Horror Story
︎︎︎ Myles Zavelo
︎ OCT 28, 2021
Let’s start with the big ones.
My name is Peter Mike, and I want to talk about how we are powerless.
You name it: murder, an ear infection, the freezing cold.
The month was January. The year was 1997. The city was New York City.
The sun was going down, my dorm room was home, only one I had, and I was walking there.
I was sweating alcohol from the night before. I was a fantastically and enormously insecure person. I was living my best life. I was dating a performance artist.
She was a violent offender. She was constantly threatening my castration. She had a job to do.
And, worst of all, I was sexually confused—like I said, it was 1997.
I was on an academic excellence scholarship, attending a prestigious university that, due to a tragic act of terrorism, no longer exists. It’s just gone!
Now, at this moment, as I was walking across an extra icy version of the Manhattan Bridge, there suddenly appeared a graveyard getting ravaged by grave robbers.
These grave robbers were blasphemous surgeries of men. They were faceless.
Their selfishness was endless. They just took, took, took. They were robbing my grave, too.
Distracted, I slipped on black ice, falling into a river of treacherous sharpness.
At the same moment, in Missouri, my mother’s live-in-boyfriend buried her body in the backyard.
He had a job to do. He needed the money. He never got rich.
Instead, he got a haunted backyard. That lasted only a moment.
Glued to my mother’s sofa, waiting for the law to surround, he ate candy.
His name was John Hardbridge.
I fell back to the bridge, flat on my face, like an idiot.
I remember the courtroom. I remember the lawyers, their shoes and faces.
I was asked to help determine Hardbridge’s sentence.
Peter Mike? What’s the punishment?
I looked up from my folded hands, I stared back at their infinitely stupid question, I asked for the death penalty.
I donated my mother’s body to science. I just want to forgive and forget.
Scary things are sometimes very violent, believe me.
My name is Peter Mike, and I want to talk about how we are powerless.
You name it: murder, an ear infection, the freezing cold.
*
The month was January. The year was 1997. The city was New York City.
The sun was going down, my dorm room was home, only one I had, and I was walking there.
I was sweating alcohol from the night before. I was a fantastically and enormously insecure person. I was living my best life. I was dating a performance artist.
She was a violent offender. She was constantly threatening my castration. She had a job to do.
And, worst of all, I was sexually confused—like I said, it was 1997.
I was on an academic excellence scholarship, attending a prestigious university that, due to a tragic act of terrorism, no longer exists. It’s just gone!
Now, at this moment, as I was walking across an extra icy version of the Manhattan Bridge, there suddenly appeared a graveyard getting ravaged by grave robbers.
These grave robbers were blasphemous surgeries of men. They were faceless.
Their selfishness was endless. They just took, took, took. They were robbing my grave, too.
Distracted, I slipped on black ice, falling into a river of treacherous sharpness.
At the same moment, in Missouri, my mother’s live-in-boyfriend buried her body in the backyard.
He had a job to do. He needed the money. He never got rich.
Instead, he got a haunted backyard. That lasted only a moment.
Glued to my mother’s sofa, waiting for the law to surround, he ate candy.
His name was John Hardbridge.
I fell back to the bridge, flat on my face, like an idiot.
*
I remember the courtroom. I remember the lawyers, their shoes and faces.
I was asked to help determine Hardbridge’s sentence.
Peter Mike? What’s the punishment?
I looked up from my folded hands, I stared back at their infinitely stupid question, I asked for the death penalty.
I donated my mother’s body to science. I just want to forgive and forget.
*
Scary things are sometimes very violent, believe me.