Lullabies for Suffering
Tales of Addiction Horror
“The wicked run when no one is chasing them”
Proverbs 28:1
Wicked Run Press
Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
For more information, contact: [email protected]
Edited by Mark Matthews
with assistance from Andi Rawson, Jason Parent, Glen Krisch
and Julie Hutchings (editor for Lizard)
Cover Art and Design by Dean Samed
Copyright 2020, all rights reserved.
Praise for Lullabies for Suffering
"The stories in Lullabies for Suffering are the real deal, a plunge into agony and the ecstasy, the inescapable nightmare of addiction."
—Alma Katsu, author of The Deep and The Hunger
“My emotions are exposed and raw, my stomach tangled, my shoulders sagged. This open-veined collection tore me up. Each story was captivating and sucked me in and led me on a dark and twisted ride.”
—Nico Bell Fiction
“Beautifully Brutal.”
—Steve Stred, author of The Ritual
"These stories are brimming with sobering revelations and heinous aberrations."
—Christa Carmen, author of Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked
"Beautiful, enlightening, revelatory. Everything that good fiction should be, in a manner that elevates both its chosen genre and the status of discourse on its core subjects."
—Ginger Nuts of Horror
"Brutal, raw, but still somehow elegant, Lullabies for Suffering plumbs the depths of addiction in its myriad forms. There are no filler stories in this anthology, just six punches to the chin.”
—Glen Krisch, author of Little Whispers, Nothing Lasting, and Husks
"Lullabies for Suffering delivers time and again. Rarely do you come across a collection so well-versed in its life lessons and realistic horrors."
—Aiden Merchant, author of Dead As Soon As Born
“Be forewarned—These dark tales are hypnotic, gritty, and full of torment.”
—Richard Thomas, author of Disintegration and Breaker, a Thriller award finalist
Table of Contents:
introduction:
by Mark Matthews
Sometimes they see me
by Kealan Patrick Burke
Monsters
by Caroline Kepnes
Lizard
by Mark Matthews
The Melting Point of Meat
by John FD Taff
Beyond the reef
by Gabino Iglesias
Love is a Crematorium
by Mercedes M. Yardley
Lullabies for Suffering – An Introduction
Addiction starts like a sweet lullaby sung by a trusted loved one. It washes away the pains of the day and wraps you in the warmness of the womb where nothing hurts and every dream is possible. Yet soon enough, this warm state of bliss becomes a cold shiver. The ecstasy and dreams become nightmares, and for the sick and suffering addict, we can’t stop listening to the lullaby. We crave to hear the siren song as it rips us apart.
Such is the paradox of addiction, and dark truths such as these require a dark piece of fiction to do them justice. Welcome to Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror. Just a few words before we start.
This collection is a follow up to Garden of Fiends but certainly not a sequel, for the scope is larger, and the volume bigger. Garden of Fiends injected horror into your veins, Lullabies for Suffering slices into your wrist while tenderly holding your hand. The goal is the same—an unflinching portrayal of addiction but with empathy for those impacted by its curse.
As someone who has been in recovery from addiction for many years, and who now works in the field of substance abuse treatment, this project is very personal for me. If I am the only one who reads the kaleidoscope of voices that follow, it will all have been worth it. The talent on display in this collection is extraordinary and it was chosen with care. Some stories will strike you as horror with addiction as the theme, others simply as the insidious nature of drug use—damaged humans craving for highs and wholeness but finding something more tragic and horrific on the other side. All of the works are novella or novelette length, for once you step inside the world, you’ll want to stay a bit.
Why addiction horror? Horror has the capacity to speak to trauma in a unique fashion. It's a tone and technique as much as a genre, and what better way to capture the epidemic of addiction, and the barren emotional and spiritual states that come with it, than through a work of horror. Until you’ve had your mind and soul hijacked by addiction, it is difficult to comprehend, for in the throes of a craving, the desire to obtain and use substances equals the life force for survival itself. Imagine yourself drowning and being told not to swim to the surface for air. Obsessions should be so mild.
Lullaby aims to portray this affliction with honesty, empathy and understanding. As Joe Hill so aptly noted, Horror isn't about extreme sadism; it's about extreme empathy. As much as that term ‘trigger warning’ is overused, I feel it may be useful here, for some graphic depictions of drug use, as well as cutting, lie ahead, but always with an artful sense and bigger purpose.
Some words about the contributors:
Kealan Patrick Burke
Kealan writes part Faulkner goth, part cosmic horror. After his brilliant story “Wicked Thirst” from Garden of Fiends, it was impossible not to ask for more. His story, “Sometimes They See Me,” is a frenetic love story of two addicts bonding over art and constantly needing a fix for the cracks in their psyche. Powerful, rich, and imaginative, this story begs to be read twice.
