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Our family doesn’t have to be perfect to be wonderful.

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The Wind Beneath

By Alex Ebenstein

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There’s a gale when dawn illuminates our world. The morning light arrives as though leached from my son’s eyes, his gaze cast skyward, forever in search of hope, his dreams. He’s gone.

There’s little else to mark the passage of time now, everything’s wind and survival…and heartbreak. When the world turned, we had no choice but to reckon with loss. To choke on it with every gust. We made it damn near ten years after, him and I, and that’s that. I don’t know what time I have left, but it feels like too much now.

It’s not all bad, this incessant wind that yanks at my clothes as I sit grieving. An old neighbor, distant a mile or so as we are nowadays, was an engineer. Before. A good one, apparently, able to retrofit leftover technology, made harnessing wind for energy a breeze. So we’ve got that at least, an efficient windmill and perpetual electricity. Well, I have that. The neighbor hanged himself years ago, and today my boy is dead.

The wind isn’t the problem. The problem is everything else.

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My son was only five when the heat arrived, and with it, the wind. Both came with death. There wasn’t one single incident that caused Earth’s revolt, but a culmination of undercurrents finally boiling over at once. I never fully understood what happened, but it didn’t matter anyway.

It’s funny what remained threaded through the folds of my brain from that time. My boy’s, too. Our personal connection to that End of Days, which became the routine topic of discussion in the After, a storybook read enough to know by heart.

We were due to fly out west for vacation, the first real one he’d have gone on—but the morning of our departure saw all flights canceled. Globally. It was the first time I felt the visceral stab of his despair, the first sign of what was to come. It cut a part of me I wasn’t aware existed.

The next devastation came soon after, when his mother, carrying a once-dormant disease, died alongside five billion of our Earthly neighbors.

My son and I found refuge along the shores of Lake Michigan, when the urban areas became more dangerous than useful. There was little competition for land in the wake of the mass death, not to mention our spoiled earth had run the great freshwater lake rancid. I didn’t mind, and neither did my boy; the big lake looked and sounded the way it always had, at least from shore. Fresh or poisoned, the water was a comfort.

I get no comfort now, scanning the horizon as though searching for my son. But what remains of him is by my side, exactly where he asked to be when he knew it was time. I almost refused to cart him down to the water, unwilling to accept that he was right—but how could I deny my boy a final view of his favorite place?

Hadn’t I known this day was coming? Since discovering the near-extinction level disease had first rooted in humans just when my wife carried him in her womb? Even if I couldn’t guess when, there’d been no doubt in my mind, I’ll admit now, that he would meet an early grave.

Funeral services are still attainable in this age, but that would mean a multi-day trek into town. It’s a place I never liked, full of false hope and gossip, torturous for my boy who wanted to believe a new, different life was attainable. The only real source of conflict between us over the years, but he knew. I much prefer my windmill to the rumor mill.

And I much prefer to say goodbye alone, my way, than whatever way they might suggest in town.

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The fire is strong—crackling—and I’m planted in the sand upwind so as not to catch any flames. Same place I always sit on bonfire nights. The difference now is that my son is not beside me, sat cross-legged, but up shore, prone and bundled in a blanket. Though it’s not so much a bonfire tonight, but a pyre. He’ll burn soon, when I can muster the courage to put him to rest.

To avoid fixating on that bundle of my grief, I gaze into the cloudless night sky. I could get lost in the sea of stars, and I’d like to. Though I couldn’t fathom such a journey without my boy. The thought brings me back to Earth, and I wonder if I might be better off getting lost in the sea-like lake before me. I could walk and not stop. Eventually I’d find the end. Perhaps I’d find him.

My sorrow blurs my vision, and it takes me a second to notice. There’s a blinking light, high up in the atmosphere. A drifting satellite tethered by gravity. I know it as well as anything, yet after all these years of telling my son as much, to protect him from false hope, I wonder… Is this one a plane, after all?

I rise ungracefully to my feet, the weathered skin on my cheeks drier than normal, leeched of moisture by way of the wind wicking tears I didn’t know I’d been crying.

What if it is a plane? What message would the universe be sending me, on this, the day of his death? I picture the products of his often-singular focus over the years: every paper airplane, every cardboard rocket, every kite…

With as gentle a hand as I can manage, I draw the blanket from his face. My fingertips trace a familiar route down the soft skin from eye to lips. I kneel beside him with shaky knees, lay a kiss on his forehead.

