Squalor!

A haunted house story

[Notes: This is still all the same universe as previous short fiction I’ve posted here. All of these stories involve a fair amount of violence, including sexual violence, caveat lector etc. I’m not posting these in chronological order—really just basing the order on vibes—so this one takes place after “Mine Eyes…” and before “What Is in the Psyche?” It’s also the first (and probably the only) one that’s too long for email, so you will have to click over to substack itself to read the whole thing, I think.]

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When Constance had only two days left before he’d be sent into public service again, Horace Moore came to the auction hall. Constance stood naked on the sales platform with his scarred hands clasped on his head and answered the usual questions: He’d never attempted suicide, never run away.

“When was the last time you wet the bed?” Moore asked. He was grinning, a tall bluff blond man with a manner that was intended to be jovial. His thick, wild hair had a slightly greasy look—his hair looked somehow both feral and expensive. It looked like it might leap out at you.

“Not since the night before I was subordinated, sir,” Constance said. He was still trying to make his voice husky.

Horace Moore grunted. He turned to the sales agent. “So—not a virgin, no specialized abilities other than cleaning skeletons, which I’m sure is a skill I’ll rely on often and definitely isn’t off-putting or creepy, and you’re asking four figures. Is this a joke? I thought you sold subs here, but maybe this is really a money-laundering business, like a drug front—?”

The sales agent grimaced in a way that he hoped looked like a pleasant grin. “He has a grade A rating for physical strength, and if you’ll take a look at his IQ, sir, you’ll see that he’s exceptionally—”

“Oh come on! That test was done before he was subordinated—when he was what, eight? How do they do an IQ test at that age? Hey, Einstein,” casually slapping the back of Constance’s thigh, “did they have you analyze the imagery and themes in Froggy Doggy Meets the Board of Education?”

But Horace Moore bought Constance anyway, and Constance rode to his new home in the back of the Moores’ family sedan. He knelt on the floor mats, so his first view of the house didn’t come until the car stopped and Moore ordered him, “Get out and get down on all fours.” Laughter ran through his voice in a way that made Constance shiver. He realized for the first time how lucky he’d been that in his previous household he’d been a necessity, whereas here, he was a treat.

He looked down at his new owner’s shoes. They were fashionable zebra-patterned high-tops, new but already looking ragged and soiled. I’ll have to take care of that as soon as I can find a minute, Constance thought, and the normalcy of that thought reassured him. Then he looked up at the house.

Constance’s first impression was of something enormous and misshapen—a spider going to a party, he thought, and he was not the first one to think so. The brick center of the Moore house, its dull red heart, had two windows close-set against the front door and seven windows on the second story. The seven windows gave an impression of surveillance; they were curtainless and somehow beady. An addition had been stuck on to the right side of the house, a complex Victorian thing with dormer windows and turrets. On the left there rose a barndominium.

Separate from the house there were two other structures. Behind the house and slightly west there was a giant sycamore with a treehouse in its branches. The treehouse was rustic in a way that could only be deliberate. It had a rope ladder, but also an elevator—the generator was hidden behind the thick trunk. And to the east a Southern magnolia sheltered a small outbuilding which Constance would remember for the rest of his life, although it was only a shed of the kind where people dump broken tools they vaguely intend to fix.

The house throbbed with excess. It was like that state-fair food that’s just several incongruous normal foods commingled: the deep-fried Coke with ranch dressing of houses.

As he was looking at it Horace Moore came up behind him and kicked him hard between his legs. He sprawled forward with his face in the dirt, as the pain made bile come up in the back of his throat. Horace Moore kicked him all the way up the drive, Constance rolling and scrambling as his new superior laughed from the exercise.

“Now we understand one another,” he panted, as Constance reached the threshold of the barndominium. Constance hunched forward to press his lips against the threshold and Moore kicked the side of his head, like a golfer making the last delicate putt.

---

The Moore house started life as a two-story brick Colonial, and from the very beginning the neighbors hadn’t liked it. At that time “Lobo” Howell Moore was just a sheriff’s deputy, best known for selling the jail’s toilet paper to the other employees at cost. Cut-rate prison toilet paper was a lousy employee benefit, but at least they weren’t wiping with a sock like the prisoners.

Lobo Moore built his house right up to the property line on all sides, and when the neighbors asked, “Don’t you want to leave some space for a backyard? Someplace the kids can play?”, Lobo smiled and said, “I’ll get a yard.” By the time his younger child turned ten Lobo owned the lots on all four sides of the house, and he was still expanding. It was said that Lobo got the scar across his left cheek when he arrested one of his former neighbors for trespassing—the man was sleeping on the construction site that had been his childhood home.

Lobo Moore started out as the usual small-timer. As sheriff he cut funds for maintenance, salaries, and food at the jail and pocketed the leftover cash. This was legal and even though there was occasional grumbling about salaries and mandatory unpaid overtime, most taxpayers liked his efficiency. He maintained that ten people could run a jail as easily as fifty. He encouraged the Skeleton Staff, as they were officially known, to boast of their toughness. They had t-shirts printed up that said “C— COUNTY ANIMAL CONTROL: You blame ’em, we tame ’em,” with a circus scene, the ringleader cracking his whip above a prisoner crouching on a large rubber ball, holding his hands up like paws. The ringleader was a skeleton smoking a cigarette.

Lobo bought one of these t-shirts himself; it was a lot cheaper than hiring more C.O.s. Later Lobo and several people who worked for him got the image tattooed on their backs or chests. Most employees got at least a smoking skull on a bicep. Once it became clear that these tattoos could fetch your survivors a nice sum on eBay, former inmates also began to get them, and the tattooed skin from inmates turned out to be even more lucrative than that of guards. (This caused no little bitterness among the C.O.s.) It was rumored that Lobo himself had a shoplifter’s tattooed back hanging above his bed.

But he made his real money on the food. Lobo Howell was one of several Americans who contributed to the development of what was later known as Chow: a nutritional “supplement” for subordinates, made from whatever was cheapest, which could be eaten as a loaf or drunk as slurry. Lobo’s innovation was Punishment Chow, which was regular Chow laced with capsaicin and maximum-strength laxatives. When Industrial Nutritionworks (later, a subsidiary of Amazon/Pfizer) bought Lobo’s patents, it was Punishment Chow that bought the barndominium with two-story glass doors, and room for an RV and a boat.

Lobo had two children, though he never revealed either the identity of the mothers or the means by which he obtained sole custody. The older child, Lupita, left home at age eighteen. The son stayed home.

