In the hall, Tate heard the tramp of little feet. Dreaming familiars. Echoes of what they’d once been. Human children. Feral and starved, their will to survive bent the universe. Transformed them into something you couldn’t bottle. A strange brew.
Tate pulled on his shirt and left number nine. He dawdled down the stairs, past the office, through the heavy front door, and jogged up the block to his car without so much as a glance over his shoulder. When the time came, he wouldn’t need a trail of crumbs to find his way back to Leighaven. He had history here, and history never died. No matter how dark, or how still, if you got real close and real quiet, you’d hear it breathing.
<<====>>
AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE
Fairytale retelling is a popular sport amongst writers. We can’t resist mining the veins of subtext running through those grim yarns, and Hansel & Gretel in particular always struck me as a story with more to say. About hunger. About losing your way.
What happens when babes in the woods refuse to curl up and die? What happens to the next lost soul to stumble across the gingerbread house? What happens when the fairytale doesn’t end at happily ever after?
MISS_VERTEBRAE
ERIC LAROCCA
From Rejected for Content 4: Highway to Hell
Editor: Jim Goforth
Publisher: J. Ellington Ashton Press,Wetworks
______
G REETINGS FROM ELVAGOG
Date: 01/24/2015 7:32 a.m.
Elvagog Standard Time
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
They’ll have found my body by the time you read this, lover.
If you think the first thing that expires when you die is pain, you’re wrong.
I’m dead.
And the small cyst of pain I’ve been hosting since birth still tickles me in all the usual places.
_______
DISSECTIONS IN THE KEY OF ME
Date: 01/24/2015 7:59 a.m.
Elvagog Standard Time
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I wish I could perform my own autopsy.
I wish I could see myself outside of myself.
When I was only seven months old and in my mama’s tummy, my father found a baby German Shepard he called Maggie.
She stayed even when my father didn’t. Mama said he never loved us.
I always wish I could see myself the way Maggie saw me.
_______
HOLES WHERE FACES SHOULD BE
Date: 01/24/2015 9:17 a.m.
Elvagog Standard Time
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Did I ever tell you about the man who could regrow separated limbs? This one’s better than the one about the man who could defecate with his asshole closed or the woman who taught her vagina how to talk and tell jokes.
He’s a factory hand who assembles bits of machinery at one of the bigger warehouses outside of Worcester, Massachusetts. Teaching himself to delight in the invariability of the everyday sameness, he scarcely gripes to fellow laborers and even seems to enjoy the predictability of his post at times. It isn’t until his acceptance of tedium turns to utter carelessness that he allows his right hand to be caught in one of the larger machines and the hope of monotony is literally pulverized.
One out of five fingers remains; four glistening red stumps grimace at their misfortune. Strands of fat tendons violently wrenched from the pinkness of rubbery sinew flower from the channels ribboning without any sort of precision or accuracy from the palm of his hand to his forearm. His body stirs, the agony so intense it renders him voiceless as threads of arteries joining his wrist with his hand snap and his hand loosens permanently. Ignoring the pain, he cannot help but feel sadness for his right arm’s only relative as it slumps on its side, rejected from the body corporate.
His sadness is suddenly dashed, however, as he senses the tickle of cartilage lengthening where his hand had once been and veins unraveling and furiously curling themselves about the cylinder of the new bones that seem to spider in five neatly calculated geometric directions. He watches, unblinkingly, as new supple and spongy pink tissue proliferate instantly and flesh follows suit. When he no longer senses the enthusiastic disagreement between cartilage and rubbery bands of ligaments as they shift, he tightens and contracts his newly formed digits and watches them flex.
Although the new hand appears to possess the same health and fortitude of the previous one, it seems considerably divorced from the rest of his being and occasionally ticks with the identical cramps of agony as before when it was severed, his fingertips drooling with what appear to be black tar. He’s met with equal astonishment as he watches the disjointed hand on the ground stir and shift, making viciously frenetic movements. Its gaping aperture bubbles and foams as rounded pipes explode outward and dark red cables of arteries uncoil neatly around the expanding shafts of white. From the small severed hand on the ground mushrooms the beginnings of a man; one that was just as tall as him and just as lean. A duplicate.
The inauguration of the new being is just as violent and painful as the unbearable process of a proper birth. The thing twitches violently on the ground, making spastic seizure-like movements, as muscle fattens and more veins sprout from the frothing tissue. It isn’t long before the entirety of the thing’s legs, groin, torso, and shoulders adjust and became fully formed.
He recognizes himself in every inch of the new being—from the dark brown mole ornamenting the instep of the thing’s left foot to the small scar on his left pectoral from a childhood injury. Although the thing’s development of living matter seems to halt, leaving the being headless, its inability to see or sense leaves it with hardly any handicap at all as it swings immediately at him, tearing at his lips and eyes and making them its own.
