imisphyx

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - life, still

Even though he’d been skeptical of my monster-hunting plans, Joyce still brought them to life with inexhaustible enthusiasm. I could have traced it back to his father’s conditioning, if I’d looked hard enough, but I wasn’t looking. I was busy gaping at the walls of our tree-house, which he’d managed to cover with dancing paleolithic horrors within days of me first suggesting we play the game.

He still liked painting with white-out, and he went through bottle after bottle of it while inventing beast after beast to slay. No one monster on its own was very complex, each just a handful of gooey dots and smears on the rough wood boards. But their individual simplicity belied their combined menace: in the amber lantern light, they were a constellation of cryptid limbs and eyes, both lovely and terrifying.

At least I found them terrifying, because it was up to me to slay them all.

My own supply of dime-store dragons and demons had dried up fifteen minutes into our first practice, and he deconstructed my inventions so swiftly and so utterly, I realized it would never prepare us to face a real threat.

So I’d embraced my role as hunter, content to watch him squint at the walls of our fortress, like a small Michelangelo scrutinizing the Sistine, porcelain fingers caked with white dust that left ghostly streaks across his peacoat. His hands trembled when he lost himself in his dreams, and whenever I got close to killing one of his creations, he’d reach into his pocket for that little bottle of white, fussing with it as though he could barely wait to present me with his next invention. I don’t think he realized he was doing it.

Then one afternoon, his ideas took a sharp turn toward something…different. I recall watching as his meddling neared madness; his nails dug into the tiny ridges in the bottle’s plastic cap, twisting right for five or six turns, then twisting left for just as many, then right again.

Closed. Open. Closed.

I was so caught up the waltz that I lost my train of thought until he cleared his throat.

I glanced up to find him waiting, an anxious gleam in his eyes. The hieroglyphic outline of a perfectly average human haunted his left shoulder.

“Well, this… uh…” I fumbled back into my thoughts: “This ‘hobbit dance’… it’s a demon, right?”

“Hobbididance,” he corrected, gently. His lips twitched into the phantom of a smile. “…and yes.”

“Okay, so I would just exorcise it, right?”

“Exorcise it how, exactly?”

“I guess by reciting the right Bible verses? I mean, I’m not sure which ones. I’d probably have to try out a couple, but—”

“It wouldn’t work.”  

I scowled.

“Why not?”  

“Because, the Hobbididance is The Prince of Dumbness,” he said, with a gravity that didn’t at all match the ridiculous thing he’d just said.  

“The Prince of Dumbness?” I snorted. “What kind of lame title is that? Are you telling me he won’t understand the verses I’m reciting because he’s too stupid?”

“Not that kind of dumbness,” said Joyce. His answer was a very particular combination of warm and weary: a voice he used only when he knew damn well that he was withholding the lantern but was nonetheless teasing me for being in the dark.

“Well what kind of dumbness, then?” I played along.

“The Hobbididance prevents people from being able to speak.”

I considered this carefully. He returned to twisting the bottle cap.

“But, shouldn’t it only affect the person it’s possessing?” I asked. “So why wouldn’t I be able to speak?”

“That might be true of an average demon in his order. But he is The Prince. So his silence is a blanket effect.”

“That’s cheating,” I complained.

“How is that cheating?!”

It wasn’t cheating. I just really didn’t like it. So I huffed and went rummaging for my lunchbox in the corner, thinking maybe I at least had some celery sticks left.

“Fine,” he sighed dramatically, and collapsed down beside me, tossing up his hands. “Let’s just say, for the moment, that the Hobbididance only affects the person it possesses. How would you have known to exorcise it?”

“What do you mean? It’s a demon. That’s what you do to demons…”

“But how did you know it was a demon?” he demanded.

“Because you told me—”

“But I’m not part of this! If you’re out monster-hunting and you come face-to-face with a possessed person who can’t tell you they’re possessed, or by what, how would you know?”

He was close enough that I could nearly feel the way his throat clawed at the words of his question, trapping the last of his breath in his lungs. I stared at him, transfixed, and he stared back. It could have been seconds, or minutes, or seasons of silence—

—until he finally, finally blinked—

—his pale lashes looked like the afternoon light filtered through the slats in the wall behind him—

—and it seemed to restart time.

“There are lots of ways to detect demons…” I whispered, hoarse and barely believing myself: “Holy water. Holy artifacts. If the person cooperated I could have them write down what happened—”

“—If the possessed person cooperated?” Joyce’s eyebrows soared to the roof. “Gods, Danny, are you serious?!”

But he was laughing, and I allowed myself to feel triumphant for a spell. Not because I’d solved his riddle—I still hadn’t tackled the original version—but because I thought I’d succeeded in distracting him from reality. I believed I was fulfilling my duties as best friend, and admirably at that. I was too busy trying my damnedest to impress him with my hunting tactics to consider that maybe creating the monsters was his true catharsis. I was too busy battling a tiny, persistent creature in my stomach that watched the brilliant shiver of his hands and asked my brain what it might be like to reach out and hold them—just to stop them from trembling, just to keep them still.

My triumph upon closer examination looked an awful lot like greed.

- ❀ -

All the while, November’s chill took hold of the earth, and my desperate greed began to permeate my methods for finding Mrs. Jacoby’s flowers. The autumn crocuses were quickly passing their prime, as were the mums, and my  neighbors threw their browning pots into the compost heap.

I turned to exotic imports, stealing blooms out of the living-room vase my mother kept bursting with color year-round. At first I tried to be subtle about my selections, only taking smaller specimens, or the ones that were hidden in the middle of the vase, but after a week or so I began to grab the first thing that caught my eye.

Exotic flowers yielded equally foreign results, I learned. Brighter hues produced wilder stories, high on emotion but lower on coherence. Redder flowers seemed to agitate her, while those on the bluer side of the spectrum made her melancholy. I wondered briefly if maybe I was being cruel, but the experimentation seemed worth it, somehow, just to get her to speak at all. She seemed to relish the chance.

Then there was the zinnia.

The surprise on Mrs. Jacoby’s face was apparent when I pressed it into her fingers—as was the confusion. I took a few stumbling steps backward, in case she decided that my gift was unsuitable, or worse: an insult.

She scrutinized it for a long, silent moment, brows furled as she twirled it this way and that between her thumb and forefinger. Her two front teeth, almost fey in their smallness, peeked out to gnaw on her lower lip, and for a second her son was blindingly present in her features. I shivered and tried not to be obvious about pulling my coat tighter.

“I can take it back,” I began, “If you don’t—”

“What color is this?”

“What?” I said, one step behind as usual.

“What color is this flower, Danny?” she asked, more urgently.

“It’s uh… it’s pink?” I wasn’t very good at the shades of pink. I hoped she wasn’t expecting something more specific.

“No… no…” she shook her head vehemently, pressing her eyes shut like an insolent child. “No. No, that can’t be right.”

“Okay,” I said, softly. After months of playing games with Joyce I was always open to the possibility of my assumptions being wrong. “What color do you think it is?”

“When I came to him, the rot had already taken root in the earth,” she replied.

I sank slowly to the floor at her feet, because that had to have been the craziest thing she’d ever said, and she didn’t seem to be finished. She tugged the tiny petals off of the zinnia one by one, stripping it bare as I listened:  

“It had been summer for ages, and the hearts and souls of man had grown drowsy in the humid warmth, not recognizing the sweetness of the air for decay. He bought me spun-sugar at the county fair, and his sweetness wasn’t rot. It was dusty pink clouds and tacky pink fingertips and pink cheeks and pink-maned horses on a carousel meant for children. He brought me to his home, and his sweetness was bubbly rose wine and opal pendants and the ears of our newborn son. He was one of the last, the very last, and I came to him and kept the rot from finding him. But something else found him instead, and the pink in his cheeks became a fever, not a balm. And I could no longer protect him. I can no longer protect either of them, but—”

She stopped.

“But?” I whispered.

But she did not continue. Her fingers had frozen, centimeters from the head of the zinnia, but there were no more petals left to pluck. They were scattered like rain across her lap and around her feet.

That settled it, then—at least that’s what I remember thinking. Something sinister had gotten ahold of Mr. Jacoby, and possibly Mrs. Jacoby too, though she couldn’t say what. And even though she hadn’t finished her thought, I was positive that I knew its conclusion anyway:

“I cannot protect Joyce, but you must.”

I stood, shakily, and went to her, lowering her pinched fingers and extricating the barren stalk from her fist, settling both of her hands in her lap. “I-I’ll… I will,” I grit out. I had to say it twice to make the words intelligible; I was surprised to find myself in tears. “I… um… I’m going to go get the dust pan, okay?”

“Thank you, Danny,” she said. I was quick enough to realize that it wasn’t for the dust-pan.

I fled the room, scrubbing my shirt-sleeves hastily over my eyes and snuffling snot.  

Joyce was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs. It was unclear whether he’d been on his way up to find me, or if maybe he’d just been standing there the entire time, waiting for me. I braced against another shiver. But he was smiling, and enthusiastically thrust a tiny object into my fingers.

“I’ve been monitoring the flowers for days now,” he said. “And I think you might be right…”

The object was a ring, made of polished aluminum, and lined with tiny blueish lights that flickered on and off in an inscrutable pattern.

“You know I don’t know how to work this thing,” I said, tossing it back.

Joyce rolled his eyes and sighed a why-do-I-even-bother sigh. He slipped the ring onto his own thumb, and grabbed my coat sleeve, dragging me into his living room.

The last light from the front windows was barely enough to resolve the outlines of a camelback sofa and a few wing chairs—and the silhouette of Joyce lifting his hands toward the ceiling beside me: a shadowy maestro about to conduct a symphony.

The ring on his finger uttered a tiny, agreeable chirp, and the coffee table before us glowed brightly—lit by multitude of tiny projectors embedded in the geometry of the room. Arthur Jacoby had always been into the latest gizmos and gadgets, and their house, despite its Victorian charm, boasted a hidden myriad of high-end tech.

I fell back into one of the wing chairs, sitting on the edge of the seat so as not to drown in the size of it, and waited as Joyce commanded the “Ring of Power,” as he called it, with a series of delicate hand gestures.

“Shoulda just let the scrying stone watch them,” I joked.

Joyce said nothing, but spared me an approving glance in between hunting through the videos he seemed to have been collecting.

One by one, I watched the bouquets I’d given to Mrs. Jacoby take shape, suspended above the coffee table in a neat matrix as he stacked feed upon feed. The resolution was almost too good. It made the flowers look like the ever-perfect plastic replicas that my Mom bought in craft stores. She always claimed she would make a wreath for the front door, but they usually ended up on the opposite side of a closet door, never touched again…

“I kept a camera on each one for three days. It’s mostly the most boring thing ever,” admitted Joyce, and the flowers all flickered in unison as he skipped forward in time, “but I watched almost all of it—

“—What?!—”

“—I kinda thought it would help me get better at drawing if I tried to sketch them all,” he explained, hastily, “But just like you thought, every so often one of them changes color. Like—there, see?!”

