Stones for the Living

“But I wanna keep playing!”

“No, kiddo. In by dark. You know the rules.”

“But it gets dark so early now!”

“Inside, fella. Now.”

Heath pouted and shuffled inside. Leslie tried to put a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder, but the little guy jerked away from him and ran inside.

“How come he can’t stay out?” one little girl asked.

“I just feel safer with him inside.” Leslie made sure the beer bottle stayed hidden behind the door frame.

“But it’s only six,” the little girl said. She wasn’t arguing, just confused and asking questions, the way little kids do. Her head was tilted back so she could see from under the oversize hood of her pink parka.

“I know. Go on home, guys. It’s already gettin’ cold.”

As if for dramatic emphasis, the Tennessee mountain wind blew a small gust. The children hugged themselves against it and ran off. A couple snowflakes blew by and melted as they set down against the brick by the door.

Leslie set the deadbolt against the November chill, and listened to Heath wailing in his room down the hall. Since Anne had died he’d taken to telling Leslie he hated him. He was six; he’d stop eventually.

Leslie would give him some space till supper. He swigged his beer and ran a finger along the mezuzah by the door. They’d hung it inside, to avoid any mishaps from curious little hands. A small fleck of blue paint flecked off on his finger. He touched the little box so often the Hebrew lettering was wearing away. Hanging it inside had actually reduced the case’s lifespan. Maybe he and Heath could touch it up.

Half an hour later he heard scratching at the patio doors to the side of the house. Leslie ignored it long enough to chuck his empty and grab a fresh bottle from the fridge. He loped across the living room, feeling suddenly, overwhelmingly tired. He stared at the closed Venetian blinds for a moment, sipping his beer, then reached out and pulled the drawstring.

Anne was pawing at the glass like a stray cat. Her white gown was brown around her ankles, and her bare feet were blackened with dried mud. When she saw him she opened her mouth in a moaning hiss, leaning in and nearly pressing her blue lips to the glass. Her teeth looked sharp and shiny, worn the way a leather cutter’s knives are after sawing through countless hides.

She patted her empty hand against the glass. In the other, she held a small child’s jacket. A pink parka, the fabric torn – bitten – where the hood joined the neck.

She was pale. She’d always been pale, but not like this. Her face used to go red when she laughed too hard. Her cheeks would flush whenever she stayed out in the snow too long. Her skin would quiver with eager life whenever she climaxed.

When she was alive, her flesh would glow with pink heat. This woman outside his home now was gray and slack.

Her thick curls were tangled and dirty. He used to think of them as chocolate-brown but now the only word that came to mind was muddy. Her brown eyes were unfocused and unblinking.

She slapped the glass again, insistent but not insistent enough to break it. She looked to the side, and Leslie followed her eyes to the mezuzah on the frame. The letters here were painted green. Heath had added a little glitter when they’d made it. Here, too, the letters had been caressed so often they were beginning to fade.

Leslie closed the blinds on his dead wife, and went to make Heath’s supper.

***

While they ate they touched-up the mezuzah that hung by the front door. While Leslie held it in place Heath dabbed at the letters with a small brush. Drips of blue paint outlined the box against its bed of paper towels. Before the paint could dry, Leslie helped his son dust the letters in glitter.

“You did good work, kid,” he told him, kissing the crown of his head. The little boy smiled. Leslie wondered if the child heard the praise in the voice of his mother. He scooped him up under the arms and hoisted out of the chair, then set him on the carpet and gave him a playful swat on the rump. “Now go brush your teeth and pick out a story. I’ll tuck you in in a second.”

Heath was halfway to the hall when the knocking started at the door.

“Who is it?” Heath called out, excited over the idea of visitors. A throaty rasp called back to him.

“Baby, go brush your teeth.” Leslie grabbed his shoulder to stop him running for the door. He was careful not to squeeze too tight in his fear.

“Who is it, Daddy?”

“I don’t know, but it’s too late for anyone to be knocking on our door, kiddo. Now go brush your teeth. I’ll see who it is.”

Heath tried to hang around, but Leslie turned the boy around and nudged him till he scampered to the bathroom. The knocking had turned to hard slaps against the wood.

“Heath.”

Leslie blew on the mezuzah to dry it before hanging it back on its nail by the door. The rasping had turned to a growl.

