Shock Totem 4: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

by Shock Totem

  Man of Constant Sorrow, sung by Dan Tyminski. Abe helped me understand that my mother really didn’t hate me; she really hated herself, just as I hated myself. The loss of Suzie was a powerful bond between us, something that when twisted together with our true familial love could be stronger than anything. Once he explained it to me, I felt it. My love for my mother was stronger because of the event. What had been horrible had become an apologetically, wonderful thing. Still, the sadness of Suzie’s death never went away. Abe taught me an old song that had become his mantra. As old as slavery in America, “Man of Constant Sorrow” had been recorded by dozens of singers. My favorite version was sung by Dan Tyminski, who I’d seen in the strange, mythic movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? But I first heard it and memorized it from the mouth of Abe, whose pure clean notes brought the sorrow alive, especially on the opening heartache as the words came out with a painful tugging of sounds: “I am a man of constant sorrow. I’ve seen trouble all my day.” From this I learned the power of sorrow, how it could be molded and formed, used to make love stronger. It was an impressive bit of knowledge Abe imparted upon me, one that I took to heart when they let me out after four years, three months, and twenty-three days.

  Shadows once again darkened the slice of light at the bottom of the door. I watched the doorknob turn. I resisted the urge to hold it, instead I pretended to be invisible. If they were to catch me, my life would be over. I’d most assuredly be killed. The door opened a crack. I held my breath, ready for the end. Then I heard a voice farther into the house. The door slammed and I heard footsteps pounding away.

  Fight the Power, by Public Enemy. The years after my incarceration were filled with both sorrow and love. My mother passed away before I could patch things up with her, which left me without any family or ties. I became a rolling stone, moving from town to town. I’d been marked by the police, however. They hassled me wherever I went. But I’d learned from Abe the importance of a mantra. I adopted the funky Public Enemy anthem, “Fight the Power,” and under my breath I’d chant, “Fight the Power,” over and over. In fact, it was the first song I ever ripped to MP3. As an ex-con, no matter the reason I’d been incarcerated, I was an easy target for police. On more than one occasion, I was rousted from a deep sleep and dragged down to the police station to be interrogated for some event about which I knew nothing. But I persevered. Like Abe said. Like Flavor Flav sung. I fought the power at every turn.

  Stan, by Eminem. I got to the point that I needed some semblance of a relationship. The only ones I’d ever had were with my mother and Suzie, who were both dead; with Abe and the other cons, who were unreachable; and with Roddie Archie. So I reached out to Roddie, who’d become a regional sensation with his guitar while I’d been incarcerated. He played at bars and at some shows. His pictures looked good. I composed a letter, much like Stan did to Eminem. In the song I could hear the need in Stan’s voice. I had that same need. I needed to connect. I needed validation. Three letters were returned unread. Finally, I tracked down Annalisa. She wasn’t happy to see me at all.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’ve been writing Roddie. How is he?”

  “Dead.”

  It took me a while to respond. “What happened?”

  “What do you think? Drugs.”

  “He seemed to be going somewhere.”

  “Death isn’t a place.”

  We talked through her anger after she eventually let me come in off the porch. Roddie had been dead for a year, a year I’d spent fighting the power and finding myself. After we smoked a joint, I asked a question I’d been burning to ask.

  “Do you miss him?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Just answer the question. Do you?”

  “Terribly.”

  “Do you love him more now that he’s gone?”

  She paused and looked at me strangely. Finally she said, “Yes. I actually do. Probably because he’s not here to do anything stupid to piss me off.”

  “I’ve found it’s very easy to forgive the dead,” I said.

  “Your mother?”

  “Yeah. I never hated her for hating me, you know?”

  “I hated him for a while.”

  “And now?”

  “I love him.”

  Dido’s chorus in the song went “Your picture on your wall reminds me that it’s not so bad…not so bad.” Those lines make up the bass line that is the thread that keeps the song together. Who someone was, was always better than who they are.

  Finally I had direction.

  War Pigs, by Black Sabbath. Oh Lord yeah! I had direction. Everything that had ever happened to me had coalesced into that moment. I finally understood the events that had happened to my family, the words of Abe, and my subsequent indoctrination into the cult of sorrow. I wasn’t a criminal. I wasn’t a bad person. I was made for love. I could understand love to a greater fidelity than anyone because of how I had been remade. I could show others what real love was. I grabbed the last piece of pizza and ate it mechanically as my head bopped to the hard guitar riffs. Then I finished the water. I placed both empty containers into the right cargo pocket of my fatigues. My fingers flexed as if I were playing an air guitar. Ozzy had been amazing before reality television and the effects of too much alcohol had ruined him. I watched his television show like most people because I remembered who he was, not who he’d become. What a tragedy that had been. But I had a shortcut to love without all the disappointment. I tried it on Annalisa first. It was in the moments after she told me the truth about how she’d hated Roddie that I dug my hands into her neck and squeezed the life out of her. I’d hated her for a long time; really it was misplaced jealousy on my part. After I killed her, I immediately wanted her back. We’d connected on some level, just as Stan had connected with Eminem. The more I wanted her to return, the more I realized I loved her, thus proving the hypothesis of sorrow.

