Ok, so it's in a really small local publication that's free, but hell, I'll take what I can get.
Just thought I'd share the short story of mine that they printed in The Nemadji Review.
Sorry for the weird formatting, and the few errors I missed before print.
Katie had always been a wayward soul. She did not grow up under the best of circumstances, but she was a bright, wide-eyed little girl with golden hair that everyone was envious of with bright blue eyes. She was a curious little girl and despite generally being of a good disposition, she occasionally would lie for no reason at all. She did not know why she did it. It could have been for the reactions that she would receive. It could have been a cry for attention of some sort, or it could have just been out of boredom. She was raised strictly Roman Catholic with an extremely high value placed on religious values and dogma.
She was confirmed when she was seven years old. It was a memory that stuck out in her mind for some reason. She remembers with vivid detail how bright and white her cotton dress was and how it contrasted to the dark somber interior of the church. The only thing that was as white as her dress, as she recalls, was the pale skin of Christ up on the crucifix at the front of the cathedral. It seemed to shine with a supernatural glow. She was always comforted by the statue, but at the same time horrified by the dark red blood that flowed in long ribbons from the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet and side. The statue also felt like her only tangible link to God. When she was very small, the priest once rebuked her for constantly referring to the statue itself as God. He had said that worshiping an image rather than God himself was one of the sins that must never be committed. She thought it was horrifying that people would treat God in such a gruesome manner. As much as the priest kept telling her that he had died for her sins, she couldn’t help but escape the feeling that the crucifixion never needed to happen.
“People just should have been nicer.” She once told her mother.
This thought brought her crashing back to her current reality. She opened her eyes. It was all still there. The carpet, the walls, and the horrible smell. She now noticed in her increasing sobriety a bright white sheet laying in the center of the floor. In contrast to the room surrounding it, Katie thought it was absurd that the sheet would be so clean. She stood up and moved closer to the sheet. It was with dawning horror that she realized that there was something under the sheet. Something vaguely human shaped, but more skeleton than human. She knelt down in front of the sheet, becoming fixated on a dark red spot. The spot seemed to be growing like the bloom of some gruesome flower. It was almost beautiful in its own way. Katie resisted the urge to lift the shroud. This was all too horrible for her to process. How did she get here, and who was under the sheet? The harder she tried to remember, the more her head ached. She leaned back into the ache and searched her memories again.
Katie became more troubled as she grew into adulthood. Her taste in movies and music started to move to anything that would annoy her mother. She would listen to anything loud and thumping that would require her mother to scream to be heard as she told Katie to turn it down. She became fascinated with macabre and horrible movies which depicted graphic sex and violence.
This is not to say that Katie was really a bad person. Amidst all this chaos and lashing out, she still maintained good grades and was generally liked by those around her. Despite her fascination with the macabre in her movie choices, she still dressed in the nicest fashions that her mother could afford. Even with her occasional lies, people in the school seemed to adore her. They simply chalked up her lies to her being “quirky”. She was still a fiercely loyal friend to those around her. It probably helped that she had grown into a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair that always appeared silky and well groomed. She wore little makeup as her natural features defied the use of it. She had high cheekbones that gave her face an angular appearance with soft full lips. Her eyes seemed to sparkle, perhaps conveying the mischief that she sometimes concealed behind them.
Without any warning, the doorknob of the room rattled, causing Katie to instinctively jump to her feet. Years of running from her past and occasionally the law had honed her fight or flight instincts firmly to the flight side. The sheet and its ghastly contents now completely forgotten, she looked all around the room for a way to escape. There were no doors or windows other than the main door and a large picture window that was currently covered by blinds, shutting out any light. The rattling of the doorknob became more insistent. She finally decided to bolt into the bathroom. If she could not run, at least she could hide. She huddled down inside the grime covered bathtub, listening intently as the turning of the doorknob stopped.
