Memorial at the Gazebo
By: Tantra Bensko
Tags: Horror Fiction, Short Story, Horror, Scary Story, Monsters

Memorial at the Gazebo

A Horror story about merciless monsters

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Peetay had been a vibrant young man half my age, bouncing his belly dancing to the music, party after party. But on that Sunday afternoon, we sat in a circle on the concrete, reviewing about our memories of him. A disgusting baby rolled over my dress and drooled on it, preparing to eat the world.

My son and his wife were not at the memorial, having moved across country a week before to live with her parents and to have a baby. They wanted to be around grandparents who relished burping and jiggling, in spite of this world being already overcome with humanity, dying out from under us, with nothing to offer offspring’s future, as we pull oil from Earth’s veins, water from its tears.

A guy wearing a kerchief said: “Peetay helped me get off crack. I feel bad because I brought him down. Peetay, I’m sorry. I know you’re out there, dancing in your giant baby costume. Sucking on a giant tit.” People smirked, because of the story that wearing that costume had gotten Peetay laid at a festival.

A woman with dreadlocks said: “Peetey, you big bright light, you weren’t meant to be part of this world.”

His art book was placed in one quadrant of the gazebo. Four-foot pages of thick paper displayed ramblings about drug trips that made him see monsters, his handwriting scrawled huge across it and moving upwards off the page. The letter g’s that were near the notebook’s spiral center widened into open mouths that ate the next page. Stories clambered to break free of the page, intersecting the shapes of gruesome convolutions and speculations of cosmology.

I couldn’t understand how such a smiley man had that awfulness inside. I wanted to look closer at the notebook to see if he mentioned an event he’d told me about. But I had to wait until I could do it without sobbing.

Another friend said: “Peetay, you’ve always been in your own world. A world too beautiful to stay in. I know you’re dancing naked as the day you were born and drinking Mother’s Milk beer and you’ll always have that twinkle.”

His brother Dave talked about how they used to have lucid dreams all their lives. “We used to tell each other our lucid ones, and sometimes, we’d find out we’d shared them. Sometimes, I saw those creatures.” He pointed to the art.

Looking at Peetay’s art and writings, I saw something in my peripheral vision. I thought maybe it was a mirage from the heat or from being out in the sun too long. It hovered around his brother Dave’s head.

Once everyone was done talking, we got up.

A young man circled the gazebo on a bike, yelling out obscenities at us.

I went over to talk to Dave. Eventually I worked up to my question: “Did you two ever feel like you were exploring other worlds and learning secrets of the universe when you went on your dream trips?”

“We thought of it more as exploring our subconscious, learning about our psyches.” He took a swig of wine from a bottle. “The dreams were especially intense if we imbibed.” He leaned toward me and whispered: “We were crack babies. Our mother was really fucked up when we were in the womb. I think that has something to do with it.”

The astral monster near his head seemed to scrunch up, become denser, and seethe at me. I noticed a second something, maybe even a third, all different astral colors, barely visible even to my trained auric vision — the exact duplicates of images I’d seen in Peetay’s big spiral bound notebook. I’d seen people’s auras for years but nothing like this before.

People were toasting Peetay and getting loud. I knew I was being rude to Dave by looking away from him as I talked, but I could only see the creatures that way.

Someone else started talking to him, so I let it go. The air next to Dave felt palpably rough, even scratchy.

And when I looked down, I noticed my arm was scraped. I hadn’t remembered that being there before. It itched, and as I scratched, the thing by Dave’s head looked more monstrous. One side of its mouth curved up way too high, and its long, sharp, red teeth stuck out at a sickening angle.

My heart hurt. I sat down on the floor of the gazebo. The guy on the bike kept yelling.

After seeing those aura-monsters, which I assumed came from his imagination like tulpas, or egregores, I didn’t feel like Peetay was a cute boy as much as a darkly troubled man.

I asked: “Did Peetay ever tell you about the monster who showed up in his room, saying he had to sacrifice his oldest friend — as in, you know, an old person, or he would die? He talked about it for a long time at a party. I’m his oldest friend, if they’re talking about age. None of his other friend’s mothers showed up at the parties.”

I tried to look both sincere and ready to laugh it off, with a half-smirk. I’d asked four people over the last few months and no one knew. I had trouble holding my mouth stable, as I wanted to cry and hug him and have him tell me it was OK.

“The weirdest part was the monster also told his girlfriend she had to get pregnant so she could carry its child. And even though they didn’t have sex, because he was in rehab, she got pregnant. What the creature said came true!”

Dave looked at me with mild disgust. “No, I don’t know anything about that.”

“Do you know what happened with his girlfriend?”

“We don’t say her name in this family. We’re not in touch with her. She’s the one who got him started on crack to begin with.”

I talked to his mother instead. I sobbed the hardest with her, seeing loss in her eyes. I was the only other mother of an adult there. She was pale, with terrible teeth, shaking, her eyes crossed. We hugged.

She said: “I never wanted to have a child. I literally don’t know how it happened, to tell you the truth. I’ve always seen him as a miracle boy. That’s why everyone calls me Madonna.”

She shook my hand the whole time she was talking.

He’d always had wide-open eyes in that oversized head, sticking out that stomach with self-acceptance I wished I had.

I hoped his girlfriend had just cheated on him and lied about it. I wondered what the monster meant by sacrifice.

Dave announced to the crowd: “My mother and I can’t take much with us when we fly back. Otherwise, I’d hang on to Peetay’s art. I think Mom’s scared of it. I know you all love him, and so this is my gift to you.”

