The Miller family had lived on Clark road for as long as anybody could remember. They had taken their 2 sons and 1 daughter to school every morning. The father had gone to work and watched football with his friends, the mother had embroidered and cooked and hosted dinner parties, and the kids had grown up.

Each year, they took first day of school photos on the porch, and they would get yearbooks at the end of the year with their pictures stamped on each page, the most popular kids at their small school.

Lily, the daughter, liked playing with dolls. She and her closest friend, Sarah, liked to put makeup on each other, and would giggle in their high pitched voices. They would sing their stuffed animals to sleep, dress each other up in frilly pink, and imagine being older. They would pick out their earrings together, they would obsess over boys, they were inseparable. But Lily never seemed to grow with Sarah. No matter how many first days or last days or days in between, Lily was always stagnant. Stuck in her year, in her life. No matter how many times Sarah graduated, went off to college, all the letters she wrote from her dorm, all the pictures taken and sent, all the emails and late night phone calls, Lily never left.

Tyler, the older son, was the star of the football team. He had short hair, big muscles, and never went anywhere without his entourage of girls. He had a friend - sidekick, more like - named Davis, and a beautiful girlfriend. Her name didn't matter, but she was hot and the cheer captain. He would spend his lunches with Davis, checking the girls out and catcalling them. He drank milkshakes after games with his teammates, and went out partying every Friday night. Davis aged, his unnamed girlfriend moved on, but he went on winning games and partying, harassing girls and being a general douche.

William was the younger son. He was what you may call a nerd, though he was a relatively popular one due to his brother's popularity. He was captain of the chess club, on the baseball team, wore glasses and braces and had a few good friends. He preferred to be alone, and spent a lot of time on the computer. He was obsessed with Star Wars and Star Trek and Marvel and DC and everything in between. His computer skills never advanced. He added to his tally of the chess games he won each night before bed, but the number never increased.

The mother's name was Jane. She had blonde hair, a stunning smile, and was dangerously thin. She wore an apron all the time, always had a dusting of flour on her face. No matter what time of day you called her, she'd always be pulling a fresh batch of cookies out of the oven, unless she was out getting her hair or nails done with her friends. Every Friday night she made nachos and bought beer for her husband and his football friends, every Saturday afternoon she hosted book club, and each Saturday night she brought candy and soda to Lily and Sarah as they watched musicals until late at night. Every Sunday morning she dressed up her kids for church, and the next morning she woke them up for school. She was happy, or at least she said she was. She ignored her graying hair, instead covering it up with dye. Then she ignored the empty boxes of dye in the trash cans. But no matter how much dye she used, her hair never seemed to get grayer than it was. It always stopped, never emerged again. The members of her book club came and went, her husband's friends and football games and beers, but she stayed there, puttering around, offering to help whoever needed it.

That just leaves the father. His name was Hudson. He liked football, beer, and hot women. He was temperamental, and overtly homophobic, transphobic, racist, antisemetic, sexist, and all the bad things you could think of. He hit on his wife's cousins at Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and all the holidays, and he pretended to be religious. He cheated on his wife, but she never left. He yelled and hit and grew a paunch, but the needle on the scale never tipped.

The mother never went out anymore. She went out every day. She drank more. She didn't drink.

The father drank more. He stopped before it could hurt him. He rarely changed out of his undershirt. He quit his job. He went to his job every day with a briefcase and a freshly ironed button up.

The daughter played with dolls. She was too old for dolls. She wore pink and cried on the phone but her mascara never ran and she always looked perfect. Pink looked awful on her.

The older brother lost a game. His winning streak never broke. His friend was a year younger than him. He was left behind when his friend graduated.

The younger brother made the first move in every game of chess. He always played on the black side. He moved on from Star Trek. He watched it every night. He got new glasses, though he never changed them.

The mother never quite fit in. She was the most proactive, on the PTA, always organizing bake sales and going with her daughter to sell girl scout cookies. But she knew something wasn't right.

The father knew something was up, but was happy with ignoring it and drinking himself into a blissful oblivion.

