Just Like Home

by Sarah Gailey

The man wheezes, a high whistle from low in the chest that ends with a popping sound like when Vera blows bubbles into her milk with a straw at lunch.

It was nine o’clock, and she was going to claim the house her father had built.

Now, she was going to inform the other resident. She just had to catch it first.

The thing that struggled out from underneath Vera’s brand-new bed was the color of a struggling nightcrawler, the color of a cut finger, the color of an open mouth. It was a hot, visceral pink, marbled with dark veins, aggressively flesh. All of it, every angle and color and shadow, made Vera ache with want.

She was a Crowder. She’d finally gotten a taste of the thing that lived under the bed, and she wouldn’t rest until she’d gotten her fill.

“You’re the house.”

She finally knew what it was like, and she’d never felt anything so perfect in her whole life. She didn’t want to lose the sweet delicious electric rush of it. She didn’t want to let it end too soon.

Duvall’s corpse tumbled down the stairs to the floor of the basement with the heavy loose-limbed inevitability of dropped groceries.