JARED WASN’T SURE WHICH he hated more: the others chanting miss-mary-mack-mack-mack, or the clink of their chains between each clap.

His own manacles chafed his wrists when he lifted his arms as far as they’d go to cover his ears. He strained, pulling the chains taut—just a few more millimeters and he could force the meat of his palms flush against the sides of his head—but he could only bring them close enough to muffle the noise. He looked out the attic window, into the abandoned house across the street. Against his own will, the voice of his mother praying over two decades prior swept through his mind. He ground his teeth until the memory went away.

“You’re wasting your time,” Braeden said, breaking the game. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ve all been through a lot. It’s completely normal to see things, after what’s happened to you.”

There it was. Completely normal.

“Not things. I didn’t see things. Something. I saw something move. In that window. Last night. Maybe someone. Maybe someone with a phone,” Jared said.

He examined the building’s rotting, ivy-swept siding closely, straining his eyes to make them out like a riddle. In the light of day, he could just barely see the top half of the attached house number. He was sure that if only he could parse the address, he’d know where he was.

The first digit was a 3, that much he was certain of, but the other trailing behind it danced somewhere between an 8 and a 9.

“All I’m saying is we have a better chance of working together to make an escape plan than we do of waiting for outside rescue,” Braeden offered. The mere thought of doing anything with Braeden gave Jared a headache, so he chose not to engage further.

Something fell on his shoulder. He turned his head to peek at it from the corner of his eye. He found Ryan’s shoelace.

“Did you undo that and toss it with your toes, you weirdo?” Jared shuddered the lace off his shoulder as though it were a worm.

“Come on, play with us,” Ryan replied. “The last one did.”

“And where is he now?”

“Where you’re about to be if you don’t shut up,” Braeden said.

Ryan stuck his hand out to Braeden and wiggled his eyebrows. “Miiiiiiisss… Mary… Maaaaaaa… don’t leave me hanging… I bet your kids love this game… aaaaaaa—”

Braeden’s shoulders relaxed. “-ck,” he pitched in. “All dressed in…”

The light pressure of Jared’s palms against his ears provided just enough cover to mask the sound of the trapdoor opening. However, the thud of footsteps on the attic floor penetrated the gaps in his fingers. Jared tore his eyes from the window to find a fitted suit jacket and a tousled crown of blond hair towering above him, facing the others.

“Are you having fun?” The man asked. Jared could feel his pulse in the tips of his fingers. “I miscalculated, I think, keeping you in one place.”

Ryan’s shaking head blurred in Jared’s peripheral view. From between the man’s legs, the straight, Jared saw the angry line of Braeden’s mouth break into a frown. Ryan shook his head. The man turned to Jared.

“Your friends don’t like that idea very much. You?”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” Jared said carefully, with an even voice. “Whatever you think is best. I don’t need the company.”

The man returned his attention to Jared’s attic-mates. He knelt on one knee and closed a hand between his face and Braeden’s ear. Whatever was said in the space between, Jared could hear only the sound of Braeden’s breath hitching.

“I don’t believe you,” Braeden said, but the you wavered.

“Well, it’s true. There were always a few wires loose, there, from what I can tell, but I’m sure the abandonment didn’t help. Here. He left this.” The man withdrew a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and smoothed it against his thigh, then held it before Braeden.

Braeden’s eyes traced the lines, and then he struggled against his chains with such desperate force that his arm cracked and fell against his body at the wrong angle. He retched and screamed until Jared thought his own eardrums might burst. When Braeden couldn’t scream any more, he wept, rocked backward, and curled into a fetal position.

The man produced a glass vial from the same pocket. He pressed it to Braeden’s cheek and let it fill with tears, then tucked the sloshing tube of liquid away.

After this, he unlinked Braeden’s bonds from the ground and hoisted him over his shoulder. Braeden must have passed out. Snot and flaking vomit fell to the ground from his face while his broken arm pointed to the ceiling, but he made no sound.

Jared listened hard to the sound of the trapdoor creaking open, the man’s receding footsteps as he descended the stairs, the creak as the door closed the hole in the floor, the click and latch of the lock. The man came back for Ryan next, and then the attic was Jared’s.

Jared turned his gaze back to the window, straining to make out what he could. A few hours later, the man fed him. When Jared felt the lip of a glass reach his lips, he pulled as much of the water into his mouth as he could.

The second the trapdoor was closed, he spat it out.

Late in the evening, when the aching need to sleep pulled at every muscle in his body, he saw it again.

Something moved in the attic across the street.

The longer he looked, the more certain he became that a live human being stood at the window opposite him, unbound, breath fogging up the glass.

As he looked, a fingertip glided across the misted window, leaving in its wake a sputtering trail of letters. Jared nearly choked.

“NEED HELP?”

He lurched forward to etch his reply, stopped short by a biting pain in his arm where metal broke flesh. Blood dripped onto the floor beneath.

He lifted his uninjured wrist and spat into the lock, trying to wiggle himself out of it a little, just enough to get closer to the window. It did all of nothing in his favor. He leaned back onto his uninjured hand.

