I was locked up at Camp Happy for thirteen months. When I got out, the firewalkers were no longer impotent. They impregnated everything: bus stop benches; fences; building faces; branches. My neighborhood was smoke-stained when I returned to it, but I didn’t let that get to me. I just wanted to see my wife Janning and my two kids again.

I assembled household appliances at Camp Happy. They called it Camp Happy because your meal card got docked four hundred calories as soon as you stopped grinning. This had the effect of scraping twenty pounds off my already thin frame while it lengthened certain muscles around my mouth and shortened others, so that I always appeared to be smiling even when I wasn’t.

Tears glossed Janning’s bloodshot eyes when she opened the front door. I reached for her; she pulled away.

“Judah, I thought you were getting out next month,” she said.

“The robots went on strike, so they moved up my release date.”

She rested her shaved head against the doorjamb and started to cry. “I haven’t gotten paid in three weeks. There’s barely enough food for the four of us, and now I’ve got five mouths to feed!”

I tried to turn my permanent grin upside down and failed to do so. “Five? Why five?”

Janning wiped her nose on the back of her wrist. “I had to rent out our room, Judah.”

“To who?”

“To a firewalker.”

Fists clenched, I bared my teeth like a maniac, which was the right thing to do even though it felt wrong. Janning let me in.

■■■

The firewalker referred to himself as Mr. Toad. He stomped around our tiny two-bedroom apartment like he owned the place, leaving little licks of flame on the linoleum that Janning doused with her callused big toe. After he introduced himself, he asked me if I’d encountered any of the flaming homunculi that had infested the city. I lied and said that I hadn’t but the truth was that several of the tiny buggers had spit fire at me when I got off the bus.

“I see by your smile you want to make a fresh start,” Mr. Toad told me, whistling as smoke seeped through his nose. “Knowing your place will help with that, but you also need to acknowledge that the future incineration of the Earth is inevitable. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

I acted as if I didn’t want to break his nose but he must’ve noticed the fuck you emblazoned in my eyes, because he laughed, shaking his entire body like a snake trying to shed its skin.

“Janning was right, you are strong willed,” he said. “But you’ll learn to like us, eventually. You may even grow to love us.”

“I’d rather have my eyes plucked out,” I said as I left the room.

■■■

At dinner, we talked about the rest of the family to avoid discussing Camp Happy in front of Hanna and The Baby. I learned that my father had been arrested a few weeks after Christmas, and, although no one knew why he’d been arrested, my brother had managed to locate the prison my father had been sent to. It was in another country.

My father’s sudden disappearance sent my mother into a tailspin. She got involved in a long-term relationship with her smart refrigerator and had to be hospitalized for frostbite several times. My sister, who was still unemployed, was doing her best to take care of Mom, but it wasn’t easy with Dad gone.

Because of the small portions Janning doled out to us, we finished eating quickly, which gave me more time to catch up with my kids. Seven year old Hanna responded to my questions about school and her friends with polite, disinterested answers. It was obvious that she preferred the content splashed across the wraparound screen bolted to her head to any interaction she might have with her father. The Baby, who wasn’t really a baby any more, stared wide-eyed at me but wouldn’t say a word when I questioned him, almost as if he was frightened of me. Janning explained his reaction later on, when we were about to bed down in the living room.

“Mr. Toad’s been telling him that he’s The Baby’s father,” she said.

“And The Baby believes it?”

“What did you believe when you were three years old? Of course he believes it!”

I rubbed my eyes until I saw swirls of kaleidoscopic color dancing in the dark.

“You didn’t try to change his mind?” I asked after a long pause.

“What was I supposed to say?” she whispered. “It wasn’t worth the risk.”

I stared at the ceiling while we lay on the floor, trying with all my might not to smile.

■■■

I started looking for a job the next day. I checked in at stores, restaurants, and delivery stations, but there were only a few places hiring and none of them would give me the time of day because I wasn’t wearing a firewalker-friendly asbestos sweatband. When I asked one of these potential employers what I needed to do to get said sweatband, she stuck her chin out, buried her eyebrows in her black bangs, and drawled, “Where’ve you been, Camp Happy?”