Horace Moore was an attractive man, tall and well-built, with high cheekbones and that seething mane of dirty-blond hair. He had powerful hands and well-shaped forearms: a body built for action, a face built for sunglasses. By the time he purchased Constance he had laugh lines around his mouth and at the corners of his blue-gray eyes. A tanning lamp and an extensive collection of athletic equipment kept him looking like a cowboy in a music video. He took daily injections of the blood of subordinates who were forced to exercise; studies had shown that proteins in the blood of these “joggers” reduced brain inflammation and boosted memory.

Unlike his father, who had valued his children strictly as legitimate heirs, Horace took to domestic life. He built a household consisting of wife Camille, son Victor, daughter Claudia, and a small platoon of subordinates. He worked from home, to be closer to his family, so every day was a steeplechase of interruptions and yelling. “You’re unmuted,” his direct reports would text, trying to find an emoji that conveyed commiseration. What combination of sweat drops on the forehead and scrunched-up cartoon mouth would convey, We’ve all been there, when your boss is screaming at his wife, “Why can’t you leave me the fuck alone for five minutes?”

When Camille divorced him, he had to restrict himself to one sub—or, rather, a series of subs, high-percentile so that they could handle the stress of being the Moore family’s stress relief.

Horace Moore was an extrovert (according to his psychodynamic exam, which had also rated him 95^th percentile dominant). There was always something jovial, even gregarious, in the use he made of his short-lived subordinates.

For example, when Constance had crawled into his new home, Horace Moore looked down on him and said, with an easy grin, “Bet they don’t fuck you at all when you’re up for sale. By now you must be horny.”

“Yes, sir,” Constance managed. He tried to remember the inspirational sayings they’d taught him in training. On the day they sign your purchase order, your superiors buy your emotions. Your obedience is their entertainment. You are a worthless vessel filled with precious fear.

Rhyme and Reason are your betters, or, more explicitly, Rhyme and Reason owe you nothing.

Does the penis ask the urine where it wants to go?

“We can take care of that,” Moore said. And then, pressing a couple buttons on the home controls, “Vic! Claudia! Come here and see the new sub.”

The hulks of the pleasure boat and the RV loomed in the shadows of the barndominium. Constance couldn’t help comparing them to the great jeweled mammoths of his former owner. In the shadow of the great tusks the Moores’ vehicles just looked like things.

Pull yourself together, he told himself. It was a commonplace that subs took a while to shed the last vestiges of loyalty to their former owners; it was a serious defect in a sub’s character, since in loyalty as in all things subordinates were expected to be flexible, their devotion complete and selfless but its object fungible. (For the first time Constance understood why some people found it hard to trust their subs.) Vestigial loyalty was a form of opinion or preference: human rights.

The children of the household arrived. They were both teenagers, so he wouldn’t be responsible for their schooling. Victor was tall and broad where Claudia was short and wiry, both dressed in baggy clothing: expensive clothing, though the material was cheap and the labor cheaper. Constance couldn’t tell if it would need hand-washing. The boy was wearing red tracksuit bottoms and possibly nothing else. The girl had on a kind of loose pantsuit or extended romper, with a built-in belt and a swirling pattern of black-and-white stripes. She looked as if somebody had stuck a straw in a zebra and swizzled.

The boy was eating from a foil bag full of salted pork puffs. He shook the crumbs into his mouth, dropped the bag on the floor, and wiped his hands by grabbing his penis through the tracksuit bottoms.

“Does it have a name?” the girl asked. “What do we call it?”

Nobody said anything for a moment, and then Horace Moore kicked Constance in the ribs, and he said what his name was, and they all laughed and said, in almost the exact same words and talking over one another, “But we can call you whatever we want.”

“Clean my hands,” the boy commanded. Constance was naked, so what he was being made to do was pretty obvious. He crawled forward and licked the boy’s hands, just like an illustration in a children’s book.

“Nice doggy,” Claudia said. “Good boy.”

“Clean my pants,” and the boy gestured toward where he’d wiped himself off. Constance got a mouthful of pork-flavored cotton-poly fleece.

“You must be horny! You must be horny!” squawked a voice from above. Constance jumped—or did whatever jumping is like when you’re on your knees with a mouthful of porky crotch fleece. Victor yelped in anger and hit him on the side of the head.

His ear ringing, Constance jerked his head up toward the squawking and saw a huge glass tube running just beneath the ceiling, with holes here and there which were a little smaller than the palm of his hand. Poking its head through one of the holes was a parakeet. “You must be horny,” the thing said again; and it laughed, the laugh of its owner.

“Look,” Claudia snickered, “he’s scared of it. It’s only a bird, dumbfuck.”

“They’re all scared of animals,” Victor said.

“What are you, a subologist? ‘They’re all scared of animals,’” she mimicked him, and he hit her on her shoulder with a closed fist. Their father looked on indulgently.

Constance, still looking up, saw that the bottom of the glass tube was covered with droppings, piled up and dripping like beards from the lowest holes. Just at that moment another bird, hidden behind the droppings of its fellows, shat out a hole above their heads. The droppings thwacked down onto the pork puff bag like buckshot.

---

At first he thought a long time had passed since the Moores had lost their previous sub, and that worried him. A family who had to save up for their next subordinate—who couldn’t even get a loan—was financially unstable. Constance had grown up believing in thrift and financial responsibility, believing in them not solely in the sense of “trusting that they would provide material well-being” but in the sense of “trusting that they were good.” (That society found it difficult to separate these two concepts.) He also knew that a family whose finances weren’t steady could sell their sub, even their only domestic; or lease him out for short-term use, which was proverbially more deadly, if not more degrading, than working as part of a household. Constance had been raised to think it was shameful to buy a subordinate whose future you couldn’t guarantee—although, by contrast, in training they emphasized that “subordinate futures” had no meaning beyond the technical stock market definition.

At any rate it turned out to be more difficult than he’d realized to determine the state of the Moore family finances from the state of the house. The Moore family generated trash at a speed and scale he’d never imagined possible. Constance had never strayed from the principle taught him in training—you get up before the family gets up and you don’t sleep until they’re asleep. But it wasn’t possible to wake up early enough to cope with the Moore family. They were entropy in human form. Late at night, when he started to hallucinate from exhaustion, he would think that they were blond death principles, walking and lounging decay, laughing rot.

