Walking down the street, skin pale as moonlight, shining stretch marks glowing in the night, crisscrossing the deflated belly. Obvious that the man had been fat once—but had since lost so much weight that now his skin folded in all different ways and different directions, so much so that it was almost impossible to figure out his exact silhouette.

It was old but appeared ageless. The balding head with badly tinted hair and varicose veins on the legs pinned him at around seventy, but there was a vigor to his step and a tone to his walk that made you think of a young man. Zack thought all these things, noticed all these things, because he was so much like Eph. His mother would have told him to move away from the window and called 911, while Eph would have pointed out all the details that formed the picture of that strange man.

The pale creature circled the house across the street. Zack heard a soft moan, and then the rattle of a backyard fence. The man came back and moved toward the neighbor’s front door. Zack thought of calling the police, but that would raise all sorts of questions for him with Mom: he’d had to hide his insomnia from her, or else suffer days and weeks of doctor’s appointments and tests, never mind her worrying.

The man walked out into the middle of the street and then stopped. Flabby arms hanging at his side, his chest deflated—was he even breathing?—hair ruffling in the soft night wind. Exposing the roots to a bad “Just for Men” reddish brown.

It looked up toward Zack’s window, and for one weird moment they locked eyes. Zack’s heart raced. This was the first time he saw the guy frontally. During the whole time, he had been able to see only a flank or the man’s skin-draped back, but now he saw his full thorax—and the pale Y-shaped scar that crossed it whole.

And his eyes—they were dead tissue, glazed over, opaque even in the gentle moonlight. But worst of all, they had a frenzied energy, darting back and forth and then fixing on him—looking up at him with a feeling that was hard to pinpoint.

Zack shrank back, peeling away from the window, scared to death by the scar and those vacant eyes that had looked back at him. What was that expression…?

He knew that scar, knew what it meant. An autopsy scar. But how could that be?

He risked another peek over the window’s edge, so carefully, but the street was empty now. He sat up to see better, and the man was gone.

Had he ever even been there? Maybe the lack of sleep was really getting to him now. Seeing naked male corpses walking in the street: not something a child of divorce wants to share with a therapist.

And then it came to him: hunger. That was it. The dead eyes looked at him with intense hunger…