Max read the words on the curled slip of paper and his face went dark.

“Max, c’mon man what does yours say?” Julien said.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s stupid. Nobody believes that shit anyway.” Max stuffed the tiny slip of paper into his pocket.

“Stupid? Nah man, these are legit. Henry’s came true. He got that job at Comic Readers didn’t he?” Julien’s brow furrowed, “What did his say again? Riches will befall you or some shit. Anyway, I’m looking forward to mine: Love is on the horizon.” He grinned to himself.

“Maybe you’ll get lucky at Lisa’s party tonight.” Max laughed, “But I gotta get home, man. See-ya later.”

Max stuffed his hands deep in his pockets and walked toward home. When he’d rounded a corner he pulled the fortune out of his pocket. 

Blood is red. Veins are Blue. Someone out there watches you.

It had to be a joke. Kids at school had been raving about the new restaurant, Uncle Mick’s, since the beginning of the school year. It was a regular burger joint, but they had Esmeralda, an animatronic fortune teller who sat behind glass in the foyer. She was old. Nobody knew how old, but old enough that her joints creaked with rust when she moved, turning her head back and forth, her painted eyes looking through you. After your burger, you’d drop in a quarter and get your fortune spit out on a slip of paper.

Weird thing was, they came true. At least, that was what kids at school were saying. He’d never heard of her producing something like this before.

His home was only a few blocks from Uncle Mick’s. He couldn’t wait to be inside; to be safe. His backpack felt heavy on his shoulders. Sweat beads formed in the hollow of his back. Max started as a squirrel leapt out of a bush and ran up a tree. A curtain moved in a window. Were those eyes?

This is stupid, Max consoled himself, it’s just a fortune. Totally fake. Stop freaking yourself out.

At his door, Max fumbled with his keys, his fingers trembling. He looked over his shoulder at the neighbour’s house across the street. The blinds were parted, but snapped back into place as he looked. Come on he plead with the dead bolt as he felt it slide open. He flung the door open, pulling it closed behind him and twisting the bolt shut.

He dropped his backpack to the floor and flopped down on the couch, closing his eyes and trying to slow down his breathing. Get a hold of yourself. 

A knock at the door.

Max froze. His eyes shot open and his shoulders tightened. Was he expecting anything? He rose from the couch, his eyes on the faceted glass inlay in the center of the door. His heart beat hard in his chest as he peered through the glass. There was nobody there. What the fuck.

Max opened the door. Nobody. Birds chirped and the summer sun played shadows on the lawn. Something on the front step caught his eye. It was an envelope with his name scrawled on the front in awkward strokes, as if written by a child. He made a quick sweep of the surrounding houses with his gaze as he snatched the envelope up and closed his door once again.

The envelope sat on the counter, unopened. Max stood with his arms crossed looking down at it. It was a faded yellow, inoffensive looking, so why was he so scared to open it? You’re letting that fortune get to you he scolded himself. Fuck it. He tore the envelope open and peered inside. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, not much larger than his fortune from Esmeralda. On it was written:

We’re watching you Max. -The Bones

Gasping, Max dropped the slip of paper and stumbled backward. He tripped, his back slamming hard against the corner of the counter top. He cried out, grasping for purchase. The sleeve of his hoodie caught the edge of the knife block, pulling it sideways as he tumbled to the floor. A carving knife toppled and fell, landing in the bone of his forehead with a thick twanging thud. As blood turned his vision red, the last thing he saw before losing consciousness was an impossibly thin man with hanging yellow skin emerging from the broom closet. His bloodshot eyes were looking directly at Max, and he was smiling.

I was walking down Hamilton Street, on my way to work, when a beetle the size of a fist scurried across my path. I leapt with a shriek at its appearance. It had ten little eyes balanced high on ten little stalks. They watched me, blinking and curious as I jumped back. 

I looked to the yard from whence it came. There was an abandoned three story decrepit thing looming dark on the otherwise bright corner lot. Bushes and branches were tangled in knots, while crab grass overgrew the narrow path to the door. 

