When the milk started talking to him, Tim didn’t know how to respond.

“YOU SHOULDN’T EAT DAIRY! DAIRY PRODUCTS OF ANY KIND WILL KILL YOU, TIM. I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP!”

He looked at the gallon jug of milk in his hand. He checked the expiration date: June 15, 2010. Still good. He tilted it back and forth slowly, as if it were a particularly delicate Christmas present, or maybe a bomb, and he felt something slide heavily within the milk.

With shocking force, the forms of two gnarled claws slammed against the plastic halfway down the jug. “YOU ALSO SHOULDN’T SHAKE MILK BEFORE SERVING! I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU … IDIOT!”

Tim screamed and half-dropped, half-threw the jug at the counter in front of him. It was two-thirds full, and so he couldn’t see the thing inside once it retreated back into the white murk. He could only see the disturbance of the milk itself, frothy and choppy in the jug, as the creature within resettled.

“W-w-what? Is … are you … I mean, what’s … ?” Tim was at a loss. How was he supposed to interact with a milk jug that shouted at him? “Have I gone insane?” he asked quietly.

“OH, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!” the milk shouted. “NO, YOU HAVE NOT GONE INSANE! YOU ARE THE MOST BORINGLY SANE PERSON WHO HAS EVER LIVED! THAT IS WHY I AM HERE: BECAUSE YOU ARE A BORE! TO EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING. I AM HERE TO HELP. YOU CAN CALL ME REX.”

“Rex,” Tim said. “Okay. I’m … Tim.”

“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! JESUS! I ALREADY SAID YOUR NAME NOT SIXTY SECONDS AGO! IDIOT! ARE YOU ALWAYS GOING TO MAKE IT THIS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO HELP YOU?”

“Well, I don’t–I mean, I’m not sure,” Tim said. “I didn’t even know I, you know, needed any help.”

“WHY WOULD I BE HERE IF YOU WEREN’T A MAN WITH PROBLEMS?” Rex said. “GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME, TIM! YOU NEED HELP, AND I AM HERE TO PROVIDE IT! TA-FUCKIN’-DA, THE DOCTOR IS IN, BITCH!”

Tim fidgeted. It was all so troubling. He stared at the jug, blinked, and chewed the edge of his thumbnail. “But,” he mumbled, his mouth full of dirty keratin, “what if I don’t, you know … want your help?”

The creature flung itself forward and its gray-brown, furry, cat-like face pressed against the plastic, pushing away the milk and revealing its brain-melting monstrosity.

“THEN WE ARE GOING TO HAVE PROBLEMS, TIM!” it screamed. “WE’RE GOING TO HAVE BIG, BIG PROBLEMS!”

And then Rex laughed a horrible, terrifying laugh, and it started to occur to Tim that maybe the fiendish creature wasn’t there to help him after all.

“POUR SOME HERSHEY’S IN HERE!” Rex said. “MAKE ME CHOCOLATE! THEN, AH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH, LET THE HELPING BEGIN!”

Driving back was always the worst part for George. Laura always cried, and it wore on his nerves. That day, coming back from Portland, the rain was oppressive, gray, and suffocating in the summer heat. Trapped in the car with his sobbing wife, George struggled to find NPR’s Global News report interesting.

Peter and Sarah were in the back, playing on their game systems as was the usual. Laura was staring out the window with her finger in the middle of a book she had already confessed to him made her feel stupid. By the look of things, she hadn’t made it more than twenty pages into it. Not that he wanted to read it, anyway–it looked like something she’d heard about on The Daily Show.

There was definitely something unseemly about his wife’s infatuation with Jon Stewart. Buying books she never read was bad enough, but she’d taken three separate vacations to New York just to go to his show (a show which, if he had to be honest, George found more than a little tedious).

The Global News was over, and he hadn’t retained a single thing. Marketplace came on. Why did he always have to try and listen to things he didn’t really like? After all this time, who did he think he was kidding?

“Did you put that hold on the new Dan Brown?” he asked her.

“Ugh,” she replied. “You really want to read that?”

He shrugged. “I liked Angels and Demons.”

“You have terrible taste.”

“Says the woman who never makes it more than thirty pages into anything,” he said. “Fine, though. Forget it. I’ll just buy it from the bookstore.”

She shook her head and defiantly reopened the book she’d been fingering for the whole ride. She lasted about four minutes.

She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “God,” she said, “do you ever wish you had a better brain?”

“All the time,” he said.

The following day, we kept the shades drawn. Dim light crept around the edge of the yellow plastic. We cowered, our nerves still raw from the terror of the previous night, until Gretchen got too hungry to stand it anymore and went to the door.

I couldn’t shake the thought of the door rattling and cracking during the worst of the night’s gusts. None of us knew just how the phantoms worked, but they were in the wind somehow–we knew that much–and if the wind hit you, you’d be convulsing and transforming into a monster within seconds.

Gretchen moved the pale blue towel we’d used to block the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. I didn’t like seeing the daylight there; I felt so vulnerable. If I could see out, they could get in.

Same with the windows. Those thin slivers of light worried me.

Gretchen looked back at us guiltily. “We have to find something to eat. We can’t just cower in here forever.”

Penny drew closer to me and pressed her mouth against my ribs.

“Just hurry,” I said.

Gretchen put her hand firmly on the brass knob.