They liked to talk to him. In his previous household nobody with human rights would have bothered talking to him, but the Moore family liked it. One day, to Constance’s astonishment, Victor dropped his track pants and excreted right in the middle of the kitchen concept. And then asked Constance what he thought of it.

Constance hated the kitchen concept at the best of times. Everything was recessed and emerged from grooves, which were nearly impossible to clean; the whole place was supposed to be “modular” but that just meant the counters were too far from the stovetop. He stared at the soft warm pile his owner had produced. For the hundredth time he cursed whoever had decided to put down a tile floor.

“It’s so well-formed, sir,” he said. “It’s… sculptural and unique. And very personal to you, of course, sir.”

Victor came around behind him and kicked him so that his face fell into the mound of shit.

“Who told you that you could have opinions about us?” he asked. “You think I care if some moron thinks my shit is ‘unique’?”

After that Constance was careful to answer these questions about what he thought of things with, “I don’t know, sir” (or “ma’am,” for Claudia), “I can only think about how I’m to serve you.” That made them laugh and he’d have to agree with them that he was unusually stupid even for a subordinate; but it meant that they kicked him less.

They liked to chase him. They had a whole room in the main house which was, for no obvious reason, hung with plastic shower curtains to form a kind of maze, and they chased him through this maze fairly often. Their dark fast-moving shapes appeared against the milky decorated plastic like shadows of themselves. They ran and he went on all fours, stumbling into the sheets and fending them off as Donald Duck or a map of the world wrapped around his head. They’d thrust a sheet aside, from some direction he hadn’t been expecting, grab him and drag him along the floor to prove they’d won. He had to clean these plastic sheets frequently or else they’d become sticky and discolored—with what, he never knew—and he loathed this chore, because even when it didn’t lead to a chase it was still a journey through a hostile white labyrinth, an ectoplasmic maze. In the sheet maze he could never tell if he was alone.

The shower-curtain room was in the Colonial part of the house, which was the family’s favorite because, like Constance, it monitored their moods. The house had sensors that knew when their heart rates accelerated, and could pump out calming scents. The toilets there collected nutritional information based on their deposits and, at the end of every week, ranked their top five shits.

The house monitored their facial expressions and sold the data to companies which then advertised, at times when the Moores were especially vulnerable, sugary packaged foods and social-media games and medications. The Moores’ devices frequently showed them deals on sleep aids; these sleep aids in turn lowered inhibitions, so that the family would order, say, a gross of circus peanuts, then fall asleep and forget about them until they arrived. The Moores enjoyed getting these unexpected treats sent from their forgotten past selves. It made them feel generous.

Claudia spent more time in the Colonial than any of them. Maybe that explained why she was always buying wellness candles, eyelash implants, body-sculpting pills; an exercise device shaped like a big pretzel that was supposed to tighten her vagina; a vibrating anal meditation egg. Claudia spent her days working on herself. She made spreadsheets for her wardrobe and took at least twenty photos of herself daily. Constance never knew who she sent them to, since she didn’t have friends over to the house. When Victor made fun of her, she screamed that the clothes and the photos helped her manage her stress.

All three of the Moores used him for sex; the boy also handed Constance around to his friends. As the months wore on Constance noticed that these friends came over less and less. He never had time or energy enough to wonder why.

Constance’s exhaustion made him miss some of the other undercurrents in the household, even the ones that most affected him, like Horace’s guilt. Horace knew that his work took him away from his children. He blamed their instability, their neediness, their inability to self-regulate on Camille’s bad parenting, and he’d fought hard to make sure she couldn’t see them, but that only increased his guilt when he spent days locked in his office screaming at his underlings. He expected Constance to compensate for everything the children didn’t get from him. Horace encouraged his children to demand more from their sub; more than once he’d kicked Constance aside as he came out of his office and grunted, “I’ve had a shitty day. Go and suck off my son.”

Constance didn’t understand why that would help, but at least it was an intelligible command. And the Moores were, to his surprise, sexually no worse than the guests at his previous owner’s banquets had been. Their other behaviors left him in abject confusion and dismay.

Constance was a mediocre cook at best; even so, he would have liked to feed his family well. But they ate things he refused to understand. Who has a donut and soda for breakfast? he’d think, watching the Moore children in horror. In his previous household subordinates were allowed to eat the leavings off the household’s plates, but the higher-ranked subs always got first pick of the desserts. So in Constance’s horror there was no little trace of envy. He had forgotten what soda and donuts tasted like but it helped him to think, How can that feel good?

And then his eyes widened as Victor leaned back and showed his sister how he could hold a donut with his bare feet and bring it up to his mouth. And he ate it like that, as Constance itched all over his body with the urge to go and grab the thing. I will hold it for you! Just don’t eat it with your feet!

But “feet are not for eating with” was an opinion above his station.

The family had all their food delivered, all packaged premade food, so Constance was spared the work of cooking but also deprived of the respite and camaraderie of marketing. The deliverers left the packages outside and didn’t ring the bell, so he didn’t even have the tiny social joy of greeting them and maybe cleaning their shoes for them. He fantasized about that sometimes: just small acts of care for people who weren’t the Moores.

Victor chewed his toenails, and spat out the sharp ragged crescents for Constance to clean up.

The Moore family liked to play pranks. For example, when Constance was scrubbing the floor of the shower they liked to turn the water on. This was only funny if the water was all the way hot or all the way cold. They liked to take pictures of the faces Constance made under the burning or freezing spray and share these photos on social media, sometimes with animal ears. They’d show him the photos and kick him if he didn’t earn them enough likes. They were kicking him like this one time when he forgot all his training and cried out, “Please, I can’t take it! I’ll do anything if you’ll stop.”

Claudia laughed and said, “You’ll do anything anyway,” and kept kicking.

Constance had to admit that this was true: This was the kind of thing he was. He took it as a psychological or even existential statement, although Claudia had meant only the political fact that he had no choice.

They called him lazy whenever they saw him, and whenever they saw him, he was working. He would think to himself, You have got to be joking; but the rich are not joking. Not about this.

---

Constance got through the days by making lists of what he missed about his former household. He missed the skeletons and the colors their jeweled bodies made at night. He missed the company of other subs, even the ones who had taunted him or blamed him for their mistakes. He missed the warmth of the subs’ dormitory at night, the satisfaction of coming in last and tiptoeing to his place knowing no one could reproach him for laziness, the communal breathing and private dreams. He missed gossip.

