It started with the laundry math.
You know the kind. It’s the inexplicable calculus of domestic life where you put five pairs of socks into the washer and only four and a half come out. We accept these things as parents. We joke about the dryer eating them, or them disappearing into the dimension of lost things alongside Tupperware lids and bobby pins.
But you don’t lose blankets.
Socks are small. Blankets are architectural.
My son, Leo, was a creature of comfort. At six years old, he had developed a very specific, ritualistic sleeping arrangement. He didn’t sleep with just one duvet. He slept in a “nest.”
That was what he called it. The Nest.
It consisted of exactly four layers, applied in a strict order. First, the weighted blanket (grey, fifteen pounds, intended for anxiety but used for security). Second, the fleece throw (navy blue with stars, a gift from his grandmother). Third, the quilt (a patchwork monstrosity I’d bought at a flea market in Charleston). And finally, the “topper”—a generic, beige thermal weave.
Four blankets. Every single night.
I was the one who made his bed every morning. It was part of my routine before coffee. I’d go in, open the blinds to let the Ohio sunlight hit the dust motes, and reconstruct the Nest.
The first time it happened, it was a Tuesday in late February. The slush outside was grey and freezing, the kind of weather that seeps into the foundation of a house.
I stripped the bed to wash the sheets.
Weighted blanket. Fleece. Quilt.
I paused, holding the quilt in my arms. I looked around the room.
The beige thermal was gone.
I checked under the bed. I checked the closet. I checked the pile of laundry I hadn’t folded yet.
“Leo?” I called out. He was in the living room, building a skyscraper out of magnetic tiles.
“Yeah, Mom?”
“Did you take the beige blanket downstairs?”
“No,” he said, not looking up.
I frowned. I assumed I had moved it. Maybe I’d used it on the couch while watching Netflix the night before and forgotten? I checked the living room. Nothing.
I eventually found an old comforter in the linen closet to replace it. I told myself I was losing my mind, just another symptom of “Mom Brain,” that perpetual fog of multitasking that makes you forget where you put your keys or your coffee cup.
Three days later, the navy blue fleece with the stars vanished.
This time, I felt a prickle of genuine irritation.
I tore the room apart. I pulled the dresser drawers out. I looked inside the toy chest. I even checked the trash cans, wondering if Leo had spilled something on it and tried to hide the evidence.
Nothing.
It was just gone. Vaporized.
That night, I put Leo to bed with the weighted blanket, the quilt, and the old spare comforter.
“Where’s the star blanket?” Leo asked. He didn’t sound upset. He sounded… curious.
“I can’t find it, buddy,” I said, smoothing his hair. “Did you take it to school? Did you put it in your backpack?”
He shook his head against the pillow. “No.”
He looked at the closet, then at the gap beneath his bed frame.
“Maybe they needed two,” he whispered.
I paused, my hand on the light switch. “Who needed two?”
He rolled over, snuggling into the pillow. “The cold ones.”
I froze. “Leo, what does that mean?”
“Goodnight, Mom,” he said, closing his eyes with the finality only a tired child possesses.
I stood there for a moment, the hair on the back of my neck standing up. Then I shook it off. Kids say weird things. Last week he told me the mailman was a robot because he didn’t sweat. The cold ones was probably a reference to some cartoon he’d watched on YouTube Kids when I wasn’t looking.
But the next morning, the spare comforter was gone.
There were only two blankets left on the bed.
That was when the irritation turned into a cold, hard knot of anxiety in my stomach. Someone was taking them. And since Mark was away on a business trip in Chicago, and it was just me and Leo in the house, the options were limited.
Option A: Leo was hiding them in a place so ingenious I couldn’t find them. Option B: Someone was coming into our house.
I checked the windows. Locked. I checked the alarm logs. Nothing.
That evening, I did the bedtime routine with a heightened sense of alertness. We were down to the weighted blanket and the quilt. I added two heavy bath towels to the mix just to give him weight.
“Leo,” I said, squeezing toothpaste onto his brush. “We need to talk about the blankets.”
He looked at me in the mirror. His eyes were wide, hazel, and entirely guileless.