Caroline Kepnes
“Hypnotic and scary,” said Stephen King of her work. Her novel You is one of the greatest second person point-of-view works you’ll ever read, and the inspiration behind the must-binge series on Netflix. Kepnes writes in a unique tone of darkness, capturing our neuroses, sexual tensions, and internal dialogue with remarkable candor. Kepnes flexes these literary muscles in “Monsters," where the legacy and stigma of addiction spreads through generations. As she did in You and Hidden Bodies, Kepnes shows us monsters hide behind human faces.
Mark Matthews
My own piece, Lizard, about a young girl growing up with two addicted parents, who then becomes the dreaded ‘fentanyl final girl’ after a mass overdose. She will do anything to make sure other children don’t suffer as she did. Like my addiction horror novels, Milk-Blood and All Smoke Rises, it’s a true story, even if it didn’t happen. I hope you like this one.
John FD Taff
The King of Pain is back and turning up the temperature to The Melting Point of Meat with a powerful story on the obsessive urge of cutting and craving for pleasure that comes with pain. His characters are vibrant but fragile, the cracks in their life where the light comes shining through. Melting Point is a savage, cosmic, visceral piece. A definite page-turner.
Gabino Iglesias
An infectious writing style and contagious passion, Iglesias is a master of the mosaic. He weaves his sentences as part sledgehammer, part harpsichord, beautiful but savage. Try to pin him into one genre, and it will change with the next sentence. Iglesias is the author of the ground-breaking, award-nominated Coyote Songs, with more songs to sing. Beyond the Reef takes place in the ‘barrio noir’ of
Puerto Rico where a new father fights both heroin addiction and Lovecraftian beasts who surround his island home.
Mercedes M. Yardley
Mercedes is listed here last as the grand finale of a firework explosion. The Bram Stoker Award-winning author is criminally creative with a wit and whimsy that turns her prose to music. To read her works is to live deliciously and walk through a field of poisonous wildflowers. "Love is a Crematorium” is a bittersweet love story that only Mercedes could write and I think you’re going to love. You’ll understand how heroin, much like love, “is a crematorium that lights you up and burns you out at the same time.”
There you have it. My hope is for this book to serve, as Franz Kafka said, “as the axe for the frozen sea within us.” For there certainly is a frozen sea, and the result is a spiritual hunger for warmth and wholeness. Our fractured selves suffer and crave for healing—or if not healing, at least relief from suffering, if but for a little while. Reading, like addiction, can offer that relief. A sweet song of comfort. Thank you for taking the time to listen to these Lullabies for Suffering.
-Mark Matthews
October, 2019
Sometimes They See Me
By
Kealan Patrick Burke
Sometimes They See Me
Kealan Patrick Burke
1.
I met Calvin on the Singing Bridge outside Rosewood Park on the night of December 24th. I’d gone there to kill myself, and though he never admitted it, so had he. It was there in his eyes, the same flat look of grim resignation I’m sure I carried in mine. Everyone goes there to die. It’s become a cliché, but such things don’t matter when the end of your life is concerned.
He’d been throwing scraps of paper down into the frozen water. The scene looked familiar to me, but it would take a while before I could recall where I had seen it before. In that moment, I was more intrigued by his posture and the aura radiating from his emaciated body.
“I can wait,” were my first words to him, and his response bound us together until the end of the whole mess.
“For how long?”
The night was full of funny things, the first of them being that when I rounded the spider web of frozen trees and saw his dark figure hunched over the railing in the haze of cold moonlight, I felt a brief twinge of panic. Woman alone; strange man on a bridge. That I worried he might be a killer only tickled me later as we lay in bed together reminiscing on how fucked up it all was. If he’d turned out to be a homicidal maniac, it would have put a serious damper on my plan to kill myself. But that’s the interesting thing about suicide. It’s a personal thing, perhaps the most personal thing of all, the very last measure of control. Thus, having someone else do it doesn’t count. Instinct will revolt if the executioner isn’t you.
Rather than cast our bodies into the freezing current, we walked and talked, and retreated to his place among the unsteady tenement buildings in a part of town nobody thinks of as anything but a backdrop to the occasional nameless murder on the nightly news. There, on the second floor, by the cozy light of a host of guttering candles, we drank cheap vodka, laughed and wept and entered each other both spiritually and physically until sleep left us entwined in his stained and stinking sheets.
With his true nature written in sweat all over my skin, my dreams did not, for the first time in years, try to drown me in anxiety. I did not see the wallpaper, and I did not see the blood. I saw only magic.
I knew him.
And so our brief love story began.
2.
One of my late father’s truisms, deposed while bribing me out of his life: You’re only fine until you tell on yourself.
