FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

Recommended Listening: https://youtu.be/dHEkeUcP-uY?si=COB4-hxinCrmBok1

3. SIDEREAL

1 year after it happened

Michael Carpenter shivered. Kelly Thompson's trailer was fucking cold.

The old cat didn't seem the type to like it. He didn't even have any fur to keep him warm through the deluge of frosty air that the AC pumped out - the _two_AC units, Mike noticed, and yet Kelly had them turned up to nearly max, with hanging blankets duct-taped around most of the other windows to keep the sunlight out. He blinked a few times to let his eyes adjust, watching the faded patterns (Steelers, Coca-Cola, galloping horses) come into focus. He took in a shallow breath through his mouth, trying not to become too overwhelmed by the barrage of new scents hitting him all at once. Categorizing them helped.

Cigarettes. Sweat. Some kind of microwave food - chicken, probably. Lysol. Something burnt. A twinge of something sour. Beside him, Jesse shot a quick look and stuck out his tongue, head jerking forward like he was pretending to puke. Mike tried not to laugh, teeth biting onto his lower lip as he looked around. The place was dirty and cluttered - that much was obvious - but to Michael it seemed _dry._No trace of spilled drinks or old cups, no open bottles or cans. The kitchen to his left was covered with old junk - what looked like a hunting rifle lay in pieces around, spray-cans and brushes positioned around it like surgeons. A hallway extended into the dark beyond it, lined with hazy picture frames and portraits. What must have been the dining room was to the right, but it was impossible to see past the fold-out partition that cut off that entire end of the trailer from view. A tiger woman was stretched out across its five panels, body partitioned and angled oddly.

"You cold, buddy?" Kelly's voice made him jump. His ears lifted and followed the cat's footsteps by sound behind him, catching the door closing too. Kelly stood behind, his breathing as noisy as the AC. The laugh died in Michael's throat but the smile remained as Kelly put a hand on his upper back, rubbing in slow, firm circles with his palm, fingers lifted.

"No, I'm okay. Just gotta get used to it, is all." His skin crawled, even though he did feel a little warmer. The smile stayed as Kelly stepped around him, keeping his palm there for a second before he clapping him on the back a couple times. There wasn't a lot of room to maneuver inside. A TV in one corner droned some kind of drama that Michael didn't recognize. Framing it like a cupped hand, two couches met at a corner where a cloudy glass corner table held an ashtray that once upon a time may have been transparent. A corona of pills, strange powdery and sticky residues, and a few lighters filled out the available space around it.

"You want a soda or something?"

"I'm good, thanks," Michael murmured.

"Nah, I'm off soda," Jesse added, swinging his leg over the armrest of the right-hand couch and planting himself firmly in the corner. "It's not good for you, and I'm trying to make varsity this year." Kelly snorted.

"Well, that's fine. You let me know, though, if you change your mind. You too, ah, Mike." He had to pause before the name, shaking his head. "You boys have a seat and relax, now, and I'll get you fixed up with something." Michael took a seat beside the weasel, who made a quick motion down at his pocket. The money. Michael nodded.

"Aaaal-right. So," Kelly began, tugging open a drawer in the kitchen. Wood squeaked against wood as he wrenched it out, sorting through whatever was inside. "You want weed? I got some of the good shit here for you, if you want. Ain't cheap, though." The weight of money in his pocket felt so much less the longer that he listened. The couch creaked underneath him no matter how he moved, turning every nervous fidget into a rubbery croak.

"We want the good stuff. I don't have that much money today," Michael murmured, "but I can probably get more next time if the stuff is as good as you say."

Jesse shot him a surprised glance. His pupils were two splinters buried in the center of his eyes. Somewhere behind them, Kelly laughed. Michael didn't turn around.

"What in the hell? You drive a hard bargain, boy."

Jesse stared at him. Michael looked back.

"I've never tried your stuff before."

Wood squealed as Kelly pulled open another drawer, and the hound folded his hands in his lap, weaving his fingers together. There was a long silence, and the old cat grunted. It sounded half like he was speaking to himself.

"Your brother tried it. He liked it fine."

Michael forced a smile. He could see the phantom of it distorted and stretched by the corners of the television screen, segmented into a grid so small it was difficult to imagine, little panels of color. Across the shape of his muzzle, two dancers swung each other in wild circles for a game show's prize. He looked into his own eyes, black and undefined in the electronic haze.