She looked around the bathroom, hoping that there would be a window through which she could slip, but found none. All she could see was the filthy bathroom. The smell of the rest of the hotel room was not as strong in the bathroom. It was instead replaced by the strong acrid smell of bleach. All the bleach in the world could not have washed away the filth that seemed to cover everything in the room. It was as if the room itself defied cleaning. She again drifted back through the haze of her memories.
When she graduated, her mother simply kicked her out of the house. There was no warning. She simply came home from graduation, and her bags were packed. Instead of the perpetual look of anger and exasperation she usually wore, she instead looked tired. It was obvious that she had been crying and Katie noticed that she held a rosary tightly in her hands as she calmly said in a slow, deliberate voice.
“You don’t belong here anymore.” Her voice seemed devoid of any emotion other than exhaustion. “I have tried and tried with you, but no matter what I did, the devil managed to take you away from me. I can’t have your evil in my house, so you need to go.”
This devastated Katie. She didn’t know what to do. She screamed at her mother, but found her unmoved. She tried being kind and coercive, but her mother simply ignored her. This was real. Her mother serious and no amount of cajoling or argument would get her to change her mind. Katie lived off the kindness of her friends for a while, but eventually, they all moved away to pursue school or careers. She simply drifted for years, jumping from one sordid relationship to the next. She eventually turned to drugs, finding the comfort of the short high of heroin to be preferable to this cold cruel world she had been thrust into. All the while, she wondered why the bright man on the cross had forsaken her.
She was just starting to wonder if whoever it was had gone away when she heard the sound of a key being slipped into the lock. They must have gone to the management and come back with a key.
Katie held her breath as the door to the hotel room slowly creaked open. She didn’t know what to do. She needed to get away, to get her head together and find out what happened here. Through the closed bathroom door, she started to hear muffled voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it appeared to be two men who were having a serious conversation. She may have not been able to make out the words, but she could make out the tone. One of the voices moved closer to the closed bathroom door. Katie held her breath and pulled some soiled towels over her as she tried to sink into the linoleum of the bathtub. She left enough of a space on the towels for her to be able to see the doorway. As the doorway slowly swung open, Katie gasps as she saw the barrel of a gun peek through the opening, slowly followed by a tall man. He had a very serious look on his olive colored face. He grimly surveyed the scene. Katie started to tremble in fear as his keen looking brown eyes surveyed the bathroom. He was dressed in a cheap suit and clipped to his belt shone a policeman’s badge.
“Bathroom’s clear.” He said over his shoulder and slowly made his way back to the main room.
Katie didn’t know how the police officer didn’t see her, but she let out a small quiet sigh of relief.
“I’m gonna go call this in, the coroner should be here soon.” Said a light masculine voice. She imagined that it belonged to the man who had just been in the bathroom.
“I’ll go ask around, see if any of the other scumbags in this place heard or saw anything,” growled a deeper gravelly voice.
She heard both of their voices trail off as they left, closing the hotel room door behind them. If she had any chance of escape, it would have to be that moment. She quickly threw the towels off of herself and crawled out of the bathtub, rushing towards the hotel door. As soon as she cleared the bathroom her heart skipped a beat as she came face to face with a small framed woman who was crouched down next to the body. Why hadn’t she heard another person? The woman looked back up at Katie with wide brown eyes that were now the size of saucers. The woman appeared to be just as surprised as Katie. Katie stared at this small unassuming black woman kneeling before her. The woman was wearing a professional outfit. Maybe she was the coroner and the other’s just missed her. Why hadn’t Katie heard her come in?
“OK, honey,” said the woman as she slowly stood up. “I don’t want any trouble, and I don’t think you do either,” she said in a slow, deliberate voice. Her voice sounded sweetly comforting and strangely familiar to Katie, but she couldn’t place where she knew it from.
“I don’t even know what the fuck is going on here,” Katie blurted out suddenly. Everything seemed to come crashing down around her. The terror, fear and confusion of the last few minutes simply collapsed in on her and she started crying hysterically.
