"Big Mad Monobrow"
Featuring yelp and flail, too wet too sharp, apparent facts, broken designs, and CORPSE FLUID, what?, CORPSE FLUID
/ Now at AC: Debbie Hudson, “The Furring”
It starts happening just after you turn fourteen.
You and Aaron sit on the swing set in his back garden, sipping dilute orange juice from Disney cups, watching wasps sway drunk over the neighbour’s hedge. It’s late August. The sun is still ripe and the backs of your knees sticky. You’re looking at Aaron’s arms, at the sudden sprouting of fine hair gone gold, the skin underneath pink as a newborn’s scalp. You’re looking at this and your Disney cup is sweating through your fingers. You’re looking at this when the wasp hits.
It pings off your forehead like a pebble and you blink, confused. Then it missiles back into your eyeline, stinger cocked, and you yelp. Yelp and flail. Splash orange juice all over your neck as you tip backwards off the swing.
Aaron folds over, laughing. The wasp darts towards him. It teleports, appearing at ear, then chest, then knee. When it materialises by his nose, Aaron jerks his arm, and with one bold blow, swats it into the grass.
You lie in the dust beneath the swing set. Watch for the wasp to perform its magic trick, reappear—TA-DA—in a yellow flash, but it doesn’t. Aaron offers you his hand. He’s smiling, but there’s something of a snarl about it.
You hesitate. His teeth are suddenly a bit too wet, a bit too sharp.
It’s the end of May, so I don’t know about you, but I’m getting ready to start getting ready for Halloween. To that end, how about a coming-of-age story with a steadily building thrum of horror? Which is, of course, how I and I think most of us recall coming of age. Read “The Furring,” now at AC.
/ From the Archive: Daniel Carter, “Wolf Vibe”
Wolf asks the fairy about the crabs. Why do they only come sometimes? Are they pets? Do they belong to the creature who owns the tomb? Have they been abandoned? Has the creature sent them back from the other side? Should Wolf eat them?
Wolf looks at the hole in the ceiling where the fairy lives, but the fairy doesn’t answer.
The crabs keep coming in through the weep holes. They pool in low parts of the floor, and Wolf dances around them. He does what he’s supposed to, leaning his motorcycle against the wall and cleaning his hands on the patch of turf nailed to the back of the tomb’s door. He checks all the lines going into the creature. He has to jump, just a little, to grab onto the red handle that is always trying to pull up and away, out of his reach. The food haze descends, though, and the creature sighs through its bag.
Wolf reaches for the sword on his back. He finds his sunglasses. The fairy tells him what to do, and he slices a line through the bag. The line is parallel to the floor and runs for about four inches along the creature’s left side. Wolf slips the sword through and lets its tip rest in the pucker of scar tissue.
“What did I get last time,” he asks the fairy.
The fairy screams from its hole in the ceiling.
“CORPSE FLUID!”
Wolf pushes the sword into the creature’s side, wipes its blade on the sole of his boot and straps it to his back again. His paw pushes into the creature, and the fairy yells the same thing it always does.
“TAKE ONLY THE FIRST ITEM YOU TOUCH.”
He knows what it is before he pulls it out. The creature’s skin has to stretch to let the jar out, and he tosses it back toward the motorcycle. He stitches the bag around the creature closed. It sags where jewels from the cut have collected, and he massages them smaller and smaller until they can be reabsorbed. He steps around the crabs again and puts on his coat before picking up the jar.
“YOU FOUND CORPSE FLUID,” the fairy yells.
Look, sometimes we like to have a theme around here. Read “Wolf Vibe” from the AC Archive.
/ Elsewhere:
“What does it mean to be alive and, if we can never be certain, why do we nevertheless take this apparent fact about ourselves to be the absolute groundwork of everything we think and do?”: A searching, wrenching essay on death and puppets by David Leo Rice at Southwest Review.
We were saddened to learn last month of the death of AC contributor Sheldon Lee Compton, but thrilled to hear that Cowboy Jamboree is continuing to release his work posthumously. His novel The Old Invisible, which Dan Russell calls “A by God masterpiece,” is available now, and CJ promises that there’s more to come.
“God never designed anything straight unless He wanted it to break”: Sarp Sozdinler at Wigleaf.
/ Today’s Soundtrack
I have basically no interest in watching this movie again, but I get this song stuck in my head approximately once a month. Alice Cooper should’ve written more songs where he pretended to be David Bowie-era Iggy Pop, tbh