MicroHorror

When I was a child I broke my legs, and now my skeleton hates me.

I’m all healed up and the years have gone by, but it doesn’t matter: skeletons don’t forgive.

I have a recurring dream where my skeleton dances with me. We quickstep and waltz, everything is pleasant, until my wife cuts in. My skeleton watches us, and I feel his jealousy and hate. He covets our flesh. He cuts in, then takes my wife from me, twirling her around the dance floor. She laughs and cries out in pleasure, but the dance ends with his hands around her throat.

The dreams are warnings.

I look at my hand sometimes, and find it has curled into a fist. I stare at my wife, and see in her panic that I have been shouting.

Her bruises don’t get a chance to fade.

It isn’t me, it’s the skeleton, but no one listens.

I tell doctors, but they don’t know what to say. They dispatch me to various specialists who give me stupid prescriptions I tear up.

I forgot about my broken legs for years, blocked it out. It was only recently that I began to understand. It was when Judy left me. When she took the kids.

She knew there was a monster inside me. It hit her, not me.

Not me.

That was when I knew for sure. Not me, something inside of me, but what? And then I remembered.

My skeleton. My broken legs.

My grandfather had told me, on one of those nights in the ward. I was ten, my legs were in plaster. Everything was so sterile and cold. He told me stories to keep me from crying. Once, with a smile on his face, he told me how angry my skeleton was with me.

At the time I had thought he was making a little joke. As you do.

But it was a warning. Like the dreams that would one day come, a warning that skeletons don’t forget.

Now I don’t know what to do. I pace the house. I forget to eat. I can’t shave, I daren’t pick up a knife. It wants to do away with me.

How do you escape your skeleton?

My wife calls me one night. I try to tell her how much I miss her, her warmth, her smile. I want to tell her I forgive her for seeing Jim behind my back… (I could have gone crazy but didn’t)… instead I find myself shouting, it is the skeleton again, my hating, vengeful, skeleton.

Later, sitting naked in the bathtub, rocking back and forth, I whisper apologies for cracked bones through cracked lips.

I’m tired, but I can’t sleep. Skeletons make you sleepwalk. It’s when they get you.

I hate it, now, as much as it hates me.

Why can’t it forgive? What’s wrong with it? It was so long ago.

The end, when it comes to me, seems quite obvious.

On a cold, black, night, after the birds fall silent, and the roads clear of traffic, I drive to the tallest building I know. I take the stairs to the roof, force the door, and emerge to the scene of my own revenge.

I will break more than legs. Punish what’s inside. Save Judy.

I remember, when in hospital, I had a complete X-ray done. Though I was a child, I vividly recall the leering skull, the splintered bones.

You could feel the animosity.

Standing on the roof, I hold my hand up to the moon and stare. I can almost see the bone beneath. How it would like to claw at me, shred me from its frame. I hear laughter, and realize it is my own. Soon the skeleton will be broken again, and there’s nothing it can do

The moon bathes me, it is my second, final, X-ray. For one last moment I am whole.

And then I jump.

And what is not already broken, breaks.

• Copyright: © 2009 Barry Charman

The first time she dug up the coffin, he’d only been buried a day. She took him back home, and cradled him, singing the songs she had wanted to sing.

The second time was a week later. They came to the house immediately, and they found mother and son on the couch, watching cartoons.

The third time was months later, she’d moved house by then, so no one knew where to look for her. She had him for a week before a neighbor called the police.

The fourth time it took them a month to find her. The boy was now nothing but a sheet of flesh draped over a pile of pointed bones. She didn’t see. She didn’t care.

They talked to her. They listened to her. The only thing she wanted, she said, was something they kept taking away from her.

The fifth time she was stopped before she started. Someone saw her go into the cemetery, her shovel and torch swinging listlessly from her hands.

Each time she broke the coffin, and a new one was made.

The sixth time, they moved the body. She dug and she dug. In the end she took the shovel to the policeman who was first on the scene. He lay stunned from the first blow, then she brought the shovel down and dug into him. She dug through his flesh, and his blood and his bones. She may have heard him scream, she may not.

She was in the institution for ten years. Every time she could, she would fall to her knees, and claw at the ground. It had taken something from her. It had it still.

She would call out his name. She would dissect his name. She would replay his words, she would hear them still.

They would tell her about the accident. They would explain over and over again. She saw them, but she couldn’t focus, she was focused on only one thing.

Eventually they left her to her silence. The silence would tell them whatever they wanted to hear.

When no one was looking, she mouthed his name.

Silence meant whatever you heard.

The seventh time she dug up his coffin came a year after her release. It took her that long to find the body. She left the coffin in pieces, and took the body home. It fell apart as she took it to the car, but she would stop and pick up the pieces, she didn’t say a word or make a sound.

The policeman who found her did so on a hunch. He found her living not far from the cemetery, in a flat that overlooked the grave it had taken her a terrible year to find.

She let him in. She made him coffee. They didn’t talk. Words were unnecessary, inappropriate. She showed him the body in the small bed. He noticed the new-paint smell, the brightly colored cars on the curtains. They sat in the kitchen. Drinking. Thinking.

