Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Big Fish Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

BIG FISH

Ash fell from Bucky Johnson’s cigarette and swirled between his dusty boots of different sizes. He was sitting on a stack of dirty pallets—three high—outside the loading dock and drinking a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Next to him was a man named Jim Brown. Across from them, sitting on bags of cement, were Melvin Howick and Putter Westlake, the foreman. They’d been discussing the girls who’d gone missing over the last few weeks and the naked bodies that had shown up in their places. None knew the girls—the closest had been four towns over—but that didn’t make it much more palatable.

“Bucky! Bucky!” a high, childish voice thrummed just barely above the mill’s auger and a running forklift, both just inside the gaping door.

Bucky looked up. His little brother, Chip, and his brother’s little girlfriend, Veronica Goodrow, were racing toward the men on break. Chip had his fishing pole and his creel. Veronica had about two-thirds of a fishing pole.

“Bucky!” Chip said. He was nearly vibrating. He’d stopped two feet short of the foursome. “Bucky! You should a seen it!”

Bucky sighed and toed out his cigarette on the rough asphalt of the mill lot with his bigger boot. “Seen what?” he said.

Chip had been an accident. Up until eight years ago, Bucky was the youngest of six kids at seventeen. His mother was forty-four at the time, now fifty-two, and his father had been fifty-three, was now sixty-two. His mother was doing all right with the arrangement, but his father didn’t know what to make of Chip, had lost all understanding of the youth today. All that anti-government, anti-country, anti-war stuff was unpatriotic. And he’d told Chip and Bucky so whenever it came up.

“There’s a fat old fish in the gravel pit. Bigger than a beach ball in the middle,” Chip said, dropping his creel with a rattling thud.

“Fat as Annie the pig,” Veronica said and immediately blushed to the tops of her ears.

“In the gravel pit?” Bucky said, rising to stand, though not straight. His severe hammertoes and the resulting bones that jutted painfully kept him on a permanent lean, this had also kept him alive and out of a hot, hot jungle way the hell across the Pacific.

“Kirby, he stocked some wee pike last year,” Jim said, reaching into his shirt pocket for his tin of minty-smelling wintergreen Skoal. He pinched a wad and fingered it in next to his gums on the left side of his mouth. “Getting big, are they?”

“Wasn’t no pike. It was pale blue and fat in the middle. I never seen no fish like it,” Chip said.

“When I was a kid, I told everybody I caught a stingray in the pond out at Saint George Road—pond’s dried up now. I even rubbed line against my palms so it looked like I was really wrestling with it,” Putter said, gazing vacantly at the dull grey sky, a small grin lifting the right corner of his mouth.

“It broke Veronica’s pole!” Chip said.

“Yeah,” Veronica said, though with much less emphasis.

Chip grabbed the pole and held it out to Bucky.

Melvin smiled. “That pole’s twice as old as she is.”

“Minnow might break that pole,” Jim said, getting in on the harmless poking.

Chip scrunched up his expression. “It was there and we’re gonna catch it!”

“Not likely to catch more than heartbreak with that pole you got there. If you want a real big fish, you got to have a real strong pole, a good reel, and some sturdy line,” Putter said.

Chip looked at his pole and then at Veronica’s. “Oh,” he said.

The men turned to their boss, curious expressions on each and every face. Putter winked at Bucky. “It’s okay, though. I know where you can get just the right equipment. How much money you have?”

Bucky snorted. His and Chip’s parents were tight as a strawberry seed wedged between molars, and Chip hadn’t worked a day in his young life. Veronica’s parents lived in an old farmhouse with tarpaper showing between the siding and finicky plumbing—the Goodrow family was infamous for their choice of poverty, probably needed Veronica to bring home a fish now and then so they could eat.

“We don’t have any money, sir,” Chip said.

“Hmm, well, how’s your backs?” Putter said.

“Good,” Chip and Veronica said in unison, lively.

Since the beginning of time, a kid in need of something expensive could always sense a job offer looming. Never failed.