“It’s all right, sweetie,” the woman said. “Why don’t you just sit down and we’ll get this all sorted out. I’m Sarah. What’s your name?”
Without hesitation, Katie simply sat down on the bed. “Katie,” she replied weakly.
“Is that what I think it is?” Katie said, shakily pointing at the sheet on the floor.
“I’m sure you already know the answer to that,” Sarah said soothingly.
“Who is it?”
“I think you know the answer to that, too.” Sarah said, looking down gently at Katie.
“I… I can’t remember,” said Katie. “I keep trying, but I just can’t remember.”
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Katie?” Said Sarah, “Maybe it will start coming back to you.”
For some reason, Katie inherently trusted Sarah. She had no idea why, but she felt such a comforting presence in her. Katie didn’t know where to begin, so she started at the beginning. She told Sarah everything. She told her about her confirmation, her lying, and her mother’s betrayal. She told Sarah everything. Through the entire story, Sarah simply sat next to her and listened. When she had finished, Sarah simply reached over and gave Katie a hug. It was the warmest, most fulfilling hug that she had ever had in her life. Katie had spent so long being closed off from everything and everyone, this one single gesture of kindness was like an atom bomb of emotion destroying all the walls that years of desperation and fear had built up. Katie began crying again, unable to hold back the tears.
After Katie began to regain her composure, Sarah looked at her gravely and said “What about the gun, Katie?”
Gun? What gun? Katie rolled the word around in her head as if it was the first time she ever heard it. It was as if Sarah had mentioned a concept that was completely foreign to her. She didn’t know anything about a gun, but at the same time, the mention of the word gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Dim memories began to swim to the surface. Cold steel. The smell of gun oil. A bang. A flash. It was all there. Suddenly Katie knew what lie under the sheet. She knew, but didn’t want to know.
“Katie, honey,” said Sarah, “it’s time.”
Katie kneeled down next to the sheet, a sheet that she now knew wasn’t really there at all. A sheet that only she could remove. She reached out a trembling hand towards the sheet. As she did this, she felt Sarah put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Go ahead, Katie.”
Katie grabbed the sheet and pulled it back. It seemed to melt away like fog as she pulled it back. Under the sheet, she saw her own beautiful blue eyes staring back at her. She hardly recognized the ghoul that lay before her. Her long yellow hair was now stringy and brittle like straw. Her once beautiful face was now emaciated and worn. On her forehead, was a small hole where the bullet had entered, ending her life. She suddenly felt a wave of pity for this lost creature, this failed being of the flesh. Katie realized how fragile she really was. She suddenly wanted to hold that little girl in the cathedral tight and give her words of comfort, but it was too late for that now.
“Katie, let’s go home.”
As Katie turned around, the small black woman was no longer there. Instead she was replaced by the pale glowing man that she remembered from her childhood. He too was transformed. He no longer carried the ugly gashes of blood pouring out of rough wounds that had so revolted Katie as a child. She fell into his arms, more exhausted than she had ever been. She didn’t care if this was a drug induced hallucination. She didn’t ask for salvation but it came to her anyway in the form of his all-encompassing embrace. She knew that it was over, this sad failure of a life and in that, she felt comfort. She knew that she was no longer forsaken.
Just thought I'd share the short story of mine that they printed in The Nemadji Review.
Sorry for the weird formatting, and the few errors I missed before print.
