She grappled his shoulder and pulled him closer; her nose in his neck and the memory-scent of her very first time; that sickly-sweet stench of day-old sweat and mall cologne... she wondered if he’d showered in the ten months since they last shared a bed.

The feeling was FEAR, she realized... but it was a new type of fear; more sincere than the jitters she felt when it rained and not as piercing as the terror of crashing cars. This fear was darker somehow... mysterious... curious like the retracted paws of an alley cat.

New sounds rustled through her anti-depressant haze; a gentle reverberation from the heart of the home... another creek... another thunk... rapid clicking like the wings of a broken cricket. Then, raindrops on metal... the escalating blare of a car horn... the scream of wet tires and the clink clink clink of showering glass.

The scar rippled from the top of her bikini line down to her thigh. Where normal girls had hair, Ava had a quilt of mangled skin that required tweezers to de-fur. For ten months she tried joking about it (“Turns out sharks really CAN smell menstrual blood a mile away!”). She tried fixing it with a myriad of steroid injections and silicon gels. She even tried ignoring it. Her last hope was to confront it.

She was stubborn.
She was evolving.
She needed SOLITUDE like normal people needed exercise.

Trevor climbed once again to the land of the living, naked except for an antique gas mask strapped to his face. As he peered through glass eyes like a mutant fly and breathed through the alien snoot, a single thought coiled through the booby-trapped labyrinth of his brain:
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.
I need to be alone.