When I nodded, she looked a little sorry for me. Then she droned, “Firewalker-friendly sweatbands are available to eligible citizens who have demonstrated their love for the firewalkers by engaging in an act of charity.”

“An act of charity? Like what?” I asked.

“Like denouncing a fellow citizen who has spoken ill of the firewalkers, or reporting vandalism against firewalker-friendly establishments to the proper authorities.”

Still smiling, I shook my head and returned to the smoke tinged, steamy street. It was lunchtime, and tiny homunculus firewalker hybrids were bouncing on the sidewalk and swinging from the eaves and awnings above my head. As soon as they saw me, they nipped at my heels, calling me dirty names while they spit tiny arcs of flame at the cuffs of my torn jeans.

I quickened my pace. When ignoring them didn’t work, I showed the homunculi my smile, which only seemed to egg them on. Desperate, I got the attention of a cop standing on the next corner. When he saw the little bastards chasing me, he hit me with his nightstick, landing a blow on the side of my arm.

“It’s the only way they’ll leave you alone, if they see me giving you a beating,” he explained.

I stood still while he whacked my shoulders and back with the nightstick, and we both grunted—me because of the pain; the cop from exerting himself in the heat. The doll-sized firewalkers cheered, sending fountains of fire into the air, but after a few minutes, they got bored and rolled away, and when the sidewalk was no longer littered with burning lumps of plastic and metal and clay that had fused with human flesh, the cop cracked the nightstick against the back of my skull and said “I hope you’ve learned your lesson” before he gave me a good shove.

I was pointed in the direction of an overcrowded panhandlers’ pen. I went home with thirty-seven cents I’d stolen from the pockets of a bum sleeping with a smile on his face.

■■■

When she wasn’t cooking, cleaning, or taking care of Hanna and The Baby, Janning was extinguishing the fires set by Mr. Toad with her bare feet, a spray bottle, or a damp mop. Although she never complained about the extra work she had to do to keep the apartment from burning down, I saw the toll the constant strain of following in Mr. Toad’s footsteps put on her, so I intervened on her behalf. I confronted Toad while he was gleefully setting fire to the old clothes hanging in our bedroom closet.

“Listen, Toad. There’s no need for you to be here now that I’ve returned. I think you’d better go.”

A chuckle chuffed his round cheeks. “If you didn’t have that silly smile slathered across your face, I might be inclined to take you more seriously, Judah.”

I took a deep breath, inhaling a whiff of bitter smoke. “I’m asking you politely to leave,” I said.

He frowned, furrowing his forehead with rows of wrinkles. “On what basis? We’ve gotten along just fine without you, you know. Your wife is quite happy to have me here, and your children look up to me. If anyone should leave, it should be you.”

When he said this, I raised my fist without thinking, but before I could follow through on the threat, Janning grabbed my arm, yanked me around to face her, and dragged me out of the room.

“Fool!” she hissed. “Do you want your kids to wind up on the street?”

I wrenched my hand out of her powerful grasp. “We have to stand up for ourselves.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got no job and no prospects—what do you have to lose?”

“That’s not fair, Janning. I’m trying.”

Janning rolled her eyes. “You’re trying. Just like you tried before you were sent away. How many jobs did you lose because you said something nasty about the firewalkers? How many days did you waste standing on street corners, making speeches about the end of the world that no one wanted to hear?”

“That was different. I know better now.”

“Is that why you keep mocking us with that ridiculous smile, because you know better?”

“I told you, it’s because of the camp—”

“Yes, let’s talk about that too, about why you were sent away. Because you did something so absurd, so insane, that the firewalkers had no choice but to send you to Camp Happy. You brought it on yourself.”

“Three of them were beating up an old woman on the sidewalk! What was I supposed to do, keep walking?”