It’s not long before the beginnings of a head flourish from the severed lips that look like two fat pink slugs. Eyes join them and ears and nose as well. Gaping holes are left in his face where robbed organs and muscles had once been. The gaping duct where his mouth had once been, so miserable over the loss of lips, begin to implode, suddenly collapsing itself inward into a crater making a permanent home in his face. His eyes, nose, and ears eventually do the very same thing until the entire man’s front has been compressed.
Although he no longer has ears, he can somehow hear what the thing said to him.
“I’m a better YOU than YOU’LL ever be,” it says, tongue flexing and seemingly relishing in the delivery of every syllable. “I can talk better, eat better, work better, and fuck better.”
The man does not die as you might think. Instead, enduring the permanent stress of his compression day after day, he follows the thing around until he loses all sense of self and the thing becomes a truer him than he had ever been.
He still sometimes talks, though—a hole where his face should be.
________
SHE LAUGHS AT MỸ LAI
Date: 01/24/2015 11:56 a.m.
Elvagog Standard Time
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Every nerve in my body shrieked as they tore the flesh from my fat.
I don’t miss my skin much.
I feel much more honest without it.
In fact, I’m watching it being hung right now by the two surgeons that took it. They come back to me every now and then and kiss my nakedness, as if praising their craftsmanship. My skin hangs on a hook and looks like a large rubbery body suit; pleats of the excess dangle obscenely and small bees whisper out in droves from the sulking labia. For the first time, I see myself outside of myself and I laugh. They laugh with me and call me, Miss Vertebrae.
There is a group of little naked boys playing beneath it, their skin wound with barbed wire and cemented with ash from mornings in the charnel house where they’re usually forced to elect an unfortunate member of their bre
thren, decapitate him, and take turns shitting down the beheaded spine. I see perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four of them. Some of them lag behind the other ones as if pained, handicapped. Perhaps their discomfort comes from the scalding needles that are typically forced into their scrotums every morning. Sometimes they come around with loud percussive and horn instruments and they serenade the pageant of grotesquery while the more unlucky ones are humped by headless wild dogs. Not today, though. When they’re not blowing their horns or banging their drums, they shove little scraps of food in their gaping black mouths and make little gobbling noises.
There was a young boy brought to the charnel pit today. They called him “Girlroot.” They laid him out and made him suck on the hot-iron prick of the two-headed-ram. Then, they buried him in excrement up to his shoulders and lit his hair with fire.
I thought perhaps I had known him. His body, that is. It’s strange how you can know the confidence of one’s body without actually knowing them. It was then that I saw two empty outlets on both sides of his nose and realized how I’d known him in life. You and I had taken his eyes and sold them.
The small band of children will come back tomorrow, short one more member, and play another song.
_______
GIRLROOT
Date: 01/24/2015 1:07 p.m.
Elvagog Standard Time
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
When Isaiah is eleven, he invents a game he calls “Alien Autopsy.”
The game’s invention is purely an accident at first.
One morning, after a bath, he lays himself out on his bed and, with his mind very much elsewhere, his pubescent hands begin to outline the entirety of his unexplored body. His nipples toughen at the excitement of the self-discovery and possibility of his senses as his index fingers and thumbs pinch both identical rounded pink knobs on his chest. Isaiah pretends his hands are no longer his own, but instead belong to some sort of strange creature with many tentacles that had abducted him in order to study lifeforms on Earth. It never scares him. The thought that he, out of billions of earthly candidates, has been picked for analysis delights him, in fact. He feels special and the painful reminders of his inadequacy in gym class seem so trivial in their sudden insignificance as his alien digits continue their inquiry.
His hands wander further down, gently toying and examining the round divot in the center of his belly. It’s when his hands reach his flaccid boyhood that his mind reels from its comatose state and flowers with minute throbs of untouched bliss. Pulling his foreskin back, he examines it, admiring the configurations of veins running from the base to the tip. He rubs it with the palm of his hand, back and forth, sometimes gripping the hardening shaft and moving his hand up and down the length. To his surprise, the instrument seems to tremble as though its bloating purple head seems to be eagerly anticipating the arrival or dismissal of something.
His hands continue moving up and down for several minutes until a feeling of exhilaration overwhelms his entire body, muscles contracting and shoulders tightening. He rests his hand, body still reeling from the sudden invigoration. Excited and yet bewildered at the same time by the weakening spasms of elation quivering throughout his entire form, he wonders if this is what “getting high” means. The two boys who live next door are always going on and on about “getting high.” Isaiah had always thought you need a cigarette and some of those funny looking herbs to feel good and get off. He’s relieved to find out this wasn’t the case. Smoking always made his lungs ache anyhow. He’s content to know all he needs is the strength of his right hand and some saliva.
He wants to ask his father if he knows this method of self-pleasure and, if so, he wonders especially why his father has never told him. The window of opportunity for asking is significantly limited, however, as his father isn’t home most nights. Dad’s the night watchman at the hospital just two towns over. The nights that he is home, he always brings a lady friend that makes far too much noise with repeated supplications to a deity. Maybe he’s teaching her what I learned, Isaiah thinks to himself.
