WAMPUS
I don’t know how to explain it—what I saw, what I see.
There’s a psychiatrist who asks me about it sometimes.
He leans forward in that way they do, elbows on his knees, hands folded like he’s patient, but I can see it in his eyes—he’s waiting. He thinks I’ll finally crack. That whatever’s rotting inside me will rise to the surface if he just sits there long enough.
But I don’t tell him. Because I can’t.
How do you explain something like that? How do you put words to a thing that doesn’t belong in words?
If I tried—if I so much as hinted at it—I know exactly what look I’d get. That look with the scrunched brow. The practiced concern. The one where their lips press together just slightly tighter and their eyes go flat, even though they think they’re hiding it.
They can’t read my mind.
But I can read theirs.
And every time I sit across from him, every time he leans forward with that earnest tilt of the head—like I’m a crossword clue he’s sure he’ll crack if he just stares long enough—I can hear it. Not in words, not in any polite, measured question he puts to me, but in the vibration beneath it all, echoing like the faint buzz of a bad lightbulb in a darkened room:
This guy has lost his marbles.
And maybe I have. Maybe those marbles rolled under the couch years ago and gathered dust bunnies the size of fists. Maybe they’re down the drain, clicking against the pipes in some hellish crawlspace where rats gnaw at the insulation and the walls sweat in the dark.
But maybe—just maybe—that’s the only sane reaction left. Because once you’ve seen it—really seen it, the thing you were never meant to see, the thing no human eyes should have to swallow down—you don’t get to keep all your marbles neatly in the jar anymore. No, sir. They spill. They scatter across the floor of your skull.
And the truth is, you can’t get them back. Not when you’ve stood toe-to-toe with something the world insists doesn’t exist.
So maybe I’ve lost my mind.
But tell me—what kind of lunatic would still call himself sane after that?
And so my lips stay sealed.
Here, in the dark burrow where my mind’s eye wanders, when I truly find myself in that void of a cave, I’m not silent. She calls, soft and cruel, and I answer like a damn fool.
Dream or not, she finds me. She always does. Comes strutting out of the dark in that black leather, jacket half-open, dangling the bait. Her look is the kind that makes you feel cheap and wanted at the same time—like she already knows how this ends, and it’s her victory, not mine.
The place she drags me into isn’t a room, isn’t anywhere. Just black space thick as wet cloth, air damp enough to choke on. And the smell—sweet rot, like fruit left in the sun, like a carcass with sugar sprinkled on top. It seeps into me, runs hot in my veins, makes the hair rise on my arms. Wrong, but thrilling, like leaning over the tracks and feeling the train rush past your face.
She opens her arms. And damn it, I open mine, too.
I hate myself for that. I’ve hated it every single time.
Because I know this place. I know what she is. But the thing that chews me raw is worse: I want her. God help me, I want her.
She comes in close, slow, pressing herself against me like she was carved to fit there. My hand finds her back without me meaning it to, and her skin is warm, too warm, slick like something that shouldn’t be alive but still is.
Then she grins. Not a smile—a baring. Fangs where teeth should be, shining pale, wet. And her eyes, black as oil, no light in them, no bottom. She tilts her head, lips parting, invitation clear as a neon sign. And me—the fool, the addict—I lean in.
That’s when it rips apart. Her face, I mean. Splits like paper burning from the inside. For a blink she’s still beautiful, still the woman I crave. Then her jaw cracks sideways, too far, bones snapping, teeth multiplying like a shark’s. The breath that hits me is foul, grave-cold, thick with the stink of something dug up too soon.
And so I move timidly throughout my days like some lost wanderer who stumbles on a cave he wishes he hadn’t found, only to learn something’s waiting inside. Not a lion, not a panther—nothing you’d see in a nature special. This thing’s wrong. A misbegotten feline freak, stitched together from pieces memory doesn’t want to keep, crouched in the dark of me. That cave is my mind, and the beast breathes in the corners where thought turns rancid.
When it gets bad—when its claws drag along the walls in there—I lock myself in the bathroom and jerk myself off like a man possessed. Not for pleasure. No. But to choke off the pull, to keep from being lured to her like a man stripped of self-will, dragged on a leash of his own hunger.
Before I step further into the heart of this insanity, you should know why I stand here at all—while there’s still clarity left in me. Before she returns.
I was out with Dennis on a Friday night. I knew him for 16 years and in that time I’ve come to realize no one had ever walked the earth as smug and full of themselves as Dennis Perry. Atheist from Brooklyn—That was all you needed to know about Dennis.
He believed in nothing. Nothing above him. Nothing waiting for him. Life was one long sprint—you get one go at it. His unfiltered view of mere mortals was: What do you offer me? Time, money, purpose? The secret to immortality? No? Keep moving.
And that went for everyone. Even me.
Yet here we were in a bar that had somehow—over the course of four beers, morphed into an adult club. I remember the lights dimming and we moved from the bar to a booth. Women glided between tables like wraiths dressed in nothing but smiles and perfume, their skin catching the light in places your eyes didn’t mean to linger but did. And the worst part. The smoke. Stay in a place like that long enough and you’ll catch second, third and fourth hand smoke.
I looked at Dennis, then around. The truth was I wasn’t there because I wanted to be. I was there out of habit. Out of loyalty, maybe. Out of something that once passed for friendship but had long since rotted into nothing more than history.
And I thought, being married wasn’t so bad.
