Incendiary

I’d never been able to eat bacon, not since I burned down the flat where my brother Eddy and I lived with the Bogeyman. It’s the smell. That unmistakable reek of fat and flesh crackling. Even years later, sitting in the food court of a motorway services off the M1, as I attentively cut the rinds off Eddy’s rashers and shovelled spoonfuls of slop into his slackened mouth, the slightest whiff of bacon could make my stomach perform a pirouette and my spine do a number like fingers running a dud piano.

I’m not entirely sure if it was the bacon or the nervous energy I felt at the prospect of finishing off the Bogeyman for good that evening that set my heart aflutter in that little café. Then again, it could’ve been the fact that Eddy’s face was already on the afternoon news, gurning out at the diners of the motorway service station in high definition.

I’d always had a secret penchant for setting fires and getting away with it. But one look at Eddy’s ugly mug, neatly underscored by a police hotline, and I thought my days as a cold-case arsonist were numbered.

Breaking Eddy out of the psychiatric hospital that morning had been easy enough. Too easy, in fact. I’d long played the long-suffering visiting brother, and I was blessed with a face that people were instantly charmed and disarmed by. In the end, all it had taken was a bit of misdirection—a generous sprinkling of laxatives into the coffees I brought, as on all my visits, for the attendant staff and security, and a well-rehearsed dance around their CCTV blind spots. But the pièce de résistance was a whisper in the ear of a maniac as I loosened his bed restraints and thrust into his shaking hands a box of matches and a can of lighter fluid. “Those giant ants plaguing you—why don’t you incinerate them all? The queen has made her nest in a bed of hollyhocks in the atrium. Don’t let anyone stand in your way. Remember, Dr. Pritchett and her staff are in league with the colony.”

“My God, it’s true!” he yelped, squeaking off down the linoleum hallway to do the deed. As he went about his work, I plonked Eddy, already doped to the gills, in a wheelchair and pushed him straight past the nurses’ station, where a young auxiliary sat, completely and reliably absorbed in her headphones, jabbing away at her phone. By the time the fire alarm had sounded, with the crunch of broken glass and the distant din of screams and laughter, we were away down the entrance ramp. It was as easy as that.

The present situation, however, was not so easy. I had not counted on them noticing Eddy’s absence so quickly, especially not after the pandemonium that I’d caused back at the hospital. “Time to go,” I said, doling the last spoonful of slop into his mouth.

I scoped the food court to see no one had clocked our presence. There was a pockmarked cashier, his sloping shoulders chalked with dandruff, trying to flirt with another server behind the counter and getting nowhere. Other than that, only a smattering of solitary travelers, their eyes cast down on their meals.

"Eddy," I said, dabbing at his chin with a paper towel, "you know what’s tonight, don’t you?" His vacant eyes rested dead ahead on the red plastic stool opposite, not registering anything. Poor Eddy. He’d never been the same since the fire. A sensitive soul, Eddy’s mind had cracked like glass under a flame, bearing witness to what I’d done to the Bogeyman. "It’s Bonfire Night," I said. "And you know what that means, don’t you?" Crouched next to him, I whipped my Zippo lighter from my pocket. "It means fireworks."

Eddy’s eyes focused instantly on the flame, and he flinched as if yanked out of a tranquility as fragile and membranous as amnion. Something was rekindled in him. His lips trembled in recitation, "Remember, remember, the fifth of November..."

In a whisper, I joined the recital, the words coming back to me like a half-remembered dream.

Gunpowder, treason and plot.

We see no reason why gunpowder treason

Should ever be forgot!

I snapped the Zippo shut on forgot. "We’re going to have a hell of a Bonfire Night, aren’t we?"

My earliest memory is a spinning lantern balanced precariously on a wonky trestle table. As my father, who had been watching me from the sofa, sank into a drunken stupor, I toddled toward the lovely light. I was transfixed, not so much by the shapes and patterns cast out, but by the naked energy behind them. Reaching upward, I lost my footing and brought the table crashing down. The fire took on a glorious life of its own. It lapped the carpet and climbed the curtain. It fed and grew and raged. By the time my father was awake, I was already cowering under the kitchen sink. While he pounded at the flames, I awaited my own inevitable beating and plotted how I might bring about another, greater conflagration.

