A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

by Krystal Sutherland

  DEFCON 3. Food was not provided. If lack of food was mentioned, Rosemary suggested they get jobs = pretty broke. Increased readiness. Action required: attempt to prevent large appliances and furniture from being sold online.

  DEFCON 2. Distant relatives started calling the house looking to be paid back the money they lent = flat broke. Extreme readiness. Action required: cry to said relatives about how Rosemary had lots of bills and Dad couldn’t work and they were absolutely, definitely, positively not broke because she’d been hitting the slot machines more than usual. Lock the bedroom to prevent pillaging of remaining family heirlooms.

  DEFCON 1. Maximum readiness. Rosemary’s engagement ring gone for “cleaning” = pretty damn broke. This had happened only once before. Eviction from house imminent. Action required: hide valuables. Like, really well. Say you lost them when Rosemary asked where they were. Suffer her wrath. (Reg’s service medals, Esther’s most prized possession, were currently buried in Heph’s backyard to prevent Rosemary from selling them.) Pack all remaining valued personal belongings in suitcase, ready to move in with Hephzibah or any number of angry relatives at a moment’s notice. Prepare to become a ward of the state.

  There was no food in the house on Sunday morning. When Esther asked her mother about the grocery shopping, Rosemary suggested she get a real job instead of selling cake, so Esther hid her late grandmother’s jewelry in a loose floorboard under Eugene’s bed. Then she dressed as Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol, facing left, and went outside to wait for Jonah on the porch steps, as had become her routine.

  She’d been swept up in a moment of giddy appreciation when she’d agreed to go on a date with him and now she kind of hoped that he would both a) not remember that she’d said yes, and b) never mention it again.

  When he arrived, though, he was dressed in a pressed brown suit with a custard-colored shirt and patterned bow tie. It was easily the most hideous ensemble of clothing Esther had ever seen, but Jonah somehow made it look adorable. He kind of made everything look adorable. That was part of the problem. It would’ve been far less panic-inducing to be around him if he wasn’t quite so charming.

  He’d made her a paper corsage (complete with a dead moth corpse glued to one of the petals; so romantic) to mark the occasion, so she could hardly change her mind now.

  Still, cornfields were far less terrifying than going on a date, so she insisted they do that first.

  “Cornfields aren’t scary,” said Jonah as he parked the moped under a tree and they started to walk toward the distant farm. “What did corn ever do to you?”

  “It’s like the dark,” Esther explained as she used her parasol as a walking stick, her long white dress hitched up in her free hand. “It’s what’s in the corn that’s scary.”

  “What the hell is in the corn?”

  “Children. Crop circles. Scarecrows. Serial killers. Tornadoes. Aliens. Seriously, cornfields are messed up. They may actually be the epicenter of all evil things.”

  “How come corn got the bad reputation, and not wheat or sugarcane? All this discrimination against moths and cornfields makes me sick.”

  “I had my first panic attack after watching Signs when I was thirteen.” Esther wasn’t sure why she told Jonah this; she’d never told anyone before. Talking was easier around Jonah, somehow. The muscles in her shoulders that were constantly clenched around other people seemed to loosen in his presence. He calmed her. Made it easier to talk about scary things.

  “Yeah, well, Mel Gibson is a frightening dude.”

  “Eugene and I watched the movie at Heph’s house. I didn’t sleep that night. I swear I could hear something outside the window making that clicking noise the aliens make on the baby monitors. When we got home in the morning, I decided to go for a run, just around the block, just to burn off some of the anxiety. One of the aliens started following me.”

  “What, you were hallucinating or something?”

  “No. I never saw it. I wasn’t even near corn or anything. I just knew it was there. I knew it was right behind me. I ran until I collapsed, and then I crawled under a car to hide from it. Took me two hours to get home. I had to run from car to car, hiding from this alien. Scratched up my knees and arms until they were bleeding and I was bawling my eyes out, shaking. I knew I was going to die.”

