The Duck

There was only one rule. Don’t open the door.

There used to be more. But things got simpler after dad died.

Peter was playing underneath the kitchen table when mom told him. Her bare feet appeared beneath the edge of the table cloth. Strange. Normally she wore red tennis shoes. Peter crawled out. Her skin was pale and drooped beneath her eyes like heavy sandbags. Then she told him dad died. And then the rule: Don’t open the door.

Two months later he opens the door.

Mom became different. Her old habits vanished, replaced with long baths and quiet mutterings.

The stench is assaulting.

She seldom talked with Peter, save for his nightly bedtime story, the same every night.

He sees the twisted shape of a man. Lifeless and rotting.

It was a strange story, about a family of ducks who wanted to be geese. They dressed their baby duck as a goose and sent him away.

Flies buzz lazy circles around his dad’s navy sweater.

One day the geese vanished. The ducks returned for their baby, and from him they learned to be geese.

Peter backs away, but there, reaching from behind the desk, is another hand.

He moves closer, waiting to breath. Another body. Facedown. Naked. The entire corpse skinned from head to toe. Flesh peeled from muscle and bone. But on the feet. A pair of red shoes.

Realization.

The floorboards creak. Then the raspy breath of that being behind him, wearing his mother. He turns to face it.

“I said don’t open the door.”

Its eyes flicker red. Bubbles rise up and down its stolen skin, popping into a rancid pus that drip away to patches of green, leathery scales beneath.

“I was going to tell you.”

Peter looks down and sees. His skin bubbles too.