A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous

WE RUN RACES WITH GOBLIN TROOPERS

by Lee Thompson

November 9^th

In the War he took the intestines of your enemies and made dolls for the village children. They weren’t much more than sock puppets, but he was good with his hands and he told stories that made children smile.

Until recently he worked as an auto mechanic.

In the War he held and shushed children, and they trusted him because he had the saddest eyes they’d ever seen. The kids felt sorry for him, even though you’d just murdered their parents and left behind broken homes, while he told them, “It was all a horrible accident, understand? But you can build a fire and eat the dolls in a day or two.”

Jim was always spinning twisted metaphors from flesh and blood.

He taught the children how to be cannibals so they didn’t starve once your platoon moved on to their next objective.

YOU OPEN THE FRIDGE.

He smirks.

He whispers, Two days it’s going to be Veteran’s Day, boy. Two days and the skies will blaze with fire and smoke like they used to.

You set the rifle, the shotgun, and the .45 on a drab green mattress. The room is bare the way people are when they’re isolated and have nothing to accompany them but reflection and hindsight. Your parents were proud of you throughout school, fought like hell to keep you from becoming a soldier because soldiers die in faraway places and leave behind nothing more than thin sheets of metal, worn boots, and fading memories.

You’ve seen death and tasted its hot kiss when the heart lights with fire and smoke fills the sky behind you. When your tour was complete, you sat at their kitchen table again nursing a cup of coffee. They hovered close by, nearly ghosts, and asked you if you were okay. You never answered. You were still running races with goblin troopers. And you hear them in the trees late at night, and behind the walls as you drift to sleep. Their eyes are pure white, their tongues black, and they whisper gunfire into the caverns of your mind.

The apartment is on the third floor. From the bedroom window you see the city sprawled like some fallen and pummeled giant, buildings like bones ripped from concrete flesh.

Everything is gray, you tell yourself.

It helps you remember the night Jim taught you about pain.

JIM HELD A GIRL face down on a green mattress. He chopped her arms off and babbled about how the war was over, but there was another one building. He sent you into the other room to give her children cookies. But you stayed by the door for a moment and listened to her cry against her gag, watched her face spasm in pain, maybe expecting him to ram himself into her any moment while she bled to death, but Jim wasn’t like that. He didn’t give a shit about violating anyone. He needed them to create art so children might see that the world was cruel and indifferent. People didn’t care, and they wouldn’t stop you, and he smiled at you sometimes when you gave the kids milk and Oreos, like he wanted you to remember that the lesson was for everyone.

From the doorway you watched the light flee her remaining eye. She offered one final shiver before Jim gutted her and took a hacksaw to her legs. You shivered too but not in terror, nor in excitement, but simply because Jim had shown you something important at the expense of someone else. Not everyone can be this happy and sad at the same time, you thought. Jim glared over his shoulder while the kids in the living room watched Sponge Bob pursue an adventure in Rock Bottom. You thought, I’ve always been trapped there, but Jim’s trying to show me the way back to the surface. You helped him because you wanted to know what it was like to stare into dead eyes again, thinking maybe then you’d learn to appreciate your own life.

But Jim had another lesson planned to teach you that.

November 10^th

YOUR BACK HURTS FROM sleeping on the floor. The guns on the green mattress are well-oiled and they shine so brightly they hurt your eyes. You’re not some twisted asshole who’s out to wreak havoc on the world for being evil, or even for hurting you first. You don’t know what you are. You think, I’m not like everyone else. I’m alone. That’s it. Truth. You’re isolated again in this little third story apartment and your stomach knots because you haven’t eaten in three days and before you had a job but it’s gone and once had a family but they’re somewhere else now, and you’re so hungry for someone else’s touch the way a bum is. You know they don’t beg change just to get a bottle of wine. They need someone’s fingers to brush theirs, if only for a moment, because it proves they still exist.

There’s a knife on the dresser. It’s black and sharp.

Someone moves in the hall.

Goblins move like shadows across the wall.

You’re at the door and looking through the peep hole.

A woman stands on the other side. She’s a hooker, you think, but you don’t remember calling one.

How the hell am I supposed to pay her?

You have no money left.

Your stomach rumbles.

Goblins skitter across the roof.

The girl outside scratches on the door until the sound of it starts driving you a little crazy and that’s the last thing you want because to go crazy will ruin the little celebrations life throws your way when you open the fridge and stare into Jim’s eyes.

You open the door, open your mouth and the hooker looks you up and down, appraising you. She can tell you’re broke, exhausted, heartbroken. She says softly, “You’re just one of them who needs someone to talk to, aren’t you?” You nod, but think of the knife on the dresser, think of intestines and dimming lights. “I understand,” she says. “It’s a fucked up world we live in.” You agree. She doesn’t touch you but almost seems like she wants to. You think of the guns on the bed. Jim in the fridge. Your wife and kids.

