The Clipper, The Clown, and A Bag of Dark Dirty Things

He offered her a zombie cocktail, the suave motherfucker with his metro accent and his glassy-eyed laissez affair. I sat there and watched like it was a personal affront, burning the celo wrapper on my cigarette pack until it curled up into a blackened waxy ball I could flip at the waitress who’d been ignoring me for almost an hour. There will come a time when the illusion becomes real and you believe everything is grey cheese and fickle brain-eating amoebas warning us about the rat-pig rodent winter coming to a mass murder near you. I could kiss off all the criticism and consumer media, cause this new addiction I got falls just short of ear splitting ecstasy.

She was decked out in x-rated warning labels and firecrackers. She was as deadly as the switchblade strapped to her thigh. It made me jealous the way she toyed with proper Johns as if she were something, something other than what she was once, back in the dust bowl …

It was a season of extremes, seeing her here, a hitchhiker resurrection in hotel gift shop linens.

“New and Improved Ten-in-One Kootch” claimed the gargantuan sign over my head as the barker staked his claim with a red, orange, and white painted banner. We’d had the only show like it, but that was years ago, years best forgotten. I thought I’d seen the last of it, the last of her, but the sexy billboard off the interstate said otherwise. You’d think I would have learned by now that you never see the last of anything. Damn fancy-pants billboard advertisers! How do they know who you are? What you’re looking for? I hadn’t been on the circuit in years. Neither had she. She’d got tired of it all, the cheers and the jeers, the foul subtext, and all the creepy flophouse men. She’d got tired of being applauded with ignorance and vomit, so she made a bid and hit the dirt road in a turnip truck on it’s way to LA.

She’d had work done: liposuction, a little electrolysis, organic foods and herbal supplements. Throw in one silicone implant, a careful tuck, and a whole lot of clean living, and there she was, rubbin’ up against the beautiful people. Her days of walking with the dead were over, history, just a rotten childhood memory best left to the imagination of horror fiction writers and fetish freaks.

She had real style now, all capped teeth, kinky boots, and a shaved ass. She’d hit the majors. I settled farther into the shadows at the back of the room. Smoked my cigarette. I was used to it. The silence. The fear on their faces. No one ever looked directly at me, let alone looked me in the eye, no one except her. I missed her, and I hated the way the men looked at her. She’d finally figured out how much she was worth and had bid the gaffs a fond adieu for good.

She wasn’t just a sideshow anymore, she was an “act.” Things weren’t the same without her. I flipped open my tired old leather satchel. They were all rusty and dull. Everything was, until now. I might grow tired of watching her, someday, but for now, I’ll keep at it until she screams or begs me to stop.

By Cheryl Anne Gardner

http://apocryphaandabstractions.wordpress.com
http://twistedknickerspublications.wordpress.com

The Cursed

She was breathing deeply now as her bones started to crack and she couldn’t help but think this could have all been avoided, somehow, if she wasn’t a lustful creature eager for the fuck.

Cal loved her softly and with tender hands, cradling her breast in his large bed as they watched horror movies and she moaned. Her back would arch and would invite the pleasure that always made her bounce a little higher, her copper mane elegantly tossed in the moment. She was bored and in want of adventure, touring the ashy back alleys that smelled of rotted meat and sour milk, vomit and spilled urine. She longed for dirty needles and the thrill of driving while she could hardly see through blurred intoxication. Prostitutes with rich red lips and torn thigh high stockings, held up with safety pins. The pimps screaming their product advertisements to the gentlemen clientel who drove slow enough, you knew they were looking for tight place for their dick to fit. The tame touches of Cal were none of these temptations.

She left him after that final good-bye in the embrace of shortened sighs. She loved him, yes she did love him like she had never loved any man who ran fingers through her tangled mass of red hair, pulling slightly, but not enough to hurt. The first time she slapped him during their love-making he threw her off, but she jumped back like a ravenous beast determined to dominate. Perhaps the wild creature was always lurking in her shadows, just beneath the surface, the first
layer of epidermis. Cal knew it, she thought, that’s why he tried so persistently to subdue and assure her of safety, but he knew that she didn’t want that. He must have known. So she left. She wrote a note while he slept that expressed her regret at the mode of this dismissal and explained that a face to face good-bye would be too difficult. She took her leave and disappeared into that powdery night.

