This story is the winner of the
2026 NECKSNAP x M E N A C E Emerging Voices in Speculative Fiction Prize.

You sign the lease, even though the apartment is in a sketchy part of town and the stairwell smells like a Porta Potty and a guy died in the living room six months ago. It feels fitting. Lose control of yourself, get exiled to a slab of concrete with cracks running through, across the river and a thousand streets away from heaven as a place on Earth and your lover-boy. That wonderful boy now sits in his apartment alone. He thinks of you, he worries. You want him to.

So you sign the lease, even though you and everyone else in the greater Chicago area heard about what happened in that place on the news. A million headlines whiz by our heads every day but ELDERLY MAN SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS IN RECLINER can snag on even the most fried attention span. People from outside the city cast their dark, judging eyes on your new neighborhood. Another death on the roster, Fox News said. There was a skit about it on SNL.

The overly professional woman in five-inch heels from property management mentions that dark day in a scripted manner as she gives you a tour. It seems as if she’s shown off this apartment a lot and doesn’t register approval or fear anymore, merely cycling through her routine until she finds an undiscerning tenant. She helpfully points out the spot in the living room where the man shot up in a blaze. All that remains from the roast is a little gray circle on the floor. Scaly like dried skin. She suggests putting a chair over it.

As it turns out, you are the perfect undiscerning tenant. You come back the next day for the keys and to move your meager possessions in, the few things your lover allowed you to take from his apartment. His apartment, encircled in red brick like a sparkling geode, his apartment with cream white walls and ornate wood detailing on every entryway, his apartment with a clawfoot tub to sink into and a strange loft bedroom typically reserved for guests. You slept like a guest the last few weeks in paradise, still blissfully surrounded by his nag champa incense and blankets covered in astrological signs and Persian rugs which he’d found in suburban antique shops and lugged home on the CTA. He always called it “our apartment,” up until the end, but it was his through and through. He permeated every speck of dust in the air.

This is why you don’t bring much. The only thing you moved into his apartment with, almost ten years ago, was a television. You also simply never had much to start with, even from birth. Your grandmother always said you clenched your hands constantly as a child, as if to say, “Where’s my money?” Or maybe, “Give it to me!”

You’re too distracted with your own desolation to think about hauntings and you’re also not a superstitious person. At your worst, you can be very close-minded. As you sit in the living room and stare at the charred floor and drink, and drink, and drink, you mostly don’t feel any particular way about the man who died there or his possible continued existence in a vengeful state. You don’t even bother to cover it up. Best you figure, the old vet killed himself and promptly blipped out of the universe forever. You’re always surprised that more people don’t.

But even the most skeptical and miserably drunk can find a bit of charm in the story, the man baked into his recliner in one pillar of flames. Sometimes, you toe at the spot with your bare foot. You call out, “Hello?”

Nothing ever happens. Reality TV jeers and applauds in equal measures faintly in the background. Your neighbors yell in the narrow hallways that snake between the identical apartments around you. Children throw rocks at each other or sing outside of your window, ten stories below. Roaches slide their antennae together. The singed circle is unchanged. You feel stupid, but vindicated in your incredulity, and amused by the novelty. You, the most worthless loser on the face of the planet, wasting your life in a piece of Chicago history.

You waste your life like this: you wake up at noon, drink two glasses of wine, and then “go to work,” which entails sitting on the couch with your laptop and testing educational software for elementary schoolers. You have a masters degree in education, which is valuable for this kind of busywork. Most people with your qualifications would not do this, only you don’t really have your qualifications anymore. Everyone says that nobody can take your schooling away from you, but they can always take your teaching license. You were given a six year suspension, of which you have served six months. So you bide your time on the computer adding apples and oranges.

In the evening, you take shots of whiskey and eat pasta with alfredo sauce and watch reality television. The burn is hypnotically meditative. Makes you think of the way flames would have felt licking at the old man’s flesh, the suddenness of the blaze that wicked away his nerves. Sometimes you drink so much whiskey that your face burns, and you understand how he must have felt. They never say anything about him on the news except that he was a drafted Marine in Vietnam and a widower. Some people don’t have much aside from what is done to them.

But some people are immanent, always changing, leaving handprints wherever they go. Your former lover (with boyfriend being too trivial, and husband being untrue) has a fireplace in his dreamy apartment, and in the golden years of your life he would often sit and knit sweaters on the floor in front of it during thunderstorms, in your button-up shirts and tall socks and nothing else. The logs would burn slow and smokey and the reflection of the flame danced in his pupils. He learned to knit at twenty nine because he wanted to. He’s good at it. You still have a beanie he made you. With love, he always said. But everything he did for you, he did with love. Including kicking you to the curb to die of liver failure.

If you get very fucked up and drink a lot of whiskey and a lot of cough syrup, it’s almost like he’s there in front of you. You can almost bring to the physical plane his ankles and the backs of his legs, curled in the shape of the burn. The lily-white of the insides of his knees. His small piston hands working thread and pricking needles. His red curls, shining like the gore from a gunshot wound to the head.

