The smell of death clogs the back of your throat. It sucks the contents of your stomach up into your burning throat, and you spend most of your energy forcing the bile back down. The sky rains fire. Smoke twines through your legs like chains, and every sound burns through your ears and brands your brain. And in the moment when disaster strikes the ground you walk on and screams through the once-quiet streets of your town like a banshee, you cover your ears and wish for it to be over. You do not care how. Death has caught up to you, and you are unable to stop their forward march.

My mom hung dreamcatchers from our porch a few years ago. She bought three, the biggest the size of a car tire, the smallest the size of my hand. The wood and feathers were both plastic, but my mother believed what the man from the flea market had told her. “Handmade by reservation women,” my mom said proudly. “You could donate to get them clean water.”

“They don’t have clean water?” I asked, but she ignored me. 

She claimed the next morning that she had had the best night’s sleep of her life. “I think it was the dreamcatchers. They must have cast a lot of spells on them,” she said.

I didn’t even know how to reply and left early for school. I knew as much about indigenous people as my mother, but I knew they didn’t cast spells. I had become obsessed with black magic and healing crystals, reading every book on Wicca that I could get my hands on. There were not many, but the books made it very clear that Native American religions were not synonymous with Wicca. This was not something I could have explained to my mother or anyone else within a thirty-mile radius.

I lived in a small satellite town outside Lubbock called Lake Hill. Our town had a Main Street, two blinking yellow lights, and numbered residential roads that gave way to unpaved farm roads. You learned to drive at twelve, got a hardship license at fourteen, and took your driver’s test on your sixteenth birthday. Your parents bought you a car, or a rich older cousin gave you theirs. Half the town raised chickens; ninety percent had grandparents who were farmers. Every local business closed by 7 PM. The two fast-food chains along the highway were chronically understaffed and closed before the posted hour. 

In short, Lake Hill was a tiny sleepy town along I-27 that no one visited except to see family. It was not a prime spot for a horde of strangers that crowded into the Boar Bed & Breakfast one sticky June evening. They roared down Main Street on black and silver motorcycles free of license plates and make-and-model branding. They did not sleep. The hotel’s owner, Mary Nadeline, claimed she could hear them all in the same room, laughing and talking and yelling and moaning. When asked why she neglected to call Deputy Horner, her face would slacken, and she would flounder for a response; she never gave the same one twice. 

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The motorcycle gang stayed into July. They bought the old abandoned hair salon on Main Street and turned it into a loft atop a tattoo parlor, something no one in town liked, but no one dared complain. An old woman had suggested running them out with hunting rifles, and the next day, she had awoken mute. Her tongue had been severed, but she did not remember who had cut it off. The doctor said it looked like she had been born that way, but just yesterday, she had been talking. 

Halfway through July, a family with three kids moved in across the street from me. No one knew where they had come from, and no one could ask since they stayed completely shut in with their blinds drawn and the door locked. No one locked their doors in Lake Hill. Lorrie from two doors down left them a casserole. The dish was still sitting on their porch the next morning, the foil cover glittering with dew.

A week after the family moved in, I saw the oldest kid, a girl around my age, lifting a bar packed with fifty pound weights on either side in her open garage. I took a walk around the block, and when I made it to her house, she was still there. “Hey,” I said, wondering what it could hurt.

She put the bar down and turned to face me, her expression neutral. Or, I thought she was trying to look neutral, but she had a serious case of resting bitch face. “Hello,” she said.

“Uh, nice setup you got here,” I said, indicating the home gym. A rack of weights was pushed up against the far wall. There was a stationary bike, dumbbells, climbing rope, gymnastic rings, and two concentric circles drawn in white chalk on the floor. What the fuck was up with this family? 

The girl glanced over her shoulder. “Thank you,” she said. She glanced at me, back at the equipment, then at me again and crossed her arms over her chest. “Is working out something you like to do?”

Her muscles shimmered with sweat, and I had to force myself not to stare. Even if I did like working out, I would never get anything done with a distraction like that. “No. Uh, no, definitely not,” I told her. 

She looked me up and down, and I tried not to squirm. “Okay,” she said. She started to switch her attention back to her lifting when she suddenly spun back on her heel. “Your name. What is it? Um… sorry, I mean, what is your name?”

Okay, so she was super weird. Super muscular and hot with black curls that spun just past her chin but weird.

“Um, Marisol,” I said. “What’s yours, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The girl shrugged. “What the hell. The name’s Nyx.”

“Okay, cool.” Why the hell did she say it like that? Again, kinda hot but indisputably weird. “Nice to meet you, Nyx.”

“Likewise.”

I had never heard anyone use that word outside of the scripted conversation our Spanish teacher had us memorize. “Cool. See ya round then,” I said.

She nodded once then picked up the weight again. She moved onto weighted squats, and I caught a glimpse of her ass. I hurried away before she could see the blush blossoming across my cheeks.