The NoSleep Podcast - NoSleep Podcast S12E20

Episode Date: April 28, 2019

It's episode 20 of Season 12. On this week's show we have tales about the strange people we meet in this strange life. "By Her Hand, She Draws You Down" written by Douglas Smith (Story starts around 00:05:40) Produced by: Jeff Clement Cast: Narrator – Jeff Clement, Joe – Atticus Jackson, Cath – Addison Peacock "My Mother" written by G N Story (Story starts around 00:33:55) Produced by: Phil Michalski Cast: Narrator – Nikolle Doolin, Mother – Sarah Thomas "The Jolly Man" written by Scott Ferguson (Story starts around 00:58:00) Produced by: Phil Michalski Cast: Narrator – Mike DelGaudio, The Jolly Man – Kyle Akers, Young Boy – Elie Hirschman "The Girls of Briar Hill" written by Mia Ram (Story starts around 01:20:30) Produced by: Jesse Cornett Cast: Clara – Jessica McEvoy, Rosie – Nichole Goodnight, Red Scarf – Addison Peacock, Sunglasses – Corinne Sanders, Jackson – Atticus Jackson Click here to learn more about the voice actors on The NoSleep Podcast   Click here for a chance to win a copy of the game Yuppie Psycho   Click here to learn more about Douglas Smith   Executive Producer & Host: David Cummings Musical score composed by: Brandon Boone "The Jolly Man" illustration courtesy of Krys Hookuh Audio program ©2018-2019 - Creative Reason Media Inc. - All Rights Reserved - No reproduction or use of this content is permitted without the express written consent of Creative Reason Media Inc. The copyrights for each story are held by the respective authors. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brian, thanks for coming. Oh, man. That's nice a time. Things still going well, my lad. Ow! You have to be kidding, Hugo. Everything's a disaster. Really?

Hmm, news to me. The company's in disarray. We've lost the entirety of the R&D division. Human resources are on the rampage. There's a giant spider thingy in the archives. Everything is chaos. Okay. So what's wrong exactly?

You're not. This whole place is nuts. I can't do the job I've been assigned. Not without some help anyway. Help, eh? Well, we can't hire you an assistant. You've only been here a day. But maybe you need Yuppie Psycho.

Yuppie Psycho is available for streaming on Utomic and purchase on Steam now. It's a hot new video game developed by Baroque Decay and published by another indie. Yuppie Psycho is a first job survival. horror inspired by the real-life corporate experiences of the lead developer. I wonder if he survived. It's horror satire with an emphasis on the horror, but it's genuinely very funny too, in an extremely dark way. The game is the story of Brian Pasternak.

Hey, that's you. A young man hired for a job beyond his abilities and qualifications, which is significantly more complex than he could have guessed. His first task, to kill the witch, maybe his last. So yes, Brian is really going to need your help If he's going to solve the mystery of Centricorp, Defeat the Witch, and maybe even get the girl. Oh, does she even know I exist?

But you should all follow at Baroque Decay And at another Indies on Twitter And go find the game on Utomic or Steam. Remember, it's out now. And you'll be out too if you don't start improving your performance. Out of a job, that is. Oh, come on, Hugo, man. You're not even my boss.

You don't get to fire me. What's that you say, Brian? I'm just a... Please, someone help me. Check out Yuppie Psycho on Steam or Utomic. It's out now. Someone saved me from this madness. CitraCorp will live forever.

Rambhoblblah. And bring death to the enemies of the witch. Dude, I mean, back to work, Brian. Time is money. Yuppie Psycho. Out now. Welcome to our sleepless sanctuary. You enter at your own risk and choose to be entertained with dark and disturbing horror stories. You have been warned. For the dark hours when you dare not close. your tales of horror to frighten and disturb as the sleepless hours tick. Brace yourself for the No Sleep Podcast. Welcome to the No Sleep Podcast Sanctuary. I'm David Cummings.

Our service this week features tales about the strange people we meet in this strange life. I want to express my gratitude for your patience this week. week. You may have seen that our website and email server were basically offline for a number of days. We think we have it fixed now, and hopefully things will remain stable, even if we ourselves remain rather unstable. Since there was a bit of confusion about what was and wasn't working this week, allow me to clarify. We have three main systems in our no-sleep podcast world, our website, our free episode hosting system, and our season past membership system. All three systems are separate and don't rely on each other.

