The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World Read Free Page A

sandbox in the schoolyard is picked up and blown off in a magnificent wind that scrapes paint from the cars it crosses over. Soccer balls and bicycles and baby dolls are wriggled away from their resting places, redeposited at the phenomenon’s whims. Countertop fryers dance until they drop on linoleum, spilling their rancid grease in pools that ooze slowly with bits of caramelized flour shimmying in the thickness. Lipsticks melt, pools of maroon and crimson emerge at the base of their black containers. Pianos and guitars and violins and cellos and violas in the orchestra room of the high school emit all their notes in unison. The cooler doors of the convenience store spill open under the weight of the toppled beverages they contain, and Gatorades and Coca-Colas and Pepsis and chocolate milks and Budweisers fumble out into the aisles, the glass containers cracking and rivers of beer and soda flood across the tile floor, down the grout lines. Coins rattle in car ashtrays. Keys jingle where they sit. Books fall from shelves. Coats limp from their hangers in the closets. The pilot lights in all the ovens extinguish. Old ladies lose their wigs, contact lenses. Dentures drop from their mouths. Babies shit themselves. Then the words. Carried on the screams. Thick as cement. “Where are my children?”

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    There is a legend, and it varies in telling. Some say it’s 500 years old, others, less than 100. It centers on this: a woman is left by a man.
    Is it Malinche, Cortez’s translator and concubine? Is it a peasant who fell in love over lies? Either way, there are children. Most say two, and most say this: The woman is deceived, destroyed, heartbroken.
    The man desires the companionship and matrimony of one closer to his station, one of his own race, nationality.
    Once content to confine his time with the mother of his children, the lowly status of her lineage grows troublesome to him, and their current proximity to poverty, while once poetic, romantic, intoxicating in its reality, becomes laborious, repulsive, complicated and terrifying.
    Could it be catching, the squalor? If you mix yourself into that cocktail of ill-repute, can you come clean of its contents and rise to your rightful spot in society?
    First, there is love.
    Let’s say the couple occupies themselves in the sunshine of the world, clipping flowers that they dry by hanging upside down in front of open windows—the perfume of their drying, soporific and warm.
    There is no music, but alas they are dancing.
    Draped in quilts of lavender-dyed cotton, the man and woman read fairytales to their children—cautionary things that expound on the positive results of behaving with virtue, dust-flavored stories where witches drown and spoiled princes are punished.
    But it’s terrifying to turn your back on your training, and in these moments the man is bungled by internal whispers that revoke his current joys and manifest self-doubt.
    The man’s protocol, preached to him since birth, is this: Find a woman of strong history, pleasing form and well-postured behaviors, woo her, win her, and have her bear you children. Endow these children with your knowledge. Bless them with your name. Gift them with inheritances. And pray that your line endures strong for eternity.
    To the woman chosen, this notion is lost. To her, you seek love. She can’t conceive the trepidation mounting in her husband’s heart every time her family appears dressed in tattered clothing, playing music on botched instruments with broken strings, drinking until they forget their own language.
    She is prideful in the strength of her own charms. She believes the warmth of her affections are celestial-sent, predetermined by heavens. In her mind and soul, the matrimony she’s engaged in is somehow woven into the fabric of the galaxy and her husband’s eyes see beyond her flaws because love allows for every kind of