When he opened his eyes he was still screaming and he felt as if he had just begun, with the wails echoing helplessly off the walls and his hands tangled in his hair. He had been thinking about his ex-wife before he fell asleep and it wasn’t pleasant. It started out well enough, the two of them sitting at the breakfast table over hard-boiled eggs, he tapping his neatly with the egg fork and her rolling the shell against the rim of her plate, two steaming cups of coffee and the white cotton curtains swaying delicately in the breeze. She was smiling.

They sat for awhile in that way. He reached for the toast fingers, arranged as a centerpiece, fanning outward from the center of the platter like rays of light, and dipped two in the yolk at once. She sipped her coffee and stirred it with her untouched egg fork, watching him. “Nice morning,” he said, and touched her hand.

“Gerhl flehck,” she said, her fingers curling up under his, small nails caressing his palm.

“What?”

Somehow, though light flooded the room still, though the toast was where he’d left it and her eggshell was broken into a thousand pieces as always, though the curtains fluttered in the breeze, he felt the closing of shutters.

“Gerhl flehck,” she said again, and now she was leaning forward and studying him intently as if trying to make him understand.

“Sorry—I can’t—” He waggled a finger in his ear, helpless. “Can you say it again?”

She stood. “Pitook gerhl flehck. Wergh. Wergh?”

The sunlight was behind her. She looked like an angel. “I can’t understand you,” he said, panicky because her face was changing or maybe that was just his imagination no it was her face her face, and her skin wasn’t flaking but stretching somehow, spreading lengthening her mouth widened she had more teeth than he remembered.

“Flough,” she said, “loor moap.” She picked up the abandoned egg cups, presumably to take them to the sink for washing. He felt that he had just been called a very bad name, and then he was overwhelmed by this thought, alone and strong: I have to get out of here.

“Honey?” he said feebly, from the dining table, looking at her back. “You okay?”

She did not answer. Her hair, hanging just to her shoulders, a cut from decades past, bounced. She ran the hot water with thin fingers. He bolted out of his chair suddenly, heading for the back porch, and he got his hand on the knob but it wouldn’t turn and wasn’t that just fucking classic.

“Pitook gerhl flehck,” she murmured from somewhere behind him. Her voice was no longer angry, it wasn’t puzzled; now it was perversely philosophical. Maybe she was pondering the mysteries of the universe in that language of hers, he thought, and then she plunged the bread knife through his abdomen.

The blade protruded just below his heart, and he looked at it with almost medical detachment. She twisted it and pulled out. There was something oddly sexual about the act, perhaps autoerotic; he groaned, wondering if he was becoming aroused. Necrophilia. Walking dead man. His hand on the handle twitched then and it gave with a creak. He’d planned on oiling it last summer. Too late now.

Blood rushed from his chest, dripped to the porch in a rush. He made a fist and stopped the hole.

She followed him outside, still murmuring those words that he couldn’t understand, and got him once more, in the neck, probably just missing his carotid because he was alive. The blood was spurting now in an affronted geyser, over the lawn and the swing and her clothes.

“Ack,” he said, helpless, her face stretching before his eyes, waiting to see what was behind the mask, if it could possibly be worse.

And then, of course, he woke up, hollering bloody murder, his fist still clenched to his abdomen though layers of flesh and muscle guarded against that fatal visceral flow, his legs tangled in the sheets and his face wet with tears. The room was dark, the curtains were drawn, and there wasn’t an egg cup anywhere.

It took him awhile to recover. He turned on the light with a pale and trembling hand. No blood. No woman. Everything normal. It was going to be okay.

He ran through the probable causes; the therapist had said that, after such a traumatic event, he was bound to suffer from a little PTSD, there were many different ways in which the symptoms presented, if he had bad dreams he was to take a tranquilizer and lie still and try to remind himself that he would be okay.

“I’ll be okay,” he said quietly, wondering why he didn’t quite believe himself and believed the therapist even less.

There was a creak.

“Is anyone there?”

His voice sounded less confident than he would have liked. It sounded, in fact, almost afraid. Not good enough.

“Is anyone—?”

No answer but the creaking sound again, the same noise their back door used to make in the house on the hill before he oiled it, because he never got the chance to oil it before the accident and afterward there was really no use. It squealed and grated. She used to say it reminded her of an animal in pain.

He swung his legs over the side and walked to the closet. Closed. Had he expected otherwise? He wasn’t sure. He opened the left side, saw nothing but his clothes, hung neatly in rows, starched and impassive.

Still dark.

Back under the covers.

Hunched down until he couldn’t see the door, he felt for the light switch and turned it off, and, thinking about the therapist with the massive spectacles who knew perhaps less than nothing, fell back into the dream, screaming.