We waited for her to open the door and face whatever was out there.

The grass danced against the concrete side of the gas station in the bright, sharp afternoon sunlight. Merle stood beside his Mustang and smoked a Camel Wide. Frank was thinking about avoiding the bathroom entirely and shitting in the ditch beside the station.

“Come on, man, it’s just a fucking bathroom already!”

“You know how I feel about places like this! Remember Kansas? Remember that nightmare?”

“Whatever, man. We stopped because you said you had to go, so either go, or shit out here in the open. I really couldn’t give a rat’s ass which.”

Frank faced the restroom sign. The key, attached to a craggy, bent wire, which in turn was attached to a giant wooden block, labeled ‘Manly Key,’ was shaking in his hand.

Nearer the gas tanks, there were only a few eighteen-wheelers. Other motorists passed on the highway on the other side of a wide diamond of brown reeds.

Frank put the key in the door.

“Attaboy!” Merle said and pitched his cigarette to the ground. “Now make it snappy.”

Frank grabbed the handle and pulled back. He didn’t like anything about this seedy joint. He had legit concerns, he really did. Like, what was the place like when no one was in it? What kind of creepy-ass things crawled up out of the pipes when no one was looking? And hell, what of the bacteria, which loved dark and dank places? He figured that anything that was in the business of mutating would surely love to mutate away in such a place.

And people kept feeding it. Feeding it with their urine, their shit, their semen, their snot, and their blood. All of it into this rank den of germs that would then sit and stew, locked away until the next injection of disease-rich filth.

He turned on the light. There was a crowd standing in front of him in the nasty bathroom. It was all his family and friends.

“Surprise!” they all yelled, and Frank realized he’d forgotten his own birthday, yet again.

Cheered by the quality of beer at the party, Paul took a sip of a nice IPA and decided to take his chances mingling.

A pod of people had gathered around a clean-cut, Rob Lowe-looking guy, standing in front of an empty fireplace, telling a story through copious references to technology.

“I didn’t have my BlackBerry, so I had to login to my mail using my iPhone. Have you ever tried that? Not using the mail app, but actually logging into a client you haven’t actually set up? It’s so slow if you don’t have the 3G enabled! I have to upgrade this summer when they release the iPhone OS4, because it’s just hellish using my first generation iPhone these days. It’s like I’m living in the Stone Age, although I did just finally order an iPad. I can’t wait to get it. I got a Kindle for Christmas, but I never use it. Our IT girl has an iPad, and she swears by it. I really think it’s the future.”

Wow, Paul thought. They’ve replaced that guy’s brain with advertisements.

He found an attractive girl who looked about twenty-five, laughing at something an old gentleman beside her had said while the two of them perused the table of expensive snacks. There were slices of peppercorn-encrusted salami, a wheel of brie, assorted crackers, a fruit plate, and an assortment of dips. Paul thought the salami looked good and took a few slices.

“I love this stuff,” he said.

The young brunette’s eyes immediately went to his gut. “And what do you do?”

He loved getting asked that before being asked his name. It was how he knew he was in New York City. “I’m a lumberjack,” he said. “What about you?”

“I work for a hedge fund.”

“Oh,” he said, and he smiled and walked off, realizing that he was judging everyone there even more harshly than they were judging him.

He took another long pull from the IPA. It really tasted delicious on top of all that peppercorn salami.

It wasn’t so bad, being in a cage with a monkey. The monkey was curious, but as far as roommates went he was very considerate. There was very little feces-flinging, and he was as decent a listener as Meredith had found.

Outside, it was raining, and their only visitor was a lone, ugly child with blond hair and a sour face, who wore a blue raincoat and sucked a red lollipop, sucking it right at them, staring, waiting, and yet unimpressed.

Eventually, the little girl’s mother called out her name, and the girl vanished, running to join the rest of the crowd eating sausages beneath the protective shield of a nearby bridge.

“I certainly never thought this would happen,” Meredith said. The monkey was picking at his fur in the corner away from where he’d shat a moment ago. “I don’t suppose you did, either,” she said.

The monkey looked up.

“No, I thought not,” she said. “No one expects this. Not in a million years, but life is strange.”

The monkey bared his teeth at her. She took this as him trying to smile, trying to cheer her up.

“I know, but you never expect this when you’re just going along, doing what the boss tells you to do, you know? They definitely don’t prepare you for this in college.”

The money laughed.

“Right?” she said. “I mean … I thought this was going to be a good job. Now look at me: in a cage, smelling monkey shit all day.”

He turned away, and she thought perhaps she’d gone too far. She didn’t want to insult him. He really wasn’t all that bad.

So she added: “Well, I suppose it could always be worse, right? I could’ve been a corporate lawyer.”

Faht came in, and everyone was laughing.

Ok, so maybe the purple pimp hat was a bad idea, he thought. The trouble with John Faht was that not only was he intensely serious about silly things, but he had the ability to see himself behaving this way and know just how much he looked like an ass. One might wonder: If he could see all this, couldn’t he change? But no. No matter how much time went by, Faht stayed the same.

Oh, poor Faht. He was a truly miserable and lost soul.

But he walked into that conference room bravely, and took off the purple pimp hat and set it on the table with a smile for everyone who was there making fun of him. Yes, this was the life of John Faht. This was how it went, day in, day out.

Sometimes it seemed that everything was just one big Faht.