ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER
SPOOKY SHORT STORYÂ CONTEST STORY SUBMISSIONS October 30, 2019
CONTEST ENTRIES AMANDA SCHREMMER
XUANXUAN CHEN
Of Monsters and Men
Dear Pumpkin
ISABELLE KRIEGER
JAMES BLAIR
Nocturne for Two
The Call
ARIANNA NIMOCKS
CHRISTIAN CRAWFORD
Kiss of Death
The Dog and the Pale Man's Game
ZHIXIAN (ALEX) LI
HELEN HICKS
0:00
Worn Out
DARBY POWER
RYAN GUILLEN
Ghost Stories
Loan
Worn Out Helen Hicks
Loan Ryan Guillen
In the restroom, the woman picks at her loose string. She’s spilled to a couple of apathetic coworkers that she’s falling apart at the seams. They see she’s, well, wobbling: sloppier movements, slurring speech, more reliably unreliable. Her thoughts slip away for hours then she gathers her slack by the skin of her teeth. She molds to her cubicle like liquid takes its container’s shape.
Alex should have asked her friends for money. “That’s what friends are for,” her parents would have said before changing the subject. Her grandfather would have been eager to feel useful again, but he lived off a teacher’s pension and they hadn’t spoken since Easter.
Walking home, she grabs another frayed thread and anxiously tears it from the fabric. In her youth the penalty for damaged clothes would make any parents prohibit their children from trick-or-treating there. Snap! goes that thought through her sagging mind and leaves her hanging by a thread. Her work shoes rub her ankles sore; they look as cheap as they are. She feels the pavement through the worn down rubber, and heaves upwards to counteract her burdensome briefcase that grinds her drooping shoulder down down down–every second closer to concrete and dust particles. If only she could’ve held her first job, could’ve gone to college, could’ve focused in class and could’ve stopped thinking about what happened. If only she could pull herself together. She descends into her studio apartment. Bag, shoes, clothes drip off. Her boneless feet lead her sagging body to the bathroom where she heaves her mass into the tub. Ancient thread-ends sparsely crosshatch over missing skin. She yanks and releases fistfuls of little white strings ‘til she was all her landlord later found: nothing but a full tub of wet sand.
Dusk found Alex in a forgotten parking lot two towns over. The bank had subsumed the strip mall’s other business decades before the recession. The bank fed infrequently now, but still frequently enough that it didn’t need Alex more than she needed it. The lobby’s fluorescent lights hung oily shadows over rows of office workers, pens fused to their hands. The manager looked like he’d hidden a nicotine addiction at work from his spouse for twenty years. Alex sat across from the manager, waiting for him to look up. “What are they working on?” The manager’s yellow fingernails tapped at a keyboard. “T-their fingers are bleeding.” He ignored Alex and handed her some paperwork. She pointed at the repayment amount’s number of zeroes. “Is that yearly?” “Due on the first of every month, miss.” Alex set the paperwork down. “My credit score…you’re not worried if—” The manager offered a professional smile. “Everyone is more valuable than they believe themselves to be, miss.” “O-okay.” The scratch of pens on paper stopped. “Is there a problem, miss?” Alex looked behind her. Dozens of office workers turned in their seats and stared at her. “No,” she said, leaning forward to sign. “Why would I have a problem?”
Nocturne for Two Isabelle Krieger
The Call James Blair
As of recent, Emma would sit in Brendon’s room with the door closed, creating a firm barrier between their world and the rest of the house. Her mother leaned back in the chair and put a cigarette to her lips. The house seemed empty without the sound of saxophone back when Brendon practiced constantly. Now Emma had taken the case that had been collecting dust in the corner and began practicing daily. As the weeks passed by, Emma’s mother noticed a rapid improvement in Emma’s playing. Standing outside the door, her mother opened it a crack and peered inside. Emma sat in a chair and enthusiastically perked up at the sight of her mother.