The daughter didn't notice anything, not even when her best friend's name changed every 18 years or so.

The older brother was too focused on football to pay attention to the passing of time.

The younger brother knew something was wrong. He could feel it, and all the signs pointed to it. But he was too timid to mention it.

The family lived like this, in perfect harmony, small cracks widening in each one of their lives, nothing wrong whatsoever, for an uncountable amount of time full of Sunday roasts and summers at the pool and breakups and relationships and manicures and pedicures and hitting on girls.

Then the witch moved in across the street.

They were different. They never turned their lights on and the house always seemed to emit a low buzzing sound. Their yard was overgrown and they had a red bulb screwed above their porch. At first, nobody talked about them. They were always there, always about town, in the grocery store, at the library, at the gym, the pool, always there. Their door never opened. Nobody ever left the house.

One day, after months - years - weeks of this not acknowledging her, the mother decided to bring it up at book club. She asked if they'd ever even seen the new neighbor talk to anybody, or if they'd ever been to their house. They gave her concerned looks and asked if she was alright, there was no new neighbor. She looked at them with wild eyes and pretended to agree, pretended she'd made something up. But she knew they were real. She knew that they lived right across from her, and that there was something about them. She didn't know their name, or their age, or even how long they'd lived there. She never brought them up again, though.

It took William a little longer to bring them up, but he did. He was in high school, talking with his friends about their neighbors, when he mentioned the "witch", as he had started calling them in his head. They stared at him blankly. He looked around and repeated what he had said about the ivy crawling up their walls, the misty windows and how the lights were always off. That night, he brought it up. He was 8 years old, asking innocently about the witch that lived across the street.

The mom was visibly shaken, but the father just shook his head. He made an off-color remark about how they were probably queer but in a rather offensive way and Lily said she was scared to go near the house. Tyler rolled his eyes and agreed with his father. Then he changed the subject to how a girl had actually turned him down. Him! The father was indignant, but the rest of the family was quiet.

Later that night, the mother went to the younger brother's room. She called his name softly, and he called her in. They talked for an indiscernible amount of time about the house. On the mother's part, it was mostly nervous rambling and spiraling. On the son's part it was a lot of theorizing and worrying, but staying rational. This lasted until the father came in and brought the wife to bed. Neither the wife nor the son slept well that night.

Years later, Lily was in the front yard playing with her best friend Millie. They had always known each other. It was the summer before first grade, and they were scaring each other with ghost stories when the witch stepped out of their house. They were holding a large pair of yard clippers, and started seemingly aimlessly clipping small twigs off of different bushes. Lily scared Millie with it, and they went their separate ways for the day.

Lily would have forgotten about it, if not for the note she found on her desk a week later, on the very first day of school. It was a piece of rather fancy card stock, with pressed flowers and leaves glued around the edges. She recognized a few of the plants from the bundle the witch had gone inside with the week before. The note simply read "do you know what you are? ". Lily ignored it, but didn't throw it away.

Years later, she found it at the bottom of her bag. She threw it away, forgetting where it came from.

Tyler was fearless. He wasn't afraid of the bullies at school who called him names - so he became the bully. He wasn't afraid of losing his parents - so his distanced himself from them to prove that he could. He wasn't afraid of bad grades - so he didn't worry when he failed his classes. So when he saw the witch's house and it's aura of mystery, he decided to go inside. But he wasn't stupid, at least not that stupid. So he waited for a good old-fashioned game of truth or dare.

He knew it was a silly game for girls but if he tweaked the traditional questions, he should be fine. Instead of asking about crushes, how about who you thought was hottest. Instead of dares about makeup, how about a dare about how far you could throw a football? Or trying to see through that girl's window? He didn't care if it was creepy, he was popular. They should be honored that he even cared enough to do it.

He brought it up at about 11 that night. They'd each had a couple of his dad's beers, and they were sitting in the backyard. He had a clear view of the witch's house, and he captured his chance. It was his sidekick Josh's turn, and he chose dare. He told Josh that he either had to admit he was a pussy in front of the cheerleaders the next day at school, or knock on the witch's door. He didn't quite realize he'd never mentioned the witch before. He figured everybody noticed them, and just didn't say anything, and he never wanted to be the first to take a risk. People were his shield, and without them, what was he?

