May 2026

May 27, 2026

5/27/2026

The Flesh that Endures
by David Horn

A chilling wartime horror story where the battlefield becomes something
far more terrifying than expected.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.

By dawn the trenches sweated again; brown water through sandbags, duckboards slick with a sheen that never quite dried. The wind, when it came, brought the dead ground with it: no man’s land salted with shell fragments and frozen limbs, a flat of gray meat and splintered timber where the ravens hopped and scolded.

Private Hara kept his scarf over his nose, but the smell found him regardless—sweet, oily, like meat left too long under a lid. It threaded the wool, the hair, the mouth. You could taste it when you swallowed.

He watched the wire through the periscope: two small mirrors, a narrow slice of the world. Beyond the pits the Russians crouched with their sacks of rye, behind Hara the cook boiled weeds again. “Anything?” Sergeant Okada asked, stepping up, boots careful on the firing step.

“Smoke. A cartwheel stuck. The ravens,” Hara said. The lieutenant had taught them to watch birds: where they fed, there was no ambush; where they fled, be wary. The ravens fed. It should have been comforting. It was not.

At midnight Hara’s watch tightened. The smell changed: not a field of rot, but a focused, oily exhalation concentrated just under the parapet, as if something close to them were breathing.

Okada leaned in while Hara forced himself to lift the periscope. Between the outer wire and a shell hole where a horse had died, something moved. It was not a man; but a slump that hauled itself in shivers, the way a sack of entrails might if taught to crawl. It left a dark smear on the frost that refused to ice over. The ravens shuffled and pecked once, as if their beaks had touched a live coal.

“Fox?” Hara whispered and hated the shape of the word.

The thing bumped the outer sandbags and drew nearer. Its skin looked like overworked dough, fold upon fold with no seam, no face. Then the folds parted, and a mouth of glistening ridges opened and sighed without sound. The air bent to it: not merely decay but the lacquered stink of warmed fat.

Okada’s hand closed on Hara’s sleeve. Stay.

The creature lifted part of itself and set it on the parapet. It had the weight of a hand but was not a hand; it left a dab of pale, greasy matter that steamed faintly against the cold. Then, dragging its stench like a tide, it slid into a hollow and was gone.

For a long minute no one spoke. The frost felt almost eager to be the worst thing again. Hara wiped his eyes and found he had not noticed doing it.

Okada lowered himself down and touched the smear with a cautious forefinger. The substance gleamed under the lantern’s hood like miso oil in a bowl.

“Fetch a spoon,” he said hoarsely.

They eased the lump into a dented tin and set it on a packing case by the brazier, deliberately away from the coals. Men gave it a look, and then other looks, and then looked elsewhere. Lieutenant Ishikawa came as the brazier hiccupped. He was young—his mustache still borrowed—and he kept his hands rigid behind his back as he studied the tin.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Sir. I don’t know,” Okada said.

“Throw it beyond the wire,” one private said.

“Not until we note where it came from,” Ishikawa answered. “See if it draws anything back.”

Bait is bait even when you have no trap. The tin sat under a crate where the wind might not shove the smell down their throats; still the air lay on them like a damp cloth. Hara’s eyes watered. He checked the tin twice on his watch, each time thinking it nearer the brazier than it had been.

At dawn the tin was empty; wiped as if the smear had never been there. A stripe of grease led from the tin across the duckboards and over the edge into the drainage; it did not break at splinters and did not respect boards. Okada touched the trail.

“Still warm,” he said.

“It came into the trench,” Hara whispered, and the idea made his stomach tighten. The thing had crawled where they slept, defiled the spaces they had left for letters and prayers and the last stub of candle.

Ishikawa squinted at Okada’s fingers and finally said, “Post a double at the angle. Report any movement. Don’t fire unless it crosses the parapet.”

“And if it does?” someone asked.

“Then fire,” Ishikawa said, and his voice caught. “Aim for the center.”

They ate boiled weeds and a mouse the rats had missed. The lieutenant sliced the mouse into five ragged pieces with a penknife and handed them out as ritual—two to stretcher-bearers, one to Okada, one to the messenger boy. Hara got none and felt grateful; the smell from the drains was worse than hunger and coated the tongue. A private from Niigata tucked a scrap of paper under his scarf—If I fall, burn me. If I do not fall, burn me anyway—and showed it with a hollow laugh no one shared.

At dusk, when the light went rat-soft, old stories surfaced. Okada’s voice was flat. “When I was a boy,” he said, not looking up, “my uncle told of a thing that comes when meat is scarce and men are cruel. It has no face. If a man eats of it, he does not die.”

That is a blessing,” the messenger boy blurted before the others could quiet him.

Okada’s mouth turned down. “He does not die,” he said again, and the last syllable was something harder than speech.

They slept in turns and jerked awake at small sounds that might have been the old wind, or might not. The brazier burned to a rind. Hara took the last watch before dawn, the hour when a man’s private thought feels heavy enough to smother.

The smell rose like a pulse from below, as if the earth itself had spoiled. Hara trained the periscope and saw the shell hole with the dead horse. Frost webbed along its hide, then cracked, then billowed: a rib lifting, then sinking, then lifting again like bellows. A pale fold oozed from between bones as if the carcass loosed something it had been forming.
Hara made a sound that surprised him. An old private across the angle crossed himself and then snatched his hand away, as if any devotion might offend whatever listened.

By full light the thing had withdrawn, and the frost had capped the hole. The only sign left in their bay was the dark stripe on the boards, tacky under boot soles.

At midday a shout came from the next trench. Okada and Hara ran.

Private Matsu knelt by the sump, shoulders hunched. In his cupped hands lay a thumb-sized lump, the color of bone marrow, quivering as if trying to remember a shape.
He looked up with eyes that already knew what they should not. “I’m so tired of dying,” he said, and lifted the lump to his mouth. The lump was gone between Matsu’s hands before Okada could knock it away.

He chewed once. Twice. His face pinched at the stink, but he swallowed.

“Idiot!” Okada hissed. He slapped the boy across the mouth hard enough to draw blood. A single thread of grease clung to Matsu’s lip, shining even in the winter light.

The men ringed them, their hunger louder than their disgust. Every one of them smelled the thing. Everyone had seen Matsu’s eyes when he said he was tired of dying.

That night, Matsu stood picket duty without a lantern. He swore he could see fine, his eyes bright in the dark like wet stones. At dawn, when the Russians shelled the ridge and the trench roof came down in chunks, Matsu was buried waist-deep in timber and clay. They dug him out expecting to find his ribs crushed. He spat mud, coughed once, and climbed free. His skin sagged strangely when he moved, as if his bones no longer fit him quite right.

They huddled around the brazier that evening. Nobody wanted to look directly at Matsu. Nobody wanted to look away.

“You know what it is,” muttered Corporal Sato, eyes half-closed as if quoting a prayer.“Nuppeppō. My grandmother said it comes when the world is already rotten. Its flesh keeps you walking, but you’ll never walk as a man again.”

“A story for children,” spat another, but his hand trembled as he fed the fire.

Okada’s jaw was tight enough to crack. “Stories keep you alive. Remember that.”

Matsu smiled across the fire. The curve of his mouth drooped, too heavy, the corners pulled down by some invisible hand.

Two nights later, a patrol dragged back three wounded. One had lost most of his calf to shrapnel.

Matsu knelt beside the corpse, muttered words no one caught, and pressed a lump of grayish fat into the man’s slack mouth. The others tried to stop him, but it was already done. The body shivered, arched, and sat up with a scream that tore itself off halfway.
The wound still gaped, but it no longer bled. The man’s skin had turned waxy, his eyes dull. He breathed shallowly, a bellow that never emptied.

Okada dragged Matsu back and slammed him against the trench wall. “What did you do?”
Matsu’s teeth gleamed, streaked with grease. His voice rasped like someone speaking through a clogged reed.

“I gave him what I was given. Now he won’t die either.”

They sent the “immortals” forward at dawn. Ishikawa, pale but steady, gave the order. Matsu and the others shambled into the wire when the bugle blew. The Russians opened fire.

Bullets punched through arms, bellies, throats. The men fell, then rose again, flesh sagging where bone no longer gave shape. Their eyes shone pale in the gunfire, like lanterns glimpsed through fog; not the eyes of men, but of something already departed, staring back from the grave. They screamed, but their screams did not end in silence. They kept walking.

