The Monster in the Closet

by Bill Gauthier

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Horror

Synopsis

What if the monster in your child’s closet is real?

Tim Beaulieu’s daughter, Cleo, says that the monster is also her invisible friend, whom she blames for innocuous trouble. The whole thing makes Tim uneasy as he tries to remember a part of his childhood that is missing. Surely nothing can be wrong. Can it?

When the boy in the apartment upstairs goes missing after hurting Cleo, horrific memories begin to resurface as Tim finds himself under suspicion for the unthinkable. His daughter and those around him are in danger.

Tim must face his past to save Cleo but can they survive the monster in the closet?

****************

“At first, Bill Gauthier’s The Monster in the Closet feels like a traditional love letter to iconic horror authors like Stephen King, Michael McDowell, Peter Straub, etc. However, this marvelously unique, terrifyingly unpredictable tale suddenly goes off the rails in an unexpected direction that quite surprised me, shocked me even. Imaginative, tense, and deeply heartfelt, this novel moved me and chilled me in equal measure with unforgettable twists and flawed, richly textured characters. Highly recommended!” —Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

“I have watched Bill Gauthier’s career from the very beginning, and he never fails to impress. Steadily and consistently he has become one of the finest up-and-coming writers at work in the horror genre today. And he’s done it the right way, through years of hard work, determination, perseverance, and a focus on constantly honing and improving his craft. There are a lot of pretenders out there. Bill Gauthier isn’t one of them. He’s the real deal. Do NOT miss his work.” —Greg F. Gifune, author of Pack Animals and The Standing Dead

Release date: February 24, 2026

Publisher: Crossroad Press

Print pages: 323

Sample

1

One should never have to bury a person they thought they’d be with for life, Tim Beaulieu thought after the funeral. It was an odd thought, considering he and Jenny had been divorced for two months and separated for eighteen, but there it was. It’d cycled through his mind the entire morning, at the funeral parlor, in the limo, at the cemetery in the ice-cold February air, and then at Jenny’s parents’ house on Turner Road in Clifford, a house up on a hill with a beautiful view of a valley. A house he would never be able to afford, not on a teacher’s salary. Not with—

“Daddy. I’m hungry.”

Tim blinked and looked at Cleo. Light brown hair, big brown eyes like her mom’s. His eyes had once been dark brown, as a child close to Cleo’s age, but they were more hazel now. She’d taken a seat at the small dinette table. Jenny had kept the slightly nicer dining table they’d bought with the money her parents had given them for their wedding four years ago. He remembered—

Hungry. Cleo was hungry.

“Sorry, kiddo,” Tim said. “Just thinking.”

“About Mommy?”

The question felt like an icicle piercing his heart. Her big brown eyes looked at him with knowledge that seemed inconceivable for a four-year-old to have. He pulled out a chair and sat. The suit jacket tightened in places and he couldn’t wait to get out of the thing.

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I was thinking about Mommy.”

Cleo nodded. “Me too.” She paused. “I miss her.”

“I know, Babes.” Tim almost added that he missed her, too, but didn’t know how the little girl would take that since Mommy and Daddy hadn’t lived together for almost half her life now. Not too long ago he’d made the mistake of saying something similar and had innocently been called out on that.

“I’m hungry, Daddy,” Cleo said.

“I have some of those chicken nuggets you like.”

“No.” It was the saddest sounding no Tim thought he’d ever heard. “Can I have peanut butter and jelly?”

“Sure, Babes.” Tim stood, took off the suit jacket, and put it on the back of his chair. “How about milk with that?”

“Yes, please.”

Tim leaned over and hugged her, kissing the top of her head. Her hair still smelled of shampoo. “I love you, you know.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

If there were sweeter words, Tim didn’t know

them.

In the small kitchen, what his mother called the pantry, he began the work of making her sandwich. The smell of the peanut butter made him realize he was hungry, too. He knew the peanut butter would probably give him heartburn but decided to hell with it, and began making himself a sandwich, too.