"Maybe I won't like it. Anton smoked anything." Kelly sniffed and Mike flicked an ear.

"Not everything. How do you know that, anyway? He sure wasn't doing it at home, boy."

"I heard it around town."

"I bet you did."

Mike still didn't turn around. Something about acknowledging the need to felt too much like acquiescing to Kelly's words, giving truth to them. There was little he could say in response. The mobile home's living room felt like it became bigger by the moment, leaving him dwindling into the corner of the couch.

"Bet you heard a lot around town. 'Least you look like you're bulking up better than he did. You know what they used to say about 'im?" Michael swallowed. Kelly sounded a little angrier, now, his voice twisting into an irritated twang for the last few syllables. "Said that it was a surprise Anton was so skinny - he never went a day without meat in his mouth." The trailer went so quiet that Michael could hear the buzz of the muted television, phantom sound from laughing faces. Mike looked down at his thighs. His claw picked at a loose string while a dull throbbing began in his temple.

"D'you, uh- d'you think that we could try a sample?" Jesse's voice trembled so badly when he spoke that it didn't even sound like him. Without looking up or waiting for Kelly's response, Michael let out an atrophied, shuddering breath and shot to his paws, dusting off nothing from his shirt.

"I need to go to the bathroom."

Kelly was much closer than he'd realized, standing just behind the couch. He looked down his short muzzle, and Michael looked up, trying to hold a stare back despite the tremble in his spine. Kelly's scent was strong, this close. Old cigarettes, the acerbic cut of minty cologne. Sweat, some kind of motor oil, the sour smell of weed days prior. He noticed a small bird tattooed on the cat's bicep, nearly in his armpit, that he'd missed before.

"Down the hall. On the left." Once given an escape route, Mike collapsed down it like water through a broken vessel. Dark, faceless figures watched him from the pictures in the hall, and the shadow of the trailer's furthest rooms swallowed him up. The cold was even more profound here, enough to make the Brittany shiver anew as he pushed open the last door on the left. The dark bathroom tile looked dirty even with the light turned off, and his silhouette was practically invisible in the mirror until a blade of artificial light, razor-thin, slid across his eyes.

Michael never did find out where that light came from. Nor did he ever truly understand, for that matter, why he decided to enter Kelly Thompson's cracked bedroom door, or how the cat never saw him do it. What he found within was understanding enough.

-

Mike never really understood what 'sex' smelled like until he entered Kelly's bedroom. Some portion of his brain concerned only with biological objectivity identified it immediately: a musty, heady odor that he'd never smelled before and with no discernible source. It hung in the air, unable to filter through the closed windows or dusty air vents. Michael took his time walking through that air, dragging his pads through the carpet and letting his weight settle onto each paw in turn, splay them silently into the fuzz, test to see if the floor would creak before taking another step.

A small TV stacked with VHS tapes buzzed on a dead channel. A few guns lay along the walls in different places, forming crude borders between which cheap furniture and stacked cigarette cartons supported an eclectic selection of old jackets, dog tags, dying house plants, and odd machinery that Michael didn't recognize outside of snippets from watching CSI. Burners and scales, hot plates and syringes. One thing did catch his eye, though: a milk crate filled to the brim with writhing bodies on paper. Magazines, he noted as he drew closer, like the ones they sold in the back of the local Video Hut. There were all kinds there. Here, there were only dogs. Michael looked at the top.

The magazine's cover had lost its gloss over the years. It _looked_old in the way that flimsy gas-station magazines often did, but more by rigorous use than by inherent cheap production. "BOYS IN THE POUND," the thing was called, and behind a chain link fence, barely-clothed men - mostly canines, though a cat was in the background of the shot - cast smoldering looks to the photographer. Fake toughness. Mike could tell - their tails weren't tucked, their ears weren't flat. The way they showed their teeth was halfway to grin rather than baring. Shiny chain was connected to loose-fitting collars and most of them had their hips jutting forward, none of the closed-off nervousness that other dogs could recognize immediately.

Because it wasn't for dogs. Of course it wasn't.

Mike leaned forward and carefully slipped his claws under the spine, lifting it from the stack to look underneath. An earlier edition with a bird dressed as a doctor gazed up from the shadowy stack below, and beneath it, the barely-unearthed look of a basket muzzle over a drooling snout. Ensconced within a cartoonish circle of chain was the issue number. Fifteen. Below, fourteen, each in order, spines facing the same way.

