by Zac Kish

— Ø —Erin grew up on tile floors. On stale beeps, on sterile cold, on endless wires plucked and protruding from her. It was all home to the girl.

She was fine with seeing the other patients rolled in and out. She was fine with the freezer-burned food delivered to her cold in the middle. She was even fine with the looks her widower father gave her—or rather, didn’t—as he couldn’t bear to meet eyes with his only daughter as she wasted away.

For a dying girl from a line of dying girls, Erin was as good-humored as they come.

It was only when the lights dimmed, in the single hour between early and late when all was still, that she wasn’t fine. When she heard his rattle down the hall in some other soon-to-be-empty room.

‍Crick. Crick. Criiick.

‍For a long time, Erin didn’t quite know why she was confined to her bed here. She wondered, naturally; she could feel the clock ticks itch beneath her skin. In her father’s side glances, she could feel herself thinning like the mother she never knew before her. All she knew for certain was that she was sick and the doctors were going to make her well.

It was only when she was told they couldn’t, that she wouldn’t live past sixteen, that she learned the inescapable reality of her illness.

And that she saw him for herself.
‍
Not immediately, for the thoughts had to first seep into her brain. For the fear had to wet her eyes.

She couldn’t see him until she understood that there would be something, then there would be nothing. And there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Not until the dimmed lights, the single hour, the still halls. Not until the crick, crick, crick.

Then there he was. The little boy who faced away from her, yet moved as if he saw her every twitch. Whose shape was young, but whose cracked skin was not. Even in silhouette, Erin could see his wrinkles.

He sniffed with a curious hunger and shook his cracked and dusty rattle, walking backwards, drawing closer to the foot of her bed. He stood there waiting for the thoughts to fully infest. Until they were all that crept inside her head.

But these thoughts were home to the girl, too. And so his hunger curdled, sending him to her bedside, where her father slept.

Erin’s father awoke in the chair beside her. His gaze shifted from his daughter to the face of the boy looking back at him.

And Erin watched as the lines carved deeper on her father’s face.

As his dark eyes grew darker the longer he looked, and yet he couldn’t tear himself away.

As his heart gave out, and if the wires attached to Erin’s chest were instead on his, the steady beep would have gone flat.

Then he was gone. Both of them, her father and the boy. And she was spared.
‍
‍— I —For the next five years of Erin’s life, she expected to drop dead every day. After all, that is what she had always been told would happen.

She expected her bucket to be kicked from under her when the perplexed doctors discharged her to be more “comfortable,” she expected her jaw to close on dirt when she reluctantly moved into her workaholic aunt’s house in the suburbs, she expected her maker to introduce himself when she was chastised for muttering jokes through terminal group therapy.

It helped Erin to think in tired metaphor. Not to separate herself from the idea—for it was too intertwined with all she’d known—but because everyone was such a fucking bummer when it came to death.

When teachers and students treated her like porcelain, she entertained herself by collapsing suddenly. Just to make them gasp and think, “Is this it? Is she finally gone?” Before she would cough herself back to life, her chuckles worth the painful hacks that followed.

Catching her breath, she then found joy in their pity, in convincing them of their own futility. What did their silly worries about college and boyfriends and gap years matter? No really, looking way ahead, what was any of it worth?

She cracked through their consciousness to the void behind it they so desperately ignored.

But still, she lived on. All signs on the road read “dead-end,” yet her steps still somehow brought her forward. She began to exist in a certain limbo; all that was truly real was whether her next step would touch the ground.

Her steps touched ground through her senior year, while other kids thought on pointless university choices she would never get to make. Through her cake-less eighteenth birthday which she never imagined she’d reach. Through her graduation and the day she moved out of her aunt’s house, the aunt who she’d never thought even realized she was there until she cried the day she left.

Erin’s father had left her a meager inheritance and an old Volkswagen van he used to tinker on to distract himself—a habit he had also passed down to his daughter. But the money and vehicle were all Erin needed to go through with the only thing she had thought about since that day in the hospital.

Since him.

It took Erin time to figure out how to track the boy. His home was not the hospital, though he’d made a nest of the place during her time there. An easy place to feed unnoticed.