So when the website was down, all the free episodes were still available via their feed or our standby website, which has all the audio. Our season pass episodes also worked fine. The only thing you couldn't do is purchase any episodes or passes through the website. So basically, if the website is down, the audio should always keep working. If those systems go down, we'll let you know. And in the future, should any downtime occur, you can always check our social media feeds. We keep an up-to-date status report on those sites. And since we were offline for a few days, we're going to extend the yuppie psycho contest.

If you still want to enter for your chance to win one of the 20 steam keys for the game, head to contests.the nosleeppodcast.com. So with everything working, I think it's time for us to get to work and start sharing our stories. because now it's time for our service to begin. Bow your heads and hear our words. In our first tale, we meet a young couple on a romantic road trip, traveling around, taking in the sights, stopping off for a bit of art. What more could anyone want?

But in this tale, shared with us by author Douglas Smith, we discover that sometimes people have to suffer for art and not always the artist. Performing this tale are Jeff Clement, Atticus Jackson, and Addison Peacock. So if someone offers to sketch your portrait, you'd better think twice, because by her hand, she draws you down. By her hand, she draws you down. With her mouth, she breathes you in.

Hope and dreams and soul. soul devoured, lost to you what might have been. By her hand, she draws you down. Joe swore when he saw Kath drawing a kid. He had left her for just a minute to get a beer from the booth on the pier before it closed for the night. Walking back now, he could see Kath on her stool, sketchpad on a knee, ocean breeze blowing her pale hair. A small girl sat on another stool facing her. A man in and a woman, parents, he guessed, beside the child. Kids not more than seven. Kath promised me no kids.

She promised. The sun was long set, and the air had turned cool, but people still filled the boardwalk. Joe wove through the crowd as fast as he could without attracting attention. Cath had set up farther from the beach tonight, at the bottom of a grassy slope that ran up to the highway, where their old gray Ford waited.

She had turned to him with a slight smile when they had parked the car earlier. Last night tonight, I can feel the change. Joe had swallowed and turned off the ignition. He was never comfortable talking about it. Where's it headed? Kath had just shaken her head. That's part of the fun, isn't it?

Not knowing where we're going. That's fun, isn't it, Joe? Yeah. He approached Kath and her customers. It had been fun once, when they'd met, before he learned what Kath did, what she had to do, when his love for her wasn't all mixed up with fear of what she would do to someone, or to him. The child's parents looked up as Joe came to stand beside Kath. The father frowned.

Joe smiled, trying to hide the dread digging like cold feet. fingers into his gut. Turning his back to them, he bent to whisper in Kath's ear. That flowery scent she had switched to recently rose warm and sweet in his face. Funeral parlors. She smells like a goddamn funeral parlor. A kid. Kath shook her head.

Her eyes flitted from the girl to her pad. Joe looked at the drawing. It was good. But they were always good. Kath had real talent, more than Joe ever had. She would set up each night where people strolled, her sketches beside her like trophies from a hunt. People would stop to look, sometimes moving on,

sometimes sitting for a portrait. Eventually, Joe and Kath would move on too. When the town was empty, Kath said, when the thing inside her wanted to move on. They had spent this week at a little New England vacation spot. At least they were heading south lately. Summer was dying, and Joe longed to winter in the sun. Sleep, for Joe, was rare enough since he'd met Kath.

Winters up north meant long nights and bars. Things closed in then, closed in around him. On those nights, he would lie awake in their motel bed, feeling Kath's eyes on him, feeling her hunger. He looked at the sketch, that the child captured there, perfect, except for the emptiness that spoke from the eyes, from any eyes that Kath drew, and the mouth. Where the mouth should have been, empty paper gaped.

Cath left the mouth until the end. The portraits always bothered Joe when they looked like that, To him, the pictures weren't waiting to be completed, waiting for a last piece to be added. To Joe, something vital had been ripped from what had once been whole, leaving behind a void that threatened to suck in the world around it. An empty thing, but insatiable, waiting to suck him in, too. She ignored him again. Joe wrapped his fingers around the thin wrist of her hand that held the sketchpad.

You promised. Kath snapped her head around to glare up at him. Joe caught his breath as anger met hunger in her gray eyes, becoming something alive, something that leapt for him. The father cleared his throat, and the thing in Kath's eyes retreated. Kath turned to the parents. Taring the sketch from her pad, she shoved it at the mother. Can't get her right.

You can have this. We got a gal. Kath stood and folded her stool as the child ran to peek from behind the father's legs. Joe grabbed the other stool in the canvas bag that held Kath's supplies. He put an arm around Kath's waist, leading her away. The father started to protest. He said she was almost done. She just needed to draw the mouth.

