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

As he set the woman on the bed, plastic around her head like a mummy wrap, someone knocked on the door.

“Mr. Dolan, are you in there?” the voice was mannish, deep, and for some reason Josh thought it sounded as if it came from behind a moustache.

He quietly crossed the room and checked the peephole. Two cops, both big, fat men—sans moustaches—and a small man in a Radisson button-up stood in the hallway. Josh flipped the U-lock over the ball and backed away. His plan had no more steps, but this wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

“Mr. Dolan? Open this door.”

The electronic key card beeped and the door pushed open an inch and a half. “He’s in there if that lock’s engaged, right?” a voice said, heavy mannish, but not the same one who’d said Josh’s surname.

Josh began breathing fast, faster.

“Josh Dolan, open this door! We need to talk to you about your wife!”

Faster, faster, hyperventilating.

“I can get it open,” the man from the desk said, his voice was TV show host smooth. “Just take a card like this and close the door a smidge.”

The door moved a hair and a card wiggled against the U part of the lock. The door closed more.

Josh stopped breathing, grabbed the Winnebago Indian Motorhome by Tonka and set it on the floor.

The arm of the U-lock swung, freeing the ball end.

Josh picked up the little man, tilted his head back, and dropped him down his throat. He fell to his hands and knees, pressing his face hard against the open roof of the motorhome as the door burst open.

The cops charged in, both had hands on their gun holsters. “Where is he?” one said, “Not in the bathroom,” the other said, “Maybe under one of the beds?” the concierge said.

They checked everywhere and decided the U-lock must’ve engaged accidentally.

Shauna Amry grinned from ear-to-ear as she stood by the storage unit with the others picking up their winnings from the online police auction. She scored an amazing Winnebago Indian Motorhome by Tonka for twenty bucks, and if it was half as nice as the pictures suggested, she might just flip her lid. Her thirteen-year-old niece had recently gotten into retro toys—she had a four-foot dollhouse, a horse track, a few cars, a tractor, and the better part of a train set.

The door went up and the three officers began doling out seized prizes.

An hour after that, Josie Amry was bouncing on her heels, shouting, “O-M-G! O-M-G! It’s amazing!” In her bedroom after supper, she plucked the little man from behind the wheel and a slip of paper fell onto the driveway she’d painted on the dollhouse platform. She picked it up and turned to let the light fall on it directly. Help I’m stuck in here. She scrunched her face and set the little sheet aside. “Weird.”

Shauna came up to kiss Josie goodbye. “I’m so glad you like it.”

“I love it,” Josie said.

Josie’s mother shouted from down the hall, “Bedtime!”

Shauna smiled, patted the girl’s dark brown hair, and headed for the door. “Goodnight, sleep tight.”

Josie finished, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

The room was dark and the house was quiet as quiet got, which wasn’t very quiet, not since he’d changed. Everything was loud, but he understood the types of loud and saw this as his best chance.

Josh Dolan climbed down the beveled leg of the table and sprinted from shadow to shadow. He grunted and sweated as he pulled and kicked his way up the dangling bit of duvet hanging from the little girl’s bed. Leaning on his knees, back bent, he caught his breath. It was better that he hadn’t gone to prison, but it had been a long six months trapped in the Winnebago, that toy.

Ready, he continued on, weaving over and under the girl’s splayed and bent arms and up onto her pillow. “Sorry,” he said and wiggled in between her lips.

Josie jerked upright, gagging as the little man that came with the motorhome travelled down, down, down. Her stomach clenched and she ached, hands pressed tight at her bellybutton. She moaned and rolled to the floor. She felt her body shifting, changing…shrinking, but then the pain shifted.

She began gagging anew.

Something was coming, something hard and painful.

She convulsed on three dry heaves before the little toy clanked plastically on the hardwood floor. It was a little brown girl—a tiny facsimile of the body Josh Dolan now occupied. He picked her up and started down the hall, stopping at the first open door. He found a light switch and spotted exactly what he sought. He—no, she—lifted the toilet seat and dropped the little girl toy in.

Josh-cum-Josie whispered, “Sorry. I hope you can swim.”

Sepia Grass

Sam Hicks

My father was a drug dealer and I know that sounds bad, but it wasn’t. It was nothing heavy, just a bit of cannabis resin and grass (he hated calling it weed). Money was tight when I was born and tighter still when Mum died, too young, a few years later, and after that, it became clear that Dad’s part-time job wouldn’t bring in enough to keep us. My father was a clever man, but he’d messed up his education and didn’t exactly have first choice of lucrative careers, so in his hour of need, he turned to his one transferable skill—getting high—for help. It was drugs that paid for my school uniform, for holidays and birthday presents. It was drugs that saw us through, and we owed them thanks for that.

Dad wasn’t stupid about it, though. He kept his job in the supermarket as cover and his clientele small, and he resisted the temptation to upscale. The universe had, he said, always found ways to stop him overreaching.

When I was six I ate a lump of resin that had rolled beneath the coffee table. Dad was very careful to keep his stock out of reach, but this runaway piece, like a chocolate in its shiny pink wrapper, managed to evade