Daniel?

A piggish snort. Crusted eyes crack open like the wings of a beetle. Ragged nails scrape against the red-worn desert of an adolescent jawbone. A fishlipped yawn.

Ugh. What?

What did you call that plant thing again?

Jesus, James. Waxwood. It's a reddish bark. Oozes this cloudy stuff if you crush it.

Oh. Yeah, of course. Sorry.

Ambient silence. Raindrops fill with rotting organic sediment and fall into the leaves around the
clapboard tollbooth. A zealous fist of ivy tightens its tattered fingers across rheumatic windowpanes.

Dan?

Mm?

Why don't you like to talk about Clifftown?

Ambient silence. Raindrops. Ivy.

I’ll tell you why I don’t like to talk about Clifftown.

Go on.

Sigh.

I was born there. Before all this happened, it was this small village where onions grew. Not many people lived there. There was... Christ. A church, a chemist, a library and a few houses. The biggest house was this tall yellow clapboard place, which was on the cliff by the sea. This kid who lived there. He wasn’t -

A thud as a gesticulating knuckle rasps against splintered pine.

-Ow, **** - didn’t look human. His head was big and soft like a berry, and his eyes were wide and wet and creepy, and he never spoke. It was like he was empty.

What’d you say his name was again?

Never did.

A dusty rubbing noise as the fluid is forced out of a cheekbone.

Leviticus Croker. He died when he fell from a low salt cliff into the sea or something. Can’t remember.

****. I’m sorry.

Don’t be. I hated him.

A lump of pressed asphalt sends a clouded multitude of motes spinning and passes screaming through the glass pane of the sunwards window. A chuckle.

That was a year ago. They had to blame somebody.

Oh. Right.

An eyelid raised in revelation traps a mote against the skin stretched taut across a young skull.

Right. ****.