Outside the motorway services, I filled up the car, a scuffed red Ford Fiesta, at a Shell garage on the opposite corner of the car park from the food court, while Eddy sat in the back seat, his head slouched against the window. The clouds were coming in low and heavy, the air pregnant with November rain. I breathed in the fumes of the petrol pump deeply, gripping the lighter inside my hoodie pocket, gently turning the spark wheel and letting it clink against an aerosol can I had stuffed in there.

Across the car park, I could see the pimpled cashier standing at the automatic door, looking directly my way. Was that a phone he was jabbing at, a three-digit number? I couldn’t tell. No matter—we’d be on the back-country roads soon enough, and we were already so close now, so close to the Bogeyman’s lair. By sundown, he’d be gone for good, exorcised by a purifying fire.

Since childhood, Eddy and I had feared the Bogeyman because we knew him. We had seen him take shape many times in a shadow that moved over the features of our father. One of the kids on our floor of flats told us one time about the Bogeyman. It sounded to us like the thing our father would transform into when he came home each night.

Our father was a man named Rod Kendall. Rod had lost most of his left forearm and scalp to a mine in the Falklands and subsequently spent most of his time and what little money he had at the Blacksmiths Arms, drinking, quarreling, and getting into bar brawls with other broken souls. His good arm, his “fighting arm,” as he called it, was still capable of flooring a man with the wrong look—it was an arm Eddy and I were deeply accustomed to. You didn’t cross Rod when he was pissed, and he was pissed pretty much permanently, which meant we were more than content to be left in the flat by ourselves most days.

The flat was a ramshackle little hovel on the twentieth floor of a tower block. Our front window looked out onto a barren estate whose only color was a dappling of off-licenses, chicken shacks, and pawn shops. The air was always heavy with the funk of stale cigarettes and day-old booze emanating from ever-replenishing hoards of half-empty cans and bottles. It smothered you like a rag cloth soaked in sickly sweet ether.

Consequently, I spent most of my time in the bathroom, conducting little experiments with a rusty old Zippo lighter I had nabbed from Rod’s room and engraved my name onto with a penknife. One such experiment involved the construction of a makeshift flamethrower. It wasn’t exactly something you learned off “Blue Peter,” but it worked. I took a can of hairspray that had been gathering dust in the medicine cabinet (God knows what use Rod had for it) and secured a wall bracket to the can using rubber bands. Then I stuck a wick candle onto the end of the bracket with a piece of gum so that the flame was perfectly lined up with the sprayer tip. Hey presto, a fully functional homemade flamethrower.

One afternoon, I was killing time with my new toy. While roasting spiders in the bathtub, Eddy burst in, breathless and giddy. “I did it! I made the TV move!”

Eddy always had an overactive imagination. He believed he had psychic abilities. It’s not unusual for a boy that age to have fantasies. But what separated Eddy from the rest was the perseverance, the sheer tenacity of hours spent staring at inanimate objects, his brow furrowed in concentration, willing them to bend to his will. He really believed it—that was the spooky thing.

“What’s that?” he said, his headiness diffusing into curiosity at my flamethrower.

“Nothing. Just a school project.”

“You’re such a liar! Tell me!”

“Show me how you move stuff with your mind first, then I’ll show you how this works. But you must promise not to tell Dad; otherwise, the Bogeyman will get you.”

“Deal.”

We were tearing up winding country lanes in the Fiesta when the crook of Eddy’s arm pinned me to the headrest, almost sending us veering into a hedgerow. Gasping, I steadied the wheel, glimpsing wild, darting eyes in the rearview mirror. Whatever they’d put Eddy on had worn off, that’s for sure—it was like the worst comedown you’ve ever seen.

“Where are you taking me?” Eddy asked. He was a big guy, so it helped not to inflame him when he had you in a headlock at sixty miles per hour.

“Fireworks,” I spluttered. “See the fireworks.”

His brow furrowed. “But I’m not allowed to… see the fireworks…” I felt his bicep tightening on my throat like a boa constrictor. “You’re lying!” One wrong move, one wrong word, and he’d snap my head clean off.

“Really, fireworks,” I choked. “Big ones.”

For a moment, his eyes lit up. Was it excitement or fear? I couldn’t decide. Either way, I didn’t have time for this.

