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In the lonely town of Jasper, nestled among the pine thickets of East Texas, the sun sets as I pull in for gas. Three hundred miles down, f our hundred to go before I reach Dad's funeral. A north wind barely tempers the summer heat, even as night approaches. The courthouse across the street seems frozen in the 1960s. On its front porch, convicts in striped uniforms sweep under a police officer's watchful eye.

A ticket lies at my feet, its paper is crisp and white despite the date printed across its face: June 15, 1966. It looks fresh off the printing press, advertising a carnival at 1629 County Road 266. Dad used to talk about a carnival from when he was a kid—said it changed him forever, and that it took more than it gave. I'd always thought it was another of his drunken stories, like the ones he'd tell on those nights I'd have to pick him up from O'Malley's Bar. But now, standing here, I remember how his hands would shake when he talked about it, even when he was sober, how he'd look at me like he was trying to warn me about something he couldn't put into words.

The gas pump suddenly clunks. Sliding back into the car, the ticket feels cool against my palm. Against my better judgment, I punch the address into my navigation and pull away from the gas station.

The warm glow of my screen begins to eclipse the falling sun. I might be the only person in this town, except for the officer and inmates back at the courthouse. Shop lights flicker within the General Store at the corner. What a strange little town.

The county road dead-ends north of town, with train tracks running parallel a few hundred yards to the east. There, in a grassy clearing, stands a looming yellow circus tent surrounded by carnival rides and attractions.

The flattened grass barely cushions the crunching gravel under my tires. I park, alone. The sun has completely set now, leaving only a single light above the circus tent to illuminate the carnival grounds. Carnivals always felt like sensory assault wrapped in cotton candy—Dad never understood why I'd grip his hand till I cut off circulation in his fingertips, why the calliope music made me want to curl into myself. He'd just buy me another ticket and drag me to another ride, insisting I'd learn to love it like he did. But this one feels different. The towering yellow tent draws me in like a beacon, familiar as a childhood memory.

Through the entrance gate, past dusty popcorn and cotton candy stands that breathe out memories of burnt sugar and rust. Behind the tent, a carousel's painted horses stand frozen mid-gallop, while a silent calliope and motionless Ferris wheel loom in the gathering dark. Everything looks abandoned by just minutes, not decades. The muffled voice gets louder and louder as I approach the tent flaps, and see him: the ring keeper.
He towered over the empty tent and seats, his blood-red tailcoat catching what little light remained. The top hat on his head cast a shadow that stretched toward me like a pointing finger. Below, his elongated feet should have seemed comical, like a clown’s, but the black suede loafers—each fastened with a leather strap and tiny ceramic skull atop—suggested something more deliberate, more ancient.

“Welcome to the circus, my boy! You hold the last ticket. What an auspicious and valuable circumstance for you. Choose any seat—the show awaits." His voice filled the tent like smoke, seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.

"But there's no one else here," I said."Oh, but there is—for those who have eyes to truly see. Tell me, do your eyes perceive value, or do they perceive meaning? Watch how Lady Value prostitutes herself to self-righteous Meaning, who pays only in promises and empty words. But here, in my tent, they dance as equals. They breed something new. You’re here today because you’re missing something or someone in your life. Something.. familial. A parent maybe? Don’t get flustered now. The fortune-teller gave me the scoop.”

“My Dad died a few days ago, he-”

“Oh yes, your father. What a great man Roger Harrison was.”

“That’s impossible. How could you possibly know his na-”

“I know all kinds of things, Jake Harrison.” His smile stretched wider than any normal human mouth should allow.

The ringmaster knows my name, knows Dad's name. Part of me wants to run—it's the same part that used to hide in my closet during Dad's rages. But another part of me, the part that still has a ten-year-old's stuffed tiger burned into its memory, needs to know what changed him here. What made him trade the dad who won carnival prizes for the one who couldn't stay sober through Christmas dinner?

“Tell me, Jake, what's worth more: a lifetime of memories, or a lifetime of meaning? Your father chose meaning that day in 1966. Left this very tent a changed man. But perhaps he chose wrong. Perhaps his son could make a better bargain?”

