Nettle is exactly like a Venus Fly Trap: Southern-style gardens and narrow stone one-way streets with tall ivy-entangled fences. All sweetness and promise until the jaws snap shut behind you.

The tourists eat it up, like they’ve never seen some place so beautiful, so magazine-perfect in the muck and heat of Louisiana. They drive right on past the broken down apartments, and take instagram photos of the crumbling stone houses and roots of ancient trees breaking through the sidewalk. "I’d love to live here," they swoon.

Toomey Starks is that fat horsefly waiting for death, coated in juices and slowly dissolving. Not like he had much a choice, being born here and all. Hatched like a maggot in the same thick poison that keeps him at the bottom.

Mama Starks still lives in the same old damn house she was born in. And when she dies, which is hopefully soon, Toomey will continue to live there until he dies. That’s the way of it.

Not that he don’t love his mama. She just hasn’t been the same since her daughter disappeared. Perhaps she is going crazy, if the folks in town are to be believed. Toomey loves his mama, he just wishes sometimes she’d get on with it and die so he can watch his programs in peace.

"Tooms! Tooms, I told you! No damn internet until you take the dog out for a walk! It’s nearly sunset!"

"It’s too hot right now. I’ll be done in twenty minutes, this episode’s almost finished."

"It’ll be this damn hot in 20 minutes. Don’t sass me. NOW."

Frustrated, Toomey pushes his chair away from the computer and stands, running his hands through his shaggy sandy-brown hair. He stretches out his legs, which honestly had maybe started to cramp from how long he’d been binge-watching Mad Men, and walks to the back porch.

"Toomey! Did you hear me?" She shouts down the stairs. She’s up there doing who knows what. Clipping coupons or shitting or something.

"GODDAMNIT MA I’M DOING IT! Jesus!" He angrily yanks the dog leash off its hook by the door.

"Don’t you fucking swear at me!" Her voice rises to that perfectly annoying pitch that makes Toomey want to start punching things. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath, remembering what Celia told him about breathing out the anger. When he opens his eyes, he doesn’t bother with a response. But he slams the door behind him all the same, whistling for Barker.

Barker St. James, a large mutt with the chocolate-dark fur of a lab and the attitude of a much smaller high-strung animal, bounds over and jumps up on Toomey’s legs, yapping away.

He was Toomey’s sister’s dog, a rescue over a decade ago. She had tried to name him Bartholomew St. James (aiming for something fancy was always her particular aspiration), but, seeing as how he was the loudest fucking dog in the world, Mama Starks called him Barker and it stuck.

But damn, is he a loud son-of-a-bitch.

Toomey unhooks the gate and Barker immediately almost dislocates Toomey’s arm.

"Whoa, boy! You see something?"

Sure enough, a squirrel rockets out from the bushes to the left of the gate and vanishes. The dog strains at the leash, growling and pawing mid-air as he tries to pursue it. Toom barely gets the gate latched again behind him before he’s able to take a few stumbling steps, trying to avoid choking the dog or tripping over his own feet.

Out on the road, a shiny car rolls past, slowly. A flash. Tourists, taking a photograph of his neighbor’s house most likely. If they could only see what lies just beyond the doors in this town, they’d be running for the hills. Nettle was as pretty as a postcard, and just as flimsy.

Toomey walks Barker to the left, and is instantly accosted by the answering barks of the rotties next door, at the Lufkin’s. Their names are Jesse and James, and they are actual assholes. They snap their jaws at him through the fence posts, ignoring Barker’s attempts at befriending them.

"Boys," he mock salutes the beasts and has to drag Barker away. As he walks past the gate, he sees Jasper Lufkin on the side of his house, digging something. Jasper looks up, wiping the sweat from his beady little eyes, and Toomey immediately averts his gaze and walks faster. Barker’s happy for the increased pace, and Toomey lets the dog pull him forward.

The next house over, the one the tourists were taking a picture of, is the fancy fucking house of Cecilia Olive Henderson. Her family’s not exactly what most people’d call old money, but for this part of the world, they might as well be. She goes to a private school the next town over (a safe hour drive away). She gets highlights painted on her hair at the only high-end salon in town. She wears skirts with heels pretty much all the damn time. And when her parents aren’t looking, she gets drunk out by the lake with Toomey and fucks him in the back seat of his Mazda.

He’s going to marry that girl. He’s going to lock that shit down. Before she realizes she’s hooking up with an actual human toilet fire.

Celia’s not home right now, or Toomey wouldn’t be watching so much Netflix. She’s at some posh event with Mrs. Henderson, or buying dresses for one, or some shit like that. He stands in front of her house, anyway, trying to see it like out-of-towners do.

Two stories, flawless facade of old-style plantation pillars and neatly-groomed lawn. The gate is wrought-iron. Flowering honeysuckle grips the fence, the hot scent of it almost overpowering. It’s hard to pull away, but when the front door opens and Mr. Henderson looms out of the doorway, glaring at Toomey (he knows he knows), it gets easier.

The rest of the walk is uneventful, but the sun does start to set and the cicadas start their little chainsaws in the trees, and Toomey rushes home before he gets bug-bit to shit. He leaves Barker in the yard and returns to the computer in his room. His cell phone, which he accidentally left on the desk, lights up. Four missed texts. Jesus fucking Christ. He was gone, what? Ten minutes?

One from Celia: "hey babe back in a few hours. beer?" To which he replies "Fuck yes."

Three from his best friend Dason Mire (mostly asking if he’s played that new Fallout game yet. He hasn’t.)

And one from an unknown number: "just saw tooley."

Toomey sits down hard, misses his desk chair, and falls on his ass. He barely registers the pain, staring at that text, at those words on that impossibly bright screen, like they’re burned into his brain with tiny lasers.

Impossible. Fucking impossible.

Tooley. Tooley motherfucking Starks. Toomey’s twin sister, the owner of Barker St. James and the reason Mama Starks is slowly losing her mind.

Toomey’s twin sister who was murdered ten years ago.

Next Chapter: Old Names