Sure, places like this overload you fast. Every sense cranked to redline until your brain feels like it’s floating three feet above your skull. The lights, the music, the stink of arousal tangled with desperation—it all short-circuits you. And for a while—longer than you’d admit—you let yourself buy into the trick. That you’re wanted. Desired. That you’re still twenty-five, and the best nights are waiting just past the next drink, the next song, the next body brushing too close.
But marriage grounds you.
You drag yourself home at the end of the day—the bullshit of the world clinging like mud, cops eyeing you like prey, still trying to squeeze into a world that’ll never let you in—and she’s there. Waiting. Dinner ready, smell filling the rooms like a promise you don’t get anywhere else.
And yeah, she wants your money. Who doesn’t? Everybody’s got their hand out in one way or another. At least with her, it makes sense. And sex doesn't have to be chased down because it's baked into the deal. Inevitable. You don’t have to crawl into some dive, tossing crumpled singles at strangers who wouldn’t know your name if you carved it into their skin. You don’t have to beg for it like a starving dog at the back door. No. You come home, and it’s there, part of the unspoken bargain, part of the weight that keeps you planted in this messy, goddamn world.
Dennis didn’t get that. Or maybe he didn’t give a damn. And yet somehow he was shacked up with a God-fearing woman—white coat doctor, no less—who still found time on her days off to cook and scrub floors. For a man who didn’t believe in God, he sure managed to hustle himself into the platinum-life package.
He snapped me out of the thought with his voice, sharp as a thrown bottle. “You’re stinking up the place.”
I could’ve argued it. Between the sweet musk of leather and the sharp funk of ass, the jury was still out on who reeked worse.
“It’s pissing me off,” he added, like punctuation.
“I was just thinking about the next round,” I said, sarcasm sandbagging the flood.
“I’m running to the bathroom. Have them bring another. This one’s on me.”
“Yeah? When you find your dick in there, try acting like you got one when you come back out here.”
I stood, half wondering if he’d had too many reposados and whether buying another round was charity or suicide. On the way to the bar I passed some middle-aged wreck, half-drunk, whispering too loud about paying for back-room service. His words sloshed into the air like spilt liquor.
Then came the girl with the neon rack—plastic tubes glowing radioactive, teeth flashing the kind of grin you only give the next fool in line. They called them blow jobs, because subtlety was dead in this place.
I passed. But I’d seen it before. They do a dance, hips shaking like some dollar-store Vegas showgirl, then tip the tube, bottom end in their mouth. The lips clamp down, and they tilt it back, pouring it into you while bobbing their head like they were giving—well. You know.
I shoved the bathroom door open with my shoulder. Inside, the light had that weird, two-faced quality—dim but sharp, like a morgue that hadn’t gotten the memo about being clean. The floor pulled at my shoes in one spot and tried to send me skating in the next. Above me, the fluorescent tubes hummed their dying-song, buzzing like the whole place was thinking real hard about giving up.
They lit just enough to make the wall art visible: graphite cocks, crooked hearts, initials in boxes. Somebody had even scrawled a phone number under the words Tightest in town.
I aimed for a stall. Each one had a little screen bolted above the door, angled down like it was waiting to judge you. At first, I figured it was ESPN, or maybe some old MTV trash, sound off so you could piss in peace while your brain dribbled elsewhere.
Then the ad rolled.
A woman’s voice came on, soft and slick, sliding into the ear like lotion: “Take a moment of relief.” And there she was—on the screen—a girl in black vinyl, hips swaying slow to music I couldn’t hear. Not a face you’d remember, not someone unique, just one of those carbon-copy dream girls you see out front, promising things you’re too drunk to believe and too horny to doubt.
Then the text flashed: Want something more? Have a private view. She’ll perform just for you… while you enjoy yourself.
Yeah.
I remember thinking if I hadn’t downed three whiskeys, I might’ve zipped up and walked out, bladder be damned.
I finished, somehow dirtier after than before, and lurched to the sink. It coughed water in fits, a stutter that barely got the soap off. Half a rinse. Good enough.
On the way out, my eyes snagged on a poster by the door. A woman in a full black suit, skin-tight, face hidden except for the eyes—wide and gleaming under a cat mask. The image twisted on me. Didn’t look like she was wearing a costume. Looked like that was her true hide, peeled tight and sleek, waiting for something stupid enough to wander close.
The words underneath: THE MAN EATER. Tonight.
I couldn’t tell you why it unsettled me right then. But it did. Maybe because I thought, Dennis, meet your match. Or maybe because sometimes words don’t just stick—they dig in.
And Christ, did they.
When I got back, Dennis was slouched in the booth, legs spread like he owned the joint, face set in that dead-flat expression he’d been carrying since we walked in. Why the hell does he have me here? Something was off. Too proud to confide in a friend of sixteen years, but too brittle not to break. And when he finally did crack, this—this place—was supposed to put Humpty together again.
Women drifted past, perfume clouds and swinging hips. A couple gave him the look—the one reserved for men who looked like they tipped big and left their hotel key on the dresser. He didn’t bite. Didn’t even glance twice.
Me? I watched the girls. Not out of want. Not anymore. But because I remembered what wanting used to feel like. Like being hungry in a dream where the food dissolves when you touch it. Nothing behind it. All appetite, no weight. Now it felt like a bygone era, something extinct, like phone booths or smoking sections in airports.
Dennis took a drag off his vape and let out a cloud that hung there in the half-light. I swear it twisted, thick and gray, and for a second it looked like one of those cartoon skull-and-crossbones warnings. Death by mango ice.