Against my better judgement I was drawn to it, this grey and hulking house. I crept up the path and the crumbling steps. The door knob was warm to the touch. Was that music? Yes, music! I heard it through the door. I opened it, a crack at first, then all the way and I stepped in.

I squinted in the gloom. My eyes adjusted on a downward spiraling staircase before me. A lively chorus of pianos, violins, accordion, and drums echoed up to where I stood. I walked down, down, down  to a door where colourful lights sprayed out at my feet from the gap near the floor. I twisted the knob and it creaked open to a velvet draped room. A theater! Rows of plush seats and a stage wearing bright neon letters:

THE GREATEST SHOW UNEARTHED

The door slammed shut behind me. A marionette puppet with wet human eyes plucked from sockets unseen pointed and laughed at me.  Its strings disappeared into blackness above. I backed away from this ungodly thing, trembling from head to toe as the chorus rose.

My legs hit something and I tipped backward into a chair where plumes of dust puffed up like smoke. Hands lift the chair up high: human hands attached to human bodies without faces, but each with a gaping black maw whispering in tandem, “Please enjoy the show!” 

I screamed. I tried to get up. The chair beneath me  seemed to come alive, its arms warm, real, hairy, and clutching fast around my waist. 

The music grew louder then. The lights on the stage grew brighter, flashed faster. The round black mouths of the faceless ones stood to either side of me and breathed into my ears, “watch this”. To my horror their cold, white, clammy hands held my face, peeling eyes wide open to view the stage. 

The band was grotesque. A human skeleton: fleshless, moved inexplicably playing a violin made of flesh and bone. A hulking and tentacled pale creature with one giant rolling eye sat at a piano playing impossibly fast. A small group of beetles with stalked eyes like the one outside worked frantically together on a set of drums wet with spoiled meat and garbage. They jumped and pounded their sickly beat, moving bile up the back of my throat. 

They hammered their harmony, working up to a frenzy as a tingling began in the tips of my fingers and toes. It spread like warm disease toward my center, relaxing me. I tried to look down at my body, but the black mouthed beasts held tight, staring at me now with their eyeless faces and they seemed to be smiling. The music grew faster and stronger. I could feel it moving all around me, through me. There was no more struggle. In fact, I no longer wanted to leave. I felt at peace with the horrors that flashed before me, all monsters and bodies and bits of meat. I couldn’t feel my arms or legs.  The numbness took my body until I could feel nothing but warm, squelching oblivion. I fell into a blissful sleep, content to be a permanent part of The Greatest Show Unearthed.

Featured photo by Ján Jakub Naništa at Unsplash

These walls. These familiar walls. Names and dates scrawled over every inch. Geometric patterns scratched anxiously into the light blue paint, mathematical equations he couldn’t understand. This graffiti meant nothing to Allen. It was the work of his colourful roommate. 

“Will you please get down Jude? We’ll never get social privileges back if you keep acting so… crazy.” Allen said.

“Crazy?” Jude turned bright blue eyes, wild eyes, toward him. “The only thing crazy is what they expect us to ignore. I know they’re watching.” he gasped, hands and arms spread along the walls in an awkward embrace, ear to the concrete, “the eyes are watching, see? You can hear them blink.” He spun away, body clenched, tendons out, “I CAN HEAR YOU FUCKERS BLINK!”

Jude assumed a fighting stance, leaping off the bed toward the heavy metal door, bracing for a fight that would never come. Allan watched as Jude’s muscles finally went lax, his face softened, and he sunk back onto his cot. 

“Feel better?” Allan asked his friend. Jude just stared at him, nodding slowly. 

Allan and Jude were roommates in college, and now they were roommates at the Riverside Psychiatric Hospital. It was a misunderstanding, a mistake. They were drinking and accidentally took a few too many pills. No big deal, right? The psychiatrist on call at the hospital that night didn’t seem to think so. They were admitted here into room 19 who knows how long ago now. Allan stopped counting when he reached 50 days.