But if you focus on the dream too hard, it dissipates into nothingness. You turn from the burn on the floor and lumber back into your tiny bedroom, barely large enough for your mattress and dresser, and lay prone and want to die. This is your routine, in the apartment where a man burst into flames.

But after a slow, monotonous, blurry-on-the-edges month, you begin noticing strange things.

The first time comes as you force your way through an arithmetic module. You use a calculator for all the sums and for every five questions you get through, you take a swig of wine. You buy it by the box and usually go through two per day, sometimes half of a third. So by the time you’re almost done with the module, you’re pretty sloshed, and the sun has already sunk behind the other concrete towers that surround your own. As you punch nine plus eighteen into the TI84 you bought in undergrad, you hear something behind you. Whispers. Voices.

Not just one voice, and nothing decipherable. A whole group of people, your drunken mind hysterically deduces, in your apartment just behind your couch, talking about you and watching the back of your dead. So many people there. Behind you. Undeniably there, hissing between their teeth. Your heart slams in your chest and your palms moisten against your hot laptop. How did they get in without you noticing? You’re even facing towards the front door, which remains firmly closed and deadbolted. Could you be that drunk? They’re all going to laugh at you and how much of a pitiful loser you are, squeezing the dredges of the box red wine into your mouth by holding it upside down and shaking it and rolling the empty bag between your palms and praying for more. You can’t even stop yourself from doing it as they watch you. The only good thing about your current life is the complete solitude in which you can ruin it.

As you spiral, the voices slowly get quieter and quieter, and when you finally build up the courage to turn after licking the last remnants of wine from the hard plastic mouth of the bag, you find nobody behind you. Just the yellow-white wall, black mold creeping in the corner. Maybe that’s to blame, you think vaguely. But probably it’s the drinking.

Hallucinations quickly become your new normal. You’re not shocked. You’re an educated man, you understand exactly what you’re doing to yourself.

When you lay in your bed, or in your bathtub, you hear sounds in the living room. Light thumps, the sounds of limbs colliding with chairs, bundles of pillows and blankets to the floor, a dropped phone. And most often of all the large crowd, the conspiratorial whispers outside your door. But there is invariably no one there, when you wrench yourself out of the bath or bed in a panic. Just you and the chair that sat in your lover’s bedroom, by the bay windows, where his senile cat basked in the setting sunlight. He let you keep it because he’s just that nice. You regret not starting over, living a monastic lifestyle with only a mattress on the floor and a cross on the wall. You briefly consider bringing all the furniture back to him but you remember his words: “Do not come back here until you are two years sober.”

You want to keep it all anyways, deep down. The distance kills you. The last vestiges of him, single red curls still clinging to the chair and the mattress, bring you slightly closer to him. They’re the only thing keeping you tethered to earth as the phantom sounds continue, as the phantom voices hiss just behind your door. These little remnants of him, fossils of your old life.

If you’re self-aware, it can’t be so bad, right? You’ve always had that, at least. Even in the early days of your drinking, you have always known for whom the bell tolls. But you were able to keep yourself strong and stable for many years, teaching physical education at a high school for the gifted and talented, coaching the track and cross country teams, writing their college recommendation letters and reporting their parents to DSS. It’s one thing your lover liked about you, your dedication to your students. Now, you don’t leave the house, and you don’t do any running, and if you see a teenager on the sidewalk during your rare outdoor excursions, you cross to the other side of the street. You miss helping kids, helping anyone. Now you don’t even help yourself.

You call your lover while drunk. He doesn’t answer. You tell his answering machine that there’s a ghost in your apartment, the man who burst into flames, remember? You tell him that you think of him when you look at the burn. You tell him that you still find his firelight-colored hairs on your mattress, that they’re so hot they cauterize your hangnails. You tell him that you masturbate to the memories you have of fucking him on the beach in Provincetown, in the guest bedroom at his parents house in Champaign on a visit for Christmas, and even in a far, quiet corner of Millenium Park, on a picnic blanket, food abandoned in favor of wine. You call him his old pet names– baby, darling, honeybee.

You wake up after dinnertime most days to a temple-throbbing hangover and the sound of muttering in the living room. Work doesn’t exactly sound appealing so it falls to the wayside in favor of drinking and television and waiting fiendishly by the door for your pill dealer. Since you spend most of your weekly paycheck on non-nutrious substances, you’re comically broke and take a weekly shopping trip to the grocery store a block over for pasta and sauce and cereal. You’re pretty sure the people who work there think you’re an insane person. You’re pretty sure you classify as such. The employees at the liquor store think even less of you. The wrinkles between their eyebrows, carved in neons, tell you all you need to know about how you appear. It makes you laugh on the way home. You feel like Rimbaud– you have slashed your own body, drank your own blood, tattooed yourself, screamed in the streets.

That was how your lover looked at you, in the end, on your way out of his paradise. Like you’d made a beast out of yourself. You were lugging the last of your belongings out as he lingered in his kitchen, picking his fingernails, ignoring you taking long swigs out of a flask. You did it in front of him on purpose. He knew it, too. Drunk and mean, you were glad to see him suffer.

You wanted to ask him, “Is this the worst it can get?”

You didn’t, because you knew that he’d say, “Of course not. There is so, so, so much lower you can go.”