Regardless, he learned how to brush his teeth and wipe himself after using the toilet without his father’s help; he figures he shouldn’t be so surprised to think his father wouldn’t share all the prospects of his growing body. He’s startled, however, when one afternoon his father sits him down and tells him about the “girlroot.”
“What’s that?” Isaiah asks.
“It’s, unfortunately, what you’ve got inside you,” his father says. “Your mother knew. We talked about it before she passed.”
Isaiah can’t help but wonder why his father’s kept this from him for three years.
“Most boys don’t have it, you see? But then, there are some ones that do,” he explains. “It’s got to be cut out, though. Permanently.”
Isaiah knows his father has known for quite some time now what the other boys call him while waiting for the school bus in the morning. “Limp-wrist.” “Mary.” “Fruitcake.” Some of them might be amusing if he weren’t taking the brunt of it. Ones like “Oklahomo,” “Marmite Miner,” and “Chutney Ferret” confused his tears with involuntary giggles. His embarrassment is overshadowed by the pure elation that his father has sat him down and has acknowledged him.
“Where is this ‘girlroot’?” Isaiah asks. “What does it look like?”
“It’s somewhere deep inside you. Different places for the boys that do have it. But, it’s there,” his father says. “Remember those spinning wheels we had talked about?”
Isaiah feels pressure in his hairless testicles.
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s there?”
“What does it look like?” Isaiah asks.
He watches as his father shifts in his chair, visibly uncomfortable.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve never seen one. But you’ll know it when you get rid of it. And you have to make certain you do. You’ll feel better.”
Isaiah wonders if anything on earth aside from his right hand has the potential to make his eleven year old self feel any better or more euphoric than the ending result of playing “Alien Autopsy.” Although he figures that perhaps his father’s acknowledgement and pride in him might outbalance the excitement of his game of self-pleasure.
He twitches, sensing another spasm of pain in his testicles. The discomfort is inconsiderable at first, but soon begins increasing in duration and frequency. Despite the intermittent throbs of pain, he feels overwhelmed with a sudden happiness, convinced he has located his body’s girlroot.
After making certain his father’s car has left the garage for another midday run to the package store, Isaiah sneaks out to the backyard and recovers a flat-head screwdriver from the toolshed. Its tip glistens in the light, immaculate and prepared for usage.
Isaiah wonders what his girlroot will look like as he lays the screwdriver on his bed and begins to undress himself. Maybe it will look like some sort of alien slug or salamander, he thinks to himself. He can scarcely contain his excitement at the prospect of his father’s happiness. He plays the scenario over and over in his head of how it might transpire. Maybe he will simply leave the girlroot on his father’s bed, like the head of a slaughtered beast. Or perhaps he’ll greet his father at the front door with the dreaded thing being held with a pair of pliers. They could then flush it down the toilet together.
He’s trembling with unbridled exhilaration now as he sits at the edge of his bed and works up an erection. I can’t “get high” yet. Not yet, he thinks to himself; although the temptation is already there and reaching perhaps five inches in his hand. He has decided that the pleasure would be a treat for his victory. Once the shaft has hardened to its fullest extent and the glans of the head inflate purple, with one finger, Isaiah gently opens the small slit. The lips frown at first, dripping tiny pellets of urine from a recent trip to the bathroom; more manipulation, however, and they comply, parting further.
Isai
ah grabs hold of the screwdriver and rests its tip at the mouth of his penis, the cold frankness of the metal opposing the warmth of his flaring urethra. With a grunt of determination and an unthinking thrust, the screwdriver goes inside Isaiah. He winces, eyes watering as he works the tip deeper and deeper down the tube of his shaft. Stirring the tip of the screwdriver in its place, he hopes he will recognize what his girlroot might feel like. Instead he feels nothing but a rush of warm fluids. He suddenly feels as though he has to pee. With a quick tug, he nervously jerks the rod of the screwdriver out of his groin’s pipe and senses a molten liquid violently spout from its mouth. His father will beat him into a pulp if he finds he has peed the bed and carpet.
Isaiah grabs his crotch and it’s then that he recognizes the fluid streaming out from the duct is not urine, but is in fact red. His erection is fountaining out torrents of blood. He cries out, sobbing at the realization. With both panicky hands, he grabs hold of his groin’s weakening cylinder and tries to discourage its aim; however, even under the slightest duress of touch, the slit at the head of his boyhood widens with another profound jet of redness, pumping the spray all over the carpet and the wooden train set he had set in the corner and hasn’t played with in three years.
Isaiah collapses, his naked body convulsing in a pool of his own blood still draining from his disfigured flute. Although the pain quiets most other senses in his eleven-year-old self, he cannot help but feel an excruciating defeat for not cutting out his girlroot.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 22
