Atticus Jackson

Pulverizer...

Something else probably should have happened other than what we actually did, which was pack those intestines into a garbage bag, then mop up the blood with what must have been a whole bottle of bleach.

We should have called someone, should have maybe taken a minute to try and understand what we'd just seen so we could explain ourselves.

But really, how do you ever tell anyone that your best friend died via spontaneous disintegration that maybe happened because he watched a movie?

So, we didn't say anything.

Plus, I couldn't pull Logan away from the couch after that.

He came around just enough to help me load up the little bits of Corey into a bag and take them out back where the heat was no doubt already stinking them up really good.

And then, he was back at the TV, starting the combination over, trying to get back to the place where we could see if there was more to this thing.

We made it through two movies before the first cut opened on Logan's body.

Logan winced, held up his right hand, and we both watched as a thin vertical line of red appeared in the space between the knuckles of his first and second fingers.

It wasn't split skin either, the kind you get when it's the dead of winter and you've washed your hands too much.

This was a clean, deep cut.

Like watching my mom butterfly open a chicken breast so she could stuff it.

Blood bloomed in the little canyon of flesh the cut left behind.

But Logan did nothing beyond wincing, not until I reached out with an old takeout napkin and shoved it over the wound.

God of razors.

He looked at me like he expected me to have some kind of symptom too, that we couldn't imagine what, since I'd never told him what my movie was about.

I could barely remember myself.

I just remembered a blackness, and those teeth, and something shuffling out from the cosmos to devour.

That hollow feeling returned in my gut, but I didn't have time to dwell on it, because by then, another cut was spreading across Logan's forehead, this one so deep I could see the paleness of his skull beneath it.