It was his fault Jenny was dead. He knew it was stupid to think that, stupider to believe it, but she’d been on her way to pick up Cleo. He hadn’t wanted to bring her home because of all the grading he had to do. Grading, and the snowy, icy roads. Since Jenny had the newer Ford Explorer with better tires than his Toyota Corolla, he’d asked her to come and pick Cleo back up. After all, he’d said, he’d picked her up Friday night, and he shouldn’t always have to do the driving.

Jenny hadn’t been happy about it but had agreed. She would be at her parents’ place anyway and could get Cleo before going home, even though it meant going out of her way and driving into Harden.

Tim realized Cleo was talking.

“I’m sorry, Babes. What did you say?”

“Nothing, Daddy. I’m just talking to Mr. Brambles.”

The hairs on the back of Tim’s neck tingled and, for a moment, his heart softly fluttered. He didn’t know why. Cleo was an imaginative little girl, always had been, and so it was probably something she was playing. Maybe something from a show that she watched, though he didn’t recognize the name.

“Oh,” he said. “You’re playing.”

The sandwiches were done and he was reaching for the milk but stopped. She sat with her back to him, alone at the small table. He briefly wondered if he’d get his old table back, and then pushed the stupid thought from his mind.

“That’s not playing?” he asked.

“No. Mr. Brambles is real.”

Tim poured the milk (did his hand tremble a little?) and put the gallon back in the fridge. He brought her plate of pb&j in one hand and the cup of milk in the other.

“You’re alone out here, Babes,” he said.

“No. Mr. Brambles is here.”

Tim placed the plate and cup in front his daughter. “Where?”

“Standing over there.” Cleo pointed into the corner of the dining room, near the arch that led to the living room.

Tim looked in spite of himself and thought, for a moment, he saw a figure from the corner of his eye. But there was no one. She’d made up an imaginary friend. That was cute. He wasn’t sure if she was too old to have one but didn’t think so. Four may have been a Big Girl in her eyes but he knew better. Losing Mommy at this age could spur a whole bunch of new things that wasn’t there before. He knew bedwetting and nightmares were possible new issues but so far, five days after Jenny’s death, Cleo hadn’t shown signs of either of those things. Sure, she insisted he check her closet to make sure a monster wasn’t there, but that had been going on for a few months now, long before Jenny’s accident. Maybe the imaginary friend would be here until she felt better and moved on.

“Why, hello there, Mr. Brambles!” he said. “Welcome to our humble home.”

The smile he’d anticipated (hoped for?) didn’t come. Instead, around half a mouthful of pb&j (some of which she wore like Heath Ledger’s Joker wore lipstick), she said, “He says not to patronize me.”

Anger flashed. “Excuse me?”

Cleo stopped chewing. Her big brown eyes became circles as they whipped up at him and her small fingers dug into the sandwich, nearly tearing the bread. She said nothing. She didn’t need to.

Pain rolled through Tim’s rapidly beating heart. His right arm tremored and he took a deep shaky breath.

“I’m sorry, Babes,” he said. “That came out a lot…stronger…than I meant it to.”

Cleo nodded. She looked as though she might cry. He wouldn’t be surprised if she did, with everything the poor little girl gone through.

He leaned over again and kissed her head. She had relaxed now, but only a little. “You’re amazing, kiddo. Your vocabulary is truly amazing.”

He went back into the kitchen for his own sandwich and milk, and stopped as tears came. He closed his wet eyes, counted to ten, and then to twenty, and wiped them. He did the deep breathing his last therapist had taught him before insurance cut him off, and then joined Cleo at the table for a lunch that they needed,

if not necessarily wanted.

2

Cleo played with her Supergirl, Hawkgirl, and Wonder Woman action figures at the coffee table while Tim sat at his computer, reading the email from Michelle about the happenings at school that day. Everything seemed to have gone fine in his absence but it sounded like the head of the English department would be happy with his return on Monday. He had two days to mentally prepare himself to go back. Then he’d only have a week until February vacation.

“Daddy? When are we going to get my stuff from home?”

Tim grimaced a little but decided not to correct her. Soon enough, this would be her only home.

“There are a few things that have to go through Grandma and Grandpa’s lawyer and then we’ll be able to go and get your stuff. I think we’ll be able to do it when I’m on vacation next week.”

