When she was forty, she flew up North to help her father move out of her childhood home and into a smaller condominium. Now that he was by himself, he didn’t need the space, and besides, he wanted to start wintering in Florida. Moving out allowed him a lot of freedom, but she was still sad to see the old place go.

They filled hundreds of boxes. Donated some things, threw some away; put some in storage, moved some to the new condo.

The day of her flight back, her father first drove to the old, empty house. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “You wait here.” She got out and leaned against the car, and her father walked in through the front door. She had walked with him through the house the day prior and seen that it was empty; she assumed that he just wanted to walk through one last time and revisit old memories.

After a few minutes, her father came back and handed her a horrible thing. It was about the size of a camping backpack, rising to a triangular point at the top; it was covered in what appeared to be a thin, short-haired, light-brown animal pelt, unmarred and unstitched, with no apparent pockets, zippers, clasps, or buttons. Some mysterious structure inside maintained a more-or-less rectangular shape, appearing hollow at the pointed top, and heavy and dense at the bottom. As she handled it, it seemed that it was filled with a thick, viscous substance, like honey, or molasses, or very fine sand; its center of gravity shifted as she moved it. It weighed about forty pounds.

“This is for you, daughter,” the man said. “It is very important to me that you have this.”

“What is it?”

“Your inheritance. Take it.”

“Dad, I don’t have room for this thing. I don’t know what it is. It’s hideous.”

“That’s fine. Just take it home with you. Make some room, put it away somewhere. The attic, the basement.”

She lived in a condo that had neither of those things, but she didn’t correct him.

“When you need it,” he said, “you’ll be glad you have it.”

She paid the extra forty dollars to check it with her other bag, and watched the woman at the counter turn it around in confusion before finally slapping a sticker on the side of it and throwing it onto the conveyor. She got on the plane, slightly worried about what would happen when they X-rayed it, or if the TSA decided they needed to open it and inspect the contents.

When she landed, she sat in the baggage claim for two hours, just watching the strange furry bony thing go around and around on the luggage return. Finally, she hauled it onto her cart, and then loaded it into her trunk, where it sat for two weeks. Eventually, she hauled it into her home and shoved it into a storage closet.

That’s where it sat. Periodically, she would remember it. When she did, the thought of it was always accompanied by the hope that she would never find out what it was, and that she would never need to.

Once upon a time, in the days when a sense of entitlement had value, a privileged baby boy was born. Because his parents were of a certain class, and were a certain color, and had money, the world was wide open to this boy, and he did not need to work very hard or become very smart in order to attain his goals.

After high school, the boy decided that he wanted to become a doctor, so he went to college, where he performed acceptably, and to medical school, from which he graduated in the bottom ten percent of his class. And because he attended one of the few medical schools with a Department of Anesthesiology, he became an anesthetic specialist; and because of his name, his class, and his face, he became the Head of Anesthesiology at a large hospital on the West coast.

He was not a good anesthesiologist. In those days, the science was still new: patients were given ether and sodium pentothal; good anesthesiologists killed one of of every thousand patients with anesthesia alone, and this was an acceptable risk. In this field, against these numbers, this doctor was worse.

“You don’t understand,” he would say, each time, after the review board had rendered a decision, and then he would explain. “The surgeon nicked an artery, and the patient lost a lot of blood, so of course the ratio of sodium pentothal was too high!”

Or he would say, “They didn’t tell me the patient was missing a leg, so it is understandable that I overdosed!”

Or he would whine, “It was all Joseph’s fault!” Joseph was the pharmaceutical purchasing representative for the hospital. “Joseph kept buying the wrong things, and then those things killed the patients!”

But no one gave credence to his claims.

After several years, when he had killed enough people, he was let go from the hospital. Because it was known in the medical community that he was not very good at his job, he was unable to find any work at any other hospitals.

So the man became an anesthesiologist at a large veterinary clinic, where animals were the only things he could accidentally murder at an inordinately high rate.

One day, the King of Foxes came calling at the veterinary clinic. He lay his scepter across the front desk, and adjusted his crown. “I seem to have fallen and broken my leg rather badly,” he said. “It hurts like the very dickens, and I have been assured that you provide the best care. Fix my leg, and everyone here shall be rewarded beyond their wildest dreams. Fail to fix my leg, and my skulk of foxes shall tear you to pieces.”

None of the doctors could stop staring at the anesthesiologist. As everyone knows, a wild animal with a broken leg must be put under general anesthesia in order to undergo surgery.

“For God’s sake, don’t mess this up,” said the Head Surgeon to the anesthesiologist.

Oh, how the anesthesiologist did sweat. As the doctors took x-rays, he ran into his office and read all about the unique biology of Vulpes Vulpes, the red fox. As the nurses shaved the leg, he carefully noted the King’s weight to the ounce, and began running complicated equations to determine the precise dosage of the anesthesia. As the King of Foxes spoke with his loved ones, he carefully measured the animal’s mouth and sternum.

