Abigail looked around the table at the other slack, young faces; she didn't know what to say. In the middle were two open boxes of cooling, half-eaten pizza. The gnawed dough bones of a few slices lay in pieces here and there. You could divine the future from these remnants, like tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. It was what occurred to her, anyway. This was what she wanted to say, but her observation would be non sequitur; it was just pizza to them, a free crappy dinner provided by the school for the RA trainees. It wasn't supposed to inspire poetic musings. It was a gesture of good will and a way to bind them together and to the school. The university fed and housed them. In exchange for this loyalty they were granted the lowest rung of power and control.

They all were wearing the free t-shirts, with the school logo on the front and the words: RESIDENTIAL ASSISTANT on the back. They had been bought, paid for, and branded.

She kept quiet about reading the future in old pizza. There was no way to explain it without it sounding clumsy and pretentious. Her peers watched her expectantly for her response.

"I don't understand, what am I supposed to do?"

Some eyes rolled. Max, the lead counselor, smiled to her gently and repeated himself.

"Sure, no problem," he glanced down at his clip board, "Okay so, these are just little mini murder mysteries. You have a minute to give your answer before someone else can jump in to get the point instead."

Abigail wasn't sure how this kind of activity was supposed to foster teamwork and group unity. The whole week of training had been one inane group-think scheme after another. The only really useful thing they covered so far was the CPR training, and she already knew the basics. Aside from that, there was a lot of veiled legalese and propaganda. They were essentially the first against the wall, if any of their freshmen fell victim to date rape or alcohol poisoning or gay bashing, or whatever other bullet points Max had listed on his goldenrod paper.

He wore a pink triangle pin on his shirt. Not that he was gay, he explained, but to make himself visible as someone any student could talk to about that kind of thing. She was expected to be able to spot the early tell-tale signs of anorexia, pregnancy, suicidal depression, and homicidal rage. They each were given a plastic tub of cheap condoms to keep in their dorm rooms and to hand out to any student who wanted one, without question.

The school paid them and fed them cafeteria pizza. She had a roof over her head for the duration of the semester. Abigail needed this silly job to help offset the costs of room and board. She would shepherd and counsel the homesick for that. She forced herself to care.

"Okay, I get it." She nodded and watched the pizza come and go, the pattern of it shifting.

"I'm going to flip the timer, then... and here's your mystery: A wet corpse at the front doorstep. What happened?"

Somebody snorted. Abigail looked to the clock on the wall. They were in the lounge to one of the dorms. Posters on the walls warned about plagiarism and STDs. There was a calendar of events that needed updating from last semester. They had been shuffled from activity to activity all day, never left alone. Lunch was supposed to be when they participated in "team building". She wondered if Max came up with these activities himself or if he was just following orders and a script. He was a senior. He shaved his head, but she could see from the faint stubble that his hairline was already receding. She pictured him naked, at the point of orgasm. She did this dispassionately and was unimpressed by her imagined vision.

The puzzle was hardly novel, "A guy leaves his house one winter, slams the front door shut behind him. Down falls an icicle and stabs him dead. He's buried under the falling snow and the body isn't discovered until the spring thaw." She still had about 20 seconds of sand left in the glass. She reached for her own second slice of pizza.

"Wow," said Max, forcing a smile. He looked about, "How about that, huh? She got it right off the bat; pretty good. How about a hand for Abby, guys." He clapped, and a couple others joined in politely.

"A lucky guess," she said around a bland mouthful of greasy cheese and tomato paste. He called her Abby when all her life she was Gail. She stopped trying to correct him. It was just a week of training before classes started and students arrived and life could go on. She didn't care all that much, not really.

"This is stupid," somebody muttered. Max seemed not to hear it. He looked to the girl to her left and then down at his clipboard.

"Okay, let's get the timer ready and... It's Stacy's turn, next. Ready? Here's your mystery: A dead body surrounded by 53 bicycles. What happened?"

