Most people give her a single eye. This is within the rules, so she accepts, with a quiet warning. They nod, not understanding. Others try to be clever, and give her an appendix, or a spleen, or even hair. These she does not bother to warn. They will return soon enough, she knows, offering a hand, or a foot, or even a leg.

Damn Shackleton and damn Amundsen and damn Hillary. All that attention, just for tramping around in the snow? I will show you how a real surveyor finds his glory. I will show you the stink and the viscera of glory. It is bone dust in the air, from a freshly sawed-open skull. Glory’s what I heap out of the brainpan with forceps and scissors and surgical knife.

For decades, horror fans were trained to spot her. She wasn’t always the prettiest, but she was responsible, loyal, and polite. She carried her books against her chest, worried about her grades, and was always home by curfew. The “good girl” by the moral arithmetic governing slashers in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, while masked psychos and possessed killers stalked the streets.

Michael Wehunt has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, multiple Shirley Jackson Awards, and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’s Crawford Award. In Spain, his stories have garnered nominations for the Premio Ignotus and Premio Amaltea, winning the latter. He haunts the woods outside Atlanta with his partner and their dog. Together, they hold the horrors at bay.

not a metaphor for social decay,
or the collapse of the modern family,
or the domestic transformed to dread