It'd be wrong to say I don't like kids. It's adults I have more
of a problem with. In my last school, when I called one of
the ten year old boys in my class a little asshole, it wasn't the
problem. His parents are the ones who insisted I get fired. But that
boy didn't mind me swearing at him because he knew damn well he'd keyed my
car. Even if I had no proof. He just thought it was funny,
No different to the sort of interaction he'd have with an older sibling.
On that note, I wouldn't say I like children either. Kids are little
adults. They're more truthful, but only because the stakes are lower. People
with jobs and mortgages tell great, big, tremendous lies. Kids don't have
the weight of the world and their shoulders, So why lie about mistresses and
promotions and why you've been crushing up antibiotics since your wife's morning smoothie. Instead,
they just lie about where their homework is. Ther kids I teach are
right on the cusp of it. Some of the boys might get caught giggling
at the back while showing each other naughty little videos they don't understand but can't
look away. From But then they go out and chase each other around,
do cartwheels, play tag, hide and seek, cry if they take a
particularly bad knock. Kids are weird. Got one whose dad is in jail
and he talks about it like it means nothing. His old man tried to
kick a woman to death in the parking lot of a bar and won't be
out until the boys. A teenager kid don't care, doesn't get it.
If anything, he thinks it's funny. But then last week I confiscated his
novelty pencil that was the size of a cucumber, and he screams so hard
he threw up all over the speckled tile that have been glued to the floor
since ninety six. Ten is a weird age, old enough to feel the
vaguest hint of life's problems just beneath the surface, like lumps in a pillow,
to question why Mommy downs three bottles of wine on a Tuesday, or
why Daddy changes his shirt and hide it in the garage before coming in from
work, but too young to know what's really under the surface. These kids
can feel something is wrong with the world, they just don't know what not
yet Anyway, they have my sympathy. Twenty six years of teaching has eroded
most of everything else. I'm not particularly invested in whether these little turrets become
scientists such editors, nor am I particularly interested in helping them process their emotional
luggage. If any of you want me to undo the damage you've done to
your own kids, then you can start by paying me a hell of a
lot more. But I do feel sorry for them because they don't really know
what's going on. But unlike a five year old, they can't just fumble
around in blind ignorance. They're stuck in between worlds, one where you cry
yourself to sleep at night over your parents divorce, but still think Santa and
the tooth Fairy are real. Maybe it's different out of rich school, one
where kids don't go to food banks, but where whole families don't have to
share a smartphone. I doubt it. I don't know why. I just
doubt anyone's out there living the plot of the Bernstein Bears, Rich or otherwise.
I used the dream of teaching at one of the big schools, a
couple of towns over the ones with all the funding. How that would be
nice walking into a building that doesn't look like a set dressing for the next
season of True Detective. Now I just dream of getting out of this profession
entirely. Maybe if I play my cards right. Sounds crazy to say out
loud, so I won't. But maybe I found a way out. Well,
to be exact, the kids found it. I don't know what they
got. Of course they don't their kids. They haven't a clue. But
I think I'm maybe thirteen weeks from another go, and when that happens,
you can bet your ass I'm asking for a ticket out of here. At
first, I planned on getting a cushy job in one of the schools a
few towns over one where the school bus doesn't have to plan its route around
multiple trailer parks. Now I realize I was thinking small. If I'm smart,
I won't ever have to work another day in my life. Imagine that
thirteen more weeks. Right now, grin Wig is with Laila. Sweet girl,
but she's smart enough for it to be a problem. The dumb ones
for the best. You wake up to something grinning at you at your bedroom
window. It helps to have a sort of mind that doesn't ask questions about
what floor you're living on. Laila isn't winning a genius grant anytime soon.
But I can tell it's bothering her because deep down she knows how wrong this
all is. Dark circles under the eyes, hallid skin, eyes that keep
darting to the corners. Sometimes she falls asleep at a desk. Sometimes she
wakes up with a little jump, like something only she can see has startled
her. It's hard. The only reason she sticks it out is the same
reason you or I would the rewards. She got a smartphone last time.
