by Justin D. Anderson

They fear the boy but act like they don't: A couple years back when the boy still couldn’t walk and slept all night, the husband shared a pillow-talk scenario – ‘What would you do if you woke up in the middle of the night and the boy was standing there in the doorway?’ – and he’d only once seen his wife so disturbed: Back before the boy came along and they were fixing up the nursery and they lived way out in the country, he snuck outside and went around in the darkness and snow to the window of the nursery (where she was arranging stuffed animals) and stood close to the glass and made a face in it and waited for her to look and when she did, her body seized and her face twisted into something more terrifying than any face he could have made at her from the window.