Abigail finished her slice and considered tossing the crust to join the few others or eating it as well. Again she thought of a shaman sorting through the remnants and seeing her doom. She decided to keep her fate to herself and kept chewing.

Stacy was apparently baffled. She blushed in embarrassment, and Max tried to draw her out.

"C'mon, Stacy. You still have lots of time to figure this one. There's a dead body and 53 bicycles." He spoke to her with a politely leading tone that made Abigail wince, like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard, or snot bubbling out of a infant's nose. Her therapist used to talk to her with that tone. Her high school counselor. Sometimes her father. Sometimes. Irritating and brittle and visceral and gross.

Stacy just shrugged, "Dunno."

Max held his grin, through it started to fade into a grimace. He looked around, "Anybody? Anybody want to guess, there's still time on the clock."

Abigail raised her arm, the wrist limp, her hand slumped and uncaring. Max nodded to her.

"A guy is caught cheating at a card game, probably poker. He's shot or stabbed or something." Max narrowed his eyes.

"I don't get it," Stacy said. "Bicycles?"

"It's a brand."

This went on one more time and Abigail again jumped through hoop of answering when nobody else would. She didn't know why she did so. Nobody cared. The game was stupid. The pizza bones skittered about, suddenly settling into something that sort of looked like the outline of a skull. Well, if you squinted and turned your head the right way.

She was about to comment on this, to point out the lopsided, grinning deaths-head when Max said, "You're pretty good at this, Abby. Isn't she guys? Okay, here's last one: A naked corpse, face down in ashes, near a gun."

Abigail was stumped. The sands in the little minute-glass ran out completely and nobody had an answer. Max grinned in smug triumph.

"Nobody? Well, maybe next time, mm?" He checked his watch. After lunch they covered adolescent identity issues, what to do in the event of a campus shooting, and how to counsel the grieving after a death.

That night Abigail couldn't sleep. The dorm beds weren't exactly comfortable to begin with and every motion set them squeaking and squealing. She could only imagine the god-awful racket horny frosh away from home for the first time; fucking and experimenting. She tossed about, tangled in the sheets and stared at the ceiling. She was still stuck on the puzzle. It nagged at her. She thought she knew these kinds of things. She was supposed to be a geek like that. And Max had refused to give the answer. She tried to work backwards, but there was too little information to really go on. Her imagination spun wildly, and in her mind's eye she saw scenarios playing out in reverse like strange foreign art films. Something about ashes, smoldering back into flames. A bullet zipping back into the pistol. The dropped body leaping back to life, naked. But how to tie them together?

Her clock showed 2:39. In the morning. She sighed and wondered how long it would take her to acclimate to dormitory life. How long until this cinder block cell in this ugly slab of late-70's architecture transformed into "home". She got up. Shuffling into the lobby, she waved to the guard at the front desk and held up her cigarettes and ID. She needed a smoke.

It was chilly outside and she sat on the front steps, looking up the hill to the dim lights along the row of Greek houses. There was still some sort of party going on there. She lit up and breathed deeply. Blocking clouds moved along to reveal the moon and she heard shuffling steps along the sidewalk. A group of four girls bubbled up the steps, rosy in each other's company. The Resident Assistants weren't the only early arrivals to campus. There were also a few exchange students, and some pre-semester kids, mostly those from high school that might need the odd remedial course in algebra or essay writing. Abigail didn't recognize them. She was a senior; was short time. A quick eight months and she was done with this hole-

"Got a light?" An earthy voice asked at her side and she startled. It was a guy, immediate and smiling, looking quickly from her eyes to her cigarette. He held his fingers to his full lips to imitate the act.

"A cigarette? Do you?" His eyebrows raised in question and she give a brittle embarrassed laugh. He must be one of the foreign students. Long and lanky, black. She wasn't cosmopolitan enough to know for sure but he sounded, what - French? Haitian?

