WHOOOOOSH. The faucet washes away the marinara-stained dishes in the kitchen sink, spraying beads of water across Julie’s new dress. “God dammit,” she exclaims, as one of the beads is not water but the blood-red sauce itself. She shuts off the faucet and grabs a washcloth, rubbing out the soon-to-be permanent stain.
In the living room sits Samuel, a quiet eight-year-old boy whose eyes are fixed on a television screen projecting Jason and the Argonauts. A few plates sit on the table before them, including a charcuterie board with a large knife for serving. Sam’s father David sits beside his son with a lifeless face. “If I had to punish every blasphemy, I would have no followers,” proclaims Zeus.
“Not again,” Julie sighs as she enters the room. She looks at her husband. “I was in there for two seconds and you let him put this on again?” She stares at him, demanding support, receiving none.
Samuel is an introverted child with very few friends. He is obsessed with the work of Ray Harryhausen and stop-motion cinema, particularly those featuring giant monsters who desecrate small towns. His obsession with the macabre is to the chagrin of his parents who, though encouraging his creativity, found themselves concerned for Sam’s mental well-being. He has become aggressive; more argumentative, and anti-social. When he isn’t watching old movies, he is in his room playing by himself with an amateur stop-motion kit and clay figures that he meticulously manipulates millimeters at a time.
“C’mon, Sam, it’s time to get ready for bed,” Julie states as she grabs the remote. “No,” the boy replies, “I want to watch Jason.” Stop-motion skeletons battle. The sound of clanking metal swords resonates through the room as the figures clumsily chase the protagonist across the screen.
“Sam, we talked about this. No TV after eight o’clock.” She shuts off the television. “If
you brush your teeth, you can stay up another half an hour to play with your puppets for a bit.”
A soft rumble from outside. A storm is coming.
“They’re not puppets!” he shoots back, “They’re armatures. I’m making a monster
movie.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. But it’s time to go.”
“You can’t control me!” he yells.
“I’m your mother, so yes I can,” she replies, with poorly chosen words.
“Come on, buddy, we’ll finish it tomorrow,” Sam’s father finally interjects. Julie shoots
him a disapproving look. She was hoping for words of real support rather than the passive good-cop-bad-cop routine in which Julie is always stuck being the bad cop.
Sam gives up and storms off toward the stairs. Julie turns to her husband. “Seriously?” He looks up at her with a dumbfounded expression. At this point, Julie is able to take a closer look at her husband and sees that his eyes are red and bloodshot. “Oh, okay,” she says. “You’re stoned. Great parenting.”
“What?” he replies with another ambivalent shrug. “It’s not like he knows.” David stands, locking eyes with his wife. “I gotta go take a piss.”
“Look in the mirror while you’re there,” Julie groans back. She takes his spot on the couch and puts her head in her hands.
Upstairs, Samuel slams the door to his room and begins pacing back and forth. The room is covered in dark trinkets and toys. These are not, however, the toys of an average eight-year-old boy. There are stacks of old books from a bygone era, some with titles highlighting monsters, magic, and witchcraft, others about model-making and stop-motion mechanics. Dark sketches and paintings fill the walls of the room. Glorious chaos in a suburban home.
In the center of the room sits Samuel’s armatures: two metal figures half covered in clay. These malleable, unfinished skeletons, imitating the human form with their waxy flesh, are the things of nightmares. A normal child wouldn’t allow them in their bedroom, for fear that they would come alive at night. Sam, on the other hand, is less likely to sleep if they aren’t there looking over him. And how they look over him indeed. The bone structures of the figures are made of metal, but the faces of each contain white teeth and piercing eyes that are forever open. They sit there watching Sam as he huffs across the room, somewhere between a temper tantrum and a panic attack. Poor Sam is at the age where he doesn’t quite know how to handle his emotions when he doesn’t get what he wants. No one understands him and he simply can’t explain it. There is one thing, however, for which he is certain: all his troubles are entirely the fault of his parents.
Samuel plops himself on the ground before his armatures. He wipes a tear from his eye and takes a deep breath. He stares at the figures as they stare back. They truly are the only things that listen to him.
A CRACK of thunder shakes the quiet house. The sun begins to set as raindrops hit the roof of the house. The warm yellow light of an impending storm creeps through the windows. A few flashes of lightning fill the house, causing the overhead light to flicker.
Julie looks to the ceiling with concern.