Russians stopped firing for a heartbeat, appalled. Then the Maxim guns roared again. Still the figures lurched forward, bleeding but not dying, stumbling in waxen heaps through the wire.

Behind them, the trench stank of carrion and gun oil. Every man who hadn’t eaten the flesh stared into the smoke, trying not to imagine what it tasted like.

By nightfall, Matsu had returned, holes in his body like punctures in a wineskin. He grinned through sagging cheeks. “See?” he croaked. “I told you. We cannot die.”

The smell around him was unbearable, worse than the battlefield. Men gagged when he passed. His skin wept grease, leaving stains where he leaned.

Okada watched him from the firing step, bile in his throat.

“They’ve won us the ground,” Lieutenant Ishikawa said beside him, voice hollow.
The stink said otherwise.

By the end of the third week, the trench reeked of a butcher’s midden. Not of blood, though; blood thins, dries, and flakes away. This was thicker and sweeter, a stench that smeared itself across the tongue. The living choked back sobs. The “immortals” inhaled it like perfume.

Private Hara awoke one night to find Matsu crouching over him, mouth half-open, grease dripping from his teeth. Hara tried to swing up his rifle stock in self-defense, but Matsu only laughed.

“You dream too loudly,” he croaked, and shuffled back to his place. The boards gleamed where his feet had passed.

The rats ran out of food weeks before the men ran out of food. Men were boiling leather straps and chewing weeds until their gums bled. In one corner, Matsu and his fellows huddled around their brazier, chewing on lumps of gray meat they never offered to anyone else, grease slicking their chins.

Corporal Sato was the first to break. He waddled into their circle, sobbing. They tossed him a strip of glistening flesh, and he stared, gagged, wept, and swallowed.

At dawn, his wound from the last skirmish was healed. It had been a raw, bayonet slash that had festered and oozed; but the skin around it sagged like dough. He walked without a limp. His eyes did not blink enough.

The others eyed him in awe and loathing. By nightfall, three more had joined him. By morning, five.

Okada pressed his rosary so hard into his palm it left welts. “Better to die a man than live as that,” he muttered to himself. But his voice trembled.

Enemy trenches were quiet, always watching. Scouts reported no more ravens feeding on Japanese corpses near the lines. Russians muttered of plague, of a sickness that made men rise when they should fall.

One Orthodox priest wrote into his journal: The Yellow Army sends corpses against us. Their faces droop loose. Their wounds do not bleed. This is no war of nations, but against the dead.

The Nuppeppō returned on the seventh night. It came without a sound, belly dragging the ground like a sack of grease, and left smears that steamed in the frost. But this time, it left no scraps.

It hunkered at the parapet, folds pulsing. The “immortals” rose as one, their heads cocked at the same angle, like children roused by a mother’s voice. They shuffled forward, mouths half-open, moaning.

The other men shrank back from the parapet. No one dared raise a rifle.

Okada dug his fingers into Hara’s arm hard enough to bruise. “Do you see? It is calling them home.”

The “immortals” reached the parapet. The Nuppeppō opened, its folds gapping like a monstrous maw. By one and then two, they scrambled over the bags and disappeared into the depths. The flesh shuddered, swallowed, then bulged from the inside like something clawing at the surface. For the space of a heartbeat, the trench had been full of whispers in the skull, the dead mumbling in borrowed throats. The folds finally smoothed, but the whispers remained, faint and hungry, as though the men were still speaking from below the earth.

By dawn, only greased stains remained.

Corporal Sato was still in the trench, staring at the grease stains where his fellows had gone. He rocked back and forth, clutching his rosary until it snapped.

“I was too slow,” he whispered. “It didn’t want me.”

When Ishikawa demanded an explanation, Sato only repeated it, voice dull as ashes. It didn’t want me. It didn’t want me.

That night, he tried to feed on his own hand, gnawing until the tendons snapped. The others bound him, but the stink of his blood drew rats for the first time in weeks. The rats lapped the grease with black tongues.

The trench was no longer a place for men. It had become a larder.
***
Snow fell in gauzy sheets, sifting into shell holes and cushioning the sharp angles of the wire. For a moment, a clean hour, the world looked white. Then the wind changed, and the smell came back: heavy, sweet, inescapable.

The Russians fled from their forward redoubts. At the center of Port Arthur, the guns roared, but in the trenches, they talked only of the figures that did not fall. Some swore they saw Japanese soldiers shredded by bullets and limping forward on arms, their bellies opened and their entrails steaming in the cold.

By New Year’s, the gates were thrown open, and the “immortals” stumbled through first. The soles of their boots blackened the snow, as if the ground had turned against them. Russians threw down their rifles rather than stand at close range.

Priests crossed themselves until their fingers bled. No one fired their rifles.

The living soldiers tried to hold themselves together, mouths clamped over jaws, hands white around the rifle stocks. One man sobbed out his prayers and another gagged, the scarf at his throat soaked through.

Captain Ishikawa seemed to change the least of all: he did not weep, did not vomit, but stood wooden and unmoving, watching his pale troops stumble past.

Okada hissed at Hara: “This is not victory. This is blasphemy.”

But Hara did not reply. His belly was too hollow, his tongue too thick with the grease that stank in the air.

***
A Russian clerk in Petrograd translated the journals of the survivors into print, careful to preserve their syntax and idiom. His hand shook as he wrote. His stomach churned. His ink spilled on certain words: Men who do not fall. Faces melted. Stench of death that walks.

The journals spread through the barracks and through the factories and through the frozen apartments where even now the hunger began to gnaw. Soldiers talked of their empire having not lost to men but to rot. Of something that had fed in Manchuria and was not yet done.

The Tsar preached loyalty and honor. The priests prayed louder; the whispers were louder still.

In Japan, Captain Ishikawa kept a little book secreted beneath his kit. In it he wrote one line the night Port Arthur fell:

They will call this victory, but I know what I have done. We are not conquerors. We are carrion that walks.

He snapped the book shut and did not open it again.
***
Snow churned in the Petrograd streets, banners snapping in the breeze. The clerk who had copied the soldiers’ journals was in the crowd, the ink and grease still clinging to his fingers. He remembered the words he had written: The flesh endures. The flesh rots.
The empire will follow.

As the marchers shouted beneath the palace windows, he thought he smelled it again. The sweet, rotting perfume of spoiled meat. He pressed a scarf to his mouth, though it helped nothing.

Somewhere, far from the square, a door slammed against its frame. He told himself that it was the wind.

The banners waved. The chants rose. In his mind’s eye, he saw the siege: the waxen faces that grinned at him, the entrails dragging in the snow, the shambling figures that did not fall.

Not victory. Not defeat. Something older.

Something still hungry.

💀💀💀

David Horn is a Colorado-based writer whose fiction explores the border between history, memory, and the uncanny. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Rooted Literary Magazine, AntipoedanSF, and other journals and anthologies. A veteran, former police officer, and cybersecurity engineer, he now divides his time between writing and environmental studies. He is the author of Signals from the Edge and the forthcoming novel The Glass Child. Find him at https://www.facebook.com/horndw

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May 20, 2026

5/20/2026

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Heavenly Escape
by MN Wiggins

A dark and twisted tale about identity, memory, and manipulation.
Truth, sometimes, can be worse than death.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.

Bullets rizzled, drowning out the obscenities as an army of Feds raided our office building. Alone in my office, and farthest away from the gunfire, I typed furiously on my desktop, deleting as many financial documents of my employers as I could. If agents breached this room before I was finished, if I just missed deleting one file, there would be a bullet just for me—and it wouldn’t be government-issued.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead as the deletion progress painfully ticked away at its own chosen speed: seventy-five percent gone, eighty, eighty-one percent. Come on, come on. Why couldn’t they have upgraded the system when I’d asked?

The gunfire drew closer, and I could hear doors being kicked open in the search. That meant several of our guys lay dead out there. A stray bullet pierced my office door, zipped past my head, and exploded into the wall behind me. I ducked low behind my desk, popping up every few seconds to peek at the screen like a whack-a-mole. Ninety-two percent, Ninety-four. Just a little more.

Then it paused. An alert popped up asking if I wanted to save my work on a minimized open document. Why on Earth would I want to save a document I desperately need deleted? I reached up to click no, but my hand was enveloped in an ephemeral white glow. “No, not now!” I cried. But it was too late. My fingers passed through the mouse as if it wasn’t there. Another stray bullet whizzed through my office, but it didn’t matter now. Nothing could touch me. The progress meter stood at ninety-six percent. “Dang it, Chloe!” I yelled. “I was so close!”