“Hoooooold meeeeee.”

Leslie was almost relieved she’d died the way she did. Throat cancer. Never smoked in her life. When she died she couldn’t speak through the pain. Maybe pain was moot now, but whatever damage had been done had reduced her speech to garbled hissing. Heath would never recognize it as the voice of his mother.

Leslie had seen her buried. He’d tossed dirt on her coffin. He’d left a stone upon her headstone just the other day. So where did this thing she’d become come from?

“Daddy, I’m ready for my story!”

“Coming, kid!” From outside, Anne growled at the sound of his voice. He left her to the cold, and went to Heath.

***

With Heath asleep and the dishes washed, Leslie poured a few shots in his beer to guard against the mountain chill. By his second glass, he made his way back to the patio doors and opened the blinds.

She was gone. He turned on the floodlights, and could see small piles of kicked-up leaves leading to the treeline. Scattered on the ground were stones, like those he always left atop her headstone.

Old Woman

 

The scraps of paper lying about the kitchen fill two entire boxes when I’ve finally gotten them all together. Recipes, announcements, baseball schedules, odd articles she found interesting. Small slivers of paper that, taken together, ultimately come to little more than a bulky, disintegrating mess. I figure I’ll cut down on the inevitable junk pile and just feed this to the fire pit tonight.

Grandma, like most of her generation, accumulated kitsch, seemingly wholesale. An entire wall of glass shelves is packed to the brim in heavily glossed ceramic figures, all in soft pastel tones of pink and blue. Tea sets, figures of children in prayer, images of squirrels and skunks and cats and dogs. In the center of the middle shelf, nearly lost to the crowd, is a picture of Grandpa, tucked in an old clam shell frame. Right beside, the old people on their honeymoon, back when they and the world were young.

I drag the boxes of old paper to the side, and begin the process of photographing the collection for sale. Maybe somewhere there are still those who’ll love these things the way Grandma did.

Every few minutes, a figurine I put back on the shelf flies off and thumps against the thin carpet. None of them break, and there’s a small pull whenever I pick them back up.

***

Photographing the collection takes a couple hours, and while the pictures load to my cloud drive I sit down on the thinning wraparound sofa with a beer. I drink too much, so of course I’ve added a shot or two of Evan Williams to it. I turn on the heavy TV, a set from the days when TVs were made to look like furniture. It has a remote, the kind where the buttons click when you press them. I watch a flickering anchorwoman as she updates me on the local high school football teams.

The boilermaker makes me sleepy. I doze off for a few minutes. When I wake up, the anchorwoman’s hair has gone white, and she’s screaming through the screen. It takes me a moment to blink myself back to consciousness, and when I do she’s smiling again, her hair dark, her voice low and pleasant.

***

I power my way through boxing up Grandma’s mammoth collection of trashy paperback romances, wondering to myself how many of them Goodwill will actually take. I reinforce each box with duct tape so they won’t collapse as I lug them to my car. When that’s done I drag a folding chair from the garage to the back yard, and lug out the boxes full of old recipes and newspaper clippings. I drop some logs into the fire pit and splash them with kerosene, then go back in to get my bourbon.

I drink straight from the bottle and light a cigarette, throwing the match to the logs to get the fire going. There’s a burst of light that seems to illuminate someone moving near the fence, but when I squint and shield my eyes from the flames, I can’t make out anything but shrubbery.

I get drunk. I light smokes with burning twigs because I can’t bring myself to use anymore matches. I feed the fire with handfuls of old paper. Glowing ash flits through the air as they burn. Sometimes they almost seem like eyes.

***

I nod off halfway through the first box. Only for a moment, but catnaps always make me feel like I’ve been out for hours.

I take a deep breath. The cold December air shocks my lungs, and the rest of my body jolts awake. The fire is out, leaving a lump of glowing embers in the pit. I toss a few handfuls of paper in, weigh them down with another two logs. I think about splashing some liquor in before I remember the booze isn’t actually alcoholic enough to ignite. I take another swig and doze back off.

I dream that Jenn is across the fire from me, her olive skin orange in the light, her black curls wafting from the heat. She’s smiling, like she always does. She’s wearing a red checkered shirt.