The wind across the water and sand, rustling the loose folds of the blanket, it speaks to me. It repeats my boy’s final words, as if they haven’t been looping through my head since he spoke them, clawing at the chambers of my heart. I suspect they always will.

Maybe, wherever I go from here, they’ll let me fly. I’ll never stop until I find Mom.

This time, I understand. He’s not going on the fire as I had planned.

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The work is delicate and agonizing, each movement wrought with anguish—but if these past ten years have done anything, it’s make me skilled in such endeavors. Countless, the number of animals I’ve skinned, and though I would never reduce my son to such a comparison, I can’t deny the similarity. I handle the blade with care, always, and give an extra ounce now. Once enough skin is gathered, the appropriate bones selected, and my well of tears momentarily emptied, I’m ready to begin construction.

Oddly enough, I don’t know how, exactly, to construct such an object. I helped my son once long ago, but that soon became his own challenge to tackle. Though, much like if I were handed a piece of paper and told to fold it into a plane, I find that when I employ logic and creativity and craftiness, the work becomes obvious and steady. Almost joyful.

It helps that I’m doing this for—and with—my boy.

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It should be easy, flying a kite in this wind, but I can’t remember the last time I tried. Regret is acute, thinking of all the times I could have done so with him and chose not to, the mountains of excuses employed. But, I suppose, I’m doing it now.

My hand clutches the bone frame, testing the feel and positioning of my fingers. I angle the kite just so; the wind catches the taut skin-fabric and I feel the pull. There’s nothing else I need to do but jog and let the wind take hold. We’re ready.

I never liked running in sand, but I don’t need to go far. After only ten steps, the kite takes off. Yards of string fly through the loosely closed fist of my trailing hand. Memories from childhood roost in my mind. Up, up, and away!

A quick glance to the sand, not wanting to take my eyes off my creation above, but needing to know how much is left below. I squeeze, trapping the final few feet of string. We’re tethered, and I’m his anchor. He tugs and swoops and soars, and I struggle to hold tight. Familiar panic finds its home in the hollow of my throat.

Not again. Let me be the anchor.

My forward motion comes to a halt and my feet dig pits into the sand and I strain against the upward force, yanking my arms left and right, mercilessly.

I can’t let go I can’t let go I can’t—

Let go.

My grip loosens and the string slips through my hand. The loss pulls at my knees, but it’s counteracted, overcome by a swell of pride. My handiwork is good. It’s holding up to the wind.

My boy finally gets to fly.

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They Still Haven’t Found Stevie

By Scott Weisser

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It’s been three weeks now, and they still haven’t found Stevie.

The shock they felt at first has worn off. It’s been replaced by a sense of dread that never really goes away. The apprehension is like an ambient hum, tuneless and pervasive. Like something in the air.

Because “missing” is sugarcoating the situation, isn’t it? A six-year-old boy doesn’t play hide and seek by himself for three weeks. The woods where he disappeared has neither a pond nor river to lure a child to an untimely death. There are no sinkholes or caves. There were no signs of a struggle. No blood or torn scraps of clothing, no freshly turned earth.

There was no Stevie. The woods cover many acres, but volunteers turned out by the dozens. They searched for hours. They would have found him.

The volunteers who took part in the search effort were mostly friends and neighbors, though “friends and neighbors” is a waste of words around here. People use them interchangeably, and sincerely. When they talk about what happened to Stevie–what must have happened–they quietly share the hope that it was someone “just passing through.” The alternative is too awful to consider.

There has been talk about Tommy, of course. How could there not be? Tommy and Stevie were seen walking into the woods, hand in hand. Only Tommy walked out.

So yes, people talk, but not within earshot of Cheryl and Greg, the boys’ mother and dad.

Tommy and Stevie, just a little more than a year apart in age. “Well, we liked the first one so much …,” Greg used to joke, back when there was anything to laugh about. Cheryl liked to say that when Stevie was born, Tommy got a little brother and best friend at the same time.

She wasn’t kidding. Tommy and Stevie were each other’s preferred playmate and pal. They liked the same books, food, games, and TV shows. They shared everything without quarrel, even their imaginary friend. Especially him.

Charlie.

“Perfectly harmless and pretty common at that age,” said the school counselor when the boys’ folks quizzed her about invisible companions. Cheryl had been the one to suggest meeting with the counselor; Greg hadn’t been worried at all.

“I had an imaginary buddy when I was little, too,” he told his wife.