From obituaries, practicing fake voices on phone calls, and tracking where strange occurrences found dead-ends, Erin developed a method to follow him from afar.

The key was to follow his prey. From each victim, a seed was buried whose roots stretched elsewhere.

Erin started tracking from her father in the hospital five years ago. First, to the burned-out nurse who’d found him, who’d quit and drove across country with a sudden and desperate urgency. Then, to the addict gas station attendant who was the last to see the nurse before she vanished, who returned to his childhood home to reconnect with a more innocent past. Then onward again, to the small-town librarian who kept her nose in romance novels and finally looked up to explore her own heart.

To a dozen more, before Erin’s Volkswagen puffed out smog in front of Marina Court Assisted Living. Where she was sure he would feed next.

— II — Tracking him from a distance was one thing, but Erin wasn’t quite sure what to do once she actually reached his nest. She approached the reception desk and put on a smile as fake as the orderly’s before her.

“Hi, I’m here to see my grandpa James Mercer?”

The orderly’s mask slipped at having to give the worst kind of news.

Erin was led into a simple, empty room with a single box of James’s old things. Trinkets that probably meant something to James and those who knew him, meaningless to Erin. The orderly seemed disconcerted at Erin’s lack of tears.

“I guess I was expecting it for so long…” she covered, repeating what she had heard others say in her hospital days.

“That now it’s here it just feels… empty.”

The orderly nodded in practiced understanding and moved for the door to give her space. Erin called for him to wait.

“Can you— can you tell me what happened to him?”

Two weeks ago, an 81-year-old insomniac named James Mercer went from being one of the spritelier guests at Marina Court to seeing his health decline abruptly.

“As if he had aged ten years in one night,” one of the nurses stuttered through tears.

This wasn’t a particularly strange occurrence in assisted living, the orderly explained, but a shock to many as Erin’s “grandfather” had been an active member of the community. When asked why he wandered the halls at night, James Mercer’s cheery refrain was that he could sleep when he was dead. James didn’t have any family left—besides his fake granddaughter, it seemed—but the room was paid out through the month. So there the box sat.

It seemed Erin was too late. He had already fed. Would the rattle remain for another meal, or was she exploring an empty nest?

Regardless, Erin’s interest was piqued not by the dead man’s rapid wilting, but by how the boy didn’t normally follow his hunger to a feast so old. Sure, the boy seemed to nest near death, and there was as much here as there was at her children’s ward, but his prey usually had a lot more life left in them than James Mercer.

In fact, as far as Erin could tell, there hadn’t been a victim older than fifty. Erin wondered if it wasn’t death the boy fed upon, but all that was near it. Death is a singular event; life stretches out. Why she was spared at sixteen? The question scratched at the back of her mind.

But more than that, what truly piqued Erin’s interest was the missing person sign for five-year-old Anthony Nunes she spied pinned to the facility’s community board.

“And him?”

“The great-grandson of a patient. The family swears the boy was visiting before he went missing, but you know, with the slipping mind it’s hard to tell…”

When the orderly got back to chewing gum at the front desk, Erin snuck out of this room and searched for the great-grandfather’s. She was only a few doors down when she heard it down the hall.

“Crick. Crick. Crick.”

Erin creeped past the flickering fluorescents. A cold chilled her from the chest down. The hallway’s moldy humid scent left her nostrils for something more sterile. For a moment, she felt as if she was back in that single hour between early and late when all was still.

But what Erin found inside the room was not a little boy at all, but an elderly man making a rattling noise with his dry mouth. His eyes were bright with youth, a nervous smile on his face when he noticed Erin lurking at the doorway.

“Did you come to play with me? They said someone was gonna play with me.”

Erin recognized the confusion in the man’s eyes from the dementia patients she had met in the hospital. She remembered the nurses telling her you were supposed to meet them “when" they were, and play along.

“Yeah, I’m here to play. Why were you making that noise?” Erin asked.

“It’s what I heard whenever I saw Grandpa.”

Erin’s throat clenched.

“And when’s the last time you saw your grandpa?”

“We were playing hide and seek. And then nobody found me.”

“Nobody found you?”

“I don’t think they knew we were playing. I hid in a cupboard. After they told me.”

“Told you what?”