Janning leaned close to me, a rictus freezing her face while her eyes went wild. “Absolutely you should’ve kept walking! Because they weren’t beating up an old woman, they were beating up an old dyke, which was none of your damn business! If you had left them alone, those firewalkers would have ignored you too, and you would’ve come home that night instead of being sent away. Then I wouldn’t have had to pay the incarceration tax, and there wouldn’t be a boarder here. Do you realize that? If you’d kept on walking, Mr. Toad wouldn’t be paying me rent—so if anyone should go, it’s you, Judah, not him!”

All the air in the room pressed on my narrow chest, making it impossible to breathe. When Janning’s face finally relaxed, I swallowed and said, “If you want me to leave—if that’s what you want, I’ll go.”

Janning shook her shaved head. “I don’t want you to leave, but if you can’t accept that this is the way things are now, then you’ll have to, for the sake of Hanna and The Baby.”

That was when I noticed The Baby. He was clinging to his mother’s legs, crying, trying to protect her from the stranger with the permanent smile. Seeing how frightened he was, I apologized and tried to pat him on the head. He screamed, and I turned away in time to see Mr. Toad standing in the entrance to my bedroom, gloating. Flicking tendrils of yellow flame from his nostrils, he slowly closed the door.

■■■

That night, when everyone was asleep, I filled the mop bucket with water and took a carving knife out of the kitchen. Treading quietly, I unlocked the front door of the apartment and tiptoed down the stairs to reach the darkened street.

Little fires burned everywhere: in the trees; on the stoops of the buildings; on the roofs of the parked cars. I walked by these fires slowly. Our power had been rationed years ago, so the streetlights were dim, like candles perched on thick sticks, but if I looked closely, I could tell which of the glowing embers was a tiny homunculi and which was a flame bud that was about to bloom.

Tilting the mop bucket, I doused the snoring homunculi with water, extinguishing their sputtering fires before I stamped on them with my feet. To the burning blisters of protoplasm grafted onto metal, bark, and concrete, I introduced the blade of the carving knife, twisting the steel after I stabbed the smoking growths, those little sacks of living fire. I worked my way up and down both sides of the block in this way, murdering the deformed progeny of Mr. Toad and his fellow firewalkers.

I didn’t notice the lights that had flicked on in the windows above until my neighbors opened and closed their doors. They were standing on their respective stoops, staring at me. Scanning their faces, I sought some sign of solidarity but found only spite and indifference.

Someone hurled a curse at me, and a tin can bounced off my chest. Watching my former friends and neighbors descend from their high places, I felt the knife and bucket fall from my hands, and I smiled helplessly, like a guileless child. I was still smiling when they pushed me to the ground, their shadowed faces blotting out the sky.

Chad Gayle  is an author and professional photographer from New York. Chad has suffered from chronic depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and debilitating anxiety for much of his adult life but has made great strides in managing his symptoms with psychotherapy. His fiction has appeared in MoonPark Review, Inner Worlds, and Cosmic Horror Monthly; to learn more about his photography, please visit https://chadgayle.photo/.

Visual Art
Ria Cabral is an author, artist, and graphic designer whose work is inspired by a lifelong love of storytelling and creativity. She holds degrees in Communication with a concentration in Journalism from the University of Phoenix and creates work that blends visual art with thoughtful narratives exploring imagination, emotion, and human connection.

Writing from her home in the Texas Hill Country, Ria is the author of Elara's Tea Leaves and The Eighth Candle. When she isn't writing or making art, she enjoys time with her family and believes creativity has the power to inspire hope, foster connection, and reveal the beauty found in everyday life.

Fragments of the Self is an expressive mixed-media artwork exploring vulnerability, identity, and resilience. A solitary blue figure with a blooming flower over the heart symbolizes hope and healing, while surrounding skeletal faces, a crowned skull, and a tangled red heart represent fractured identities, memory, ego, love, grief, and the complexity of human emotion. Broken shards evoke loss and transformation, while the open white space at the center offers a place for healing, renewal, and personal interpretation. Through layered washes, expressive ink lines, and symbolic imagery, the work invites viewers to reflect on how we rebuild ourselves after life's challenges and discover new growth within our fractured pieces.

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