I was happy she was dead, I realized. I had been staring at her big, blue body with no particular care, and Johnny had seen. Embarrassed for myself, I looked away.
“You see her too, right?” Johnny asked.
I inched closer to him, to her. He was looking down at me with wild, excited eyes, like Darren sometimes got. I took a deep breath, letting her decay filter through my insides.
“Johnny,” I said slowly, slipping my hand inside his, pulling him down. “There’s nothing here. Where’s the body? Pick it up and show me, if there’s a body.” The need in my voice was unflattering, ugly. He recoiled at the sound.
But I, I could not help it. I leaned in to taste the body—just a lick of the neck. She went sweet on my tongue. Johnny laughed hard and endless, finally having a good time.
The Barrow Wight
JOSH COOK
The winter debilitated us.
We thought it was a glove.
The winter became subcutaneous.
Blizzards buried parking meters. Plows built roadside balustrades. Schools closed. We exhausted the energizing joy of dramatic snowstorms by January. Were drinking more by February. Catching up on classic movies.
You expect a glove in a melting snow mound. Three days later we realized it was a hand.
Authorities were called. Hospitals contacted. Missing-person reports cross-referenced. We reached out to people we hadn’t heard from recently. The authorities were, we assumed, scientific and thorough.
For a week, we saw hands instead of gloves.
Feet instead of boots.
We saw another hand.
The media invaded. We gave the ill-informed, poorly phrased, emotionally contradictory interviews expected from “the people on the street.” Got pretty good at them, eventually. Inside jokes and everything.
Another receding snow mound revealed a foot.
After the second hand, we constantly imagined feet. Idle moments at work. When yawns closed our eyes. Blinking away the colored shapes of too-long-stared-at screens. We thought we were prepared.
Maybe we would have been if someone else had found it, not the kind fifth grader who still believed the world is so people can be happy in it. What do they think about a fucking foot in a snow mound? We weren’t prepared.
Then a four-day problem with an idiom.
Then . . . (fuck it) the other foot dropped.
The media returned but their tone changed. Mocking derision replaced morbid curiosity, as if behind every question lurked a rhetorical “Can you believe these people? Limbs in their snow mounds? Who’s driving their plows, am I right?”
We shared a nightmare of being chased through a dark tunnel. The tunnel narrowed until we crawled. It terminated. An evil approached. We pushed with all our might against the terminus. We broke through, flopping onto slushy ground to a chorus of screams. Bottles dropped. The shattered glass assembled into a surface that reflected a severed hand with a face in its palm.
The use of “applause” radically increased.
Our alcohol drinkers felt their desire for it diminish in direct proportion to the increase in their need for it.
Parents couldn’t tell their children to play outside.
Horror movies were absented from sleepovers.
We packed high school basketball games like never before and cheered with unprecedented passion. The team went two and six.
We watched even more TV.
Next was a forearm.
A dog found it. A good dog.
The forearm was put in the morgue with the other limbs. Picture the visage of a freaked-out coroner.
Spring increased the pace of revelation. The rest of an arm up to the shoulder was found the next day, and its partner that afternoon.
A few people left. In public, we politely questioned their commitment. In private, we hated them as we hate elderly relatives lingering in nursing homes.
