STORIES
NON-CANON STORIES
The Boy on the Lake
Once upon a time, in a world that was probably far away from this one but not all that different, there lived a family who would take excursions out onto the nearby lake to stare up at the constellations, eat picnic lunches, share stories, and do other fun, happy family stuff. The little boy in this family, being an only child, was spoiled by his parents as only children often are, but he was also an honest worker, learning how to feed the chickens and keep the farm in a presentable, working state. One summer day, however, there was a sudden thunderstorm that swept over the valley while his parents were alone on the lake - in fact, just as they were getting ready to paddle out of it for the afternoon - and a bolt of lighting came down and struck the boat, if not killing the parents instantly through sending one billion volts of electricity through their bodies, then causing them to drown as the entire boat snapped and collapsed on itself. The boy mourned his parents as well as the fact that he had not been with them at the time, so that he too could have perished in a fit of electrical burning and therefore never learn how it felt to be an orphan.
The boy’s aunt and uncle took possession of both the farm and the boy; possession because that was genuinely how they looked at him, and how they treated him every day, as they didn’t know how to run a farm and wanted him to complete most, if not all of the work. They expected him to shuffle around and feed the animals, milk the cows, and fix all of the meals. Being not terribly kind individuals, they also teased him mercilessly when he became too exhausted to continue working.
"Your parents are the ones sleeping with the fishes, not you!"
--and they said this very often, and the boy thought about this, and one day, he headed down to the dock and hopped into a small boat. He brought a lot of his toys with him - though the coloring book was a bad idea in retrospect - and he sat out on the water until the day faded away and the only light left was a sprinkling of stars. At night, he slept, and the words "sleeping with the fishes" became a comfort, as he too was sleeping with them, and in turn his parents, whom he loved very dearly.
He stayed out on the lake for a very long time, only returning to stock up on peanut and butter jelly sandwiches from the fridge, ignoring his aunt's and uncle's protests. Many times he was grounded only to slip out his window in the night and row out into the lake again, and when his aunt and uncle started closing off his window with a very firm padlock, he began learning how to pick locks, and then he began coming home less and less. His aunt and uncle didn't know what to do about him, this stubborn boy, and with time, the farm began to fall into disarray.
But the boy was dissatisfied, as there was something intrinsically lonely about living on a small boat day in and day out, and in the nights he sighed and wished that his parents were truly there with him. One day, however, on one of his visits to the shore, rather than arriving to find the angry faces of his aunt and uncle, he saw an old man with long, grey hair and a blindfold over his eyes, unnaturally tall and dressed from head to foot in robes. This old man didn't speak, but with his hands, he pointed to the boys chest, and then he pointed to his two fingers, and then he pointed out towards the river that left the lake. Because the boy was not an expert in interpreting cryptic gestures, he asked the old man to repeat himself, but then, rather than gesture again, the old man mouthed a word. "Family." Though that area was filled with rocks and rapids, in the irrational way that grief tugs at the mind, the boy took the old man to be telling him that he could find his parents there, and so rather than go home, he took the boat back out again and rowed towards the river. He paddled and paddled and paddled, going farther into the lake than he ever had before, eventually reaching the rougher river that the man had pointed him to on the shoreline.
But it wasn't very long before the waves began to wash over into the small, fragile boat, and the bottom snagged on a gathering of rocks. As the boy sat there, he began to imagine that the man might have been Death, and that he was going to be reunited with his parents in a slightly unconventional, yet predictable way. As the boat toppled, he didn't try to fight it, and instead let the water swallow him up. However, rather than the warm, open hands of a benevolent god, he felt himself suffocated by the cool, unfeeling grip of nature, and as the end grew closer, he tried to struggle, but by then it was too late.
Back on the shore, his uncle stepped off the shoulders of his aunt, removing a blindfold and a long, grey wig as they laughed to themselves, convinced that the rapids would scare the boy into leaving the lake for good, unknowing that his lifeless body was drifting to the surface some distance away.
The Tale of the Starving Village
Once upon a time in a village far, far away, there lived a little girl who was such a happy little girl, such a kind little girl, that should the village have had a contest to determine the citizen with the greatest amount of altruism, she would have easily won. She stood up for the kids who were picked on in school. She brought flowers to strangers at the nearby hospital. She helped everyone and anyone, and she wanted nothing more out of her life.
That village - a small, peaceful, isolated farming village - fell on bad times, however, when a harsh winter came early and unexpectedly, turning the once flourishing fields of crop into a wasteland of frost and ice that no one could use. Not the farmers who relied on it for their salary. Not the villagers who relied on it to avoid starvation. None of the animals, either, benefited from this sudden, wintry turn, and as the smaller, foraging animals succumbed to their hunger, the larger animals, too, began to suffer tremendously, dying off in scores and littering the surrounding forest with their emaciated bodies.
Now, although the girl and the family were effected by this downturn, they were not the worst ones off by any means. They still had the money, albeit barely, to buy the surviving vegetables from the market on the far end of the village, and the parents sent the little girl to this market daily with a few silver coins, as they themselves were too busy keeping jobs to afford the long trip through the icy streets. This arrangement, with the girl making the trip through the village and purchasing vegetables for her family, lasted one full week without any problems. One full week.
