Influences, Known & Suspected
Let Him In, a novel abandoned after its fourth inelegant metaphor in as many pages.
Poor Deer, whose first three chapters kept me up past my bedtime.
A misfired arrow in Oblivion; I was supposed to rescue him from a cave full of zombies, but I shot him in the arm instead. He tried to flee in endless panic, forcing a reload.
A late-night headline: a man in Virginia opens fire on three teenagers; one dies. The boys had been banging on his door at 3am, claiming a TikTok prank (but they were a little old to be that fucking stupid).
My mother on the phone with a woman she used to hate, laughing, her words a rapid-fire blur of Sicilian slang and affectionate incomprehensibility.
A string of true crime YouTube videos played over the squeak of my faulty treadmill (because I can’t read and run simultaneously). One man says, “I’m tired of hiding it.” They find the body in a shed, dead for years.
(a wound misremembered as refuge)
You are young again, rewound—a tape unspooling backwards through scraped knees and untroubled afternoons, jammed in the mouth of a machine that forgot how to play you. Ten, maybe. Ten was when you stopped spending the night at their house every weekend; ten was when her memory began to [ERROR: CHILDHOOD NOT FOUND]. You are young enough to build a fortress of pillows in the guest bedroom, old enough to know it won’t protect you from anything.
Your grandmother is still alive, still animate—no trace of the disease that contorted her cognition in increments for a decade before it finally took her life. She is exactly as she was, you think upon waking, but-but-but: you barely remember her; then again: this is the underworld and she is myth now, not flesh (so this version is as true as any). She helps you raise the fort: pillows and couch cushions like walls of soft defiance, a blanket draped like a canopy between the oversized dresser and the bedpost. This is, the adult-salted version of your mind realizes, a child’s attempt at sacred architecture; temple, sanctuary, bloodless battlement.
Night falls, the house is quiet. (A quiet house is already a falsehood because in dreams, the house is always the soul, and the soul is never silent, only suppressed.)
And then it wakes you: the crackle of a mechanical throat clearing itself. A voice emerges from the security intercom, warbled and insectile, half-chewed by static. The words are nonsense to your waking-mind, but they are anything-but to your dreaming-one—phrases you recall from half-glimpsed TikTok rituals, fragments of news-speak warning about the trickster gods infecting the wires. Mischief, chaos, sedition.
You see him on the video feed: a boy (a teenager, not a man) in a letter jacket (and why this detail? the high school alpha, the adolescent tribal marker of prowess, a symbol of sanctioned violence—sports, competition, masculinity) with a knife (that has never seen kitchen nor vegetable). Two girls like dobermans at his side.
He talks to you. (What does he say? That part’s missing. Maybe he spoke inside your skull.)
“You won’t get through,” you tell him. “It’s state of the art.” (The type of thing a kid says because the grown-ups said it first.)
He laughs. You hear it and you see it. “We already did,” he says. The sound is glitch-wrong (too many sound, not enough mouth). The door opens like a stage cue and you watch them enter.
Your grandmother is awake now and so is your sister (where was she before? was she here the whole time?). The intruders approach; your grandmother stands sentinel. Three adolescents in silhouette but wrong in the details, one old Sicilian woman staring them down. Their eyes are black, glistening absences. The one in the jacket (the pack-leader) smiles like he knows how this ends, but your grandmother doesn’t flinch (and she wouldn’t—she was stitched from the war stories of the old country, grease-burned and indignant).
“Vattene,” she growls (get lost). She says it to them, but you’re the only one who flees the showdown. Into the sanctuary of the guest bedroom, calculating the violence in your head.
9-1-1 on the rotary phone by the bed. “What’s your emergency?”
“There are kids in our house,” you say. “Kids who aren’t supposed to be here.”
“Did you let them in?” the operator asks.
“The security system failed,” you tell her.
There’s a hush on the other side of the line, a sound like someone else contemplating the equation you’ve already solved. “We can’t do anything about that,” the operator says. (Bureaucratic gaslighting, the system serves the system, the polis does not protect.)
“Why not?” you ask.
But the line goes dead without explanation. (“I hear the Call to Prayer / fade into that of the wounded gazelle tonight.” No help for the helpless / no mercy in the wires tonight.)
You return to the scene of the argument in time to see the blade write its final vowel into your grandmother’s body (this is not how she died—you feel this indignance like a canoe crossing the Lethe, a peek behind the curtain, not that it does any good). It’s not as dramatic as it should be—quiet, textbook. Like something choreographed. The two doberman-girls are chasing your sister, junkyard dogs in eyeliner.