The flowers flickered again as he rewound and replayed the last ten seconds. My gaze darted from bud to bloom, eagerly awaiting something fantastic—but I saw nothing.

“I feel like I’m trying to set a bunch of my mom’s ugly old paintings on fire with my mind,” I complained. “What am I looking for?”

“There,” said Joyce again, pointing at a cluster of red and orange mums. “That one got a little more purple.”  

His fingers continued to play and replay the same few seconds of footage, twitching an obsessive pattern at his side. It did look like one of the mums was changing. But even though I’d been quick to suggest that monsters were mixing colors, I now found myself desperate to disprove my own hypothesis.

“It was probably just a change in the light. Like, a cloud passing over the sun or something—”

“But that would make it darker,” he protested. “It’s not darker. It just goes magenta and then back to red again.”

“Well maybe the camera is broken,” I said, suddenly irritated. “Give me the ring.”

“You said you didn’t want it.”

“Well, I changed my mind,” I said. “Give it to me.”

“Make me,” he taunted, idly. He was still watching the flowers, lost in his thoughts. He clearly didn’t expect me to take him up on the provocation.

…which made his undignified yelp twice as satisfying when I lunged for his hand and checked him bodily onto the carpet.

“What the hell, Danny!” he coughed, breathless and struggling as I tried my damnedest to uncurl his knuckles and claim the ring.

Above us, the video feeds began to dance, swapping places with each other and exchanging themselves for other videos in the family collection—birthday parties and science documentaries and a tutorial on how to bake christmas cookies. They cast a discotek rainbow around the dark walls of the room, and through the quartz of his wide eyes beneath me.

“C’mon! I wanna see something,” I said, pinning his arm to the floor.

“You said you didn’t even—Ow!—know how to use it!”

“I just didn’t feel like it right then.” It was only half a lie. “I needed to get the dust pan for your mother, and I—”

“Wait. What’s that?” Joyce cut in.

His eyes were glued to something beyond my shoulder.

“Yeah no, sorry. Not falling for that,” I said.

But to my surprise, he twisted and slipped from my grasp so quickly that it left me staring gobsmacked at the rug where he’d just been.

“Danny,” he hissed. He was standing behind me at the table, as if our tiny sparring match had never happened. “Look at this.”

“The flowers didn’t change color,” I pled with him in a whisper, suddenly incredibly tired. “They couldn’t have.”

“It’s not the flowers, Danny. Someone’s been in here. Look.”

At that, I whipped my head around, following Joyce’s gaze to a dimly lit feed on the far right. A few flicks of his wrist got rid of the rest of the miscellany and centered the footage in the room. He zoomed in until the shadowy protagonists were nearly life size.

“That’s your basement…” I said, because I always provide helpful commentary. Joyce, understandably, did not reply. His earlier delight had been replaced by quiet terror. “What are they doing?”

“I don’t know…”

There were two figures moving about the lab bench Arthur Jacoby kept downstairs—one altogether average, with short, dark hair, and the other thin to the point of frailness, with long, lighter hair drawn back into a ponytail. They dressed in black, the way spies from old war movies did, and the amber Edison bulbs that Arthur fancied didn’t shed much light on what either of them were doing.

And neither of them had a face.

The videos were three dimensional. I could walk around the coffee table and see the scene from whatever angle I wanted, thanks to the absurd number of cameras Arthur had installed. But there wasn’t a single angle that revealed so much as a nose. Anywhere there should have been a face just seemed to fade, like when you try to take a picture indoors, but you’re too close to a window, and all you get is glare.  

Another twirl of Joyce’s fingers conjured the video’s metadata out of thin air. The timestamp read October 12, 8:47PM.

The night his father died.

Joyce was frantic, whirling through all the video feeds of his house, hunting for any other glimpses of the mysterious intruders. But my eyes were stuck to the original footage, desperate to make sense of it.

All at once everything went black, and it took me a moment to understand that Joyce had shut down the media system, and not my mind. We stood there, side-by-side in the dusk, listening to each other’s hearts pound for what felt like an hour, until I managed to find the courage to speak:

“We need to tell somebody.”

“No!”

His reply was barely more than a whisper, but it stung like a smack to the face.

“But—”

“Danny, we can’t. You can’t tell anyone,” Joyce insisted, voice trembling. “If they think I’m not safe here—”

“—But what if you’re not safe here—”

“—they’ll take me away. They’ll take her away. I won’t let them take her away from me.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but my jaw dangled uselessly on its hinges.

“Please…” he whispered.

I sat with a thump on the floor for the second time that afternoon. Mrs. Jacoby’s lament echoed in my skull: I could no longer protect him. I can no longer protect either of them, but—

“They won’t take her from you, and they won’t take her from me, and they won’t take you from me, okay?” I said. I didn’t even know who ‘they’ were. Why had they come? Were they Mr. Jacoby’s colleagues? Burglars? Wraiths? By that point in my life, almost anything was starting to seem possible. “Nobody will.”

He sank down beside me, hugging his knees to his chest.

“… Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I sleep over at your house tonight?”

“Sure,” I said instantly, but then paused. “I mean, I think so—but only if my mom says yeah.”

My words were only a formality, and he knew it. He smiled, gently.  

- ❀ -

Every time Joyce spent the night at my house, my mother would try to offer him the guest room, and every time, Joyce would politely turn it down in favor of sleeping on my floor, causing her to turn the house inside-out to give him every spare pillow and blanket we owned, while Joyce tried and failed to stop her. This time was no different. It took her an hour to finish doting and leave us alone, and when she did it was with a reminder not to stay up talking on a school night.

Joyce didn’t need the warning; he shook hands with the sandman the second he crawled into his enormous blanket fortress. But I couldn’t for the life of me get the crusty bastard to pay me a visit less than five feet away, so I just lay there in a ball at the very edge of my mattress, and watched Joyce sleep.

We’d made sure Mrs. Jacoby was settled for the evening before we’d taken off for my house, but it didn’t feel right, leaving her there alone. My legs twitched with a ceaseless desire to get up—to don my shoes and coat and venture back into the night to check on her—or, at very least, to walk down the hall and wake up my parents, and tell them about the trespassers in Joyce’s basement.

You can’t tell them. They’ll take her away…

Joyce’s hands were curled into fists in one of my mother’s quilts as he slept. I stared at them, thinking suddenly about the way they’d felt in my grip when I’d tried to take the ring from him. I’d been afraid to pry too hard for fear I’d snap his fingers. His wrists had been warm and beating with life, their blue and red blood barely concealed beneath milk-white skin. I’d thought I’d had him pinned, yet he’d vanished the moment his will had shifted…

They’ll take me away…

I’d kept secrets from my parents before, but this one felt awful.

You have to protect him…

I rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling.

At some point, finally, I slept, and dreamt that the wraiths in Joyce’s basement were there because they were waiting for light to seep through the cracks in the concrete and give them their eyes back.  

- ❀ -

He was gone by the time I woke up at eight— he always was, when he stayed with us on weeknights. His school started an hour before mine, and even before his father died, Joyce was the one who made his mother breakfast.

I, meanwhile, slouched sleepily at the kitchen table like a typical ten-year-old as my mother plopped a waffle and a bottle of maple syrup in front of my face. She hovered as I began to eat, and I waited for a question. For an announcement. For her to realize I wasn’t Joyce. For something.

“Danny, why do you keep taking flowers out of the living room vase?” she asked, finally, and I nearly choked.

“I didn’t—”

She sank down into the chair across from me and tilted her head toward the refrigerator door, which was displaying the last few days' worth of home-security footage at 40x speed. Apparently Joyce hadn’t been the only one pointing cameras at flowers that week. 

I watched myself repeatedly plucking blossoms from a bouquet: a thief caught red-handed, and yellow-handed, and pink-handed. A thief like the wraiths in Joyce’s basement.

I pushed my plate away across the table, suddenly too nauseous to eat.

“It’s not okay to just take things that don’t belong to you, Danny.”

“I know,” I mumbled.

“You could have just asked me. I would have let you have them.” My mother’s voice was gentle, but unyielding, and it only made me feel sicker. But to my surprise, when I didn’t say anything, her mouth slid into a mischievous smirk. “If there’s a girl at school, you can ask her over, you know. I’d love to meet her.”

“No! Mom. Ew. No. It’s not… it’s… it’s nothing like that.”

“Then what is it like, Danny?” she pressed.

There are monsters in Joyce’s house, and I think they killed his dad, and I’ve been using your flowers to try to track them down.

“They’re for Mrs. Jacoby,” I sighed. “There’s nothing in her garden anymore and… I dunno… I thought they’d make her feel better?”

My mother’s face was a difficult thing to read, at that moment. It somehow simultaneously softened and tensed.

“I’m sorry,” I added, when I didn’t get any other response.

“I wish you wouldn’t go over there so much.”

She said it all at once, like she’d been trying really hard not to say it.

“Why?” I asked, startled.

“I just don’t understand why you’d want to. There’s nothing for two boys to do in that house. Over here you have your tree-house, and all sorts of games, and I keep the pantry stocked with all your favorite snacks—”

“All of Joyce’s favorite snacks!” I snapped, before I could stop my half-awake brain from sending the words to my tongue.

My mother blinked at me like I’d smacked her. I half expected her to yell, or ground me on the spot, but nothing came. I pulled my plate back toward me, mostly so the squeal of the china across the table would fill the silence.

“Danny—”

“Why don’t you like Mrs. Jacoby?” I asked, impaling the undeserving waffle repeatedly with my fork.

“Honey, it’s not that I don’t like her. She’s… I mean… your father and I don’t know her that well—”

“Because you’ve never even tried!”

“Because we’re scared, Daniel!” cried my mother, then, and it was my turn to blink like I’d been struck. “It’s not just Joyce’s mother, Danny. You know that! You know there are other people at your school who just—” she made some opaque gesture with her hands, “And if you follow the news, it’s the entire East Coast! Maybe the whole country. And nobody knows how it happens or why it’s happening, Danny. And your father and I, we love you, and we care about Joyce, and we don’t want either of you to—”

“Hey-ho, my Comet and Cupid!” my father’s voice echoed through the landing. He walked in still buttoning the last few buttons of his dress-shirt. The collar was still all askew. “Who here is ready to rot behind a desk for the next eight hours, huh?” he asked, jovial until his gaze fell upon our faces. Then he frowned. “Christ, who died while I was in the shower?”