In the seconds after the brake and the force of the whiplash, I freed myself of Eddy’s grip, snatched the lighter and the aerosol, rolled down the window, and released a torrent of fire that left Eddy whimpering in the back seat, his nose bloodied.

“You are really starting to piss me off, Eddy. I swear I’ll turn this car around right now and drive you straight back to the hospital if you don’t behave. I’ll walk you right in there and give you the electric shock treatment myself.”

“I’m sorry,” he sniveled. “I got scared. I’m not allowed to see the fireworks. I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

“Who says you’re not allowed to see the fireworks?”

“The doctors.”

“Well, the doctors are full of shit. If I say you’re good to see the fireworks, you’re good to see the fireworks.”

He held his nose and threw his head back, gurgling.

“Ah, Jesus.” I unbuckled myself and crawled into the back seat next to Eddy. “You want the blood to pour out of your nose, not down your throat.” I tipped his head forward, letting the blood trickle onto the bunched-up end of his jumper.

“From now on, I need you to be calm.” Over the jumper, Eddy’s eyes slumped down to his feet, like an admonished schoolboy. “Are you calm?” He nodded silently.

I climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition.

Then came the siren.

It was a distant cry at first, difficult to discern over the sound of the engine stalling. But it soon grew unmistakable, and it was heading our way.

I pounded the dashboard and felt Eddy flinch behind me. I’d taken a risk breaking him out, but now I was seconds away from being unmasked. If this was how it had to go down, then I wouldn’t be taking any prisoners. I clutched the aerosol and the lighter inside my pocket, my temples throbbing, and waited.

Blue lights rose over an incline in the rearview mirror. The wail reached a dizzying intensity, forcing Eddy to clasp his hands to his ears before it receded to a dwindling Doppler. The hulking body of a fire engine shrank into the middle distance, then twisted around a bend and out of sight.

My heart steadied, and I let out a great howl of laughter. I turned to face Eddy, still cowering in his seat. “Better get going. We don’t want to miss the fireworks, do we?”

The night I burned down the flat was a Bonfire Night. It was the first time Rod had agreed to take us to the park across town to watch the festivities, on the condition that the flat was clean by the time he returned that evening. That seemed a small enough price to pay. That day, we did nothing but scrub and tidy with giddy enthusiasm. We talked of nothing but the coming spectacle.

Our neighborhood was renowned for its spectacular Bonfire Night. There would be a torchlit procession, music, and costumed revelers. There would be gingerbread, toffee apples, and hot, buttered potatoes wrapped in foil. And, of course, there would be fireworks—vast eruptions of color illuminating the November night. It was the promise of those fireworks that lit Eddy up with anticipation. Me? I yearned for the blaze and the burning of the effigy.

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November,” we chanted happily to each other.

By the time we heard the fumbled jangling of keys at the door, there wasn’t so much as a cobweb. Rod staggered in, carrying with him the usual heavy fog of booze and a brightly colored box tucked under his bad arm. We watched as he turned to survey the flat and grunted a sound as close to approval as he could muster.

“What’s that?” said Eddy, looking at the box.

“Something I got off a bloke down the pub,” said Rod, collapsing into his armchair and turning over the package. “He was giving them away.” It was a box of fireworks.

“Wow!” Unable to check his excitement, Eddy ran over and plucked it off Rod’s lap, a brash thing to do. “Can we set them off tonight?”

“What else are we gonna do with them? Bloody birthday candles?” Rod chortled. I was about to mention that we didn’t do birthday cakes but thought better of it. Besides, Rod had come home on Bonfire Night in a reasonably good mood, and that was good enough for me.

“Can we go now? It’ll be starting soon!” Eddy squealed.

“You can get me a fresh one first,” said Rod, pointing to the fridge. Eddy was there and back in a flash, bearing a can of Special Brew. “It’s a rite of passage this,” said Rod, popping the tab open. “I remember when my old man took me to the bonfire.” He took a gulp and wiped his mouth on his sleeve, then looked at me. “Fetch my dad’s old lighter, will you? We’ll use it to set off these beauties.”

Well now, didn’t my heart just do the biggest loop-de-loop at that. “Which one is it?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Old Zippo. My bedside cabinet.” An heirloom. A family heirloom I’d carved my name onto. “Well, what are you waiting for? You heard your brother. Time’s a-wasting.”