Kath stomped, and Joe swore. He just wanted to get her out of there. She walked back to the man who exchanged glances with his wife. Kath touched a finger to her lips. Mouths are the hardest part. The most important part. Everyone, they say eyes are the windows of the soul. They say, oh, you got the eyes just right.

They don't know. They don't know it's the mouth you got to get just right. That's what makes the picture come alive. Like it's going to just start breathing. The father cleared his throat, but the mother tugged at his shirt. Joe grabbed Kath's arm and pulled her away. The man muttered something, but Joe didn't care. He led Kath to a gravel path that switched back and forth up the steep hill to the highway above.

Halfway up, an observation area looked down on the pier, in the beach and the boardwalk. Kath twisted away from him there. A low stone wall ran around the area's edge, and two lampposts stood at either end. Putting her stool down under the nearest light, she began setting out her sketches against the wall. Joe dropped the other stool and sat down.

The fatigue that lived with him always now rose to engulf him. He felt dead inside, all used up. Like the way Kath's pictures made him feel, waiting to be sucked into the void. Kath sat, looking up and down the path. We had a deal. I'm hungry. No kids, remember?

Nobody with a family depending on them. He tried to make his voice sound strong, but his hands were shaking. She opened her pad. Kind of cuts down the field, Joe. Use one of the sketches you've got. Put away. Cath laughed. A bitter, empty sound.

Joe imagined the mouths she drew, making that kind of sound. Kath looked at him finally. All gone. Used them all. Joe felt the emptiness again. Avoid gaping below, drawing him down. He leaned forward, head between his hands, fingers pressing hard on his town.

samples, trying to make his fear go away. Jeez, Kath. All of them? Girls got to eat. She stared past him, and he heard gravel crunching underfoot. Joe turned, his hand slipping by reflex, to touch the switchblade inside his boot top. A fat man in black pants, white shirt, and paisley tie loosened at the neck, was struggling down the steep path from the highway.

away, a beach chair in each arm. He walked over to the stone wall and put down the chairs to rest. Notting at Joe and Kath, he glanced at her sketches. He began to turn away, but then looked back. His eyes ran over the portraits lined against the low wall, like prisoners before a firing squad. The man whistled. Joe sighed, from regret and relief. Kath would eat tonight. With her mouth, she breathes you in. The man's name was Harry. He haggled with Kath over the price, then he sat down, and Kath started sketching.

Joe glanced at the two chairs that Harry had carried, but couldn't see a wedding ring, so he kept silent. Kath worked quickly, her hand slashing at the page, pausing only to switch the color of her pencil. When only the mouth remained unfinished, she put the pad down on her lap. Harry looked down at the sketch. Like the girl's father from before, he

noticed the lack of mouth. Mouths are special, Harry laughed. She puckered at him, and Harry laughed. A nervous, squeaky sound. Kath touched a finger of her drawing hand to Harry's lips.

He gave that little laugh again but didn't pull away. Kath ran her fingertips slowly over his lips, tracing each curve and contour. Sitting on the stone wall, Joe thought of her fingers on his own skin at night in bed, tracing the lines of his body. Love and fear and lust.

With Kath, they all mixed together, colors and a picture flowing into each other until you couldn't separate one from another. She lowered her hand to the paper, her eyes still on Harry's mouth. Picking up a red pencil and dropping her eyes, her hand began to stab at the paper in short, urgent strokes. The mouth grew under her fingers as Joe watched. She finished in seconds.

Removing the sketch sheet, Kaff handed it to Harry. He regarded it for a moment. grunted his approval and paid her. Portrait under his arm. He picked up his chairs and nodded a goodbye. After watching Harry labor down the path toward the boardwalk below, Joe walked to where Kath sat cross-legged on the ground, her sketch pad on her lap.

She carefully lifted a sheet of carbon paper from the top of the pad. A copy of the sketch she had just rendered of Harry, stared up at Joe in black and white. No color, as of all the life's been sucked out of it. No, not all of it. Not yet. From her canvas bag, Kath removed a small rosewood box, its hinged cover carved with letters in a script Joe thought was Arabic.

He'd never checked, wanting to know as little as possible about the thing. Kath opened the lid and withdrew what looked like a child's crayon. but without any paper covering. The crayon was as long as Joe's middle finger, but thicker, and a red so dark it was almost black. Joe remembered drawing as a kid, the crayons, the names of the colors. Midnight blue, leaf green, sunshine, yellow. He knew the name that this one would have carried.

