Author’s note: The two sentence horror genre would probably not deny that it is a very low art form. It’s often Guignol, often in bad taste and pure internet. I confess a soft spot for this awful genre that wears its lack of literariness on its sleeve. Some of these micro-stories are childish and pointless as a firecracker, but some are memorable for reasons you can’t quite place your rational finger on. So maybe not so pointless after all. There’s sometimes an overlap with the urban legend. Maybe, like the urban legend, the well-written two liner works on the subconscious and its unresolved issues. How much can you say in only two sentences? Sometimes, surprisingly much. It’s a populist thing and probably powered by the young. I wanted to take a spin in this goofy bumper car for a day, so in honor of October, spook month, here are my original contributions to this light, dark genre.
I was horrified that two people had the bad taste to dress up and do their makeup to look like my dead parents and stand on my front porch, ringing my doorbell over and over, many hours after Trick or Treat ended. And then through the rotting clothes, I noticed the secret tattoo my mother never told anyone about.
*
After popping an Ambien, which always messes me up, I dreamed that I was carving a pumpkin into a jack-o’-lantern. Twenty-three facial plastic surgeries later, I’m almost back to normal.
*
Our children have begged my husband and me for years to tell them the story of how we met. Hubby and I tease them that we’ll tell them someday, when they’re old enough, but how can we tell them that we were using the same dumping ground for our victims.
*
I used to worry about the snakes that kept coming into my house from the crawlspace. Now I worry about the thing they’re fleeing, the thing I saw eating them in the crawlspace the first time I shined my flashlight under there.
*
After receiving that crazy note in my mailbox, “THEY WILL KILL YOU AT EXACTLY MIDNIGHT,” I stayed up until 2 a.m. and then drifted off to sleep, laughing at the stupid prank and my fear. When I woke later in the dark, my digital clock was flashing 12:00 in bright red, over and over, and I realized the power must have gone out and the clock reset itself, at the same time I realized two large figures were in the dark of my bedroom with me.
*
I was friends with a kid named Robbie whose family always spent the winter in Europe, and one year I broke into their empty house to retrieve a game system I accidentally left there. I found these white things in each of their bedrooms, glued to the walls, that looked like the butterfly chrysalis we learned about in science class, but large as a human being, and when I looked closely at the one in Robbie’s room I thought I saw his face under the white fibers, then something screamed in another room, and I ran away, and the house was sold in the spring and I never saw any of them ever again.
*
I was told not to skate on that pond at night, because a kid skating there had fallen through the ice, gotten trapped and drowned many years ago, and they say he looks up at you through the ice and screams. To tell the truth, I think I would prefer the scream to the dark smile he gives me.
*
“The Fingerpaint Killer,” who painted surreal images with the victims’ blood (always smudging so fingerprints could not be captured) on walls, turned out to be a psychotic fourteen-year-old girl. Her mother had told her that no one on earth would ever talk about her paintings, and she had proven her mother wrong, and become one of the most talked-about young artists in America.
*
I feel really creeped out by the stranger in the elevator who always smiles at me for virtually the entire ride. You see, the living aren’t supposed to be able to see us.
*
Roses are red, violets are blue.
Where you are, both feed on you.
*
In the eighteenth century, Farmer LeDoux accused his widow neighbor of witchcraft. She won her case in court and shortly after that his sheep gave birth to calves, his cows gave birth to sheep and his wife delivered a stillborn piglet.
*
I’m happy to see two Mormon missionaries in white, pressed shirts and black trousers standing on my front porch and can’t wait to invite them inside. Sometimes the conversation can get a little stale among the six I already have chained in my basement, but I think all they really need is a little more young blood to liven up the atmosphere down there.
*
I begged mom to let us move out of this small house next to the toxic waste dump, but years later here we still are, and now I even have a little baby brother to babysit. I hate it when he keeps climbing out of his aquarium, and
I have to rush to put him back, because otherwise his gills start to dry up.
*
I used to bang on the walls when the neighbors next door made that disgusting noise when they were having sex, when you could hear both of them groaning and moaning. Then one day I met the single neighbor who lives over there, a Buddhist practitioner of daily meditation actually, who assured me she’s as quiet as a church mouse, and that’s when I realized the sounds were coming from within the walls.
*
Being a geneticist who specializes in recombinant DNA, I think it would have been wrong of me not to use my special expertise to give my children every extra advantage in life and to enhance their ability to protect themselves. However, the school feels somewhat differently, since this is the third my son has stung another student, and this time the venom was nearly fatal.
*
When I began out of nowhere to have perfect, eidetic-memory recall of days from my earliest childhood, I thought it was interesting and I watched these little films play out in my head, and it was like I was living twice. And then the memories started to come from before my birth and the worst memory of all was my conception, in which I watched and felt a billion of my brothers and sisters die in a single night, just sink into an oblivion of darkness like all the stars in a galaxy going out at once.
*
Mom and Dad gave little Dexter a Ouija board for Christmas, because they thought he might be able to contact Grandma. Instead, he contacted Charles Manson and now little Dexter is an orphan who has founded a cult.
*
We swam in the creek and joked about the water monsters waiting just under the surface to kill us, grabbing at each other’s legs underwater and scaring each other. And when we went home that night, one of us was carrying the real monster in his nose, and this brain-eating amoeba took first his senses of smell and taste, and shortly after that his sense of sense itself, and lastly his young life.
*
After dark, the boys and I lie in our beds and tell each other stories to see who can get the best reaction, the biggest scare jumps, out of the others. We miss Charlie, because he had a real way with words, and our Death Row family just isn’t going to be the same without him.
*
“If I have to explain the joke, then I guess it isn’t a very funny joke,” I said from behind the wolf mask in a dismayed tone to the stranger whose home I had just invaded. Then I started up the chainsaw as the punchline.
*
You know that horrible sensation where just as you’re drifting off to sleep, you suddenly feel like you’re falling off a cliff and then suddenly jerk awake? Well, I get that twenty-four hours a day now, even wide awake, but I just can’t tell anybody because, you see, I’m an airline pilot.
*
Vladimir spoke in a tone Donald had never heard before, telling him, “I’m sorry, but in light of recent events and your failure to heed my ‘advice,’ the Trump Kompromat will be global news in exactly one hour.” The first ICBMS were screaming towards Russia within forty minutes.
*
Civilization is a glass floor we all walk upon, and it is composed of very thin glass that barely supports our weight. If you look down through the transparent glass you are walking upon today, you can see people of all ages being loaded onto trains for Auschwitz, a mere Augenblick ago, historically speaking.
*
For a moment, every animal on earth that could look to the skies did so, as the alien craft beamed an energy into the core of their being, raising their intelligence exponentially, making them aware of how they existed only as “product” to one species which had monopolized the planet. The War began in that hour, the war for justice, and perhaps not surprisingly it was the insects which struck the first and most decisive blow, making it clear that humanity’s cruel hegemony was over, and that the eaters were now to be the eaten.
*
The meteor which would have struck the earth with such force as we think only gods can muster was delayed thirty seconds, missed the planet entirely, and continued on into infinite darkness. In Washington, D.C., in 2018, small upright hominids averaging four feet, who only recently developed language, are scattering, their primitive conversations interrupted by the occasional T-Rex chase or a pterosaur swooping down for takeout dinner and finding it, lifting one of their family members into the sky and delivering the screaming man-thing to a waiting nest of hungry kids.