She wrapped my body in her glow, and we levitated a foot off the floor. A moment later, she pulled us backward, phasing through the wall and hovering us in the crawlspace behind.

“You couldn’t have waited thirty more seconds?”

“You’re my kick-ass, killer sister,” she replied, bear-hugging me from behind. “I can’t let you die. One dead girl’s enough for this family.”

“Just release me for a couple of moments. You don’t understand what’ll happen if I don’t delete the last of those files.”

“Sorry, Shel. Don’t blame me for your poor life choices.”

My mouth fell open. “What poor choices have I ever made?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Every little girl wants to grow up to be a CPA for organized crime.”

“Oh, please. These guys aren’t that organized, and they’re not that bad.”

Chloe huffed. “A bullet almost took off your head. You don’t exactly work for Habitat for Humanity.” She sniffed. Is that smoke?”

“Yeah,” I said sheepishly. “We call that Plan B. If I don’t erase all the evidence in time, they set everything on fire. Dang it, my purse is still in there. And it had my phone, my keys, my wallet. You couldn’t have given me just one more minute? I loved that purse.”
Chloe descended us through the floor and underground. We glided around rusted pipes and electrical conduits until we settled into a large sewer main.
“Don’t you dare unmerge me here,” I warned. But she dropped me anyway. I landed on my feet in an ankle-deep brown river of who-knows-what with a splash. “Darn it, Chloe. These were my best shoes!”
She flashed a devious smile as her glowing white form levitated above the stench of infected feces that now tickled my toes. “Did you just say, ‘Darn it’? You’re a thirty-two-year-old woman, Shel. It’s okay to use an occasional swear word. Go on, try it.”
I straightened my glasses and smoothed out my conservative outfit. “I will not be made fun of. Now, take me out of here.”
She shook her finger. “You could show a little appreciation for my Guardian Angel-ing your ass out of harm’s way. Your little situation down here interrupted my party time in Heaven. Do you know what I was doing?”
I looked away and sighed. “No, but I imagine you’re going to tell me.”
“I was playing Marco Polo with Marco Polo. He’s a cute little dude.” She put a finger to her lips. “He was a little confused at first, but once I let him win, he figured it out, if you know what I mean.”
“Everyone knows what you mean, Chloe.”
I could see the gears turning in her head. “Who wears their best shoes to the office?”
I blushed. “I had a date after work.”
“Bullshit. While I totally believe you’d pick that funeral gown for a date, what I can’t believe is that A, someone asked you out, and B, you said yes. All you’ve ever done is look at numbers all day, sis. And that’s why your number is zero.”
“Just take me home, please? I need to get ready.”
“You almost got killed today, and you still want to go out?”
I waggled my head. “As you so astutely observed, I don’t get a lot of gentlemen callers. So, yes, I’m going. Can we leave now?”
“Who asked you out?”
“Just a guy I know.”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
Chloe shook her head. “Nope. I smell bullshit.”
“You did drop me in a sewer.”
Her eyes narrowed, then widened. “You do have a date, don’t you?”
I tossed up my hands. “Yes! Can we leave now?”
“Holy shit, you’re paying someone, aren’t you? Shelly Dumont, look me in the eye and tell me you did not hire some gigolo to deflower you.”
I folded my arms. “I did no such thing.”
“Girl, that’s messed up. And sad, even for you. Why can’t you get that shit for free? We’re twins, so you’re obviously hot enough. Is it because your personality is so off-putting? Or your zero fashion sense? And most days, you don’t smell particularly nice. And why do you wear glasses? I don’t have to wear glasses.”
I closed my eyes. “Could you please stop? And you don’t wear glasses because you’re dead. Dead people don’t require corrective lenses.”
She smiled. “Do you think once the gigolo meets you, he’ll give you a discount—or charge you double?”
I bent down to grab a handful of brown sludge to sling at her, but thought the better of it. It’d pass right through her anyway. “You are so mean. And for your information,” my voice lowered into a whisper, “I’ve had sex before.”
Chloe’s back straightened. “No, you haven’t. I would’ve known. There would have been banners all over Heaven. They would’ve read, ‘Local girl finally gets some. Corncob fully dislodges from her ass. Film at eleven.’”
“You are so terrible. Why do you make fun of me? Just because I don’t go around jumping into bed with Ben Franklin?”
“Hey!” Chloe snapped back. “Don’t pick on Ben. That dude invented the kite.”
“No,” I replied, pushing my glasses up. “He flew a kite doing an electricity experiment.”
“Yeah? Well, I did not jump into bed with him—at least not alone.” She grinned. “Benny’s a non-starter unless it’s a threesome.”
I stamped my foot and immediately regretted the splash. “I never thought I’d say this, but I refuse to stand in a sewer and listen to the sexual preferences of our nation’s forefathers. Now, take me home. I need a shower.”
Chloe shook her head. “You say you’ve lost your virginity. I want details.”
I sighed. “It was eight years ago, okay? His name was Steve. Happy?”
“That’s it? Where did this guy work?”
“What difference does it make where he worked?”
“Oh, it makes all the difference. Come on, Shel. I can wait here an eternity.”
I mumbled unintelligibly.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I said, he worked at Splitsville. Can we leave now?”
Chloe laughed hysterically. “You schlepped a dude from the bowling alley?”
“He had great hair.”
She laughed harder and drifted upward.
“Wait, where are you going? Aren’t you going to take me out of here?”
“I’ve gotta go tell Betsy Ross. She’s gonna laugh her ass off. Besides, this place smells like a sewer.”
And with that, my sister and her Heavenly glow disappeared. I stood alone in darkness, wondering where in the city I was, which direction to go, and what just swam past my foot. Awesome.
***
A few hours later, I felt my way up a ladder and out through a manhole cover. Yes, they’re as heavy as they look. With my keys lost in the fire, I begged my apartment manager to unlock my door, which she hurriedly did to get the smell out of the hallway.
A very long shower later, I put on a clean bathrobe, grabbed some popcorn, and plopped on the couch to watch my favorite movie, Hot Tub Time Machine. I didn’t technically lie to Chloe. My date just happened to be with Clark Duke, who was on my TV and didn’t care what outfit I’d chosen. Real-life dating was overrated anyway. I’m sure it only led to disappointment and loss. I’d already experienced enough loss to last a lifetime.
All in all, I suppose my life was just like everyone else’s—everyone who worked for criminals, lived in fear of relationships, and was frequently visited by her dead twin sister. I really didn’t expect life to turn out this way. Aside from my current employment history, deep down I’m a rules follower. I thought I’d have more in my life by thirty-two than a tiny apartment and three dead plants that apparently required water. Besides, Chloe was the reason I ever got into trouble.
She was the baby of the family, born two minutes after me. And while I was a model child, if there was a rule to break, a bad idea to be had, or a cabinet to be climbed to reach a forbidden cookie, Chloe couldn’t resist. And she always had to drag me along.
Then that day came. We were six-years-old and lived in a big house with a pool. Dad was a hedge fund manager, and Mom, well, you couldn’t expect her to watch us every minute of the day.
We were forbidden to go near the pool without supervision, and that’s all the encouragement my sister needed. We were playing dolls on the pool’s edge that day when Chloe announced that she knew how to swim. I said she couldn’t and that we should leave before we got into real trouble. That’s all it took.
Chloe climbed up on the diving board and jumped. I screamed and stretched for her as she struggled, but she was out of reach. I ran for Mom as fast as I could, but by the time we returned, Chloe had gone to Heaven.
She was dead, and it was all my fault. I knew because that’s what my mother told me, over and over. And six months after Chloe died, Mom was gone, too. She scheduled an early-life check-out time and joined her favorite daughter.
Dad sent me to therapy to cope with the loss, but I didn’t need it. Chloe came back from Heaven not two weeks after she’d died and kept me company. She made me promise not to tell anyone, and I kept our secret. She helped me all the time. For example, she told me how to play pranks on my teachers at school, convinced me to release our class hamster back out into the wild, and taught me how to make a proper fist to punch girls who picked on me. And she told me all about Heaven and how much fun it was.
I asked her lots of questions, like how it felt to be a ghost. And Chloe, being Chloe, instead of telling me, gave me a huge hug, merging us until we were a ghost together. She explained that she really wasn’t supposed to come down here to see me, but that sneaking out of Heaven was easy as pie because who would want to leave? It was sneaking back in that was the tricky part. But if anyone could slip past Saint Peter at the Pearly Gates, it was my sister. And she was good at it, appearing over and over as I grew up, always matching my age to make me feel better, and always appearing when I needed her most. I never asked if Mom was in Heaven with her, and Chloe never mentioned her. I suspected Mom had gone to that other place, and thought I’d feel bad for her, but strangely never did.
As you might imagine, Chloe’s ideas got me kicked out of several expensive private schools over the years. Dad always fumed after being summoned to a meeting with the Headmaster. But the very last time that I got called to the office over a Chloe shenanigan, Dad wasn’t there. I was sixteen and was told, in the usual fashion, that my presence at the school was no longer required. But I was also informed that my father had been arrested for insider trading. The government froze our assets, and a social worker placed me in a small town with my diabetic, alcoholic, Aunt Cathy, who proceeded to die eight months later.
I didn’t much like foster care after that, so I left for the city, where I got a job, earned my GED, and ultimately put myself through college to become a CPA. It wasn’t easy. I worked hard to ignore most of the stupid things Chloe wanted me to do.
Next thing you know, I’m a thirty-two-year-old virgin working in a back room for bad people. Yeah, I lied about Steve. Oh, and now I’m unemployed. And possibly on a hit list if anyone makes bail. At least I still have Clarke Duke.
“Ha!” Chloe said, suddenly appearing in my living room and blocking my view of Hot Tub Time Machine. “I knew you didn’t have a date. I’ll bet you lied about big-hair Steve, too.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
I cocked my head. “Why are you even here? Shouldn’t you be in a four-way with Cher, Genghis Khan, and Bon Jovi?”
“Oh, please. Half those people are still alive. But, I guess a dead girl can always dream. Look, can I crash here a while?”
I could tell by her voice that she was hiding something. “You’re a ghost who lives in Heaven, which, according to you, is all sex and drinking games. Why do you want to hang out in my crappy little apartment?”
“Can’t I just want some hang time with my kick-ass killer sister?”
“No. What’s up?”
Her shoulders slumped. “They might have caught on to my sneaking in and out of Heaven. There’s this small opening in the Pearly Gates that only I know about.”
“Well, God is all-knowing, so I’d imagine He knows.”
Chloe snapped her fingers. “Yes, exactly! And if the Big Guy’s cool with it, I don’t know why these other dudes were like, ‘You can never return.’ Because it’s like, never is a really long time.”
I sat upright on the couch. “Wait, you got kicked out of Heaven, just because you were comforting your sister on Earth?’
“I know, right? You’d think that would give me bonus points or something. Maybe extra time in the Cabana Room. Oh, do I have stories about that place. Once, I was playing Twister with Ponce de León, and the next thing I knew . . .”
I wiped a tear as I stood. “I can’t believe you got kicked out of Heaven for me. Come here.” I stretched my arms wide, and we embraced into a glowing specter, hovering a few feet above my rug. It was in that tender moment that the Police broke down my door.
They couldn’t see Chloe, and before she could hide me in the wall, I was face down in cuffs and hauled away. In retrospect, Habitat for Humanity might have been a better choice.
