We paid the Home Depot, gave our number to the cashier to collect our stars, but apparently the employee had been using their own number to collect them, so we spoke to the manager—they insisted there was nothing they could do about it, so we gave up and went home; when we got home, the employee was there with a letter they received in the mail saying that they were awarded a bunch of stars; we got pissed, so Ismael left and got on the phone for like ten million hours, but it was dark in the woods, and he was wearing shorts and it was cold, and I was sitting there, in the living room with my mom, watching TV, waiting for Ismael to finish, and on the TV was a woman sitting on a couch and she was kind of scorned, and across from her, on another couch, was a man and another woman, and they were all drunk and laughing; then my mom turned into Ismael‘s mom and she was breast feeding a baby in her in her lap, and one of the women from TV stood up and sat on the man’s face and he started eating her out and I looked at Ismael‘s mom and I said, “are you gonna cover that baby‘s eyes,” but she said it was fine; then the TV changed and there was this older, fatter woman freaking out on the floor, crawling backward into a room, and she reached the edge of a bed and started to pull herself up—she was screaming about what was going on in the living room, but as she pulled herself up, it became apparent that something was already in the bed; it lurched forward, opened its mouth, latched around the woman’s head, and covered her all the way down to her clavicle and chest; she started writhing in its jaws; the thing bit her fucking head off, and then we found a blonde braid hanging out of the wall, so we started pulling on it; it went along the whole house; we just kept pulling on this braid and it was just coming out of the wall, chipping bits off until it led to this white purse with teeth; a head inside started flying around trying to eat people so we fucking whacked it with a broom and it fell to the floor, and then Ismael came back and said that they weren’t going to do anything about the stars, and I was mad at him because he was wearing shorts and it was cold outside.
Patrick "PJ" Smith is an Irish-Italian writer who recently graduated from California State University, Northridge with a BA in English/Creative Writing. He enjoys reading and writing horror, surrealism, magical realism, and any other genre his writing wants to take him. He was born in New Jersey, raised in south Florida, and had some major formative years in South Carolina before moving to Southern California in 2014. There he met his husband of 11 years, adopted his two cats Karma and Simba, and began his writing and educational journey. They all now live in a cozy apartment overlooking a foggy lake in San Francisco.