SAGE TYRTLE
The Lurching Horror of Kennewick Road
November, 1963
At the dinner table Carolyn’s little brothers are mixing gray peas and black cranberry sauce, stuffing them in bread sandwiches. She cuts a small piece of ash-coloured turkey and tries to chew. Her ribs still ache from yesterday.
“Pass the butter,” the monster growls. Her mother hurries to obey, pearls swinging. Heels clacking.
The monster gobbles and snorts, flinging stuffing around his plate, and Carolyn is not the daughter in this movie. She is not the niece or the girlfriend or the secretary, fleeing in a pencil skirt, wailing. That’s her mother’s job. Carolyn is the hero-scientist. The one who says things like, Keep that net handy, George. I might need it. She swallows the half-chewed turkey and without thinking says, “That’s margarine, not butter.” Under the table her capable hero-scientist hands start to shake. She knows better.
Her mother the heroine does nothing.
“Do you think,” says the monster, his smile revealing his long fangs, “Do you think, stupid girl, that I can’t tell the difference between margarine and butter?”
The screenwriter is, as always, typing away at a furious speed. “Say Yes sir! Wait. Say No Sir! No no no, that’s wrong — say, Of course you can tell the difference, O Holy Patriarch Of Our Precious Nuclear Family! I know nothing, you know all!”
But hero-scientist Carolyn ignores the screenwriter. Even though when she turns to the monster her ribs burn. “What you’re spreading on your bread right now. It’s margarine.”
“You wanna make a bet?” His tongue lolls. Drips venom. Carolyn can see herself in the back of his mouth in pearls and clacking heels, arms outstretched.
Her brothers are competing to see who can drink their milk fastest. Donny’s shirt is soaked.
“Your mother will give you a piece of bread with either butter or margarine. You taste it and say which it is. If you’re wrong, you get a whipping.”
Her mother comes unstuck from the air and murmurs, “Oh honey, I don’t know that — ”
The monster doesn’t look at her. “Shut up.”
Mouth dry, Carolyn fights to keep her voice even. “What if I’m right?”
“What?” he says.
“What if I’m right?”
He shrugs. “Then… nothing happens.”
“No thank you,” says Carolyn. “I don’t want to make a bet.” Inside her head the screenwriter screams. Her ribs scream. Her brothers stop mid-gulp.
“The hell did you just say?” says the monster.
This time Carolyn doesn’t need the screenwriter’s hissed, “Stop, please. Stop.” She stares at the turkey on her plate. Counts each small gray pea. She thinks that if someone walked into the movie theatre right now it would seem like the monster had frozen them all in time. Only the milk dripping from Ralph’s shirt looks alive.
When the monster finally speaks everyone lets out a breath. “Boys, clean up that milk. Right now.” Her brothers, speaking-role extras, scurry into the kitchen for dishtowels.
Carolyn picks up her fork. Her mother walks back to the table. Everyone finishes dinner. Everyone goes to sleep.
April, 1964
Carolyn is standing in the dark at the kitchen door and she is turning the knob by centimetres, by millimetres, breaking into the safe of the outside. In her other hand she is holding a suitcase. Light washes through the kitchen and her heart pounds in the moment before she understands it’s truck lights, trundling by on I-63.
The soundtrack swells, the violins high and filled with tension and Carolyn turns the doorknob, and turns, and — there. The latch disengages. She eases the door open and goes down the cement steps into the backyard. She creeps along the edges to the thicket of cedar trees and steps over the gray daffodils. She kneels down. The props people have filled the suitcase with three blouses, three skirts, three pairs of underwear. Three hundred and fifty-seven dollars, every penny from babysitting and sewing jobs, her grandmother’s Christmas envelopes. She can’t keep the suitcase in her room. The monster does periodic checks, running his clawed hands over her spartan desk, leaving a thin layer of iron-coloured slime on everything, emptying her dresser, her closet. Ripping down the magazine pictures taped to the wall in case there’s something hidden behind them, the Giant Leeches and the Alligator People and the Cat Women lying in shreds on the floor.
The rain machine starts and she feels the first drops on the back of her head. She knows the monster will ask why she is wet, why her tweed skirt is muddy, what happened to her cardigan, why why why and the screenwriter instructs, “Say I slipped in the mud, Sir. I fell, Sir,” and there is a part of her that understands the futility of it all. Understands that she is playing at the escape she is not fearless enough to effect. Daydreaming of her own hero-scientist shack on the edge of the swamp / top of the mountain / underground in a field of ice, her never-to-be realized shack where it would be so quiet. Where there wouldn’t be doors to walk into, stairs to fall down. Where she would move among her bubbling beakers with grace. With ease.