My throat dried out. “Such as?”

The deal is simple," the ringmaster said, reaching into his coat. "I can give you back every memory of your father before he came here—every moment of the man he was meant to be. The bedtime stories, the proud smiles, the sober Christmases. You'll remember a lifetime with the father you deserved." His hand emerged holding what looked like a small, brass ticket punch. "Or you can know what he knew—understand what changed him that day. But understanding comes at a price. Just as it did for him.”
"You'll remember him whole," the ringmaster continued, twirling the brass punch between his skeletal fingers. "Not just the good parts—you'll have memories of him teaching you to drive, crying at your graduation, walking you down the aisle someday. The father who got sober, and lived to meet his grandchildren. All the moments the bottle stole." He stepped closer, and I caught a whiff of something like burnt sugar and formaldehyde. "Or you can know his truth. But truth, Jake—the truth is a dangerous thing."

My hands were trembling, just like Dad's used to. "And what exactly would this truth cost me?"

The ringmaster's smile widened impossibly further. "Only what it's worth to you. Your father traded his joy for understanding. Some trade their love, their fear, their rage. The price matches the patron, you see. Tell me, Jake—what burns brightest in you?"

I thought of all those nights picking Dad up from bars, of the Christmas presents that sat unopened because he was passed out on the couch, of Mom crying in the kitchen when she thought I couldn't hear. But I also thought of how he'd look at me sometimes, in his sober moments, like he was carrying something too heavy to put down.

"If I choose the memories," I said, my voice steadier than I felt, "what happens to the truth he carried?"

"Ah, clever boy. You see, that's why you're here, isn't it? Not just for him, but for you. You're afraid you inherited more than his resemblance, uncanny as it may be. You’re afraid that whatever broke him is lurking in your blood, waiting to break you, too."

The tent seemed to pulse around us, like a living thing breathing. In the shadows between the seats, I could have sworn I saw movement—other figures watching, waiting. Maybe even Dad himself, frozen in that moment of choice forever.

"Let me sweeten the deal," the ringmaster said, pulling a small silver flask from his coat. It caught the light like a mirror, reflecting faces I almost recognized. "A taste of what your father chose. Just a sip to help you decide."

The flask felt warm in my hands like it had been sitting in the summer sun rather than the ringmaster's cold coat. Inside, something shifted and moved that wasn't quite liquid.

"Dad always said the bottle took everything," I said. "Funny that you're offering me one."
The ringmaster laughed, and the sound rippled through the tent like a stone dropped in still water. "The bottle didn't take anything from Roger Harrison that he hadn't already given away right here. He tried to drown the knowledge, but truth floats, my boy. Truth always floats."

I unscrewed the cap. The smell hit me first—not alcohol, but something older, like earth after rain or blood on rusty metal. Behind me, the shadows had grown longer, and darker, gaining substance. They crept between the seats like smoke, and I could hear whispers now, a thousand voices speaking words I almost understood.

"Your father chose truth," the ringmaster said softly. "He saw behind the curtain of reality, saw how thin the membrane is between what is and what could be. Saw the price of every choice, the weight of every path not taken. Some minds aren't built to carry that kind of knowledge. But you—" he reached out and tapped my chest with one gloved finger, "—you've spent your whole life trying to understand him. Maybe you're built stronger."

I looked into the flask. Something appeared to look back, a brief reflection of a face.
"Or maybe," he continued, "you'd rather remember him as the father he could have been. The man who conquered his demons instead of drowning in them. Which would heal you more, Jake? The truth, or the dream of what might have been?"

The tent was full now. Full of shadows, full of whispers, and full of all the choices that had led me here. I thought about Dad's funeral waiting for me, hundreds of miles down the road. Thought about the eulogy I'd written, full of careful omissions and gentle lies. Thought about the way he'd looked at me that last time in the hospital, trying to tell me something through the fog of morphine, something about this place.

The whispers grew louder, and I could almost make out Dad's voice among them. But not the slurred, angry voice I knew best—this was his early morning voice, the one that used to wake me for fishing trips before the drinking started.

