Saneyah’s Horror Column
Watch Your Step
Image Courtesy of Pexels
Darkness falls early in autumn. Straight-line walk home. Venous sidewalks snaking a path through. Damp and shiny after rain; breeze so cold it makes the autumn-dark leaves, red like lipstick, shake and collapse on themselves. All quiet in the night. Footsteps train to be unobtrusive. Dull roar and then the bright bursting cackle of ecstasy as the bar door opens. Closes again to silence.
Stars above. Jaundiced yellow stars and the hazy brights of a too-big car on a too-small road and the thousands of tiny ants in their apartments, kitchen lights falling out and being swallowed up by darkness. Meek and meager lights, sickly yellow of visceral fat as it bulges out through the dozens of tiny pinpricks in the dark. The night is overstuffed and something has to go.
Keys clatter. Sharp metal jangles as it hits the sidewalk. Now, stoop down to pick it up and miss—the dark, it fractures depth perception—and touch the slimy, wet ground below. Relics of a long-lost rain coughed up by the sewer system. Vulgar isn’t it, the way that steam rises in hot, feathering plumes from the roadside covers. Gleaming eyes in the gutter. A raccoon, like last week. But it blinks slowly and then, at the second jingling—you have them now, the keys, remember this—dashes down like a crossed-out sentence. The clatter of metal as a four-count lead into events ahead. Dull footfalls. Familiar in the way of practice: another person, muffling their body as it moves through dense and heavy air.
Now eyes leave the gutter and blink in the bush. Yellow eyes again—bright yellow this time, the banishing sunlight trapped in the dark—and the sound of claws scraping. Could possibly be a squirrel. Scraping noises can be independent of eyes. But the low, muffled growl of a sedan passing by sounds so like wolves. Sweat causes hair to curl around the nape of the neck. Anticipating. Footfalls behind pick up the pace. Out of step means they don’t care if they’re heard. Faster still, walk faster. The red light turns green and the white crossing sign blinks angry and orange, and a car cuts across the pavement. Slow and finally stall altogether.
Hand touches exposed shoulder. Heavy weight forces a turnaround. Most men don’t know their own strength, or so they like to say. Metal glitters and clinks like wind chimes. Jackrabbit heart drowns out the sound of sorry, I think you dropped your—
Easy to think it in the hot, wet air. Acrid from the gasoline fumes, the thrown-out trash piling up in the alleyways and the dragged-out carcasses left sprawled in the middle of the road. Smell of the city, sharp as always. Like walking inside the belly of a great looming beast.
Strike out,
Writer: Saneyah Khan
Editor: Francesca Jaques
Saneyah Khan is a writer for Strike Magazine GNV. She is prone to strong opinions.