Josh gave him a weird look. He asked if he meant his girlfriend's room, she was such an old hag. This got a few laughs, but Tyler was confused. He meant the witch! The one across the street? He pointed, but they just smiled nervously. There was no house, he could see it on their faces. Josh's brother Sid piped up that there was no house there.

Tyler refused to believe it. He stood up and marched to the threshold of her wild and tangled garden. There was a strong, almost dizzying smell of sweet flowers and bitter herbs. The group tentatively followed him, worried about him and certainly scared at his intense expression, but unwilling to risk being exiled from the 'popular' group. Nothing was worth that.

He knocked on the door and was answered by a tall, so, so tall figure. Their face was shrouded in shadows, and their limbs were long and twisted. They seemed to be floating a bit off the ground, and their clothes hung off of them in ribbons. They were little more than a silhouette, but seemed more powerful and intricate than anything Tyler had ever seen. He was frozen for a moment, but remembered that he had a point to prove. He shoved his fear down his throat and turned back to his entourage. They were all frozen with bored and slightly concerned looks on their monochrome faces.

The street was painted in shades of black and white. The windy night had turned still, the absence of trees rustling, birds chirping, music playing faintly from bedrooms, was a physical thing. Everything was frozen. He turned back to the being.

They didn't say a word.

Hello. My name is Eris.

They didn't even have a mouth.

Your name is Tyler.

They didn't have eyes, either.

You are different.

They seemed to be beckoning him.

Your whole family is different.

The hallway they were standing in seemed to stretch on and on behind them.

I know what makes you different.

They were moving backwards, not so much walking or floating, but being pulled with the hallway as it stretched itself thin.

I can tell you.

The soft pink of the carpet no longer seemed inviting. His eyes swum.

All you have to do is step...

He walked forward. His entire body was locked in place. The door swung shut behind him.

Inside.

The being smiled, and he wished he could scream.

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Life went on in their happy family of four. Lily played with Brianna, her best friend. William aced every one of his tests, the father hid behind his friends, the mother smiled thinly. They had never had an older brother.

Tyler didn't know how long he was inside. He wasn't inside, though. He wasn't anywhere.

Eris was kind. It was warm. He didn't need to eat or sleep, and he knew everything there was to know.

I should go home. He didn't need to speak, Eris always knew what he wanted.

You should stay with me. You are happy here. I know it.

You never told me what's different about my family.

You already know.

I don't! For the first time in the eternity he'd been in the house, or whatever it was, he felt a flash of anger. It scared him.

He woke up in his bed. His alarm went off and he was awake and it had all been a dream. But he got weird looks at school, and had a strange feeling that he was a puzzle piece not quite fitting into the poster that was his town. After a  few months, though, he got over it. He never forgot the feeling of Eris's voice in his head, though.

Lily was next. She had recently picked up a habit of baking, and was out of eggs. The next door neighbors were out, and none of the others had any to spare. She never seemed to consider how strange it was, she just knew that the only place to go was the witch's house. She was scared, of course she was scared, but she had read enough books to know that the witch always turned out to just be misunderstood.

The family felt unbalanced with only 4 members. Had the mother and father always fought this much? It must just be the wear of time.

Lily was calm. That was the only word for it. Eris had promised to tell her how her family was different, and though neither of them had spoken a word, she just knew. Time didn't work for them. Oddly enough, this fact didn't scare her. It wasn't even as if she had learned it, but as if it had been buried in the sands of her mind, and the wind had just so happened to uncover a corner of it. It was still too big to pull all the way out, but she accepted that maybe she would never be strong enough.

When she asked to leave, Eris didn't protest. She appeared in the middle of a math lesson on multiplication. The change was not jarring, though she remembered nothing from the class. She must have spaced out.

Time went on. She hung out with Erica, her oldest friend, and tried to ignore the nagging feeling that something was wrong.

