Meme by Aaron Starmer

Author:Aaron Starmer [Starmer, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

GRAYSON

It isn’t Gus, I text Meeka.

You sure? she writes back.

Dinner is over and I’m sitting on a wicker chair on our back porch. It’s chilly, but the porch is screened in and this is my favorite time to sit out here. It’s dead quiet and plenty dark. I’ve got my phone in my lap. It’s cold enough that I can see my breath in the glow of the screen, but not so cold that I can’t flip the horseshoe over and over in one of my bare hands.

Dad’s devil story has got me all wound up again. Not sure why—it’s only a legend—and yet something about it seemed personal.

I imagine myself in thirty years, with a teenage son looking all confused about something. Assuming I get through this mess, what sort of story do I tell him? Do I tell him about Cole? About how we hung a horseshoe on our world and drove that devil right the fuck out of here?

Hell no.

But what about in sixty years, when I’m really old and have nothing left to lose. Who knows? Maybe I’ll confess to every bad thing I’ve ever seen or done. Lay it all out there.

For now, what I’ve done stays between me and the rest of them. And the Gus stuff stays, well, only with me.

I don’t respond to Meeka’s text right away. Explaining the whole Gus shakedown would take too long, and besides, I need to get a handle on what exactly is going on. So I plop the horseshoe down on the wicker table and I unlock my phone.

I search for “The Cavalry.”

Tons of hits. There’s a Wikipedia page that talks about horses and the military and all that. There’s a podcast called The Cavalry and I listen to the first minute of it and figure out it’s a dead end; meatheads talking about football doesn’t have shit to do with Cole. There’s some band from Kentucky that’s also called the Cavalry and they play punk bluegrass and their SoundCloud clips aren’t half bad—I might even check them out in the future—but they aren’t what I’m looking for.

Finally, after a few pages of results, I spot a site called TheCavalry.net. I open it.

It’s pretty simple looking, and I recognize it as the same thing Gus showed me. Again, along the top there’s that photo of two guys wearing those stupid horse head masks, trying to look tough. And there’s that tagline:

HORSEMEN OF THE MEMEPIRE

When I was thirteen or fourteen, I might’ve thought this was badass, but now it’s pathetic. What grown person is actually impressed by shit like that?

Cole. That’s who.

I suddenly realize that Cole used to forward me articles and videos from this site all the time. He was always writing shit like this one will melt your face right the fuck off. I never bothered to read any of them. If I’m not even taking the time to read my homework, I’m not about to settle down with some nose-picker’s essay about how he can’t get laid.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.