“Intruder in the Mist” written by John Grey and read by Emma Nakopoulos
Winner of the 2021 Halloween Contest
Darkness holds up its mirror. My harsh reflection Accentuates how much the parting day conceals, But evening, for all its stone-blindness, reveals; The true face within, malevolent complexion Suspended in ebony, a dire confection Of harpy, leech, demon, monster, the grim ordeals Of knowing the beast that I really am. It seals My soul for foulness, predation and infection.
Dank air, gathering mist, nothing to reassure Potential prey, whose unwitting presence completes My nefarious task, my trail interwoven With bat-wing flicker, spider web and serpent spoor As I haunt the coarse bedraggled moonless back streets With evil’s night eye and a foot part-way cloven.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of this story, read by Colby Halterman!
This story is a runner-up in the 2021 Halloween Contest.
I looked up from my Romeo and Juliet annotations. My lips pursed and wiggled around, irritated. “Now I have mixed feelings.”
“About what?” Dad asked from beside me, his eyes on the
road.
“This Queen Mab. She’s…complicated.”
“The best characters are complicated.”
“Yes, I know! But she’s–” I waved my hands around in front
of me. My fingers arched so my hands made mini claws. “She’s not what I wanted
her to be, I guess. Now I’m not so sure she’d be a good fairy godmother for a
future offspring of mine. Mab would have been such a badass middle name, too!”
He chuckled. “You don’t need to worry about any of that yet,
Miss Freshmen.”
“Obviously,” I said in my best Snape impersonation, which
was a pretty bad impersonation. “Because now I have to think of a whole new
fairy godmother and middle name!”
“You don’t even have a partner yet…right?”
I waved a dismissive hand. “Details.”
I looked back down at my homework packet, full of more
Shakespeare and a few discussion questions I hadn’t gotten around to yet. I
could do them after CrossFit, I decided. “Do you know who’s programming the
workout today?”
“It’s Mike’s week.”
“Oh no.” I scrunched up my nose. He always focused too
heavily on one muscle group and made us so
sore the next day.
Dad parked in their driveway, which was slightly elevated
from the rest of the neighborhood’s road. The garage door was open for us, so I
slipped out of the car, grabbing my water bottle and change of clothes.
I left Dad and Mike to discuss board games, beer, disc golf,
and all of the other things they normally talked about. I skipped up the stairs
in the back of the garage and opened the door leading to their living room.
Finding the first floor bathroom, I took off my jean shorts and long-sleeved
blue shirt. I came back out to the garage in my cool exercise garments.
The workout on the white board didn’t look too bad for the
strength portion. Front squats 5×5 was doable–it was the EMOM that involved
wall-sits, running, and box jumps that I was worried about.
In between my second and third set of front squats, I
sprawled on the mushy purple matt. My FitBit said my heart rate was at
eighty-two and dropping, which meant I probably wasn’t pushing myself hard
enough, but I could still feel my heartbeat in my face and chest. I moved my
gaze to the ceiling, but the naked lightbulb made me look at one of the walls
instead. They had never been properly painted so they were covered with white
spots…and now red dots when I blinked. I had probably damaged my retinas a
little by looking at the lightbulb, but a little eye damage had never hurt
anyone. It kind of looked cool, actually, like little flaming fireflies I could
still see when I closed my eyes.
“Poppy!” Dad called. “Your turn, c’mon. Max reps for the
last set.”
“Six or seven good ones,” Mike said.
I got seven, and then they both started teasing me, accusing
me of sandbagging. “You could have gotten eight.” “Too easy.”
I rolled my eyes and they laughed. “Alright, I’m going to
start at wall-sits,” I said, choosing my station. Mike set the timer for forty
seconds on, twenty seconds off. Then hell began.
Towards the end, I was doing box-jumps, and I was falling
behind. I had chosen ten reps as a goal for this station, and the timer was
ticking down. My legs were shaking, and I was losing form on my hip thrust to
get my feet on top of the box. I steeled myself and worked to increase my pace
so I could reach my goal. On rep nine I missed. My right shin collided with the
top of the box, and my leg exploded in sharp pain.
I stopped myself from crying out. This had happened before,
but before I hadn’t hit the box as hard. This time, blood was coming from the
scrape, and it was coming ridiculously fast. The word gushing comes to mind. I
cringed and looked away from it.
The timer went off, and Mike collapsed onto one of the
matts. Dad came in from running and did the same. I went around the box,
careful to angle myself so they didn’t see the blood. I acted like I was just
going to grab a tissue, which I was. I turned from them and wiped the tissue
against my shin, knowing full well they were too exhausted to wonder why I
wasn’t blowing my nose with the tissue I had gone to grab.
Completely forgetting my Red Cross Baby-Sitter training, I
continued to wipe the blood up my leg instead of applying a steady pressure.
That made it look a lot worse than it was.
