All the Old Haunts by Chris Lynch

door locked. You know in the morning he would still find the light off—and the door locked. If he had been allowed to sleep at all.”
    “What do you want me to do, Ma? Should I take the bat to his head?”
    Mrs. Duncan moves and stands over Stanley, staring at him as he eats, and repeatedly smoothing the creased skin at the outside corners of her eyes. “Mmm,” she says, which might be reluctant agreement, or more likely fear at the return of Satan.
    “Well hello again, beautiful,” Satan says as he walks back into the room. As he says every time he walks into a room where his mother is. He kisses her on the cheek, as he likewise always does.
    Mrs. Duncan freezes at the kiss, and only relaxes slightly when he sits down to eat. She looks like a prisoner in his presence.
    “So tell us, how was your day, beautiful?” Satan asks, smiling, pouring himself a second cup of coffee.
    Satan wants to double date. Satan’s concept of the double-date is two guys, one girl. And Stanley’s not supposed to forewarn the girl, naturally, or there would be no girl.
    That is how it is normally for Satan. No girl.
    “No,” Stanley snaps.
    “Why?”
    “Because it’s a disgusting idea, and you’re a disgusting guy for thinking it up.” Satan goes quiet. “Cut it out. Stop pouting. And straighten up. I hate it when you do that. Your hump isn’t half that big, faker.”
    “You owe me,” Satan growls.
    “I don’t owe you anything.”
    “Yes you do. Because of you stealing my nutrition and oxygen, I can’t get a date of my own. So now you gotta share with me.”
    This is how it goes. On and on, is how it goes.
    “You’re not coming.”
    “Wither thou goest, Bro.”
    “Wednesday the third. Saint Stanley is in the shower. Okay, we look alike a little bit. But you know what I mean. Change the teeth slightly, and one guy’s a movie star and the other guy’s a donkey. One guy’s tall, the other guy’s geeky. One guy’s got strong, prominent forehead, the other guy’s a mutant.
    “God flipped that coin over and over and over, and every time Stanley came up the heads and I came up shit-ass tails. So god, if you have a tape player, you can just bite me, too.
    “But we look like brothers. No denying. The one who survived and the one who didn’t. He can’t ever forget, and neither can anybody else, what he did to me.
    “That’s why he wears the stupid sideburns. The stupid Marty Van Buren sideburns that are supposed to make him look smart and bohemian cool but just make him look like stupid Marty Van Buren, but still don’t make him not look like me.
    “What we are is, we are one. Stan is me, and I am Stan. We are Siamese. Nothing between us, nobody between us. Separation is death.
    “And I am a certified hunchback, no matter what he tells you. That’s why he wants to make an audiotape, instead of a video. So he can spin it his way.
    “And now you want to ask me if maybe I’m feeling a little bit sorry for myself.
    “Eat me.”
    “Stanley!”
    The scream wakes Stanley in the middle of the night. He jumps up out of bed, stands there staring in the dark, unsure whether it is just the latest in an endless parade of nightmare screams that visit and evaporate in the unstillness of his nights.
    “Stanley!”
    The scream is for real, and Stanley tears out of his bedroom, down the hall, and into his mother’s room.
    There, he finds his mother sitting upright in the bed, the reading light on, but lying on the floor, her black-rimmed glasses lying next to it. She is staring, unblinking, as she fidgets backward and backward into the headboard, going nowhere but dead anxious to get there.
    “What the hell?” Stanley says wearily to Satan, who stands at the foot of the bed. “What the hell, Satan, can’t you just leave her be—”
    “I heard her scream,” Satan says, his voice bloated with mock concern. “It certainly took you long enough to—”
    “Make him get out, Stanley,” Mrs. Duncan says. “Please make