For Shits and Giggles [2024]

Chapter 01

Waking up each morning felt like some form of punishment. The alarm clock always rang too loud, the sky was always too dark, and the house, as always, was too empty.

Gracie woke up that morning with a jump. Her phone read 5:30, as it did every workday, and she groaned. It took longer than usual to hit snooze. Her hand was still sore from yesterday's accident, when the Café's industrial oven decided to malfunction and engulfed her left arm. The smell of machine smoke and burning flesh was overwhelming, and so the Café decided to close early. Everyone went home. Everyone except for the manager, Paola, who stayed behind to get the Café looking and smelling like new.

The nails, skin, and meat on Gracie's hand had fused together into one grotesque, claw-like shape made of melted, slightly charred flesh. Today, Gracie's hand was fully back to normal. She opened and closed her five (now separated) fingers slowly, watching them through half-asleep eyes. The tendons moved as they should have. The skin stretched and pulled in the way it was supposed to. Even after two years, she was mesmerized by how expertly the Tree would recraft her body. The Tree, the savior. 

Even her nails looked longer and healthier. Despite this, it was still much too early, and her bed much too comfortable, for Gracie to give into the whims of some needy alarm clock.

Gracie also understood that she had no choice. Rotting the day away in bed like she really wanted to just wasn't an option. Preparing breakfast, going to work, seeing friends, enjoying her hobbies were all vital parts of her routine. And routine was crucial. Without the familiar, comfortable monotony of every day, the Tree's fickle sense of humor would consume you. Feeling hopeless, feeling helpless—that for Gracie was the scariest thing in the world.

Of course, things that could physically hurt you, or even kill you, were still scary. But when you know you'll always wake up the next day, alive and whole, death starts to lose its weight. Without finality, it becomes just another part of the routine.

But depression, the kind Gracie feared, only gets more terrifying the longer you're alive. Getting stuck in an unending cycle of nothingness—feeling nothing, loving nothing, being nothing—and knowing that not even death can free you in hopes of something better in the next life, that wasn't something Gracie ever wanted to experience again.

It was like having no mouth but needing to fill your lungs and scream.

That's why it was crucial, in the town of Pleasantwood, to approach each day with intention, to will yourself to be okay and keep going. And if you couldn't, you had to at least pretend. 

Gracie took on each day with this in mind; yesterday's horrors stayed in the past. She left her burdens at the front door each evening. She scrubbed away any remnants of her day in the shower, scrubbed so hard she bled, careful not to bring any part of the day into her bed. She had already spent hundreds of sleepless nights pondering the Tree's existence. Why us? Why now? Do we deserve this? How can we make it stop? But the answers never came.

Just outside, Tommy was quickly approaching her house, barreling down the street on his bike with a bag full of newspapers hanging off his shoulder. It was true that hardly anybody read the papers anymore. Why would they?

Nothing was ever new in Pleasantwood. And without access to the outside world, without access to the internet or radio stations that weren't local, all the news ever was was death. The paper was full of who died today, and how they felt about their death the next day. Was it on purpose, would they do it again? 

But delivering papers didn't require much skill. Other than pedaling quickly and throwing with accuracy, there wasn't much to it. It was the perfect arrangement for someone like Tommy, whose adult mind had been robbed by the Tree.