I’m sure it’s nothing, she thinks as she continues to sip her wine. She reaches forward to grab a large knife resting on the charcuterie board to cut herself a piece of cheese.
In the bathroom not far, her husband gives one last shake. Yellow piss lands on the lowered toilet seat. David flushes without cleaning his mess and meanders to the sink to run the faucet. He splashes water on his face and looks straight into his bloodshot eyes in the mirror. He chuckles at himself: he is, in fact, quite stoned and not hiding it well.
His hazy delight soon stops. David looks closer into his eyes. His finger pulls down the bottom of his eyelid as if hoping it would give him a better look into his being. He realizes that his life has become a shell, burying who he once was deep inside. His life is no longer his life.
But this existential realization of self is more than what it seems. It is deeper.
It is physical.
It is real.
David freezes. The lights flicker again as the clouds continue to rumble outside. He cannot move, paralyzed in the same position, with his finger still pulling at the base of his right eyelid. The faucet of the sink drips in front of him. Drip. Drip. David’s eyes dart around inside his skull. Drip. Drip. Drip. He can’t blink. He can’t do anything. He is trapped within himself.
In the living room, his wife of seven years stares at the knife in her hand. She stares because there is nothing else she can do. Like her husband, Julie can no longer move. She tries to speak but can not move her tongue. Her heart beats faster and faster inside her frozen body.
The world outside spins as the storm grows. The wind howls through the trees. The rain pours faster and faster but inside this house, David and Julie remain stuck in time. A darkness surrounds them.
Up the stairs, however, sits their son, perched on the floor with his legs crossed, staring into the clay eyes of his favorite figures before him. Unlike his parents, Samuel is not paralyzed. Unlike his parents, he is not afraid. Samuel is calm as he looks at the frozen armatures, which are now in new positions not dissimilar to the current poses of his parents down below: one figure stands leaning forward, with its metal arm up to its face, and finger near its eye. The other is in a sitting position with a small toy knife in their hand. Perfectly still.
For David, the real-life stillness is unbearable. His body shakes from the inside. Sweat drips from his forehead. He can barely think. Fuck, what was in that edible? Am I having a stroke? Is this even real?
Then it begins.
David realizes that this is in fact very real and the thing of nightmares or, perhaps, a thing of a child’s imagination…
A perfect line runs down the center of his face, between his eyes and across his nose. The cut is so thin that little blood breaks through. His skin begins to rip down his head like a zipper hidden under a soft fabric. He watches as it happens, unable to do a thing about it. David feels pressure from within his finger pushed into his cheek, just below his eye. But this pressure isn’t from the finger itself. It’s from the bone underneath. Blood drips into the sink in tandem with the droplets of water.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The drips become a flood as David’s own skeleton rips through him like a butterfly bursting out of a cocoon. The white phalanges burst through the tip of his index finger as blood spills through to the surface. The other fingers soon follow, curling out from under the hand, and digging into David’s cheek. The boney hand pulls into the skin, ripping it from the center seam of David’s face.
His skull, now in complete control, pushes forward through the muscle and flesh that once made David who he was. Blood pours into the bathroom sink and floor below. David feels everything as he is ripped apart from the inside. He would scream if he could. He would die if he could.
In the living room, Julie is suffering the same fate as her husband. Unlike him, however, the skeleton trying to escape her body isn’t pushing forward but pulling back. One by one, the vertebrae in Julie’s back poke through the skin. Circles of blood stain the back of her new dress like a string of ruby pearls until her back is entirely red. The marinara stain was nothing compared to this.
The skin of Julie’s face mashes together in a fleshy mess, like a cheap Halloween mask. It stays together before falling to the ground below. Her eyeballs pop from their sockets. Julie’s bones rip through her fat fingers as well, gripping the handle of the knife as the remaining skin falls below. Her skull whips back through the base of her neck as if screaming at the heavens, the jaw cracking in place as it frees itself from its fatty confines. Flashes of lightning and the loud crack of thunder fill the room as the bloody skeleton emerges from within.
The creature stands upright in a dominating position of power and strength. The rest of Julie’s organs fall to the ground on the once-white sofa below: intestines, heart, and lungs now merely a steaming hot pile of organic waste. Fat, skin, and muscle create a new form of primordial soup from which the skeleton has emerged.
