The refrigerator clicks to life and its innards—the marble slabs of cheese and deli meats and salad dressing, packaged as prettily as soap boxes—glow with a soft, orange light. An uncorked bottle, still dusky and full, demands his hand.
It's a bit of a reach, but he's in the midst of a growth spurt and he manages to catch the bottle's neck. The glass is dew-studded and the color of the butterscotch candies his piano teacher used to keep in her granddaughter's pottery dishes before diabetes championed and forced the candy into exile. From his various encounters with the bottle's contents, Jake knows that it won't taste like butterscotch.
There's the odor of his mother's nail polish remover and kitchen ammonia; still, the vestige of something subterranean and mossy. Jake can't imagine why his dad is so persistent about drinking the stuff when they
have a case of Coke and a pitcher of milk and some apple cider from his aunt's orchard. But it's not a choice anymore. Not for Jake, anyway.
He rolls his shoulders, then brings the bottle to his chin. The image of his father unrolls like a classroom world map in his mind: diamond-cutting angle of his jaw, bruised apple eyelids, Great Wall of China shoulders. Jake does his best to shed his young body, his scabbed knees and soft cheeks, and in the moment, he zips on his father's skin.
Then he hears his mom scream and the bottle goes up in butterscotch fireworks on the tiles below.
.
.
"They'll think we're a couple of… of Mormons or something."

He paused mid-button; the flaps of his shirtfront unfurled across his narrow chest like sails. An amused grin touched the corner of his mouth. "We wouldn't want to give them that impression, would we?"

Kate Hirsch stepped back into the cracker box bathroom. She was a tall, severe twenty-six, impeccably blonde and manicured. A tissue was pressed to her poppy lips, which bled fresh red. "They'll think we're boring. That we're the kind of people that are too good for drinking and get nutted off the History Channel instead. Do you want to make that impression?"

The collar button was coming loose. Logan Freeman fingered it fretfully before tenting his collar and groping for his tie. "Jesus, Kate. Next you'll say we're not in the in-crowd unless we do pot after fourth period in the parking lot."
"Everyone drinks," Kate snapped.

Though Logan doubted the statistical accuracy of the statement, he couldn't argue. Kate had been pre-law, an innate dissenter, a practiced doubting Thomas, and probably would've pursued a career if the technical aspects hadn't bored her. Even though her degree was in Social Sciences, Logan's impression of Kate was still one of a daytime soap opera lawyer, who arrived in court in fresh-pressed power suits and hot-rolled hair. And he, being of relatively rocky will, had long ago conceded to her. "Fine," he said softly. "I'll drink at the party."

She flashed him a dazzling smile as she pinned a pearl earring to either ear. "Good. Drinking's a social obligation, Logan. No one's forcing you, but… come on, do you wanna be the kid in the corner of the party while everyone's having a good time?"

Logan glanced sidelong at his fiance, who had zipped herself into a classic black cocktail dress that emphasized every curve with a kind of calculated, impersonal promiscuity. He then felt something alien swell over him: a distinct vertigo that enveloped him like an ocean tide on dry land. It struck him that he did not know this girl. A stranger was walking among them and she slept in his bed and her name was Kate. And she was
they're all spiders logan-boy all black f***ing widows don't you dare climb in their web his future wife. Stranger Kate, blonde bombshell with the beauty and the brains and what else? Everyone drinks, signed Anonymous.

"No," Logan finally replied, the silk tie snaked around his neck like a do-it-yourself noose gone wrong. "I guess not."
.
.
There's a smear of blood on his shin from where an errant glass shard wheeled out of the wreckage and carved a rut out of him. He soldiers through the business of getting the gash sterilized and bandaged, his little face cut from stone.

"There," Kate Freeman says, tossing out the bandage wrapper and doing her best to smile. Even though he's too old for such matronly excess,

she kisses the wound lightly. Her lipstick leaves a strawberry-shaped smudge on his leg.
Jake looks down at it. His apathy is almost infectious. "It doesn't hurt that much."
"That's good." She can smell it on him now, the rancid stench that she can't scrub out of his dress shirts. It's enough to make her sick. "Do you want to talk about this? Or just watch a movie? I rented something on my way home yesterday—one of those John Carpenter movies you like."
"What do we need to talk about?" His voice drips with grey, damp fatigue.