One day, on the way back from the market with her bag full of vegetables, she encountered a homeless man dressed in rags, lolling against the side of a dumpster where he had just spent time unsuccessfully searching for his next meal, and when he saw this little girl, he sat up and watched her with his pleading eyes, and he said, 'Please help me. My crops died off in the winter, my farm was taken from me, and now there's nothing left.' The little girl knew that while her family needed the vegetables, this man obviously needed them more, and she gave them to him without a second thought, and he thanked her with tears streaming down his face, and she felt a warmth in her chest that told her she did the right thing. The little girl was very happy.
When she got home, her parents were obviously distressed, and they yelled at her and they scolded her, for now their servings were even more meager than usual, and they were going to have to live only on broth and stale bread until they received their next salary. The next day, they vowed to send the little girl on a different, longer route to the market, so as to avoid encountering this homeless man again, and thereby protect their food.
On that different, longer route, the little girl instead encountered a woman who was suffering from schizophrenia, just as homeless and just as miserable, and she could tell from how the others avoided the woman that she had no hope of finding a job or getting food, and so the little girl again offered the vegetables she had purchased at the market, and the woman told her, looking as though she might burst into tears at any moment: 'Thank you.' And the little girl was very happy. Again, she came home to her parents empty-handed, and again they fussed and yelled, and so the next day, they sent her on another route, this time around through the forest.
While walking through the forest with the groceries in her hand, the little girl encountered a wolf, as tends to happen when wandering out in the woods, and like everyone else in the village, the wolf was starving, and his fur was coming off in chunks and his eyes were bloodshot. To her alarm, the wolf spoke, and the wolf said, 'I'm starving. Please, let me have your flesh,' and while the girl was very very nice, she wasn't stupid, and so she told the wolf, 'No, you can't have my flesh,' but she promised instead to go home and collect more money from her parents so that she could buy him meat. The wolf was surprised, but thankful, and the little girl was very happy.
The girl's parents, of course, wouldn't have any of that, and when she arrived home and asked them for more money the next day, they knew something suspicious was happening, and they ignored the little girl's tears and protests that she was doing the right thing, that she needed that money for someone very special, and that they would be very sad if she could not use it. The next day, the parents sent her on a different route.
This new route, however, was also through the forest, and, as happens in life, the wolf didn't stay in one single solitary place. She encountered him again, and the wolf was even more hungry this time, and she didn't have the meat she promised him, and although she apologized profusely and genuinely, the wolf couldn't hear her, because the wolf was an animal and he was starving to death, and while wolves don't typically harm people, there are certain, desperate situations that call for it. It only took a second for him to leap on top of her, and he tore at her neck with his powerful teeth, and then when she fell and her screams turned to gurgles, he sank his teeth into her abdomen without even thinking and began taking the flesh he had asked for just yesterday. As she lay dying on the forest ground, the world around her growing dim while a wild animal tore up her insides, the little girl prayed for an escape. A rescue. Help like she had provided for so many others.
Suddenly, the wolf pulled back from her and ran away, frightened by something she herself could not see, and she thought yes, yes, this is it. I'm saved.
But she wasn't saved. No one came. When her parents found her five hours later, her blood had stained the carrots and lettuce a perfect crimson. Later, they'd learn at the funeral that if the people whose footsteps scared the wolf away hadn't assumed it was killing a dear, if they hadn't assumed it couldn't have been such a big deal, if they weren't afraid to take the time out of their commute to see if anyone needed help, maybe, maybe something could have been done.
The Face Basement
*mentioned in canon but never read aloud
Once upon a time, there was an unhappy man who lived alone in a forest outside of town, and the reason this man lived in the forest instead of the town wasn't because he loved the sounds of birds or how the light traveled through the trees and pleasant, happy things like that, but because he hated the town, hated people, and wanted very little to do with any of it all -- except for one thing. You see, the man had a very peculiar, not at all legal hobby, and this hobby was collecting the bones, muscle, and tissue of the human face. Which he did. Regularly.
He kept the faces downstairs in the basement - after he cut them from his victims, of course - in a jar, on a dummy, and these dummies he would set up sometimes, based on how he imagined the owners had lived their lives. Playing catch. Handing out mail. Waiting tables. The children he would keep together, and the adults too, as the man had a negative, isolated relationship with his parents much like he had with humanity in general, and had a hard time imagining anything else. Every other week, he would collect an unsuspecting townsperson, and yet another face would make its way down to the basement. He buried the faceless, bloody bodies outside for the maggots.
Well, one day, as he was slicing the face off his latest victim -- a schoolteacher who once had bright, round eyes -- he heard a knock on his door that he knew belonged to his father, a RAT-tappity-TAP. Now, as I said, the man had an isolated relationship with his parents, his father especially, in that although he came to visit every week against the man's wishes, he willfully ignored both his son's misery and his distaste for humanity. He only gave the same booming laugh, a HA HA HA, as though nothing was wrong or could ever be wrong, and it drove the man into a barely suppressed rage each and every time. But he had never come when he was finishing a face before. He smelled like blood and preservatives and he was frightened. Frightened, and very, very irritated. Yet he answered the door. He took the knife with him, hidden in his pocket.
