Melody was everything. Her name suited her well, her beauty comparable to that of a choir of a thousand seraphs harmonizing the most divine tune. I loved everything about her from her hair, which resembled obsidian in both color and shine, to her eyes, the color of fresh grass in the summer. I memorized her every feature and mannerism and had come to know them like the back of my hand. I was completely head over heels for this girl and the most interesting aspect of it all was that I hadn’t even met her.

Melody and I had been chatting for about a year and two months online. We met on a website that allowed you to video chat with people based on similar interests. She caught me by surprise. I was sure she would just click disconnect on me like most other conventionally attractive girls had, but she was different. She immediately greeted me and gave me the warmest smile. We talked for hours about our interests from music to literature to simple things like our favorite foods. Ever since we met that night, we’ve spoken nonstop. Between texting each other from dawn til dusk to losing precious sleep by Skyping at all hours of the night, she had become the center of my world. She knew everything about me. Well, almost everything.

I heard the ting from the computer, signaling me that Melody was calling. I pressed answer, feeling my heart flutter when her face appeared on my screen.

“Hey there, I have great news!” She practically yelled as soon as I answered the call.

“What is it, Mel?” I smiled at her excitement.

“I got a promotion at work, do you know what that means?”

“Uh, that you’re one step closer to taking over the company?” I chuckled. She made a face. I don’t think she found my joke funny.

“No, it means I can finally buy a plane ticket to come see you!” She grinned, her eyes visibly lighting up.

My face felt hot. I smiled awkwardly and shifted the conversation to something else by cracking another dumb joke. I could tell she didn’t find it funny but she didn’t call me out on my blatant dance around that subject. We chatted for an hour or so until she cut the conversation short.

“Ugh, I forgot I’m supposed to have dinner with my mom tonight. I gotta go, I love you Danny. Byeeee!” She sang before hanging up. Her “I love you” rang in my head as I stared at the now blank monitor. I felt my pocket buzz a few minutes later and I pulled out my phone. Melody’s name lit up my screen with a message below:

“I’m happy I got to see your face, even if it was only for a little. I love you.”

I grinned ear to ear. She always made me feel like the luckiest guy alive. I don’t know how I ended up with a girl so out of my league. She was perfect in every sense of the word, but I could tell she was slowly getting frustrated with me and it made my heart sink. I knew at this point that my time with Melody was limited, and I wanted to cherish every moment I could. She became more vocal about her frustrations with me avoiding the visit. Every conversation seemed to blur into a mess of excuses and angry sighs.

“I don’t know if I can get off work, Mel.”

“I’ll hang at your place until you’re off work. We wouldn’t have to be together every minute of every day.”

“Well, my car has been having a lot of problems lately. I don’t know if it’ll make the trip to the airport and back.”

“I’ll rent a car or something, Danny.”

“My dad has been sick lately and I think I should be using my spare time taking care of him.”

“You never told me that. I’d be happy to help. I volunteered at an assisted living clinic for five years.”

For every excuse I gave her, she had a solution. I felt desperate and nervous. I wanted nothing more than to hold her in my arms but my dark secret stood in the way. I couldn’t go through with it, and even she wouldn’t understand. Our daily Skype calls soon turned into weekly Skype calls and our texts went from actual conversations to “Sorry, I’m busy right now.” I could feel her slipping from my grasp and all I could do was sit back and watch. I felt powerless and defeated but I knew this was the only way we could go from here.

It had been about two and a half weeks since our last Skype call at this point and I felt as if the end was near, but then I heard the familiar ting from my laptop. I hesitated for a moment but answered the call. Her face popped up and instead of being greeted by a warm smile, I was greeted by a stern and cold expression.

“Daniel.” I cringed hearing her use my actual name.

“Hey smelly Melly.” I tried to joke, but she didn’t crack a smile.

“I can’t do this anymore.” My heart sank. “Danny if you keep refusing to meet me I have no other choice but to move on from you.”

“I-I understand Mel. I really do. I want to meet you but-”

“But what, Danny? What could possibly be your excuse this time?”

“I just can’t.”

“Well then I just can’t talk to you anymore.”

“I understand, Melody. I’m sorry.”