  “Man, you’re more messed up than I thought.”

  “Thanks.”

  When they reached the edge of the corn, Jonah knelt and fished a drone out of his backpack. A goddamn drone.

  “Do I even want to know where you acquired that?” she said.

  “Probably best you don’t ask questions about this one,” he said as he attached a camera to the device and sent it up into the air.

  Then they sprinted together through paths in the cornfields, the drone cruising along above them, dipping and whirling as they ran. Esther imagined what the footage would look like: the long green ribbon of her hat trailing along behind her like seaweed in the air, mint umbrella at her side, the billowing skirts of her dress threatening to launch her into flight. Then she thought of that long, terrible morning she’d spent running for her life, the first time fear really got its claws into her. The first time she felt what Eugene felt every single night as she sat hunched over and hyperventilating in the gutter next to a car, tears streaming down her face, knowing logically that she was in no real danger but unable to shake the certainty that death was imminent.

  They turned. The drone followed. The corn began to sigh in the breeze as though breathing. Whispering even. Jonah slowed, and then they stopped completely to listen. The sun beat down. A bead of sweat rolled down her spine. The drone circled above them, strangely threatening. Something made her eyes water.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” she said quietly. The corn was definitely whispering. Run, run, run, it said to her. Something is coming for you.

  The cornfield was a sea and they’d swum far away from safe shores. The stalks were taller than their heads. A sea of corn had drowned the world. It was everywhere, everywhere, and they were sinking in it, being pulled down. Esther felt a surge of panic, that same panic that jolts through you when you’re underwater and scrabbling for the surface but aren’t quite sure if you’ll make it before your lungs involuntarily suck in a flood of water.

  Get out, get out, get out, sighed the corn. Or maybe the warning was from the irrational part of her brain. The same part that made her worried about sharks in swimming pools, murderers lurking behind shower curtains, and sudden velociraptor attacks.

  “I need to get out!” she said, and now she was panicking, turning, looking for an easy escape. The corn was whispering, hissing, snagging her hair, pulling at her clothes. Creatures were moving through the stalks. She could feel them. She could see the shadow trails they left behind, and the corn was trying to trap her so she could be eaten.

  This was the point where most people said, “Breathe.” This was the point where most people said, “Calm down.” This was the point where most people said, “Aliens don’t exist.”

  Jonah Smallwood was not most people. He put his hands on her shoulders and said, “The curse doesn’t make you interesting.”

  The statement was strange enough to rip Esther right out of the panic quicksand. “What?”

  “You think the curse is the most interesting thing about you, but it isn’t. It doesn’t even make the top five. You being scared of cornfields and aliens doesn’t make you some special snowflake. Everybody’s fear sounds the same in their head.”

  “How dare you,” she said sarcastically, panting as she came back to herself. “I am a special snowflake.”

  “You really wanna let M. Night Shyamalan do this to you? That’s like crying to a Nickelback song. Have some self-respect.”

  She gave a shaky laugh. “What are the top five?”

  “Top five?”

  “Most interesting things a
bout me.”

  “Narcissist.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll tell you number five right now, but I’ll save the other four for later when you no doubt have other freak-outs about all the fun stuff we’ll be doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Number five: your hair color.”

  “Strawberry blond isn’t interesting.”

  “Nothing strawberry or blond about it. It’s peach. Hair like an orchid in summer,” he said, and then he had a strand of that very same hair threaded through his fingertips.

  “You read too much Shakespeare.”

  “How about you tell me a story. I wanna hear more about that Jack Horowitz dude.”

  “Okay,” she said, and as her breathing settled into a manageable rhythm, she told Jonah Smallwood about the second time her grandfather met Death.

