued to soak my shirt as I ran out of the house. I got in my car and drove away as fast as I could, constantly checking the rearview mirror. I decided to drive as far as I could and never come back, but I doubted whether it would keep the abomination from returning.
The winter wind whipped over the empty streets as I fled, blowing flakes of ice and snow across the dead earth. Covered in blood and shell shocked, I listened as it howled with the cold agonies and unheard voices of the damned.

As a prologue, my partner and I are from the US and are well traveled through Europe. Typical itinerary is to land in a major city such as Oslo, get our bearings for a few days, grab a car hire, then tour for 10-14 days. Japan seems so different as it’s so train centric! JR pass is under consideration though with the price hike its usefulness is in doubt. Have international drivers permit so no worries driving in Japan either.
Below is not set in stone as far as daily things. The cities are hard targets though some days are flexible, such as extending Tokyo in the beginning or end, or adding to Kyoto. It’s a checklist of all things considered on the journey!
18 Days Leaving JFK nonstop HND 5/16/24.

• (2) Travel Days
  
• (4) Tokyo
  
• (1) Nikko- Tokyo Day Trip (2-3 hr train) Nikko Pass ($25) leave Tokyo by 7AM
  
• (2) Lake Kawaguchiko
  
• (2) Kyoto
  
• (2) Osaka
  
• (1) Nara - Day Trip from Osaka
  
• (2) Hiroshima
  
• (1) Travel Day back to Tokyo
  
• (1) Travel Day
  

prebook pocket WiFi & JR Pass???
Tokyo Day 1 (Central City)
Shibuya Crossing - go at dusk, best view from above Shibuya Scramble Square tower (Hachikō) 1hr

• Takeshita Street (Anime Heaven) 2hr
  
• Meiji Shrine 2hr
  
• Metropolitan Government Building 45th floor (free) closed on weekends / Tokyo Skytree ($25 to observe deck) 1hr
  
• Golden Gai (omoide yokocho) back-street ally bars) - Piss Alley (at night) cash only places - seat charges
  
• Shibuya Center Gai - see at night
  

Day 2 (Eastern Side)

• TeamLab Borderless 4hr - TeamLab Planets 1hr (March - Tickets)
  
• Tokyo Tower (Japan’s Eiffel Tower) 2hrs
  
• Imperial Palace (need to register for tour inside (1.5hr tour 10-130 - gardens free) closed Mondays and Fridays 2hr
  
• Ramen street - Rokurinsha/Oreshiki Jun/Tonkotsu) 2hr
  
• Heiwa Doburoku Brewery Kabutocho
  
• Monzan-Nakacho (Mon-Naka) neighborhood - Tomioka Hachiman Shrine and the Fukagawa Fududo temple (shitamachi - downtown)
  

Day 3 (Central Tokyo)

• Senso-ji Temple Buddhist (Kaminari Gate/Kannon Statue) 2hr
• Ueno Park 4hr
• Kimono Shoes
• Sumo Wrestling - Ryogoku Kokugikan Sumo Stadium 830AM-6PM (book ahead 1 month)

Day 4 (West Side) / (Shinjuku)

• Ghibli Museum 2hr (buy tickets April 10)
• Cat Cafe - Kichijoji Petit Mura
• Yayoi Kusama Museum (90 min)
• Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden 1hr

Day 5

• Disney
• Akihabara District

Tokyo Additional Options

• Nonbei Yokocho (bar hopping tour)(closed Sunday/Days) 3hr
• Food/Bars: Uogashi Nihon-Ichi (Standing Sushi Bar), Nemuro Hanamaru KITTE Marunouchi, Motodane, Tokyo Whisky Library, Ichiran Shibuya, and Uohama
• Toyosu or Tsukiji (largest fish market)
• Owl Cafe
• Unko Museum (Poop museum)
• Ramen Tours
• Park Hyatt New York Bar Tokyo

Nikko (Day Trip from Tokyo)

• Shinkyo Bridge
  
• Hongu Cafe
  
• Toshogu Shrine (8-4 1hr) buy tickets at bus station tourist info centre Kanmangafuchi Abyss (hike)
  
• Takino shrine - hike
  
• Futarasan-jinja - play games
  
• Oku-nikko High Moor (hike)
  

Lake Kawaguchiko (Fuji Five Lakes)

• JR-Otsuki then to Fujikyu line -Kawaguchiko stay:Fujikawaguchiko Onsen Konanso
• Oishi Park
• Kawaguchiko Enkei Hall/Music Forest Museum
• Arakurayama Sengen Park & Chureito Pagoda - go another 5min higher past the view point for a better view
• Narusawa Ice Cave
• Ide Shuzo Sake Brewery)
• Momiji Tunnel
• Oshino Hakkai
• Eat: Hoto Noodles
• Fuji Shibazakura Festival - Mount Fuji Framed in Pink
• Shimoyoshida Honcho Street (SHIMOYOSHIDA STREET)

Kyoto Day 1 (Northern Kyoto)

• Stay: Southern Higashiyama, including Gion / Miyagawacho geisha district
• Arashiyama (Bamboo forest/Tenryu-ji Temple) go early(bamboo at sunrise), Okochi-Sanso villa, cycling? - Gio-ji Temple / Moss Gardens 4hrs
• Kinkaku-ji Temple (Golden Pavilion) 1.5hr (opens 9am!)
• Ryoan-ji Temple - houses the 7 emperors 1hr
• Pontocho (alleyway)
• Tea Ceremony 2hr
• Motoshiro (washi shop)

Day 2

• Kiyomizu Dera Temple 1hr (b4 8am) Kiyomizu-Zaka St(souvenirs)
• Nishiki Food Market (Aritsugu knife shop)
• Fushimi Inari Taisha (2/3 hr hike) - Torii Gates (visit: 6am / 8pm) (Secret Fushimi Inari hike??)
• Kōdaiji Temple (less crowded bamboo grove) 1-2 hrs
• Gion (geisha district)

Suntory Yamazaki Distillery (btw Kyoto and Osaka)
Osaka Day 1

• Osaka Castle
• Food Tour
• Dotonbori (Minami District)
• Hanamaruken Namba Houzenji (ramen
• TeamLab Botanic
• Harukas 300 (view of Osaka)

Day 2

• Shitennoji (Buddhist Temple)
• Shinsekai District (Tsutenkaku Tower modeled after the Eiffel Tower)
• Namba Yasaka Shrine (lion head)
• Osaka Aquarium

Nara (day trip from Kyoto-leave befor 8am)

• Yamato Kano Rental Cycle (book ahead
• Nara Deer Park
• Isuien Garden
• Todai-ji Temple (Giant Buddha)
• Kofuku-ji Temple
• Mochi - (fresh)

Hiroshima/Miyajima

• Hiroshima Peace Memorial
• Atomic Bomb Museum (Dome)
• Peace Arch
• Will need to take a ferry and train to island
• Torii Gate of Itsukushima-jinja Shrine

Places for next time:: Fuji Five Lakes Lake Yamanaka (Yamanakako Hananomiyako Park/Lake Yamanakako Panoramic Deck/Oshino Hakkai/Paper moon(bakery) $20 2.5hr ride Hakone (pirate ship cruise across Lake Ashi, ropeway (cable car) up a mountain to Owakudani, an active volcanic valley, and a train through the mountains) Shikoku Ritsurinko-en gardens Sanuki udon (local specialty) Spotted Pumpkin on Naoshima Island One Bridge in Iya Valley

Keeping track of everyone’s favourite foods and the ones I’ve already given them 😌