Jude stood, pacing back and forth. He kissed the door in a grand romantic gesture, then crossed the room, blew air at the opposite wall from his pinched mouth. Back and forth he went. He could be at it for hours at a time. 

The side effects of the pills were different for each of them. Allan got dizzy. Jude was losing his grip on reality one little yellow pill at a time. 

“They’re going to kill me, Allan old buddy.” Jude stopped in the middle of the room and swung his arms from side to side. 

“No they won’t” Allan said, “If we can act normal for long enough they’ll let us go. We can get off these fucking pills and go back to regular life” another bout of dizziness washed over him. Jude blurred, doubled, then fell back together. I need some sleep, Allan thought.

“Normal, normal, Norman? Nor-mell, Ner-mole, nickel-bo” Jude played with the words, making exaggerated movements with his mouth.

“Jude, stop. Look. Maybe if you ask to talk to the therapist it could do us both some good. They’ve been asking me a lot of questions about you. Why won’t you talk to them?”

“Night night Al. Pal. Grand Mal.” Jude giggled, falling into bed and under the covers.

Allan fell back on his own cot, pulling itchy gray wool covers up to his chin. One good thing about the little yellow pills was that they sure did help a guy get a good night’s sleep…

Allan woke with a start. He looked over to his friend’s cot. It was perfectly made and empty. Where the fuck is Jude?

“Jude?” He asked aloud. Fuck. They’ve taken him. “JUDE! JUDE!” He stood, but fell back. Dizzy. 

A man in a white coat entered the room. The doctor. A nurse in pink scrubs followed after. They knew where Jude was. They had to. 

“Allan, how are you feeling today?”

“Dizzy. Where’s Jude? What have you done with him?” Allan could hear the tears in his voice, felt them sting his cheeks.

“Oh. He isn’t here?” The doctor and nurse exchanged glances. The nurse scribbled something on his chart. 

“WHERE IS JUDE!?”

The doctor turned away from Allan, as if he hadn’t heard a word he said. 

“The higher Clozaril seems to be working. Auditory and visual delusions have subsided. Please check his BP and get a blood sample to the lab.” The doctor said to the nurse.

“Hey! Down here!” A voice from under Allan’s cot. It was Jude. “They tried, but they couldn’t kill me. I can still hear the fuckers blinking.”

“JUDE!” Allan exploded into wild bursts of laughter. He rolled off his bed, slipping under to be with his friend.

The doctor exchanged another glance with the nurse. 

“Scratch that. I’ll put in an order for a higher dose of Clozaril. I think we’re almost there.”

Photo by NeONBRAND from Unsplash

Life is a waiting room. We wait. We wait in line. We wait in cars and on buses and planes. We wait for phone calls and mail deliveries. We wait for appointments, promotions, birthdays and anniversaries. We wait for holidays and the passing from one year to the next. We wait for life. We wait for love. We wait for death.

An endless expanse of chairs draped in matching blue fabric that doesn’t quite distract you from the dated magazines meant to hold your attention until your name is called. Such is life, with our minds holding hands with smartphones and TV screens to avoid real human touch, or a connection made through more than a WiFi signal.

We breathe in the tombs we create for ourselves because we’re afraid of life. We construct walls made out of the past so that we can keep the future out. We wait for meaning in the meaningless worlds we’ve programmed to spoon feed us exactly what we want, and then we wonder why nothing surprises us anymore.

So here we wait for life to start happening to us when we should be out there happening to life. We’re stuck in a social Limbo of sterilized status updates and instant message dates. Love has become a formula you follow while sedated with compatibility tests and prescribed profile questions. Whatever happened to baring your soul; to being vulnerable with another human being without fear so that you can feel something real? It’s all too clean. Too safe. Too guarded.

It’s a lonely place coated in plastic with hand sanitizing stations; where starting a conversation is considered an annoyance and eye contact is avoided. We keep to ourselves with faces lit blue by our wireless phones. We say we’re connected, but we’ve never been more alone.