Calvin told on himself early on. He was an alcoholic and an addict, manic depressive, and possibly a narcissist. I don’t know how long we meandered through those drunken days before I realized I knew more about him than he did me. That was because I asked questions, whereas he was content to let me be a mystery. Or maybe he didn’t care. I guess the nature of your passenger doesn’t alter the destination, and we were on the road now, familiars, headed somewhere together, even if the motion was an illusion. Our days saw us waking in his grimy, powerless apartment, fucking like we’d die if we didn’t, barely bathing beneath the teardrop trickle of cold water in the calamitous bathroom, and eschewing breakfast in favor of whiskeys at a local dive bar, The Big Grand. It was a disproportionately austere name for a place where your feet stick to the floor and the regulars are only marginally more material than shadow.
From there, we walked the cobblestoned streets and ambled aimlessly through the nicer part of town, cackling when we found ourselves obstructing the urgency of the better-dressed and daring each other to antagonize the police whenever we caught them giving us the rooster eye. Bookstores and libraries provided succor, a spiritual peace that saw us return to something almost human, cowed by the awe of a hundred thousand voices clamoring to be heard above the din of reverent quiet. Only here could we be apart, like sinners to the confessionals that best suited our brand of sin, baring our souls without judgment before a godless jury.
Afterward, better educated, we reunited, rejuvenated by dead men’s tales and hidden knowledge, and off out into the world we went again in search of more distraction from the ever-encroaching edge of the inevitable abyss.
Running beneath it all was an awareness of doom, of borrowed time, and of the secrets we were keeping from each other.
It would end, this little adventure, and probably not well.
3.
On the last of our jaunts into the city, three weeks since we first met, we stopped before the large plate-glass window of The Orchid Gallery. It was nestled between a secondhand bookstore and a Subway, within which, the employees stared out at us in an envy unique to the bored and underpaid. Displayed before us in the gallery window were a series of small paintings apparently floating in thin air against a backdrop of stark white. Each canvas depicted an explosion of colors in no discernible pattern, the kind of work Pollock was known for, only less agitated, and no less impenetrable. There was a softness to it that appealed to me, even though such art has always seemed to me at best nonsensical, at worst constrictive, even while it inspires paroxysms of desire among aficionados. How difficult is it to spackle a canvas in fury, and what is it we’re supposed to see other than orgiastic chaos? But perhaps that’s just me. I have an aversion to art I have never quite been able to reconcile beyond its tendency to constrain. How can such things move us when they require us to stand still? What is it they’re supposed to say? I divine no more emotion from a slapdash mosaic of paint than I do a pile of coats on a floor.
“It’s wondrous,” Calvin said, and I watched my reflection second his appraisal with a treasonous nod.
We went inside. The gallery was one long narrow room with walls of white-painted brick and a lot less art than one would expect given the purpose of the place. Even the art that was there embraced too much negative space to the point that the sparse amounts of color seemed like an oversight.
One of the paintings caught Calvin’s eye and held it. It was a small blue square in the center of an enormous rectangular canvas. Within the square was a single red thumbprint. A simple placard beneath read: “Identity” – by Doris Wiltshire. Beneath that, the price. $17,000.
“Are they fucking serious?”
Calvin ignored me, still enthralled, and I couldn’t help but wonder at the source of his fascination. I lingered dutifully until ants began to crawl their way out of my bones, and then I went outside for a cigarette.
Three cigarettes later, my patience expired. I needed a fix in my veins or a drink in my gut, preferably both, and Calvin was burning our time staring down a fucking thumbprint. It no longer mattered what it meant to him. Only the need mattered now, and he was its sole obstruction. When I looked through the window, I saw him turn to say something to me. Only then did it dawn on him that I wasn’t there. His gaunt, pockmarked face screwed up in bafflement before our gazes met throug
h the glass, mine hot enough to warp it. He nodded and hurried out to join me.
“The fuck was that about?” I asked him, my irritation evident in everything from my tone to the way I stomped my cigarette to death on the pavement, an act which gleaned a look of disapproval from a woman hustling her two oblivious children along before us. “And what the fuck are you looking at?” I feel bad about that. It wasn’t her fault that she reminded me of my sister.
Calvin took my elbow and led us to the closest bar. He handed me a baggy and shoved me into the bathroom, where, after cooking up the dope with toilet water, he went down on me while I shot up, and we were fine again for a little while. I didn’t climax, but that’s nothing new.
4.
“I wanted to be an artist for the longest time, ever since my parents took me to Atlantic City and I saw those guys doing caricatures on the boardwalk. I was enthralled by them. Couldn’t stop watching them. Couldn’t move. Would have stayed there forever. These working joes getting to sit outside with the smells of the sea and the popcorn and hotdogs, painting likenesses of people all day long. Took me years to realize I wasn’t very good and never would be, though I was featured for a while in The Vanderelli Room. People seemed to like it and it excited me to be so positively appraised. I thought I might be going places, but I couldn’t make the spark catch again. I felt trapped, so I moved, thought a new space might serve me better. Thought I might be able to make a living from it someday. The self-delusion of all budding creatives. We should be compensated fairly for our passions, shouldn’t we? And if the world deems art should be free, then I propose that so too should living.”
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