I wonder what'll be this time. These kids don't ask for a lot toys.
Mainly one of them got crazy good at football real quick. That makes
sense, But it's that kind of thing, you know. They don't ask
for the lottery. Well, nothing like that, because money's a little too
abstract right now. Strange thing, though, as young and naive as they
are, they learn the rules pretty quickly. I guess Grenwig's lessons aren't subtle.
Just look at one of my former students, Jared Now. At the
time, all this flew under my radar. Kid in my class lost the
parent, moved away, so what things happen? Turns out he asked for
his father to get sober. Next day, the poor guy got caught in
the machinery at his job. CCTV footage was very popular in live leagues,
makes for grim viewing. I'm not particularly handy, so I never knew a
lathe could do that to a human body. Anyway, It's not good to
ask things for other people. I wish my dad was this, I wish
my mom was that. Alia told me that upfront, around the time I
started asking why half the kids in my class had new iPhones and Nintendo switches.
She said it was easy to ask for things, but it was risk
here to ask to change something into another thing, and downright awful to ask
it to change a person in any way, no matter how small. Even
that kid who got good at football played a risky game. It paid off,
but the other kids wouldn't go near him for a week. They kept
expecting something bad to happen to him, and they didn't want to be in
a splash zone. I can't pretend to understand the subtleties like the kids.
I can only observe what happens to other people and learn the lessons that imparts.
Nothing about Greenwig is guaranteed. There are no certainties. Even the kids
get worn down by it. Whoever has it, they are a prior risk
assessment in under elevens. Strange thing to see, but unless it's your turn,
you don't even want to risk something as inane as a game of catch
with his chosen friend. Greenwig, his territorial, possessive bizarre, didn't even
believe it until it was somehow my turn, which the kids found pretty alarming.
Green Wig doesn't like adults. I thought there was a ghost at first,
lights coming on and off, footsteps in the corridor outside my apartment,
pretty creepy, sharing my home with something I couldn't see. I didn't like
it, but it had only been a couple of nights, and I did
a good job of convincing myself there was no ghost or poltergeist, just an
overactive imagination. Yeah, sure, the TV changed and there were finger marks
and my bathroom window I hadn't put there, so what way. At the
back of my mind, I'd reserved a little bit of space for the possibility
of a haunting, but otherwise I remained a skeptic. Jesus, if only
it was as simple as a haunting, I don't know if I could explain
to you how it felt the first time I woke up to Grinwig gently stroking
my toes. The violation of it, the feeling of a world that didn't
make sense. My eyes glared at his fingers, terrified, heart pounding,
head throbbing like I'd taken a knock, and I kept waiting for it to
make sense. My eyes wandered, tried to find the hands those fingers belonged
to, but they just kept going and going and going. They stretched for
meters until they disappeared into the shadow of my closet. Whole time, they
kept massaging the big toe, cold as ice. I started counting the knuckles.
I got to thirteen and gave up. But they were fingers. I
could tell from the nails, the hair that ran along the dimpled skin,
the color of cement. And then, just as I started to really appreciate
that I was awake one hundred ston't cold, sober and lucid, and what
I was seeing wasn't a dream or a nightmare or some other conjuration of the
mind, just as I felt panic begin to flare up inside my chest like
a burgeoning heart attack. It was impossible. Fingers withdrew into the darkness like
a spider curling its legs. I got up and threw on the lights.
I found my clawset empty. Felt the world was coming apart. Had to
be a night terror. I decided I hadn't had one for decades, but
what else could it be. I wanted to go back to sleep, to
at least try, but I was so scared I couldn't face the dark again,
so I decided to stay up. Went out into the living room and
turned the TV on, PLoP down on the sofa and let my head tilt
back. I might have drifted off again, I don't know for sure.