'My son!' said the father. 'Will you ever get married?'
The man had heard the question before, as it was part of the routine of normalcy. 'No, father,' said the man.
The father laughed. 'My son!' he said again. 'Will you ever have children?'
'No, father,' said the man.
Again, a laugh. 'My son!' said the father, as though all the other answers had somehow been absurd. 'Will you ever be buried?'
The man thought about this for a moment, and then he said, 'You buried me long ago, father.'
Once again, he gave the booming laugh which the son found so maddening, and enough was quite suddenly enough, and before he even realized it, he cut down his own father, slashing across his throat so that he could never laugh again. Within the evening, his face, too, was in the basement.
That night, however, while the man was sleeping, there came strange sounds down from the basement - clinking like glass, chattering murmurs, even the resonating chords of an organ - although at first the man couldn't be sure if he was imagining them. When he went downstairs, he found not a single sign anything was amiss, save for an empty dummy he didn't remember having. It was next to a female dummy across from his father, and in that way, it resembled a wedding with his father as the priest. The man felt very sick and went upstairs.
The next night, more sounds emerged from the basement - the excited giggles of children playing - and the man went down to the basement to find that all of the children dummies were together with the adult dummies, and their sickeningly pale, preserved mouths had been pulled back into smiles with push pins. The empty dummy remained beside his father's dummy, whose mouth, as well, had been tugged into a grin. Although the man was reluctant to believe in ghosts, he recognized very easily that he was in danger and had no interest in being buried, and so he packed up his clothing in a worn, gray suitcase and left that lonely, deadly house in the middle of the forest, and went down to the town to spend the night in the inn.
Now, in that inn, a very curious thing happened. The man had never spent time in the town before, save for collecting his victims, and so this was the first time he stayed overnight. Rather than return home to what he believed was certain death, he spent time in the town the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and he realized, with some alarm, that it wasn't as awful as he expected it to be, that people were more than just faces on plastic, and that some of them could be very nice, especially when compared to the unfeeling wall that was his father. Soon he met a woman that to his surprise, he loved very much, and with many, many years, he even married and had children with her, the life that he had pushed away for so long finally appealing and wonderful and good. The man was happy.
One day, after his children had grown, he went to revisit his old house, not for any real reason, just to look around at this and that, to get a feeling for how it all was. The moment he stepped inside, however, he felt a certain tickling under his chin, and then another inside his nose, and another just behind his eyes, and still more underneath the skin of forehead. All at once, hundreds of squirming maggots emerged from his face, and his bones and organs slowly fell to dust onto the carpet below, as though he had been buried and rotting for years and years. Despite the unbelievable pain - and although the maggots that emerged from his eyes had quickly blinded him - the man was aware they were removing his face.
The last thing he heard was the booming echo of his father's laugh and the sickening slosh of muscles separating from muscles.
The Bone Treasure
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who was born with a head heavier than all the other little boys and girls, and no one really knew why, no one questioned it, until one day the boy cracked his head open in a nasty fall. When the doctors went to stitch him up, they found that his skull wasn't, in fact, cracked, and they puzzled over the x-rays, because from what they could see, the bones weren't made of bone after all, but something else entirely. Many operations and many tests later, they learned that his skull was made of diamond, pure diamond, and his parents, who until then had expected to live a life of poverty with their strangely-headed son, saw themselves an opportunity to live a life of luxury, and so began to wish the opposite of what most parents wish, to outlive their son, so that when he died, they could harvest his head and never want for anything ever again.
Well, they waited and waited and waited, their son grew and grew, and he never got into any accidents or made any enemies or saw any sickness, and his parents grew older and older and began to fear the end of their own lives. How fair was it, they wondered, to live so close to treasure their whole lives and yet never receive any of it? Well, one day, the father lost his patience, and he went to go visit his grown son, and when his son opened the door, the father shot him in the chest with a shotgun. As he died, the son asked 'Why?' even though, of course he already knew, because one cannot grow in an environment with people actively wishing your demise without noticing sooner or later.
When his body went still, his father cut his head off and brought it home with him, and he and the mother dug into it, ecstatic with the reward they were to receive, never once thinking of their son's death; however, as they pulled back the skin and muscle, they saw that the skull was made of bone after all, and that everything in their lives, all the lies and their son's death, was built on a falsehood. Rather than face this, however, they grew angry at each other. The mother insisted he killed the wrong man, even as the remains of her son's face lay in front of her. The father insisted she had tricked him into going in the first place, even though he knew he went on his own, and the two of them fought and yelled, and eventually the police were called, and the police saw the son's carved up head and they took them away.
They spent the rest of their poor, miserable lives in prison, having outlived their son after all.
The Woman in the Spotted Dress
Once upon a time in a world not unlike this one, there lived a little girl to whom nobody paid much attention at all; not her depressed, opiate-addicted mother, not her unfeeling, absent father, nor the chattering, excited children on the playground that deemed her unanimously and definitively unfit for their games not through malice, but sheer thoughtlessness. She was invited to no one's homes to play dollies or have tea, and no one smiled extra bright whenever she entered a room. The loneliness in her heart grew and grew until it gained form in little, ghost-like friends, imaginary people that she could call and dispel at a moment's notice like so many little children could, lonely children in particular.