"Sure, here." Abigail held out her pack and he deftly plucked from it. He cupped his hands about the flame of her lighter and his eyes sparkled with the cherry glow. He mumbled a quick "Merci" in apparent reflex before saying more clearly, "Thank you." He stepped away a polite distance.

She looked him over. Perhaps he was a graduate student. He didn't return her gaze at first, but then nodded, smiling brightly.

"Thank you again. I don't know where to get these yet. I just arrived from the airport."

"Oh, well you won't find any on campus. But there's a gas station just past the main gate."

He nodded again, excessively deferential it seemed to her. She looked past him to the front door, all glass, the security guard there watching TV. A car rolled by. She still had half her smoke to go and didn't feel like going inside just yet. He seemed harmless enough.

"Are you a graduate student?"

He nodded curtly, again his teeth flashed, "Yes." He wouldn't look directly at her and she felt suddenly like a total slob. In her slippers and t-shirt, her ratty sweatpants with the school's name along her leg and "EAGLES" across her ass. She had the sudden insight that he had only approached her to sooth his habit and that he was now lingering here in the middle of the night for the same reason she was: they couldn't smoke inside.

"I'm a senior," she said gamely, determined to make him see her as a person. She had no tools for interacting with anybody so different. Well, that's how it felt to her. Despite all the diversity training, her experience with people outside her pale suburban world was still theoretical. She neared the end of her cigarette and shook her head, "I don't know if I'm going to graduate school or not. Not just yet."

He nodded, completely disinterested. She imagined him naked, recognized herself doing this again, twice in one day, and then compared him to her mental picture of Max naked. She felt vaguely put off, because he wouldn't look at her, now that he had his smoke. He was watching the moon, the occasional traffic, his watch. She wanted some sort of conversation before going back inside, just so she didn't feel like a brute vending machine. She wondered if he thought of her as a thick American cow. She felt paranoid.

"Say, do you know any riddles?" He frowned and shook his head, then he smiled apologetically.

"No, no riddles. I don't know."

"Well not like joke riddles but murder ones?"

He did then look to her, and she saw that his expression flickered with concern. He pointedly glanced at his watch and drew deeply on his smoke. He dropped the butt and crushed it under his foot. He had had enough.

"No, sorry." He left her there on the steps and went inside, waving to the guard in passing. She saw the flash of a wedding ring on his finger. Abigail felt like an idiot.

The next day, she saw him again after dinner. It was by the cafeteria, he was wearing glasses and had books in his arms. He didn't recognize her, or even seem to see her at first. She waved and he gave her that same flash of concern before nodding and begrudging a slight smile. He didn't stop to talk. She saw in his shirt pocket the tell-tale bulge of cigarettes.

In her imagination she saw him in the library stacks, pulling down old books on voodoo and zombies, Caribbean culture and psychoactive pharmaceuticals. She once saw a horror movie about that kind of thing. Maybe it was a documentary. It was a long time ago, but the general impression was something about mind control and slavery, witch-doctors and superstition.

But it wasn't like she was fixated. Abigail thought about other guys too. Once classes started there was lots of eye candy to consider. She kept it to herself though. She didn't know how to small talk. And besides, the semester kept her busy. Right off the bat she had to deal with freshman roommate drama and binge drinking. Her floor was typically rowdy.

And then there was her classwork. Between studying and babysitting late-adolescents, she didn't have time for significant mental dawdling. Not during the day, anyway, but once in a while she laid in bed and fingered herself and shuffled through the few hazy faces that came into view. She didn't even know his name, but she thought of his hands touching hers and his face over her flame, lighting the end of his cigarette. She replayed that mercurial moment when he had so clearly shifted his regard; you don't get a second chance at a first impression. She was now the Strange Girl that kept smiling and waving from across the street around dinner time. But she liked to imagine, there in the dark, that he knew the answer to her grim riddle and that he might have invited her in to his room after some chatter to look over his books. To handle his feathered bone fetishes and to try some tea - tea laced with ground powders that would make her his slave for the evening; his weekend zombie. She wondered about his penis.

