Freckles

More about Freckles

The back closet breathed like a sick lung. Damp wood sweated. Mold stitched green constellations across the walls. A single bulb trembled, throwing a jaundiced cone of light onto a boy everyone called Freckles, because his face was a map of rusted stars.

He liked the quiet in that closet. Quiet meant control. The small animals he brought there—field mice, a frog cupped in shaking hands, a sparrow fallen from the eaves—made sounds at first. Then they went still. Freckles listened to the stillness as if it were a prize. He told himself it was curiosity, told himself it was science, told himself anything that made the tight feeling in his chest behave.

The closet learned him. It learned his footsteps, the pause before the latch, the way he breathed faster when the door closed. The animals learned too. The mice left seeds in lines that pointed toward the drain. The spiders pulled their webs low, closer to the floor, where the air stayed wet. Ants arrived, a patient black grammar, spelling paths between cracks.

One evening the bulb flickered and died. The closet went thick with dark. Freckles laughed and clicked the latch shut anyway. He did not hear the sound that followed—many small sounds, agreeing.

Something brushed his ankle. Then another. The floor shifted under his shoes as if it had grown a skin. He stamped, swore, reached for the door. The latch did not answer. From the corners came the whisper of legs, the soft insistence of bodies too small to fear him now. The ants found the warmth of his socks. The mice did not squeak; they pushed. The frog, alive and patient, pressed cool against his calf.

Freckles shouted. The closet answered with damp echoes. He fell, hands scraping mold, and the mold did not mind. It had been fed before.

When the door finally opened, the room was quiet again. The closet exhaled. Freckles crawled into the light, shaking, his freckles pale as chalk. He did not go back there. He did not bring anything small into dark places. Outside, the mice took the long way through the grass. The ants returned to their grammar. The closet kept its lessons, written in green.