***
I sat handcuffed to a steel table bolted to the floor in an interrogation room. They really do look like the ones on TV. I wondered how long I’d be in here before Chloe rescued me. A young, clean-shaven man entered, sat across from me, and began typing on a laptop. He had nice hair. Under different circumstances . . .
“Do you know why you’re here, ma’am?”
Ma’am? I thought. How old does he think I am? I pretended to cough as I subtly leaned and sniffed my pits. Chloe was right. I didn’t smell great. “I think it’s obvious, detective. I’m the CPA for the organization the Feds raided this morning. Let me guess. They’re on the other side of that mirror?” I waved at them in my cuffs and then looked back at the cute detective who reminded me of a young Craig Robinson from my movie. “Ask whatever you want, but I’ve done nothing wrong. I did everything by the book.”
Without a word, Detective Robinson closed his laptop and stepped out. I sat alone on a metal chair for three hours, wondering why Chloe hadn’t appeared. There had to be a good reason. Finally, Detective Robinson returned with his partner, a no-nonsense, seasoned detective who reminded me of CCH Pounder from The Shield. She looked at me with soft eyes. “Ma’am, are you Shelly Dumont?”
“Yes. Shelly Dumont of Dumont Accounting, LLC.”
Robinson, whom I noticed was not wearing a wedding ring, typed on his laptop for a few moments, then looked at Detective Pounder and shook his head.
“Miss Dumont, there is no Dumont Accounting licensed in this state.”
My back stiffened. “That’s absurd. I’ve been in business for five years.”
Detective Pounder blinked. “You mentioned you worked for an organization under investigation. What organization would that be?”
I sighed. None of this mattered. I didn’t know what was keeping Chloe, but she would surely appear once I was alone again. My bottom was sore from the chair, and the cuffs were starting to chafe. They had nothing on me. I’d kept the books by the book, and any evidence to the contrary was up in smoke. Plus, I kind of had to pee. So, I cut to the chase. “I know what’s going on here. You’ll try to scare me with some sort of threat of prison time, which will magically disappear if I testify. But you know they’ll kill me if I do. What are you offering, witness protection?”
The detectives looked at each other. Pounder leaned forward. “Miss Dumont, who exactly do you believe you need protection from?”
I shook my head. “You know it’s the Bridges Family.”
“And you’re their CPA?”
“You know all this. Look, I will testify, okay? But I expect to be protected around the clock. Somewhere nice—with decent WiFi. Now, if you two would like to step out and discuss it, I’m sure I’ll be here when you get back.”
But they didn’t budge. “And where is your office?”
“Corner of Maple and 16th. Which you already know.”
Detective Pounder nodded at Robinson, who turned his laptop around. It was a screenshot of my office just before the raid. My cheap bastard dickhead employers had apparently installed a security camera to keep tabs on me. Chloe was right. Swearing was fun.
Detective Robinson pointed at the screen. “Ma’am, is this you in the frame?”
“You know it is.”
He nodded hesitantly. “Ma’am, this is Bridges Family Furniture Outlet, and, to our knowledge, not a criminal enterprise. There was no raid this morning. According to the store manager, you are not employed there. However, she reports catching you using the computer in the employee break room on several occasions, as shown here, and has politely asked you not to return.”
He pushed play. “Here you are typing on the computer before you back away and stand against the wall. You appear to be talking to someone.”
“Who are you speaking with, Miss Dumont?” Pounder asks.
“A friend,” I replied, which wasn’t a lie.
Pounder nods. “But you’re alone, and I don’t see any ear buds.”
“I had it on speaker phone.”
Pounder shook her head. “The audio on the tape is clear. No one is answering you, and we see no phone. Who do you believe you’re talking to, Miss Dumont?”
“No one. You make me sound crazy.”
Pounder puts a hand on top of mine. “No one’s saying that, honey. But sometimes, things can be confusing.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. I was talking to myself. People do that, don’t they?”
“Yes, they do. But they don’t do this.” She nodded at Robinson to advance the tape.
We watched as I pulled a bottle of lighter fluid from my purse, sprayed the desk, and lit a small fire. It was like watching a stranger with my face. Then, my body jerked and walked backwards to the back door as if I were possessed. We watched as I backed out into the alley behind the building.
Robinson clicked a button. “This is a street camera that shows you sliding your feet as if on roller skates as you proceed to the next street, where you remove a manhole cover, descend into the sewer, and twenty minutes later reemerge and wander away.”
My eyes went wild. “What is this tape? That is not what happened. Bullets came through the wall. Bridges’s men started that fire. I swear.”
Pounder gave her best effort at a compassionate look. “The employees were able to extinguish the fire before any real damage was done. You’re lucky no one was injured. What were you hoping to achieve, Miss Dumont? Were you upset they’d asked you to leave? Is that why you tried to burn down the store?”
I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. “This is all bullshit.” Where the hell was Chloe?
Robinson’s eyes saddened as he looked at Pounder. “What do you think, doctor?”
She nodded and leaned forward. “I’ve pulled some background on you, Shelly. You lost your sister and mother in a short time span when you were just a little girl. You had disciplinary problems all through school, and when your father went to prison, you moved in with his sister, who passed away shortly after that. After your father was paroled, he came to live with you but died only a few months later. It seems you’ve experienced a lot of loss in your life.”
Detective Robinson raised an eyebrow. “It also seems people die when you’re around, Miss Dumont.”
Doctor Pounder waved him off. “You’re going to come stay with us for a while, Shelly. We’ve got some issues to unpack, but don’t worry. We’ll have plenty of time.”
***
Several days after my transfer, I lay in a locked room on my bed, staring at the ceiling. Why had Chloe abandoned me? This wasn’t like her. Had the Heaven Police caught her? And who made that video footage? Any way you looked at it, I was screwed.
Chloe finally appeared. “Damn girl, I knew you were crazy boring, but they lock you up for that shit?”
I sprang to my feet. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been here for days!”
She smiled. “Swearing already. Prison life has changed you.”
“What took you so long?”
“I do have an afterlife, you know. I was with James Dean at his lake cabin. That man is all kinds of cool. You can’t rush that.”
“Let’s merge and get going.” I opened my arms. “They’ll be here any minute to take me to group.”
But instead of embracing me, Chloe floated down as if sitting on my bed. “Have you figured out what’s really going on here?”
It was a fair question, and one I’d racked my brain to figure out. “At first, I thought the Police were on the Bridges’s payroll. Locking me away as insane ties up a loose end. And that fake video gives them all they need. Then, I considered it could be the Feds. What if they saw me phase into the wall with you? They have the resources to give the local PD a fake tape, have me committed, and later quietly transfer me to a different kind of facility at an undisclosed location, the kind people never return from.”
Chloe’s eyes widened. “Wow. Didn’t take you long to dive down the conspiracy rabbit hole, huh? Have you considered the third option?”
“What third option?”
“That the tape is real.”
My sister loved tormenting me almost as much as she loved playing hero. That’s what sisters often do, but this was not the time, and my patience was wearing thin. “Stop screwing around and get me out of here!”
She smiled, but didn’t budge. “Think about it, killer. Maybe this place is exactly where you should be. I mean, after all the things you’ve done.”
“I’ve never done anything in my life,” I huffed. “Certainly nothing compared to what you’ve done in your afterlife, screwing both Wright brothers behind the other’s back.”
“It’s not a competition, Shel. But as long as we’re listing our greatest hits, let’s start with Mom. You cried yourself to sleep every night she put you to bed and whispered that my death was your fault.”
“What about it?”
Chloe shrugged. “Who took her milk the night she supposedly offed herself?”
“I did, but only because you said it’d make her feel better.”
She nodded. “And I also told you that crushing up all those pills, putting them into her glass, and stirring it really well would make her never speak to you that way again. And it worked, didn’t it?”
My mouth hung open. “I didn’t do that. That’s not what happened.”
“Sure, you did. And when you couldn’t sleep night after night because of Aunt Kathy’s freight train snoring, who told you how to adjust the doses in her injections to make that go away, too?”
“Stop it, Chloe. This isn’t funny.”
“And then there was dear old Dad, the family ex-con. Couldn’t get a job and wanted to live off your piddly little salary. But that was never going to work. Wonder what was in that coffee you made him every morning?”
“I didn’t kill any of them. Why are you tormenting me with these lies?”
“Because that’s what we do.”
And there it was. I had killed three people. Chloe was right. I did deserve to be locked up. But why couldn’t I remember? And the way I’d moved on that tape. There was only one explanation. “You possessed me. You bitch.”
“Oh, please. I didn’t possess you. Haven’t you ever seen a movie? Clearly, only Catholics can get possessed. You did those things. Not me.”
I covered my face. “This is all a bad dream. I can’t be a killer. I’m a freaking CPA!”
Chloe laughed. “CPA, my ass. You didn’t even go to college.”
I wiped my eyes and shook my finger. “Oh, yes, I did. It may have been a community college, but I worked hard and graduated in three years.”
“Sorry, sis. In reality, you were on the janitorial staff at a junior college for three years until they fired you. You didn’t go to class. You scrubbed toilets.”
Tears streamed down my face. “I don’t understand.”
Chloe nodded. “I know. You see, the only ghost power we have is the ability to whisper ideas in your head. We can make you see the world however we wish. Believe whatever we want. The only trick is that the living must secretly desire to see and believe it that way, too. Think of all the people who believe something despite all the evidence to the contrary. And no one is better at that than you, Shel. You’re the queen of self-deception.”
A fire sparked in my eyes. “You’re horrible. How the hell did they ever let you into Heaven?”
She shrugged. “They didn’t. When I died, I had so much hate in my heart that Heaven turned its back on me, which was fine, because they have this stupid no-revenge policy that wouldn’t have worked for me anyway. So, I headed south for warmer weather. You know, to work on my tan.”
I folded my arms. “So, you’re what, some sort of demon?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Shel. You don’t automatically become a demon. You have to apply, fill out endless forms, pass a background check, and then, if you’re lucky, get an audition.” Her eyes lit up. “The best part is, you’re my audition. Based on how things turn out here, I might actually get the job. So, help a sister out, would you? Now, so far, you’re doing great, but I’m going to need you to confess to the murders. And once we wrangle a death sentence, I’ll make you decline all appeals. We’re going to throw such a party for you down there the day they snuff you out. Everyone’s looking forward to meeting you. Isn’t that exciting?”
“To Hell with you, Chloe!” I shoved a finger at her. “I’ll never let you manipulate me again. I’m telling everyone about you.”
“I’m buried so deep in your head that I’m a part of you, sis. You can’t stop me. And if you want to tell everyone in a psychiatric facility that your dead sister made you do all those horrible things, go ahead. I can’t wait to see what happens. In fact, I’ll post about it on our social media down there. Think of all the followers I’ll get.”
I fell to my knees. “Why? You’re my sister. What did I ever do to you?”
“Golly, sis. I just couldn’t say. I mean, I feel like we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you hadn’t held my head under water until I drowned.”