They got up for our cool down walk, and I kept to myself
behind them where they couldn’t see. The blood was coming out too quickly for
me to wipe all of it in time while I was walking. That caused some blood stains
on my white sock and one of my new baby-blue shoes, but I didn’t particularly
mind that because it would wash out of the sock and give the shoe more
character.
By the time we had gone back to the garage to get our
things, I had given up on keeping them from noticing I’d messed up on the box
jumps and hurt myself. I wasn’t entirely sure why I had tried to keep it from
them in the first place. It was probably a pride thing.
Mike saw it first, and he reminded me to apply pressure. I
felt stupid for not thinking of it sooner. Dad gave me a well-intentioned
lector on the correct form for box jumps. I nodded and smile-grimaced. Like me,
if he couldn’t fix a problem, he focused on making sure it didn’t happen again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’ll be more careful next time.”
Once the bleeding had slowed, I went inside to get changed
back into my red v-neck shirt and jean shorts. Afterward, Dad and I walked to
the car. “My legs feel hollow,” Dad grunted.
“Need Sheetz.”
“I can’t even think of food right now.”
I sat in the passenger seat, taking Dad’s phone and placing
an online order for two spicy chicken quesadillas and a bucket of totz. I let
my mind wander as Dad began to drive. “What about Titania?” I asked. “That
would be a cool middle name, right?”
“Mhm.”
I noticed an interesting tree out the car window. The world
slid past us, but I focused on it, and that seemed to keep it from moving out
of view. It appeared to be pretty healthy. Lively green leaves adorned most of
its branches despite it being almost the middle of autumn. However, all of the
leaves that weren’t green were close to the trunk, and they were all red and
shriveled.
I took my phone out and zoomed in for a photo. That’s when I
noticed a little cobweb nest in one of its right branches. I took a few
pictures, surprisingly none of which happened to be blurry, and then I googled
what kind of bug makes those cobweb nests. The top website said it was probably
caterpillars or mites.
I turned on the shower, the spice from the quesadilla still
tickling my tongue. A tap on my phone screen started the girl in red song “we
fell in love in october.” I was hoping I could manifest that kind of love story
beginning before the month ended. I swayed to the gentle tune while the water
picked up heat, scorching the sweat off of me. The dried blood around my scrape
disappeared under my washcloth. “You will be my girl, my girl, my girl. You
will be my girl,” I whisper-sung with the song.
Once I finished up, I wrapped my shark towel tightly around
my too-long hair and put some Indian-style yoga pants on, leaving my upper half
bare. I went to open my bedroom door, and I saw a crinkled red leaf wedged in
between the bottom of the door and the floor. I pulled it out, eyebrows
furrowed. I held the leaf with one hand, and the other, seemingly of its own
accord, reached for my golden door handle. And my hand turned it.
Inside my bedroom, where my mother’s old rocking chair used
to be, was the tree. This time, though, it had been horizontally stretched so
that the trunk was wider and the branches on the side were longer. The nest had
also grown. Reality warped, and a thin foot came through the nest, as if it
were not made of cobwebs but rather the substance between worlds. A slender,
toned leg slowly formed its way out of nothing through the nest. The leg kept
coming and coming, and soon I could see that it was too long to be human, to be
right.
Another came down beside it. I could see the ends of its
dress, made of a cloth so red it was almost more of a hot pink. And then there
were hips and a waist out of 1800s political cartoons making fun of women for
their usage of corsets. The waist was probably only fourteen inches in its
circumference.
I couldn’t move anything but my eyelids. They had the
ability to widen and keep widening until it felt like they were showing the
area around my eyeballs under the skin. Breasts that would have been comically
large if I wasn’t terrified came through next. At their tips, they were pointed
so sharpy I thought them capable of cutting flesh. The overripe, over-mature
nature of its hips and breasts gave a sense of ancientness to it, despite the
youth radiating around it like a too-thick perfume.
Lastly came the head. Its nose was aristocratic in
intention, but it too was incorrectly proportioned, as were its giant eyes and
nigh microscopic ears. Its red hair was made of waves too long and wide to be
natural; it flowed out from it like a silk cape. Though everything about it
screamed monster, I could feel my lips opening, the reaction to a wild
sensation. This thing was attractive.
My body told me to be both jealous and admiring. A sudden, overwhelming surge
of self-consciousness hit me because I was half-naked in front of its beauty. My eyes welled with tears, and
for the first time in years, I cried in front of another being. “No, no,
please!” I meant to wail at the top of my lungs. It came out as a weak whine. I
gained control over my neck only to shake it back and forth, back and forth.