Something answered her then and there, the instant, it seemed, when her heels clicked down on to the path for lost souls. She was invited in the half-moon light by a man who loomed handsome and cringeworthy. She took the proposition to follow him into maelstrom and the steps of hell paved with all her restless dreams. In a warehouse club with androgynous patrons, suckling each other in a sinister way, they drank real absinthe. Lit the match and sugar, let it fall in the poison, gulp it down. The first desperate kiss was a horror show of mutilation and massacre. They enacted the seven deadly sins upon each other: lusting for the flesh, glutting themselves on feasts of orgy, pridefully denying their enjoyment, greedily satisfying their pleasure crusade, exacting wrath of the fury with violent thrusts and turns, coveting each other’s orgasms, and slothfully wallowing in passion spent. She did not know who he was, the being that ripped her flesh like tissue paper and raped her body with anger and desire, but she allowed him to violate her, with a green cloud of fairies thick in the air, she surrendered.

There was no love. Only torment and abandon. Only fierce threats of unparalleled mayhem and disaster. She was succumbing quickly to the world of drugs and sin, no longer looking in the mirror at her terrorized face. Those lips of hers were spilt at the seams and her eyes black and yellow. Bruises in the shape of finger marks held definition around her throat, and the moon was not yet full. Sleep was a taunting deception, a fickle whore with no sense of accountability. It teased her. When she found herself at its door, almost completely engulfed, the madness began. There were bodies everywhere, disemboweled, missing faces and limbs, throats torn out, blood drained. Demons with yellow eyes feasted on their organs and hissed her name ‘Delilah‘. She woke up screaming every time.

The moon was a swollen belly, he began to change. He inhaled more drugs and fed her as many different varieties as he could find. Delilah would cry every time she heard his heavy motorcycle boots on the stairs. The small room they slept in had a dirty futon mattress on the floor with a single lamp and cupboard bathroom. They went to the warehouse clubs every night, dining on liquor and some kind of rare meat. He would dance to saturated drum and bass beats and lick the face of a fresh girl. She should have noticed what was happening, but she didn’t.

On the night of the pregnant moon, she felt particularly feverish, so much so that when he came home and touched her she didn’t even flinch. He smiled, a rare thing, and said under hot breath, “Tonight baby, you look beautiful tonight. I’m going out, you have to stay in.” She turned over, laying on her stomach and moaned. “Why . . .” But he was gone, a spectre dissolving into foggy themes of blood shed and injection sites. The window of their flat was small but when she looked up that bright orb seared her flesh and she began screaming. Her hands began to stretch into something like grotesque paws, she fell to her knees gasping for air as she felt the skin and tissue tearing and rehealing into an animal form and her body coated itself with dense red fur. Delilah’s snout protruded and her ears pricked; she was a very large, very beautiful and terrifying wolf. She broke down the apartment door and her night of unbridled chaos began.

The man was sitting by a garbage can holding himself close, trying to keep out the desperate cold that was seeping in through the torn overcoat. Something in the night made his hair stand on end and sent a sharp shiver through his bones, it was not the chill air. He smelled her before he saw her. That deep animal musk of wild unnatural desire and woman’s floral perfume, her scent was intoxicating and absolutely frightening. Like smelling a match and gasoline together, you know the fire will burn everything. He attempted to stand but she was in front of him before he’d even moved an inch. Her ivory teeth gleaming sharp in the moonlight, glistening with hungry saliva. She ripped out his throat as he opened it to scream and the blood fell hot on her muzzle. She buried her face in his belly and began to consume the meat of her first kill, swallowing the smaller organs whole, gnawing on the ribcage, tearing the meat off in strips. When there was nothing much left of him she gave a grim howl, the howl none of god’s creature could raise, its mournful treachery was an octave of annihilation. She bounded out for more blood.

Delilah woke up naked in the grass. Her face was caked in dried blood and a half eaten mongrel lay nestled beside her. Confused and scared shitless, she leapt up and began running towards what she imagined was the apartment. Lucky for her they lived in a decrepit neighborhood where a naked woman sprinting at dawn did not catch much attention. She darted up the stairs to their flat and was surprised to see a fresh door in place of the one she somehow remembered tearing down. Turning the handle cautiously while covering her breast with her other hand, she stepped into the dim room. He spun harshly and grabbed her. At first she thought he was going to rip her own throat out with those still sharp-looking teeth but instead he smiled exuberantly. “How was your first night?”
“Wha . .what?” she stammered.
“Any hot kills?”
“Whats . . .going on . .?” she was starting to cry now remembering the man in the alley and several others she’d butchered under the light of the full moon.
“You are like me now. A wolf. A killer.”
“I’m not a killer!” she screamed violently and pushed him off with more force than she knew possible. He flew across the room and his eyes caught a yellow gleam, the black hair falling dangerously in his face. “What is this? How could you do this to me?!”
“Shut up bitch and be grateful I don’t rip your fucking throat out for that little stunt.”
“Tell me what the fuck is happening, what the fuck is this shit Adrian!”
“I didn’t know if you’d actually been infected,” he said with a simmering voice, anger still radiating through the syllables.
“Infected?”
“I knew last night when you looked sick that there was a good chance it had taken, and that you’d become one.”
“One what?” she almost whispered.
“What the fuck do you think?” he spat at her. “Clearly you’re too fucking dumb to understand the gift you now have and the power that comes with it.”
“You’ve turned me into a fucking monster!” she grabbed a dress from the floor and ran out the door.