“Good. ’Cause I miss my toys at home.”

“You know—” he began but was interrupted by the phone. He looked at the screen. It was his mother.

Cleo still looked at him, inquisitive.

“Another time,” he said and answered the phone. His arm tremored.

“Hi, hon,” his mother said. “How’re you? How’s our girl?”

“Good, I think. Hold on. 

She looked up from her superheroes.

“It’s Mémé. I’m going in the bedroom. Call me know if you need me.”

Cleo nodded. “Okay, Daddy.”

Tim left the bedroom door open. When Cleo played, she was lost in her imaginary world and it was sometimes difficult to get her out. He’d been the same way when he was little. Truth was, he sometimes still was when he was creating or working. He still wanted to hear her, though, if she needed him.

“She seems all right,” he said. “She’s playing right now.”

“Oh good,” his mom said. “Your father and I have been so worried about her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s been good so far. No nightmares. No bedwetting. As a matter of fact, she said I was patronizing her before. Can you believe that?”

“Patronizing? At four? Wow. She’s a smart one. Takes after her Daddy and her Mémé.”

“Yeah….”

Here we go, he thought. Everything good that happened with Cleo had to always go back to his mother.

But Mom surprised him. “So…how was the funeral?”

An image of Jenny’s headstone flashed through his mind:

JENNIFER SOUZA BEAULIEU

Beloved daughter and mother.

March 13th, 1979 – February 3rd, 2019

and Tim shivered.

“You can’t spell funeral without fun, right?” He sighed and sat at the foot of the bed. “It was terrible. Absolutely terrible. Jenny’s mother was a mess. Her father looked like he was carved of stone. He wore sunglasses the whole time so you could never see if he was crying or not.”

“Her mother was always a drama queen,” Mom said. “Either way, no parent should ever lose a child. I feel for her. I wish me and Dad could’ve gone.”

Tim thought he heard a little bit of relief in her voice that betrayed the sentiment. He couldn’t blame her that. The last ten years hadn’t been kind to Diane Beaulieu and she seemed less and less like the woman who raised him. He knew she loved him and he understood that this hit very close to home for her right now.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

He thought about it. It didn’t take long. “Not good.”

That was the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Could he go lower, though? Did he want to?

“Things didn’t go the way Jenny or I wanted with our relationship,” he said, and found his mouth had made up his mind for him. “When I married her, I thought it was going to be forever, that we’d prove everyone wrong.

 I know she thought that, too….”

He thought he sounded like someone from a goddamn soap opera and started over.

“We fought like crazy before Cleo was born. It got a little better for a while after she came but the fighting started up again and got even worse. I don’t think either of us really wanted to separate or divorce but it was the right thing to do. For Cleo as well as for us.

“But I didn’t hate her. Sometimes…. She pushed my buttons and I couldn’t stand her. But I still loved her. Not like I had, but…it’s complicated.”

“I understand,” Mom said. “Youse guys were never right for each other. Youse were too different.”

“I guess so. We thought it’d work out, though, especially after Cleo was born, but we were lying to ourselves. Jenny was always good at that.

“I guess I’m pretty good at that, too.”

His mother didn’t say anything. Too often lately when they spoke, he wanted to throw the phone against a wall afterward or punch the wall like he used to when he was a kid. He remembered putting a hole in one of his bedroom walls during a temper flare-up when he was twelve or thirteen. Dad had patched it up easily enough but there it’d been. At the time he thought it was cool that he could be that strong. Now, at forty-one, it made him cringe.

“Seeing her in the coffin—I don’t know why Sandra and Geoff had an open casket. They knew that Jenny wanted either a closed casket or to be cremated when she died. Seeing her in that coffin brought everything back.

“It was terrible.”

e hated the trembling in his voice and the heart palpitations. He hated the tears in his eyes again and the anger that bubbled below the surface, the ever-present anger that wanted something to lash out but had nothing. Who was there to lash out at? Jenny, for not being more careful when she drove? The curvy road that had become icy?

He’d asked her to come get Cleo. Had he brought her home….

“I know, honey,” Mom said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

At that moment there was a crash from the living room.