All I remember was the feeling as the cushion beneath me adjusted, and I
heard it the sound of something tightening, like a creaking door. I looked
down and saw white bands wrapped around the entirety of the sofa fingers. They
tightened, and the material let out a groan as the tension went up a
notch. I flew upwards in a terrible panic. By the time I turned
back, the fingers were gone, but the indent they'd left and the sofa
remained. This repeated itself all night, Each time I felt close to drifting
off, those impossibly long fingers would reach out of the darkness somewhere and make
an appearance. They knocked glasses off, countertops, opened the fridge, turned
on the oven, and whenever possible, they touched me, stroked in ear,
tickled my nose, slid between my fingers, and tried to hold my
hand. I tried to play chicken with it, at least once. I
stayed stock still as a greasy finger plucked at my lips and tried to find
its way into my mouth. But before it met any success, I flipped
out and ran, shrieking into the corridor outside my apartment. Hunting in the
hallway, I told myself I'd never stepped foot in that apartment. There was
something about the way all my neighbors came to their doors one by one and
just stared at me in my underwear and sweat stained vest. I felt like
a damn idiot. Before I knew it, I was offering modeled apologies while
slinking through my front door. By the time I got to school the next
day, I felt like I was teetering on the edge for a breakdown.
A genuine suspected my day was going to end with me being carted off in
a straight jacket last people. I expected to find any understanding from with my
students, But when I came in looking like a sleep deprived drunk, they
all stared at me in silence. And this wasn't the slight Jordan idiocy I'm
sometimes used to with these kids. At that time, I told them I
used to have a wife. This was something else. Took me a second
to decipher. It not the sort of expression I'm used to from that age
group, with what with half of them being miniature psychopaths. It was sympathy.
They felt sorry for me. But when I took a step forward,
every single one of them scooted their chairs backwards. Just like that. It
clicked. I spent the last year watching them take turns ostracizing one another,
and I'd just written it off. It's just a peculiar product of child social
dynamics. It felt cruel, and I tried over and over to mitigate it,
to sit with the excluded kids and talk with them, try to figure
it all out. But it was an enigma, all of it. If
it wasn't for the fact that this messed up system seemed to operate and a
kind of wrotor I would have been forced to intervene, but as it was,
the kid who was targeted would always be back with the crowd a week
later, and they'd be the ones excluding someone else. But now all of
that made sense the way they were looking at me pity recognition. They knew
what I'd spent the night going through, and for the last year, they'd
gone through it themselves, one by one. You should play with Greenwick,
sah, one of the quieter girls piped up in, wide eyed, like
a hostage at gunpoint, and all the other kids nodded, Yeah, he
wants to play. You need to play with them. He gets real impatient.
A chorus of whisping our hearts. Greenwig, I muttered. One word?
Is that what is called? I wondered, and all the other kids
nodded, but they could read my mind. There are no records of Greenwig
anywhere, by the way, Good God. I tried a thousand times over
to find something, anything. The best I could think of was that Greenwig
was a kind of boogeyman. But what does that even mean? Just the
word used to give the world a little more shape, a little more structure.
I'm not sure Greenwich as much of either the games he plays are like
what a toddler or a young dog would be interested in. Basic stuff,
no rules. I moved something, Grenwig moves it back. I was lost
tracing the spiral of my hair or pulling up my cheeks and face to create
strange new expressions of flicking the lights on and off. During that time,
I took to eating lunch in my car, largely because it was hard to
be around people who couldn't see why a glass went flying at the wall or
why I had to keep stacking plates until they were so tall they toppled over.
At least the kids gave me a heads up, most important warning I
ever gotten in my life. Every kid had their own observations, some more
relatable than others. Most of them boiled down to the simple fact that for
seven days you belonged to Greenwig, you were a toy, a source of
endless amusement for something that had the sense of humor of a three year old.
