[Excerpt] Adam’s Name

Most of us have seen someone out of the corner of our eye that’s not really there. Not many of us have been knocked on our butt by said shadowy being.


Seth shrugged and slipped the notebook into a pocket of his hooded sweatshirt. “Ready?” Susan nodded and left the tip on the table. He cast one last glance at the clubbers that had started the whole conversation, and then they were out the door and into the brisk Autumn air. You could feel the heat and the smells radiate off of you into the breeze, and it was one of the reasons that Seth stayed in Michigan. Nothing like a good Autumn.

He was startled out of his enjoyment as Susan fell bodily into him, nearly knocking him over. He caught the brick wall of the Coney with one hand, and Susan with the other. Pain sliced into his palm, and he tumbled to the sidewalk with her.

She was up again in an instant. “Hey, fucker! Why don’t you watch… where…” She turned around slowly, searching the empty sidewalks. “Where did he go?”

“Who?” Seth used his left hand to pull himself up by the brick wall. His right palm was scraped, bleeding, and full of sidewalk grime. Great. He had iodine and bandages back at his place, but this was going to hurt for a while.

“The guy that ran into me! He was drunk; I could smell it on his breath.” She had that same look in her eyes, as if she was waking up from a dream. “He had the strangest eyes. Brown with little flecks of green in them.”

Seth felt a chill in his bones again, and thought that maybe they really had jumped off of some kind of cliff. “You saw his eyes that close when he knocked you down?” He limped over to her, and started them walking to her building.

“No. I didn’t even get a look at them. You know what else? I know what his name is. It’s Adam.”

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