Eventually he got up and left. They never exchanged a word. He never told a soul.

There was no putting it right. No treatment for raw and endless love.

Let it be, he thought. There’s enough pain, enough death.

And there were only so many coffins.

• Copyright: © 2009 Barry Charman

There’s a Martian porn star called Venal Zpunk. He’s more octopus than man, but he keeps his tentacles hidden in a pair of slacks. He looks like you and me, only he’s green, and he’s got no lips, and he reeks of epic death.

Venal is living above me, in an apartment in Soho; he throws fruit out the window, because he can’t be bothered to learn our customs and introduce himself.

He has six wives, four are kept in the fridge, spares no bigger than shriveled foetuses. They can be grown in a day. Venal was visited by the home office, but only once.

Venal came here to grow his aunt in a bathtub of his own faeces. There has never been anything so utterly unnatural and alien on the earth before. We look at him and realise that our knowledge is insufficient, but frankly, our curiosity is waning.

Venal took a couple of kids inside the other day, showed them some of his movies. They came out shaking, faces twitching, strangled words alluding to things beyond articulation. Within an hour their pubic hairs had turned white.

Venal flashed a woman and her dog recently; it amused him because he didn’t know which was which.

Oh, how long will he be here? Nobody wants to say anything, but this isn’t right. We know we’re supposed to accept him, it’s important he sends back a good report. But he’s obscene.

He was mating with his wives last night, I think one gave birth. Judging by the sounds, he shoved it back up her. This is awful. Venal knocks on my door and asks for milk, then he looks too long at my nipples.

I tell him I’m the wrong sex, but the words don’t seem to translate.

Venal says others are coming. Females. They’re going to film the first Martian hardcore on Earth. Nobody wants this.

I think I’m going mad, I dream of Martian porn titles and tentacle penetration. I smell things coming through the floorboards and find myself hanging out the window, gasping and screaming.

I bang on the neighbours’ doors, but no one wants to talk about it, they say they don’t mind, or they don’t have an opinion.

What, they don’t have an opinion on Martian hardcore?

What has to be done?

There’s a Martian porn star called Venal Zpunk, he is making love in the room above me. It sounds like three octopuses fighting for space in a hot tub.

I try to drown out the sounds with a porno, but I can’t look at the flesh without thinking of Venal writhing between the bodies, an ever-curious pervert groping his way to contentment.

I turn the tap for a sobering drink, and some kind of bubbling black ink dribbles out. It’s too much. I snap.

I’ll burn him out if I have to. I don’t care if the whole building goes up, I don’t care if he’s an “entertainment emissary,” enough’s enough.

I pour petrol through his letterbox, I light a match. This fire will cleanse. This fire will purge. The building can be sacrificed, everyone will understand.

But then I pause. I think about the stars we sent to Mars. Are they being treated like this? Will they be purged by distressed Martian folk? Is it just me?

Eventually, I don’t know what’s right or not, I just accept that he’s driven me insane, and relax.

The fire comes and licks my face. The warmth comes and sits in my heart.

***

I come to covered in ink, the fire doused. I am lying in the hall, stunned. In his room, Venal has put one of his movies on, the sound reaches me, and for a moment I am nauseated.

But then I look down at the ink, the pungent, disgusting, life-saving ink. I could be dead, I could have been left to barbecue. But I wasn’t…

Does… does this make me the monster?

• Copyright: © 2009 Barry Charman

Zombie Jesus, rolling back the rock.

Dried blood plasters his hair to his face. His ribs line his torso. Flies hover about him in a halo of disease.

He is hungry.

He knows it is flesh he needs, nothing else will sate him.

Zombie Jesus, stumbling in the midday heat. Craving. Crawling.

Ahead–two girls called Mary, they bring spices to anoint him. They see him and fall to their knees, shouting, “Lord, oh Lord.”

He staggers to a stop before them. A dry tongue flicking in his mouth. They look up at him, awed and disturbed. Their faces are so soft, so tender. He bears down on them quickly, biting and tearing. Blood like wine, flesh like bread.

He eats their hearts as one. They beat against each other as he swallows them whole. He is sated, but only briefly.

He walks, the road is as cracked as his lips, his skin as burnt as the sun. The hunger is all consuming, the instinct to devour is absolute.

Sometimes he scratches at a wound in his side.

Eventually, he senses new meat. Two disciples up ahead, staring at him in shock.

“He is risen!” One disciple runs to him, embracing him. The Zombie Jesus bites into his face, tearing strips of red flesh away in a frenzy.

Thomas, doubting what he sees, falls to his knees.

Zombie Jesus, with a nail, picks his teeth clean of the warm disciple flesh.

Thomas staggers to his feet, pleading. The Zombie Jesus hears no prayers. He smells sweat, he tastes blood. All his senses are attuned to his next kill. He lunges at his former disciple, his fingers find eyes, his teeth pull at hair. In minutes he has bitten through to the succulent brain.

Night comes. The moon baptizes the Zombie Jesus, as his hunger grows again. He staggers through the blood and sand, seeking the meek who cannot fend him off.

He is risen. And the world will never be the same again.

• Copyright: © 2009 Barry Charman