Matt Moore's Blog

What inspired me to write “Below The Surface, We Can Only Imagine” in Horror Over the Handlebars

I have a short story in the recently released anthology Horror Over the Handlebars: A Yankee Scares Connecticut Horror Anthology. It’s a collection of horror stories set in the 80s and 90s in my home state of Connecticut.

It’s available on Amazon in trade paperback and Kindle (and on amazon.ca for my Canadian friends). You can also read an interview with me on the publisher’s website and find the other authors’ interviews.

My story, “Below The Surface, We Can Only Imagine”, is set in a forgotten, flooded quarry turned swimming hole for local kids. As a hot summer where five people have drowned in the quarries draws to an end, three friends sneak in a swim before going their separate ways—two to college and one to finish high school. This is in the 80s, before cell phones and email, and they wonder if they will remain friends. Except one reveals a secret he’s been keeping all summer. A secret about their fourth friend who drowned. A secret tied to a local town legend about why the quarries were abandoned and lost.

The R.E.M. song “Nightswimming” off Automatic for the People inspired this song. (Video of the song is below.)

I find something uplifting but also melancholy about it. And something sinister. After lyrics about swimming, friendship and reminiscing we get:

You, I thought I knew you
You, I cannot judge
You, I thought you knew me
This one laughing quietly underneath my breath

To me, this reveals something dark. Perhaps the idea that we don’t know our friends as well as we thought, but despite what they may have done we love them and can’t judge them despite another friend laughing quietly and menacingly. This changes the opening and closing line:

Nightswimming deserves a quiet night

In the openings, it’s about being calm and peaceful with your friends in a dark, out of the way place. In the closing, is in quiet regret? Is it that something terrible is happening that isn’t quiet but you wish it were?

I decided I wanted to write about it. I borrowed a lot of elements from the song: swimming at night, the moon, a friend’s low laugh, regret, streetlights (though that didn’t make the final cut). In fact, the original opening line was:

September’s coming soon

Most of all, the power of friendship when you’re young, how we change as we grow up, and how well do we really know our friends and ourselves?

Free will is also front-and-center here. A critique of horror (and, as it were, of this story by someone who admitted they hate, but don’t understand, horror) is “The devil made me do it” is a cop-out that releases antagonists from accountability. A theme I wanted to explore—and then blatantly put into the narration to make sure it isn’t missed as I was smarting from the critique—is that the devil (or any corrupting force) can’t make you do something evil. You choose to do the evil thing; the devil just offers you the tools to do it. Christianity would have you believe the devil seeks pure souls to corrupt. I think the devil reveals who you really are.

The first draft of the story clocked in around 15,000 words, written mostly in a burst during a train ride to Toronto. The ending of the current story was the end of the first act. The main character has his night swimming in the quarry, goes on to live his life, and reencounters his friends in his 30s where he learns what is revealed in the final version of the story. I might revisit that one day, but for now I love this version that takes place over about 20 minutes as the sun sets.

I set it in the fictional town of Trenton, Connecticut which is a stand-in for my own hometown. Calling it “Trenton” is a bit of a joke my wife, a Canadian, made about the Connecticut accent where rush through our “t”s. I might return to this town in future stories and am considering setting a novel there.

My thanks to the East Block Irregulars who critiques this story when I first wrote it 10 years ago, and to Write Club who critiqued it before I submitted it to Horror Over the Handlebars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahJ6K...

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Published on June 25, 2024 06:59

Inspiration for my Aurora-nominated poem “My Pillow Eats Screams”

My poem “My Pillow Eats Screams” is on the ballot for the 2022 Aurora Awards and voting is now now. I’m hope you enjoy this poem and consider giving it a vote. If you like it, I explain what the Aurora Awards are and how you can vote. Voting closes July 23, 2022 at midnight Eastern Time.

In the meantime, I wanted to share the what inspired me to write “My Pillow Eats Screams”.

Why did I write this poem?

This is a very personal poem for me. A lot of healing and introspection went into it, and examining things from my childhood that only now—with age 50 looming—I am coming to grips with in how it shaped the adult I have come to be.

I don’t know if you can spoil a poem, but I’m going to talk about its origin. And while I’m also going to say what it means to me, by no means is this saying what it might mean to you. One of the great things about creative works, and what I have always believed, is that what the reader takes from it as as valid as—if not more so—the author’s intent.

The origin of this poem came from three ideas.

The first was just the words “my pillow eat screams,” which just came—like so many ideas—spontaneously and out of nowhere. I wrote it in my writer’s notebook some time ago.