Blood red. It glinted in the overhead light as if it would be sticky to the touch. But Joe had never touched it, so he didn't know for sure. He didn't want to know him. Hunched over the portrait copy, Cath began to retrace the lines of the mouth with the red crown, adding color and shading. She worked with almost painful slowness.

Joe remembered how once she had made a mistake at this stage, how the fury had burst from her like a wild thing caged too long. At last, Kath straightened. She gave the mouth one last appraising look, then returned the crayon to the rosewood box. Joe walked back to the low stone wall. He knew he would turn back to watch her. He always did.

Below, Harry had reached the boardwalk. The big man put down one chair to wave to someone on the beach. Joe's stomach tightened. A woman waved back at Harry, and a small boy and girl ran to hug him. Jesus, no. He turned back. Cath sat hunched over the portrait of Harry on her lap. Joe rushed to her, praying that it wasn't too late.

A prayer that died when he saw the picture. It had started. The portrait's mouth was moved. moving, fat lips squirming like slick red worms on the paper. A pale vapor rose thin and wispy from those lips. Kath bent her head over the mouth and sucked in that misty thing that Joe never wanted to name. He walked back to the low stone wall and looked down at the crowd gathered to where Harry had fallen.

Joe stood there, eyes locked on Harry. still form, feeling the void opening below him again. Kath, we have to get out of here. Kath didn't answer him. Joe tore his eyes from the scene below and turned back to her. She was standing now, looking south down the coastline. It wants to move on. Hope and dreams and soul devoured.

Joe drove, staring at the white line markers slicing the dark two lane one after another, like brushstrokes by God on a long black canvas. White on black. The negative image of Kath's secret portraits. Black on white. White on black. Just the red missing. Just that blood red.

How long before some cop put it together? A string of deaths, all the victims drawn by a young woman with a male companion. Christ, Harry died with a sketch in his hand. Kath stirred beside him, and then he felt her eyes on him. He could always feel her gaze, like a physical touch, like a brush dipping into him, drawing something from him. Now you take the thing you take. Capture it in your eyes.

then caged through your fingers onto the page. We'll hit town soon. But it would be three in the morning when they arrived. No one around. No one to draw. And she had no pictures left. Cath said nothing but looked away. After a while, he figured she was asleep.

Then he felt her eyes again. He swallowed. This was new. She never talked about it. even when he did. He should say something now, something smart, something that would lead them out of this. He should, but he had nothing left to say.

He could only nod. I know, babe. Oh, hungry. I get so hungry. I know. I can't stop it. It's pulling me, making me. Joe could feel her pain in those words.

and his fear. I'm tired. I wish I could just go to sleep and never wake up. But he just nodded. Kath looked away and he took a breath as if he was coming up for air. Her eyes settled on him again like a beast on his chest. Joe's hands tightened on the wheel. Kath said it the way a kid told you she could ride a bike or tie her shoe.

The lines flashed by in the headlights. White on black, no red. Joe stared at the road. The burden of her gaze lifted. He looked at her. Her eyes were shut, and her hand moved in her lap, mimicking drawing motion. Her hand stopped, and she leaned her head back. A few minutes later, Joe could hear her breathing slow.

So there it was. He always knew it would come to this. This was why he had stayed, even after he learned what Kath did, what she was, afraid that when he left, when Kath no longer needed him, she would draw him down, draw him down onto the page from memory, then drink him in like all the others. The road lines flew at him like white. knives out of the night. White knives and blackness. Just the blood red missing. Taking a hand from the wheel, he felt inside the top of his boot, running his fingers over the bone handle of his

switchblade. A few miles down the road, he found a wider shoulder and pulled over, turning off the engine and the lights. Kath still slapped. Hands shaking, Joe pulled the knife from his boot. It's self-defense. But he just sat, holding the knife. It was for the best. How many more would she kill? But he still loved her.

Could he do it? So tired. He leaned back. He only slept now when Kath did, when he didn't feel her eyes. He closed his eyes. Her breezed. Breathing, brushed his ears, soft and deep, soft and deep, soft.

He awoke to the sound of scratching on paper. He looked over, framed against the moonlight, Kath sat hunched over her sketchpad, her hand moving in short, sure strokes. Kind of late for a drawing, isn't it, Kath? His throat was dry. He fumbled in his lap for the knife. Hungry. Dark two.

Drawing from memory. Drawing him. He knew she was drawing him. Don't, Cass. His thumb found the blade's button. Tired of being hungry. She sat back, eyes on the sketch. He couldn't see the picture, but...

he saw the red crayon in her hand. She'd finished the mouth. Please, don't do it. His cheeks felt cool and wet. He realized he was crying. Kath lifted the paper to her face. She was crying, too. The knife blade clicked open.

