I ran back home as I tried to get someone to answer—Rick or Patty, my foster parents, or their biological daughter Sierra. No one picked up. Rounding the corner onto our street, I saw no signs of trouble, but wasn’t sure what to look for anyway. I wanted to go ahead and call 911, but I had held off initially because what I had seen on the path was so bizarre and I couldn’t be sure I really wasn’t having some kind of delusion this time. Now, as I raced home to try and warn them, I didn’t want to slow down to call until I knew they were safe.

When I reached the house, I saw just how safe they were. They were sitting down to a nice family dinner, which was always a big deal on weekend nights. I had a momentary pang of disappointment that they were starting without me being home yet, but then I realized they weren’t.

Because Jeffery was in there, smiling and laughing. I watched in horror as they all took their places and Rick had everyone bow their heads to bless the food. Everyone closed their eyes and prayed except for Jeffery, who turned toward me at the window. He just stared silently at me for several moments, baring his teeth like an enraged ape or rabid dog as his eyes rolled back toward Rick, who was finishing up the prayer.

As everyone looked up, Jeffery was back to smiling at his new family.

I heard seven words and now I’m in Hell

I was a reader for two years before I met Elliot Stoffel. A reader is just what it sounds like—I read to the elderly and the disabled several days a week. The pay was never great, but I enjoyed the work and there was no denying it would look good on my applications to graduate school.

There was a time that meeting an esteemed sociology professor like Stoffel would have been exciting. We actually used one of his books in an undergrad class I had junior year. But that man, whoever he had been, seemed long gone when I first met the shattered ruin he had become.

Stoffel was supposed to be in his early fifties, but this man looked past seventy at least. And while the professor's books and reputation in sociology circles made him out to be a very articulate and intelligent man, the pitiful figure before me vacillated between long bouts of drooling, dead-eyed silence and brief interludes of incoherent screaming and thrashing about at some new imagined horror.