It felt nice outside, Clem remembered thinking. He could remember watching the sun peak in and out of the clouds and he could almost feel that gentle breeze that felt like freshly cleaned white sheets fluttering on a clothes line. It was Sunday, so the roads were empty. Everyone in town was either at church or pretending to be and all he could remember thinking about was how much he wished he hadn't quit smoking. 'To just have one more on a day like this would be the the cherry on top', he could remember thinking over and over in his head as he watched the clouds drift by. But the fresh spring grass was soft on his back and for the first time in weeks he felt, or at least could remember feeling, that he could breath easy. He had to take what he could get. And this was just fine by him.

His Aunt Susan hadn't expected him home until at least 3 pm and he seemed to recall he had planned on meeting up with Jim Donald over in the Village Mart parking lot to buy some pot at 2. He'd had 3 hours to kill, but for some reason he couldn't remember what he did. Everything from then to now came up as a blur. Had he broken down and picked up a pack of smokes? Did he stop by Dennis Moore's house to get that $20 he'd owed him so he could pay Jim? Or did he just keep lying there in the grass, wondering what the fuck to do with himself?

He wasn't sure. And no matter how hard Clem racked his brain, he couldn't retrace his steps from the unfamiliar house he now found himself in and Watson's Park. The windows were dark, so it had to be pretty late out. Aunt Susan would have already called around town to see if anyone had seen him. She scared easy, especially when it concerned Clem.

The house reeked of cigarettes and the once white popcorn ceiling was stained yellowish black from nicotine. Extra butter. The old arm chair he found himself in was worn and the threads on the arms were scratched away from decades of lounging and nervous picking. There was also a coffee table that laid flattened and in pieces in front of him while someone laid motionless on top of it, face down in a pool of orange liquid.

'That couldn't be blood', he thought, though he wasn't quite sure. He'd never actually seen blood, at least not a lot of it. He'd only seen the stuff they showed on late night horror flicks on T.V. and the fake stuff they sold down at the Dollar Store on Halloween. It always looked red on those. But maybe it was actually orange.

Clem didn't recognize the body, at least, not by the way it was dressed. It was faced away from him and he knew he didn't want to try moving it just to see it's face.

'That would make all of this real', he told himself, 'as long as it just sits there and I sit here, there's still a chance I could wake up from this. This only keeps going if I do. If I don't participate, the illusion will just have to give up. Right?'

There came a hard banging at the door, the screen door rattling against the frame with every knock. He couldn't hear any voices from where he sat, so Clem kept still and quiet. Where had he gone after he dozed off at the park? He closed his eyes and pretended to hit an invisible rewind button. He focused hard on the backs of his eyelids, like he did through his windshield when driving through a thick morning fog looking for ghostly headlights. But each knock at the door made his heart jump one more rung towards his throat. And when the door handle began to jiggle, he found that his mind could focus on nothing else. It jiggled, it rattled, it clinked, and clicked. If it was the cops or this things family, they could tear the door down. If this is how he was going down he was going to do it enjoying his last few moments in a soft, ratty old armchair.

He closed his eyes, and listened.