a gardener in a war

Rule of nines. You are a killer. You tend the garden that is your mind. Against anything that would threaten it. And the sentinel. Nothing enters without your permission. You are the dominator of You ruthlessly kill and root out negative thoughts. The perfection. God is now being expressed through you. The idea of perfect health is now filling your subconscious mind. You destroy self-doubt. You destroy fear. You embrace the fact that you are a killer and dominator of your mind.

It is better to be a warrior in a garden. Then a gardener. Negative thoughts that threaten the peace of your gardens. You are a demon. You are a demon.

My name is Dylan Graves. I grew up in a modest two bedroom home in Alexandria, Virginia, though it was not the only place I called home. I was the only child of parents who worked together at the State Department. This meant that we spent years at a time living overseas, usually in an African or Middle Eastern country. I spent many early years of my life which I can hardly remember now in consulates in Jordan and Kenya.

I was far too young to understand what a unique childhood I had the opportunity to experience, but I would be lying if I said I didn't feel a sense of relief and belonging each time we returned to Virginia. By the age of eight, I had only spent three summers in the United States, and two of them were before I was three.

So the summer of 2006 that we spent in Alexandria felt sacred to me. Something about playing baseball in an open field in Virginia felt more authentic than a gated embassy in the Middle East. Every weekend, I begged my parents to take me somewhere. It was usually the Smithsonian Museum or the National Zoo in Woodley Park. It didn't matter. It felt like there was endless things to do and experience. My parents almost always obliged.

Looking back, I think my parents felt a little bit guilty about some aspects of my life. Especially the constant moving, having to try to make new friends and leaving behind the ones I did have. I do not blame them now and I did not blame them then for their career choice, but it did have an undeniable effect on me.

By that time, I had developed some severe problems with my sleep. It was not usually falling asleep so much as it was staying asleep. Almost every night I'd wake up around two or three in the morning and stare hopelessly at the ceiling, while I implored my mind to let me return to sleep. For a while I was allowed to have a TV in my room, likely another side effect of guilty parenting.

But I started to build the bad habit of turning it on whenever I woke up in the night. It didn't really matter to me what was on. Anything was better than the strange noises my room made at night. This usually ended with my parents coming in my room and unplugging it until they finally got fed up and took it out altogether. Without the TV to occupy my restless mind, I turned to Legos.

I kept a dim flashlight by my bed, which I would prop against the wall, tilt it just enough to illuminate whatever set I was working on. I liked to build Star Wars sets because they took so long to finish. I would sometimes spend hours building until the sun rose. Other times I would fall asleep right on the floor.

On a late August night, my usual sleep pattern woke me up around two AM. And I quickly found myself working on the floor, putting together a tie fighter set. I'd spent the last three nights working on the thing, and I thought I might have to restart when I couldn't find a few key pieces. I startled myself when my hastily placed flashlight slipped from its usual position against the wall and made a loud thud against the hardwood.

I moved quickly to grab it as if I could mute the sound it had already created, fearing my parents would hear me awake again. The flashlight rolled across my floor slowly before I could reach it, and just for a moment the ray of light pointed directly into my bed. For a split second, I saw a person. Its figure was lying face down in the less than twelve inches of space between the floor and my bed frame.

I cannot tell you if it was a man or a woman. What I can tell you is that when the light found them they moved. They seemed to retreat quickly to the darker space at the far edge of my bed, to the small space between my bed and the wall. Somehow I did not scream, but I ran wildly back to my parents' room, barely able to articulate what I thought I'd just seen. My dad went to check and came back within thirty seconds.

Against my will, he made me follow him back into my room and showed me, with all the lights on, how there was simply no one there. He even pulled my bed further away from the wall to prove it. I still refused to sleep in that room for weeks. I wouldn't even walk by it during the daytime if the door were open.