Muffled speech drifted foglike from beyond the door, filtered through the dingy carpet that stuffed the gap.

"... sure... hear about..."

"Nobody ... whole time."

They sounded occupied. Michael lifted the magazine. The back cover stuck in a couple places to the one beneath it, and he grimaced at the sound it made, pausing with the thing half-lifted to see if the conversation outside had stopped. He lifted his right ear with his fingers and really focused.

"...nobody... disappears ..."

"Well..."

A fast tug separated the two with a crinkle of paper and small rip. The issue below lost a small gash of color. Mike wrinkled his nose and experimentally scratched at the patch with his index finger, finding it didn't peel easily. The magazine itself possessed a crinkly quality to it, with sections of the pages that felt stiff and crunchy. He rolled it into a tube to feel the paper creak, running his hand across the front. He could hear Kelly's voice still, muffled behind him. It sounded a little heated - the cat's yowling voice was broken up by slamming drawers and cupboards.

Michael considered the magazine for a few moments, and then he thumbed it open.

THE BEST A MAN CAN GET!

A coy bobcat demonstrated a condom around a few fingers. Two spread it wide and the third, claw out, pressed at it hard from the inside. Wide and Tough for your Wildest Times. An essay entitled A Visit to Florida; Miami's Secret Clubs Exposed. Michael looked up for a moment around the room. Did Kelly want to go someplace warm like that? The trailer was so damn cold it didn't seem likely. It was a strange thought, imagining the cat anywhere but Whitegrass: this place suited him. Where else could a trailer like this perch so perfectly at the edge of town? He flipped a few more pages and placed the magazine back into its pile, walking back to the closed bedroom door. Jesse and Kelly again, a little clearer than before through the din of air conditioning fans.

"Your friend doing..."

"I just think he's a little nervous..."

Michael slowed, releasing the doorknob. From the corner of his vision, he could see the front-facing window and knew Ish was just beyond it. The fluttering curtain laid over it cast a spinning slant of light along the room, illuminating by turns the floating cloud of dust motes in the air and casting a spotlight on the rumpled mess of Kelly's bed, a mound of pillows creating a makeshift back-support and a heap of prescription bottles on the bedside. Mike picked one of them up, turning it over in his hand and reading the label. He didn't recognize the name or the large blue pills inside, setting it back down.

A pouty-eyed dog looked up at him.

Slowly, he lifted the pill bottle again and pushed the others aside, taking care not to rattle them too much. In the shadowed darkness of Kelly Thompson's bedroom, he worked the magazine out from under the heap of medicine and turned it over in his hand. More BOYS IN THE POUND. Issue nine. On the cover, a fire-lit hearth warmed a picturesque living room and Christmas tree surrounded with suggestively-shaped packages. A golden retriever, his eyes covered with a silken blindfold, lay sprawled out in front of the fire with his wrists and ankles tied together with bright red bows. He seemed to be smiling around a candy cane clutched carefully in his jaws. Goldens had soft mouths like that. They could hold an egg without cracking it. He'd heard that from his dad on the way home from getting his jaw strength tested when he was little.

As Mike went to set it down, the top of the magazine caught his eye. The corner of a receipt stuck out from its pages. The Brittany worked his claw along the edge of it, parting the magazine's pages to the marked pair. It fell open easily, exposing the glue of its spine with no fuss. The pages, folded over themselves so often, assumed this position naturally like two thighs dropping open. Michael followed the crease between the pages with his index claw. It was well-worn out; with a bit of pressure, he could tear through and rip a gash in the spine if he wanted. He pushed only a little, waiting until he could imagine the fibers of paper separating from themselves like wood grain splintering.

It was a two-page spread.

The crease in the middle, cleverly hidden along the borders of some photos, was pressed flat anyway to let the three images sit even with one another. His eyes went to the left first, where a new floppy-eared dog smiled over his shoulder at the camera. Behind him, a fireplace illuminated his fur in gold and red, dressing the brown and white with rosy tones. Mikey's fingers lingered in that space of the photographer's light, the very edge of his pad feeling it like there might be some ghostly warmth.

He could not keep his gaze from roaming, nor did he make an effort to. There was the faintest curve of the canine's balls visible from between his legs, and his round, perky hind seemed almost to perch on the photograph's frame. The room was warm and hazy, light bleed making the finer details difficult to pick out. Even so, his eyes were a rich green that gleamed through everything.

"I bet they edited you," Mike whispered. "I bet they brightened these for you."