The alpha-Chad turns to you, pins you still with his wells of nothing, but only for a moment. You take off down the hall and dive into the guest room’s closet, which swallows you into its mothball reek like a wad of gum (yes, that detail, yes—her house always smelled like mothballs and marinara).
This detail, too: the panel loose at the baseboard of the closet; a crawlspace—oh my god, you fucking hated that term as a child, the word with ten legs and and no eyes. But it offers itself to you now like a rabbit hole (you are rabbit; you are prey), and you consider it, but no, look again: the box of knives, your grandfather's relics, the ones he used to polish like prayers at the kitchen table (he wasn't a violent man, but he kept it near the way some men keep saints on the dash; she hated it, but she loved him).
You choose one, squeeze the haft; it weighs at least as much as your resolve.
There are sounds like footsteps. He’s coming. You wait.
(You wait. You wait. You wait, rabbit-heart sick with adrenaline going thump-thump-thump.)
The door creaks open and you strike—no sound, just blade, but it’s—
it’s your grandmother who—
no, here the dream fractures, a split yolk in a pan too hot, and the versions sizzle-flicker like an interdimensional grease fire.
In one world: the knife finds the god-boy’s chest. He curses in a dialect of red warning lights and vanishes, taking the others with him.
In another world: it’s your grandmother who falls, heart-blood like marinara oozing off a wooden spoon.
In yet another world: your sister dies.
In a world mid-apocalypse: you do.
[PROCESS: MULTI-TIMELINE COLLISION DETECTED]
[SYSTEM RESTART INITIATED]
Fast-forward (the machine coughs, a sound like a Mr. Handy spitting blood in the sink). You are on the phone with your mother, static like a fit of rain behind her voice. “If you hide it,” she says, grainy and exhausted, “you’ll ruin your life.”
“Are you saying I should confess?” you ask. (Recall that you are ten.)
“You should confess,” she says. (She’s smoking. You can’t see her, but you know she is. She quit twenty years ago, but everyone knows she only half-meant it.) “But look, we’ll get you a lawyer.” And the name she offers is familiar—he’s the one your grandfather used to call Faccia d’Angelo (Angel Face, but you haven’t heard that in years because your grandfather’s been dead a long time, too). “Hang tight,” she says.
The three of you meet at a dimly-lit cafe that smells like mustard and bagged lettuce (like a Subway without the toast). You never met Angel Face in the dayworld, so your mind renders him like a seraphic Brooklyn oil-slick in gold cufflinks and a three-piece white suit. You slide into a booth across from him and next to your mother, a green vinyl gash scratching the backs of your thighs. They’re both smoking.
“I don’t know what’s real,” you say.
He nods. “They do that,” he says—the trickster-gods. “They blur it on purpose. Dream logic is a legal loophole. If you can't prove intent, you can't prove crime. Mischief isn’t technically evil, it’s plausible deniability with a personality disorder.”
“Even when someone dies?” your mother asks. (The someone is her mother-in-law, but they always hated each other.)
“Especially then,” Angel Face replies. “If they make you carry the knife, they win.”
“What, then?” your mother asks.
Angel Face ashes his cigarette in a ceramic tray shaped like a crucifix; it lands on the Savior’s crotch. “She won’t survive county,” he says. “The ones in holding will erase her. She’s evidence. A threat to the system’s denial, we might say.” (Recall that you are ten.)
The logic here is wet-paint; your mother opens her mouth as if to reach for it and then withdraws, fingertips gooey. “What do we do?” she demands in her I’m-gonna-have-a-chat-with--your-boss voice.
Angel Face thinks. “The panel in the closet,” he says. “We’ll wall her in. Feed her through the vents. Keep her hidden. No one’s gonna look for her there. We’ll tell ‘em she Aliced.” (Trickster-gods on TikTok, children pulling an Alice and no-clipping into Wonderland.)
But this doesn’t amuse your dream-analogue. “For how long?” you ask, a tremor of panic seeping into your voice.
Your late grandfather’s lawyer shrugs, weary, and exhales verdict. “Until the world stops worshipping entropy?”
(lol… oh, okay… )
Silence, and then, “I don’t think I killed her. I don’t think that’s the true version.”
He meets your gaze. “Neither do I,” he says. “But dreamers can’t serve on juries, kid.”
And then you wake to contend with this Lynchian hellscape of Catholic guilt, half-tempted to scribble it in a love letter to the new Pope.