Nightsiders

00:00 A.M.

They came for him much later, after the police and the ambulance crews had arrived at the scene to catalog the list of atrocities.

They had watched the aftermath from the trees, realizing they were now free and wondering what to do with that freedom. They watched as the bodies were carried out, nodding as they recognized three of them: the man, the woman, and the boy—the older one they had never really liked. These people—these intimate strangers—whose remains would never properly be identified.

It was dark again. He was sitting in the woods, crying into his fists, when they emerged from the tree line, hand in hand. They were barefoot, their faces were dirty and they did not seem to know where they were or where they had come from. They approached him with caution, as if he were a wild beast, but when he looked up and smiled, they began to run toward him.

They fell into his arms, feeling like they were home at last. The man and the woman and even the boy—had never treated them well, had beaten them and raped them and made them do things to each other that should never be done, not between brother and sister. They still remembered the time before the man and the woman, when they had lived somewhere else with people who had loved and cared for them. This man, they felt, might care for them, too.

They waited for the man to finish crying, moving away from him, but not too far. They wanted to keep him in sight, within reach. The girl sat on a tree stump and watched the man, wondering what his tears would taste like. The boy ran off after a squirrel, baring his teeth and hissing like a snake.

The man continued to cry. The girl thought he might never stop, just go on crying forever, until he finally stopped living. But soon enough he did stop; and he smiled at her with a look that meant she could trust him, and that he could trust her and the boy in return.

The boy emerged from the trees with the squirrel in his teeth. There was red on his cheeks, and the squirrel still twitched, its hind leg jacking like a little piston. The man laughed, and the boy laughed, too. The girl did not see anything funny, but she joined in because she knew it would please them both.

Shortly thereafter, they left the scene, the girl and the boy each holding one of the man’s red hands. They walked into the woods, going deeper and deeper, until finally they came to a place where mist hung at ground level and the spaces between the trees were black as night. The man leaned down and kissed both the boy and the girl on the cheek, and then he straightened and led them into that darkness; the darkness between scenes, between pages, the invisible gaps between stories as yet untold.