The father rarely left the house as of late. But he felt he needed to pay a visit to the new neighbor, show them who was boss. When had they moved in? They had always been there, but they had moved in just last week. He couldn't remember any moving trucks, but he was sure he had just been watching the 'big game'. It was always the 'big game' when it came to getting his family to ignore him.

He had never felt a state of such absolute calm. He hated it. He left before he could step inside.

The younger brother was shy. He didn't like talking to people, which is why he protested when his mother insisted that they visit the new neighbor. But his mother was chatty to a fault, and seemed to want her youngest son to be the same, for some inane reason. He went along, figuring it would be over.

He felt... uneasy. He didn't like the way the house seemed to tug at the edges of his mind, make him forget the steps he took to get down their walkway. His mother seemed unbothered.

He told her that he was going to wait at the walkway while she said hi. She adjusted her box of cookies indignantly and begrudgingly agreed.

She only took a couple of minutes. She seemed strangely out of it, but she claimed she just needed a nap. She slept for a day straight, but when she woke up, she didn't seem any better. He ignored it. Nine years old was too young to worry about your parents.

The mother knew she had to say something. The thing that had greeted her at the door was not human. She couldn't remember what it was, but she knew it was enormous, absolutely gargantuan. It's wiry frame twisted around the doorframe just to fit under the ceiling. It's voice was silent in her ears and screamed into her head. It hurt, but it was the pleasant kind of pain, the reassuring kind that told her that she was still there, still human enough to feel pain.

She remembered every last second of her time there. She remembered none of it.

She knew nothing for sure besides that she wasn't normal. Her family wasn't normal.

They didn't act differently, it was nothing about the family itself. But somebody had granted them a shield against time, something that bent the seconds around them, letting them move forward and back and sideways. She knew it wasn't Eris. She knew Eris didn't want to save them. She didn't know who Eris was, exactly. She wondered why she'd never greeted the new neighbor.

It was Easter when she noticed that the ivy on the house was gone. It was the day after when she saw the moving van pull up and 3 men started unloading furniture. They drove away.

The next day, one of the men who had been in the moving truck and another man moved in. They smiled and laughed and danced late into the night. They played music loudly and were unabashedly themselves. They were nothing like the town had ever seen.

The father hated them. He often told the family about how he had never seen such an outward display of gayness. The mother couldn't help but roll her eyes at that. They were newlyweds, they deserved as much happiness as they wanted before the excitement wore off. It had been - well, she didn't know how long it had been since she had been newly married. She bet it was written down in one of the family albums somewhere. Later, when she looked, the pictures changed and shifted, the faces of the friends and neighbors never quite staying the same. She put the books away and never brought it up.

The younger brother admired the couple across the street. They seemed so... themselves. They were so outgoing, but they never seemed to acknowledge him or his family when they were out around the town. His father was clearly grateful, but William was a bit sad. He wanted to know what somebody so different was like.

Some months after they moved in, the shorter man died in a car accident. The other man packed his boxes and never left the house.

William never went out of his way to talk to somebody, but he felt bad for the poor man. He gathered up a gift basket of some cookies his mother had made that day and a small "sorry for your loss card" and set off across the street.

The inside of the house was plastered in bright colors. The furniture was arranged in an open way, the house was the picture of inviting. The man - Ganymede, he said his name was - was bright and cheerful. He did not seem like somebody who had recently lost his husband.

They spent a pleasant half hour making small talk in the living room when William offered up his small basket of gifts. Ganymede accepted it gratefully and placed it in the center of the coffee table. William left about fifteen minutes later. He was a bit dizzy. There was something about the way that house smelled...

The next family in that house came less than a month later. Or was it a year? Lily could no longer tell, though she ignored it and talked on the phone with Marcella, her very best friend forever.

It was a single mother and a baby.

Lily expected her mother to go over immediately, volunteer for babysitting, or something. But she steered clear of the house. She overheard her talking to her book club friends - none of which she recognized - about how she seemed... weird.