"There’s one last thing you should know," the ringmaster said, his smile now more wound than expression. "Whatever you choose, you choose for both of you. Pick truth, and every sweet memory I offered vanishes forever. Choose the memories, and whatever truth your father carried dies with him. Gone like morning dew under a hot, burning sun." He extended both hands—the flask in one, the ticket punch in the other. "Time to choose, Jake. The show must go on."

I lifted the flask higher and watched the something inside twist and turn. Then I looked at the ticket punch, brass worn smooth by decades of bargains. Two paths: understand my father, or forgive him.

"He warned me about you," I said. "Not with words, but every time he looked at me with those haunted eyes. Every time he reached for the bottle instead of reaching for me. He was trying to protect me from this choice."

"Protection born of cowardice is still cowardice," the ringmaster sneered. "He couldn't bear what he learned, so he tried to keep you from learning anything at all. Is that the kind of protection you want to honor?"

The shadows pressed closer, and now I could see faces in them—carnival-goers from across decades, each holding their own flask or ticket punch. All of them watching. Waiting.

I thought of Dad's hands shaking as he poured his drinks. Thought of how he'd sometimes start to tell me something important, then stop himself, fear crossing his face like a shadow. He'd chosen truth over love once, in this very tent. The truth had eaten him alive, one bottle at a time.

I made my choice.

The ringmaster's laugh shook the tent as I moved, but the sound cut off abruptly as I poured the flask's contents onto the ground. Something dark and writhing soaked into the earth, and the whispers rose to screams.

"Neither," I said. "I choose to remember him exactly as he was—broken, haunted, but still trying to protect me in the only way he knew how. Keep your truth. Keep your perfect memories. I'll take reality."

The shadows surged toward me like a wave. The ringmaster's face contorted, stretching beyond any pretense of humanity. But as the darkness reached for me, I felt Dad's presence beside me, stronger than any memory or truth could be.

I ran.

Behind me, the carnival erupted into chaos. The carousel horses screamed with real voices. The Ferris wheel spun like a mad clock rewinding time. But I didn't look back. Dad had run from this place too, but he'd run straight into a bottle. I aimed my car toward the highway and pressed the gas until the carnival vanished in my rearview mirror.

Four hundred miles to Dad's funeral. I had a different eulogy to write now—one with all the messy truths of love and failure but without the weight of whatever knowledge had broken him. Some choices, I realized, are best left unmade at all.

The ticket on my passenger seat had turned yellow with age, the date had faded to nothing. I crumpled it and threw it out the window, watching it disappear into the Texas night. The carnival would find someone else, and perhaps offer another choice. But its hunger for my family and our suffering had ended.

Dad could rest now. And maybe, just finally, so could I.

​                                                                    💀​💀💀

Daniel Culver lives in Houston, Texas with his wife and four kids. He has work published in places such as The Garfield Lake Review, Paragon Press, and Indolent Books, among others.

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It’s dark.  Evelyn is not sure where she is.  She knows she was sleeping.  There are unfamiliar shapes in the room, then she remembers, this is her new home.  The family moved in Spring, and she does not yet know her room’s patterns and habits.  That pale light from the tall window, the angles of sounds when they echo off walls and furniture, or the mysteries lurking in shadowed corners.  She goes to the window and looks down onto the garden, spread out below in the moonlight.  A silvery lawn, dotted with fruit trees, stretching away to the forest’s black edge. 

There is a glow in the sky above the nearby town.  Her papa told her that, out here among the trees and grass, there used to be farming.  She sees the glimmer on far fields, where shreds of determined wheat scratch upwards, wild among weeds, as if the crops wouldn’t give up after the folk moved away.  Evelyn gazes across the garden toward the remains of the abandoned houses along the track.  A beaten line of timber shells. 

She unfastens the window and opens it wide.  Fresh air drifts into the room’s mixed scents of old beams and young paint.  The daisies on the lawn, which seem to smile during daytime, are unseen now, quietly dreaming.  There is no breeze.  It’s mid-summer, approaching the new school year, and she thought she might hear an owl in the evening’s heat, but the land lies silent. 

