PRAISE FOR “SPLIT SCREAM VOLUME TWO”

  “SPLIT SCREAM has something for everyone. Gómez offers a haunting of bleak hopes and grim specters, where every sentence breathes a fresh ghost story. Lopes da Silva scratches another itch with their fast-paced conflict of demanding modern milieu and gut-churning body horror. An entrancing duet of nightmare.”

  —Hailey Piper, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth

  “The combined stories are a beautifully organic Latinx experience. Both are very different in writing style and storyline, however, each kept me wanting more. Cynthia Gomez does a fantastic job with the tale of La Llorona. I loved everything from the characters to the development of the mythology. Fresh takes on oral tradition are a must read for me. M. Lopes da Silva slides into your imagination like a French kiss. This story is delicious and terrifying as it takes you to literal depths you won’t expect! And yes to more non-binary writers and characters in horror. Great duo of stories I hope you will check out.”

  —V. Castro, author of The Queen of The Cicadas and Goddess of Filth

  PRAISE FOR “THE SHIVERING WORLD” by CYNTHIA GÓMEZ

  “The Shivering World empathizes with people pushed to the margins and left with little choice but to lash out. Exploring the monstrosity of both humans and supernatural beings, Gómez fills every page with a quiet, aching dread.”

  —Eric Raglin, author of Extinction Hymns

  PRAISE FOR “WHAT ATE THE ANGELS” by M. LOPES DA SILVA

  “In What Ate the Angels, the physically toxic and romantically toxic collide. Lopes da Silva’s bizarre body horror story is at once grotesque and tender in its exploration of messy queer love.”

  —Eric Raglin, author of Extinction Hymns

  Volume Two

  Featuring:

  Cynthia Gómez

  &

  M. Lopes da Silva

  SPLIT SCREAM

  Volume Two

  © 2022 by Dread Stone Press

  Cover illustrations by Evangeline Gallagher

  Interior illustrations by C. Paul Ramey

  Cover & interior design by Dreadful Designs

  The Shivering World © 2022 by Cynthia Gómez

  What Ate the Angels © 2022 by M. Lopes da Silva

  No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, scanning, recording, broadcast or live performance, or duplication by any information storage or retrieval system without permission, except for the inclusion of brief quotations with attribution in a review or report. Requests for reproductions or related information should be addressed to Dread Stone Press at dreadstonepress@gmail.com

  All rights reserved. The stories within this anthology are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.

  Dread Stone Press

  dreadstonepress.com

  First Edition: November 2022

  ISBN: 978-1-7379740-4-8 / Paperback Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-7379740-5-5/ eBook Edition

  For the love of horror, and all you weird ones.

  INTRODUCTION

  The novelette has been dismissed and disparaged. Some dictionaries don’t even define them as a unique form, listing only short stories, novellas, or novels. Others write them off as being “too sentimental” or “trivial”.

  This is silly, of course, and, with little effort it’s easy to see the novelette has a purpose and value.

  What makes a novelette, then? Exact word counts vary, but these stories are longer than a short story and shorter than a novella. Entertainment consumable in about an hour or two.

  Sound like another form of easily digestible entertainment?

  I’m not saying a novelette is a movie is a novelette. And I’m not saying written fiction needs to be like movies. But… But they are kind of like movies, right? If you’re willing to accept that premise, at least for the moment, may I present to you…

  SPLIT SCREAM

  A Novelette Double Feature

  Truly, what better way to present these stories than as a double feature? Do you have to read them back to back in a single Friday night after dusk? Certainly not. But could you? Absolutely.

  So, what do you say?

  You’ll first find yourself in a world of poverty and gentrification in Cynthia Gómez’s “The Shivering World.” There’s hope, though, provided you’re willing to accept the supernatural and make a sacrifice or two—La Llorona has a way of being convincing. Then, let the oily goop of underground L.A. seep into your brain, courtesy of M. Lopes da Silva’s “What Ate the Angels.” But it’s not just body horror; there’s love there, too.

  Well, are you ready? Grab some popcorn, turn the lights low, and don’t be afraid to scream.

  This is Volume Two of the Split Scream series. If you read Volume One, my heartfelt thanks to you for coming back. If not, I do hope you enjoy, and that you seek out more.

  Long live the novelette!

  Alex Ebenstein

  Dread Stone Press

  Michigan, USA

  September 2022

  Contents

  The Shivering World

  Cynthia Gómez

  What Ate the Angels

  M. Lopes da Silva

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ABOUT THE ARTISTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The Shivering World

  Cynthia Gómez

  I.

  The signs were falling off the trees around the house Nayeli hated. SE BUSCA, they read, and some also read MISSING. Messages scrawled in the margins: te queremos; please come home. Dates reaching back two years, seven months, four months; grainy pictures faded from the sun. One man had an American flag tattooed on his shoulder, at his belt buckle the Mexican flag. Some of them were undocumented, her Uncle César pointed out as he showed her family around, so they probably just went home. That explanation made little sense to Nayeli, but by now she was used to the stories adults told themselves, to seeing the threads they didn’t want pulled.