Wounds
Katie sat on the dingy floor of a cheap hotel room that reeked of a disgusting blend of mold, marijuana and stale sex. She didn’t remember how she had gotten there. Only slight flashes of memory that were there and briefly gone. The more she tried to focus on them, the faster they flitted away like fireflies darting back into the night. The carpet was a drab olive color that looked like it was probably installed in the early seventies and didn’t appear to have been cleaned since it was first installed. The walls were yellowed with years of cigarette smoke and most likely the smoke of other more illicit drugs. Katie felt that she should be repulsed by her surroundings, but this was not the first time she had come to in a disgusting hotel room. It wasn’t even close to the worst place that she had come to after a serious heroin bender. She tried to clear her mind. Usually if she focused on her memories of the past, it helped to ground her; to make her feel more real. Heroin had the effect of making everything seem as if it was just a construct Katie had built up in her mind. It made her feel that her entire life were something ethereal that she constructed out of sugar glass that would melt away as the rain of pleasure brought on by the rush of a fix entered her veins. She closed her eyes and remembered her mother. If anything would bring her back to reality, her mother was it. Memories of her were by far the most sobering in her mind, but also the reason she sought the comfort that the drugs would bring.Katie had always been a wayward soul. She did not grow up under the best of circumstances, but she was a bright, wide-eyed little girl with golden hair that everyone was envious of with bright blue eyes. She was a curious little girl and despite generally being of a good disposition, she occasionally would lie for no reason at all. She did not know why she did it. It could have been for the reactions that she would receive. It could have been a cry for attention of some sort, or it could have just been out of boredom. She was raised strictly Roman Catholic with an extremely high value placed on religious values and dogma.
She was confirmed when she was seven years old. It was a memory that stuck out in her mind for some reason. She remembers with vivid detail how bright and white her cotton dress was and how it contrasted to the dark somber interior of the church. The only thing that was as white as her dress, as she recalls, was the pale skin of Christ up on the crucifix at the front of the cathedral. It seemed to shine with a supernatural glow. She was always comforted by the statue, but at the same time horrified by the dark red blood that flowed in long ribbons from the wounds in Jesus’ hands, feet and side. The statue also felt like her only tangible link to God. When she was very small, the priest once rebuked her for constantly referring to the statue itself as God. He had said that worshiping an image rather than God himself was one of the sins that must never be committed. She thought it was horrifying that people would treat God in such a gruesome manner. As much as the priest kept telling her that he had died for her sins, she couldn’t help but escape the feeling that the crucifixion never needed to happen.
“People just should have been nicer.” She once told her mother.
This thought brought her crashing back to her current reality. She opened her eyes. It was all still there. The carpet, the walls, and the horrible smell. She now noticed in her increasing sobriety a bright white sheet laying in the center of the floor. In contrast to the room surrounding it, Katie thought it was absurd that the sheet would be so clean. She stood up and moved closer to the sheet. It was with dawning horror that she realized that there was something under the sheet. Something vaguely human shaped, but more skeleton than human. She knelt down in front of the sheet, becoming fixated on a dark red spot. The spot seemed to be growing like the bloom of some gruesome flower. It was almost beautiful in its own way. Katie resisted the urge to lift the shroud. This was all too horrible for her to process. How did she get here, and who was under the sheet? The harder she tried to remember, the more her head ached. She leaned back into the ache and searched her memories again.
Katie became more troubled as she grew into adulthood. Her taste in movies and music started to move to anything that would annoy her mother. She would listen to anything loud and thumping that would require her mother to scream to be heard as she told Katie to turn it down. She became fascinated with macabre and horrible movies which depicted graphic sex and violence.
This is not to say that Katie was really a bad person. Amidst all this chaos and lashing out, she still maintained good grades and was generally liked by those around her. Despite her fascination with the macabre in her movie choices, she still dressed in the nicest fashions that her mother could afford. Even with her occasional lies, people in the school seemed to adore her. They simply chalked up her lies to her being “quirky”. She was still a fiercely loyal friend to those around her. It probably helped that she had grown into a beautiful young woman with long blonde hair that always appeared silky and well groomed. She wore little makeup as her natural features defied the use of it. She had high cheekbones that gave her face an angular appearance with soft full lips. Her eyes seemed to sparkle, perhaps conveying the mischief that she sometimes concealed behind them.