She’s also beside me, saying something I can’t make out. I feel her lean in and kiss the corner of my mouth, then slide her tongue out longways so that it parts my lips. I turn my face and kiss her back, deeply, sucking on her wet tongue.

The other Jenn continues to stare at us, grinning. I look back to her, and now I can see her teeth are being eaten away. I can see it in detail, despite the distance. Her grin never fades, but I watch as the edges of her teeth bubble and shrink. Faint wisps of steam seem to waft from her mouth. I can hear the sizzle of the dentin over the crackle of the fire.

The other Jenn is still kissing me, still ramming her tongue into my mouth. This one is also wearing a red checkered shirt. What if the one across the fire tries to take her place? How would I know she’d done it?

The other Jenn’s teeth wear away into ragged sawing fangs before I wake up.

My phone is chirping. Text from Jenn: “miss u”

I text her back: “miss u 2. thinking of u”

I decide it’s time to call it a night. I got too late a start on everything today. Still have most of the weekend ahead of me to get this done with.

I fill a couple lemonade carafes with water and douse the embers. Before the water hits I think I see the same gray face I saw on the TV, mouth open, lips curled back over ragged teeth. I can’t tell if she screams at me or if I’m just hearing the squawk of the steam.

***

I stretch out across the old couch, and around one in the morning I wake up with dry mouth. I pour a glass of water and drink it in one standing, then shuffle to the toilet to piss and brush my teeth.

I wash my hands and splash water on my face, then make my way to the porch for a smoke before going back to sleep. On my way to the back patio I hear a hard tapping at the bay windows. Fuckin’ woodpeckers.

I yank up the blinds and rear back to pound on the glass, but stop when I see the old woman again. Hair white and wild, face gray. Wrinkled mouth curled in anger. Both hands are against the glass, and she’s snarling at me. I can see the glass fog against her open mouth. Her teeth are small and lined in black.

“Grandma?” I ask.

I feel like falling, but somehow I stay on my feet. Maybe I’m too scared even for minimal movement. Eventually the hand I’ve drawn back smacks against the window. The old woman snarls at the sound and snaps at me.

The palm of my hand is pink, and darker in the center where she’d burn me when I misbehaved. She never used those matches for anything else. She never even used that fire pit Grandpa dug her. She always kept the match to me till it burned out on its own.

I take out a cigarette and use my Bic lighter this time to light it. I stare at the snarling thing on the other side of the glass.

“Move, old woman,” I tell her ten minutes later. “I got work to do.”

She stays another few minutes, a growling, hateful pile of ash, before the window is once again dark. I drop the shades and finish my smoke by the sink. I decide I don’t want to sleep on the couch anymore.

I walk down the hall to the back bedroom, and when I open the door an old man is lying on the bed in his boxers. He’s wringing his hands and staring at me in terror. Or maybe staring past me. He seems to be craning his neck to look…behind me. He’s almost solid, but I can see the faint pattern of the bedspread through him.

Well, couch it is, I guess. I’m too tired to put up much more of a fight.

“Alright, old man, you can stay put.” Grandpa flickers a bit at my words. “I’ll deal with you in the morning.”

His wide-eyed fear stays plastered to his face as I close the door. I sleep in the kitchen with the stove light on. The linoleum feels cool against my heated skin.

Temporary Story

So I posted a story today that I’ll only leave up until tonight. It’s one if those tales I’m particularly protective of, ya see. Anyhow, it’s available in the post below. For anyone interested, catch it while ya can!

Read it here: https://seanganus.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/original-fiction-ziz/

Fear and Feeling

Recently I learned that there is a secret room in the basement of the building I work in. Though this will sound like absolute bullshit, the room is dark, covered in fading wallpaper, and is filled with broken dolls and torn teddy bears. And, naturally, some of those items are nailed to the wall.

There’s also a sink and bathroom that has seen recent and regular use. I’m not always a nice person, so I made sure to tell all of this to the girl who replaced me for the evening shift before I left. She’s told me before that she’s heard humming and moving below the floor, and this new tidbit of info caused her to give me a petrified look before I almost literally skipped out the door.

We love scary stories because they take our fears and transplant them outside the realm of everyday occurrence. We feel scared when we think we’re alone with a ghost. We are terrified when a human being comes at us with a knife. The things monsters might do lie in imagined, ethereal possibility, but we see our own actions every day.