  When Ozzy screamed, “Hand of God has struck the hour, day of judgment, God is calling,” I drew the twenty-four inch serrated hunting knife from its sheath. Oh Lord yeah!

  Get the Party Started, by Pink. “I’m coming up, so you better get this party started” was my cue to open the door. It was a three-bedroom suburban house. I couldn’t hear anything except Pink singing in my ears, so walking down the hall with the knife out in front of me was like playing a first-person shooter. I was at once connected and disconnected. I turned the corner into the dining room and saw the family eating dinner at the table: two kids, about the same age and gender as Suzie and I had been; a wife who doted too much; and a husband who seemed a little too free with himself based on what I’d seen at a bar the night before. For one idyllic moment they sat there happily ensconced in the machinations of a family meal. Then they saw me. Wife screamed. Son screamed. Daughter screamed. The husband turned around and he screamed, too. That was my second cue. I plunged the knife into his chest ten times in beat with the song, keeping my other hand over his face to ensure it was clear for the funeral viewing. Through it all, the family sat screaming, the very idea of me just fucking unbelievable. The last thing I did after I left the knife in his chest was to smile fondly at the family. They hadn’t known what love was, but they would now.

  My playlist ended as I walked out the front door. I removed the rubber gloves from my hands and placed them alongside the containers in my pocket. I removed the ear buds, wrapped the cord around the MP3 player and shoved it in my front pocket. I loved those songs. They had made me who I was today. After every time I did this, I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d ever appreciate how completely I understood what they were trying to say. After all, they influenced generations. Just as I soon would. Every day. Every month. Every year.

  Until everyone loved as perfectly as I.

  [ Click here to watch Weston Ochse read “Playlist at the End” at KillerCon 2011 ]

  —//—

  Weston Ochse (pronounced 'Oaks) (1965–Present) lives in Southern Arizona with his wife, an
d fellow author, Yvonne Navarro, and Great Danes, Pester Ghost Palm Eater, Mad Dog Ghoulie Sonar Brain and Goblin Monster Dog. For entertainment he races tarantula wasps, wrestles rattlesnakes, and bakes in the noonday sun. His work has won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for short fiction. His work has also appeared in anthologies, magazines and professional writing guides. He thinks it's damn cool that he's had stories in comic books.

  LOBO

  by Justin Paul Walters

  He never wanted it to be this way.

  A life, a spark, begging for sweet mercy,

  but he knows that mercy will not come.

  The bone snaps, the shell cracks, the sun

  spills out into another ceramic bowl.

  “Ah, Ronaldo,” his mother says,

  “we’re making empanadas today, your favorite!”

  A smile, a scream, a crater. The blood flows down.

  The sun, no longer whole, a sea of gold.

  If he wants to live, this man must die.

  It is his job; it matters little that

  he’s never done it before or that he doesn’t

  even want to do the thing at all.

  Any job is worth doing if done well.

  His fist returns, a single tooth embedded

  deep into the knuckle, and Mami rolls

  the empanada dough, flat and soft.

  A little boy revels in endless love.

  It looks down upon him in fondness,

  and he tries to fight back the coming tears.

  Sweetness permeates the air, the strong

  smell of apples and bread; of rust and fear.

  Granny Smiths litter the cutting board.

  The stuffing always was his favorite part.

  Is it really necessary? Yes;

  God help him, he must do it now.

  The knife falls, and a crimson promise is stuffed

  into a small and lonely plastic bag.

  There’s a price to pay for betrayal, always a price.

  There is no more room for forgiveness.

  A room, once meaningful, now rests

  in a heap of quiet desolation.

  Broken fragments of memory, cast away.

  When his time comes, when he must pay the price,

  will his imagination console him then?

  No, he will cry, and he will moan.

  The man before him, sobbing, is him one day.

  His only hope is that, when that day comes,

  he’ll look up and see the same sadness

  in the cloudy eyes of his own dark fate.

  And now, the moment of truth, when heat and fire

  give way to the miracle of new life!

  The delicious morsels cook in the hot oil,

  their warmth spreading throughout the entire room.

  If only he could live in this moment forever.

  Or, at the very least, just long enough

  to endure the madness he himself has wrought.

  The heat spreads, engulfing the broken memories

  in a brilliant dance of sound and light.

  A bullet, a flash, a jolt. A life cut short.

  His Mami sings a soft lullaby,

  and her baby knows that he is safe.

  —//—

  Justin Paul Walters lives with his wife and daughter in Richmond, TX. When he’s not reading or writing, he works as an Electrical Engineer in the energy sector. This is his first published work.

  You can find out more about Justin at www.justinpaulwalters.com.

  ABOMINATIONS

  LIVING DEAD: A PERSONAL APOCALYPSE

  by K. Allen Wood

  I came upon the dead in a small clearing.

  They shuffled around the trash-strewn area, sniffling, twitching as if flies flitted across their skin. Their eyes glowed a dull red in the deepening shadows.

