Groped at movies

SA :
Around this time last year I was sexually assaulted by a friend/ co worker helping me get back on my feet. Honestly the first time time it happened was early on in our friendship. He had took me home from work and asked for a kiss, which I said no, but continued to ask over and over again and wouldn’t really leave my apartment. After asking me 3+ times to get him to leave I agreed to one on the cheek. He then turned his head and made me kiss him on the lips and laughed as if it was a joke. I then told him to leave and brushed it off. Over the course of the next 4/6 weeks, he insisted on taking me home and there were some occasions where he would then beg for little kisses, however I wouldn’t let him in my apartment again unless it was to fix my vacuum cleaner or something random. He asked me on one date, and I agreed only b/c he persisted & he was doing me a big help. I didn’t really see anything going any further. He asked for a hug and groped my butt, in which I told him that belongs to me and he’s not allowed to touch me. He laughs. Another time while sitting at work he asks for another kiss in which I tell him no, and he begs but I stood my ground. He then told me I hurt his feelings. One day before work we agreed to watch a movie and he insisted we watch it in his bedroom. I responded by saying I know what happens in the bedroom, and im simply not interested. He insists its to get away from his large dog who ended up in the bedroom anyways. We took a couple shots and he instantly began touching and rubbing on me, in which I continued to push him off. I decided to just fall asleep, so he can leave me alone. He did. The next day I decided to not be friends as he was pushing me pass my boundaries. Weeks pass and he tells me he’s been trying to get my attention at work by dressing “ nice “ and apologizing for whatever he did. I accepted his apology and we continued to be friends. Weeks past and we continue as normal actual friends. My lease for my apartment is coming to an end my cousin offers to let me stay with him until I can find a better apartment for 500$. Since I didn’t have a car I asked if he can help me move in which he agreed, but then offers me to stay with him for 3 weeks for free so I can save money for when I move. After we move everything in, he asks me to be his girlfriend, in which I decline stating I wasn’t interested. He looks bummed and then asks me for a kiss instead in which I declined again and I state that I don’t want to give him the wrong idea. I also add that if that’s what he’s expecting from me I will move in with my cousin for the time being. He reassures it’s not, and that hurt his feelings and it was too good to be true. I still offered him money for the time being in which he declined. It was a nice offer at first until It become a nightmare after only 2 weeks. I work an additional job so it’d be times where i’m rarely there. This day was a saturday before mother’s day sunday 2023. I worked my normal overnight shift going into saturday 10-6:30 am, then my second job 8 am - 5 pm. i returned around 6 pm. Before i went to sleep we smoked and took a couple of shots, not to the point where i was drunk, I was more tired. Well I laid down on the couch to go to sleep, and I felt someone ( of course him ) touching me while I was sleep. I remember him vividly trying to kiss me and take off my clothes. I continued to push him off so I can go to sleep. Minutes pass and i’m falling into a deeper sleep, but then I feel someone penetrate me while i’m sleeping. I fully wake up to push him off of my body and he scurries into his room, and I run out the house. It was misty foggy outside, I was belligerent and called a mutual friend in which I told her I’m sure he had sex with me. Only 45 minutes pass. His neighbors interupt the call and ask what i’m doing on his property, as I don’t live there. I had to go get him so he can tell his neighbors not to call the police on me. He was sleeping in his bedroom, minutes after sexually assaulting me in my sleep. He then calls off his neighbors and tells me i’m his “ girl “ now. I stayed up for the remainder of the day in which I was scared to go to sleep. When he awakes he recaps asking if it was good and if I enjoyed myself. I didn’t know how to respond because I simply don’t know. I felt dirty and disgusting honestly. He then talks about his neighbors and he responds saying I knew something was wrong because you never come into my bedroom. I no longer felt safe and stayed with my friends on the weekends or made sure I had plans to avoid him. Two weeks later he tried again, only I am sober and he begs to give me oral sex, even proceeding to grab my vagina in his hand. I asked him to stop and even moved his hand multiple times . he begged and caught an attitude when I continued to say no. I texted my frien to come get me. After this I gave up, I was already not in a good place financially , I didn’t have have an apartment nor car, and I lost a battle with myself. I gave up and allowed him to just have his way with me. I lost. I hate myself even more. I feel like a weak woman. I caught an alcohol addiction in which he told me he’s basically feeding me alcohol. The alcohol made it easier to not think about it honestly. I am not sober and processing my emotions more, they wont leave me alone. It’s like haunting memories that replay over and over in my head. I should’ve never accepted the help. I don’t feel worthy, and I was always a relatively confident women despite me looking for new apartment and car. but I lost protecting myself and it breaks me down everyday.