“How Grandpa won’t be here. How…” the old man struggled to string the words together, but it was clear to Erin he had been haunted by the idea. “How he’s here now, but he won’t always be. He’ll be gone. And that it’ll happen to them too. And then one day me.”

His mind was fogged with webs of futility. The same futility Erin had once enjoyed pushing on her classmates. The dying girl knew these webs her whole life. But she wasn’t trapped in them. She wore them like thread.

Erin stared at the old man in front of her. She glanced at the nameplate on the door to see she was talking to a John Doe, perhaps placed in the facility by the state. Erin knew the answer to her next question, but still her quivering voice asked.

“What’s your name?”

The old man didn’t have to answer. This was no patient. This was no old man at all.

“The nurses told me I’m confused,” the missing boy answered.

Erin went quiet, her eyes unable to believe she was looking at five-year-old Anthony Nunes.

“And… what happened when you came out of the cupboard?”

“A nice old man helped me. He couldn’t sleep. But then we heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“The crick, crick, crick.”

— III —Warren, the orderly assigned to James Mercer, had quit abruptly after the old man’s death, left all his bills and debts unpaid, and headed for a city with more life than those halls.

And so Erin followed. The nest had been abandoned.

At first, she could only trace Warren as far as the Independent, a four-star hotel where her guise as the orderly’s niece was not as well received as it had been at Marina Court. But as Erin was led out to the street by security, a lopsided, greasy guest who had watched the exchange spied the photo of Warren on her phone.

“Is that Amoraline’s boyfriend?”

Amoraline was a social media star who got her start in cosplay and live-streaming horror video games, moving on to more sordid displays for only $9.99 a month. Her girl-next-door persona combined with meet-and-greet crowd appearances at every major comic convention granted her millions of followers a feeling of personal connection.

But one week ago, all of her channels went dark.

Amoraline posted an uncharacteristically depressed, philosophical, and clean-faced video rambling about her fading time in the spotlight and then ended her twenty-four-hour livestream.

The rumor was that she’d left her superficial life behind to be with the orderly who was once her high school sweetheart. Others said Warren had probably murdered Amoraline in a lovelorn rage. All her fans knew for certain was that a man had suddenly showed up in her livestreams harassing her about true love and fleeting time, and then she was gone.

It became clear to Erin it was not Warren she needed to find, but Amoraline.

Scouring online forums and message boards, Erin found that the neckbeards of her fan base had tried all the usual ways to find the missing woman to no avail. They tracked her last video’s IP address, they gathered outside all of her known addresses, they even harassed her mother at the brownstone on Park West she’d bought for her.

Erin had no more skill than Amoraline’s subscribers, but she knew something they never could.

When Erin first knocked on Amoraline’s mother’s door, there was silence. When she knocked again, there was a shout to leave her alone. It was only when Erin shouted a cryptic, desperate message through the keyhole that she heard scraping footsteps approach the door.

“I know this is strange, but there’s something— there’s something here for your daughter. I’d like to help her.”

And it was only when the door swung open that Erin saw the boy had already nested here.

This was not Amoraline’s mother, but Emily Lorine herself.  

No longer in her late twenties, but by the looks of the dark-eyed woman clutching her bathrobe, now just shy of sixty.

Inside the brownstone, while she waited for Amoraline to bring her a shaky cup of tea, Erin couldn’t help but look around. Cameras were outfitted at every angle, adjustable lighting hung from the ceilings, blackout curtains blocking out all natural light. Dozens of creams, masks, and massage stones lined her counters, positioned for what must have been an hours-long nightly routine.

The woman’s life was her work, and her work was her body. A body Amoraline’s eyes avoided at every passing reflection.

“Warren and I dated in high school. We were each other’s firsts. So when he showed up here, all manic… I just wanted to help him, y’know?”

The way Amoraline spoke was strange to Erin, her voice strained with age, but carrying the dialect of someone not much older than her.

“It was like, I dunno, something had crawled into his mind and wouldn’t leave. He couldn’t stop thinking about the time he’d wasted on things that didn’t matter, he said. About how I was what mattered. What we had together.”

Erin could see the same something had already crawled into Amoraline’s mind. A curse she was desperate to shed.