“Okay.”
“Are you throwing them on the floor? Are you dragging them somewhere?”
“No.”
“Then where are they going?”
He spat into the sink and wiped his mouth. He turned to me, his face serious.
“Someone else uses them.”
I laughed, but it was a breathless, hollow sound. “Someone else? Like an imaginary friend?”
He shook his head. “No. Not imaginary. They’re really cold.”
I crouched down to his level, gripping his small shoulders gently. “Leo. Who gets cold?”
He shrugged, a small, loose motion. “I don’t know their names. They don’t talk. They just shiver.”
“They shiver?”
“Yeah. Really loud. Like this.” He chattered his teeth together, a vibration sound that was disturbingly accurate. “And they take the blankets so they stop shaking.”
“And you let them?”
“Mom,” he said, looking at me like I was being dense. “Sharing is caring. You taught me that.”
I stayed in his room for an hour after he fell asleep. I sat in the rocking chair in the corner, watching the room. Nothing happened. The house settled. The furnace kicked on. The shadows stretched.
At 10:00 p.m., I left the room.
But I didn’t go to sleep.
I went to the kitchen and opened the junk drawer. I dug out the old baby monitor—a Wi-Fi camera we hadn’t used in two years. I dusted it off, plugged it in, and synced it to my phone.
I crept back into Leo’s room and set it up on the bookshelf, angling it downward. It had a clear view of the bed and the three-foot strip of hardwood floor between the mattress and the wall.
I went to my bedroom, plugged my phone into the charger, and opened the app.
The feed was grainy, black and white night vision. Leo was a lump under the remaining bedding.
I watched for an hour. Nothing.
Eventually, exhaustion won. I fell asleep with the phone on my chest.
I woke up at 1:47 a.m.
I didn’t wake up because of a noise. I woke up because of a feeling. That primal, reptilian brain-stem alert that tells you something has changed in the cave.
The house was silent.
I grabbed my phone. The screen blinded me for a second. I tapped the camera app.
It buffered. A spinning white circle.
Load. Load. Load.
The image popped up.
Leo was asleep.
But something was wrong.
I zoomed in, pinching the screen.
The bath towels were gone.
He was down to just the weighted blanket and the quilt.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I looked at the timestamp on the bottom of the feed. It was live. 01:48:12 AM.
I scrolled back. I needed to see when it happened.
I scrubbed the timeline backward.
12:00 AM. Leo sleeping. 12:30 AM. Leo sleeping. 1:15 AM. Movement.
I hit play.
The room was still. Leo was breathing rhythmically; I could see the rise and fall of the quilt.
Then, at 01:16:03, there was a motion at the bottom of the screen.
Under the bed.
A shadow darker than the surrounding darkness shifted.
I brought the phone closer to my face, squinting.
Something slid out from beneath the bed frame.
It wasn’t a dust bunny. It wasn’t the cat (we didn’t own a cat).
It was a hand.
I clapped a hand over my mouth to stifle a scream.
It was small. Pale. It looked, at first glance, like a child’s hand. But as it crept further into the pale wash of the night vision, the anatomy looked wrong. The fingers were too long. They had extra joints. They moved with the fluidity of a spider’s legs, testing the air.
The hand reached up, blindly groping for the edge of the mattress.
It found the hanging corner of one of the bath towels.
The fingers clamped down.
It pulled.
Gently. So gently.
Leo didn’t even stir.
The towel began to slide. Inch by inch. It poured off the bed like water, pooling on the floor for a split second before—zip.
It was yanked under the bed with terrifying speed.
The hand was gone. The towel was gone.
I sat there, frozen, waiting for it to come back.
At 01:22:15, it did.
This time, a second hand joined it. They worked in tandem. They reached up for the second towel. They pinched the fabric. They pulled.
Leo rolled over in his sleep, murmuring something.
The hands froze instantly. They went rigid, blending into the shadows. They waited.
When Leo settled, they resumed.
They took the second towel.
I watched the recording end and the live feed resume.
I was out of bed before I realized I was moving. I grabbed the flashlight from my nightstand. I grabbed the baseball bat Mark kept behind the door.