He missed the excitement of banquets. On rare occasions he’d had to entertain the guests and that was awful, but there were hidden pleasures in running around, sweating, scarfing the worst leftovers in between courses—not least the pleasures of being useful. He missed the relieved appreciation on the face of a higher-ranking sub who knew that Constance’s efforts had spared him a whipping. He missed the laughter of the guests and the knowledge that his betters were enjoying themselves.

Because that was the strangest thing about the Moore house. They did nothing but seek their own comfort, and they were endlessly miserable. They never went hungry and they were never happy.

The Moore children acted out when they were tired or their blood sugar was low. Constance, himself exhausted and underfed, learned to soothe them and bribe them with treats. He remonstrated with himself for this. His training had been crystal clear that a subordinate was not to spoil the children. But if he didn’t they howled. When the two teenagers yelled, “Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!”, that wasn’t so bad, because he suspected they were doing it on purpose. But when Claudia would scream, “Why are you doing this to me? Why does everyone treat me like this when I work so hard,” hitting him with her video-game controller, “why is life like this?”, then he was troubled.

He’d been trying to reason with Victor, who was kicking him because the wifi went out, when Victor screamed, “I can’t self-soothe!” And Constance felt a terrible fear and pity, because this seemed to be true.

The children lied to their father, saying that Constance had done things he needed to be punished for. That was normal enough. But what disturbed Constance was that when Horace Moore believed his children’s most outrageous lies, they didn’t seem triumphant or gratified. Their faces fell and they watched dully as Constance was beaten for eating a gallon drum of Cheetos (while orange dust still coated Victor’s lips) or hiding Claudia’s yoga mat under her bed (the dust-shrouded yoga mat, unrolled, revealed sweatpants Claudia hadn’t fit into since she got her butt recurved three years earlier). Constance couldn’t understand why they looked so bereft to learn that the truth was just whatever they decided to say.

Most of the time the family didn’t move. They absorbed themselves in various games and in social-media competitions, and yelled for him when they wanted something. To diagnose his superiors was not his place, and yet he couldn’t help wondering how much of wealth was just depression presenting as enjoyment.

And as his time with the Moores dragged on he found that even his memories of the Gould household began to warp. Had Marcus Gould ever found relief in his hall of spangled fossils? What good had those banquets brought him? He began to remember how furious Marcus Gould would get in the days leading up to a banquet, how much shouting and violence would roll down the long hierarchy of the household.

In the Gould household he was used sexually much less often, and nobody paid enough attention to him to target him for fun the way the Moores did. If Marcus Gould had had a social media presence, Constance was glad to say he didn’t know of it. In the Gould household his life had not seemed unrelenting the way it was here. But everyone in that household could tell by the tread of Marcus Gould’s foot in the hallway whether the day would bring some respite and satisfaction, or only misery.

One day the parakeets were screaming at him in Victor Moore’s voice, “Waaaaaaaaahhhhh!” And Constance, dodging their beaks as he used a poisonous solution to scrub guano off the glass tubes they lived in, had the bizarre thought that Victor himself was simply a parakeet version of Marcus Gould.

After that when he looked at the children his heart would ache for them—not always, he couldn’t always manage to care, but sometimes he could see them. He knew he should tell them about it. They were so unhappy; they were his superiors, and his purpose was to serve them; but then again, they were also the Moores. He kept silent.

---

Constance liked the house best in the early morning, before any of the family were awake. He enjoyed the quiet work of these hours. Even the parakeets seemed calmer then, and made chittering, crackling noises as he cleaned their glass aviary, instead of telling him he must be horny. The work of the early morning was almost like a holiday. He even liked the quality of light, when the house shed its yellow electric glow on the predawn backyard: The sun lit only from above, but the houselight illuminated the undersides of things and made them shine.

This attentiveness to the pleasures of nature was something they’d been taught in training. Mindfulness, being present to the moment, made subs work harder and postponed despair. The only difficulty was that he was starting to think the house was haunted.

He thought this late at night and in the early morning. In the morning he’d often discover that some problem he’d been too tired to resolve had been dealt with while he slept in the pantry: the crimson splatter on the ceiling, from when Claudia had put strawberries in the blender and left the top off, had been scoured clean. Or else the smeared playroom windows had been washed.

An electroshock device with the newest camera features and a trendy zebra-striped cat-o’-nine-tails design had gone missing. Constance spent more than two hours hunting for it so that Victor could use it on him in front of his friends, and earned a rare belt-whipping when he failed to find it. But then the next morning it was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor, and all the stinging tails were untangled and laid straight.

There was a story, “The Listening Kitchen,” which Constance, like everyone else, had heard a hundred times in childhood. In this story a family’s only domestic sub had died, and after his death, they noticed that things started to go wrong in the kitchen. The new sub couldn’t understand it—how cookies would be flung about the floor, how vases would break as if struck by an invisible rock, how the knives would bend and the toaster suddenly fill with jam. (Certain children laughed uneasily at this scene, as they imagined being the one who had to clean every hidden ridge and recess of that toaster.) At last after several punishments the new sub convinces the family that he isn’t just incompetent, and they agree to go into the kitchen and even spend the night there.

The moment they enter a strange hush seems to fall on the kitchen. A scraping noise from the knife block falls silent; the blender, which the new sub hadn’t turned on, turns off.

And before their eyes—before the eyes of the mother and father and their three children, and also the new subordinate although he doesn’t appear in this picture—the refrigerator door opens and eggs begin to float out. Then the pantry door, flour and sugar and salt. They watch, enraptured, and on the next page they are eating a plateful of chocolate-orange cookies, the specialty of their previous sub. The poltergeist’s identity now revealed, the family explains to the new sub that the old one must have hated being kicked out of the kitchen by death. He came back to serve them. They promise the spectral sub that he can stay there forever; and from that day forward there were no disturbances, and the cookie jar was always full.

One quiet morning Constance was gratefully folding the load of bedsheets his silent helper had not only washed but treated with stain remover. As he checked the sheets over and thought with relief that he couldn’t have done a better job himself, he remembered suddenly that “The Listening Kitchen” never did say what happened to the new sub. And then he thought about the way the house was at night, and he shivered.

At night he didn’t like to go into the Victorian part of the house. Shadows flickered there, down the long creaking hallways. Constance had been cleaning the playroom at the back of the house one night when he saw glowing red eyes in the black picture window. He’d jerked his head up—and it was only the reflected blinking of a broken clock radio, and he laughed at his own fear. But then he caught a glimpse of something hiding behind the playroom door, and when he looked again it was a waist-high stuffed Border collie holding in its mouth the torn-off arm of a doll, and that was real.

