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Cheerleaders are rife in the horror movies of the 1980s and 1990s, from Night of the Comet’s Sam Belmont to The Midnight Hour’s Sandy Matthews.
Jude sat alone behind her folding card table and hoped the stories her mother had been telling her for her entire life, about how Fighting Pumpkins were a little harder to break than people who weren’t on the squad.
She had the kind of expression Jude’s father sometimes described as “if you held a candle to that girl’s ear, it would be the first time anyone ever saw light in her eyes.”
Well, live and learn, as her mother always said, usually right after she’d ripped the throat out of someone who’d made it onto her list of acceptable victims. (She had a real fondness for people who were cruel to women, children, or animals. One of Jude’s earliest memories was watching her mother eat a man who’d been running a puppy mill out of his basement. Being a vampire’s daughter was hard on a sense of normalcy.)
In case you’ve ever wondered, clawing your way out of the ground is hell on your manicure.
“Can we stop being morbid and just get on with our lives?” demanded Marti, who thought tact was something that happened to other people.
“Heather died,” said Jude. “Voting to kick her out just because she might reanimate and show up for practice would have been kind of tacky.”
“Oh, God,” I said, feeling like I was going to faint. My heart would have skipped a beat if it had still been, you know, beating.
Turn the Year Around
Chapter title
The universe has decided we’re good at this, and so it just keeps throwing things our way. We’re not the only ones. The pee-wee baseball team saves the world twice a season, and so does the sewing circle down at the retirement home. It’s just that we all have our own areas of expertise.”
These girls, who had seemed like strange, bright birds to me when I stood at the edge of the forest, were birds in more ways than one. They flew. They soared, they twisted in midair, they dropped out of the sky with the absolute confidence that they would be caught. Colleen seemed to have no weight at all when her teammates flung her upward. She jackknifed in flight, pressing her face to her knees, and then she fell like a star, so fast and so impossible that I almost made a wish on her. I was sure that if I did, it would be fulfilled. I wanted to fly. The practice that came after it was less
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Surprisingly poetic!
Blood on the snow melts winter into spring, and blood on the flowers matures spring into summer, and blood in the corn calls summer into fall. Blood on the fields and blood in the fire.
So we come to them, to the Harvest Queens and Winter Kings, to the lives that stitch the curtain of liminal time. So we come to the autumn girls, sewn from dead leaves and pumpkin hearts and wheat and grain and frost, who live for such a short time, and whose love—if they can find it—will shape the winters yet to come. Some of them go willingly, joyfully into the winter, for they have learnt to love the cold. Others fight, and the winter fights back. Those are the years when people die.
It doesn’t mean you can’t want more than just to be a genetic accident your whole life.
Persephone understood. She loved me, and we knew that winter would come, would be whole and complete and eternal in itself, if it was allowed to be so. I was wiser than any who had come before me, because I understood the vitality of the wheel, and she was wiser than any who had come before her, because she saw the wisdom of the winter, and the freedom it could yet afford to her. She came to me willingly. She comes to me still.
“Temporary kings. It’s another way of saying ‘seasonal monarchs,’ which I prefer, since it’s not so gender essentialist, you know? Anyway. Temporary kings are representative symbols of harvest or plenty or events, and have to be removed from their thrones in order for those events to come about as they were intended to. Mostly, um.” She glanced up before saying apologetically, “Mostly they get removed with knives. This is pretty grim, Steph. Why are you asking about this?”
In the case of this story, my central threat is the pop culture interpretation of the wendigo, a traditional creature from Algonquin legend. This modern interpretation bears little resemblance to the historical creature. Thank you to the readers who have since communicated that many First Nations people would prefer that such legends not be used in this manner. I am sorry for causing offense, however inadvertently, and will endeavor to do better in the future.
Marti generally sounded annoyed by anything that wasn’t about Marti, which made her a perfect mean girl attack dog for the rest of us. Any time someone started to question why the Pumpkins did things a certain way, we’d just point Marti at them and run in the opposite direction. After she was done stripping the flesh from their bones with her tongue—metaphorically speaking, anyway; she wasn’t a real flesh-stripper, not like Angie from Junior Varsity—they were generally way more willing to tolerate the rest of us being a little odd.
The door hadn’t latched all the way. I hit it shoulder-first, bursting onto the porch in a shower of splinters and deeply confused termites.
“Maybe because they’re mangy cannibalistic monsters, and not members of the Computer Club,” said Marti. “It’s not cannibalism if they’re not human,” said Colleen.
Because the Fighting Pumpkins come from a “kitchen sink” universe where basically anything that can happen either has happened already or will happen in the future, it was inevitable that they should go up against aliens again, with hopefully better results this time…
Spirit bows.
Even those of us who don’t like going to class (Laurie) or don’t enjoy the company of our fellow students (Marti) understand the sheer necessity of school spirit, which is the glue that binds a student body together.
Cheer is about spirit, musicality, coordination, and the willingness to be flung like, super-high into the air by girls who have been lackadaisically trained by failed gymnasts, at best, or taught by one another, at worst.
Second up were the West Brookside Tardigrades, and third were the Centerville Centipedes,
disdain
Shub-Niggurath
Yibb-Tstll.
