Issue Three

JESSICA BOWERS
“Why can’t you talk?” kids at school
would ask.
“I’m mute,” Eli would write.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means I can’t talk.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t.”
And that was always that. Eli couldn’t
laugh with his friends—not that he had
any—couldn’t sing along in music class,
and couldn’t talk to the girl he thought
was pretty without her abruptly turning
away, whipping him with her long
ponytail as she went. He grew to hate
the other kids, and sometimes, he found
himself wishing not that he could speak,
but that all of them were mute like him.
When he lowered the pillow he saw the
flashing lights with their steady tempo of
on off, on off. The pattern calmed him
from his fit, and watching them still, he
put his feet on the floor, straightened his
tiger-striped pajamas and went to the
window. He peeled back the star
curtains and climbed up onto the
windowsill for a better look. Surprised in
his silent way, he knelt there with his
hands on the glass, his mouth half-
parted in childlike wonder as he gazed
at the bizarre activity atop the hill.
Eli didn’t even like to look at the house
in the safety of full daylight, because he
thought he could always sense some
kind of grotesquely shaped shadow
meandering past the grimy window,
watching him. The house was, Eli felt
with a certainty more acute than fact,
the hiding place for the creatures of his
nightmares; for the creatures of all the
kids’ nightmares. When the kids of the
neighbourhood had too many bad
dreams, there wouldn’t be enough room
for the monsters anymore, so they’d all
come out and go into the kids’ houses
instead. Eli’s throat tingled with the
desire to whimper as he imagined the
devil clown scraping its crab claws
across his windowpane, laughing its dry,
wind-up toy laugh and drooling shiny
black blood.
So what did the lights mean? Was
somebody in there, fighting all the
monsters, killing them with light? Eli
didn’t think so. The ichor yellow flashes
painted and repainted sunsets on his
rosy cheeks, dazzling his tentative eyes
and dying his curly dark hair a queasy
green. The sudden enlightenment was
brighter than the light itself! The
monsters were beckoning to him, to all
the kids to come and face them once
and for all. This too Eli felt with that
eminent certainty, the certainty more
concrete than the fact that he had no
voice.
He took a deep breath and swallowed it
down in a painful gulp. Eli had to do it,