I ran down the hallway.
I burst into Leo’s room and slammed the light switch on.
“Leo!”
He bolted upright, blinking in the sudden harsh light. “Mom?”
I didn’t answer. I dropped to my knees beside the bed. I gripped the baseball bat.
“Get up, Leo. Get on the chair.”
“What?”
“Now!”
He scrambled out of bed.
I took a deep breath. I gripped the frame of the bed. It was heavy solid oak.
“One, two, three!”
I shoved the bed away from the wall, dragging it across the floor with a screech of wood on wood.
I raised the bat, ready to swing at whatever was underneath.
I expected a raccoon. A possum. A burglar. A monster.
There was nothing.
Just dust bunnies. A lost Lego piece. A singular, lonely sock.
The floor was bare.
I stood there, panting, the bat lowering slowly. I looked at the camera on the shelf. I looked at my phone. I knew what I had seen. I had the video.
“Mom?” Leo asked from the chair. “Did you find them?”
I turned to him. “Find who?”
“The borrowers.”
I looked back at the floor where the bed had been.
The floorboards were dusty. But in the center of the dust, clearly visible in the overhead light, were marks.
Handprints.
Not just one or two.
There were four distinct sets.
They were small, like the ones on the video. But the fingers… the drag marks in the dust showed fingers that were five, maybe six inches long.
And where the prints ended, right at the baseboard… there was nothing. No hole. No vent. No trapdoor. Just solid oak meeting solid drywall.
“Leo,” I said, my voice shaking. “We’re sleeping in my room tonight.”
“But they’re still cold,” Leo said.
“I don’t care,” I snapped, too harshly. I grabbed him and carried him to my room.
I locked my door. I wedged a chair under the handle. I didn’t sleep.
The next morning, the sun rose, and the terror of the night felt, as it always does, slightly ridiculous.
I watched the video again in the kitchen while Leo ate his oatmeal. It was still there. The hands. The theft. It wasn’t a nightmare.
“Did you sleep okay?” I asked him, trying to keep my voice casual.
He nodded, spooning sugar onto his porridge. “Yeah. But I felt bad.”
“Why?”
“I gave them the thick one last night. The quilt. But you woke me up before they could take it.”
I froze. “You… gave it to them?”
“They asked for it,” he said simply. “They were chattering really loud. It wakes me up sometimes.”
“Leo, look at me.” I waited until he met my eyes. “There is more than one?”
He frowned, looking confused. “Yeah, Mom. There’s a lot of them. Like… a pile.”
“A pile?”
“Yeah. A tangle. They hold onto each other to stay warm. But they need the blankets for the outside part.”
“The outside part of what?”
“Of the pile.”
I dropped my spoon.
That afternoon, while Leo was at school, I went to the hardware store.
I bought a new lock for his door. I bought brighter light bulbs. And I bought a thermal imaging camera attachment for my phone—something Mark used for checking insulation leaks.
I went home. I moved Leo’s bed back against the wall, but I pulled it out six inches.
I set a trap.
I went to the linen closet and took every remaining blanket we owned. The guest duvet. The heavy wool throw from the living room. My own comforter.
I piled them on Leo’s bed. Five layers thick. A mountain of warmth.
If they wanted blankets, I would give them blankets. But I needed to see where they were going.
Night fell.
I put Leo to bed. He looked delighted by the mountain of bedding.
“Whoa,” he said. “It’s like a fortress.”
“It is,” I said. “You’re safe in here.”
“They’re going to be so happy,” he whispered.
I kissed his forehead. “Go to sleep, Leo.”
I went to the hallway. I didn’t go to my room. I sat on the floor outside his door, watching the feed on my phone.
10:00 PM. Silence. 11:00 PM. Silence. 12:00 AM. Silence.
I was starting to doze off when the movement started.
12:42 AM.
It was earlier tonight. Maybe because the offering was larger.
I watched the screen.
From under the bed, a hand emerged.
Then another.
Then a third.
Then a fourth.
They didn’t come out one by one. They flowed out, like a wave of pale crabs scuttling over the floorboards.
