Please Tell Me

by Mike Omer

She had a bit more time before it started. That unsettling drawing came to her mind. She’d seen morbid drawings by kids many times before. But there was something in the way Kathy swirled the red paint, and in the void-like mouth of the person she’d drawn, that stayed with her.

And then there was a shopping cart traffic jam caused by a man who placed his in the middle of the aisle as he examined cereal boxes. Men shouldn’t be allowed to go shopping in the supermarket. They should be shot on sight if they walked in.

She stumbled to Mom’s bedroom, about to drop onto the bed, when the dollhouse caught her eye. A few minutes later, she walked out the front door, carrying the enormous dollhouse in her arms, a turmoil of vindication and fear in her gut.

she wild for that

Kathy placed the tree with the noose next to the dancer and then tried to mime as if the clown was placing the noose over the dancer’s head. It was too complicated. The noose kept unraveling from the branch, and the dancer dropped from Kathy’s fingers twice. Finally, she put the clown away and looped the noose around the ballet dancer’s head. She let go. The dancer swung back and forth from the tree’s limb. Stabbed and then hanged. Just like the influencer, Haley Parks, whose body had been found in the forest a few weeks before.

They entered the structure. A small house, its walls crumbling, the roof broken. The floor was wet, water trickling from the ceiling everywhere. She blinked as she saw the graffiti on the walls. It was the ruined house she’d been to with Claire. The place where the police had found Kathy’s shoes.