The Devil Crept In

by Ania Ahlborn

That part of the creek was so remote, Stevie liked to think that he and Jude were the only ones to have explored it since dinosaurs had roamed the earth.

She looked a lot like Velma from Scooby-Doo, if Velma had been a hundred years old.

Whoever had taken him had messed him up, stirred up his brains with a screwdriver through the eye, and now he’d rather sleep than hang out.

Rosie’s mother assured her that her dad didn’t mean it. He loves you, she’d say. He means well. But his thoughtless cruelty had crawled beneath Rosie’s skin.

The gunk inside his brain made both riddles and arithmetic problems almost impossible to solve.

The thought curdled as soon as it surfaced.

Perhaps that’s why he saw things differently—the shadow people, the maggots in his cereal, spiders stuffed inside his pillowcase that his mother insisted weren’t there.