Those We Left Behind, and Other Sacrifices

by Brandon Applegate

When people ask me what I write about, I tell them “I write about what scares me.” But I’m not afraid of body parts coming up through shower drains, carnivorous fairies, or shape-shifting Martians. In these stories, I’m afraid of the choices that lead to them—turning a blind eye to a child’s pain, giving in to anger and bitterness, making the wrong decision in a crisis, failing to see what needs to be done. Those are the things that keep me awake long into the night, staring into the blackness, the primal parts of my brain warning me of predators that slink in the corners, and telling me stories about things that crawl in the ancient dark. And that’s where these stories come from. Some of this is real. Some of this is make-believe. I’m not going to tell you which is which right now because that breaks the spell. If I’ve done my job here, it’s all real.

I have a good feeling

“It wasn’t long before the young man figured out he and his new brothers had been tricked. He hadn’t been sent there to help. They’d sent him to do terrible things. And he did them—he killed people, sometimes the same people he wanted to protect.

Yeah that sounds about right. At least for the US military.

A hole in the universe in the shape of a girl through which I could see the paper on which we all are drawn, the pen strokes crawling up her form like scratches on an old film.

I am tired of being a disappointment. It’s such a mistake to put all your happiness in someone else’s hands like she has in mine. I am clumsy and don’t know what to do with breakable things.

That last sentence. Wow.

The bread has green and white spots on it, but Maddie ignores them. She opens her mouth and bites down, feeling the crunch then a warm squirt. Some juice dribbles from her bottom lip and gathers in the divot above her chin. She tongues the sandwich to the back of her mouth then chews, crunching it like a lollipop.

Thanks i hate it

“We open at eleven,”

We open at eight if you want to buy something else.”

Bestie you just said you opened at eleven tho??

Roots crawled from Suarez’s mouth into Harland’s, tentatively at first, exploring. The mouths at the tendrils’ ends lapped at the moisture inside his cheeks, on his tongue. Let them come. They crawled down his throat in choking spirals.

No thank youuuu no thank you sirrr

Silence sits heavily, wrapping around him like a cloak. Pasture stretches out all around. Stars blaze like blue fire. The world is monochrome. Out here, everything is big, the whole night stretches to the universe’s end like a great sigh and he’s a speck floating on the current.

There’s something frightening about a father. Children know on some primal level that Daddy might sooner eat or abandon them than stay and raise them.

“It is the secret nobody ever tells you about being a tree. First you must be small and weak and frail; if you can survive this, you can survive anything. In that way, I think being a tree is very much like being a man.”

I cross the room in three steps, too aggressively. I grab Emily with both hands. Her screams are wild like a cornered animal. God dammit, I’m not going to hurt you. I hold her tight, restricting her arms and legs. Gotta get the message across.

............

"I don't know what's going on in your head, and it's okay. I'll be here when you're done," he says. "I'll always be here when you're done."

Timothy thought about an article he read some time ago about how dust is made up mostly of dead skin. He thought about the pieces of his mother that were still there. How much of her was embedded in the walls, the cracks in the floor? They would never be able to extract her fully from this room. In the graveyard, she was dead, decaying, melting into the earth, but she’d been dying here for years, little pieces sloughing off and floating to rest among the junk.

"Beginnings are always preceded by endings. Renewal by destruction, rebirth by violent death."

“Everyone here has obtained their wealth by the sweat of their brow. We have prospered because we are stronger, smarter, and more diligent.

Press F to doubt

Gray flesh slapped haphazardly against bone and cartilage. Remnants of pink, rotted muscle, split over the knees and at the shoulders so the meat can shine through, white in places, like flaking catfish. Its black hair hangs shoulder-length and its breasts droop. Its stomach is swollen, and something moves inside.

Gross

The trees moved, jerky and mechanical at first, but gaining grace. Their bark liquefied and pooled until the massive trunks turned black and viscous.

Dont like that

Before him stood a gigantic black dog, wet and sleek. At the end of its neck, where a dog’s head should have been, sat a gore-caked human skull, its eye sockets empty except for an unnatural yellow light, mouth crammed with canine fangs. A thick, gray, human tongue lolled from its mouth. Its wounded shoulder bubbled and smoked from the cut. It unhinged its jaw and from deep in its throat issued the scream of a human baby.

Thats dope as fuck

Writing (or art of any kind, really) is sort of like a Rorschach test. What the artist puts on the page, and what the reader sees, are often reflections of things they see in themselves. For me, that works especially well when I’m not paying attention.