Margaret Killjoy (29:53)
And we're back because Frankie isn't chopped up anymore. Sticky puddles coat the wood where Selina heaved the axe down on his limbs and ax driven grooves mar the floorboards, but there are no loose tendons, muscles, bone. Frankie's torso is whole, his head attached, as if striking him over and over with the axe were as fictitious as a scene seen in any movie. Silver Is Silver battles in Selina's mouth with what the fuck? And all she can get out is Silver is fucked. Must a silver bullet really finish the job? Nothing else will work. What did people do in olden times when a werewolf came stalking their villages? Ask it nicely to leave, sacrifice their children to sate its appetite? Or has modernity tainted myth and twisted folklore with new ideas? With Hollywood's unhelpful movies, erasing every ancient werewolf weakness, now that everyone believes only a silver bullet can end the nightmare? Selina doesn't have a silver bullet. She doesn't have a gun or a field guide to killing werewolves or much hope. But she believes Frankie's going to come back in all his wolfish glory. She believes only she can stop him. And she believes in spreading fire from the fireplace to the curtains and furniture before she heads out the door. She believes in burning this cabin to the fucking ground with Frankie inside. The insistent blaze fills the smashed picture window and front doorway as she stumbles back to the truck. Red light brushes tender fingers through the trees. A cautious twilight wondering if the time has come for sunrise. Selina wants to tell the world, yes, go ahead and let the lights up. At last it's really over. Or is it? There's that wolfish gurgle again, and this time it breaks into a howl. Serena drives her hands against her. Her ears can't be hearing this, refuses it. The fire roars too loud for her to block it out. And beyond its crackle, she hears another howl. What if the problem isn't the wolf or the silver? Maybe the problem is her and the trauma within. Or the idol Frankie found. Or whether it infects people not by touch but but by sitting in their presence, biding its time against silver axes and flame. Her problem might even be math, she realizes, as firelight and early morning luminescence reveal an absence in the fallen leaves beneath the broken picture window. There's no dark lump where Marvin should lie, only shattered glass. Selina throws herself into Ted's truck and twists the key in the ignition. Movie logic says the engine won't start. Might even have been savaged during Wolf Frankie's initial rampage. But movies are liars, so who's to say? Who can ever really know if the Movie's over when you walk out of that dark room. Maybe when the projectors shut down and the staff leaves. The ghost of the movie keeps on playing itself. An undead presence prowled by secret werewolves. The rear view mirror spots the ongoing nightmare as Selina drives Ted's truck from the cabin where three werewolves pour from behind the inferno. There's Frankie, his shaggy hair singed. There's Marvin, a dark lump now flowing with more muscle and claws. And between them skulks Ted. No more crude jokes, only a cruel appetite between his mishmash of sharp teeth. One claw clutches that damn tooth and wood idol. He's saved it from the fire, his and Marvin's transformations finishing out while they were dead or undead or somewhere in between. That was never Frankie alone, gurgling and howling. Only a trio of werewolves still in the works. And by Hollywood conspiracy or plain simple fact, maybe only a silver bullet can really kill any of them. The idols made sure of it. They cling together in howl, a polyamorous pack mourning a lost member. And then they chased the truck to make their unit whole. Tongues flop from jaws and saliva flails into faces and down necks. They're almost an excited smattering of suburban neighborhood dogs chasing a postal truck. Except this chase is for keeps. Selina floors the gas and Ted's truck rushes up the dirt road and through the woods. Dark, dark branches scrape with toothy sharpness at the windows, the roof, as if a wind full of wolves encircles the truck. But when Selina glances to the rearview mirror again, only a cloud of dust follows her tires. No claws or hair or stretched out faces. No boyfriends turned wolves. They're still alive back there. Still werewolves. But whether or not the nightmare is over isn't about letting fate crash down on her. She has to choose a time for the show to end, a time to leave the theater and let the werewolves play in their coils of ghost films. Only Selina can decide if there should be a lingering question mark or a bold and clear statement of the end. And she has decided. This is the finale, the road scrolling under the truck's hood like a column of end credits. No more horror show. No more nightmare. Even as she scratches her arms where her fingernails snag on a strange new clump of shaggy hair, she promises herself, yes, it is over. Definitely. Forever. Entirely over. Or is it dun dun dun, the end of the story? Or is it the end of the story? It is the end of the story as written. But maybe the ghost of the story still lingers On I like a good short story that could mean so many things, depending on what you're feeling when you read it. I