“What the hell?” he muttered. “I have to go. Cleo got into something.”

He heard his mother say, “Okay, bye,” just before hanging up. He was in the living room in a moment.

3

Cleo played with her DC Superhero Girls in the living room while Daddy was in the bedroom talking to Mémé. She drank her milk and sighed. She thought of Mommy, lying in the casket. That was a new word for her. Everyone had talked about caskets right after Mommy died, and for a little while Cleo thought they were talking about something to hold capes. She didn’t understand why they would need something to hold capes for Mommy since 1) Mommy didn’t have capes (that Cleo knew of, anyway) and 2) Mommy was dead now.

Dead meant forever. She’d been told that after her goldfish, Goldfish, died, not long after Daddy moved out. Dead meant forever. But a goldfish wasn’t the same as a person, Cleo knew, and the idea of not seeing Mommy ever again almost made her want to cry. But she didn’t. Not because she was a big girl because Daddy, Grandma, Grandpa, and everybody told her it was okay to cry—heck, they were all crying!—but because she didn’t have to right now.

Mr. Brambles asked her what she wanted to do. Cleo thought about it for a few minutes. One of the things she liked to do when she came to Daddy’s apartment was to watch the Muppets. Daddy had some DVDs or Blu-rays of them that she enjoyed watching, especially the one where they go to Manhattan, or New York City, as Daddy explained it to her.

Cleo told Mr. Brambles. He thought that sounded like an excellent idea, he liked the Muppets, too.

On either side of the TV were shelves with movies. She wasn’t allowed to watch a lot of the movies. She thought about Mommy again. There were a lot of movies Mommy didn’t want Daddy showing her and while he agreed with a lot of them, there were some he didn’t agree with. Still, Daddy didn’t show them to her. She wondered if he would now?

Cleo couldn’t read yet but she was beginning to learn. She knew the sounds of most of the letters and had begun sounding words out, which made Mommy and Daddy very proud. The sides of the DVDs and Blu-rays were mysterious. Some of the titles she could tell, like Star Wars, because their letters were

 recognizable to her. On a higher shelf, near the Star Wars movies, were the Muppets movies. She’d watched them so often that she recognized the look of the packaging.

“Can you get them for me, please?” Cleo asked Mr. Brambles. He’d be able to reach them.

He said he shouldn’t. Daddy didn’t like his stuff touched and if Mr. Brambles took the movies down for her, Daddy might get mad and say he could never come and play with her anymore. She didn’t want that, did she?

“No,” she said.

Cleo started toward the bedroom to ask Daddy but Mr. Brambles stopped her. He said that grown-ups didn’t like when children interrupted them while they were on the phone. He might be talking to Mémé about something he didn’t want Cleo to hear.

“Guess I’ll have to wait,” she said.

Mr. Brambles guessed so, too. But then he smiled. He had an idea. He suggested that Cleo climb the shelves to get the movies.

“I don’t know,” Cleo said. “I think it’s dangerous.”

Mr. Brambles reminded her that she was a great climber, the best at pre-school. Both Mommy and Daddy said she was like a monkey when they took her to the park and she climbed the climbing wall.

It was true. Cleo loved to climb at the park.

Mr. Brambles told her he just knew she 

could do it.

With her friend’s faith in her, Cleo turned toward the shelves and looked up to where the Muppets lived. She took a deep breath and began climbing. One shelf up, and then two. She grabbed the shelf where the Muppets lived with Star Wars and other movies, excited that she was so close, when a plastic piece shot out from beneath the front left corner of the shelf, bounced off Cleo’s forehead, and the shelf began sinking and sliding at the same time.

Oh no! Cleo thought just as the videos began sliding off the shelf in the split instant before the shelf itself came out and she toppled backward.

4

DVDs, Blu-ray discs, and a few assorted knick-knacks lay in a pile in front of the TV. The shelf rested beside Cleo, who lay on her back. She looked at Tim with her saucer-round brown eyes.

“I’m sorry!” she blurted. “I wanted to watch the Muppets.”

The Muppets?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

She stood much faster than he’d be able to if he took a fall. “Yes, Daddy.” Tears weren’t far behind.

He looked at the mess on the floor. How—?

“Cleo,” he said. “Did you climb the bookcase to get the movie?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, Daddy.”

“I wanted the Muppets.”

This somehow made him angrier.

“Look at this. The bookcase could’ve fallen on you. It could’ve—”

Killed you. The two words instantly diffused his anger.

Tears shimmered in Cleo’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Please don’t be mad.”

Tim knelt, took his little girl into his arms, and hugged her. Her small, warm frame and little arms that wrapped around his neck and squeezed were the best feeling in the world. “You scared me, Babes. You can’t do that.”

“I’m sorry,” Cleo said again. “Mr. Brambles said he liked the Muppets, too, and said that climbing the bookcase would be safe.”

Tim pulled back a little. “Mr. Brambles said?”

“Yes. He said.”

Again, the hairs on the back of his neck quivered. Again, he chalked it up to stress.

1

Cleo began nodding off around 6:30 that night so that’s when Tim began the bedtime ritual. Once her face was washed, her teeth brushed, and her story read (she’d been in her pajamas since after dinner), he sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her forehead. Cleo smiled a sweet smile that melted his heart. If he and Jenny had done nothing else right, bringing Cleo into this world was enough. As fucked-up as this world was, the amazing little girl lying here fixed it for him with only her smile.

“Daddy? Is Mommy in Heaven?”

Tim continued smiling but had been afraid of this question. One of his and Jenny’s (many) differences was religion. She was raised Catholic and while didn’t practice, she’d still held many of the lessons her parochial schooling had ingrained in her, including a belief in God. He wasn’t sure what her most recent beliefs in heaven and hell had been—they weren’t very strong when they’d been together—but God was definitely an entity to Jenny. Not so for him. He’d had some Catholic training in his early childhood but by eight or nine questioned everything. In high school, he learned what it meant to be agnostic and thought that fit him for a while. By the time he was nineteen, though, he considered himself atheist. Still did.

“What did Mommy tell you about it?” he asked.

“She told me that some people believe in Heaven and some people don’t. I know when Keith’s rabbit died, he said it went to Heaven.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t think people go to heaven.”

“You think they just stop?”

“Well…yes and no.”

“The priest said Mommy was going to Heaven,” Cleo said in a matter-of-fact way. “I think Grandma and Grandpa think that, too.”

“That helps them.”

“So will it help me?”

“I don’t know,” Tim said. “Maybe.”

“Why don’t you think that she went to heaven?”

“Lots of reasons, I guess. And maybe I’m wrong.”

“I don’t want Mommy to just stop.”

“Let me ask you something,” Tim said. “What did Mommy look like?”

“Well…” Cleo said. “She had brown hair and brown eyes, like me and you. And she smiled a lot, except when she was sad or mad. And she always put her hair in a ponytail.”

“And what did Mommy like to do?”

“Do you remember what she sounded like? Do you remember her laugh?”

“Yes! And sometimes she’d fart when she laughed too hard!”

They both laughed at that.

“So see?” Tim said. “She’s alive. Up here.” He placed his index and middle fingers in the center of Cleo’s head. “And up here.” He did the same to himself. “And, most importantly, she’s alive here.” He held his hand over Cleo’s heart. “As long as we remember her, she’s alive. We have pictures and videos of her, too, but mostly, she’s in our heads and in our hearts.”

“So, that’s like Heaven?”

“Yes. Her heaven’s in our hearts. Which is the best place for her to be because we can always see her that way. She’s always with us.”

Cleo smiled. “I like that.”

Tim smiled. When she was older, she could make her own choices. For now, he wasn’t going to lie about his position. He’d tell her what others believed when he could but he couldn’t lie about what he thought. And it dawned on him, again, that Jenny was dead. Gone a month before her fortieth birthday. He didn’t have to check with her on anything anymore. He found it almost more terrifying than liberating.

A rock lodged in his chest.

“All right, Babes,” he said. “Time for sleep.”

He leaned down and kissed her. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Daddy.”

He stood, turned off the small bedside lamp. An Elena of Avalor nightlight was plugged into the far wall.

“All right,” he said. “Time for the closet inspection.”

“You don’t have to check for monsters tonight, Daddy.”

He stopped and looked at her, a smile growing. This had become part of the routine about three, four months ago. “Really?”

“Really,” Cleo said. “It wasn’t a bad monster in the closet, Daddy. It was just Mr. Brambles, who’s a good monster.”

2

Tim sat at his computer, listening to Cleo’s small voice whisper to her imaginary monster friend. Kids had invisible friends, even in 2019, but he found himself on Google looking into it anyway. Cleo was an imaginative little girl and the idea of her having a friend only she could see didn’t trouble him. He’d certainly played alone a lot as a kid, sometimes actually preferred it to playing with others. The people who populated whatever stories he played always did exactly as he wanted, never arguing or breaking character. Other kids did argue and break character, though. Still, he didn’t recall having one imaginary friend with whom he spoke or shared secrets.

There was no correspondence to trauma and invisible friends according to the study she cited. So that was good. Maybe it was just a strange coincidence.

But why are you so bothered by it? he thought.

Because her friend told you not to “patronize” her.

Cleo was intelligent. She could already read easy sentences and had known her alphabet by the time she was three. Her math skills were already remarkable, as was her imagination and sense of humor. He and Jenny—before and after the divorce—marveled at Cleo and how ahead-of-her-age she so often seemed. The word patronize should’ve been beyond her, though. Many of the teenagers he taught couldn’t accurately use (or understand) that word.

Maybe Jenny said it around her?

Maybe, but it wasn’t a word Jenny would use much. It just wasn’t her style. She’d know the word but Tim couldn’t remember ever having heard her say it. A four-year-old uses a big word because it’s said in front of them a lot, not just occasionally, and unless Jenny had suddenly begun using the word more in the last eighteen months than she had in the eight years they’d been together, Cleo learning it from her was unlikely. Learning it at her day care/preschool was even less likely.

Maybe you said it around her lately.

That was possible, he supposed, but patronize wasn’t a word he used much. There weren’t a lot of people around him patronizing him. Maybe as a kid but not now. Even if he had used it in front of her once or twice, what were the chances of Cleo not just picking up the word and remembering it but also knowing exactly how to use it?

Tim sighed, rubbed his face, and then yawned. Tired. Beyond tired. It’d been a long week and the coming weeks were only going to get worse as the bullshit with Jenny’s parents’ lawyer would drag things out. Tim had a claim to almost everything in Jenny’s apartment because it had been their apartment and he’d pretty much left everything when they’d separated. He brought with him a bookcase, his computer, and a small TV that his parents had given them as a gift for the bedroom. Unless it was stuff that was his and his alone—books, collectibles, a few collectible drinking glasses and mugs that he’d acquired, and his clothes—everything else had stayed behind, including a bureau his father had built for Tim when he was born. He feared that, with the exception of Cleo’s bedroom, everything else would be off-limits for him. A tremor shook his arm. He also knew that Sandra and Geoff would want some sort of visitation with Cleo, which was fine as long as they didn’t speak ill of him. Though they weren’t fond of him and he wasn’t fond of them, she was their grandchild.

Another yawn and he decided it was time for bed. He stood, turned off the light in the living room, and put the computer to sleep. After using the bathroom and brushing his teeth, he stood against the doorjamb and watched Cleo sleep.

Her cheeks looked baby-chubby against her pillow and she was curled up, facing him. One of the things he missed most after the separation

 and divorce was putting her to bed every night; every other weekend hadn’t been enough. Now that he had her every night, he felt a little guilty for being happy. The situation was horrible, and he would happily give this up to have Jenny alive again, but she wasn’t alive and he had his Babes back every night.

Tim pushed himself off the doorjamb and began to head to his bedroom when he heard a noise from Cleo’s closet. He looked and waited. He didn’t want some misplaced shoe or toy waking Cleo up. She needed her sleep.

Once he felt sure no more noise would come from the closet, he went to his bedroom. It didn’t take long for sleep to come.

