#she kept her dead turtle rotting in our room for about three weeks. just. in a cup by the sink

[skrunksthatwunk]

how do i tell my roommate that her cat repeatedly pissing on and destroying my things is something that people usually offer to clean or replace or apologize for instead of shrugging off

[inkstainedfanfics]

To my Dearest Regret, With Hope

Request: Listen. I'm legit bawling. I'm crying. My heart has been broken and scarred. You did that! I need a part 4 please or I might just die, M. Your writing is gonna kill me someday, you queen of angst, you. AND other sweet comments! THIS IS A PART OF THE To Newt, With Love series

Word Count: 2,627

Pairing: Newt x Reader

Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3 |   Part 5

Tag List: @dont-give-a-bother @red-roses-and-stories @caseoffics @myrtus-amongst-the-stars @gemininomad @fangirlingandcrying @adellyhatter-blog @ryeosomnia

Requests are currently open! Feel free to send one in

Newt stares at the brick house in front of him, taking a deep breath before dipping his head and walking toward it. The leather case in his hand bounces against his right leg with every quick step he takes. He times his steps, falling into the same familiar rhythm as the creak of the neighbor’s porch swing.

Climbing up the three hole-ridden steps, Newt curses under his breath. He pauses at the top and sighs. It’s now or never.

The door slams open halfway through his third knock. He nearly smacks his mother in the face as he stumbles forward, but she just ducks under his hand and wraps her arms around his stomach.

“Erm, hi mum.”

“You finally remembered I’m alive!”

Newt rolls his eyes over his mother’s head. “I never forgot it. That would be hard with all the owls you kept sending.”

She steps away from him, leading him into the house. “How could I not send them? You never replied. I didn’t know if you were getting any of them.”

Newt pulls the door shut behind him as he steps inside. “I’ve been busy.”

“I know, I know,” Mrs. Scamander waves her hands, walking down the hall to the kitchen, “Your animals mean more than your own dear mother.”

“That’s not true.” He follows her, eyes trailing over the pictures of him and Theseus at various ages, hanging in rotting frames on the cream walls.

“Well, you aren’t very good at showing that, are you? Come in here, I just finished baking some biscuits.”

Chuckling at a picture of him and Theseus grinning ear to ear in front of the ocean, stacks of shells balanced on their sopping curls, Newt heads into the kitchen. It hasn’t changed much since he was young. The same dog and cat salt and pepper shakers sit above the stove. The same row of flower vases with the same nine vases are lined up on the far counter, like soldiers ready to march at any moment. The same wooden frames hold up the same moving pictures.

Well, almost all the same pictures. Newt tries not to see the different faces in three of the frames, changed courtesy of Theseus.

“How have you been, honey?” Mrs. Scamander sets a cup of tea and a plate of two bite-sized biscuits down in front of Newt.

“I’ve almost died five times since I last saw you.” He fights a smile at his mother’s frown as he bites into a biscuit.

She falls into the chair across from him. “Do you want to kill your mother? Merlin’s beard, Newt, didn’t I raise you better?”

“You’re the best there ever could have been, mum.” Newt starts on the second biscuit.

“I failed to teach you not to lie.”

“It was a joke, mum.” He stands, taking his now empty plate to the sink, pressing a kiss to the top of his mother’s head as he passes her.

“You know, I hear from your brother far more than I do from you.”

“Here I thought we’d agreed to ignore you.”

She huffs at his crooked grin. “You always have a joke now, don’t you?”

Newt returns to the table, sitting and wrapping his hands around the cup of tea. “I do my best.”

She ignores the comment, brightening at whatever she thinks of. “Have you heard from your brother recently?”

Newt twists the glass in his hands. “I could start an owlery with all the messages you two send me.”

“Did you hear he was promoted? Of course, no one’s surprised. He’s the best there.” She drones on. Newt takes a sip of his tea and nods when it seems appropriate but doesn’t listen, attention focused on a tiny glass figurine. It’s a green turtle that doesn’t even take up two inches of the counter. Its neck stretches as though it’s craning forward, trying to hear their conversation, the way a girl he had once known used to sit.

No, he won’t think of that. Won’t consider it. Dead to me.

Shaking his head, he tries to tune back into his mother.

“He’s always out with his new friends if he isn’t here with me. He brought some over once. They’re such lovely men. So kind and respectful. I told them they could come over whenever they wanted a homecooked meal.”