“So I let him stay with me. But when I told him I didn’t want anything more with him, that I was too busy— y’know, with my streaming and all the fucking travel… he got so cruel. He said everything I was, everything that made me valuable to people, it would fade…” Amoraline fought tears, her voice small and fading.

“As soon as I had a wrinkle under my eye, or arm, or chest— no one would care. He left, but… he was right. I know he was right. I try to slow it down, I. The next time I looked in the camera… I didn’t recognize myself.”

Erin herself had never thought about fading beauty, when her youth was foretold to be snuffed out. Never thought about eye creams or injections or lighting tricks. She’d never had the privilege. She was never supposed to make it this far.

Amoraline’s bathrobe slipped. Erin saw the lingerie she still wore underneath.

“Can I see the video? The one… the one where it happened?”

Amoraline scrolled through pictures and videos on her phone. In the thumbnails, Erin saw dozens and dozens of videos and photos of the wrinkled Amoraline.

She was still trying to make content, but couldn’t bring herself to post. Erin fought a deep pity for the woman, unsure where it came from.

Amoraline finally landed on the last video from when she was young.

She sat silently as the video showed her applying three kinds of lotion, desperately massaging a spa roller against her temple until her face became red. Her eyes fought tears, but she knew that was bad for her skin; she did her best to keep relaxed.

Finally, she threw the rejuvenating implements across the room and shrieked in frustration.

Suddenly, she looked up. There was nothing there, but her eyes locked onto something. An empty space in the room. Where the boy stood.

Horrified, Amoraline’s mouth held open as the wrinkles at her lips deepened, as the skin she massaged so carefully thinned, as her youth seemed to be slurped out of her as if through a straw.

“I was so beautiful,” Amoraline said, slowly scrolling back to the start of the video as if she could turn back time.

But as she replayed it over and over, Erin swore she could hear the little boy sniffing.
‍
‍— IV —Erin knew she was drawing closer. James Mercer was two weeks ago, Amoraline was only a week. She knew she could reach him at his next nest. What she would do then… she wasn’t sure.

Amoraline had fired her assistant Trix without notice. In a tough financial spot, Trix moved back to her parents’ home in a town in the Southwest. Though small in size, the town was big on football and runaway dreams.

What Erin found instead of the assistant was a funeral.

Not of a strangely aged woman who only days ago had just been a girl, but of a youthful face in an open casket.

“She passed too young,” they cried, “taken too soon from us.”

Complaining of a strange sound following her, Trix had driven drunk and sent her body through the windshield, hitting a telephone pole off the old turnpike. The stresses of city life and starry ambitions were too much for her, Erin overheard.

The town was small enough that anyone could walk up to the wake, but big enough that Erin could go unnoticed. She sipped a soda behind groups of mourners to get a sense of who Trix was.

“We had sky high hopes for Trixie…”

“But what’s it mean when ya throw your life away like that, worthless…”

Frustrated with the dead-end when she was so close, when she could almost feel the boy’s presence, Erin turned to leave until—

“Didn’t make a damn mark, did she…” a voice next to her muttered.

Standing on the outer rim of the milling black suits and dresses, a bright red cast was held up by crutches. Something about the quiver the voice hid compelled Erin to stay.

“Did you know Trix?” Erin asked the fridge-sized teen next to her. Six foot six and rippled with muscle, his cast looked like a locked boot crippling an F-150.

“Knew of her. In a shithole small as this, if someone makes it out you hope they stay. I would’ve stayed,” the burly teen muttered, fidgeting on his crutches.

“What’d you do to your leg?”

“I didn’t do shit. Tucker Watts suckered me with a late hit. Fucker. But it’s all good, I’ll be back next season. Better than ever.”

The teen felt no need to introduce himself because everyone around here knew Braxton White. Amarillo High’s record holder not just in passing yards as quarterback, but rushing yards as well. Full ride to TCU offered to him as a sophomore, so long as he could stay healthy another year.

“I’ll break my own record, break Texas’s records, then head to the league and break their records too. Folks’ll know Braxton White all over, won’t just be some kid from Amarillo.”

The way Braxton shuffled on his crutches, Erin could tell this was something the kid from Amarillo told himself often. Or something someone else did. And by the softness of his pitch, something he was maybe questioning for the first time in his life.

