Why doesn’t it bother them? That’s the question, I told myself. How is this normal? Again, I wanted to call out, and again something in me really wouldn’t. I was starting to be frightened of what I might do, that I had this impulse to call out riding around in me.

I slipped out the back door and made my way to the street through the bit of scrub that divided my Aunt’s property from the Overbrooks’ next door. I walked up around the bend, maneuvered around the yellow gate that marked the end of the street and the beginning of the ridge trail, and spent a while up there by myself in the dust and brush. I wondered when they would notice I wasn’t around.

The feeling started when I turned back. My heart felt like it was packed in hot mud. Hot mud that started to go cold right away and stayed cold. I was down like I had never been before, not further down. I mean, I’d been hurt much worse. I’d been more deeply sad than this, but this was just different. Like I knew something was coming, and I was going to be a part of it. I was going to be all about it, and it was going to be all about me. And it was going to involve Medusa mask. Something had to happen, and all I was waiting on was the chance that the something would come from someone else, not from me, like I’d get summoned away or there’d be a fire or Dr. Wilson would move to another neighborhood and take his buddy with him.

None of those things happened. What happened was I had to run some cans of beans or something up to Mrs. Mendez’ house for my Aunt, and coming back I saw them again, clearing some brush by the corner of Dr. Wilson’s house, and before I knew what I was doing or why, I called out.

“Hey!”

No response.

“Hey! Hey, monster mask!”

I couldn’t believe I’d said that, but what else could I call them?

They stopped and turned to me, arms at their sides. Those bird shit eyes weren’t looking at me, they were focused on two different, random points, but I knew that there were eyes behind those little slits, and they were on me, walking up to him. Big, massive, solid. Fat over muscle. Totally silent. Not even some breath whistling through the neck hole of the mask, nothing. Didn’t move an inch as I came over. Still holding a cut branch in one hand. The air was thick with the smell of fresh-cut brush, sort of resinous, very strong, a little like turpentine.