He began to feel that the playroom was always bad at night. That picture window—more than once he’d thought a spindly pale shape had scuttled past, out there in the backyard, and disappeared somewhere beyond the funereal magnolia that overshadowed the tumbledown shed. But it wasn’t only the playroom. Doors swung closed, or stood open when he’d left them latched. The staircase in the Victorian wing creaked and settled at night, as if someone were walking down it, always pausing on the step just above the one he could see from the playroom. The house hissed at him and sent jets of cold air from above. The Victorian wing had a crawlspace above the stairs, and into this he refused to go.

Most of these things turned out to be problems with solutions: the hissing was rats, the flickering shadows along the corridors were also rats, attracted by the garbage piled in the abandoned upstairs rooms; the cold air was because there were broken windows up there which he fixed as best he could with cardboard and duct tape. (They beat him for that because it made the house look trashy, but they didn’t give him any supplies; he spent a desperate night taking down all the cardboard, coloring it in stained-glass patterns with markers, coating it with weatherproofing spray, and taping it up again, and that he got away with.) The flickering lights he saw in the intact upstairs windows of the Victorian when he was taking out the recycling turned out to be a small fire, started by bad wiring and smoldering in a nest of pizza boxes. He rewired the wing, guided by online videos he’d watched while the household slept, and although he glanced up at the windows every time he went outside he didn’t see the firelight anymore, so he hoped he had fixed it.

But the things outside the house continued to worry him.

He stood one night in the boiler room, warming himself and looking for more rat traps, and when he glanced out the narrow barred window there was a giant standing there. The low huge gray foot splayed across the front yard and the great leg, wrapped in scrawny muscle, rose higher than his head and disappeared, with a huge knee knobbing out at the upper edge of the windowframe.

And Constance rubbed his eyes, and looked again, and it was a tree, and the “knee” was just a place where a branch had been lopped off years ago.

“Tree,” he said, “I’m very tired. I think I’m losing it, tree.”

He could have sworn that the tree chuckled.

After that he didn’t talk to the tree anymore; but he did talk to the ghost. You have to talk to somebody, after all.

He was picking up the playroom, in the late afternoon as the sun came down behind the magnolia and the shadows began to walk across the grass. He’d tidied up the racks of pastel-colored plastic tubs where the family kept the children’s disciplinary devices—what they’d used on the family subordinate before they were old enough for zebra-print electric whips. And then Claudia had appeared from the boiler room.

Her sly, contemptuous grin made him think that she’d been watching him work. She held a large jar in both hands, with an old towel draped over it. She bent over and set the jar on the ground, and took the towel off, and the big jar was completely filled with something alive.

The big snake was black, and it gleamed as it moved, slowly pulsing like blood from a wound. Claudia lifted the snake and it moved like living oil in her hands. Constance’s eyes went wide with terror; he couldn’t breathe. But she put the snake around her own neck.

She was still grinning as it coiled around her neck, tightening as if it were choking her, but it wasn’t. Constance cringed in front of her.

“Do you see my snake?” she asked.

He stared up at her. He smiled, because in training they were taught that it would be easier if they always spoke with a smile and he had found this to be true.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I see that you’re beautiful and dying.”

Claudia stared at him. Technically he was allowed to speak, because she’d asked him a direct question and what he’d said was at least plausibly a response to it, but subordinates weren’t supposed to be surprising.

She laughed with scorn. “From the snake?” she said. “Dumbshit, the snake isn’t going to hurt me.” (It hissed.)

“Not from the snake, ma’am,” he said. He took a deep breath, still smiling.

He told her then about the beauty you can only see when your knees are aching and your hands are raw, the beauty which discloses itself to those who go on all fours—to those who know they have no right to it. He told her that this was her beauty, but she couldn’t see it in the mirror because she looked at herself in the mirror as an equal. (This argument showed a certain ignorance of the experiences of even the dominant women of that society; but Constance had never had a chance to learn better.) If she were to kneel down, if she could know what it was to hurt from work and to live in shame, then she could know a beauty that was like rapture.

She stared down at him. He examined her face, anxious, hoping against hope. He saw boredom laced with amusement—maybe even curiosity. To his astonished gratitude, she nodded. He seemed to hear music.

And so he went further. He said that she had this beauty in her, but she was letting it disintegrate. The whole household was. He told her that from his perspective she and they were walking decay, laughing rot—and he only saw his betters this way because he was lazy, disrespectful and ungrateful, but that didn’t make it untrue. He begged her to pick up, just for example, the soiled red socks she’d left shoved between the cushions of the playroom couch. If she were to pick them up and clean them, as he had done so many times, and maybe even scrub the couch cushions with stain remover, then the thing that held her together would tighten, she would stop dissolving into the general miasma of the household’s disorder—and she would see the beauty that he had seen once, on the back of the great mammoth in the middle of the night, a beauty that could only be seen by submitting to it.

She was nodding more and more as he talked, and his words came faster so that this whole last sentence came out in a rush. Then he stopped and stared at her urgently. She watched him, and he suddenly recognized her expression. He had only served at a few of Marcus Gould’s banquets; Gould rarely held the kind of bacchanal where you’d bring out your lowest-ranked subordinate to do some entertaining. But even those few experiences had left him able to recognize how his betters looked at him when they were waiting for him to do another trick.

He felt a slow deflation in his chest. Claudia, still looking at him with that amused expectant gaze, laughed a little to herself.

“No idea what you’re saying,” she said. She thumbed the phone clipped to her romper belt and the music he’d heard before got louder. Still nodding, bopping with her shoulders, she turned away from him and strolled into the kitchen to eat an entire shareable bag of Twizzlers. He realized that before he poured out his beliefs about beauty and submissiveness, he should’ve made sure his superior wasn’t wearing earbuds.

---

The year wore on, in the seasonless climate-controlled home. The Moores never left the house. They lolled there, picking holes in the upholstery, shuffling through the surf of candy wrappers and takeout boxes that whispered around their feet. Constance was so tired that he barely noticed that the ghost seemed to have gone; he decided it must have been a hallucination.

There was one day when Victor was eating Ding Dongs in the playroom, and Constance snuck into his bedroom so that he could do some cleaning without being taunted, kicked, raped, or pelted with shelf-stable pastries. As he was gathering befouled underpants from the floor and lighting fixtures, he thought he heard the underwear yelling at him: “You lazy punching-bag! You are confused—you have no right to a conscience but you certainly don’t have the right to ignore it! You humanoid! You comedy! You don’t have grit. ...Loser.”