Barbara Gordon’s consciousness flickered off and on until she finally forced it all the way on. She was, she realized, sharing the floor of an elevator with a body formerly named Asa. Her wheelchair was on its side, and she was only barely still in it. The ‘Please Use Stairs In Case of Emergency’ sign on the wall appeared to be mocking her.
Acutely conscious of the fact that now was an inopportune moment for panic- People always say that. When IS the right time to panic? I mean, if we weren’t supposed to panic, why’d we even evolve the ability? Oh, God, I sound like Dick. Is Dick okay? Stop. We just decided not to panic.- she forced herself as calm as possible and did her best to keep pace with her own racing thoughts. The clown only a guy in a clown mask. Not THE clown. But maybe someone just as bad, and someone very, very unhappily familiar but FOCUS already must have cut the elevator cables. And she hadn’t hit the ground at terminal velocity and died because… of course. Elevators have friction brakes. Cables severed, the brakes kick in. So a sudden stop, knocked me off my chair, but not a lethal one. So I’m still relatively safe…
Until Big Ugly climbs his way down here. Time to panic yet?
It had been a long time since she’d been called upon to do anything in the way of superheroics. Even before the Accident, Barbara had contemplated giving the life up once or twice. But some habits, for worse or, as in this case, for better, were persistent. Hand moving almost unbidden, she popped open a hidden compartment in the wheelchair’s armrest. Out came three black, compact objects which she set to work uncollapsing. Secret stash of collapsible batarangs. The day you can’t smuggle a few of these past a metal detector is the day you’re well and truly retired.
There was a thud on the roof of the elevator.
Oh, good, Barbara thought, feeling her heart start to pound. That must be Big Ugly now. He does get around, doesn’t he.
No time to waste righting the chair. Barbara heaved herself across the floor, making a mental apology for sliding across Asa’s blood. The ‘rang’s razor edge jammed in between the elevator doors, she started to pry, trying to get a grip in with her free hand. The thumping on the roof was intensifying. Clownface was fumbling in the dark, probably looking for an escape hatch to enter through.
Fuck that. I’m getting off this ride.
She had the doors, one in each hand. Come on. Pull. Pull. Honed muscles hiding in her arms drew taut as the doors were forced apart. No sooner was that obstacle out of the way than the next one reared its ugly head. The cab of the elevator was caught between floors; solid ground was a ledge not quite five feet above the floor of elevator. Lifting herself that far off the ground, without the aid of legs? It could be done, with a little effort. Taking the chair with her, though? All but impossible. Leaving the lift would mean giving the chair up.
Something dented the lift roof. Clownface was getting impatient.
Alright. One problem at a time, then. Get out of the death box, then worry about the chair.
“Okay. Hup.”
Barbara groped for the ledge, fumbled. Tried once more. This time, the batarang’s jagged edge snagged right on the ledge. Good. Sweat was already beading on her forehead and I’m not even in costume. I’m either out of shape or terrified beyond all reason. Still. Press on. Just like hauling yourself out of a swimming pool. Let’s just ignore the homicidal maniac about to break his way in here, and PULL, dammit, PULL.
A grunt. An inch lifted. A split millisecond of panic as she thought her arm would buckle. Nope. C’mon. There! Yes! Torso fully above the ledge. Keep pulling. Good. Yes. Now just grab your legs and pull them up after you. Done!
It was at that point that the roof of the elevator caved in completely, and a hulking, clown-faced Shape fell, fluid as a shadow, into the lift with a thud. Barbara was about 60% certain she screamed, a little. The pale white face was nearly level with her from where she sprawled on the ground. At the end of a shadowed, muscly arm, a scarred hand reached out. Instinct mercifully kicked in, and before she knew it, the batarang was sprouting from the pale, ragged skin around one pitch-black eye.
The Shape grunted in pain, lurched back. “It’s you,” Barbara heard herself say. I remember. Just like this. I stabbed you in the eye with a coat hanger. It was Halloween. And you barely even slowed down. I should have known you weren’t dead. They never stay dead. Real evil never dies.
Those thoughts raced by like photons through darkness. In the present, the Shape was still grunting in pain as he clawed at the razor blade in his eye.
“That had to hurt,” Barbara said. “You know what else sucks?”
As Michael Myers pried the blade from the meat of his forehead, the tiny pouch of aluminum powder encased within blew up right in his face. And if you can survive a stab in the eye, I guess that’ll rattle you without killing you. The force of the blast knocked the Shape off its feet, back into the wall of the elevator cab and sprawling to the blood-soaked ground. He (It?) was still for perhaps a second before the masked head shot up, empty eyes and ragged skin-face looking somehow angry. Without flexing a single extraneous muscle, the Shape rose again…
And the elevator cab lurched. Evidently an explosion and a Shape rolling around inside on top of an unexpected fall was a bit more than the cab was built to take. With a groan, the emergency brakes gave way, and the elevator plummeted down the shaft.
“Ground floor,” Barbara grunted, still splayed on the hallway floor with her heart pounding. “Perfume, stationery and serial killers. And ow. My abs.”
***
Harvey Bullock’s battered car came to a stop outside of Thompkins Memorial, and he stepped out into silence. It was pitch black and a light rain was starting up. “Spooky-ass place,” he murmured to himself. It was inarguably a less-than-pleasant building to look at, but Bullock spoke aloud mostly in the hope that a little sound would fill the emptiness. Awright. No more of that. Mikey Myers ain’t gonna be chatting to himself when he sneaks up behind you. God ‘isself only remembers how many years as a cop, an’ runnin’ with Checkmate now. You oughtta know not ta give yerself away like that. No being taken by surprise this time. No, sir. So there was no reason the nape of his neck should be prickling right now.
Gordon’s kid was inside that building, somewhere. Well, so long as his new employer’s briefings were any good, at least. It usually was. Lil Babs. Harvey could vaguely remember when she used to be a kid. More of a kid. Harvey Bullock wasn’t anyone’s idea of Honorary Uncle, but she was Jim’s kid- almost family, in a way. Close enough for him to stay in the loop. It had been hard to hear about the Accident, and the wheelchair, and even harder to believe the… the other things Checkmate had told him about Jim’s daughter.
And speaking of secrets, Comish ain’t never gonna forgive me, knowin’ this freak went after said daughter an’ I went in without tellin’ ‘im. Well. Tough. This is my case. And I’m endin’ it the way it’s gotta end. Evil dies tonight.
Something was just audible, tickling at the edges of Bullock’s perception. A stage whisper, vacillating between wanting to be heard and wanting very much not to be heard. A shadow was twitching, moving, in the direction of the soft call, the edge of the lot. Bullock felt hairs stand up on the back of his fat neck. His hand wanted to inch toward his gun, until he made the words of the call out: “H-help! Help, please! He’s hurt!”
Bullock plodded over. As the shadow moved into dingy streetlamp light he realized it was a woman in a white coat, with some badly-bruised, staggering pretty boy leaning on her shoulder. “Oh god oh god oh god,” the woman was whispering, but clearly on the verge of a breakdown. “It’s in there! I couldn’t risk it hearing us, it- I just barely got out! My nurses are dead, and, and I think this kid got thrown out a window-”
“Kid?” the kid mumbled, groggily. “I resettle that remark.”
Apart from being, in Bullock’s unprofessional opinion, just generally banged up, the kid didn’t look like he could walk on his own. All his weight seemed to be either on the lady or unsteadily on one leg. Being thrown out a window probably wasn’t far off.
The lady in doc’s clothes was still babbling. “Look, are, are you police? Are the police coming?”
“Yeah, they’re on their way” Bullock lied- well, not lied, they would be soon enough, he guessed- and then said “Who th’ hell are you?”
“I’m Dr. Kinsolving. Uh. This is… I forget, but he’s got at least a broken leg and maybe a concussion. I thought he was dead for a second-”
“Slowed down my heart rate, to simulate death, just in case,” the kid murmured, clearly still loopy. “One of the first things you learn in the Ba- the Boy Scouts.”
“A’right, look, doc” Bullock hissed, now up to speed and short on patience. “I’m goin’ in to bring that freak out. You are gonna take Pretty Boy here an’ hide-”
“No.” Pretty Boy’s hand was on Bullock’s lapel suddenly, with impressive strength for someone in his condition. “No. I gotta- Barbara’s in there, with the… the Shape. I’ve got to go in.”
Bullock rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, kid, I’m sure she’d appreciate you stumblin’ in just to get thrown out another window and breakin’ the other leg. Assumin’ you can even walk.” The point was apparently taken; Pretty Boy’s grip relaxed. Bullock turned to Kinsolving, keeping his voice low.
“Look, I gotta get in there. But you’re stayin’ here. He popped the door on his car and gestured in ward. “Just keep in here. If anyone else comes along, you crouch down an’ keep the doors locked shut-” An’ hope they don’t notice the windows fogged up from the breathin’, Bullock thought to himself- “an’ in the meantime, keep the kid’s head elevated or keep ‘im awake, or whatever you’re s’posed to do with a concussion.”
“He, he can rest provided someone wakes him up periodically to check his vital signs-”
Oy. That’s what shrinks call coping mechanisms, I think. Bullock helped the kid into a sitting position in the backseat, and continued speaking to the doctor, his voice whisper quiet. “Lissen,” he hissed. “Y’said the thing that did this, it’s still in the building?”
“It was when I left. S-Second floor. It cooked someone alive in the hydrotherapy tanks-”
Around then was when he heard metallic screeching from inside the building, and felt an earthquake-like thud. Harvey Bullock drew his gun. “Get to the car,” he said.
***
Barbara felt the first traces of pain and tiredness. Adrenaline was slowly draining out of her. That was inconvenient. She had a feeling she was going to need more of it. Considering how much punishment he’d taken so far, there wasn’t a chance Big Ugly was done. The fall wouldn’t stop him, and the walk up the stairs would barely delay him. So. Time to start commando crawling.
She inched forward, using batarangs the way a rock climber used grappling claws. One arm forward, thoroughly undignified wriggle, then the other arm, rinse and repeat. Not the best way to get around, and not especially great when trying to leave a building in a hurry. Not to mention the staff might complain about the pitting in the floor. There had to be a supply closet or something. Maybe a spare pair of crutches. Not ideal for paraplegia, but quicker than crawling at least. Barbara tried hoisting herself up, to try and make a grab for a door handle. No luck. Fine. Crawling it is.
Not exactly good long-term planning, though is it? Still need to go down a floor. Can’t use the elevator. So your options at this point are to take the stairs and just hope Gruesome doesn’t notice you going down while he’s coming up, or try your luck with one of the vents.
Barbara swore under her breath. Those infamously roomy Gotham City air vents. You spent enough time going through those in the business. Grates close to the floor, easy enough to remove. And right about now it was hard to argue they weren’t safer than the stairs or a window. But they wouldn’t be terribly much easier on someone without the use of their legs than this hallway. And- well, it wasn’t that she was claustrophobic. But in one of those vents, she might just learn to be.
There has to be some other way.
Then she heard the gunshot.
Screw it. Vent it is. She took the ‘rang and began picking at the bolts on the grate.
***
Harvey Bullock hustled in through the hospital’s sliding front door with his weapon drawn, because he might not have been a great cop in his day, but he sure as hell wasn’t ever any kind of amateur. His pulse was pounding in his ears, which, he reflected, probably wasn’t going to make this job easier.
Nobody at the front desk, but he heard indistinct voices in the background. Went to see what all the damn noise was. All of a sudden, the voices became screams. Then nauseatingly wet, splashing noises. Then silence. ohcrap. Freak’s already up and attem. Bullock picked up his pace, tightened his grip on the gun until his knuckles went white.
Come on, Harv. No big deal. You musta cuffed a hundred punks. Some frightmask don’t make a lick a difference. He’s got a knife, you gotta gun and the element ‘a surprise. An’ evil dies tonight.
There couldn’t be as many hallways as there seemed. Somehow it felt like running through a maze. It was on either the second or third hallway-turn that Bullock bumped into the wreckage of the elevator shaft, and with it, the first corpse, a security guard. Lying in a pool of blood and missing a good chunk of his face. Bullock forced himself not to swear. How’d this freak move so fast, without making a sound? And how- Footprint, in the bloodslick. And a trail. Freak chased someone for a bit- around another corner, where Bullock found...
The trail of bloodprints was gone. A pair of shoes was placed neatly at the side of the side of the hall. Bullock thought fast. ‘e took his shoes off. Stops him leavin’ a train. Only reason he’d do that is if ‘e knew someone was followin’ ‘im.
There was a noise behind him. Bullock whirled around and fired.
***
Traveling by ventilation duct wasn’t the worst skill to have in Barbara Gordon’s line of work. But like so much else in life, it wasn’t much like the movies. Movies didn’t convey how cramped things really were, the inch-thick layers of dust, the near-absolute darkness, or, most pressingly, the noise. Moving through the vents had to be done slowly, or else it couldn’t be done quietly. At the moment, quietly was the thing.
And, as predicted, dragging oneself along the vent with two paralyzed legs didn’t make things any more pleasant. Barbara gritted her teeth over two batarangs. No freaking pockets on a hospital gown. And the ‘rangs would tear right through duct metal without purchase. Still, she wasn’t ready to throw her only tools away, even with her jaw starting to cramp.
Don’t focus on that. Just keep moving forward. Just one reach and one pull at a time. No hurry.
She wasn’t sure what made her pause. But when the vent buckled inward, as though a sledgehammer blow had struck it, just in front of her face, she was glad she had.
He found you. Somehow. He’s right below you, on the ground floor. Guess that’s a yes hurry.
Barbara reached and grabbed, desperately pulling herself forward past the dented wall. The next dent came not long after, striking against her side. She couldn’t stop the yelp of pain and fear, but she didn’t let it slow her down. Stab him with a batarang? No. You’re too vulnerable. Don’t give him any more time to pinpoint you. Just KEEP MOVING. The next dent burst straight through, revealing a pale, bloodied fist with a knife clenched firmly in its fingers, and the blade of the knife left a shallow cut on one of her paralyzed legs. Good thing I can’t feel that, she thought, dizzily, and didn’t let it slow her down.
The vent either had to reach another opening or else trade horizontal for vertical, eventually. She kept going, the pounding rattling her nerves and the sound of ragged breath somehow omnipresent. Eventually, it stopped- maybe below, the Shape had hit a wall- just in time for the vent to bottom out. Barbara fell face-forward into the darkness.
***
Bullock struggled to find his breath. His shot had been wild, hitting a wall at the end of the hallway. It had totally missed the target, though mercifully the target had turned out not to be Myers. Less mercifully, the second body, the one that looked to have been a nurse perhaps a second before, was collapsed now at his feet, in a pool of her own blood. She’d tried to say something to him, between gurgling gasps for air.
She musta followed the guard up to the elevator. When the guard got ganked she ran for it. Not fast enough. He killed ‘em both in a couple ‘a seconds. What the hell is this guy?
Harvey Bullock fought panic. He’ll ‘a heard that gunshot. If he didn’t know I was ‘ere before, he knows now. Evil might die tonight, but looks like I might too. He left the nurse alone. Nothing to be done for her now.
More noise. Like someone was smashing furniture. Bullock focused on it. He didn’t know why, exactly, but tears were burning his eyes now. Maybe for Montoya, maybe for the nurse and the guard, and maybe because he was afraid, plain and simple. Goin’ after someone else, then, creep? Distracted? That works swell for me. Smile, ya sap, cuz company’s comin’.
***
He had her now. His prey was scrabbling about in the walls, which was no hiding place at all. Not to someone who lurked in every shadow. Not to the Boogeyman.
As the Shape marched down the linoleum hallway, he felt the heat of his own ragged breath on his face as the skin-mask sealed it in. When he finally reached his prey, he paused, and reached out with one bloodied hand to touch the wall. Further up. The long fingers inched. Further. Further… There.
