swallowed up the crowed of neighbors, strangers, and relatives who were busily shoving and jostling towards the exit. They fell like dominoes into this latest opening, and I stood there feeling my jaw drop, helplessly aghast at this latest happening. My favorite aunt Meredith was clutching at the edge of the abyss before me, her shrill screams echoing against the roof of the bowling alley. I watch in horror as the acidic fog escaped the pit and melted the flesh off of her grasping knuckles. Liquefied meat and skin slid off the bones and sinew, and soon only a skeletal hand remained, identifiable only by her distinctive turquoise birthstone ring. I felt hot tears gushing from my eyes as I stood there, frozen.
Everyone else with a punk-assed absentee father was frustrated because daddy wouldn’t send child support checks and the kids were in hand-me downs, but not me. No, that wasn’t bad enough for me. Me, I had to have a dad who would melt aunt Meredith like an ice cream cone in a microwave. Who wants a daddy like that?
At last, the screams subsided.
“Let me go!” I yelled, jerking my body ineffectually against the iron grip of the claw. I began kicking against the thing’s knee, but it didn’t do any good. I felt its steely hand begin to forcibly turn me to face it. I twisted my body the other way, but it did no good. Soon, I was looking through bleary eyes at the fuzzy face of what appeared to be a lion’s face with curved antlers.
It starred deeply into my eyes and whispered, “see…”
Suddenly, I was able to see perfectly, as if I had on the world’s best pair of lightweight contact lenses. Why on why did I have to start seeing perfectly when there was nothing to look at except for this horrible mess? Everywhere, I saw the fleshy molten body meats pulsating at the edges of the sinkholes like the bowling alley had just turned into the nastiest pockmarked face you could possibly imagine. Bodily fluids were flying out of the holes like pus from a really nasty zit. I couldn’t help myself. I vomited all over my so-called father.
“All of this will be yours,” he shouted, gesturing with his free hand at the bowling alley wasteland. Now that I could see better, his crinkled face looked less like a cat, and more like some kind of hairless pug dog with twisting horns that looked like that one time when Grandma Louise decided to stop clipping her finger and toenails and they grew out and got all twisted and bent. It really looked like crap, man, her hands and feet were a hot mess, but no one could tell her anything… all brittle and yellowed and broken. This guy’s horns were that skuzzy.
“I don’t want it,” I spat back at him. “You can keep your hell bowling alley.”
That’s when I spotted it. In a corner, untouched by the many sinkholes, there was Goofy Gary from my physical education class, that guy who kept trying to keep up with me when Mr. Fields had us running circles around the track. He was standing on a pool table, trying to avoid the horrible flesh-eating fart juicy smoke.
He grabbed a pool cue off the nearby wall and looked at me and cried out, “Here Minnie! Catch!” I reached up in the air and grabbed the stick. With all of my might, I slammed it through that demon’s big orange cat eye. A horrible stew of blood and pus-like yellow crud came sliding down the pool cue as I forced the stick through his skull and watched it pop out the back of his head.
“Nooooooo!!!!” It screamed as it dropped my body and fell to the floor. As the life oozed from its body, my lousy eyesight began to return. Whatever magic trick it used to improve my vision was fading along with its life. The sinkholes began to shrink, and suck the fog back into the ground with them.
I suppose it was all over. But nothing would ever, ever be the same.
As Gary and I limped out of the bowling alley, we saw the evidence that disaster that had happened not just in the bowling alley. It was all around us. Partially devoured cars protruded from the ground out of spots where the sinkholes used to be.
Gary turned to look at me. It was a serious look, a deep look.
“Let me help you,” he said. “You have a little something on your face.”
I smiled a little. He had something in his hands. He looked so cute as he unfolded my glasses and grinned sheepishly as he slid them across my nose.
“Thank you,” I said. Goofy Gary was kind of cute when you took a good look at him, especially right now, when he was looking so shy and sweet.
“Wait a minute,” I said, snapping my fingers. “I forgot something.”
