Night of the Mannequins

by Stephen Graham Jones

SO SHANNA GOT A new job at the movie theater, we thought we’d play a fun prank on her, and now most of us are dead, and I’m really starting to feel kind of guilty about it all.

Is it just automatic to steal any mannequin you happen to encounter? “We would have,” Danielle countered. JR and me shrugged, couldn’t exactly deny that.

Maybe this is how it happens after high school, right? Or even on the ramp up to high school being over. You just drift away, and then it gets easier not to call, and then you forget the number, and then you see your old friend in line for the movie or whatever and you let your eyes keep moving, because it’s going to be awkward now. Never mind that they know you better than any other human in the world. Never mind that they fake-spilled juice into your lap in fourth grade when you’d peed your pants. Never mind that you hugged them when they slept over and cried about their dad moving out. Never mind a thousand things.

SHANNA WAS THE FIRST TO GO. And by “go” I mean die. And by “die” I mean get killed.

Really, I figured, it would be better for the world if we all just killed ourselves. Except of course that would break our parents’ hearts and set bad examples for our little brothers and sisters, and everybody at school would have to go to endless assemblies about what to do if you get invited to participate in a group suicide, and we didn’t want to be remembered like that. It’s much better to be on the murder victim wall, right? The Died Too Young wall?

It’s probably best we were all dying, right? We were falling apart anyway. Too much was changing.

a blade around every corner, teeth in every shadow.

We just sat there like a math problem, like the remainder left over after everything’s gone to hell.

Fish stories aren’t about what happened, they’re about what almost happened, what should have happened, what was so close to actually happening that, in the telling and retelling, it sort of starts to happen.

This is kind of a fish story, too, in a way.

If scale isn’t a thing, then the outline of a car and a giant foot are about the same shape, aren’t they?

Roaches have always been his terror. Not because they’re actually mean or anything, but because they’re like dirty bullets with legs, dirty blind bullets always aiming at your feet when you just want to suddenly be able to fly.

Roaches are always freaky!

Better safe in the cellar than sorry halfway up into the sky, all that.

West Texas springtime

Sometimes the way you know you’ve done good is that the whole town hates you and wants you dead. That there even are still people to hate you and want you dead, that’s success right there.

I just want to go with you and sleep, and wait for the next group of kids to find us, the mannequin with the falling-apart legs and the boy mannequin beside him, his face blanked out with pleasure from all the fun that’s coming.