“You both know where I live?” Putter said.

The kids nodded.

“Be there at eight sharp tomorrow morning and bring a lunch. I have about five days’ work needs done. You do the job and I’ll give you the exact pole you need,” Putter said.

The kids got big eyes and started nodding, no clue what kind of work they’d signed on for. The men started back into the mill after Chip and Veronica buzzed away, bouncing as they ran off the lot.

“I don’t know what good you think they’ll be. Chip’s about as weak as it gets,” Bucky said.

“That doesn’t matter. He’s only three and a half feet tall. During the last good storm, mud ran down and filled in my crawlspace. Those two’ll be able to stand up down there. Surely they can handle buckets of mud,” Putter said.

“And you’re going to buy them a fancy rod for it?” Chip said. The other men had pulled away from the boss and the man who’d struggled to keep up—physically—his whole damned life.

“No.” Putter turned to walk backward toward a receptionist waving at him from the doorway of the office. “Had a brother-in-law pass and I inherited his rig. Must weigh twenty pounds, has a harness and everything. Think it was for fishing sharks. I’d planned on selling it, but by the time I got around to it, Ron at the store said that kind of pole was just about worthless to anyone not living on the coast and he could give me all but ten bucks for it.”

“And you said no thanks,” Bucky said.

“And I said no thanks. I knew it’d come in handy for something, and now your little brother can go catch him a fish like a beach ball and I can get my crawlspace cleaned.”

—

Chip and Veronica arrived at Putter’s place at 7:57 AM after coming together at the last stop to the north of town. The Westlake household was another half-mile beyond that last sign, and it was tough for the kids to keep from running all the way. There was immense pride and excitement in a first day of work. Chip had told his parents and his father had been so surprised that he gave him a side hug, squeezing him to his hip—easily the most pleasantly physical his father had ever been with him. Veronica’s parents had only asked about money, and when she explained there was no money, they had no more questions and even less interest.

“You’re on time,” Putter said. He had a coffee mug in one hand and a cigarette burning in the other. “You all eat?”

Chip nodded and Veronica looked at her overlarge and holey canvas shoes.

“Gail, put some toast down for these kids. They’ll need their energy,” Putter said before taking a drag, taking a sip, and then exhaling about a third of the smoke he sucked in. “Follow me, be a minute before your breakfast’s ready.”

Across the gravel driveway was a steel shed with a roll-up door. Putter slipped his cigarette between his lips and pulled open the door, squinting like Mr. Magoo through the smoke tendrils tickling up his face. Inside was dim and smelled of gasoline. He flipped a switch before pulling the cigarette from his mouth. Hanging on the wall were a series of tools: axes, shovels, hammers, and saws. Leaned near them was a dusty, silver fishing rod. The line was thick, with a bronze hue. The hook on the end had to be six inches long from eyehole to barb.

“There she is,” Putter said.

“Wow wee,” Veronica whispered.

“You can have it just as soon as you clean out my crawlspace.” Putter flicked the light switch off and effectively disappeared the rod into the thick shadows. “I’ll show you what needs done. Probably going to take you all week.”

—

“You know I love everybody, deep down in my heart. You know I love everybody—”

“What is that song?” Gail said. She was bent over, looking into the crawlspace. She carried a pitcher of light-yellow lemonade and two stackable green plastic cups.

Chip and Veronica both silenced instantly. They’d been at the job a couple hours and were making good headway. There were four five-gallon pails and two stubby square-mouthed shovels. They’d shovel until the buckets were full, then cart them up through the storm door. There were small rectangular windows every few feet in the crawlspace, but stepping out into the daylight blinded them momentarily, giving them the chance to pretend to be like the vampires from the Vault of Horror comic books in Chip’s attic—they’d belonged to his oldest brother and were treated like gold on account of them now being banned. They’d set down the heavy buckets and cover their filthy faces with their filthy hands, moaning like they were being burned.

