The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

I’m a freelance editor. I turn decent books into decently readable books and hopeless books into hopeless books with better grammar. It’s a living.

Dad said he’d had the power turned back on. No Internet, but that’s why God invented cellular data plans.

You can’t let coonhounds off the leash, not ever. They’ll smell a rabbit and wind up in the next county.

When you’re a kid, you’re always wrong if you’re mad at a grown-up. But now a grown-up had agreed with me, and that meant that maybe I was right after all.

The South is weird.

If you are ever planning on having a serious conversation with people you barely know, about weird carvings on an impossible hill behind your house, try to get a better soundtrack.

But families run on optimistic lies sometimes, so neither of us called the other one out on it and we said goodbye.

Clearly I was developing radio Stockholm syndrome, on top of my other problems.

My voice sounded very calm. It sounded like my aunt’s voice more than mine. It sounded like a grown-up’s voice and not at all like someone who was about to cry or scream or curl up in the bathroom and wait to be eaten by monsters.

The man with the cracked skin turned his head and looked at her. His pupils dilated wrong. I’d have thought he was on drugs, except for the bit where I was in a cold city on the far side of impossible and if anybody was on drugs I would probably ask them if they’d share.

If you’re thinking that I was focusing on something inconsequential in order to not think about what was happening, you are absolutely correct.

Surely unholy abominations wouldn’t follow me to Walmart.

Let it burn. Let this awful place and its secrets and its nightmares and the dead I hadn’t asked for and the junk I never wanted burn.