The high school drama club met after school; at least, we think it was the drama club, because none of the other groups of students would have this conversation; or maybe they would: teenagers are weird. It wasn’t even a conversation, just one kid talking. You know, how you just kinda talk yourself into the outside. What are we doing? We’re not afraid of this getting out, are we? That’d be stupid. Nobody got in a fight. Nobody drew a gun and accidentally shot someone else. Nobody had sex in the bathroom. Nobody even did drugs. Somebody said they were looking up stuff on the internet because they were bored and Dad was watching college basketball and you do not change the channel when Dad is watching college basketball, so they learned that many scholars theorize that the idea of “barrow wights” originated with Mongolian herdsmen who believed powerful spirits guarded improperly buried bodies and tormented travelers, and the belief in these malicious spirits accompanied them as they swept into Europe, where the spirits were associated with trolls guarding cemeteries in Poland and Hungary, making their way into one unattributed German fairy tale in which the cruelty of a tyrannical prince congealed into a gremlin that haunted his grave, a version of which was adapted into an Arthurian legend—originally composed in France, of course—in which a “burial wraith” tried to trick Sir Lucan the Butler into replacing the dead lord in a tomb, and once in France there was only a channel between these monsters and England, which actually had burial mounds or barrows, barrow coming from the Old German for “mountain,” and in England they developed a mischievousness that included using dead bodies and the parts thereof in pranks, which many scholars believe was an explanation for the occasional absences of bodies from graves, and it was from these folktales that Tolkein created the “Barrow-wights,” now so prevalent in fantasy and horror culture.
Somehow the term barrow wight manifested in everyone’s minds. If we lost focus, it ended up in open documents and emails.
Thighs and shins of two legs were found at the cardinal directions.
The genitals centered the leg compass.
The torso had to be next. We could do an autopsy. We were thrilled. Autopsy is the highest expression of modern humanity. Another thing we learned.
We held a dark carnival. We dressed as demons to frighten demons. Warty prosthetic noses. Gnarled horns. Hooves over hands. Grizzled branches on our backs. Gleeful in our horribleness. We made curseful noises to banish the curses. Rucksacks of glass hurled against stop signs. Plastic bags fed through snowblowers. TVs dropped from heights. Vicious comfort in our cacophony. We pantomimed cruelty to defuse cruelty. Staged executions. Harmless lashings. Unspecified but unsettling devices. We replaced thrill with fake thrill. Whatever else we felt in consideration of this image of ourselves we defined as coincidental.
The torso was in the sewers.
In a glass case.
Perfectly preserved.
We opened the case.
The torso turned to mulch.
The guy who worked in the garden center, nice enough really, but talked about fantasy sports way too much, said it was organic cedar. But really, could he tell just by looking? It was just a fucking torso. It’s fine. He wanted to contribute. We all want to contribute. Most of us don’t know how. So we have kids. Hi, kids. We love you.
The head should appear soon and end this.
We discussed war heroes.
Uncles who died overseas.
One barrow remained.
The sense of carnival returned. Just the sense.
We vigiled in shifts, with snacks and flasks. Just like ice fishing.
We finally started talking about the Mound Man. We would look in his eyes. We would put him on the internet. We would solve a mystery. This ordeal would rebind what components of our community had drifted apart through capitalism’s tectonics.
We would contact the media.
We would give interviews.
Again.
We would sell the movie rights and build a homeless shelter. Or a playground. Or a free clinic. Mound Man Day would be the official start of our spring, a celebration of our triumph.
/> We would triumph.
The barrow melted.
There was another hand.
Katy Bars the Door
RICHIE NARVAEZ
Less than three hours after she tied the knot, after the escape from a Dutch oven of a church and then the bladder-jarring limo ride to Flushing Meadows Park, after posing for pictures covered in a steady drizzle and the clinging smell of defeated deodorant, and after another long zigzag ride to Izzy’s wedding hall, with a quick stop off at a Sizzler, all the patrons staring at her as she taffeta-ed down a cheap wood-paneled hall to a bathroom of greasy yellow tiles, and after arriving and after the first dance to the wrong song (“I wanted ‘My Blue Heaven,’ not ‘Tears in Heaven’”), and seconds before the cake was cut, the newly minted Katy de la Cruz (née Guerrera) experienced what she considered an epiphany.
The thunderbolt of insight revealed to her that her handsome-but-between-jobs new husband, Jesus, thought of her as a prize. Actually, it wasn’t so much an epiphany as her overhearing something that her sister said she had overheard: Jesus turning to his best man and saying, “She’s a career girl. I ain’t gotta lift a finger for the rest of my life.”
