I did something creative! My little wrung-out sponge of a brain managed to ooze a flash piece and three illustrations for my friend Chad Woody’s book, a collection of small horror stories, called The Darkest Season. Expect humor, horror, and Christmas rolled into one festive, grotesque, ungainly animal. It’s great fun.
Merry Christmas!
She handed me a holocopy of a fragmented newspaper from the 1990’s.
“Is that me?” I said, pointing at a sign: Virgo.
“Yes,” she replied. “We haven’t determined how they came up with these facts, but they’re always correct. The ones written by Madam Zorastra are especially reliable.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “So we just line up today’s date with the ancient American calendar?”
“Yes. I have the templates here. First, the fee.”
I leaned forward and she tapped my head with a data drawing wand. I blinked several times before regaining my equilibrium.
“So we just line up today’s date with the ancient American calendar?”
“Yes. First, though, the fee.”
“Go ahead,” I said, leaning forward. She tapped it with the data drawing wand. I blink. Red flashes through my eyes.
“Hang on… my defense software is detecting fraud. That can’t be right.”
“Of course not. You haven’t even paid yet.”
“Right, right… Virgo…”
“It says here: ‘your trusting nature makes you incredibly valuable to anyone around you.’”
“Wow! Do you think it’s true?”
“There’s no debating this science. The ancients had stringent scientific standards for anything published in a newspaper.”
“Amazing. I haven’t paid yet, have I?”
My cat sits on my computer and yowls in my face. She is smashing the letters.
“Diva, let me do my homework,” I say, pushing her aside and commencing the deletions.
Undeterred, she sidles back up to me, puts her paw against my thigh, and cuts her claws into my leg.
Enraged, I stand up, and she skitters a safe distance away, conspicuously near the food bowl.
I sigh and go to feed her. She always gets her way.
As I dole the food into the dish, Diva twining around my ankles in smug self-satisfaction, the phone rings. It’s Gina at the steakhouse.
“Yes?”
“Hey… will you come in today? Kirk was supposed to but it fell through.”
“I have homework to do.”
Diva meows her agreement.
“Please? I’m really in a bind.”
I massage my temples. “Alright… alright, but you owe me.”
I grab my keys, put on my work clothes, and head out. They still smell like the restaurant from last night.
As I shut the door behind me, Diva takes advantage of my distraction and streaks outside.
Fucking cat.
I get to work, put on my apron, and start taking orders. Of course Gina gives me more of the shit tables; the old church ladies who keep their change and never tip. The two-top tables, women who share a flatbread and drink a mimosa, then talk for two hours, picking at their crumbs. A poorly-dressed man with feral eyes who I suspected might be homeless. He asks for his steak cooked rare.
Wednesday afternoons at the steakhouse are never very busy, I don’t understand why she called me in. The way she was talking you’d think the place was on fire.
I go into the kitchen to find Gina gone. Gone. She’d just left without a word to me. I have to host now. It’d actually be an improvement, if I weren’t so angry at her. She might be my supervisor, but that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve a fragment of respect.
I run the whole damn front for the next six hours, until Mina arrives.
“She just left you?” Mina says as she ties her apron on. Her terse lips tell me she’s been treated this way, too. She shakes her head and punches in.
“Yeah. I’m pretty worn out, so you don’t mind me leaving you with my tables?”
“Tables? You mean table.”
I glance out of the kitchen. The feral homeless man had dashed while I was talking to Mina. Bastard had gotten a free dinner out of me.
Well, that was coming out of my paycheck. I just made $34 for six hours of work.
I come home, Diva is waiting for me. She zips back into the house when I open the door.
At least I get tomorrow off. Thirty-four dollars. What’s the point.
I climb miserably into bed. I’ll shower tomorrow.
I wake up at eight AM. Diva demands food. I feed her, go back to bed, and luxuriate in my blankets, the warmth, the soft sheets. Diva lies in the patch of sun on my bed. I curl around her to share the rays. I’ll get hungry soon, and have to get up. But now, this is where I want to be. Today, I am free. It is a delicious sensation.
The phone rings. I look at the name. It’s Gina again.
Diva slumbers on my chest. She cracks a questioning golden eye at me, which catches the sunlight, lighting her iris in glinting amber flame. I am lost in admiration of her.
Maybe I’ll skip class today.
The phone rings again. I won’t answer.