Evelyn is not yet used to this re-built house.  When she looks at the painted walls, they tell her nothing.  If a door creaks when no-one is there, she cannot interpret what it says.  She often feels that the house is trying to reveal something, but she doesn’t know its language.  All she can do is watch and guess.  For instance, there is a tree in the garden there, down near the forest’s edge.  She’s sure she hasn’t seen it before, even though it’s tall: what Grandpa would call “a mighty oak”.  She waves at it.  A branch moves, as if waving back.  She chuckles then closes the window, and goes back to bed.

In the morning, before her parents wake up, Evelyn runs outside to meet the new tree.  She cannot find it.  She lines up her arm with her bedroom and squints along her finger, pointing at the dark rectangle of window.  She is in the right place.  A big tree cannot hide on a lawn.  A proud oak wouldn’t want to. 

She looks into the grass.  The sun-licked daisies are bright as stars.  “Were you real?” she asks, as if the oak were there beside her.  “Did you come to see me? Why?”  

At breakfast Evelyn’s mom laughs.  “Honey, you’re just remembering what those old folks said when we moved here.”  Evelyn frowns.  She doesn’t remember any old folks.
 
Papa puts down his mug and tells her there were about twelve of them, all waiting by the front porch when they first arrived.  A mass of cotton hair and warm coats.  They all shared friendly smiles, but their eyes quietly professed worry.  “Those smiling folks told us that, ever since the area was first lived in, children have gone missing here.  Some adults too.” 

Evelyn’s mom adds “Don’t worry, honey.  They were probably meaning a long time ago, when people didn’t look after their kids as we do today.  You must have been listening in.  They said trees come in the night, and people vanish.” 

Evelyn doesn’t remember any of that, or even that any old people visited at all.  Her mom laughs again.  “Well, obviously you heard, sweetie.  Where else would these dreams come from?”

Evelyn frowns.

The following night the moon is brighter.  Through her window she spots another tree freshly appeared in the garden.  It looks like a quaking aspen.  It shimmers.  And the mighty oak is back.  It’s closer this time, half way up the garden.
In the morning, when she looks out, they are gone.

“But mom!” Evelyn huffs.  “It’s not dreams.  I saw them!  And supposing they’re right, those old visitors!  How can you say it’s nothing?”

Evelyn’s mother holds her daughter’s tense arms, and speaks down, from a high stony plateau half way up the hill of years.  “Listen, baby.  I care about your happiness - which includes you not upsetting yourself with things you imagine.”  Her mom strokes her hair.  “Honey, I know it all feels real.  When I was younger than you my papa read ‘The Hobbit’ to me and my sisters.  For months I saw goblins in the garden, and wizards and hairy-toed hobbits under the stairs.” 

Together they stroll down towards the forest.  Evelyn’s mom waves an arm across the lawn with its tiny flowers.  “You see,” she comforts.  “No new trees.  No Hobbits, no wizards.  Honey, most of what we worry about isn’t real.  Now, come with me into town.” 

Evelyn squats down and touches the smooth, empty grass.  Walking back to the house she blinks.  It felt as if a leaf brushed her eyelids.

Chairs are full in the hairdresser’s shop.  It’s busy.  Evelyn’s mom wants a cut and color.  Evelyn guesses it’s for her parents’ night out at a party they’ve been invited to, and her mom is trying to entice Evelyn to come along too. 

The place smells of shampoo and heat and swimming pools.  It’s clamorous with young and old alike, from the splashing sinks to the hands bustling with scissors.  When Evelyn mentions moonlit trees, her mother says that, if she keeps thinking about trees, it’s only natural she’ll see them more.  “You really should come out with us tonight.  There will be other children there.”   Evelyn interprets this as ‘If you’d make more friends you’d dream of happier things.’

