The Horrors Hiding in Plain Sight
by Rebecca Rowland
Genre: Psychological Horror, Transgressive Dark Fiction, Short Stories
Three adolescent bullies discover that the vicious crime for which they were never charged will haunt them in unimaginably horrific ways; a dominatrix and a bondage fetishist befriend one another as one’s preoccupation grows to consume his life. A man persuades his wife to start a family, but her reluctant pregnancy comes with a dreadful side effect. A substitute teacher’s curiosity about a veteran teacher’s methodology provides her with a lesson she won’t soon forget. An affluent, xenophobic lawyer callously kills two immigrants with her car with seeming impunity; a childless couple plays a sadistic game with a neglected juvenile each Halloween. An abusive father, a dating site predator, a neglected concierge, and an obsessed co-worker: they are all among the residents of Rebecca Rowland’s universe, and they dwell in the everyday realm of crime and punishment tempered with fixation and madness. There are no vampires, zombies, or magical beings here; no, what lurk in this world are even more terrifying. Once you meet them, you will think twice before turning your back on that seemingly innocuous neighbor or coming to the aid of the helpless damsel in the dark parking lot. These monsters don’t lurk under your bed or in the shadows: they are the people you see every day at work, in the supermarket, and in broad daylight. They are the horrors that hide in plain sight, and they will unsettle you more than any supernatural being ever could.
Trigger Warning:
Contains graphic violence (though not continually) including accidental death, murder, and suicide; sexual content, and occasional graphic language. Sexual assault is implied but not described in a graphic nature. No animals are harmed.
Excerpt:
Excerpt
from “Bent” (second story, The Horrors
Hiding in Plain Sight, Rebecca Rowland)
I.
Jesse
Confucius said, “if you choose a career
that you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I didn’t become a nurse
because I like to help people. I didn’t become a nurse because I have an
affinity for keeping cool in hectic situations or because I have a preference
for soft-soled shoes with solid instep support. I became a nurse because it
seemed like the most obvious transition after practically consuming anatomy
books throughout my adolescence. To say that I was fixated would be an
understatement. There were times when I wanted to peel the images from the
glossy pages, drape them over my forearms like perfectly formed crepes, and
carry them daintily to the solace of my bedroom where I could consume them
still warm from the pan.
No, I didn’t enjoy anatomy book drawings
like every other adolescent boy “enjoys” them—as if that isn’t the euphemism of
the year—I mean, their ultimate purpose was by-proxy masturbation material of
course, but not in the way you think. You see, I didn’t use the illustrations to
view naked bodies. I used them to investigate. To formulate. To plan.
Sure, maybe it all stems from that
somewhat traumatic incident when I was about eight and the babysitter was
curled up on the couch, watching The Exorcist on HBO. I needed to pee,
so I crawled out of my bed and crept down the hall in my Ninja Turtle footie
pajamas and did my business. For whatever reason, I chose not to return
straight to bed; instead, I padded further down the hall and tip-toed into the
shag-rugged living room, pitch dark save for the strobing alien glow of the
television. It was just my good fortune that the scene that was playing on the
screen was the one where Ellen Burstyn is trapped in her daughter’s bedroom,
furniture sliding along the floors and blocking the exits, while Linda Blair
hacks away at her hoo-ha with the business end of a crucifix. I froze,
completely transfixed by what was going on. And then Linda’s head turned in a
way I had never seen a head turn. It was as if all of the joints and cartilage
and muscle and bone in her body had melted. In that moment, I realized: there
was nothing keeping a human body from becoming a life-sized Stretch Armstrong.
The funny thing is, the creepy
back-bending spider walk scene wasn’t reintroduced by William Friedkin until
the movie was rereleased in 2000. I can’t fathom what kind of effect that scene
would’ve had on my sexual identity.
After that night, I became obsessed. I
needed to know every detail of the human skeletal and muscular system. I dumped
all of my GI Joes into a big pile on my bedroom floor and spent hours trying to
bend them into yoga poses even the Kama Sutra would frown upon. Zarana and
Zanzibar were my favorites, and looking back now, I can see why: unlike most of
the hero Joes, those villains were half-naked, clothed in what I, a now
rational and somewhat worldly adult, can only describe as “daddy bondage wear.”
Zanzibar, with his swarthy eye patch, midlife crisis ponytail, and brown and
silver codpiece, sported a ripped orange t-shirt like a bizarre fetish club
stripper. Zarana, the decidedly more butch of the two, wore ripped jeans, a
pink halter, and elbow-length leather gloves. The red knee pads draped over the
tops of her boots are a detail crystalized in my memory, one that immediately
came to mind when Samantha, my rich, blonde, dumb-as-rocks girlfriend in high
school, decided to deliver a special present for my sixteenth birthday but
insisted on kneeling on the throw pillows from her parents’ Sunpan Modern
Bugatti grain leather sofa while doing it.