Kath breathed in through her lips. Joe saw a pale wisp rise from the paper and move toward her mouth. Saw his hand gripping the knife flash forward. Saw the blade slice her white t-shirt and slide between her ribs. Saw the red, the blood red, flow over the white of her shirt to blend with the black of the night and the shadows. Kath spasmed and fell sideways onto him.

Surprise, mixed with her eyes closed, and her head slumped back. A wisp of mist escaped her lips. Sobbing, he pressed his lips to hers, sucking in the breath and the gray mist from her mouth. Bitter and sour, the thing burned his throat as he breathed it in. Something was wrong. Joe felt a presence of something dark, something hungry. His head spinning, Joe flicked on the dome light. Blood soaked into his shirt where Kath slumped against him.

The picture still clenched in her hand. Joe stared at the sketch, a scream forming in his mind. A familiar face stared back at his. him from the page, a face that Kath knew from memory, the face she knew best of all. Not Joe's face. It was Kath. She hadn't been drawing him. She'd been feeding herself to the thing that lived in her. Kath had been killing herself. The emptiness that was the mouth in Kath's pictures gaped beneath him, and Joe felt himself being drawn down. Lost to you what might have been. A February evening, St. Pete's Beach, Joe sat on his stool, his back to the beauty of a gulf sunset.

His portraits lay strewn on the sand around him like the dead on a battlefield. A woman and man looked them over while Joe waited. The woman held the hand of a little girl and boy. Twins, Joe guessed. Couldn't be much more than seven. He remembered when that would have meant something to him before Kath died. Before. The little girl tugged on the mother's hand, telling her that all the picture people looked so sad. The mother hushed. the child while the father haggled with Joe over the price. The day had been slow, so Joe agreed to do both kids for the price of one. Joe started sketching.

His hand lacked over the paper, and the images of the children grew around the emptiness where their mouths should have been. A tear ran down his cheek, but he kept drawing. He had to. was hungry. Some people seem like they've been born blessed. Everything goes right for them, and their lives are perfect. It's easy to look on from the outside with envy or even jealousy.

But in this tale shared with us by author G.N. Story, we discover that sometimes perfection comes at a cost. Performing this tale are Nicole Doolin and Sarah Thomas. So sit back and listen to this perfect woman. woman wax lyrical about her perfect life and the secrets that lie beneath the veneer as she tells us about my mother. The sins of my mother are vast and varied. Those sins committed across decades must now become mine.

For from the moment I came into my mother's life, every sin she exacted, she exacted for me. My childhood was idyllic in every sense. of the word. Even though she was a single parent, my mother never seemed to struggle. Everything that she did, she did with poise and grace. Never a hair out of place, nor a smudge in her lipstick. My mother was perfect, and she loved me with every single ounce of her being. She was a force of nature, strong and protective and ever watchful. She shielded me from every ill or injury that the world threatened upon children. I grew up knowing nothing but bliss.

My mother was beautiful. I would watch her apply her makeup, sprawled on her bed, with a sense of awe. It was like watching Van Gogh create starry night. She had an array of brushes and paints, powders and lotions, and she would apply each with an expert hand in front of her massive golden vanity. She would put on her lipstick and catch my eye in the mirror, smiling wide with her half-painted lips, and I would blush and giggle.

I would watch her brush out her raven hair, always smooth and shiny, and I would reach out to run my fingers through it. It felt like warm silk. I would look into the mirror and search for my mother in my own features. I had blotchy cheeks and a spray of freckles, I had wiry hair the color of straw. I had long knobby limbs and crooked front teeth.

I would try to find the features of my mother, but I never could. My mother would tell me not to worry, sitting down beside me and promising me the world, making me forget about my vain attempts to compare myself to her. Over the years, my mother always had an array of gentlemen callers. They would appear on our doorstep, a dozen roses in the crooks of their arms and smelling of Cologne. Some of them would wave to me, peeking out at them from behind the couch. Others would ignore me altogether. My mother never got me a sitter.

Instead, she would leave me at home alone, somehow trusting me to behave. I always did. I would sit on the couch and watch television, snacking. on the neatly stacked prepared meals my mother had left in the fridge, waiting for her return. Her dates never lasted very long. She'd return home an hour or so later. Dinner packed into styrofoam and wrapped neatly in brown paper bags. I would hug her gleefully and we would sit down at the dining room table and unwrap the leftovers, turn on a movie, and snuggle up together as we My mother never went on second dates.