💀💀💀

MN Wiggins is an internationally published novelist, surgeon, professor, and voice actor from the American South whose short stories have been performed on multiple podcasts and published in several magazines. His narration credits include The Night’s End podcast and Thirteen. Dr. Wiggins’s latest novel, El Dorado, is available through Solstice Publishing. His complete works may be found at www.MNWiggins.com

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May 12th, 2026

5/12/2026

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Flies in the Honey
by Kyle Walker

A story about control, fear, and the inevitability of decay. When one man’s carefully ordered life begins to unravel, he discovers that some things can never be kept out.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai Podcast.

Honey caught the first flies.
***
Reynold Valerie kept a jar of honey on his kitchen table. The real, raw, unfiltered kind - not the high-fructose corn syrup kind squeezed into bear-shaped bottles. Fake honey can go bad, but real honey does not spoil.

“Everything spoils, but not you,” said Reynold, complimenting his jar of honey in the usual way.

Each morning started like this. Next, he would unscrew the jar’s lid and spread its amber sweetness over his toast. However, today, when he looked down at the jar of honey, the black of his eyes swallowed the blue and he took a panicked step backward. Bile churned in his throat as the three black houseflies trapped inside the viscous prison stared back at him with their dead eyes.

“This can’t happen. Honey is pure, honey is clean, honey is—”
He choked on his next words. Sweat greased his greying auburn hair. It was the smell. He could always find it, no matter how fresh – how hidden. The stench of decay. He had not smelled it in a long time. He should have known the fear would find him eventually.

Fear came to define Reynold’s forty-four years of life. As with many things, perhaps his parents were to blame. Not his father, of course, having abandoned them before Reynold was born. It was his mother that instilled the importance of cleanliness and neatness. She taught him how to avoid crowds when he could, move swiftly and quickly when he couldn’t, and wash his hands afterward. However, he discovered the smell on his own when a truck driver failed to see his mother’s car pull out into a busy intersection. The smell found Reynold in his safe place in the backseat. When the paramedics and the police and the crowds came to pry his mother from the mangled car, they couldn’t smell it. Only he could.

Maybe if his mother warned him about the smell, things would be different. Maybe he would have known how to explain it to the women he dated. Why it was important for them to always be vigilant for the smell of decay. Reynold never blamed his mother though. Reynold never thought to blame anyone. These were truths hidden in plain sight and Reynold never went looking for them. Instead, he went looking for things that never spoiled. Things like honey.