I resorted to making a nest of blankets on the floor of my parents' room where I slept like a dog. They tolerated this for a while, but eventually they sat me down for a long talk. They asked me if what I was doing was about the move. We were set to leave for Morocco in November, and they wondered if maybe this was why I was acting out. They asked me if I was scared or if I didn't want to leave my friends behind, or if I was simply making something up to get attention.

I did my best to try to explain that this had nothing to do with Morocco or moving or anything other than the person I'd seen under my bed. I told them again and again exactly what I saw. A figure facing down, moving towards the back corner. By October my parents had finally lost their patience. They told me I had to start sleeping in my room again, and that was the end of it. I think they thought that forcing me back into my room would somehow prove to my brain that everything was fine.

The first few nights back in there, I kept every light on. The overhead fan lamp, the lamp on my desk. I even plugged in my old night light into the wall for good measure. I laid in the dead center of my bed each night, staying still as possible while I watched the corners of my bed till my eyes burned with dread. I don't think I slept more than three hours that week, most of it during the day.

It was no surprise that I had caught a cold by the end of the week. My immune system was likely completely compromised, not to mention some kind of virus seemed to be spreading around at school, To my parents, the only known remedy for such an illness was a healthy dose of cherry nyquil. Had I been aware of the effects this would have on my ability to keep my eyes open to wandering hands at the edges of my bed, I would have never accepted it.

I tried hard to fight it that first night. I eventually became delirious, but the medicine pulled me under, sure enough. I slept twelve hours straight, starting to make up for weeks of lost sleep. They gave me the same dose the following three nights in the Each time I woke up fine. Nothing had touched me and nothing had crawled out from beneath my bed, at least to my knowledge. Something in me had simply decided to stop being afraid.

When that particular fear left me, another one took its place. November was coming fast and the boxes had started appearing in the hallways of our house. What my parents thought I'd been worrying about was finally beginning to take shape in my mind. I dreaded the idea that I would have to say goodbye to my only friends again. That I would have to leave a place where our so-made ventures were just a few minutes' drive away.

I waited until my parents were watching television one night and asked them if we could stay. They looked at each other the way parents do and they can't decide who should answer an unfortunate question. It was my mother who told me that their work was important, and that I would make new friends in Morocco, just like everywhere else I had.

I countered and asked them what if I didn't make new friends? And what if I just wanted to keep the ones I had? My father turned off the TV and simply told me that sometimes life asks us to be brave even when we're not ready. By November 1st, my room had become nothing but a bed and packed cardboard boxes. My posters, desk, and Lego sets had all been carefully wrapped and packed away, some already shipped starting their journey across the world.

The room no longer felt like mine, it only felt like a space that was waiting to forget me. I laid in bed that night, scheming ways to stay. I thought about running away and trying to secretly live with my friend Tyler and his family. I thought about just flat out refusing to get on the plane. Amongst all the doubts of these ideas that filled my head, I began to notice a light scratching noise coming from beneath my bed.

I held my breath, hoping the sound would stop when I fully noticed it, but it didn't. It started to get louder. It sounded like nails dragging across the old hardwood underneath my bed. I pulled my legs towards my chest as quietly as I could, terrified that any part of me hanging over the edge would be grabbed.

I felt my body surge with adrenaline when I started to hear wet and shallow breathing coming from the same spot. I wanted to jump off the bed, but I couldn't convince myself that I could jump far enough and open the door before whatever it was could grab me. I resorted to screaming for my father relentlessly.

I did this over and over until I heard his footsteps in the hallway. My father opened the door but did not turn on the light in my room. He stood in the doorway with his back lit by the dim hallway light, and his face half in shadow. The expression he wore was not one I recognized but I pointed frantically towards the floor beneath me, failing to properly articulate the entity that I thought laid in weight on the

My father stared at me for what felt like a very long time. He did not say anything, and he did not move to turn on the light switch, which would have been a common sense thing to do as a parent. Instead, while in the doorway, a good ten feet from my bed, he lowered himself to his hands and knees, his eyes never leaving mine. He paused here for a few moments before he started moving slowly and deliberately towards my bed. His palms pressed flat against the hardwood as he labored forward.