In the bedroom, I considered climbing out the window and scaling the block wall. I wouldn’t be seeing any bonfire now, possibly worse. I paced the room, snapping the Zippo open and closed in my short pocket.

“What the hell are you doing in there?” Rod’s drink-sodden voice boomed from the living room.

“I can’t find it!”

“What do you mean you can’t find it?” There was a pause, the sudden, violent creak of Rod’s armchair breaking the silence, the heavy footsteps to the bedroom door. “What do you mean you can’t find it?” He was in the doorway, breathing heavily.

“I... it’s not there.”

He practically knocked me out of the way as he charged over to the cabinet and started rummaging through the drawer. “It must be. It’s my dad’s bloody war lighter.”

Eddy stood at the doorway now. “But Dad, you’ve got loooads.”

“We’re not leaving until I’ve found that lighter!” He was incandescent now, yanking out each drawer, turning over the duvets, the mattress, the bedframe. Finally, after upending the entire bedroom, he collapsed into a crouch by the radiator, his back toward me and Eddy as we stood there, too afraid to say or do anything. Then his breathing got heavier, and his shoulders heaved. That’s when I knew it was too late. Rod had been transformed, and we were alone now with the Bogeyman.

He spun around, his features contorted, a vein pulsating under the pale, disfigured scalp. Like a viper, his arm shot out and gripped me by the throat. “What have you done with that fucking lighter?”

“I...” My head pounded and the stained, yellow walls of the bedroom blurred out of focus.

“Leave him alone!” Eddy tugged the Bogeyman’s stump and was thrown to the floor, cracking his head open on the upturned cabinet, blood staining the pristine carpet we had cleaned that morning. He lay there groaning, a hand clasped to his forehead.

I was certain this time he would kill one of us. So, I did the only thing I could to appease him. I retrieved the lighter and held it up, like an offering to a wrathful god. He released me instantly, his anger stilled.

Inspecting the lighter, he discovered my etchings on the metalwork and was about to strike me when Eddy’s groans drew his attention away. At the sight of the blood, the Bogeyman vanished as quickly as he had appeared, retreating into the depths. “Go to bed, both of you, now. No fireworks.”

“But—”

“—NOW!”

I fetched an ice pack and plaster for Eddy’s cut and put him to bed. That night, I lay awake, listening over Eddy’s groans to the distant fireworks in the darkness. As the explosions tapered off and the raucous din petered out into stillness, I clenched tightly onto the bedsheets and plotted.

When I was sure Eddy had dozed off, I slipped out of my duvet, retrieved my flamethrower from under the bed, and made my way to the kitchen. There, silent as a ghost, I gathered a full bottle of Rod’s hardest, most expensive, most flammable rum and headed to his bedroom.

He was already comatose, fully clothed and splayed face down on the duvet. His fighting arm sagged over the edge of the bed, the hand limp around a near-empty bottle of scotch that had spilled out and seeped into the carpet. He had restored the bedside cabinet to its upright position, and on top of it lay an ashtray and his father’s Zippo.

I tiptoed around the moonlit bed and pocketed the lighter. Clenching my teeth, I unscrewed the cap on the rum and, very gently, very gingerly, poured a few droplets onto his back. He didn’t stir. Satisfied that he would not wake, I emptied a good amount onto him in tiny, fitful dribbles. Eventually, he was doused from head to toe and still sleeping as soundly as a baby.

I took my instruments. I lit the wick candle on the end of the bracket and aimed. My finger rested lightly on the sprayer for what felt like an age before he let out a moan, his body shifting with uneasy dreams. I lowered the sprayer and waited a while, unsure how to proceed.

Then, like an alarm, a piercing shriek sounded from the other bedroom, followed by low moans. Under the door crevice, a light flicked on, and the groaning grew louder as it approached. I blew out the candle and ducked under the bed as the door creaked open.

Eddy, in a befuddled voice, was crying my name and grumbling about a nightmare.

“What the hell are you doing?” it spat, and the bedsprings snapped back as it hoisted its body up. “I’m gonna kill you.”

I rolled out from under the bed, unseen in the darkness, as the looming shadow stumbled over to where Eddy stood in the open doorway, a column of the hallway light catching its outstretched arm. I lit the candle and aimed it right at its back. In the wardrobe mirror, I saw Eddy’s eyes fixed on the silhouette with that same focused concentration he reserved for his psychic fantasies. “Just die!” he screamed.