  I counted four, but a low moan drew my attention to a dirty mattress on the ground. There, a woman with dirt-encrusted hair lay contorted in either ecstasy or pain. Staring into her dead, haunted eyes, I decided probably it was both. She pawed at the air, her bruised legs dangling off the mattress, feet digging ruts into the soil, as if fending off an unseen demon.

  And then she went still. Dead, but alive.

  The nearest man to me, an old man I once knew and loved dearly, turned and said, “Hey, kiddo. What are you doing here?”

  “I heard you were out here, so I figured I’d stop by, say hello.” I didn’t tell him I was there to say goodbye. “It’s been a while.”

  He nodded. What could he say? It had been this way for longer than we both cared to admit. It had always “been a while.”

  “You know how it is,” he said. “Life.”

  Or Death, I thought. I could smell the stench of rot, taste it draped across my tongue like a burial shroud. The cold weight of darkness pressed in, slowly piercing my skin. Death was a close friend to them all, here in the clearing; it oozed from their nostrils in bloody rivulets, from the pus-filled scabs and sores that littered their skin like a grim foretelling written in a diseased language.

  As the fingers of twilight began to reach slowly into the woods, the old man introduced me to the four others. They grunted or simply didn’t hear, didn’t care. I waved awkwardly as if shy, aware of the untrusting way some of them looked at me, the hunger gleaming in their bloodshot eyes. I wasn’t one of them, and they didn’t want me there. Not as an outsider, anyway.

  I looked at the old man, eyes sunk deep, his skin yellow and flaking like aged parchment. My eyes traced the jagged lines of burst capillaries that twisted across his nose and cheeks like errant electricity, and I wondered how it had come to this point. I had always expected the end to be more predictable. For years I anticipated a phone call, a news clipping, something ordinary. Just... The End. Move along, nothing to see here. To watch a man wither away to nothing, however, to shed the skin of all his humanity and return as something so corrupt, so vile—and then to see him not only live but thrive—was the one thing I could never have predicted. And it mocked my anger at every turn.

  In that clearing, on that long-ago day, taking in all the detritus around me, human and otherwise, I was appalled. In another time, another place, I could have put them out of their misery. But they were already out of it, soaring high, out of reach. I could no more put an end to them than they could breathe life into me. I lived as they would die—by desire.

  I stayed for a while longer, finding it much harder to do the one thing I came to do: Say goodbye to the old man. Forever. Winter fast approached, and no man, metaphorically naked as they were, living or dead, could endure its cold embrace for long.

  After giving me a tour of his flimsy tent—which housed a small mattress, a battered bureau, and too much heartache to deem it a home—the old man looked up at the sky. He remained silent for a time, then said, “I used to hate my father. For the beatings, the anger, for not loving me like he loved my brothers.” He turned and looked at me. “I hope, someday, you’ll be able to forgive me, too.”

  In that moment, I realized I already had. Long ago. So long ago that I wondered if the hatred I’d been fiercely clinging to had ever been real at all.

  I nodded, not strong enough to say the words he wanted to hear. So I did as I intended all along; I said goodbye. A feeble, cowardly thing. But I said it with more love—and fear and anguish and helplessness—than I ever thought possible.

  My father has been clean for five years now.

  After living dead for twenty years, he’s now just living—living, as Mike Ness once said, “Down here with the rest of us.”

  —//—

  K. Allen Wood’s nonfiction has appeared in countless music magazines and webzines over the years. His fiction has appeared in 52 Stitches, Vol. 2, The Zombie Feed, Vol. 1, Epitaphs, a New England Horror Writers anthology, and is forthcoming in The Gate 2: 13 Tales of Isolation and Despair. He lives and plots in Massachusetts.

  For more info, visit h
is website at www.kallenwood.com.

  DEAD BABY DAY

  by Michael Penkas

  Luke’s seventh birthday had been perfect. His friends had come over. There had been pizza and cake. He’d received a half-dozen new toys that he’d already arranged on his toy shelf. It had even fallen on a Saturday, so that he could stay up late.

  Luke was about to fall asleep, ready to relive the day in his dreams, when his older brother, Mark, said from the other side of their bedroom, “You’re a lucky guy.”

  Luke nodded. “Thanks.”

  “But I guess anyone born on Dead Baby Day is lucky.”

  Luke wanted to ignore his brother. Mark was just trying to ruin his special day, the way he always tried to ruin things for him. It had been Mark who had told him the truth about Santa Claus. It had also been Mark who had told him the horrible stories about where babies came from.

  Luke didn’t really want to know; but still he asked, “What’s Dead Baby Day?”

  “It’s the day when dead babies come back to life.”

  Luke imagined zombie infants, pink faces gone to rot, and shook his head. “That’s not true,” he whispered.

  “Sure it is. That’s why no babies are ever born today.”

  “I was born today.”

  There was a pause, a horrible silence in the dark bedroom, before Mark said, “No. You were born on a different day. But you died. You died when you were still a baby and you came back to life today because it’s Dead Baby Day.”

  “No.” Luke was embarrassed by the tears he felt welling up in his eyes. It was stupid. Mark was just trying to scare him with a stupid story.