I counted six hands gripping the bottom blanket—the heavy wool throw.
They pulled.
The blanket slid off the bed. It hit the floor.
But they didn’t drag it under.
They… passed it back.
I watched, horrified, as the blanket was handed from the visible hands to something deeper in the darkness under the bed. It disappeared into the shadows, but the hands stayed.
They reached up again.
They took the second blanket.
Then the third.
My breath caught in my throat.
At 12:45 AM, the thermal camera attachment on my phone beeped. I switched the view.
Thermal imaging shows heat. Living things glow red and orange. Cold things are blue and black.
I pointed the phone at the screen of the baby monitor, trying to correlate the two, but realized I needed to be in the room.
I stood up. I opened Leo’s door quietly.
The room was dark.
I raised my phone with the thermal camera active.
I looked at the bed. Leo was a bright orange blob of heat.
I looked at the floor.
The floor was cold blue.
But under the bed…
It wasn’t orange. It wasn’t red.
It was white.
White-hot.
It wasn’t a few small heat signatures. It was a massive, pulsing sun of heat radiating from the very center of the floorboards beneath the mattress.
The heat signature was so intense it was blowing out the sensor.
But as I watched, I realized the shape wasn’t just a blob.
It was a mass.
A twisting, writhe of distinct shapes pressed together so tightly they formed a solid plug of heat.
Hundreds of them.
And they were all reaching up.
On the regular camera, I saw only four or five hands.
But on the thermal…
I saw the truth.
The floor under the bed wasn’t solid. The heat was coming from through the floor.
It was a funnel. A gateway.
And the hands I saw? Those were just the ones at the very top of the heap.
They were standing on each other’s shoulders. A ladder of limbs.
I watched as the fourth blanket—my comforter—slid off Leo’s body.
It hit the floor.
And then, I saw something that made me stop breathing.
The blanket didn’t just disappear.
It was pulled down, and for a split second, the thermal camera caught the silhouette of what was taking it.
It wasn’t a hand.
It was a face.
A face upturned, mouth open wide, pressing against the bottom of the floorboards like a face pressed against glass. But there was no glass. The wood was permeable to them.
The face was screaming. But there was no sound.
And then, I noticed the count.
I had put five blankets on the bed.
Four were gone.
The hands reached up for the fifth—the last one covering my son.
But there were too many hands now.
Ten. Twenty.
They were spilling out from under the bed, scrabbling over the hardwood, grasping, desperate.
They weren’t borrowing the blankets to get warm.
I looked at the thermal image again. The white-hot intensity.
They weren’t cold.
They were burning.
They were trying to smother the fire.
And they were running out of fuel.
One of the long, pale hands missed the blanket. It reached further.
It brushed Leo’s ankle.
Leo kicked in his sleep.
The hand recoiled, then lunged.
It didn’t grab the fabric.
It grabbed his foot.
I kicked the door open and screamed.
“Get away from him!”
The motion under the bed stopped instantly. The thermal heat signature vanished as if a shutter had been slammed closed. The hands retracted so fast they blurred.
I grabbed Leo, blankets and all, and ran.
We left the house that night. We drove to a motel.
But here is the thing that keeps me awake.
When we were packing the car, I did a headcount.
I counted the blankets we had left.
I counted the blankets they had taken.
And then I realized the math was still wrong.
Because when I grabbed Leo, he was wrapped in the quilt.
But the camera showed they had taken the quilt.
I checked the backseat where Leo was sleeping. I unwrapped him.
The quilt he was wrapped in… it wasn’t ours.
It was heavy. It smelled like earth and ozone. And it was warm.
Too warm.
It was pulsing.
And woven into the fabric, in intricate, frantic patterns…
Were strands of hair.
I sat in the driver’s seat of my SUV, the engine idling in the parking lot of the Super 8 motel, and stared at the thing wrapped around my son.
The overhead dome light was on. It cast a harsh, yellow glare on the interior of the car, illuminating every horrific detail of the “quilt.”