I wanted to tell him to stop and that he was scaring me, but I couldn't even summon the courage to do this. I watched in terror as my dad crawled like an animal towards me until he finally reached the edge of my bed. He looked at me with an expression that I may not understand until the day I die. Then he lowered himself flat against the floor, pressing his chest to the hardwood, and turned his head to peer beneath my bed.

He stayed like this for a long time. I could not see his face anymore. I could only see the back of his legs and the soles of his white socks pointing towards the ceiling. He did not say anything, though I begged him to. He did not tell me that everything was fine or that there was nothing under my bed. He then began to disappear further beneath my bed. It was his shoulders first and then his torso.

I was too cowardly to lean over the edge and look for myself. I could only watch as his legs slid inch by inch further into the dark space, until finally even his feet were not visible. I called out for him several times, begging him to tell me that he was okay. But the only thing that responded was the scratching. It started again louder this time and seemed to fill the entire room. I could hear my father breathing heavier and heavier, until both sounds became one terrible rhythm.

The only thing I could do was cover my ears and close my eyes. I said the only prayer I knew the best I could, and when I uncovered my ears, the noise was gone. I ended up compromising with myself, thinking that once the sun came up I would finally look. I actually believed that once the light returned I would be safe to do so.

Until then I waded through the night in absolute terror. I think that after a certain point I would have been more frightened if my dad did crawl back out from beneath the bed. I thought about his face right before he lowered himself to the floor. I kept trying to figure out why he hadn't turned on my light when he could have. When the first pale light finally touched my window, I waited another hour or so just to be sure.

Instead of simply leaning over the side, I stood on my bed and made a great leap as far away as I could. Then I lowered myself to the floor and pressed my cheek to the cold hardwood, and looked under my bed. There was nothing there, nothing.

I found my mother in her bedroom, still half asleep beneath the covers, or the other side of the bed was undisturbed. When I finally got her full attention, I told her what happened. I told her that my dad had come into the room and gone under my bed and never came out. She rubbed her eyes and told me that it was impossible. She said that my father never came home last night. She said that he never called to say why, but she assumed that something had come up at work.

She clearly didn't seem fully convinced of this, but was fully convinced that the story I was telling could not have been true. I gave the most compelling argument I could to try to convey to her that what she was saying could not be right. I went over every little aspect in great detail of my father's behavior in my room. Eventually my mother had told me to stop. She said that I must have been dreaming, and that she would have heard me screaming one of the several times I had claimed to.

For a day and a half I watched my mother go through the motions of continually calling the State Department and leaving messages on his cell phone to She made me breakfast and packed my lunch for school as if my father's absence were simply an inconvenience that would resolve itself. She told me twice more that I had been dreaming that night.

On the third day, the police found my father's car at the bottom of Burke Lake, just fifteen minutes from our house. The driver's side window was down and all the doors were unlocked. I told my mother that it appeared he had driven off the road in the early morning hours, and that the cold water would have made for a difficult escape. They never found his body. They explained to her that sometimes this happens with Lake.

That the bottom is too deep or too silted, and that sometimes people will just stay down there. But they assured her that a second scuba team would continue the search efforts the next day. This ultimately failed as well. Each time the police came to our house, I wanted to tell them about what I had seen. I felt I had a story that would change the course of their investigation and alter how they viewed their findings.

But my mother seemed to sense whenever I was building up the courage to do this, and insisted that I hold my tongue. She tried many times to point out the logical flaws in my story, but none of them ever got through to me. At the funeral, I sat in the front row, staring at the clothes casket that I knew to be empty. I listened to the pastor speak about my father's service to his country, his devotion to his family.

Relatives I barely recognized wept. The whole time I wanted to stand up and scream at all of them that he was not dead, or at least that he didn't die the way they thought.