The doctors all scrubbed in, and the anesthesiologist put the King of Foxes under.

After surgery, the entire operating room waited with bated breath. The surgery had gone well. The leg was pinned and casted. The patient was still alive, but there are many things that an anesthesiologist can do horribly wrong that will leave a patient alive. No one wanted the King of Foxes to be a vegetable, or even slightly brain damaged.

At last, the fox shook his head, muttered, and opened his eyes. He looked down at his cast and flexed his foot. The nurses scrambled to help him sit up.

“Thank you,” said the Fox King, when he had regained his faculties.

Everyone in the hospital breathed an enormous sigh of relief.

“Take them apart,” said the healed King of Foxes, and his skulk set upon the surgeons and nurses in a flurry of fangs and claws. They yanked the receptionist’s arm from its socket, and broke her neck. They burrowed into the Head Surgeon’s soft underbelly with sharp little teeth. And then they tore out the anesthesiologist’s throat, silencing a scream and leaving him gurgling to drown in his own blood.

As we all know, all foxes are liars; and the King of Foxes doubly so.

Illustration by the lovely and talented Bill Latham.

Once upon a time, during the Great Recession, a baby was born to two young parents in California. The parents were very poor, and had left the disapproval of friends and family in their hometown in order to have the baby. They were excited about the new life they were about to welcome into the world, but they were very scared as well.

The baby was born next to a dumpster behind a Wal-Mart in Bakersfield. His mother rinsed him off with a gallon of distilled water, and swaddled him in a roll of Brawny paper towels. She nursed him in the back seat of their 1992 Hyundai Excel, which was also where they were living and sleeping, while the father went into the Wal-Mart to shoplift some diapers.

They lived behind the Wal-Mart for several days, moving when they needed to, and eating cheap fast food. After two days, the baby had his first bowel movement, which was audible, and began to cry. His mother gave him a blind wipe with the remainder of the Brawny paper towels and threw the wad into an empty dumpster.

It landed with the clang of metal on metal. The boy’s father jumped in to investigate.

This baby’s body, through its own unique process of digestion, defecated pure 24-karat gold. It exited his body in a malleable form, but solidified within seconds; that first lump of gold was in the cast of his tiny buttocks and legs, and was imprinted with the repeating BRAWNY logo on the other side.

The baby’s father went into the Wal-Mart and weighed the gold in a produce scale. It amounted to nearly a quarter of a pound. He bought two apples and a hammer so as not to seem suspicious. Out in the parking lot, he used the hammer to pound the gold into two lumps, breaking it in half along the seam, and the two of them drove along the drag until they found a seedy store offering cash for gold and silver. The clerk offered them $900 for one of the lumps and $600 for the other, a pitifully offensive lowball which they happily accepted.

They slept in a hotel that night.

The baby consumed nothing but breastmilk for four years. His parents were afraid that his diet was the main reason for his output, and were afraid to make any change, until eventually his mother’s supply dried up. Over those four years, the price of gold had nearly doubled; the family lived in a nice house, and had nice cars, and owned a “gold mine” in Alaska, which was the purported source of their seemingly endless supply of pure gold. They had enough money that they could stop. So they fed him his first hamburger, fries and shake, and that was the end of the breastmilk.

The next morning, a twelve-ounce gold bolus clanked into the special plastic basin that they had set up to catch all of his leavings. So they fed him more hamburgers. In this way, their coffers filled, and their child became very large: the more they put into him, the more they got out.

When the time came, the family opted to have their son home-schooled by tutors; they had food delivered, and they only let him leave the house rarely, to limit the chances that they would need to fish in a public toilet for their profit, or explain their situation to an angry McDonald’s manager with a flooded bathroom.

When puberty came, the child was huge and angry and hairy and smelly and surly. He hated living in his house with his mother and father. He hated wearing Depends adult diapers every time he left the house, and he hated most of all the feeling of his bowel movements hardening and scratching him once he filled those Depends adult diapers. The sight of their basement vault filled with the smelted ingots of his feces made him sick to his stomach.

So he planned his escape. He gathered ten pounds of gold, in small nuggets. He paid one of his unscrupulous tutors to get him false identification, and a car, and a very nice tent.

The night he was to leave, he waited until his parents went to sleep, drank a whole bottle of laxative, and waited as long as he could. When he couldn’t wait any longer, he ran through the house, leaving a gold streak across all the furniture, the carpet, the nice hardwood floors. He got the counters, the wet bar, the trophy room; he painted the inset speakers, the leather sofa, the bookcases. He left a trail to the front door, put on his pants, and ran into the night, never to return.

That was the last time he shat gold.

He settled down in Canada, became a CPA. He married, and had children of his own, all of whom poop normally. Once in a blue moon, as he’s perched on his stool, he hears a small clink; when he does, he just sighs and flushes.