“Franklin said it’s a song you sing when you’re working for the man, ma’am,” Veronica said. She’d picked at her nose a few times since starting and her nostrils were packed and smeary brown.

“Franklin? You mean your father? Does he tell you to call him that?” Gail said.

“Yes,” Veronica said.

Chip was cringing. Veronica’s parents were so damned weird.

“Why?” Gail said, frown creasing her brow up the middle, deep enough that the skin came together like a butt crack.

Veronica took a deep breath. “Because there cannot be equality when there is a hierarchy within any given system.” She said this robotically; the words of another coached to come from her mouth.

Gail shook her head. “You might be wise to watch how people around you live, don’t let your hippie parents brainwash you.”

“Can’t wash her, their water isn’t working right now,” Chip said.

“Lord, save them,” Gail said. “Come here and drink some of this lemonade.”

The kids each took a cup and chugged it back before sheepishly side-eyeing the pitcher. The lemonade was sweet as candy.

“Go on, refills are free,” Gail said. She filled the cups once more and watched them drink slowly. “Going to need another?”

Both shook their heads.

“Good, you go on and finish up and give me the cups. Be crawling with ants if I don’t take them inside.”

Gail was ten steps from the opening of the crawlspace when the duet began anew.

“You know I love everybody, deep down in my heart.”

—

There were five of them sitting around the mill’s loading dock, all but one smoking a cigarette—Jim had a dip of Skoal bulging out his lower lip. Beatrice Farmer had joined the men. She was a big, muscular woman who worked at one of the farms and had delivered a truckload of frozen and wrapped chickens for the storefront.

“How’s the cleanup coming?” Bucky said.

Putter inhaled from his Marlboro. “Better than I ever imagined two little kids doing. They must really want that pole.”

Bucky snorted a laugh. “I’d say. They go to the gravel pit every afternoon they finish at your place. They washup in there, but won’t go past the shallow stretch, afraid the giant fish’ll eat them or drag them down and drown them.”

“Gail says they sing slave songs all day. Says the girl’s parents have her call them by their first names in the sake of equality,” Putter said.

“That ain’t right,” Melvin said.

“What do you care?” Beatrice said, grinning at him.

“Ain’t how you raise kids,” Melvin said.

“Maybe not how you’d raise ‘em,” Beatrice said.

“I don’t really care what she calls them because the work’s getting done almost as fast as if I were to do it myself and my back isn’t getting sore in the process,” Putter said.

“Have they seen the fish again?” Jim said.

Bucky crushed his cigarette butt with his bigger boot. “Say they have. I’m guessing their seeing something. I don’t know, maybe somebody wanted to play a trick and put something in there.”

“Oh, they’re just—” Jim began.

“Just nothing. Must see something. No way they do all the work they have for a fib,” Putter said and then stood up, crushing his butt beneath his boot after letting it fall from his lips.

“What’s all this now?” Beatrice said.

Bucky waved it off. “My little brother and his girlfriend think if they get a big enough pole, they’ll catch a great big fish.”

“What might someone a put in there?” Melvin said.

Putter snapped his fingers and grinned that one-sided grin. “Bet there’s a big old turtle. Might be someone even played a trick on it and painted it blue.”

“Holy, now that makes more sense,” Melvin said. “Even painting it. Hasn’t anything much gone on around here since that meteor shower.”

“Not here,” Jim said. “There’s those girls…”

“Don’t get back on that,” Melvin said.

“There’s the drive-in to go to, when you can find someone to take ya,” Beatrice said after a pause.

Jim spat a brown gob from the side of his mouth. “What’s playing?”

—

A few minutes after one in the afternoon on Friday, the kids emerged from the crawlspace with two buckets, both now full of sodden and filthy rags. The cement down there wasn’t clean enough to eat off, but it was entirely visible, which was the goal from the onset. Chip knocked on the side door of the house and waited. Nobody answered. Veronica stepped around to the front of the house and came back immediately.

“Car’s gone,” she said.