“Braxton White doesn’t get hurt. Braxton White’ll never be some wilting flowers and faded pic on the side of the pike.”

With her only lead six feet under, Erin didn’t know where to go next. But she could sense something in Braxton, see something in his eyes that had once been in her own.

And maybe the boy could too.

So Erin followed Braxton’s truck, driven by his coach as his cast kept him from hitting the brakes, until he was dropped off at a rusted double-wide in the park.

“Doc said eight more months of PT, let’s make it four… can’t have Texas lose faith… see what your pop says when he gets back in town…” Erin heard the coach order before he drove off.

Erin then creeped up to the window and listened.

She could hear the clink of Braxton lifting weights, the whir of his blender of protein powder. All below the photo of his grizzled, bitter father glaring down at him from the wall.  

And as Braxton went quiet to sleep, Erin did too, nodding off against the stiff wheel block of the trailer. Until—

‍Crick. Crick. Crick.

Erin snapped awake. She peered through the trailer window, but couldn’t see anything in the shadows and blue light of the TV left on.

‍Crick. Crick. Criiick.


She rushed around from her hiding spot, and banged on the trailer door to no response.
“Braxton? Braxton, open up!”

‍Crick. Crick. Crick—

Finally, she tried the door, unlocked, and burst inside.

There, she saw the burly teen collapsed on the ground, just out of reach of his crutches. The cricking was only from him fingering his crutches but unable to pull them closer.

“I fell,” he said between sobs, “I fell and I couldn’t fucking get up… worthless…” So out of it, he took no mind to the stranger holding out a helping hand. Possessed by a feeling that gripped his heart tighter each passing second.

“I’m gonna be my pop… play high school ball, get hurt, never leave Amarillo.”

“No, you’ll heal, just like you said,” Erin soothed, as she looked around for where the boy might be hiding.

“Just like Pop said, I’ll never leave a mark. They’ll lose faith. And they’ll forget all about me when the next one comes along…”

“You know what my dad said?” Erin offered, her own voice now quivering. Braxton quieted, listening to her whisper.

“He said nobody ever forgets us. Even if we make the smallest little mark, it’s still here. Even if we’re not here as long as someone else, what we do matters. So whatever time you have… you should make the most of it.”

Erin hadn’t thought of those words in a long time. She felt a strange guilt, an odd sense that she’d been wasting that time in her obsession.

Braxton’s sobbing ceased. His breathing slowed. He took Erin’s hand to help him.

And then suddenly, he looked up.

“Did you hear that?”

‍Crick. Crick. Crick. Erin tore her head towards the noise at the end of the trailer. There was nothing there.

But when she turned her head back, the boy was behind Braxton.

Facing away yet moving as if he saw Braxton’s every twitch. Whose shape was young, but whose wrinkles were not.

“He’s there… behind you!” Erin cried out.

As Braxton turned his head, it was clear he saw nothing. His mouth gaped in horror at the sound. But the sight of the boy was apparently reserved for Erin.

Erin was frozen as the boy began his feeding ritual. He sniffed with a curious hunger and shook his cracked and dusty rattle, walking backwards to crouch next to Braxton.

“Just flowers on a fucking highway, man… just a faded fucking picture…”

The shape of the little boy squatted there, waiting for the thoughts to fully infest. Until they were all that crept inside Braxton’s head.

Erin could only watch as it happened. Just as it had to her father. She couldn’t bear to look Braxton in the eyes.

Erin watched the bright red cast as the leg within it shrunk and shriveled. As the muscles atrophied and the veins spidered out. As Braxton White’s healthy, youthful sobs cracked and withered in his throat.

Until Braxton could slide his emaciated leg right out of the cast.

Until he was older than the photos of his leering, burned-out old man on the walls.

“Just fucking flowers…”  

Erin looked up, expecting him to be gone. But he was still there.

A voice whispered out the other side of his head. Ancient yet youthful, sickly yet cruel. Like many voices in one cracked tone.

“The girl… the girl followed me all this way… for what?”

— V — The trailer door shrieked in protest as Erin bolted out into the night. She had spent so much of her borrowed time searching for the rattle, she hadn’t prepared herself for how it would feel to relive that night from so many years ago.