Lily saw her around town, shopping at stores and talking to faceless strangers. Lily put these people out of her mind.

One day, she was walking to school and she ran into the woman at a coffee shop. Lily was told to call her Ariadne. Lily knew she recognized the name, though where from she did not know.

Later that week, they were invited over for dinner. It was very nice, Ariadne - or Ari, as she insisted on being called - was not the best cook, but she had a very good recipe for gingerbread that they got for dessert. Lily thought this was a bit unusual, seeing as it was the middle of July, but they had a Christmas tree in their living room and the street was decked out in festive lights, so it must have been December. How hadn't she noticed?

When she went to Ari's house, she noticed a distinct accumulation of spiderwebs. They covered nearly every surface. Lily figured it was just because Ari was so busy, but it looked like more than could possibly build up over such a short amount of time. However long it had been.

Tyler was an only child. He was about 3 years old, and his mother had left him with his father for the afternoon. He was watching television, and his father fell asleep. He crept out the unlocked front door and across the street.

Ari was knitting on the porch. Her yarn was thin and wispy, but when she tugged on the knots, it seemed firm. She seemed to be weaving a sort of wall covering - perhaps a large spiderweb for Halloween?

She talked to him, asking him if he was ok. He walked right past her inside. He didn't know why, but he wanted to be inside. It was warm, inside. The shelves were covered in small jars, each full of small dead exoskeletons. He shivered, but sat down on the couch and reached for the bowl of candy.

He was almost vertical as he leaned to the side, and as he did he rested his elbow on a throw blanket. But it wasn't a throw blanket. It was more of the web that Ari had been weaving. He was thrown into the air, wrapped in web and tangled up and stuck to it. Where it stuck to his skin, he grabbed at it, but it just didn't let him go. After a couple of minutes, he gave up. He felt a needle-like prick, and everything was dark.

Lily hated her brother. He was always busy. He only had one year left before he left for college, and she always had such a good time with him! She knew he only spent time with him out of obligation, he would rather be on the computer, or playing video games. But he still made an effort - or he used to, anyway.

She was too old for dolls, in 9th grade, but that didn't stop her from reorganizing her extensive American Girl doll collection every other day.

The new neighbor seemed interesting. He was single, and young. He didn't seem interested in getting to know anybody though, just in his art. When he left his house, he wasn't just going to the grocery store, he was making a statement. Hudson hated it. He thought that a man should represent his future family, and if his future family was anything like him, they'd have no life skills.

When he showed up at the husband's door with a fruit basket and a fancy bowl, he had been so shell shocked by his personality that he just had to let him in.

Their table usually only sat 4 people, but he managed to squeeze in a 5th chair for... he said his name was Leto? This only made him dislike him more.

He had a bright personality and even brighter teeth. They seemed almost... iridescent.

The night was not dark. This was not unusual. The streetlights were bright, the moon full, and though the shadows were deepened, the light flooded most of the room. The father was sat in his armchair, half asleep. There was a knock on the door.

It was Leto. He didn't move. The knock came again. He got up.

His teeth were sharper than he remembered. Leto came in without an invitation.

Where are your children? The father was confused. His mouth had not moved, though he had asked where his children were.

Why do you care? He tried to respond, but he was frozen. Leto shook his head.

Just wondering.

Lily's out with her friend somewhere, Jane's out with a friend, who knows where William is. He did not know why he had said that. He didn't open his mouth.

You should know where your children are. They're very young.

They can take care of themselves. He hated this man now, for whatever he was doing to his mind.

Would they be better off without a neglectful father?

Yes. He didn't know where it came from. He was disappointed in his children, wished he didn't have them weighing on his mind. He wanted a popular son, one that played football, not a nerd and a girl.

Very well. He didn't know what he'd agreed to, but the room was unraveling into fractals of colors and tendrils and reaching around him and lifting him up and he was getting smaller, or the room was getting bigger, and everything was not what it seemed and nothing was there and he was alone and he was surrounded and then he no longer existed.

