Happy Horror Month!!!
We finally made it, everyone. We suffered through a very long (at least in my city) summer that kind of overstayed its welcome.
I love October because it gives me a perfectly valid excuse to not shut up about horror for an entire month. Not that I really make a habit out of shutting up about horror the rest of the year, but you know.
October is also something I look forward to because I take a break from writing for the month. It gives me time to plow through some of my endless physical TBR, watch a bunch of scary movies I never have time for, and it feels like a well-deserved breather from the constant self-induced pressure to write often and well. I have it really hard, guys.
So what’s in store for Horror Month at Pen & Sword this year???
This week to start, I’ve got a silly little flash piece to share with you. My goal is to toss you guys right into the spooky and strange. The story was composed as an exercise for my Creative Writing certificate; we were told to re-tell a well-known fairy tale. I decided to try my hand at Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Next week I have a nice little article reviewing the two Suspiria films, so if you haven’t checked them out yet and want to get ahead of the game, this is your notice!
For week three I’ve got a fun little examination of some cool, less well-known cryptids from around the world.
And we’ll close out the month with a discussion on my favorite horror settings! And of course, like last year, my first post of November will be a round-up of everything spooky I read and watched during the month.
I hope you guys will hang out with me all month. This is my favorite time of year, and I love to get into the spirit (heh) as much as I can.
Also, since October is a no-writing month, I won’t be tagging each post for the month with a writing goals update (obviously), so instead, I’ve decided to throw something a little fun at you. I’ll be ending all four October posts with a spooky silly rhyme!
Alright folks, are we ready to get going? I sure am. Let’s light a few candles and get strange.
Porridge
Goldie skips down the path, having already forgotten her main task for the day: deliver her mother’s basket to the sick widow across the bridge.
Instead, Goldie makes her way down the path wondering what sort of fun she might make for herself this day. She gets bored quite quickly but is very inventive when it comes to entertaining herself.
Luckily, Goldie finds something entertaining without even having to bully a sick toad or kick a passing rabbit simply minding his own business: before her, nestled cozily in a copse of trees, is a cottage.
“What luck,” she says to herself with a titter, “I was just beginning to grow hungry!”
Goldie’s wooden shoes clomp down the stones leading up to the cabin’s front door. The home is quite modest, hardly bigger than a garden shed, really, but it is painted a soothing pink with pale yellow trim along the windows and sides. Flower beds bloom below the biggest window, the conversations of busy bees filling Goldie’s head like swishing sand. She grimaces at the noise.
“Keep it down, you bees!” she shouts. “Nobody would tolerate you if not for your honey.”
The bees grow quiet, hurt by her harsh words, which causes Goldie to grin.
“Right, then,” she mutters, and pushes the cottage’s front door open, completely ignoring the little wooden knocker carved to look like a honeycomb.
“Hello,” she calls into the small space. Her voice does not echo; it is absorbed by all the crafts hung up on the walls, which are painted pale yellow, like the trim on the outside of the cottage.
Layers of overlapping macrame hangers, oversize crocheted doilies, knitted tapestries, and hand-tied godseyes pad every inch of every wall.
Goldie sneers: why would anyone waste their time in such a way?
Goldie’s eyes fall onto the hand-crafted dining table by the stove. Upon it sit three wooden bowls, all of them nearly full to the brim with food that shows no sign of going bad.
“Perhaps they’ve only just left,” Goldie says aloud to the gaudy cottage. She does not fear reprisal for her unbidden entry; as the daughter of the Duke, she carries enough power with her name alone to intimidate everyone into allowing her to do as she wishes.
Approaching the meager feast on the table, Goldie leans in and inspects the contents of each bowl. In one, chops of lamb and stewed vegetables still simmer in broth, steam still rising in the stuffy cottage air. She picks up the spoon left inside it and scoops a mouthful, not bothering to blow on it before plunging it into her greedy little mouth.
The stew burns her tongue and tastes gamey, and Goldie chokes, spitting the boiling stew out and all over the wooden table in a mess of barely-chewed meat and soft vegetables.
“Disgusting!” she mutters to the doilies.
She tries the next bowl, which appears to be full of fresh tuna salad dotted with delightful bits of chopped celery and onion. Lifting that spoon to her mouth and tasting, the sides of her mouth turn down. It is much too fishy, and the mayonnaise is too rich for her taste. This she also spits out onto the table, scrubbing at her poor abused tongue with her fingernails.
“Pitiful!” she growls at the macrame, then grows angry with hunger, grabbing the bowl with a grunt and throwing it across the room, where bits of tuna and mayonnaise explode all over a knitted pink cloud pinned to the wall.