The second was the idea of what might happen if one were to stuff a pillow with feathers fallen from angel wings? What powers might that pillow have? How would it affect one’s sleep?

The third was the image of massive, horrific creatures battling in the night sky, only able to take physical form in darkness. They fought with swords and spears and shields. I had the image in my mind of a sword as high as the St. Louis Arch stuck in the banks of the Mississippi River.

The ideas collided as a pillow made supernatural that feeds on the tears, cries, and confessions we make at night when replaying and reliving the traumas endured that day. If the pillows feeds on screams and tears, what might it do to the sleeper? Is this pillow benevolent in accepting what you tell it, or exploitative?

I liked the concepts of not-quite-angels fighting in the sky. Angelic, but not angels, the feathers fallen from their wings are not beatific. I laid some of my own childhood experience of crying myself to sleep following my parents’ fights. Or when they took out the frustration of the fight on me.

What follows was a poem that, on the surface, was of these angelic beings fighting in the sky, their blood and feathers drifting to the earth, and the horrific transformations they caused.

Underneath, this is about inter-generational violence. How the abused become the abusers. How we can cling to fantasies of violent revenge as a way to feel power and control.

Of course, your opinion my be different. If this poem means something different to you, please leave me a comment!

My Pillow Eats Screams

My pillow eats screams, engorged on these tears
Trapping confessions in celestial down

For six nights, six again, skies sang with steel
Trembled to warfare’s thunder
Titans of the clouds, leviathans of the air

Mornings brought
Purple-tinged blood
Stained roadways, rooftops.
Muddied ground drank greedily,
Sprouted mint and thistle,
Roses and cinnamon snaked
Over row house fences.

Through yards and parking lots,
cemeteries and playgrounds
I first walked then raced to gather—feathers
Colours beyond count
Colours that stuck some competitors mad or blind
I dodged, delivered blows
Filled a pocketful of feathered remnants
From the inner din and outer dark

Our battles brutal
Vicious in intensity,
Spread like fork lightning
Spilled blood to feed the mites and ticks and flies
Dawn’s calm gloom shattered by shattering bone
Gasping, gasping
Final sounds to leave a mortal throat

My treasure, safe beneath my head
Eyes swollen on recounting horrors inflicted, horrors endured
A father’s words and a mother’s hands
Smiling denials in tomorrow’s light
Silence the only armour

Replies, whispered in the small hours, of special death
Flawed, finite bodies jettisoned
An ascension, up and out and above
To touch the sky and rise above the inner din and outer dark
To the light that eradicates all

For six nights I wailed my well-practiced denials
Rationalizations like finely honed battle steel

For six more nights, I stalked, drenched in mortal blood
Until wings emerged from where they hid

We are as that which below has shaped us
We are as that which above calls us to be
I am, now, of everything and everyone
To—at last—scream in the heavens

“My Pillow Eats Screams” was first published Polar Starlight, Issue #4.

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Published on June 15, 2022 16:50

My poem “My Pillow Eats Screams” is eligible for nominations in the 2022 Aurora Awards

My poem “My Pillow Eats Screams” is eligible for nominations in the 2022 Aurora Awards. I’ve created this page about what the Aurora Awards are and how you can nominate my poem.

“My Pillow Eats Screams” was first published Polar Starlight, Issue #4.

The poem is below.

Why did I write this poem?

I don’t know if you can spoil a poem, but I’m going to talk about its origin. And while I’m also going to say what it means to me, by no means is this saying what it might mean to you. One of the great things about creative works, and what I have always believed, is that what the reader takes from it as as valid as—if not more so—the author’s intent.

The origin of this poem came from three ideas.

The first was just the words “my pillow eat screams,” which just came—like so many ideas—spontaneously and out of nowhere. I wrote it in my writer’s notebook some time ago.

The second was the idea of what might happen if one were to stuff a pillow with feathers fallen from angel wings? What powers might that pillow have? How would it affect one’s sleep?

The third was the image of massive, horrific creatures battling in the night sky, only able to take physical form in darkness. They fought with swords and spears and shields. I had the image in my mind of a sword as high as the St. Louis Arch stuck in the banks of the Mississippi River.

The ideas collided as a pillow made supernatural that feeds on the tears, cries, and confessions we make at night when replaying the troubling events of the day. If the pillows feeds on screams and tears, what might it do to the sleeper? Is this pillow benevolent in accepting what you tell it, or exploitative?

I liked the concepts of not-quite-angels fighting in the sky. Angelic, but not angels, the feathers fallen from their wings are not be beatific. I laid some of my own childhood experience of crying myself to sleep following my parents’ fights. Or when they took out the frustration of the fight on me.