Delilah sped through the broken glass and hypodermic needles littering the streets of unwanted lovers, and she didn’t care. She thought of Cal and his soft warm hands. Regret. She had thought that was only a word for people with weak souls, but here she was thinking about the impulsive mistake she’d made, wondering how this lunacy had happened. She realized half way through trying to puzzle it out that it must have been their carnal lust, the biting and blood-letting that spread his infection to her body. She looked down at her slender form and felt a solid ache for mundane. This was a sentence, a curse, a lifelong stigma, and she realized she couldn’t even think the word for herself without wincing: werewolf. She was a killer, a predator, an evil fucking bitch. Her normal life, or any hope that she might have had of one day having a normal life was now shattered, like the beer bottles she walked through, shiny amber fragments glittering as the tear drops of her demolished existence. He had done it. He had known what he was when he brought her that night to his sex den. Had he smelled the anxious weakness of a girl still in love but searching for something surreal? He must have, because he picked her out of nothing and led her to this. She hadn’t noticed that she had begun to run hard towards a particular destination. When the door opened he seemed unphased by her appearance and simply opened his arms.

Cal was silent after she told him of the painful life she’d been living, the dreary delinquent warehouse with its drugs and fiend music, Adrian and his wretched curse, her bitter change, the events that followed and the brutal aftermath of learning her future. “I don’t think he’ll come after me,” she ended.
“I’ll kill him,” Cal stated gently.
“I don’t think you can kill him.”
“I can fucking find a way to kill him.”
“Don’t kill him.”
“Why the fuck not?!”
“Because I may need him one day.”
“What the fuck for?”
“To tell me about what I am now.” Cal held his breath, rage filling
his usually placid face.
“We’ll get through this,” he said.
“I can’t ask you to be involved anymore.”
“What?”
“I’m dangerous. I couldn’t live or let myself live if I knew I was responsible for something awful happening to you.”
“You’re not alone D, I’m here and I’m not leaving. Nothing you can say will make me leave you. I don’t care what you are, I don’t care about the mistakes you didn’t know you were making. I will help you and I will keep you safe.” He looked at her with deathly serious and merciful eyes. She fell into his arms and was soothed. Maybe there could be life after this curse after all. If Cal wasn’t going to give up on her, she couldn’t let him down by giving up on herself. Suddenly a frigid breeze swept through the room and she all at once felt his presence, his ever watchful presence: Adrian, that leering face, those yellow eyes. She wouldn’t kill him . . . unless she had to.

By Emily Smith-Miller

Severance

“You’re gonna what?”

“You heard me, you’re not fucking deaf are you?”

She told him she was going to cut off his dick when they finished their meal. He had prepared the steak himself, and when she came over they sat down to eat  and talk about their day. It was like any other day, but when she told him she was going to cut off his dick, everything changed.

“What are you talking about?” he laughed, forking another bite-sized piece of meat and lifting it to his mouth. He halted it when she spoke.

“Just what I said, Tom. I’m going to cut your dick off and there’s no way you’re going to stop me.”

Tom looked at the morsel on his fork, the redness in the middle, the way he liked steak, medium rare with a little blood still in it. He looked up at her and stuck the meat in his mouth and chewed, slowly, his eyes set on hers. She said nothing in return, just stared back; she had finished her plate, so she waited for him to do the same. Then the mayhem would begin.

He finished chewing and set his fork beside his plate, which still had leftover food in it, some corn and mashed potatoes, a couple of still unforked cuts of steak.