  The strip of water behind the house was called Courtland Creek, but that name was a joke. When Nayeli was growing up she and her mother Vero and her younger brother Mateo used to go up to Temescal Creek on weekends—when the car was working and Vero felt like getting out of bed. It cut its way down from the hills and murmured to itself while they ate cheese sandwiches by the muddy banks. She could imagine it running down to the bay and making its way beyond to the ocean. What ran behind the house was just God spitting, Vero liked to say. Water was powerful in any form, was Mateo’s response. Nayeli just thought it looked weak.

  So the creek wasn’t a creek and this house wasn’t a home, but after they got evicted from the place on Fruitvale it was where they could go. César had gotten partway to converting the garage before he ran out of money. Most nights the windows smeared over with frost and they piled on his Raiders blankets and slept in knit caps. Daisy-chained extension cords powered a space heater that smelled of burnt hair. Nayeli and her mother shared the sofa bed, and Mateo had an airbed on the floor. It leaked slowly every night and he would wake up with the gray rug under his cheek.

  Nayeli worked at the coffee shop on Laney’s campus, usually swing shift, after class. The coffee smell lay thick on her hair and in her clothes. When her mother was feeling playful she’d nuzzle Nayeli’s hair, slick as black oil and smelling of Antigua or Java or places none of them would ever go.

  Twice. That was how many times she’d been more than an hour from home. Once Vero’s boyfriend and two of his friends took her and Vero and Mateo to Santa Cruz on their motorcycles. The three men were from the East Bay Dragons: Black men on Harleys, something Nayeli had thought was as unlikely as Black cowboys, until they told her those existed too. The wind whipped the long hair that poked out from under her helmet, and a week later she was still finding sand in her clothes.

  Her senior year her boyfriend Josh had taken her to visit the University of Oregon, where his parents had met. His dad helped her with the admissions forms, and it was the only school she finished the application for. But the financial aid application threw Vero into a funk for days, and in the end what Nayeli couldn’t leave blank she just made up.

  She’d wanted to break up with Josh before the trip, but she could never have paid for it on her own. They hotboxed his lime-green Passport the whole way up and giggled about cutting school to go visit college. She almost wanted to keep him. But sex that night was empty and sad, like the word damp. What stopped her from pushing him off was the sound outside their window, of bikes in the rain, and she let herself imagine those wheels underneath her, cutting through puddles and speeding her off to read Anzaldúa in some coffee shop, cedars dripping outside. Three days in Eugene showed her maybe a dozen Latinos. All but two of those were chopping or sweeping or scrubbing, the verbs Nayeli associated with her own kind.

  The news came into their inboxes two days after they got back. She’d been accepted; he hadn’t. She let herself imagine, for a second, those books, the soft green of the sweatshirts, the bright yellow O across her chest. But then she saw the letter offering a tiny scholarship and $40,000 a year in loans. All those zeroes made her pull out her phone and enroll at Laney before she could change her mind.

  Mateo had finished school but was stil l working at Home Depot, where the manager pretended not to notice his long lunch breaks. When he was still in school he’d clamored to be assigned any reports on dams, bridges, anything about taming water or the earth itself. But the night before his tests he would slip off to a sideshow or go smoke weed by the lake. He reminded her of Vero, and Nayeli wanted to shake him for it. Her brother was like one of those air puppets outside the car dealerships, blowing any way the wind would pull it but never leaving the ground.

  After a month at Uncle César’s she and Mateo saw another sign, the ink reading SE BUSCA still fresh and bright. A very young man, long hair in a leather clip, crooked teeth grinning into the wrinkled face of a baby girl. Gone home, she imagined, or maybe dead. She pictured that mouth frozen open, blood running in a thin stream. A thin creek. The missing men were now four.

  When they told their mother about this Vero said to them both: “You so much as look at that creek after dark and I’ll forget I don’t believe in hitting kids.”

  She liked to say stuff like this, just as she liked to pull down her old books from her only year at Laney and make her kids read her worn volumes of Cherríe Moraga or Audre Lorde, Mateo slipping his phone between the pages, Nayeli scribbling notes in the margins. What Vero left unmentioned were the days she lay glued to whatever soft surface was left in the house, whatever house they were in. They’d come home from school to find Lauryn Hill blasting from her headphones, sometimes Héctor Lavoe. They’d drape a blanket on her shoulders and put a glass of water by her bed. If it was anything by Chavela Vargas they knew to pretend they hadn’t seen her at all.

  The garage room sat underneath Uncle César’s living room and extended partway under the front stairs, so every time he or his family came or went the peeling steps would rattle practically over their heads. It had a single curtained window they could look through to see car crashes, Fourth of July fireworks, a couple having sex by the creek. Their neighbor picking up pans, dishes, shoes, and throwing them at the girlfriends who passed through every few weeks or so. One woman left after a month, the next a few days; once they saw him pulling a woman out of his Camaro a week after she’d tried to leave. Nayeli caught the woman’s eye, the skin swelling red even as the door trapped her back inside.