Luckily it’s her mom’s turn to have a plastic sheet around her neck.  The trimming begins.  It reminds Evelyn of those tidy hedges they passed in the town’s small gardens.  A town haircut.  Evelyn goes out into the street before anyone suggests she get a cut too.  Evelyn likes her hair.  Likes its wildness.  Free in the wind, open to possibilities, and ready to connect in all directions.  Of course her mom wouldn’t believe that trees move at night.  Town haircuts are as if your thoughts are cut into a simple smooth shape.  Someone else cuts it for you, taking away your points.  Mom has never embraced the thoughts of the land.  Why did mom and papa move here?

As Evelyn thinks this, a lady stops next to her, awkwardly close.  Then another lady stands the other side of her.  One says “You’re from the track,” and it’s not a question.  Their coats, oppressively close to her nose, smell like rugs and broth. 

The women step back and hold out their hands to her, like aunts offering woeful flapjacks.  Evelyn’s not about to hold the hands of strange folk on the street.  “You must leave, child,” murmurs one of them.  “Your family must leave.  The trees always come.” Their faces show kindness in wrinkled eyes above smiles dusted with fear.  Evelyn tells them about the mighty oak and the quaking aspen.  One of the women grabs her shoulders.  “It’s not safe around harvest, child!  Not until the forest begins its autumn rest after the Hunter’s Moon, before winter’s sleep.  If your heart is pure, they will take you.  You will be lost to the forest.”

The other looks in her eyes.  “Long ago, it began.  The first woodcutters, among the settlers, learnt the lore of the forest…  Trees and crops and Man alike: we harvest, and we are harvested.  The trees know, as they grow in the circle of life and lives taken.  Forests know this fate, and are at peace with it.  They bear no grudges.  But this forest is different.  It’s not at peace, child.  Folk never should’ve settled in that place.  To the trees, the ground there is sacred.  But no-one knew.  The forest seeks payment for what was done.  Thousands of trees cut down for houses, chairs and tables and fires and fields.  Young branches taken for our first woven baskets, and wood burnt for the baking of bread.  It is a place of remorse and revenge.  The forest takes the first born, if of pure heart.” 

“The woodcutter did what he could to save them.  He cut back the trees that came for sweet souls, but there were too many for his axe.  This was long, long ago, when that place was only a line of simple shacks and a thin dirt track.  Many houses have grown there since, and many have fallen, abandoned through the loss of loved ones.”   

Through the window, Evelyn watches the hairdressers’ movements, precise as a ballet.  Her mother’s haircut, and the trimming of the curly blond locks of someone she recognizes from school.  Snip snip snip.  Like chopping trees.  She loves trees, with their branches in all directions, like her hair, but she feels that she understands these women and her mom.  Sometimes a cut can be for protection.  Evelyn cannot ask her folks to move somewhere far, simply to be protected from ghost trees.  Her mom would laugh, protecting her only from dangers she understands. 

Snip snip snip.  A blond tangle of twigs silently hits the floor.

Her mom will not let her go away while the moon drains and re-fills, to become the Hunter’s Moon.

That night there is a cracking sound from the garden.  Tiredly stumbling to the window, she sees many new trees.  They are so bright that they glow.  They are much nearer the house now, and waving in a phantom wind that the calm fields do not feel.  Then she sees a man. 

She leaps back.  There is a huge man in the garden, standing next to the mighty oak.  He holds an axe.  She creeps to the side of the window, to not be seen, and peers round, through the barrier of glass. 

The tall man, like the trees, shines under the moonlight.  He wears furs, like those wax models of early settlers in scenes in a museum.  The man lifts his giant axe and swings it into the trunk of the oak.

Branches sway like seaweed in a pool, slow and silent.  Seaweed that drifts in a wave, coming toward the house, towards her.  The huge man swings again, and the tree shakes.  He lowers his axe, looking down and getting his breath back.  Suddenly he looks up at her. He stares straight through the window's shield and the years between their times.  Evelyn gasps.  He knows she is here.  The man is grizzled, with a rough beard.  He wears thick cloth tied with animal skins.  His boots are clogs, knotted with fur.  A fur hat clings round his head like a couple of cats.  Everything about him looks like mist.  So well padded, with that furry head, he reminds her of a toy bear.  A big protector.  He seems almost transparent in the colorless moonlight.  His eyes are dark.  Then he looks back at the growing woodland.  His enormous axe cracks into the trunk.  Evelyn grips the window-frame tightly.  The oak creaks, as if it knows it will soon fall.  Then the man and the tree start to fade.  There is a splintering sound.  The oak topples.  Before it hits the ground, trees and man are gone.