Featured photo by Andreea Popah on Unsplash

“Nobody’s seen The Smiths for weeks,” Jon told Rich on their walk home from school. “My mom said they moved, but at night I can see blue flickering, like a TV is on in there. Nobody moves and doesn’t take their TV.”

“True.” Rich feigned interest. They’d been friends since Kindergarten. Jon had always been into conspiracy theories.

 “So I think we should go over there. I think something happened to them. What if they got abducted or died?”

“Jon, I’m not breaking into your neighbor’s house with you and getting arrested,” Rich told his friend.

“Okay so the legalities of it are a bit of a grey area, but once we solve the mystery we’ll be celebrated.” Jon stopped on the sidewalk, putting his balled up fists on his hips and puffing his chest out like he was posing for a Superman poster.

“Yeah, or we’ll be arrested and never graduate high school.”

 Jon deflated and rolled his eyes. “Are you still coming to sleep over tonight? I’ll prove it to you.” 

“Sure, whatever. See you tonight.”

***

 “See? Look. Right there in the living room.” Jonathan had his eyes squinted against a pair of binoculars. He handed them to Rich.

 “Huh.” Rich thought Jon was seeing things, but there it was. The tell-tale blue flickering of a television. Could Jon be right?

 “Let’s just go look. Just for a second. A tiny peek.” Jon pleaded.

 “Alright fine but we’re not breaking in,” Rich scolded.

 “Promise.”

***

 The boys crossed the threshold between houses and poked their heads slowly up over the window ledge. They saw a television set to a station playing some soap opera. Wherever Jon’s neighbors were, they certainly hadn’t moved house. The place looked filled with furniture.

“They must be home.” Rich was saying. He looked toward Jon but his friend had vanished. “Jon? Jon!” He whispered into the dark.

“Over here!” Jon whispered from around the corner of the house. He was at the front door.

“Shit. I said no breaking in!” as Rich rounded the corner, Jon had turned the knob of the front door. 

“It’s open.” Jon’s eyes were wide as he entered the house.

What hit them first was the smell, like soured fruit. Next came the buzzing of flies and what sounded like whispering.

“We shouldn’t be here Jon. Let’s go.” Rich reached for Jon’s arm, but he was already walking toward his neighbors kitchen. Rich followed, covering his nose from the smell.

Ahead a few paces, Jon gasped and as Rich caught up, he understood why. There were Mr. and Mrs. Smith, sitting at the table. Their faces were turned toward the ceiling in matching purple grimaces, their mouths gaping, their throats bulging with… was that fruit he could see sticking from their mouths? The whispering they’d heard stopped abruptly as they entered the room. The boys screamed as an apple rolled from the table and fell on the floor. Rich couldn’t peel his eyes away from the Smiths. He looked closer. Their eyes had been gouged out and replaced with grapes. Banana peels draped from their mouths. Their faces were morbid fruit salads.

The boys backed away from the ghastly scene.

“Don’t leave. You’ve only just joined us!” A tiny voice, inhuman, from under the table. The boys looked down and saw a small brown creature dragging itself from beneath the stained and disheveled tablecloth. It was a slimy, rotten banana dragging itself with sections of peel that had been pulled away from a hollow-eyed face that seemed to be sneering at them.

More movement came from the floor, the counters, cupboards, and even the mouths of the Smiths. A shriveled apple rolled toward them, a section cut away to reveal a mouth, screaming their names in a shrill voice. An orange, with a blue furry spot that blinked open into an eyeball, watched them from the darkness of a cupboard. There were thousands of voices. The room was alive with them. Panicked, they turned to run but the rotten fruit moved quickly. Jon stepped backward into a watermelon that collapsed in on itself. Its insides looked like blood. Rich slipped on a banana peel. As the two tumbled to the ground, they felt the fruit slurping over their bodies toward their mouth. The last thing Rich remembered before passing out was his first taste of wine sliding down his throat as thick fermenting grapes cut off his breath.