Chip eyed the shed but knew he had to wait, that they had to be given the rod, couldn’t just take it. “Be back soon.”

“Yeah,” Veronica said and stretched out in the grass, luxuriating in the sun like a cat.

Chip fell in next to her. “I bet we’ll get on the front page of the Greenville Chronicle.”

“Bet they put us in Field and Stream,” Veronica said.

They’d batted this exact conversation back and forth dozens of times while they’d labored those long, long workdays—typically, they stayed about six hours, if you counted when Gail brought out lemonade and snacks. Oftentimes while they worked, the immense blue fish would expand and take on new and interesting attributes, but every afternoon they’d go out to the gravel pit and refresh the reality. Though it didn’t have scales, eyes like rubies, or teeth like a sabre-tooth tiger, it was impressive and strange. Like nothing they’d seen before or heard mention of.

“Bet we get to go to the White House,” Chip said. This was a new one.

“You think?” Veronica said. “Franklin says the president is a murderer, but I don’t think so.”

“I bet my dad will want to hang it in the living room,” Chip said, his eyes glistening at the happy, happy notion.

“That’s nice…Missy doesn’t like dead things unless we’re eating them and only after we thank Mother Nature for her bounty,” Veronica said, but Chip wasn’t listening. He was seeing his father’s proud face and his mother rooting him on as he dragged that whopping fish out of the flooded gravel pit.

—

It became a bit of a scene for the first hour. Beatrice had followed the mill workers, and two of the women from the sales floor offered up a snack of tuna fish and egg salad sandwiches cut into triangles, served on wax paper. Putter had splurged for tall bottles of Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, and 7-Up, stopping on the way from his house where he’d handed off the pole before loading the kids into the car. While they’d waited for Gail or Putter to return, Chip and Veronica had dug up thirteen good worms. Based on the size of the hook, they figured it’d take more than one to cover the steel enough to trick the fish.

By and by, as the sandwiches and sodas disappeared, so did most of the onlookers. Bucky had stuck around but scooted away temporarily so he could inform his parents where Chip was. Putter offered to do the same for Veronica, but she shrugged a polite and silent no, thanks, that’s okay. The sun fell and Gail appeared with a tin of cookies, a couple cans of Yoo Hoo chocolate milk, and six cans of Hamm’s beer.

“Where’d Bucky go?” she said.

“Went off to tell my parents where I am,” Chip said, stretched out in the soft gravel dust next to the phony pond.

“Ah,” Gail said and cracked the top of a Yoo Hoo and handed it down to him. “Keep your energy up, don’t need that monster—”

“Something’s on!” Veronica screamed.

The rod pitched forward, bending in her hands, and would’ve surely been gone had it not been for the harness hooked to the pole. Putter pushed to his knees and grabbed onto the harness from the back. The force against his hold had him making faces. Chip crawled close to the edge and tried to see through the evening gloom to locate the beast. He saw nothing.

“I can’t turn it!” Veronica’s face had gone deep red, and her hands were pale, pale white trying to reel in the line.

“Is there really a fish?” Gail said, her tone oozing disbelief.

Putter snaked an arm around Veronica’s skinny side and began fighting with the crank. “Holey. Holey,” he said. “I can hardly believe it.”

“There’s really a fish?” Gail said.

Behind them, an engine rumbled and then died. Bucky kicked open the door of his rusty Plymouth Satellite and pushed to his feet. In his hand was Chip’s denim jacket.

“Mom says if you stay out too late, you’re going to catch a summer cold and according to her, summer cold’s—hey, do you have something?” Bucky shuffled in close and drank in the situation.

“We got it!” Chip said, looking back over his shoulder.

The line suddenly went slack, sending Putter backward and Veronica into his lap. The shimmering blue blob was airborne, following the line that had sunk its hook somewhere in its body. It landed with a wet thunk that sent gravel and dust up in a puff, greying Chip’s damp green shirt.

“What in God’s name?” Gail said through a gasp.

