Gingerbread Man

at a time, and only had to feed it a neighbor’s cat here and there, they saw it. Kids homed in on shit like that and tried to kill it. You know, like a litter of healthy animals, mom and all, will push the one sick one right out of the nest and leave it to die? He’d seen it on the Discovery Channel. Lions did it. Wolves did it. Birds did it. Kids were
just
like that. A weak one, a different one, a broken one, or even an especially gifted one—anything different—was to be shunned, banished, destroyed. It was probably a matter of self-preservation left over from the caveman days. You didn’t want anyone evolving faster than the norm or they’d be unfair competition. And you didn’t want anyone evolving slower than the norm, or they’d drag you down with them. And you sure as shit didn’t want predators—the kind who would prey on their own—because they’d eat you.
    Kids always knew. Adults, not so much. Adults were mostly blind. Not his mother, though. His real one. She must have taken one look at him and seen that he was broken.
    Eric smoothed Josh’s hair and turned toward Jeremy’s bed, then stopped where he was, shocked by how much more of the bed Jeremy took up. He couldn’t possibly have grown that much taller since May. Could he?
    He moved closer, surprised when Jeremy rolled over and opened his eyes. They were brown and accusing. "You forgot, didn’t you?"
    But it wasn’t his words that made Eric’s blood chill in his veins. It was his
look.
He didn’t look like a kid anymore. He looked like a young man. Tall, lean, lanky, with brown hair he’d let grow all summer long, and deep brown eyes with heavy brows and thick eyelashes.
    He looks just like they all look.
    And that hot scratching began deep inside Eric’s brain.
    "No," he whispered. "No."
    Scratch, scratch, scratch.
    "No? Well then, where were you?"
    Eric backed away from his son.
    Jeremy rolled his eyes and gave an exaggerated sigh. "Come on, Dad, can’t you even talk to me?"
    But he couldn’t. The rat was coming out. He felt it scratching, clawing, gnawing. The plaster hadn’t even had time to dry, and already the rat was breaking through. Its twitching nose was sniffing through the first tiny hole.
    Eric backed out and closed the bedroom door. The digging intensified. That scratching rat inside his brain had caught the scent, and it was demanding to be fed. And the meal it wanted this time was Eric’s own son.
    He couldn’t stay at the house. Not once that feeling had begun. It never went away once it started. Nothing would stop it, nothing but killing.
    He heard Marie banging pans in the kitchen, warming up leftovers for him. She was always worrying about what he ate, his cholesterol, his weight, shit like that, shit that didn’t even matter. His body wasn’t diseased, his brain was.
    He walked quietly back through the house. It wasn’t a bad house. Small, only three bedrooms. The boys each had their own, but Josh had given his up to be a nursery, so they were sharing now. The living room was a mess. The boys’ sneakers scattered randomly all across the rug, jackets flung over chairs, backpacks spilling out onto the floor. He looked at the clutter, at the out-of-place sofa pillows and the TV, turned on, volume muted, running an infomercial about an electronic gadget you plugged into the wall to drive away pests. Mice and ants and spiders…
    Not rats, though. Once you’ve got a rat, you’ve got a rat, that’s all there is to that that that.
    He went out the front door, barely making a sound. He knew how to move in silence. He was a predator, after all. A hunter.
    He got into his ‘03 F-150, and drove back the way he’d come, over the bridge onto 81, and twenty minutes south to Binghamton. To his brother’s apartment. Mason let him in, groggy, only a little curious, but too tired to stay up long enough to grill him. Just pointed at the couch and scuffed back to his bedroom. A minute later he brought out a pillow and a blanket. "You need to talk, bro?"
    "No. Maybe tomorrow."
    "All right. Get some sleep, okay?" Mason handed him the bedding, and went back to his room.
    Eric hadn’t slept, though. He’d thought. All night long, he’d paced and he’d thought.
    He guessed he’d probably been hoping to stumble onto another solution. A different answer. But he knew down deep that there wasn’t one.
    And now it was morning. He’d pretended to be asleep while Mason was getting ready to go to work, knowing his