“Hank—”

“Mom thinks Mrs. Jacoby is going to make me sick,” I said.

“I didn’t say—” started my mother, but she trailed off with a sigh.

She and my father shared a long look, while I shared a long look with my abused breakfast and pretended not to notice.  

“I, for one, think that it’s very noble of you to be so kind to her,” my dad announced, then, putting his hand on the back of my chair. His voice had the same soft tension as my mother’s face. “I’m proud of you for having such a big heart. We could all stand to learn a little from you, son.”

“We just want you to be careful, okay?” whispered my mother.

“Right. Just be careful. That’s all.”

You know nothing. You’re worried about Mrs. Jacoby making me sick, while there are monsters in Joyce’s basement. I watched the damning security footage of my flower-snatching continue to play out across the fridge, and said nothing.

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - vignette

For nearly a month after that afternoon, I brought her flowers.

I guess that makes me sound like some kind of suitor swinging by a florist, but really I was just ripping up whatever I managed to find growing around the neighborhood, which, at that time of year, was not all that much. But I curated what I could: the remnants of dandelions, hastily snatched handfuls of my mother’s burgundy mums, a stubborn sunflower stolen from a stranger’s front porch, and every autumn crocus I could find, bound into tiny bouquets with plastic zip-ties.

I didn’t tell my parents. At first I didn’t tell Joyce either, and did my best to make sure he was otherwise occupied before I presented his mother with my latest discoveries. It wasn’t all that difficult. Most of the time when I followed him home he had a long list of chores to complete: things his father had always reminded him to do, or things that his mother had begun but never finished. Any good friend probably would have been helping him wash the dishes or fold the laundry, but instead I wandered off until I found Mrs. Jacoby, and together we watched the autumn crocuses come into full bloom—sometimes sitting among them in the grass, or sometimes from the window of her bedroom—and tried to parse meaning from my botanical gifts.

I don’t know why I felt the need to be so secretive about it, but I was self aware enough at the time to realize that this ritual was just as much for me as it was for her. Sometimes she stayed silent the entire time. But other times, she’d speak to me.

Her stories were yet again a different creature than her husband’s brash Grand Visions and her son’s beguiling dreams. Hers were tiny, tactile things, little more than isolated sensations without a before or an after. She could explain to me in detail prying a fishing hook from the mouth of a herring while knee deep in a brook, or the imprint left behind on the palm of one’s hand after pressing a cookie-cutter fifty times into hazelnut dough by the glow of a holiday hearth—and yet I never understood whether these were memories from her past, or desires for the future, or something else altogether. The lack of cohesion between such excruciatingly specific vignettes distressed me, but kept me rapt. And as the violet of the leaf-freckled lawn intensified afternoon by afternoon, dread seemed to bloom within my ribs as well.

“You feel it too. I know you do, Danny,” she said, without warning, about ten days into our ritual, while Joyce was in the kitchen vacuuming shards of a ceramic mug that his mother had dropped at some point earlier in the day, whether because she’d ceased to believe she was holding it, or ceased to believe it would break. “The crocus is a sign of spring—a triumph over death. But these false idols, they bloom, and you think: gods, it must be spring! It must be here. And you are seeing those tiny purple swords slash forth from snow that hasn’t even fallen. You see yourself found before you ever were lost. And you think it’s happiness you feel, and maybe it is, but there’s no triumph. Your heart feels the chill of the winter missing in between. You long to be lost first.”

I didn’t have the capacity at the time to respond with any eloquence to her appraisal. But my tiny mind had latched on to one word. It hadn’t even been a major component of her small sermon, an interjection at most, but at the time it had a larger impact on me than all the rest of the words combined, and I echoed it, stupidly:

“Gods?” I gulped. “Like… multiple?”

“The prism gods, of course,” said Mrs. Jacoby, “Joyce must have told you his stories about them?”

“Yes!” I said, tilting my head, “But I didn’t think that… I mean… do you… believe in them?”  

Before she could answer, the bedroom door whined open on its hinges and Joyce slid through, brandishing two mugs, both of them very much intact and full to the brim with hot cider. The steam wafted thick and sweet-spicy through the room, a pleasant haze that preceded his careful, steady strides. He wordlessly set one mug down on the windowsill before me with a quick flash of a grin, and then turned to attend to his mother.

“We’ll make sure you don’t drop this one…” he assured, pressing her fingers firmly around the handle with all the gentle fastidiousness he reserved specifically for her. “And remember, you have to wait until it’s cool enough before you start sipping. I told you last time that a dragon warmed it up with its breath, and I know you didn’t believe me, but I also know your tongue still hurt when you burnt it, so let’s not do that again, okay?”

Mrs. Jacoby had fallen silent, and simply stared out the window at the yard below. She seemed to have forgotten that I had spoken, or maybe that I was even there. If the new mug had simply fallen from her fingers right then, to join its shattered spouse, the crash wouldn't have surprised me.

And yet despite all other signs suggesting she no longer occupied our plane of existence, she still ran her free hand through her son’s hair as he stood beside her. In the draft of the house her long fingers had gained a bluish tint at the tips. I wouldn’t have noticed, if they hadn’t speared through his locks like buds peeking though drifts of gently rolling snow.

- ❀ -

“Why do you do it?” Joyce asked me, much later, after we’d walked back to my house and safely hidden ourselves away in our tree fortress. It was nearing dusk, but my parents were content to let us stay outside, so long as we wore our coats and didn’t leave the yard. We had a camping lantern between us on the floor, and it threw long warped shadows of our heads and shoulders upon the walls whenever we so much as breathed.

“Do what?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

“Why do you bring her the flowers?”

“I…” I swallowed, dragging a stick across the pine-board wall. It filled in my silence with a series of sssssskthaps. “You know…?”

“She leaves them around the house, and they wilt, and then I throw them out…” He admitted, and I felt my face heat in a blush.

“I-I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to give you extra chores. I-I just—”

“No! No, that’s not what I meant…” he insisted, with a note of strange desperation in his voice. He picked at a knot in one of the floorboards and his porcelain fingers seemed extra white against the dark whorl. “She leaves them around intentionally, I think. Not like the mug, where she just drops it and it lands wherever. She puts them places so she can find them again. But she doesn’t believe they need water so they end up dying. But the weirdest thing is, I’ve tried to put them in little cups of water for her and she takes them out again. I’ve … I don’t think I’ve ever seen her decide to do something on purpose like that.”

“I-I think they’re the wrong color.”

It wasn’t a very good sequitur to the things he’d just confided, but it was the only bit of information I could seem to surface above the tides of anxiety rising in my mind.

His head snapped up, and his eyes were terror-bright and shining stronger with the lantern’s reflection. I immediately wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

“What?”

“The flowers—the blue ones in your backyard. Or maybe all of them. I don’t think they’re the right color.” The words tumbled from my mouth in a rush, as my heart had begun to pound against my ribs.

“How would that happen?” he asked, squinting at me.

“I-I don’t know… I mean, you said the prism gods cross over to this world every spring to make sure all the flowers are the right colors… and you said that if … if a creature showed up who could bend light further than the prism gods, then we’d have to look for the effect it had on its surroundings if we wanted to catch it…”

For a long time Joyce simply stared at me—long enough that I began to wonder if maybe this whole time I’d been sitting in that tree house making up stories by myself. His gaze was a powerful yet absent thing sometimes—so pale it made you wonder whether he was looking through you, or if maybe you were looking through him.

“You think it killed my dad,” he said, almost beneath his breath, just when I’d nearly lost faith in my own sanity.

“Maybe,” I croaked, dry-mouthed. I still hadn’t told him about my dream.

He nodded, after a moment, more to himself than to me.

“And you think my mom can see it?”

“No. ‘Cause it still bends the light too much. But I think she knows it’s there, somehow. Maybe that’s why she’s putting the flowers everywhere? They could be some kind of warding magic, like when people hang garlic to keep vampires away…” I ventured.

“Or maybe she’s tracking it,” he murmured.

“What do you mean?”

“If what you’re saying is true, and this creature is out there, then when it passes it probably changes the color of objects around it. So maybe she’s leaving the flowers out as coordinates, to try to triangulate where it is.”

“Do you think it’s following her?”

It was the wrong question to ask. His father had barely been dead for a fortnight. He shrugged, aiming for nonchalance as he returned to picking at the floorboards, but the shadow of his curled shoulders leered like an omen across the ceiling, and told me all I needed to know about fear.

“Hey,” I said, reaching out for his shoulder before I could stop myself. He twitched like a cornered fawn and stared at the place where I’d touched him even after I’d hastily withdrawn. “Don’t worry. We’re going to catch it and kill it first.”

“How?” he asked, blinking up at me as I continued to kneel awkwardly beside him, too close for comfort.

I didn’t like that he didn’t have a suggestion. He was the one who was supposed to come up with fantastical ideas, not me.  

“I dunno yet,” I admitted, taking a deep breath. “But we’re pretty good detectives, so I think we’ll be pretty good monster-hunters too. We just need to practice.”  

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - einfühlung

“Can something out there bend light further than the prism gods?” 

It was four days later. Arthur Jacoby had been laid to rest that morning, and Joyce and I were sitting on the back steps of his house to escape the suffocating scent of lilies and the awkward shuffling of mourners picking at mini quiches and antipasto. 

Joyce had somehow compelled his mother to serve some beverages, but my parents had, rather generously, made most of the food. And it was good that they had, because unbeknownst to us, the eccentric, work-obsessed man who often overstayed his welcome at our backyard barbecues had made quite an impression on the community. Apart from coaching the youth soccer team, he served on the town council, helped kickstart several local businesses, and had coordinated the middle-school science fair for several years. 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d be wondering if somebody hired these people to show up with a story, right about now,” my father mutter to my mother, after one particularly over-the-top tale of ‘King Arthur’ Jacoby saving somebody’s dog by brewing a poison-antidote from kitchen spices. My mother swatted his arm so hard that he nearly dumped his plate full of kebabs onto my head.

Some of Mr. Jacoby's fellow chemists showed up to pay their respects, but none of them seemed to have any idea what had happened to their colleague on the night of his demise. Through the screen door, fragments of conversation still reached us from time to time: “You see incidents with burns sometimes—a splash of something on the arm, or in the eye. It’s god-awful, sure, but you still walk out of it with a heartbeat—” 

“I guess there could be,” Joyce murmured, when I’d nearly forgotten asking him the question that had rendered me sleepless for days. He was stripping away the amber flesh between the veins of a fallen oak leaf, until nothing but a skeleton remained. He twirled it in his thumb and forefinger, considering it with his signature bitten lip and furrowed brow. “But it would sort of hard to know, I think.”  

