The boy was there too, stumbling through the living room horde and passing out magic mushrooms from a paper bag. His eyeballs sparkled inside gaping, play-dough sockets while his limbs hung gaunt and exhausted from eight straight days of self-medicating fear. Another boy in a black tee pinched some mushroom flakes from his bag, nodded his thanks, and mouthed the word “bro” like blowing a man kiss.

Foreboding” might have been the appropriate word. “Dread.” The PROMISE of fear. It was tangible fear... smellable... the stale odor soaking into the dirt and lingering in the windless jungle of dead branches and train tracks to nowhere; lovelier than angst, kinder than panic.

Memories of last night manifested slowly from the back of her brain, every new detail hammering her heart like a war drum: the flowers, the vodka, the persistent dream-like sensation, the closet, the outline of a stranger, the sex... and, most gut-wrenching of all, the sudden realization that he might still be here.

The search party became zombie silhouettes in shafts of early-morning light, yawning, despondent, and halfway home when a boy’s scream pierced the fog—“OVER HERE!”—and everybody ran.

She wondered if she was the only person trying not to imagine what death-by-bear looked like. Would bears pick the bones white? Or would they leave bits of meat for the coyotes to scavenge? The authorities hadn’t actually determined the type of animal that did the mauling, but she couldn’t help but picture a bear.

She wondered if she was the only person trying not to imagine what death-by-bear looked like. Would bears pick the bones white? Or would they leave bits of meat for the coyotes to scavenge? The authorities hadn’t actually determined the type of animal that did the mauling, but she couldn’t help but picture a bear.” 

She was stubborn. She was evolving. She needed SOLITUDE like normal people needed exercise.

Trevor climbed once again to the land of the living, naked except for an antique gas mask strapped to his face. As he peered through glass eyes like a mutant fly and breathed through the alien snoot, a single thought coiled through the booby-trapped labyrinth of his brain:I need to be alone.I need to be alone.I need to be alone.

The whirlwind in his brain—which had so many times tugged his pituitary in ways that made him TAKE instead of GIVE—subsided for the very first time. Tightness in his crotch usually corresponded with a tightness in his gut, making him want to CONTROL, to CHOKE, to SUBDUE... but not this time.Not ever again.