Well, one day, the parents forgot to let the little girl inside after returning home from school, as they were too busy with either this or that to care very much at all. The little girl sat outside - her stomach rumbling, as they had also forgotten to give her lunch - and she cried for hours and hours. It was then that she conjured up a woman. This woman was different from all the other imaginary friends in that she seemed more solid, somehow, more real, and the little girl wondered if she was even making her up in the first place. The dream woman wore a blindfold and a beautiful, white dress covered with blue and brown and green dots; the girl noticed, in fact, that the dots had holes in their middles and weren't part of the fabric at all. They were thin like butterfly wings. She asked the dream woman, 'What are all those dots for?' to which the woman replied: 'For you, my sweet darling. For you.' She sat with the little girl all night, keeping perfect company.
When the little girl awoke, the mysterious dream woman had vanished and her mummy and daddy still hadn't come to let her inside. Just as she was about to peer into the window, an unearthly shriek emerged from inside the house. The doors slammed open, and out came her parents - frantic, gasping, and clawing at their wide, unseeing, colorless eyes. Blood dribbled down from their eyes to their cheeks and into their gaping, screaming mouths. They had no irises.
The little girl screamed as anyone would scream and ran all the way to the school yard, where all her classmates lay strewn across the playground, moaning and blind, blood oozing from their eyeballs. Once more, none of them had any irises, and the uncaring sunlight burned their exposed pupils. The little girl ran into the school itself, where she found the science teacher slamming herself again and again into the wall, leaving specs of blood everywhere, and the history teacher, sobbing with eyes that meant nothing anymore.
When the little girl went outside again, the blindfolded dream woman was waiting for her. The little girl now understood the peculiar shapes on her dress. They were irises, torn from the eyes of the people who had dedicated each and every opportunity to ignoring her. The little girl cried, telling the woman that she didn't want this, that everyone who ignored her she loved in some vague, inexplicable way, and that she couldn't stand to see them to suffer for her sake.
'Why, my sweet darling,' said the dream woman. 'If you didn't want this, then why would I be here?'
With that, the woman removed her blindfold and took a knife to the little girl's eyes. The last thing she saw before being irreparably blinded was the dream woman's mutilated, iris-less eyes, which the little girl recognized - quite alarmingly - to be her own.
The Metronomes
Once upon a time, there was a faraway land in which everyone controlled his or her own heartbeat. Rather than allowing immortality or a new form of meditation, however, this ability carried a darker fate, as since everyone controlled their own heartbeats, hearts no longer beat automatically. It was a constant chore for the citizens to keep track of how many times their hearts should be beating every minute, and those who were unfortunate enough to lose count quickly succumbed to massive heart attacks. In fact, people died more frequently in this land than in any other, so much so that death stopped holding any significance. Still, it was generally accepted that it was better to be alive than dead, and thus each person kept their own metronome on their body at all times, one-two one-two one-two, to better help them manage their unusual physiology. The metronome didn't solve everything, though; deep sleepers frequently stopped hearing the regular clicking, and most little babies simply couldn't understand the pulling sensations in their chests. It was a meaningless, frustrating world... but it was, for these people, the only one they knew.
One day, however, a traveler happened upon the land, dressed in rags and with holes in his shoes so large that his grey, gritty socks were visible underneath, and the natives were puzzled greatly by this man, as they had never even seen a visitor before, and this man, to their astonishment, had no metronome. He was also greatly dehydrated, and after they gave him a glass of water, he gasped:
"I've seen other worlds! Worlds where people have forgotten how to sleep, where people breathe manually, where people crawl on their hands and knees! I've seen worlds where people must break food down into mush before they eat it, and worlds where people thread string in their eyelids in order to blink!"
The crowd that had assembled were by now convinced he was a lunatic, but one small child, one little boy, believed him. This little boy had lost most of his family due to the strains of controlling a heartbeat, including his mother and father, and he had also lost a number of his friends, leaving him lonely and hopeless in a world he saw shrinking before his eyes. He asked the man, can these people control their hearts? And the man said:
"Why, they can do it as easily as you can breathe!"
The little boy asked if he could see the worlds, to which the man replied yes, he could. A hush fell over the crowd, but the boy didn't care, and he was so excited that he started to run home to his step parents for permission to explore these new worlds, with hopes of learning how to control his heart without thinking about it, thereby healing the ruined world around him.
As he ran, though, his legs moving faster than they ever had before, he felt himself losing track of his heartbeat, and then he felt something just as immediate, a push, a stab deep inside his chest and he knew that his heart was stopping. When he turned around to call for help, he saw that the crowd around the traveler had fallen to the ground, and that the hush that came over them was more than just surprise, but also the sound of each of their metronomes going quiet for the last time. The traveler was crouching by one of the dead bodies and making a noise that sounded like sobbing to the dying boy's ears, but was in reality laughter, as he removed wallet after wallet from the bodies surrounding him, his movements perfect and seamless, a remote clutched in his worn, pale hand.
