A monster emerges from the shadows. He is followed by another, and another, until the world is inhabited by new beasts of its own creation. This anthology incorporates stories from various genres and timelines, exploring what makes us who we are.
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A car honked, its tires screeching.
My eyes widened.
Light filled them up.
The vehicle slowed to a halt just inches from running me over.
I couldn't move, paralyzed, longing to wake from a nightmare. Dreams brought relief in those years. My legs wobbled. Gazing into the headlights that flooded the quiet night, I yanked at my shoulder bag as the driver emerged.
He wore a large coat.
It reminded me of Daddy's.
People notice the oddest things when frantic, I've learned.
"Adolfo?" called a woman inside the vehicle.
I shook as the gust parted my hair.
"Don't come out!" the man named Adolfo yelled back to the woman.
My hands quaked, fisted at my sides.
His wrinkles deepened as he squinted through the pensive, grim, lonely night his vehicle's blinding headlight eyes had cut in two.
"Kid?" he muttered.
I recoiled from the twin beams illuminating me and staggered into the darkness.
"Adolfo!" The voice of the woman in the car reached a hysterical pitch. "Adolfo!"
"Don't come out!" repeated the man.
I lingered in the black.
"Non c'è niente da temere." He spoke Italian, exhaling panicked and misting gasps yet doing his obvious best to comfort me, probably recognizing in my facial features a number of key similarities to himself, the delicate, angular truths of ethnicity, but I was a child and he looked so old there in the cruel, cold darkness, his gray hair twinkling silver as he stepped in front of the headlights. "Mi occupo di questo, tu rilassati." He approached, slow, slow. "What's a boy doin' out here at midnight?"
I gave him no answer.
He'd receive nothing from me.
"Adolfo Vincenzo Giordano!" screeched the woman in the car.
He put up his hands and nodded. "You thirteen, kid? Fourteen?"
I glared.
"Christ's sake, you look twelve." His bloodshot eyes fluttered. "I almost killed you. What's your name?"
"Lenny," I mumbled.
"You t-talked." He spun back for the car. "The kid talked, Mildred!"
I didn't accept his worry.
No one seemed to have noticed me before him.
"Mildred!" Adolfo jumped up and down, coat flapping. "Mildred! Mildred!"