“I’m single now,” he said. Just like that.
No pause. No catch in the throat. He dropped it like he was reading off a bus schedule. It hit me so sideways I almost missed it in real time.
“What happened?” I asked, turning toward him, though I already knew the shape of it. “I liked Yvette. Hell, I thought you liked Yvette.”
“She kept asking about being married.” He sipped his reposado slow, deliberate, like the words had been too bitter and needed rinsing down to whatever deep hole he kept in his chest. His eyes were fixed on the stage, but he wasn’t watching the dancer. Not really. “I won’t be forced into that. She’s supposed to come by later, get the rest of her things.”
You gotta be fucking kidding me. I didn’t say it out loud, but I wanted to. Wanted to shove it across the table like a card in a losing hand. Way to fumble the bag, as people say now. Narcissistic bastard, and still she’d wanted him, overlooked all the sharp edges just to imagine a life smoothed out. I couldn’t picture what it did to her when he snapped it all off at the stem. Couldn’t picture it without seeing her collapse inward, glass shattering in a thousand pieces, cutting herself to ribbons just trying to gather it back up.
I leaned back. The music thudded through the room like a slow heartbeat, but my head wasn’t there anymore.
I thought back to Kelly’s thirty-second birthday cookout, because the brain likes to tuck things away like receipts you’ll never throw out. Yvette was there, folded into a plastic chair on the patio, thumbs working her phone like she was trying to be part of the party without actually being in it. The sun had done something to her—she wasn’t her usual shea-butter self but a darker, almost-almond color, like somebody had taken an extra measure of late-afternoon light and rubbed it into her skin. She looked happy enough, if you measured happiness in smiles that had to be held together with dental floss. There was a tightness at the edges, like she was taping the corners of herself down so she wouldn’t fall apart for everyone else.
“It was hot,” she said, flipping photos. “That’s why I’m so dark right now.”
“You definitely got a tan,” I said, leaning over.
“And we were drinking all day.” Her laugh came out thin, like a popped balloon. “It’s crazy—I look like my mom now. Her skin’s this color. I don’t think I ever told you I’m part Cherokee.”
She flicked through the pictures and it went from their vacation to—well it was probably still their vacation. It was some cat lady. It could have come off as strange when she dropped the face of the phone downward. And then I thought not weird, but perhaps kinky. Her in a cat costume. I find a way to ease any awkwardness by asking questions about anything else, as anyone would.
“Has she met him yet?” I asked, because once or twice curiosity crawls up your spine and sits there.
“She has,” Yvette said, glad but careful. “She likes him. Hell, he’s an asshole everyone likes him. She says he’s got this devilish charm.”
Devilish charm. I wanted to spit. It’s the neat little putty assholes use to fasten themselves to other people’s warm spots. Still, I’ll give it to the man—making another human feel like both cracked and wanted at the same time is a talent, if a rotten one. If walking on eggshells is the dance, this guy wore Timberlands.
Then she looked right at me. Not the half-look you get in crowded rooms—no, she actually saw me.
“I’m just trying to see where his head is at, you know?” She laughed again, thinner. “I’m thirty-six. I’m not getting any younger. I want kids too. Don’t get me wrong—I love Denise. She’s beautiful. But… she’s not mine. And even though she’s mostly with her mom in Tampa, there’s always this gap. You know?”
I nodded. Denise—never seemed part of his plan. Dennis had always been the kind of man who treated birth control like a casual suggestion. Then he goes down to Miami on one of those if you’re not living you’re dying vacations he loved and comes back with the sun in his ears and a Dominican hanging off his arm. The man lived loud. For a minute, it was like he’d swallowed a hurricane and been pleased with the taste.
“At the same time… I don’t wanna make him feel pressured to make a decision.” She stared at the phone. Her thumb stopped scrolling like it wasn’t needed anymore. But then I saw it—nothing pornographic, nothing you could point a finger at—a small thing that your brain files away and later plays like a record when the mood is right. You know that look: the one that ah-ha!s later.
And I said it. The sentence you don’t always have the right to say.
“I don’t wanna speak for him,” I told her, “or make you think anything that ain’t there. But… Houston? He and I had this conversation. Caught me off guard. We don’t have those conversations. He’d usually change the subject if the idea of settling showed up. But this time he didn’t. He said you were it. Said he was gonna cut everybody else off. When he said it… I believed him.”
She blinked, those big glossy eyes doing their thing—only Dennis could refuse them, and even then he had a way of saying no that sounded like a dare.
“What I got from that day,” I said, “is that you’re the one.”
She stared for a long beat, and then—without smiling, without softening—said, plain as a law:
“I better be.”
That memory sat in my chest like a fistful of gravel. Saying what I said could’ve given her the green light to push the question farther. The reason she was pushed past her limit. The question that, in the end, is the reason he died.
I should’ve known better than to take a man’s word after he’d had too many hand grenades on Bourbon Street. You learn that kind of thing the hard way: promises sift through whiskey and fall apart like paper boats. But there he was, Dennis, sitting next to me, edging toward that same kind of stupor, as if none of it had happened at all. As if Yvette had been no more than a line item on an expense report.
All I could think was: when’s someone going to tell him you can’t keep living like this forever? One day you meet your match. One day the scale tips. There’s a movie—A Thin Line Between Love And Hate—from the nineties that should be tattooed under his skin. I would have said something, tried to save him from himself. But before I could open my mouth, the room decided for me.