Ryan’s shoelace greeted his palm. Feeling it, he knew what he had to do, and it pained him even more than the scrape on his arm. He was only glad that Ryan couldn’t take any satisfaction from what was next to come.

With concentrated wiggling, he undid his lace well enough to get a shoe off and stick the foot out. His big toe just barely made contact with the glass. He brought it back and rubbed it in the little puddle of blood.

“HURTING US”

With a heavy breath, he ducked down to watch the other window for a reply.

When none came immediately, he leaned back to double check his work. It dripped, but it was legible.

His stomach dropped.

To him. It was legible to him. Which meant on the other side, it read backward. With a layer of sweat gathering on his brow, he furiously wiped the last S with his socked toe until the glass behind it was clear.

He went to work erasing the remaining letters, but hadn’t gotten much farther when a cloud of breathy puffs spread once more over the window across the street. The person there moved more quickly than Jared could read. He squinted at the quick-fading condensation.

“HILARIOUS,” the silhouette wrote. The word hovered before Jared’s bloodshot eyes until long after the fog which held them faded. He rubbed the remainder of his window clean, then pushed his arms against his bracelets and traded messages with the silhouette until the first rays of sun pulled up the morning.

The man came to him then, but Jared was ready. When a fist met Jared’s cheek and cracked a tooth, he spat it out. When the man told him that it was pointless to struggle, that no one cared what happened to him, that he would never, ever get out, Jared offered assurance that he’d find a way to keep his date with the man’s mother that night, then laughed so hard it hurt his throat.

He listened to the man walk the halls below him to another room for another guy. He listened, too, when the man got what he wanted there. Jared recognized the hoarse sobs that floated through the boards in the trapdoor as Ryan’s.

When the trapdoor next opened, Jared swallowed every drop of water pressed to his lips. Thinking of his body objectively, he observed that the open cuts on his arms hurt, but he did not indulge the sensation of pain. He held in its place something warm and new in the shape of the silhouette in the other attic, the knowledge that he no longer needed to abstain from drink in order to reserve the shining piece of himself the man so badly wanted to separate from him.

The drooping of his eyes and the soreness between his ears grew with nightfall. He savored these sensations as appetizers for his rendezvous with the silhouette, and with each passing ragged breath, the time grew nearer.

The sun made its departure and the silhouette appeared. For almost longer than he could bear, it faced in every direction except his, until at last it turned, and he felt himself glow in its sight, with all his scabs and bruises.

“CRY?”

He made new cuts and began his half of the work.

“NO”

The silhouette’s next reply knocked the ache right out of him. He fixed each letter in his mind so that even when he closed his eyes they were there, blinking in his empty spaces like beacons to whatever scrap of him-ness that still flickered beneath the chains in the dusty dullness of the attic.

“BADASS”

When the trapdoor next opened, he was ready to laugh again, and harder than ever before. The hand which emerged from the hole in the floor, though, shook and bled and bloomed in purple spots.

Ryan’s head followed his hands, then his shoulders and a limping leg.

“Get away from me,” Jared said. “Get away.” But it was no use. Ryan knelt, a pair of pliers glittering dully from his hand in the light of the window.

“It’s okay,” Ryan said. “We’re going to be okay. He can’t hurt us anymore. I’m going to get you out of here.”

“Braeden?” Jared prompted. Ryan shook his head, eyes glistening.

As Ryan drew closer, struggling with the pliers, Jared felt a nausea so greedy that it wouldn’t be contained by his stomach. It billowed through every inch of him, revulsion so clear and simple he could feel it in his knuckles, his kneecaps.

When he was free he kicked Ryan in the gut. Ryan sprawled on the floor, winded and groaning. Jared plucked the pliers from where they fell and lifted them above his head with both hands.

“Why?” Ryan asked, clutching his stomach and trying, and failing, to inch away from Jared with his one good leg. Jared brought the pliers down into Ryan’s face, feeling the corners of Ryan’s mouth jump at the collapse of skin and bone. He heard himself laugh.

“With silver… buttons… buttons…” he chanted to no one between swings of the pliers. “What? Isn’t this how it’s played?”

With the new well of ink pouring from the hole in Ryan’s face, he got an early start on his message to the silhouette. He reveled in his newfound ability to write without his legs cramping.

“STILL HERE. STILL HILARIOUS. STILL BADASS.”

He went downstairs to raid the man’s food supply. He found on the dining table an envelope addressed to 39 Gem Street.

From the downstairs window, the house number across the street was plainly visible, and echoed the writing on the envelope. He slid his thumb under the flap to open the envelope and dumped its contents on the table.

new initiative likely to support more samples over longer period of time than was the case with predecessor do thank you as always for ingenuity

Jared read and re-read these handwritten lines no fewer than six times. At the end, he decided it was another of the man’s tricks. He folded it in two and tore it down the middle.

With a full belly and the words of Ryan’s game stuck in his head, he made his way back to the attic. He cracked his neck and he waited for night to come, for his chance to speak with the silhouette who would look on him and say he was far from completely normal, that he was set apart, set above, fearfully and wonderfully made.

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