Pretty Much every kid agreed on one concrete thing, though saying no to
Greenwig was dangerous. Now. I can't say for sure, but I'm positive
Greenwig gave the kids more leeway. He left them alone for lunch and dinner,
bedtime games were usually quieter, but for me, it was almost like
part of the game was watching me go about my adult life as he did
everything to mess with me. He'd snatched my steering wheel, giggling from the
dark footwell, yellow eyes peering up from between my legs. He grabbed my
phone and throw it into the middle of traffic, or sit there, tickling
my neck and armpits. As the principle demanded to know why my classes behavior
was so erratic, he made it difficult, pushed me right up to breaking
point. Eventually I snapped. I slapped his hand away as he tried to
mess with me during a traffic stop. Felt like screaming at him that he
was this close to get him me shot. But of course I couldn't just
let to sit there as this cop looked over my license and mulled give me
a sobriety test. Couldn't blame him. I'd been swerving all over the road
until I saw the flashing lights. Didn't help when as he approached I pulled
over car, he saw me slapping furiously at the steering wheel, hissing stop
it over and over. He inevitably issued the test, which I passed.
The cop gave me a long, narrowed stare before telling me to go get
some sleep. He must have figured I was just a stressed mental case instead
of a drunk, and he was right. It was day six and I
barely slept. Despite all the grave warnings from the kids about the dangers of
telling Greenwig off, I drove off, hoping that maybe he would just let
this one go. I went to school and taught lessons as usual, but
Greenwig made no appearances. I asked the kids if his little voter ever found
itself wrapping up a day early, and they all shook their heads like they
knew bad news was coming my way, but none of them wanted to say
for sure. Still, it was my first time, so I ignored the
look in their eyes and try my best to focus on the hope that maybe
Greenwig was going to finally leave me alone. A feeling and I dissolved in
its entirety, and I opened my front door and found a package on the
floor, a large box about one foot cubed. It looked like old cardboard,
like what happens when it gets soaked but left out to dry, just
dingy. Its sides had been stable together too, and that gave it a
real homemade look that went the extra creepy little mile. I expected something bad.
I knew the second when I went to lift it and it was too
heavy that something was wrong. It just felt well, It felt like lifting
an overfull bucket from the bottom. And then there was the smell and the
noise that sounded like a distant transmission of a mewing child, tinny, like
the muffled cries of someone on the other side of a very thick wall.
When I finally opened it, I found the policeman inside familiar because of the
shield and name he Well, he'd been folded, I guess, is the
best way I can describe it. At first I thought it was just his
uniform, but well, clothes aren't warm, and obviously a folded uniform wouldn't
explain the forearm, hair and skin poking out the side. I recoiled,
terrified, fell backwards onto my ass, and this was when Grenwig made his
appearance. His aragnic fingers curled out from the box. I'd say about a
dozen of them this time. There are always more in the dark, out
of sight, and these did when I couldn't have brought myself to do on
my own. They unfolded. The policeman lifted him up like a tailor shone
off a suit, and the flayed skin opened up to reveal the barely recognizable
outline of an adult man. He was still alive, and the rest of
him, I soon found out, was in my bathtub, and that half
was also very much alive, thrashing and sliding as it struggled to gain a
grip on the smooth ceramic, begging for its other half. Words, I
don't really think we're a natural fit for the stern man who'd interrogated me just
ten hours ago, But then again, it wasn't really the same man either
way. He spoke of the darkness between atoms, the infinite space where time
doesn't exist, and the endless shapes that swim the murky abyss fleeing their cruel
God. More than that, he lamented no longer being whole, feeling himself
in two places at once. He called it wrong, and on that he
had my agreement. I begged Greenwig to take it away to undo what he
had done, and that was how I used my first favor. The box
and the man disappeared, dragged off to some dark corner that was out of
sight, and that was the last they saw of him, although a bit
of research later on revealed that while Grinwig did indeed put him back together,
the poor man has been catatonic in a hospital bed ever since, alive but
definitely not well. The next day, the kids asked me what I'd requested.
I told them I asked for a new PlayStation. Didn't tell them the
truth, partially because it would traumatize them, but partially because acknowledging it even
happened would traumatize me. After that, I crunched the numbers. I figured
out the number of kids and how often the rotor would fall on me.
Based on this info, I booked the week half ahead of time, and
well, I just waited. I tried to support the kids as best I
could when it was their turn, but they didn't really have the same problems
as me. I mean, it wasn't a holiday for them either. Each
one came to school looking like they'd spent the night watching their dog die over
and over, just distraught, ruin exhausted. But like I said, Greenwig
generally let them eat their food or interact with their parents and siblings without demanding
attention at the worst possible time. Eventually Round two came along. The kids
seemed damned relieved. As for Greenwick's games, this time I came prepared.