That was why a large stock of honey jars cluttered his pantry. He ordered the honey through a local farm’s website and they delivered it to his doorstep. Reynold was a computer programmer for a large corporation and worked out of his apartment. He found everything else he needed on the internet. He had no family or friends to visit, so visits were not made. The farthest he traveled was to the garbage chute down the hallway. The silver-mouthed, black-handled chute equalized and cleansed everything. For the first time, the chute dined on honey. Honey infused with flies.

Reynold hadn’t always lived like this. He used to venture into the bowels of the city to go shopping or buy groceries. He would go at night when the subway and store aisles were less peopled. Less people meant the sea of faces could not find him. A sea of faces was all Reynold ever saw in a crowd. Waves of bodies and germs and infections threatening to crest upon him. However, at night, the tide receded and left only a few splashes of the diseased seafoam. About a year ago, everything changed.
***
The subway car had been empty when Reynold climbed aboard, grocery bags in tow. Two stops later, one passenger joined him - a large man in a shabby business suit. His suitcase hung from a clenched fist, his face clenched to match. Reynold was wary of the man from the beginning. With the entire subway car at his disposal, the man decided to sit across from him.
The man shifted in his seat throughout the ride. He pulled his tie down and released his top collar button, but it did nothing to ease his restlessness. Reynold tried to look away from the man’s discomfort, but it beckoned him. Stains blotted a dirty handkerchief as the man sponged sweat from his pale white forehead. A loud belch issued underneath the wet rag, flapping under its new weight. The man’s cheeks flushed to match his bright red hair.
“Excuse me,” said the man, looking ashamed. “Must have been something I ate.”
Reynold made no response but could not hide his disgust. The disgust stayed even as the man’s nervous chuckle choked on itself. Shame turned to pain then panic as the man grasped his chest and attempted to stand. He looked at Reynold and coughed two words.
“Help... me...”
The man fell headfirst onto the floor of the subway car. Metal thrummed then went silent. The dead man swayed with the rhythm of the train, the nighttime lights of the tunnel wriggled over the corpse and left him untouched. That was when Reynold smelled it. The stench of death rose from the motionless heap of meat and bones. The smell of rot, of disease, of fear. Fear that the dead man would trap him in the sea of faces. That the sea of faces would rise from the corpse, seeping from the bodily fluids sloshing sluggishly through his empty flesh. And the sea of faces spoke. They spoke the words which sloshed inside his head.
“Help... me...”
Then the man spoke again.
“Please...” croaked the man.
“No. You’re dead,” replied Reynold.
The dead man clutched to life, attempting to roll on his side. Was it life or decay that made his arm grasp for support? Reynold could smell the decay, so the man could not be alive. Yet the man looked up at Reynold and spoke through pained breaths.
“Please... help me...”
Fear unraveled.
The paramedics will come and the police will come and the crowds will come and I’ll be swallowed by the sea of faces.
“I’m sorry,” Reynold managed to say.
Reynold found himself on his feet, sweat soaking his clothes. The subway train came to a halt and the doors opened. Before the fear could find him, Reynold stepped through the doors. The decay inside the man lost its grip and he slumped back to the floor. The closing doors silenced the hollow thud.
Reynold ran out of the train station, out into the streets, and back into his apartment. The fear still found him, but when it did, he was safely behind his own door. Scalding hot water welcomed his soiled flesh.
He never learned what happened to the dead man. And he was dead. When Reynold remembered it, he remembered that the man did not move after he fell. The other memory was false. Decay playing tricks. Maybe the man had never been there at all. Or maybe he still rode around on the floor of the subway car. His fluids no longer sloshing. His body no longer swaying. The sea of faces replaced by a sea of flies, coming to feed on his death.
***
Reynold never had a problem with flies before. He was very fastidious about pest control. Pests brought germs. Germs bred infestation. Infestation warranted extermination. Extermination meant fumigation. Fumigation forced evacuation. And the sea of faces would find him again.
“How did this happen?” Reynold asked his fly infested jar of honey. “I always close your lid.”
Reynold scoured his apartment checking for any other signs of flies. Bleach accompanied his search, cleansing the bacteria he could not see. Once finished, only the antiseptic smell remained and his fears settled back into their forgotten places. He set another jar of honey on the kitchen table, confident in his cleansing. He made sure to fasten the jar’s lid, checking it twice. He returned to his morning routine that had been upset by the flies’ invasion. The hum started as he readied his toast. He followed the hum to the kitchen table. To the jar of honey.
The honey had caught six flies.
The lid sat abandoned next to the exposed and defenseless honey jar. As he stared at the trapped black corpses inside, the hum returned. He looked for the source but it went silent. The seventh fly appeared on the rim of the jar, mocking him with hunger. Its wings lay silent as it balanced over the abyss. Hunger gave way to recklessness and the fly descended into the abyss, sealing its fate along with its compatriots.
The fly flapped its wings inside the liquid quicksand. The solitary buzz sang a funeral march in quick staccato beats. Attempting to free its wings, the fly rolled to its side and the organic farm-fresh raw honey swallowed its head.
“How did this happen,” Reynold asked the yawning jar of honey. “This is not possible.”
The jar answered only with the sound of the fly’s death throes – incessant, creeping, piercing.
“Why are you doing this to me!?”
Reynold snatched the jar with frenzied hands and his anger propelled it through the air. The artisan glass jar shattered on his pantry door and the honey wept slow, oozing tears.
“You’re spoiling everything!”
That was when he heard it.
“Please...”
Reynold’s voice caught in his throat as he turned to gape at his apartment. Heavy, warm morning sunlight cast a long beam through the window and slithered across the floor. A quiet, almost inaudible hum hung in the air. It collected at his bedroom door. It stirred and breathed and the pale brown wood color changed to black. He squinted at the blackness and understood the change.
Houseflies blanketed his bedroom door.
Clinging and buzzing and crawling and mating and spawning and infecting and infesting.
***
Memory slipped as Reynold watched the door undulate and shimmer in the morning sunlight. He just cleaned his entire apartment. Hadn’t he? Nothing but darkness came back when he searched his memory. When was the last time he went into his bedroom? He had to have been in there this morning when he woke up but no memory of it accompanied his thoughts. He remembered going in there during the power outage last week. Yes, that’s right.
He just finished preparing dinner, drizzling honey over his roasted chicken, when the lights roared and went out. A lightning storm cut the power to the entire building. He stumbled toward his bedroom, groping in the darkness for the fuse box in his closet. His eyes tried to adapt, but the curtain of night remained in place. He had to restore the power. Or else fear would unravel.
The contents of his refrigerator would spoil. The cool, filtered, conditioned air would turn stuffy, hot, and contaminated. Worst of all, the landlord would violate his apartment in an attempt to correct the problem. The landlord only ever came when there was a problem. He brought with him the infection. The stench. Everything would be spoiled. In darkness, the sea of faces waited.
He hadn’t even crossed his bed’s threshold when the power restored itself. The sea of faces vanquished. The stench of decay barred from entering. Yet somehow, the smell found its way inside - bringing flies along with it.
***
The heavy odor of decay welcomed him as he took a step toward the door. This decay was different. It was not the decay he knew - the decay only he could smell. This decay was thick and full of reality. He choked in revolt and brought his arm up to his face, burying his nose in the crook of his elbow.
And again, it came.
“Please... help me...”
He knew the words. He remembered the words. He realized who the words belonged to.
The man on the subway train came back and brought his disease of death with him. He festered inside Reynold’s bedroom. Waited for Reynold - waited to take his revenge.
He should have run but something drew him forward. Truth. Or fear. Or both. He needed to clean the only safe place left. Either that or run to the outside world - the infection, the disease. He must clean or surrender to a place that could not be cleaned.
Reynold would not run away. Not this time.
The flies swam around him as he gripped the doorknob. They parted and skittered away upon his approach but only momentarily. Their curiosity prodded his skin, buzzed into his ears, grasped at his hair, searched for a way inside. The taste of vomit touched his tongue as he swatted them away. Their hunger for vomit drew them back.
As the seal of the door broke, a new taste followed. The stench caught in his nostrils, sliding down to touch his taste buds. He coughed, attempting to expel the fresh scent of rot. His vision blurred and the bedroom swam before him. The writhing form on his bed made itself known.
Like a living curtain, the flies parted as he turned. The room drooped with them. They darkened the air. A shadow upon a shadow. The dark shape that lay in his bed shrouded itself under his bedsheets. It moved as he grew nearer and he could hear its rasping, moaning words.
“Help... me...”
The flies gathered around him, soldiers ready for the breach. A terrified yelp escaped his lips, betraying his actions, as he tore away the bedsheets.
He heard the movement before he saw it.
The tired bedsprings groaned, shifting the weight that settled into motionlessness. Outside, the lightning storm returned. The flashes of light pulsed inside him like a heartbeat. A heartbeat full of clenching pain. A pain that struck him in the chest with grasping claws. Claws that held him in place, held him in hell, held him in unmoving terror. A second claw rested on his shoulder. It wore the shape of a hand but its touch was thick and sharp. The dark, lurching shape crept from the bed, the lightning shattered across its face.
Reynold opened his mouth to scream but air could not reach his lungs. The shape mirrored his silence and opened its mouth in feigned terror. Its pale white flesh writhed in the light and fell from its mouth as it spoke.
“Help... me...”
The flesh fell to the floor, continuing to twist and struggle. But it wasn’t flesh. The thunder-filled lightning shined upon the darkness. And in the darkness, Reynold saw what covered the shape.
Maggots. Hundreds. Thousands. Fighting for food in a wasteland of death.
Like a liquid stain, the maggots streaked down the front of the shape’s shirt. The stain saturated his chest, darkened his heart, clasping it in feverish hunger. The shape opened his mouth to speak once again.
“Help me.”
This time, the voice did not come from the shape. It came from Reynold.
The world went dark.
Reynold no longer stood. He felt the bedsprings under his body, supporting, caressing. All he saw was the darkness — a darkness that the lightning storm outside could not penetrate. The sea of faces scratched in the void. They would come for him. Intruders would come. His sanctuary defiled by those searching for light. The sea of faces would bring their diseases. His safe place torn apart, leaving him naked and exposed. Within darkness, the sea of faces clutched at his chest.
Tightening.
Strangling.
Choking.
The shape stood at the foot of his bed, staring at Reynold. Its hair hung in sweat-soaked strands of auburn grey. White film shaded the blue of its eyes into a milky haze.
Reynold still had no air in his lungs, but he screamed at its lifeless face. He tried to move, to escape the bedsheets, but their weight held him down. The flies stuck to him like honey, thick and sweet. The white stain of maggots grew dark. Yet all of this could not tear him away from the lifeless face that stared down at him from the foot of his bed.
It spoke. It spoke through familiar lips. With a familiar voice.
“Everything spoils.”
***
Complaints of the smell brought the first intruder into the apartment. The landlord discovered the corpse of Reynold Valerie in the bedroom, claimed by a heart-attack during the lightning storm that caused the power outage a week prior. On the kitchen table, an uneaten plate of roasted chicken rotted beside an opened jar of honey.
Flies filled the honey with their death.
But it had not been the honey.
Reynold Valerie’s corpse caught the first flies.

