Paramanu Pentaquark

You look like a shy owl
flirting

with a pair of salad tongs.
This is the nicest thing

I've ever said
to anyone.

My eyes are kneeling,
the only unbelievers

in a shrill church,
a church of florescent salad

bowls and Johnny-on-the-spot
barbeque aficionados.

You look like an old shoe
whose stamped size

has worn away years ago.
You look like a paper bag

full of feathers
and over-the-counter muscle

relaxers.

When Grandfather died,
intense nationalism

burned in his head,
his esophagus, his kidneys.

The slogans on his t-shirts –
I will not repeat them here –

were hateful.
I blame the radio,

the same one that used to broadcast
Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Once a city burns,
it gets sung about forever.

hands:

clustered lilies

brim with dew

please:

the drawing-in

of the sky of late hours

into shut-eyed,

great-columned

closeness—

extravagance—

plenty:

caught and led

through protective circles

by a rivulet from

the body

into the body

gasps:

closely drawn sketches

of wiry, benevolent

sainthoods—

pacifists—

faces:

mountains

joined so close they became

an insurmountable range

any explorer would die on

she

and her lover

drew nearer and nearer

to what had been held

in escrow—

their green shoots’ delicate tips

found new suns—

the quilt of the galactic:

salve; love

the yet-to-be-born speak

I’m an unlanded bird

happy

I’ll be

midwife loudmouth

leader gravedigger

I’ll put the corpus in

pull it out

my blades

will spread jam

I’ll feed on

decorum

call down the furies

blame everyone

make no bones

I’ll grow

out of sand, stone,

out of pearl, palm

cannon, slate,

ribbons, cues

I’ll find the staircases &

grow out of the rooms

out of holes &

into stems hymns

I’ll rise at dawn sleep in

grow out of praise &

into races I’ll win

or waste and

I’ll grow out of suits, corsets, high stakes & into

enough breath

I expect to

touch moss

lay

in furs, grasses,

snowdrifts, baths

I’ll get wet & object

I’ll relent & smoke a cigarette

I imagine

cold will slap

heat will brood

I expect no beatitude

I’ll live with fingers

unprised, let

to lay down, to play,

to be and do as they

will

I will imbibe walk west & east

I’ll grow cramps

& a toy chest

I’ll hold

lovers

who cower

who roar

My body will be its own reward

I expect seasons

a tidal stench

summer scents

I’ll rescind vows

believe reasons

announce triumphs

I’ll be

bailer & bailed

turncoat & key

I’ll kiss confess

in attics under docks

I will make of pieces

sets

I’ll clear the air

grow out of

hunger / rages

I’ll rouge my face

I’ll branch / cluster

hollow \ treasure

I’ll be a maker

holy

worse for wear

I’ll break in

drape a wool coat

over barbed fence

climb it

I’ll be in disarray

I’ll use words / bread \ law

as brine—

preservation from

false

sermons & signs

I’ll earn points

grow hyacinths

bleach my sheets & hang them on the line

do small engine repair

I’ll be sincere

bargain prices down

grow out of

skepticism’s

hymns

or not

I’ll use lowercase letters

reduce words to ash

pilot ships give tours

I expect to hear \ cast

theories

agonies

I’ll break waves

glass

mores

I'll dissolve

rage

bring it in from the rain

I—chest locked, ribs shelves

decorated with breath

will

have

been

I’ll bleed from the chin

stitch patterns that clash

brawl in the street

I’ll feel

uncured raw

sure

I’ll jeer

fold

until I tear

I foresee plots and fines

commas after

broken bread/oath/drought/wax/plaster

stone

calm

the drench

of poem

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If you've done dowsing, it feels like that, except inside your head, she'd said. As if that statement would mystically clarify my utter lack of knowledge, somehow. If I had a Y-shaped stick, maybe I could dowse my way out of this self-inflicted Hellscape. Presuming, of course, I could figure out how to dowse on my first ever try. Sometimes, I get the stupidest ideas.

It was because I'd asked her how she found her way back to the freeway without a map, without a phone, without anything other than the two of us, her rusted pickup truck, and more swearing than one tiny woman should be able to physically manage. We had been horribly, profoundly lost. Backtracking was impossible. Some roads were one way only, not in the direction we needed.

Those were the simple roads.

Things got weirder as that night progressed. My memories are disturbing, too real, too colored, too dim. An over-produced, too-filtered Hollywood version of a trippy dream.

