That whole day, the trio got drunk on stolen whiskey in the computer room. They’d splinted Ron’s pinky tight in some chopsticks and athletic tape, the big guy saying he was content with just that. He said even if they could find an available doctor at the hospital, they’d treat it the exact same way. That didn’t sound right to Dor, but as long as Uncle Ron was happy and didn’t mind his pinky healing crooked, Dor wouldn’t question him.

For their drunken escape, the trio laughed, cried, and bullshitted. Emotions turned up the more drinks they put down. Dor told every detail of his story, from nearly choking to death on his own puke to the monster shattering his window. At that point, he knew secrets would only lead to disaster, disaster far worse than a busted pinky. While they shot the shit, Dor sat like a wall separating the monster from his family.

True to form, when Dor began to wobble, her tail wrapped around him, supporting his body upright. Dad and Uncle Ron nearly jumped into attack mode seeing that, but Dor waved them off.

“She’s a docile creature, very docile,” he reassured.

When Dad and Uncle Ron weren’t looking, he turned around and whispered to her. “You ain’t going to attack me tonight…nod your head, dammit.”

She nodded; he relaxed, and before too much longer, Dad and Uncle Ron relaxed, too. In fact, those two relaxed so much, they slumped into a heap on the floor, passed out drunk. Apparently, they neglected to exercise their livers as often as Dor did.

The tail loosened from Dor’s waist, not that he hardly noticed in his own slurried state, and the monster disappeared for a minute or two. She came back with a pillow in each hand, likely Donnie’s and Jimmy’s. Using her tail, she lifted both Dad’s and Ron’s head and tucked a pillow underneath, then returned to her chair next to Dor.

“You’re a good monster,” he told her.

“People…,” she said. “I’m people.”

“Take off your mitts.”

She wavered. “It’s not a test,” he said. “Take off your mitts and hold out your hand.”

A slender white hand poked through a slot in her comforter. Her fingernails gleaned under the flashes of the monitors and tinted a dull red from Jimmy’s mood lighting.

“Hold them steady,” Dor instructed. “I’ll trust you for this. Don’t let me down.”

She held her hands steady and he grazed the tip of his finger across her pinky. Her cold skin brushed against his own until his finger traced to the end, then a wet trickle ran down his palm. The sharpness of her nail even surprised him. As quickly as his finger grazed it, it sunk in like a hot knife through butter, a cut so sharp he hardly even felt it. In exactly the same way as the Glock he kept in his jacket pocket, her fingernails had only one purpose.

Dor held up his hand as a thin trail of blood dripped onto the floor. Her black eyes studied it with fascination. What else were you expecting? Maybe she really was expecting a different outcome?

“Your turn,” he said. “Hold your palm flat.”

She did, and he poked his own fingernail into it barely leaving an indentation and certainly no blood trail. The monster’s skin was much too tough for that.

“It only works one way,” he told her. “How haven’t you realized that?”

She poked her head out of the comforter and forced a smile. She did realize that. She simply didn’t want to face it. Dor could see that now; he could also see the state she was in. Her jet black hair stuck out in all directions, an impressive feat given how long it was. Didn’t you just take a shower yesterday? But the part that really got him was her face. She really was starving. Her cheeks sunk in. Her skin stretched so tight and without a shred of fat for cushion, he might as well have been looking at her skull. Even her eyes appeared dead, the glean lost in them.

“What do you eat?” He asked.

“Tomatoes,” she simply replied. “Oh, and I like the corn from Jasper’s garden. He had that trick thumb, you know, always pretended to bite it off on accident. He’s a silly, silly man. And I like Canasta. You don’t eat it, but you play it. Thomas used to come over and we’d try to get through a game, but he was so frisky, mind you, that well—”

“Yes, yes, you already told me about Thomas,” Dor said. “But tomatoes? You really eat tomatoes?”

“Garden tomatoes. Not the tomatoes from Don’s. He doesn’t switch out his stock like he should, so they are always a bit stale. One time, I bit into a brown spot, and after that, I swore off Don’s tomatoes. Nuh-uh, never again. He won’t get my business back.”

The more she talked, the more Dor assumed her home was similar to his. That maybe her upbringing wasn’t so different that they’d never be able to relate to one another. After all, cross-stitch and garden tomatoes…I got along with Granny Ann just fine.

“Where was this town?” He asked.

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“Where?” She thought for awhile. “Well, I don’t know. You see, we had big white walls and a bright ceiling. That was the whole world. But then…but then…”

Once again, she trailed off, shaking her head in an incoherent rant.

“Tell me about it,” Dor said.

“…but then…but then the world changed color. It dyed a marvelous shade of red with yellow stars hanging in the air, just like this.” She waved her hand in front of her face. “You see the stars swirling around? You see them right? Scrub-bucket couldn’t, but you can, right?”

Dor hadn’t the heart to tell her nothing was there. He nodded and her face lit up.

“Oh good!” She cried. “Good, good! You see? I wasn’t alone. It’s a brilliant color, don’t you think? Look. I can write my name.”

She traced her finger in the air, rearranging some intangible delusion. He watched her for a while, then a thought struck him. “What is your name?” He asked.

She pointed. “It’s right there, silly.”

“It’s backwards, so I can’t read it,” he lied.

Her finger traced out the letters, ignoring him. E-T-A. Eta.

“Eta?” He asked while a vague memory reminded him he already knew that; the kid told him.