I spent hours, more likely months, of my
tween years trying to bend Zanzibar and Zarana and their merry band of Tom
Savini Sex-Machine-costume inspired action figures into human pretzels. After
my father took me kite flying on Wells Beach one summer, I swiped the spool of
string and repurposed it as fixing rope, manipulating tiny Joe bodies into
contortionist tableaus. After weeks of careful, systematic stretching, I
managed to turn Zanzibar’s head completely around until he was a fortune teller
in Dante’s Inferno, forever doomed to look only behind himself and
tickle his silver skull pendant with the tip of his hair. Unfortunately for
Zarana, though, I became too impatient, and frustrated after weeks of trying to
make her elbows entwine behind her back, she broke in two, her torso spilling a
dried-out black rubber band and her splayed legs held together only by a tiny
metal hook.
Twenty-five years later, I still have her
legs. Sometimes I think about attaching an ornament hook to them and hanging them
somewhere out of sight on the town’s Christmas tree, but that might give the
police a clue to my identity, and it’s best not to be reckless after what I’ve
done lately.
II.
Rebekah
My name means “tied up” in Hebrew. I shit
you not. When I was a kid, a bunch of us looked up our names in my mom’s old
baby book shoved way in the back of the old, musty bookcase. Apparently, it had
been a real party game in the late 1970s, deciding what to name your little
bundle of post-Roe v. Wade joy. When we cracked open the spine, a few dog-eared
pages pulled us right to our brood’s namesakes. My older brother, Matthew? His
name means “Gift of God.” My sister Abigail? “Gives joy.” And my cousin Adam,
his name translates into “Son of the red earth,” whatever the fuck that means.
Rebekah? “Bound.” Restrained. Confined.
The irony kills me.
I didn’t set out to become a dominatrix. I
mean, I know everyone in the sex trade says that, unless they’re lying and/or
coked up so high they’d say just about anything to keep the camera rolling.
When you’re sitting at that worn wooden desk in third grade, tracing the
scratches and graffiti with your finger, all the while cursing the son of a
bitch whose etchings cause your pencil to make holes in your papers because the
surface below isn’t perfectly flat anymore, you don’t daydream about one day,
maybe someday, wearing a latex cat suit and cracking a whip against some
thirty-something-year-old district attorney whose suit jacket shoulder smells a
little like sour milk and Fruity Pebbles. You don’t go shoe shopping with Mom
the summer before you begin junior high and imagine the sales clerk licking the
toe of your brown Candies t-strap loafer. You don’t fantasize about hog-tying
your senior prom date and stuffing him in the trunk of his dad’s Dodge Aries
while you stab your undercooked chicken cordon blue and listen to your best
friend whine about her stiletto heels totally killing her feet.
I mean, maybe you do think about all of
those things. But you don’t make it a career choice. When Mrs. Zahn, my high
school guidance counselor, called me into her office in October of my senior
year to have “the talk”—you know, since I hadn’t expressed any interest in
applying to college, entering the military, or even pursuing a dead-end career
as a Citgo convenience store attendant or IHOP waitress—I had nothing to offer
her, not even a half-assed line of bullshit about wanting to become a
kindergarten teacher or a famous fashion designer. I simply stared at her and
waited out the five minutes of silence that hung between us until the bell rang
for next period.
I loafed around community college for a
few years, even honed a trade working for an engraver part-time to pay my rent.
The place was called “Stanislau’s Personalized Gifts,” and Stan, the
mild-mannered owner with the heavy Polish accent, was patient and taught me
first how to engrave metal plates using a machine. After a few months, I was
using the hand stencils and detailing calligraphy like an ancient stenographer
on papyrus. I even tried my hand at
stone etching a few times and seriously considered going into the tombstone
design business. I still might. It’s an art, transcribing someone’s last
identity onto a marble slab. I dabbled in wood carving a bit, too, and was even
hired to create a set of “special edition” paddles for Pi Beta Phi’s Rush Week;
the sorority liked my work so much that they let me keep one of them
afterwards. I still personalize paddles for wedding shower gifts every now and
then. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Rebecca Rowland is the transgressive dark fiction author of the short story collection The Horrors Hiding in Plain Sight, co-author of the novel Pieces, and curator of the horror anthologies Ghosts, Goblins, Murder, and Madness; Shadowy Natures, and the upcoming The Half That You See and Unburied. Her writing has appeared in venues such as Coffin Bell, Waxing & Waning, and the
WiHM online collections The Ones You Don’t Bring Home to Mama and Final Girls with 20/20 Vision and has been anthologized in collections by Red Room Press, Transmundane Press, Forty-Two Books, Emerald Bay Books, Twisted Wing Productions, Thurston Howl Publications, J. Ellington Ashton Press, and Dark Ink. To surreptitiously stalk her, visit RowlandBooks.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment