neck , his tiny body . His grandfather was wet and sour . He was the grime between folds of flesh , the coating of paste on a probing tongue , the dirty nails and sweaty palms of clutching , gripping , trembling hands that wanted and needed and took and took and took .
In the toilet , two black ended cigarette butts bobbed under the boy ’ s piss . The paper was peeling from the filters . He didn ’ t flush , but he washed his hands . There was no towel . The boy stared hard at himself , glaring in the mirror . His face and body were changing in time with the shifts in his mind . He was leaner , darker . A year ago he ’ d been soft and pale , like a maggot in damp bread . Now his limbs unfolded like a spider ’ s legs . He was still a child , but he was changing . His skin was oilier . His hair hung in black strands over his eyes . There was a hunger behind his face that only he could see . The translucent larva was dead . With the awakening , the boy had evolved . He kept staring at his reflection , trying to figure out what had emerged .
Staring at himself , he pondered his grandfather ’ s games . He knew they were secret , and he knew they were part of the old man ’ s hunger . His grandfather had an emptiness inside him that he filled with whiskey and cigarettes and the strange , uncomfortable games the boy was made to play at night . The boy had never questioned the games before . They were a part of his life for as long as he could remember , no stranger to him than the convoluted social rituals he had to play along with at school . He ’ d started questioning everything , though . The boy hated these questions , feared the looming answers , and he pushed them down as much as he could . He turned away from himself and went back to his room .
For years , the boy had kept collections . It was his only way to simulate stability in a life where change and confusion were the only constants . Before the awakening , he ’ d been pulled by the bright colors and loud noises to toys and candy and the chaos of commercial childhood .
But his interest in these things fell away as his games were sterilized and changed . The toys he collected now were very different .
He ’ d found a rat one day and carried it around with him , stroking the dry fur and picking tiny black insects from its rashy , cold skin . Later , as he held it up to a cold sun by the tail , he felt a slip beneath the skin . The bones snuck out of his grasp . When the rat landed , the boy was holding a thin cord of limp , empty skin . Not knowing why , he felt that this tube of skin was important , even sacred . He brought it home and hid it in his dresser where it hardened and dried . It was shortly after this that he bought his first red light bulb .
In the lazy red light of his room , it was never light and never dark , because both were frightening for different reasons . He didn ’ t have to see anything clearly unless he looked hard at it , but nothing was hidden either . On his flimsy desk were the familiar shapes of his collections . Glass jars , once filled with pickles and jam , now held murky shapes suspended in rubbing alcohol . In one , there were dozens of insects : spiders , beetles , centipedes that he had scoured rocks and logs and closets to find . In another was a baby bird that had fallen or been thrown from a nest : a bulbous head with black eyes and a feeble yellow beak hanging limp on a skinny , shattered neck . There was a dog skull taken from a vacant lot , a crow skull from the shrubs behind the Shriner ’ s building . There was a dried , dead lizard he ’ d taken forcefully from a child in his class two towns back . There were teeth , some human , some not , scattered like dropped candies . There was a sharp , rusty slab of metal with a masking tape handle : his sacrificial dagger . Under and over all of these treasures were layered sheets of paper : drawings and scribbles and words illegible to all who saw them other than him . These were the thoughts he could not speak , but couldn ’ t bear to hold in his head . He drew out all the hideous night-