Now

Eli says I can come over on Saturday, but I have to be quiet when we go inside, because his mom will be home all day. One time on the playground behind the swings, Eli told me that he hates his mom, and I didn’t know what to say, so I just said it was pretty cool. He wants me to have my parents drop me off at 733 Hamilton street, which is his next door neighbor’s house. He’ll meet me in the yard out front, and then we’ll sneak in. I say yes because it’s the first time all year I’ve been invited to anyone’s house, and because I’m excited by the idea of getting away with something. 

Eli’s all smiles and Thank you, Mrs. with my parents, but when they drive away, the other face comes out, the one that makes me think of a fox with its leg in a trap. He has me crouch down so I can’t be seen through the window, and then we run around to the back of the house. He opens the door first to scout, and a few seconds later, we’re in his room. 

I tell Eli I like his room, and he gets mad at me and says I need to whisper. I say it again, quieter, even though it’s a lie. The walls are bare and the floors are clean but everything else is covered in a thick layer of homework and toys and old trash. Nothing’s anywhere on purpose. Everything has been dropped or tossed, and it makes the room look like a years-long accident. 

Eli says he wants to show me a secret. He says even his mom doesn’t know it, and she’s always spying on him trying to figure it out. He says it’s the way he gets away with things. He says he can get away with anything he wants, and once I know it, I can too. I just nod, but I’ve never listened so closely. I always knew there had to be a secret. 

He says you have to hold your head at just the right angle, and then wait a little. He says you have to be calm, but not too calm. He tilts his head back a little more than halfway and to the right, so I can see straight up his nostril. Then, his face, which had been blank, suddenly takes on a new expression. It looks like hunger. 

He says it’s my turn now, and then he puts my head in his hands and guides it gently back. My skin tingles, electric, under his fingers, and I feel a fear rising up into my chest. He isn’t the one I’m afraid of. 

Then, the world cracks. 

Without movement, jagged black gaps appear in the walls, the floor, down the middle of the unmade bed. On either side, the room continues just the way it used to, and between them, pitch darkness, the mouths of thin caves. Eli smiles at my astonishment, and he hides a flicker of relief. I almost miss it because I’m staring at the scar on his face, the one that starts under his tousled hair, cuts between his eyes, then slips down his throat and vanishes into a Metallica T-shirt. 

“Most of them can’t see it,” he says, and beckons me over to the empty bedroom wall, where the widest of all the cracks gapes like teeth all the way down to the floor. There’s just enough space for him to slip his fingers into it and I wince when he does, because the dark in between them isn’t still. It writhes and squirms, breathes in and out, like the maggots in a walking corpse. 

Then, he pulls his hands apart, and the crack opens, yawning larger with each second. I try to make sense of it as it happens. Did he move the wall? The whole house? Is the world itself split here, just beside his bedroom door? His joyful grin is cut into twin smirks by the dark line down his face. Light still refuses to penetrate into the new space. 

“Where’s it go?” I ask. 

“Out,” he says, and that wild hunger flashes in his eyes. 

I wouldn’t have done it if he weren’t looking at me, but for him, I turn sideways and squeeze between the wall’s jaws, into the moving space that can’t exist. As I step through, it takes on shape and substance. Rock, flat, but not perfectly flat, stretching up into shadowy heights that slope downwards and away. It isn’t possible, because we climbed stairs to get here, but even with my neck straight, I still see it. Water drips. The stone is warmer than it should be, and every step forward tightens it against me.  

“We can’t go this way,” I say, turning back. “It’s too-” 

Eli is running towards me, a fox free from a trap and pouncing at its prey. I want to tell him to stop, that he doesn’t have to do this, but he does. I can see that much. Instead, my eyes fix on the gap straight down his face. He doesn’t know about it, I realize. Just like I can’t see mine. My hands fly out, reaching for the only exit left. 

That night, at dinner, Eli’s parents watch me, quiet. They eat their food in near silence. His mother has a crack across her face and his father doesn’t. They already answered the phone call, and said they never heard anything about me coming over. Both of them are afraid. Not just because I’m a stranger, but because of the way I carry their son’s body. The way I look back at them. It frightens them. They’re frightened because they can tell I’ve found my way out. 

__________

Lillie E. Franks is a trans author and teacher who lives in Chicago, Illinois, but is normal about it. You can read her work at places like Flash Frog, Scaffold, and HAD or follow her on Bluesky at @lilliekoi.bsky.social. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.