“How come?” I asked.

“Well, if it were powerful enough, it could probably bend the light around itself, so it would seem like nothing was there. Or maybe it would just be a black void—like a great big nothing that turns everything else into nothing too... I don’t know... sometimes I didn’t really listen to him...” 

He started pinching the veins off the main stem of the leaf, and I swallowed around the lump in my throat. I could hear his voice—that very same voice—crying words that it had never actually spoken: it must have already bent all the colors in their realm into nothing. You have to destroy the scrying stone before It figures out how to follow them through the—

The squeal of the screen door’s hinges cut into the echo of my dream. I looked up to see Joyce’s mother gazing down at us. 

She didn’t greet us, or even really acknowledge us. Her gaze was simpler than that. She clearly understood that there were two obstacles in the path she had been following. But the observation didn’t appear to bother her in the slightest. Rather, upon discovering us at her feet, she looked as though she might just stop there and remain blithely caught in limbo. 

I had to suppress a shiver, and looked studiously back at my shoes. But Joyce immediately leapt to his feet, and I found my eyes slowly drawn back to him. 

“C’mon mama. You can’t be out here right now. There are guests inside,” he told her as he turned her around. He grasped her hand ever so gently, pressing it around the latch to the door, encouraging her to squeeze it.

“No!” 

Mrs. Jacoby tore her hand away with such intensity—such unexpected purpose—that it sent both of us jolting. But the strangest thing about it was the aftermath: after Joyce and I had settled back into our skins, Mrs. Jacoby’s arm remained in tense recoil, jutting awkwardly behind her like some unfortunate posable dress mannequin, until Joyce reached to ease it back down. 

“I don’t want guests,” she said, as though she desperately needed sleep, or perhaps could not wake up. “I want to be in the garden.” 

Joyce’s voice had inherited nearly all the qualities of his father’s: the crisp lucidity of April morning air and the solid brightness of french horns, but the few times I heard Theresa Jacoby speak were the moments when I felt like I could hear Joyce most honestly. She gave his voice a softness around the edges: a subtle sandman grain.

And it was there, unmistakably, as he took her hands again, caressing her knuckles:

“Okay, mama. That’s good. Alright? It’s really good that you want something, and also that you don’t want other things. Dad would be so happy with you, you know? Come on, let’s go to the garden, okay?” he coaxed, not taking his eyes from her face for even a second as he slowly backed down the steps, leading her into the flowerbeds. 

The persistent lump in my throat grew larger as I watched him settle her in the browning October grass, watched him pick a sprig of dry lavender and a dandelion gone fluffy white, watched him rub the lavender into her fingers and press them a little too close to her nose. He did most of the work of blowing the dandelion seeds into the breeze, but she reached for another one when he’d finished—actually reached—and it felt like something I wasn’t supposed to witness, something more than the sum of its parts, or maybe less. But the meaning of it was escaping into the air with the seeds, and I could not grasp at it. Not entirely. 

I considered retreating inside to find my own parents, maybe acquiring another plate of snacks, but before I could, Joyce rose from his knees, and with a quick kiss in his mother’s hair, made his way back to me. 

“She won’t go anywhere,” he said, as though I would doubt it, “But could you stay with her, please?”   

His request also felt bigger than the words he’d spoken. I didn’t feel capable of carrying out the simple thing that he’d asked of me—no, that’s not quite right. I knew that I could, but I didn’t feel as though I was worthy. Fear clenched a fist around my stomach. 

“Where are you going?” I asked, desperately. 

“There are guests inside,” was his reply. He was already making his way up the steps, a dutiful little march. He stopped with his hand around the door-latch and glanced back. 

“It would be no use looking for a creature like that,” he offered, as temporary parting words: “You would probably have to look for the effect it had on its surroundings instead.” 

- ❀ - 

I watched the door for a long moment after he’d disappeared inside, not because I expected him to return, but because it took some time for me to muster the courage to look back at Mrs. Jacoby. 

She was still sitting where her son had left her, gazing idly at a something far below the surface of the earth. Being the product of my own mother and father, my instincts told me to engage, to be friendly, but I felt out of my depth, and so I sat in stupid, rude silence, and watched her watch the dirt. 

As it dragged on, I began to make out scraps of the conversation inside the house again. Not really dialogue, just overtones, like the foundation of the house itself was shifting subtly toward something more buoyant. People seemed to be laughing more, but at what I couldn’t say. It all felt starkly in contrast to the growing twilight in the yard. 

Mrs. Jacoby was easy to make out, even as the afternoon waned. Arthur had been a golden lion, and Joyce was all champagnes and rosés, but Mrs. Jacoby draped like a ghostly veil across the lawn, her long white hair french-braided pristinely—and likely not by her own hand. She was still in the black sheath dress she’d worn for the service that morning, and for lack of anything else to do, the immature child in me began to explore how much squinting it took to make her head appear to float in the midst of nothing.

“The flowers are so bright.”

I snapped my eyes open, convinced that my mind was beginning to play tricks on me. There were no flowers at this time of year, save the dying dandelions and the withering detritus of summer’s squash and tomato vines.

“Come see, Danny,” she said, then, and my heart skipped another beat. 

“Y-you... you know who I am?” I stammered, and immediately felt like a fool. 

If Mrs. Jacoby were capable of laughter, or a smile, she might have done either, but as it were she simply rested her hand in the grass beside her; there was forgiveness in the gesture.

“My boys say I have trouble wanting things, believing things, acting on things, but I don’t have trouble remembering things, Danny—not yet, anyway,” she said. “Joyce tries to tell me stories about the adventures you two have. It is hard for me to picture them, even when he dwells on every detail. But he trusts you a great deal, or he wouldn’t have left me with you. And he trusts me a great deal too, I think, or he wouldn’t have left you with me. Not with the way I can be, sometimes. My sweet baby believes we’ll be kind to each other. Come see the flowers?”

My thoughts were racing with all the things she had just said, but my legs didn’t want to do anything at all. And even after I’d won that battle, on the way over I stumbled on a root hidden in the grass and nearly gave myself a heart attack. I’m not sure why I was so terrified. I think half of me was still waiting for her to recoil again. 

But she didn’t. Actually, she did the opposite, leaving her hand resting in the grass where I was presumably supposed to sit. 

I caught on belatedly, and knelt down to pick up her hand, trembling as I carefully placed it back in her lap. 

She stared at the ground again as I took my place beside her. 

“See them?”

I focused my gaze where I thought she was looking, but all I could see was brown. I shook my head, and then tried squinting. It didn’t help. 

“Maybe you can tell me about them?” I tried, uncertainly. 

She may really have laughed, then. 

“Joyce tries that game with me too, angel. You both give me too much credit. I don’t invent things like you do. You just need to look a little harder.”

“But I don’t know what I’m—” 

No sooner had the words left my lips than I realized exactly what I was looking for. 

The flowers were not in the flowerbeds at all. They were peeking through the grass all around us: in between my fingers, brushing against my shoes. I’d probably squashed at least a dozen on my way across the yard. They were everywhere, like a battalion of tiny violet spears. 

Autumn crocuses, not yet in full bloom. I hadn’t noticed them before because there were so many that the entire lawn had adopted a faint hint of blue.

“They’re very bright, this year,” Mrs. Jacoby said again. “Don’t you think?” 

They hadn’t been, before I’d seen them, but after I’d noticed them it was impossible not to think so. This must be the prism gods’ work, I thought. As they fled they must have accidentally left behind colors that don’t make any sense...

My heart raced, and I felt suddenly exhausted, but also desperate, like there was something I forgot that I very much needed to remember, or some unfinished task that I needed to complete. Did I finish all of my homework? Was today the day I needed to take out the trash? When was the last time I told mom I loved her?  

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

The words sounded strange when she spoke them, and I realized it was because I had been thinking them too. I pulled my eyes away from nothing in particular, and finally looked at her—actually looked her in the eyes. 

“... why?” I asked. 

“I was supposed to move my hand, so you could sit down. Before.”

“Oh,” I said, blinking, “It’s okay...!”

“It’s not, though,” she sighed. “I realize it’s not, all the time, but only when I’m out here do I begin to think that maybe I can do something to make it okay. And even then, Arthur tried so hard to make me believe it.”

“I’m sorry,” I murmured, reaching out for her hand again.  

“... why?” she asked, an echo of the moment before. 

“... for your loss...” I tried on words that were much too adult, and the result was clumsy at best: “I um, I liked Mr. Jacoby a lot. He was always really nice to me.”

“It’s okay,” she said, “I don’t know how to believe he’s gone. But with him still here there’s not much of a difference.” 

I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t really understand why she would tell me such a thing. We sat in silence then, until it was completely dark around us, and the last echoes of laughter could be heard flooding out of the house through the front door toward the street, and the autumn crocus sentinels stood a solemn guard: their hue imprinted upon our spirits long after we rationally saw anything with our eyes.

- ❀ - 

They came to find us, eventually—Joyce and my mother and father. 

“You could have brought her inside, you know,” said my mother. “What on earth have you been doing out here all this time?”

“We didn’t want to come inside,” I said, and it came out more fiercely than I’d intended. Something about the way my mother had spoken—as though Mrs. Jacoby wasn’t present beside me—made me bristle. “She was showing me the garden.” 

“Not much left to see this time of year,” remarked my father. 

“Or this time of night!” giggled my mother. “You’ll both go blind!”  

“There was enough,” I said. 

My mother and father both stared at me, quizzically, but I just turned to Joyce, who was busy getting his mother back on her feet, and dusting the bits of leaves and mulch off of her dress. I began to help him. 

He only met my eyes briefly, but if there were just one moment I could steal from this story and keep for my own, it would be the way he looked at me, right then.

There was just so much in his eyes: fear, and grief, and hope, and pride, and gratitude, and things that I cannot name even to this day—all of them such a sudden heavy weight on my soul that it seemed to squeeze itself impossibly small, then glow impossibly hot, and then just burst within me. He looked at me like I’d just hung the moon, and I believed for one brief moment in his backyard that maybe I had, and moreover, if I simply put my heart to it, that I could hang every damned star in the sky. He picked a maple seed out of his mother’s braid and smiled as it twirled its way to the ground. 

We were only ten, but I would have built him galaxies, if he’d just asked.

- ❀ - 

Joyce helped his mother upstairs to her room before coming down again to send us off, thanking us quietly but profusely for all of our help, and insisting that my mother stop attempting to wash all the dishes. We didn’t speak much to each other in those few minutes. He seemed tired, understandably, but also not tired enough, when I considered how different our worlds would become when his front door finally shut for the night. 

