I Was a Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: S&S/Saga Press
Published: 2024-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

At this point, I’m pretty sure Amber knew what was up with me, more or less.

I was like a nickel in a change sorter, though, just rolling down all those little switchbacks until the final slot swallowed me down, told the world what I was. And Amber had her face pressed right to the clear plastic side of that change sorter, because she didn’t trust it to work this time. Because, if I started to fit through a slot she didn’t want for me, she could tilt the whole contraption, shake it like an Etch A Sketch, save me from my fate.

It wasn’t me she should have been worried about, though.

I’m pretty hard to kill, it turns out.

Example: I’m pretty sure that about five years ago, something sort of evil bloomed in my gut. I didn’t go to the doctor, of course––slashers don’t have health insurance––but I did writhe around on my saggy couch a couple nights, my knees up to my chest, a sort of puley thin bile or vomit or something leaking from my mouth. It eventually tinged pink, then deep, deep red, and I knew this was it, that I was dying at last. Lamesa hadn’t been able to kill me, but this ruptured appendix or colon cancer or liver cirrhosis was finally getting it done.

I’d always imagined that, when the day came for me, I’d try to prolong it. Not so I could hold on for one more drop of life, nothing like that, but so it could hurt more. This would be my chance to feel the littlest bit of what I’d inflicted, right? I could pay for my crimes. Pay in blood, which is really the only currency there is in the world.

This was all well and fine to think, but when my marker finally got called?

I just wanted it to be over, I wanted the pain to please stop, forget what I owed, that didn’t even factor in anymore.

You can think this makes me a bad person, but really, I think this means I’m human.

Mostly.

That second night of writhing, I finally blacked out––mercifully––and when I came to, my face puke-welded to the rough fabric of the couch… the pain was gone.

Lying there in the dark, the sound of nothing stretching out in every direction around me, the yard quiet as the tomb, I probed my gut with my fingers. Lightly at first, then deeper, trying to gouge the pain back to life.

Whatever it was, I’d beaten it.

Because of what I am, I have to think. Because the job I have to do––revenge––trumps any malignant cells. It doesn’t care about burst organs.

Again and again, it props me up, so I can slouch out into the night with purpose, come back holding a severed head by its hair.

Which is another thing I’ve picked up on, over the years: carrying a severed head like that, the head’s probably going to be leaking from the neck, isn’t it? More at first, of course, but still, another drop after twenty yards, then another on down the road.

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