911 dispatch to Mary Carpain (787-342-0478) at 11:47pm EST on Saturday, November 24, 2016
“Mom! Brendon showed me how to play some new notes. He’s going to teach me Nocturne today! Do you remember it?” “Yes, but he only ever played the first part since none of us could play.” “That’s why he’s going to teach me the second part so I can play with him.” She closed the door with a disconsolate smile plastered on her face and resumed sitting in the chair. A few hours later Emma came running out of Brendon’s room clutching her phone. “Mom, listen to me play the second part!” As she hit play, the sound of two saxophones came through the speaker. Her mother started at the sound and grew pale. The melodious first line sounded just as Brendon had always played it. Brendon had passed away three months prior.
Dispatcher dialogue improperly recorded, unable to transcribe. Calleronly transcript follows: “Hello? Hello?... yes, hi I’m sorry I called but I’m near Polsum and nobody is around and I got scared and I panicked… I don’t know where I am really. I’m surrounded by a bunch of cornfields and it’s very dark… I don’t know why I called I just… I thought I heard things moving in the cornfields, a lot of things and I got scared … no it wasn’t just rustling, It sounded like something coming toward me through the stalks all at once and I panicked but the noise stopped right before the road… no, there’s nothing, there’s only a green streetlight a whiles away down the road… please don’t hang up on me. I swear there was something coming through the stalks… oh my god something just came out oh my god it’s on all fours and it’s twisting up and pale oh my god there are more oh my god… no it’s not an animal I don’t know what it is! Oh my god there’s more they’re all coming out now oh my god… they’re getting bigger they’re standing up oh my god… oh my god they’re changing… their faces are melting oh my god they’re turning into… me oh my god oh my god they look like……………… hi… yes, I’m okay… where are you?”
Kiss of Death Arianna Nimocks
0:00 Zhixian (Alex) Li
“Today we’ll look at the heart,” Professor Vadnya said in her thick accent, once all the students had taken their places in front of a body. The room smelled of death, and all the students’ faces were pale with nausea, but she was... giddy. Vadnya had been promoted to Chair of the Department of Human Anatomy. Maybe that was why.
The tumbling of the tracks grew louder and louder outside her ears. Lamp poles passed the twelve dust-covered windows, lighting and dimming the carriage. Outside she saw the farmers in their torn shirts, shuffling the ground with their pitchforks. Golden hay landed on the windows before the sweeping of a shuddering wind.
Her eyes glinted as she dug her knife into the back of the body. The skin was slightly gray, which she said was "perfect, but extra color makes for a better experience.” Her knife was different than the rest of the students. It had a wooden handle, with a cursive “V.V.#4” carved into the side. She reached her hand in to the large slit. After some digging and sloshing of liquid, an organ the color of rotten meat squished in her hand, with dark red blood dripping down. A student fell to the ground, and the professor’s tongue gently touched her upper lip. The T.A., the one with a full beard who always wore a tight black shirt, inched towards the fallen student every few seconds. Nobody noticed. “The liver,” Professor Vadnya said, in her raspy voice. “This one was over-worked. Too much partying.” She laughed a deep, rattling laugh. “Now look carefully... this will be on your test. The teres ligament here...,” as she pointed, her red nail polish showing through her gloves. She stroked the ligament with her pointer finger. The T.A. slipped something into the mouth of the student on the ground. The T.A.’s eyes were as dead as the eyes of a shark. Nobody noticed.
The muffled speaker announced a station. Her half-closed eyes were sore after rubbing. Slowly she stood up, yawned, and glanced at her watch: 0:00. The numbers struck like the beating of drums. “But the last train ends service at ten.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes again. 0:00. She looked outside when the doors buzzed open. A crescent moon stuck in the clear sky like a sharp sickle. The air was filled with the incense from joss sticks. She went back to her seat. The doors slid open. A silk lantern floated in, tugged by a small, pale hand. In her eyes the carriage appeared longer than before. She counted the number of windows: 14. The shadow sighed and turned. She felt it slipped out of the door and heard the gentle shutting of the carriage door. The sound of something dripping woke her up. It was daytime. In the next station, people rushed into the carriage. Their murmur dimmed out the dripping sound.