“That’s nice, mum.” Newt murmurs, mind still drifting to the way that turtle had made its way into the house.

“And he’s met the loveliest girl, too. Oh, she’s so sweet. I’m so glad our Theseus swooped her up.”

She continues talking as Newt gives in and glances at the turtle again. It had been so small on that counter, so precious. He could hear your voice, the way it had shimmered in delight at the sight of the glass glinting in the sunlight.

No.

“Maria promised she would stop by soon to have lunch with me.”

Newt lets out a shaky breath before glancing at his mother and giving her a wry smile. “Theseus finally meets a girl and you want to put her through your cooking already?”

Mrs. Scamander scowls. “You don’t like my cooking? Then why did you bother with those two biscuits, hmm? I may as well feed you store-bought goods if that’s how you feel.”

Newt chuckles. “You’re good at baking, mum, but I think I may have inherited my cooking skill from you.”

“Then you would be wonderful at it.”

Newt sips more of the tea, raising his eyebrows in fake assurance. “Of course. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Oh, that reminds me, I need to get that recipe from Mrs. Dukir. Have you tried one of her stews?”

Newt can’t listen to his mother harp on about the main ingredients in a stew, not when there’s so much else on his mind. He runs through his mental checklist: feed the animals, check on Charlie’s wound, take notes on the habits of the diricrawls, walk through each habitat to make sure nothing’s out of order, then maybe sleep. He fights a yawn. He’d been up all night traveling here to see his mother, and the effects were finally hitting him.

His eyes wander to the turtle one more time, and he can hear your voice in his mind, worrying his mother wouldn’t like it, asking again and again, trusting Newt to know the answer.

Yep, time to sleep.

He pushes the chair back, standing. “Excuse me, mum. I’d love to hear more about Mrs. Dukir’s stew, but I’m afraid my trip here is catching up with me.”

She’s on her feet in an instant. “Of course, honey. Your room should be empty. You can stay in there.” She takes the cup of tea from him. “When you wake up, we need to talk about you visiting more. You worry me too much to stay away for so long.”

Newt glances at the turtle again, a slight blush filling his cheeks. “You won’t die if you don’t see me, mum.”

“It sure feels like I will. You know Frank March from across the way? He stops in to see his mother every week. I’m lucky if I see my own little boy every year.”

Newt rolls his eyes, leaning down to lift his case. “I think you’re being a smidge dramatic.”

“I understand that you don’t care. Whatever.” She raises her hands and heads to the kitchen. “That’s the curse of being a mother.”

Newt laughs as he leaves the kitchen, ignoring his mother’s guilt trip.

He doesn’t stop to look at the pictures in the hall now. He just trudges up the stairs, skipping the one that groans by habit, and turns the corner, pushing open the old door to his room.

Everything is nearly the same as he had left it years ago when he’d left the house: journals next to his desk, leaning against a stack of textbooks from Hogwarts, old notes taped to the walls with poor sketches right next to them, the same navy comforter stretched over his bed. Everything is the same, other than two boxes off to the left, some sort of trophy poking out of the top flaps of one of them. Probably Theseus’s junk, Newt figures as he sets his case down. He kneels to open the case though the need to sleep weighs him down. He needs to feed the creatures.

He lifts his hand to check the time and freezes. No watch. Of course.

The memories surge forward, easily fighting past his tired mental block, and all he can think about is you.

You, walking into his room, eyes taking in everything with a wonder he hadn’t seen on anyone else.

You, shouting up at his window from the front lawn, squinting with your hand over your eyes, asking him to hurry up and get outside already.

You, head falling onto his shoulder, exhausted from the long train ride, muttering his name in your sleep.

You, telling him you never want to see him again, that you could never forgive him, that you just want to forget he ever existed.

Newt winces at the last one, hearing it, seeing it all over again like he’s reliving it. He stands and steps back, sitting on the bed, head in his hands. He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to forget the way your voice sounded when you realized he was choosing Leta. So hurt, so broken, a way you had never sounded before, and then  you did because of him, because of what he did, because he couldn’t realize what was best in his life. He falls onto his back, rubbing his eyes, wishing he could go back and choose any other decision. Anything but Leta.

As he falls, something lodges itself under his shoulder. Shifting, Newt reaches for it. It’s a bulky package, heavy and fat. Something inside crinkles under his touch, and another seems to slide down. Probably from his mother.