Now all she wanted to do was get as far away as possible. She fumbled with the keys to her dad’s old Volkswagen, but she could see the boy looming in the doorway to the trailer.

He crept backwards towards her, a sight so chilling she dropped the keys. She raced for the trees outside the park, a thin forest stretching into the distance.

But with each twig her desperate steps snapped, she could hear him following.

‍Crick. Crick. Crick.

‍“For what?”

See him between the trees.

‍Crick, crick, crick.

‍“Tell me…”

Feel him watching her.

‍Crickcrickcrick.

‍“NOW.”

Erin tripped over a root, skidding against dirt, leaves, and branches, dusting up a cloud that faded like the years off his victims.

When it dissipated, he was there, waiting in front of her. Waiting for her answer. The silence burned the eyes Erin refused to shut.

“I wanted to know why!” Erin finally shrieked.

Though he was turned away from her, she could feel him grin at the question. Almost taunting, the way the little body contorted.

“Why… what?”

“Why it wasn’t me. Why you fed on my dad instead, when I was the one dying.”

The words sputtered out as a whisper. Erin felt again like the child she was in the hospital.

He seemed to consider the question before answering, as if trying to remember a delectable flavor from years ago.

“The girl grew up on tile floors. On stale beeps, on sterile cold, on endless wires plucked and protruding from her. It was all home to the girl.”

Erin chilled in memory. She could feel the dirt under her nails harden into mop-wet sterile floors. Smell the scent of latex gloves. Hear the soft chirps of medical machinery.

“The girl knew what was to come. She didn’t care about fading beauty, or what she might accomplish and leave behind, because she knew she would never reach it. She had no life to expect, so she expected nothing. The end was what she knew, so she had no fear for it.”

Erin could even see her father, in restless sleep, in a chair between two trees in the near distance. And so could the boy.

“But the man had fear. The man feared that he would be left alone. That the girl would not have a life after him. That she would be snuffed out. That he hadn’t done enough for her.”

Erin watched as her father wasted away into dust, slurped as if through a straw into the boy’s unseen mouth.

"The man was… delicious.”

A rage boiled up in Erin. She stumbled to her feet and raced to his other side. She wanted to look him in the eyes. Only to see—

The back of the little boy’s head.  He was still facing away.

“But the girl… the girl is still here. What the girl knew doesn’t seem to be true. What the man feared is false.”

“It’s not, I’m going to die, okay?” Erin gasped. She cut around to his other side again, but it was still the back of the wrinkled little boy’s neck.

“Some inkling in her head must wonder. How long it will last. When will she forget she is meant to expire. When will she live long enough to have something to lose.”

“I won’t! And it’s fine— I’m fine!” Erin shouted, echoing through the thin foliage. Finally, she grabbed him by the shoulders and turned him around to at last see—

The little boy’s face.

With no eyes, no lips, no nose. Whose holes all seemed to look at her. To sniff for her. To hunger for something she had buried so long, she had forgotten it was even there.

Her voice was stripped; all she could do was stare into his cavernous void.

It was there that she saw it:

Everything. Beating her illness. Accepting that she had, her death sentence stripped from her. Meeting a boy as dark-humored and stilted as she was, and slowly, cautiously falling for him against her better judgement.

Wandering the world with her love, discovering sloped peaks, cracked castles, strange sights she had never allowed herself to dream for. Watching the lines in her skin form, worrying the boy wouldn’t see her as beautiful as he once did but comforted in his warm arms.

Staring at the plus sign on a pee stick, scared for what she would leave behind for a child she had never wanted but yearned for. What would she leave behind?

She saw it all. She saw the life she would come to have.

And for the first time since before Erin was told the doctors couldn’t help anymore, she felt afraid. Cracking through her consciousness to the void behind it she so desperately ignored. For there was a life left in her bones, if she took it.

But he could smell it. He could taste it. And he could rip it from her.

The lines carved deeper on Erin’s face. Her dark eyes grew darker the longer she looked at him, yet she couldn’t tear away.

And before her heart could give out, he was gone.

Erin looked down at her now wrinkled hands, bones twisted and cracked as if she had lived the years she imagined in his darkness.

Lived the years she never thought she would.

And at last, alone in the woods, she smiled.