“It’s back isn’t it?” I asked her quietly.

She nodded and reached out her hand. I’d never seen what she had. Even so, she described it as a little girl, wearing a yellow sundress, and her eyes were always glossed over.

“It will be my time soon, Jacob. That’s what she had said.”

And they loved Hannah.

At least until tonight. Tonight I find the babysitter’s back gnawed down to her spine. Karen lays legless, dead mid-scream, a broken doll herself. Samantha’s face is chewed to tattered strips of scarlet skin — wet ribbons staining hectic red hieroglyphs across the carpet. Her eyes and scalp are gone.

I find Hannah looking up at me. Her painted eyes are flat black coins. Her plastic teeth, still moving, are soaked in violent crimson.

His mother, divorced, comes up with an alternative solution and sits Timothy on her lap. “Honey, there’s another way we could give you a similar present. Each month we can sponsor a child.”

Timothy tilts his head. “What does that mean, Mommy?”

“Well, each month we’ll send money to help the boy get food, education, and whatever he needs. Some children in other countries can’t afford these things and need help.”

Timothy’s face lit up the room with his radiant smile. “I like that, Mommy.”

We can’t touch our food until the turkey is on the dish and the
Thanksgiving prayer has been said.

My younger brother squirms in his seat waiting to shovel stuffing into
his mouth.

“Okay, the turkey is carved,” my father says and clasps his hands
together and begins the prayer.

The vet carried out a full examination before pronouncing.

‘I have some wonderful news for you Miss Soames. Your lovely tortoiseshell is pregnant and will soon have a litter of kittens. Congratulations!’

‘That’s impossible. She never goes out. She always stays in the house.’

Just then, an old and battered ginger tom walked into the kitchen and began to munch on some food.

‘I bet that he’s the culprit,’ the vet said.

“Bobby, do you know who your father is?”

“Nope. You?”

“Me neither.”

Smiling, they were sure they had her goat.

We took Drooley to our vet who laughed when she measured the prodigious amount of slobber that Drooley produced, but she couldn’t recommend any measures to reduce it.

Desperate, we invented our own cure. We added alum to Drooley’s food.

After collecting the body, the wardens painted the black cross on the door.

Then her husband and son Mark sickened. She could do nothing for their agonies.

A cart collected them to be buried in the pit.

Now the street is sealed off. No food arrives, and the water is almost gone.

She sneezes twice. She knows this is the end. But what is there to live for?

My teeth are Publius Horatius at the Sublicius Bridge: facing off against a more dreaded force than that of Clusium.

But bridges span rivers, and the guy next to me sipping spring water from a bottle of ostentatious brand summons images of the Tiber and spilt blood.

A cockroach scuttled by. Even in the scant thousand years since humans
had disappeared, Darwinian evolution had changed it. The cockroach
held itself on its hind and middle legs, while it’s forelegs
dexterously solved the problem of extracting a morsel of food from a
crack.

Another cockroach approached. The two insects greeted each other with
interlocked antennae. Evolution had been at work here too. Their
social interactions more complex and their intelligence greater.