When you open that door, it’s not onto the hallway that should be there, but into another closet.

  The smell is all different. Then you get it: that time you took too many at that one party and went and hid in the closet to call your dad and say you’re sorry, but fell asleep instead, woke the next morning, stumbled out into a kitchen of people who didn’t know your name but were happy to see you anyway?

  This is that closet.

  Stumble out of it again. Not into a strange kitchen but into a closet that’s dusty, like a vacuum cleaner died in here. Outside, in what you are suddenly sure is a bedroom with a hardwood floor and white curtains gone yellow with nicotine, somebody’s sleeping.

  This is when I tried to go back, when I felt the wall behind me for a doorknob, because I didn’t belong here.

  My grandfather, when they found him, he’d been dead for eight weeks. In his bed.

  He never went into his closets anymore, by then. Just one pair of clothes, and the closets had too many photo albums in them anyway. And shoes of children long gone.

  Instead of finding a doorknob when I reached back, I found a hand.

  Josh. He was just standing there.

  “What happened?” I said into his chest.

  It was dark, so there was probably a fly crawling across his eyeball or something, for all I know.

  And then my grandfather’s slippered feet were scraping across the floor.

  He’d heard us.

  I closed my eyes, screamed, spilled us out the door to rush for the hall and the front door and the porch and the yard and the driveway and the world we used to know, that we could still live in if we could just find it. But where we fell out into, it was the loft over a bar nobody was in.

  I nearly fell over the railing but had Josh to hold onto. My dead-weight boyfriend.

  The reason he’s a scabhead, it’s because the headliner of his Monte Carlo, it scraped all the hair and skin off up there after he’d locked his elbows against the steering wheel.

  That’s the way inertia works: he couldn’t go forward, so his arms pendulumed him up into the maroon roof.

  The other way inertia works, the way it works best, really, is if you’re a passenger, one not wearing a seatbelt. One about to say something funny that you now can’t remember. But it’s right there on your tongue, wriggling and unborn.

  * * *

  What I kept doing at first—what anybody would do—was go back to that first bar.

  Right?

  I would hold Josh’s hand, pull him up the rickety ladder and we’d try every door up in the loft—all two of them. Because this had to be a mistake.

  The first door opened onto a closet that was just a closet.

  The other was just a spare door someone had stashed up here. It was leaned against the wall.

  Still, I tried.

  My handprints were in the dust on the rail, from our first day.

  Since nobody was ever down in the bar smoking and drinking, then this dust, it wouldn’t be powdered skin, would it?

  Then where did it come from?

  But barns the world’s forgotten about, they’re always dusty.

  Moths, I told myself.

  Every time a moth launches off toward what it probably thinks is a sun, there’s a small breath of dust puffing up from its wings. Dust that has to go somewhere.

  When I was kid, we thought that dust was poison, like the dust in a rattlesnake’s tail, or the white powder inside certain beetles, if you cracked them open right.

  Standing up there, I licked my lips. But not the rail. Not even where it was clean from my hand, however long ago that had been.

  Behind me, Josh made his groaning sound and secretly swallowed a maggot.

  Soon he was going to open his mouth, and flies were going to crawl out.

  Maybe this is what love is, here.

  * * *

  If Josh is a scabhead, he’s the only one I’ve seen.

  Aside from him and his decaying breath, there’s the inkfeet—I should have called them shadowrunners, but it’s too late now—and there’s the standers.

  I think I might be a stander.

  I didn’t even see them for the first few days.

  All they do is stand flat-backed up against a wall, and stare. Soon enough they get coated in the same grime as the walls, as the bar, as the loft. They’re easy to miss.

  In the mornings, though, their footprints give them away.

  After dark, they drift through the streets, feeling around for a better vantage point. For some span of days early on, two of them were standing back-to-back against each other right by a doorway, like they’d been caught out by this version of the sun, and were just standing very, very still, waiting the day out. I don’t think they even knew it was another stander behind them, not a wall.