They came up the aisle in black. Cat masks and leather slick as wet stone. They moved slow, practiced and hungry, like shadows that had learned to seduce. Tight bodies, oil catching the club lights. Their steps were choreography, but it wasn’t just dance—it was stalking. Tribal. Purposeful.
Dennis watched them like a man who’d been reading the menu his whole life and finally found the item he always ordered. He didn’t even flinch when they passed. Some of the girls shot him the look—the one that says, this one pays. He didn’t glance twice. He sat there like a king on an ottoman, grin spread across his face like he’d gotten exactly what he deserved.
“No, no,” he told me, the words a slur and a promise. “I paid for you, for him—”
“What?” I waved a hand, because how do you answer that?
“It’s alright,” Dennis said. “They just dance around you. They don’t touch.”
Whether they’d heard us or didn’t care, I don’t know. Thank God, maybe. They danced around him — not me. They didn’t even look my way. He was the center, as he liked to be. They moved for him, around him, orbiting him like he was the sun and they obeyed his gravitational pull.
And then she arrived. Different from the first pass, like a different animal stepping into the room. She didn’t glide so much as arrive — the room made way for her like a crowd at the edge of the ocean. Hips that didn’t consider gravity an opinion. When they parted for her it felt ceremonial, like presenting an offering or a verdict.
She worked her way to him, close and casual, and when she touched him it was not greed but ownership — slow, deliberate, as if she’d already decided his fate and was merely signing the paperwork with her body. She leaned in and whispered something I couldn’t catch.
Her eyes found mine. Under the blacklight, they glowed wrong — contacts, yes, but a look that felt older than her face. Not a look that saw me, but one that prowled inside me, skimming the surface of memory and finding something it wanted. Then they slid away and she was gone, melting back into the dark like smoke.
When they left, the air seemed thinner, like someone had taken a breath out of the room and kept it. Dennis drew on his vape and exhaled a fat, lazy curl of smoke that hung there, ink-gray and patient.
I waited, then asked the only question I could think of: “What’d she say?”
He didn’t look at me when he answered. He watched the smoke shape itself into some private signature and let the letters settle.
“She said I smell delicious.”
He smiled then — slow, satisfied. Like the joke was already on the world, and his mind was already at work counting the winnings.
We finished the food. Strip-club wings, believe it or not, hit different. People talk shit but I’ll swear on it: some of the best I’ve ever had. Skin snapping under the teeth, grease clinging thick, heavy with seasoning like somebody’s aunt was in the back with a cast-iron pan and a prayer. Not that frozen bagged crap. This was deliberate. You’d think a place like this would skimp, but nah. They knew. Feed a man right, he stays. He stays, he drinks. He drinks, he spends. The economy of lust, written in grease.
When we finally walked out, it felt like slipping away before the second act of a Quentin Tarantino flick. The air outside was cleaner but carried its own filth: exhaust, cheap cologne, city sweat that only really comes alive after midnight. That’s when the night flips the script, when things usually take the turn.
Dennis took a drag off his vape, blue tip glowing in the dark like a lazy firefly. He’d always loved convenience—things made for people who didn’t like to fuss. Hit it, forget it, move on.
“The way she came to you like that,” I said, still running it over in my head. “Like it was nothing.”
Dennis exhaled slow, vapor curling. Shrugged. “Women love me.”
I shook my head. “No. That was different.”
He looked at me now, eyebrow raised.
“I’m serious. ‘You smell delicious’? Come on.”
That grin spread across his face, that cocky, hollow little smirk he wore when he wanted to end a conversation without saying a damn word.
And then the door creaked open behind us.
She stepped out. I didn’t expect it. Some part of me thought she’d vanish backstage, disappear through a side alley where the stars go when the curtain drops. But there she was, plain as night. No mask. No leather. Just her. Gorgeous.
Her legs bare, heels clicking slow on the concrete, each step deliberate, like gravity worked differently for her. She didn’t look around. Didn’t care who was watching. She went straight for Dennis. Like she could smell him from here.
“Take me home,” she said.
Flat. Simple. Like telling him to open a window.
He didn’t look surprised. Just nodded, turned toward the car, and she followed like she belonged there. “Catch you later, B,” he tossed over his shoulder.
Didn’t phase me. Not really. I was ready to call it. Feet sore, wallet light, head clogged. Besides, Dennis always left with somebody. Well—before Yvette.
And that thought stabbed deeper than I wanted to admit. My son had actually liked her. That stung worst of all. She’d bought him a toy grocery set for Christmas. Spent hours with him, setting it up piece by piece in the living room. He kept calling her Miss V even though she insisted just Yvette was fine. I remember him saying she should be his godmother. We all laughed. I told him to go ahead and adopt her.
Now? Now I’m stuck lying to him. Can’t tell him why she doesn’t come around anymore. Can’t tell him what we let happen.
I watched Dennis’s taillights smear red down the block, the Hellcat roaring through the night like an animal that wasn’t done feeding. Somewhere beneath it, I swear I heard her laughter—a high, bright cackle stretched thin over the dark. It hung there, riding the night air until it bled away.
The hunt was finished. Now came the feast.
I was home by one. Shoes off, keys in the bowl by the door, the house dark except for the weak amber glow of the kitchen light Kelly always left on for me. I stood there a minute, letting the silence breathe around me. The faint trace of lavender from the wax warmer drifted through the hall. Home smelled like peace. Or maybe just the absence of chaos.