  19

  A NICE DAY FOR A WHITE WEDDING

  IT WAS late morning on October 4, 1982 when Jack Horowitz, the Man Who Would Be Death, rang the doorbell of Reginald Solar’s house and asked him to be best man at his wedding. Reg, now the father of two sons and a daughter, took one look at the familiar pockmarked face on his porch—who, as you might remember, he believed to be long dead—and promptly fainted. When he regained consciousness half a minute later, Horowitz was crouched over him, fanning him with a handkerchief.

  “Goodness, I thought I scared you to death. It would have been very awkward if my master had arrived to reap you. I called in sick today. Hello, Lieutenant.”

  “You’re dead,” Reg said, staring up at Horowitz’s ghost, which looked remarkably alive. The scars on his face were red and pitted and far more inflamed than the skin of a ghost should be. Could ghosts even have skin?

  “Quite the opposite.” Horowitz extended his arm. Reginald didn’t take it, instead remaining stationary on the floor.

  “I don’t understand. You were murdered. You drowned in a river in Vietnam.”

  “Oh no. I was down there for some time, though. They tied me tight, you see. I was down there fumbling around in the rocks, looking for one sharp enough to cut my bindings for quite some time indeed.”

  “You . . . Why are you here?”

  Horowitz smiled serenely. “I find myself in the position of needing a witness at my wedding. A best man, if you will. You were the first and—I hope you’ll forgive me for admitting this—only person I thought of. I don’t have a great deal of friends.” Horowitz glanced at his still-extended hand. “Do you intend to spend the rest of this conversation horizontal?”

  Reg let Horowitz help him up, then said, “Best man? Horowitz, you don’t know me. We only met once, the night before you died.”

  “Yes, but you mourned me. You fought for my honor to be reinstated. I suppose I have developed something of a soft spot for you, Reginald Solar. And since the state requires there be a witness at my wedding—someone who knows who I am—I would like for that person to be you.”

  “I thought you’d been murdered on my watch.”

  “Alas, as I tried to explain to you in 1972, I am very hard to kill.”

  Reg, of course, still did not believe that Horowitz was Death’s apprentice—even if his survival was remarkable. Still, he invited him inside and they drank milk together as Horowitz explained that Death, too, could love, and indeed, he had swiftly fallen for the young Vietnamese woman who’d discovered him floating facedown in the river, too weak to swim to the bank after several days of trying to free himself.

  “Several minutes, you mean,” corrected Reginald.

  “I assure you, Lieutenant, it was several days.”

  Reginald shook his head and poured them both another round of milk. Horowitz continued. It was frowned upon for the Grim Reaper to take a lover, he explained. During his tenure as Death, he would be granted long life and immunity from the messy business of dying for as long as his term of service lasted, but his partner would not. This, as you can imagine, had caused some problems in the past. Horowitz couldn’t confirm it for sure, but there was a rumor that the Black Death of 1346–53 was the direct result of the Reaper becoming depressed at the sudden and unexpected demise of his young boyfriend, who was killed in a freak accident—the kind that even Death cannot predict. Plagued by despair, he walked the streets of Europe for seven years, rats infected with the Yersinia pestis bacterium scuttling behind him by the dozen. In his state of mourning he touched the cheeks of young lovers as they slept so that they, too, might know his sorrow.

  Horowitz described the ordeal as a “logistical nightmare.” Still, he loved the woman, Lan, and every single person who dared to love risked losing their beloved anyway, so why should he be any different? He thought himself very unlikely to go on a rampage if she died, and besides, she was young and fit and healthy, so why should she perish anytime in the next fifty years or so? He would remain a young man while she aged, and then, when she passed peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he would train an apprentice, and then retire and join her in the afterlife. Even as Death he’d have to die eventually, but he’d get to choose how and where and when—one of the few perks of the job.

  The two men spoke until early afternoon, mostly about the war and the years that had passed since it ended. Reginald showed Horowitz pictures of his wife and children, and Horowitz showed Reginald pictures of the little white house he’d bought in Santorini. It had blue window frames and a blue door, and a small goat grazing in the yard, perfect for making cheese. Lan, his betrothed, loved olives and sunshine and waking to the sound of waves crashing against rock, so that was what Horowitz was giving her.

