#183

Brett Reed made a ragged ball out of his saturated sweat shirt and tossed it into the waiting mouth of the dryer. He was still wondering where the hell the rain had come from, forcing the cancellation of the tennis lesson he was due to teach, when the little girl stepped out of the washing machine, next to where he had been about to poke the dryer into action.

"Jesus!" He staggered back, curls of black hair poking through the hand he clamped against his damp chest.

The girl straightened, her legs horribly warped and twisted as if by some disease ignorance and half a proper education had kept from Brett's awareness.

She was naked, her chest yawning wide in a bloodless and pitch-dark vertical eye. Her almost-white hair had been cropped short, seemingly by a blunt scissors and with little affection. Beneath the alabaster brow, milky, leaking white eyes stared at Brett.

"Where is she?" the girl hissed and Brett shook his head, perplexed and frightened all at once, inspired to flee but paralyzed by amazement at what the deceptively benign washer had birthed. The child's face was crisscrossed with angry red scratches that looked fresh and drew the eye away from the perverse exposure of her chest cavity.

"Who are you?" he stammered and felt the wall behind him for his tennis racquet.

"Where is she?" the girl repeated and twitched as if shocked by a sudden current from the machine at her back.

"I don't know who you're talking about."

Her face crackled into a toothless smile. "Yes, you do. She loved you."

Brett frowned and felt his stomach tighten, sending bile shooting up his throat.

"She loves you, but you did some nasty things to her, didn't you?"

The child wobbled forward and Brett was compelled to abandon his search for a weapon. Watching the child--who to all intents and purposes should be dead--closing the distance between them, he reluctantly acknowledged the fact that nothing would save him from this waking nightmare.

The child stopped, smiled. Crackle. She cocked her head and stared up at a point in the corner of the room, somewhere above where Brett's bladder was at that moment giving up the ghost.

God, please help me, he thought. I'm a fucking addict and I've made some bad calls, but I'll make it up to you if you please, please, please make this thing go away.

"I hate her, you know," the child continued and Brett flinched, his shoulder blades attempting to force their way through the wall as if this bizarre scenario nullified their obligation to stay within their owner's body.

The child looked back at him. The motion was accompanied by the sound of shells being crushed underfoot as the ragged bones in her neck ground together.

"After you made me, she hurt me. It was awful."

"Wh-who?"

The corners of the girl's mouth drew downward in synch with her brow. "Why are you pretending you don't know?"

Brett swallowed, his voice close to breaking. "Because I don't. I don't know who you are. I don't know who 'she' is. I don't have a fucking clue what's happening here."

"You put your dirty thing into her, so you must know her," she said.

"What?" To hear this coming from the mouth of a child, or whatever the hell this thing was, spun the volume up on his fear.

"You put your dirty, filthy thing into her."

"Into who?"

The girl stepped closer, swaying on her broken feet, the bones rolling beneath mottled greenish blue skin. "Into her."

The sob escaped, forced outward by the weight of desperation buoying to the top of his throat. "I don't understand."

This time when she smiled, it was almost human. "Don't worry. I didn't understand either, until she used a clothes hangar to teach me. Did she try to make you understand?"

He slid to the floor and lowered his head, welcoming the darkness when he covered his weeping eyes with his hands. It's not real. I'm not seeing her. He repeated this over and over and over again, sometimes aloud but more often in his head, where nothing could touch him.

"Not to worry," the girl croaked, and this time her voice sounded awfully close. "I'll help you understand everything."

Brett, braving a peak through the safety of his fingers, only saw her eyes before there was nothing left to hide behind.