Associate editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus story: This small story contains a vividly uncanny world. Alternating between the mundane, horrific, and absurd, it plunges the reader into a bizarrely comedic yet solidly apocalyptic vision of humanity.

Last and First Human Beings

He was on TV when I was little, a large man with no skin, who never had any skin for as long as he’d lived. The camera followed him as he walked to some unknown destination. I was scared and wanted to watch something else, but my mom and dad and five siblings and ten cousins and fifteen relatives overruled me. In our household it was not uncommon that the soda I left in the fridge for later would be drunk by my parents, and the snacks I kept in the pantry would be eaten by a relative. One of my cousins picked up the potted bonsai I was growing on my nightstand and dropped it. My relatives agreed it was bad luck to keep bonsai indoors, so I was inviting this to happen, and told me to sweep it up. One day my parents sat me down and told me that I could have a cool million dollars. All I had to do was stay home and take care of everyone in their old age, doing whatever it took to keep them happy. That night I packed my things and ran away to the city, where I lived and worked for many years. But the city was full of the same sort of people, obsessed by the same small set of things. And so I journeyed out with Maffei II, the closest friend I had in that period. Maffei II looked like a fully grown woman but she was three and a half feet tall. A pair of short, thick wing bones like winnowing baskets stuck out of her shoulder blades. We were playing catch among the wind turbines in the wasteland with my ballpoint pen, the only thing I’d brought with me besides a water bottle and some Cliff bars, when we saw him. The man was coming, red and glistening from head to toe with exposed viscera. He sauntered by without noticing us, leaving a trail of bloody footprints like rose petals on the salt flat. He didn’t seem to mind when Maffei II and I made to follow him. He led us to the mouth of a great tunnel in the hills. The sun was setting, but neither of us wanted to turn back. The tunnel spat us out before a placid lake. The skinless man waded out into the freezing water and came to a stop. Our eyes had adjusted to the dark, and we could see the smooth roundness of a human skull on the surface. The skeleton was standing in the shallows of the lake’s southern end, resting its arm on a protruding rock, as if it had been waiting comfortably. The skinless man scooped up the skeleton and carried it to shore the way a groom carries a bride. He came right up to us with the dripping bones. “We’ll get out of your hair now,” he said. “It’s a long way to Vegas.” Maffei II noticed something colorful nestled between the skeleton’s ribs, reached up and pulled it out. “A token of our appreciation,” the skinless man added. He nodded and started back the way we’d come. Maffei II carefully unfolded the soaked and scummy pieces of paper, one with yellow borders marked 20, another with blue borders marked 100, and scowled. “This is just the play money from my old school,” she said.

Alex Lanz lives and writes in Brooklyn. His stories and essays have appeared in places like Babel Tower Notice Board and Full Stop.