"The Tooth Fairy Pillow"

 

When I was younger, I had a small pillow, pink with lace trim and a pocket about as wide as the diameter of a quarter sewn onto the front, where I kept the baby teeth that I lost. The night after a tooth had fallen out, I would slip the dead little bit of enamel into the pocket. In the morning, the pocket would hold a coin. My tooth fairy was somewhat lax in her duties, though; often, she left the teeth tucked inside along with the quarter. As more and more teeth fell out of my mouth and ended up in the pillow, I swore that I could hear them clacking together at night, as if someone were talking very quickly, or shivering in the cold.

I hadn't thought much about the tooth fairy pillow until the other day, when I was cleaning the hair out of my brush. I'm used to imagining the tangled bunches that I pull out as tumbleweeds as they drift down toward the garbage can. This time, as it was falling, the mass of hair sprouted tiny legs and feet from its bottom side, landed on the can with its toes curled over the rim, and leaped onto the floor, where it dashed toward a crack in the wall. I thought I had been hallucinating until this morning, when some of my fingernail clippings joined together and grew a hand out of nothing, and afterwards proceeded to run out the front door like the Thing.

Sometimes I've thought about the parts of me that I've lost over the years, and the other lives that I or some other version of me might have gone on to live. Now there's a knocking on my door downstairs, and I find myself wondering, What about all the thoughts I used to have? The stories I once dreamed and the terrors I used to fear? What might have become of them?

"Spiders on the Brain"

 

[Doodle courtesy of Wesley Wong]

"You've been drawing spiders a lot lately," he said to her.

She shrugged and swept her pen across the sheet of paper, creating a web of thin lines and broken angles. "I don't know. They've just been on my mind."

In bed that night, he woke and found her turned away from him. The lamp on her nightstand was on and dimly glowing. He peeked over the crest of her shoulder and saw that she had a notebook open and a pencil in her hand. Another spider menaced him from the corner of the page.

"Hey," he whispered, "drawing again?" Her hand kept moving, creating lines on the paper. He glanced at her face and saw that her eyes were closed. And then he saw the first of the spiders crawl out of her ear.

"Keep Me Warm"

 

We sat on the porch under a red, fading sky, with a blanket drawn over our shoulders. I felt the heat spill out from the cracks that split the pavement like open sores.

"It feels so fucking stupid to be cold right now," she whispered. "Keep me warm. Please."

I pulled the edges of the blanket together, over her arms, over the spots where she no longer had skin to cover her.

"Come Out and Play"

 

I heard what I thought might have been an empty plastic bottle rattling down the street. I thought it seemed odd, as there was no wind blowing to sweep anything along over the blacktop. Because that was the only sound echoing in what felt like an empty chamber of night, I stood and looked out the window. That was when I saw the ghost, a blue flame burning in the image of a boy; on the sidewalk by his feet was a white styrofoam cup. He saw me staring at him from where I stood on the second floor. "It's been a lousy day," he said, as clearly as if he were right next to me. "You want to come out and play?" He kicked the cup with a foot lit by ghostfire. The rattling sound could have been the sound of bones. I didn't offer him an answer, because I knew I had no choice.