I could not believe how easily each person in that room had accepted the idea of my father's death. For years I saw a therapist. ones in different cities, different countries, and different backgrounds. Each one listened to my story that never once changed, but they all vaguely told me the same thing.

They explained that what I experienced was some sort of trauma response. They would say that my young mind, when faced with the incomprehensible loss of my father, had constructed a narrative that could process It did not matter to them that this had happened to me before I knew my father had gone missing, or that this narrative was far more incomprehensible than the one the police had given.

They often used terms like intrusive thoughts, false memories, and confabulation. Some of them gave me breathing exercises, some gave me cognitive reframing techniques. Some even tried to prescribe me medication, most of which I never even tried. One told me I was displacing guilt, another said I was manifesting abandonment fears. A third suggested my father's work overseas had created attachment issues that express themselves through fantasy.

Despite my unwillingness to try their techniques outside the office, that continual dismissal of my story began to seep into my mind. One of the therapists I saw during high school, an older man in Fairfax, who specialized in childhood trauma, spent a great deal of time on one particular memory. It was one I had almost completely forgotten. I was four years old and we were living in Nairobi, where I'd gotten extremely sick.

He asked me what kind of sick, and I told him I really didn't know. I remembered my parents arguing on the phone with someone about whether they were allowed to fly with me back to the United States and my condition, I told them that it had gotten so bad that my parents had resorted to letting in a local woman into wherever we were staying to give me a blessing of sorts. My father resisted this, but my mother insisted.

Most of what I could recall was the smell of something burning, and the sound of her voice uttering words I could not understand. I ended up recovering about a week and a half later while still in Nairobi. Though I think we all had our doubts about whether the blessing had any effect on my recovery. The therapist failed to convince me of the significance of this event of my childhood, but we talked about it so much that I can now never forget it.

It was around this time that I finally began to open to the idea that I made need to acknowledge what I experienced as an anomaly of my reality. Eventually I reached a point where I had accepted this memory as less than true, but this still left me with the problem of how frequently it surfaced in the conscious part of my mind.

In college at Virginia Tech, I started seeing a new therapist at the campus counseling center. Her name was Alison and She could not have been more than four or five years older than me, barely out of her doctoral program at UNC. She had a soft voice and wore cardigans that made her look like she could host a children's reading hour at any moment.

Yet she spoke about her ideas and approach to the human mind with more certainty than any of my previous therapists, most of whom had far more experience. Her conviction made everything she said come across as fact rather than someone trying to convince me of their own opinion. Unlike the others, she spent no time trying to persuade me that what I experienced was not real.

Instead, she told me that my mind was a garden. She explained that whether I liked it or not, all gardens are created and maintained through violence. She said that before anything can grow, the earth must be torn open and Trees must be felled to let in sunlight, roots must be ripped from the soil, and most importantly, the pests and vermin that would devour your harvest must be killed without mercy or hesitation.

She told me that my mind was no different, that the thoughts I wanted to grow and the peace I wanted to cultivate required the same ruthless approach. The intrusive thoughts and memories that constantly clawed their way back, uninvited to my mind, were the weeds and vermin, and I had to treat them as such. She warned me that in the beginning it would feel like war.

That it would feel bloody, exhausting, and impossible to sustain. It would feel like each time it ripped out a negative thought, another one would be waiting in the shadows to take its place. But she told me that if I kept doing this and remained brutal and unrelenting, something would change. these thoughts would begin to see me differently. They would start to recognize me as something dangerous, something to be avoided. They would see me as a demon,

She expressed several times how there was no middle ground in this endeavour. Peaceful coexistence with the things that wanted to destroy me from the inside was not an option, You had to be the dominator of your own mind, or your mind would dominate you.

It was the first thing that any therapist had said to me that made complete sense. I left her office that night and for the first time felt like I had autonomy over my own thoughts. She was right that in the beginning it felt entirely unsustainable. Every time the memory surfaced, I had to meet it with full force.