“Cynthia,” he said, trying to force a smile but failing, “I don’t know why you’re saying this, I mean, what…are you unhappy about something, was there something I did wrong, I mean…what…tell me what you mean, I really don’t understand what—“

“Tom. Shut the fuck up. Are you done? With your food? Which, by the way, was lousy as fuck. The steak sucks ass just like you do. I ate it all just to be polite, what my mother taught me to do when people invite you over for dinner, even if they’re total assfucks. And yes, Tom, you are a fucking assfuck. Do you understand what I’m saying, Tom? I spent all day thinking about this, believe me. Like, do I really want to cut his dick off? Do I? Does he qualify? Is he material? Like the others were?”

Tom gaped at “the others” – he stared at her and said nothing.

She continued as if she were speaking about a shopping day at the mall. “Really, Tom, there was a moment or two when I thought against it. I was like, well, if I cut off Tom’s dick then he can’t fuck me like he wants, he can’t get that fucking cock inside me anymore and oh my god what would he do then? Because as you know, Tom, that’s why I’m even with you, right? That’s why we’re together. So you can fuck me and make me lousy steak dinners and take me to movies that suck so much fucking ass they smell worse than yours when you shove your cock in my mouth. So yeah, before I came over tonight I decided you were finished. Well, I guess the better phrase would be I was finished. And I am, Tom. Finished. With my lousy fucking meal you so kindly made and with you. It’s time, Tom. Your dick will soon be severed and your blood will match the steak’s. Except of course you have human blood and not that of a cow. But for all practical purposes, Tom, you are a cow. Moo for me. C’mon, Tom, I’m serious! Moo for me! I wanna hear you fucking MOO!”

He couldn’t speak, much less verbalize what she wanted. She grabbed her fork and stabbed his cheek, reaching across the table, which was large enough for two, and stabbed him, the fork tines leaving four marks inches from his left eye. Tom grabbed his face and screamed and she forked his other cheek. She crawled up on the table and grabbed his hair and stabbed the fork in his neck, but not deep enough to cause arterial damage, just enough to make him paralyzed with fear and pain and shock. She knocked him backwards then, pouncing on top of his chest, the fork in her fisted hand, then stabbed his hands as he tried to grab at her. She stabbed hands and arms until he stopped the grabbing then stabbed his chest repeatedly. She tore his shirt open, buttons flung to the side, pinging on the hardwood, and stabbed him some more until he was in a deep enough state of shock that he couldn’t move.

“Tom,” she said, her tone mild, as if speaking to a child. “You should have known I would do this. I guess you’re not very perceptive, are you? All those times I didn’t laugh at your stupid fucking jokes, the way I would sneer at you in response. Yeah, and what about meeting your batshit crazy mother? Huh? Remember that? Yeah, of course you do. How she leered at me when I told her about my life – which she fucking asked me to talk about! – and how she took your side against me when you said I could do better? Um, Tom? What the fuck did you even mean by BETTER? I’ve been doing fine, thank you, so fuck better and fuck you and fuck your fucking mother! Fucking whore bitch cunt!”

Tom was breathing but the pain she had administered still had him rendered speechless, unable to speak intelligible words. He just lay there, his pants coming off by her hands, the bloodied fork beside his right calf, just out of his reach.

She got his pants all the way off and yanked down his boxers, a pair of blue and green striped ones she also abhorred: those colors made her sick for some reason. Maybe they reminded her of the sea, which was the one thing she would never enter. Fuck, even a swimming pool struck fear in her.

She had kept the steak knife she had used when they ate. She grabbed it from a rear jeans pocket and placed the serrated blade against his limp cock, pulling it straight up with the other hand and holding it still as she spoke again.

“Tom. Are you listening, Tom? I know you are, you fucking cunt. You fucking mama’s boy who can do no wrong, even if you killed somebody on the street or some shit. Your mama would take your side on that too, wouldn’t she? Well, I’m really tired of talking, Tom, and even more tired of you.”

She cut into his cock, which caused Tom to jolt and scream. He again tried to grab at her with his forked hands, the pain in them suddenly more excruciating now that he had been thrust into a higher state of consciousness, but she pushed the knife in deeper, sawing the serrated edge back and forth, cutting into the flesh of his cock, her other hand pulling at it harder, stretching it, cutting deeper, blood spurting and oozing onto her hands and his balls, the blade red with his blood, which she smiled at as she kept up the cutting of his cock, until finally, through all his screams and failed grabbing with his flailing hands, all his writhing and kicking with his legs, every attempt to make her stop a miserable and pathetic try, he fell silent and motionless but wasn’t dead. She could see his forked chest rising and falling, rising and falling, his mouth still agape, as if he were listening to her at the table, her words carefully considered and arranged just the right way for her purposes.