I'd already noticed that Grenwig only ever emerged from the shadows, and the kids
corroborated that fact. So in the run up to my turn, I spent
the week setting up my bathroom with as many lamps and torches as I could
find. Wasn't easy to eliminate all those shadows. I had a lot of
sleepless nights trialing different arrangements, but eventually I got one as close to perfect
as I could. I figured if I could just have one or two nights
of sleep, it'd be damn easier to deal with. An hour passed before
my stomach began to wake. By the time I realized what Grenwig was doing,
I could already feel the urge to throw up. I guess I hadn't
given him much of a choice. He wanted to play, and there was
only one place in that room that was still dark. It wasn't until I
threw myself out into the living room and switched off all the light that the
pain knees up. By then, I was already close to suffocating on the
finger sticking out of my throat when it finally withdrew and I took my first
breath in over a minute. I collapsed to the floor, unable to do
much of anything except heave and sob. Greenwig yellow eyes glaring at me from
the space between my sofa, giggled. In hindsight, I'm lucky he found
it funny. I think he thought he was a game of sorts. God
knows what would have happened if that little stunt had made him mad. Otherwise,
at second round past without incident. At least I wasn't at work.
It was hell, but I didn't have to worry about driving anywhere or being
out in public waiting for those wretched hands to find me. I just stayed
indoors and played his weird little games, which mainly just involved me cleaning up
whatever stupid thing he decided to make a mess of. I found it helped
if I played up my exasperation. The less I reacted to his mischief,
the more likely he'd escalate. When it was all over, I asked for
a winning lottery ticket. Unfortunately I didn't specify the amount, which I suppose
is my fault. At least the amount I won covered rent that month,
even if my expectations were a little higher. Still, I figured it'd be
better next time. I'd be more specific. I decided best laid plans of
mice and men. You ever lost someone, most people have, I have,
for sure more than once. To it nearly unmade me, and I
was a fully grown man. It was about a couple days before my turn
that Alia experienced the first loss. Most kids, it's a hamster if they're
unlucky. A grandparent for her, who was her older brother. I taught
him eleven years earlier, and he was a good kid, smart like her,
went on to become a mechanic. His passing wasn't anything strange or sinister,
just an accident. Jack popped off car crushed him, random devastating.
She was called out of a lesson by the principle and her parents, the
three of them looking like hell, like they'd spent a month one on one
with Greenwig. A little reminder that not all nightmares hide in the dark,
I suppose. And why this hit me hard, I think it was probably
my own experience with grief. Either way, it's stuck with me. Her
absence, the empty chair and desk felt hard to ignore day after day,
knowing what she was going through. I think it's one thing to accept that
these kids will face circumstance, poverty, bad parents. Life isn't fair.
I don't get a say in the way society say some kids get ponies and
others get rickets. But there's something about losing someone that way, just a
random confluence of bad luck, and it's harder than most. I don't know
if I can explain it. It's just earlier. It's already grown up at
the bottom rung of a not very invisible class system. Hadn't she had a
fair share of bad luck already. I mean, damn, even Greenwig Grant's
favors, even that wretched monster isn't all bad. But an accident like what
happened to Ali's brother, there's no upside. It's just a mess. Thing
is like I said, my turn was coming up, and I mean the
way I saw it, the boy was already dead, right. It wasn't
like he could die again. Who wrapped up three times around a Lathe was
there already come to pass. I decided to do something, But even at
the time I figured to be pretty stupid, but if there was a chance
he could work well, I had to try Round three. Greenwig went real
easy. I preemptively bought a bunch of jigsaws and left them half done.
He honed in on them straight away. I did as much as I could
in a single sitting, turned around, turned back, and he'd modeled them
all up. I'd play up my anger in rotation, then go back to
it. Drank a lot of coffee and whiskey, watched a lot of movies.