Where I would previously let the thought slowly creep into my brain and let it fester while still giving it half my attention to whatever I was doing. Now I gave it my full attention, telling it that it was not welcome. Some days I would lose entire lectures because I'd spend the whole hour fighting my own mind. But I had to convince myself it was worth it. After a few months something did change. The thoughts came less frequently, and when they did, they arrived weaker.

I started to visualize myself standing in my own garden. It was often a garden surrounded by a dark forest of trees. I imagined myself willing to die before I let anything take what I had created.

By the time I was twenty five I had graduated from college and found myself working as a developer for a tech company in D C. It was entry level back end work for some lucrative government contracts. But the pay was enough to afford my own apartment in Logan Circle, While some of my friends who had graduated with the same degree as me were getting jobs at places like Amazon and Google, I still considered myself wildly successful in ways most people would never understand.

I had survived my childhood and teenage years and even some events in college that could have easily led me down a path of darkness. I was beginning to enjoy life in a way that had not seemed feasible just a few years earlier. In September of that year, the company I worked for began an aggressive hiring spree. Most of the new faces were recent graduates, a couple years younger than me, mixed in with a few experienced tires.

One of them I recognized immediately as Richie Corvo. He had the same disheveled hair and half untucked shirt style he had worn throughout his four years at Virginia Tech. Richie and I had been close during college by way of hanging out with the same people, though I'm not sure I ever entirely understood him. He was the kind of person who would be down to do anything at any moment and could easily be egged on.

If there was a party in a questionable area, Richie was always the first one to suggest that we go. He once thought it was a good idea to invite forty people to the indoor golf range where he worked part time after it closed and He moved through life like consequences were something that happened to other people. But beneath the recklessness he had these strange observations about people that he would casually drop into conversations and never elaborate on.

Most people dismissed this as Richie being Richie, but I always found myself fascinated, wishing for more. We had not been in contact since graduation, but when we saw each other again we didn't miss a beat. Richie had been placed in the marketing department, which meant our paths were rarely meant to cross during the work day.

But this didn't stop him from finding ways to insert himself into my routine. He would appear at my desk around lunch with some half baked idea for where we should eat, or a rumor he had heard about one of the executives. He treated the office like college where not a single person was above or below him. For the first few months everything was great and

Richie had a way of making the mundane feel like an adventure. He even convinced a small group of us to start going out for happy hour every Thursday at a bar called Angry Inch on fourteenth Street. What usually started as a casual drink after work, more often than not, turned into staying out until last call. This went on for several months until late January, when Richie and I found ourselves leaving a bar in Roslyn around midnight,

Richie had convinced me that we should meet up with some girls he knew who lived in Balston, a neighborhood on the outer limits of Arlington. I didn't ask how he knew them or why they were expecting us so late. I knew not to question these things with Richie. We walked through the mostly empty late night streets of Arlington on our way to the metro, with our hoods up and our hands stuffed into our pockets. We were halfway through the crosswalk when Richie casually asked me.

Do you ever feel moments where it feels like something else is controlling your body? I laughed abruptly. No, well, what do you mean, I guess? We made our way through a group of people leaving a bar. I don't know, it used to happen to me every once in a while in college, and then it stopped and now it's been happening again a few times recently.

It's not like I'm passing out, he said. It's more like I dunno like something else is in my body and I'm just watching them. I don't really understand it. I didn't know what to say to that, and I didn't really want to take the lower half of my face out of my jacket. When we finally got to the metro station and it was warm enough to speak again, he continued It happened the first time when I left with a girl from that bar in college, um 540 social. You remember that place?

That was actually the longest amount of time I've ever lost. It had to be close to twenty minutes. It was when I was hooking up with her at her place. I remember actually watching myself, not feeling any of the sensations. I felt like I was a third person in the room. I waited for Richie to make it through the turnstile. Maybe you got roofied. He shook his head as we stepped onto the escalator.