As a teenager, I loved sneaking into cemeteries late at night. The local graveyard is huge, and I could burn hours just wandering around. I remember a scary moment as I sat beneath a tree, beside an old tomb that had been broken open long ago by falling branches. There was heat lightning in the sky, and something seemed to be scratching and muttering from inside the concrete hole. I was spooked, but I did not literally hide the way I did when I thought I heard living human voices, trailing along a set of railroad tracks, laughing and growing nearer…

There’s a psychiatric hospital in a nearby town that is largely closed down. I used to sneak into the larger buildings with an old girlfriend. We dropped dry ice in mildewed bathtubs filled with water, we looked through old x-rays, we studied forgotten maps leading to patients’ graves outside. Most of those graves seemed to be unmarked. Friends of ours loved to spin stories about ghosts still wandering the collapsing halls, and old patients who still lived in tunnels beneath the hospital grounds.

We need ghosts and monsters because metaphor absolves us of the sin of oversight. We thrill to scary urban legends about serial killers, because otherwise we would be left to sympathize with the old man muttering to himself in the cold. We tell stories of voodoo queens, because it hurts us less to fear an old woman who sleeps outside than it would to feel for her. We ask each other if we believe in ghosts, when our own indulgence compels us to never notice them.

***

Images taken from “Abandoned: A Look Inside Central State Hospital of Milledgeville, Georgia,” by Monica Waller. Follow this link to purchase her work.

Original Fiction – “Rest. Stop.”

Something I wrote alone in the park, during those hours between sunset and closing, when I’m the only one I can see braving the dark and the October chill.

All original material posted here is the intellectual property of the writer. All applicable copyright laws apply.

***

Rest. Stop.

© Copyright 2013

Sean Ganus

I sit in my old Honda for about five minutes before I decide to go into the men’s room. I was kind of hoping to get the drop on somebody, but I’m the only one here and the fast food coffee is getting to be more than I can handle.

So I’m going on minute two of peeing before I hear the door open. A guy sidles up to the urinal beside me. Short, chubby Latin guy. In my peripheral vision I see the bill of his ball cap swing from side to side, and the movement makes me curious enough to look up, ‘cause maybe the guy’s having a seizure or something, I dunno.

Nope, no seizure. As soon as I look over he looks me in the eye and smiles, nervous-like. He has a moustache that’s too sparse to keep, and crooked teeth that somehow matches his sorta offset eyebrows. Poor dumpy bastard grins even wider, but I roll my eyes, shake off, and flush. He follows me with his eyes as I walk to the sink, hoping maybe I’ll look back. Fuck. So I got a witness, I guess.

I like this place because there aren’t any cameras around. Weird, really. Georgia has three times the police budget Tennessee has, but their cops only do about a third of the work. No privacy from the cops north of Chattanooga; there’s a trooper or two at every rest stop until Kentucky.

I kick open the door, turn back to the guy, see he’s still at the urinal, probably only just now getting to business. I whistle, a quick generic two-note to get his attention. He looks over his shoulder, hopeful at first when he sees me, starting to smile even. The smile drops when he sees me wave the knife.

I wiggle it in my fingers, rapping the point against the particle board door. I motion outside with my eyes, hoping to convey that I’ll be waiting when he comes out. The look of terror is absolute. Here is a little man trapped in a box, his only crime the desire for a blowjob. And now for reasons that can never be justified, someone wishes him dead.

His mouth sags in the kind of toothy frown only horror can inspire. He looks like he’s about to cry. I go out and leave him to his urine-soaked prison.

I get in my car, move it far down the lot where the safety lights can’t reach it, park it, and wait. Thirty minutes go by. His ride, a beat-up Civic from the eighties, sits lonely and forgotten by the building’s entrance. I wonder what he’s doing in there. Crying, maybe, probably praying, though that’s probably bigoted of me to assume. I doubt he paid much attention to my vehicle before he came in. Really I just needed him to stay back long enough to move myself out of sight.

A family pulls in, their minivan’s brakes squealing so loudly I cringe in my seat. They pour out like beer from a shaken can, children practically rolling onto the asphalt. The father speaks as though he has a megaphone shoved down his throat. The mother is liberal in her use of the term “smartass.” They file inside, half a dozen at least, and trickle back outside over the next ten minutes, refreshed from emptied bladders and assaulted vending machines.