These fantasies were elaborate and extensive. In truth, she had no idea what his field of study was. It was probably one of the hard sciences though, because she never saw him near the liberal arts buildings. He was married, maybe had a child.

At mid-semester the Campus Life office held a big meeting to check in and see how things were going. More crappy pizza, more strained smiles. Abigail remembered to ask Max about the answer to his riddle. He shrugged. It was too long ago, he said. He didn't remember, but he'd find out and get back to her about it, okay?

"Sure, Max."

"How's everything else, Abby? Doing fine?" She wondered what he knew. She actually wasn't doing so well academically. Her grades were lousy, she couldn't focus. Did he check up on the RAs with faculty? No, of course not. He was too busy. She gave him a thumbs-up and he patted her shoulder. His touch made her writhe with guilt and loathing inside. She disliked this man and his phony smile, and she dreaded being found out in a lie. Abigail went home from the meeting and tried to study. Her fresh resolve only lasted a couple hours. She wound up doodling skulls and obscene stick figures in the margins of her notes. The Internet fed her pornography.

Abigail spent increasingly more time in the library, presumably to study, but she took long breaks to linger in the small section on the occult. Mostly old books about cults in America. In the photography section she found some book on true crime reporting. Ghoulish black and white images of bloody scenes, taped off and detailed in white chalk. She checked out these books, she took them into bathroom with her to read. She carried them to the cafeteria and sat by herself with them while eating. She looked online for how to make a love potion.

"Hey, Abby. What's up? Got a minute?" It was Max. At her door, with his bald head sticking in. He then knocked and pushed it open. To his credit, he didn't actually come into her room. Like a vampire, she thought, annoyed and embarrassed. Her computer screen was full of pornography. Simulated necrophilia. Still shots from juvenile horror films; couples killed during sex by clumsy actors in ridiculous costumes. She switched over in a startle to her screen-saver. If Max saw anything, he didn't let on. He withdrew back into the hallway to wait for her, though this was likely to avoid any appearance of impropriety. The RAs were supposed to be available to students as much as possible, and technically she had left her door open a couple inches. He could have been making a point with his barging; as a Resident Assistant, if she was in her room, her door should have be open and welcoming until ten o'clock. It was part of her training. What if a student needed that open door to avoid doing something self-destructive? Yeah, yeah.

"Be right there," she could not avoid sounding irritated. It was night, late at night. What does he want? She pulled on her robe.

Max led her down the hall, "Can I show you something?" She nodded, mildly confused. He was being cryptic and curt, with more than his usual sense of bureaucratic urgency. She followed him down the hall, looking over the doors in passing. Each was plastered with outward manifestations of inner identities, obvious signifiers and allegiances. Band stickers, fliers, corkboards and pinned up ephemera. Loud music and conversations.

At the end of the hall Max opened the emergency exit, the door that opened into the back stairway. He held it for her. Over his shoulder he said, "I have to check the escapes each month, at each dormitory. And today I found this. Here, on the backside of the door. Just, just look." He said this in a strangely leading tone, glancing past her back down the hallway. He added, "I don't want to make this a bigger deal than it already is."

She looked. The back stairwell was chilly, just raw cinder block and slab concrete. There on the door someone had scratched a sprawling mandala into the paint. It wasn't crude graffiti; it was precise. And it was made with something sharp like a needle, a knife, or an unbent paper clip. Maybe the corner of a razor blade. There were letters, but the words were meaningless. The design curled in upon itself here and there such that the words crossed and intersected into tangled phrases. Symbols marked the edge of the pattern, some she recognized from her books, some she didn't. Max waved his fingers over one that was clearly a swastika.

"Did you know about this?" He watched her keenly.

Abigail shook her head, "No, no. But I don't... I mean I don't come back here, y'know? Nobody does except for fire drills, and the last one was a while ago."

He tapped the bent cross.