With incredible strength, the hand thrust, and pounded against the wall, buckling the metal duct behind. If the Shape felt anything at all, it was only the satisfaction of hearing the yelp of sheer terror that escaped. Now there was more scrabbling as the prey crawled away in terror. The Shape followed the noise, drew back his fist again and cratered another segment of wall. Another shriek of terror and more frantic scrabbling was the response.
No place to hide. And no way to run.
The Shape kept pace again, and struck the wall again, this time with his knife hand. He could feel the spray of blood on his knuckles as the backward-facing blade grazed his prey’s flesh. So close. Just once more. Maybe he could pin her to a wall. Maybe he could just thrust and thrust the blade into her until the screaming stopped. The possibilities were endless. And that was when the bullet struck Michael Myers in his back of the shoulder. He froze, like a statue.
“Turn around, bright eyes,” came a wheezing voice. Defying all expectation, Harvey Bullock had come to the rescue. “I got you now, you bastard. Turn and face me when I finish you.”
The Shape was still as a statue for an eternity of about a second. Then, with terrifying slowness, the masked head turned around to face Harvey Bullock.
***
Barbara Gordon reflected on having fallen down two pitch-black metal tunnels in the last half-hour and decided that it if never happened to her again, that would be too soon. On the bright side, falling down a ventilation shaft with two batarangs in her mouth had not resulted in her being decapitated from the lips up. Keep looking on the bright side. Still dwelling on the image of Headless Barbara, she spat the ‘rangs out into her hand. The Shape didn’t need any extra help. Now, where am I?
Not in the ducts, anymore. She’d hit the floor. The cuts and bruises would probably register later. The flimsy wall-grate had slid straight open and disgorged her as she came down the duct chute. So much for using it as a hiding place. Barbara rolled around onto her belly again, pushed her upper body upwards to get a look at her surroundings.
Dim room. Tile floors. Swinging doors off to the far wall. Gurney in the center of the room. Canisters everywhere. Canisters? In the gloom, she squinted to read the labels. FLAMMABLE. Oh God. This must be some kind of operating room. This must be anesthetic. If I live through this I’m going to talk to someone about storing this stuff properly.
There was a gunshot and a scream from outside the door.
Well, that’ll have to wait for later.
Barbara dragged herself behind the nearest row of canisters, pulling her legs out of sight just as the Shape staggered through the doors. Hurriedly, she clamped a hand over her mouth, struggling to keep her breathing even and quiet. She heard something scuff the ground as the Shape moved, and then a thud as something hit the ground.. Smart money say’s that’s someone else who got in his way. Between him and me, in this case.
This is it, he thought. Cornered. I cant outrun him. There aren’t enough places to hide. Can’t drop him down another elevator shaft. Sooner, not later, I’m gonna have to fight my way out. And all I’ve got is two batarangs, which don’t even faze him. Not to be a downer, but… this could be it. Wonder what Bruce would do in the face of imminent death, she found herself thinking.
The Shape was moving, she could hear. But… weirdly Shuffling, stumbling. Not what she would expect from someone hitherto unstoppable. Moving away from her.
It hit her, suddenly. Coat hanger to the eye a few years back. And a bad batarang wound to the head. Blood in your good eye, probably worse because of that stupid clown mask. Which means you’re having a little trouble seeing, aren’t you? Plus the blood loss, the explosion in your face… I’m guessing maybe a couple bullet wounds. All that must have you feeling a bit worn down. That’s not much. But that might just be my way out of here.
Barbara held as still as she could and listened. Pick your moments carefully. They might not come again. The shuffling was faint, but she could make it out. Further away, further. Now. She tossed her next-to-last ‘rang, putting some arc into it. It landed with a ting noise off in the corner, further from the door. And after the ting she just heard absolute silence. Trying not to swallow, Barbara peered out from her hiding place, oping to see the Shape’s back as he took the bait.
Instead she saw the Shape looking head-on at her hiding place, an eyehole in his mask leaking blood.
Oh crap, Barbara thought. Guess he knows that trick.
***
Harvey Bullock’s consciousness flickered on and off before he finally forced it on. He remembered getting a few shots off on Myers. And a big black Shape rushing at him. And he remembered a knife cutting through the air- Harvey Bullock felt his throat, something wet and warm, that was getting rapidly cold.
Bastard musta got me right ‘n the same place Strange did, those years ago. How’zat f’r good luck? Guess scar tissue’s harder t’ get through.
Awareness of his surroundings finally reached Bullock. He was sprawled on the ground, in a pool of his own blood. Not the best sign. Even if he’d survived the cut, things didn’t look good for him in the immediate future. What else? He could see the Shape, framed in the shadows. Still there, despite the bullets in his torso. Barely even slowed down. Failed. I failed.
What else? Through fading vision, Bullock looked around, and saw the label “FLAMMABLE.”
Huh, he thought. Wonder if I got enough strength left to stand up.
***
There wasn’t any point in holding still now. Barbara crawled for it, moving backwards as the Shape staggered closer and closer, knife clenched in hand and raised for the kill. Got one last batarang. Maybe I can get a lucky shot. Maybe-
Barbara Gordon was suddenly aware of a hissing sound. The Shape, responding with an almost ludicrous puzzlement, seemed to hear it, too. They turned towards the door, where Harvey Bullock, soaked with blood and unscrewing valves on a gas canister, was standing.
“Hey, Mikey,” the battered cop said, voice hoarse and rough. “See ya in hell.”
Then he went to his pocket for a cigarette lighter. Barbara has just enough time to face the wall, curl into a ball, grabbing her legs to pull them underneath her. The Shape had just enough time to charge forward.
Then came the explosion.
In the time it took Barbara Gordon to stop reeling from the noise and the pummeling force, and to reassure herself that this was real, everything was ablaze. The shockwave had rattled her down to her very bones, and now the air was full of heat and smoke. The phrase ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ coasted irreverently through her mind. Her thoughts rose unbidden. After so long out of the life, tonight had been a quick sink-or-swim remedial course in thinking fast.
What kills you isn’t the fire. It’s the smoke. Suffocation. And smoke rises up. So keep your head close to the ground. Well, that shouldn’t be a problem for me, right? Just keep your head down. It would be too absurd to survive everything else tonight threw at you to die in a stupid fire. Right?
Barbara crawled as best she could through the flames, her breath ragged through the folds of her gown. As she crawled, she could not notice the shadowy shape that rose behind her, wreathed in the light of the fire…
***
Michael Myers rose to his feet. His target was finally in sight. But as he lifted his knife for the kill, he could not notice the shadowy shape that suddenly stood behind him, wreathed in the light of the fire.
“Myers,” said the Batman.
The Shape whirled around. If a human thought ever crossed through the black pit of his mind, Michael Myers probably thought You.
He got no chance to act further. Gauntleted fists struck his masked face, again and again. The Shape lunged with the knife, aiming for the stretch of lower jaw, only for his hand to be deflected, and for something to cave in his elbow. There was a hand behind his head; a knee drove into his nose. The punishment was unrelenting. Between bullet wounds, elevator crashes, blood loss, explosions and burns, even the Boogeyman had his limits. Michael Myers finally sank into unconsciousness. The knife fell from his hand. The Batman caught him before he slumped to the ground.
With a few careful steps through the flames, he caught up with Barbara Gordon, who, after a few coughs, said “I softened him up for you. Good timing, by the way.”
Although, as a rule, the Batman did not smile, he was sometimes known to smirk.
*** It began to rain not long after. A small mercy for the people who had to put out the flames.
Emergency workers spent the rest of the night pouring in and out of the building. The few patients left in the building had to be moved out, out of concern that the destroyed elevator and scorched operating room might compromise the building’s integrity. Several bodies had to found and extracted, three nurses and a security guard among them. With emergency care at Thompkins Memorial heavily compromised, Harvey Bullock was hurried to another hospital, in extremely critical condition. Nobody was sure he’d survive the night or not, though surviving appeared to be among his talents.
The Batman disappeared into the night, as was his custom. Michael Myers was strapped to a heavy gurney and escorted to the infirmary in Arkham Asylum, under the constant watch of at least a dozen heavil armed guards. Barbara Gordon was in the backseat of an ambulance clutching a trauma blanket to her shoulders, dreading the moment when her father showed up to inform her she wasn’t allowed to live on her own anymore.
For the moment, she was left alone with a thoroughly dopey-looking Dick Grayson, who was waiting to trade his hastily-improvised cast for something a bit longer-term.
“This isn’t how I imagined Halloween going,” Dick said, evenly.
“Nope.”
“I think the worst part is I missed Kadaver’s Mystery Theater. They were doing Thing From Another World tonight.”
“I think the worst part is I’m going to have to do my preop exam over again to see if falling out of a ventilation shaft and being in an explosion damaged my spine any more.”
“It’s not a contest, you know.”
“You’re an idiot.”
They both watched as Dr. Shondra Kinsolving struggled to explain something to a police officer, arms flapping wildly.
Dick coughed. “I’m- sorry.”
“For being an idiot?”
“No. Well, maybe. It’s just… You needed help in there, and I was stuck barely-conscious, hiding in a car the whole time. I didn’t mean-”
“Dr. Kinsolving was, too.”
“I think she’s content with that.”
“I told you before, Dick. You don’t need to worry about me. I’ve been doing this about as long as you have. I took care of things as best I could. And if you- if any of us- try to take responsibility for protecting the whole world, we’ll be crushed under the weight of it. Even Bruce knows that.”
“I just- I know. You’re right.”
“But still. Thank you.”
“Right.”
“Happy Halloween, I guess.” And they were quiet for a moment.
“BARBARA!”
Jim Gordon had arrived on the scene, looking about as panic-stricken as any father could reasonably be expected to, given the circumstances. Barbara failed to fight off both a small smile and tears. In less than a second he’d crossed the scene and had his arms around her.
“It’s okay, Dad,” she struggled to say. “I’m fine. Thanks.”
Dick Grayson turned away, in what he hoped was a respectful gesture. He caught a glimpse of something dark swinging through the sky, outlined against the moonlight.
“Thanks to you too, Dad,” he murmured.
***
November 1st. Day of the Dead.
The Batman, as usual, surveyed the skyline of Gotham City by dark. He had seen so many crises befall the city that it was hard to imagine how any of it was still standing. Sometimes it was easy to believe there was something beyond control, something malicious, that pulled the strings. The sort of evil that created things like Michael Myers, or… or others he could name.
Still. In spite of it all, the city was still standing.
“Brand. You may as well come out.”
A paunchy man in a too-small tank top snapped his fingers as he walked out from behind an intake vent. “Damn. ‘owdya you even know it was me?”
“You walk the same. No matter whose body you’re wearing.”
“It seems you did not require our aid after all, to confront the Boogeyman,” said blindfolded Madame Xanadu, who was suddenly at his side and seated at a large round table shuffling a deck of cards. “Do you still wish to know what fate has in store for you?”
“No.”
“That is wiser than you know.”
“Yeh, she overcharges,” the Dead Man quipped. “You will at least take one small bit of free advice,” Xanadu said. “More than any goblin, ghost, or witch, humanity has cause to fear the darkness inside itself. Do not grapple with the weight of the world, lest it crush you beneath. And one more thing… ah. He is gone, isn’t he?”
“Sure is,” the Dead Man said, approvingly. “Always did wonder how he pulled off those exits. Phew.”
***
An Epilogue
Before the year was out, Michael Myers was transported out of Arkham Asylum (with extreme precautions taken) to a more specialized prison facility, by way of the Federal Transfer Center in Central City. On the advice of his doctor, the transfer did not take place on October 31st. From the instant he left his cell at Arkham, Myers was strapped to a gurney that restrained his arms, legs, and neck, a position he was not to leave for the rest of the journey.
In theory, nothing could have gone wrong.
It was odd, in retrospect, that none of the personnel involved in the transfer noticed the Man in Black, clad in a broad-brimmed hat and dark trench coat that obscured all other features. He featured in several frames of the security footage at the Transfer Center, and even more curiously given the scrupulously-observed rules of the facility, none of the guards in those frames seemed to take any notice of him.
Suffice it to say that the procedure was ultimately interrupted in the next leg of its journey. Set upon by an unidentified aircraft mid-flight, the transfer plane was boarded and hijacked by unknown assailants, described by survivors as being dressed all in black, ‘like ninjas.’ Several facility personnel died in the ensuing struggle. The transfer plane made its unscheduled landing in a secluded, unlicensed airfield, where surviving personnel were blindfolded, restrained, and held in a darkened room for some 28 hours, then allowed to re-board their plane and leave, without the use of their radio.
The prison plane made its landing at the nearest possible airport, after the comparatively brief emergency brought on by an attempted landing without radio equipment. The unlicensed field where the plane had made its unscheduled landing was completely abandoned by the time authorities made a search of it. There was no sign of what had become of the hijackers, and there was no sign of what had become of Michael Myers.
***
The Man in Black reached his final destination in ‘Eth Alth’eban, tucked away undiscovered in the remote parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The settlement consisted almost entirely of a single edifice, built into a canyon cliffside. Throughout it, the robed members of the League of Assassins, the Fang Which Guards The Demon’s Head, moved back and forth, busied with their various tasks.
In spite of his heavy, dark dress, the Man in Black paid no mind whatsoever to the heat. This place might not be where he was raised, but over the years it had come to feel almost like home.
Black-clad, lowly-ranked Shadows followed in the Man’s wake, one pushing the gurney on which Michael Myers was clasped, the rest flanking the gurney on either side. It was difficult to guess what Michael Myers might have thought of all this. His face, unmasked and unremarkable save for several nasty-looking and recent scars, stayed perfectly expressionless. Some length down the brick path on which he walked, the Man in Black encountered his reception committee. At its head was a man in grey camouflage and hood, lower face hidden by a cloth mask. This man was counted among the dozen most feared human beings on the planet, and could count the other eleven finalists as either associates or rivals.
The Man in Black removed his hat, revealing the face of a white-haired old man, a face that was pleasant and even charming.
“Conal Cochran,” said the man in grey, coldly and seriously.
“Mister Cain,” the Man in Black said, with a bit of mirth.
“The Demon’s Head may be seven centuries old, but his patience is not inexhaustible. I trust you’ve delivered what you promised.”
“Most certainly!” Cochrane stepped aside and gestured dramatically to the murderer strapped to the gurney. “As promised. Your Boogeyman. A natural aptitude for killing! You may depend upon it! I’ve seen him in action. Not the equal of your best-trained, perhaps, but realize that the boy hasn’t had even a moment of tutelage in the homicidal arts. He is completely self-trained.”
The man Cochran had called Mr. Cain- the man known throughout the world as Orphan- looked Michael Myers in the eye. What he saw there, none could say, but Conal Cochran was sure he saw a slight grimace.
“No need to question him. He doesn’t speak. His only language is that of the kill. I thought you might appreciate that especially, Mister Cain. The very creed under which you planned to raise your daughter, isn’t it?”
Mister Cain’s body language indicated this was not something he wished to discuss.
“We’ll see if he meets with the Master’s approval.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“For the Head of the Demon.” said Cain, bowing slightly.
“For the Head of the Demon.” said Cochran, reciprocating.
The darkness in Michael Myers’ eyes glinted.

