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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