Young Writers Society

A fog crept through the town.

He and his mother sat on the living room couch, watching her favorite show. It was a cheesy comedy, some sort of plot involving Patricia loving Harry but John loving Patricia and Patricia's best friend being married to John, and they aired it every Saturday. You could always anticipate all the jokes.

Patricia said something idiotic again. Jacob's mother, who was eating pie and sausages at the same time and had begun to choke with laughter, coughed onto her plate a wad of half-chewed protein and carbohydrates. This provoked another round of laughter. Jacob sighed, leaning back into his seat.

"Let's do something today, why don't we?" he suggested.

"You can't see an inch in front of your nose out there." Mrs. Grimm waved vaguely at the window before returning her attention to the telly screen. Her eyes reflected its flickering light.

"Inside, I mean. Like a board game. We have Ouija and Twister and Clue, and a bunch of other stuff that's collecting dust in the cabinet. And you used to read stories to me. I liked that."

She laughed. "You're too old for that," she said.

"Fables and fairytales were your favorite, remember? 'The Sheep and the Swallow'?"

But it was like talking to a robot, whose lexicon consisted solely of the phrases "I don't feel like it," "can't you do that yourself?", and "I'm busy, honey; go yabber about your day elsewhere." Jacob could hardly believe this was the woman who put his dinner in the blender when he couldn't recite a prayer, or when he'd forgotten to pray before bedtime and she made him read half the New Testament before giving him permission to leave the house--as if the grief had swallowed her completely. Swallowed her and defecated her into a toilet only too happy to flush her away, and he sure wasn't going down into the sewers to retrieve the remnants.

"Here." A brief moment of hope as she dragged her gaze from the telly and searched through the books on the coffee table. Then it was extinguished as she emerged holding a paper clip. "Be creative. You have four hours to impress me."

Disgusted, Jacob left.

There remained just enough brain in Mrs. Grimm to make dinner and go to work, but otherwise she'd lapsed into a state of near-quiesence. The job had fallen to Jacob to keep the family functioning. He was eleven years old. Wilhelm was ten.

In the beginning, she'd depended on her own siblings to fix their financial issues.She worked a job at a local grocery store that sold everything from bread to bread--really, she'd joked in the days that she was still partially sane, they have two-and-a-half different brands of pumpernickel, and you can even get a four-pound bag of breadcrumbs. It wasn't anything near enough to support the family. And in the beginning, her siblings had answered her call. They fed her a bit of money, and it should've been enough, in addition to the money the government had given her ... but she'd blown it.

That was when it became clear to her children something was wrong.

Jacob sat on the front steps of the house. The fog that'd been creeping through the town brushed softly his face and neck. He touched the area of contact, absentminded, certain for a moment he'd felt something, but returned his hand to his lap and continued staring at the horizon.

It'd been about ten minutes before he was alerted to a presence behind him.

"Bored?" said Wilhelm.

Wilhelm was thirteen months younger than Jacob, with a feminine chin and round cheekbones. People knew him as the charismatic person of the family, the child that'd inherited all his parents' best traits, and they wondered how he and Jacob maintained such a strong friendship.

"No," said Jacob, "I'm occupied with staring into space. It takes a lot of concentration. See, you have to select a point to fix your eyes on, and you can't stray from that point, and you have to tilt your head to the left a perfect thirty-six-degree angle that just enables you to drift off without looking idiotic."

"And then?"

"And then," said Jacob, "you have to sift through your brain for a mindless topic to mindlessly think about for the next five minutes. This is the most difficult part."

"You're weird," said Wilhelm.

There's the charismatic guy for you.

"I brought a baseball if you want to play catch in the yard, but it looks like you're occupied, so..."

Jacob leapt up, so suddenly it was as if a porcupine had crawled underneath him. "Daydreaming can wait."

They relocated to the front yard and threw the ball back and forth a few times before it became evident the fog had confused their hand-eye coordination. They tried moving to the driveway, but that was worse, so they trudged back toward the front steps and sat, tossing the ball up in the air. Wilhelm dug some peanuts from his pocket and began snacking.

"This is exciting."

"Yeah," Jacob agreed. "Got my baseball, peanuts, and a bit of fog. I'm ready for an adventure."

"Who said I was giving you any peanuts?"

But two seconds later Wilhelm was dumping unshelled peanuts into Jacob's hand, muttering, "You have a rubbish puppy-dog face."

"That's my normal face," said Jacob.

"It's still rubbish."

Then the door creaked open behind them. There was their younger sister, something that looked like cheap lipstick smeared on her lips, and their even younger brother, marinara sauce smeared on his face. They smiled expectantly. "We're bored," Jacob's sister announced. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot. Jacob guessed she'd been trying to quiet their brother with spaghetti and meatballs, the only food he was willing to eat, and that she wanted to leave the house before someone could command her to do the dishes. It was her least favorite chore--she often tried to bribe Jacob by offering to do his homework.

"Good for you," he returned.

"We want to walk around town, but Mom says we should have adult supervision."

"Me?"

His brother nodded, shoving his thumb into his mouth.

"It's not like I was doing anything important, I guess." Jacob rose to his feet. He looked at Wilhelm and said, "Coming?"

"Of course!"

He snorted. There should've been a law against acting so cheery in dismal weather. They walked down the street, Wilhelm linking hands with their younger siblings and Jacob keeping his firmly by his side. The sun twinkled above them, creating shadows across the pavement and asphalt and trees, and walking past the graveyard, behind the tombstones. Something was vaguely unsettling about the way they cut through the fog. Elliptical. Like hands stretching outward.

And if Jacob hadn't been so preoccupied keeping his siblings under control, he might've noticed the cloaked figure behind them, with his fingers wrapped around a ruby-topped cane.