Throwaway because he has Reddit. If he sees this he'll know it's about him, but I'm willing to take the risk because this will probably get buried.
My (f18) 'friend' (m18) has been making me really uncomfortable by the way he's been touching me and talking about my body. For context, I'm a lesbian - this is something everyone knows and I came out when I was 14. I have quite a strong stomach for stuff like this (you get used to it) but after I recently went cold on him he's been trying it with our other female friends and I think he's trying every woman he knows until one eventually caves and has sex with him. He's making everyone uncomfortable, but he does the typical "don't tell anyone, this is our secret" so we're all too scared to talk about it.
He has this thing where he likes to be called a "good boy" which he insists isn't a kink. He keeps pressuring me to say it, and I say, why don't you ask someone else? If it's not a sexual thing, why not ask one of your male friends? But he refuses and he says "I just want you". I'm very vocally against it every time he brings it up and I'm really worried that the conversation itself gets him off so I usually just change the subject or ignore him. There's way more than this - he gropes my thighs and says he wants his face buried in my breasts, etc - but I don't want this post to be too long. Just an important point, he especially likes to do these things when I'm drunk. And it's not just me.
I was willing to put up with it for the sake of keeping the friend group together (which is so pathetic). However, I spoke to my best friend (f18) about it and she opened up that he did the same to her too. We found out together that he's done it to multiple other girls in our school and none of them realise that it's happened to anyone else. He's been absolutely prolific, like we are talking about every woman I've seen him befriend within the last year or two. And that's just who we know about.
I know it's not my responsibility and it's a bit immature, but I have about 200 screenshots (and counting) of him harassing me since January this year and I've been collecting them because I want to do something with them, but I don't know what yet. I had a few ideas like printing them all on A4 sheets of paper and throwing them around at prom but that kind of thing feels way too Disney movie.. I don't wanna act like I'm some vigilante or risk upsetting any of the girls there.
What I should do is just cut him off, but as I'm writing this he's still trying it with other girls. He takes every concern I bring up as a joke. I'm just terrified that he's gonna get too confident and take advantage of some girl while she's drunk, and I'm gonna feel guilty. Or he's gonna take advantage of me. Going to the police or something isn't really an option because there's technically no crime (that I know of).
My friends and I are going on a night out tomorrow and he's gonna be there. I'm scared to be honest, but it's my best friend's birthday and whether we like it or not, he's gonna come along. The girl he's trying to get with atm is going too. We're taking one for the team and keeping the two of them in our sight at all times.

You who have discovered this message, this sort of bottle in the sea, have you ever truly found yourself in the dark? Not the dark of night or a dimly lit room, but complete darkness. The kind where no light penetrates, where no diode seems to watch over you like a lighthouse in the night. I’m talking about total, oppressive darkness. The kind that traps you in your own fears and drowns you in a shroud of dread. Something happened to me... You will surely think I’m mad. But I’d rather someone know, even if they don’t take me seriously, than no one know at all.
My name is Thomas and I’m almost 24 years old. I’m a young computer science teacher and, as you can imagine, I’m always surrounded by gadgets of all kinds. It’s a bit like a Christmas tree, but I like it. I’m not easily scared, in the sense that horror movies seem quite flat to me. Too much déjà vu. But I think what happened to me has changed me forever.
I was coming back from work one night, on my motorcycle. Riding relaxes me, and the sensation of freedom on two wheels is delightful. I live in a remote area, you know, the kind of place in the countryside where there are more fields than houses. It must have been 11 PM and the weather was bad. A real mass of clouds blocked the light of the moon and stars. I stopped near my house, convinced that this week had been the worst I’d ever had. It’s funny how wrong we can sometimes be.
I parked near the streetlight next to my house and started looking for my keys. I have a bad habit, I’m absent-minded and always lose everything. I must have left my keys in my bag. I used the artificial yellowish light to find the key that would grant me well-deserved rest in my den. As I rummaged, cursing my negligence, the light flickered slightly. Strange, even though I lived in a remote area, the installations were recent and outages were rare. But you’re never safe from a little glitch. Another flicker of the light pulled me out of my reverie; I hoped there wouldn’t be a power cut. I’d left a good Final Fantasy downloading since this morning, and I’d be annoyed if I had to start over or at least lose time. I finally found my key, put my bag back on my shoulder, and, helmet in hand, headed for the door when suddenly, the light went out for good. Power outage, great.
I looked for my phone to have a reliable light source, but no sign of the device. I must have left it in the staff room again. I cursed myself and my goldfish brain: I would have to grope in the dark. And damn it, my download! I cursed again until I realized something. It was damn cold. You know that sensation when you pass by a fridge in the supermarket? It was the same, but this cold enveloped me, like I’d entered the damn fridge entirely. I felt suddenly quite stupid. Always daydreaming, I’d become senile one of these days. But deep inside me, a feeling started to grow, an impression of being watched. To shake this off, I imagined a little guy with night-vision goggles watching me. It made me chuckle, but only briefly, because it seemed I was in another place. The sound I made wasn’t natural; the atmosphere seemed to absorb the sound I produced, leaving me curious and perplexed with one question in mind: what’s going on here?
I was worried. Not scared or anxious, just worried. I wondered how, although I always felt grounded, I could feel so disturbed. I stayed there for a good 5 minutes filled with slight worry. Then I told myself out loud that it might be time to stop dithering for nothing, and I set off, slowly and gropingly, towards my door, key in hand. It’s crazy how vision seems to be the basis of everything, even other sensations. I say this because the sidewalk seemed more damaged and less smooth as I walked, even though I knew it was my sidewalk. As I continued to move through this atmosphere, I tried to estimate if I was still far from the small staircase leading to my home. Two more good strides, one more, and I felt like I stumbled over something. I tried to climb the first step, but my foot only met empty space, then the object I’d stumbled over. Probably a big rock, but still weird. I resumed my path, always slowly, but something quickly seemed incongruous. I had walked way too far; it was impossible that I hadn’t encountered anything in the meantime.
This sensation of walking on uneven ground was still there, but with all the distance I’d covered, I should have easily reached the end of the entrance hall. Then I did the first thing that, in hindsight, allowed me to start considering that there was a real problem. I bent down, placed my helmet next to me, and groped the ground on all fours to see if I was still actually on the sidewalk. But I didn’t encounter that sensation. The ground I’d been crawling on for some time seemed quite rugged, though relatively flat. It wasn’t tiles. It felt more like I was moving on volcanic rock. Continuing my exploration (and hoping a dog hadn’t done its business where I was putting my hands), I picked up a rock from the ground. It felt very light with edges sharp enough to slightly cut my finger. My worry suddenly turned into a soft and diffuse fear, gripping my guts and spreading throughout my body without being excessive. I murmured, “What the hell is this? Where am I?” I thought I’d hear my own voice, but besides the impression that the sound I produced stopped a bit quicker than usual, I heard scratching in the distance. Like a brief but certain fingernail scrape on a chalkboard. This wasn’t normal. I knew I was alone. No way anyone else was there; the nearest neighbors were a good 500 meters from my place. So I did what my instincts told me to do and called out. “Is someone there?” No response. I picked up my helmet and stood up. Maybe too abruptly because a clicking noise informed me of bad news. I’d dropped my damn keys.
I abandoned them before even starting to search. In such darkness, it was impossible to find anything, especially in this place. I started walking, so I wouldn’t freeze on the spot, towards my neighbors’ house. I moved slowly, and a new scratching sound, closer, was heard. Fear gripped my stomach, but I held on. No question of panicking; on the contrary, if I stayed calm, or at least didn’t freak out, the source of this damn scratching wouldn’t find me. Upon reaching this conclusion, I finally realized I’d gotten myself into a mess that was beginning to take a toll on my mental health. And this darkness didn’t help me keep a clear head at all. I started walking again, a bit faster, without even realizing it at first. “I need light, I don’t know where I am. And especially, with WHO?” This information resonated in my head like an obsession.
My slightly faster pace was echoed by the acceleration of the scratching sounds, an undeniable sign that I was being followed. I felt trapped; the darkness seemed to act like a vise, and the scratching noises probably heralded a hammer blow trying to strike me. But I had to move forward above all, and cautiously. If I tripped, who knew what horrors would descend upon me. Fear had overtaken my anxiety despite my attempts to reassure myself. I still held my helmet at arm’s length as if it were a talisman connecting me to my world. I was lost, and I couldn’t tell how long I’d been moving through this complete darkness, followed by invisible assailants, waiting like vultures for me to collapse. The prospect of ending my life like this cut the last thread that kept me tethered to reason. I ended up literally running to my doom. This sudden change of pace seemed to surprise the things following me because one of them let out a howl no earthly creature could ever produce, and the scratching noises accelerated. I was a good athlete, but this oppressive atmosphere seemed to slow my movements. I got out of breath and began to slow down. “You’re stupid,” I thought, “and now you’re even more screwed since they know you’re tired.”
Barely had I finished this thought when I felt a movement initiated by one of the creatures and a mass with a stench like a thousand open charnel pits made me fall. I was done for, finished, over. I felt a pressure followed by intense pain in my leg and I screamed. It was biting me, and the other scratching noises were getting closer. Trying to fight back, I found my helmet that had landed next to me. I grabbed it and swung it above my leg in a desperate effort to free myself from the thing. My attempt seemed successful as it was followed by a dull thud and the creature collapsed. I then noticed the first source of light since the power outage: the injured creature had left a glowing trail on my battered helmet, as if its blood was bioluminescent. Likewise, a puddle of this substance was spreading on the ground, and for the first time, I faintly saw my surroundings. The ground seemed black like volcanic rock, and I saw, as swift and agile as a feline, one of my pursuers. And I was struck with horror. It was as big as a wolf, but its skin was slimy and holed in places, revealing dark, sick organs. And their maw. My god... It was like a cross between a dog and a human! A human face with a snout, with that always slimy skin.
The luminescence of this blood triggered a reaction that made these monstrosities flee, howling as if struck by white-hot metal. The world around me seemed, from what little I could see, to tremble visually, and two images superimposed, like I was emerging from this hell to return to my world. I eventually felt grass under my feet and my back on a sidewalk slab, as if I was laid across it. The streetlights reappeared as well. That was the last thing I remembered before losing consciousness.
I woke up in a hospital room, my brother looking at me with a worried expression. “Well, were you fighting dogs while drunk?” he said. “The only dog I’d fight is you, idiot,” I replied. “Seriously, look at your leg, it must have been a damn big dog.”
I wanted to tell him everything, but my good sense stopped me. He would never believe me. He explained that my neighbors had found me 200 meters past their house, my leg bleeding, and my motorcycle helmet battered and coated in a strange substance next to me. I pretended to remember nothing, but the vision of that disgusting creature never left me. After staying two days under observation, I was able to go home. The fear never left me because now one sensation always followed me, even when I was at home: it always seemed like I could faintly hear scratching in the shadowed areas, as if the sound was dampened by a barrier between its source and me. Since then, I never do anything without light. I have a necklace with a small light hidden in it and always a flashlight at hand. Because they’re waiting for complete darkness to fall upon me. Because they’re waiting for me.

"You know, people come up to me all the time, on the street, in the laundromat, or when I'm gassing up the ol' Macabre-Mobile, and they say to me: 'Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, how can you sit through those turkeys week after week without even batting an eye?' Well, you see this bat? And you see this eye? Only kidding, only kidding. It's my life! I mean, somebody's gotta do it, so why shouldn't it be me? Okay, okay, so the pay's not so great, but it isn't pretty being easy. I mean, nobody promised a rose garden, did they? Of course, they didn't exactly promise me a cactus garden either, but they still managed to stick it to me."
Strength/Damage Output

• Shoves a man back with her finger hard enough to put him through a desk.
  
• Punches a woman out of her padded bra.
  
• Her nails are steel-coated, which she uses to (accidentally) pluck a man's eyes from his skull.
  
• Smashes up possessed pumpkins with strikes and throws.
  
• Bashes down a brick wall using a sledgehammer.
  
• Knocks out a giant monster of a man by throwing her shoe at his head.
  
• Throws her stilleto hard enough to impale into a man's skull, then snaps a heavy chain with her chest.
  
• Hits a robotic construct with a dinosaur egg hard enough to knock its head off.
  
• Lugs a 70 pound Marlin up six miles of a winding mountain road then around a half mile of castle.
  
• Casually carries with one hand what a manservant struggles to lift with two.
  

Speed/Agility

• Very athletic.
  
• Casually jumps a 5-foot fence. Then immediately after trips because she was running in heels.
  
• Outruns an angry mob.
  
• Outruns some angry dinosaurs.
  
• Runs in a circle for 55 minutes straight.
  
• Dodges flying pumpkins.
  
• Deflects a magic blast with her ring.
  
• Catches an attacking falcon out of the air.
  

Durability

• Tanks a punch to the face.
  
• Quickly shakes off being struck by lightning.
  
• Falls from a prop kaiju hand, then has it fall on top of her, to little ill effect.
  
• Tumbles down from a cliffside among boulders and a MTV-Rex, lands on the back of a baby dinosaur which then charges forward then tosses her from its back, and quickly recovers.
  