Once upon a time there lived a fortune teller. She performed her fortune telling in a small building off of a main thoroughfare in a large city, and her building was decorated with many neon signs. She sat in the building at a small round table in a dimly-lit room, wearing a scarf about her head, and gazed into a ball made of glass that was lit from beneath with many swirling colors. In this way, she built up many regular clients, and she also had many walk-in customers.

Now this fortune teller had not an ounce of supernatural talent. Like the overwhelming majority of those purporting to be psychic, she could no more predict the future than she could fly to the moon. However, this woman (unlike most fortune tellers) did not harbor the delusion that she was special. She knew that she was a fraud.

What this fortune teller could do was read people very well. When someone walked in the door, she could tell immediately their approximate age, relationship status, emotional state, and many other things besides. If a fellow with a bad gray comb-over walked through her door and shook off his umbrella as he sat down, she could look at his hands and tell you if he was single, married, or divorced, a construction worker or a court reporter; she could look at his shoes and jacket and tell you his basic lifestyle and economic status; she could look at his eyes through his glasses and tell you if he was very sad, or hopeful, or skeptical.

Many times, people would come in asking questions to which they already knew the answers. A man would come in and sit down, red-eyed and damp, and ask if his wife was cheating on him. A woman would come in and ask if she was going to get fired. Someone would come in and ask if they would ever see their estranged parent again. She would hold their hands, and gaze into the crystal ball, and confirm for them what they already believed.

One night a woman came in, looking tired and ragged and soaked through with rain. She sat down at the table, and the fortune teller saw that she was not very well off, middle-aged, married (likely to someone for whom she felt no great affection), and from a difficult background. She saw that this woman was deeply skeptical.

The woman took out a damp newspaper and laid it down on the table. Then she took out a small, crumpled scrap of paper and lay it down next to the newspaper. “I just won two million dollars in the lottery,” she said.

The fortune teller looked into the woman’s eyes.

The fortune teller slowly pushed the candle on the table toward the newspaper and the scrap. The woman looked at the candle for a long time. Then she slowly lifted the lottery ticket into the flames.

After the woman left, the fortune teller turned off the lights and all the neon signs. She locked the door behind her.

Once upon a time, O children, there was a woman who worked as a librarian. She was a very good librarian, and she lived a long, successful, and generous life. Eventually, through no fault of her own, she became elderly, died, and went to hell.

Now, when you go to hell, O children, the first thing that happens is that your face is removed. All the skin and the fat. Your nose and your eyelids and your ears. Zip!

This leaves only the nerves, the muscular fascia, and the eyes. This is for a variety of reasons: so you can’t recognize people you knew in life; so you can’t make subtle facial expressions; so you will exist in near-constant pain; so you can’t judge attractiveness; so you cannot look away from unpleasant things; and so on.

The second thing that happens when you go to hell, O children, is that your fleshless head is removed from your body and mounted upon a small platform with wheels. Then your platform is placed in an enormous room, larger than all the oceans, alongside all of the other fleshless heads, each with their own wheeled platform. Then, the floor tilts and pitches and yaws, and all of your heads roll hither and yon, colliding and spinning and moving very quickly.

Now, children, because you have no hands, you cannot protect yourself from colliding with other heads. Because you have no skin, every collision hurts and aches and stings. Because you cannot cover your eyes, you have to watch every impending crash. Because you cannot cover your ears, you can hear every other fleshless cranium screaming and complaining and cussing.

Remember, children, this is not every hell; this is just the hell where this particular woman went.

The woman spent many years in this hell, never sleeping, never knowing the respite of rest, or cool water, or food, or the nonviolent touch of another living thing. The sun perpetually beat down upon her, and the hot wind was unceasing. There were days when the tilting of the ground was lazy and slow, and days when it was very steep and fast.

One day, the tilt was very steep. The woman found herself clumped up with a great many other fleshless heads, with more heads raining down upon them and grinding into their tender nerves. The woman clenched her teeth and waited for this particular pain to subside, and found that many others did the same, although some of them were doing it to try to keep their mouths shut so nothing would drip inside.

There, in the large pile of heads, waiting for renewed and different pain, she listened to the heads around her, which she normally could not do, because everything moved too fast.

“Boy, this is terrible,” said one of the heads. “My cheek meat is raw from crashing into another fellow’s forehead. My tongue is torn from flipping over on the surface. One of my eyes burst last year and it’s been growing back so very slowly, itching the entire time. This is awful. I mean, this is really, really bad.”

“Aw, it’s not so bad,” said one of the other heads. “It could be worse.”

“You kind of get used to it after a while,” said a third head.

Aha, thought the woman. After a while, I will get used to it. This, at last, is something I can look forward to.

Then, O children, the woman crumbled into nothingness and returned to earth, a fresh-faced infant ready to begin anew.

The art at the top of this post is by Grady Gordon.