Below, the same dog lay stretched on a velvety couch, one leg hiked up and his long, furry tail draped between his legs. It covered little, though, and it was just as well. From over the back slunk a cat, short-haired, sleek, dressed in a Christmas hat. Santa's little treat, that one. Mike trailed his fingers down over the dog's body again, and then the cat's. His breathing slowed.

"Is that what you like? Is that what you thought about when you saw him?" Mike felt something stir in the back of his head that he had difficulty putting words to. The sliver of eye that the cat showed, just a few dots in the printer's matrix, made his jaw clench. Something between the two of them, something that stole each other's glance, something that pushed the camera out. The dog with computer-green eyes had floppy ears - it was obvious at this angle, with how they lifted to triangles as he let his head fall back. One sported a piercing that the flash caught, glistening in the lower flap of his right ear. Mike exhaled.

The right page of the two was a single picture, glossy and wide shot.

One bright eye again, straight over the cat's shoulder. The two became a single shape in the fireplace-lit room, a tangle of arms and legs differentiated only by fur pattern. Otherwise they were one mass, their edges smudged by the fire's burning charcoal, a sense of fullness between the two that made the room feel empty, scorned. The dog's toes were splayed out, paws flexed in some kind of powerful feeling - he showed his teeth in an open-mouth cry that was difficult to read. Ecstasy? Discomfort? Bliss? The cat was simple enough with his open muzzle and glistening string of drool hanging from his tongue, rocking on his toned, muscular legs and driving himself into the dog's body, bringing out that cry louder and louder.

A Saint Bernard, perhaps, at this angle. His muzzle was just a little droopy, his paws surprisingly big. His fur was cleaned up, sure, but he held that look that certain breeds of dog did. His mom called it the hound dog look - 'little bit of sad, lotta bit of wanting: the look that makes them so damn good at singing the blues.' Anton had it. He'd heard it around town after his brother left and he heard it when they were kids too. Saint Bernards were no Brittanies, but by the firelight, Michael could swear that they shared a resemblance. The light of longing in that look, the parted mouth, all begging for something he couldn't define.

Even in the faint illumination that Kelly's bedroom offered, he could see the light play off cloudy marks on the paper. Both sides, but especially the last- when Mike bent the page, it crinkled. He exhaled, and on the inhale, a faint scent wafted up from the pages, pungent and bitter. There it was again. There was so much: the magazine was well-used. Well-loved, if those things meant the same. Without moving his head, Michael's eyes flicked upwards and fixed on the door. Thin, a gold nimbus of fluorescent lighting waited. The slack-jawed doorknob was ready for him for him, offering Kelly and Jesse beyond. Michael closed his eyes, dropped the magazine, let his fingers trace the edge of the handle and walked through.

When Jesse would look back at Michael Carpenter's first time buying weed in Kelly's trailer, he sought a clue that he never found. He would just remember the way that Mike's smile lasted even when Kelly wasn't looking at him, how his attitude was completely different after he returned from the bathroom. The Brittany stared at him even when the old cat got the dingy plastic bags out and used a squeaky brass grinder to pack a pipe, even when his back was turned as he weighed out their prize. Jesse would remember how little he blinked, the way he let his ears relax and his shoulders slump to seem smaller. Mikey even laughed a few times at the dark-eyed cat's jokes, but the laugh was higher than normal, glassy and sharp. So different was it from the laugh that Jesse heard after at HONG KONG RESTAURANT that it seemed almost like a call from a different room in the dog's throat, a cry echoed through an altogether different church.

-

The ghost-blue glow of evening television lifted through the floor like a vapor, gathering thick near the carpet and fading as it went higher. Michael aspirated it, letting the scent of dust and old air freshener roll over his senses. When his lungs felt full he'd hold his breath a while before releasing, allowing the humidity to filter through the fibers. It was the news, like it always was. The anchor's timbre rolled through his skin, mumbling something he couldn't decipher. Across his bedroom, he watched Ish's chest rise and fall. Somewhere above him, Jesse was asleep too, both unconscious in the invisible stream of information that came from below. Only the rhythm and syntax were preserved, etchings in limestone. Mike ran his hand in slow circles, hooked his claws in some of the carpet's knots and tugged.

