Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones [Jones, Stephen Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Collection
Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press
Published: 2013-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Your mom’s so young, and she looks at her knees a lot.

She’s a counselor. Her and your dad, in his short shorts with the two stripes on the side like a green racetrack.

Don’t laugh.

They don’t know each other yet, even.

The game your dad used to play with you in your room—it’s nothing bad—it was for the two of you to dress up from the costume box (clowns, pirates, alligator heads) to look at their old pictures from the album. But to see them right you had to look through the frame of the mirror from the hall you’d accidentally broke, that had all the mirror gone now, and the back part as well. Your dad would lean the brown frame up against the wall and then put the picture album down under it, and always be careful to reach around to turn the pages. He said this was how you looked into the past.

So, when you close your eyes to see him and your mom at camp, the sky all golden and dusty every day, it’s like your dad’s sitting there beside you with a pirate patch over his eye.

Looking at the old pictures started when your dog Philip (you chose the name) had to go live with people in the country, so he could run and be free and have a better life.

It was like trading Philip for summer camp. And it was a good trade.

Your mom and dad didn’t take pictures of everything, though.

Because your mom knows you know all the normal parts, she doesn’t go through them this time. They’ve told you all about the archery, about the tire swing into the lake. About how the moose head in the cafeteria was supposed to be haunted, and about how, the last night there was bonfire night, and that that was when your dad first put his arm around your mom, with all those sparks leaking up into the sky, never coming down.

Those are the parts you want, but now there’s more parts.

This time there’s the accident with the arrow. That’s what your mom calls it from the front seat.

Through her eyes or her words, you can’t tell anymore, you see it: the newest counselor, the one who just walked up, hasn’t even checked in yet. He’s behind the big hay targets. Not accidentally shot once, maybe in the eye because that would be deadliest, but shot twelve times, all in the face. From somebody who had to have been standing right over him. Standing on his arms probably.

“His head was a—it was a pincushion,” your mom says all at once, the crying back in her voice. And she tried to lift him up but couldn’t, because he was stuck by the head to the ground.

By the time she pulled everybody back to the archery range, the dead counselor was gone gone gone. Not even any blood.

They counted the arrows and there was one quiverful missing, but nobody took your mom’s screaming seriously. Not even your dad.

Then, next,

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