I wasn't even drinking that night. That was back when I was on the ground screw at the stadium and I had to be there at like five the next morning. I stood on the step behind Richie as the escalator carried us into the depths of the station. I couldn't figure out why Richie was telling me this and whether he was looking for advice or simply to get it off his chest. He turned around and said, It's a shame it never happens during work because then I might not mind.

We rode the rest of the escalator in silence, and managed perfect timing as we saw the orange line train coming to a stop as we walked up. We entered one of the nearly empty cars near the back and sat down across from each other near the doors. I was about to ask Richie about the girls we were going to meet when he started talking again. Have you ever heard the story of Daring Dalton? he asked, leaning forward as the train lurched out of the station.

I shook my head. Richie explained that Dalton was a former baseball player who spent most of his career with the Phillies. He said that in his last season he ended up with the Marlins as a bench player, where he got some big hit in the World Series that helped them win the whole thing. He described it as a career defining moment. Then, a few years later, Dalton was being interviewed and he was asked about what it was like to get that hit. Richie said that Dalton started crying on camera.

He claimed that the moment was stolen from him, Richie said, staring out the window behind me. He said that an alien took over his body and that he just had to watch it while it happened, that he never got to experience that moment. I wasn't sure what to make of Richie's story. I never knew him to be a sports fan, and I certainly had never really talked to him about something with this kind of depth.

So you think an alien hit that ninety five mile per hour fastball and you think that's what's happening to you? It came off a bit more dismissive than I meant it to, but Richie didn't seem to even register the question. I just wonder how many people are out there that had something like this happen to them, and they're too ashamed or afraid to admit it.

I looked at him for a long moment but didn't answer his question. I know someone you can see if this is really bothering you. But Rishi looked away at the empty seats as the train slowed and didn't seem interested.

You mean like a therapist? I've already tried that before. I'm good. He waited for the doors to close at the Clarendon stop before he spoke again. You know what's weird, though? Ritchie asked, without looking at me. You were the only one who didn't seem that fucked up after that night in Blacksburg. I frowned at Richie. Why you bringing that up? Richie sat up straighter but kept looking away. I'm just saying everyone was different after that night, but you you seemed fine.

He paused. Is that what they teach you in therapy? That stuff doesn't matter or that it didn't happen? Because it did. I'd been expecting this conversation for years, yet still didn't know what to say. So I didn't say anything at all, instead let myself stare into the distance. Richie didn't seem to have any fight left and let it go.

The pair of girls lived on the sixth floor of one of those cookie cutter apartment buildings off of Wilson Boulevard. We walked into the building's entrance as the same time as they were returning from their night out. Both of them hugged Richie first and then introduced themselves to me as Megan and Mara

The apartment was sparsely furnished and it was one of those cheaper units where one of the windowless bedrooms was right next to the front door. There was Yellowtail and Burnett still sitting on the kitchen counter from their pregame before they had left. They seemed to immediately pick up where they left off and started drinking heavily, and we followed suit.

We hung out in the kitchen for a while talking about some mutual acquaintances that we all knew who also lived in the building. At some point Mara put on music through the TV speakers and we moved to the living room. There wasn't much talking after that. The vodka had done its work and the music filled whatever space conversation might have occupied. Richie gravitated towards Megan and I found myself near Mara. We all dance in the dim living room light for a while.

I eventually lost track of time and felt my mind kept wandering back to the conversation I had with Richie on the metro. I kept replaying the story he told me about the baseball player whose name I had already forgotten, until we heard a banging on the door, Mara quickly turned down the music and went to answer it. The three of us listened to the faint conversation she had with whoever it was in the hallway, telling her to turn down the music.

Once Richie was satisfied that's all it was, he told us he was going to step out to the balcony to smoke a cigarette, offering one to each of us. Lagan took him up on it, but I passed and I sat down the couch and only then did I realize how drunk I was when the room tilted slightly. I heard the sliding door shut behind Richie and watched his silhouette appear next to Meghan on the balcony through the glass. When I turned my head, I saw Mara who was suddenly sitting close to me on the couch.