And Constance was fairly sure that hadn’t really happened.

Constance had so much to do keeping the parts of the house that the family actually used from sinking beneath their ordure that he rarely attempted the second floor of the Victorian house. He knew there were archaeological layers of trash there. Things migrated there: unmatched gloves, extension cords, travel toothbrushes; unopened boxes of cat food, which suggested the existence and disappearance of a cat whom the family never mentioned. He found umbrellas lying everywhere in the Victorian wing, always the short kind with the collapsible handle, never the long tightly-furled kind, always black and roosting amid the trash piles like overgrown bats. Everybody loses umbrellas but it was the Moore family’s particular genius to lose them within their own house.

He’d seen broken fax machines, dead printers, late afternoon sunlight pricking out rainbow gleams on cracked CDs; he’d opened a door, bulging outward from the pressure within, and an avalanche of boxer shorts had hit him in the face. He had discovered the Closet of Thongs.

One day he crawled into the crawlspace. He’d been coming down the upstairs hallway dragging a garbage bag full of greening, ossified or oozing cakes when he noticed a tendril of smoke coming from the crawlspace. He’d opened its door (dropping the bag, which crunched and squelched) and then he’d had to crawl in, with one arm over his face and the other hand feeling forward in the rutted dark, until he stuck his hand into something that collapsed and crunched into burning chunks embedded in his palm. He’d taken off his smock to scoop the stuff up and dragged it out into the hallway, where he discovered that the fire had roasted a small escaped parakeet.

He was about to crawl back in to make sure the fire was completely out when he heard a scuttling toward the back of the house, where the crawlspace let out. It suddenly seemed to him that he’d seen something there in the smoke—that something had been in there with him, on the other side of the fire, almost close enough to touch.

“But that can’t be,” he said to the roasted parakeet. “The ghost is gone.”

He decided to sample the bird—why not. “Not bad,” he said. He plunged his thumbs between the feathers and the bones and sucked as much meat off the bones as he could manage before shaking the rest into the cake bag.

In the daily cataract of housework he forgot about his plans to clean the treehouse (which Victor never used anyway, because the air conditioning was broken). He forgot that he had meant to look in the outbuilding to the east of the house, under the magnolia. It was almost Halloween before he remembered.

---

The Moores liked to tell Constance that Halloween was coming when it wasn’t. On Halloween superiors served subordinates. (Only in private ownership. It wasn’t a federal holiday.)

In the Gould household it had been a real treat: Constance remembered wearing mismatched things from Marcus Gould’s wardrobe, tucking his smock into a pair of pinstriped trousers and knotting a paisley tie in a floppy bow around his neck. He was much skinnier than his owner, so he’d had to hold the trousers up with one hand as he clumped around the floor, dancing with one foot shod in his owner’s wingtip and one foot bare. He’d woken up the next morning with blisters, and every time he’d winced he’d also smiled at the memory.

Marcus Gould would run around the banquet table in nothing but bespoke boxer shorts as his subordinates snapped their fingers and called for wine. Everyone got enough to eat and they could sing and strut around, and pretend they weren’t ridiculous. There were limits—no one dared to lay a hand on their superior. Everyone still used the communal waste buckets, nobody would sully the flush toilets in the house’s twelve bathrooms. This made Constance’s mornings-after especially noisome, since as the lowest-ranking sub it was his task to cope with the prodigies brought forth by the bowels of a household of subordinates unused to luxury in food and drink.

And although the subs would call out, “Shift your thighs!” if Gould didn’t serve them fast enough, they were covertly awed by the way he held himself in response to their commands. When Gould ordered them around, they cringed; on Halloween, when they snapped their fingers at him, he merely nodded and even laughed. Halloween was, from a certain perspective, a convincing argument that dominant people were simply and inalienably superior. So it was easier to go back to work the next day. (Superiors did the serving but subordinates did the cleanup.) And Marcus Gould, unlike some owners, would only whip the ones who’d gotten drunk.

Constance tried to look forward to Halloween in the Moore house, but the fact that they kept telling him it was coming made him worry.

He only found out what day it really was because Victor had his best friend over. They lay around in the playroom messing in a desultory fashion with the family’s Squalor! game, as the sun set in a depleted orange haze outside the picture windows. Constance was scrubbing the floor of the laundry room while he waited for the dryer to finish.

Squalor! was a game Constance well remembered from his childhood—his early childhood, he couldn’t help thinking. Even the help can’t help thinking.

Players used a joystick to manipulate gangly plastic “subordinates,” who picked up brightly-colored plastic pieces made to look like various kinds of garbage using their clawed hands, hinged jaws, or the magnets on various embarrassing parts of their anatomy. The first player to get his sub entirely covered in trash was the winner. Even when he was young Constance had disliked this game. He would argue, “It shouldn’t be called Squalor! It should be called Tidiness! since that’s what you’re trying to achieve.” Admittedly what he meant was that he lacked hand-eye coordination.

(And anyway he was wrong. The garbage-covered, stooping plastic figure of the subordinate was not irrelevant to the game’s purpose.)

Now in the Moore household he learned that you could hate Squalor! for all kinds of reasons. It buzzed and jangled, and the shriek the thing made when a player won made Constance twitch. The plastic pieces got scattered and lost; ever since Victor had gotten the game out a week earlier, Constance had been finding pieces by stepping on them. He had never before considered that domestic subs went barefoot not just to save money on shoes, but also to entertain their betters.

“You guys haven’t put out your Halloween stuff yet,” Victor’s friend said, as he wiggled a toy subordinate’s face toward a toy clump of used kitty litter. “You’d better do it soon if you want it out in time for tomorrow.”

“Our sub takes forever to do anything,” Victor said.

“You should come and see ours,” the friend said. He pressed his thumb against the wrong edge of the joystick and the clump of cat litter and turds fell off of the toy subordinate. When it hit the “floor” the playset went womp-womp.

“Sure,” Victor said without interest.

“No, you should see it. It’s not just the stuff we had last year. My dad bought a real skeleton.”

Victor made a scoffing noise.