• Quickly recovers from her arms being stretched to twice their length by a torture rack.
  
• Rams into the side of a commercial airplane while flying at high speeds, then crashes through a roof, seemingly without injury.
  
• Survives being launched several places around a city hard enough to destroy moderate amounts of metal.
  
  • She claims this is partially due to the ability to "cushion [her] own landing".

Horror Movie Powers
Magic

• Capable of minor spells, moving shopping carts and fixing parking meters and the like.
  
  • Lifts the corner of a rug.
• Sets a sandwich on fire with her mind.
  
• Appears amidst the fog.
  
• Separates into three versions of herself, two of which then vanish once their job is done.
  
• Able to speak with another person across long distances.
  
• Wins a rigged bingo game using subconscious luck manipulation.
  
• Reading a passage from a spellbook surrounds her in a protective field, casting aside a downpour of syrup, and conjures a few manservants.
  
• Summons a demonic talent scout to get her competition a better job.
  
• Reanimates the dead to call out someone attempting to use their names to scam her.
  
• Teleports to the scene of copyright infringement, then teleports away to escape a groping.
  
• Spits up a giant leech, mimicking the actions of a doll on-screen.
  
• While attempting to heal Luigi of a zombification curse, accidentally turns him into a mummy, then a wolf-man.
  
• Accidentally transforms a fellow late-night public access film critic into a gorilla while trying to cast a love spell. She also possibly successfully casts the love spell immediately after.
  
  • Goes on a tear transforming random people into random creatures and objects trying to undo the spell.
  • Another attempt causes him to grow giant.
• Shifts a talking horse's outfit in an attempt to revert him to a human.
  
• Uses her ring to summon a rainstorm and douse a town's attempt to burn her at the stake.
  
• Removes a length of restraining rope from the cast of TNBC. It's possible it was placed there magically as well.
  
• While attempting to "beef up" a permanently sad man's happier side, she accidentally creates a second, wholly happy version of him. Completing the spell merges the two personality.
  
• Activates a portal to help send a man out of a pocket dimension and into the higher plane controlling it. For context.
  
• Can read minds.
  
• Capable of hearing the thoughts of animals.
  
• Extinguishes a fireplace, pulls down a curtain, and lights up a projector, all with the snap of her fingers.
  
• Does a magic space costume change.
  

The following feat is heavily dubious, but seems impactful enough to debate that it should be included in a thorough thread. I will explain the context and the arguments for and against its inclusion.

• Shoots a beam of fire that ignites a man fully in an instant.
  
  • This feat was performed as Elvira in-universe acting within a feature being filmed. The nature of how it was accomplished, through Elvira's power or special effects, goes completely unstated, with the only mention after the fact being Elvira saying "I usually meet a man before I burn him" to the stuntman she set on fire.
  • The argument for: This scene is explicitly set in pre-production filming, not an image of the final product which was color graded sepia. A later episode in the same series does contain at least one explicitly supernatural event.
  • The argument against: The rest of the episode has the characters skeptical of a haunting and "the supernatural" as a general concept, ultimately to be proven correct. Also, a later scene which is also depicting pre-production filming similarly has special effects appear in the scene, despite seeming as if the audience is meant to understand that these did not really happen.

Concoctions

• Uses a collection of household supplies to create and animate a man (unfortunately he is gay).
  
• Concocts a love potion (with extra starch) that, when dropped on the ground nearby, completely paralyzes a man.
  
• Quickly cooks up a tentacled monster that manhandles several men.
  
• Uses an old family recipe to boil up a slimy reptile monster.
  
  • A modified version of the recipe induces intoxicating and aphrodisiac effects in those who consume it.
• Cooks a sentient gingerbread man, then tortures him.
  

Objects of Power

• Elvira regularly uses genuine magic artifacts for her show. Though most are rented.
  
• The ring on her finger deflects a bolt of magic that shatters a small amount of stone.
  
  • Absorbs and redirects a killing spell back at its caster.
• Pulls out a semi-automatic energy weapon that mows through zombies.
  
• Keeps a jar of radioactive waste on hand. In this instance it irradiates a small anole to roughly the size of a crocodile, powerful enough to shake the ground by walking and eat a delivery guy.
  
• Has a spray bottle of holy water which she uses to dismiss an IRS agent.
  
• Gives her boss a drink laced with a love potion.
  
• Eats a small pill expecting it to turn her into a giant monster, though it actually shrinks her down to the size of a mouse.
  
• Brings a concealed flamethrower into a wrestling match.
  

Other

• Accidentally uses the Wayback Machine to travel 10,000 years into the future.
  
• Rides in on a sleigh pulled by a magic reindeer, stuffed with the greatest gifts of all (her merch).
  
• Twists her head all the way around on her neck, and breathes out smoke.
  
  • There's a scary demon face on the back.
• Flies around as a disembodied head.
  
  • Flies into and shatters the camera.

Familiars
Gonk

• Transforms from a poodle to a mouse to squeaze through a small jail cell hole.
  
• Transforms from a mouse to a rottweiller and helps to tear off a man's bindings.
  

Bela

• Elvira's pet shapeshifting demon familiar.
  
• Turns into a small goldfish, then launches as an octopus to attack.
  
• Turns into a cat and a parakeet.
  
• Turns into a frog and leaps hard enough to knock over a large man/ghost.
  
• Turns from a frog to a large octopus mid-leap.
  
• Turns from a capybara into a bear.
  
• Turns into a chimpanzee.
  
• Turns into a gorilla to carry around a barrel of spirits.
  
• Turns from a spider monkey to a sheep to a snake.
  
• Helps Elvira recreate the ending of a sea monster movie, growing and shrinking between various aquatic forms very quickly.
  
• Sniffs out a lurking enemy as a bloodhound, then threatens her as a mammoth.
  
• Transforms from a mouse to a bat to a snake to a chimp, and then again in reverse, in rapid succession, in order to sneak into a house and steal some documents.
  
• Transforms from a pig to a elephant and sprays several paparazzi with her trunk.
  

Skills

• Kicks off one shoe to short-circuit a pair of tesla coils and undo electronic restraints.
  
• Drives her car, with a parade float attached, with enough skill to smack a monster away with a fish-tail.
  
• Paints up an impressionist portrait in under a minute.
  
• Skilled at tassel twirling.
  

Other

• Has a colander which, of course, can protect her from massive rocks crashing through the studio ceiling. It's also good at protecting from alien mind control.
  
• Has been hosting horror movies on tv since before movies and tv were invented.
  
  • Is officially recognized by the United States government as a historic site. Also her birth certificate was chiseled into a stone tablet. So she's probably immortal.
  • Was alive and fully grown and doing her schtick in the 1850s.
• Capable of moving her hand in a jittery fade in real life.
  
• Skilled at chainsaw pumpkin carving.
  
• An expert in comics manufacturing and production.
  
• Can be used as a floatation device.
  
• Takes a hit from the evil bong.
  
• It's not a wig. It's a macaque.
  

"Goodbye, darlings. And as always... unpleasant dreams."

Remembering the movie Twister some 28 years after seeing it twice in the theater – not for the story but the vicarious experience of watching cinematic tornadoes rearrange the built environment.
These days, so many close-encounter videos of tornadoes-in-the-wild populate the internet that Twister-the-movie comes off as tame, timid even.
The tornadoes that ravaged Iowa yesterday – twenty were detected – favored windmills. All those windfarms that turn a tidy profit from spring storms like yesterday’s were suddenly running for their lives, as a tornado lifted a windmill off the ground, broke it in half across its knee, propeller blades shooting off in all directions.
I don’t really doubt the functionality of obsessive capital accumulation, but how do we rebuild windfarms and repopulate towns after destructive tornadoes pass through unless we let capital flow freely through the fields?
What if we do that before emergencies strike? Before the familiar hook appears on the Doppler weather radar?
In Greenfield, Iowa, yesterday, an EF3 tornado exploded all structures in its path from one end of that town of 2000 to the other – a town divided,
at least among those whose property survived, sides delimited by de-barked trees stripped of their branches. Even after the debris is cleared away, and a certain number of structures are rebuilt –
even if all the structures are rebuilt – the city will have a scar for the rest of its life, stories to tell to go along with it. That was yesterday,
and I picture first-responders passing the torch to second responders who start coordinating efforts to clean up and repair – how all that critical activity starts with a sensible and agreed-upon order that radiates
through governmental agencies, the banking sector, private contractors. The Greenfield people and those in surrounding counties will look out for each other more than usual for the rest of the year – this by virtue of having been visited by a spontaneous, uncompromising authority from above.
To Twister’s credit, the film attempts to address the tragic nature of life and death, how it torments, then challenges, which is when we become ever wiser or die fools.
We expect way too much from a spring popcorn flick if we expect Twister to provide a credible response to such a conceit, so instead it opts for reunification of the self – this, it proposes, is the likely outcome
of going all the way through an awareness of the hyperreal, depicted in the film by once-lovers turned upside down, side by side, staring at the untroubled blue sky.
This is what weather researchers believe exists inside a tornado, like the eye of a hurricane – hanging upside down in the eye of a cyclone,
not to be confused with cyclopes – or maybe do. Confuse the two! Lovers reunified in the upside down eye of a cyclopes, which inverted posture raises us above the sky, assigns us the existential task of comprehending the hyperreal by inverting parts of it, being thus inverted.
In the scene that immediately follows, the male lead and the female lead lay side by side, and he gropes her breasts. I don’t so much mean the one character gropes the other –
I mean, the one actor runs his hand across the breasts of his costar. They must have thought that was a funny take, those folks in the editing bay, when they cut the film,
but then they take it a step farther, announce their existential relief by pointing to a house left standing, a surviving family climbing out of a root cellar.
A different cut of the ending might have had the female lead go ungroped, and the two of them motion to the farmstead still there, say glumly: modernity – it remains with us –
get up, start assessing the damage. Whichever ending the film leaves us with, the message it delivers to itself arrives earlier, when the putative villains – rival storm chasers with a corporate sponsor –
are impaled by a transmission tower that shoots through the windshield of their SUV rolling down the road, which vehicle is then sucked up by the tornado, like the funnel has skewered them with a toothpick, then raises them to its lips before spitting them out in disgust, and they whistle to the ground, explode on impact, like something lifted from Star Wars.
Can that be accurate? What the fates think of corporate sponsorship? I take it to be a comment about rivalry generally, how films seem to require it, plus epic explosions, in order to be publically transmissible.
Poor Cary Elwes – gallant rogue to the princess bride turned sneering rival with a transmission tower thrust through his windshield. If the film is haunted by a tormented father –
I picture a studio executive who’s wondering where the money is going to come from for these splashy FX –
then it is debased a little later in the film by a big barrel of corporate sponsorship in the form of soft drink logos, which are thrust in front of us, fetishized, the whole cast giddy about handling the logos.
They didn’t really need the earlier dialogue about corporate sponsorship – they could have said of poor Cary Elwes – his parents are rich or he has family in the business or his wealth comes from drug dealing – whatever – but instead, the script forces us to self-hate by sneering at the thing the film is – nakedly corporately sponsored –
while also sneering at the audience for the deals the film had to strike to finance those magnificent digital tornadoes we all remember. You forced us to, the film contends, blaming us for watching it.
Follow the thread through yet another knot – collecting data is what drives the plot and which collected data signals triumph. Data to do what? Model tornadoes, which digital models fill the frames of Twister already.
It seeks what it already has – that’s the message. The plot flaunts its willingness to deceive as often as it desires to please. This gives us license to read more into the film than the film knows about itself,
such that the tormented father – poor Cary Elwes – seems to be adjacent to domestic violence, possibly sexual abuse, such that scenes of shrieking and running for one’s life are juxtaposed with scenes of mild domesticity and scripted chatter.
Then the tormented father plus family take a job as caretakers of a winter lodge, slowly go mad, before a tornado disintegrates them on a drive-in movie theater screen.
Then the tormented father, drunk again, chucks the bottle at the tornado, heads off to take a nap on the couch, and low and behold, the bottle never hits the ground.
Then the tormented father gropes his daughter’s breasts in celebration, feels blessed when the tornado leaves the household intact, the family unharmed.
Twister is filled with difficult narrative details like this, like the narrative is trying to stun us with its visuals while slipping strange messages into the back of our minds.
Biblical – I guess that’s what you’d call the aesthetic. Oh tormented father, why did you create such suffering in Greenfield?
A storm-chaser video shows the Greenfield tornado disintegrating a farmstead, tearing apart windmills. It is an extraordinary sight, the sort of image that suggests designs so much larger than we are.
A helical suction vortex, it’s called, and it has the shape of some special drill bit designed to cut through stone – that’s the thing that passed through the town of Greenfield. Locals say four people died.
A couple is interviewed. She describes running with her baby to a friend’s house that had a basement, covering up, praying for the first time in her life, but before she could utter the words dear lord, a staircase fell on top of her. She shielded her baby.
The husband is interviewed in the middle of a debris field that was his life’s possessions the day before. He says: This is everything I’ve ever had . . . years. But at the end of the day, as long as they’re okay, it’s garbage.
He is speaking from the perspective of the freed. Yes, he is devastated by what he lost, the fear of what more he could lose, but he is also freed. He can see that they were living in a debris field before the tornado arrived.
They will raise their daughter differently than if they hadn’t been hit by a tornado. They will teach her to resist the compulsive accumulation of capital, of possessions. She will become a nomad. She will walk around the country, discussing the nature of the good life, bringing about justice where she can.
The EF3 tornado that struck Greenfield would have been rotating at least 136mph, which is the threshold speed of an EF3. Tornadoes are rated by the damage they cause, which indicates wind speed.
Compare this to the EF5 that hit Joplin, Missouri, on this very day in 2011. Its rotational speed was estimated to be greater than 200mph, which is enough to devastate most everything in its path, except those structures designed to survive bomb blasts.
An EF5 tornado is an end-of-the-world sort of weather event – the built environment simply cannot account for the possibility of such stresses, and so urban landscapes and planned communities except their fate – if an EF5 appears, run for your lives.
The Joplin tornado appeared 17 minutes after a warning was issued, entered the city two minutes later, and grew to a mile in diameter.
The tornado was on the ground in Joplin for some portion of its total lifespan of 40 minutes, and in that time, damaged 8000 buildings, 4000 of which were destroyed, and killed 158 people, injuring more than a thousand others.
The Joplin tornado tossed heavy equipment hundreds of yards from job sites, lifted parking barricades out by the roots, scraped asphalt off the roads. Steel-framed buildings were twisted on their foundations, and brick and metal warehouses were wiped clean.
Those who survived describe it less like a tornado than a dark furious wall – that’s what they were seeking shelter from.
The most compelling portrait of this witness comes from Pizza Hut employee, Dan Fluhart, who recounts how his manager, Christopher Lucas, hustled the employees and the customers into the walk-in freezer for protection.
I’ve watched the interview again and again, first trying to imagine Dan’s state of mind mere days after his brush with death, then trying to imagine Christopher’s state of mind, with the tornado sirens going off, a bunch of people around him, inside a window-rich structure bolted to a slab.
Dan says that Christopher hustled everyone into the walk-in freezer, and they waited there in the dark who knows how long before people began to be ripped out of it by the tornado.
Christopher wrapped a cord around the inside handle of the door, then wrapped the other end around his arm and leaned way back, using his weight to try keep the door shut between the inside and certain death.
Tornadoes sound like freight trains when they get close, so imagine the loudest freight train of them all, a mile wide, traveling at more than 200mph. That was what they were trying to keep out of that walk-in freezer.
Then the Joplin EF5 tornado took that door off its hinges, taking Pizza Hut Manager Christopher Lucas with it, still holding onto the cord.
Dan says he tried to hang on to Christopher, but he slipped away. The rest of the structure came apart around them, but Dan and others somehow survived.
We can prevaricate about whether Christopher’s sacrifice technically saved lives, though I’m willing to bestow hero status the moment he wrapped that cord around his arm. In the face of extraordinary danger, he died heroically.
When we try to redeem the suffering of the Joplin tornado, tornadoes of all kinds, I picture a park statue of Christopher in exactly that pose – the freezer door, the cord, his arm – his body dramatically posed to play tug-of-war with an EF5 tornado.
The Pizza Hut visor and uniform would be there, too – all part of the motif of the service class rushed to the front of the line when the time comes to square off against forces of nature, to hold their post against acts of god.
Would park goers want to be reminded of that sort of thing? Should heroic statues lift up the world that is or inspire worlds to come? These would be the sorts of questions the statue would inspire.
Sure, pigeons would perch on Christopher, just as they do the statues of warriors on horseback and noble leaders gazing into the future. But that Pizza Hut manager who offered himself to the tornado before the others – maybe he would have found that funny.
Afterward: This metaphysical weather report was not compensated by Pizza Hut Inc. The last time I ate Pizza Hut pizza, I was desperate, and I thought it tasted predigested. I can easily imagine Pizza Hut pizza being more like a thick liquid than a circular solid, like you could extrude another slice from the sorts of machines that serve fake ice cream, but it would be hot. Hot extruded pizza in a waffle cone – my impression of the brand.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some twenty-four hour news channel, talking about a mass break-out in a nearby mental asylum.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by murdering a doctor and taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