Greg, actually, was the first grown-up to learn that Charlie was in the house. He loved to stand outside the boys’ room and listen to their chatter. One night he heard them talking, but not to each other. Each boy would ask a question–“Who are you?”, “Where are you from?”–and then wait quietly for an answer.

Their father spied on them the following night, too. Tommy and Stevie sat facing a corner of their room. Silent except for intermittent giggles, they seemed for all the world to be listening with rapt attention to a storyteller.

At breakfast the next morning, their father asked, “Boys, has someone been in your room at night?”

“Charlie!” the boys replied in unison.

“Well, what’s he like?” Cheryl asked.

The boys considered this a moment.

“Big,” Tommy said.

“Where does he live?” mom wanted to know.

“Here, now,” Stevie said.

Greg and Cheryl didn’t press the issue. After the talk with the school counselor, they even got in on the fun themselves.

“Goodnight, Charlie” became a nightly parental refrain when the boys were put to bed. That Christmas, a stocking labeled “Charlie” and loaded with sweets was hung on the fireplace, much to Tommy and Stevie’s delight.

“Charlie says, ‘Thank you’,” Stevie told his mom the next day. She thought the boys ate all that candy awfully fast, but said nothing. Why be mean at Christmas?

And so it went for the next few months. Charlie was the family’s unofficial fifth member. Then came an early morning near the end of the school year.

Sometime past midnight, Stevie began to scream.

Cheryl and Greg ran to the boys’ room to find both children shaking and sitting up in their beds. Neither said anything when asked what was wrong. Tommy and Stevie were too busy staring at a corner of the room. They seemed to be listening to something, or someone.

“It was just a bad dream,” Stevie said at last.

“It’s OK now,” his brother chimed in.

Tommy and Stevie talked about Charlie less and less after that. When their folks asked about him–“How’s Charlie?” or “Is Charlie still around?”–the boys answered with “Fine, I guess” or “I dunno.” What happened? The answer seemed obvious: Tommy and Stevie were growing up. They were putting away childish things.

How, then, to explain what their uncle Rick overheard? It was Tommy telling Stevie, “Because Charlie said so, that’s why.” By this time, everybody in the family had heard about Charlie. Uncle Rick didn’t think it was anything to make a fuss about.

Walking past the boys’ room one night, Cheryl heard Tommy say, “I promise.” She’d meant to ask him about it later.

On the day he disappeared, did Stevie seem … apprehensive? When Tommy took his brother’s hand and announced that they were going outside to play, did Stevie hesitate, just the slightest bit?

No one could seem to recall.

The woods are barely a quarter mile from the boys’ home, but the boys were forbidden to go there without Greg or Cheryl. Cheryl was the one who grew suspicious when she didn’t hear the boys making their usual ruckus in the backyard. She hurried to the woods prepared to give her boys a scolding.

She was the one who saw ashen-faced Tommy emerge from the woods, alone.

Tommy was silent in response to the increasingly urgent questioning from his parents and the police. Where was Stevie?, they wanted to know. What happened to Stevie?

Tommy spoke not a word until the fifth day after the disappearance.

“He’s gone now,” he said.

The investigators wanted to know where.

“Not here,” Tommy said.

The boy has been silent ever since. His parents are beginning to wonder if they lost two sons that day in the woods.

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It’s been three weeks now, and they still haven’t found Stevie–but they’re not giving up hope. Not just yet. The police feel that Tommy must know something he’s not telling, something important.

Tommy’s father finally had enough. It was during the latest round of questioning with the lead detective in the case and yet another child psychologist.

“No more!” Greg yelled. “Tommy didn’t do anything! He’s a big brother who loves his little brother. And he’s a good brother.”

Lying awake that night in the room he used to share with Stevie, Tommy thought about what his father said. He’d sounded so protective, and so proud. It made Tommy happy.

The little boy was just beginning to drift off to sleep when his dad lightly knocked on the door.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Can I come in?

Greg sat on the edge of Tommy’s bed. He patted Tommy on the knee and told him not to worry.

“I know this is hard, but everything’s going to be OK, Tommy,” he said. “Charlie doesn’t mean any harm. He just gets lonely and … well, sometimes he plays too rough. He did when I was little, too.”

Tommy’s eyes got very big.

“You’re not going to tell on your friend Charlie, are you?” Greg asked.

“No,” Tommy said, almost too quiet to hear.

“Good,” his dad said. “Charlie wouldn’t like that.”