In those movies, the characters always say at the end that their memory of whatever happened is fading, or some BS like that. Except my memories are so intense, my mind shies away from it if I think about it too long.

Like how you can't look directly at the sun because you'll burn your retinas out. Maybe I’d burnt my brain cells out, and that’s how I thought I could do the same thing.

***

"Oh no you don't, you fucker. You're not getting away from me!" I lurched sideways in my seat as she rapidly turned right down an alley without slowing, slalomed refuse, and outright ignored that the alley ended in a chain link fence.

"Fence," I pointed. She accelerated. I grabbed the 'oh shit handle' by the door and fought my panic. "Right in front of us! There's a fence!" I looked at her, genuinely scared now. She loved this truck; surely she wouldn't drive it through a fence just to escape this blasted urban wasteland she'd picked me up in? I looked at her, about to ask her to turn around.

She was looking at me and said too calmly, too firmly, in a voice that was more Real than it had any right to be, "Remember, you have to trust me. I'm getting you out of here. Yeah?"

I nodded dumbly. Some small part of my brain – the kind that could do mathematics and computer programming – was shrieking at me. The rest of me was fuzzy, comfortable, and knew that I had chosen correctly for my one phone call available out of greater metropolitan Hell. I'd had nowhere else to go, nothing to my name. Just the clothes on my back and a now-dead candybar phone.

At dawn, somehow, we made it out.

***

Dowsing is how you get the sense of what’s underneath the ground by clearing your mind and waving a stick around, right? I’d figured that I could find my way back to my apartment in a much better way: by walking next to the transit line, or, when that wasn’t possible, taking the closest possible road. I rode transit every damn day, I looked out the windows, these neighborhoods weren’t foreign to me, I’d figured.

Shit looks a lot different when you’re down on the ground, I gotta tell you.

I was lost within a half hour. Nah, probably less than that.

The similarities made me think of that night, years ago, when my best friend and I caromed through a darkened slum at speed, her shouting that she wouldn’t lose her way, that she promised she’d get me home safe. Here I was in a dark, stinking ghetto, hoping that I was alone and worrying that I wasn’t. It was after midnight, same as that time with her. Certainly, I was completely lost. Oh, and once again, I had no phone; rather, I had no functional phone. The remains of my phone were a weight of sharp edges and crunchy electronics in my pocket. RIP, little buddy, I sure hope I can save your data.

I tried looking for landmarks, or turning toward what seemed to be main streets whose lights I could see from a block or two away. Somehow, I ended up more and more mired in abandoned buildings, weed-choked sidewalks, and trash-filled streets. I spotted an overpass ahead and backtracked – even I’m not so dumb as to walk under a dark overpass in the wee hours of the night. Better to take an even longer way around.

***

It felt like we’d been driving for hours. But I knew that she lived only 2 hours away from where she’d picked me up. It shouldn’t have been possible unless we were driving in circles – which we weren’t – or… maybe someplace else entirely. My skin prickled, knowing something that I didn’t want to acknowledge.

“How the Hell is this neighborhood so big?” I asked instead. We both know I’m dumb, but considering the World treats me like the smart one since I’m swinging sausage and she’s teeny-tiny, I like to play dumb around her. Besides, she really is smarter than me, and best friends like to help each other shine.

She panted a couple of times before answering, like she was jogging uphill and not just driving recklessly. “We left that neighborhood a while ago, sweetie. Now it’s just keeping ahead of the turns. That freeway exit is fucking slippery!” She glanced at me as she answered; her teeth were clenched and she was sweating more than the warm night called for. Especially as the breeze from the open windows was nice and cool.

By that point, I’d seen us somehow ignore the existence of the one chain link fence and at least two brick walls. A couple of times she’d turned onto roads that weren’t there until she turned onto them. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I knew it wasn’t normal.

She always said ‘Normal is a setting on your dryer,’ before laughing.

I mean, I’m not normal either. More like a fuckup that somehow kept getting up, trying to escape, and even sometimes succeeding. Meeting her was definitely a success. Calling her was… probably one?

“Um,” I started, but she interrupted me.

“Sorry, sweetie, I – This is kinda hard, so can we not have too many questions, please?” She was definitely panting, now.

