For Want of a Hunter, Pt. IV

ISSUE #128

For October, I decided to try writing fiction—each week will unfold a new part of a scary story I've written for the Halloween season. Today's is a guest playlist by Bill Wright, the reigning king of finding nightmare music that also makes you want to move. I love these songs for their techno-terror—whether manifesting in SOPHIE's violent twisting steel or Danny Brown barking like he runs a carnival of iron maidens—which all sounds just fun enough to tempt us to join the party. A monster mash for the modern age. You can find him @GodofHugs on Instagram and Twitch.

Kate stands before me, her body stone still while her eyes fizzle and pop like pink sparklers. Each one fills its whole socket, wide as a clementine. They strike me as separate entirely from Kate, so different in their restless flits and flickers.

“Duck!” Cate says behind me. I drop flat as I can to the bridge's boards. Something flings past my hair and lodges itself in Kate's eye—the glint of a brass knitting needle. Yet there is no response, not even a blink, until she takes a step forward.

Fuck that, time to go. I run down the bridge to the thicket of woods at the end. There sits a treehouse which nestles in the branches of an American beech. Its door is harvested from swing set plastic. When I look back, I see creatures pouring from the house, casting a glow like an oncoming train.

I open the door and meet the glowing gaze of a huge barred owl. It sits atop a tiny bureau across from a knotted-wood bed. I suddenly feel that I cannot move, and I cannot avert my eyes. All scuffle has ceased for the moment, as if all sound has been sucked from the world. The eye of the storm—I'd laugh if I could. The owl sits stoic, unamused.

Two lights come out from behind the bureau. They float down toward me all on their own, stars in a shapeless orbit. Closer they come, brighter and brighter, until my vision's engulfed in a kaleidoscope of popsicle pinks and blues. Then they scratch my eyes like blowing sand. I can’t reach up to wipe them. I can’t even scream when I feel tiny hairs that try to join the ranks of my eyelashes.

Water floods my eyes, and then I sink. My feet melt through the floor, and I am gazing at light through a thick plastic wall. The floor tilts until I’m sliding on a stream of water down a tube full of blue bends and curves. Soon, I recognize each one. I know where I'll end up, and I brace myself to be spat into my hometown pool at the other end.

I swim back to the surface and emerge in my room. My old room, the one before my parents divorced. I’ve come up for air from the afghan blanket which was knitted as a gift for my birth. I take it all in, this place now a memory—my cedar bed frame, the backyard window, the cypress they planted when we moved in.

This was a night I tiptoed downstairs, careful not to wake my brothers down the hall, until I reached the crisp October night's air and the edge of the brown cornfield. This is where I sit and think. The wind is blowing, so I toss up the kite we always kept tied to the cypress. It catches and starts to fly away, held tight by the branch's grasp. I think of how nice it would be to fly and yet remain somewhat tethered. The joy to feel free yet secure in the hand of one who will never uproot.

I remember—this is when my father comes to check on me. I turn to catch him, but the house is gone. In its place is an old grain silo, the one on my grandmother’s farm. I sit about fifty yards out, by the creek. Today, I am out with my puffy new coat and the BB gun my brothers had gotten for Christmas. I wait a long time near the trickling stream, but nothing stirs in the winter's sun.

Finally, the flash of a red-winged blackbird. I aim, but my finger refuses to pull. It cocks its toy head to look at me. I couldn't—but it’s going to move soon. I take a panicked shot. A falling blur and the crunch of snow. Mere seconds go by before I’m crying. I close my eyes to say a prayer for its poor little soul.

When I open them, I'm sitting on the toilet's lid. I'm crying still, but this time in that dingy garden unit where we'd moved to play house just after college. My husband—though not yet my husband—is here, still holding the shoe that he'd used kill a spider.

“I didn’t want you to kill it,” I say. I can’t believe I’m crying. My husband, before he was that, is stuck, having just done a thing that he’d hoped was virtuous, only to find my emotions fickle. His forehead is free from the wrinkles of today—he looked cute when puzzled, his thick eyebrows furrowed, small pink lips slightly parted in thought. I look at myself in the fogged bathroom mirror, my face warped and smudged as a pruned fingerprint. I am the ugliest crier. I promise myself this is the last time I do it.

I bring up my hands to wipe away my tears only to yelp when my eyes have hair, a thick coat of thorny and shuddering fuzz. By reflex, I smack it—the world around me shakes. I smack it again, much harder this time. For a flash, I am covered in chaos, back in the woods with crazed creatures around.

Sinking back to the bathroom, I grab the hair iron sitting hot on the sink. I slowly bring it up to my eye. A whine in my head grows louder with every inch. I get it close enough to feel the heat on my eyebrow. The whining is as loud as a siren in the shower.

With a burst, it gives—I have freed my left eye. I see that I’m back with the bridge and the treehouse. Awareness slowly seeps its way back to my mind. The arm in which I once held the hair iron has begun to show spots, purple boils of bubbling fluid.

I hear a small scratching on the boards next to me. I see what resembles a squirming black tuber—a bug who's pink glow is now fading to black.