They sip coffee and soda, nibble pretzels and orange curls of not-quite dough. While they hover around their van I see the Latin man emerge. He’s glancing around like a squirrel who smells a cat, taking small, hopping steps, emboldened by the family’s presence but not impatient enough to lose his caution. He reaches his car, hurriedly climbs inside. I catch him scan the backseat before the lights come on, and he must be flooring it when he makes for the interstate.

The family stays behind for another five minutes before piling back into their roving fortress and going on their way. I’m alone again, left to my thoughts and the humming sodium lights.

***

            The trooper comes in twenty minutes after the family leaves, and for a moment I’m nervous. I guess the Latin guy called the cops. Can’t blame him, I guess. The trooper stops in front of the restrooms for a moment, seems to be considering going inside, then a glare shines from his cruiser and I realize he’s turned on his spotlight.

He twists it slowly, scanning the empty lot. The light is strong, and he sees my vehicle tucked away in its little dark corner. The light stops, and the trooper ponders his next move for several minutes. Eventually the cruiser turns, its overworked engine groaning as it mounts the incline and inches forward. The trooper keeps the light steady on my Pontiac.

I pull the knife from its nest between my flesh and my belt and I wait.

The trooper, he’s a plodder. Takes him forever to make up his mind. I wait, crouched so uncomfortably my thighs begin to cramp. The knife is cold in my grip. I breathe slowly through my nose so that no mist will give me away. I lay the warmed blade against my free palm. No fall leaves to step through. Good. The trooper opens his door.

He climbs out, a thick, log-like man, long legs, long arms, long face, everything thick and heavy looking. A man who is strong by nature. He rests a hand on his sidearm prematurely and approaches my car, his bland face showing neither focus nor confusion. It’s a face unused to processing emotion or thought.

He shines a flashlight through the windows, inches closer until he can reach out and rap a knuckle against the glass. He gets bolder, knocking even harder, scrutinizing every corner he can. After a little too long it becomes clear to him no one is inside. He straightens up, looks into the darkness beyond the trees.

There is a moment between him and me. There is an instant in which one step forward or one step backward will make all the difference. Another few inches, and I can spring and knock him down with the whirlwind of my madness, my toothed knife grinding through bone and organ. I can scream and scream into his empty ears and spill myself down the dark road that always opens in those moments. I’ll see the blessed empty highway I take to escape the unrelenting anger that bites at my heels and threatens to suck me down whole. The street will roll through the unlit fields of my mind, and I will be lost and free of the animal for a little while, the mutt busy feeding on gasps and split veins.

A step backward, and I will be stuck here with the nagging wasp that is my will. He’ll leave me to slowly sink down its throat, ground by bullying teeth into a paste that could once cry and scream and flow with spilled blood. He’ll leave, this fighting buck that could have held back the Great Little Thing long enough for me to have a little peace in a cold black corner of my mind. I can’t take little people or those already pushed around. The stalking boar in my spirit has great need to exert itself, to smash against the sinews of pride and allowance.

The trooper’s breath mists in the light. He turns, and walks away.

The cruiser backs down the inclined parking lot, the trooper killing the spotlight before swerving the wheel and aligning the Crown Vic with the onramp. He guns the motor and leaves, and I am once again alone.

I take a breath, allow it to fog the chilled knife. I wait, spring-loaded, for bait. I feel worn tusks behind my eyes, steamed breath within my ears.

When you come, you will never know I’m here.

New Twitter Feed

I would’ve updated sooner, but work at the hotel has been heavy, and my landlord has a nasty habit of demanding money in exchange for providing a dwelling, so I’ve been stuck in that rut for the past couple weeks.

But I finally have a little time off, and since my sex life is currently comatose, I thought I’d make good on a few of the promises I made a few weeks back.

First off, the new Twitter feed is up: @SeanGanus. So stories there, just me ranting and raving. Follow me anyway. I’m a needy boy.

Also my idol died yesterday. Special post tomorrow eulogizing him.

New original fiction coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled.

– The Awful Writer

Follow Post the Horror!
Also follow Tweet the Horror!!
And brand new: Picture the Horror!!!

Follow ’em all, and I’ll perform humiliating sexual acts for your pleasure!