Later, as Jesus stood next to her, Katy stared into the photographer’s flash, just as someone handed her a knife.
She turned to look at Jesus, his bearded cheeks ruddy and glistening, as they both grasped the knife, and she knew that she despised him. Dutifully, she shoved the buttercream- laden cake slice into his face.
They went on to have twins.
Seven years later, her career in market-research analysis well on its way, she let her lover kiss her, his stubble like a cheese grater on her neck. He called himself Roberto, but she called him Romeo in texts to Adriana, her best friend and alibi. He was fit, dabbled in sales, and was very talented with his lips—except that he used them too much to talk about an upcoming zombie apocalypse.
For that reason, she broke up with him. But also because when he looked at her with emo eyes behind big black glasses, she felt that he, too, saw her as a prize.
Afterward, she sighed for a year.
But then the zombie apocalypse actually did arrive, and Katy felt pretty chagrined.
Adriana was the one of the first people she called. Before Katy could say anything, Adriana said, “Oh my god! Do you think a claw hammer is enough to kill these—is undead the correct term? Zombies just seems culturally appropriated.”
“I only know what I see on cable,” Katy said. “Do you have a shotgun or something like that?”
“C’mon, Katy, we’re not those kind of people.”
“Listen, the kids are with their grandparents in Florida. No one’s answering the phone, and Jesus’s t—”
The line went kaput. As did the Wi-Fi. And thus the world.
In the master bedroom behind Katy, shirtless and in sweatpants, her husband grunted about brains. She barred the door with the giant TV console and one of the kids’ larger Lego sets. Jesus banged at the door with more oomph than he had ever shown for anything in life.
Meanwhile, outside the window, emerging from underneath the blooming dogwood tree across the street, taking his time as always, came Romeo. How inappropriate of him to come to her house while her husband was home. But Romeo was a zombie now, too, his lovely lips reduced to monosyllabic muttering.
She barred the front entrance with a credenza and a coat rack, both from Raymour & Flanigan. Sitting on it and sipping cabernet, Katy searched for another epiphany.
To both these zombies—better?: people who are no longer living—she had been a prize. For her sex, her steadiness, her salary. Now she was a prize again, but for her brains. And not in a complimentary way. But what was the prize she was seeking, the thing she could win for herself, to make her life worthwhile?
What was it she looked for in Romeo? Was he, as her therapist suggested, just a prize as well for her? When she’d broken up with him, he sent a dozen poems he had written himself, several drafts of a suicide note, and fifty-four nude selfies. She deleted all but one.
When Jesus had found out about Romeo, he said, “This shit has to stop,” but then confessed to a ten-year “emotional affair” with someone he met online gaming. Katy slept in the guest room after that, which was fine since Jesus was a blanket hog. In the dark, she had wondered what it was she had loved in him. Was it how he wouldn’t break a sweat as he worked his way through a plate of buffalo wings? Or was he—as Adriana had suggested—just a replacement for Papi?
Oh, Papi. Papi had never talked about prizes. He had never said much of anything, and when he did, it was about the weather—things like “It’s gonna be cold today” or “It’s gonna be hot today.” Every once in a while, though, after a few Drambuies, he would pat her head and say things like, “Katy, mi niña, life is all sacrifice.”
He was right. Because now she had to sacrifice herself. There was no cellar to hide in, no helicopter waiting on the roof. Letting her husband be the one to consume her seemed like the proper, wifely thing to do. But surely Romeo would do it with more imagination.
But then she had another epiphany. She didn’t have to go one way or the other. She had a third choice.
If she remembered right, Jesus had the keys to the car in his sweatpants pocket, the car that was parked in the driveway, the driveway across which Romeo was currently, fitfully shuffling.
Fine, then. She would move the furniture. In a minute. But first she poured herself more cabernet, and then she made a double-headed pike out of a stainless-steel curtain rod from Crate & Barrel, and once she finished her wine, she would roll up her sleeves and her new life would begin.