The Dog and the Pale Man's Game Christian Crawford
Ghost Stories Darby Power
Untethered, with a rusty chain clanking, and clanking behind it, the dog lept and sunk its teeth into the pale man's left shoulder. Stumbling back into a china cabinet ornately made from cheap wood, the man screamed and screamed into the darkness of the living room. And, woken by the sound of screaming, barking, and splitting flesh and wood, the foot stepping, and stepping of a shotgun wielding mother joined the clamor. Yet the following silence that came as two sets of glinting eyes turned and stared out of the darkness at the stairs, stopped the mother dead in her tracks. Had she known that it was all a misunderstanding, had she known both the dog and the pale man were already dead, had she known they would leave her family alone if she just didn’t join their game, right there and then, she would have stepped, and stepped back up the stairs. Instead, neither her eyes, nor the dogs, nor the pale man’s saw anything through the spray of bullet pieces and human pieces splattering the walls of her living room.
One. My great-aunt is the first person I know who dies. After, I sometimes dream about her. She always disappears just after I realize I’m dreaming, and by the time I turn to ask her what it is like she is already gone. I remember more of her from these dreams than I do from before she died. Two. My grandfather died just after moving to a new house. Sometimes, now, while playing dominoes or watching Jeopardy a door will open of its own accord, and my grandma will greet her late husband by name. Three. After a sleepover, my best friend informs me I talk in my sleep. Last night, she tells me, you sat straight up in bed and looked towards the corner, and said, Someone’s over there. And then you closed your eyes again and laid back down. Four. Sophomore year of college. The girls next door claim to have a ghost opening doors and leaving scratches on them in the night. I never see it, but sometimes after I have seen them both leave for class I hear shuffling and thumps through the wall. Five. When satellites and radios were still new, scientists didn’t know why they picked up static. They eventually accounted for it as ever-present background radiation, cosmic leftovers from the Big Bang. Phantom energies that had always been everywhere, but we hadn’t yet known how to listen for. Ghosts.
“Mama?! Mama!?!” Cried and cried the boy from his room. Two slow sets of stepping, and stepping, replied the pale man and his dog.
Of Monsters and Men Amanda Schremmer “Choose,” the creature said. And because its fangs were poised so close to my neck, I didn’t hesitate. But my freedom was no salvation, for I had to watch the horror unfold across your face as it dragged you away. For the next three nights, your expression haunted my dreams. If you hadn’t stumbled into the living room when you did, I wonder if I would have still been there to tend to your wounds. You were so thin, so pale, throwing up any food I could get you to eat. Yet no matter how much your exhaustion grew, sleep was impossible. You cried in pain when the sun touched your skin and screamed when those tears turned to blood. Eventually your condition became stable. You could leave the house as long as you thought I was asleep. Still that smile never returned, so I searched far and wide for someone who could help you. I thought the dark-haired man might hold the key until he took me aside and held out a silver bullet in one hand and a wooden stake in the other. “Choose,” the hunter said. I decided by leaning forward and ripping his throat out. I brought the corpse home. I re-purposed his warnings to teach you how to feed. If one of us is a monster, then it’s me for letting you become this. But I’ll bear that burden with pride so long as I can shield you from any further harm.
Dear Pumpkin Xuanxuan Chen Your own vines hanged you. The picker smothered you. When the vendor displayed you in the lethargic market, you were crushed under your siblings. You spent all your life, suffering and waiting. Here I came. I woke you with a gentle cut which unveiled your pale heart. “Rise and shine.” I murmured. My knife shed your coat, revealing your scarred beauty. You are open. You are blossoming. I am caressing you with tears of joy. I will never apologize. You should say thank you.