The Boy on the Lake
Once upon a time, in a world that was probably far away from this one but not all that different, there lived a family who would take excursions out onto the nearby lake to stare up at the constellations, eat picnic lunches, share stories, and do other fun, happy family stuff. The little boy in this family, being an only child, was spoiled by his parents as only children often are, but he was also an honest worker, learning how to feed the chickens and keep the farm in a presentable, working state. One summer day, however, there was a sudden thunderstorm that swept over the valley while his parents were alone on the lake - in fact, just as they were getting ready to paddle out of it for the afternoon - and a bolt of lighting came down and struck the boat, if not killing the parents instantly through sending one billion volts of electricity through their bodies, then causing them to drown as the entire boat snapped and collapsed on itself. The boy mourned his parents as well as the fact that he had not been with them at the time, so that he too could have perished in a fit of electrical burning and therefore never learn how it felt to be an orphan.
The boy’s aunt and uncle took possession of both the farm and the boy; possession because that was genuinely how they looked at him, and how they treated him every day, as they didn’t know how to run a farm and wanted him to complete most, if not all of the work. They expected him to shuffle around and feed the animals, milk the cows, and fix all of the meals. Being not terribly kind individuals, they also teased him mercilessly when he became too exhausted to continue working.
"Your parents are the ones sleeping with the fishes, not you!"
--and they said this very often, and the boy thought about this, and one day, he headed down to the dock and hopped into a small boat. He brought a lot of his toys with him - though the coloring book was a bad idea in retrospect - and he sat out on the water until the day faded away and the only light left was a sprinkling of stars. At night, he slept, and the words "sleeping with the fishes" became a comfort, as he too was sleeping with them, and in turn his parents, whom he loved very dearly.
He stayed out on the lake for a very long time, only returning to stock up on peanut and butter jelly sandwiches from the fridge, ignoring his aunt's and uncle's protests. Many times he was grounded only to slip out his window in the night and row out into the lake again, and when his aunt and uncle started closing off his window with a very firm padlock, he began learning how to pick locks, and then he began coming home less and less. His aunt and uncle didn't know what to do about him, this stubborn boy, and with time, the farm began to fall into disarray.
But the boy was dissatisfied, as there was something intrinsically lonely about living on a small boat day in and day out, and in the nights he sighed and wished that his parents were truly there with him. One day, however, on one of his visits to the shore, rather than arriving to find the angry faces of his aunt and uncle, he saw an old man with long, grey hair and a blindfold over his eyes, unnaturally tall and dressed from head to foot in robes. This old man didn't speak, but with his hands, he pointed to the boys chest, and then he pointed to his two fingers, and then he pointed out towards the river that left the lake. Because the boy was not an expert in interpreting cryptic gestures, he asked the old man to repeat himself, but then, rather than gesture again, the old man mouthed a word. "Family." Though that area was filled with rocks and rapids, in the irrational way that grief tugs at the mind, the boy took the old man to be telling him that he could find his parents there, and so rather than go home, he took the boat back out again and rowed towards the river. He paddled and paddled and paddled, going farther into the lake than he ever had before, eventually reaching the rougher river that the man had pointed him to on the shoreline.
But it wasn't very long before the waves began to wash over into the small, fragile boat, and the bottom snagged on a gathering of rocks. As the boy sat there, he began to imagine that the man might have been Death, and that he was going to be reunited with his parents in a slightly unconventional, yet predictable way. As the boat toppled, he didn't try to fight it, and instead let the water swallow him up. However, rather than the warm, open hands of a benevolent god, he felt himself suffocated by the cool, unfeeling grip of nature, and as the end grew closer, he tried to struggle, but by then it was too late.
Back on the shore, his uncle stepped off the shoulders of his aunt, removing a blindfold and a long, grey wig as they laughed to themselves, convinced that the rapids would scare the boy into leaving the lake for good, unknowing that his lifeless body was drifting to the surface some distance away.
The Tale of the Starving Village
Once upon a time in a village far, far away, there lived a little girl who was such a happy little girl, such a kind little girl, that should the village have had a contest to determine the citizen with the greatest amount of altruism, she would have easily won. She stood up for the kids who were picked on in school. She brought flowers to strangers at the nearby hospital. She helped everyone and anyone, and she wanted nothing more out of her life.
That village - a small, peaceful, isolated farming village - fell on bad times, however, when a harsh winter came early and unexpectedly, turning the once flourishing fields of crop into a wasteland of frost and ice that no one could use. Not the farmers who relied on it for their salary. Not the villagers who relied on it to avoid starvation. None of the animals, either, benefited from this sudden, wintry turn, and as the smaller, foraging animals succumbed to their hunger, the larger animals, too, began to suffer tremendously, dying off in scores and littering the surrounding forest with their emaciated bodies.
Now, although the girl and the family were effected by this downturn, they were not the worst ones off by any means. They still had the money, albeit barely, to buy the surviving vegetables from the market on the far end of the village, and the parents sent the little girl to this market daily with a few silver coins, as they themselves were too busy keeping jobs to afford the long trip through the icy streets. This arrangement, with the girl making the trip through the village and purchasing vegetables for her family, lasted one full week without any problems. One full week.