She somehow did not look drunk at all. Instead, she looked at me attentively. This threw me off for a moment and I fumbled for my phone and asked her what time it was. She didn't respond. She only kept staring at me.

I was about to stand up to see if my phone had fallen out of my pocket when Mara put her hand on my leg. She leaned in close enough that I could feel her breath against the side of my face. For a moment I thought she was going to kiss me. Instead, her lips found my ear and she whispered. I hunt demons, and I found you. I pulled back to look at her and saw the stake knife in her right hand. She had already begun raising it by the time my brain registered what it was.

In my drunken attempt to stop the knife I swung my open hand towards her arm, but ended up connecting squarely with her jaw. I felt the blade catch the top of my ear on the end of its altered path. I went to feel my ear, but Mara was already coming forward again. I quickly grabbed both of her wrists. She was impossibly strong. It felt like I was struggling against something mechanical.

I lost track of the knife, it was no longer in her hand, and I tried to look around the floor for it during our struggle. The next thing I knew, Richie's arms were wrapped around me from behind, pulling me away from our who was no longer resisting. He was yelling something I couldn't process. I tried to tell him that she had a knife and pointed to my ear, where blood was still pouring down the side of my neck.

Mara had gone completely limp on the couch. Her eyes were open but vacant, like someone had simply turned her off. Megan was screaming beside her, calling me every name she could think of while pointing out the bruise already forming on Mara's jaw. I searched everywhere for the knife, scanning the floor for where it could have fallen. Richie kept asking me what the hell was going on, and after a while I didn't even try to explain it to him.

He looked at my ear and I could tell he saw the blood, but he also looked at Mara sitting motionless on the couch, and I could see him trying to reconcile the two things. I paced the living room with both hands on my head, trying to understand what had just happened myself. Richie grabbed my shoulder and told me we needed to leave right now. I wanted to stay and find the knife because without it, I was just a drunk guy who had hit a girl in the face.

But Richie was already pulling me towards the door, and I realized that the longer I stayed, the worse it was going to get.

On the metro back towards DC, I held the crumpled napkin from my jacket against my ear where the bleeding was finally starting to slow. Richie sat across from me, staring through me, lost in thought. Neither of us spoke for a long time. As the train rocked through the dark tunnel, I tried to remember what Allison had taught me.

what was previously second nature I now found difficult, even with my full attention. I felt myself replaying the event from my childhood, in other horrors that I had once banished from my conscious mind, A woman boarded at the courthouse stop with a yellow Labrador service dog on a short leash. The dog seemed to lead her to a seat near Richie and I until it locked onto me and started barking.

It was doing its best to try to intimidate me, and I almost stood up to move until I saw the woman use her full strength to drag the dog to the far end of the car. I looked at Richie, who had seemed like he didn't even see the dog. Did Mara really have a knife? He stared at me expectantly. I pointed at my ear again as if the answer was obvious. I could not let him know that I had any doubts of my own.

Richie leaned back and squinted at me. You know that night in Blacksburg, Roy told me that you looked like something else. He didn't say someone else, he said something else. Do you want to know what he said? I held the napkin tighter against my ear and said nothing. The train shuddered into the Pentagon City station and the doors opened to no one. I watched the empty platform slide by as we pulled away.

Richie took my silence as a cue to continue. Of all the things that happened that night, Roy said that the thing he remembers the most was that you had the legs of the goat I frowned at him. The train rattled to another tunnel and the lights above us flickered once. I could feel Richie watching me carefully and studying my reaction.

I know that with everything that's happened to Roy since then, I can't believe anything he has said. Ritchie paused and rubbed the back of his neck. But I need you to tell me that it's not true. I held Richie's gaze for a long time. It's not true.

I called Alison the next morning from my apartment. I had not spoken to her in nearly three years, but she answered on the second ring and seemed to remember me immediately. I told her that I needed to see her as soon as possible, and that it could not wait. She was quiet for a moment and then told me that she had no office availability for weeks.

