Did it come from the freezer, or was it in his head? Julian had never hallucinated a sound this vivid, nor had he been this scared. His hope, that he was just high and exhausted and hearing things, disassembled as he turned and saw George’s eyes shoot open, temple and cheekbones going white, as if the space arrested by his pupils shoved the blood away into the corners of his face. On a cue he was painfully aware of, a new kind of sinking feeling crept across Julian’s gut. His friend’s face, unwitting reflection of his inner panic as projected on a backlit screen, or perhaps in the one straight mirror inside an amusement park fun house, communicated that he was not, as he desperately wished, being tricked by his scrambled senses. They looked at the freezer, at each other, waited.

George, Julian, shivering.

“Hm mh, mh mhmm hm hmhmhm, hm,” the freezer, or what was inside of it, said.

The boys stood side-by-side, unable to scream. They huddled, whispered, and agreed that, if need be, George would stab it with a cooking knife, but only after a reluctant Julian had opened the freezer door. As he fixated on the handle, it occurred to Julian that something animated but nonetheless deceased could probably not be killed again, the seed of a thought which proliferated into a vague notion about death, either his own or someone else’s, being an impermanent state vulnerable to interruption at a moment’s notice, seemingly by accident or on some unknowable whim, blurring or entirely contradicting, antagonistically, the established notion in everyday life that, once something was dead, visually, sensorially, hopefully medically dead, it was absolutely dead, and as such, shouldn’t be able to mumble and speak and shake and scare him in the way this was, lest he and George were the first people privy in recorded history to the ways in which the dead, for no real reason, chose to be alive again, a particular acknowledgement that, though he recognized as unlikely, freaked him out even more than he already was.

As Julian sunk further and further in his spiral, George took him by the shoulders and shook him violently, pulling him out of the fungal root system growing from his thoughts. Julian attempted to keep the intrusive thoughts away from him, settling on the comfort that he was either going to die quickly or continue to live, options which, though not ideal at the time, allowed him a base level of manageable anxiety. As their breath steadied, the boys swallowed the spit building on the edges of their teeth, the echo in their motions mixing and clashing with the freezer mumble, spinning, faint and light as vapor, in the depths of their K-hole.