  The reason I think I might be one is that I always wonder what they’re looking at.

  One of them is a scraggly-haired girl, always hiding her face in the corner.

  Josh is drawn to her. I have to guide him away each time we get close enough for him to sense her, however he does that.

  One time I found him with a mouthful of blonde hair. He wasn’t chewing it, it was just packed in, some of the strands even down his throat.

  I pulled it out carefully, smelled it.

  It was like a battery.

  I looked at Josh. He knew things I didn’t. I could tell. He’d traded in his higher functions for a set of low ones. For instincts. He could navigate here in a way I couldn’t. Because he’d forgot about the Monte Carlo, about the party, about my sister. About me. None of that was clouding his head, now.

  It’s not his fault, though.

  It had to be one of us.

  * * *

  Two mornings before I’d decided this was it, that something had to be done, something was burning on the horizon. With those oily black flames.

  We walked out together, me leading Josh by the hand.

  He tried to pull away but I insisted.

  It was a corrupt mattress. One a body had decomposed into.

  I threw dirt at it and finally fell down onto my knees and cried.

  Josh was watching the sky again by the time I looked up to him.

  The woman who’d called him a scabhead, she was watching him. The flames from the mattress were throwing his wavery shadow behind him. It was doubling and reforming, but in the middle where it crossed itself, there was a deep blackness.

  The woman looked from that blackness up to me.

  And then she was running for us.

  I met her ten steps out, and we clawed into each other, but I wasn’t spent from running my days away. I drove her back, screamed after her like an animal, so she would know to stay away.

  In reply, she pointed behind me.

  Josh was standing on the mattress. In the flames.

  Above us, the things in the sky screamed.

  * * *

  The bar nobody comes to is ours now. I’ve decided.

  I keep Josh laid out on the part of the bar that lifts up like a door.

  The fire burned most of his features off, but you can’t really die here. It’s like a rule. You only get to die once.

  The bone behind his ear is still infected with light.

  Not everybody comes here through closets, either. The day after I pulled Josh from the flames, a man fell from the sky. For a long time he lay facedown in the street.

  He’s in the basement now, and is staying longer than we did.

  Maybe that’s a fourth option. The basement people. There were probably already generations of them down there watching us when we’d tried to hide.

  To try to keep Josh alive, I pried his mouth open to spit into it—there’s no water, nothing in the bottles on the shelves—but what came up from his mouth, it was that same light from behind his ears.

  It was grainy light, too. I could put my fingers in the glow and feel the grit between the pads of my finger and thumb.

  If the door wasn’t barricaded, the inkfeet would all be in here already, looking over my shoulder.

  Instead, they have to mill around on the street. Because they’ve been in motion so long they can’t stand still anymore, have to walk back and forth, doing neat flip turns at the end of their round. It’s like the street’s a big waiting room.

  I’ve tried stacking bottles and clothes and broken off chair legs under Josh’s chin to keep his mouth from spilling light—it settles in odd, now-phosphorescent places—but every time I nod off, I come back to my boyfriend, the flashlight mouth.

  Finally what I do is find a right-sized bottle, one with the narrowest base of them all, and work it into his mouth, careful of his teeth, trying not to pinch his dry tongue.

  The bottleneck focused the light into more of a beam. Which I then corked off.

  He’s not a flashlight anymore. He’s a lantern.

  From the side, it’s like he’s got a beak but ate too many fireflies, and now they’re swarming, trying to get out.

  I don’t know how much longer this can go on.

  * * *

  In the clean spot I elbow-rubbed in the mirror, I see the bones behind my ears aren’t glowing. Not even a little.

  I’ve figured out there are standers in here with me, too.

  I don’t mind them so much. I think they’ve been there too long, have forgotten what they are, or used to be.