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Precious Darlings

By Annie ZH Sun

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She bleeds out of the mirror at the stroke of midnight. She glues screams into a body, and darkness into sight. The first child who met her, drowned at the bottom of a swimming pool. His body stuck to the ceramic tiles and refused to float up even long after his flesh loosened like soggy naan.

The second was turned inside out in a closet. He wore his skin inside his flesh, and accentuated his rotten lump with blood-laced bones.

The third is your friend Timmy, who had all the skin licked off of his fingers before losing his hands. When he tried to speak, she severed his tongue.

You know who she is, what she’s done. But no one believes you.

“Let it go, darling,” Mum closes her eyes and thrusts one of your headless barbie dolls at you. “Poor Timmy was born without hands.”

You know that’s not true. Only two days ago, during your sleepover, he had hooked his skinless pinky into yours. He promised that he’d let you play house if you let him keep his hands. You tried to tell him it wasn’t you. You showed him your tongue, how it wasn’t the same tongue that grew baby teeth on them and chafed off the top layer of his skin. You stick your tongue out now, in front of the oval mirror on top of the cedar dresser, and examine the smooth, teeth-less muscle that slobbers like a fat snail in your mouth.

“Put your tongue back. You don’t want to catch a fly.” Mum prods between your shoulder blades, reaches across the vanity table for her blush, and dabbles a finger into scarlet powder.

“Timmy’s fingers looked just like that before she chopped off his hands,” you whisper to Mum. “Mummy, I don’t want a sister. She’s so mean. She bullies Timmy, she rips all my dolls’ heads off and she makes people’s eyes go funny.”

Mum sets down her blush and looks at you seriously. “You don’t have a sister.”

Behind Mum, a girl smiles at you, sharp eyes and sweet mouth. You point. “She’s there, Mummy! Look at her! She sneaks into my room at night and she chokes me if I don’t obey her.”

Mum takes a sweeping glance at the oval mirror and lets out a sigh that sounds like a broken horse. She pulls you in front of it. “Take a good look, darling. Does she look exactly like you? Does she move when you move?”

“Right now, yes.”

“Does she smile when you smile?”

Not always. Sometimes she smiles when you cry. When you watched Timmy run handless out of the house, trailing blood and screams behind him, she had crackled like mad, digging her fingernails so hard into your shoulders that bits of your flesh went missing. You open your mouth to tell Mum about the nightly terrors, how she chews on your fingers until the tips look like minced meat, how she traps you and makes you watch her hunting game, but her eyes narrow at you in the mirror and you find yourself whispering, “Not in the dark.”

Mum pats your head. “My precious darling, you’re confused. That girl in the mirror isn’t real.”

She stiffens in the mirror. Your lips go numb with fear. “She’s mad at you for saying that.”

Mum makes a face at the mirror. “She can come get me. I will wrestle her down in a jiffy!”

You close your eyes so you don’t have to see how her pupils dilate and her nostrils flare, a predator catching scent of a new prey. But as the seconds tick by, as Mum picks up a square hand mirror and begins her eye make up, you can’t help but peek. The girl is smiling in the reflection. You touch your frozen, tight sealed lips, and stare back at her mouth that is alligator wide. You want to yell at Mum to look, look at how she is smiling when you are not, but her mouth parts wider, and inside it, past the double rows of milk teeth, tiny baby teeth crown her tongue. Loose tendrils of flesh and translucent stripes of skin line amongst her pearly whites. You bury your face into Mum’s neck, breathe in tangy perfume, and repeat her words like a lullaby; You’re confused, you’re confused. You are confused.

It is night. Your room smells of fruit and the thick scent of decay. The alarm clock reads 11:48. You slip out of bed and fumble in the dark. Something moves behind you.

You freeze. Your throat holds a scream the size of a building, but you mustn’t let it out. She feeds on screams like the starved at a banquet, drinking in fear the way vacuum cleaners suck up dust. Shakily, you feel towards the light switch. You thread over the fur rug, past the closet where you keep Timmy’s rotting hands and tongue, towards your bedroom door —-

Something breathes down your neck.

You yelp. Frantic, scrabbling limbs. You flip the switch on. The light pierces in sync with a sharp pressure at your throat. Your fingers fly to your neck. They pry at cold, semi-solid hands, but somehow they are also plunging into something moist, and warm. As she distracts you with her scraping tongue, your feet begin to dance on their own. They whirl your body to the front of the wardrobe. The inbuilt mirror in the wardrobe door reveals your reflection; it is all wrong. You still look like you; bed curls and cotton nightgown, bare feet missing two pinkie toes. Your hands are still prying at your neck, but your head bends at an impossible angle, so twisted that you are certain it would roll off. You suck your tongue to the roof of your mouth. Your lips are tightly sealed. But inside the mirror, your face has spat out a tongue that bears hundreds of embedded teeth. That tongue slurps over your fingers. A searing pain. You think of ceramic shards and swollen gums.

