Twilight Children Episode 1
Elaine, The Book Haulers, and everything coming to an end.
Writing Skins is a reader supporter author newsletter that shares excerpts from Aigner Loren Wilson’s writing journal. Aigner is an award winning and nominated author of literary speculative fiction and nonfiction.
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
When You Came to Me
Memories are more than just the stories we tell ourselves to remind us who we are. They are the scraps we leave out for the hungry ones.
I am a hungry one.
The Day the Town Died
Elaine
To hell with the mayor and her great big balloon of an idea.
Assholes—pitiful fucks with no sense of an ending.
Look at yourself, Elaine, you’re a mess. Spitting and cursing all over the page like some little girl who got lost in the snow-drenched woods on her way to school. Well, schools been out for so long you don’t remember what shoes you’d wear on the first day.
Explain it before you forget.
I forget so much lately. The nurses call it a sickness. The doctors call it late-stage dementia. It all turns to slush, doesn’t it? Like how did I get home? The door’s still open. Legs are cut and covered in ice crystals. I must have walked.
Yes! That’s it. I got myself home in the snow. In the downfall alone…
I was at that place where kids get ambushed by history and stories they were never there for and never will remember, where the rafters are decorated with the heads of victims who dare try to beat the Ghostwoods’ Hunters—there’s a lumberjack’s head, an otter, a leprechaun, even something called a Geoduck with a long member reaching down to rub the heads of children, teens, and adults alike as they enter the school.
That’s where that bitch of a mayor, Jamilia Barlow, broke the news. Right there in the community space.
Before it all goes rushing out of me in mad hurls, here’s what happened:
Jamilia sat at the front of the room with her husband at her back like he knows how to do anything but roll a deer and stuff a hog. Ha! Two half-wits on a podium heralding the end.
She started with some shit about misguided or misunderstood intentions. She was like us. She had been born here. She had given her stillborns to the earth like is told. She washes her hands when entering anyone’s home to get the death away. She is not trying to change anything.
Only make it better.
My part-time bookseller and full-time worrywart, Ryth, sat a couple seats away from me. They laid into Jamilia like a fire eating away at all the scents you put in to keep strangers away. It was something like, “Mayor Jam, you truly believe in your bones the Book Haulers aren’t another conglomerate looking for a town to hollow out?”
The other townspeople scattered throughout the small room in their snow gear and hats clapped for Ryth. I picked at the exposed skin where I had recently lost a nail doing something with a hammer.
Jamilia’s young and dark-skinned husband, Eddie Barlow, placed a hand on her back but said nothing. What strength can a husband give that a wife has not already taken like sap from him?
Our dear mayor stood to her full height. A small forest of a woman with weak eyes and weaker knees. She pled with the folks like me who lived out in the thin pine trees of the Outer Banks outside of town. We may have nothing more than an old cabin and a fire to keep us, but we ain’t simple. Her words are cold, distant. What did we expect to happen? Nothing stays frozen. Nothing stays the same. For the small number of families who lived, like Jamilia, in Ghostwoods’ snowy market square and newer homes, the mayor served them golden cake on a silver plate.
“We each get a share of the profits to do with what we will.”
That’s when I threw in my spit to all the bullshit. “Let us be forgotten. We’ll all do just fine in the cracks of time.”
No one clapped for me, but I swore some heads like that of the Hale boys nodded along.
I pressed on, alone, daring to stand. “And while you were signing Ghostwoods’ soul of away to some book capitalist, you forget we got a bookstore, got enough of enough?”
“Elaine, please,” Jamilia said, smiling like a crow with teeth but refusing to meet my crooked gaze. “This is as much a benefit to you as it is for everyone else. Your bookstore is a historical monument. It will not be threatened. No one will be threatened by the Book Haulers. They are here to help.”
Ryth laughed loud and empty in the way nineteen-year-olds only could, with the whole world opening up inside them. “Sorry,” they said. “That shit is just funny. Go on with how a giant super bookstore that sells both classics, used, and new books in a ‘one-stop shopping and restaurant experience’ isn’t going to push Elaine and me out of work. Or better yet, what about our restaurant? Hurley’s? That gonna be okay, too?”
More claps.
Clap for the one with pretty lips but hold your tongue against the bitch with fangs.
“Elaine,” Ryth cooed, leaning toward me and my capsizing anger. “I got this.”
They squeezed my hand as they have done in the past when I’m lost in some memory where we play different roles.
“Get your hands off me!” I pushed and freed myself. “This is bullshit,” I said it so loud no one could pretend they didn’t hear me, didn’t see me. I had the floor now, and I wasn’t going to give it up for some overhauled book service. “You’re bringing our deaths on an eighteen-wheeler and telling us to say thank you, smile, it’ll be quick.”