Kelly was up, of course. She never really slept when I went out with Dennis. She pretended—lying quiet, scrolling—but I always found her awake, like she was standing guard against something neither of us could name.
She sat at the kitchen table, hair tied up, one of my old T-shirts draped over her, phone in hand but eyes somewhere else. A mug of tea sat beside her, cold as the linoleum underfoot.
“You’re late,” she said, still looking at the screen. “Did you at least bring me wings?”
I dropped into the chair across from her. “Dennis broke up with Yvette.”
That got her. She lowered the phone, slow, eyes narrowing as if she needed the words to settle before she believed them. “What?”
“Said she kept pushing marriage. He ain’t having it. She’s supposed to come by tomorrow… get the rest of her stuff.”
Kelly shook her head. Not surprised, not even disappointed. Just tired. That bone-deep kind of tired women get after seeing too many good ones wasted on the wrong men.
“I liked her.”
“Yeah.”
Silence came down like a blanket. The kitchen clock ticked. Somewhere down the hall the fridge hummed awake, filling the room with a sound that was both steady and hollow.
“You remember at dinner,” Kelly said, “when she bowed her head and said, ‘Just waiting for you before I bless the food,’ and he told her, ‘You don’t need me for that’?”
I nodded. Everybody remembered. The way the night went flat after. Yvette, stone-faced, not giving away a thing, but all of us felt it.
“She overlooked that,” Kelly said. “She’s a woman of God. And she overlooked that.” Her voice was soft, not sad, just factual, like announcing tomorrow’s weather.
I leaned forward, arms on the table. “That’s the devil of Dennis.”
She looked at me, searching. “What you mean?”
“I mean that’s his charm. That’s his curse. He ain’t evil. But he don’t believe in anything. And that’s dangerous.”
Kelly didn’t answer, but I saw it in her eyes. That look. That knowing.
“You get a man who don’t answer to nothin’,” I said. “No God. No love. No future. He’s free. But what’s that worth? Who’s he tied to? Who’s gonna pull him back when he’s at life’s edge?”
Kelly looked down into her tea. Whispered, not to me but to herself: “No one.”
I sat there a long time. Watching her. Thinking about Yvette. Thinking about Dennis. Thinking about how sometimes you don’t need horns or a pitchfork to meet the devil.
Sometimes he’s just your friend. Close enough to touch. And you don’t realize it ‘til it’s too late.
And why it mattered, I don’t know. But I kept thinking about how he left with her without even knowing her name—and how he’d never care to know. The only name he had was the one she gave the stage: Man Eater. And in my head the tune followed, that slick, bouncing chorus about a woman who chews men up, swallows them whole, and never looks back. It looped until I almost believed it was written for her.
“Since you’re home earlier than I expected,” Kelly said, standing up from the table, “how about I be your dancer for the rest of the night?”
She didn’t smile when she said it. That’s not how Kelly played it. She just said it straight, like she was offering coffee, and it hit harder because of that. No teasing. No play-acting.
She slid past me, slow, hand brushing my shoulder on the way by. Barely a touch, but it made every nerve stand at attention. I watched her hips move as she walked down the hall, loose in that old t-shirt she always wore to bed—the one she knew drove me crazy, not because it was sexy, but because it wasn’t trying to be.
And right then, I remembered exactly what I meant when I’d thought: Being married wasn’t so bad.
People talk about marriage like it’s chains. A sentence. A death of freedom. But for me? Nights like this? It was a reward. She let me have my space. Let me breathe. Trusted me enough to let me walk out the door and come back without suspicion waiting on the other side.
That’s worth more than any one-night stand you could scrape up under strobe lights and cheap music.
I followed her down the hall, and when I hit the bedroom door, she was already peeling the shirt off, letting it drop to the floor like it didn’t mean a thing.
And it didn’t need to be more complicated than that.
That night, I dreamed about her.
I didn’t want to. I didn’t even know I was thinking about her when I went to sleep. But that’s how it works, isn’t it? Dreams pull up what you’d rather forget. And what you push down hard comes back stronger.
That panther mask was gone. It was just her. Bare skin. Bare lips. Eyes like dark glass, pulling me in the way a cigarette does after you swore you quit.
I was sitting in that club chair again, but the lights were lower. Music wasn’t thumping anymore. It was something softer, a hum that felt like it came from inside me. She walked toward me, hips moving like water, and every step sounded loud—heels cracking against the floor like nails tapping glass.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak.
She sat on my lap without asking, like she knew she didn’t need permission. Her skin was hot. Not warm—hot. Like her body carried some fever that didn’t belong to this world. And when she leaned in, lips brushing my ear, her breath felt cold. Cold enough to raise goosebumps all the way down my arms. Just the right temperature to raise something even lower.
She didn’t say anything, not at first.
Her hands moved over me, slow, confident. Fingertips traced my jaw, then down my chest. She touched me like she owned me. Like I was something bought and paid for. I felt everything. Every graze. Every brush of skin. Real. Too real.
I tried to speak. Tried to push her off.
But her hands kept working. Slipping lower. Sliding under. And God help me… I didn’t stop her. I didn’t want to.
When her mouth found mine, it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a claim. She bit my lip, hard enough to draw blood. I tasted it. Warm, metallic. She moaned against my mouth like the taste excited her. And dammit it excited me.