One day, on the way back from the market with her bag full of vegetables, she encountered a homeless man dressed in rags, lolling against the side of a dumpster where he had just spent time unsuccessfully searching for his next meal, and when he saw this little girl, he sat up and watched her with his pleading eyes, and he said, 'Please help me. My crops died off in the winter, my farm was taken from me, and now there's nothing left.' The little girl knew that while her family needed the vegetables, this man obviously needed them more, and she gave them to him without a second thought, and he thanked her with tears streaming down his face, and she felt a warmth in her chest that told her she did the right thing. The little girl was very happy.
When she got home, her parents were obviously distressed, and they yelled at her and they scolded her, for now their servings were even more meager than usual, and they were going to have to live only on broth and stale bread until they received their next salary. The next day, they vowed to send the little girl on a different, longer route to the market, so as to avoid encountering this homeless man again, and thereby protect their food.
On that different, longer route, the little girl instead encountered a woman who was suffering from schizophrenia, just as homeless and just as miserable, and she could tell from how the others avoided the woman that she had no hope of finding a job or getting food, and so the little girl again offered the vegetables she had purchased at the market, and the woman told her, looking as though she might burst into tears at any moment: 'Thank you.' And the little girl was very happy. Again, she came home to her parents empty-handed, and again they fussed and yelled, and so the next day, they sent her on another route, this time around through the forest.
While walking through the forest with the groceries in her hand, the little girl encountered a wolf, as tends to happen when wandering out in the woods, and like everyone else in the village, the wolf was starving, and his fur was coming off in chunks and his eyes were bloodshot. To her alarm, the wolf spoke, and the wolf said, 'I'm starving. Please, let me have your flesh,' and while the girl was very very nice, she wasn't stupid, and so she told the wolf, 'No, you can't have my flesh,' but she promised instead to go home and collect more money from her parents so that she could buy him meat. The wolf was surprised, but thankful, and the little girl was very happy.
The girl's parents, of course, wouldn't have any of that, and when she arrived home and asked them for more money the next day, they knew something suspicious was happening, and they ignored the little girl's tears and protests that she was doing the right thing, that she needed that money for someone very special, and that they would be very sad if she could not use it. The next day, the parents sent her on a different route.
This new route, however, was also through the forest, and, as happens in life, the wolf didn't stay in one single solitary place. She encountered him again, and the wolf was even more hungry this time, and she didn't have the meat she promised him, and although she apologized profusely and genuinely, the wolf couldn't hear her, because the wolf was an animal and he was starving to death, and while wolves don't typically harm people, there are certain, desperate situations that call for it. It only took a second for him to leap on top of her, and he tore at her neck with his powerful teeth, and then when she fell and her screams turned to gurgles, he sank his teeth into her abdomen without even thinking and began taking the flesh he had asked for just yesterday. As she lay dying on the forest ground, the world around her growing dim while a wild animal tore up her insides, the little girl prayed for an escape. A rescue. Help like she had provided for so many others.
Suddenly, the wolf pulled back from her and ran away, frightened by something she herself could not see, and she thought yes, yes, this is it. I'm saved.
But she wasn't saved. No one came. When her parents found her five hours later, her blood had stained the carrots and lettuce a perfect crimson. Later, they'd learn at the funeral that if the people whose footsteps scared the wolf away hadn't assumed it was killing a dear, if they hadn't assumed it couldn't have been such a big deal, if they weren't afraid to take the time out of their commute to see if anyone needed help, maybe, maybe something could have been done.
The Face Basement
*mentioned in canon but never read aloud
Once upon a time, there was an unhappy man who lived alone in a forest outside of town, and the reason this man lived in the forest instead of the town wasn't because he loved the sounds of birds or how the light traveled through the trees and pleasant, happy things like that, but because he hated the town, hated people, and wanted very little to do with any of it all -- except for one thing. You see, the man had a very peculiar, not at all legal hobby, and this hobby was collecting the bones, muscle, and tissue of the human face. Which he did. Regularly.
He kept the faces downstairs in the basement - after he cut them from his victims, of course - in a jar, on a dummy, and these dummies he would set up sometimes, based on how he imagined the owners had lived their lives. Playing catch. Handing out mail. Waiting tables. The children he would keep together, and the adults too, as the man had a negative, isolated relationship with his parents much like he had with humanity in general, and had a hard time imagining anything else. Every other week, he would collect an unsuspecting townsperson, and yet another face would make its way down to the basement. He buried the faceless, bloody bodies outside for the maggots.
Well, one day, as he was slicing the face off his latest victim -- a schoolteacher who once had bright, round eyes -- he heard a knock on his door that he knew belonged to his father, a RAT-tappity-TAP. Now, as I said, the man had an isolated relationship with his parents, his father especially, in that although he came to visit every week against the man's wishes, he willfully ignored both his son's misery and his distaste for humanity. He only gave the same booming laugh, a HA HA HA, as though nothing was wrong or could ever be wrong, and it drove the man into a barely suppressed rage each and every time. But he had never come when he was finishing a face before. He smelled like blood and preservatives and he was frightened. Frightened, and very, very irritated. Yet he answered the door. He took the knife with him, hidden in his pocket.
