Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

They’re preparing for something the human body won’t sur-vive.

His songs reminded him of when he could spend days on the ocean without being tethered to the shore. In the end, the water didn’t take him. A land-dwelling woman two villages over did that. He left my mother with three girls singing his songs.

“Simulation hypothesis.” Wolf breathed heavily as they carried firewood up the steep driveway to a small but posh rental cabin overlooking the Chattahoochee. The truck was left parked in front of a massive boulder, proving that some shit was just too big to clear. “It indicates that our reality is a computer simulation. The flattening of the human experience in the last…I don’t know, fifty years, can point to the simulation winding down.” “Flattening?” Kam asked. “Has it seemed at all like shit’s just kind of run its course? Problems are obvious and no one’s that invested in fixing them? No new discoveries, no new ideas. All the new arguments are the same as the old arguments. Lost the plot with art and entertainment. Everything’s AI or a remix or remaster or expansion of the same five IPs.”

“You can’t keep me here.” “Can’t I? Who will save you? Once you criminalize a population it’s marginalized. No one cares. They erase convicted criminals from society—and their minds.”

WHITE BOY #3 Dude, chill. It’s not like we’re dying, okay? We’re just being relegated to the wings where we have to wait until some playwright comes along to excavate our humanity and remind the audience that we have inner lives worth exploring. WHITE BOY #1 Bro, we are an undifferentiated mass of heterosexual, cisgender, Anglo-Saxon, upper-class, male privilege. Who the fuck is gonna wanna explore our inner life by the end of this?