I watched a single tear roll down her face and then the call ended. I stared at the blank screen and watched her icon go from online to offline. Tears trickled down my cheeks as I just sat there, unable to do anything but stare and cry. I wish she knew. I wish she could understand where I’m coming from. I wish she knew how much I loved her. I sat there for what felt like hours until I decided to move. I leaned over and grabbed my bandage, wrapping my thigh and sliding into my prosthetic. I stood up slowly and adjusted myself so the prosthetic cupped my thigh properly. I sat back down at my computer desk and stared at the screen. I continued to stare at her Skype profile, trying to hold back the tears.

Gabrielle Vincent is a senior at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School (CASA).

I am a maggot, a decomposer, a consumer of the dead, and most importantly, I am the last witness of a dead body.

My family is excited to move me and my brothers into our new home.

I overheard this at this woman’s funeral, that Elyse Gabel was a psychology professor at the college nearby.

“She’ll be great for your first,” Mom says “She’s smart. The smartest ones have the sweetest brains.” We take her advice.

My brothers and I slither through the edges of Elyse Gabel’s casket. I inch my way across Elyse’s shoulder and into her ear and start gnawing. Sweetest remains I have ever tasted.

I feel the pressure of my brothers sinking into Elyse’s flesh and eating her torso. She gets heavy with us on top of her, then lighter as we eat her. I imagine this is how breathing is. It’s like we’re giving the dead another life, a new purpose.

What a life it is—providing a feast and a home to smelly bugs. I know she wouldn’t understand this.

Humans move. They switch houses to get a new start. They travel for jobs, for freedom, for their families. Maggots only change our places in search of the next meal. Elyse is fresh. We won’t have to move for quite some time.

Dirt starts to fall through the edges of the coffin. I slide out of Elyse’s ear. The earth sprinkles atop of the family. I curl my body around her pearl earrings.

Something bangs on the coffin, hard. There’s a click. Elyse Gabel’s dead body lights up. I’ve never seen an “alive” human until now. It’s strange to see someone’s mouth move on its own, and to finally connect a voice to a face.

“Jackpot.”

I know he can see us, smell us, chewing leftovers of something he’d saved for himself.

“He must think we’re disgusting.” My brother creeps behind me.

“So then why’s he here? To stare?” I say.

I’ve never seen a human open their eyelids by themselves either. The only times I’ve looked into a human’s eyes is when I’ve eaten them. But the eyes never moved. It’s unsettling to realize how much control you really have over someone.

“Nah. He’s one of those—” my brother says.

“What?” I uncurl to look at him.

“Grave robbers.”

“Aren’t we technically the grave robbers?”

“You could think of it that way, but we’re after the guts and the skins. It’s ethical. We need death to live.”

“And this person?”

“Grave robbers use death to get a thrill and some money. Why do you think they put bodies in the ground? So the living don’t get greedy.” He looks up. “See?”

The grave robber kneels on Elyse’s knees. Some of my other brothers start to crawl atop him, but he smashes them down. Dying in another’s coffin seems rude. But we have no control.

The living human squirms about. A noise escapes his lips. I’ve heard this noise before, at burials. It’s shock.

People don’t accept death the way that maggots do. They get scared, sad. I hear it in their trembling voices. It sounds like the noise that comes out of my mouth right now. This body is my home.

He removes her shoes, picks out a ring and dumps it in his front pocket. He moves his hands up her body, shaves some of my brothers off her legs along the way. Her tights already have holes from where the other maggots have bitten through.

A different noise from the grave robber. This is not a scared, shocked or sad noise.

His arms circle Elyse’s waist as he moves up her dress. Maggots wiggle under the fabric, but he puts his arms under anyway. He palms Elyse’s chest and pulls a gold chain from her neck. Then he gets to her ears. He works carefully, as if avoiding piercing Elyse and getting formaldehyde all over his clothes, even when he’s already got smashed maggots all over them.

He pulls on Elyse’s left ear, pulls the backs off of a gold hoop, a pearl, and a diamond. Three piercings to match the ear I’m in. He holds the prizes in his fist. Grave robber slides across Elyse’s arm. Maggots crawl under her fingernails. He ignores us, takes some jingly bracelets off her hand.

The noise again. He lines up every inch of his body atop hers. Almost like he is dead, too.

But his heart pounds on my home, blood rushes through his veins, noises that pouring out from his lips.

His hand creeps near me as he removes the last of Elyse’s jewelry. I squiggle away when he picks out the hoop, pearl and diamond.

He shoves the treasures in his pocket, then presses into Elyse, hard. That noise. He’s smashing my home, taken all the pretty things she was left with. And he’s not even finished.