He pauses, though, when he sees the handwriting. Turning it over in his hands, he barely breathes, heart pounding.

It is.

Oh God, it is your handwriting.

He releases his held breath, flipping the package over and tearing the top open with controlled excitement.

The contents slide out, landing with a muffled thump against his mattress. Eyes wide, Newt reaches down, lifting the watch. Its face sends a glint of light darting across the wall as it swings in his hand. The watch. It can’t be.

But he flips it and sucks in a breath.

To Newt,

With Love.

You’d sent it back.

Tears prick his eyes—silly, he tells himself but doesn’t blink them away—as he wraps it back around his wrist, a piece of a home he never thought he’d see again. He twists it once, pure joy filling him. It’s back.

You hadn’t forgotten about him.

He lifts the other item on the bed: a small key. The spare key you’d given him so many years ago.

Newt wonders in the back of his mind why you’d sent it back now, after he’d returned them two years ago.

He picks the envelope back up, searching for a letter of some kind, some sort of answer to his question. Tugging it open, he notices a piece of paper, just a fragment, stuck in the fold of the protective washcloth.

To an old friend,

With all my love

You wanted him to have the watch back. And with the key and the note, maybe… No, Newt stopped himself. No, you’d been pretty clear how you felt that day with Leta.

Still, you’d gone out of your way to send everything back to him. That must mean something.

The envelope slips from his hands, landing on his lap, address facing up. He thinks nothing of it until he notices the date: Almost a year ago, just a few days off.

Merlin’s beard, why hadn’t his mother said anything to him? He stands, rushing to his desk, scrounging up parchment and a quill. He needs to send you a letter, tell you how he feels.

To my dearest regret,

With hope

It’s as far as he gets. He sits to begin writing more, but nothing comes out right. The parchment is filled with lines of ink running through messy words. Newt scowls at the paper as though it’s hiding what he wants to say. He tries five more times, the quill ending up in his mouth many more times than that, before finally giving up.

He doesn’t know where the idea comes from, or where the nerve to do it comes from either. Newt just knows as he stands that he’s going to your house. He’s going to apologize in person. It’s been too many years since he’s heard your laugh and seen your bright smile. He might not see them today, the first time seeing you in years, but he’s going to bother you until he does.

Tearing off the only coherent words he has on the page, he shoves them in his pocket. He grabs the key, hiding it in his palm, closes his eyes, and pictures your neighborhood.

Birds scatter as he lands in an alleyway a few blocks away, safe from the eyes of any muggles.

He wraps his jacket around him as he paces forward, trying to block out the cold breeze gusting through the narrow streets. Imagining your face when you open the door keeps him moving, keeps him from second guessing his decision, but doesn’t keep his hands from shaking. God, he wants a hug from you. You give the best ones, and it’s been too long since he’d received one.

Your house looms in sight now, slowing Newt the slightest bit. He fiddles with the key in his hand, spinning it over and over, trying to imagine what he’ll say to you, what you’ll say to him. Will you hug him? Will you smack him and tell him it’s about time? Will you just invite him inside for a cup of tea and laugh about everything that’s happened?

He reaches the thin sidewalk that leads to your house, heart thrumming against his chest, threatening to stop if he opens the door.

He climbs the two steps and stops, taking a steadying breath. Finally.

He lifts his hand and knocks three times.

Waiting.

A beat.

A noise from inside. Newt shifts to his other foot, rubbing the back of his neck.

The doorknob turns.

“Can I help you?” A man stares at Newt, lips curved into a kind grin, impeccable grey suit on with a matching hat.

Newt freezes. No, this isn’t right. This isn’t right at all. He checks the house number uselessly. He knows what your house looks like. “I-I’m sorry. Do you live here?”

The man nods. “Just moved in a couple of days ago. Are you a neighbor?”

Newt tries to conjure up some sort of smile as his heart plummets. “No. No, just had the wrong address. I’m sorry.”

The man says something Newt only just hears before the door closes on his face.

You’re gone.

Newt blinks rapidly. You’d left no hint of where you’d gone, given no other way of contacting you. You’re a ghost now.

He’ll never see you again.

The ache in his chest deepens, hurting, nearly dragging him to his knees right there on the front stoop. You’re gone, and he’ll never get a chance to tell you how deeply he misses you.

He can barely breathe.