In the chaos of fleeing the house—the adrenaline, the screaming, the sheer primal drive to get Leo out—I had just registered it as a heavy, dark fabric. I had assumed it was one of the old moving blankets from the garage, or maybe something the “borrowers” had dragged up from the crawlspace.
But now, in the silence of the parking lot, with the adrenaline fading into a cold, trembling shock, I could see it for what it was.
It wasn’t fabric.
It was a tapestry of refuse.
The base of the quilt seemed to be made of dryer lint—thick, grey, matted clumps pressed together with frantic force. But woven into that fragile grey felt were other things.
Socks. Hundreds of single, mismatched socks, stretched and torn until they were just colorful ribbons. Scraps of denim. The labels from t-shirts. Plastic grocery bags, twisted into ropes.
And the hair.
It was the stitching. Long, intricate braids of human hair—blonde, black, red, grey—were threaded through the lint and fabric, binding the chaotic mess into a solid, heavy sheet. The pattern wasn’t random. It was geometric. Spirals and fractals that hurt my eyes if I looked at them too long.
It pulsed.
Not like a heartbeat. Like a breathing lung.
The quilt expanded and contracted on Leo’s chest, independent of his own breathing. It was warm. Radiantly, feverishly warm.
“Mom?”
Leo’s voice was small, muffled by the heavy mass covering him up to his chin.
I flinched. I wanted to rip the thing off him. I wanted to throw it out the window and drive until the wheels fell off. But the way it hugged him… it looked tight. Adhesive.
“I’m here, baby,” I said, my voice sounding brittle. “We’re at a hotel. We’re safe.”
“I don’t feel safe,” he whispered.
“Why not?”
“The blanket,” he said. “It’s talking to me.”
My blood ran cold. I reached into the backseat.
“We’re taking it off, Leo. Right now.”
I grabbed the edge of the quilt—the part made of matted grey lint and blonde hair.
It was hot to the touch. Not warm. Hot. Like a laptop that had been running for three days straight.
I pulled.
It didn’t budge.
It wasn’t just heavy. It was anchored.
I pulled harder, bracing my knee against the seat.
“Ow!” Leo cried out. “Mom, stop! You’re pulling my skin!”
I dropped the quilt instantly. I leaned in, pulling the collar of his pajamas aside.
Where the quilt touched his neck, the strands of hair—the stitching—weren’t just resting on him.
They were burrowing.
Tiny, microscopic filaments of hair had curled like tendrils, threading themselves into his pores. The quilt was knitting itself to my son.
“Okay,” I breathed, forcing a calm I didn’t feel. “Okay. We’re not going to pull it. We’re going to go inside, get some scissors, and cut it off. Okay?”
Leo nodded, his eyes glassy and feverish.
I carried him into the motel room. The night clerk, a teenager with headphones around his neck, didn’t even look up as I lugged my six-year-old wrapped in a cocoon of trash and hair past the front desk.
Room 104. Ground floor.
I kicked the door shut and laid Leo on the bed. The room smelled of stale disinfectant and industrial carpet cleaner.
I ran to the bathroom and dumped the contents of my toiletry bag onto the counter. Nail clippers. Tweezers. And a small pair of cuticle scissors.
It would have to do.
I ran back to the bed.
“This might tickle,” I lied.
I started at his shoulder. I slid the tiny blades of the scissors under a thick braid of black hair that was connecting the quilt to the shoulder of his flannel pajamas.
Snip.
The sound was wet.
The quilt flinched.
A ripple went through the entire mass of lint and rags, shuddering like a wounded animal.
And then, a sound filled the motel room.
It didn’t come from the quilt. It came from the air vent above the door.
Hhhhhhhhhhh.
A sharp, collective inhalation.
Leo’s eyes rolled back in his head.
“They felt that,” he whispered.
“Who felt that?” I asked, my hands shaking so badly I almost dropped the scissors.
“The Pile,” Leo said. “They say… they say I’m the Wick now.”
“The Wick?”
“The fire is too hot,” Leo murmured, his voice changing. It was deeper. Resonant. “The heat is rising from the Core. The blankets aren’t enough anymore. The wool burns. The cotton burns. We need a Wick to draw the heat out.”