The creature takes the knife and slashes at the remaining clothes that hang from the bones. The skeleton’s bones are stitched together by more than bits of cartilage: something not-of-this-world keeps them together. The once-new dress and bloodied clothes fall like wet rags. The remaining skeleton is not a pristine, dry figure seen in a Ray Harryhausen film. Those figures were meant to mimic the bones of a body buried in the earth for decades. Julie’s skeleton is wet and bloody. A fresh, newly birthed creature straight from the depths of hell. A hell that lives within all of us.
Julie’s skeleton examines itself, trying to understand what and how it is. Who controls this creature? Without her flesh, is Julie even there? Is the Ship of Theseus the same ship or something new entirely?
The slow knocking of bone against wood resonates from the back of the room. David’s skeleton enters the hallway from the bathroom. Unlike Julie, his eyeballs remain dangling within the sockets of his skull, still bloodshot from the edible taken earlier. The skeletons face one another, cockeyed and confused. Julie’s bones look toward David’s with just enough memory of their former self to convey annoyance surrounding David’s stoned, bloodshot eyes. Recognizing this reaction, his skeleton responds by reaching into its skull and ripping out his eyes as if to say, “Happy now?” to his former partner. Julie’s skeleton expresses sarcasm as much as a skeleton without vocal cords can.
The skeletons look toward the stairs and up toward their son. Another crash of thunder and lightning knocks out the power inside the house. The skeletons ascend the staircase, leaving trails of blood as they do, their movement knocking loose the remaining bits of flesh that haven’t yet melted away from their bones. Chunks of brain, which were encased in the creature’s skulls, fall out the base of the neck with each strep, splattering onto the stairs below. David’s skeletal foot slips on a piece of the brain as it stumbles forward.
Sam sits in the center of his dark room. The lights are off but his eyes remain fixed on his metal armatures before him. The figures are completely naked now, metal wires without any clay. The sound of strange footsteps makes its way up the stairs. He looks to the door to see the doorknob turn. His face goes white but he can’t look away. His eyes widen at the thought of what could be on the other side. Sam doesn’t have to wait long as his skeleton parents burst through the door. Lightning flashes again, illuminating the wet blood that shines through the darkness.
Sam cowers backward but doesn’t scream. “Mom?” Sam whispers. “Dad? Is that you?”
The skeletons tilt their heads, unsure what to make of the question. They stay at the doorway as they watch Sam stand before them, waiting to see what happens next. He slowly approaches the creatures to take a closer look. He looks at their arms, rib cages, teeth, and even the knife one of them still holds. Sam reaches out to touch it but the skeleton simply looks back. It doesn’t stop him. It doesn’t tell him what to do. It simply waits and listens.
Realizing they won’t stop him, Sam pushes past them into the hall.
He walks down the staircase. He tiptoes around the bloody mess of brains and goo that were once his parents until making it back to the living room. He briefly stops for only a moment as the lights flicker on and power is restored to the house. Once downstairs, he spots the pile of his mother’s organs that are already attracting flies. Sam grabs a nearby blanket and throws it over the messy heap of tissue. The skeletons creep back down the stairs as Sam settles himself on the blood-stained couch. They curiously watch him, contemplating what it all means.
Sam reaches for the remote and turns on the TV. With the click of a few buttons, Jason and the Argonauts flickers on the screen. He increases the volume as the two skeletons lean against the couch with their empty eye sockets fixed on the television.
“Destroy them!” the villain screams as the stop-motion army of skeletons creep toward the protagonist with their swords raised.
A smile appears on Sam’s face as his eyes remain fixed on the screen, his parents standing behind him. It is all he ever wanted.
About the Author
Curtis Matzke is a writer and filmmaker based in Chicago. He was recently published in Filmmaker Magazine and MovieMaker Magazine with essays about his filmmaking process. His work has been recognized at dozens of film festivals, including Athens International, NewFilmmakers LA, Chicago International, and more with his screenplays winning several awards. Curtis was recently mentored by the legendary Werner Herzog on the creation of new projects during a program in the Canary Islands and his latest experimental horror short film, SINK, premiered at the Academy-qualifying Chicago International Film Festival and screened at a dozen festivals since. He recently completed a writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center, Nostos Writing Retreat, and received an honorable mention in the Stowe Story Labs’ Final Draft Fellowship. He holds a B.A. and M.A. in Media Arts and Technology from Michigan State University.
About the Artist
Sammy is an artist and writer in Chicago, IL. Born and raised in Troy, MI, she does freelance work as a creative and is reachable via email sammloree@gmail.com. Updates on her work and commission openings can be found on her Instagram @samloreeart.
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