  But they’ve started opening their eyes. For Josh. Josh who, before the wreck, before this place, used to always cut the inside seam of his pants legs up about two inches from where they stopped. He said it was because he’d grown up with uncles who wore bellbottoms, and now his pants, opened into a flare like that, looked the same over his boots.

  It was a big part of why I kept walking out to his Monte Carlo when he pulled up. Because I was the same age, and didn’t remember any of that. My pants all tapered down to my ankles.

  But I wanted to have more of a connection to how it used to be, I think.

  Josh gave me that, if I squinted just right.

  Maybe that did count for love.

  Or close enough.

  * * *

  Because I let Josh lie in one place too long, with that glowing bottle jammed down his throat, the burned skin and clothes between the inside of his arms and his side has congealed together.

  I woke to him jerking his left arm and moaning into the bottle.

  I kissed him on the cheek.

  The bottle had a single fly in it. It was banging against the glass walls, its eyes splintering the light.

  There was no sound, though. Any buzzing would have driven me to scream, I know.

  In the street, they’re moaning. The inkfeet, whatever standers have been roused, and maybe even the basement people.

  One of them is my grandfather, I’m pretty sure.

  When the family was trying to establish a last live sighting of him, my mother had come to me and I’d lied that I’d taken those cigarettes to him last month, and he’d been fine, okay?

  To everybody else, my grandfather lay dead on his bed for four weeks.

  I know it was two months, though.

  I was still smoking from that carton then, even.

  I don’t think he remembers me, though.

  He’s a stander now, I’m pretty sure. Judging by the accumulation on his shoulders and brow ridges.

  His lips are cracked and dry.

  We’re reborn here, though. Made whole again, in a way.

  Except some. The Joshes. The scabheads.

  When I’m watching for my grandfather in the crowd, my hand ready to wave to him, to say I’m sorry, a door opens upstairs and a boy steps through.

  Not from the cast-off door, but the closet.

  He closes it before I can crash the stairs. When he sees me coming, when his face catalogues Josh on the bar, and what’s been done to him, he crashes through a window up there, falls out into the street and keeps running.

  “Go,” I tell him.

  His feet are so sure for now. So fast.

  That’s where I want to go, I know. That’s what I should have done in the first place. Except for the dead weight of Joshua, my scabhead boyfriend, who, instead of looking both ways, figured he could just put his foot into it, surge through the red light.

  But the Monte Carlo never was a muscle car.

  I think the funny thing I was going to tell him, it was related to that.

  When I try to pry the bottle from his mouth, it won’t come. So I stand him up. At first he’s unsteady, has to lift his arms for balance.

  The congealed matter stretches up from his side.

  It’s wings.

  I fall back, a new coldness welling up in my throat.

  Outside now, the crowd is silent, holding its breath. Waiting.

  Then, as one, a humming seeps in from them. From their throats, their lips all closed, their eyes so open.

  How long have they been here? How long have they been waiting for a scabhead?

  Josh coughs and, even though the bottom of the bottle has to be whole—there’s only soft tissue at the back of the throat, nothing to crack the eyeglasses-thick bottom of a bottle—still, his cough dislodges the cork.

  It doesn’t shoot out like a cartoon, just tumbles down to the hardwood.

  From behind it, that single fly buzzes, and then the light from inside Josh’s head, the light bottlenecked through that glass funnel, it spotlights that little fly for a moment, casting its blurry shadow huge on the wall, right beside a stander.

  Neatly, like he’s been timing this for ages, that stander rolls from back to front along the wall, and slips into that shadow, is gone.

  I pull back and reach forward at the same time, one confused motion, and by the time I know I should have ran across the bar, dove through that fly shadow, after that stander, Josh has his bottle-mouth directed somewhere else.

  At me.

  He’s remembering. I can tell from his eyes.

  They’re crinkling up like from a smile, like he’s hearing the funny thing I had been going to say—it was something to do with “Monte Carlo,” how that’s a gambling place, isn’t it? Like this car was born to take its chances through an intersection—but then he jerks his head towards the batwing doors that open onto the street.

