Chapter Text
The hotel room smelled like sugar and sweat.
A man laughed too hard from the couch. Drunk, slumped, barely awake. Chips spilled from his pocket. Casino badge half-tucked in a blazer on the floor.
At the window stood a woman. Elegant in the way wealth could only fake.
She held her phone between two polished fingers, already typing out the next wire instruction.
“You’ll keep me comfortable, won’t you?” she said sweetly. “Wouldn’t want your name attached to anything… messy.”
The man mumbled something, agreement, maybe.
She smiled to herself.
“Don’t worry. I’m not the kind of woman who causes problems.”
The house was modern and expensive, but always cold.
Flint sat on the floor, a cheap toy in his lap. One of three.
The puzzle pieces didn’t fit quite right. He’d already fixed that.
In the next room, his mother’s voice rang through the walls. High, laughing, and sharp at the edges
“If it doesn’t match the marble, I don’t want it. Ugh.”
She walked past the doorway, phone to her ear, eyes flicking briefly toward her son.
“What are you staring at?”
Flint didn’t answer. Didn’t flinch. Just watched her. Quiet. Still.
She curled her lip. “Go… play or something.”
As she passed into the kitchen, her voice dipped again, still on the phone. “He’s always like that. Just…watching. I swear, sometimes I wonder if he’s normal.”
Flint blinked slowly, hands resting on the toy. He was five. He didn’t know what normal was. But he already knew how to disappear without moving.
He was six when he found it.
It was near the base of the back fence, in the overgrown patch of weeds behind the house. A small bird, feathers puffed wrong, neck tilted too far. Stiff.
It must’ve flown into the window. No one noticed the sound. Or if they had, no one cared.
But Flint did.
He crouched beside it, arms folded over his knees, face inches from the dirt.
The bird’s eyes were still open. Flint didn’t poke it. Didn’t flinch. Just watched.
Its legs were curled up like it had wanted to keep going. Its wings were tucked, but not neatly.
It looked…unfinished.
Flint tilted his head.
Death wasn’t loud like the cartoons.
It wasn’t red or bloody or writhing. It was quiet. Still.
Like a machine that had simply run out of battery.
He reached out, one careful finger, and touched the tip of a wing.
Feathers. Light. Dusty. Fragile. Cold.
Behind him, his mother’s voice echoed faintly from inside the house.
“Flint! Lunch!”
He didn’t answer, he just pulled a stick from the grass and gently turned the bird onto its side.
Watched the way it didn’t resist.
Watched the way its chest didn’t rise.
That’s what gone looks like, he thought.
And something in him sparked.
Not grief. Not fear.
Just interest.
The world broke something.
And left it for him to understand.
That evening, Flint sat at the dinner table, quietly chewing lukewarm boxed mac and cheese.
His mother scrolled on her phone, barely looking up.
Flint asked, calm as ever “When something dies, how long before it stops being itself?”
She blinked. “What?”
“The bird outside. It didn’t move. But it still looked like a bird. For a while.”
She made a face. “Ugh, Flint, are you playing with dead animals? Don’t bring it inside”
“I didn’t touch it. I just watched.”
Pause.
“Do the bugs come right away?”
His mother groaned and set her phone down.
“Go read a book or something. I’m not answering your creepy little questions.”
The next morning, Flint went back.
The bird was still there, but different. A trail of ants moved across its feathers. A few flies danced around the eye sockets. Its body had sunk lower into the grass, like the earth was starting to take it back.
Flint crouched again.
It doesn’t just end. Something uses it.
He came back every day. Watched as feathers loosened, skin peeled, bones began to show.
It became a study.
When only bones remained, tiny, white, sun-bleached, he brought a jar.
Collected what was left, cleaned them in the bathroom sink when no one was looking.
And tucked it under his bed.
The world never wastes a body. It just passes it on.
And in that truth, Flint found the first thing that felt like order.