The Phantom Pulse #2 | November 2026
Sarah Fannon
Half the town has rotted already. The whirlpool of corrosion crawls over Jesus’ face on the billboard right outside of town, the one that reads “Trust in me.” Houses are slouching into each other, drunk real estate with fungi dripping like blood from their windows. I drive past the market where I once stole a single beer from a six pack to impress Alexandra. By the time we walked back to her house, the bottle was lukewarm. We shared sips on the back porch, and I licked the rim, thinking about how her mouth had just been there, and how it’d be there again where my tongue had touched. And then her mouth found mine, and in my rush to feel her, I knocked over the bottle and the grassy earth drank it up. I pulled her into my lap, one arm wrapped around her waist, one hand holding her freckled face.
Now the store spills into the ground, a crumbled mass of wet and molding wood. The bright but foul flesh of shoppers is everywhere like a tumbled pyramid of grocery oranges. And now my sweet summer reminiscing begins to rot too because I can’t stop picturing a false memory: Alexandra’s face changing to goop in my hands, running through my fingers, her lips big enough to stay in my palm, tongue still wagging in the ghost of my mouth. I wipe my hands against my jeans and return to my car.
It started as bloating. Brick homes and tombstones and car roofs bulged as if filling up with rain. Phone lines swelled and then fell under their own weight. The animal spring riders in the elementary school recess yard looked like pregnant, mutant beasts. Then it all began to deflate and fester and dissolve. When I park outside of Alexandra’s house, I’m relieved to find it untouched.
As I get out of my car, she emerges to stand on the porch with her arms crossed. Either she recognized the sound of my car or she’s not used to visitors with so many people lost to the filth.
“You’re back,” she says flatly.
I notice new clusters of freckles—stellar birth on her cheeks and arms. I like thinking that new, pretty things can grow here, too.
“Come with me,” I say.
She stares at me a beat before letting out a derisive laugh. “Should have asked me that the first time. You would have liked the answer better.”
“I shouldn’t have run off like that. I was a coward.”
“What were you afraid of? Us?”
I shake my head. I can’t tell her I was running from the rot in the corner of my eye, so I say nothing.
“It’s amazing how it only took one shitty night to undo years,” Alexandra continues. “Now you’re here like nothing happened, but it’s too late for us.”
I clasp my hands to have something to hold on to. “Yeah, of course. I get it.”
She fixes her stare in the distance, far above where I stand at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m happy to see you, and I hate that you’re here.”
“I get that too.” We’re both silent until I rush to say, “We don’t ever have to talk again, but you can still leave with me tonight.”
“I have to think about it.”
When I’m back in the driver’s seat, I can’t resist looking back for her, but all I find is the closing front door. I take a few deep breaths before driving towards the house I grew up in. If I somehow forgot how to get there, all I’d have to do is follow the thick web of decay that leads to the spider’s hub.
Back when this all started, after I had left, my mom sent pictures and a string of angry texts about how I needed to get my ass back and fix the house. I blocked her number and took a long, hot shower. Then I saw similar images appear on the news, and I witnessed the disintegration from the safety of a different Kentucky town.
Now, my house has been rendered to fetid shambles. The roof has caved in, and its scattered pieces cover the floor. There is no door or walls keeping me out. I see the white tail of my mom’s cigarette floating in the air before I see her lying down in the rubble, as casual as if she were sunbathing.
“Hi, Mom.”
“What the hell are you doing here, Dessa?”
“I don’t know,” I admit.
“Come to autograph your damage?” she sneers.
I think back to the market and all the bodies under its heft. How slow the rot moves. But all I say is, “I’m not happy this is happening.”
“Liar.”
I want her to look up at me. There’s a large chunk of roof shingles blocking most of her face, so I kneel for a better angle. I flinch when I see her fat, bulging eyes. They look on the verge of bursting, like blisters filled with pus. While her eyes are closed, the skin is so stretched and sheer that I can see her watery blue pupils. And then those floating pupils search for me, and I realize she can see through her taut eyelids. I notice her sunken cheeks, trickling down her neck like melted ice cream. So much of her isn’t right, not her hair receding into her skull, not her knees that seem to have shimmied down to her ankles. But she’s still alive. So many people have died, and it’s easy to imagine she’s propped up by spite. I stand up and turn away.
“It didn’t have to be like this,” I say.
“You didn’t have to leave,” she says. “All of this is your neglect. You don’t turn your back on family.”
I want to parrot the last part back at her, but there’s no use.
“I did have to leave,” I say. “You’re not safe to be around.”
“You ungrateful bitch. Living at home rent-free wasn’t good enough for you? You’ve always needed so much, even when you were a baby. Me, me, me. A suckling little parasite.”
“Hmm, and this daughter you’re describing is the same one you’re desperate to keep at home?”
“Yes, because family is family, and you’re mine whether you like it or not. And now I have to see Alexandra flaunting around town,” Mom continues, “knowing she took you from me. She doesn’t even have you anymore either.”
I bristle. “You hated me before you found out I was gay. It just gave you an excuse to be worse. And I had to go.”
“I don’t care where you go. This shit will follow you because it is you.”
I close my eyes and press my fingers to my temples, try to rub away my headache, rub away the last years of my life.