Determined to try all the bowls before reverting to the icebox, Goldie then goes to the third bowl, which is much smaller than the first two. Scooping up a bit with its provided spoon, she sniffs the food.
“Hmm. Porridge,” she notes to the godseyes on the walls, then pops the mush into her mouth.
It is delectable. Rich with butter, dosed heavily with sweet brown sugar, and with little strawberries atop it for garnish, it is possibly the best breakfast dish Goldie has ever tasted.
“Mmm!” Goldie smacks her lips with delight. “I must tell Father about these people. I require their porridge for breakfast every day for the rest of my life!”
Goldie eats the entire bowl, even licking the dish clean when all the spoonfuls are gone. With her pink face smeared with bits of porridge, Goldie sighs contentedly, and realizes her eyelids are drooping.
“My, how a good meal can tire one right out! They must have beds here,” she says to the knotted rug on the floor.
The cottage is small, so Goldie has no trouble finding the bedroom. Inside are three beds: one long and with a blue and green quilt, one shorter with a pink quilt with rose appliques, and the shortest with a pale yellow crocheted throw.
Goldie is a big girl, so she pulls back the blue and green quilt on the biggest bed, lowering her overstuffed body onto its mattress.
“Ugh,” Goldie scoffs. The mattress is hard as rocks. She thinks perhaps that is what’s inside.
Throwing the covers off, Goldie stalks over to the next bed, yanking down the pink quilt with its roses. But when she lowers herself down with a groan and a bit of passed wind, she moans again.
“Too soft!” she cries to the quilts, frustrated.
Surely the last bed has to be right for her, she thinks: after all, it was the last bowl of food that suited her best earlier.
Pulling back the pale yellow throw, Goldie exhales with pleasure as she settles onto the short mattress. It is soft enough to be comfortable but not so soft that she sinks to the bedframe, and the blanket smells of lavender and lemongrass.
Inhaling deeply with satisfaction and fullness, Goldie quickly falls asleep.
~~~
When the residents of the cottage arrive back home, having gone to pick berries in the bright spring daylight, Goldie is still deeply asleep in the shortest bed, snoring beneath the yellow throw.
“What’s this?” The father exclaims when he sees their front door ajar.
The residents enter, and the mother clucks her tongue at the mess on the dining table she cut with her own hands. “Such a mess! Who would do this?”
The daughter looks at the tuna salad drying on the knitted pink cloud she made with the help of her mother not a week before, and she begins to weep. “My cloud! How I loved making that piece with you, mother!”
“Someone has been in our home,” the father booms, “and has created a mess of an unforgivable nature.”
“Surely they have not done damage to the bedroom, as well?” the mother asks with little hope in her eyes.
“If anything’s happened to my yellow blankie,” their daughter mumbles through her tears, “I will be so angry!”
Sure enough, when the three residents of the cottage enter the bedroom, they come across quite a sight. The father and mother’s beds are unmade, the blankets made by their own hands crumpled and wadded at the beds’ ends. This is not the worst assault on their security, however: the culprit still lies snoring in their daughter’s bed, getting drool on her special yellow blankie.
“We must punish this intrusion,” the mother says, looking at her husband.
“Yes,” the father rumbles. “She must pay for disrespecting our home.”
~~~
Goldie awakens to the sensation of sudden cold. Her eyes click open to see a mountain of a man, thick with bulging muscles and a snarl on his bearded face, rip the yellow blanket from atop her.
“Hey!” Goldie shouts. “You can’t treat me this way, my father is—”
Goldie does not finish her sentence. The huge man hands the yellow blanket to someone behind him, someone too small for Goldie to see, and then she knows only pain for a time.
~~~
“Don’t worry, dear,” the mother coos to her pouting daughter. “We’ll make another pink cloud together. Tonight. But you must eat your dinner first.”
The father does not interject; he is busy with his dinner. Blood drips down his chin, coats his arms and fingers. The meat squelches between his jaws as he grunts with pleasure.
“Oh, alright,” the daughter says, her tears evaporating at the thought of an evening of knitting with her mother. “I am quite hungry, anyways, since I never got to eat my porridge this morning.”
The daughter picks up her own morsel, blood beginning to run down her delicate, short arms in little rivulets. She bits into the fresh meat, raw and sticky and rich, and groans with delight.
“A terribly naughty little girl,” the mother muses, “But the naughty ones always taste so much better!”
Silly Spooky Rhyme of the Week
I saw blood in the snow on a walk today
And the woods behind my house in which I strolled
Became something more sinister than yesterday.
Reason says that it’s the blood of a successful chase
A wolf pursuing a fox or rabbit until exhaustion
But I knelt down and looked closer at the crimson stain
And thought, hm, you don’t see eyeballs on their own very often.
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