💀💀💀

Kyle Walker is a writer and playwright living in Valdez, Alaska. His short stories have appeared in Alien Dimensions, Scary Monsters Magazine, and the Prince William Sound Anthology Series. His theater work has been featured at the Civic Center Theater in Valdez, Alaska, Under St. Marks Theater in New York, NY, Dog Story Theater in Grand Rapids, MI, Hap Ryder Riverfront Theatre in Fairbanks, AK, and TBA Theater in Anchorage, AK. His non-musical stage adaptation, "Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera," was published by Next Stage Press in 2024. Follow him on Facebook and Instagram and at kylewalkerwriter.com.

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May 6, 2027

5/6/2026

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The Night of the Living Bedsheet
by Alexander Grass

A strange apparition begins as a curiosity—but quickly becomes something dangerous. In this unsettling tale, a mundane job turns into a nightmare when a mysterious entity reveals its horrifying need.

Click here to listen to this story on the Kaidankai podcast.

When my mom told her friends that I worked as a night janitor at a bloodbank, I think they believed I’d been sworn to keep the Holiest of Holy Secrets of Blood. I don’t know how else to explain their excitement. It was big news for the Catholic book club.
I think I spoiled it for them, however, when I proceeded to tell them that I never saw blood at work. It was my job to empty garbage cans and vacuum, after all. I wasn’t a phlebotomist.
That I had no special expertise in cleaning blood was particularly confounding to them. They had a look on their faces like children who’ve been told, all at once, that Santa isn’t real but that death is.
One of Mom’s friends looked at me like I was foreclosing on her house when she said, “But it’s a bloodbank. There must be blood everywhere.” (Translation: Does Santa die, too?)
“Not that I get to see.” (Translation: Everybody dies. Everybody.)
Pretty soon after that, I did get to see blood at the bloodbank for the first time, though it was my own blood, and I never had any intention of donating it in the way that I did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
First, I have to tell you about the sheet.
•
I was in the bloodbank’s bathroom Windexing the mirrors when I first saw it. I bent down to pick up a rag to wipe with from my carry caddy on the floor, then stood back up and saw through the mirrors’ reflection that there was something behind me. A single white bedsheet.
I turned around to look with my own eyes, only to find that when I did the bedsheet wasn’t there. I faced the mirror again. I looked in the Windex streaks like they held the premonitory secrets of tea leaves, or at least some sort of explanation. What I thought I’d seen was gone.
So, I saw something that wasn’t really there. You’re probably thinking: What’s the big deal?
When you’ve seen something that may be, in fact, not real, it isn’t a phenomenon you just chalk up to a ganky sandwich. Life is not a Charles Dickens yarn about moralizing ghosts. I was seeing things (or at least a single, illusory thing). And that concerned me.
Could I see a doctor about it? Technically, yes, but I was a little hamstrung by a super-high co-pay on my health insurance (commensurate with my position as a guy who spent a lot of time cleaning toilets).
I thought of telling my mother, but she’d find Jesus in there somewhere. (My mother found Jesus in everything. Like if there was a version of Where’s Waldo? for the Son of God, my mom would be the Where’s Jesus? world champion.)
So what did I do? I did what anyone else without the resources for discreet psychiatric counseling would do. I ignored it.
I used my willful ignorance to pay the rent on a temporary peace, to the tune of a month and change. But like anything bought with ignorance, that peace proved to be impermanent.
I did stop worrying about it for a time. But only for a time.
•
A month or so went by.
I was in the bathroom Windexing the mirrors again when I saw it. It was right there in the mirrors’ reflection: the white bedsheet. Just hanging there like it was strung up on an invisible clothesline.
I shut my eyes tight and said something to the effect of, “It’s not real. Please go away. It’s not real.” But when I opened my eyes, it was still there.
I turned around to look without the mirrors’ mediation, hoping I would see nothing at all again. But I saw a white bedsheet hanging, with nothing for it to hang on, just hanging there, in mid-air.
I had an incredible urge to touch it. From time to time, touch can see those things your eyes can’t see. Maybe the sheet was attached to ultra-fine fishing line, or those strings they used to make actors fly in movies, back before CGI. I wanted to find out. I needed to touch it and find out.
I know that you might read that and think, no, no, no, that’s the last thing anyone should do, ever. The safest thing to do, many of you will say (and in accordance with everything I know about cursed objects from every spooky movie ever), would be to flee far and fast before the object could rub its bad juju off on me.
You never touch the unexplainable thing.
But this was real life. I was not in a movie. My job was to clean and, to a lesser degree, organize the bloodbank at night, and I couldn’t imagine that didn’t include any and all rogue bedlinens. So I touched the sheet.
I swear, it made a sound. Like it was purring. Then it floated up toward the air vent over the last toilet stall, and slithered through the grill, then off to parts unknown.
•
I thought about it night and day for the next two weeks. Did the white sheet mean something? Was it a prank? Was it a magic trick? Was it a symbol of solidarity with phlebotomists, and if so, what kind of political movement was that?
I racked my brain and put whatever I came up with into Google: “do they hang sheets in bloodbanks?”, “white sheet bathroom prank”, “bathroom hallucinations”.
The quality of the answers I found on the internet was equivalent to how awful my need for them was. Truly, very awful answers.
But I narrowed it down to three (weak) possibilities. One, a vagrant who used the bathroom after hours had hung up his bedsheet to dry while I wasn’t looking, and the AC blower hiccuped and sucked it into the HVAC. Two, I was experiencing the slow and agonizing onset of schizophrenia (a theory that somewhat tracked since I was a man in my mid-twenties). Or, three, I’d drank an astonishing amount of NyQuil and then forgotten about it.
I’d lay awake in bed, tossing and turning and weighing impossible explanations in my head. I was convinced there was some deeper meaning that I had yet to grasp. Maybe it was a sign. Maybe telling my mother wasn’t the craziest idea. Maybe hearing her savior-centric speculations wouldn’t hurt me. I’d already scraped the bottom of the barrel by visiting WebMD.
I started to feel an alternating thrill and dread before I went into work. Some nights I cleaned the bathroom first, which only meant I’d be distracted till work ended (and inevitably run to go check if the bedsheet had materialized). Other nights I tried (and sometimes even succeeded) to hold off on cleaning the bathroom until right before my shift ended.
I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. My health was suffering because of a (probably unreal) bedsheet.
•
And then it came back again, as it was bound to do.
I had my headphones in while I was vacuuming the reception area. I turned to whip the vacuum cord out of my way and there it was. I froze.
It was slack, as if carelessly draped over an invisible couch. It was bunched and twisted now, too, but it still levitated like it had done the other two times I’d seen it.
The bedsheet turned and floated away from reception and into the back office. Its shape changed as it wove between desks, cabinets, and water coolers. And as it wove, I followed its course.
It reached the secure door past which was the cold room full of fridges and freezers, where plasma, cryoprecipitate, and red blood cells were stored.
What happened next was a moment that was, I believe, unique to human experience. Something whose witness must be memorialized.