My mother knelt before him in the threshold as my father and I waited out near the street. I could have guessed what she was saying even if I hadn’t been able to hear it: 

“JJ, listen to me. If you need anything. Anything at all, at any time of day or night, you can call us. Or just come knock...” 

“Thank you, Mrs. Pyrran.”

“I mean it, sweetheart! I don’t care if you think we’ll be asleep. And even if we’re not home, you can always—” 

“I’ll be okay, I promise.” 

I honestly expected my mother to keep going for another five minutes, but she didn’t. She just stopped and considered him for a moment, and then ruffled his hair, tenderly kissing him on the temple.

- ❀ - 

As we walked down the road to our house, I could tell that my parents both wanted to ask me what had happened in the garden that afternoon, but neither of them did, much to my relief. I didn’t know if I could explain. Not in a way that would make sense to them. 

I doubted if it would have made sense to Joyce, either. When I’d seen him side-by-side with my parents, gazing down at me in the grass, something soft and strange had shifted in the earth. He’d been standing in the spot where I should have been, and he looked as if he’d belonged there. And I felt equally that I belonged in the flowerbeds alongside Theresa Jacoby. I’d felt at home.

- ❀ - 

The feeling wore off a little when we got back to my house and turned on some lights. It was far past my bedtime, but my parents didn’t make a fuss about it. It had not been an average day for anyone. I fetched a glass of water and slid into a seat at the kitchen table, glancing at the open books and papers lying there in wait. Turns out I hadn’t finished my history homework, but by that point I didn’t feel particularly motivated anymore.   

“I still can’t get over how many people showed up,” said my mother, expertly wedging a tupperware full of leftovers into our fridge. 

“Or how long they all stayed,” said my dad, yanking his tie loose at the throat. “Who knew an eight-year-old could be the life of a party, eh?”

“It wasn’t a party, Hank. It was a funeral reception!”

“Yeah, I know. But tell that to the rest of the crowd after they’d had their third glass of wine and JJ was showing off his paintings. You would’ve thought you were at a gallery opening at the Met.” 

“He’s very talented,” said my mother, “Did you hear him telling the McQueens his story about painting with his mother?” 

“I heard him tell more stories than I can count on all my fingers and toes.”

“I bet he got that from Arthur.”

“His are way better though. Arthur just put me to sleep. This kid? He can tell people stories that they actually want to hear, instead of just pontificating on whatever topic happened to suit his—Lizzy?”  

I’d been sort of pointlessly tracing my fingernails along the grain of our kitchen table as I listened to them talk, but my father’s faltering voice snapped me out of my hypnosis.

To my surprise, my mother had tears running down her face as she stared out the window into the darkness of our own backyard. 

“Oh my god,” she murmured, “How did I believe that he was going to be okay?” 

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - being here and not there

Sometimes when you mix two chemicals, you get heat, or light. And if you can make heat and light, there is no limit to what you can synthesize. Once you know that, it’s just a matter of perseverance… 

“... Joyce, are you listening to me?”

We were in Mr. Jacoby’s laboratory, and it was dusk: too late for him to still be working, and far too late for us to be there with him. Through the vast plate-glass windows that lined the outer wall, a foggy golden autumn rolled through the Berkshire foothills. For a brief moment I thought I was hearing the the rustle of falling leaves, but it was just Mr. Jacoby scattering papers all over his lab bench in some fit of inspiration. All of his work—his entire presence, really—was tucked away in a single corner of the lab, leaving the rest of the space, with its high vaulted ceilings, feel too large, and holy, sparkling with stainless steel and crystal phials like some industrial gothic cathedral of his son’s wildest dreams.

Joyce was perched atop a counter some ways away, alternately considering the nature of the horizon outside, and the nature of a bunsen burner beside him.

“I want to go home to Mom,” he said, quietly enough that his father probably wouldn’t hear him, but just loud enough to sustain the hope that he might.

“Your mother doesn’t care whether we’re here or there.” His father had heard. “That’s why we’re here, and not there. Heat and light, Joyce. They’re intrinsic, organic in all of us...”

“You said all organic stuff has to contain carbon,” balked Joyce, twisting a valve on the burner back and forth, and back and forth again. Closed. Open. Closed. 

“That’s true, chemically, but—” 

“Well, we’re talking chemically.” 

Joyce glared stormily at his father’s back, but his little voice was level. He didn’t care what his father was talking about, actually probably already knew what his father was talking about, but stymying him on semantics was his revenge for not being allowed to see his mother. The way he fenced with his father sometimes felt terribly adult, certainly far beyond anything that I could have pulled off at that age, or even thought to attempt. But his silver eyebrows were jagged lightning through his dimming silhouette, and he was fearsome, and somehow admirable.

Mr. Jacoby, for his part, fell silent, but whether by concession or distraction it was unclear. I was about to suggest that we go find something to do outside while we waited for his father’s latest frenzy to die down, when something twinkled in my peripheral vision.

It was the scrying stone—rolling, silent and seemingly of its own accord, across the black concrete floor toward Mr. Jacoby’s feet. 

Surprised, I turned to look at the door to the lab, but it was still shut tight. There was nobody else in the room who could have set the ball rolling. The light of its marbled heart gained intensity as it went.

Every part of my body suddenly begged to run.

“Dad!” Joyce shrieked.

He leapt off the countertop and raced toward the ball, throwing himself over it—forever the master goalkeeper. Gasping, he hauled himself back to his feet, grabbing at his father’s sleeve.

“Dad!” he begged, “Dad you have to stop! It found us. It’s coming. You have to look away, or—” Joyce’s cry trailed off in a whimper, and it didn’t take me long to see what he was seeing.

The wall behind Mr. Jacoby’s fume hood had begun to crack apart, and through the crevice crept the sweetest, loveliest of lights.

His father stared straight at it, transfixed, and still holding something godforsaken in a pair of tweezers.

“Dad, you have to look away or your soul will shatter!” yelled Joyce, with all the authority his tiny child voice could muster. “DAD!”

He dropped the bowling ball again, and scrambled onto the bench, trying to put himself between his father and the light, smashing his palms so hard into his father’s eye-sockets it should have made him recoil in pain.

It didn’t. Mr. Jacoby did nothing.

“Help me, Danny!” cried Joyce, then, and only then did occur to me that I wasn’t doing anything either. I was just standing there, still wanting to run but not really grasping how my thoughts connected to any part of my body. “Danny, please. I have to get him to the lighthouse. Take the scrying stone. You have to destroy it!” 

“I thought... I thought we wanted the prism gods to cross over...?” I heard myself say. It sounded delayed—like maybe my words had to reach him before they travelled back to my own ears. 

“We do, Danny. We do, but not all at once. Don’t you see? They’re fleeing.”

“Fleeing?” I echo, my throat knotted with dread. “... fleeing from what?”

“From the only thing that can bend the light farther than they can—it must have already bent all the colors in their realm into nothing. You have to destroy the scrying stone before It figures out how to follow them through the—”

But as he spoke, his eyes and mouth and nostrils began to bleed light the same way the wall was. I couldn’t do anything but stand there and stare as it overcame his features, turning him into someone I couldn’t comprehend. It was Joyce, but it wasn’t. It was everyone at once, shades of humanity, blended and bent: rapturous color. His words died in the brilliance of it—

—which made his one final scream all the more shocking when it came.

“Don’t look at it!”

The universe detonated.

- ❀ - 

I awoke in a cold sweat, shaking and clutching white-knuckled at the quilt on my bed. I lay there for a long, terrible minute, choking in one breath after another and trying to banish the nightmare back into the depths of the hell whence it came—the hell otherwise known as my eight-year-old imagination. It had been several years since I’d disturbed my parents in the middle of the night on account of some wild dream, and given all the strange crap Joyce and I invented in the daytime, I was fairly proud of my streak.

But this was something else altogether, vivid and just simple enough to wrap itself in horrible plausibility. I’d never been to Mr. Jacoby’s lab. I had no idea where it was, nor what it looked like. Clearly Joyce and I hadn’t witnessed his father’s death, and yet I could not shake the dread that had settled over my bones, thicker than my quilt, and nearly asphyxiating. 

Specifically, I couldn’t quell the fear that, by waking up before I’d destroyed the scrying stone, I had just allowed a terrible unknown entity to discover our world. "How would you know?" my stupid little brain kept asking. 

How would you know?

I pulled myself upright and crept quietly out of my room, only to find the light in the stairwell still on. Evidently I was not the only one who’d been unable to sleep.

“It’s no use speculating,” my father was saying, somewhere downstairs. “I’m sure we’ll know more in a few days.”

“But I mean, it makes no sense. Was he alone in there? That shouldn’t even be allowed! What kind of lab are they running…?”

“Speculation, Lizzy! I don’t know what to tell you! Here. Let me pour you a shot of something. What do you want, Scotch? I think we’ve got some Baileys….”

“Baileys is fine… It’s just… I can just see him, you know? I can just see him being that reckless asshole who doesn’t think he ever needs to wear safety goggles or gloves, just fucking about in that lab of his until something blows him away. Did he ever pause to consider what would happen to JJ? Christ, it just makes me so—thank you—it makes me so angry!”

“Joyce is going to be okay, hon. His mother loves him dearly.”

“Hank, when’s the last time you even saw Theresa.”

My father’s sigh was heavy enough to hear from where I sat alone in my pajamas at the top of the stairs.

“I don’t know. Maybe a month ago? She came with Art and Joyce to that outdoor orchestra on the green in August.”

“They dragged her there, and she just sat—never smiled, never clapped. I don’t think she could even tell when the movements changed, or when the composer changed. It was like she didn’t even hear anything! They probably could have forgotten to give her a chair and she would have just sat on the wet grass without noticing! How is she supposed to take care of a boy as brilliant as Joyce? He’s going to wither.”

“He’ll be fine, Lizzy.”

“How can you just sit there and keep saying that? It’s not fine. None of this is fine, Hank! Some ‘horrible accident’ kills the father of Danny’s best friend, some atrophy of the human spirit is sweeping across the entire eastern seaboard rendering people somewhere between lemming and vegetable, and you just sit there and say it’ll be fine! God! What if you’re next? What if—”

“Liz-zy!” exclaims my dad, two distinct syllables that likely would have woken me if I hadn’t already been awake. “I’m not saying I don’t care. I care, alright? And I am also lucid enough to separate my feelings from my actions! I cannot do anything at 2am based on the half-account of one policeman, no matter how much I care! I cannot go kidnap Joyce out of his bed just because we think his mother is unfit to provide for him. The best I can do is be here for you and Danny—and for Joyce too, if he needs a father figure. And honestly, babe, so long as that kid has three people in his life who care for him as much as we do, I can’t help but believe that he is going to be fine. Actually probably better than half the lost souls on this damned planet...”

