MicroHorror

Shelby Day had long legs like bones in skinny black jeans, built like a boy in green combat boots. All limbs and inelegance, the geometry of her body cut in a narrow waist, small breasts and no ass to speak of. Because of this the boys in Parker County looked through Shelby rather than at her. Small town boys liked blond hair and cheap beer and breasts spilling out from tight shirts. Shelby couldn’t compete with that.

She stopped trying in high school, when puberty passed over her with an anticlimactic sigh. She had only watched from the sidelines, while every other girl in town started filling out bikinis and halter tops over the summer of Shelby’s quiet dissatisfaction. Somewhere down the line, Shelby figured out that teenage boys were stupid, and Parker County boys were even dumber. They just talked about football and beer and big tits, anyway. She didn’t need that.

The nice thing about the end of the world was that there was no one left to look at her breasts. Except for Spike and Bill and Jo, but they didn’t really count. Shelby wasn’t concerned with their opinions on her breasts in any event.

“You know it makes me nervous when you do that,” Bill said from the lawn chair on the other side of the rooftop of his uncle’s repair shop, sitting by the portable CD player running Dolly Parton on loop.

Jo was downstairs behind the barred and boarded windows, cooking lunch from canned beans, eggs and cured ham. Spike sat nearby, chained to the railroad spike Bill had driven into the asphalt, as he occupied himself watching the crows fly overhead. Bill was cleaning the heavy Colt .32 he appropriated from Howards Guns and Ammo down the street, his dirty blond hair smoothed back from his face with a handful of water. Squinting in the afternoon sun, he scratched at a stripe of grease on a stubbled cheek, licked the dust from his bottom lip, and let out a sigh.

“Do what?” From the ledge of the roof Shelby swung the purple hula hoop around her skinny hips. She watched the hordes of zombies from behind her father’s aviator sunglasses, the ones she’d found on the dashboard of his truck the last time she saw him. They all stumbled around aimlessly down Main Street below, a moving mass of decaying flesh, moaning and burping from bloodied jaws.

“Tempt the zombies like that,” Bill answered patiently, watching Shelby in distraction as he began to piece the disassembled gun back together again. He made it sound like Shelby was the dog that peed on the rug, after repeatedly having her nose rubbed in it. “It’s just weird. And I think it’s gonna give Spike the wrong idea.”

Sitting on his ass four feet away from Shelby, Spike rattled at his leash in what could pass as irritation. Bill looked at the zombie and rolled his eyes. Shelby let the hula hoop drop, catching it with a turn of her wrist and stepped back from the ledge.

“Oh, Spike’s fine,” she brushed Bill off, planting a hand on her hip with an affectionate glance in the zombie’s direction. “You know he’d never hurt anybody. He’s like a big Labrador puppy.”

Spike made motion to clap his hands, missed, and instead burped appreciatively. Bill shook his head with a sigh.

“A dead Labrador puppy,” he insisted, popping the clip into his newly cleaned and assembled gun. “With a wooden plank nailed to his head.”

Shelby made a face, sliding the sunglasses to the top of her head. “Nobody’s perfect.” Tossing her hula hoop in Bill’s direction, she sat down on the ledge and peered over it. A zombie with a missing arm belched, while another in a patterned yellow sundress chewed lazily on the missing limb. It looked like her third grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson. Shelby sighed.

“Besides, that’s the one benefit of having a flat chest: even the zombies don’t want you.”

There is an octopus in my bathtub. There is ink on the floor, bleeding over the white porcelain. I too will bleed soon, into the bathtub and on the floor and down the drain. This is how I am going to die. They must think me mad for of this, telling stories of sea monsters in old houses. There are monsters everywhere, whether they accept it or not. I could not blame them in any case; I could not accept this either, not at first, this notion of hiding beasts. They breathe under the stairs and behind the checkered cloth of the kitchen table, living in the shadows that flutter in the corner of one’s eye when he is not of mind. This is how the beast came for me.

He is waiting for me, the octopus, in a bundle of slippery leather. Like a sack with eyes and arms, his breathing is hard, the formless weight of his body spilling over on the floor in the hard wet slap of flesh and tile. I woke to find him there this morning, mocking me with eyes that are old and empty and black. If this makes me mad then the octopus is my insanity, my sickness divined, creeping over the wrinkles of my brain with heaving tentacles.

How he got here I neither know nor care; crawling in from the drain or through a slit of space an open window. He could have opened the front door with the spare key beneath the welcome mat and slithered in, all arms and slick flesh, or waited hidden in the bushes for me to return home and crept in behind me, down the hallway and into the bathtub. The details do not concern me; I am undone.

The octopus wants to see me dead. He has come to kill me. I know this, because he has told me so. There is a smile written crookedly in the jut of his beak, black like deep-ocean and the hollows of his eyes. He will snare me with his toothy suction cups, snarled by heavily muscled tentacles to feed me to his gleaming bill of a mouth. I will scream but no one will hear me, and I will run but there is no escaping the reach of the monster’s arms, dragging me back to the bathtub. There are no teeth to chew me so I will slide down his gullet, a piece of meat falling clumsily into the monster’s belly, useless to protect myself from him.

Falling into this pit, I will wander his labyrinth of a stomach, and know no other shelter. I will descend the crooked staircases assembled from misshapen steel and the spines of whale carcasses, snagging at my clothes and skin in harsh angles of bone and metal. I will wind down the wet and vacant corridors of flesh and fish skeletons, like living ribcages, breathing, sighing, and forever spiraling into empty depths. There will be no gods to help me here; I will be beyond all of that.

There is only the darkness and madness and the slosh of seawater around my ankles. I can only travel forward, never back, my body propelled by feet too fearful to stop moving. Until wearing through the soles of my shoes my clothing will follow and fall away, then my flesh and muscle, torn open and flayed by rough geometry, and finally my bones, my skeleton left as testimony to my existence in this pit.

This is where I will die. My blood will bubble up from the octopus’ beak, and bleed out into the bathtub and on the floor and down the drain and I will disappear forever. The octopus will simply smile.