He looked at me. His pupils were blown wide, swallowing the hazel irises.
“I am the Wick, Mommy. I have to burn so the house doesn’t fall.”
“No,” I snarled.
I grabbed the scissors and stabbed them into the quilt, trying to find a weak point, trying to slash the fabric away from him.
The quilt screamed.
It was a sound like tearing metal, a high-pitched shriek that shattered the bedside lamp bulb. Glass rained down on the carpet.
And then, the floor of the motel room began to smoke.
I looked down.
The cheap, synthetic carpet was melting.
Directly in the center of the room, the fibers were liquefying, turning into black sludge. Bubbles of tar rose and popped, releasing plumes of acrid, toxic smoke.
The heat in the room spiked. The air conditioning unit under the window groaned, chugged, and then died with a spark.
“They’re here,” Leo said calmly.
I grabbed Leo. I didn’t care about the pain. I didn’t care about the hair digging into his skin. I wrapped my arms around the quilt-cocoon and hauled him off the bed.
“We’re leaving!”
I ran for the door.
I grabbed the handle.
It was red hot.
My skin sizzled. I screamed and recoiled, clutching my burned palm. The metal handle was glowing a dull, angry cherry-red. The paint on the door was blistering, peeling away in curling strips.
I looked at the window.
The heavy blackout curtains were moving. Not from a draft.
Something was pushing against them from the outside.
But we were on the ground floor. It should have been the parking lot outside.
The shape pressing against the curtains wasn’t a person. It was a mass. A wall of pressing, desperate shapes.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The glass of the window began to crack.
“Mom,” Leo said. He was standing on the bed now. The quilt had grown. It was trailing off him, fusing with the bedsheets, spreading like a fungus. “You have to let them in.”
“No!” I backed away, trapping myself in the corner by the bathroom.
“They are drowning in the heat,” Leo said, tears streaming down his face. “They are the forgotten things. The lost things. They fell through the cracks in the floorboards and landed in the fire. They just want to be cool.”
“They are monsters, Leo!”
“No,” he said softly. “They are just… kindling.”
The carpet in the center of the room dissolved completely.
Underneath, there was no concrete foundation. There was no dirt.
There was a hole.
A jagged, glowing rift in reality, roughly three feet wide.
And out of the hole came the light.
White. Blinding. The heat was instantaneous. My eyebrows singed. The wallpaper curled and blackened.
And then came the hands.
They poured out of the hole like ants escaping a flood. Thousands of them. Pale, long-fingered, frantic hands. They weren’t attacking. They were climbing. They were scrambling over each other, a living ladder of flesh, trying to get away from the white-hot light below them.
They were burning.
I saw their skin blistering, peeling, reforming, and blistering again. They were in a state of constant, agonizing combustion.
They needed blankets. They needed mass. They needed anything to put between themselves and the hell that lived under the floorboards.
They swarmed toward the bed.
They swarmed toward Leo.
“Leo, jump!” I screamed, holding out my arms.
But he couldn’t move. The hair quilt had fused him to the mattress. The strands of hair were weaving into the headboard, anchoring him down.
The hands reached him.
They didn’t hurt him.
They hugged him.
They piled onto him, layer after layer, burying him. They pressed their burning faces against the “hair quilt,” absorbing the coolness of his life, stealing the moisture from his body to quench their eternal thirst.
The quilt hissed as they touched it. Steam rose from the pile.
Leo screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of pain. It was the scream of being erased.
I looked around the room for a weapon. A lamp. A chair.
My eyes landed on the fire sprinkler system on the ceiling.
It was a desperate, stupid idea. But it was all I had.
I grabbed the heavy metal trash can from the bathroom. I climbed onto the vanity counter. I leaped toward the sprinkler head.
I swung the trash can with both hands.
CLANG.
The little glass vial in the sprinkler head shattered.
For a second, nothing happened.
Then, the water came.
It wasn’t a drizzle. It was a torrent. Black, stagnant sludge that had been sitting in the pipes for decades blasted out, followed by high-pressure, freezing cold water.