I crawl back through Elyse’s ear and to her brain, but I no longer taste the sweetness. Just the bitterness of defeat.

Thud.

Another living human. This one holds a shovel above his head. Another thud, this time on the grave robber’s skull. Finally a different noise from his mouth. Something scared and sad. Blood gushes from the wound.

A feast.

The human with the shovel slams the casket shut, and I hear the earth bury us again.

The grave robber’s body smashes against Elyse’s, but now, my brothers and I swarm over both of them. We have complete control.

Alix Gregory is a sophomore at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School (CASA).

She scanned the entire room in two seconds looking for an escape, beads of sweat forming on her forehead. Her abductor, a tall, pallid man with the darkest sunken eyes, entered the room and removed her restraints.

“Please… Why are you doing this?”

“Don’t talk. Here,” he said, handing Randi a scalpel, “Your next task is to cut a slit in your eye.”

“I’ve done everything you told me to do… Please, just let me go… I won’t tell anyone!”

“DO IT!” Randi picked up the scalpel, hand shaking, pleading and crying as she brought it closer to her eye. The words, “The slower you do it, the more it hurts,” creeped out of his mouth with a grin. With one swift motion, Randi peeled her eyelid open and slit her eye, shrieking in pain, blood pouring from it.

“That’s two. Three more, and you’re out of here.” He re-tied her, laughing as he left the room. “I’ll be back soon.”

Randi struggled in her chair when she heard a knock at the door. She found a way out; she just needed to free herself before her abductor checked the door. The more she struggled, the tighter the ropes became. Her abductor walked through the doorway into the kitchen and peered through the peephole.

“Don’t do anything,” he warned Randi, facing her, his voice muffled. Turning back to the door, he opened it a crack, enough that the man standing on the other side could see her and the look of absolute terror in her eyes. “What do you want?” he demanded.

“Oh, hi. I’m your new neighbor, if you can even call it that since the houses are so far apart—” As her abductor was about to close the door in the neighbor’s face, he said, “Anyway, I just wanted to get acquainted and invite you over for dinner some time.”

“I’m busy.” The door slammed shut. “Where were we? Ah, yes. I have something for you.” He grabbed a nutcracker from the cabinet and shoved it in her face. “Put your big toe in it and twist.” Randi flinched away from the nutcracker. “Or I’ll do it for you.”

She snatched the nutcracker up and quickly broke her toe, wincing in pain. The abductor gave her a glass of water, and sat down in the chair next to her, but she refused to look up from the floor. He told her that she made the right choice because if he would have done it, it would have been much more excruciating.

“Who was that at the door?” she said, sifting pain through her teeth.

“Nobody. Some dumbass neighbor that shouldn’t have come here.”

“I heard him invite you over; are you going to go?”

He sprang to his feet, banging his fist on the table. “Mind your damn business. You think I’m dumb or something? Like I’m just going to leave you here alone? Nice try.”

“You can take me with you—that way you know where I am.”

He hesitated, but then said, “Anything you do, you ask me permission first.”

Dinner went smoothly until cleanup when the neighbor asked Randi to assist him in the kitchen. She looked to her abductor to see if it was okay, but was given a look of warning so she politely declined and said, “Would you please show me to the restroom, actually?”

“Sure, right this way. By the way, what happened to your eye?” he asked as they headed down the corridor. She had to choose her words carefully with her abductor around, so she said she had a freak “accident.”

As Randi stepped into the restroom, she whispered to him, “It wasn’t an accident.” In the restroom, she left a note on the toilet paper with the toothpaste sitting on the sink. “Help me, he’s going to kill me.”

After Randi and her abductor thanked him for dinner, they went back to the house. Behind closed doors he could reprimand her for what he called “misbehaving.” Holding a revolver in his hand, aimed at Randi, he said, “Let’s play a game.” Randi froze in her tracks and put her arms up above her head as if she was being arrested.

Her abductor opened the chamber, showing Randi the single bullet. He closed the chamber, letting it spin. A laugh slipped out of his mouth—ragged and malevolent—as he said, “I told you not to try anything, you bitch. Russian Roulette—fire the gun at your head. Three times, if you’re lucky.”

Randi grabbed the gun, shaking with fear. She had two options, both terrifying. She could aim it at her abductor, she could kill him, but it could be a blank, which would piss him off even more, or she could end up shooting herself in the head. Randi closed her eyes and pulled the trigger, tears streaming down her face. Time slowed. Seconds passed. One, two, three, four, five. A blank. The look of relief on Randi’s face turned to horror; she had to do it again. Two more blanks. Randi dropped the gun on the floor in defeat. The tears continued, but her sobs silenced. Her head hung to the floor.