Even though I was homeschooled, I wasn't a lonely child by any means. In fact, my mother had a whole collection of single parents that she was friends with, each with a single child of their own. We were all homeschooled, so we could get together and go to museums during the week. Chuck E. Cheese on the weekends. I got along royally with these other children. But as a group, we rarely got. along with anyone else. We would often leave the laser tag arena or trampoline room full of

crying children in our wake. We were all spoiled rotten little kids and we weren't used to having to share. All of us together could quickly gang up on and overpower the other kids, and we were never scolded or told to act otherwise. I think it was around this time that I realized that my mother was different. Her peer group, all perfectly groomed men and women, dressed impeccably, no matter where we went, always stood out amongst the other adults. The parents of the children we terrorized were usually dressed in sweatpants and hoodies, bags under their tired eyes, harried and weary looking. They'd slump against their plastic seats and drink like beer, while our parents perched like a flock of jewel-encrusted birds along the edges and in the corners,

sipping something they brought in an engraved flask. Even when the other parents would come charging at them, shouting about something one of us had done to their child, my mother and the rest of her friends would just blink at the red-faced fiends. My mother would say something quiet, and the color would drain from the other parents' face, and they would turn and gather up their family, leaving in a hurry. Sometimes, while we played in indoor tree houses or trampled through museums, I would catch a glimpse of my mother with the mother of one of my homeschooled friends. My friend's name was Lucas.

His mother was named Raina. Raina and my mother would sit close together whenever we were out, holding hands and smiling at one another. As I grew older, I began to understand why none of my mother's dates had panned out in the past. Eventually, those dates stopped altogether, and instead of a new man appearing every weekend, it was Raina and Lucas on our doorstep on Friday nights. I was perfectly happy with the arrangement. Raina and my mother would leave, and Lucas and I would be left to our own accords.

We were already good friends, and we were gleeful at the thought of becoming siblings. We'd play video games, listen to music, eat ice cream, and do the kind of things 10-year-olds do when they aren't supervised. Our mothers would return around dawn the next day. Leftovers gripped in their manicured hands. The four of us would sit down and have breakfast, cleaning our plates of whatever fancy restaurant had been chosen the night before. When I was 13, I was told I would be attending public high school the next year. This was apparently a decision the group had come to. At first I was forlorn at the idea, but my mother told me that I needed to learn how to socialize with other people.

She promised that all of my friends would be there and that I wouldn't need to worry. On my first day of high school, I looked at myself in the mirror and for the first time saw a small glimpse of my mother staring back. My hair was darker, now a deep chestnut cut. and no longer a frizzy mess. Tight, soft locks fell around my face. I hadn't kneaded braces as my adult teeth had grown in straight and white. Nor was I plagued by acne.

Another scourge that I learned most kids my age were struggling with when I went to public school. My skin tone was even. My eyes were bright. And when I smirked at myself in the mirror, my lips twisted in a perfect replica. of my mothers. None of my homeschooled friends seem to be dealing with the typical puberty pains of our age.

We hadn't even known about them until we got to high school and were surrounded by girls with tragically uneven breasts and boys with cracking voices. As we walked together into high school, I was reminded of our parents at the bowling alley or the swimming pool,

looking like display items surrounded by their tragically flawed counterpart was that me now when had it happened had i changed or had i always been this way a world apart when lucas and i walked into our first public school class every head turned and eyes followed us as we found our seats all of us were in advanced classes so lucas and i were the only freshman in the sophomore level science class a pretty blonde girl glared at us from across the room That pretty blonde girl's name was Bethany, and she was a waspy little thing. It took her all of ten minutes to dress us both down.

We had learned well from our parents, sitting perfectly still and blinking at her as she made fun of our stiff white shirts and matching polished shoes. But our non-response only made the other kids laugh harder at us. To them we were strange. Perfect posture and non-affected faces. The rumor quickly went around that we and all our friends were an occult. The rumor hardly bothered us, though, and by our sophomore year, we had classmates asking us to join. How could they resist?

We were like gods among men in those cramped halls. Everyone could see it on us, seeping from our very beings. We were better than them, and they knew it. Bethany still tried to bother Lucas and me, But once I had seduced her boyfriend and had all of her friends fawning over me at lunch, she soon realized she was on the losing team. By junior year, she was among the gaggle that followed us around. We had plenty of admirers, my little group of friends.

