From outside the house I could hear the TV blaring. Strange, unnatural guttural sounds poured out the windows and onto the front lawn, and they got louder when I went inside and into the living room. A zombie movie played—Land of the Dead—except nobody watched it, and it was playing with the volume so high, and no audience made the movie more frightening.

The cedar chest that served as our coffee table was covered in ashes, and strewn wrappers of Hershey’s chocolate and cellophane littered the floor. The black back to the remote control stuck out from under the cedar chest, and I grabbed it and found one battery under there too. Smooshed between the couch cushions I found the remote but I could not find the other battery. The movie played on, and a man wearing headphones and carrying a rifle was grabbed by a young boy zombie in a filthy black suit, and the man screamed and rolled back on the skateboard he rode for whatever reason, and then zombie after zombie appeared, a dirty clown biting the man’s wrist like chicken, another ripping the skin from his neck, and a horde of the dead tackled him into a shed where he fell onto his back and the bunch of them ripped him in half and ate his intestines while he died gasping.

I stuck the one battery into the remote and set the remote and its back on the cedar chest, and I went around to the TV and turned it off, and as I did the quiet revealed her screaming and scared the shit out of me.

“What’s the matter?” I yelled. I hurried down the hall to Paige’s open door and went in. Her room was trashed—the dresser was flipped over, the mirror shattered into small and large sharp pieces on the floor. An incense stick, burning, blackened the white linoleum. Nobody was there.

She screamed again. Mom’s room. I opened the door to Paige on the bed crying and on top of her was Frick, in his clothes but ripping Paige’s off. She yelled my name and Frick hit her and then he looked at me over his shoulder and called me a fucking Jesuit.

Paige screamed while Frick came after me slowly, bumping into the wall and rubbing his fingers together. I backed down the hallway and watched him, and he mumbled that this was his wigwam, that white people weren’t welcome, and I led him down the hall and through the kitchen and then I opened the back door and stepped onto the concrete steps, to get him to follow me outdoors. He must have thought I was leaving, because he turned around and started back up the hall.