The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Goes to Infinity – Odilon Redon, 1882
2016 was certainly a very weird, very dark section of time-space, so it’s no surprise that a lot of the weirder, darker pieces we published here this past year attracted so many eyeballs. The 10 most-viewed pieces on flapperhouse.com in 2016 were…
#10. “Doodlebug” by Emily Linstrom is a haunting tale about a family of monstrous immortals hiding out in “a part of London even London has no recollection of…” (From our Spring 2016 issue.)
#9. “How Emma Jean Crossed the River” by Shawn Frazier is a powerfully gothic short story of a woman on the run from the Klan, from our Winter 2016 issue.
#8. “artemis”isone of five sizzling poems that Monica Lewis contributed to our Fall 2016 issue.
#7. “The Invention of H.P. Lovecraft” by Shay K. Azoulay is a fictional–yet, perhaps, plausible?!– theory on the origin of the influential horror author, from our Fall 2016 issue.
#6. “Mothers and Demons and the In-Between” is Janelle Garcia’s haunting flash fiction about creepy monsters & the perils of parenthood, from our Winter 2016 issue.
Our Winter 2016 issue is plagued by the perils of parenthood, and crawling with creepy monsters– both of which you can find in Janelle Garcia‘s haunting flash fiction “Mothers and Demons and the In-Between.”
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WE WANTED SO BADLY TO SPEAK WITH THE DEAD, to make contact, even if we didn’t yet know anyone who had died. Our grandmother’s older brother, Ramón, didn’t really count. He only spoke Spanish, after all. But we imagined her death, even if we never said so: our mother.
Our grandmother warned us about the demonios. They’d call to us, whispering our names when we were alone—desperate, pleading whispers. They’d snatch up our souls if we made the mistake of answering them, if we so much as turned our heads towards the source of those whispers. Demonios lurked in the shadows, crouching in the narrow corridor between wakefulness and sleep. Their yellow eyes glowed like beacons, luring us into their embrace, we innocent girls armed only with the name Jehovah.
Say it out loud, she told us.
We pictured demons splintering in the dark or dissolving into puffs of demon dust as we shouted Jehovah, our voices louder than thunder. But she never told us what to do when our tongues, our lips, our throats seized, incapable of even a whisper. What were we to do when our bodies sunk into the sticky tar of that place where our bedroom looked the same, and the clatter of dishes could still be heard from the kitchen, where our bodies remained, wrapped tight in our bedsheets, and yet the air was not the same? Our lungs were always the first to detect we were not of that world, that terrible world of not asleep and not awake. In that place there was only the torpor of fate, an airless sinking. Our demons waited in silence, and there was nothing we could say.
But daylight was the treacherous one. Morning tempted us to forget our terror. With daylight, shadows were shooed away, unmasked. If a squat demon was a pile of laundry, then a sunlit whisper could be chased down with fingers outstretched.
FLAPPERHOUSE 