Anthropology 201

Written by Kitty Sarkozy

College is a crucible. You go in a dumb kid, and with luck, you leave a less dumb adult, ready to take your place in the world. It took me a little longer than the standard four years. I had a job throughout, slowing down the matriculation process. It’s not all books, lectures, and labs – there are life lessons too. In college, you learn, grow, get exposed to new ideas, new cultures, and new people.

Do you remember that story I told you a while back, about that cow, the black Angus that showed up in the barn? How I said it came from somewhere else, kinda crawfishing into our reality. You know all about that. Wait . . . have I told you about that waterfall, up near Forsyth? No? Well remind me sometime. Don’t let me get off-topic. I’m telling you about college and learning to see what’s there, not what you think ought to be. Part of growing up is understanding that you can’t always trust that you know the truth, even when you see it with your own eyes.

Let’s see . . . that semester I think I was taking Anthropology 101, with the most delightful professor – Dr. Tragos. He was short, round, bald, and full of energy. Tragos had a dramatic voice, an energetic way of moving around the room, and a bookshelf full of antiques and specimens he used as props. He told the most exciting stories, making his class feel more like a play than a lecture.

However, you had to pay attention in his class; if not, you could get hit in the face with a human skull. (Continue Reading…)

Reflections on Bloody Mary

By Catherine MacLeod

“Maaa-reee,” my husband taunts. “Oh, Maaa-reee. Come out now, dear. We need to talk.”

Wrong, I think but don’t say. My mother used to say, “A real lady knows when to keep her mouth shut.” It was her favourite piece of advice. When I didn’t follow it, she whispered, “Sh, sh.”

“Mary, you don’t understand.”

Also, wrong. I understand my husband is a liar, a thief, and a joke, and his snug little world just imploded.

My mother would surely have advice for that, too.

I never wanted to follow in her footsteps, but tonight I did, right into a dark bathroom with only one exit. “History repeats itself,” she used to say, and yes, it does.

“Maaa-reee.” Shadows shift under the door as Leonard prowls back and forth. He’s drunk, terrified, and—SLAM!—determined to kick the door in. I might have 10 minutes before he goes full-out Jack Torrance. (Continue Reading…)

The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs

by E. Catherine Tobler

In the predawn dark, Annie found herself in a bed, holding onto another hand beneath the cool weight of the pillow. Floral case, it was the trailer—her trailer—and slowly she came back to herself, to her body, and kissed the folded fingers beneath the pillow before claiming the ringing phone, dreadful thing. The voice on the other end was frantic, offering double pay because the cops needed her—needed her boat, a man had gone missing—Ricky had that charter, didn’t she remember—it had to be her, there was no one else. Triple, she said. She lived plain, but there were always bills.

She dressed in the dark, phantom chill of the lake already clinging to her. Her skin pebbled everywhere and she was surprised when she pulled her hair back into its customary tail that it did not leak lake water across her shoulders.

It was twenty-four minutes from the RV park to the lake, not counting the time she spent hitching the boat trailer to the truck. Years ago they’d told her: don’t stay hitched overnight, anyone could drive away with the whole shebang. She’d never seen it happen, but there was plenty she hadn’t borne witness to that still was in the record of the world.

The sun stayed hidden the whole way there. The roads were barren and she liked them that way, listening to the even breath of tires over asphalt. Dry, smooth. The trailer had a wobble, a squeak, but it would wait until the afternoon—depending how long they kept her out. A man had gone missing.

It wasn’t the first time and surely wouldn’t be the last. She had helped the law before—it was a fine diversion, given how well she knew the lake, its surrounds. Usually people wanted to know where the fish were: rainbow trout, sockeye salmon. A man was many times larger than a fish, but the lake was larger still. Sometimes the lake won. (Continue Reading…)

Think of Me

by Lindsay King-Miller

Sasha and Taylor are fucking and Sasha is thinking about me. She tries to stop, but the harder she tries to push me out of her head, the more space she makes for me there.

She thinks about the way I fucked her –things she still hasn’t worked up the courage to ask Taylor for. Things she could only do with me, because there was never any question who was the more damaged one in our relationship. Taylor is very pretty and college-educated and normal in that all-American tennis-scholarship lesbian kind of way, and Sasha doesn’t want to scare her off, so she thinks about me and the good ways I used to hurt her.

This of course leads to thinking about the bad ways I hurt her, and there are so many of those. She’s rocking her hips to the motion of Taylor’s fingers but the rhythm in her mind is me banging my head against our bedroom wall. An image of my body the way she found it, slumped over in the bathtub, flashes through her head in the moment before she comes. Guilt and grief and rage and shame and lust all at once. She hates it, and I hate it too, but I can’t look away. I don’t even have eyes to close. (Continue Reading…)

Grave-Worms

By Molly Tanzer

The grey flannel suit might have looked masculine on the rack, or on another woman, but the close cut of the cloth, and the way the expensive fabric skimmed over the lines of her straight, slender figure was intensely, wholly feminine. If you saw her from behind, you might have thought she looked frail, or saint-like with her close-cropped hair—but when she turned, the determination that shone brightly from the grey eyes almost lost behind her long black lashes was anything but fragile.

Or innocent. (Continue Reading…)

The Haunter of the Dark

By H.P. Lovecraft

I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge or lustre or name.

—Nemesis.

CAUTIOUS investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but nature has shown herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church of Federal Hill—the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected.

For after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city—a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he—had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.

Among those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and—above all—the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple—the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake’s diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man—a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore—averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.

Between these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it—or thought he saw it—or pretended to see it. Now studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarize the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor. (Continue Reading…)

The Shambler From the Stars

By Robert Bloch

I have nobody but myself to blame for the whole affair. It was my own blundering that precipitated that unforeseen horror upon us both; my own stupidity that caused our downfall. The acknowledgment of my fault does not help us now; my friend is dead, and in order to escape an impinging doom worse than death I must follow him into the darkness. So far I have relied upon the ever-diminishing potency of alcohol and drugs to dull the pangs of memory, but I shall find true peace only in the grave.

Before I go I shall inscribe my story as a warning, lest others make the same mistake and suffer a similar fate. (Continue Reading…)