You’ve given up on him.

His breaths are shaky as he breathes in and out, gripping the nearby railing until his knuckles turn white, trying to understand, trying to process, what just happened.

Then someone behind him calls his name.

[clockwerksorcery-blog]

Fiction - These Things Take Time

Welcome once again, Facebook freaks and fiends! This week, we delve a bit deeper into our mysterious set of circumstances and the effects of the outre gently pushing into our minds.  In this twisted, gothic tale of Vrt Lrhian pathos, our friends, the walldwellers, bless a landlord couple with their glorious presence and cradle them in depths of gloom. Enjoy... or... something...

                                         These Things Take Time

                                              by Arthur Cullipher

   Randall didn't know how long he'd been sitting there, staring at the wall. It hadn't moved and neither had he, for hours it seemed. He would sit there for many more, if he could. His bones felt heavy and he had no real desire. Sometimes, if he waited just a little longer, his momentary awareness of his situation might pass. But not now. Not tonight.

   She would call for him again tonight. She would peek half of her yellowed face out behind the doorframe and call those dreadful words.

   "Randall, it's time."

   He wanted to hate that. He wanted to hate her for making him hate it, for making him do it. But these days it was such a chore to feel much of anything, even hate. It was much easier to just do what she asked and when it was done he could sit, leaving the horrible squalor of this reality behind. But in these sour moments of awareness, of real thought, he was mortified at what had become of him. And what was becoming of her.

     "Randall, it's time."

   He leaned in his chair and looked down the hall. His eyes caught Greta's face peeking out from behind the doorframe and, for an instant, he saw a sparkling reminder of who she used to be. A dark twist of hair hung down the side of her face, curling in the hollow of her cheek. A flicker in her grey eye. Was she smiling? No. Nor did her skin seem as vibrant as a moment before. Her eye had gone flat as the walls. She was growing impatient. He made his slow, uncertain rise from his creaking, wooden chair and moved timidly toward the hall. Greta retreated into the dim light of the bedroom. His legs awakening from a deep sleep, he found it difficult, painful even to creep as he did. He could smell the room at end of the hall, past their bedroom. He knew he would have to clean in there again soon.

   Randall stood in the doorway, his eyes adjusting from the dark hall to the smoked yellow light of the bedroom. How odd, unwholesome it seemed to him now. He only came in here when she called on him for this task. He wasn't allowed in here at any other time. Hadn't been since they'd found that first one, years ago, not long after their first child was born still. It was her room, not theirs. She had been in here ever since. Piecing together nonsensical devices of what exact purpose or nature, though he had his suspicions, Randall could never quite discern. Nor did he wish to. He left her meals and the materials she requested outside the door. He was supposed to deal with the tenants and the delivery boys. It was his job to pay the bills, maintain the apartments and their bank account.

   He dared not tell her how five of their eleven units had been trashed and abandoned for months, how he had not replaced the tenants and had not bothered to clean. He never spoke to her of the buildings structural problems or the hate mail he received with the existing tenants’ rent checks, calling him a slumlord, complaining of rats and snakes and untraceable, fetid odors. It was his burden to bear, not hers. That was the way she wanted it. That was part of his duty as her husband. Part of his penance for having sperm that gave her a dead child. The dead child that gave her the hollow grief. The grief that caused her condition.

   He looked at his wife, lying stiff, naked on the bed. She had grown _so_ very thin. He hoped it was only the room's lighting that made her skin look that way. Like jaundiced ash, parched and cracking. Only the light that made her eyes seem to recede, her belly so sunken. But he knew from the large remains of her barely touched meals that she hadn't been eating well. Leaving the meat, hoarding the bones.

   She stared at him blankly, with her flat, cloudy eyes and slightly ajar mouth, as he wearily undressed beside the bed. He didn't want to look at her. His eyes pretended to scan the room, but he didn't really want to see anything else in here either. Old and newly fashioned instruments littered the tops of small tables and shelves and spilled onto the sticky floor, all bearing the slightly disturbed aura of recent use. Bizarre contraptions formed from greasy animal bones, broken mouse traps and baby doll parts, glass ampules filled with dried, white carcasses of strange, many-legged bugs, and the reconfigured innards of countless dismantled music boxes. He had never told her about the similar items he’d found and half-heartedly toyed with in his meandering inspection of the vacant units. He never asked her what these things were for or what caused her to build them. He didn't want to know what she did in here. He didn't want to know the morbidity that had afflicted his wife with its touch. He didn't want to have any understanding of why the air in this room was thicker now than in the rest of the apartment, why the walls seemed so... damp.