"We have a clear policy about hate speech on this campus. The last thing we need is for this kind of thing to blow up, right? I took a walk down your hall and didn't see anything on the doors, but you know your residents better than I do. I don't want to have to conduct room searches or hold a floor meeting if you already have an idea who would do this."

Abigail shook her head, "Max this isn't a Nazi thing or whatever. This isn't even German." She balked; how could he think that? She traced her fingers over the swastika and then the letters around it. Her fingertips tingled, fingers still with her scent on them.

"This is an ancient symbol, and this one, too. Most of these are, that I recognize. And this whole part here looks like a veve to me-" She stopped talking when she noticed his expression.

"Abby," he had been holding the door open, but he let it go. The click of the latch echoed ominously in the stairwell. He started again, "Abby, is there something you want to tell me about this?"

She rolled her eyes, "What? No, I told you I don't know how this got here. Yeah, I know something about what it is, but I didn't put it here and I don't know who did. I don't think anyone on my floor could've done it, and it's not something anti-semitic or whatever."

"Well, I'm going to have facilities come by tomorrow to repaint the door. And just keep your eyes open for anything else out of the ordinary, okay? We're trying to foster a safe campus environment for everybody, okay? The last thing we want is a visiting parent to see this, right?"

"I don't know, Max. I'll ask around or something."

"Oh, don't do that. Just watch for it: any student on the hall being withdrawn, or more withdrawn than usual, or stressed from midterms. Stuff like that."

Abigail couldn't sleep after that. She walked the hall in the dead of night. She went out again to smoke. She didn't need this shit to worry about. She was so caught up in her thoughts that she didn't recognize the guy, her Haitian guy, with a group of students ambling up the sidewalk. The mob of them paused at the foot of the stairs, socially chatting and making end-of-the-evening noises.

"...up too late, going to be ruined tomorrow."

"It was so good to see you..."

"Happy Birthday."

She didn't recognize him until she saw the flickering spark of a lighter beneath his brown face. He stood just aside from the group he was with and pulled on the cigarette. When he looked up to exhale, their eyes met and he then scanned the rest of the building as if just then realizing where he was. He nodded to her and a slim woman from his group reached for his hand. She was dark and smiling, jovial and elegant in ways that Abigail immediately envied. They were all at such each in each other's company. Abigail had yet to make friends like that. The man chuckled, and they kissed. His arm looped about her waist. Abigail noticed his ring was missing.

The group fractured; some dashed past her into the dorm, the rest wandered elsewhere. The Haitian and his mistress (what else could she be?) lingered only long enough for the woman to pull away his cigarette and drop it. It seemed to be a brusque moment, perhaps his smoking was a point of contention between them. The mistress crushed it and kissed him again. His hands followed the curve of her waist into her back.

Abigail frowned. This woman did not want him smoking. This woman was not his wife. Was she even a student? The way she carried herself had the collected manner of someone independent and fully adult. She likely had a job and her own car. They walked arm in arm across the street, in the direction of the parking lot. Abigail watched as long as she could see them, long after her own smoke had finished. She lost track of them among the parked cars, and it was a while before lights came on and a vehicle started up. Were they making out? Arguing? Making plans for another date? She seethed with envy bleeding into strange, groundless jealousy. And touched around the edges of this was a small startled, jilted anger. She had imagined many things about this man, but not that he was unfaithful - not unless it was for her. This new wrinkle did not feed her fantasies.

Abigail returned to her room, but could not find sleep. She turned and tangled about in the sheets. She spread her legs and invited the loa to enter into her. Any one would do, it was only something she vaguely understood anyway; possession and divine guidance, to be ridden hard like a fevered, lathered horse. So otherwise empty and aimless, this idea that some spirit might find her useful and guide her hand was irresistably attractive. That someone might pay attention to her and come to value her, even as a tool or slave. She shuddered, rough with herself and panting, imagining herself as bright beacon of need in an illusory world, in a pitch void swirling with tattered mawkish spirits. She waggled and bucked lewdly. She licked her lips. "See me," she whispered, over and again, clenching her eyes and working her legs in offering. Wallowing like this, she found her release, and the rush blotted out her angst for a time.