You ask the whore her name and she lies to you.

It’s okay, you tell yourself, she doesn’t know me. Of course she’d lie.

But it still bothers you.

Jim lied.

He promised and took a lot.

The girl is barely out of her teens. She looks so much older. There’s a bit of dirt caked beneath her nails and you wonder how it got there. You imagine her in a graveyard with the wind rattling dark branches, tears in her eyes, as she buries her dreams.

You say, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

You make a move to hug her but she back peddles into the hall and whips her head left and right, looking for a way out. If you tell her there’s not an exit anymore she’ll cry so you let her search the halls for a door until she returns.

SHE’S THE FIRST PERSON who has really seen you, and in doing so she sees herself, her life as it really is, every bloody and lonely juncture, and she cries. You invite her in because it’s better to be lonely together than it is apart. She sees the guns on the bed you’ve pulled into the living room. She says nothing. You ask if she wants something to eat as she rubs her arms and tells you about her life, how it has always been like this, how she did what she had to do, but wasn’t proud of any of it, or herself. You open the fridge and move Jim’s head aside so you can get at his fingers. You tell her, “You can spend the night if you want. I won’t hurt you.”

She stares at the guns and doesn’t answer.

You cook two fingers for each of you and wash it down with water from the tap. She thanks you and asks as she looks at a picture of your wife and son on the wall near the window, “You have a family somewhere?”

You haven’t told anyone. The police would charge you as an accomplice. Instead, you direct the question at her. You say, “Who hurt you?”

She describes a man who had loved her in the shallowest of terms, a pale reflection of the love he carried for himself. He’d fucked her friend, her best friend—they’d grown up together, they’d cried on each other’s shoulders more times than she could ever count—and the man, he’d taken her friend in and put her out, and she had nothing but the clothes on her back. He took her far from her family and she couldn’t go back to them, they’d laugh at her, they’d say, I told you so… So she worked where she could but nothing ever lasted when she kept stumbling from the shock and hopelessness and the stench of rarely showering because she didn’t have a home anymore. She wanted to kill him but she didn’t have the guts. She wanted to forgive him but…

“He is a thing now,” she says, and, “how do you forgive a thing?”

You say, “I don’t know. You don’t, I guess.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head and looking at the guns. She stands and walks to the window. The clock on the nightstand says 11:54 p.m., the time you were born. She says, “Oh my god! There he is…” and she’s laughing and crying. You grab the rifle and move to her side. Looking out the window you see a lot of people prowling the street. You hold Jim’s gun, stand in his apartment—his payment for what he tore from you and everyone else. You squint as a man below looks up. It’s Jim. His face is too white in the murk. You hand the rifle to the whore and unlock the window and push it up. The night outside is cool and soft and it seeps into the room and caresses both of you. You look at the clock, look at Jim down there, remembering what he did and somewhere in the distance, like the sound of coming thunder, hear goblins running wild.

The whore begs, “That’s him,” and jams her finger at a man. You work the bolt on the rifle and flip the safety. You can’t miss from here. People laugh below. Jim is still watching you. You think, Give me a second…

The whore’s husband has his arm around another woman’s waist; they’re walking away from you. You sight on the middle of his back and let out a breath slowly as you draw slack from the trigger…

November 11^th

…THE ALARM BEEPS AND you squeeze off a shot too soon. It takes the man high in the shoulder, paints half the girl’s face like a rose as they both stumble.

The whore says, “You didn’t get him good enough!”

You think, Give me a second… as shadows dart about in the street and cars blare their horns and people stop to stare at the strange couple dancing on the sidewalk. They look around, the husband holding his shoulder, face scrunched up in pain, the girl clinging to his arm and trying to pull him away. You put a bullet in his chest and he hits concrete but you can’t hear anything now because your ears are ringing and Jim is down there pointing at the apartment window, ratting you out after all the times you covered for him. You draw a bead on his chest and fire lights the sky and he drops out of sight as a car speeds past.

The whore cries, “There he is! You missed him!” But the man she’s pointing at is not Jim, so you think she means you missed her husband, though you were certain you’d dropped him. But there he is, looking up at you, horror carved into his features because he sees his wife with another man. And you pull the trigger and put him down. But Jim is hiding in a phone booth across the street and he thinks you can’t see him, thinks you don’t remember how he showed you his masterpiece, how he used bits of your wife’s viscera to paint unicorns on your son’s bare chest, how he whispered to him, “It’s okay. It was an accident, but this will make it better, watch…”

You pull the trigger and work the bolt and bodies are piling up as sirens scream and cars jam the street below, no one knowing whether to go back or forward—just as stuck as you—and the whore flickers because at this point you don’t really need her anymore. Your wife’s hand strokes your neck and she whispers of blood and love while goblins, who look so much like your son, dance in your periphery vision.