The spray hit the pile on the bed.
The reaction was explosive.
The water hit the white-hot entities and flashed instantly into steam. A concussive blast of pressure blew the windows out. The curtains were ripped from the rods.
The room filled with a blinding, scalding fog.
The screaming from the bed stopped. It changed to a hissing, shrieking retreat.
The heat signatures—the “Borrowers”—recoiled. The water was acid to them. It was too much shock.
I dropped to the floor, crawling through the boiling steam.
“Leo!”
I felt the bed frame. I reached up.
The pile was gone. They had retreated back into the hole to escape the water.
Leo was lying on the mattress. The quilt was still on him, but it was smoking, wet, and limp.
I grabbed him. The connection—the hairs—had been severed by the thermal shock or the force of the blast. He slid free of the quilt.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t check to see if they were following.
I dragged him out the door, into the cool night air of the parking lot, and threw him into the car.
I drove.
I drove until the gas light came on. Then I drove some more.
We ended up in a hospital in the next state over. I told them there was a house fire. I told them the burns on Leo’s skin were from the heat.
They believed me. Why wouldn’t they? He was covered in first-degree burns.
But the doctors were confused about one thing.
“Mrs. Miller,” the doctor said, holding a clipboard, looking troubled. “We’re treating the burns. But we found something else.”
“What?” I asked, clutching a paper cup of coffee, my hands bandaged.
“Embedded in his skin,” she said. “All over his chest and arms. We thought it was soot at first.”
She showed me a photo on her tablet.
It was a microscopic image of Leo’s skin.
Embedded deep in the dermis, looping around the capillaries, were tiny, microscopic fibers.
“It looks like keratin,” she said. “Hair. But not growing out of him. It’s woven through him. Like stitches.”
I stared at the image.
“Can you remove them?”
“We can try,” she said. “But there are thousands. And… they seem to be reacting to his nervous system.”
I took Leo home to a new apartment a week later.
We live on the fourth floor. No hardwood. Concrete slab.
We have no blankets in the house. We use sleeping bags. Synthetic. Zippered.
Leo is quiet now. He doesn’t play with Legos. He sits by the window and watches the sun go down.
He’s always cold.
He wears three sweaters, even in July. He shivers constantly.
And sometimes, at night, when I check the monitor—because I will always check the monitor—I see it.
He doesn’t sleep under the sleeping bag.
He sleeps on top of it.
And he waits.
Last night, at 3:00 a.m., I saw him sitting up in bed, looking at the floor vent.
He was whispering.
I turned the audio up.
“I know,” he whispered into the dark. “I know you’re burning. I’m sorry.”
He reached down and unscrewed the vent cover.
He took off his sock.
He dropped it down the hole.
Then he took off his other sock. Dropped it.
Then his sweater.
He is tithing.
He is paying the rent.
Because we know now. The “Borrowers” aren’t evil. They aren’t monsters.
They are the dam.
They are the only thing keeping the fire under the earth from swallowing us all. They are the burning, suffering shield between our world and the white-hot core.
And they are running out of blankets.
I walked into his room this morning. He was sleeping, shivering, his skin pale and stitched with invisible thread.
I looked at the vent. It was screwed shut.
But lying next to it was a note, written in crayon.
Mom, it read. They said the socks aren’t enough anymore.
I looked at Leo.
I looked at the linen closet in the hallway, where I keep the new towels.
I walked to the closet.
I took out a towel.
I walked back to the vent.
I hesitated.
If I give them the towel, they stay down there. For a night.
If I don’t… they come up. And they take the Wick.
I unscrewed the vent.
I pushed the towel down.
I felt a rush of heat against my hand. A brief, grateful brush of long, spindly fingers against my fingertips.
They took it.
I screwed the vent back on.
I crawled into bed next to my son, and I hugged him tight, trying to share my warmth.
But I know it’s only a matter of time.
I can feel the floor getting warmer every day.
And I have started to notice something about my own hair.
When I brush it in the morning… the strands don’t fall to the floor.
They drift toward the vent.
They are knitting a new quilt.
And I think this time… it’s for me.
THE END