The thing was gelatinous and writhing. It had no discernable fins or face or feet or…anything really. It was bigger than a beach ball, much bigger. Until it suddenly deflated and vibrant blue goo spilled into the ground, stretching out wet fingers that Chip was not prepared to avoid.

“Ah!” he said—his last word for many days.

The blue stuff touched his bare knees beneath his shorts and seeped in through his pores. Sucking into his system with tremendous celerity. Chip lost consciousness and fell limp. Bubbles and boils formed on his flesh; each had a great blue head. His lips turned blue, as did his hands. His mouth opened and his tongue slipped out, it was almost black. His limp body convulsed, and his breaths entered and exited his throat in quick sipping whistles. His legs bent at the knees, curling toward his backside. His spine arched, his bones creaking and cracking until his shoulders touched his toes. Snot trickled wetly down his face, clear until it went blue and ceased, as if this interloping fluid had to make room for itself.

On the ground not a foot away, was a deflated skin, emptied of life and perhaps a little fish-shaped after all.

“What…what?” Gail said.

Bucky fell to his knees next to his brother, trying to cradle him, lift him. “Help me! Dammit, help me!”

Putter unceremoniously tossed Veronica off his lap and took Chip from Bucky’s grasp. He was cold. Cold as the dead. “Gail, take her home and then go get Christine and Mervyn, tell them Chip had to go to the hospital.”

Bucky and Putter started jogging then, toward Bucky’s Plymouth. Gail was so flustered, she forgot her task and trailed right behind them before veering off to climb into her Ford LTD. Veronica watched them go, still attached to the fishing pole by way of the harness. Unsure of what else to do, she reeled in the line and kicked the emptied skin of the formally blue thing off the hook. She then started off for home.

—

The vigil, like the event at the gravel pit cum fishing hole, started out well attended. All but Beatrice who had been there to watch the children cast and reel made an appearance the morning after an unconscious Chip had been brought in. Veronica stayed outside, looking through the first-floor window. She’d never been in a hospital and things Missy had said swam about her mind heavily as that blue not-fish had swum against the tug of her line.

By Sunday evening, only Bucky, his parents, and Veronica—outside the window—remained in place. By nightfall, only Bucky remained. He slept, arched over two chairs, until the sun was up, and he had only time to rush home for a change of clothes and a cup of coffee before he had to be at the mill.

School wouldn’t start for another two weeks, so nothing kept Veronica away. When she got to the window, a nurse was fidgeting around Chip’s bed and for a moment, Veronica imagined the best, but was immediately let back down. He hadn’t moved. Before she left, the nurse opened the curtains wider and popped back when a face looked in at her. She then opened the window a few inches.

“You can come in here, you know,” she said.

Veronica shook her head.

“Fine,” the nurse said and started away.

There was a second bed in the room that was currently empty. Veronica could see it, just barely, if she pressed her forehead to the glass. She straightened and from her back pocket brought out a newspaper she’d snatched from a park picnic table along the way. Chip’s story was enough to be front page, above the fold, of the Greenville Chronicle.

“Boy in coma after fishing incident,” Veronica read aloud, the flow pausing and stiff. “Chip Johnson is in a coma. Friday evening, he and a mate had gone fishing after seeing an unusually large shape in the water. Men and women from Westlake Feeds joined the children at the flooded gravel pit, which has been stocked with fish in the past.

“‘It was actually the Goodrow girl holding the pole. She brought the thing in. I’ve never seen anything like it. I think Chip had an allergic reaction, but I’m no doctor,’ said Putter Westlake, a manager at Westlake Feeds…” Veronica went on to read the entire article, even the part that continued on page three.

She remained there by the window until she got hungry and that, alongside the boredom, finally coaxed her away.

—

“Your brother was front page and on the radio,” Jim said around dip in his mouth. “Even beat out the Carter County Killer.”

“Carter County Killer, they give that sick sonofabitch a nickname?” Melvin said.

“He’s killed six women this year alone, who knows how many in the past,” Jim said.