“You’re one lucky girl. Now stop your crying!”

Just as her abductor finished restraining her, he picked up the gun and placed it on the kitchen table. The phone began ringing. She had no will left to fight.

“What do you want?” There was a pause as he listened to the person on the other end. At the same time, Randi tried to stop her crying. “What?! She did what?! I’m going to kill the ungrateful bitch!” He slammed the phone down onto the table and glared at Randi. “You think you can just leave me? After everything?” He shook with anger as he lunged at Randi, grabbing her neck with his big paws.

The door slammed open as Randi’s abductor continued to scream in her face, not taking his eyes off her. Holding a lock pick set, the neighbor stood in the doorway, stormed over to the table, picked up the revolver, and yelled, “Hey, Rowan! Turn around.”

Rowan instinctively turned toward the startling voice and saw the gun in the neighbor’s hands.

“I told you not to kill her, Rowan. I told you what would happen if you tried to kill her. Why didn’t you listen to me?” He opened his mouth to try to explain himself, but it was too late. The neighbor raised the gun, pulled the trigger, and shot Rowan in the heart, watching him collapse on the floor. He walked over to Randi and removed her restraints.

Rowan screamed in agony as he bled out. “Why are you leaving me? Why does everyone leave me!” Randi got up and hugged the neighbor.

“We need to get out of here. Come over, get cleaned up, and I’ll take you to the hospital.” Randi shook her head and darted out of the house. She heard a shout from behind her. “Get back here!” Tripping over tree branches and rocks, the footsteps quickly got louder. The last thing Randi saw was the ground, after a heavy bang to her head.

As Randi slowly came to, her eyes fluttered, then opened quickly. She was in the same dining room she had been in an hour ago, her arms and legs tied down, a gag in her mouth. On the table next to her was a “Missing Person” flier. She saw her “savior” holding a large kitchen knife in his hand. She began to thrash in her chair frantically. He circled Randi’s chair, his shirt soaked by sweat. He pulled the shirt off over his head and put the knife to her neck.

“Do exactly what I tell you to do.”

Jess Wilson is a junior at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School (CASA).

“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
– Chuck Palahniuk

Awaking, I check for the color of the walls, only to be met by the tragic realization that they weren’t covered by those little glow-in-the-dark-stars my aunt put up for me when I was younger.

Heaps of tears dimple the teal fabric of the mattress, its attenuated metal springs complacent, yet yearning to penetrate the silver duct tape imprisoning them. He’s next to me, his pallid flesh escapes from the tattered bottom of a coffee-stained wife-beater; cellulite barely drapes his penis. A dim computer screen burns onto his obesity, his thick-framed glasses reflecting my exposed rib cage and protruding collarbones. My breath feels like the first after a coma, tongue withered at the root. It’s warm as I lie naked beside him.

These past three weeks have been stitched together by agony. But I’m starting to like the scent of the menthol cigarettes he brushes his teeth with.

Ashes fall upon the frayed carpet running deep with the scent of cat piss. Smothered by his own skin, he coughs and wheezes, my feeble arm wraps around his porcine stomach in search of comfort, palpitating along with the excess of his shaking flesh. Clamping my wrist, he throws my arm off and steps into his decayed bedroom slippers, outing the cigarette upon the oak dresser. The contorted butt’s ember cooks into the wood, then exhausts following the slam of the bedroom door.

I used to stare at those stars when my aunt fell asleep and the house was still. I’d bite the filth beneath my uncut fingernails, scraping it onto my canines, letting it accumulate with the plaque of my crooked smile. The trick is to keep the fragment of the nail still between your lips, begin to slightly blow and let it flutter between them until it flies across the room. Some call this a habit. I call this a distraction, a remedy, my practice of foul hygiene would lead me to ponder thoughts for hours, reflecting, biting, chewing, ruminating over how each adventitious being lives a life as complex and vivid as my own, populated with their own ambitions, sorrows, routines, worries. A bestseller that continues to invisibly type itself around you, like Roman catacombs sprawling underground, with complex passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know exist. Where you may only appear once, as an extra kissing your beloved in the background of a scene, as a dirty look given at the supermarket, as an attraction far too real to speak to. As anything. There’s some purpose that others hold in my narrative.

