Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls by Brian Hodge

Author:Brian Hodge
Language: en-us
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: horror
Publisher: Darkside Digital
Published: 2010-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

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I’ve always wondered what her dentist would have said if he’d ever gotten a chance to see her teeth again.

It wasn’t a hard thing to do, and I was able to get a closer look at her mouth than she expected, because I had a telescope, all the better to see everything on the earth and sky I was missing. Roni stood in her window and smiled a wide, crazy smile, and I let it fill the telescope’s eyepiece, and first drew her teeth the way they were, how the ones around the side tilted in and one in the front overlapped the other. Then I concentrated really hard and started changing the lines a little at a time. Twice she said it hurt, but didn’t want to stop.

After we were done, it took a while before she came back from the bathroom mirror. But she said I’d done a good job.

It wasn’t the first time I’d fixed something, and I was better at it by now than I was before, when I was smaller and my fingers didn’t move as well, and this was all new to me, and something my parents didn’t understand. All I’d done until that time was little things around the house, like switch the arms and legs on a dancing figure that spun around on top of my mother’s music box. They never suspected, not until the night they had a party, for Christmas, I think, and they marched me around to all the guests, and had me show off things I’d drawn so everyone could see what a great artist they had here.

One of the guests asked me to draw his portrait.

So I did.

Except I drew him the way I wanted him, because I didn’t like him. He was loud and his breath stank and he spit when he talked and it hurt my ears to be around him, so first I drew his ugly flapping mouth, and then I smeared it out, and his eyes, too, to stop him from looking at me the way he was starting to.

That changed the party in a hurry.

My parents figured things out, finally, and made me put him back together again, but I was scared by then, and didn’t draw as well, and it was the first time I’d tried to make anything the way it was before. A few days later, when I was eavesdropping on my parents as they argued about what to do with me, I heard them say the man was going to be having surgeries for years.

So it was good to help Roni.

But there wasn’t much else that needed changing, so the rest of the time I just drew without any other reason behind it, mostly other places I would rather be, if only I knew how to get there.

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