  Nayeli was in her second year at Laney and she had by now gotten used to tapping off papers for school on her phone when work was slow, the A’s landing on them with no effort. In class she only half-listened, waiting for her classmates to make connections that seemed screamingly obvious. Meanwhile, she doodled in the margins of her notebooks: cedar trees dripping onto damp earth, buds curled behind leaves, waiting to bloom. She could always spot the students who swore they were going to transfer from Laney to a four-year school. The longing came off of them in waves. They were like her friends’ parents who promised they were going back to their ranchos in Mexico someday, even as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks into decades. Sure they were. Sure she would.

  Then came a night in November with rain in sheets, in Nayeli’s hand the first A she’d ever sweated for. The assignment had tugged at her, hard: “Tell us a story or a legend you heard growing up. Who told it to you? And why?”

  Her mother hadn’t been much for bedtime stories, but when she did indulge her children, she loved to frighten them with tales from her own childhood in Juárez. Those tales, Nayeli would later come to realize, were one of the few things from that life her mother had chosen to keep. La Llorona, sometimes Juana in Vero’s version, waited at night on the banks of the Río Bravo with her black rebozo and an appetite for wayward children. Juana had killed her children to be with her white lover, was how Vero told it, and was cursed to wander forever, crying their loss. Nayeli knew these stories were meant to scare her, but she mainly wanted to know whether La Llorona ever made it to California.

  She’d borrowed the house laptop to write this paper, letting the messages from Vero and Mateo stack up in her phone. She hid out at the main library, telling work she was sick and praying nobody would walk in and see her surrounded by books in piles and sticky notes she’d swiped from the librarian. She scribbled notes in the margins of the library books and folded down the pages and left most of them spread on the table at the end of the day. And now the paper was back in her hand, praise scrawled in green marks. Professor Luna had also written a long email that Nayeli kept opening to read and re-read: an invitation to visit a class at Berkeley, a nudge to think far ahead to next fall when she could apply to transfer there. The word “transfer,” always rickety and dull to Nayeli’s ears, now sounded like a rope hissing into a well.

  The green ink seemed to glow in the gathering dark as she waited for the 40, reading and re-reading the lines that Dr. Luna had marked with a star: “In seeking to forever cut off the line of her own Indian blood, Juana was seeking to cross her own border and plant her feet firmly in the white world where her lover had come from. For her, the dream was of mobility, and her children were the price to pay. In this way, she is a freak mirror image of women like my grandmother, who left her children behind in Juárez for years, in order to come here and give them a better life. The knife that Juana stuck in her children landed in her own heart. My grandmother wanted to protect her own children from a world not so very different from Juana’s, but her leaving was a wound of its own kind, and her children have never healed.”

  Getting home that night took Nayeli so much longer than she’d imagined. Her coworker Jasmín had flaked on a ride, the 40 took forever to come, and when it finally spilled her back out on the street, the rain was much worse. Stomping soaked feet in puddles the last few blocks to home she prayed the green would hold until she could show it to her mother. She felt like she should be wearing pigtails and carrying a SpongeBob backpack. She shivered past the creek where the water slicked the tree roots like oil and for just a second the dark seemed to grow thicker and move. Her head cocked, soaked feet paused, but she turned her head forward and marched on. Past the driveway where the men hoisted cars on jacks and liked to leer at Nayeli as she walked. Past the little yellow house where the neighbor pulled his escaping girlfriends back through the door. Up to the side door to the garage, the rain finally easing up, the clouds parting but grouped in black, as if holding their breath, puffed up and coiled. Waiting.

  On the doorknob was Vero’s bright pink scrunchie. A fucking scrunchie. The sound of the sofa bed banged against the wall and Nayeli yanked her hand away from the pink as if it were a snake.

  She knew Uncle César and her aunt and cousins were upstairs, but knocking on their door would open a flood of questions, and she’d end up defending Vero against all of them. She started back the way she had come, intending to ride the 40 until it was safe to come home. She passed the creek again and remembered Vero’s words, her weak warning—You so much as look at that creek after dark …

  As she stepped closer the shadows seemed to ripple, as if they had layers. A glass bottle clattered under her foot and into the water below. The light of her phone showed scraps of cardboard and an old crate that she propped against the split oak tree and sat on, her sweatshirt a cushion, and she leaned back against the bark, willing her mind to grow as quiet and dark as the shadows above.

  “What are you doing?” The voice came from above Nayeli’s head. It sounded like barbed wire scraping against itself. She stumbled to her feet and the crate clattered away.

  Where the tree began to reach gently over the bank, a woman’s body stretched along the trunk. Her long hair wrapped itself around the tree and into the ground, as if growing out of it. The streetlights barely penetrated here, but Nayeli could see clearly. Rich brown skin, darker than Nayeli herself. Cheekbones high and strong, eyebrows thick. Her eyes looked like black grapes left to dry in the sun. But her mouth was red and wet as a pomegranate, and when it opened red teeth fell out and scattered over the damp ground. She was speaking Spanish, which Vero had tried so many times to teach her children, but Nayeli understood every word.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8