Knock Knock, Open Wide

by Neil Sharpson

There was a silence so thick, you could hear the paper clinging to the walls.

They moved across the ground too quickly, with the hideous suddenness of lizards.

Found it, she thought.

She’d been having a lot of bad thoughts recently. She’d been pulling them up like weeds every hour of every day for weeks. She was starting to lose the fight. She was starting to succumb to sheer exhaustion, trying not to think the things that she was thinking.

“There’s like five lesbian fish in the whole ocean and I’ve already eaten one.”

Ah, there was the word. “Family.” It was an old Irish word. It meant: “Do nothing. Challenge nothing. Change nothing.”

the charred remains of Feidhlim Lowney’s home, jutting out of the weeds like a lower jaw full of rotten teeth,

But she remembered the priest vanishing down the stairway like a stage devil through a trapdoor.

He shook his head, his hands tugging the skin of his face taut. His lower eyelids yawned open, pink and wet like the mouths of baby birds.

Never have something that you can’t afford to lose.”

And then she gave a scream that sounded like it came from a thousand throats

She was coated in his blood, saturated. She had gone swimming in the man.

and they cried until everything but love was washed away.