My mother didn’t reply for a long moment.

“You're right. I’m sorry,” she said, finally.

“No. Don’t be,” replied my father then, softer. There were footsteps, and I got the sense that he was moving, maybe from the chair where he usually sat, to the sofa beside her. “My Lizzy and her tizzies are the most wonderful thing I have.” 

“Shut up, Hank.” 

“I’m serious.” 

I’d been considering whether to go downstairs and join them, but as the conversation lulled into silence I decided against it, and carefully tip-toed back to my room.

My quilt and my thoughts felt a little less heavy, but I still couldn’t stop thinking of the bowling ball, and the terrible light flickering within. I wondered what sort of accident could have killed somebody as alive as Mr. Jacoby had been not ten hours earlier. I wondered what exactly he’d been trying to create, after mastering heat and light.

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - it couldn’t be just one or the other

Joyce rose to his father’s challenge to see the tree house as something more than it was, and he was not lazy about it. Every minute he saw it differently. Each afternoon I’d climb up the rope ladder to find him waiting for me with the scenario of the day. He exhausted the standard cops-and-robbers fare within the span of a week, and from then on things got more and more elaborate. One day it was Tarzan’s jungle home, and then it was Tolkien’s Lothlorien. Then all of that got too literal for his tastes and he stopped seeing the trees for the forest. We were in the crow’s nest of a pirate ship, looking for land.

“But there’s land everywhere,” I said, looking out of the porthole window cut into the boards.

“No, no,” he sighed, as though I were unbearable. “That’s not land. Our boat is sitting on the back of an enormous alligator-squid,” (it couldn’t be just one or the other), “and that green stuff is all the algae growing on its scales. And the things that look like trees are all the masts of the other boats that got stuck here for a hundred years!” He suddenly handed me a large, sharpened stick. “When we find land, you’re the harpooner. We have to stick the ‘gatorsquid on the right side, so he swims toward shore and we can jump off.”

Both of us were too chicken to jump out of the tree at the end—probably for the best, although, in retrospect, perhaps ending this tale before it progressed further might have been a blessing.

Anyway, another time, we were masters of a lighthouse on the edge of the earth, waiting for the aliens to come—“No, wait, I have a better idea,” he’d said, chewing his lower lip like he so often did: we were waiting for the gods themselves to return. And this was a reverse lighthouse. Instead of us making the light, the gods made the light, and the house allowed us to see it.

“If it’s light, then why is it so hard to see?” I asked. “Can’t we just look?”

“No! The land where the gods come from, it’s like a giant prism!”

“A prism?”

“A big crystal thing. My dad showed me one. It can take regular sunlight and turn it into rainbows by bending it,” he said, like this was the craziest thing on the earth, and back then it actually kind of was. “But the gods’ prism is so big and so powerful, it can bend light so far that it bends back into the prism, and then bends again, until it’s turned into a billion-kajillion colors that we don’t even know how to see. So if a portal opens to their world and we look at the light inside, our souls will shatter!”

I remember I just sort of sat there when he explained this, hugging my knees, eating the celery sticks that were left in my lunchbox. I remember this, because I never ate my celery sticks at lunch, because I hated celery sticks, and for some reason I was eating them, because the world he was constructing was so outrageous that I had to do something.

“So… why are we waiting for them to come, if they’re going to kill us?”

“Because…” He paused to think, teeth sinking back into his lip. “Well it’s not like they want to kill us. It’s accidental. They’re just bringing new colors for things! Like, in spring, when flowers bloom, they make sure they’re all the right colors.”

“This sounds like a girl’s game.”

“But they make sure that everything is the right color, Danny. If they left us alone for too long all the colors would get mixed up, and apples would be blue and giraffes would be black and white, and everybody’s soccer jerseys would get mixed up, and whole armies would shoot at themselves!” he exclaimed, and then, as an afterthought: “—and your hair would turn pink. So it’s important.”  

“I guess so…” I tugged at a strand of my hair and wrinkled my nose as I tried to assess it for signs of pinkness. Was it a little redder than it had been before? Maybe. It was hard to say.

“So this lighthouse!” He picked up where he left off, standing up and pacing around, peering through the cracks in the boards. “It has these cracks, and as long as we only see the light through the cracks, our eyes can handle it and our souls won’t shatter. There, see? Like that!”

He pointed suddenly at the west side of the treehouse, where a bright glow seemed to be creeping between two panels. It waxed and waned as the trees around us swayed in the autumn breeze, and their branches moved in and out of the path of the setting sun.

Or at least that’s what I knew in my head. But as I gazed at the light, it took on some other quality, something I’d now call seductive.

I found I didn’t really care what my brain told me was on the other side of those wooden boards. I could see the rocky beach at the end of the world, and the chill swept through my bones as the clouds opened up and the gods came to set all the colors straight—

Everything went dark.

“Hey!” I pushed his hand from across my eyes, but he returned with both of them just as quickly, trying to cover my face. “Stop it!”

“You can’t look too long! The lighthouse only shields us a bit! The only way to be safe is to look away if you ever see a light that’s trying to break through between the cracks! It won’t last very long, and then you can look back, and the gods will have crossed into our world, and everything will be safe.”

- ❀ - 

There’s one other afternoon sticks out in my mind; a warm memory that glows a bit more brightly than the rest. It sounds pleasant when you put it that way, and I guess it was, in a way, but that’s not what I meant.

He showed up after I did, pink faced and breathless, having hauled something the size of his head up the rope ladder, wrapped in a sheet. It was a scrying crystal, he informed me, in answer to my unspoken question. He stole it from one of the prism gods, and using it we could predict our enemies’ movements and stop the end of the world.

At that point, I took it upon myself to inform him that it was a bowling ball, and the only place he stole it from was his father’s closet.

“Wanna bet?” he asked, throwing back the sheet and holding out the ball. “Go ahead, put your hands on it.”

I was sick of trying to figure out what the words said in my chapter book, so I obeyed. It was a dark blue ball, but not entirely opaque, with a swirly pattern like cream mixing with coffee. As I held my palm against the surface, it suddenly grew hot—and not like my hands. Hot like a radiator.

I tore my fingers away in horror.

And suddenly the entire ball was illuminated from the inside out, glowing a sickly, demonic green. It cast a strange, ethereal glow upon his face, canceling out the blush. He was laughing, utterly exhilarated, and at that moment, he didn’t look much like my friend. He barely look like he belonged on this Earth.

I was all the way on the other side of the tree-house, with my back pressed hard against the wall.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

I nodded; part of me was thrilled. Part of me hoped that if I agreed with him, he would make it stop, and I could have my friend back.    

- ❀ - 

It did stop, after awhile. The whole act was part of a science fair experiment. He said his dad was trying to teach him that when you put two chemicals together, sometimes they make heat, or light.  He said if one could make heat and light there was no limit to what one could synthesize.

When his dad wasn’t looking, Joyce snatched a bunch of the chemicals and the bowling ball. And when I wasn’t looking, he’d shoved them all through the finger-holes and then held it out for me to touch. “Dad wrote a bunch of math on my notebook,” he said, “But all I really got out of it was that it would make a pretty awesome scrying crystal.”

I stared at the ball in his hands. Part of me was probably trying to make sure he didn’t try to shove any more of his trick powders and potions through the finger-holes. Part of me was also considering the reality of the object—the reality he could make out of it. I wondered how it looked when he looked at it. I wondered what he could see when he looked into it, where all I saw was formless light and shadow.

“Where is the enemy going to strike?” I asked him, finally. “Who is the enemy, anyway? Who are the prism gods fighting?”

At this, all the joy drained out of his face—as though this wasn’t merely a game. As though the question deeply begged an answer.

“I don’t know. I was hoping you’d help me figure out that part.”

- ❀ - 

We spent weeks that autumn rolling the bowling ball across the pine floor, scribbling nonsense across maps we’d torn out of old Rand-McNallies in the library’s discard bin. We were detectives, he and I, and it was a strange, unspoken competition: each of us trying our damnedest to come up with a more artful plot for our imagined enemy, and then to explain the even more clever means by which we’d unraveled it.

I became a disciple of cold thrill, addict of the hunt—of the slow reveal of the final detail that made all evil schemes crumble and all villains kneel in defeat. I craved the suspense that tightened my rib-cage. I forgot to breathe between my sentences, stringing along my thoughts from map-to-map, building a case, crafting the perfect story.

I relished watching Joyce’s face change as I spoke: his eyes narrowing in analysis, only to widen again in sudden comprehension, cheeks hollowing, teeth biting lip in hot-blooded wait for the punch-line. Watching his face was like watching the words pouring from my mouth take shape, like vaguely lit prophecies of a scrying stone suddenly incarnate. I think it was at some point during that fall when I stopped believing my own thoughts until his face echoed them into reality.

- ❀ - 

The enemy struck first, without a hint as to its movements. 

Joyce was in the middle of drawing the greek alphabet across the floor of the prism gods’ lighthouse with a piece of blue sidewalk chalk, explaining his vague notions of cryptography to me with the air of a tiny emperor, when my mother called up to us from the ground.

“JJ,” she said, and her voice wavered in its pitch, “You need to come down right now, sweetheart. Your mother’s here. It’s important.”

Joyce glanced at me. His face said my mother’s voice had sounded as strange to him as it had to me. His father was always the one who showed up to pry us away from our games. His mother never came over.

He swung over the side of the platform, silent, dignified, and disappeared down the rope ladder.

His father was dead.

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - the periscope

Nothing Arthur Jacoby believed was ever wrong. 

Joyce and his parents lived four houses down from us on the opposite side of the street, in a updated white Victorian masterpiece that looked as though it should have had a white picket fence to match, and was almost infuriatingly subversive for lacking one. 

My own house, by contrast, was a little brown-shingled saltbox with two big brick chimneys and a no-frills attitude. The two could not have been more different, with the notable exception that a considerable amount of work went into the upkeep of both: fresh paint, manicured lawns, perennial and annual landscaping, curtains in the windows, wreaths on the doors at holidays. Details like these, though I didn’t realize it until I was older, were what made our house appear much more akin to the pristine Jacoby farmhouse than it did to most of the other houses on the street. These were the tiny things that had made Mr. Jacoby notice us.

A comparable amount of effort went into the tree house Mr. Jacoby soon convinced my father would be a good addition to our backyard. The two of them worked together to build it snugly into the highest reaches of the tallest beech tree on the block. It had to be the tallest tree, something imposing, something inspiring. Mr. Jacoby had stressed this to my dad, hunched over the blueprints at our kitchen counter while Joyce and I looked on, sharing a pack of fruit snacks and intermittently kicking each other.

