Butterchips comes face to face with true horror in his latest adventure.
Kolleen introduces the horror issue and celebrates 7 years of Drunk Monkeying it around.
“I haven’t seen the doctor in two years,” the voice says again, making me flinch. “I’m worried about what the doctor will find.” The spoon falls into the bowl. The heap of oatmeal looks bloated and sickly. The malignant cells in the raisins have undoubtedly metastasized.
The light thickened into blood that pooled at my feet in a methodical flood, and there were things in the blood, nameless shapes that bobbed just beneath the surface. I stumbled backwards, slipped, fell three steps, and grasped onto the banister. Then I turned and hobbled after my friends, my own panicked breath not loud enough to diminish the sound of blood dripping behind me.
And now my son is screaming in the backseat, near-impact,
while all I can hear are tires slipping on gravel and how,
in some twisted way, that father didn’t want his child to
be afraid, and how Styrofoam can feel cold as a knife
A woman at the store: I’ve had two,
I wear Spanx with jeans. I am Spanx,
holding myself in shape against the world.
Maybe we never figure out how to figure.
his ears picking up on the announcement of
corn chowder from twelve to two
but also hearing the thin, white-mist howl of wolves
pushed past wet muzzles and blue-dotted tongues
(they go in caves, Danny, where it’s warm)
Wallabies stop; sniff the air, bound off up the hills and away.
Snakes take to their hollows. Something has changed but
the sun stays the same and the heat and not even a cloud
in the sky when the mullock heaps stir. Hands sifting for gold
emerge from the piles, push back stones from the dirt.
I get caught in the headlights
of our love, and moon about intersections
like a lost traffic cone, orange and useless.
Nothing was ever just the wind or the house settling or probably nothing ever again would be afterwards. Our wait for silence was actually a vigil for the noise we had so missed.
I plunk my keys onto the entryway hook, noticing the stack of newspapers I have been collecting for the last few weeks have disappeared. “Me scare the hell outta you?” I ask, clicking the door closed behind me. “You’re in my apartment.”
He explained that that the house was haunted by many ghosts, and each had a backstory that he’d surmised from communicating with them. One of these ghosts was Chloe, an abandoned child with an affinity for playing with a yellow bouncy ball, which she would move of her own accord. He tossed the yellow ball into the center of the circle and all of us stared at it, waiting. A few minutes passed.
He fouls. He fouls over and over. We feel
bad about his fouling. We sing
Root root root for the home. Home has plates
for everyone, and one diamond.
Call me Biter:
rubber and blood,
just an accident.
It wasn’t long before Harold was predicating. Speaking in short sentences, Harold confirmed what his preliminary remarks had foreshadowed. “This kibble’s stale.” “My water’s warm.” “Lower taxes trickle down.”
Five minutes turn into ten minutes turn into forty while thin tendrils of blood are running across His arm, down His hand, and he’s crying because His ‘go-to’ has finally collapsed from hundreds of jagged needles, missed shots, and dehydration.
The man met her gaze with rheumy eyes that welled with fresh tears. Justine felt her own throat tighten as she spoke in hurried, hushed tones. “My mother’s an invalid. We can’t travel. But you and your family could still book a flight, or just get in your car and drive. Get as far away as you can before it happens.”
It’s Las Vegas in the mind,
so everything stays there.
It’s honor. It’s horror. Divorce,
fake as it is, bloody on the dash.
Gabriel Ricard on some of the most infamous cult horror classics of all time in his latest Captain Canada’s Movie Rodeo column.