  Goodbye, I want to say to him, because I know, because I can tell from the way he’s shifting his weight on his feet, but what I say instead is “Wait.”

  I’m too late.

  He’s already running, pushing through the doors, through the wall of bodies opening before him.

  He’s leaned forward like a kid, pretending to fly.

  Maybe this is how old he was when he first saw how his uncles wore their pants. Maybe this is where he gets to stay.

  I hope so.

  Behind him, the wall closes. I crash against the people, the bodies, the standers and the inkfeet and the basement people, and I fight through, over, under, but still only get to the edge of town with the rest of them.

  Josh is already aloft. He’s already up there, swooping back and forth.

  Scabheads, they’re eggs.

  I want to smile, I want to laugh.

  But his shadow seeping across the ground like oil, like ink, it’s still so fresh.

  What I do is what I have to do: I run after it.

  Inside it, bathed in it, it’s cool, it’s quiet, it’s perfect.

  If he can just keep his flight straight for two steps more. For four. Steady now. Steady.

  I run faster, harder, lighter, my skin so tuned to the coolness under his leathery wings, trying to track it, anticipate it.

  I can keep this up. I can do this.

  The tears, they’re streaming back from my eyes, cutting through the dust on my face, tracing coolness onto my scalp.

  And I’m smiling.

  Because I can, I can do this.

  You only die once. I know this now.

  But it lasts forever.

  Stephen Graham Jones is the Bram Stoker Award®-nominated author of twenty novels, five collections and more than two hundred short stories. Jones has been named a Shirley Jackson Award finalist. He has won the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award for Fiction, the Independent Publishers Awards for Multicultural Fiction and an NEA Fellowship in Fiction.

  Jones recently published the single-author collection After the People Lights Have Gone Off. The novel, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly, was written under the pseudoynam P.T. Jones and is a collaboration with Paul Tremblay.

  Jones likes hackysack and slashers and hair metal and old trucks.

  "Omniscopic" by Rhoads Brazos

  Copyright © 2015 Rhoads Brazos

  "Some Other Day" by John F.D. Taff

  Copyright © 2015 John F.D. Taff

  "Haunter" by Hank Schwaeble

  Copyright © 2015 Hank Schwaeble

  "Nine" by Aaron Polson

  Copyright © 2015 Aaron Polson

  "Penumbra" by Jay Caselberg

  Copyright © 2015 Jay Caselberg

  "Foxhole" by JG Faherty

  Copyright © 2015 JG Faherty

  "Drowning" by Gregory L. Norris

  Copyright © 2015 Gregory L. Norris

  "The Weight" by Jane Brooks

  Copyright © 2015 Jane Brooks

  "Harder You Fall" by Brian Fatah Steele

  Copyright © 2015 Brian Fatah Steele

  "Mirrorworld" by Martin Rose

  Copyright © 2015 Martin Rose

  "March Hays" by Matthew Pegg

  Copyright © 2015 Matthew Pegg

  "High Art" by Karen Runge and Simon Dewar

  Copyright © 2015 Karen Runge and Simon Dewar

  "A Pirate's Ransom" by Jay O'Shea

  Copyright © 2015 Jay O'Shea

  "To Touch the Dead" by Paul Michael Anderson

  Copyright © 2015 Paul Michael Anderson

  "You Only Die Once" by Stephen Graham Jones

  Copyright © 2015 Stephen Graham Jones

  "Grey Matter Press has managed to establish itself as one of the premiere purveyors of horror fiction currently in existence via both a series of killer anthologies -- SPLATTERLANDS, OMINOUS REALITIES and EQUILIBRIUM OVERTURNED -- and John F.D. Taff's harrowing novella collection THE END IN ALL BEGINNINGS." -- FANGORIA Magazine