You sit silently in the now empty room. You just lay in the bed, simply blinking, breathing, and clutching the glasses in your hand. You don't know what to make of this, of any of this. You don't understand how or why any of this is happening to you. None of this makes any sense. You are scared. The compulsion is still there, knocking on the back of your mind, whispering of how nice it would be to put the glasses back on. Reminding you of how badly you miss having the glasses on. You try your hardest to ignore the compulsion, but it is hard. It takes all your energy to not act on it. With every second that you remain unmoving, the compulsion grows, becoming more and more insistent, as though it were growing indignant with every passing second that it remains ignored. You have no way of knowing how long you sat there in the dim light of the bedroom. You realize time has passed only as you see the sunlight beginning to creep into the window. You haven't slept, not even for a moment. Your entire body is screaming its protest at being forced to stand, and to walk, to leave the bedroom. You run your fingers through your choppy chin-length hair, throw on the dress you came in, and your little kitten heals and heads out into the open morning air. You need to breathe; you need to clear your head. You are hungry. Ravenous would perhaps be the better word. You haven't eaten anything but striped candy since the funeral, and that was... two days ago? Your stomach grumbles. You need to get out of the house. You're not sure if you'll come back or not, but you know that at this moment, you need to put as much distance between it and yourself as you can. You don't bother locking the doors behind yourself. God forbid anyone breaks in and steals the great load of absolute nothingness that lays behind the unlatched doors. You shiver in the early morning chill. You momentarily think of the warm flannel and consider running back inside to grab it. You dismiss the thought as quickly as it arose. You don't want to be there right now, and your resolution is more staunch than your aversion to the cold. You rub your arms up and down to try to generate some warmth. It is then that you notice with a start that the glasses are still in your hands. Didn't you set them down? Have you been holding onto them this entire time? Surely not, but you must have. Otherwise, how did they get here? You want to put them down on the road and let the next car that drives by shatter them and whatever creature lives within them into absolute oblivion. But you can't. You don't understand why, but you can't, so you sigh and put them on the top of your head because this dress is tighter than a second skin, and you have nowhere else to put it. Your brain feels like it is in a fog as you walk down the road. You stumble into a gas station and grab a blue raspberry slushie and a hotdog. You sneak out the back of the store so you don't have to pay because you have no money. Not that you would pay if you did, as you have eaten more than your fair share of gas station hot dogs in your life and feel as though they ought to be paying you. You wish you had any place to stay besides that stupid fucking house. You wish you had any friends in the area, anybody you could hit up and stay with, but you don't know anyone here. It is just you, by yourself, all on your lonesome, and you are scared. You're more scared than you've ever been in your life. You sit in the parking lot and bite into the nasty gas station hotdog as mystery meat grease drips down your chin. "Hey, You! You didn't pay for that!" Comes the angry call of the middle-aged gas station manager who takes his job way too seriously. "Come on, man, it's just a hotdog; let it go." You grumble. You're just not in the mood for this. "I'll call the police!" He shouted. The sun was blaming off of his bald head; you can't see his face as he is backlit by the rising sun. You try to use your hand to shield your eyes from the sun. "Come on, man, it's really not that deep; you don't have to do that." You groan. The man sputters and stammers in anger. Before you even realize what it is that you're doing, you pull your sunglasses down to see him better. "Oh." Was all you could get out before you see it. It only took an instant, but as the gas station manager reached out to grab your arm, Laughing Jack materialized out of thin air the moment you slipped the glasses on, and he threw his head back, unhinged his jaw like a fucking snake. The manager's eyes widened as he saw the many rows of pointed teeth, but he didn't have enough time to scream. A moment later, there came the sickening crunch of bone and snapping viscera as Laughing Jack closed his mouth around the manager's bald head and tore it clean off. The manager fell to the ground, his neck a bloody, spurting stump, and the monochrome clown licked his lips with his striped tongue and enveloped you in a tight embrace. "Kitty!" He exclaimed. "It's me, your best friend, Laughing Jack!"