Stories of the missing. Tales with a person-shaped hole in the middle. Every night when they thought he went to bed, his parents would put on the news and watch it for hours. Sometimes, Michael crept to the edge of the stairs where he'd watch them too, scan their faces for reactions to what scrolled on the TV far to the side and beyond his sight. Tonight, as they often did, they seemed to radiate frightened hope at each tale of a rescued transient, of grainy photographs that said things like "missing person" and "if you have any information, please call."

Mike's room had changed a lot since Anton left. The living half of a dead Siamese twin, the wall that the two rooms shared was plastered nearly ceiling to floor with posters. The ones nearly all the way overlapped were a little older. Van Halen, Joan Jett, and New Order lay under brighter faces - White Stripes, Good Charlotte, the Chili Peppers. His TV sat in that corner too, flanked with a long, squat shelf on one side that held the staggered rib-cages of games and DVDs that leaned against each other in every available space. The newer ones rested horizontal like little miniature bookends, separating the thoroughly-loved titles from the well-intentioned Christmas gifts and birthday surprises. The floor, Michael never covered. It dampened the sound too much, closed the room in. Only one wall needed insulation in a house like this.

He closed his eyes to the paused Mortal Kombat screen to better catch what was coming from below. His mother's voice, quiet. His father's, resigned. The television grew quieter then. He rolled over to look at Ish, watch his shoulders lift and drop so rhythmically it seemed clockwork. The bear didn't sleep with his eyepatch on, and every so often, Michael had the thought to lift his eyelid, soft as a sheep, and look at the mess of his eye like a surgeon peering down at a project that he was grateful he'd never have to fix.

He tried to force himself to sleep, counting his breathing in and out and making his shoulders go limp. His paws splayed out and relaxed, tail hit the ground in a soft rhythm until the sound. Somewhere between a creak and an impact, dispersed and hollow, pushed at the shared wall. Michael's eyes opened. Even with the weed from earlier, the buzz had worn off and now there was something keeping him up, constantly nipping at his heels, so he rose from the ground to follow it. Michael felt his heart beat fast but he wasn't afraid.

"Where you goin'?"

Ish sounded so much older when he was asleep. Like his dad.

"Just downstairs for a drink."

"Mmh. Bad dream?" The ursine began to push himself up.

"No. I'm good." Michael smiled, and Ish went back to sleep.

Mike walked to his door slowly, making sure to let his paw fully spread and hold his weight before he went to take another step. No thumping or creaking, just the imperceptible rustle of carpet as he left the room and pulled the door almost-closed, just before the latch clicked. In the dark hall, he waited for the time it would have taken for him to make it to the top of the stairs, then took a couple steps backwards, resting his hand on the cold knob of the next room over. Thumb on the lower screw, index on the very top. A quick twist - if it went too slow, the knob would squeak - 180 degrees. The youngest Carpenter boy didn't breathe as he pulled, overcoming the eggshell-white door's faint resistance.

When a house was on fire, there was a terrible danger of something called a backdraft - Michael remembered hearing about this at school once, during a mandatory drill. The fire in a closed room soon burned through every breath of oxygen that remained within, existing only on seeping dregs. Hot and hungry and quiet like a predator lying in wait, it took only a hapless young thing to fling open a door hoping to find and rescue a stuffed animal or tragically trapped pet to feed it the oxygen that it needed. Then, the compartment fire would explode out of the open door or window, incinerating whoever happened to be standing there. Fur and whiskers would burn first, resulting in unimaginable pain as the skin beneath went next. There was only relief when it hit nerve-deep, but usually you were dead before you even felt it.

Cold air touched Michael's nose. There was no yawning sound, no flow of fog from the secret corners. It was just cold. Cold like old garages in warm houses were cold. It smelled faintly, now, of dust. A perfect rectangle of darkness opened into Anton's old bedroom, giving away nothing and allowing no light to walk within. Michael stood, framed by that nothing, for what felt to him like whole minutes. Then he stepped inside.

Once in, the supreme darkness became altogether less oppressing. Residual light from the hall bounced off of his eyes and helped him see - no doubt causing a bit of glassy eyeshine as he looked around. It was the same as it had always been. Nothing changed in the night or was moved. The top quilt on Anton's bed was still gone, the curtains still fastened with a safety pin. All the lamps, on stands and on his desk, tall ones on the floor and nearly bare bulbs hanging from his closet rod, were still there. His parents had left those lights on in here until the filaments burst, Michael remembered. They probably still had electricity going to them, even after all this time.