My scrape itched worse and I couldn’t stop scratching it. My lip bled. An eye twitched. My stomach cramped. And the aura-monster with the lopsided grin stuck its teeth out farther up, raising them in the air away from its lower lip, the creepiest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

People picked up his framed drawings and paintings first. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to know about the pregnancy story. I wanted to see if these monsters existed in some shared world the brothers had created out of their imaginations: I picked up the notebook.

I said goodbye to everyone, crying all over again, put the notebook in my backpack and walked across the park beside the lake.

I’d never seen monsters before. I’d only started to suspect such things existed when Peetay’s girlfriend got pregnant.

My legs were weak, and my vision blurry. I couldn’t help crying, and I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

I wasn’t familiar with the city or the buses, and the stop I’d expected wasn’t there, so I got off, but after a turn, I got disoriented. I wandered around West Oakland, looking for the best way back home, lost in a dingy area full of urine and feces. People’s faces distorted by drugs stared at me.

One came close as he passed me and whispered something, I couldn’t tell what. It felt like a threat, and I walked faster.

I saw something behind me, floating in the air, and I turned around. The creepy things I’d seen around Dave’s head were right behind me, blobby and scrambling, toothy, one with something shaped like a saw for a head, another like an overgrown gangrened fat baby slobbering blood and reaching out to me with fingers with knives for nails.

I screamed, and ran toward where I thought the right bus stop might be. My sense of direction took me in the wrong way and as I turned the corner, I tripped over a bunch of folks doing crack, seated in a huddle on the sidewalk, my face landing right on a crack pipe. I thought I’d broken my nose.

“All you had to do was ask, lady. We could have sold you some.”

“Heck, she’s pretty enough, for an old’un. Let’s just give her some.”

“Whether she wants it or not.”

“Then she’ll buy it from us after that, no problem.”

They fell upon me. Elbows in my eye, scratchy beards against my cheek, toothless laughter drooling in my ear, and the assault of the chemicals.

The crack was incredible. I’d never done any drugs at all, and I finally understood the appeal.

At some point, I don’t know when, because I forgot to make notes about it here — I stopped worrying about finding my way back to Emeryville, or how I’d hardly get to see my son again because of his wife’s insistence on mindless breeding.

Luckily, I didn’t need to worry about birth control, being menopausal, when I turned tricks to buy crack from the guys I hung with on the sidewalk.

I no longer felt alone. I loved the men who’d given me crack. I gave them all I had: I gave them myself.

I was bliss. I was eternity. I was angel.

******************************************************************

I don’t know how long ago that was. I don’t know much at all other than from reading what I’ve recorded here.

I wrote the story of that day after I started living on the street, as memories faded.

Now, I’m so glad, as I would never know who I was except for this narration.

But I’m also not glad, when the astral mouths start licking the words on the page, huffing their essence, destroying their narrative meaning, making the letters flip around on the page dyslexically.

I huddle with the men on the sidewalk in two big boxes taped together.

I keep wandering through the streets trying to find the way to my old home, some bus stop that has the right number or a map that hasn’t been torn off or a bus driver who will talk to me.

I’m starting to smell like monster.

I’ve started talking to the oozing blue dead baby and all those other awful creatures in the book. They don’t talk back, but they scratch me in response, the last scratch cursive writing on my thigh: “Out of Date.”

No one will let me borrow a phone. When I get tired of wandering and sit down on the sidewalk, the only thing I have to read is Peetay’s book.

It reads me.

My past is going away. I’m writing all this down in the back of his book, trying to get it down faster than the monsters can eat it up. My g’s are a widening gyre. I barely eat, but my belly has become distended.

The men have torn off the book’s cardboard backing and cover and taped them to make doorways on the boxes.

They patched the holes in the boxes with pages from it that I’m still writing on above my head now, shaking the pen to make ink flow.

The monsters have almost finished eating my story as they read it, savoring it word by word.

I read the beginning of this story, which is taped up almost entirely now to reinforce our cardboard house. I read it over and over so I remember who the art notebook belonged to and how I knew him.

But really, I think I’m only writing it because the monsters hungrily asked me to, now.

I don’t even care about my past.

Apparently my son doesn’t care enough about to take care of me in my disability, and prefers to go have a new baby to spend all his money and time on instead.

The monsters are hungry for that story. They cry if I don’t write it, and when I do, they gurgle and coo.

The teeth sticking out from that monster’s mouth have already begun pushing into my cheeks. They bleed with the pressure, poking through the flesh and press against my own teeth. The big blue baby monster’s nails dig into my kneecap.

If I don’t write this story on our cardboard home’s walls for the monsters to eat, the men won’t give me any more crack. I don’t have to turn tricks any more to buy it. Just feeding the monsters with this story has become enough. It is everything. The men give me crack. That is all my all.

I don’t know if the men I live with in the boxes knew Peetay, or if I really did, if I ever had a son at all.

Maybe no Peetay existed. His name is not on the art book. Maybe I drew the monsters all along.

Maybe I was the one who lucid dreamed. I do remember having a brother named Dave. I think. And our mother.

Our mother who condemned me to my disabilities because she used crack. Who hated having children, who didn’t even know the fathers. Who was like our child to take care of. And I drew it all in my book. I made up a life.

Was the gazebo really this art-covered box? A bike messenger riding around and around it shouting obscenities.

My breasts are distended.

Maybe I made up Peetay and Dave as my children who cared about me, but really, didn’t, just left me to decay on the streets with these men I’ve known all my life.

Without the crack, I think I would die.

I wonder if I’m dead already.

The only reason I think I’m alive is because the giant baby steals milk from my breasts.

I don’t bother covering my chest as we hunker on the sidewalk.

I feed it endlessly year after year, or day after day, that fat baby that never had a father, a ball of pudge that will never take care of me when I’m old. A baby with no face.