Jane never missed her husband. She hadn't liked him all that much, and he was almost never nice to her friends. To be honest, she barely remembered him. He'd left her only a year after their first child had been born, or at least that's what she told herself. She couldn't remember coming home to a note, or a big argument, or bags being packed, or friends patting her back. He had just... stopped being there. She tried not to think about it.

She didn't have a job. She didn't need money. She stressed about it every night. Her life didn't make sense. She ignored it.

Her kids were sweet, and she loved them very much. Their next door neighbors were distant and disjointed, and their across the street neighbor was strange. She never met any of her children's friends. They never stopped talking about them, though their names and personalities seemed to change nearly daily.

The across the street neighbor was perfectly normal. They had a life and lived and read books and watched tv and stayed over at friend's houses. Their name was Mnemosyne. It was not strange in the slightest.

Jane never met the neighbor. Lily seemed enchanted with them, however.

Lily loved to dance. She would twirl and wear poofy dresses and point her toes. She liked to move through dance - why walk when you could leap and spin? She loved dancing in Mnemosyne's garden. She would pause to smell a rose, or clutch a twig to her chest and sink to her knees dramatically, as if lamenting a lost lover. Mnemosyne never noticed.

Until one day, when Lily was twirling a bit too close to the porch stairs. Her foot caught on a step and she tripped, shrieking. She looked up, terrified at her reaction. Her ankle throbbed.

Mnemosyne was kind. She refused to use a nickname, and it took Lily quite a few tries to learn it. She often contradicted herself, telling stories with endings that didn't make sense. Lily visited her every day after school. She forgot about homework, forgot about friends. She was rarely home, usually telling stories with Mnemosyne and learning secrets that should not have been known by anybody.

One day, Lily asked who her father was. Mnemosyne always seemed to have the answers to all of her questions. Mnemosyne shook her head sadly. Another day, she said. Another day. So the next day, Lily asked. And the day after. Until one day, she came in, dropping her bag on the ground and asked Mnemosyne for what she decided would be the final time. Mnemosyne gave a resigned sigh and sat Lily down at the table.

She said not a single word, but Lily's head spun with the information. Her family did not fit with the world. They had been an... experiment? Of beings that weren't deities, but something greater. They walked the earth with the humans, fitting in but causing their own chaos. The one thing they had never been able to mess with was time. But they bonded together to imbue the family with a sort of resistance to time. They would stay stagnant and still. But slowly, their immunity had spread through the town, poisoning it. Their power gave the citizens life, so when they weren't around, the people went gray and still. The only ways to save the town, and eventually the world, was for either them to all die, which could only be done by one of these... beings. Or one of them could become a being themselves. But if more than one of them joined their ranks, the world would be overwhelmed. There could not be such a drastic shift in the way the universe worked, so either Lily could become one and watch her family fade into the rest of the world, live forever, never look back, or she could die a horrible painful death with her brother and mother and never have existed in the first place.

Lily was selfish. She knew this. She justified her choice by saying that she wanted to let her family have a good life. She was sad that she never got to meet her other brother and father, but they seemed like bad people anyway. She took a deep breath and locked eyes with Mnemosyne, who understood what she meant immediately.

There was light. There was light and wind and she couldn't close her eyes, her brain hurt, it hurt, it hurt so very badly, and then it was over and she didn't feel anything. Her skin glowed and her eyes sparkled and her voice was as smooth as silk. She was the polar opposite of the being sitting before her, Mnemosyne. It's hair was black and thick, it's eyes hard as stone, and it's sly smile cunning. Lily knew that she was no longer Lily. She was no longer she. She was just one member of a collective. She was a part of the universe now, and she saw this. She saw this as she floated above the town, leaving her family behind. She could now see the deep cracks in the town, the streets crisscrossed with cuts and the houses not quite lining up. As she took a deep breath and turned to leave, she knew in her heart that the black tendrils of death were drawing themselves back, into her. She felt the dark smoke trailing behind her perfect picture of beauty and innocence.

She was Apate, the being of betrayal. She was pristine and pure and would never tell a lie, but hid a dark side that would always be ready to pounce on anybody who crossed her.