The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

by Tori Bovalino

I’m only one person, one girl, seventeen and still in high school. I ought to be doing my homework and falling in love. I ought to be dreaming of college and life after this place, but I can barely get past the mailbox at the end of our drive. How much can you give to a place before it swallows you whole?

Don’t you owe more to the living than to the dead?

But this is where I belong, isn’t it? Isn’t this what it means to be born of the people who lie in this cemetery, born of the sweat and blood and soil of this town? Isn’t birth just another name for destiny? Your family name the border between you and the rest of the world?

“He doesn’t matter. Granny said the only family you need is the family that stays.”

Sleep comes eventually. It is fought for. It is a beast that I chain up despite knowing it will tear free sooner or later, and I jerk awake again, disturbed by the rushing foam or the crowing morning birds or the house creaking.

Because I’m not content with one small corner of the world being all that I’ll ever see. Because it is an ambitious person’s nature to flock to where the world’s beating pulse is. Because there should be no harm in admitting that the world’s pulse is certainly not here, but I haven’t once been able to say that aloud without the people around me thinking I’m looking down on them, and perhaps—God, deep down perhaps I am, but why must I be punished for wanting more—

Because if she and Simon broke up, all four of them would. Something this brittle couldn’t survive that kind of cracking.

They were so afraid of change, so afraid of becoming new people, they’d shackled each other to the corpses of who they’d been before.

And wasn’t that the worst part, every time? How the love and the caring stayed, even as everything around it rotted?

Life is too fragile to get attached to. One day you’re there, and the next, you’re not. Summers here have a way of teaching you that. In summer, everything always teeters on that knife’s edge of living and dying.

But she doesn’t run for the fitness; she runs to be alone.

Love wasn’t supposed to make you so nauseous that you couldn’t eat. It wasn’t supposed to leave you feeling empty. Constantly worried that you said or did the wrong thing. That you weren’t enough, and never would be. Love wouldn’t send you into a dark tunnel without a flashlight.

It was impossible to keep something that never intended to stay. No. It was more than impossible. It was exhausting. Heartbreaking. The kind of thing that tore you to shreds, only to hastily put you back together, with no regard to where the pieces were being placed. It was a painful process. A punishment.