“Aren’t you concerned about one of them falling?” asked my father.

“No,” said Mr. Jacoby. “I’m concerned about neither of them ever reaching heights where a fall would mean anything…”

My dad laughed, baffled.

“Sure, Art, I get that. You know I think Danny and JJ should accomplish great things in life too, but this isn’t some kind of metaphor for achievement. This is a tree we’re talking about. Broken bones, blood, snapped necks…”

“And if they don’t learn about those things in a tree, where do you expect they’ll encounter them safely?” asked Mr. Jacoby, “Or do you expect them to continue to evade true danger forever, stuck in the same rut as the rest of the Complacenti of this godsforsaken country?”

“I think the roof should have flying buttresses!” said Joyce, then, reaching over with a pen and drawing lines on his father’s plans—meticulously, for a child. He bit his lip as he concentrated on perfecting each arch. I had no better idea what a flying buttress was than a Cerberus, but since befriending him I’d quickly found myself trusting Joyce’s judgment in these matters. “Or maybe it could have six roofs, like a pagoda!” he went to put more ink on paper, when his father gently reached out for his hand and paused his fervor.

“Why don’t you ask Danny what he wants it to look like?” he coaxed, glancing over at me with a grin.

Joyce’s glanced at me too, and almost immediately his face took on his father’s same exact smile, generous and beckoning and moth-deadly.

He held out the pen toward me and I inexplicably began shaking my head.

“I like what you were drawing,” I said. It was the truth.

“It’s your tree house too, though. You gotta want something, right?” he asked, almost hopefully, and it seemed odd, for him to be so concerned about me wanting something for myself.

“I-I…” I gulped, “I think it would be neat, if… if it had one of those things from old submarines, that let people see what was going on above the water…” I said, mostly with the hopes that Joyce would find it an acceptably fantastical idea. “Except… except we could use it to see what was going on above the trees instead…”

“A periscope!” announced Mr. Jacoby, summarizing all my babble with one crisp, complex utterance. “Yes, that’s an excellent idea, Danny. I like the way you think. Joyce, you could take a leaf out of his book, you know. The pagoda roof and buttresses are flash and grandeur but a periscope—that’s one step from clairvoyance…” Joyce only seemed to be half listening to his father. He’d gone back to work doodling on the blueprints, this time giving life to my idea: a long, steampunkish set of bolted tubes at precarious angles, culminating in an oversized, extraterrestrial glass eye.

“Danny may be one step from clairvoyance, but I’m two steps from the fridge, and I want a beer,” said my father, then. “You joining me, Art, or will a little alcohol impair your grand vision?” he teased.

“I think the boys can handle the grand vision,” said Mr. Jacoby, clasping us both on the shoulder and causing one of Joyce’s perfect lines to shudder jaggedly, much to his silent chagrin. “I’ll have whatever you’re having.”

My dad tossed him a beer. “I was gonna put the grill on. Lizzy should be home from her jog in a few and I thought you could get Resa and we could have a bit of a barbeque…”

“I’ll see how she’s feeling…” The beer bottle interjected a fizz-crack. “When I left she was gardening, but she may have given up for the day by now…”

Their voices faded down the hall as they headed for the patio outside.

“I swear, Art, it seems like those flowers are the only thing your wife blinks an eye about.”

“Possibly. But it’s a start.”

- ❀ - 

Joyce’s mother didn’t join us that night. She rarely did, but his father would come over anyway. And as Joyce and I tromped through the bushes where the freshly-mowed lawn ended, searching in the twilight for fireflies and crickets and spring peepers, Mr. Jacoby would sit with my parents in front of the chiminea and nurse another beer or two. It often seemed as though the care he took with his alcohol might have been an echo of the care he might’ve shown his wife, were he at home.

- ❀ - 

I should point out that the tree house didn’t wind up having buttresses, or a pagoda roof.

“If we built it all, then there would be nothing left for your imagination to fill in, and you would become lazy,” Mr. Jacoby told his son, as Joyce stared tearfully at the finished product.

“Or, you know, you could just confess that we’re amateur carpenters,” laughed my father. “I’m sure he’d find a way to forgive us.”

“The biggest problem with society today is that we’ve stretched our imaginations to their utter limit, and in doing so, undermined them…”  said Mr. Jacoby, seemingly ignoring my father’s suggestion and shaking Joyce by the shoulder, adamant. “We have learned to create, to show ourselves fictions with the same resolution as our reality, and nothing is left up to interpretation, to aspiration. We have all our fantasies, and that is our downfall—do you understand, Joyce? More important than having your dream is desiring to dream. You have to create, you have to show, but only enough to hint at possibility. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I wanted a gothic cathedral,” whispered Joyce.

“Then make it one—make it different, make it better each time you enter it. Make others want to worship within it. What do you always tell your mother when she looks at your paintings, and she tells you she doesn’t see anything?”

“… then you’ll just have to believe me,” whispered Joyce.

“’Atta boy,” said Mr. Jacoby, and let go of his son’s shoulder with a final thumping pat. 

I oddly recall the sudden firm press of my father’s fingers into my own, at the very same moment.

- ❀ - 

Amateur carpentry or not, even Joyce eventually had to concede that the tree house was a remarkable structure. And it did have a periscope—a real periscope at that—fashioned out of old metal tubing from my dad’s hardware shop and glassware from Mr. Jacoby’s laboratory. When you looked through it, you could see up and over the canopy of the neighborhood, past chimneys and crumbling church steeples and flickering cell towers, all the way to the horizon.

To the south, nearly too far away but just close enough if you turned the knobbery and squinted just right, there was a billboard sitting above the tree-line, on a hill by the highway. It was a man in a well-tailored navy blue suit and red-striped tie, giving a supportive thumbs-up to the people passing by in cars. The right side of his face had peeled completely away, and the rest of the board looked weary: splotchy with water damage and faded like the canvas of an old lawn chair after too many summer suns.

The man on the billboard was our president. He’d been our president for as long as that signage had been there. The man was still our president, not because he’d taken over in some dictatorial coup, or because the government stopped holding elections, but simply because, at some point that nobody could pinpoint, the percentage of the population that voted wasn’t high enough to accurately represent public opinion—or, if you listened to Arthur Jacoby after my dad put a few beers into him—lack of opinion had become Opinion. Years and years passed without anyone rising to challenge the unfortunately christened Last Man Elect. By the time Joyce and I were teenagers, the billboard had no face at all, and the tie which once was red had been replaced by a stranglehold of ivy.

- ❀ -

There’s something quaint about the apathy that comes with unfaith. Like the ivy that consumed that billboard, it feels organic in its progression: a slow return to nature. In some ways faith itself is an unnatural state—an invented way of being we were able to achieve through the smallest of mediums—words.

“Whole religions, entire philosophies,” Arthur said, gesturing with his bottle toward the heavens, the night after the tree house was complete, “all based on books—on some man’s word, divorced and abstracted from his being and given its own life. Before there were words there was no belief, and at their beginning, words only served to name the things that humans saw before them with their own eyes, in the present moment. The first and biggest miracle may have been the moment a man first used words to speak of something he saw yesterday, or might see tomorrow—something he might never actually see or taste or touch at all. The second biggest miracle was that anybody else decided to listen to his stories and hope for him. To believe that they too could see and taste and touch these things for themselves…”

It’s no wonder that a good two thirds of the sentences leaving Joyce’s lips at that age began with: Dad said…; Arthur Jacoby said a whole lot of things: about science, and politics, and current events, and literature, and art. He was a walking encyclopedia, or maybe a font of knowledge, bursting with discoveries and ideas. There were times when my parents could barely get a word in edgewise, and it would be up to Joyce to suggest they go home so he could get up early for school the next day.

- ❀ - 

“He’s lonely, I think,” I heard my mother say, once, when neither Joyce nor his father were around. I was watching TV on the couch, and my father was folding laundry on the kitchen island while my mother cooked lunch. “It’s Theresa—well, it’s not her; it’s the Apathy, but you know what I mean. Can you imagine if I were like that, Hank? He must spend so much time trying to inspire her, give her something to latch on to. I don’t think he knows how to turn it off anymore.”

“Well I know how to turn it off,” chuckled my dad. “Serve him some stronger booze.”

“Hank!”

“Or maybe some crazy chemical from his lab. One of those is bound to put a guy out like a light, right?”

“Sure, Hank, probably permanently!” said my mother, “You shouldn’t say things like that!”  

“Well I am saying it! We’ve had the guy for dinner how many hundreds of times? I feel like he’s my brother-in-law or something, and I still have no fucking clue what he actually does for a living!”

“Hank, language! Danny’s right there.”

“But seriously, how’s that for weird?”

“He’s a researcher—he does science for a living, Hank. Be glad that’s all you know. Next thing you know he’ll be expounding upon his latest journal article and you’ll be wishing you hadn’t failed O-Chem in college.”

“Hey now, I passed O-Chem…”

“You got a ‘D’—and that was after I helped you study for your final.”

“’D’ is for ‘decent.’ It’s too bad I didn’t have Arthur Jacoby to help me study for my final, isn’t it? You certainly seem to loathe the guy. Why do we keep inviting him over?”

“I don’t loathe him. I worry.”

“Worry about what?  Bubbling beakers of mystery chemicals? Lizzy, come on—”

“I worry about Joyce.”

Silence rang from across the room.

“… Danny is still right there,” said my father, then, slowly, and afterward the silence stretched onward, as I kept pretending to watch cartoons. That afternoon my parents conversation washed over me with the same blithe inconsequence of the CGI wonders flickering across my oversaturated retinas, but now I think I understand: Arthur Jacoby was in the business of re-inventing miracles, and his first invention—his first miracle—was his own son.

[imisphyx]

}  {  } - a three-headed hound

I was ten, playing youth-league soccer, and the only thing between me and the goal was this kid from the other team. He seemed shy: one of the few kids that didn’t want to chase like a hyperactive beagle after the ball. That was their team’s mascot, after all: some kind of hound. His father was the coach. In retrospect I think he probably stuck his precious son in the goal to keep him out of the melée, just like he’d stuck him in private school to keep him away from all of us public school urchins. But this kid wasn’t scrawny, or wimpy looking, or anything. Frankly, he looked more athletic and competent than most of the kids on my team—that is, when he wasn’t staring off into the sky.

At one point earlier in the game, I’d seen him crouch to move an earthworm away from the goal, leaving it wide open in the process. And as I ran down the field, I remember believing that getting the ball past him was going to be a cakewalk. I was about to become the hero of the day, admired by all my teammates—

—And then this daydreaming kid just martyred himself across my path, diving upon the ball. In an instant, my feet were gone from beneath me, and a snarling demonic hound was lunging toward my face. For some reason, the logo on his jersey had two extra heads. As I fell, it suddenly had five, ten, twenty heads.

