I Was a Teenage Slasher

by Stephen Graham Jones

It was the best of times––high school––and it was the suckiest of times: high school.

People who wear plaid pants and hit small balls aren’t exactly the crowd I run with. The crowd I do run with are… well. We’re the ones with black hearts and red hands. Masks and machetes.

We were sort of outcasts together, you could say. On the outside looking in. But? Stand at that tall chain link fence long enough, peering through those metal diamonds, and the hand you have hooked up higher than your head might nudge into someone else’s, and then the two of you can maybe nod, don’t even have to say anything.

When your dad dies, whenever in life you are, you realize that you’ve either got to hold yourself up, now, or just start falling and falling.

I was a clown, sure, but I had no intentions of ever being a rodeo clown.

Some people are just good, aren’t they? I wonder what that must be like.

But, really? It’s less about survival, more about who you’re holding when that big irradiated shockwave blows you to ash.

Old slashers may not die, but they can, if they’re careful, if they’re conscientious, stop killing.

The world’s so much simpler when you’ve got a chainsaw in your hand, isn’t it? A chainsaw or a machete or an axe, that’s the elegant solution to every problem. And I wouldn’t get caught, either. My kind don’t.

We all want to hide, don’t we? To not have to be constantly navigating between our true self and people’s expectations twenty-four seven?

Lesley, man, you never deserved that. You either, Shannon, my fellow glue-eater.

It’s six minutes of my life, tops, but some memories you don’t measure in minutes or miles, but by how much of yourself is still in that moment.

and, two, maybe three seconds after she faded into the night, into the rest of her life, I said it back, that I loved her too. And then I went on about how she was my best friend, how if she hadn’t been there when my dad died, I probably wouldn’t be here now, how she was the best thing to ever happen to me, to Lamesa, and I blubbered on and on, finally just sputtering and sobbing in my chickenwire burrito.