Bucky sighed. He was dead tired and stressed as hell. What he saw come out of that water and pass in through his brother’s skin…it was tough to put words to the reality. “I say that limp dick loser can have his headlines back, just let Chip wake up okay.” The fact the boils and bumps, and most of the discoloration, had passed was a single bright light in a sea of darkness.

“Limp dick? He’s raping the women first,” Jim said.

Putter shuffled out and plunked down next to Bucky on a stack of pallets. He withdrew his cigarette pack from his breast pocket and lipped free a Marlboro. “Enough of that,” he said and flicked his zippo open. “I drove by the gravel pit, some men in a white van were out there this morning. Had on big white gloves.”

“Doing what?” Melvin said.

“Collecting samples, my guess,” Putter said before taking a deep, deep drag.

“It’s going to be a zoo,” Bucky said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you get men with undefined government badges milling about your brother’s hospital room,” Putter said.

“If it makes him wake up, I don’t—”

A feminine shout interrupted Bucky’s thought and Barbara from the office came running out to the loading dock. “Putter! It’s Beatrice! They just found her body!”

“Was it the Carter County Killer?” Jim asked.

“Uh…yeah, I guess, if that’s what they’re calling him,” Barbara said. She was pale and wide-eyed as a fawn staring down a midnight freight train.

—

The hours passed and brought with them hundreds of out-of-town looky-loos who posted up on the hospital lawn with candles and signs. They sang hymnals and waved Bibles. The moon came out and seemed to bring with it cameras and news crews, as if they’d needed the perfect lighting to show off the candles and the well-wishers still in attendance at 9:33 PM. It had become the main story, and by a long shot.

The men in the white van refused to comment and that was almost better. It gave everyone room to speculate. Many thoughts veered near to the night of the meteor shower, though nobody had actually witnessed a meteorite touch down in the area, they also couldn’t say for certain that one hadn’t. More fuel for the flames of possibilities.

Bucky was once again alone in the room with his brother. His family—all of his siblings, excluding those over fighting in the jungle and the one in the box buried four feet deep—had been in attendance a while, but a nurse kindly asked some of them to leave as it was too much disturbance for the small hospital, despite that they’d bussed four long-term patients over to Greenville that evening, after the hubbub really began kicking in. The family decided they’d leave Bucky as an ambassador of information, should any information need to be conveyed. So far, Chip lay motionless, sleeping a long, long sleep, as if awaiting a kiss from a handsome predator lurking within a Disney forest.

Bucky himself had been nodding off for the last half-hour, exhausted from a lack of sleep and the extra-large carbohydrate-heavy, chip wagon take-away he’d eaten for supper. The plan was to eventually make his way across the room to the empty bed, but not until he was really ready to commit to sleeping.

In and out, his consciousness wavered as hours began to pass. He dreamed he was drinking a milkshake, slurping it through a straw, while someone unseen massaged his demented foot. He’d lived a life embarrassed and angry over that foot. It shot most of his confidence with the opposite sex and made him feel like less of a man when the country didn’t want to sacrifice him in the name of capitalism over in Vietnam.

The slurping grew loud enough to transcend sleep and Bucky blinked himself awake. Chip was no longer on the bed, but was instead on the floor, the back of his hospital gown spread wide revealing his pale back and even paler butt.

“What the hell?” Bucky said, trying to kick away from his brother’s grip.

Chip’s face had stretched morbidly as he sucked. Bucky’s huge and awful foot was in the boy’s mouth, the entire thing, heel to toes.

“Somebody!” Bucky shouted, but the door was closed and who knew what time it was. Everything was dark but for the dim light built into the headboard and the yellow coming in through the closed curtains from the street. “Help me!” Bucky began swatting at Chip’s head, but Chip would not be deterred.

Bucky’s will started to drain, though his foot felt full, swollen, like jelly in a bowl. He began to fade, fade, fade…

—

“Where is he?”

Bucky looked up at the distraught expression on the old nurse’s face. He then turned to the bed. “Shit! He woke up and he was…” he trailed as he studied his bare foot. His now normal foot—aside from the bluish toenails.