'My son!' said the father. 'Will you ever get married?'
The man had heard the question before, as it was part of the routine of normalcy. 'No, father,' said the man.
The father laughed. 'My son!' he said again. 'Will you ever have children?'
'No, father,' said the man.
Again, a laugh. 'My son!' said the father, as though all the other answers had somehow been absurd. 'Will you ever be buried?'
The man thought about this for a moment, and then he said, 'You buried me long ago, father.'
Once again, he gave the booming laugh which the son found so maddening, and enough was quite suddenly enough, and before he even realized it, he cut down his own father, slashing across his throat so that he could never laugh again. Within the evening, his face, too, was in the basement.
That night, however, while the man was sleeping, there came strange sounds down from the basement - clinking like glass, chattering murmurs, even the resonating chords of an organ - although at first the man couldn't be sure if he was imagining them. When he went downstairs, he found not a single sign anything was amiss, save for an empty dummy he didn't remember having. It was next to a female dummy across from his father, and in that way, it resembled a wedding with his father as the priest. The man felt very sick and went upstairs.
The next night, more sounds emerged from the basement - the excited giggles of children playing - and the man went down to the basement to find that all of the children dummies were together with the adult dummies, and their sickeningly pale, preserved mouths had been pulled back into smiles with push pins. The empty dummy remained beside his father's dummy, whose mouth, as well, had been tugged into a grin. Although the man was reluctant to believe in ghosts, he recognized very easily that he was in danger and had no interest in being buried, and so he packed up his clothing in a worn, gray suitcase and left that lonely, deadly house in the middle of the forest, and went down to the town to spend the night in the inn.
Now, in that inn, a very curious thing happened. The man had never spent time in the town before, save for collecting his victims, and so this was the first time he stayed overnight. Rather than return home to what he believed was certain death, he spent time in the town the next morning, and the morning after that, and the morning after that, and he realized, with some alarm, that it wasn't as awful as he expected it to be, that people were more than just faces on plastic, and that some of them could be very nice, especially when compared to the unfeeling wall that was his father. Soon he met a woman that to his surprise, he loved very much, and with many, many years, he even married and had children with her, the life that he had pushed away for so long finally appealing and wonderful and good. The man was happy.
One day, after his children had grown, he went to revisit his old house, not for any real reason, just to look around at this and that, to get a feeling for how it all was. The moment he stepped inside, however, he felt a certain tickling under his chin, and then another inside his nose, and another just behind his eyes, and still more underneath the skin of forehead. All at once, hundreds of squirming maggots emerged from his face, and his bones and organs slowly fell to dust onto the carpet below, as though he had been buried and rotting for years and years. Despite the unbelievable pain - and although the maggots that emerged from his eyes had quickly blinded him - the man was aware they were removing his face.
The last thing he heard was the booming echo of his father's laugh and the sickening slosh of muscles separating from muscles.
The Bone Treasure
Once upon a time, there was a little boy who was born with a head heavier than all the other little boys and girls, and no one really knew why, no one questioned it, until one day the boy cracked his head open in a nasty fall. When the doctors went to stitch him up, they found that his skull wasn't, in fact, cracked, and they puzzled over the x-rays, because from what they could see, the bones weren't made of bone after all, but something else entirely. Many operations and many tests later, they learned that his skull was made of diamond, pure diamond, and his parents, who until then had expected to live a life of poverty with their strangely-headed son, saw themselves an opportunity to live a life of luxury, and so began to wish the opposite of what most parents wish, to outlive their son, so that when he died, they could harvest his head and never want for anything ever again.
Well, they waited and waited and waited, their son grew and grew, and he never got into any accidents or made any enemies or saw any sickness, and his parents grew older and older and began to fear the end of their own lives. How fair was it, they wondered, to live so close to treasure their whole lives and yet never receive any of it? Well, one day, the father lost his patience, and he went to go visit his grown son, and when his son opened the door, the father shot him in the chest with a shotgun. As he died, the son asked 'Why?' even though, of course he already knew, because one cannot grow in an environment with people actively wishing your demise without noticing sooner or later.
When his body went still, his father cut his head off and brought it home with him, and he and the mother dug into it, ecstatic with the reward they were to receive, never once thinking of their son's death; however, as they pulled back the skin and muscle, they saw that the skull was made of bone after all, and that everything in their lives, all the lies and their son's death, was built on a falsehood. Rather than face this, however, they grew angry at each other. The mother insisted he killed the wrong man, even as the remains of her son's face lay in front of her. The father insisted she had tricked him into going in the first place, even though he knew he went on his own, and the two of them fought and yelled, and eventually the police were called, and the police saw the son's carved up head and they took them away.
They spent the rest of their poor, miserable lives in prison, having outlived their son after all.
The Woman in the Spotted Dress
Once upon a time in a world not unlike this one, there lived a little girl to whom nobody paid much attention at all; not her depressed, opiate-addicted mother, not her unfeeling, absent father, nor the chattering, excited children on the playground that deemed her unanimously and definitively unfit for their games not through malice, but sheer thoughtlessness. She was invited to no one's homes to play dollies or have tea, and no one smiled extra bright whenever she entered a room. The loneliness in her heart grew and grew until it gained form in little, ghost-like friends, imaginary people that she could call and dispel at a moment's notice like so many little children could, lonely children in particular.