She held his dripping cock in her hands, severed as it was, and stood. She shook his cock like a wet rag, draining it until it dripped no more. She wrapped it in some napkins, some of them the ones he had used during the meal. His blood from where it had been still seeped out; his entire groin was a huge red mass. She studied his grimaced face for a moment then turned and walked out, dropping his severed penis in her purse.

When she got home, she prepared his cock with the proper preservative procedures, then opened the safe and counted: Twelve. Eight more to go and I’ll be done.    

By Jeff Callico

Extreme Makeover

I want you to be my surgeon

I want you to cut me open with a bone saw
down the axial plane
and the sagittal
hack into me every fucking which way
cut me wide open and explore my insides

don’t you want to know what makes me tick?
why my blood is thick with vengeance
why my brain is full of sick thoughts about you
and me
and killing people randomly
and where this rage, this wild uncontrollable fury comes from
and how deep it goes
and why I want to take a knife to myself sometimes;
slit and shed my skin like the slimy reptile that I am
stick my fangs into the neck of society
and inject them all with my venom,
poison this useless fuck of a world
that I never understood
and which never understood me

depression and rage are all I seem to be made of
so see if you can trace those wires, Doc;
cut me down to the fucking bone
dissect me and examine me,
find out how I get lit
patch me up with different body parts
put me back together
make me someone new
and wait
for lightning to hit

By Cynthia Ruth Lewis

Perfect

Such a nice girl she was, her favorite black dress with long straps, all that cleavage he liked, especially when she didn’t wear a bra. She told him she dressed just for him, her breasts all his, her sex his to own. And he did own it, just like she wanted him to, sometimes begging for it when he held out.

Sure, they met at a bar. She was a regular there and he had come on business. They hit it off soon and he found himself making arrangements more often, the jet fares adding up, but fuck if he cared. She was fiery and he liked it, how she’d tell him just how she felt about something, anything, and didn’t give a fuck what he thought, even if he disagreed or took offense. “Fuck you,” she’d say, and that would incite him; they’d attack each other with near rage and end up spooning.

She was perfect, he always thought.

Really.

He lost count of the stabs as he plunged the knife in her like a machine that chops up meat. He used her lace red panties to sop up her blood, the smell of it making him want to keep stabbing her, even though there really was nothing left to stab. She was now mangled beyond human recognition. He had stabbed her face, her eyes, her skull, her neck, her chest, her abdomen, her arms and hands and legs and feet – and then had turned her over and stabbed everywhere else that remained, so much virgin flesh ready for his blade. He saved her pussy for last and shoved the knife straight in, just like he imagined that cock she fucked it with so many times, thinking he never knew. Well, he knew. He caught her in the act itself. There was likely more than one cock. The lover was able to escape but he would get him later. She was the culprit, that lying mouth of hers, the same mouth that sucked so much cock behind his back. He slammed the knife in her now worthless cunt and twisted it around, fucking her, scraping inside her and spurting so much blood. Her panties were soaked soon enough. When he finished he filled them with parts of her cut-up flesh. She was now bloodied meat, and her panties, the same ones that fucking lover slid off of her, were just a flesh bag. Her face was horrid; it didn’t look like a face. He couldn’t find that mouth of hers now but just guessed where it had been, then stuffed the filled panties into her skull, part of which was cracked by his raging knife. He stood up and surveyed what he had done to her.

Such a nice girl she was.

By Jeff Callico

Ghosts in Winter

My mouth on yours, like an open wound.
My hands on your face,
My hair falling softly against your skin.
 
Your cock was hard against my hip as our legs tangled together with our whispered words. Words like want, and hungry, and desperate needful love.
“Just touch me … don’t fuck me,” I said to you. “Let me feel the sinew in your flesh,” and your hands slipped into the small of my back. You wanted to feel my lust, your own lust, like you always did, but “I don’t want to feel my lust right now … I just want to feel you.” My hands like the feel of you … the gentle arc of your abdomen and the tight little snarl of pubic hair you keep trimmed just for me. I touch your hipbone ever so slightly with the back of my hand and take your bottom lip into my mouth…
 
“Don’t look at me,” while I adore the you that is your flesh. “It makes me feel starving and weak.” You laugh at me, and I apologize for waxing poetic because it’s a different kind of hunger that consumes me today. A hunger I’d forgotten to appreciate along with the miles of distance in your flesh that I had always overlooked in my haste.
 
I want to know that distance.
 