They all wanted whatever mysterious thing that we had, constantly asking to be invited along to our homes or along on our outings. But our parents were firm. no outsiders. It was this policy that had landed me in the principal's office one day in January for a line of questioning about my mother and the parents of my friends. It seemed that the rumor about us being a cult was reaching fever pitch and some of the other parents in the school were calling in with concerns.

CPA was called and my mother was dragged in, made up and impeccable as always, immediately intimidating every other adult in the room. It always amazed me the way she talked her way out of things, ever with a pleasant smile and well-timed comments. I again felt like a child, laying on my front and watching my mother apply makeup. My attention was just as apt,

witnessing the way she navigated a difficult situation. By the time she left, all concerns were swaged and there would be no need at all for a home visit by the CPA representative. I saw my mother cry for the first time and last time when I graduated high school. My friends and I were ecstatic. Our eternal success had landed us all in Ivy League schools, and we were all excited to be finished with the juvenile trials of public high school. Our parents, however, all had grave looks on their faces.

Our fellow students and their guardians gave us all a wide berth. Most do when they see us. But we could practically hear their whispers. It's not right. It's not fair. It's not natural. Criminals, cultists, drug lords, Illuminati. It's difficult for me to take on the perspective of those other people.

But I suppose that if I try, I can see how incredibly outrageous our long trail of good fortune might seem. We were perfect, impossibly so. I had never known anything but success, but I also didn't know what the price of that success truly was. There were no parties, no celebrations. My mother told me that she had something important to tell me. I had never seen her so grave,

Never watched worry crease her perfect face. It was off-putting and it made me frightened. I got into the car with her and we drove out of the city. I had no idea where we were going and my mother said nearly nothing on the long drive. The highways turned to country roads and still we drove. On and on for hours. Through the night.

It wasn't until the sun was cresting the horizon that we finally pulled to a stop. I looked around unsure where I was. It was a dingy little trailer park, the sort of place I had never been before, full of crumbling mobile homes and dirt lots, housing run-down vehicles and discarded children's toys. I gave my mother an incredulous look.

Why had she brought me to this horrible place in the middle of nowhere? We were parked in front of a brown and white trailer with a crooked screen door. my mother's sleek sports car looking out of place. Stay in the car. My mother didn't look at me. Instead, she opened her door and climbed out, leaving me alone behind the tinted windows. Her expensive heels crunched on the gravel

as she approached the house, never glancing back. She climbed the rickety wooden stairs and knocked on the screen door. A figure appeared in the doorway, and my mother stepped aside, allowing me full view of the stranger. What I saw that day took my breath away and rocked my understanding of the world permanently. The woman who stood beside my mother in an oversized dirty t-shirt and threadbare slippers

was me. It was me if I had lived a different life, if I had been someone else entirely. shorter, plumber, features far duller and creased, hair, dirty, blonde, and lanky, eyes pale and sunken, skin oily, posture slumped and shy. She looked miserable and dirty and tired. I wanted to leap from the car to demand to know who this woman. was. Did I have a twin? I couldn't imagine my mother giving up a child, but here was my replica. In the middle of nowhere, living in an old trailer. My mother exchanged a few words with the woman

who stared at her wide-eyed and kept her arms crossed protectively across her chest. It was a brief encounter, and soon my mother was crunching back across the driveway towards the car. Who is that, Mama? That's your changeling, my love. My mother is not human, and now neither am I. Once I was, born to teenage parents in the middle of Pennsylvania, my mother had noticed me right away and had known that I belonged to her. My human parents, neglectful and selfish,

hadn't even heard her when she came into my room at night and began to feed me at her breast. When the sickly child born to a drug-addicted mother had taken a sudden turn to picturesque health, the doctors had called it a miracle. But really, it was true mother's milk nourishing me, recreating me. Burthing a changeling is no easy task.

It's dirty, bloody work, my mother told me. My mother cannot have real children of her own. only these half-creatures, born limp and faceless. And as I fed on my mother, the thing fed on me. Slowly, after months of clandestine nightly visits, the changeling began to resemble me until one winter night my mother realized that it was a perfect copy, on the outside at least.

It's not truly human. It has no soul, no real personality. It cannot feel love or bear children, and it will die at a young age, weak body finally giving out. So on that night, my mother left with me and not the changeling. In my crib, that creature remained to be raised by the young parents who bore me. To live that life that I would have been condemned to had my mother not interceded. It is my placeholder, the thing created to suffer. so that I don't have to.