The world was meant to reset, to correct if I did it fast enough. But the thing
was still there, and it was closing in. Its lips parted. The voice that came
out sounded like what a car-on-car collision would sound like if it were
pleasing to the ear. “Perhaps Titania
would have let you keep your spine, child.”
written by Sarah Henry and read by Emma Nakopoulos
Runner-up in the 2021 Halloween Contest
Last Halloween, a man wearing a Santa costume came to my porch for trick-or-treating. He had a big pack on his shoulder. The timing of his visit surprised me. It wasn’t close to the merry season.
“Happy Halloween!” I greeted him and offered a bar of dark chocolate. “Thanks!” he said. He took down the pack and put the treat away. Rummaging, he located something. It was a snow globe with a winter scene.
“Here’s your gift,” the Santa explained. He handed over the snow globe. The glass piece must have come from a store where Christmas creep had begun. “How nice!” I said, then shook the flakes inside.
He closed the pack. I watched him arrange it neatly on his shoulder. The Santa said, “I must hurry on to distribute gifts at homes while calling out, ‘Merry Christmas! Happy New Year!’” He seemed thrilled by the idea.
“You’re too early,” I said, protesting. “Not for America, the land of malls!” he replied. “Here, we deck the halls with merchandize all through October!” It wasn’t even Thanksgiving; the Santa meant to cancel fall.
We are pleased to present the following two runners-up in our Halloween contest:
“Rushing the Season” written by Sarah Henry and “The Fairy Godmother” written by Brynn Lietuvnikas
And the winner of our Halloween contest is…
“Intruder in the Mist” by John Grey
We will publish “Rushing the Season” on Friday, October 29th and “The Fairy Godmother” on Saturday, October 30th.
We will publish “Intruder in the Mist” on Halloween!
When we publish these pieces, we will also include audio recordings of the pieces. Our theater students are currently working on those recordings.
Additionally, if you would like to see some other students read these pieces for a spooky Halloween event at our college, please check out the Facebook livestream that will begin on WED October 26th at 1:00 pm EST.
Thanks so much to everyone who submitted. There were many fantastic entries.
Please send us more work… we will be reading general submissions again starting in January, but feel free to submit now!!
When I was young, I wasn’t allowed to light
candles.
My father would warn me that the wax
would be too hot or the glowing flame
could burn my fingers; instead, he lit the
wick.
In only a matter of seconds, it would begin to
melt
and I’d sit mesmerized by the delicate drips.
As I grew in age, so did the length of the
drips.
And with them, my connection to those candles
grew warmer, fonder, strong enough to melt
and mold others’ feelings made of wax;
This time I would try to light the wick.
Carefully and cautiously, I’d watch the budding flame.
Brighter, bolder, brasher grew my precious
flame,
as did my protection, fearful that the drips
may extinguish the older, staler glowing wicks
of my more mature, independent candles
with their worn, dingy, lackluster wax;
I didn’t want to see them melt.
For some, it was fate to melt.
Over time, my fading attention killed their
flame.
The fragile, broken and crusted wax
cooled by the chill of my neglect ceased to
drip,
and slowly I lost some of my candles.
No longer viable, I’d swallow my hesitation and extinguish the wick.
Even so, others prevailed; hearty, stubborn
wicks
continued to burn, desperate not to melt.
These are my most cherished candles,
reminding me the value of even the oldest,
weakest flame
It doesn’t matter how long it can drip,
but the quality and integrity of the wax
The hue, shape, or scent of wax
matters not, for the strength lies in the
wick.
Who do you think causes the drips?
Who controls the shape, the speed at which
they melt,
revealing the central flame
of those long-lasting candles?
The wax will always melt;
the wick is left to carry the flame,
and all that remains are the drips in the shape of candles.
Author Bio: Alaina Conaway is a free-spirited, yet outspoken writer who finds solace in the deepest, most profound corners of the universe. Her focus falls on the less digestible, grittier subjects, occasionally turning towards life’s unyielding beauties. In her free time, Alaina can be found throwing pottery, making excellent coffee, and/or blasting music, belting along.
Author Bio: Gretchen Miller is a Therapeutic Art/Life Coach currently residing in Frederick MD. Gretchen received her Bachelors (1993) and Masters (1995) of Fine Art from Rochester Institute of Technology. Gretchen has worked in the Arts and Design Field her entire life. Before moving to MD she had a successful Art Studio in Boston MA specializing in the “Healing Arts for Women and Children”. Her “Pandemic Mandala” work is in the proccess of being published by Amazon Publishing.
Author Bio: Leanne Fortney is a multifaceted artist whose artwork resonates from her soul and illustrates the journey of her life. She is primarily an autodidact artist who creates with a passion brought through her experiences. Her artworks are catalysis that illustrates the connectivity we have with each other through shared empathetic experiences, pain, love, and joy. Her careful consideration of medium, support, and sometimes site specifics are reflected in each piece allowing the entire artwork to encompass the entire story. Leanne’s artwork has been featured at the Shenandoah Valley Art Center, The Maryland Art Place, and The Athenaeum