I want to know the way you breathe, the way you die just a little when you sleep, and the way your hair falls against your forehead when you rise up in ecstasy above me. I want to know what your heart and your liver and your kidneys taste like fresh and warm while your heart is still pumping, and I want to know what the palms of your hands feel like against my cheek when they are slick with your blood and bile. I want you to put your fingers in my mouth. I want to taste you on them, knowing that you were thinking of me when you took the blade and caressed yourself into oblivion.
 
It’s not your cock I want today or your desperate needful love. The want is deeper today, darker, like the copper smell on your breath when you lie to me like you mean no harm when you say the word “fuck.”
 
You say I make you feel wicked. You ARE, wicked, when you worship the flesh of a whore. Your hands on my throat when you say it: “Whore,” and then you make me believe it long enough to deny it. You want me to deny it, to deny you, to pretend I could survive YOU long enough to drain you from my veins. But I can’t…
 
Deny you.
Deny what I am.
 
“Don’t fuck me,” I say again softly into your ear as I wrap my legs around your trembling waist. I just want to press myself into you, until there is nothing left, like the white bones of a ghost, lost and longing, lamenting the transparency of its own flesh.

By Cheryl Anne Gardner

http://apocryphaandabstractions.wordpress.com
http://twistedknickerspublications.wordpress.com

A Bitch of an Itch

When I woke I was missing a finger.  Well, not technically: I knew where it was.  That’s what I get, dating a part-time med student.

Laura and I had been dating about a year.  Her folks knew, mine didn’t – they weren’t interested in hearing I was queer, same as they covered their ears when I mentioned our nudist beach resort, ‘Skin, Sin & Sand”.  She was my ‘friend’ when we paid a visit, and when I went by myself and stayed over, like all good girls she ‘came’ when I called.

But she was what some people term ‘bi-curious’.  Except, that seemed an awfully limiting term for Laura.  She wasn’t just curious about men, and before me she’d had a few, but about everything.  Anything that could go up there, did.  Cucumbers, candles, toothbrushes, sex toys, even a lizard called ‘Joe’.  But it wasn’t enough.

We were committed, together, close as could be.  But the maw between her legs wanted more.  And Laura being Laura, it got it.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a prick?” she’d say on our lazy Sundays to Mondays in bed.  And I’d yawn, or moan, or mumble and agree.  I agreed to anything in bed.  She was that kind of girl.

Then it was our anniversary, and I had one too many drinks.  One or two too many.  But I don’t think she did.

If she had, there wouldn’t be those nice neat stitches on my hand.  A gap between my come-hither finger and commitment ring.  A bulge in my pants.

And as my hand helplessly twitched for its loss, and my crotch beckoned it lower, I wondered…  was a flirty finger worth giving up the beach and its skin-drenched stretches of sand?

Looking at me, licking her lips then mine, I touched her nose with it and figured ‘what the hell’.

Forget about the waxing, let my bush run wild.  A bit of a comb-over, and I could roam free.  On the bright side, for now, I had a finger in my pants and only we knew.  It would come in handy for the next few weeks.

Regrowth’s a bitch of an itch.

By Gill Hoffs

The Carnage Conservatory Crimson Skull Contest

 

WELCOME EVERYONE TO THE CARNAGE CONSERVATORY’S FIRST ANNUAL HALLOWEEN SHORT STORY CONTEST

This Halloween the Carnage Conservatory is going to make your holiday extra bloody with its first time CRIMSON SKULL SHORT STORY CONTEST

Carnage is asking for all horror writers to submit a piece of short horror fiction based around some element of any ghoul’s favorite holiday, HALLOWEEN

THE RULES

  1. Must be 1,000-4,000 words
  2. Submitted between September 15th to October 15th to either Emily Smith-Miller: emilysm737@gmail.com or Jeff Callico: wiredwriter26@gmail.com
  3. Involves some aspect of Halloween
  4. The bloodier the better, Carnage guidelines apply
  5. ALL SUBMISSIONS AFTER THE 15TH OF OCTOBER ARE DISQUALIFIED

 

THE PRIZES

THE WINNER OF THE CRIMSON SKULL CONTEST WILL RECEIVE A $30 AMAZON GIFT CARD AND A GENEROUSLY DONATED $10 GIFT CERTIFICATE TO CARNAGE’S FAVORITE T-SHIRT SHOP

FRIGHT-RAGS

www.fright-rags.com

THE RUNNERS UP

WILL HAVE THEIR FICTION FEATURED ON THE CARNAGE CONSERVATORY WITH FULL PROMOTION OF YOUR BLOG OR PERSONAL WEBSITE

THE WINNER

WILL BE ANNOUNCED ON OCTOBER 20TH

HAPPY HAUNTING MY FLESH EATING FIENDS

A Werewolf for Salomé

she looked out the window
(as she polished a platter)
at the assassin asleep
on the concrete.

she smiled because he was
drugged with a violent pleasure.
an image created for her.
a glimmer of
fear,
and slithery pain
an electric switchblade pointed into her heart.

squirmy squishy sounds:
she took those feelings for her mind.
a pale television set
love out of focus
test pattern drool.

