CW: Violence, death.
ONE: I told them it was stupid to rent the same cabin in the woods where that other slaughter took place, twenty years ago. I said I knew of a perfectly good bed and breakfast where nobody had ever been slaughtered, not even once. It even had a pool, and not a lake, which is always disgusting because you never know what’s been pooping in it. I told them all, let’s go to that place and have room service instead of discovering body parts under the floorboards. They made fun of me because I was being such a wuss. And now my head’s in a bush right next to Jenny’s head and I told them so.
TWO: Did I leave the oven on? I mean, I suppose it doesn’t make all that much difference, now, but something’s been nagging at me even before Mookie went missing and I think that’s it. I remember that just before I left the house I turned on the burner to boil some water and I remember taking the pot to the table to pour it in the mug with the instant coffee and I remember thinking I had to go back to turn the heat off but right now I’m not exactly sure that I actually went back and did it, because that’s when the phone rang and I had to run and get that and it was Phil telling me to turn on the TV to get the bulletin about the mass breakout at the asylum. I’m not sure that I ever did get back to the stove, because that’s when the gang pulled the van into the driveway and started honking, because we had to leave right then if we wanted to beat the holiday traffic to the cabin. Even at the time, I thought it was pretty damn stupid to worry about traffic being slow when we were headed to a cabin, because cabins in the woods don’t have check-in times. But I grabbed the bag and rushed out the door, and now I’m wondering: did I turn off the burner or what? Would I have come back home at the end of a frolic-filled weekend to discover that my house was now blackened rubble? That would have totally sucked, almost as much as the final shreds of my consciousness dwelling on it. I should be more careful.
THREE: You know, when we got here, the cabin was pretty damn dark, and I was the one who had to go stumbling through the darkness with a flashlight looking for the generator, and just as I found it something leaped at my face, and it was just a goddamned cat, and that was a pretty good jump scare, I think, a preview for all the running around and screaming and bleeding that we’ve all been doing ever since. But I wonder: the cabin was securely locked. There were no broken windows, no holes in the walls, no means of ingress or egress that a cat could have used to get in or out, and it honestly makes no sense that the cat was hiding in the closet by the controls to the generator, when there was absolutely no reason for it to even be in the cabin in the first place. It was a well-fed suburban cat, the kind that runs around in its living room at three o’clock in the morning batting a jingle ball around until its owner wants to kill it. Who brought it to the cabin? Who locked it inside? Who fed it? Who made sure it didn’t pee in the corner and make the whole place smell so much like ammonia that we would have all declared it unlivable and gotten back into the van to seek out some motel on the highway? Primarily, why did it jump out of the darkness right at my face when most cats would have either remained in hiding trying to look as small as possible, or come out heavy-lidded and meowing the cat phrases for, “I hope you brought some food?” This stupid cat ran straight out the door and we never saw it again, and come to think, why didn’t we ever go looking for it, when normally Becky or LaTisha would have said, “Omigod, that poor cat, we have to find it!” Instead, we just forgot all about the cat, and that was out of character even for me, and I don’t even like cats. But again, that brings us back to why the cat was there, in that cabin that Brock said hadn’t been used since last summer. Maybe it was this masked spree killer’s cat?
FOUR: And here’s the really annoying bit. I just came up with a great idea for a novel. I’ve been looking for one. So far, I’ve only published a few shorter pieces in the school literary magazine, like that one story which was the stream-of-consciousness monologue from the point of view of the lonely old woman on the park bench. Professor Broadman said that I really shouldn’t have wasted it on the school literary magazine but should have sent it straight to The New Yorker. A review like that, from a literary lion like him, struck me as proof that I was ready for the big time, but my big problem is that stream-of-consciousness is really my thing, and it’s hard to apply that to novels, most of the time. But I just had this great idea, a profound story of our times, driven by character and by the issues that assail my generation, and it would have been terrific.
I don’t know why I happened to get this idea right now except that it might have been the sheer sensual experience of having my head sliced from my body, and experiencing what it was like to be in that head while it rolled down the slight incline from the base of the front stoop and treated me to a view of the world in motion, first the grass still soaking wet from the recent thunderstorm, to the dark forbidding shapes of the nearby trees, to the stars now streaking by in a perfectly clear sky, to the sight of my still-standing body fountaining blood out of the stump of my neck, to the killer now going after Amy, to the sight of Jenny’s head, facing me from its resting place in the bushes where it now looked like my own hurtling noggin was about to end up. She never would give me the time of day, Jenny, though we were going to have some togetherness here at the end, both staring wide-eyed at the stoop, though she died some time ago and didn’t get to see what I now see, my headless body taking a single confused step, like a chicken, before performing a neat pirouette and landing prone in the position that could no longer be called face down.
The point is, that is a lot of sensual stimulation for a rolling head, and it kick-started my muse, and it gave me the entirety of a novel that would have made me famous for all time, from its vividly realized setting to its superb character arc to the final lines that would have echoed the conscience of a generation. This is the kind of idea I normally only have while I’m lying in bed on the edge of sleep, and I always think that I’ll start writing up my notes first thing in the morning, and then I wake up in the morning and I can’t remember a damn thing. I can’t let this happen again, not with this idea. I need to get up and scrawl down some preliminary notes. Or better yet, pull an all-nighter and just start the damn thing. Except that I left my laptop at home, and my actual lap over there, though I can’t get to it any more than I can get to my Word files. Damn it. This is what destroys writing careers: procrastination. I have to start. “Chapter One. The Night was Sultry.”
FIVE: Becky was right. Now that I can see it from this angle, those pants really do make my butt look fat.