“Good to see you too, Mom.”
I drive just to drive, to witness the slow degeneration of my hometown. There’s a row of expensive houses with “For Sale” signs, the stench ever-present, like the smell of approaching rain, only rancid. I take a snaking road past farms where the white fences are browning like bananas, the boards peeling and chipped. In the field of a farm, there’s a mare with a void in her stomach, round and rusted like an oversized bullet hole. A shape shifts inside of it. I pull over so I can get out for a closer look. A bird nests in the nook of the horse’s body, its brown head poking out. My tears are sudden and embarrassing, but I let them out and lean across the fence to watch this creature make a home in ruins.
I pull out my phone and call Alexandra, who answers after one ring.
“Wanna see something cool?”
Alexandra brings a couple beer bottles, and we plant ourselves in the grass to watch the bird in the horse as the sun begins to wane.
“What was the point of leaving if you were just gonna come back?” she asks, her words a crack in a long stretch of silence. “Weren’t you afraid what’s happening would infect you?”
I finish off the bottle in a few gulps to give myself time to decide on an answer. I opt for honesty.
“No. Natural immunity. I’ve survived it my whole life,” I finally say, thumping a fist against my chest. “It comes from right here.”
“Don’t say that,” she says fiercely.
I like the scrunch of her nose, the furrow of her brow, that reveals her concern for me, after everything.
“I came because I was worried about you,” I admit. “I had to see that you were okay.”
“You didn’t seem worried about me when you left with no goodbye. That was shitty, Dessa.”
“I’m really sorry. I know that’s not enough, but I am. It was all closing in, and I had to get out. I didn’t want anyone stopping me or slowing me down. But that wasn’t fair.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I was ashamed. Didn’t want to look back.”
“I would have come with you in a heartbeat.”
“Will you come with me now?”
Her eyes are steely but wet with tears. She gives me a tight nod.
“Honestly?” I ask. “When I heard what was happening, I thought you’d be safe from having been with me for so long. Like I’d rubbed off on you.”
“Well, we’ve done that to each other a lot,” she says with a teasing quirk of her eyebrow, hiding her smile behind the neck of her bottle.
I grin, then take her face in my hand. She sighs, rests in it, closes her eyes. I kiss her gently, and her body shudders into mine. Her mouth acts on its hunger, a kind of force that rumbles through me like an earthquake. She grabs my hair in her fist and yanks my head back, pulling our mouths apart. She inches forward until I’m about to kiss her and then draws away, holding me just out of reach before I finally whisper, “Please.” And she gives in.
I snake my arm under her loose tank top. But instead of finding the familiar softness of her back, my hand slips right into her, and it feels like plunging into a mouth. I pull it out and my fingers are bloody and viscous and sticky with grime that borders on purple and black.
“Alexandra, turn around.”
She shakes her head, sad and definitive.
“You were never going to leave with me tonight,” I say softly.
“I told you it’s too late,” she says with an exaggerated shrug that makes her pain more obvious.
“How?” I ask, knowing there’s no logic in this moment that would make it any better. “It didn’t look like it’d reached your neighborhood yet.”
“I don’t just sit around at home all day. It was bound to happen.”
“What are you not telling me?”
Alexandra stares up at the darkening sky. “Your mom paid a visit a while ago.”
“Why?”
“Looking for you. She came crying, said she wanted to put the past behind her and ask me for a second chance. Thought together we might be able to get you here. She even hugged me, and it was all so weird and surreal. She patted and rubbed my back for a long time, and I was uncomfortable, but I let her because I knew how easy it would be to upset her. She waved at me as she left, and that’s when I noticed the blisters on her palm.”
My stomach tightens and my nostrils flare. I hope a chunk of my old house impales my mom in the night. Then again, that would cut her suffering short.
“God, this is all my fault.”
“Don’t go making this about you,” she mocks.
I lean my forehead to hers. “What do you need?”
“Just hold me.”
I take Alexandra in my arms. My hands curl around her waist like when we first kissed.
“It’s like we’ve gone back in time,” I whisper. “Can we pretend?”
She shakes her head. “You don’t get to do that.”
I nod.
Alexandra’s voice breaks when she says, “I’m so sick of waiting. I waited for you, for an apology, for that revolting stuff to come for me, and now I’m waiting for it to turn my body into its own grave. Or maybe a birdhouse, I guess.”
“Survival is strange.”
I’m afraid to say more because I don’t want to get choked up and make this all worse by sobbing. I remind myself we have time. We have more than this night. But that means I have to watch her waste away, her body collapse, an imploding star.
“You could still run away with me, you know,” I say. “For a little while.”
“I could. Maybe I will.”
The sun is gone, and the breeze is gentle, and Alexandra has fallen asleep in my arms. Her body is heavier in sleep, and I try to memorize the weight of her. She will dwindle day by day, but I will hold her as long as she is something to hold.
About the Author
Sarah Fannon is a graduate of George Washington University’s Honors English and Creative Writing program and she continues to live in DC. Her work is featured in SmokeLong Quarterly, Uncharted Magazine, The Maine Review, CHEAP POP, Diabolical Plots, The NoSleep Podcast, and elsewhere.