Not sure if she is breathing, she puts a hand to her heart.  She is still there, awake, she thinks.  She breathes heavily onto the window glass, leaving a thin mist.  With a finger she traces the forest.  The mist evaporates, and she breathes again and dabs where the trees were, and where she saw the woodcutter.  The image fades.  She breathes again and the picture reappears: a trace of being, and of vanishing.  A proof she will be able to show to herself, if she wonders whether this was all a dream, and proof for her mother.

When she wakes, desperate to tell her parents, she hurries to her door, but something isn’t right.  It’s still dark outside. 

There are footsteps downstairs.  It doesn’t sound like her papa.  Mom and papa are still asleep after their party, and there is someone else in the house.  These are hard, slow boots, treading heavy through the kitchen.  She rushes to the window.  The garden is a forest.

Hundreds of trees.  Branches scratch at the house.  Downstairs the footsteps stop, then climb the stairs.

The thuds approach her room.  Evelyn presses back into the corner, against the wall.  Where are mom and papa?  Don’t they hear it?  There is breath by the door.  She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight, and tells herself “This isn’t real. This isn’t real!” 

She hears him in the room now, though the door didn’t open.  A smell of shacks and billy goat hair, and brown leaves, twisted and blown to settle on damp earth. Bootsteps scrape the floor.  They echo from the walls.  She opens her eyes.

The woodcutter stands over her, tall and pale as moonlight on a lake.  She can almost see through his feint figure.  She feels frozen, too afraid to run.  Deep, empty eyes stare down at her, through her, as if in a void.  She feels something slide past her ribs.  It’s a branch, then another, piercing through the wall.  The branches, like vines, twist around her, and he raises his axe and swings, shattering the cage that is forming around her.  More branches splinter the walls, dragging her away, and some twist toward him, as he hefts his axe again.  Evelyn is pulled back, towards the window, towards the dark forest.

 “It's too soon,” she whispers.  “I won’t be taken!” 

The woodcutter advances, striking at her thickening cocoon, and branches fall.  He pauses, puffing through his beard to catch his airless breath, and in this brief moment the trees hurl Evelyn toward the door.  She sees wooden vines grasp for his wrists, but he bats them away easily, and in the darkness of his eyes she understands.  The trees are not trying to take her.  She swings the door open, and runs.

Evelyn’s bare feet dash over familiar wonky floorboard ridges under the hallway carpet.  She runs down the stairs.  Behind she hears heavy footsteps, and her mind flashes to her, pictures of people she has known. 

Parents, teachers, friends: they want to help you grow up, telling you what you should do and how to behave, like it’s a game of climbing a mountain, where they focus on the pathway they’re told to, and don’t stop for the view.  But the view is why you climb mountains!  None of them are with her, to help her.  No wonder she feels alone.  They don’t see the things she sees.  Why climb like they do? 

She hears the trees whisper “Yes!  Why climb?  Stay with us in our forest.  You don’t need to tread the hill’s pathways.  Not yet.  First you have to be.  To feel.  Stay with us, where you are safe.” 

Down by the front door she sees the woodcutter’s pale shape descend the staircase; a beast aglow with cloth and fur, and centuries broken.  Those ladies with their warnings: they were kind, but so confused, lost in clouds as white as their hair, barely able to see the ground where they once played, or their final stone so near.  We harvest, and we are harvested. 

Evelyn opens the door and rushes outside, into the sparkling sea of trees.

It is as if the woodland has returned to the way it was before people came.  Before the first woodcutter.  Centuries past, when he came here among the settlers, and the village was built, he began to hear the trees speak of their desecration.  He couldn’t stop hearing them, and he knew.  Fearing for his soul, he brought them the first-borns among the villagers who had called for the trees to be cut, sacrificing the forest to make their homes and comfort.  His soul was not released.