The world spun.

My chin struck his shoulder blade as we both met the ground with a crunch and my lip burst hot and salty between my teeth. 

Without immediately making the connection, I watched the white canine on his back splatter with red. The soccer ball rolled away from us until it came to an unsatisfying stop beside the goal, then blurred as my eyes watered in tears.

“You ruined it!”

He yanked at his jersey until he could see the blood smeared across it, and then was suddenly ripping at mine. His nose and cheeks and ears flushed furiously. “You ruined it!”

“No, you ruined it!” I shouted, shoving him away, “It’s your fault. You tried to steal the ball!”

“That’s what goalies do! That’s what Cerberus does!”

“I don’t care what a Cerberus does!”

I had no idea what a ‘Cerberus’ was.

He pushed my face into the mud. I kicked him in the shins.

At some point, his father pulled us apart. He spent the rest of the game sitting inside his goal instead of standing, while I watched from the bench next to my parents, sucking on my swollen lip. After the final whistle I lost track of him in the crowd, and that was just fine by me.

It wasn’t until we were walking back toward our car that he appeared again. He was eating a firework popsicle, and held out another, offering it to me: the elementary school version of the olive branch.

“Dad said it would make your lip feel better,” he explained. 

Whatever his excuse, I liked firework popsicles too much to let pride get in the way. I took it and began to tear back the wrapper. 

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” he continued, awkwardly, not sounding at all the ball of fury he was on the pitch, but still just as pink in the ears. “I just am not s’posed to let the ball go by me. That’s what Dad said…”

“I know,” I said, sullenly, and then, mostly because my mother was listening: “I’m sorry I messed up your shirt.”

“Oh,” he said. “That’s okay. I looked at it after, and I kinda think the blood makes Cerberus look even more awesome. See?” 

He turned around to show me, tugging at the bottom of his jersey with his hands to stretch it, and glanced at me over his shoulder, as though looking for approval.

All at once my delusions from earlier made slightly more sense: he’d drawn an extra two heads upon his hound in something that looked like white-out, and my blood laced their muzzles in a vicious drizzle.

It looked, for lack of a better word, awesome.

“It’s like they ate someone!”

“Dad said Cerberus eats people who try to visit the underworld. He said nobody can get in, and if I guarded the goal just like that, nobody would score.”

“I’m going to score anyway,” I told him, defiantly. “Next time.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he replied, as he turned back to face me.

My lip stung with the wicked smile spreading across my face.

“I’m Danny,” I said.

“Joyce,” he replied, while trying to slurp up the drops at the base of the popsicle that were threatening to dye his fingers blue.

“Isn’t that a girl’s name?” I asked, not really mocking, but genuinely confused.

“Only if you think it is, right?” he chimed immediately, maybe a little too brightly, a little too rehearsed. “My mom didn’t believe that, and Dad said it wasn’t, and now it’s definitely not.”

“I guess so…” I said, still a bit confused, but fascinated, somehow. He had a way about him, this little kid, a way of articulating, a way of insisting.  

“Your boy’s a real firework himself, you know,” Joyce’s father was saying, right above our heads, to my mother. “He was completely convinced he was going to score that goal. It’s not something you see in kids these days…”

“No, I guess it’s not. But our Danny’s nothing if not a little headstrong.”

“It was more than that,” said Joyce’s father. “He wasn’t seeing the goal. He was seeing what came after. Trumpets and sashes and knighthood and eternal adulation from the crowd…”

My mother laughed, in that easy, space-filling, Pub-style Irish way of hers:

“All that because of one little soccer game? Imagine the fanfare in his head when he accomplishes something that actually matters.”

“And are there still things in this world that actually matter, Mrs. Pyrran?”

He had a way about him too, a way of articulating, a way of insisting. I remember thinking, even at the insignificant age that I was, that there was something defeated about him, even as he stood there: tall, square shouldered, laughing like the adulated knight he joked about.

His laugh didn’t fill the space like my mother’s. His laugh was an agoraphobia, the sudden surrealization that I was standing on a wide stretch of asphalt, beside six wide, freshly-mowed fields, and with no roof above my head save heaven itself, if it began to rain. His laugh was the quiet kick in the air hinting that it just might rain at any second.

“Goodness, I’d better hope so,” said my mother, and she was suddenly diminished. “Otherwise we’re all wasting a hell of a lot of time and energy pretending like there aren’t, don’t you think, Mr. ____?”  

This answer seemed to satisfy Joyce’s father. He grinned blindingly and held out a hand.

“Jacoby, Arthur Jacoby—my wife Theresa and I live just down the street from you, I think? That is, I believe I’ve passed you walking your son to the school bus on my way to work in the morning…”

[imisphyx]

}  {  }

At the moment I first encountered Joyce Jacoby, I was ten, staring headlong into the jaws of a three-headed dog.

Closed. Opened. Closed.

I always knew that my story would close and open and close there, with a monster, with me, with him, but I’ve spent my whole life avoiding and agonizing over what lay between.

I didn’t realize that what lay between would be stolen when I finally went looking.

You have two choices when it comes to memoirs, right? You either wait for the prism gods of hindsight to cast your plot in a brand new light, or you just start yammering like an idiot for fear that your dawn will come too close to the end. I excel at the latter, never out of stories so long as my fingers have the condensation of a drink to trace across The Lazaret’s bar. But tonight, as I was sitting there across the river, winding up to launch into my latest epic, the words fell away. And I started running…

Less than an hour later, and I am bleeding out on the scuffed concrete floor of a university chem lab, watching my dawn race toward me in tongues of magnesium flame. And it turns out that no amount of illumination can make sense of my life, because my life was already gone before the gun went off.

The words were there, I know they were, as Bux pushed another whiskey sour toward me, eyes twinkling with anticipation. I’d been about to explain how Joyce and I had met, about the three-headed dog, when, in the depths of my mind, the hound had slowly turned to fix me with a different face than the one that had held my gaze all these years…

And just like that, between one tiny thud of my blood in my ears and the next, all my thoughts softly receded. As they departed, they left strangeness where there had been familiarity: a taste like a drink expecting bitters, but bearing none. The helpless levity of bones stripped hollow of their marrow, yet still too heavy to take flight. And more than anything, the terror of being unable to convey how two faces differ, only how you differ in this new creature’s gaze: prey, when once you were protected.

That’s how I figured it out—that I had reached the close, and the open of my story: the sudden onset of abstraction. Because that’s what the Imisphyx leaves behind when it has taken nearly everything from you: abstractions. It starts with the details it thinks you won’t miss: the extra buttons sewn inside your shirt before you realize you’ve lost one, stumbling sick in a cobblestone alleyway with your hair plastered down by the rain. It siphons away the lush liquid violet that fills a medical phial, two phials, three—and sweeps away the glass crushed beneath your hasty boot.

Then it goes for the big things—the pillars of your reality. Your family, your career, your friends. Did you have those? Did you create them for yourself? That which is given is so easily taken away by the flood...

The last thing the Imisphyx takes is the softest kiss upon your forehead in a grey dawn, before you’re awake enough to know it for what it is— or when you’re no longer lucid enough to know it for what it truly was.

I can’t leave you thinking this is a love story—that’s what I believed for twenty-nine years, and it’s not. It could not be less of one. He is a monster of abstractions upon abstractions: terrifyingly clear in peripheral vision but softly distorted head-on. He is a monster on his knees, not slain but clutching me to his chest, waiting for me to relinquish my pulse so that he might gain one. And Christ, I love him with every last fucking heartbeat he will allow me.

And I don’t know why he’s allowing me so many. I don’t know why the sadistic bastard didn’t just kill me quickly. The gun he shot me with landed on the floor a few feet beside us, but when I try to reach for it—to just get this over with—he reaches for my hands and clutches them, stopping me.

He isn’t crying. His face is dry. He just looks terrified.

Terrified, maybe, of the fact that he isn’t crying. Why would he be? This isn’t a love story. Which head of the dog is this, you bastard? You demon. Do you even know what you are?

He strokes my knuckles with a pale thumb, and says nothing, and says everything. Says: I was trying to tell you this story, Danny, the whole time, don’t you see? But I couldn’t.

He couldn’t tell it because it doesn’t belong to him—yet. He started it, technically, when we were kids, but the story of the Imisphyx belongs to me. He’s not going to let me die until I finish telling it. I cannot die until I finish telling it, and in doing so give it back to him.

His long wool coat is a black abyss ripped in the remnant fabric of my reality, and his wild white hair is indistinguishable—inextinguishable—from the fire slowly licking the edges of my vision. The lab smells like autumn and so does he when he looms so close: he’s cider mulling spice and rain on dead leaves, and I have wanted to die so many times because of him. It’s possible I already have died more times than I can count. He stops hearts when he enters a room. I know that’s some kind of top-forty cliché, but he is not a song lyric. He’s life-bending, lethal, and if he wanted to badly enough he could bring all of creation to its knees. Someday, if our government gets what it wants from him, I’m scared that he will.

But for now he masquerades as a simple man, a kind man. They call that momentary whirl you feel when the blood leaves your brain charisma, and with a smile he allows your pulse to begin again before you sense the damage. I’ve wished that he wouldn’t. I’ve prayed that the next time he came borrowing heartbeats from me he would take just a few too many and I could slip away from this world in peace.

And I am furious that now, now that he is doing exactly that, I suddenly, fiercely want to live. I want to keep living so he can’t have this story, because I’ve finally realized it’s the only thing he’s ever really wanted from me. I never thought I’d understand what it felt like to possess something that this leviathan values. And of course that would be the thing—the most valuable thing of all, right? What could be more valuable to a story-stealing monster than its own damned story? Wouldn’t it be just wild to withhold it?

But who am I kidding. I could never deny him a damned thing, even when he never asked. I’m not about to start now.

So let’s start again. My words for a moment more before they become his. Christ, they already sound like his, honestly. I’m not usually this flowery.

At the moment I first encountered Joyce Jacoby, I was seven, staring headlong into the jaws of a three-headed dog.

Closed. Opened. Closed.

Now that I’ve got all this babbling out of my system, I should probably start by explaining what the fuck a three-headed dog has to do with any of this.

[imisphyx]

—after the meal, the Imisphyx whispers to the faithless masses a promise, a psalm. It swoons to the ever steady rhythm of freshly begotten pulses, gorged sick upon stories and singing praise to a prism realm, where all things bend back upon themselves, where all tales spin identical, and all hearts beat in time; a space where ‘upon a time’ is all times, and nothing waits to greet ‘happily ever—