16 years before
vaguely remembered:
the morning they bathed
together in the
iron claw foot tub –
caressed atomic hair
with sighs so liquid.
afterwards he had to leave.

she looked in the water
for the remnants of a beast:
fur, saliva, blood, rabies all were dancing,
all were accounted for:
gentle and quiet he
lay on the pavement
enjoying the licks of the manhattan snow
a quiet shelter for a thought barrier.

her eyes yellow
with pupils black
spit cyanide
down below
his dreams were sliced
and reverberated in crimson.
he walked up the stairs
he knocked on the door
she let him in for
a liquid moon’s slam:
a slippery time zone for
a change for
a reverb.

she cringed at his touch
dropped her veils to the ground
regretting that she was repeating
a past long forgotten –
atomic hair

(spit
black latexm mucous.
screaming
torn split

and vinyl dreams.

dripping moisture
down her long legs
her heels and her hooves

and the leather doors
her fingernails scratching

sighing
a reflex
not touched for so long. never.
again.)

she welcomed him inside
boiling tears swirled out of time
merged
unmerged
with

the sounds and the fangs
fluorescent lights collapsed
then a breath separation
a calliope played
a scalpel for vivisection
gleefully a sacrifice

9 years later:
the shelf held the platter
(a small part of an extensive collection)
a former partner shrouded in gore
a head shocked with lust
eyes returned her gaze blankly

she parted his lips
her tongue traced his teeth
(a tune – twisted fractured)
her blood – acid taste
(that’s what remained).

they washed her dreams away

she paused and whispered
to a crack in the wall
as she sewed his lips tight

the seeds of his image
did a slow dance inside her
a womb out of balance
as she removed her skin – just a covering.

the bride cries often
pale and bleeding
hiding in the shadows
from her maker and her partner.

fractured
eyes

fractured
smiles

final words said
zero to go.

walk.

exhaustion:
heat &
pain sleeping.

we’ll wave and
they’ll wave goodbye

we’ll watch and
they’ll disappear

mental blood-watch
time to go

often watching the eyes
to come back at a later time.

flat clouds crawl across the night.
slow. away. then run quickly.
shadows fast.

moon erases shadows

and
no one here
to say
goodbye.

a case of love
in the atom age

By Peter Marra

www.angelferox.com

Butcher’s Choice

 

Sweat soaked the back of Andy’s T-shirt as he trudged up the garden path towards the barbeque under the blazing June sun. His friend Steve was moving the burgers around with a pair of prongs. Steve was wearing a bizarre plastic apron bearing a pink-naked woman, the meat’s sizzling mingling with the background music and conversation.

‘Ah, Andy,’ he boomed, ‘you’ve brought the good stuff.’ He nodded to the bulky package under Andy’s arm. ‘And I don’t just mean the booze.’

Andy dumped the cans of beer in the big blue water-barrel.

‘Let’s chuck them on, then’ said Steve.

Andy handed over the enormous package. Steve eagerly unwrapped the white greaseproof paper revealing a massive pile of sausages. He lifted up a string of fat red bangers, shining in their skins. He cut off a section and draped them around the burgers on the grille.

‘Perk of the job, isn’t it,’ said Steve. ‘Being a butcher, and all that.’

Andy grinned as he watched the sausages spit and steam. ‘I guess so.’

‘Where’s Dave then,’ asked Steve.

‘Dunno,’ replied Andy. ‘He said he was going to buy some booze. That was at lunchtime, just before I locked up.’

***
‘How long have you been screwing her?’ Andy was furious, purple-faced, a caricature of a florid butcher in his red apron. ‘Fucking her and fucking me?’

‘It’s not like that,’ mumbled Dave, a tall young man with the remnants of acne on a handsome face.

‘Bullshit,’ roared Andy. ‘She packed her bags this morning. Said she had a key to your place.’