“He was what?” the nurse said.

Bucky couldn’t answer and she took off running. The sound of the crowd singing outside carried through the walls: “He welcomes, the weakest, the vilest, the poor; Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more.” Bucky pushed to his feet and tested a step, and then another, and another. He tried a shadow jump shot and fell to his knees with tears streaming his face at the ease and comfort of the motion.

—

“Three corpses found in one night and the kid’s still the top story,” Jim said, holding the paper before him. He and Melvin always got to work early enough to drink a coffee before the shift started.

Putter swung open the huge roll-up door and shouted, “Chip flew the coop!”

Melvin spun fast enough to spill coffee all over his lap. “He what?”

“Got up in the middle of the night and left without a word!” Putter said, frantic.

“Either of you know any of these girls? Tracy Powell, Kendra Mulgrew, or Gloria Stevens?” Jim said.

“Holy shit, those girls. That stuff that got into Chip, what if it turned him crazy?” Melvin said.

“Dear, Lord,” Putter whispered and spun, ran for the office.

“What about all the ones before?” Jim said and spat a juicy brown gob.

—

The men in the fancy suits and skinny ties started with Bucky and then moved onto the nurses before discovering six very ill patients had awoken this morning now healthy. They couldn’t say why, but one of them heard slurping, as if someone was suckling at her breast. The men returned to Bucky with a little more belief in what he had to say and what he had to show. Really, they believed him once a nurse brought in Bucky’s file, the one going back to the first thoughts of surgery when he was only an infant, the one featuring x-rays taken at intervals of about every four years of his life.

—

The sun played on dust motes as the elderly got in line in the common room at Willis Old Age Residence, located about a mile from the hospital. The nuns who acted as nurses made steady calls, but to the ceiling and the sky above rather than to anyone of local authority. This skinny boy in a hospital gown was performing miracles one after the other. He did not speak and accepted no thanks, he simply placed his incredible stretchy—and admittedly off-putting—mouth over trouble areas and began to suck at the flesh. The resident would pass out for a short nap and awaken feeling better than they had in many, many years.

There was music and dancing. The old folks sang praises to God, and to the boy, Chip—one nun eventually recognized his photograph from the newspaper. Once the residents were done, the boy stepped toward a young and somewhat wayward nun. Wordlessly, he lifted her smock and affixed his mouth to her genitals. She fainted before she had a chance to let the miraculous medicine of this boy’s mouth send her to dreamland.

“What was ailing you?” an old nun asked when the young nun awoke.

The young nun put her hands against her crotch and began weeping. Two years ago, she’d contracted an infection after receiving an abortion in a blacked out van, which, even after diagnosed and cared for, led to chronic, painful urination. “He rid me of God’s punishment for my sinful ways,” she said.

—

The news was big that Chip had visited the retirement home, though what he’d done there was kept secret. Everyone fanned out, looking for a runaway child in a hospital gown.

“Hello,” Chip said, his first word since his body had been invaded.

Veronica was at the gravel pit, tossing pebbles. “You’re awake!” she said.

Chip sat down next to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “Not all the way,” he said.

“There he is!” someone shouted from a distance, beyond the swinging gate of the gravel pit.

“I think they will take me away,” Chip said.

Veronica took his hand and popped to her feet. “We can hide,” she said, pulling him along. She’d been raised to fear the eventual coming of the man.

Hand-in-hand, they cut through the back of the gravel pit property to a cornfield beyond. The shouter had already driven away, unseeing of where the children went or the freshly dead woman with wintergreen-scented brown smear on her lips, where she lay in the long weeds at the shoulder of the road.

—

Bucky couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t permitted to leave the hospital, but his parents had come with news from the outside. They’d settled on the notion, as had most of the townsfolk as well, that the sudden surge of dead women was the work of a deranged boy in a hospital gown.

“Putter’s leading the charge,” his mother said.