And there she was, a quiet, plain little thing that didn't even recognize its own mother, living with a drug-dealing boyfriend and working at a gas station. That would have been me. Would have been my life if my mother hadn't whisked me away, raised me as her own, transformed me into what she is, into what I am now.

My mother was born in a similar fashion, to human parents in the year 1936, the height of the Great Depression. Her true mother had stolen her away in the night, switched her with her own child, and raised her as a proper lady in Montreal. She fed her a special diet, the same diet that I had been fed since my mother took me in. And it's this diet that makes us what we are, that takes us a step above the rest. You see, those styrofoam boxes had never been filled with leftovers. Well, they had been leftovers in some sense.

The leftovers of my mother's dates. What was left over when she had finished consuming them? It was the remains of the men, the men my mother had dated. The men she and Raina had seduced on their nights out. Cooked into elegant recipes at a secret flat my mother. My mother kept downtown. My success, my mother's success, our good looks, our irresistible nature, our prolonged lives and perfect bodies, all of it is because my mother hunted, killed, cooked, and consumed human men. My mother cried that day that I graduated because she could no longer shield me from the ugly truth, from the impossible breath of her sins.

I had to know, I had to understand, because I was grown and those sins were now my burden to bear. It was painful to accept, and I had outright refused to at first. I pushed away my mother's meals, and I threatened to reach out to my birth parents. I punished my mother for loving me, and I soon learned my lesson. It was just a small pimple at first, the very first one. I had ever gotten. Soon that turned into a lesion, and then my hair began to fall out. As my body broke down, so too did my social standing.

I lost many friends and even a scholarship after a failed interview. Lucas, concerned for me, had pulled me aside. He had learned the horrible truth that day as well, but he had told me that some part of him had known all along. Nobody can be as perfect. as effortless as our mothers. He had always suspected that there was something else occurring. He embraced his fate as Wendigo, he told me.

I should, too. It wasn't until I took my mother's car in secret and again visited my changeling's home that I changed my mind. She hadn't been there when I arrived. So I walked into the trailer without invite and found her boyfriend lounging on a broken futon. The cramped space smelled awful, like rotting food and body odor and something chemical.

The prematurely balding man had woken, and commenting on how good I looked today, hadn't hesitated to demand a blowjob, a service I have never provided. Instinct took over. Killing and consuming that man hadn't been easy. It was a bloody mess, and the time. Tiny kitchenette in the trailer left much to be desired. I ate only from his thigh. The meat too sour for me to consume anymore.

But instantly I noticed that my eyes were brighter, and the lesion on my face was lessened. I showered in the filthy bathroom, changed into the best clothes I could find in the closets, and drove to the next town over. It was easy to find a couple of high school football jocks to get into my mother's nice car with me. They tasted better than my changelings good-for-nothing boyfriend,

but still a bit chewy. I moved on to the next town after them. When my spree was over, I had killed 14 boys in total. My lips were fuller than they had ever been. My hair was glossy and dark. My skin was clear. My breasts were larger, and my legs were longer. I received a call from a local woman's foundation offering me a substantial scholarship.

Bethany called as well to confess to me that she had had a crush on me since the moment she had seen me my freshman year, and to tell me that she was finally brave enough to ask me on a date. When I returned home that night, my mother gave me a knowing look, drew me a bath, and brushed out my long hair as I washed the blood from my skin. You are my world, my one true love. I never faced repercussions for those murders. No, my changeling went to prison instead. I had been careless.

I had been seen, and her boyfriend had been my first kill. Or what else is that morbid doll for if not to take my pains for me? It's what she was born to do. Over time I got better and my palate became much more refined. Now I prefer men in their early 30s, athletic, Latin, preferably Cuban, who drink spiced rum and work in the entertainment industry. The flavor of meat like that and the effects that it has far outweigh those first bites of white trash I had in a dingy trailer in the middle of nowhere. I still see my mother often. We look the same age now.

I ask her if she will ever have another child. Raina is already planning to snatch another. She tells me the same thing she told me back then. You are my only true life. I live with Lucas. We hunt together often. He's like a brother to me. But I have a need for something else.

Something more. I've picked out a child. and the changeling grows inside of my body every day. My mother was right. Growing the little monster is bloody work, but it's worth it, because I have seen my purpose in this life. It's a little girl, one of 18 in a massive polygamist family living in the desert. They have enough children already, we figure,

and when I feed her on my breast at night, her siblings in the room staring at me with terrified eyes, She smiles up at me like I am her whole world I will love her in a way her parents cannot And I will give her a life they could never provide She will be my one true love And I will be her mother Aim

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