Without any warning, the doorknob of the room rattled, causing Katie to instinctively jump to her feet. Years of running from her past and occasionally the law had honed her fight or flight instincts firmly to the flight side. The sheet and its ghastly contents now completely forgotten, she looked all around the room for a way to escape. There were no doors or windows other than the main door and a large picture window that was currently covered by blinds, shutting out any light. The rattling of the doorknob became more insistent. She finally decided to bolt into the bathroom. If she could not run, at least she could hide. She huddled down inside the grime covered bathtub, listening intently as the turning of the doorknob stopped.
She looked around the bathroom, hoping that there would be a window through which she could slip, but found none. All she could see was the filthy bathroom. The smell of the rest of the hotel room was not as strong in the bathroom. It was instead replaced by the strong acrid smell of bleach. All the bleach in the world could not have washed away the filth that seemed to cover everything in the room. It was as if the room itself defied cleaning. She again drifted back through the haze of her memories.
When she graduated, her mother simply kicked her out of the house. There was no warning. She simply came home from graduation, and her bags were packed. Instead of the perpetual look of anger and exasperation she usually wore, she instead looked tired. It was obvious that she had been crying and Katie noticed that she held a rosary tightly in her hands as she calmly said in a slow, deliberate voice.
“You don’t belong here anymore.” Her voice seemed devoid of any emotion other than exhaustion. “I have tried and tried with you, but no matter what I did, the devil managed to take you away from me. I can’t have your evil in my house, so you need to go.”
This devastated Katie. She didn’t know what to do. She screamed at her mother, but found her unmoved. She tried being kind and coercive, but her mother simply ignored her. This was real. Her mother serious and no amount of cajoling or argument would get her to change her mind. Katie lived off the kindness of her friends for a while, but eventually, they all moved away to pursue school or careers. She simply drifted for years, jumping from one sordid relationship to the next. She eventually turned to drugs, finding the comfort of the short high of heroin to be preferable to this cold cruel world she had been thrust into. All the while, she wondered why the bright man on the cross had forsaken her.
She was just starting to wonder if whoever it was had gone away when she heard the sound of a key being slipped into the lock. They must have gone to the management and come back with a key.
Katie held her breath as the door to the hotel room slowly creaked open. She didn’t know what to do. She needed to get away, to get her head together and find out what happened here. Through the closed bathroom door, she started to hear muffled voices. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it appeared to be two men who were having a serious conversation. She may have not been able to make out the words, but she could make out the tone. One of the voices moved closer to the closed bathroom door. Katie held her breath and pulled some soiled towels over her as she tried to sink into the linoleum of the bathtub. She left enough of a space on the towels for her to be able to see the doorway. As the doorway slowly swung open, Katie gasps as she saw the barrel of a gun peek through the opening, slowly followed by a tall man. He had a very serious look on his olive colored face. He grimly surveyed the scene. Katie started to tremble in fear as his keen looking brown eyes surveyed the bathroom. He was dressed in a cheap suit and clipped to his belt shone a policeman’s badge.
“Bathroom’s clear.” He said over his shoulder and slowly made his way back to the main room.
Katie didn’t know how the police officer didn’t see her, but she let out a small quiet sigh of relief.
“I’m gonna go call this in, the coroner should be here soon.” Said a light masculine voice. She imagined that it belonged to the man who had just been in the bathroom.
“I’ll go ask around, see if any of the other scumbags in this place heard or saw anything,” growled a deeper gravelly voice.
She heard both of their voices trail off as they left, closing the hotel room door behind them. If she had any chance of escape, it would have to be that moment. She quickly threw the towels off of herself and crawled out of the bathtub, rushing towards the hotel door. As soon as she cleared the bathroom her heart skipped a beat as she came face to face with a small framed woman who was crouched down next to the body. Why hadn’t she heard another person? The woman looked back up at Katie with wide brown eyes that were now the size of saucers. The woman appeared to be just as surprised as Katie. Katie stared at this small unassuming black woman kneeling before her. The woman was wearing a professional outfit. Maybe she was the coroner and the other’s just missed her. Why hadn’t Katie heard her come in?