The bedsheet billowed and tumbled in the air, its fabric moving in and around itself. It started to form an object. When the bedsheet was done transforming, there hung in the air, right in front of my eyes, a hundreds-thread-count heart the size of a garbage can. A bedlinen myocardium contracted the heart’s white walls, pumping blood that wasn’t there.
A heart needs blood. There’d never been a more winning round of Charades played anywhere in the world.
“I can’t,” I said, as if I would even consider giving a bedsheet access to the bloodbank that employed me, “I don’t have the key. They don’t give us the key.”
The white heart beat its folds of bedlinens faster, stressing the urgency of its need.
“I can’t do it, I’m sorry. I don’t have a key. I have no way of getting in except with a key, and I don’t have one.”
The heart opened itself as it cracked like a bullwhip, and I startled back on my heels. It flattened into a lowly bedsheet once again. It became so rigid, and rigidified with such speed, that it was like a rattlesnake getting ready to strike. The goddamn bedsheet was angry at me.
Heaven help me, I pleaded with it. “I can’t let you in. I’m sorry, but I don’t have a key, and there’s no other way to get in there. I’m sorry.”
I made it clear to the bedsheet that there was no way for me to get it what it wanted.
It attacked.
It rolled itself into a tight-bunched spiral, like a braided white rope. It wrapped around my neck. It dragged me away from the security door. I fought it but it had strength that came from outside the physical world. I was easily overmatched.
I felt the blood in my face trying to push out of my skin, my panicked pulse bumping in my ear like I had a stethoscope over my own jackhammering heart. It squeezed its white body tighter around my throat. The edges of my vision started to fade to black as the bedsheet whipped me onto my back and dragged me away.
It pulled me into the office supply closet. Why was it pulling me in there? There was nothing in there except for legal pads, pens, reams of printer paper…
And the paper cutter. Oh my God, the paper cutter.
When I realized what it was doing, I grabbed onto anything I could. I gripped the bottom of a rack of shelves bolted into the floor. But the bedsheet pulled me until, one by one, my fingers uncurled. It ripped me loose. I wedged my feet behind a defunct Xerox machine, but it was so powerful that it just hauled me forward until my sneaker came off.
The worst part was the moment before what happened, happened. My eyes saw the paper cutter but my mind saw a guillotine. The edge of the blade gleamed under the supply closet’s fluorescent lights.
“Stop! Let me go, I’ll get you blood,” I said, screaming, “just give me a chance, I’ll get you blood!”
For a split second, it completely loosened from around my neck. I felt the exhilaration of escape, a rush of relief. I thought it had set me free.
But then it wrapped both ends of its roped body around the wrists of each of my hands.
I screamed and screamed, but no one could hear me.
When it pulled my right hand toward the paper clamp, I dropped into dead weight, turning every ounce of my body’s hundred and sixty-three pounds into an anchor. But the bedsheet lifted me up by my wrists like a parent bulldozing through their toddler’s tantrum.
It whipped me around so that my back was bent over the paper cutter’s table. All of a sudden, I couldn’t see the blade.
There was something about being put on my back, about having to stare up at the fluorescent lights while I was being attacked, that was a violation greater than the sum of the night’s preceding violence. My panic gave me new strength with which to fight. But when I tried to twist my hands away, to lever my body weight, to buck and kick my feet in the air, to build up momentum to throw myself, I was restrained by something that felt like steel manacles bolted into a stone wall.
The bed sheet unfurled and twisted itself into a four-limbed starfish while it still kept hold of my wrists. It pushed my supinated hand under the paper clamp and, with one of its new limbs, turned the clamp’s spindle tighter and tighter. The pain that sent into my fingers was like dunking them inside boiling water. My hand was as pressurized as heavy duty tires. My blood tried escaping the constriction of my flesh around it.
“Help! Somebody, please help me!”
Slice.
I screamed. The bedsheet let go of me. I rolled on my side and around the table, my hand still clamped into the paper cutter. I stood up and reached for the spindle to let my hand loose, but the bedsheet still had one of its snaky limbs keeping the clamp tight.
I watched the bedsheet brush itself against the open wounds of my three fingers’ partial amputations.
My blood seeped into its fabric and started to spread. Once the sheet was soaked red, it let go of my hand. I dropped to the ground, barely conscious. I watched from the floor as the now-blood-soaked bedsheet transformed again. It changed into something shaped like a human face, without the details of eyes or ears or a fully formed nose, without a body. But it had a mouth.
I watched as the bedsheet screamed. If it was screaming in either triumph or anguish, I don’t know which it was.
And then I passed out.
•
I quit the night janitor job the next day. I offered no explanation to my boss and she didn’t ask for one. I think she could tell over the phone that something was wrong with me.
You probably want to know about my hand.
“What happened when three of your fingertips were chopped off?” is a question that probably answers itself. I am missing the index, middle, and ring finger of my right hand, at the knuckles right below where my nails used to be.
Of course my mother asked me what happened. I told her I closed my fingers in a steel door. Does she believe me? Not if rubbing her rosary beads and playing Where’s Jesus? with a new end times fervor is anything to go by.
I'm sleeping in a sleeping bag now.
•
I still felt the need to know the cause of what happened. Even if I was mutilated in the process, I experienced something unexplainable. I still had a burning desire to understand—either the bedsheet, or whatever force occupied the bedsheet—whatever that thing was.
But I couldn’t go back there. Not ever again. So I posted a description of what happened to me to an occult and supernatural phenomena message board and asked if anyone knew what “entity” I’d encountered.
The user account that sent me the private message explaining what I’d experienced was deleted as soon as I received their message. Deleted User Number X said they’d included in their message to me something from a German occult reference book called “Das Nachtnabel-Kompendium Ungewöhnlicher Phantasmen, or, ‘The Nachtnabel Compendium of Uncommon Phantasms’.”
Below the book’s title was the following excerpt:
The blutgeist is the result of a misbegotten rite of the black mass. The theory proposed by the very originator of this volume, the Nachtnabel Hypothesis, puts forth that any human being chosen for ritual sacrifice at a black mass, and who is descendent from a biological parent dead by exsanguination, and then dies by exsanguination themselves, will return as a blutgeist through the medium of the last physical object the descedent touched while still living.
The blutgeist, simply put, is the unwittingly summoned victim of a black mass’s ritual human sacrifice, into the form of a ghost. Such a spirit forever seeks physical reconstitution for itself and appertaining ancestor, by subsuming the blood of others into its form. The subsumption is not parasitic, as its cause is spiritual need, not physiological hunger. The blutgeist seeks lifesblood not as sustenance, but as a means of payment on the toll road to its own resurrection into the physical world.
The Kompendium will take special note that since the blutgeist is an apparition, not an undead hemovore, none of the appurtenances of vampire-hunting shall avail against it.

💀💀💀

Alex Grass was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three kids. His recent work has appeared in Flash Phantoms, Maudlin House, Trembling With Fear, and other outlets. His last novel, A Boy's Hammer, was selected for inclusion in Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2022.

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About

The Flesh that Endures
by David Horn

Heavenly Escape
by MN Wiggins

Flies in the Honey
by Kyle Walker

The Night of the Living Bedsheet
by Alexander Grass