The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

I worry about my children. My two oldest might be fine and even the babies are looked after but then there’s my little darling. She talks more to her horse than to all of us in this house put together. How must she view me through her little ocean-blue eyes? When I’m able, I stretch out my arms to embrace her but in my saner moments, I see black fear in her eyes. Is it just a reflection of my own? Or is she terrified of her own mother? Her tiny body trembles whenever I am near. Near equals Fear. I need to throw up.

I am a complete failure. A failure as a housewife, as a mother, as a lover. They all cringe and shrink away with my touch. I am poison. Death in a bottle made of glass. Falling, spilling, shattering on the floor. Contaminating everyone around me.

Is it today? Or is it tomorrow? Or am I still in yesterday? My clock, the only light in the room, glares at me with disapproval. Must. Get. Up. My children need me. Oh! And the baby. I must give him a bath. A bath. Yes. I should take a bath. See? I’m fine. I just needed a little break. I think I’ll vacuum. The floors are dirty. Maybe I’ll sew. Or make a craft. Oh! I want to bake some fudge! It will be delicious! Here I come! I am better now! Better than better! I am great!!

Scrambling from bathroom to living room to kitchen to living room, I hear music playing in my mind and I hum along to We’re here for a good time, not a long time by Trooper.  I make a mental list of all that I will do in the next hour and it is glorious. Where is everyone?! Let’s play a game! How about Yahtzee? Yes, let’s play Yahtzee! Oh! There’s my girl! With the baby! I want to hold the baby! Please give me the baby!

As soon as my fingertips touch his tiny warm body, he starts to bawl, curling into my daughter’s arms. As I continue to grab and pull, wails of torment fill the room.

He doesn’t want me?! He doesn’t want me! He doesn’t want me.

The hurricane under my skull begins to slow, leaving clarity in its wake.

My heart crashes.

I get it.

I am a stranger. Both unfamiliar and oddly strange.

My ups and downs make mess and mayhem.

I get it.

I am crazy. Not now at this moment, but when my boogeyman takes over, I am thoroughly crazy.

I feel like a broken roller-coaster, never knowing when or where I will stop or start. I do know this: when I’m at the top it’s for sure that I will soon go racing down to the bottom once again, and It is always there waiting.

I’m so tired.

My head is pounding again. I need to be in the darkness of my room. There, I am at home. There, the black of my innermost being and the black of the room blend with familiarity. When the sun shines on me, I panic and shrivel like a dying grape, leaving a tiny, tasty treat for the monster. It swallows me whole.

A blanket of pain settles over my heart as I lay perfectly still, no energy left in me even to weep.

It’s happening again. The voice. Just one distinct voice. It’s daring me to die.

DIEDiehiss grunt Die DIE die snigger grunt wheeze

DO IT do it Die DIE DIE die hissDo ItDIE.

It’s too strong. I can’t stop It. I can’t fight anymore.

I reach for the stale glass of water beside my bed.

I swallow them all.

The Boogeyman wins.

Safe as Houses

Alex Giannini

It was mice, mostly, that Carrie found, dead and stiff and stinking, in the crawlspace as she searched the house for the source. And then again there was the pair underneath the kitchen sink and the small pack of them huddled together in the attic, bracing against the inevitable.

She found a few more in the front yard, near the white fence, as she sat in a chair on an unseasonably warm Halloween afternoon, a bowl of candy by her side. She scooped them up, those poor little dead things, and threw them in a can and closed the lid. And then Carrie sat down and took note of the trick-or-treaters that evening. It was a comic book year, apparently, with an endless parade of Deadpools and Captain Americas and Spider-Men.

There was one costume that stuck out, though, and stuck with her well into that night. In bed, lying on her side and staring out the window, Carrie couldn’t shake the look of it. It—he, she—was among a pack of other kids, right smack in the middle of them, but it might as well have been from another dimension.

It was dressed in a flowing, wispy black robe, carrying a plastic orange pumpkin in one hand and a flickering LED candle in the other, but it was the mask that really stood out. Off-white with its long rubber nose and sunken eyes, it was the mask that burned into Carrie’s memory. It struck a nerve, for whatever reason, and in the early morning light of the following day, Carrie blamed that mask for the dream she had that night.

She was in a church. In her dream, she and Will were in a church (or what was, in the logic of this particular dream, understood to be a church but more closely resembled a boarding house with wood-paneled walls and dark red carpets).

“It’s happened again,” a man Carrie couldn’t see but could clearly hear announced matter-of-factly and from one corner of the large room.

He might have been a priest, but she wasn’t sure. He hovered more as a specter than any concrete human thing. And then all at once, the dream shifted blurrily forward and Carrie was following Will through a hallway and to a closed door with light peeking out from behind