Tiffany Michelle Brown
My siblings and I lounge in the dank basement of the house on Sandstone Lane, awaiting our cue.
Malice sits on the rickety staircase. She laces up her tatty combat boots—the third time tonight, ever tighter—then applies a fresh coat of black lacquer to her talons.
Sadness is curled up in the corner, naked and shivering, their back to us. Whatever executive function they possess, which is never much, is spent weeping. If you get close, you can see a puddle of opalescent tears slowly accruing around them.
Discovery sits in the middle of the room, his spindly legs folded beneath him, a perpetual grimace on his face, as if someone lodged chunks of bleu cheese in his nostrils, and he’s doomed to forever smell brine and funk.
I pull an enormous sweater over my small frame, hoping that just this once, I’ll never emerge. Swallowed up in yarn. Nothing to do but hide away.
I’m disappointed when I re-materialize through the head hole, but honestly, why do I get my hopes up? Nothing new happens here. Night after night, the same succession of events. The same goal that is never realized, because humans are dense and too fearful of what they don’t immediately understand.
Malice is pacing now, ready to go. To earn a reaction. Bathe in screams the way stage actors soak up applause. She likes her job. Continues to believe in its importance.
The ancient grandfather clock on the second floor tolls, a mournful sob in the dark. We line up in our predetermined order—Malice, Discovery, Sadness (who I had to drag out of the corner, per usual), and me, Guilt.
Malice leaps up the stairs, kicks open the door, and runs through the house with the energy of a banshee. She’ll paint her face in fake blood and wake our sleeping tenants with an ear-piercing wail. Terrify them to their marrow. She always opens the show. Need to start strong, as they say.
When the screaming begins, Discovery plods up the stairs. He’ll stare at the residents with such intensity they’ll swear their skin is sloughing off, a layer at a time, beneath his barbed-wire gaze. He is the reckoning. He helps the occupants understand that they’ve disturbed the memory. Broken the heart of the house. Helped her remember all she carries. And in doing so, the memory, the heartache, the horror has become their own. They are a part of the story now, and they should learn all they can about it.
Sadness will pool at their feet. Grasp onto their ankles, impeding their movement. They require you to sit through monologue after sorrowful monologue. You learn more than you’ve ever wanted to know about casual cruelty and the experiences of victims and everything that gets left behind. They make the official plea, ask the humans to stay, to help. The only way the sorrow of the house can be healed is through intervention.
I’m last, the closing act. The audience never actually sees me, but I’m with them every step. I hitch a ride on their backs, fusing to their frames, making their shoulders hunch. When they approach a door and think about leaving, I whisper in their ears. How can they abandon the house and its history? How can they willfully leave the souls trapped here? I sit heavy in their gut like too much honey.
But humans are selfish creatures. They overwhelm easily. Though I twist myself into tendrils of probing persuasion, infiltrate the humans’ corps, they always choose to save themselves. I’ve grown used to watching humans run away, legs pumping, feral emotions imbuing them with preternatural speed.
Each night, I descend the steps and deliver the news. Malice makes a big show of punching a wall. She can’t so much as dent the plaster, but she must derive some kind of release from the action since she keeps doing it. Sorrow’s wails grow in fervor. Some nights, they flood the basement with tears. Discovery sulks, and his grimace opens wider still, resembling a dried-up riverbed.
I shrug out of my oversized sweater and take up my post at the tiny, cobwebbed window.
I watch, and I hope. Surely, someday a human will feel a stinging sensation in their chest, a little piece of me that lodged close enough to their heart and inspired them to care. They’ll return to help us escape this wretched suburban nightmare.
And when that happens, instead of preparing for the same tired performance, we’ll finally get to move on to a new script.
Jnnuary 26th 2024
Tiffany Michelle Brown is a California-based writer who once had a conversation with a ghost over a pumpkin beer. She is the author of How Lovely To Be a Woman: Stories and Poems and co-host of the Horror in the Margins podcast. Her fiction and poetry has been featured in publications by Black Spot Books, Dread Stone Press, Death Knell Press, Hungry Shadow Press, and the NoSleep Podcast. Tiffany lives near the beach with her husband Bryan, their pup Zen, and their combined collections of books, board games, and general geekery.
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Wyldblood 14
Wyldblood 14 is available now
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Nine great new short stories and two drabbles in a fine new collection from Wyldblood. #14 is packed with science fiction and fantasy from imagined worlds to gritty reality a clutch of adventurous, thought provoking and sometimes sligtly unsettling tales which should give you plenty to read though the long winter nights. Available in print and digital formats.
From the Depths
Our latest anthology is packed with tales of the murky deep. We’ve got fifteen stories stuffed with selkies and sea monsters, pirates and meremaids, intrigue, adventure and more. Available in print and digitally.
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