Invisible Men. Eric Freeze

what happened to the previous owner: he went into the crawl space, lay down and decomposed into the ground. Just the overalls left. But an ending shouldn’t be so pathetic. Not for Inivisiman. He got up and walked outside.

      The wet spots felt like ice through the overalls. He wasn’t going to last long out here, not at night with the wet and the chill. But he wanted to see if Donna would come. He had left messages before, pleas for afternoon walks or movie nights, but usually to stave off boredom—never with that degree of desperation. He hoped she picked up on it. He replayed the words in his mind and tried to imagine how it would sound. The reception would be poor in the basement, but even through that she would hear the resignation in his voice. She would come, drive up into the yard, not stopping until she’d taken him from the basement. Talked some sense into him. Invisiman huddled in the bushes in his overalls and the branches speared his arms. At least he could still feel that. The numbness hadn’t reached through his core yet. He had twenty minutes, he figured, before he’d have to trek back inside. Would she come? He folded his invisible arms then lifted one of his hands up to press it to his cold ear. Just the tips were tingling now. She would come. She had to.

      Invisiman started to shake. His jaw was sore like he’d been grinding his teeth all night. He wondered if he could measure the cold by the regularity of his convulsions. Cars winked past, their headlamps illuminating the bushes and leaving the fading red glow of their taillights. He would look like just a pair of stiff overalls hung on some branches but refusing to move with the wind. The shaking began to subside and an oddly warm numbness started in his fingers and worked its way slowly up his arms and to his body.

      He had the urge to run.

      He rolled himself out of the bushes and then he was down the steps to the icy sidewalk. He crunched through the snow and managed a kind of dull shuffle, kicking up little chunks of ice that had frozen around old footprints. It couldn’t be too late yet, maybe seven or eight, but how long he was in the bushes he couldn’t be sure. Up ahead the road curved next to a ravine and he could make out a figure on the sidewalk coming toward him, the curves of a woman wrapped in fleece. Donna, it would be Donna. Please let it be Donna. Closer he could see a hat and gloves and reflective tape that shone bright slashes of yellow whenever a car passed. His skin was stiff as cardboard, a jumble of invisible bones and connective tissue under age-old overalls. But there was something off in the woman’s gait; she was pigeon-toed in a way that was unfamiliar and she bounced too much on the balls of her feet. This was not Donna. Just another woman out for a night jog. Still he approached, slowing now, only wanting to lie down. The woman sped up as she rounded the corner. She had seen him maybe, done the same kind of guessing about the figure moving closer in the night, starting to emerge like a photograph in a developing tray, the lines and contours finally gaining clarity. Her bouncy strides slowed and then stopped. Invisiman shuffled through the snow. He could see her eyes. Crow’s feet dimpled her skin as she squinted, then her eyes opened full so he could see the whites. Hello, he said, but his mouth was frozen, a tin man’s jaw rusted shut. It came out garbled, like his tongue had been cut out. She came closer, her head shifted, looking at him up and down but never at his face. She was close enough that he could smell her sweaty woolen hat. He reached, his invisible cudgel arms trying to find another body, and his wrists hit her shoulders. If he could just hold her for a while. Something warm. He tried to pull her in but she pivoted in his arms and tried to run. She slipped, and when he dove and caught her ankles her body landed on the snow like a felled tree. She called out, kicked at his invisible face. Hold on, he said. Please. Just give me some time to explain.

      Lone Wolf

      It is inconvenient being a wolf. Imagine this: spring, sitting in a desk when the stamens and petals of daffodils or day lilies or lilacs bloom, and the heady scent of pollen comes to you so strongly that your nose is full of it. You feel like you’ve shoved spray foam up your nostrils and your head is expanding like a pollen balloon. You can smell the pistils and the thin stalks of grasses and the small clovers like they were part of a spring cornucopia lining your desk. It’s stronger than you know how to say, because all the comparisons are human, and yet your wolf olfactory senses haven’t gone, nor have the field lice or the burrs that ended up in your hair. And, there’s this: you’re hungry.

      “You haven’t answered me, Jason.”

      You lift your head and drool connects you to your desk in thin strands like milk whites from a cracked egg, and Beth Geary and Gina Mars both say “ew” with their syrupy whines so loudly that Mr. Midge shushes them and you’re forced to respond.

      “I wasn’t really listening.”

      Mr. Midge sighs and he looks for a second like he’s going to cry. I don’t know why I intuit this because I am a wolf and human beings should be afraid, very afraid, but maybe it is my empathetic pack sense, my ability to know what others are thinking or feeling before they even know it themselves. And so it’s no surprise when he does cry, right then, and you can hear the students’ clothes rustling as they squirm and try to avoid eye contact. He sits down behind his desk and the ergonomic chair makes a shushing sound when it accommodates his weight. “Pointless,” we can hear him saying, and then he is logging onto his computer and sniffling. Nobody in class knows what to do. They are titmouse-silent, probably thinking what is wrong? But not me; I’m awake and hungry. This beast is alive.

      Outside, I want meat. Any meat. Something to stop the throbbing in my temples, to soak up my saliva. I think: venison, rabbit, squirrel, possum. Then the domestics: cat, dog, ferret, guinea pig, rat. Each has its own distinct flavor but I am not picky and the flesh of my schoolmates starts to look more and more appetizing. A friendship-braceleted arm of a first grader, smooth calves dangling from monkey bars like slabs of meat in a slaughterhouse. Once I look, I can’t stop. It’s Cardigan Whitmore I finally settle on: a ginger-haired gymnast who can put her feet behind her head. She is on the grass, bending her arms backward to touch her feet and she exposes her belly. For a moment, my wolf senses sharpen and filter out the pollen and fetid spring swamp smell and I zero in on little Cardigan—dumpy name for one so fit—and my body uncoils with panther-like agility toward my prey. My mouth is open, wet, and with a frenzied chomp, I attack her side and she falls to the ground screaming.

      “Get off of me you creep!” She is yelling—prey often resists—and I bury my face deeper into her and shake my jaws from side to side. Soon the flesh will rip and she will bleed. If she takes flight, she will be slower, more apt to stumble, and I will be upon her again. She knows this. She knows that if she lets me in for one more moment, her life will end and this induces an adrenaline panic. She needs out now