   He heard a splashing sound near his wife's head. Greta's eyes never moved from him, or the indefinite point in space she was staring at beyond him. He looked past her to the nightstand and for the first time, he saw the jar. He wished he didn't know what that abhorrent thing in the jar was. Didn't want to know anything about what it meant that it was writhing in the yellow fluid the jar contained on their nightstand. But he did. He had known before she had even called his name.

   She had coaxed another one of those damned things out of the wall. Kept in her own urine. Blessings, she called them. As was common of these matters, his stomach sort of lurched when he saw this one. He thought that it must have over sixty of those ugly, little eyes. All of them tiny, black, festering, jiggling beads, all engorged in a headskin plum of smooth, purple fat, all leering at him, laughing. He could taste the putrescence of their lust at the back of his throat. He knew he had been promised to it. His muscles tensed and puckered as he watched it swaying its dark, eel-like tail through the yellow liquid, flexing the opulent rings of thorny spines that stemmed from just below the rim of its disgusting, bulbous head.

   "Touch it." Greta commanded through tight, barely open lips. As if she thought she might tear her paper skin by opening her mouth any wider. Randall timidly did as she asked, hoping this would be all it took. The past couple of times it hadn't been enough. He'd had to do the other. The thought made his testicles feel weak and sick.

   All it had taken was a touch, when they found the first one sticking out of the wall that day, years back. Back when he still had a couple of vertebrae and some scattered remnants of dignity. Before she had torn it all from him. He had put death in her womb, she said. Worthless, dead sperm that she swore she could still feel clinging to her insides. Infuriating excuse for a man, spilling his loveless poison inside of her. That was it. He hadn't loved his wife enough to keep their baby alive. It was his fault. She told him their daughter's name would have been January. Did he know that? Did he care? she'd  screamed.

   Randall knew that the moment he heard his wife speak their stillborn daughter's name was the same moment that he lost the ability to gain an erection. And her resentment of him grew into a continuous assault on his manhood. "If you could call it manhood." she'd said. Pathetic, ugly, puny, limp, dead chickenskin. Any real man could not only get it up and give his wife the beautiful, living baby she deserved, but could give her an orgasm in the process. Randall had never even done that for her, she told him. And he probably never would from the cancerous rot between his legs.

   Randall would just sit there. Day after day, wishing she would stop driving these guilt-tipped nails into his skull. Wanting to lash out at her, scream, something. Yet, he seemed only able to sit there, staring down at his hands in his lap. He knew she was right. It _was_ his fault. Him and his defective equipment.

   The day that they had found the first of those horrid little creatures, Greta had been in the process of, yet another, discourse on his seemingly boundless inadequacy. She had been so infuriated with him. She had smacked his face three times. And when he did nothing to stop her, she grabbed the object his fingers had been fiddling with and smashed it against the wall. Only when dead, twisted tones began to chime, light and sick in the rage-heated air, did she realize what she had broken. The little music box Randall had bought for her and for their child when he found out that she was pregnant. Once upon a time it had played "Somewhere, My Love", but as it laid there in pieces, the hollow, tin garble that was plucked from it shrieking, as the coil unwound, was unrecognizable as any but the most torturous music.

   This, he knew, would also be his fault. His head sank further into his rib cage, like a turtle retreating into its shell, as he prepared for Greta to spew another unfaltering torrent of blame from the bottomless well that she held in her heart. And, perhaps, she had started to do just that, but few words escaped her lips before she fell into silence. Something else had captured her attention. Over the tops of his eyes, he saw her jerking her head to look around, sniffing at the air or cocking her ear, as if she were trying to capture some distant noise beyond the mockery of the music box ruins.

   He looked up at his wife, almost questioning why she'd stopped. Not that he wasn't grateful. Greta put a finger to her lips and hushed him, even though he had said nothing. He waited for a moment, confused. Her eyes darted, searching. Then, from some indistinct place, some vague corner of the apartment, he heard it. Like a wet finger skating the rim of a wine glass, yet it left the image in his head that the glass was screaming.