And all the while her body pressed down, grinding against me. I could feel her thighs tightening, her hips rolling slow, deliberate, like she was working a rhythm only she could hear. And every shift of her weight sent sparks down my spine. I knew I was hard. I knew it wasn’t stopping. My body betrayed me.
She pulled back just enough to look at me. And then she smiled.
Seductively, playfully, predatorily.
Her hand snaked into my pants and she pulled me free of myself and lowered onto me with the slowness of something inevitable. What followed wasn’t touch or sensation, but something far stranger: I slipped into a space where time folded in on itself, where colors I’d never named rippled behind my eyes. It felt like seeing the universe—not in parts, not as distant stars—but all at once, all together, and for a moment, I understood everything. And then… just as quickly, I didn’t.
And then she whispered, low, like it was the punchline to a joke I hadn’t heard yet:
“You smell delicious and I’m going to eat you up.”
She opened what were now jaws—jaws where her mouth should’ve been. White lines, sharp as broken glass, rows of teeth slick with something dark. The breath, hot and heavy that hit me, smelled like dead meat—every man who came before me.
My death, imminent.
I could feel it pressing down on me, heavy as stone, smothering the last thoughts from my head.
And then—
Black.
I woke up shaking. Sheets wet with sweat. The room smelled faintly of lavender and the guilty little cigarette smoke that clings to a man who’s been somewhere he shouldn’t have been. I felt filthy—not just from the dream, but from the awful, private fact that even now, awake, I still wanted her. Kelly lay beside me, breathing slow. Thank God. There was no way I could explain what had happened without sounding like a lunatic or a man confessing to a sin that didn’t have a name yet.
That’s when the real fear hit. Not the dream’s teeth — that was bad enough — but the idea that whatever she was, she wanted me next. The certainty of it sat in my gut like a stone.
I didn’t plan to drive. You ever know you’re doing something only when you’re already halfway down the on-ramp? That’s how it was. I found myself on I-95 headed south before my brain stopped arguing with my feet. The dash said 3:07. For some reason the exact minute felt like a talisman, like if I could pin time down I could explain away why I was out there at that ridiculous hour, half-dressed, hands locked on the wheel at ten and two like I was about to wrestle with fate.
The highway was a strip of oil and halogen. Mostly empty. Freight trucks, the occasional lone sedan, people like me who were out because sleep had fled and left them with other things to do. The dream crawled behind my eyes like smoke you can’t scrub out. My thighs still itched where I’d felt her against me. My lips tasted like iron — whether from the dream or the memory, I couldn’t say — and every time I blinked I saw her smile under the blacklight, eyes glinting like a coin in a gutter.
And the worst part? I wanted to see her again. That made me hate myself in ways language can’t hold.
The car reeked of stale smoke and cheap perfume soaked into fabric. My shirt clung in places it shouldn’t. I drove with the windows cracked even though the air was a knife — damn near forty degrees — because I needed the clean burn of it on my face. It felt, absurdly, like honest air.
I told myself I was just checking on Dennis. That’s all. A neighborly lookout. Nothing noble. Nothing heroic. Just a man doing something a man might do. But the dream had the tone of a warning, and warnings have a way of making liars of the things we tell ourselves. A text he wouldn’t see, a phone call he could ignore, a knock at the door… that’d force a response. Dennis was a son-of-a-bitch, no argument there. But something happening to him—something real, something final—when I could’ve very well stopped it… that would’ve sat on me just as heavy as the guilt I carry for that dream about her. Maybe heavier.
Turning onto Dennis’s block, the feeling shifted and locked into place. Yvette’s car sat crooked in the drive, pulled in too fast, like whoever’d driven it had slammed brakes and thought about stopping after the fact. The driver door hung ajar, not flung, not slammed — half-open, indecisive. Small things mean a lot at 3 AM. They all mean a lot.
I killed the engine but let the headlights wash the sidewalk in cold white. Nothing moved. The house stood mute. My pulse drummed so loud in my ears I could barely hear the world. That whisper from the dream — the small, intimate breath that said I was next — came back, as if it had been recorded and was playing on a loop somewhere under my ribs.
I didn’t want to get out. Every muscle in me argued like a sensible animal that wanted to live. But the question had its own gravity. What if she’s still inside? What if she’s waiting? And worse — God help me — what if Dennis isn’t? What if the night had taken him somewhere I couldn’t follow?
I sat there a long time, grip white on the wheel, staring at that half-open door like it was the mouth of something. The thought of stepping out into whatever waited was like stepping off the edge of a well.
The door gave way without a fight. That should’ve been the stop-sign — the moment a sensible man backs out and calls the police from the curb. It didn’t.
Heat rolled out at me first, thick and wrong, like the house had been simmering at the wrong temperature while the rest of the world slept. The walls seemed to sweat. The air tasted of iron and something sweeter, rotten in the way old fruit goes, and it slapped the back of my throat.
Then the sound came — a thing that did not belong anywhere in a night that still smelled of asphalt and radiator fluid. A guttural, broken noise, a man’s voice shredded on the edges, like someone had tried to make a trumpet out of a throat and it collapsed. It hit me low, in the belly, the way bad news hits. My knees went soft. I knew that sound the way a kid knows the way a neighbor’s dog barks; I’d heard it in the dark rooms of dreams and in the pages of bad books. It was Dennis.
“Dennis.” The name slipped out, small and urgent and stupid as a prayer.
I ran.
