My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1)

by Stephen Graham Jones

There’s a head of long hair blowing in silhouette from the railing of the deck above Letha.

groping through the darkness when the moon’s gone above the trees, and… was this what it was like for Stacey Graves a hundred-plus years ago, when she made it across the new lake? Was she scared like this?

since—of course—it’s probably about to stand up, run away into the afterlife of elk, which is all grass and cold sunlight.

“There’s this preacher Ezekiel down there, purifying the water,” Jade says. “It makes this a Christian burial ground, and, you know. I’m Indian.”

scribbled on bathroom walls, left in code on the bulletin board at the drugstore: this year’s costume. It’s a game the whole town plays.

The theme this year is “Lake Witch.” Stacey Graves. Because of course.

She comes up behind her dad’s boat, glides up into it as stealthy as any slasher. Everything’s already rocking, so a little more rocking—her climbing aboard—doesn’t draw his attention. Before she can talk herself out of it, she steps cleanly ahead, takes his neck from the back in the crook of her arm, and presses the sharp leading point of the pole into his back, his chest swelling away from this pain but she has him by the neck, so he can’t get away from this. Of all the lines Jade’s tried to have ready for this moment, all she manages to come up with is, “I wasn’t for you, Dad.”

a little girl, afraid of what she is,

away from the boys who played this trick on her, away from the town that never fed her, away from the father who never wanted her.

and goes to sleep until the hated water seeps in with them, bringing its faint music with it.

At least until a large pale hand comes up through the muddy water, wraps around her thin ankle, and pulls her away all at once, down into the real and permanent darkness of Ezekiel’s Cold Box.

It was a good and necessary gesture last night, but dealing with that gesture in the morning is seriously sucking.