She nodded. “E-T-A. Easy, right?”

Dor smiled and slugged back a nightcap. “Well, Eta, you are a mess. How long has it been since you brushed your teeth?”

She held up a finger and opened her mouth, but fell silent. “And your hair,” he said. “It’s worse than mine.”

He knew he’d been neglecting his own pride, his mullet shamed mullets everywhere. Joe Dirt, not Pat Swayze. So, he decided to make a deal with her. “You comb your hair, brush your teeth, and I’ll do the same. Quite frankly, your breath stinks.”

Eta giggled. “It is quite awful.”

He showed her to the bathroom upstairs and very carefully, put a toothbrush in her hand, one of the spares from under the sink. Snap! The moment her fingers pinched it, it snapped clean in two. Dor tried again. Snap! The next one broke in half. He was half tempted just to brush her teeth for her, but then an idea struck him. He rummaged around his room and the utility closet, rounding up an empty whiskey bottle and a roll of duct tape.

Her tail is gentle. Her hands are rough.

He duct-taped the bottle to the handle of the last spare toothbrush, a perfectly sized handle for a snake to wrap around. Or a hungry centipede. That worked much better, and fortunately, empty bottles of booze were in no short supply in his household. Not stopping with just the toothbrush, he taped a bottle to one of Lulu’s hairbrushes, a bottle of shampoo, and even the toothpaste tube. In the end, his monster had a full lineup of bottle-handled necessities stacked along the counter.

“You know what these all do, right?” he asked.

She nodded. “Oh yes. I’m only missing a set of tizzers, and perhaps a nail file.”

“We’d need a grinder to file those nails.” Then he waved her off. “Take care of yourself.”

Her tail went to work brushing and scrubbing all the frazzle away. All that was left was to get her some food. Dor trudged into his bedroom for the first time since the monster arrived, and plopped down on his bed. Before he eased into oblivion, he didn’t forget to holler at her.

“Don’t you fucking attack me tonight!” He shouted.

Her head peeked in the door and nodded.

Satisfied, he began to shut down his sloshed mind. Another day down, one day at a time. An old army trick of Ron’s often helped him drift off to sleep. First, he relaxed his shoulders, then his head, and finally he allowed all his worries to float in and out of his head unhindered.

It worked. Dor fell asleep easily tonight, reassured by the thought of his family downstairs.

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In the middle of the night, beating drums startled him awake. Jungle music. Bongos. An intense steady rhythm played. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba,dum. As he listened, they sped up. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum. Quicker and quicker, they matched his heart-rate. His head pulsed so loud, he could hear it. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

Then he understood. There were no drums. His adrenaline was spiked. His heart beat so loud it reverberated in his mind like bongo music. A lucid sleep terror awoke him.

No visions of Peter Rabbit demons floated above him, nor did a tail wrap around him. Only the night engulfed him, completely pitch black. With his door open, the red night-light in the bathroom should have shone in. It didn’t. It was shut off. The hall loomed as black as his room.

He tried to move, but he’d woken up too suddenly. His body laid paralyzed while his mind consciously reeled. Something was wrong, he just knew it. Dor tried to open his jaw, to yell for help, but even his voice sealed shut. Something was really wrong and he was paralyzed in the pitch blackness.

Above him, the ceiling creaked. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it. The ceiling distorted itself, the sound creaking closer and closer to his frozen body. Don’t notice me. I’m not here. Don’t notice me. It did. He just knew it. The ceiling was watching him. He felt eyes bore through him. Until then, his monster’s eyes were the epitome of darkness, but he learned how wrong he was. The ceiling was the true epitome.

Snap! Like an elastic band, it snapped back into place, the red glow of the bathroom light reflected into his room once again, and the darkness lifted. Now, only the normal spackling hung above him lit by the subtle red glow reflecting in from the hallway, but he knew that experience wasn’t a dream. He’d heard the creaks and felt its stare. The bongos that strummed in time to his heartbeat faded, and his adrenaline spiked heartbeat eased to a slower rhythm.

He wrestled and writhed against the constraints of his sleep paralysis, struggling to free himself from the captive state his body put him under. A finger twitched, a leg squirmed, his head whipped back and forth, and Dor regained control.

Without a second thought, he leaped out bed and ran down the hall. Whatever just happened, he only knew he needed to escape. He really, really needed his dad. Skipping entire steps at a time, Dor fumbled down the stairs and flew through the kitchen. In the dining room converted office space, Dad and Uncle Ron were still stretched out, sleeping on the floor snugged into their pillows.

Dor lit a menthol light, and instinctually reached for his Glock. The pistol wasn’t there. He’d left it in his room, but there wasn’t a chance in Hell he’d go back to retrieve it.

‘Sorry, Mr. Body I can’t keep our agreement tonight.’

‘Take it easy on the booze and I’ll let you off with two hours of sleep,’ his body replied. ‘That was some scary shit.’

Dor took a measured sip from the handle they’d been drinking earlier. Wide awake now, he surely wasn’t going to get the full four hours tonight. Fortunately, his body felt cordial enough to let him off with a warning.

He stood guard over his old man and Uncle Ron all night. A stray dog scratched at the door. Another one came soon after and scratched at the garage. Dor tightened his grip on the bottle and prayed for sun-up.

After tonight, one conclusion was perfectly clear. He hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of his bizarre new life.