It was a pale and dreary afternoon, the sky thick with the promise of rain that never came, leaving the world beneath it suffocating in a blanket of oppressive humidity. The kind of day that made your thoughts sluggish and your mind ripe for wandering. Michael and I, best friends bound by years of similar misfortune, stood in the cluttered garage, our hands stained with the grime of the workday. We were in the business of junk removal—picking up the remnants of other people’s lives, hauling the discarded fragments of their existence from one place to another. It was a simple enough job, one that required no great skill or intellect, just the endurance of a man willing to do what others would not.
The evening before, we had finished our last job of the day: a hoarder’s house, piled high with the detritus of a lifetime. Old newspapers, broken furniture, a thousand forgotten things—scrap and debris that others had deemed unnecessary. We had filled the truck to the brim, our backs aching as we wrestled with the heavy weight of the unwanted.
But as we loaded the final bag of trash, we saw him.
Mr. Cartwright.
Our neighbor.
He was standing on his porch, his body hunched, his eyes bloodshot. A man whose once-prosperous life had slowly devolved into the chaos of addiction and despair. For years, his rants had filled the neighborhood with a kind of eerie predictability—his drunken tirades against society, his broken promises to clean up his act. He was a fixture in our lives, a constant, like a shadow cast long after the sun had set.
We had tried to ignore him, tried to steer clear of his volatile presence. But on this particular afternoon, it was impossible. He stumbled toward us, his breath foul with the stench of alcohol, his face flushed with a heat that spoke of more than just the weather.
“You think you’re better than me?” he spat, his words slurring as he came closer, his fists clenching and unclenching in the air. “You think you can just throw away everything? Everything, huh? Like you’re some kind of goddamn priest of waste?”
I glanced at Michael, who stood frozen, eyes wide with discomfort. He had always been the bold one, the one who would speak before thinking, who would act before hesitating. But in that moment, there was something darker in him. Something I hadn’t seen before.
“Get back to your house, Cartwright,” Michael said, his voice edged with irritation. But it was more than just annoyance—it was a warning.
Mr. Cartwright took another step forward, his words now cutting through the air with a sharpness that seemed foreign to us. “You’ll pay for this. You’ll pay for everything you’ve taken from me. You—” His voice faltered as his body swayed like a reed in the wind, his knees giving way beneath him. In the next instant, he crumpled to the ground with a sickening thud.
A horrible silence followed.
I rushed to him, but I already knew. The pale, unblinking eyes staring up at me, the ragged breath that never came—he was dead. And in that moment, a coldness washed over me, suffusing every nerve, every inch of my body.
Michael stood behind me, his hands clenched tightly at his sides. “We… we didn’t mean to—” His voice cracked, as if the weight of it had suddenly become too much. “He was drunk. He was going to hurt us.”
I looked at him, my mind racing, the rush of adrenaline making it hard to think clearly. “He’s dead, Michael.”
“We can’t call the cops,” Michael said, his voice low, almost pleading. “The purge is in three days. If they find out, we’ll be caught. They’ll make an example of us.”
He was right, of course. The annual purge—the one night when all laws were suspended, and murder became legal—was just around the corner. It would give us a reprieve, a chance to make things right. We could dispose of him, legally, without fear of consequence. But there was a problem. The clock was ticking. We had three days to maintain the illusion of Mr. Cartwright’s life.
And so, with a trembling sense of inevitability, we began our charade.
We hauled him into the back of our junk removal truck, his body unceremoniously dumped among the piles of discarded furniture and rotting cardboard boxes. We drove him to his house, where we placed him back into his armchair, carefully positioning his limp arms around a bottle of whiskey. We turned on his television to a channel he always watched—an old crime show—and left it there, the volume low, as though nothing had changed.
But everything had changed.
For the next three days, we lived a lie. Each morning, we would wake early, enter Mr. Cartwright’s home, and “carefully” prop him up in front of the television, as if he had simply gone on living. His phone would ring, and we would answer it, our voices muffled and strained as we impersonated his slurred, drunken speech. We answered his mail, paid his bills. We made his life appear whole, when all the while, his body rotted in the corner of the room.
The hours grew heavy with the weight of our deception. Michael would laugh—too loudly, too nervously—whenever the doorbell rang, whenever a neighbor asked about Cartwright. “Oh, he’s fine,” he would say. “He’s just, uh, resting.”
But I saw through it. I saw the cracks in the performance, the fraying edges of our carefully constructed facade. Michael’s eyes were hollow, his hands always trembling. There was something in him now—something darker, something that had shifted when Cartwright had fallen. And each night, as the day of the purge drew closer, I felt the dread crawl further into my bones.
On the third day, everything came to a head.
We stood in Mr. Cartwright’s living room, staring at his inert form as the clock on the wall ticked ever closer to midnight. The hour was near. We could almost taste it—the release, the freedom. But something was wrong.
Michael was pacing back and forth, his eyes wide, frantic. “We can’t just… leave him here. What if someone comes? What if—”
“What if what, Michael?” I snapped, the tension in my voice betraying the fear I felt. “What if someone notices? We’ve done everything right. We’re just waiting for the purge.”
But even as the words left my lips, I wasn’t sure I believed them.
I turned to Mr. Cartwright’s body, a grotesque and uncanny mockery of life, his head tilted back unnaturally in the chair. His eyes, unblinking, stared into nothing. His skin had begun to take on a sickly pallor, the unmistakable odor of decay beginning to seep from the folds of his clothing.
And then, as if some unseen force was pressing upon us, the silence broke.
The phone rang. It was Cartwright’s phone—his phone.
Michael’s hands were shaking as he reached for it. He held it to his ear, his breath catching in his throat. I watched, a strange sensation crawling up my spine. Something about the moment felt wrong. But Michael’s voice was a hoarse whisper as he spoke into the receiver.
“Hello?”
The line was silent for a moment. And then, just before Michael could speak again, a voice came through the speaker.
“It’s too late,” the voice said, cold and mechanical. “The purge begins at midnight. But you can’t escape what you’ve done. Not this time.”
The phone went dead.
We stood there, motionless, as the clock ticked down to midnight.
And then, as the first bell tolled, I realized with a cold shiver that I could no longer tell where the lie ended and the truth began.
Was Cartwright dead? Was the phone call real? Had we truly been playing at something that had already spiraled beyond our control?
The door creaked open, and I looked at Michael, whose face was pale, his eyes wide with a terror I could no longer recognize.
“Do you hear that?” he whispered.
And in the silence, the ticking of the clock echoed.
Was the purge upon us?
Or had it already begun long before the clock struck twelve?
The answer, like the truth, would never come.