Stepping off the curb to cross the street, his foot lands on a piece of cardboard, and it slips under his feet. Everything goes off-center. He is falling backwards.
He slips into a familiar, momentary lapse of time. Weightless. Maybe like being in the womb. Maybe like death.
He remembers, in that one second, being someone else, a tiny child, whom his parents would toss in the air, eliciting delighted giggles. He feels again what it was to be a grinning kid who went sledding, who rode amusement park rides, who loved the loose sensation of roller skates under his feet, the dizzying slide of tennis shoes on a frozen pond, closing his eyes and jumping off the swing at its apogee, leaping from the monkey bars. As he got older, he needed to make bigger jumps: from the second story window of his bedroom, the stomach-dropping fall from the front car of a roller coaster, perilous speeding car rides down mountain back roads.
He used to seek that. The sensation of being stunned. The joy of getting turned up-side-down. Thrilling in the unexpected. Always finding a bigger risk.
Gravity returns with a vengeance. It knocks him flat, kicks the breath out of him.
He can’t breathe. There is something wrong with his tailbone. His toes tingle. This is the kind of fall that will leave traces for the rest of his life. Drawing lines of pain through his bones, down his nerves, trailing in his new limp, slowing him down. His routine will change. His shoes will change. The content of his conversation will change.
A college kid hunkers down beside him, concerned. “Are you OK?” She says.
He sees himself reflected in her eyes, distinguished gentleman with graying temples, ass over teakettle in the gutter, and finds his breath, taking in a great gasp of air.
He can’t answer her for his own wheezing laugh.
This is a nightmare I had, so it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. I often dream in third person.
This a horror story! Turn away, ye faint of heart!
Before she went to war, she saw her doppelganger in the crowd. It was hiding something bulky under its cloak. Its eyes had a peculiar shine to them. It felt her gaze and looked at her, and she sensed great hate, warning her of things to come. It disappeared in the crowd.
Later, when she tried to tell others about it, they wrote her off as afraid of battle.
Years passed…
She was hanging up laundry to dry late at night. Her stepson was watching TV and she made small talk as she worked, the way mothers do. Gradually she noticed that something was wrong with the channel he was watching. It was a picture of hell. Twisted flesh illuminated in violent orange. Heavy screams.
It leeched all light from the room around her.
She tried to maintain normalcy, changed the station. “Let’s not watch this scary channel,” she said. He waited until she set the remote down and changed it back.
The atmosphere of the room was sapping her. This was the end of her peace. The same darkness she had seen that day in her doppelganger had returned to claim her. She could barely move.
Rolling her head to tear her eyes away from the TV, she focused instead on a coat rack leaning against the wall which she’d planned to mount in the entryway, for visitors. All the wet laundry she had yet to hang. Simple household things which she’d held on to and tried not to take for granted.
A self-protective instinct kicked in. Weak with horror, she staggered to her feet and stumbled into the bedroom next door, throwing herself onto the bed on top of the covers. Absentmindedly she wondered if she wasn’t going to get cold, falling asleep this way. It didn’t matter. As long as she wasn’t forced to watch that channel. As long as reality held fast.
Her stepson followed her. His eyes shone in the very same way her doppelganger’s had. And something else had entered the room with him: the stifling, odious presence of another being, more felt than seen.
“No, no no please,” she managed. It was hopeless. Fear sapped her limbs; paralysis suppressed her fluttering will into taut submission.
The room darkened.
Thick, strangely humid air settled into the room. A small buzzing gnat of mad rationale whispered in her ear, at least it’s warm.
The room was opaque with darkness. There was no TV in here, but he didn’t need one. He was going to bring that hell to her anyway.
The boy went to the window. An ominous brimstone glow limned the solid blackout roller shade.
He raised the shade, and hell was there. An enormous corpselike thing looked through the window at her with dead eyes, a boa constrictor jammed down its throat and wrapping its fetid body in torturing coils. It screamed, impossibly through the snake. The sound was deep, low, primal. The sound of pure evil.
She screamed back.
She screamed until she ran out of air, kept on spasmodically screaming. Paroxysms of wordless pain and terror tore through her, leaving actual tatters. She screamed until every blood vessel in her eyes burst. She threw her head back and screamed until her neck broke.
Her body jittered unnaturally. Her face was changing. She would be one of them soon.
Fresh Hell 