Nine lamps but the window pinned shut. For a small time after his brother's vanishing, this was the mystery that gave Mike's life definition. He rooted obsessively through his only sibling's things, searching for some kind of explanation, some kind of clue like there always was in a game or a book. There was nothing. The adventures that he and Anton read, pages plastered with dust, were still a chronicle of fantasies come and gone and offered as little help to him now as they did then.Trouble in Titan Springs. The Frightful Tale of Fenghast Fane. The Disappearance on the Dam. There were no clues scrawled in the margins and nothing brought a flash of clarity.

The cigarette burns in the carpet, hidden by the cheap throw rugs and cord-wrapped controllers, were no constellation. His band posters spelled no message. Michael rested the tip of his claw on the ashtray by the window sill - still full of crumbling gray - and tipped it a little, letting it come rattling back to equilibrium. It was an ugly orange color, with a raw, shattered edge that showed the thick ceramic on all sides. It looked a little like a broken jar or piece of a flower pot, no markings anywhere on it, not even a manufacturer's label. Of the loose ends, this was his favorite. Mundane and mysterious, significant yet left behind. He'd taken so much else - a handful of his favorite books, his jacket, his guitar, the folded picture of Calvin that he thought nobody knew about underneath his mattress, all of his weed, all but two of his lighters, and his gym bag. Mike knew each thing taken. He'd counted. He left the ashtray and let himself look at something else that was left behind - a picture, framed in green, of him and Anton in front of the Ferris Wheel at the state fair.

All in its place. Nothing had moved.

Mike padded to the head of Anton's bed, turned his gaze upon the rumpled sheets and wrinkled pillow. With one finger, he traced a new series of wrinkles into it - a different impression, equally meaningless as the last. The lingering scents in here had since retreated like moray eels, and even disturbing the fabric could not coax them out. No breeze disturbed the pinned curtains. Slender pins of light snuck between the gaps in the fabric, tenacious slivers of the streetlights outside. Mike stretched his hand forward, hooked his claw through the middle of the safety pin, and pulled it towards him. Thin metal strained at its latch and the fabric billowed with newfound air, then his father's voice came from behind him.

"Mikey?"

He let the curtains go. He'd left the door open, hadn't he? Of course, and he hadn't heard his parents ascend the stairs either. His eyes closed, and he couldn't think of what to say. He let his dad talk instead.

"What are you doing in here?"

"Just looking."

Mr. Carpenter stepped beside him and tugged on the corners of the pillow, smoothing it out. Michael moved to take a step back and his father's hand caught him, pushing on the middle of his back and urging him to stay. He did, long enough to watch his father carefully brush off a few bits of dust from the messy sheets. He looked around, surveying the room, and then walked to the bookshelf and pulled one of the titles off. The Wizard of Wintercastle.

"Here."

He took it. It felt like a brick in his hand.

"Why?"

"He would have wanted you to have it."

Michael looked down at the cover. A frosty-haired old man in the middle of swinging his staff was chanting something. A crease ran through the cover, splitting his face in half. Anton hated this book. He said it was boring and cheesy, that anything about actually fighting dragons was lame. The cold of the room burned the corners of Michael's eyes. A vein stood out on his temple and his wrists trembled until he clenched his hands and forced them to stop. What began as a swelling ache in the middle of his chest dulled a little with every beat of his heart until it faded into a heat, and that heat faded into the entropy of the room. He looked up at his dad and blinked away the swimming haze in his eyes.

"Yeah." Michael lifted the corner of his mouth.

"Head back to bed. Say your prayers."

"Yes, Dad. Sorry."

Michael walked backwards to the doorway until he stood in it once more. His father was a wounded oak, his shoulders slumped but his head high, hands limp at his sides, heavy with a phantom weight. In the unintelligible darkness of Anton's old room, his father was an idiot translator faced with an impossible task, and the story he wrote was not one that Michael wanted to hear. As he excused himself, his father spoke again.

The words lingered in his head as he walked in reverse back to his bedroom, let himself in as quietly as he'd left. He thought about them as he lay back down on the floor, finding the impression his body left was still warm. Michael Carpenter would wonder for a long time to come what his father meant when he said it; he considered who he was saying it for, why he said it at all, and what he hoped to accomplish, if any of those things even existed.

"I know you miss him."

In the coming weeks, Michael went back to Anton's old room often to ensure it was still the same. Nothing ever moved. He never heard the sound again either, but on dark nights as he walked to his bedroom, Mikey sometimes thought that he heard a lamp click off in the room beside him.