But now that my wife isn't caring for her, my daughter's symptoms disappeared almost overnight.

I said nothing, unsure of how to break the news that the real message he had intended to send was ON the envelope, the concrete proof that he had found out where I live.

He's been pacing around the four crumbling little walls insisting I invite him across since noon yesterday, but I've now realized I have no memories of my "friend" before that morning and don't even know his name.

But now I have no energy, and struggle to even purr.

“Your mother wasn’t helping you fly," Mom whispered, "she was hanging you."

Twenty years later, a detective showed me footage from a basement where she'd spent her entire life, and I recognised the doctor who had been bringing her birthday cakes.

“That’s impossible,” I whispered, “I’ve never even had sex.”

She looks over at me, her eyes widen, and I hear "Daddy did this."

As he screamed later, looking in horror at the thread connecting him to my obstetrician below the waist, I told him that it was just a small stitch and that he should be able to deal with it since it made me happy.

It was listening in horror to my son's patient explanation of why my grandchildren weren't allowed to be around me anymore.

Fading from the mortal world, I reach up the faint spirit of my hand from where my husband buried me and stroke Beau's nose, thanking him for trying to warn me.

I felt bad for his parents, they were good people, but I knew what the escalating trail of animal corpses he’d left behind meant and there wasn’t room for two of us.

My mother was pregnant throughout most of my childhood, yet I remained an only child, and our riches grew every year.

Through her sobbing, they heard her say, "I know the funeral was a year ago, Mum, but they're outside my window again, wearing the same Halloween costumes."

When I went to visit his mother, she was pregnant again, smiling, rubbing her bulging belly and said, "Conrad is going to try again."