Greenwig loved it. Broke a couple of plates and mugs too. It
was an all plane sailing. Woke up one night to find him licking my
neck and had to rush to the hospital to get the chemical burn treated.
Still, for the most part, the week went by without much incident,
because well, I had something in mind. Couldn't get it out. This
idea. I had to act on it, and the promise of what it
would mean if it worked meant I practically skated through the week with a smile
on my face. At least I had a sense to specify. The boy
returned to me not earlier. I thought if anything went wrong, it'd be
best if she didn't have to see it. It was four in the morning
when I was awoken by a sound that had slipped into my dreams as a
kind of creaking door. But as I opened my eyes and reality reasserted itself,
I realized that what I was actually hearing was a little more gravel being
trod on strange, distant quiet. I held my breath, if only so
that I could hear better, but it seemed to only amp up the sound
of blood rushing through my ears white noise. It's so hard to perceive what's
there sometimes, isn't it. All I wanted was for my ears or eyes
to report something useful to me without having to get out of the safety of
my own bed. Instead, all I got with dim shadows and the sea
like cescerations of my own breathing. At least I could ascertain I wasn't alone
in my apartment. Over time, the longer I waited, the more sure
of that I became. Something was out there in the corridor between my bedroom
and the living room, and a guess moving with a kind of irregular rhythm
that belongs only to living things. This wasn't the wind or some pipe settling.
Something was moving, and it was moving in my direction, low to
the ground, A noise I couldn't put any shape to wrong. All wrong
made me think of breaking pencils, grinding teeth. In the end, I
couldn't help myself. I got up and called out, who's there? The
words didn't feel real to me. The world took on a realer than real
distortion that comes with terror, coupled with a prick white heat at the nape
of the neck. For a moment, I swore I was outside my own
body, staring down at myself from above. It was too much, but
that sound was clearer than ever before. There was no pretending this ghost wasn't
real. I turned on the light. Alia's brother screamed and crawled away from
the light. Neglected whimpers left behind like a trail that led me to the
living room, where I found him curled around a table leg. It was
alive, but not whole. I guess I hadn't given much thought to what
a car would do to a man's chest. Every breath was a strange orchestra,
too many sounds, the disentangle bone on bone, crumbled, ribs expanding,
or at least trying to and draw an oxygen into blood. Filled lungs,
moss had grown across his face even in the short time he'd been in
the ground. A hand ice cold shot out and grabbed my wrist and cried
out, but he didn't let go. He followed as I tried to push
myself away, his bottom half trailing along limp and misaligned with his torso felt
like pulling a sack of meat across an ice rink. Don't send me back,
he whimpered, don't send me back. Eventually my foot hit the sofa
and I fell into it. He dragged himself, using his hands, over
to the side so that we will face the face before I even had time
to push myself upright. He likes you, he whispered, and I recoiled
at the smell of his breath. There are so few things in the dark
that know how to leave, but he does. Don't. Don't ask him
to send me back. Please. For the first time, my mind started
working. Was he talking about Greenwick, I wondered, But of course I
told myself, who else? What? What's over there? I asked.
He went to answer before the words choked in his mouth, and his face
twisted into a mask of melancholic agony. Trying to utter something. He burst
into painful sobs. Don't make me go back, It's all they could manage
to say. Don't make me go back. Don't make me go back.
Please, please, don't send me back there. You don't know what they
do to us. I don't I don't know what to do, I stammered.
The boy grabbed me and pulled me close. Unsure of how to comfort
him, I let him hold me in an embrace. We aren't the same
when it's done with us. What. I never saw him take the knife
from the kitchen, but I suppose he'd been in my home for longer than
I'd been awake, and he had plenty of opportunity. First thing I felt,
which surprised me even in the moment, was that it suddenly became hard
to breathe. That was the punched lung, but like the worst pneumonia I'd
ever had come over me in the space of five seconds. Just boom,
suffocating on your own blood so much that it's spilled over my lips and down
my chin. By the time I registered the aching ways of dull agony pulsing
out of the spot on my rib cage, I was already slumping back down
onto the sofa, sitting there like I was getting ready for a Friday night
move, not that I was hopeless. I took maybe two seconds tops to
accept what had happened, to understand it, and then I was able to
drive my heel into his head as he tried to climb up onto me.