“I knew that boy was no good,” his father said.

“No!” Bucky stood and shook his head. “That’s wrong. He’s fixing things.” He kicked off his boot and tugged away his yellowed sock to reveal his perfectly normal foot. “Look what he did! And people upstairs, he cured them. You have to tell them! They got it all wrong!”

Bucky’s parents regarded him with a mixture of pity and sadness. His father patted his shoulder and said, “Was God who cured you, not Chip…you wouldn’t believe what he did to those women.”

His mother added in a hiss, “Three last night and three more today. Chip’s a monster.”

“But what about all the dead girls before?” Bucky said, inadvertently echoing Jim Brown from work.

“We’ve only been assuming he’s been home those nights when—” his father started.

“Are you crazy? He’s seven years old! Those women were raped, a little kid can’t even get it up,” Bucky said, Beatrice Farmer’s chubby face flashing on his mind, and Jim asking what was playing at the drive-in. The night she died, she’d been fishing for a date and Jim had… “Jesus!” he said under his breath and looked at his parents, then to the men in suits with their police escorts, and then to the window nobody was monitoring.

—

Night had fallen and the men and women carried flashlights and rifles, a couple swung pitchforks. Enough people had seen Chip and Veronica around town to make some good guesses as to where they might be.

Finally, they came upon the old barn next to the train tracks at the north end of town. Every winter kids would bring a hose and flood the cracked cement to make a skating rink. An old ice fishing hut had been donated to let folks warm up, even boil some water for hot chocolate on the small woodstove inside.

The door swung open and the terrified and surprised face of Veronica Goodrow popped out before scooting away. The door closed with a slam. The mob converged on their target.

—

Bucky ran four blocks to Jim Brown’s house. He’d inherited it from his mother a few years earlier and had lived alone there since. Bucky had never been inside. The lights were on in the living room and through the yellow sheer curtain, he saw three visibly human shapes.

He ran to the side door and tried the handle. It opened silently. He stepped inside and heard Jim’s voice. He took the three stairs up to the kitchen with a single stride—something that would’ve been impossible before Chip’s miracle—and hurried toward the voice, and the whimpering.

“About time someone showed up,” Jim said.

Bucky entered the living room and stopped in his tracks. The stench was incredible, like a long unattended slaughterhouse in the middle of summer. There were maggots feasting on blood in the shag carpet and flies lighting on all three bodies sitting on couches: Jim, a dead waitress named Jean, and a living high schooler named Rebecca—Bucky knew her older siblings, knew her to see her.

“Ah, here I thought someone had come to stop me, but it’s just old Hops Along, the fucking gimp,” Jim said, he was bathed in blood and naked, his cock standing at full attention.

Bucky clenched his fists and took three quick and steady steps.

Jim, who was much smaller, though had always had the benefit of balance, grew wide-eyed at the figure coming at him. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said.

Rebecca screamed against the rag in her mouth as she bounced in place on the loveseat where she sat bloodied and next to a corpse.

—

Putter and Gail were at the head of the pack as they walked back to the heart of town. The flashlights remained trained on the road, but the rifles and pitchforks were now lowered. They detoured a block, police flashers shined from a house not far ahead. The TV crews were there too, they’d had moved on from the hospital to this private residence.

Jim Brown was alive, though barely, and in custody. In his home, police found belongings from several dozen young women, as well as his mother’s dried corpse in the fruit cellar, surrounded by popped and oozing jars of moldy jams and pickles.

Putter led the mob to the officer manning the front perimeter. “What’s going on?” Putter said.

“Got that sonofabitch who’s been killing girls,” the cop said.

“Jim? Oh,” Putter said.

Behind him, like the air leaked from a tire, the mob went their separate ways. Leaving in their wake the battered and slain bodies of Chip Johnson and Veronica Goodrow. Chip had bled red until all the red was gone and shimmering blue fluid ran from his veins.

“Guess Jim must’ve got these too, also,” Putter said.

Gail wept into her palms.

XX