The Twisted Ones

by T. Kingfisher

This must be what going mad feels like. I made faces like the faces on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones, and I lay down flat on the ground like the dead ones.

What I am getting at here is that my dog is not a reliable indicator of Bad Things Going Down.

Starting to dream about them. Not like nightmares, but think they’re watching me. They’re close. These hills are full of them, I think.

Bongo’s nose is far more intelligent than the rest of him, and I believe it uses his brain primarily as a counterweight).

But I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t leave. My dog was out there somewhere. Until I had him back, or had proof he wasn’t coming back, I was going to stay.

It was—okay, you remember The Shining? I felt like I was flipping through a stack of papers that said All work and no play… over and over again, but I hadn’t yet turned around to see Jack Nicholson standing there grinning at me.

I had a mad image of Foxy and me, two unlikely hobbits lugging a two-hundred-pound rock to Mount Doom.

I snorted. Moonshiners and white supremacists. Lovely.

Well. If Bongo could survive the things in the woods, surely anyone with two brain cells to rub together could do so as well.

There was mayonnaise on the sandwich. Maybe when we met the holler people, Bongo’s gas would knock them out.

it was another rock like the one in the Green Book, and thus there was a slim chance it might try to get me pregnant,

The entire situation was completely batshit loony, and here I was blushing because among the batshit loony things was a statue with a big honking dick on it.

I did not much like the prospect of someone magicking my dog, but if it meant that nobody got killed and Bongo wasn’t pissing himself in terror, that was what mattered, right?

“Kinda reminds me of that stuff in pyramids. Or the others. The big winged bulls.” “Assyrian?” “Don’t you swear at me.”

I’d go to… to a mall or a Walmart or something. Surely unholy abominations wouldn’t follow me to Walmart.