Weirdly, his broken back helped him. He sort of just bent with a
blow, but it didn't actually dislodge him. I had to kick him again
to do that, and then I'd just stand up and do it again and
again, and I think around the fourth or fifth kick I realized I had
something of a problem. The pain didn't really bother him, Not when I
kicked him in his pulp chest, now when I stamped on his hand as
he tried to push himself back up for the tenth time, And even when
I rolled him over and stamped on his head, struggling to hang my foot
through the tears in my eyes, Even as I'd immobilized him, Even as
I fumbled around and found an old bike helmet and clugged his skull until my
arm grew sore. He didn't cry out in pain. He just kept trying
to get back up. Damn, I screamed, as seconds turned to minutes,
which just kept ticking on. I felt like I was swinging for hours,
but in truth, I don't know how long. Eventually I stopped for
breath and frantically looked from one corner of the room to another, desperate for
the first time in my life to see those horrible, long fingers take him.
I cried, for God's sake, take him back. I suspected he'd
been waiting and watching, because with very little delay, grin Wig finally made
disappearance. Yellow eyes, clustered together like frog spawn, winked at me from
a shadow under the table. They seemed self satisfied, as they always did,
but I didn't care. The mutilated man who lay in the floor continued
to bark, with wet laughter pouring at me with broken fingers. I was
feeling faint, and my whole right side was burning hot and cold all at
once. As one blood began to pull. Oh God, I cried,
just take him back. Grenwig's hands wasted little time, and that man's laughter
grew only more hysterical as the fingers wrapped around his chest and legs and slowly
towed him towards the dark. I felt a brief moment of relief as I
hoped this would be the end of my mistake. But then I felt his
arms wrap around my legs. Even broken, his strength was something special.
Trapped in a bare hug, slowly being pulled toward that abistle shadow. I
began to panic, but it was far too little and far too late.
I went feet first, a feeling like nothing else I'd ever had. In
the end, I was clinging by the tips of my fingers to an impossible
ledge. Above me was a sort of opening with no defined beginning or end,
and on the other side laid my living room. I looked down and
for the first time saw green Wig as a whole. In hindsight, it
had been a mistake to think of him as humanoid. I think I just
decided the Buggeyman should look like a man, but floated in the strange ether
beneath me was more akin to a jellyfish or maybe a spider, I don't
know. It was dark in that void and yet impossibly clear. I could
see things in there, more than just grin Wig. It defied dimensions as
we understand it. It was both a notion and a landscape in the distance
the Viathan swam through open space. I'm not even sure I was seeing based
on light. When I blinked, I still saw everything. Green Wig found
it all hilarious. He had a mouth, and it laughed monichly as it
peeled Eliot's brother from around my waist, leaving me free to kick and pull
my way back into reality as I slid onto the carpet on my living rooms,
laughter assisted. As soon as I was out, I crawled and rushed
to the bathroom, where I locked the door and passed out. Greenwig's next
turn with me lasted two weeks, which I think was because I made two
requests, one Frailier's brother to return from the dead and the other for him
to be taken away. Either way, I didn't begrudge Greenwick's games, but
it did mean I didn't get another request. I have to wait until next
time. Meanwhile, I've watched the children approached the end of the school year,
and I find myself wondering if they'll age their way out of Greenwig or
take him with them to the next teacher's class. If he leaves them alone,
will he terrorize the next lot of kids I teach? Either way,
I think Greenwig will let me double up again, and that's important because if
so, I know what I'm going to do. Like I said before,
I'm out of here, no more teaching. I'm cashing out. But I've
decided, after what I did earlier and a brother, that I can at
least take Greenawick with me. He can become a permanent friend. Leave the
kids the hell alone. I don't want him following them or haunting the next
bunch to come along. I'm going to stuff my pocket so full of cash
that I can build him and me a playground, and he won't ever have
to bother them again. They have enough to deal with four