The stairs stretched like a bad memory. Each step sucked at my boots as if I were moving through mud or water. My lungs burned, my heart hammered against my ribs like a man trying to get out, and my brain — traitor that it is — kept whispering not to look, don’t go up there, call somebody, anything. But there are things you can’t turn your back on. Some shame, some risk, some stubborn thread of loyalty pulls you forward whether you want it to or not. I pushed.
I stopped in the doorway, feet planted, breath snagged in my throat like barbed wire. Yvette stood to the side, eyes wide, frozen with the same horror that rooted me in place.
She was on top of him.
Whatever mask she’d worn to pass for human was gone now. What straddled Dennis was caught halfway between shapes, a body mutinying against itself. That smooth, silk-butter skin split in jagged seams, fat wet cracks opening to reveal sinew and fur sprouting like bristles forced through raw meat. Every inch of her was tearing itself inside out.
Dennis lay beneath her, hands useless, chest heaving in those sick, dying stutters. Blood choked and foamed from his mouth in ropes, each breath a drowning gurgle.
“Grrggghhkk… hrrrkk… glrrrkk…”
Then the last—“Gaaahhhh”—a horrible vowel, cut short as his body went slack, eyes already empty.
Her torso twisted with wet snaps—spine writhing like it wanted to climb out of her back. Joints wrenched the wrong way, knees buckling inward, elbows bending until bone tore straight through skin with a wet pop. Her hair hung in black ropes, plastered to her blood-glossed cheeks. And her eyes—oh Christ—her eyes burned yellow, slit and luminous, like cave predators that never saw daylight and learned to thrive on pure hunger.
Any notion that she’d ever been human was slaughtered.
She dug in again. Ripping. Shredding. It was savage, uncoordinated, a child’s greedy violence tearing open a birthday present—but here the paper was flesh. Ribs cracked loud as kindling. Skin peeled back in wet sheets. She scooped through him with both hands, fists vanishing inside the cavity, pulling free chunks that glistened black-red in the light.
The smell hit me like a hammer—hot copper, sour bile, and something rank, a deep rot that clung to the back of my tongue.
And then—God help me—she tore free the last thing that made Dennis a man, gripped it in one fist, and bit down with a wet crunch.
Blood sprayed across her jaw, dripping in ropes from her chin. She chewed.
I don’t know how long I stood there. Time didn’t run straight anymore—it bent, stretched. Could’ve been seconds, could’ve been a lifetime. My feet were nailed to the floor. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t fucking move.
Somewhere far off—miles away, in another country where my body still worked—I heard a low moan slip out of me. I didn’t even know it was mine until I tasted the tremor of it in my throat.
That’s when its head snapped up. Too fast. Too wrong. The neck rolled loose and rubbery, like the bones had melted out. And then the eyes found me.
It rose from Dennis’s body slow, deliberate, dripping. What had been Yvette’s shape was caked in gore, breath coming heavy and fast, panting like a dog too long at the chase.
And then it started forward. Crawling. Slithering. Hands—no, claws—dragged through the carpet, leaving wide, wet trails behind.
One step.
Two.
It sniffed. Long, drawn out, a sound that scraped at my nerves. The nostrils flared wide, pulling in the air between us. It was savoring me. The stink of fear, raw and animal. It knew me. Worse—it remembered me. From the dreams.
I pissed myself. Didn’t feel it, didn’t even register the release, only knew when the warmth spread down my leg and the shame settled in beside the terror.
It crouched low, muscles bunching like steel springs about to let go. Ready.
And all I could think—clear as a headline—was: This is it. This is where it ends.
Then—
“No.”
A voice. Not mine.
Yvette’s.
From behind it, calm as a church bell.
“No,” she said again. Not pleading. Not loud. Just final. A period at the end of a sentence. “Not him.”
The creature twitched. Shuddered. Its head rolled side to side as if fighting the command. It turned back toward me, inhaled once more, long and deep, like it was memorizing me for later. And then—just like that—it turned.
Gone.
She moved down the hall, body shrinking with every step. The fur retreated into skin, sucked back like ink through a blotter. The tail curled, shivered, shrank to nothing. The height drained out of her until the thing was no longer the beast that had ripped Dennis apart, but only a woman again.
A woman, naked and human in shape at least, though I’d never again mistake her for either.
And then she was gone.
Yvette stood in the doorway, calm like none of this belonged to her. Dennis’s blood was slick on the floor, pooling under his body. His mouth hung open in that stunned, empty way dead men wear when they don’t know they’ve died yet. And at that moment I heard it again, “Gaaahhhh.” With it all settling, I know now that he was calling out to God. I suppose that’s what anyone does, even if you go your whole life being a heretic.
I couldn’t speak.
Couldn’t even ask how the hell she seemed to have authority over that creature.
She spoke anyway.
“I tried to stop it before it happened,” she said. “He didn’t deserve that no matter how much of an asshole he was. I was selfish about it at first. Then I thought of Denise… But I was too late.”
She took a deep sigh. Her eyes fluttered to hold back tears. Then she steeled herself to speak.
“You remember that day at the cookout?” Her voice was steady. Like she was explaining directions to a stranger. “When I was flipping through pictures?”
I stared at her. Numb.
She continued.
“I was scared you saw it, then.”
“Saw what?” I croaked, barely recognizing my own voice. Because what I saw, was beyond any measurement of comprehension.
“I was sure you saw it,” she said softly. “When I passed you my phone. Remember? I said it was hot that day? I said that’s why I was so dark?”