   Out of the corner of his right eye, he saw something. On the wall. A shadow. Moving. Gone. He tried to look straight at it and it vanished. No, wait. Over there. And another on that wall. And in the hall. The walls seemed to be dampening. Though the direct line of his vision still feigned the relative normalcy of a minute before, the horizons and conjunctions of his eyelids told him differently.

   Everywhere in his periphery the walls were crawling, swarming with slithering, dark things, wormy shadows gaining a slow, apparent solidity. His nose was invaded by the scents of licorice, and of rotten cherries, snagging in his throat like noxious, bitter thorns. The screams of the wine glass evolved into a small, backwards, tittering kind of laughter. And the air grew more dense by the second, as if a sort of fog, tepid and invisible, were settling into the apartment. Thick and stifling, making it hard to breathe.

   Randall looked into his wife's bewildered eyes and she into his. He remembered feeling nauseous, more than just to his stomach. Sick to his soul. Their mouths fell agape with want of speech, but their voices had run from their throats thin, formless. Too hard to speak. Difficult enough to breathe. Just breathe. In. Out. That's nice. Sighing. So nice. Soothing. Comfortable. Their heads grew heavy and began to loll to the side. Staring at one another, sighing together rhythmically, up to the disfigured, final note of the unwound movement. As the storm of discordant melancholia receded, so, too, did the shadows dissolve into the walls. The fog lifted instantly. The sickly sweet scents of filthy candied things departed from their olfactory. The laughter into a whine. The whine into a hum. The hum into silence. As their normal senses of awareness returned to them, their eyes searched the room for some, for any explanation of what had just happened.

     Greta saw it first. On the wall, by his desk, something like a large slug. They moved closer to inspect it. Smooth, slimy, but not a slug. Not a common one anyway. Neither of them had ever seen a slug with a posterior of plump, fingerlike tubes that degraded into wet, stringy tendrils at their ends. And never one so bright a gray. Randall had poked at it with a pencil from his desk a few times. It didn't move. Greta had said maybe it was dead. He agreed. He got the point of the pencil underneath the thing, trying to pry it from the wall. It fell. And he caught it.

     He hadn't intended to catch the thing and he thought that his immediate reaction should have been to drop it. But when it was there in his palm, he realized how much he had wanted to touch it. It had seemed so soft, pliant. Its texture, so full, voluptuous, like the flesh of a baby without muscle or bone. And the gray of it, the rich, sensuous gray of it. Warming in his hand as he stroked it with his thumb. The strangeness of it faded. He turned it between his fingers like a bauble, coming to the conclusion that whatever it was, it was not a whole animal. Where he had pried it from the wall, there was some kind of ruined, fatty material, like a mangled slice of orange and of similar color. And even that had its allure and its rewards for touching it.

   He had squeezed it, played with it, wondering what it tasted like, wanting to feel it give between his teeth. Greta looked at him in shock, but her disgust was only feigned. She shook her head and screwed up her mouth when he said she should touch it. But it didn't  take much persuading to make her giggle at the grossness of it and admit that she wanted to know what it felt like. He held his hand out, offering the thing for the approval of her senses. She placed her middle finger on it, letting it slide down, petting it, petting as he took hold of her other hand and moved it to his groin.

   She looked up at him wide eyed and a smile crept up her face. Her eyes narrowed and she squeezed his erection hard. He grinned. She licked her lips. They kissed with more passion, more lust than in the whole of their relationship. Tempted to bite each other, wanting to eat each other all the way to the bedroom, clothes quickly becoming scarce.

   Randall remembered that day. The first time he had imagined his wife without bones. A gluttonous, floppy, quivering form of tender moldable flesh, easily contoured to his every desire of her. A pillow of meat in his mind. He could not break her, no matter how hard he threw himself into her, pounded her or beat her with his body. There was nothing to break. And how he wanted to devour that slutty, boneless, debased thing.

   Randall remembered that day. All it took was a touch. The next morning she had told him she was pregnant. She knew it. He doubted that she could know, but she insisted. And indeed she was. It wasn't so important while she was pregnant, that he couldn't get it up anymore. They barely wondered what had become of that precious gray slug. They were going to have a living, breathing baby and that was what was important. Until the baby came, living, breathing.

   Randall looked now to the wretched, new wall thing in the jar on their nightstand. His knuckles were white around it, like he was trying to strangle it. It only pulsed and lengthened. His eyebrows wrinkled as he looked down in horror at the shame of his flaccid penis hanging like a dead worm. His eyes, welling with tears, turned up to Greta's. Hers said "You're weak." Her frail, dusty form lied there stiff, unmoving, yet brimming with contempt. He began to cry, simpering and sniffling.