  “You’ll be happy there, I’m sure,” said Reg as he handed back the Polaroids.

  “I must ask you, Reginald, to keep a terrible secret for me.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “My beloved, she . . . Well, she doesn’t know who I am. Or what I am, rather. I know it’s deceitful of me not to tell her, but who could love such a thing as me if they knew the truth?”

  “If you haven’t told her, I certainly won’t,” Reg said, even though he believed that a person had a right to know they were probably marrying a basket case who had delusions of being the Grim Reaper. If the woman hadn’t figured out by now that Horowitz was delusional and possibly psychotic, he wasn’t going to be the one to tell her.

  Horowitz’s wedding took place the next afternoon, in the town’s local chapel. Lan wore a pale pink sundress with a strand of pearls at her throat, and the Man Who Would Be Death dressed in a lavender tuxedo with shiny white shoes and a ruffled shirt. Reginald thought the supposed Reaper really ought to have more style about him, but then again, Horowitz was born in the South and raised on a farm—or so he said—so style wasn’t exactly expected.

  Esther’s grandmother, Florence Solar, also attended the wedding, though Esther never got the chance to ask her about what she thought of the Reaper and his bride; she died the very same night her grandfather first told her the story. Esther wondered if she knew Horowitz was Death. Wondered if, at the moment of her last breath, she was shocked to find the pockmarked young man whose wedding she’d attended almost three decades earlier come to collect her immortal soul.

  The two men parted ways again after the wedding, Reg Solar still no more convinced that Horowitz was indeed Death but glad to know that he was alive and stable and happy, for the time being.

  While Esther told her story, Jonah absentmindedly weaved a crown of cornhusks and placed it atop her head. “Queen of Death,” he said when she finished. By then, the sun had sunk low and the drone’s battery had run out and the corn was still whispering, urging them to leave.

  “Do you want to go on that date now?” she asked him, and he said yes, so they did.

  • • •

  “THERE ARE FOUR STEPS to wooing the ladies,” Jonah explained to Est
her an hour later. They were standing in front of a Mexican food truck called Taco the Town. “First I buy them Mexican food, then I buy them beer, then I take them to my favorite place, and then I whip out my secret weapon.”

  “I sincerely hope the secret weapon is not your genitals.”

  “Ugh. Get your head out of the gutter, Esther. Honestly.”

  “Wait, are you saying you’re trying to woo me right now?”

  “I’ve been trying to woo you since elementary school. You’re just too distracted to notice. You think I’d reupholster a couch for just anyone?”

  “Abandoning someone and not contacting them for six years is hardly an optimal wooing technique.”

  “Touché.”

  “Where did you go by the way? You haven’t told me.”

  “You haven’t asked.”

  “I’m asking now.”

  “It’s a long story that involves time travel and a failed attempt to kill Hitler. Trust me, you don’t want to know.”

  They ate their burritos while sitting in the gutter next to the taco truck, then drove until they got to the WELCOME TO sign on the outskirts of town. They sat on the other side of the sign, huddled close to keep warm, officially outside the boundaries of the place that held them in like a black hole. It was amazing—Esther could breathe there. No more than two feet beyond the edge, and the straps around her chest had loosened, the metal plate that encased her brain had dissolved.

  “Salud,” Jonah said, passing her a warm can of beer from inside his jacket.

  “Does this technique really work for you?” she asked him. He didn’t answer. Instead they cracked open their drinks and watched the highway that led out of town, all the cars that moved beyond the event horizon like it was nothing, nothing at all, the easiest thing in the world to escape. Esther didn’t have to ask Jonah why this was his favorite place. They stared at the cars, each one plunging off into an unknown that they wouldn’t know for years. Might never know.