Evelyn senses, as she walks, that it is not the trees that seek the souls of the good and innocent.  The vanished are his unseeing penance: this revenant spirit who perpetuates his own purgatory through the unwanted offerings he brings to their feet.

Stepping among the spectral lustrous trunks, Evelyn feels that the trees do not want to take her.  See how they curve and bend, bowing to her with care.  They cherish the cycle of passings and re-births that they share with us, and all living things.  She feels them welcome her.  As she walks on through the trees, she feels their delicate, gossamer shapes caress her face. 

Behind her, she hears the woodcutter snarl as the twisting branches hold him back, like a tethered dog.  Thick vines wrap, then roots pull him down.  But Evelyn, alone now, doesn’t hear the world behind her any more.  She is drawn into the shining leaves all around, and she hears more clearly their embracing rustle.  She feels protected, at peace.   

In her nightgown she sings, stepping onwards, onwards into the forest.

They said it was the trees.

                                                                💀💀💀

Aged 9-10, Matt Smart traded silver in London and Essex, England.  In his teens, Matt began sculpting, using materials for car bodywork repair that he learned when his mother’s agoraphobia led her to drive recklessly, often crashing during panic attacks.  He ran several research funds at Oxford University, and is published academically in psychiatry, and governmental technology investment.  Matt ran a London gallery representing artists diagnosed with mental health conditions.  He was also in the archaeology team that found the burial site of the missing Romanovs in Russia.  See MattSmart.org for his sculptures.  Matt loves art, music, writing and dancing!
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Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.



I’d long been scared of ghosts. But when it’s been even longer since you never seen one, there’s not so much to them anymore. Like a face you don’t recall, just the shape of it. And shapes ain’t scary. 

Anyway, I’d been clocked in the face much more recently than any ghost sighting. Guy said he didn’t like the look of mine. I’d been followed right up to my car in the midnight parking lot at Krogers. What the fuck do you want? I‘d growl with a flash of the sharp ends of my keys tight between my fingers. Whoa, whatever… bitch. They’re never nice when they leave you alone. 

And after I got robbed, I traded one fear for others. 

After I got mugged and concussed I found myself in some strange world of a hospital where no one knew my name and neither did I. And I stared long in the little hospital mirror at the cracked tooth, sharp with blood, which looked like I’d been sucking on someone’s neck. Had I? I couldn’t even remember.

That’s how I came to move out West. For more space around me, and between me and all that cosmic else. Was I scared? Lone woman in Montana woods? A hut I could reach all the sides of if I really starfished myself? Was I terrified? They’d always ask me in the postcards. Always ask about my shed. 

No. 

Not scared. Anymore. 

There’s no real monsters. 

Two years out here says that. Says that if humans could see at night like in the day, we’d be okay with all of it. 

We scare ourselves. 

There’s no real monsters.

I write this because I’ve been writing it all day. Those two lines.  

We scare ourselves. 

There’s no real monsters.

I want to believe it. Because, if someone finds this journal, and not me, and sees all these lines—know I’m not crazy—and I’m no yellow flower. Know that I’m tough. Hard. But I’ve seen things. Things I can only call monsters.

It’d come out of the woods. --They’d come. 

Like with fireflies, it’s one that fixes your eyes. And then you see a whole bunch. That they’re everywhere, all around you. 

I'd come outside tonight even as it was barely dusk. A glow roped through beyond the stanchions of pines. The forests were on fire over the ridge. It’d happened before but this was bigger, longer. The horizon line through the trees was the color of lava. This was real fire. The creek must’ve been jumped. You could hear the roaring crinkle of it coming. And it all smells like hell, but this one was like it was going to grab your breath where you could never get to it again.

I’d come out trying to figure if I had to get going, too, on foot, coughing, covering my mouth, eyes burning. And then seen it. Them. And it weren’t no firefly. 

