We try not to pay attention to any of the faces staring out the windows when we're walking to the shops after school. Last one of us to do that ended up strung from the telephone wires the next morning and her family moved out of town the very next day. They didn't even bother to arrange a funeral, they just changed all their details and vanished before they were made to join her up there.
Running away doesn't stop them, doesn't change anything. Any child here could tell you as much but she and her family only moved in a few months beforehand and none of them ever went near the pub so they weren't told about all the local customs.
We did what we could in school, tried to distract her from looking at the windows, tried to tell her in little ways because people don't understand unless they're from here. They either don't believe us or they look out of spite but either way they end up dead before they've even been here a year.
And the worst of it is how normal the faces look. People have taken photos of them, drawn them or described them and while they all wound up dead their work lives on and we survive knowing just a little bit more about the world looking back at us from our own homes.
Thanks to them we know that the faces we see in our windows are just parts of a larger thing all wearing humanity like a mask while they wave and bang on the glass to draw our eyes into their trap. What I still don't get is why they stay put for so long when they're clearly capable of leaving whenever they like.
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