I lost my job a couple months ago when the entire business I worked for abruptly went bankrupt and shut down. To make ends meet, I started driving for Uber late into the night. It was about 3:30 or 4 AM when I made the last drop-off on the night it happened.
The passenger was a strange, quiet man with a greasy T-shirt. His brown eyes looked flat and dead. I glanced into the rearview mirror as I dropped him off at a Victorian house in the middle of nowhere, making sure he left my car so he could wander off and wear a mask made of human skin or whatever people like that did on their days off. The house looked like something from a horror movie, all sharp turrets and dark windows with a blood-red exterior.
Dawn came early that day, a cancerous orange sky looming overhead. Needles of rain abruptly started falling sideways. Tired and hungry, I kept an eye out for somewhere to stop and eat as I drove through the filthy torrents of rain. I turned on the GPS for my apartment and sped through the dirty, empty streets of Frost Hollow.
Dark, dead trees rose overhead on both sides of me. I drove on for a few minutes, seeing only a single house far back at the beginning of the road that entire time. I didn’t know this area, so I was pleasantly surprised when a brightly-lit diner appeared on my left. A blinking sign cheerily read “Happy’s Restaurant”.
The parking lot was entirely empty except for a truck that looked like it had been there for weeks. Leaves and dirt covered its windshield, and someone had written “CLEAN ME” in the grime in giant letters. I heaved a deep yawn as I pulled into the parking lot. I tried to check my phone, but there was no internet or service all the way out here. I hoped they had Wi-fi in the diner.
Happy’s Restaurant had enormous plate-glass windows wrapping around the sides and front of the restaurant. Light burst out onto the dark parking lot in harsh white streams as birds chirped in the forests around me, waking up to the new dawn. The architecture of the place looked straight out of the 1950s. I could imagine James Dean going there and chain-smoking cigarettes over a burger and a coffee.
I got out of the car, heading over to the front of the restaurant where I lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. The spicy menthol tobacco gave me a sudden jolt of energy. Blinking quickly, I smoked the cigarette as quickly as I could, feeling wide awake by the end of it. I stood under the canopy of the building, watching lightning erupt like missile flashes across the sky. The street remained dead and empty. I hadn’t seen a single other person since I had dropped off the weirdo at the nearby Victorian house.
I opened the glass door of the diner, hearing a bell ring overhead. I looked into the empty restaurant, seeing its sparkling clean tables. The smell of fresh coffee rose out in fragrant waves. Shrugging, I went down and sat at a table next to a TV in the corner. It was playing some local news channel.
“Two patients of the Graypath Psychiatric Hospital were able to break out by taking a nurse hostage. They had apparently planned the attack for weeks, making homemade knives out of screws taken out of the walls and other contraband that went undetected. The nurse escaped soon after, uninjured but in clear distress. The facility is considered a maximum-security hospital, with the majority of patients considered criminally insane and held until…”
“Hey, sorry bud, didn’t see you there,” a voice called out from the back of the empty restaurant. I jumped, turning to see who was speaking.
A man came out in a streaked, dirty apron. He was incredibly fat, probably at least three or four hundred pounds. Four greasy chins hung down on his neck like the wattles of a rooster. He reminded me of a circus freak, a slug-like man whose heavy footsteps shook the ground as he approached my table. He had red hands like a butcher. His face, too, was beet-red and covered in sweat with a tiny nose in the middle and giant, rubbery lips. His nametag said, “Frank”.
“Morning,” he mumbled. “What can I get for you? Our waiter never showed up so I’m the only guy here. I’ll have to take your order and cook it, if that’s OK.” I nodded happily.
“Yeah, that’s fine. I just want a coffee with extra cream and sugar and a Reuben with fries and an extra side of coleslaw.” He wrote it down on a dirt-streaked pad he pulled from his apron, taking a very long time and writing as slowly as possible. I watched his face closely. He reminded me of a clown, but his eyes were gray, the color of steel. They seemed freezing cold, almost inhuman. There was nothing clownish about them.
“OK, bud, that’ll be right up,” he said, grinning down at me. His yellowed teeth were covered in a thick layer of filmy grime. I noticed that some in the front were broken, as if he had a habit of getting his teeth knocked out in fights. He turned around, heading back into the kitchen in his strange, waddling gait. I wondered how Frank had gotten here. There was certainly no public transportation anywhere in this part of the state. But I figured he must have gotten dropped off. I looked down at my phone, hoping to find an open Wi-Fi connection to pass the time, but there was nothing here. Sighing, I looked around the restaurant.
A creepy clown mannequin stood in the corner, holding a sign that read, “BE HAPPY. EAT THOSE FEELINGS AWAY.” Its red-and-white make-up was all sharp points and hard angles. Around its grinning mouth, the red paint formed into a pointed half-circle, accentuating the gleaming white teeth that shone between its thin lips.
A few moments later, Frank came out with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a bowl of creamers and sugar packets. He plopped them down in front of me, grunting and ambling back towards the kitchen. I smelled the odor of roasting meat and cooking oil rising from the kitchen in delicious, aromatic waves.
I couldn’t wait for my Reuben. Out of all sandwiches in the history of sandwiches, I thought Reubens were probably the most delicious. The way the corned beef mixed with the Thousand Island dressing, sauerkraut and marble rye bread made it seem like those ingredients were made by God specifically to make such a divine sandwich.
My stomach growled as I waited eagerly. I continued scanning the restaurant, listening to the hum of the TV next to me when I spotted what looked like spatters of blood in front of the swinging kitchen doors. I used to work in a restaurant when I was a teenager, a crappy little pizza place, and I remembered how the ground beef always came soaked in wet blood. I found it odd that no one had cleaned it up yet, though. It looked dried and clotted, as if it had been there for days.
The TV was still talking about the escaped mental patients when Frank brought out a giant plate of delicious, fragrant sandwich and golden fries. I could feel my mouth watering as he laid it out with a clunk on the table in front of me.
“Enjoy, buddy,” he said, giving me a sly wink. His fish-like lips formed into a faint half-smile. He turned away, and I immediately dug in.
The Reuben was probably the best Reuben I’ve ever tasted. The corned beef was perfectly cooked, the bread crisp and fresh. The fries were golden and had a nice, satisfying crunch. I wanted to compliment Frank, but he was nowhere to be seen. Shrugging, I finished the first half of my sandwich.
As I got to the last bite, I noticed something odd and crunchy in the meat. I thought it was a coin or something at first. I immediately spit out the entire wad of half-chewed sandwich onto a napkin, looking down.
In the middle of the meat sat a painted human fingernail. It was ripped-off, the bottom jagged and sharp. At that moment, I felt a sudden urge to vomit.
***
I sat there for a few seconds, simply staring, my mind racing in circles like a rat in a wheel. Was it a fake fingernail? How had it gotten into my sandwich?
I picked it up, bringing it closer to my right eye. I saw black, clotted blood and thin strands of flesh still hanging from the bottom. It was definitely not fake.
Rising quickly, I grabbed my car keys and phone off the table and started stumbling towards the door. There were no rational thoughts at that moment, just an insistent rising sense of panic and dread. That was the moment the lights at the diner cut out. An eerie, gurgling laugh floated out of the kitchen.
The cancerous yellow light of the new day was filtering through the stormy clouds. I looked through the plate-glass front door and saw a face peering in with wide, insane eyes. I recognized the man I had dropped off at the Victorian house down the road. He had carved a fresh question mark into his forehead sometime after I had last seen him. His face looked slack and empty as he stared inside, his dead, blank eyes roaming left and right, looking for someone- looking for me.
In his right hand, I saw an enormous meat cleaver streaked with fresh, dripping blood. He raised a trembling left hand and started opening the door. In the darkness and silence of the diner, I could hear every sound amplified a thousand-fold: every drop of rain hitting the roof, every thudding beat of my heart, every tiny creaking of the door as it swung open.
I heard the doors to the kitchen swinging open at the same moment. In terror, I frantically looked around, seeing the bathrooms only a few feet away in the corner of the restaurant. As silently as I could, I slunk towards them, afraid to look back. I ripped open the women’s restroom door, peeking out as I closed it behind me.
I could see the man holding the meat cleaver slowly creeping past the tables, bending over to check underneath them. I could hear him whispering to himself.
“I must baptize them in the blood and send them out into the world,” he muttered quietly. “Must find the blood… eat the body, drink the blood to see God…”
Silently, I closed the door and groped around in the dark until I found the lock. Inhaling deeply, I clicked it to the side. The subtle clicking noise seemed as loud as a gunshot in the silence.
I took my cell phone out of my pocket and turned, seeing a scene from a nightmare. Corpses littered the floor of the bathroom. A waitress in a button-up vest sat up against the wall in a corner. She looked to be in her mid-twenties with dark brown eyes, black hair and pale, creamy skin. Dozens of deep stab wounds gleamed in her chest and stomach. Her neck had been so deeply slashed that her head had nearly been decapitated.
Even worse, I saw chunks of flesh cut out of her body, chunks from the meat of her cheeks, arms, legs and fingers. I suddenly had a very good idea of where the fingernail had come from and what I had been eating. I gagged, retching.
Next to her sprawled the corpse of an old man in a business suit. His shirt and jacket had been ripped open, and a giant question mark carved deeply into the loose skin of his bird-like chest. Stuck in one eye, I saw the gleam of a wicked butcher’s knife. It had sliced the eye in half, the blade disappearing deeply into his brain and skull. The other eye stared glassily up at the ceiling.
I heard a light tapping at the bathroom door, a kind of polite knocking that someone might use if they were wondering if it was occupied. I was afraid to breathe. I spun, looking at the wooden door, the only thing standing between me and certain death at this moment.
“Is anyone in there?” a low, raspy voice asked, the same voice that had mumbled about drinking blood. “Occupado?”
“Hey, Question Mark, what the fuck you doing?” the gruff voice of Frank asked. “Did you find him?” His tone rose into one of utter excitement, like a child on his way to Disneyworld.
“The bathroom’s locked,” Question Mark replied. “I think we got a little lamb in there, ready for the slaughter.”
“Ready for the grill, you mean!” Frank said, giving an insane laugh that reminded me of the coldness of empty space. I turned, running over to the old man’s corpse. The game was up, i knew. I wrapped my hands around the sticky, blood-coated handle of the butcher’s knife. I started pulling up, but it was firmly implanted in the old man’s skull. At that moment, I heard a sound that sent waves of terror dancing up my spine: the sound of keys jingling in a lock.
A rush of adrenaline made the world brighten and my vision turn white in the harsh glare of the phone’s light. I laid the phone down on the top of the toilet and, with all of my strength, yanked up on the knife. There was a cracking noise, then a wet sucking sound as cold blood sprayed my face and neck. The knife slipped out in a rush, sending me flying back.
At that moment, the door flew open. Frank and Question Mark stood there, side by side, two grinning lunatics with knives in their hands. The orange light from the sunrise dimly illuminated their silhouettes. They looked over to where the cell phone lay on the toilet, not seeing me leaning against the back wall, breathing heavily in an animal panic. Before they had time to react, I ran forwards, the blade facing out towards my attackers.
Question Mark turned towards me at the last second as I brought the knife into his throat. It sliced easily into the flesh. His eyes widened in pain and surprise as he gurgled, choking on his own blood. He tried to bring the meat cleaver up, but his foot slipped on the slick blood coating the floor.
I yanked the knife back out, turning to Frank. I saw a flash of metal and felt something pierce deeply into the side of my stomach. A roaring pain like acid burned its way through my flesh. Screaming as warm spurts of blood shot from the stab wound, I ran at Frank with the last of my energy, stabbing upwards into his belly and aiming at his aorta in the center. We fell into each other, both critically injured. The blood burst from his ruptured artery, spurting like a firehose with each rapid beat of his heart.
His eyes rolled up in his head as he fell back, landing on the corpse of Question Mark. Staggering and leaning against the wall, I tried making my way towards the front of the store, but felt the energy draining out of me like water through a sieve. Waves of agony crashed through my body, taking my breath away. I collapsed to my knees, crawling slowly towards salvation. Frothy bubbles of blood flowed over my lips as I coughed, choking.
I heard sirens in the distance, approaching rapidly. It sounded like dozens of police cars were heading in our direction. Screaming and crying, I dragged myself towards the front door, leaving warm streaks of blood smeared across the restaurant floor. The gurgling death gasp of Frank rattled noisily behind me. I could feel my life draining out of the deep stab wound in the side of my stomach.
As I reached the door, police cars came into the restaurant parking lot with a screeching of tires. Men began running out with their guns drawn. The world went black as I reached up towards the door, wanting only to get out of this restaurant and never see this town again.
***
I woke up in the hospital a couple days later. Emergency surgery had stopped the bleeding, and many blood transfusions had saved my life. Police were waiting around my bed as I regained consciousness, frantic to ask me questions. I told them I didn’t know anything, that I had just stopped at the restaurant to eat and gotten attacked.
“We had gotten multiple missing persons reports over the last couple weeks,” the gruff homicide detective with a face like a bulldog said, “but we didn’t connect the victims to the diner until the day we found you there. Both of the escaped patients are dead, though, thanks to you.” He patted me on the shoulder. I shook my head, too weary to respond. If only they had investigated sooner, I could have avoided this entire nightmare.
But, then again, I wouldn’t have tasted the best Reuben sandwich in the universe, either.

Including the movies, I also watched Atlantis before SG-1 because the practical effects for the symbiotes freaked me out too much in ep1 so my bf had to gradually get me into it lol. Also apologies for the points being all over the place series-wise I'm going from freshest memories to weakest and I apologise if a lot of my complaints are dumb I do genuinely love the series.
The biggest point I wanted to make is searching through this sub I found a post from liek 4 years ago that resonated so hard with me, shoutout to the person wh osaid they wanted to climb Daniel like a tree, based.
Speaking of: the whole glasses on-glasses off Daniel was jarring, does his eyesight just get magically better and then not or are the glasses just to make scenes hotter? Also how many times does this man need to ascend? Jesus.
I gotta admit, it REALLY weirded me out, the whole symbiote thing at first, especially calling Teal'c symbiote at first "Junior" like.. maybe I'm a bit terminally online but the amount of horrific MPreg art I've had to see of other fandoms it really weirded me out. I'm glad Tretonin became a thing.
Also another thing that seemed to occur a lot was peoples wives getting stolen by other men, like probably the hardest thing for someone to go through, very rude, none of those good boys deserved to be cuckolded like that.
Mitchell grew on me, at first I think his writing was really weak but he became one of my favorites (i'd climb him like a tree too), I liked his demeanor and I wish he got to show more of him flying jets around. Vala was fun but I really don't know how they could just accept the apology of a woman who tried to steal a US space battleship and grope all over Daniel when he clearly wasn't into it. Little weird to write him into being into her later on but I guess I'm just happy he got to heal and have closure about his (ex?)-wife.
Tok'ra sucked. Hated them. All they ever did was screw over SG-1 and use them and they kept claiming they were homies. Nah they basically said 'fuck you you're untrustworthy even though you let us slurp up Carters dad and saved our asses including one of our queens' and the big fuck you of being completely absent during the Ori season.
I actually liked the Ori as a villain, I hated Adrea though she was just.. weird, why hot mommy leading a bunch of old magic dudes? Why didn't we use the anti-prior devices more? Why did SG-1 just actively get fucked at every turn? WHY DIDNT WE SHOOT ADREA WHEN THE BIG OLD DRAGON WAS COMING SHE WAS POWERLESS HELLO?
Also during the movies I got really excited about the Achilles being the boat even if it's... a boat. He's just my favorite mythology guy. I also cried every time Daniel got hurt or sad in the movies and wanted to give up, Michael Shanks is a awesome actor. Also I'm in the camp of liking Ark of Truth (dumb weapon but still) more than Continuum, maybe because Continuum ending meant no more fun space friends :(
EDIT EDIT EDIT: I JUST REMEMBERED PETE. WHO THE FUCK IS PETE. WHY IS HE SUDDENLY CARTERS BF. WHY IS HE SO WEIRD. WHY IS HE HERE. YUCK YUCK YUCK #SAYNOTOPETE im so glad she noped out of being with that fucking WEIRDO who we just decided to tel leverything about the stargate program to because he got in a shootout like?? no?? stop??
also the fraiser dying episode goes hard i loved it i missed her so much but i loved it the new doctor thats landry's daughter? fuck her rude bitch i bet she doesn't even give out lollipops she just calls you fat and to "lose weight, fatty" :(
Also shoutout to the naked space flower planet episode it was so good I loved how weird it was.
Extra Bonus thoughts: Rodney McKay is incredible and funny as hell in Atlantis and I hated how the kept being racist / fucking over the one Wraith literally giving their "we're gonna make you un-suckables now" treatment a try, and how the ending was just driving off in a convertible to some rad music? Okay that was kinda based
Extra Extra bonus, I just watched Universe first episode last night. A few takeaways other than how sad this shit is trying to be.