Cattle-bodied. Dripping wet. Tall as old vans. With two-fingered hooves curved like rams. And huge bass-like mouths slitting across thick necks. Then I see’d on one—there’s mouths on both sides., front and back, both wheezing like a popped bellows. Then the mouths sprang of all the things sprang far open in the same instance, like they were all the same thing. And the tiny eyes of the them rolled yellow and a terrible, dive-bombing noise wound up from them. Which is when I’d noticed the rest, through the haze. They filled grotesquely like bags, sucking in the air, their mute, ugly faces distorting under pressure waves of it. And as soon as one was full, the blackest urine would explode from it. Then they’d suck again. Eating the smoke. They’re fuckin’ eating it. I half-marveled. While my other half was already crinkling inside me like wet newspaper, and I saw the headlines that were never written, about a young lady beaten for the hell of it. They call it a mugging if a nickel goes missing. But I can’t remember what I had. Did you have a purse? I can’t remember. What kind of young lady doesn’t have a purse? That half flooded down into me feet, weighed me into place, like metal castings around my ankles. There was no moving. So I stood dead still, trying to appear nothing other than that. And feeling again that gangrene terror of having something not all alive within you. What a state to arrive in, and in this way.

It was at this moment Bill Johnson showed up. Likely coming to get me. I’d seen his white hair through the trees. His flannel. But so had these things, which I’d been stuck on the wonder of. But there was nothing like that back from them. Not towards Bill Johnson, no.

As he came into view, it was two of these beasts that turned and which pulled the air so hard that Bill was stumbling over as soon as he cleared the trees. Like an old man used to tumbling, he figured he missed a step and came up just happy-go-lucky and calling my name, peering into the smoke. But then these beasts sucked again. More of them. Tracking onto him like radar dishes. And he saw them too, I am pretty sure, because he cried out. And they never even touched him. They just pointed in towards him from every direction, sucking the air, surging it into themselves, and he was caught there like between ends of magnets. First Bill’s cap went. And there was a moment I thought stupidly that that’d be the end of it. No beast eats caps. But then he bent—Bill himself did. Bent easy in the middle like creased pants always hung that way. His back going one way, his legs twisting around the other. His clothes were coming off, ripping, his body rag-dolling and shuddering. Then his flesh was coming off too, sliding down off bones like overnight BBQ. And then these beasts were already pissing beet red, exploding it high into the sky around me, onto me. Until there was nothing left to shuck and his skeined skeleton tumbled alone into a pile.

I screamed. 

Stupid. But I couldn’t not. 

A scream of anger and fear and might, that I might scare these beasts away. I knew it wouldn’t work the moment I did it. And these creatures, these beasts—everywhere I saw them through the woods—their bodies shuddered and vibrated like freight cars and I thought they would explode and wipe this shit away like a nuke. I wanted them to. But they didn’t. They dug their hooves forwards into the liquefying ground trembling under them and then they ducked hard, like porpoises. They dived. They disappeared into the pissed-up dirt beneath them with the ease of a swimmer into a pool. And I stood dumb there, feeling the fade of their temblor vanish into the ground, hearing the crack of fire resume within the distant woods. Monsters everywhere. And I was crying or covered in piss. 

#

That fire that would have killed me—it passed now.

But my thoughts from the night? They haven’t. They won’t. Won’t let me be.

I can’t go back to the city. I can’t go back East. 

And I see the little green shoots that come up after a fire. The tiny, delicate flowers. These symbols of renewal. But they’re not what I think of now when I step careful over the ground outside, past the unmarked spot where what was left of Bill Johnson had to go. Along with the journal that told of it. When I tread silent as a deer now and stand stark on a beautiful day, trying to keep under the noise of the branches, it’s not simple happiness I came to the woods hopeful with. 

No, I don’t think of any of that anymore. I think about fear, and revulsion, reverence even, wondering if any of it is worth a damn to keeps us safe. I’m still scared of ghosts. Scareder now of becoming one. And I walk, carefully. And bar my door at night. And day.

 And I bring my fire in.

                                                                       💀💀💀

Alex Dal Piaz is an author from New York with recent credits in Seaside Gothic, Bristol Noir, The Other Stories, Cast of Wonders, and Bunker Squirrel. He’s currently querying a first novel and can be found online at X/Twitter @smile_stilllife and at linktr.ee/alexdpz