Kate pushes a stray curl behind her ear and smiles again, her mouth stretched tight like duct tape. "Well… we can talk about why you tried to drink one of Dad's beers."
"Oh," Jake says. 
"'Oh?'"
"I'm sorry I dropped it and made a mess."
"That's not a problem, sweetie, no, not at all!" she exclaims. Her voice hits an operatic note, then splits like a violin string snapping mid-performance; a tremulous sob crawls out.
Jake's eyes widen with familiar paranoia. "I-I'm sorry, Mom. I won't touch it again. I won't make any more messes."
please don't leave me not after what you did to me
"Oh, baby, don't be sorry." Kate tries to push herself off of her crouched hams: instead, she falls to her knees and has to brace herself with her hands. A sheath of hair unrolls down her cheek.
"I just wanted to be like Dad…"
you're the one who made me this way
The smell is overwhelming. It's EVERYWHERE and it's not going anywhere.
.
.
"Do you like the lite stuff?"
"Ugh," was Kate's perfunctory response.
Logan's hand jerked away from the lite display. "One case or two?"
The cooler door swung open, eliciting an arctic blast of milky condensation. From behind the frosted glass, she looked like a ghost, the idea of a person, half-sketched and half-realized. "Two."
.
.
Sometimes, the Thing comes out of the den. Of course, it's sometimes Freddy Krueger and sometimes it's Jack Torrance, but usually, it's the Thing.

Jake used to be afraid of the Thing, before he realized that the Thing had bought room and board with him, and bothered little in his affairs. It emerges from the den, an amorphous, fleshy thing with whippy tentacles and jointed spider legs, jaws zipped away. The spider legs poke pinprick holes in the Oriental rug; its one canine head snarls wolfishly.

If Jake sits very still, sometimes the Thing doesn't see him. He's glad the television isn't on yet—the Thing hates loud TV.  The Thing also hates Mom, who had to go to her bedroom for a nap after Jake broke the bottle. His cut burns, a tiny epicenter of pain.

The Thing goes down the hallway, trailing jellied blood, and then disappears. Jake's breath escapes him in a single whoosh.

He can't get hurt by the Thing.
"CHRIST—"
But he can get hurt by Jack Torrance.

The refrigerator door slams shut, jolting its contents with a piercing rattle. Jake scrambles to his feet and looks around the living room for a place to hide. He's aware of himself panting noisily, even though Jack Torrance never gets around to hurting anybody but himself. Still, he'd rather deal with the Thing—all bravado, but no bite—than mean, sulking Jack Torrance.

Footsteps crescendo across the hardwood. Jake dives behind the big leather couch his parents bought for their tenth anniversary and waits.

"JAKE! JAKEY-BOY! WHERE ARE YOU?"
Jack Torrance sometimes can't control his voice. Or his axe. It cleaves the air with a whippish, whistling sound.
"WHAT'D SHE DO, JAKEY-BOY? SHE TAKE THE BOTTLE? SHE TAKE IT AWAY? DID THE B**** OF THE NILE TAKE IT AWAY?!"
Jack Torrance hates Mom even more than the Thing.
"I DON'T WANNA HURT YA. I JUST WANT MY F***ING BOTTLE! WHERE'D SHE TAKE IT? WHERE'D THE B**** OF THE NILE TAKE IT?"
The axe screeches down and takes out the tasteful little coffee table. Wedges of mahogany slide under the couch, pecking at Jake's heels. He balls himself tighter and folds his hands over his head, just like during the tornado drills at school. ME! he screams internally. I'M THE B-WORD WHO TOOK IT! I TOOK IT!
There's a lull punctuated only by Jack Torrance's heavy, wolfish breathing. The next words, though, don't belong to Jack Torrance—they belong to Dad. "Jake? Did you see where your mom put my bottle? Did she throw it away?"
He sounds unruffled and reasonable, a man who addresses things logically before picking up an axe. Dad doesn't get upset when Jake does things wrong. Like the Thing and Jack Torrance, he doesn't care much for Mom, but he would never hurt him. Jake is brave enough to uncoil himself and emerge from his leather barricade.
It is Dad, however sweaty and jaundiced. Dad smiles weakly when he sees Jake crawl out, his hatchet chin quivering like he's choking back laughter. "Hey-hey, Jakey-boy. What're you doin' back there?"
Jake ducks his head, humiliated by his cowardice. "J-Just looking for my Spiderman."
"Oh, I'm sure Spidey's 'round here somewhere."
"Yeah…"
"You weren't hidin' from me, were ya?" Dad asks with a sudden, glassy hostility. Jake gazes up at the man with his father's handsome nose and Superman curl, and realizes that it's Jack Torrance in a Dad mask. A filthy, horrible trick.
Jack Torrance grins wickedly behind Dad's gentle mouth. The axe creeps out from behind his back, glinting like something off of the tray in the dentist's office. Jake's resolve withers just as his bladder releases and he wets himself like a child. He can't get hurt by Dad. He can't get hurt by the Thing.
"ANSWER ME, JAKEY-BOY!"
But he can get hurt by Jack Torrance.
.
.
She hung up the phone, shook the tremor out of her hand, and turned back to the beads of chopped onion on her cutting board. "That was Abigail. She and Paul are getting a divorce."
Logan glanced up from his tumbler and shook his head. There was an unmistakable sanctimony to the gesture. "Great idea. They've got two kids and a mortgaged house, don't they? Yeah, splitting up was a great idea."
A shiver of repulsion skittered up her back. "They never loved each other in the first place."
"No excuse," he mumbled. "No excuse…"
Kate laid a carrot out on the board and aggressively reduced it to a few orange coins in a moment of phallic, vengeful pleasure. Between the staccato stabs of the blade, the ice in his tumbler plinkled maddeningly. He was a liquor man now. That meant lots of ice. "We've got one kid and an unmortgaged house. What do you think of that?"
He glared at her back and felt a familiar burble of hatred rise to his surface like the eruption of some long dormant volcano. "We're not gonna be like them, Kate. We're not failures. We're gonna stay married."