“OK, honey,” said the woman as she slowly stood up. “I don’t want any trouble, and I don’t think you do either,” she said in a slow, deliberate voice. Her voice sounded sweetly comforting and strangely familiar to Katie, but she couldn’t place where she knew it from.
“I don’t even know what the fuck is going on here,” Katie blurted out suddenly. Everything seemed to come crashing down around her. The terror, fear and confusion of the last few minutes simply collapsed in on her and she started crying hysterically.
“It’s all right, sweetie,” the woman said. “Why don’t you just sit down and we’ll get this all sorted out. I’m Sarah. What’s your name?”
Without hesitation, Katie simply sat down on the bed. “Katie,” she replied weakly.
“Is that what I think it is?” Katie said, shakily pointing at the sheet on the floor.
“I’m sure you already know the answer to that,” Sarah said soothingly.
“Who is it?”
“I think you know the answer to that, too.” Sarah said, looking down gently at Katie.
“I… I can’t remember,” said Katie. “I keep trying, but I just can’t remember.”
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Katie?” Said Sarah, “Maybe it will start coming back to you.”
For some reason, Katie inherently trusted Sarah. She had no idea why, but she felt such a comforting presence in her. Katie didn’t know where to begin, so she started at the beginning. She told Sarah everything. She told her about her confirmation, her lying, and her mother’s betrayal. She told Sarah everything. Through the entire story, Sarah simply sat next to her and listened. When she had finished, Sarah simply reached over and gave Katie a hug. It was the warmest, most fulfilling hug that she had ever had in her life. Katie had spent so long being closed off from everything and everyone, this one single gesture of kindness was like an atom bomb of emotion destroying all the walls that years of desperation and fear had built up. Katie began crying again, unable to hold back the tears.
After Katie began to regain her composure, Sarah looked at her gravely and said “What about the gun, Katie?”
Gun? What gun? Katie rolled the word around in her head as if it was the first time she ever heard it. It was as if Sarah had mentioned a concept that was completely foreign to her. She didn’t know anything about a gun, but at the same time, the mention of the word gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Dim memories began to swim to the surface. Cold steel. The smell of gun oil. A bang. A flash. It was all there. Suddenly Katie knew what lie under the sheet. She knew, but didn’t want to know.
“Katie, honey,” said Sarah, “it’s time.”
Katie kneeled down next to the sheet, a sheet that she now knew wasn’t really there at all. A sheet that only she could remove. She reached out a trembling hand towards the sheet. As she did this, she felt Sarah put a comforting hand on her shoulder.
“Go ahead, Katie.”
Katie grabbed the sheet and pulled it back. It seemed to melt away like fog as she pulled it back. Under the sheet, she saw her own beautiful blue eyes staring back at her. She hardly recognized the ghoul that lay before her. Her long yellow hair was now stringy and brittle like straw. Her once beautiful face was now emaciated and worn. On her forehead, was a small hole where the bullet had entered, ending her life. She suddenly felt a wave of pity for this lost creature, this failed being of the flesh. Katie realized how fragile she really was. She suddenly wanted to hold that little girl in the cathedral tight and give her words of comfort, but it was too late for that now.
“Katie, let’s go home.”
As Katie turned around, the small black woman was no longer there. Instead she was replaced by the pale glowing man that she remembered from her childhood. He too was transformed. He no longer carried the ugly gashes of blood pouring out of rough wounds that had so revolted Katie as a child. She fell into his arms, more exhausted than she had ever been. She didn’t care if this was a drug induced hallucination. She didn’t ask for salvation but it came to her anyway in the form of his all-encompassing embrace. She knew that it was over, this sad failure of a life and in that, she felt comfort. She knew that she was no longer forsaken.
