Death Moves In
You find them on Craigslist. Sketchy, you know, but what else were you supposed to do when Gabby got that Fulbright and ghosted? Death can move in pronto. They Venmo you enough to get through the month, but that is the last green you see from them.
At first, they only take single bites from your lasagna. Then an onion, a raw steak, an apple left on the counter that attracts flies. Food disappears. By the time you notice they’re drinking your vodka in the freezer, it’s almost gone. They fuck randos—men, women, groups—loud enough to wake you. At the mailboxes and in the hallways, your neighbors give you strange looks like you’re the one jolting them awake with sex screams at three in the morning. Even Death is living more than you.
You remind them to pay rent, to buy their own groceries. You can feel them chipping off pieces of you, like they’re collecting them in a jar for display. At night, as Death bones another rando, you wonder how your life came to this point and where it all went so wrong. Sleep escapes you until you give up. A breathy tingling on your left foot wakes you. Death is sniffing your ankle enticingly like you’re a juicy bone-in ribeye, their mouth open, watering, their white teeth flashing in the moonlight. “The fuck?” you shout. Death glances at you and poofs. In the morning, Death acts like nothing happened, and you don’t have it in you to ask if they were about to cannibalize you. It could’ve been a dream. And, if you’re being honest, you couldn’t give an accurate description of Death to the cops even if you wanted to. Their face keeps blurring and slipping. You think you see features, then a skull, flesh blinking back, but you don’t trust yourself, and your surreptitious photos never come out clean.
One day Death moves out. No note, no sign they were ever there just the feeling that something inside you is missing, twisted, altered, and you feel lucky to be alive, as whole as you are but not as whole as you were. You search yourself for the single bite they took out of you. It’s there, in your ankle. Fuck.
Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing, 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in CRAFT, Passages North, Fractured Lit, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and 2025, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023 and 2026. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Learn more at chelseastickle.com. Photo by Maureen Porto Studios.
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