Tag: horror

Salad Life

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Before he made monsters, Dr. Frankenstein started with trying to bring salads to life.
At first, he thought that he needed different varieties of lettuce, but in the end he was thoroughly convinced that sliced radishes were the secret.
Time and time again, Igor would throw the switches, sending millions of volts of electricity through a tangled maze of wires and into the salad bowl.
Aside from an impressive shower of sparks, the salad never did come to life.
Today, salad dressing makers try to convince us they have the secret.
No, folks. It’s just a salad. Nothing fancy here.

Cursed Town

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They say Westchester’s a cursed town. I wouldn’t know.
I was sent here to computerize the county’s record-keeping. Getting all those stacks of marriages, births, and deaths from the old ledgers to my laptop for processing down in Albany.
Three days in, The Town Hall burnt to the ground.
Here’s the weird part… everyone ever born in Westchester vanished like smoke. As if they’d never existed.
And everyone who ever died and got buried here, well, they weren’t dead anymore.
Not a problem for those not born. But the rest, well…
Damn Zombies make you wish you’d never been born.

Dictator

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The townspeople got word that the country’s dictator, after many years of ruling with an iron fist, had died overnight.
There were celebrations, cries of freedom, and they threw together an effigy of Old General Montcastle for burning.
Then, they looked around and realized things really hadn”t been all that bad with Montcastle running things.
They put the effigy in the town square and started to pile up flowers at its feet, turning it into a memorial of sorts.
Montcastle’s son got word of the memorial and said “Collect the flowers, but we’re still burning the place to the ground.”

The Belt

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Mother likes it when we come to dinner, especially when I bring the kids.
When dinner is over and Dad loosens his belt, I see something in Mom’s eyes.
She’s afraid.
Sometimes, she’d call me at the strangest times. Early. Late.
But when I ask her if anything is wrong, she doesn’t say a word.
What does Dad do with that belt that scares her?
I found out last week. Mom was in the kitchen, beaten to death. Dad was hanging in the basement from the belt he beat her with.
Thanksgiving will be at home this year, I guess.

My Bloody Valentine

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Five hours ago, this bum was using his pen knife to cut aluminum cans into hearts to give away on Valentine’s Day.
Now, he’s a bloody pulp under a bench. Some other bums beat him up for the aluminum cans, cashed them in for beer money.
He could have defended himself with the knife, but to him, it was a tool and not a weapon. Just as Cupid”s bow and arrow are for love, not war.
A mother tells her son not to worry. He’s up in Heaven now.
I hope they clean him up before they let him in.

The Little Muse

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I know a girl who buys notebooks with a watercolor kitten in the corner of each page. She calls the kitten her little muse.
Sometimes, the kitten will take an interest in what she’s writing, romping among the words, chewing on commas, batting the letters around like wadded-up newspaper.
Other times, the kitten curls up on a warm, light sentence for a peaceful nap.
Once, she tore out a page and taped it to another to see if the kittens would play.
They didn’t.
And that’s how I found her body seven hours later, the blood-soaked notebook in her lap.

The Monster Under The Bed

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Every kid has a monster under the bed, but I’m grown up now.
And yet, right under our bed, there’s a monster.
No, not the orange fluffy cat down here. His grabbing at ankles and biting hands trying to pet him are behind him now.
He’s sleeping, or…
The monster under the bed is not knowing what I’ll find when I look under there again.
The monster is my fear.
The monster is his suffering, and not being able to do anything about it.
The monster takes away every good memory, and replaces it with the sadness that is now.

The Mad King

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King Rasmussen The Mad
For centuries, that name has haunted us.
If you listen carefully, you can still hear his living corpse shout and scream bloody murder from within his ruined castle.
Trapped inside a warlock’s time-bubble, his dying moment has been preserved for all eternity.
Sure, by law, he is still king. And we must obey his orders.
So that’s why we have hired deaf laborers to seal him up forever. They are filling in the cracks of the castle, and then they will pile dirt on the stone
Maybe we’ll plant some apple trees when it’s all over.

Screaming

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We landed on the planet’s other moon and felt a strange vibration on our helmets.
“Do you hear screaming?” asks the captain.
We sit and listen.
It sounds like every child on the moon is screaming at the top of his lungs.
Except – the moon’s uninhabited.
“Ghosts?” I ask.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” said the captain.
And he’s right.
Sure enough, the entire moon is a series of windy canyons. The wind rushing through the valleys sounds like screams.
Still, we had to soundproof our helmets before conducting the survey.
And nobody wants to come back here, either.

Haunts Me

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My little girl was shrieking. Confused.
Her back legs were limp. She fell off the bed, dragging herself.
Scared beyond description.
I called my wife, called a cab, got dressed. Got her into a carrier and out the door.
The emergency clinic said it was a blood clot. They’d try to thin it with drugs.
When they took her in back, I heard her meowing her “WHERE’S DADDY?” cry.
Go home, they said. Sleep. Come back to check her into the day clinic.
Two hours later, they called.
I should have been there for her.
And that’s what haunts me.