“My mummy says you’re not real,” you whisper. When she doesn’t respond, you become a little braver. “You’re not real.”

Her eyes slide to her fingers and her tongue darts back into her mouth. She lets out a giggle.

You look down at your own fingers. They are raw, and shining red, like freshly skinned carrots, like Timmy’s before he lost both hands. Fear churns inside you, a broken blender past rescue. “Don’t cut off my hands,” you whimper. “Please, I don’t want to lose my hands.”

She takes a long look at you, and like all the other nights, she beckons you forward. You lift a hand to the mirror. The cool surface gives way and one of your fingers disappears into her mouth. She bites until blood pricks sharp. Then, she leans back and guides your hand across the solidifying surface. In long, red streaks, the letters spell: MUMMY.

You shake your head, but she lets out a cackling laugh. YES. WE CHOP HER! NOW HELP!

You shake your head harder. You’ve watched her drown the first one, flip the second inside out, have helped her by holding Timmy still against the mirror while she chopped off his hands and tongue. You don’t want to help anymore. She presses herself closer to the mirror and your feet, like a compass to a magnetic field, rush forward. Your body slams towards the mirror, against the hard surface—which softens like silver goo, and the world tilts out of its axis. You stumble and crash onto the floor.

“Darling?” A woman squints suspiciously into the room. “What are you doing?”

You scream at her to run. You wobble upright and continue screaming. But everything looks as if out of a dream; the right has flipped left, and the writings on the mirror looks like a foreign language. You turn around to run to Mum, but she is not behind you. She is inside the mirror.

You stop screaming. There is no air in your throat, no vibration in your vocal cords. You bang your fist against the mirror’s surface. Mum looks at you, at the writing on the mirror, at the other girl smiling sweetly next to her. Horror blossoms like an ugly bruise on Mum’s face.

The other you skips towards the petrified woman, licks a strip of skin off Mum’s forearm, and links their hands together. Then, your voice strikes the silent air, but it is not from your mouth. It is coming from her. “Mummy, where do we keep our butcher’s knife?”

Mum looks at her smile, at the sharp teeth and sweet mouth, and her eyes go funny. Like Timmy’s mum’s, they roll up in their sockets until her pupils are completely gone, and only the white parts of her eyeballs are exposed. Mummy smiles. “In the kitchen, sweetie. I’ll get it for you. Anything for my precious darling.”

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Host Commentary

The horror of regret, something a lot of families deal with.  Especially when one of them dies. Knowing that the last time you talked with someone is the last time you talked with someone.  No more chances to express how you truly feel, no chances to make up for past mistakes, no more chances to give them what they truly deserve. So we honor the dead, funerals, wakes, and all the ceremonies in one final attempt to show that we did care for them. Now a lot of the time these ceremonies are mere obligation and duty.  Not here. On the subject, it may seem extreme, but I don’t think ive encountered a sendoff that for beautiful and personal.

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THere are some terrifying phrases to hear, especially in a family situation: “Let’s keep this between us”, “This is not for public consumption”, “You’re not going to tell, are you?. Obviously, there are times where the world doesn’t need to know your family’s dirty laundry.  More often than not though, this is used to benefit someone else and hurt you.  People can try to cover this over with. This can be covered over with excuses but underneath the threat “They wouldn’t like that”,  You should also remember other phrases “Speak your truth”, “Believe victims”. “I’m not going to hide for you”. The monster has made you a c\victim, you should never be made to be his accomplice as well.

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I find this story fascinating since it can be interpreted in several different ways.  The ‘sister’ could be a cuckoo in the family nest. It manages to fool everyone that it’s natural for it to be here even though it’s harmful to everyone around it.  It could be that the ‘sister’ is the girl’s own darkness. All the horrible violent intrusive thoughts we have condensed into one reflection in the mirror. It could be that the ‘sister’ is really her sister, furious that she didn’t get to live.  When the mother says ‘You don’t have a sister’, maybe she should say ‘You don’t have a sister… anymore’  You don’t know.  And isn’t that where the horror lives.