MicroHorror

Two weeks after my wife left, my son started sleepwalking. I’d wake up and there he’d be, hovering over my side of the bed, his eyes two black pucks. He’d let me steer his stiff body back to bed, his breathing so soft as to be almost nonexistent.

Upon hitting the sheets, he’d close his eyes and I’d be the one to watch him sleep. The air coming out of his nostrils was frosted fog. When I checked the window, it was closed. The thermostat said seventy-two. I went back to my bed and stared at the ceiling until my alarm rang.

He started writing words on his body. At first they were short things, written in a small scrawl.

FLY BIRD. SINK ME HOME. LAIR. LIAR. FIRE.

He went mute, stopped talking altogether.

When I told him his behavior had to change, he shrugged. When I grabbed his arm, he pulled out a felt pen and wrote WE ALL DIE across his forehead, each letter perfectly straight, even though he’d done it while staring at me the whole while.

School kids and people in our building were afraid of him. He refused to see a counselor. I paid to have a therapist come by the apartment. She was a redheaded pixie. I showed her to his room. Three minutes later she came running out, her eyes wild red plums. She opened her mouth, looked behind me, then shot out the door.

My son stood there, swaying. Words, put together like Scrabble tiles, were sketched across his face. I knew rappers and some edgy types tattooed their necks and faces, but seeing my boy like that sent a cold spike through my gut. When I approached, he opened his mouth and showed me metallic letters embedded in his teeth.

I KILLED HER, it said on the top row. TODAY IS DARK was written on the bottom.

I ran my fingers through my hair, not knowing which was racing faster, my heart or my mind.

My boy grinned.

He took my hand. “Where are we going?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

His strides were short shuffles. He tugged me along.

Once inside his room, he closed the door. Pointed at a chair where his desk sat. Asked me to sit. Handed me a piece of paper that said, “I want to show you something. It’s a game. Hold out your wrists.” I hesitated but did as he’d requested.

He must have had the duct tape stuffed in the back of his pants. He slung it around my wrists and to the chair, then looped it around my ankles and the chair legs, and then all over several more times. When I started to ask what the hell he was up to, he ringed my mouth and hair with duct tape, too.

He pulled a shoebox from his bottom dresser drawer. Took out a short stack of Polaroids. Spread them on the desk in front of me. I started to gag, choking on my own bile, swallowing the burning acid and trying not to believe what I was seeing.

When I looked back at him, my son had an ice pick in his hand. I noticed the tip was stained crimson. In the other hand was thread.

I looked back at the photos of my wife, her flesh puckered and ridged, a quilt of macabre code stitched into every inch of skin. There was another picture of our old housekeeper, Edna, who we thought had quit without warning. She was disfigured the same way. As was the Keller girl, the one who’d gone missing from our old neighborhood, never to be found.

I tried to scream. I wanted to tell him he was a monster, that I hated him, but I could see in his eyes that he already knew this and didn’t care a bit. He had work to do, a new language quilt to stitch, and was eager to get on with it.