1. I don't even remember his name but are you seriously going to put the supposed (I think) self-insert protag in a fucking "YOU ARE HERE" shirt to really drive the point home? CAN I REALLY JUST PLAY VIDEOGAMES TO BECOME PART OF THE STARGATE TEAM? WHAT
2. That sex scene jumpscared me I literally covered my face until it was over
3. no eye candy so far character wise 0/10 except for our old homies showing up
4. i'm not gonna cry over a politician dying no matter how sad you try to paint it lol

ANYWAY thanks for listening to my incoherent ramblings of my thoughts of the Stargate shows as a new fan I love my space friends and I hope they are having an incredible space life THANKS heres a real reaction of me takin all the stargate content i can get i miss my space friends

I’m completely new to dating. I’m 18 and he’s 20. I don’t know how dating works really and I’m VERY nervous but I do really like this guy and we have a lot in common from what I heard on the first date, so I’m interested in pursuing a relationship with him potentially. The issue is, I don’t know what’s normal for this stage in dating. we just had our second date and I made the mistake of deciding on the movies which meant we were sitting in silence for two hours. The conversation after was very awkward and we parted ways shortly after. We went for coffee before the movie but didn’t have a lot of time to chat before it was time to go. We’re both very socially awkward people, but on the first date I definitely think we had a lot of chemistry once the conversation got going. Over the two dates we’ve been on, however, he hasn’t complimented me at all or made any physical contact. Now I don’t mean like groping or kissing or anything like that that’s not necessarily something I would have wanted on the first couple dates, but we haven’t hugged, held hands, or even made any physical contact whatsoever. Is that a bad sign? I struggle with overthinking so I was going to try to initiate physical contact by resting my hand on his while we watched the movie but I overthought it and only got as far as resting it on the arm rest beside him in hopes he might make the move I was too afraid to (which he didn’t end up doing). It just overall felt so awkward and I felt so bad because I do really like him I’m just not sure how to express that without freaking myself or him out 🥲 What should I do? Preferably something low risk even… I just don’t want to blow my chance with him- also is this a bad sign? Or a sign he’s not really interested in me? I suggested a third date and he said yes but that could have been just him being polite and he might not have any intention to follow through… I don’t know.. help! Any advice would be appreciated! Also I’m very anxious that he somehow would stumble upon this post so I’ll probably delete it once I get a few answers. ^{^}

link to the thread, I will provide further below
https://www.reddit.com/Animemes/comments/1ct7fde/its_like_watching_a_silent_voice_and_still_hating/
The Setting and explaining the title
It all starts with meme about a horrible main character in a anime called Moshuku Tensei. The OC compares the main character, called Rudeus or Rudy, with another one from an anime called a silent voice. The latter, a silent voice, is a beautiful and amazing movie about bullying, self worth, growth as a person and overcoming oneself. It deals with suicide, depression, social exclusion and overall is a very sad but touching movie. It is honestly a great watch and a recommendation for everyone. Its main character was a horrible child, but shows genuine growth and seeks redemption to the deaf girl that he bullied.
The other anime, from the before mentioned series called Moshuku Tensei, deals with an anime centered around a 35-ish year old loser (overweight shut in who plays video games all day and was caught watching kiddie porn on the day of his parents funeral) that dies in our world and is reborn as a baby in a fantasy world. Now, it is a very overdone genre, called isekai, but I am a lover for this genre, so I too gave it a go, and BOY does it hit you early on with how exactly this anime is going to roll.
Our main character, who starts out as a BABY and then grows up first to a young boy (later on he will fully grow up to a grown up), exhibits continuous perverted behaviour. For example he has a fascination with underwear of the maid or those of his loli (loil =character with a clear child-esque body physique, even if said character is 100 years old) magician teacher. Later when he is 9 he meets his cousin who he tries to teach magic too.. and maybe also try to fuck on the side. Along the way he meets various young female characters to whom he has overall perverted thoughts and even acts on some of these like literally groping the girls (remember, our main character has the mind of a 35 year old grown up, in the body of a child. He is fully aware of what he is doing). While the anime is bad (I stopped at the first half of season 1 but from what I heardit continues in the same vein), the manga is even worse. Which is where we roll back to our original post, where our meme creator is mad that people hate on his beloved main character, a guy that later in the manga will fuck his before mentioned cousin (at the tender age of 13 if what I was told is correct).
Comments from the thead
I recommend going through the thread, but I will post some highlights here:
Luckily, not all users are complete degenerates and point out that the comparison to a flawed young adult who hates himself for how he treated other children when he was young, and a character who gets ACTIVELY rewarded for being a pedo are the same. And this is were I will begin sharing some of the drama:
First we have a very sane take of a user pointing out the horrible comparison, however, not everyone agrees. One person especially is adamant, that Rudy is not a groomer.
Another use is mad, because all our MC did was protect those that he loved... Ignoring the little fact that is posted right afterwards by another user (the fact being that he has a love interest with a girl HE FUCKING BABY SAT)
Another person basically saying "keep watching/reading, it makes sense later why he has multiple wives that are definitely not child like
Another user is upset that no one appreciates the character growth of said pedo
The End
I will end it here with a gentle reminder to not piss in the popcorn. Again, while anime like Moshuku Tensei are just shitty pedo fantasy stories, there are genuine good ones too. As I stated above, I really do recommend everyone to watch a Silent Voice to also see that the medium has a lot of good things to offer. Anyways, have a nice day!

Bit of a longer post, sorry bout that, but I felt it was time, perhaps once again, to point out the flaws and limitations in the CDC’s stats on sexual violence, specifically as they relate to the National Intimate Partner Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS), which is the source of all the fun stats on sexual violence that get thrown around by the 451 percenters. Who are the 451 percenters? Those the folks who believe and spread the lies bout sexual violence being endemic to society. Everyone’s a sexual predator! All 451 percent of women are violated, and all 451 percent of men are violators.
TL;DR: An analysis and rebuttal to the CDC and NISVS’s statistics on sexual violence. The CDC uses NISVS to generate the stats on punny sexual violence that make wild claims, like one third of all women, etc… the 451 percenters’ claims bout punny sexual violence. They use a ‘yes means yes’ method of determining what counts as punny sexual violence, which is aesthetics based. Elevating aesthetical concerns to ethically obligatory concerns is fascistic, and a grave moral fallacy. ‘Yes means yes’ is also puritanical, meaning it overly moralizes sexuality. Putting puritanical fascists in charge of determining how many punny sexual offenses are happening is like putting the KKK in charge of determining how many jews are sexual predators. “All 451 percent of them, obviously!”
Body Of The Post
‘Yes means yes’ is an aesthetical ethical concern, ‘Do I want it or not’. This is what the National Intimate Partner Violence Survey (NISVS) and the CDC use and reflect in their stats on sexual violence. Vibes. They are the ‘emmitt till got what he deserved’ crowd. Whistling at a lady is a criminalizable offense to these folks, a ‘punny sexual violence’.
‘No means no’ is an ethically obligatory concern, ‘Did I refuse it or not’. This is what the criminal stats on sexual violence use and reflect in their stats on sexual violence. Hard data. They are the ‘emmit till did nothing wrong’ crowd. Whistling at a lady is at most tasteless, emmitt till could do far better.
‘Wanting’ or ‘Not Wanting’ something does not consent make. I can want to fuck someone, but not consent to do so. I could not want to fuck someone, but nonetheless consent to do so. The former perhaps because I think it is a bad idea to fuck ‘em even tho I want to. The latter, perhaps because I think it is a good idea to fuck ‘em even tho I don’t want to.
The ‘yes means yes’ folks, the CDC & NISVS stats on sexual violence all mistake ‘wanting’ and ‘not wanting’ for ‘consenting’ and ‘not consenting’; these are not the same things. This is deliberate on their part too. They believe that ‘yes means yes’ is what ought to constitute a determination of sexual violence. Regardless of how y’all view that, it is a deeply controversial notion, and not necessarily reflective of what most people think of when they think of sexual violence.
‘Unwanted’ essentially means ‘I don’t like it’. It is a complaint bout the aesthetical qualities of the sexual encounter, not its consensualism. If this is at all unclear, the simplest method to understand why this is so is to note two unrelated aspects.
One is racism. People regularly ‘feel fearful’ of men for no reason at all, but they also feel fearful of men because of racism all the time. That fear factor ™ is what makes the encounter ‘coercion’ or ‘unwanted’. The person literally does nothing wrong, *just exists* and the other person freaks out.
Note in the quoted sections at the end of this post how much of the stats rely on fear and feelings to generate their numbers.
Two is the person came on too strong or in an undesirable way. The person flirts in a normal and perfectly fine way, but the other person freaks out. Think bout it people, for the love of god think bout it. ‘Coming on too strong’ and ‘an undesirable flirtation’ are being counted as ‘punny sexual violence’ in these stats.
It’s entirely puritanical, and entirely a concern bout aesthetics.
There are other sorts of coercive methods, but the point here is that the terms ‘unwanted’ and ‘coercion’ only really cash out as ‘I don’t like it for some reason or another’ in the CDC’s and NISVS’s stats.
When you see that lady spouting off bout her fears of mexican rapists, she’s reflected in these stats folks. They’re just surveys. People who lock their car doors in ‘bad neighborhoods’ are reflected in those stats.
These all translate to ‘I felt threatened’ (big black boy vibes) or ‘felt pressured’ (scary white guy vibes), or ‘felt in danger’ (native american coming to get you vibes), or ‘felt uncertain if you wanted it’ (arab terrorist vibes) or 'felt like I was being manipulated' (angry asian martial artists vibes) . Doesn’t have to be racism at play here either, women can be irrationally fearful of any man. Vibes.
The actions themselves are not criminalizable.
Non p-hacked stats try to avoid these kinds of obvious ambiguities in the language used to generate the 451 percenters’ stats. These folks however lean into the lies and deceptions, and deliberately use language designed to deceive people reading the stats into thinking that people have been harmed. They take language that means literally ‘I like or don’t like it’ and translate that to mean ‘I was sexually harassed, sexually assaulted, or even raped’.
This is how they inflate the numbers, so we get to the 451 percenters’ wacky ass beliefs; ‘451 percent of women will suffer egregious sexual violence to them at least fifty times in their lives’. All this means is vibes. 451 percent of women get some bad vibes bout some dudes.
You can hear it echoed in the bear or man discourse. Why do women choose the bear? Vibes and irrational fears. ‘We choose the bear because we don’t feel safe!’ translates directly to ‘Emmitt till whistled at me, and he’s a big black boy, that’s scary’ and ‘the mexican rapists are swarming over the border to get me’.
These are the stats that people point to when they try to justify their misandristic hot ass takes. They are self-referential to that same fear based aesthetic the stats are. The stats are reflective of peoples’ irrational fears, and people use those stats to justify their irrational fears, and people spread those fear based stats thereby spreading their unjustified fears. It’s a circle rub.
To criminalize these kinds of things is to be fascistic (treating aesthetics as if they were of obligatory concern), to believe that they are morally reprehensible is to be a puritan (overly moralizing sexuality).
The folks deriving these stats translate ‘unwanted’ (aesthetical ethics) to ‘sexual assault’, ‘sexual harassment’, or ‘rape’ (obligatory ethics), then lump everything together as ‘punny sexual violence’ to get the big numbers used to scare people and terrorize men. That’s called fascism.
“[T]here remains a likelihood of underreporting due to the sensitive nature of SV”.
This justification means that they do not trust people to report SV, ‘don’t believe women when they say they haven’t suffered any SV, manipulate the questions so they say yes to something they don’t think is SV, or which simply isn’t SV, and we’ll just call it SV of this or that sort. Later we’ll propagandize people so they too come to believe our puritanical misandristic hot ass takes.’
There is no lie nor hyperbole in what I am saying here. That is the rationale and the method. If you bone up on your academic lit in the topic, this is, well not verbatim what they say, I am lambasting them here, but this is the crux of what their argument and justifications are, and they explicitly hold that they ought be propagandizing people to their puritanical beliefs.
They push the fascistic (aesthetical ethical) and puritanical (overly moralized sexual ethics) discourse into the public by presenting stats that merely reflect fears and pretend that they are reflective of sexual violence. People then come to believe that those kinds of fear based concerns are actually sexual violence. An ‘unwanted flirtation’ becomes in their minds and only in their minds a sexual violence.
Emmitt till got lynched for whistling at a lady. They only disagree bout the racism, but he definitely deserved to be punished in some way like all men do for whistling at someone they think is hot af. Puritanism.
All just vibes, all but aesthetics, and all fascistically raised to a level of ethically obligatory concern.
“Just as SV is not limited to physically forced penetration, its perpetrators are not limited to strangers. Indeed, perpetrators of SV are more likely to be someone known to the victim. Sexual violence is a problem embedded in our society and includes unwanted acts perpetrated by persons very well known (e.g., family members, intimate partners, and friends), generally known (e.g., acquaintances), not known well or just known by sight (e.g., someone in your neighborhood, person just met) and unknown to the victim (e.g., strangers). “
Be afraid of everyone, any man out there could be your next rapist! That’s right ladies and gents, you’ve been raped several times already, you just didn’t know it. But don’t worry, the statisticians know better. They asked you an unrelated question you said yes to since you were too dumb to know that you were raped, and counted it as rape. Then they informed you that you ought be afraid of everyone in your community, lest they also rape you, unbeknownst to you of course. But again, don’t worry, the statistician will count those too.
As a measure of fear the 451 percenters capture, well or worse who knows, all the racism, sexism, bigotry, and various phobias in the society, and how those fears are transferred onto masculine bodies as imaginary perpetrators of punny sexual offenses. None of it is real, there are not 451 percent of sexual violences happening, 451 percent of men are not sexual predators, and 451 percent of women are not victims of sexual violence.
‘Safety culture’ mostly reflects irrational fears.
Ask the kkk how many black people are rapists, you’re gonna get a high number. Ask puritans how many people are punny sexual offenders, you’re going to get a very high number. Such is the most tame interpretation of what is going on. The 451 percenters are puritans, they’ve overly moralized sexuality, counting offenses to their sensibility rather than criminal actions.
Puritans informing you how ‘vile and wicked’ your sexual ways are; advocating to make their puritanical beliefs bout punny sexual offenses into legally enforceable laws. These are the same kinds of concerns bout a someone dressing too provocatively, such is a ‘punny sexual violation’ to the sensibilities of others.
The less tame version of this is that it is exactly what fascists do. Lie to people especially bout punny sexual offenses in order to ratchet up the fear levels in the population, so they run to them to solve the ‘problem’.
Could be both tho.
Either way, their misandry murders little boys. They celebrate terrorizing men, and rejoice in lynching folks. They’re despicable people.
Solutions?
Ruthlessly love them. Write them love poems, show them kindness and generosity of spirit, but give them not a dime in money, nor ever relent to their irrational fears. Extol their beauty and virtues, make love with them, utterly ruthlessly. Be overtly sexual bout it, in this give them no quarter, bring to an end their puritanism by giving them no plausible cause to be thus. No one under the duress of loves’ enticements and sexual pleasures be puritans. Be relentless, show them masculine sexuality; give them nothing to complain bout, but give them masculine sexuality. Don’t fall for their puritanism, be the boys of summer.
Respect a ‘no means no’ ethic as a code of obligatory actions. Use aesthetical ethics towards good sex with mutual respect given; don’t ever take that as a one way thing. Do not conflate the aesthetics of good sex, 'enthusiastic yeses’ with those of the ethics of obligation ‘no means no’. Don’t be puritans, don’t be fascists, be sex positivists.
Call out the stats when folks bring them up, refer people to these points, feel free to refer people to this post and/or the attached video. ‘But the CDC said’ is not a valid argument; they have put puritans in charge of determining punny sexual offenses. They find punny sexual offenses everywhere they look.
If you’re super coolio, start advocating against the CDC’s use of NISVS to determine what constitutes sexual violence. It doesn’t match with criminal data’s methods, it doesn’t utilize the metrics of ‘no means no’ which are the proper metrics to use, instead it utilizes what amounts to peculiar beliefs bout the aesthetics of sex as a means of measure for punny sexual offenses.
They are spreading a puritanical belief system bout punny sexual offenses, nothing more, and they are causing public health problems by spreading their lies. They are not counting sexual offenses, they are not a criminal justice system, they aren’t technically even in the business of understanding sexual violence. They are the Center For Disease Control, not the ‘center for social engineering sexual practices control’.
Original video on the topic, with some additional resources for understanding these issues in the description.
The Rest Of This Post Is References To The CDC, NISVS, And Crime Data Reports, Along With Some Quotes Thereof With Short Specific Retorts Highlighting The Relevant Info In The Quotes As It Pertains To The Post. This Is But A Small Sample Of How They Use Language Of Aesthetics To Make Their Ethical Claims, And How Their Language Is Misandristic.
sv_surveillance_definitionsl-2009-a.pdf (cdc.gov)
Fast Facts: Preventing Sexual Violence Violence Prevention Injury Center CDC
Key Terms & FAQs National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey (NISVS)Funded
Programs Violence Prevention Injury Center CDC
Some key quotes from this, Bolded text hereafter are coded for ‘yes means yes’ methods of understanding sexual violence, and sometimes misandristic language. Italicized text are quotes from the sources:
“Rape is defined as any completed or attempted unwanted [unwanted is an aesthetic criteria, not a consent criteria which is ‘a no was stated’ attempted while a real thing allows for further insertion of scary vibes to pad the stats, e.g. the blackness of the lover] ...includes times when the victim was drunk, high*, drugged, or passed out and unable to consent.* [puritanical belief bout drinking and drugs, e.g. one cannot consent if drunk or high. Note that it is separate from being drugged or passed out and unable to consent, and that criminally speaking being drunk or high is not indicative of a lack of capacity to consent, also note this is de facto applied to women only].
“Sexual coercion is defined as unwanted sexual penetration that occurs after a person is pressured in a nonphysical way. In NISVS, sexual coercion refers to unwanted vaginal, oral, or anal sex after being pressured in ways that include being worn down by someone who repeatedly asked for sex or showed they were unhappy; feeling pressured by being lied to, being told promises that were untrue, having someone threaten to end a relationship or spread rumors; and sexual pressure due to someone using their influence or authority.”
Unwanted is an aesthetic category, not a consent category. ‘Sexual coercion’ is not a criminal offense either. It is a puritanical belief bout sexuality that is based on a sex negative view, e.g. that sex is a bad unless and until magical words are said to make it into a good. Calling it ‘sexual violence’ is just lying. Coercion is defined misandristically to only be bout penetration, which precludes all the ways that women use sex and sexuality to manipulate, use, abuse, and harm people; note that there are essentially zero surveys done that include some ‘feminine coded coercive behavior’ into these stats. That is by design. Including not incidentally the way that women have historically and currently used irrational fears over their sexuality to terrorize men and get people murdered.
“Unwanted sexual contact is defined as unwanted sexual experiences involving touch but not sexual penetration, such as being kissed in a sexual way, or having sexual body parts fondled, groped, or grabbed.”
Unwanted is aesthetics, not consent. Also this literally describes flirting. I know they want to try and capture some other sort of notion, grossy mcgrosser pinning someone down and groping them, but all this describes here, and all the stats can possibly reflect, is flirting.
“Non-contact unwanted sexual experiences is defined as those unwanted experiences that do not involve any touching or penetration, including someone exposing their sexual body parts, flashing, or masturbating in front of the victim, someone making a victim show his or her body parts, someone making a victim look at or participate in sexual photos or movies*, or* someone harassing the victim in a public place in a way that made the victim feel unsafe.”
This category is quite broad and puritanical in its disposition, as it assumes there is something wrong with seeing naked images unless and until expressed verbal consent is given, and undoubtedly ignores the en masse flood of naked images of women online to which basically every guy is exposed to. Compare again to people who claim that women ought not be allowed to show their ankles as it causes a ‘harm’ to those who are ‘forced’ to see it. Exact same shite. Aesthetical concerns of wanted or unwantedness, and also notice the expressly stated vibes check ‘victim feel unsafe’. Look out for the black boys, they make them feel unsafe!
Crime/Law Enforcement Stats (UCR Program) — FBI
Quick Facts on Sexual Abuse Offenses (ussc.gov)
It’s worth mentioning that statistically speaking, if one uses the stats derived from crime data as opposed to statisticians making numbers up, the percentages of men who do sexual violence, depending a bit on how you count it, are: 0.0516% or .478% or .0957%. Although the video goes over this all in pretty good depth, just do a little sniff test here; are .478% of the male population sexually violating a third of all women, 55.5 million women?