It’s true. The first and last time you mix Xanax and alcohol, you call your lover. He actually answers this time. It’s late, and it’s the night before his only guaranteed day off. You imagine him curled up in his papasan chair, watching reality TV, and you feel one long, slow ache for him, like an ellipsis.

“What is it?” His voice is small, hurt.

You say many things to him that night, in a tidal wave of uninterrupted babble that you barely process before spewing. Your final words to him are these, though, and you really remember them– “I know you’ll take me back. I know it. You’re just like your mom. You just want somebody to love you.”

He hangs up. Silence, like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. You fling your phone at a wall and take satisfaction at the sound of it cracking open.
And then you see it. Him. The combusted man. The Marine. The widower.

He’s standing in the burn on the floor, a man of about 60 years old, with dark hair and dark eyes and a furrowed, sour look. He sits down in a chair that does not exist, his limbs burgeoned by the air. He retrieves a pack of cigarettes from his shirt’s front pocket and lights one, tucks the lighter and pack away. And then, in an instant, he’s burning. It takes no time at all for the tiny circle of flames around his mouth to envelop his whole body. Like he’d been covered in gasoline.

It’s so real. You can feel the heat of the fire on your skin, the warmth of a lover. The man, the phantom, the hallucination, whatever he may be— he makes no moves to quell the fire. He smiles and settles back and luxuriates in the heat, which melts his clothing, and then the thin, delicate skin of his face. It smells first like his burnt hair and flannel, but soon the smell of cooking meat wafts to your nose as his flesh turns black and sloughs away to show the red-smeared white of his bones. Even those char black and bubble.

You watch it all in rapt, immeasurable horror. And when he is reduced to a smoldering pile of ash floating midair, you blink, and the apparition is gone.

It’s probably the first time in your life that you’ve ever thought I took too much. You run to the burn but it’s normal now, maybe with a slight chill in the air. Standing in the middle of the burn mark, you close your eyes and tilt your head back and talk to God, which you haven’t done since childhood. It’s the only thing you haven’t tried.

You ask, “Why is this happening to me?”

God answers, “BECAUSE YOU ARE A DESOLATE DRUNK. BECAUSE YOU LOST EVERYTHING AND WILL NOT CHANGE. BECAUSE HE WILL NOT WAIT FOR YOU FOREVER.”

You do not like what God has to say. You wash down a sleeping pill with tequila, then water. You go to sleep. You dream about your ex-lovers father, met only that one time in their ridiculous cardboard mansion in Champaign. You dream about the way his wife wiped drool from his chin as he slept tucked into his recliner chair. You dream about Cyrus as a child, as a little girl despite his best efforts, watching his mother doing this, taking great care of the man who raised him in a hurricane of fists. You dream about Cyrus now, sleeping nestled in his blankets like a burrowed spider. All white legs and wobbly black eyes. The kind of thing you feel too sorry for to kill.

You wake up the next morning, headache pulsing to the chirping of birds. You want to die, and you are terrified of going into the living room.

So you spend all of that day in your bedroom, not even daring to venture out to the bathroom. Pissing out your window onto the sun-hot fire escape and watching it steam up, digging your emergency bottle of vodka from your sock drawer, trying your hardest to sleep but failing. Mostly, you lay on your back and think about what you saw. It’s hard to convince yourself that you’re anything other than crazy, that this is anything but an advanced manifestation of your delirium. And yet, there’s a small island in your mind that knows what you saw. That feels the presence of the burning man, even now, in the damp silence of your bedroom.

Nearly twenty hours later, your alcohol supply runs out. The empty bottle taunts you, even after you shove it under your bed. So you pace your room for another hour, only three steps forward before you have to double back, trying to build up the nerve.

But the allure of the drink becomes too much. It lives inside you, begs to burst free. And when you turn that doorknob and twist it open, you see a figure in your living room. You recognize it immediately as yourself.

You sit on a chair of nothing, of air. You light a cigarette. The flame overtakes you suddenly and totally, with the finality of death or marriage or an orgasm, with a breathless woosh. Your scruffy facial hair catches the tendrils of flames before shrinking down into nothing. Your skin melts and then there is baby-pink flesh, then yellow bubbles of fat, then dark ropes of muscle, all charring black. It smells like the coq au vin your lover used to make, cooked chicken and the bitterness of red wine. It was a dish for special occasions– on the last day of the school year for you, or the day after a hard dinner service for him.

Burning-You stares at Unburning-You until his eyeballs melt and drip into the miasma of skin and muscle and bone below. You know that he’s thinking of the same thing too, the coq au vin. Your lover’s white fingers curling around knives and fluttering over the gas range, covered in band-aids. He always got burned at work.

“Occupational hazard,” he used to say as you kissed his blood blisters, the color of day-aged bruises, smooth on your lips.

~

Drew Scott is a writer from the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. When he’s not writing, he’s usually reading or spending too much money at the movie theatre. You can read his previous work in SCAB Magazine and BULL, and he is currently working on his first novel. Follow him on Twitter/X @boyoccultist.

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“fire chair” from Getty Images Signature via Canva Pro.