That was when Gary’s head exploded. I guess I shouldn’t have snapped my fingers just then… when I looked at my hand, where the nasty yellow eye go had touched it, it was kind of bubbling and writhing where the fluids were sinking deep into my flesh. My eyes began to grow bleary, and once again I couldn’t see. I thought it was because I was crying at first, but I was wrong. Finally, I understood that it was my glasses that were making my vision blur – I didn’t need them anymore. And I hated those things.
I took them in my hand, and flung them on the ground and watched as they shattered.
It seemed that my birth father had a present to give me for my sweet sixteen, and he was going to give it to me whether I wanted it or not, no matter what. I looked around at all of the carnage and blood, which was all that remained of my past and the family I knew, and I began to sob in earnest.
That was just an hour ago.
Since then, I’ve managed to pull it together, but let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. A few minutes after I broke my glasses, those horrible baby teeth that my mom got pulled out of my head when I was seven started exploding right back out of my head like they did when I was six. There is no sense in worrying about acne when you have fang-tastic teeth coming out of your face like some horror movie freak.
So what did I tell you? My birthdays suck!
And let me tell you one other thing. I hate bowling.
Originally published as a part of the Wicked Women Writer’s Contest at HorrorAddicts.com
About the Author
The author of three sci-fi/horror novels, “Solitude,” “Warmth”, and “The Moon Cried Blood, and short story anthology “Things That Go Bump In My Head.” Born to African-American and Russian-Jewish parents, she is a native Californian, and has spent most of her adult life in the Bay Area
https://www.sumikosaulson.com
I Am Watching and Waiting
By Ben McInnis
Rhode Island, USA. Vampire Capitol of North America. There is a graveyard in West Greenwich, RI that is called Vampire’s Grave or alternatively Nellie's Grave. I used to frequent this graveyard quite often in my late teens and early 20's. There are a number of legends surrounding this graveyard including drone cars that follow one through the mist and disappear, wild men who run through the woods at the same speed of a car, and the best one, the blood-mark!
One night, some friends and I had made one of our regular excursions to the grave yard. It was a fairly active night. There was a blue green "orb" that hung suspended in front of one of the grave stones, a grave that looked as if it had been unearthed from the inside out, and a shadow that lingered near the back wall of the graveyard. These being normal occurrences, we did not think much of it and left the cemetery after our business was concluded.
As we were driving away, one of the girls who were with us began complaining of a sharp pain in her neck. We checked it out and it just looked like a mosquito bite, so we teased her about it and thought nothing more. Then, as the days and weeks passed, our friend began complaining of dreams where the shadow from the cemetery would stalk her. We teased her some more because she was one of the more excitable members of our group and usually blew things way out of proportion.
When they took her to the hospital because she could not sleep and was wasting away, we started to wonder. We thought back to the night at Vampire's Grave and wondered if the mark on her neck actually was a mosquito bite or was it something more. A few weeks later our friend died. We were all shocked because it happened so suddenly. The day before she seemed to be getting better and then the next day, she was dead. The doctors were dumbfounded. Th
ey had never seen a case of cholera come on so quickly. They continue to investigate to this day, but while we mourned our friend, we didn't really think much of it.
That was before the dreams began. We each began seeing our friend in our dreams. We would be back in the graveyard and at the back wall, instead of the shadow, we would see our friend. She would not move, but would say only one thing..."I am watching and waiting." We all started getting sick and not sleeping. Soon my group of friends began dropping like flies. And every night, in those moments my exhaustion overcame me, I would find myself in the graveyard with the crowd of my friends standing against the back wall. They would not move and all they would say was "I am watching and waiting..." I left Rhode Island and moved to New York and once I left, my condition improved. I have never gone back to Rhode Island, but every now and then, I hear them whisper in my dreams "I am watching and waiting..."
I was walking in Central Park the other night and I saw a mist start to rise. I like to walk at night, so mists coming up suddenly are no big deal. It got really thick, like pea soup, so much that I could not see a foot in front of me. I heard the muffled sound of my feet crunching on gravel even though I had just been walking on tarmac. Suddenly, my foot hit something. I looked down and it was a gravestone. The mist cleared just