"Sounds like you've got your mind made up."

"You can b**** and moan all you want, but we're not getting a divorce. And you know why?" Logan leapt theatrically to his feet, sending his chair flailing to the tiles below. "Because you made me, Kate! You made me who I am and I made you! You wanted me to drink! Fine!" He swigged from the glass and slammed it down against the tabletop; the ice cubes sang. "We're who we are, Kate, because of each other. We're failures because of each other. This is the last thing we got baby, and if you wanna cut the cord, fine. Get used to being a failure at everything. At least I make it a little easier."

She never turned from the cutting board. When he had at last picked up his overturned chair and returned it to the table, Kate picked out an onion and began to dice it methodically.

Finally, she said: "You didn't make me. I made you."
"Right," he snorted. "You were always an insufferable b****. I had nothing to do with it."
The blade slapped against the wood. "I made you a monster."
Logan snatched up his tumbler and stormed out of the kitchen. The last of his venom burst out of him with the final, violent heave of his erupting volcano. "At least you got something right!"
.
.
Evening comes silently, nothing more than a blush of stormy purple on the sky's periphery before everything goes dark.

Kate lays in bed, watching The Price is Right on the junky little television set in the bedroom. She feels sweaty and rashy, as if she contracted bed sores from just a few hours of rest, and appropriately rankled by the endless loop of life insurance commercials. Gracefully aged couples sorting through bills until they find their Insurance God and get a nice little 401k. They walk along the beach, old in body but spry in heart, holding hands, laughing, smiling as they walk towards a peaceful, painless death together.

She knows how she and Logan will die. His liver will swell and then burst like a birthday balloon, spilling a decade's worth of decayed tissue instead of confetti. He'll die a messy, mortifying death in an insured hospital bed, while Jake waits in the hallway and Kate watches with the doctor. It won't be long now. No more than seven years, she thinks.

Her turn will come after Jake has graduated college. A routine gynecologist visit will reveal an army of stalactites and bubbling tumors laying siege on her ovaries and that will be the end of that. She might live to clap for Jake at his wedding, but she'll be gnarled and revolting with arthritis and disease. Jake, as always, will take great pity on her.

THIS ALL CAN BE YOURS IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT

And the price is right. She paid long ago and bought her one-way ticket into marriage. This is her nonrefundable prize and, honestly, no contestant is going to return their fantastic showroom prize to Bob.

She smiles grimly. A prize. Logan—a prize! The notion wracks her with a gale of feverish giggles.

A prize is something won. Something earned. Kate did not earn Logan. She had sewn him together in a moment of desperation and pumped him with the lifeblood of alcohol and created a hideous monster. A monster she could never abandon, because he was her own. God never discarded his creations. And neither did Kate.

The door opens with a sharp, pinching whimper. She quickly rolls onto her side and feigns sleep as his shuffling footsteps shush-shush across the carpet. Onscreen, someone hits the jackpot; spasms of colorful, visceral light are vomited across the wall.

The mattress creaks beneath his weight. It's only seven-thirty, but the mournful squeal of the springs suggests that he's been asleep on his feet all day. A roaring silence rips through the room.

Kate slowly turns her head and peeks at the anonymous figure sprawled out beside her. He's already in the throes of a drunken slumber that will keep him bound to the bed until the craving shakes him awake. The craving is the moon that guides the tide of his life. She is the Sun, spinning lightyears away.

He's handsome. She's beautiful. They have a lovely brick house and a generous income and a darling son. These aren't failures. Their marriage is not a failure. She isn't a failure.

But as Kate returns to the program, she has a moment of piercing clarity. She clamps a hand over her mouth and quivers with a single, lung-busting sob that sounds loathsomely weak in the dim, silent room.

The creation was not the monster. It was the person who made it, the person who breathed false life and faith into it, who was the monster after all.