Pincer and Tongue
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
Had there been a trail cam, then all of this would been recorded in blurry still shots.
What happened had been centuries in coming. Rudolfo, the second vampire of his line and the oldest left anywhere on earth, had been lured into a daytime ambush deep in the Guatemalan jungle. He of course knew it could only be an ambush, and he also knew who the invitation had to have come from: Gretta, the German werewolf he had had a relationship with, each of them feeling the other’s kind out, to see if this could even be a workable thing. The wrongness made it more fun than it should have been. It had started out as information gathering, but then they ended up truly smitten with each other, until . . . they weren’t. Instead of going their separate ways and taking pains to stay out of each other’s territory, however, well—they were exes. This big final blowout was bound to happen sooner or later. South America would be as good a place for it as any.
Rudolfo, of course, knew Gretta would come alone. Unlike his kind, her kind had a scent so distinct it could be made out for miles around, by anyone with the nose to smell.
Rudolfo came alone because, well: pride. And who knew, right? Maybe this would just be the opening steps of another decades-long dance for the two of them. Gretta was unpredictable and irascible, but that served to make her a good counterbalance for Rudolfo’s calm, reserved, supposedly (so she said) “aloof” presence.
The world would tremble were the two of them to walk it hand in hand again. It could be like the old days. Until it wasn’t.
But, as these things work, not only was there no trail cam installed, hopeful of documenting a migrant jaguar or a rutting armadillo, also no trail cam could realistically have seen into the hearts or lives of this vampire, that werewolf. It could have trapped their fight on its memory card, though.
It was epic.
Gretta came at Rudolfo not with her claws out and her hair on, but with a slashing blade. He, of course, dodged it, but in dodging it he had to whip back fast enough to impale himself on a wooden spike Gretta had embedded in a tree specifically for him.
Then she brought her claws out.
Rudolfo peeled his lips back from his mouthful of fangs, extracting himself hand over hand from the off-center spike while she raked him to ribbons, even going so far this time as to sever the pinky and
ring fingers of his right hand.
He slung them away, dived at her, and she, wily as ever, dashed into the sunlight, trying to lure him to his death, taking their fight out of what would have been the frame of the trail cam, had the trail cam been there.
What that trail cam would have been seeing after the fight moved on to a different part of the jungle was just . . . leaf litter. A tropical jungle readying itself for the afternoon shower. Bugs resuming their insectile duties, birds flittering and fluttering.
And, just at the corner of the frame, two severed vampire fingers.
Two fingers that were now . . . moving?
Yes. But not of their own volition. Rudolfo, with his next full meal, could easily regenerate those fingers, should he survive Gretta’s onslaught. If not—either way, really—once the next day’s noontime sun beamed down through the canopy and found those fingers, they would flicker into flame, smoke away into nothing. Nature takes care of its own.
But now those fingers were . . . not so much crawling as traveling by antback or ant column—both—to the cavernous mound deep in the jungle, technically past the focal length of the trail cam, had there been a trail cam.
Had the digital file been delivered to the right hands, though, then focus could be changed, zooms could be faked, images unblurred such that they resolved into a lone finger jammed now at the main entry to the mound.
This entry isn’t made for boons of this size, so accommodations must be made. Slowly, particle by particle, the entryway is crumbled wider, and one finger points down to where it’s going, then goes there. The second passes through just as easily.
At which point some time lapse would need to occur. Trail cams are designed not to constantly record, but to motion- activate. What this means is that the trail cam would have zero access to the unholy miracle taking place underground, inside that ant mound.
Before imbibing Rudolfo’s volatile blood, these ants had already been blanketing acres of land on what felt like a whim, leaving only waste and emptiness in their wake. Now, two days later, when the first of the infected ants are surging up from their mound, they’ve metastasized to a darker color, night now being their favored province, and they’re more desperate for sustenance than before, no longer following chemical trails here and there but swarming forward in a ravenous world-eating mass.
Tiny Nightmares Page 10