And then I sprayed.

The fire was hypnotic. But the screaming and the smell and the spectacle of the Bogeyman blackening, twisting, writhing—it felt like a veil had been lifted, exposing the depth of his monstrosity.

I dashed past, hugging the wall as he lashed out like a rabid dog, torching everything he touched. Eddy, pale and shaking, his eyes blank with shock, collapsed in a heap in the hallway. I whisked him out of the path of the flames, out of the flat, down the stairwell, and onto the empty street below, where I fell, exhausted and yet energized. The blaze was visible from where we lay sprawled on the concrete pavement, plumes of smoke billowing out from broken windows. Eddy was unconscious beside me.

It was a long time before the sirens broke through the heavy beating in my eardrums.

Rod had died in the fire. The inquest ruled the cause had been negligence, a lethal combination of drink, stupor, and cigarettes. No one suspected foul play, not even when Eddy told the coroner he had done it with his mind. That was just the shock talking. Of course, when his delusions persisted, we were promptly separated inside the care system, and Eddy spent the following years in and out of psych wards. Me, I got adopted by a nice middle-class couple out in a leafy suburb, both of whom worked for the National Trust and adhered to thoroughly modern notions of parenting based on self-expression and child autonomy. Well, that was all just fine and dandy with me.

I parked the Fiesta on a barren heath overlooking the park. The wind was coming in strong now, whipping the windshield with near-horizontal rain, while the sky overhead darkened to a blood orange. Below, the revelers were preparing to light the great woodpile in the center of the park. Above, the whizz-bang of fireworks had already begun.

“Look!” I pointed at a bursting crossette filling the evening sky with a fiery emerald and turned to look at Eddy, his eyes lit up with wonder. “Let’s get out and take a better look.”

Perched on the bonnet, we squinted skyward against the gale and marveled wordlessly at a kaleidoscopic procession of thunderous brocades, crackling willows, and swooping horsetails. We hardly even noticed the rain and the wind beating at our faces; so enchanting was the display. Then Eddy began reciting, “Remember, remember, the fifth of November. Gunpowder, treason, and...” He turned to face me. “Plot.”

A rocket fizzed overhead. I shifted my weight on the bonnet a little.

“Are you going to take me back to the hospital?” he asked. “I don’t like it there. I get nightmares.”

“No, I’m not taking you back there.”

“What are you going to do?”

I sighed. For the first time in his life, Eddy had seen fireworks, and I was glad. But my work here wasn’t done. Like him, I yearned to be free of the nightmares, to be free of the Bogeyman’s spell. But that was my burden to bear, not his. He’d already borne enough.

“We’re getting out of here. But first, we’re gonna go set off some fireworks.”

When we got back into the car, Eddy flinched as he turned to buckle in, his breaths becoming short, sharp gasps. Over his shoulder, the revelers had lit the bonfire in the middle of the park, and a throng was now making its way toward the flames, holding aloft an offering for the fire: a monstrous, misshapen effigy of a man.

The thing about monsters is they always find a way to come back. The Bogeyman has no name, no face, and he never sleeps. He is drawn to certain places as a moth is drawn to a flame. The tower block where Eddy and I lived is one of those places. He will never stop haunting the nightmares of the children who live there.

Many years after I had struck out on my own, I felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to that tower block, to see again the place that had made me. There it still stood, clad with a new ash-gray façade and flanked on either side by squat low-rises, casting over the asphalt landscape the long shadow of a colossal middle finger jutting out of a clenched fist.

I went up to the old flat and knocked on the door. In the stairwell, layers of chipped wall paint and graffiti had scabbed over any trace of what I’d done. There was no answer. I don’t know what I would’ve said had anyone come to the door, but I was curious to see the flat again. After waiting a while, I gave up and decided to leave.

As I was descending the stairwell, I heard crude voices a couple of floors down—a woman’s and a small boy’s. “We’re going to be late again,” the woman admonished, followed by an almighty crack like a bullwhip echoing up the stairwell. Rounding the corner, I saw a boy no older than three sitting quietly in his pram while his mother locked the door to their flat. He had a crimson handprint on his cheek and day-old bruises creeping up the neckline of his oversized T-shirt, and he was looking straight at me. It was a look that somehow cut through me and held me there on the steps before he was ushered off into the lift.