3

Timmy stood near the edge of the woods in Brookfield Park. He knew he shouldn’t be there, that he should be in his backyard on Gifford Street. Mommy and Daddy would be very mad with him if they caught him. Mommy told him about the little boy named Adam who’d been stolen from a store in a mall and that only his head had been found.

“If you run off and don’t stay with me or Daddy, the same thing could happen to you,” she’d said.

But he’d had to leave the library, because—

Are you coming? a voice asked. It was a deep, guttural voice. Familiar, but unfamiliar.

Tim looked back, past the softball and baseball diamonds in the direction of the library, the duck pond, and the abandoned crimson building (I was there first, he thought) and Cushner Avenue beyond all those landmarks 

of his childhood. Tim was an adult again and barely noticed the transition. If he went back to the library, everything would be fine. If he went back, maybe Mom wouldn’t notice.

You said you were a Big Boy, the voice said. You look like a Big Boy.

Timmy turned back and was a child again. Six years old, maybe. Possibly seven. He was dressed in a black suit, a miniature version of the suit he wore to the funeral today…only today he’d been forty-one and now first grade was around the corner and he would have Mrs. Hamel, whose name was a lot like Mark Hamill, the man who played Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, and that was neat. Yet, Tim knew he wasn’t six-or-seven. Still, the small legs in the black dress shoes that he wouldn’t have owned in 1983 stepped into the overgrown grass and ferns. Daddy sometimes walked with him through the thinner woods on the south side of a closed road that intersected the park. Timmy would run ahead and pretend he was fighting Imperial Stormtroopers and Biker Scouts, but Daddy never wanted to go into these woods, those to the right of the road, on the north side.

“Too many punks go into the thicker woods,” Daddy would say. “You’ll get hurt in there.”

Yet, that’s where the voice came from, where it wanted Timmy to go.

Are you coming or are you a sissy?

Timmy swallowed hard and moved toward the voice. Tim went along, a passenger as much as the person in charge. Sun rained through the overhead leaves in smatterings that diminished the farther he went into the thick

 shrubbery and bushes. Blackberry bushes or the like became visible, like the one in his backyard on Gifford Street. Of course the voice came from there.

Come around, the voice said. I have something for you.

Tim didn’t want to see. Timmy’s feet now wore white sneakers with two red stripes going down the side, his little legs wore bluejeans, and he sported a yellowy-orange Return of the Jedi tee shirt that had Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and the silhouette of the Emperor looming over them. He knew he should go home. He wasn’t even allowed outside of his backyard without permission never mind all the way to the park!

Timmy went around the shrub and Tim gasped. Lying in a pool of blood on the grass was Jenny, her white coat now wet crimson. The right side of her face looked up at the canopy of the woods with a spot of crimson on her cheek.

A “thank you” would be nice—

4

Tim jolted awake. His sheets were wrapped around his leg and he shivered. It was 11:30. He’d been in bed an hour and a half. He tried his best to hold onto the nightmare, felt like it was important, but it faded fast. He thought it took place at Brookfield Park, near his parents’ place in Harden’s north end, and he thought Jenny was in it, but more than that was beyond him. Sometimes he recalled his dreams beautifully, sometimes not. Too often as he grew older, he found he didn’t remember as much of his dreams.

He stayed in bed, waiting for the exhaustion of the day to return and bring him back to sleep, but his eyes wouldn’t close again except to 

blink. He felt the complete and exact opposite that he had when he’d gone to bed. Whatever exhaustion there’d been was gone now, scared away by a dream he couldn’t recall.

Finally, frustrated, Tim got out of bed. He checked on Cleo, who slept soundly, her back to him. He went into the living room and turned TV on, putting the volume way down. Growing up, when he’d first begun to show signs of insomnia around eight or nine, there’d be a bunch of great low-budget exploitation movies on HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. Nowadays, it seemed like the same ol’ shit played on all those channels all the time, which was just one reason he was considering ending cable and going through apps. The closest he came to feeling the need for silly, over-the-top schlock was Encore Action showing The Towering Inferno. Since he’d never seen it, he watched. It wasn’t bad enough to fill his need for late-night garbage but it would have to do.

When he finally returned to sleep around three, there were no dreams. ...