Abigail slept. Though when she did, she had a nightmare. Something with zombies and excessive, lurid splatter. A ridiculous dream with clownish excess, yet still terrifying in the way dreams can be. She awoke to the sound of cats outside yowling. The world was cast in that clarion blue, just before the dawn. It was a little after four in the morning. Cats were mating or squabbling outside her window.

Abigail sat up, her mouth tasted foul. She had a headache. After a piss and a glance out the window she remembered the mandala. It was going to be painted over today. She had thought it was bizarre and beautiful at the time, though she obviously could not have said anything like that to Max. She had already said to much as it was. Whoever it was that made was going to be in a lot of trouble and Abigail didn't want to confuse things by mixing herself up in it more than she had to. It also was a little freaky. She recognized enough in the design to tell that whoever made it was an inspired student of the occult. Or was copying from an inspired reference. It was just so random though. It would've taken hours to make, or maybe days, a little a time. But who would know that kind of stuff? Nobody on her floor, that was certain. She knew the students by now, a none of them had a head for it. She made herself tea, took a notebook and a camera and went back to see it again.

Muted beyond the doors, a shifting low chorus of snoring accompanied her down the hall. In the silence of the hour, the back door seemed to creak louder than before and she held the handle to minimize the clack of it closing behind her.

The design was still there. She half-expected it to have changed, either grown or vanished. She sat down crosslegged before it and sipped her tea, just studying the marks. She photographed it a few times, then started to transcribe the writing. The words still made no sense. It wasn't German - how could Max have been that daft. It wasn't Latin. She didn't know Russian but some of the letters looked weirdly flipped about in a way that seemed like it. Or something. She didn't know. She imagined who the artist might be: some strange cultist conducting arcane rituals in secluded parts of college dormitories. Was it a man? Mister Haiti?

Abigail doodled aside her notes and sketches. Her mind drifted slightly, and she jolted upright catching herself almost nodding off. She was exhausted, but falling asleep back here was not a good idea. Best to try and get back to bed for a couple more hours. She gnawed at the tip of her pencil. This thing was going to get painted over anyway... she reached out and drew into the design. It was just a pair of stick figures, the two coupling suggestively. Next to this she wrote out: BE MINE and then almost immediately felt foolish. This was silly. And then another part of her thought, "You don't know what this is. It could be something you pray for and sacrifice unto, it could be a curse. It could be a ward. It could be some music major's elaborate band logo or the deranged scrabble of an schizophrenic, murderous, escaped convict hiding in the dorm basement behind the coin-op washing machines." Adding her own handiwork was probably not a good idea. Max would have been disappointed at the poor example she set.

The thought made her smile and so she began to draw elsewhere in the design: a lone figure with a bare round head. Even as she started this second addition, she knew what it would be. She drew the tiny scenario without thinking, fitting it between the strange letters. It was Max sure, but X's for eyes; dead with a little blocky gun nearby and by a pile of dotted and dashed ashes.

"How's that for an answer, mm?"

She took more photographs and finished her tea. Back in her room, she passed out.

And again she dreamed, lucidly, for she knew it to be the same dream as earlier that night. This time however, she was somewhere outside herself, above a grassy field and watching like ghostly camera. But the "Abigail" was someone else, recognizable yet distinct. The zombies were there, encircling this other Abigail. She tried to call out a warning to herself and was surprised when there was no response. She had just dreamed all this before, she knew what would happen, the gore and jostling corpses. She didn't remember seeing herself floating in the air, and she wondered if this revealed something about dreams. To be in them and not know who else might be watching.