As If It Were Kismet: Prologue
Matt tore through the brush, blind in the dark. He didn’t care where he was going. He only knew he needed to be elsewhere. Far from here.
Behind him a creature howled that shocked his mind. It’s form was cruel and dangerous, though female. Nothing like the young woman she had once been. Nothing but a girl, a small and slight female.
It’s guttural growls and howls only grew closer as Matt tried to pick between seeing where he was going and getting away. The few times he looked he caught sight of the creature behind him. Hopping through the air with a speed that told him he was being toyed with. As if he were a mouse being played with by a cat.
But the reflex in him to run kept him going. His adrenaline going as hard as it could. The tightness and burning in his core tensing and locking up as his legs felt like there were being burned from within while taking on more of a heaviness.
His lungs were starting to betray him as he tried to gulp big breaths of air but only rapid and shallow breaths were all that he could manage. His brain was starting to burn….and then he was falling.
Falling down the side of a hill he saw the creature dart in a spring towards him, imperceivably fast almost. Catching him in mid air it seemed.
Managing to wrap its body around him and cushion his impact against the ground as they rolled. His mind barely took in what was happening during the roll. Only starting to understand what was happening once they were still.
The creature's triple D-cup breasts were unmistakably pressed hard against his back as he laid facing up at the night sky.
For a few seconds the world stilled and the needle light pain hitting the center of his brain took over for the cooking heat his brain had felt. His whole body felt heavy and reluctant to move.
Even if he could have really moved, a dull ache came over his limbs making them feel stilled and trapped as if by immeasurable amounts of sand that had engulfed him.
Slowly the arms holding him started to move. Moving so the creature's hands could start exploring him. Causing Matt to unstoppably let out a pathetic moan that made him go cold inside as hands lifted up his shirt and started to touch his exposed stomach and then his chest.
He would have whimpered so pathetically had he not still been in the depths of terror.
As its hands felt and groped his pecs he tried to situp as if to get away. For his efforts, his reward was a hand around his throat and a collection snarls and growls against his ear. A beastly, guttural voice spat words at him while somehow holding a feminine tone.
“Don’t move….I don’t know if I can calm down…”
Her words were not helped by her moans in his ear and the subsequent kissing of his ear. The flesh of his ear going between her lips as she moaned and seemed to pant. Releasing it and licking the side of his face with a moist warmth. He could feel its spittle, viscous and coating his flesh where the tongue touched. He could smell something in his saliva. Something that subtly entranced him.
Matt went stock still with fear and the confusion of mixed arousal. He barely perceived her right hand traveling lower on his body. A surprised moan and shudder echoed in the night from Matt’s lips as she took ahold of him. Her hand above his pants but still….stimulating him.
A light squeezing and almost probing of her digits kept him aroused and confused within her grasp. Resigning himself to the strange fate, Matt looked up at the stars as his mind tried not to shatter under the strange maelstrom of events and sensation that had started mere minutes ago.
His mind was only more confused as a slight figure, feminine in build, how it seemed to thunk the ground audibly as she landed on her feet out nowhere. Her knees barely bending under the pressure of the landing. Yet dirt was kicked up anyways and some of it onto Matt. Feeling it pepper his shirt and pants as it fell.
The figure, lit only faintly by moonlight, roared some dark tone Matt could only perceive as a demon as her eyes went bright with a crimson light. A light in the darkness that should not have been. “Let him go you bitch.” Was its words following the roar. Spittle escaping its mouth with faint droplets hit Matt's face.
The creature holding him by his throat and crotch seemed to tighten the grasp of both hands as it roared back. “HE IS MINE!”
The figure paused with a moment's hesitation. He was also her quarry. She had felt his fear without him knowing. His confused arousal. His fear. His terror.
And now he laid at the center of a struggle between two monsters. Unsure of who he wanted to win.
As If It Was Kismet Ch. 1
Matthew Berkshire hadn’t seen his mom in two years. Not that he had seen her much over the last six years.
A messy divorce between messy people and mom’s chaotic want for a life in Alaska had been one of the most…upsetting times in life. Setting him up for so much of what had defined his life thus far but then that had really started two years before he ever turned.
His ear buds were basic and simple. A part of cheap five pack, common for his life as he was known to lose little things. Small things. They had a mix of metal and hard rock playing in them. Some classics, some alternative. Whatever made him feel something, anything. Even if it was hate. Anger. Rage. It was better than feeling numb. Not belonging.
The escalator down to his lone bag to go with his lone carry on showed his mom waiting for him. His had a type, that’s for damn sure. Not that it helped him in the genetics department as he was stuck at 5’9” to go along with his mother’s five foot even as his dad stood six foot. Forever leaving him to feel small, to pale, under his dad’s shadow. Did he ever stand a chance?
The guy next to her with the unkempt former seventies porn stache was “Dave.” He’d met him twice when his mother came and visited him in Florida. To his credit the guy didn’t look annoyed. Kind of concerned kind of which made Matthew want to break his frozen look but he was well practiced. Having removed any note of sadness from his face through much…tribulation.
His mother’s look on her face betrayed a hint of worry as the bruises on his face lightly showed up close. Saying his name was his like a distant echo that belonged to someone else.
Dave cut in and pulled out his right headphone. “What the hell bud, they knock you hard enough to hurt hearing? Your mom’s asking how you are doing.”
Matthew pulled out the other bud and grunted an empty “sorry.”
“You still have bruises after two week? What did they do to you?” His mom’s voice was full of worry. Something he hadn’t heard in….too long. Too long to make him feel anything. To ever make him believe there was any sincerity to her words. To not think her voice and mannerisms were an act. An act by someone who…wasn’t really there.
“It’s only fair. I took a nose. Fractured a couple orbital bones. Left one with having to get his jaw wired shut. And one will never walk right again for what I did to his knee cap.” Matthew said it all with a bored and disinterested tone. Perhaps well rehearsed.
“My man, handing out ass kickings, not bothering to take names.” Dave was quick to be the typical man’s man about it. Matthew wasn’t quite done yet. Lifting up his shirt to expose the right side near his kidney. Revealing a nasty scar from a six inch blade. “Luckily they gave me this first so they could rule it all in self-defense. The fuck didn’t get it in more than inch before I ruined his knee cap and then I took the nose of one of the fucks holding me.” Now he chose to smile keeping the well practiced dead look in his eyes.
No retorts. No questions. Just horrified looks on their faces. As he liked. As he preferred. They could hate him. They could be disgusted by him. But by God they would fear him.
“Well the doc did a good job sewing you up.” Dave commented uncomfortably. “Dissolving sutures. Ain’t they grand.” He smiled again and let it abruptly fall off his face and started walking to the carousel for the baggage claim.
Waiting and making small talk with Dave as his mother stood in silence. He was not the little boy she abandoned. The little boy she left with an angry man. While never hitting him. Left him in constant fear till he turned twelve and just didn’t care anymore. Something snapped. Broke. And he didn’t care if he died. Didn’t care if he stole. Didn’t even care if he killed. He just knew not to get caught. Something left over from his grandfather’s wisdom which came to make more and more sense with each passing year of life since that thing inside him broke.
Finally his bag came around and Dave went to try first to grab it but Dave practically leapt ahead of him. “Is that your grandfather’s rucksack bag?” his mother asked in a perplexed voice.
“Figured it’s been around since Viet Nam. So it’d serve me better than any of the worthless stuff they called luggage.” Dave commented after Matthew’s words. “Well hell yeah I still got mine from Desert Storm. You know the first one.” Dave laughed and Matthew eyed him oddly. Be it in the south or whether it was Alaska, country boys are country boys he guessed.
The car ride to the two people’s house, as Matthew thought of them. Was uneventful and full of vistas he imagined metropolitan types wetting themselves over. At most they meant isolation to him. Furtherness from the world as there were no mountains in Florida. And what mountains he had last seen in another state had been when he was eight. Another life, to Matthew it felt like. A life alien to him.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 2
Dave and his mom’s place was some two story type tucked into a tree line far up an elevated point. It was by no means the highest point in the mountain but it certainly felt up there.
Rocks were where the driveway should have been Matthew thought. Grabbing his backpack and rucksack from Dave’s jeep was no hard thing for him. Matthew was in formidable shape for someone his age, maybe even five years older. He had gotten a mix of fairly big shoulders and arms along with the chest to go for it when compared to most kids his age. A side effect of working out at least twice a day. First thing in the morning, some time in the evening, and the school’s gym when had had a good semester in school before he had to leave Florida.
Dave tried to come up and help him but Matthew walked past him towards the house. His mom was not sure what to make of his demeanor. Matthew was not the sweet kind boy he had once been. But she had been gone from his life essentially for a long time.
Ushering him into the house she cracked some joke he did not hear. He was too busy looking about and seeing a mix of old outdated decorating mixed with the strange and odd flair of his mother. Color contrasting against drab and dated. Like brightly painting over an old home that was falling apart he thought.
“Your room is this way Mattie.” His mom brightly intoned.
Without expressing any interest he followed his mother. Still faced and nonplussed. Just going along with the current. Pushed and pulled with its roll like a piece of driftwood.
The room was simple. A single small bed. A set of rubber weights with a curl bar and barbells. “Your dad said you were into weight lifting so we got you a bunch of stuff. Dave says it looks like his department’s gym almost. The woman’s smile felt very alien to him.
“Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ve got most of my stuff from home.” Matthew starting unpacking his rucksack and pulled out cables of repetitive and mixed colors. A single plastic barbell handle. The ruck sack could be filled with water bottles for added weight during pushups he figured. Remembering a Michael Keaton movie he watched with his dad post-Batman movies where he played a convicted killer using plastic bags filled with water for weights.
Matthew caught movement outside his lone fairly large window that could let him step out onto the roof of the house given its layout.
He saw a number of people running together through what he guessed was the backyard of the property, not that it had any fences to mark boundaries
They wore clothes that looked similar yet different from each other at the same time.”Oh those are the Johnston’s. Really nice bunch of people. Been on the mountain for a long time Dave tells me.”
Matthew looked at the group of people running and noticed the lack of resemblance. “They are related?” Matthew quizzically asked. Seeing a black and possibly a hispanic person amongst the bland looking white people.
“Oh well they are all adopted but for one or two of them…besides the parents of course. The family has a long tradition of taking in orphans they say. Real nice of them to do that don’t you think.”
Matthew looked at his mother and the hosier accent made no sense to him as he arched his left eye brow. Her and his dad were both from Florida. Born and raised. Sure her parents were from New York city but…
Matthew shook his lightly without turning to look at his mother as his vision was grabbed by one of the runners in particular. A girl of moderate height. Soft brunette. A plain beauty he figured with a slim build….and lack of remarkable breasts and rear to make any note of but….girls in general were his type at his age.
She was pretty enough. He couldn’t deny that but he found himself transfixed by her visage.
But the way she turned and looked at him, especially at that distance felt very disconcerting to him. Even if she was smiling like…she was a taste of a bright shiny day. Somehow.
Matthew’s mom noticed the exchange and smiled to herself with closed lips. “Oh that’s Vicky. She’s your age I think. Very sweet girl, who does the charity functions. You know bake sales, blood drives, car washes and the like. I think you should get to know her. Might be good for you.”
A truck horn sounded a couple of beeps in rather succession. “Oh that must be Mack, he said he might come by later this evening but he seems early.”
Matthew’s mother turned and left his room. Leaving Matthew to exchange a few looks with the alluring Vicky as she turned her head away from him to talk to the others in her group and look back at him.
Still Matthew’s left eyebrow was arched. In a way that reminded him of Spock from Star Trek that he and his grandpa used to watch on some streaming service or another.
As he heard ambient chatter elsewhere outside the house he figured to check it out as the alluring sight of Vicky would be around he figured. It was dull to stare at artwork. He was a boy who preferred jet skis and the like. Something he could ride and enjoy immensely. Even if at times it got him stabbed.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 3
Matthew sauntered out of the house and down the rockway that stood in for a driveway.
A few new people had come over from what he could first surmise of the situation. As he got closer it was obvious they were indigenous people. A couple of grown men…and a girl?
She was mousey. Maybe five foot. Hiding behind glasses and a big camo jacket that was far too big for her. It looked made for a grown man and the backwards trucker hat on her head kept her long black a beautiful mess of sorts.
She was cute in a way. A little androgynous but she had a cute energy to her. She reminded him of the more tomboyish Puerto Rican girls he had gotten into back in Florida. Given the deer corpses in the back of the truck….probably more dangerous to play with given the men in her family.
Small chatter passed between the adults when the girl noticed but turned away, trying to hide the tiny hint of a smile.
“Oh Mattie, this is Mack. He works with Dave at the sheriff’s department and John, he’s with fish and wildlife.” Matthew nodded at his mom’s words with some blankness as he looked at the deer the in the back of the pickup truck.
“Gale tells us you hunted with your dad some in Florida and Georgia.” Mack offered with a light hearted laugh camouflaged by his big simple and cheery but husky way he spoke.
Looking in the back of the truck he spoke. “We used lever action thirty-thirties and Mosin Nagants in seven-six-two-fifty-four-rimmed.” Mack and John whistled in an exaggerated fashion. Leaving Matthew to wonder if they were mocking him.
Mack spoke. “Well we just used thirty-odd-six in a custom gussied Garand.” That caught Matthew’s attention. “You have a Garand…” Matthew finally demonstrated interest in anything. “My dad has an SVT-40 and a Hakim 8mm but he always wanted a Garand but was too cheap to buy one.”
Gale, his mother, chimed in loudly. “Oh his Dad loved his guns but was such an odd duck about how he bought or why he bought them. Never made sense to me how he wasn’t a collector but he didn’t get the latest and greatest.” Gale laughed uncomfortably. At least it seemed that way to Matthew.
Matthew pointed to the girl with an underhanded pointing hand. “And who is this? A cute little mute mouse or does she have a name?” Dave and the other men laughed.
Mack again spoke. “Well you people call her Rebecca, she’s my adopted daughter.” Matthew was taken aback by what he heard. “You people?”
Rebecca kindly spoke with a soft but almost melodic voice as she struggled to maintain eye contact. “White people or rather not members of our tribe. It’s just easier to appease the colonizer kind of thing. Borrowed from when the Jesuit missionaries chased us up here.”
Mack stepped in. “It’s just easier to have white people names than have them try to say our tribal names. And we don’t want them shortening or Anglicising our names kind of thing.” Rebecca stepped back into the conversation cutting off her adopted father. “It’s an insult to our history basically.”
Matthew cocked his head sideways raising his eyebrows shortly before letting them drop. “Well as soon as I’m eighteen I’m out of here and back to Florida so I’m a sort of involuntary colonizer of sorts. So I won’t be taking any of your land from you. The Seminoles on the other hand are still shit out of luck.”
Rebecca’s smile caused Matthew to reflexively smile. Mack made the moment more awkward. “See Becca, I told you someone off the reservation would like you some. You just have to be creative.” Mack laughed in a chiding manner…Matthew presumed. He sensed that he was the butt of some kind of cultural joke. Like marrying a white guy was some sort of insult or mark of shame. That kind of thing.
Rebecca turning away from him was not something he had been expecting. Her then getting in the truck in a huff left the group in a silence for a moment.
Dave spoke to break the awkward silence. “Well just bring the truck to work on Monday and leave it for me to grab up.” Mack acknowledged Dave and they started to get off as Rebecca looked at Matthew for another instance. Matthew couldn’t look away for some reason as the two seemed to lock eyes for an instance.
Till Vicky and family seemed to come jogging down the road. While Matthew’s eyes diverted from Rebecca’s. Hers did not till she realized he was looking elsewhere. And her vision found Vicky and what had been a hint of smile on her face turned glum and disappointed.
Matthew did not look away from the vision of Vicky but instead of a starry eyed fool looking longingly. It was a baffled look. Well baffled for him, with his eyes drawn narrow and night with a focus.
There was something about her…he couldn’t quite put a name too. The way she appeared to him. One second brunette. The next second blonde or blonde like. As if the color appeared in her air and disappeared in fractions of seconds. Much the same way her body almost seemed to…shift…very subtly…smoothly. A nicer bum. Larger breasts. And then back to a simple and plain form. Feminine no doubt. Attractive. But not so…remarkable.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 4
The next two days passed without incident. Nothing of any real substance or challenge to note.
Matthew got settled somewhat and started working out almost immediately. Exploring around the woods but Dave told him not to go far. Especially without a hunting rifle. Dave had left a simple semi-auto Winchester out for him. His bear gun as Dave referred to it with its four round magazine. But Matt figured till he got some practice with the rifle to leave it alone. He made a hiking stick like his grandpa taught him and treated it over a low fire. He would take some electrical tape for the end his hand would grip around. Plenty enough to ward off anything smaller than a bear he figured.
The ride to school was a pain in the neck but simple enough. Dave would let him use a clunker pickup truck he had laying around. It wasn’t pretty but it would get him to and from. Even if it was from the eighties and still backfired on occasion. But for now Dave and his mom took him on their way to the sheriff’s department.
It wasn’t much of a school. It wanted to be modern but its fifties original construction was very obvious. It serviced the pipeline families and familys’ of fisherman who worked the seasons in between their time at the pipeline.
Matt was to report to the principal for some reason Dave and his mom wouldn’t share. Which annoyed him but he figured it was to read him the law of land. Small towns with their big views of the outside world and like.
Dressed in jeans, a grey sweatshirt under a light jacket with steel toed boots set him more apart then he expected. His buzzed head didn’t help matters. Already he was feeling like a stranger in a strange land but he was quite strange after all. And he liked it that way. Normal people were so pathetically disappointing to him.
A secretary or assistant or some such led him to the principal’s office. Where it reeked of real wood that was old and fabric and upholstery that needed to be updated for the last twenty years, Matt figured.
“This is Matthew Berkshire, Principal Andrews.” The man was turned with his back to the door and he was quick to wave her off as he turned her around.
He was an older man. Fat and large. Tall with a body built like he had once been fit and a demeanour of annoyed and irate already as he fixed Matt with a scowl and look of disgust. Another worthless government whore. Matt thought to himself. His father and his grandfather had bestowed unto him a natural disrespect for government workers and the figures that wore unjustified authority as a shield but pretended the weight of the state was not at their back ready to crush all who resisted. Little figures of valor pretending to be mighty and alone but acting with the tyranny of the state and all the backing.
“Mr. Berkshire, please sit down.” His tone wasn’t unusually hostile, just gruff. As if he had better things to do.
Matt complied and took a seat in the chair while maintaining a friendly facade. Not everyone was an enemy. And not everyone needed to be an enemy. Even if anybody could be any enemy. There was no reason to make enemies you didn’t have to. Another of his grandfather’s bastardised wisdoms.
“Well I looked over you file and you have quite the history Mr. Berkshire.” Matt resisted qiuping back a joke. Instead he waited for Principal Andrews to continue as he remained nonplussed and looking as if he felt no need to respond. A simple head tilt with dead eyes looking back at the principle as if he was not even there would suffice.
Matt’s reaction or lack of a reaction rather made Principal Andrews only narrow his eyes with examination. He was not used to a kid not responding to him. Especially with his gruff and hard act going on.
“Well by all accounts you moved here after some problems at your last school. A fight broke out and you did some real harm to your fellow students it appears.” Of course, he would take the side of the perpetrators. School administrators always did. Especially when they weren’t white. Just a fact of the times. Cowardice and pathetic mediocrity was the way they leaned, like good government workers sucking the dick of Big Daddy government. Worthless whores.
Matt chose to reply. “Oh you mean the criminals that stabbed me. Got arrested at the hospital and then pled to felonies. Yeah Florida, with the American counties are good like that.” Principal Andrews went real still. No shame. No fear. No penitence. He didn’t like that.
“Well be it as it may Mr. Berkshire we don’t tolerate that kind of behaviour here…” Matt cut him off responding with a deadpan tone. “You mean self-defense meant to save one’s own life while the cowardly and pathetic school workers look on with zero interest but to keep their money rolling in and will allow known gang members with records of violent acts and crimes that should have them expelled many times over, where in certain Democrat counties such cowardice and idiocy empowered a couple school shooters?”
Principal Andrews looked at the Matt with a note of disgust. “Look here Mr. Berkshire, your beliefs matter not one bit here. This isn’t Florida. We don’t like our way of life being disrupted by outside agitators who have problems with authority.”
Matt did his best not to roll his eyes and let the older fat man drone own as he dead-stared him. Lifeless and without emotion.
The man came to a finish and Matt spoke up without having listened to him or paid him any attention. “Great now that’s taken care of. Can I please get to class and finish my sentence of two years at your wonderful school?”
Principal Andrews huffed and snorted before calling in Vicky. Vicky stood in the corner after entering with a quiet and seamless presence. Matt felt disturbed and tried not betray his feelings as the young Vicky was perceived and not perceived to be moving.
Principal Andrews made the introductions and Matt nodded back. She was to be his chaperone for the day. They had the same classes and she was to show him the ropes so to speak. The ins and outs of the school. The locations of their classes.
He recognized her. It was hard not to. The way her appearance seemed to shift fluidly almost. The petite and skinny brunette ever so lightly had a big bust and blonde hair with curves added when she seemed to shift before his eyes. Like watching a film but each frame had a different person.
Matt didn’t say anything about it. Even if he did he would only be acknowledging his crazed state, if he had one. If.
Unlike an obedient puppy dog he got up in a slow and awkward fashion and followed behind her as his oddly disproportionate frame allowed. Causing her a note of concern for some reason. As if she was seeing something she shouldn’t have been….Or he was just weird. And Matt could admit to himself he was just weird. Part of his charm, he would jest about it at times. Not that he had many people to jest to now.
As If It Were Kismet Ch. 5
Following Vicky into the hall off to their first class was simple. She exchanged small talk and he slightly smiled as if to obviously suggest he was just being polite.
Inside his head, Matt was trying to figure out if he was having a psychotic break. The way Vicky looked kept changing and he looked at the other people around him and they stayed the same.
He was searching his mind as they were walking. And thus he wasn’t paying attention to where he was looking and so fell to his face forward over his feet seemingly out of nowhere.
A series of laughs erupted as it sunk in that he was obviously tripped. Like in prison this was a challenge to his superiority. If he let this pass he would be mocked and sneered at by this same group of boys. He wouldn’t walk to them like he was going to do nothing like a little bitch.
In a rage he turned and punched the stomach of the first face he saw. Some typical blonde haired wannabe jock. He knew from experience not to aim for the ribs. Instead he needed to aim for where he thought the belly button was.
Yells and screams blindly echoed around him as his after the punch he followed up his elbow of the opposite arm slamming into the face of the jock. Harder than a fist, the elbow struck the jock’s jaw and seemingly dropped him against a locker. Just in time to catch an errant and soft punch to the nose that sure enough hurt but did little to slow him down as his dad had taught him to fight through the pain. Blood and scars happened. They were a natural consequence of life to a man.
Taking the punch and falling further into his red state Matt headbutted the punch thrower before another guy arm bared his throat from behind. Which he managed to get his grip on the arm over a letterman jacked and jerk the unprepared boy to the side with him still latched on.
A few feet away from the lockers Matt knew his only chance was to jump and push off the lockers and knock the boy to the ground and so he did. He heard a thunk of the boy’s skull bouncing off the ground and he turned to pull out of the grapple.
The beatings he had taken from his father, the grapples, being choked unconscious. Had prepared him for fighting little bitches who didn’t know what a fight was. It wasn’t gay porn with rabbit punch fists flying.
Blood was running down his face and the pain started to hit him as the threats had been eliminated. Only then did he remember to breathe. Taking breathes as Vicky came up to him with tissues and took a hold of his nose.
“Owww owww owww what the fuck my nose could be broken.” He said to Vicky as she pulled his head up and back.
“It’s ok Carl. It’s done.” Matt tried to look to see who Vicky was talking to. It was a boy taller than his 5’9” by more than a small margin. The boy eyed him bored and annoyed before speaking. “What happened here?” An unoriginal line but one Matt couldn’t be a smart aleck about. “Well you see there was an outbreak of tripping and we all tripped over my dick. It happens.” Matt was about to laugh when Vicky seemed to pull up while still gripping his nose causing Matt no small amount of pain which he audibly evidenced.
Vicky spoke in a tone he wasn’t expecting. As if she was accustomed to issuing orders. “Keep Iris away from the hall till we sanitize the site. We have blood from at least three people contaminating the site. And have Jake bring me a spare jacket and shirt for this moron.”
Carl seemed to acknowledge her orders and seemed to blink away. Maybe the punch hit harder than he expected. He had no time to wonder as Vick took her hand away from his and pushed him against the lockers. With ease he had not been expecting from her form and stature.
Before he could respond Vicky licked his blood covered chin and then his lips and spoke to him. “Focus on me you little blood bag.” Her tone had an annoyed yet feminine sneer.
“Look into my eyes. Look at me. You belong to me. You are just another food source in a collection of food sources.” Her eyes were a beautiful hazel Matt thought. Almost green. Pretty like jewels in some old treasure collections. The eyes he could get lost in before kissing her. Finally Vicky was just a slight and petite brunette and he thought she was beautiful.
She would make a hell of a girlfriend. Some cute thing he could see laying on the beach in Florida on their sides laughing and smiling before trading light kisses while hands wandered innocently. Before his mind could drift further he felt her lips on his. It took him a second to mentally grasp the kiss but his arms were around her back as her hands were at his sides. His eyes reflexively closed as he saw hers close.
It was ineffable to Matt. Beyond words, what was happening. The kiss, the moments beforehand. The way his brain tickled with electricity and gentle warmth. He had never had a kiss like this and he had traded more than a few kisses with at least a few girls.
The kiss was like a warm bath with his consciousness slipping beneath the surface. Their lips only parted to try new angles and approaches as Matt struggled to take in breath. It was a moment he could have stayed trapped in for….he didn’t know. But a curt throat clearing by another girl pulled them out of the moment.
The girl was taller than Vicky. Blonde. With slight curves. Vicky addressed her bewildered and gobsmacked, and perhaps a bit embarrassed. “Tina?”