mean, like this is and isn't a story about polyamory, right? Like it happens to be that there's three boyfriends, right? And they all fuck each other a bunch, but that's all before the story even starts. But also there's this kind of, I don't know, leaving boyfriends behind and this sense that these men who have turned into monsters, which is a common but not always experience of people who date men or anyone, anyone who's capable of being this way. There's this, oh, trying to leave them behind in your rearview mirror, but in a weird way, they're always coming after you. I mean, I think really it's a story about trauma and never being able to leave it. But I also like the stuff about how something has gone from folklore to Hollywood. And so it's actually kind of, in a way, talking about how something has gone from folklore to trope. And kind of, in some ways, folklore is tropes, right? Because folklore is often sort of the same story told in different ways, passed on through various oral traditions, through a game of telephone and people adding new things and. And what is that but trope? But it's like less conscious and more earnest in a folklore context. And yet it's become less so in the modern context. And so that's what I was saying when I think a story that plays with trope consciously and not just like I'm subverting a trope, but like addressing that in really interesting ways. Here's what Halley has to say about it at the back of the anthology. For perspective's sake, I want to share that I love a trope. I've gone looking at character cliches and story, been there, done thats. And I start laughing and getting excited because they're wonderful. You can make something incredible from most of them. They're so much fun. So I wanted to take that enthusiasm and confront a trope. I'm not a fan of the non ending of the end, or is it? Often for me it feels like a cheat or sequel baiting or a lack of perspective. But when I thought deeper about it, beyond the implicit jump scare lies a nightmare of endlessness, paranoia lingers, trauma sticks, and there's a sense of never really getting out of a bad situation. I wanted to tackle the horror of that non ending by stretching out the wound of that moment, poking around at how far it could go and maybe how cruelly it could cut. And then Hazel, who helps me pick stories, said about this. I love how Haley uses a trope that I'm also often annoyed by to explore the viscerality of trauma I've heard. And I don't know if this is literally true, but it often feels that way. That the amygdala, where fear and trauma are processed, doesn't encode memories with time. So when you experience a memory, it's really easy to feel like it's happening right now, that you're still living in this story. And that's a horror story, never being able to move on, still jumping at shadows, perpetually needing to stay on edge to keep yourself safe. This is Margaret Again, my perspective again. I'm really drawn to the prose of this story. Very specifically, I was reading this essay and I didn't write this into the script, so I don't have it in front of me. I was reading this essay like a day or two ago, written by an author talking about how they don't love most prose and writing of the golden age of science fiction, with the exception of Ray Bradbury. And in that piece they talk about how people kind of came along and added writing really beautiful prose to genre fiction at some point. And this is of course, an exaggeration on some level. But then that author, again, whose name I don't remember, who wrote this essay that I read a few days ago, goes and like, lists contemporary authors who do it really, really well and specifically names Haley Piper. And having just read this story by Hailey Piper, it really stuck out to me. There's ways of doing prose that's beautiful without getting lost in like I'm just going to beautifully describe all of these details of things and getting kind of purple. But instead there's ways of doing beautiful prose that's moving the action along and ties into the plot. And that's what I think. Haley is a master of these sentences that are like becoming beautiful by cutting out words and taking abnormal structure. But yeah, if you want to know more about Hayley, here's Haley's bio. Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of novels, short fiction and nonfiction. She is an active member of the Horror Writers association and lives with her wife in Maryland where their paranormal research is classified. Her new novel is A Game in Yellow and she has a short story collection out called Teenage Girls Can Be Demons. You can find her@haileyper.com and Haley, I mean, it's in the title, but it's H A I L E Y-P I P E R.com and I'm Margaret Killjoy and you can find me on the Internet by looking up Margaret Giljoy. I'm on Blue sky and Instagram. I hate social media with a desperate passion, but also recognize it's the waters in which we swim. And I have a substack, martyrkilljoy.substack.com where I post my thoughts. And I also have another podcast called Cool People who Did Cool Stuff. And thanks for listening all the way to the end of the podcast because it is the end, isn't it? No, it actually is the end. Okay, bye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media.