   "Pathetic little boy," her voice was full of gravel and glass. "Be an adult, Randall. An adult man knows what has to be done and he does it! So don't just stand there and piss yourself, you scrawny little shitbag. Our perfect child is waiting. Don’t you want January to be with us?"

   Randall gripped the walldweller in the jar good and tight. He would do it. No matter how degrading. His fleeting manhood could suffer another blow just to quiet her and relieve himself of this accursed awareness, returning him to the elysian fields of his chair, his wall, where a thousand music boxes played at once behind visions of a happy life, a beautiful daughter and a healthy wife. He removed the creature from the liquid and bent at the waist, facing away from Greta. Randall looked down at his feet, watching stray tears splash on his toes. Greta looked at the ring of ten festering, upraised sores around his anus and smiled as her husband plunged the squirming blessing inside himself.

   Randall could feel its sharp spines extend and puncture him. He couldn't remove it now if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. The nectar was seeping in. She could see its dark, slippery tail still protruding from him. He turned to her, his eyes alight with an animal ferocity. His erection was raging. She spread her legs with several creaks and pops. He mounted his wife's breathing corpse, glancing for only an instant at her flaking, yellowed vulva and its sparse, patchy hair before punching himself into it. Dry and rough as sandpaper. It scraped him and hurt, but that was of no matter now. The thing was driving him into her, harder than was possibly comfortable. She just lay there very still. A peculiar cleft was developing on her face, denting the tip of her nose and drawing in her chapped upper lip, revealing the cakey gum area of her most recent tooth loss.

   He saw how easily her face could cave in. How kissing her would be like having a mouthful of ashes. He could feel, he could hear her bones clanking together as he assaulted her, as the creature assaulted him. He wanted to hurt her. He wanted to fuck and crumble her little body of brittle chalk into dust and powder. And she just lay there, expressionless, emotionless. He couldn't hurt her. He couldn't please her. He didn't care.

   He came like he was pissing away his awareness into her parched vagina. For a moment, he let his body relax, felt the limp, walldwelling thing slip out of his clutching anus and gave her the full weight of his body. She patted him on the back.

   "You did fine. You did fine, Randall."

   He knew there was condescendence in her voice, but what did it matter? Again, it was done. That was all she needed from him. She said nothing more to him as he climbed off her, gathered his clothes into his arms and walked out, shutting the door behind him.

   He leaned against the door, in the dark light of the hall, listening to the quiet sobs and mewling coming from the room at its end. He could hear metal clanging, scraping against metal. They were waking up, moving around. The stench was becoming overpowering. He strolled into their room to see how big of a mess he would have to deal with. They would probably be hungry. He hadn't made them any food in a while. They began to grunt and hoot when they saw him. They moaned and tried to rattle their cages with drooly, unfinished limbs. Their toothless mouths gummed shapeless greetings and hopes that their father had brought them some sustenance.

     Randall looked at the six cages, three stacked on three, and the ominous empty seventh, waiting, with its door sprung open. He gazed upon his children, hairless, sweaty, wriggling, slopping in their own excrement. Each one misshapen, malformed. Calling for him, with their sickly bleats. He could never seem to remember their names anymore. Oh, the burden of memory, slipping, like everything else. The one with the head like a bloated prune, he thought, the one with the filmy eyes, the absent spine. That was the first one, he was sure. Little Randy Junior. Didn't seem to be moving like the others. Just sort of lying there, shaking. The gnats swarmed by his thick lips, lapping up the foamy, pooling spittle. Must still be asleep. Probably in the midst of some spastic dream. He could scarcely remember if either he or Greta had bothered to name the other children. This next one could have a name. This one might be January.

   Randall looked down at his sorry member, dangling like a drunk’s head after a vomit. He yawned a heavy lungful of fetid air, bundled his clothes tight against his naked stomach, hugging them pitifully and turned to leave the room. Maybe this one wouldn't need to be kept that way. Maybe it would be normal. Maybe it would be perfect. Just like Greta wanted.

   For the moment, he was tired. He wanted to rest in his favorite chair, in his favorite place, in front of his favorite wall. He didn't feel like cleaning in there just now.