The key tumbles the lock, the bolt slides into the door. Paralyzed by my obscure thoughts, I lie here in a windowless room.

Do you ever get that feeling like you’re unique? As if all the shit in life you’re experiencing has some valid reasoning, to mold you, to shape you? Bathing in this feeling of being wanted, of feeling needed, I feel exactly this.

What about the sense of life flashing before your eyes? It seems I’m having just the opposite, thinking forward, to all the things I haven’t accomplished, the places I intend to visit, the objectives and goals I always said I’ll get around to. Most times I’ve pictured the thought alone, but not now. I’m photocopying all the things he and I can be inside my head, if only he could see inside my head. How it pleases. Like this avidity to be bruised by catastrophe, to lose everything in a flood, to survive a car crash. Anything that brings forth an entanglement to that rope we call life, to forge a knot, reinforcing, making that rope tighter, as if to show us there are two ends to it. As if I’m finally seeing the world for what it is, like how your eyes adjust to the darkness of a room.

There’s no need for me to turn the lights back on.

Why stand when you know the next time you fall you won’t get back up?

That’s the thought that runs through my head as I take the delicate arm off my chest. Pulling the last drag from my cigarette, I slip into those bedroom slippers Nataly bought me for Christmas in Vegas of ‘78. There’s something about the last drag of your first cigarette, that goodbye kiss to your lungs. Like your lips, that cage inside your chest will always want more. I’ve found cigarettes are cheaper than affection anyways, but you can pick your poison. Love will make you break, cigarettes just make you rot.

Patting against black walls I find the light switch, FLICK, and those black walls turn a worn white. There’s my shithole of a home. Nataly always said, “People don’t want the truth because they don’t want their little illusions destroyed.” I’m starting to wonder what happens when there’s a lack of checks and balances, when you don’t have someone to maintain the difference in truth and fiction.

When you’re alone, anything can be truth.

So I live in one of those Ikea catalogs and have the greatest art collection you’ve ever seen. From Rembrandt to Pollock, Warhol to Picasso, I have it all. I wear one of those Brooks Brothers American-cut suits with my perfect teeth and confidence. I come home after a long day and feel the compassion of my lover’s arms. I am everything I’m not.

But just how long does one have to lie until it becomes the truth?

Like a bouquet of roses, a dozen .45 caliber bullets fill the clip of a Berretta M9. My heroine, my Nataly vanished. Slipped through the slowly formed cracks of the vial I furnished out of infatuation. I am lost inside myself, forsaken by my own reflection. I would have shown her the world as it was in my dreams, but just like tear drops, those dreams came crashing down, one by one. Her questions came in the same package as the white picket fence. “Can I love without hate? Will I want without need? Will I ever live my life long enough to appreciate the fact that I can’t embrace one without the other? Do I want this? Do I need this?”

All that remains of her is my captive marionette. My Rembrandt, My Pollock. The gallery showing which lies down that desolate hallway is titled: “The Misery She Sparked.”

I pick off transparent flakes from my scalp, the now dried up super-glue, left over from the trashy blonde wig he likes to put on my head. With my feet fettered to the frame of the bed, I can’t help but lie pensive and complacent. Yearning to hear a sound, a voice, to feel his presence, his bittersweet company.

It seems there’s always something audible going on around you. Even in the purest of silence your ear will pick up on that unfathomable decibel, that steadfast murmur, as long as your heart still beats, as long as—

My heart beat stops as the deadbolt slides away. Thoughts of love and death have deafened me; my ears congest from the sight of sweat gushing off the gun’s barrel. Approaching the bed, he places the pistol adjacent to the contorted cigarette butts. As his slush of flesh climbs onto me, engulfing me, I whisper:

“You can have me; I am yours.”

His face twists with spite as the pulp of his hands, skin and sweat, wrap around my neck, drowning me.

Adulation rests within the flesh of limpid eyes. Behind bleached lips, the crush of breath expires, a victim of circumstance. My circumstance.

I have been dead all my life, now I’ve simply finished the preparing of my second demise. Placing the Berretta to the back of my throat, gagging, teeth clenched to the barrel, I whisper the vowels of my beloved’s name into the now deaf ear of my scapegoat.

Near the end I wished to at last feel somewhat alive.

But I do not.

As the white noise fills my brain, clouding my sight, like a flickering light, I burn out, into oblivion, everlasting sleep.

Austin Rick is a senior at Capital Area School for the Arts Charter School (CASA).