Halloween Shorts #1 - Daddy's Home

For the last few years on Twitter, and now over on Bluesky, I do short flash fictions for the month of October. I figured I'd do my best to extend them over here into slightly longer stories, just in an effort to get back into a habit of writing and posting.

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Evan heard the sound of a key in the door to your apartment. That alone wasn’t strange. His boyfriend said he’d be coming over this evening, but the sound caught his ear. There was an unfamiliarity to the noise, like someone missing the lock, not quite familiar with how to hard to turn the key. Nothing more than a passing thought, a momentary unease, and the door popped open. “I’m in here, making dinner,” Evan called, “Hope you’re hungry,” he said.

“Hell yeah, I’m starvin’,” a voice came in reply, and Evan froze.

That wasn’t his boyfriend’s voice. It was much to deep, too gruff, with a curdled edge of arrogance even. He could hear footsteps now, someone coming closer to the kitchen down the apartment hallway. There was too much silence between the steps, each step too heavy, the sound of boots, instead of his boyfriend’s usual sneakers. A man turned the corner, and Evan found himself facing a stranger in his apartment. Tall and thick, burly with arms covered in hair, mouth curled in knowing grin as the man looked Evan up and down.

“What’s cookin’, boy?” the man said. His manner was so casual, his stance relaxed. He looked like he belonged here, “Smells like spaghetti—hope you’re makin’ the sauce from scratch like ya usually do.”

Evan was, in fact, making sauce from scratch. His boyfriend told him it was the best he’d ever had, only ever knowing sauce from a jar. In truth, Evan thought his own scratch was mediocre, but it was a good opportunity to practice and get better. There was no way this man could know that though, and Evan didn’t know what to say, couldn’t quite find the words to shout, or scream, or tell this weirdo to get out, to demand to know what happened to his boyfriend, how he got his key, what he did to him. “Yeah, scratch, as always, just how you like it,” Evan found himself saying instead.

Recognition was creeping in with doubt. Evan couldn’t quite seem to recall who he was thinking of, when he thought of his boyfriend, all of a sudden. It wasn’t this man, that much he thought he knew, but then, there was nothing there to compare it to in his mind, like it had just slipped away while he was distracted. The man came over and pulled Evan into a hug. It was much too tight, the man dwarfing him, and the musk was sharp, peppery, pungent, but not unpleasant. A name was coming to his mind, but Evan didn’t know from where, whether it belonged to this man he couldn’t be sure he knew, but who certainly knew him, or to some figment of memory he was telling himself about.

“Jake, is…is that you? I…you seem different,” Evan said.

The man pulled away, smiling like he had a little secret, something that Evan would never know—perhaps never could know. “Evan, boy, you know we don’t use names here, right?”

“D-Daddy?” Evan said, tentatively.

“That’s right boy,” the man said, and gave Evan’s ass a hard slap, before tromping into the living room and turning on a football game.

Evan turned back to dinner, stared at the sauce. Terror was settling into familiarity. He couldn’t quite understand why his heart was racing so fast. Then again, Daddy always made his heart race when he got home, right? He reached down, surprised by how hard he was, but that could wait. Dinner first. Daddy never liked to fuck on an empty stomach, after all.