Well, one day, the parents forgot to let the little girl inside after returning home from school, as they were too busy with either this or that to care very much at all. The little girl sat outside - her stomach rumbling, as they had also forgotten to give her lunch - and she cried for hours and hours. It was then that she conjured up a woman. This woman was different from all the other imaginary friends in that she seemed more solid, somehow, more real, and the little girl wondered if she was even making her up in the first place. The dream woman wore a blindfold and a beautiful, white dress covered with blue and brown and green dots; the girl noticed, in fact, that the dots had holes in their middles and weren't part of the fabric at all. They were thin like butterfly wings. She asked the dream woman, 'What are all those dots for?' to which the woman replied: 'For you, my sweet darling. For you.' She sat with the little girl all night, keeping perfect company.
When the little girl awoke, the mysterious dream woman had vanished and her mummy and daddy still hadn't come to let her inside. Just as she was about to peer into the window, an unearthly shriek emerged from inside the house. The doors slammed open, and out came her parents - frantic, gasping, and clawing at their wide, unseeing, colorless eyes. Blood dribbled down from their eyes to their cheeks and into their gaping, screaming mouths. They had no irises.
The little girl screamed as anyone would scream and ran all the way to the school yard, where all her classmates lay strewn across the playground, moaning and blind, blood oozing from their eyeballs. Once more, none of them had any irises, and the uncaring sunlight burned their exposed pupils. The little girl ran into the school itself, where she found the science teacher slamming herself again and again into the wall, leaving specs of blood everywhere, and the history teacher, sobbing with eyes that meant nothing anymore.
When the little girl went outside again, the blindfolded dream woman was waiting for her. The little girl now understood the peculiar shapes on her dress. They were irises, torn from the eyes of the people who had dedicated each and every opportunity to ignoring her. The little girl cried, telling the woman that she didn't want this, that everyone who ignored her she loved in some vague, inexplicable way, and that she couldn't stand to see them to suffer for her sake.
'Why, my sweet darling,' said the dream woman. 'If you didn't want this, then why would I be here?'
With that, the woman removed her blindfold and took a knife to the little girl's eyes. The last thing she saw before being irreparably blinded was the dream woman's mutilated, iris-less eyes, which the little girl recognized - quite alarmingly - to be her own.
The Metronomes
Once upon a time, there was a faraway land in which everyone controlled his or her own heartbeat. Rather than allowing immortality or a new form of meditation, however, this ability carried a darker fate, as since everyone controlled their own heartbeats, hearts no longer beat automatically. It was a constant chore for the citizens to keep track of how many times their hearts should be beating every minute, and those who were unfortunate enough to lose count quickly succumbed to massive heart attacks. In fact, people died more frequently in this land than in any other, so much so that death stopped holding any significance. Still, it was generally accepted that it was better to be alive than dead, and thus each person kept their own metronome on their body at all times, one-two one-two one-two, to better help them manage their unusual physiology. The metronome didn't solve everything, though; deep sleepers frequently stopped hearing the regular clicking, and most little babies simply couldn't understand the pulling sensations in their chests. It was a meaningless, frustrating world... but it was, for these people, the only one they knew.
One day, however, a traveler happened upon the land, dressed in rags and with holes in his shoes so large that his grey, gritty socks were visible underneath, and the natives were puzzled greatly by this man, as they had never even seen a visitor before, and this man, to their astonishment, had no metronome. He was also greatly dehydrated, and after they gave him a glass of water, he gasped:
"I've seen other worlds! Worlds where people have forgotten how to sleep, where people breathe manually, where people crawl on their hands and knees! I've seen worlds where people must break food down into mush before they eat it, and worlds where people thread string in their eyelids in order to blink!"
The crowd that had assembled were by now convinced he was a lunatic, but one small child, one little boy, believed him. This little boy had lost most of his family due to the strains of controlling a heartbeat, including his mother and father, and he had also lost a number of his friends, leaving him lonely and hopeless in a world he saw shrinking before his eyes. He asked the man, can these people control their hearts? And the man said:
"Why, they can do it as easily as you can breathe!"
The little boy asked if he could see the worlds, to which the man replied yes, he could. A hush fell over the crowd, but the boy didn't care, and he was so excited that he started to run home to his step parents for permission to explore these new worlds, with hopes of learning how to control his heart without thinking about it, thereby healing the ruined world around him.
As he ran, though, his legs moving faster than they ever had before, he felt himself losing track of his heartbeat, and then he felt something just as immediate, a push, a stab deep inside his chest and he knew that his heart was stopping. When he turned around to call for help, he saw that the crowd around the traveler had fallen to the ground, and that the hush that came over them was more than just surprise, but also the sound of each of their metronomes going quiet for the last time. The traveler was crouching by one of the dead bodies and making a noise that sounded like sobbing to the dying boy's ears, but was in reality laughter, as he removed wallet after wallet from the bodies surrounding him, his movements perfect and seamless, a remote clutched in his worn, pale hand.