“It is!” his friend insisted. “It was somebody’s subordinate, they were selling it on eBay. My dad was trying to find one of those jeweled animals, he thought a jeweled raccoon on the trash can might be funny, and he found this actual skeleton. We have it set up in front of the house in a lounge chair, with a wine glass in its hand. The bones have glow-in-the-dark polka dots on them, it’s great. It’s fucked up.”

“How did it die?”

The friend shrugged. “How should I know? It’s better than the spider you guys do every year, that’s for fuckin’ sure. Oooohh, a big spider, I’m shaking.”

“Will you shut the fuck up and concentrate? You haven’t picked anything up this whole round.”

“Who cares? This is a game for babies.”

Constance, unloading laundry he’d had to rewash after one of the Moores decided it would be funny to pour a Slurpee into the dryer, turned his face away from the playroom to hide a grin. He wasn’t surprised when Victor started to yell. Victor stood up and looked down at his friend, with his hands in fists at his sides, and his friend laughed up at him while he screamed.

“It is babyish,” his friend said, sweeping a hand across the playset and knocking the toys out.

“No! You have to play what I want,” the seventeen-year-old Victor shouted. He kicked the playset and more toys bounced out: tiny sharp discoveries Constance would make later with his soles or his knees.

The friend laughed, told Victor he was “a moron and practically a virgin if you don’t count that” (pointing at Constance), and headed home. Victor kicked Constance and stormed off. Constance wearily got on all fours, picked up all the Squalor! pieces he could find, put the game away, finished unloading the laundry, cleaned the lint trap, and distributed the warm clothing to the bedrooms. He found a chunk of Kraft macaroni and cheese in Claudia’s sock drawer. Carrying it to the garbage in his cupped hands, he thanked his lucky stars that he did laundry every day, so the gelid orange mass was still in its first bloom of youth.

After he had bleached the drawer he turned to the problem of Halloween. He had until tomorrow to find a “spider.” Constance racked his brains but he couldn’t remember seeing anything like Halloween decorations, and the only spiders he’d seen in the house were unintended consequences. He’d been in every room in the house at least once. He knew he should look through the upstairs of the Victorian wing again, but the sun was sinking red at the horizon, and the thought of searching through the shadow-webbed Victorian wing by the flickering of its rewired electric lights made him shudder. He was staring out the picture window, hoping for a reprieve, when it hit him: the shed under the magnolia. That would be where they kept the big holiday things.

He went out through the pantry door, into the soft autumn air and the shrilling of crickets and late locusts, and headed across the back lawn with a flashlight. It was always strange nowadays to be outside, where the family never went. The wind picked up, sweeping across his skull and tugging his smock to one side. The sun had set and only a red razorline at the horizon showed where it had gone. The magnolia had shed its blossoms; the wind grabbed several of them and slapped the huge, fleshy petals, white with brown curling tips, against Constance’s face. The tender smell of their freshness still lingered under the more sardonic sweetness of rot.

The wind prowled, bringing bad smells and then whisking them away. Constance turned on the flashlight as he passed into the deep cold shadow of the magnolia. He stood in front of the little shed and the wind dropped, and a stench hit him so hard that he choked and covered his face, the light from the flashlight swirling wildly over the peeling wooden door.

He coughed and wondered what died in there. He’d cleaned out rotted corpses before, rats and pigeons from the Victorian wing, but if he’d known he’d have to do that here he would have brought a dustpan and bucket. Maybe I found that cat they never talk about, he thought, and laughed to himself— and then shook his head, still laughing, because: what a fucked-up thing to laugh at. “You’re decompensating, Constance,” he said. Still laughing. The first time he’d heard what passed for his own name since his purchase date.

He pulled his smock up over his nose and mouth and put his hand out to the doorknob. It spun loose and helpless. He shrugged (which made the smock fall down, so he had to tug it up again) and pushed against the door with his shoulder. It opened with a shriek of splinters.

Constance swung the flashlight through the musty dark and its beam struck a huge thing looming in the back of the shed. He yelled in terror.

But then he laughed at himself again, because he’d been right, this was where they kept the Halloween spider. It was a black and purple cloth monstrosity which he imagined might somehow cover the front of the house. It had many bald and faded patches, so he’d have to go over it with spray paint. An extra step but not an awful one; Constance more or less enjoyed this kind of task, watching something turn from rotten to useful under his hands.

There were other holiday things as well, he saw, shining the flashlight around the box of Fourth of July fireworks and a serving platter for Thanksgiving. There were rusted-out gardening tools and broken flowerpots, gutted bags of mulch and a plastic horse on broken springs, and toward the back, behind an old flag and a pile of crooked Hula Hoops, he saw a mannequin made to look like a rotting corpse. Half its rubbery face was falling off: definitely the Moore family style.

Constance got the spider out first. It took forever to shove the vile thing through the door, crunched up and bulging out in front and back, and Constance got splinters in his back and his arms as he struggled with it in the doorway. He got several good lungfuls of the thing’s foul smell, a mix of mildew and dirt and something that stirred bad memories of his time in the recycling department. Finally he got it onto the lawn, where it lay splayed and reeking under the fingernail moon. Even though the Moores never left their house anymore, he hoped the spray paint would cover up the smell and save his pride.

With this thought he went back into the shed to drag the mannequin out. He thought he might be able to arrange it at the spider’s feet. He set the flashlight on a shelf pointing toward the corner with the mannequin-corpse. He really thought he might throw up from the smell. He hung the Hula Hoops on the plastic horse and turned back to the mannequin, and then it seemed like everything shifted and sharpened and he understood what he was seeing: a naked human body, skin sloughing off, blackened and ragged and liquefying there in the dark. His silent nighttime helper, who had in recent weeks stopped coming around. His predecessor.

---

When the family woke up the next morning the Halloween decorations were up. The outside of the house had been transformed into a giant black spider, with eight green eyes and great white fangs, its hairy legs arching down from the second story, black feet shuffling across the lawn with the wind.

The Moores drifted into the kitchen. Claudia poured some marshmallow cereal from a box onto the kitchen island, and then ripped open a sugar packet and poured the sugar on top. She scrubbed up the cereal with her hands and let the ripped packet flutter to the floor. Constance stood in the corner and watched them with numbed eyes.

“Hey,” Horace Moore said, coming over to him. He held a pickle in each hand; he brought the left-hand pickle to his mouth to munch, and slapped Constance on the side of the head with the right-hand pickle. “Hey, look alive. It’s Halloween! What do you want to do?”

Constance stared at him. Pickle juice slid along his jawline.

“Just as long as you know your limits,” the Moore paterfamilias said uneasily.