“Elaine,” Eddie Barlow said, getting off the stage. He didn’t mind looking me square in the face. He liked the ugly danger. Hungry men always do. “Not here.”
He inched toward me with Von Northman, the local meat seller with his tan and wanting paws.
I didn’t know it, not then, but now thinking back on it, I was caught and tagged for death. My life was being taken in front of me, and no one seemed to care or even realize it.
I had been screaming for some time, thrashing around in that little classroom. Saying words like bitch, hot cock, and holy hell. Words I thought would cause attention, shock. And they did.
They threw me out into the snow, told me to wait for the end in the cold.
Assholes. Murderous assholes, all of them.
I watched the rest of the meeting through the windows for as long as I could until I became a mound of snow and frozen features. The words I caught and held told the truth plain as day. The corporation was coming, and with it, the end to me, Elaine’s, and everything that made Ghostwoods great.
It took forever and the strength of Ryth to dig me out of the snowbank I had become, but I got out. I remember finding the strength in my legs to kick my way down Main Street in Ghostwoods lined with small brick and wood buildings. I threw snowballs at Jamilia and her husband, riding by in their large SUV. Ryth didn’t stop me, though they also didn’t join with anything more than those squealing high pitch laughs that cut through the snow’s whistle. It was Von, that old green-toothed bastard, and his children just as dumb—demon-spawn!—who chased me off using the clattering of his rifle on his truck like I was one of those boar he keeps for feed.
Come get your meat, Von.
Is what I wanted to say, and what I think maybe in some world I did say. But what really came out of my cracked lips was:
“I’ll pick the bullets from my teeth!”
I shoved Ryth away when they tried to help me off the streets and down the dirt path into the woods. I almost got lost in all their fabric, accessories. The sparse, almost mesmerizing pines of the Outer Banks came to hold me in their forever embrace of bark and hidden iron that I felt the teeth of the future ease up around me. Where is my home but here among the trees and snow? Cold, see me as sister and take me. I can make it easy. I can ease my hand off the wheel. Take a backseat and let the way of nature guide me toward the dizzying dark of death.
Can snow fall as slow as the last snow of your life? Can it be as beautiful if you turn the dial yourself? Leave me in the sound of silence falling in white until it builds to a constant swelling feeling of stillness captured.
At some point, I took the pills. Drank the whiskey or whatever was in the jar labeled whiskey. Here in my cabin, death will find me willingly. But those cowards in town won’t know until the smell on the wind turns from iron to rot.
While I wait for death to kiss my forehead goodnight, something is screaming.
My mouth is chattering and grinding, locking, and clicking. If I had a voice, it’d moan, not scream.
But there, again, a scream. You are screaming for me, and I am coming for you. Another shout, like a pig squealing for the butcher.
It’s like that one story.
Here I come, little Death, and with a story to keep us warm for eternity.
“An outsider went walking …”
The Wandering Woman
An outsider went walking in the thick snow-locked woods of the thin pines. Moving happy and free through the autumn dark of the before-Outer Banks, the before-Ghostwoods, the before-everything, she cut a path through the forest alone. All that existed was the wandering woman, the snow, and the trees duplicating and splitting into thousands of thin makeshift forms—hollowed out by hunger and frost.
The woods closed in around her and spun her a blizzard of madness. Such craven disregard carved what little was left inside of her out. Tears can’t fall from frozen eyes, but blood still runs even from the dead.
The Wandering Woman pulled bark from tree and made a home over all that was frozen. Hard snow-drenched days found her hunched over, bent and freezing, searching the woods for a way back to the home she could no longer see in her mind.
Every nightfall, when the moon came always full, always so close to abandoning her, she was alone in the ghostwoods. If moons keep the lost company, what keeps the dark friendly?
When loneliness did not leave The Wandering Woman, she made loneliness her child. Bones come out easier than organs but grow back slower. She took all the bits of herself she could reach and pulled them out to chew each off and spit them into the ground. Like dirt over a hole, time slipped over her until she was taken by the storm.
The Wandering Woman slips now through the screens protecting your house, dives under your lashes, and comes in with your breath to rest with you when your eyes are shut against the world. She places her cold hand on your heart.
She searches you out.
When morning comes to find you, you are no longer alone. You are empty. You wander out into the snow in search of a home that never existed.
By the end, you’ll become one of her children, too.
Next Time: Find out what is crying out in the cold night.
What did you think? I’m trying things out and everything is an experiment. I’d love to know your thoughts? Love it. Hate it. Absolutely indifferent and confused?