Dave looked at the ground. ‘It’s probably best if I go.’ He turned wearily around on the sawdust floor.

Andy swung the cleaver with a grunt, splitting Dave’s skull even as he turned. He fell like a leg of beef dropped from a hook and the cleaver clattered beside him. Blood spilled from the gaping rent in his skull, obscuring the glistening meat hiding inside. Andy froze in horror.What have I done?

He came to his senses, dashing through to the shop counter and the front door. He locked it and turned the sign to ‘Closed’ before pulling down the blind. It was nearly closing time anyway.

Andy acted quickly. He grabbed Dave under the arms and dragged him onto the block, tearing off his clothes. He used the boning knife and cleaver to slice and unpick the joints, dumping the arms and legs into a gore-stained plastic crate. He worked quickly. He was well practiced, after all.

One slice of the knife unzipped the stomach and revealed the steaming offal. This went into another plastic crate. Except the gleaming brown lobe of the liver, which he kept on the block. The tang of blood was thick in his mouth and nostrils, but he was used to it.

It took minutes to slice the steak-red muscles from the thighs and arms, and a few more minutes to take the chest meat from the torso. He tossed them into the mincer with some congealed fat from the cold store and switched on the machine, putting a metal tray underneath the outlet pipe.

Then he chopped up the liver into sections. It felt warm through his gloves, slippery in his hands. By this time, the mincer was churning emptily above a pile of pink mincemeat. Andy poured it into the bath-like sausage machine with the chopped liver, and opened a bag of seasoning. He poured the powder liberally over the meat and offal and tossed in a few scoops of rusks, before switching the sausage mixer on.

He used the bone saw to reduce the arms, legs, ribcage, skull and torso to small pieces, pausing occasionally to wipe the bone-chips from his goggles. This all went into the off-cuts bin, which he dragged into the cold store. The hunks of human were unrecognisable in amongst the other carcass chunks. He made sure the scalp, hands and feet were on the very bottom. It would all be incinerated anyway.

He dumped the organs in the tripe bucket, in the cold store. He would have to burn the organs after dark, as the cattle arrived gutted and quartered. But a pile of guts was harder to identify than an entire body.

Then, he made the sausages. He fixed a metal tube to the sausage machine outlet and fed the crushed, mixed and minced meat mixture through into the skin-casing, twisting it off a few times after every few inches. The glossy red meat shone through the pale skins as they coiled on the metal tray.

Finally, Andy scrubbed the butchery from top to bottom. He was running late and the cleaning was normally down to his assistant Dave. But Dave was clearly not available to help, and was in fact the main contributor to the mess on the gore-flecked table, blood-drenched crates and clotted sawdust floor. Andy switched on the radio and whistled along as he worked. He would be late for the barbeque, but no matter.

He didn’t have time for a shower, but washed himself from head to toe in the small changing room. It was difficult enough to get rid of the meat and fat stench anyway and his friends were used to it. The clothes went into a bin-liner for later disposal. He gathered up the sausages in greaseproof paper, and picked up the cans of beer from the cold store. Then he left to Steve’s barbeque, whistling the tune he had heard on the radio, as he locked up the shop.

***
The spitting of the sausages brought Andy back to reality.

‘How’s it going, anyway,’ asked Steve, handing him an opened beer-can.

‘Not so good,’ replied Andy, rubbing his hand over his balding head. He felt tired. ‘Most of the customers go to the supermarket now. It’s only the old folks who bother with a butcher’s shop anymore. Half of the youngsters nowadays think a burger just jumps off an animal or something.’ He sipped his can of beer.

‘I think these are nearly done,’ said Steve as he poked the sausages. ‘Fancy one?’ He grabbed a couple of buttered buns.

Andy’s breath froze in his lungs. His mouth dried up and fresh sweat trickled down his back.

I’ve no choice, he thought.

He took a swig of beer.

‘Go on then,’ he laughed. ‘I don’t like to mix business with pleasure. I see enough of this down the shop to get sick of it. Slap on plenty of sauce though.’

The first bite was the hardest. It stuck in his gullet before sliding down and his stomach churned in revolt. But he had another gulp of beer and took a second bite. And then another.

‘Where can Dave be,’ mumbled Steve through a mouthful of meat. ‘He’d better get here before these sausages are gone. They’re delicious!’

Andy grabbed a roll and lifted another sausage from the barbeque. ‘I’m sure he’s not far…’ he laughed, as he bit into the roll.

By Iain Paton

http://blackdogstories.wordpress.com/