I had seen that look before on Eddy’s face. It was the look of someone who had seen the Bogeyman.

The Bogeyman was a shape-shifter, after all, a parasite. He had no form of his own, only the human clay that presented itself irresistibly to him. His spirit fed on this place still, and I decided then that I would have to expunge it.

There was the tower, its brutalist shadow flung over the estate in the dying embers of the day.

We trudged. Our feet were sodden from rainwater that had pooled in the divots of the tarmac. Eddy’s head was cocked fixedly on the evening explosions, mine on the mercurial patterns their afterglow threw against the tower.

As the wind lashed us, carrying the distant clamour and the faint, heady aroma of gunpowder, I realized I had stopped in the shadow of the building. I was clenching the lighter in my pocket so hard that my thumb was raw from the jagged spark wheel.

Eddy turned. “What’s the matter?”

On the smoke-plumed horizon, the last remaining ember of scarlet sunlight ebbed to a wink. I turned back to face the looming tower block, the dreadful scale of it, and felt only a sense of awe.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.”

At the inner edge of the car park, I stopped Eddy and said, “I need you to wait here while I go in and get the fireworks.” I did not want him to see what was to come. He nodded, and I proceeded down the entrance ramp to the underground parking.

At the basement door, I knelt down and took a pair of bolt cutters out of my drawstring bag. The rusted padlock gave in easily, and I made my way down a dark concrete corridor to the boiler room.

Everything was already prepared: the gas cans concealed under construction tarp, the fuse and explosives in my bag. The fuse would give me a good five minutes to get the hell out of there. Polyethylene cladding in the new façade would take care of the rest. Once the fire was going down here, it wouldn’t take long for the rest of the tower to light up like a Christmas tree.

I set to work with a clear and focused mind, moving with clinical determination. Once everything was ready, I could barely contain my emotion. It would all be over so quickly, the greatest conflagration yet. I only wished I could stick around to see it, but Eddy was waiting.

Crouching down by the fuse, I reached into my pocket for the Zippo.

“What’s that?”

I closed my eyes and sighed heavily before opening them again. Unable to contain his excitement, Eddy had followed me. But when I turned, it wasn’t childlike anticipation that greeted me, but molten rage.

“You lied!”

I had always blamed the Bogeyman for Eddy’s condition, for the lifetime of torment he had suffered. Yet, as he looked at me, I saw the glimmer of something behind those eyes, all aflame with madness, pain, and hate. It was the ghost of a frightened child, crying out, “Look what you have made of me.”

Before I had a chance to flick the Zippo, he had me by the throat. “No,” I croaked. “Fireworks, for you. I promise.”

It was no use. His grip tightened before he threw me to the ground, knocking over gas cans like a set of bowling pins. I grasped at the Zippo on the floor, my fingers brushing it, but he had me by the legs now. We wrestled for the lighter, tumbling and rolling in puddles of gasoline.

Finally, kicking myself free of Eddy, I stretched for the Zippo and made a dash to the fuse. It would be all right, I thought. The flames would pacify Eddy, then we would escape, just as before. With a trembling hand, I flicked open the lighter. “I’m sorry.”

I turned to see a gas can hurtling at my face from where Eddy lay, and smoke engulfing me. The strangest thing is the flames: I don’t even recall them. But there was that unmistakable reek of fat broiling and the heat enveloping me, so blinding that I don’t remember what happened next.

I’m told that I went into shock and was discovered shortly after in a smoldering, shivering heap in the underground car park by an unfortunate family just home from the fireworks. By some providence, my burning thrashes had not touched the fuse. Eddy, long gone by then, had probably fled upon seeing me catch fire.

The police are still hunting him, under the illusion they have a dangerous psychopath on the loose. His doctors will testify to the psychosis, but attempted arson is beyond Eddy; he is terrified of fire. As for me, I awoke from a coma to learn I am being treated as Eddy’s victim. Though my prints are over everything, there’s nothing left of my fingertips to corroborate this. Everyone is convinced I was the innocent hostage of a violent escapee—for now. And yet, I still can’t shake the feeling that my mask is already slipping and my secret exposed. Whenever the nurses remove my bandages to clean my wounds, they are forced to stifle

About the Author

Jamie McKinlay is a writer based in Bradford, England. His work has appeared in The Looking Glass Anthology and PressBoardPress.