I remembered. God help me, I remembered. And I didn’t question. I didn’t even put two and two together when I saw that same photo on the marquee inside of the nightclub. Half woman half panther. THE MAN EATER, it said. The impression that it meant a woman who destroys men through allure and dominance—a stage name.
“Three months ago,” she said. “I was pulling twenty-fours at the hospital. Nights drag until somebody comes in with something lodged in them that shouldn’t be there. Somewhere in all that, I decided I needed to know where we stood. I remembered asking my mother once how my dad managed to stay so loyal, and she told me this story I didn’t buy. So I went down the rabbit hole. All the way to the early 1900s. What got me was that even in 2023, there was still a report of it being seen. That’s how I ended up in the Uwharrie Forest, sitting in a trailer that reeked of shit and sage. Across from me was an old woman with milk-white eyes and a cigarette burning down between her fingers. And I knew, right then, this was the craziest way possible to try and get answers—”
I didn’t interrupt.
Yvette’s voice lowered, like she was telling it to herself now.
“She asked me: ‘You want him gone?’ And I said yes. She asked: ‘Forever?’” Yvette smiled, but there was nothing human in it. “All I could think of was my mother saying he has this devilish charm… And I said, ‘He has some hold on me that I can’t escape. I want peace. I want him out of my soul.’”
Her eyes glinted wet under the hallway light.
“She told me to bring her something of his. A shirt. Hoodie. Pillowcase. Something that carried him.”
She wiped under her eye like it was just sweat.
“I gave her his hoodie. The gray one he always wore. Thought it smelled like him. I hated that smell by then.”
I borrowed that hoodie not too long ago. The idea that it could have easily mistaken the two of us hit me like a train. My scent must have lingered underneath somewhere.
“I thought it was the perfect one,” she said. “It was the one he was wearing when that bitch Reagan, by the way who is married, came over that night. Perks of having a girlfriend nowhere around for literally a full day. I’m sure his pride didn’t allow him to tell you that. But maybe that’s why she’s dead. If I could sniff out that cheap ass perfume I’m sure it could have.”
He did. He had told me that she saw the message on his phone. Her, Reagan, already setting up the next time they’d have sex and the things she’d do next. But that was a period when he was moving differently. Doing things for Yvette, talking nice. Guilt made him a chameleon of a man, adjusting when necessary. One thing I hadn’t known because he may not have himself, was that she was dead.
She paused, swallowed, and for a moment, her voice cracked.
“It didn’t take long for her to confirm that the deed was done.”
And then Yvette said something I’ll never forget, no matter how many nights I drink myself into blackout trying.
“She said, ‘The Wampus will find him. Won’t matter who he’s with. Won’t matter where he hides. Once it knows his scent, it won’t forget.’”
I whispered it before she did.
“What’s a Wampus?”
Yvette nodded.
“I asked her that too,” she said.
Her voice went hollow. Empty as the space between heartbeats.
“And the old woman smiled. Real wide. Real slow.”
She looked at me.
“‘His reckoning.’”
Silence stretched thin, until the only thing I could hear was my own pulse hammering in my ears. I didn’t have to ask because I had just saw with my own terrified eyes.
All the same, I had to look it up for myself. It’s an old story. More myth until that night. A Cherokee woman, betrayed by her husband, snuck into a sacred men-only ceremony wearing the skin of a mountain lion. But when the shamans caught her, they didn’t punish her—they changed her. They bound her soul to that cat’s skin. Twisted her body. Turned her into something else. Half-woman, half-beast. Angry. Hungry. A predator that hunts men. And over time, women figured it out. You give the Wampus Cat a man’s scent—his sweat, his hair, his blood—and leave an offering at the crossroads… she’ll come for him. Slow. And she won’t stop.
I haven’t seen her since, Yvette.
Maybe that’s for the best.
Because if we were ever to come across each other again, we’d both feel it—the guilt pressing down like a hand around the throat. We wouldn’t speak it. We wouldn’t need to. It would be there in the air between us, heavy as smoke.
And yet...
I find myself thinking about her. More than I want to admit. Sometimes when I’m with my wife—when we’re close, when I should be anywhere else in my head—she flashes in my mind. That smile. That hunger in her eyes.
It’s like the temptation itself is the punishment.
But I don’t know if it’s a warning or a trap—Being shown consequences, a fate keen to Dennis’s or honey to lure in the fly.
They called her a man-eater, but the word felt too small, too playful, like it was best left for Hall and Oates. She was something older, something whispered about long before men had names for fear. She was Lilith walking in high heels, Lilith with a smile that made men forget themselves until she stripped the pride from their bones. She didn’t just break hearts—hearts were easy, fragile things—she cracked the mirror men used to admire themselves, left them staring at the jagged reflection of what they really were. To be near her was to feel both wanted and ruined, to learn, as Adam once did, that not every woman was made to bend.
So if you see her—if fate’s cruel enough to put her in your path—don’t look into her eyes. That’s how she gets you. That’s how it starts.
Because lust is the devil. It wears the skin of pleasure and waits for you to reach for it.
And you will want her.
She waits for the moment you let your guard down, because not only is she temptation, but the reckoning. For the moment some scorned woman out there wishes you gone and sends her for you. That’s when she moves. That’s when it’s too late.
But not for me.
No. I won’t act.
No matter how much she tempts me, I won’t give in.
I won’t let her name slip from my lips. Not when I’m weak, when I’m making love to my wife, because she slithers even then. Jealously. Not even when my body beckons for what my mind tries to forget.
I won’t say…Nina.
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