She said that she was still in Blacksburg and that if it was truly necessary, she could meet me at Marcia Park for fifteen minutes. I told her that I would be there that afternoon. I drove the four hours south on eighty one without stopping. The sky was the color of wet cement the entire way, and the mountains of Virginia felt like they were closing in on me. I arrived in Blacksburg just after two, wearing the same clothes I had from the previous night.

I sat on a bench in the park and texted her work phone that I had arrived. I sat there for almost ninety minutes before Alison finally appeared around the corner. She looked exactly the same as I remembered her. She sat down beside me on the bench, only saying hello, Dylan, and waited for me to speak. I told her about everything that had transpired since we last spoke. I told her that I was beginning to lose the technique that she had taught me and that I desperately needed advice.

She'd listened without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a long time. A jogger passed us on the path, and a few birds shifted in the bare trees above us. When she finally spoke there was something in her voice that sounded almost like disappointment. You cannot go looking for other people to tell you what is real, Dylan. You already know this. The moment you start relying on other people's perceptions to define your own reality, you have lost.

She let me contemplate this for a moment, letting the silence linger until I almost broke it myself before she continued. You know what you are, you know what I have taught you. Anything that threatens your peace must be destroyed without hesitation. I felt like I had to ask her more. I wanted to ask what was wrong with me, but Alison was already standing up. She smoothed out her jacket and looked down at me with the same certainty I remembered from college.

I have to get back to my office now. She turned away from me towards the walking path and said Stay strong, Dylan. Something has changed and they're looking for you.

The next day at work, I found myself sleep-deprived in a client presentation meeting in one of our conference room. It was far too small for the five of us, including Richie, who stood at the front of the room, the two clients and our executive sitting in the back. The clients were a man and a woman from the DOD who sat directly across from me, Wearing dark navy suits and government badges,

The executive in the back kept interjecting, messing up Richie's flow, but I found it hard to pay attention to what either of them were saying most of the time. Whenever Richie would look at me, it looked as if he was wary of my presence. I avoided making eye contact with him, making it look like I was staring at the slides instead. I sat there daydreaming about the questions that I wish I had been able to ask Allison.

I wanted to ask her what she meant when she said they were looking for me. I wanted to ask who they were. I sat there cycling through these thoughts while Richie clicked through the slides. At some point, I became aware of a voice that was not Richie's. It was coming from directly across the table. I looked up and found the woman from the DOD staring at me.

Her colleague beside her was watching Richie, and Richie was talking. The executive was checking his phone. No one seemed to notice that this woman had spoken at all. She said it again. I know what you are. I looked to Richie, who had not broken stride. I looked to the executive who was nodding absently at whatever point was being made. Neither of them acknowledged her. I tried to look away, back toward the slides. Look at me, you filth. You are an abomination in the sight of God.

I looked to Richie again. His mouth was moving and words were coming out. The executive behind me shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. The male client beside the woman was writing something in a notebook. The woman's eyes drilled into me with an intensity that made the lights above feel like they were dimming. Umiliare su potenti mano dei.

The woman stood from her chair. Her motion was slow and deliberate. She placed both palms flat on the conference table, and pushed herself upright, her badge swinging forward on its lanyard, Terram ipsam korrumpit. I looked at Richie. He clicked to the next slide. He did not look at the woman. The executive behind me coughed into his fist. The woman placed her right knee on the conference table, and then her left.

She lowered herself onto all fours, palms pressing flat against the laminate surface. She began crawling toward me across the table. I pressed myself back into my chair as far as it would go. The wheel slid an inch across the carpet before hitting the wall behind me. She stopped near the edge of the table closest to me and lowered her head until her face was level with mine. Her hair hung forward, framing her features that no longer looked entirely human. Quota hora est mortis tuae.

My hand found the ballpoint pen on the table beside me without taking my eyes off her. I drove the pen into the side of her neck. The resistance was less than I expected, and the woman shrieked a kind of piercing scream I had never heard in my life.