The Abigail below was in trouble; something was wrong. She remembered from the previous dream that there was a chase, slow running like wading through syrup. And at some point she had fought them back with a torch or something cliche like that. In contrast, the Abigail below had now fallen and was sobbing pathetically. It was just like in a movie: frustrating and repulsive that the girl being chased should fall, flailing for no reason other than scripted, hysterical panic.

"Get up! God, what is wrong with you!" Abigail shouted down to herself. Mindlessly, the languid, shambling undead drew to her. It was with inescapable logic that this happened: the girl falls, the monsters advance.

Her point of view suddenly jumped closer, naturally cinematic as though professionally edited. It was a close-up and she could see the dumb terror in her strange other-face.

"You have to move, now!" Abigail pleaded uselessly, in rising panic. "There to the house, there's a torch in the garage. Use it!" She pointed to the house. It was there, not far, a black outline against the moonlit sky. She had dreamed all this before.

"You idiot, can't you hear me? You have to get up and get moving!"

The other Abigail just scrabbled backwards, crawling pathetically and sobbing. Around her the zombies slowly seemed to converge. They did not wheeze and moan for brains. They did not even seem to notice this dream-Abigail, just like she did not seem to notice herself floating in the air. It was without hunger or malice that they fell upon her, blocking the view of their huddled business. Abigail heard herself gurgling around dead intrusive fingers. She saw her bare feet digging into the ground.

Klaxons sounded over the wet feeding, a growing wail of sirens. She felt her heart pounding, her mouth working around rotting knuckles cramming into her, pulling her jaws wide. All above her were runny rotting faces with empty eyes.

She awoke gagging, with paramedics pulling her tongue from her throat, purple nitrile gloves forcing past her teeth to keep her from swallowing it again. Hands held her head turned so that she could drain out vomit and breathe. A mask with a rubber bulb was pressed to her and air rushed in and out, making her lungs burn. She shook, shivering and steaming with sweat. There were people in her room, sirens outside, students yelling out in the hall. She could not see through watering eyes and she reached to her head to push it all away.

"She's awake. She's awake."

Abigail's eyes swirled about the small room. There were so many people in it. Dour faces in uniforms. They all had on rubber gloves, some wore little medical masks. She tried to sit up and her head exploded in pain. Hands pushed her shoulders roughly back to the bed.

"Don't move. You... you might be hurt."

The paramedic's voice was oddly concerned and bitter at the same time. A police officer leaned into view.

"How's she doing, I need to question her."

Abigail saw men with tweezers handling her things, sealing them into labeled plastic bags. Others took pictures with clever digital cameras.

"Not yet, we need to find out if any of this blood is hers."

As she was held down and examined, she saw her clothing cut away from her, most of it already in tatters and sopping wet red. Rubbery fingers carefully and efficiently traced over her body, looking for wounds, fractures, anything to account for the mess. She tried to tell them that there must be some mistake, she wasn't due for her period for another week. She just wanted some water and her Mommy; she wanted her Daddy to call her "Princess" and to make it all better. She had been too scared to hook the worms when they went fishing, and her shit brother teased her about it, but then Daddy did it for her. He set them twisting on the hook, two at a time. Daddy made a game of it, "They're just just dancing, Princess." She wanted the hands to stop touching her and she tried to tell them that she was sorry, so very sorry. She would be a good girl. She would do whatever they asked if it made her belly stop hurting. She could not help crying and sweating. Snot ran freely down her cheek. Her mouth was raw and foul from stomach acid.

"I think she's trying to talk."

"Sir, we found some more of him over here."

"Christ."

The bed squished beneath her, it creaked as she thrashed her legs. They finally had to sedate her. Fading, she looked to the high corners of the room. Abigail diligently struggled against the narcotic to see herself, to find if she was there hovering and watching. She wanted to apologize for being such a disappointment.

Excited, the fleshy mass poured about the ceiling, churning unseen above their heads like inverted sea grass. Here and there, teeth surfaced then submerged across its ciliated ripples. And so it grinned, after a fashion.