She digs in the soft soil and buries her sanity in a place the monster never goes. A grip turns the rain machine up. She’s pushing the last of the dirt over the hole when the kitchen door bangs open and the monster comes down the steps, holding two bags of trash in his long claws. The screenwriter tells her to freeze and hero-scientists don’t freeze, they act, they fight, they get up and swing their suitcases into the monster’s face until it is a battered pulp, but Carolyn freezes. Water stings her unblinking eyes. If she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught, if she is caught —
The monster strides across the yard, his crocodile eyes catching the moonlight. He opens the metal can and the screech drowns out her rabbit breaths. He slings the trash bags inside and turns back to the house, where Patsy Cline is falling to pieces on the record player and that’s when the lightning strikes. A flash of stark white, outlining his body as he falls to the ground. Thunder cracks. The screenwriter claps a hand over Carolyn’s mouth to stop her from shouting with joy.
The director has given her an early birthday gift. Has heard her talk about the dream she has every night of the monster drowning in his own too-thick silvery blood and made it come true. The monster lies in the pelting rain on the exactly two-inch high grass and his unseeing eyes are open and he must be dead. The lurching beast in the horror movie that is her house, her family, must be finally, astoundingly, dead.
The violins swell again but this time in a major key, this time with possibilities, and she thinks of unburying the suitcase. She thinks of an unhaunted house. A comedy, in which she plays a brave and plucky teen helping her family navigate Life Without Father. She thinks of going back inside, of curling up on the couch as her mother hems a skirt, the set designer roaming the room removing the fear that covers the house like floodwaters. She pictures her mother’s head thrown back in laughter.
But the monster takes a big, shuddering breath. Of course he does. Of course. He stands up. He pats the skin around his suppurating slate-coloured sores, rubs his face. He shakes one foot, then the other. He chuckles and shambles back toward the house. Whistling along with Patsy Cline. The kitchen door bangs shut after him.
She waits for the director to yell, “Cut!” for the crew to bustle, to re-set the scene, to film it again, correctly this time, because he was dead. And even the daffodils were celebrating. Brightening from gray, past white, into… something new. Different. But the director says, “Great job, everyone! Moving on,” and it wasn’t an early birthday present after all and Carolyn sits on the ground under the rain machine, shaking with silent laughter that turns into sobs. She sprinkles the small mound with sticks and leaves. She goes back inside.
June, 1964
Usually at the end of the monster movie the hero-scientist shoots or strangles or drowns or burns or beats the monster, saving the heroine, who by then has been screaming for a long time and the hero-scientist reigns triumphant and the monster is gone forever.
But hero-scientist Carolyn is doing none of these things. She is sitting on her bed while the make-up artist pats charcoal bruises around her eye, her cheekbone, her jaw. Dapples pewter-coloured fingermarks on her neck.
The heroine is in the kitchen making bologna sandwiches for Donny and Ralph and the monster is in the driveway, humming as he washes the car. In the back yard, her suitcase lies open. Her clothes scattered in the grass, ripped to pieces.
Her mother taps on the door and comes in, drying her hands on a dishtowel, not looking up. “Barbara called to see if you wanted to go swimming with her and Sandy. I said you were… not feeling well.”
Carolyn doesn’t have any lines in this scene. She nods and her jaw aches and she wonders if hero-scientists ever get tired of the heroine just standing there and doing nothing, nothing, never defending anyone from the monster’s claws. If hero-scientists ever think of saving themselves instead.
August, 1964
The dawn light is burning away the dew on the fields. Carolyn is striding through the grass toward I-63. The director, the producer, her agent, the screenwriter, they are chasing her, hollering for her to come back, that her contract isn’t up, that she can’t leave the movie, that there’s no movie without her, and the sound engineer turns up the volume on the cicada sound effects and drowns them out.
If she were to turn she would be able to make out her bedroom window on Kennewick Road, now a square the size of a freckle. But she does not turn. She climbs over the metal guardrail and stands on the shoulder facing the traffic. She sticks out her thumb.
When the VW bug coasts to a stop and the passenger door opens, Carolyn runs to get in and as the VW Beetle merges back onto the highway the camera lifts into the sky. Showing the small town, the bustling train in the distance, the almost-yellow field of daffodils.
Sage Tyrtle‘s work is available or upcoming in New Delta Review, The Offing, and Apex among others. She’s told stories on stages all over the world and her words have been featured on NPR, CBC, and PBS. She runs a low cost online writing workshop collective.