I felt really guilty as well as a little scared. It was my fault she was here; she’d come to get me. I’d asked her to. ‘Sorry,’ I’d said, ‘I kinda got in a little trouble – I’m ok! But I need a ride from – hey, what’s the address here?’ She said she’d come right after she got off work and to expect me after 10 pm. She hadn’t gotten there until midnight. When she did get there, she was already cussing a blue streak, shouting into windows, and complaining about the neighborhood toughs not wanting to let her get to me. Or something confusing and unreal like that. The ax handle is real, anyway. She keeps it next to the driver’s seat. It’s an old piece of solid Ash wood, really pretty and really solid.

I swallowed what I’d planned to say, which had been a question about why it seemed like it was darker behind us than in front of us, and said: “Is there anything I can do that would help?”

She smiled at me. Her big, shining, sunshine smile. It lit up the cab of the truck, shining off her braids and sweat, making me squint and smile. “Just trust me. I am going to get you safely home, ok? You’re going to be alright. I’ve got you.”

I nodded. “I know you will. That’s why I called you,” I said.

The sky in front of us began to turn light gray, yellow, orange. The sun was starting to come up.

She whooped, “That’s the ticket! Check it out, here’s the ramp!” She hauled on the rusty truck’s steering wheel.

And with a screeching left turn, we merged onto the freeway. My goosebumps smoothed over.

***

I was so tired. My feet were on fire, my head throbbed. I’ll confess that I’d already cried at least once and was crying again. What a shit of a night.

It had been a rough day, all around, which was why I was willing to meet up with my Friends-With-Benefits when he messaged me. But work ran long, and transit ran slower than its usual not very fast. By the time I walked the couple of blocks from the station to his place, my phone battery was low, so I messaged instead of calling, even though I know he doesn’t always hear the message tone. Which left me waiting around in front of his building until one of his neighbors who was just getting home held the door open to let me in, smiling at me – I’m pretty sure she thinks he’s my boyfriend or something. Technically, an invitation into the building, so all good. I walked up to his 3rd floor apartment and knocked, which I had to do twice, and then he was all pissed off at me for being late, startling him, not calling him, etc.

He settled down when I explained my shit day, and he even reheated some leftovers for me for dinner, since he’d already eaten. I’d kinda hoped to go out together for food like we often did, but that was ok. My phone was charging and we were cuddling on the couch and I thought everything was fine – but it wasn’t. He just up and paused what we were watching and told me how he was sick of us being FWB and how I wasn’t a good friend because I worked too much, how I had ‘let myself go’ now that it wasn’t summer and he couldn’t drag me to the park anymore, and just… really horrible stuff.

I know I didn’t react well. I know I said things I shouldn’t have. I’ll apologize tomorrow, if I get home safely and see tomorrow, that is.

My phone fell on the floor and got stepped on at some point during our argument.

Transit ends at midnight, and by the time we finished fighting and I stormed out, it was nearly midnight. I didn’t make it to the station in time, and the usual few cabs that hang about got grabbed up by other people.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t felt this low in a long time. That’s probably part of what made me think of our Mad Escape from Hell as I’ve always jokingly called it. Of how, that morning on the freeway, when I asked about what had just happened and she’d explained, I knew what we’d gone through wasn’t Normal. That my best friend was some kind of cryptid or something.

Normal is a setting on my dryer, she always says. I didn’t care if she was a Yeti; she was my BFF and that was that.

I thought I’d be ok walking home, but I’m not.

***

“The roads got shifty – they kept rerouting us. Someone really didn’t want to let you go,” she talked as she set up a bed for me on her couch. “It was a good thing you called me. Don’t know if anyone else could have gotten through.”

I flopped down, still fully clothed, though I knew better than to let my shoes be on the ‘bed’. The ragtag collection of hand-me-down blankets and hand-crocheted afghans that she used for guests is something I secretly loved. It was always far more welcoming and comfortable than any bed I had in childhood or teen years. Her sheets never match, but they always smell fresh and clean.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I tiredly mumbled. She chuckled at me and started undoing my shoes. She does embarrassing shit like that all the time.

“Sleepyhead,” she teased. “We slipped sideways. Or, really, you did, somehow. I had to go – that way –” she pointed in a weird direction off to her left and downward, “to get to you. And then getting back out to here” she waved her hands around “was a little tricky. Those roads were slick and angry. They kept changing the route on me, even as I found it.

“I think we almost didn’t make it out.” She sat next to me as she said that. She looked small all of a sudden. I often forget that she’s small because she’s so big in my life.

I put my hand on her arm. “Hey, it’s ok.”