Constance couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do except sleep, and he said so.

“That’s fine,” said Horace Moore, slapping Constance on the back in what could have been a gesture of camaraderie, but wasn’t.

“Not in my bed,” said Claudia. “That’s disgusting.”

Constance thought of the state of Claudia’s bed and began to laugh. He stood there in the middle of the Moores’ kitchen concept and watched laughter come out of his mouth. He could see himself from above, he was somewhere in the uppermost corner of the kitchen, where he always had to get the broom to sweep down the cobwebs, and it had finally happened to him, like the sub in the fairy tale he had become the kitchen of the people he served. He was the kitchen concept now.

I was always the ghost, he thought, and he laughed harder, although he couldn’t hear it anymore over the ringing in his ears.

To his surprise, he was able to leave the kitchen. He simply walked out through the passageway into the Victorian house and fell asleep on the playroom couch. The family came and decorated him as he slept—they wrote obscenities on his back and drew penises on his face. This was the closest they’d come to treating him as one of their own, and therefore in the spirit of the holiday. They left a packet of Twinkies on the floor by the couch. Then they tiptoed away and waited, giggling to themselves in their separate rooms, for midnight.

At 12:01 they were gathered around the couch. Constance was still stretched out there, with one hand over his face and the other hanging limp to the floor, almost brushing the unopened packet of Twinkies. The teenagers let their father do the honors; he picked Constance up by the armpit and punched him in the face.

A banging started in the old pipes of the Victorian wing. In the barndominium the parakeets were awake and laughing like their owners. Constance fell to the floor—squashing the Twinkies, which Victor reached down and pulled from under him—and tried to curl into a ball, but the younger Moores grabbed his legs, pulled their father’s boxers off him and held his ankles wide apart. Victor was holding his left leg with one hand and trying to open the Twinkie packet with his teeth. Horace kicked him between the legs again and again. The Moores’ dancing feet made the floorboards shake. The children spun Constance around, his face covered in his smock sliding over the playroom floor, and made their father run in a circle to keep kicking his sub’s balls.

There came a pause in the action. The Moores were panting out laughter. Victor let Constance’s leg drop so he could finally get at the Twinkies. Claudia clawed at the opened packet and scooped up a fistful of mashed yellow cake and filling. Constance’s smock was bloody and he’d streaked a wandering red circle across the playroom floor. He had sucked as much of the smock as he could into his mouth, so the noises he was making were muffled, and the family could hear the creaking of the Victorian wing’s staircase, like something going upstairs, thump thump thump.

Victor licked out the inside of the Twinkie packet and then dropped it by Constance’s face. Claudia dropped the leg she was holding. The family went through the passageway into the kitchen to replenish their electrolytes with Gatorade. They hung around the kitchen island discussing whether it would be funny to break Constance’s ribs.

“We did it with the last one and he was fine,” Victor argued. “They teach them in training how to tape themselves up so they can still work.”

“I paid a lot for that sub,” his father said, in the lecturing tone that made his children roll their eyes. “You thought you could run the boat over that dolphin and I had to replace the engine.”

“He thinks we’re done,” Claudia pointed out. “The thing that makes it funny is the unexpected repetition—you think the joke is over and then it comes back later, boom!, unexpected. Like, that’s why it’s called the punchline.”

“That’s when it happens three times,” her father said. “The second time, you do expect it. The third time no.”

Then they heard a great whoof, like a god who’d heard something that took him aback. And they rushed to the front door and saw that the huge stuffed spider leg on the side of the Victorian wing had caught fire.

For the first time in months the Moore family went outside. They saw lights moving on the second floor of the Victorian wing—like candlelight, but then like firelight. The cardboard “stained glass” window turned black and the coating melted, and then it was a mouth full of blood. Out of the bursting windows flaming garbage began to flow: unfashionable cardigans, outdated communications technology, rat carcasses popcorning their guts across the lawn, little orange bottles of expired antidepressants going soft in the heat. Thong after thong after thong after thong.

The fire walked down the staircase. The ceiling above Constance’s head cracked open. Smoke poured through the passageway into the Colonial house, which had an aromatherapy system but not a sprinkler system. The first suffocated parakeet fell with a thud to the bottom of its glass tube. In a few minutes they were falling all around the house, quiet sounds, like a hopeless knocking at a rich man’s door. One of them let out a last frantic “You must be horny!”, and a scream of Moore family laughter, before it died.

The fire raced across the spider, licking up with relish all that highly flammable spray paint. The blazing spider clung to the Moore house as if protecting its clutch of eggs.

Constance lifted his head to cough and spat blood onto the playroom floor. And thought he saw someone standing on the couch, in front of the picture window, wreathed in smoke.

“Did you start the fire?” he asked.

But he could see now that it wasn’t just wreathed in smoke; it was made of smoke, taking something like flesh from the down-swirling black and gritty clouds. He had started the fire himself, with that bad rewiring job in the depths of the Victorian wing. These thoughts moved through his mind without urgency. He thought he might go back to sleep.

The figure said, Do you want to die here, and be part of this house forever?

And Constance pulled his blood-soaked smock up over his nose and mouth, dragged himself up onto the couch, climbed through his smoke companion and dispersed it, broke the picture window with his arm wrapped in the smock, and fell out into the bushes behind the house. He crawled away across the backyard, streaming blood. With the Moores gathered at the front of the house, their subordinate could lie in the grass and imagine Horace Moore flailing, falling on his ass, howling in frustration as he failed to kick a ghost in the testicles. Constance choked on smoke and laughter, and wished that he could see it happen.

This hopelessness, the imagined glee and the guilt which makes the glee imaginable, the longing for something he was currently acting to prevent, are markers of everything subs secretly consider funny—a kind of saudade for disobedience.

The wind lifted sparks from the blazing spider and carried them all the way to the top of the magnolia. The tree began to crackle and then to roar. Fire fell onto the roof of the old shed, through the holes nobody who cared had ever had time to fix, and the fireworks began to fountain upward through the smoke like cascades of blood and ichor and champagne. Constance lay on his back in the grass and watched.

Sirens were swirling around the house now as the fire engines raced off I-95 and down the half-hidden driveway. The firefighters, themselves subordinates who could only joke when they were working, would get whipped later for trampling the azaleas. Ash filled up the wineglass of the neighbor’s Halloween decoration, which might have been a real skeleton.

[“Abandoned mansion, Beirut” photographed by Craig Findlay, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.]