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A Small & Scary/Big & Beastly Event horror story

I watch the hole in the man’s forehead be healed by a magic bullet. His brain matter and blood leap off the asphalt and crowd into the crimson gash above his eyes. The bullet departs through the unmarred back of his skull. The man is left unharmed and crouching over a shattered phone, a hammer held aloft in his hand, rage colored in his cheeks. The ruined phone begins to assemble itself on the driveway from chunks of sharp and shiny glass. Bent metal straightening out into sleek and profitable designs, glass knitting together to create a black reflection. The spidering cracks retreat, a web being unspun, creeping under the flat face of a hammer. With each bash of the ball peen, pieces roll closer, attaching themselves into a flawless, recognizable whole. After five strikes, the hammer hovers over a pristine phone. The tool lowers and the phone jumps up into the man’s waiting hand. I see him bring it’s front-facing camera close, one black eye gazing back into his own two blue eyes. The reflection of the phone sits on their wet surface and I stare, watching, seeing.

The phone slips into the man's pocket as he steps backward away from the scene. In the garage, the busted backup camera on the car begins to twitch. When the man’s hammer makes contact with it, it ceases to move, now whole and complete. The door to the kitchen bounces toward his arm and he catches it blindly. He storms into a scene of chaos. His wife is frozen, bent slightly over, face the color of raw meat. The fifteen year old daughter stands with a face of horror, tears being heaved up from off her cheeks to fill already brimming eyes. The refrigerator is damaged; on the counter, a smashed tablet lays amid the wreckage of its screen; on the island, a laptop is strewn mutilated atop a splay of printed photographs; the ruined shells of two smartphones sit glittering on the living room coffee table; and the TV has several impacts pocked across the display like bullet holes. The man continues to back up, bits of plastic skitter toward the fridge. All the shiny pieces fly around, swirling to the hammer as it moves toward the ruined smart display, glitter and plastic rushing in to hide under the blunt head. Each blow of the hammer sucks in more pieces, fits them together until the refrigerator screen displays the time.

The man backs up swiftly to the smashed smart tablet laying by the toaster. Each tap of the hammer vacuums the shards together to restore the screen. He turns to the kitchen island, his hammer fixes the ruined laptop. His wife stands motionless, bent, coffee forgotten on the counter, eyes seeing nothing, one cheek an angry red. The man steps back into the living room, things shifting toward him. Two mangled smartphones gravitate to the hammer, sliding across the coffee table, pulled in by the blunt blackhole. The daughter winces with every blow, her eyes tracking the wave of restoration. The man erases each pockmark on the TV with a touch from his magic tool. I watch, fascinated.

One of the kitchen drawers is open. It shakes slightly, calling the hammer home. The wife stands bent down and away from her husband as he steps back across carpet to tile, placing the tool into the drawer. He whips around, his wife staggers up to meet his open hand with her face. She pushes the hand away with her pale cheek, sending it speeding back into a full draw, coiled snake-like by the man’s shoulder, only to drop to his side. The red has been leached from her cheeks by his vampire hand, leaving it thin and colorless. The daughter is still, sucking tears up into her eyes, each one tracing the snail trails on her face. The three of them stand in the kitchen, unmoving. The splay of photographs on the island begin to slide into each other, hovering about, piling into a stack. They rise up into the man's hand, angelic, ascending as he begins to yell.

Spit flies from unseen places, through the air to collect in his mouth, motes of moisture making a home in his maw as he points, yells, gesticulates, shouts, his open mouth pulling more and more spittle from the air while his wife rises further and further out of herself until she speaks back. Subtle, unobtrusive gestures move her hands, her mouth moves minimally. The daughter is motionless, in shock. The man’s tirade ends. He looks at the photos in his hand. He stares at the bottom photo of the stack, the rest held away in his other hand. Written in silver marker across each photo is a different shiny word. The man stares at the picture from the bottom of the stack, the word “EYE” staring back at him. It is a picture I took from his car's backup camera of him kissing a woman. It is not the woman standing next to him. It is not his wife.

Wife and daughter step subtly closer to view the images with bulging eyes. The man slides down the next image from the front of the stack. It is from a store security camera, the word “BLACK” written in silver across the wife at a glass countertop.

She is buying a gun.

When she sees the picture, her eyes cease to bulge, her face loosening into concern.

The man flips to the next photo. This one is from a phone camera, his fifteen year old daughter’s phone, the word “ONE” scrawled over it, reflecting the light. It is his daughter, unaware her phone is taking her picture, unaware I am watching with my one black eye. Beside her is half of a disinterested boyfriend whom the man has never heard about. Behind her pale blank face is a partially cutoff sign reading “nned Parenthood”. The man looks over at his daughter, her face a spectral mirror of the one in the photo, pale and empty. He looks back to the image, then flips the next one forward.

A glossy print pulled from the desktop webcam at his office, the word “MY” winking silver up at him. It is the man at his desk, a woman standing behind his chair, seductively draped over his shoulders, massaging them. The man quickly flips the next photo down, anger and embarrassment fighting for space in his expression. The penultimate photo features the word “WITH” in silver overtop and the man's wife in color below. The image came from a phone's rear-facing camera, showing her seated lower half. Sitting on her thighs is a pamphlet detailing flight times and destinations.

The man flips the final image down and reads the graphite-colored words “I SPY”. It is a still image screen-grabbed from the front-facing camera of a tablet. It is him and his wife connected physically, cemented together by the frozen frame of a camera, him behind the couch and her sitting on it, immortalizing the moment his fist first made contact with her soft face, melting a crater in her skin and confidence, leaving behind one black eye and a broken spirit.

It was the first time.

She never saw it coming.

They all three stare at the photo for an eternity.

Out of the trashcan flies a manilla paper ball. It arcs smoothly through the air and into the man's extended hand. His fingers begin to massage it open. It uncrumples into a large envelope. The man slides the stack of glossy photos up into the envelope. The daughter scowls. The wife grabs her mug and begins spitting coffee into it. I pause the video and smile. It is even more fun to watch in reverse. I hit play and watch it forwards this time, from the beginning. I never expected things to go so well with that family. It was a high bar to beat. I minimize the video, opening the window of my live feeds. I am watching a woman, waiting for her hidden life to surface, to pull screenshots of her true self. I will see it with my one black eye, the eye that is always open, always on. I wait to capture it on the camera that is always filming, always shooting. So small, that one black eye, yet so vast is its gaze. I watch the woman through her laptop camera and I smile. She is forgetting the most important rule of camera safety: Treat every camera as if it’s loaded.

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Thank you so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed this piece. It was a fun challenge that I have been wanting to tackle for a few weeks and this was the perfect opportunity. There are plenty of other Small and Scary/Big and Beastly stories to read, right here. Go check them out and show some love to Erica Drayton and Garen Marie. Also I felt very honored and cool to have designed the logo for this event and seeing it pop up everywhere was sort surreal.