Her 9000 watt smile turned right back on. “Yeah it is. I’m really glad you called me. Promise me you’ll call if you’re ever in trouble again? No matter what?”

She had a little crease between her eyebrows that told me she was serious, so I answered seriously. “I promise. No matter what, if I’m in trouble, I’ll call you to come get me.”

“Good. I’ll always get you home safe.”

***

I’d backtracked but somehow the buildings weren’t the same as they had been before. I know because I would have remembered the double lot-sized Mini Park. The city is dotted with them, and they’re part of what I love about living here. Each little neighborhood has its own little green spot with trees, flowers, and picnic spots. Maybe a little playscape for kids. Maybe a little trail that connects through to other mini parks so you can keep going on a longer walk. They’re little gems showing that city life isn’t about independence and loneliness in a concrete jungle, but about community and connection in a planned space.

This little park had a bench just inside the boundary. Exhausted, I sat on it and let my weariness take me. The weather was chilly but not bad; maybe I could just sleep the rest of the night here and figure things out in the morning. Plenty of homeless in the city did it all the time, I reasoned. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself drift off to sleep.

“Hey there, Sleeping Beauty,” my favorite voice said, “maybe crashing out on a park bench isn’t one of your better ideas.”

My eyes bugged out, to see my best friend standing there, upside down, looking at me. Clearly, I was hallucinating. She lived in another state. She adjusted where she was standing so she looked right side up.

“Yeeeah,” she squinted at me, “ You look like you’ve had an Adventure. Let’s get you home.” She tucked her braids behind her ear and actually tugged me up into a sitting position.

I gawked at her. “You – what are you? You’re real. You’re really here. How are you really here?

“Wait. What the Hell are you doing here?!” I couldn’t help it, I shouted. She laughed and shrugged.

“You’re going to have trouble believing me. It’s a long story. Short version: I heard your Call and I came to get you home.” We may be older but her smile hasn’t changed. The night seemed a lot less dark with her there, smiling with me. “C’mon, we’re nearly there.” She nodded her head further into the mini park.

I stood up when she tugged my arm, and I followed her as she led me, arm-in-arm. But I was not going to simply accept her sudden appearance and statement that I’d called her when I hadn’t even messaged her that day.

“You are off your damn rocker, woman. I haven’t talked to you all day. I sure as Hell didn’t call you. How the Hell could I?” I lifted my poor, devastated phone out of my pocket to show her.

She shook her head at me and laughed again while we walked. “You don’t smell drunk, but you sure do have a case of the Stupids. Though, thankfully,” and she leaned into my shoulder in a half-hug, “You didn’t get yourself twisted too far Sideways. You Called me. Right here,” and she pointed first to her head, then to her heart.

“Here we are!” With an expansive wave, she indicated a chain link gate at the back of the mini-park. The whole fence was overgrown with blooming vines of star jasmine, whose heady scent changed the entire evening from something traumatic into something beautiful. She flicked the gate latch and it swung out onto the sidewalk beyond. The sky was noticeably lighter. She gestured for me to walk through before her.

Carefully latching the gate behind us, she once again took my arm and steered us down the sidewalk, past mature trees and through a residential neighborhood peacefully asleep. Street lights filtered through leaves on the trees while crickets sang. We strolled at a pace much slower than either of us usually walked.

I looked around at the cozy homes with their tiny front yards. “Where are we? I don’t know this neighborhood.”

She gave me a surprised look. “Really? It’s only a few blocks from your place. I was sure you’d know such a cute spot. You love little parks like that one.”

“Yeah, but I don’t remember that one, and I sure don’t remember any of these houses,” I protested. The light began to take on the lavender hue of pre-dawn in the city.

Suddenly, with just one turn around a corner, I did recognize the landmarks: the convenience store at the corner with its mural of children dancing, the old brick school that had been converted to a senior daycare and activity center for disabled adults, the bike rack which had been decorated with multi-color knit wraps, the Co-Op Coffee Shop, the shopfront of the Youth Art Collective. My apartment was only two blocks away, to the East.

“Things look a lot different in the light, don’t they?” she asked me quietly. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching me.

I gave her side eye and pretended to grumble. “Don’t rub it in, I know you did something weird with that gate back there. Although – I am glad to see you. How long you visiting for?”

“Four days!” she proclaimed to the dawn. “Not nearly long enough, but that was what I could manage to get in such a hurry. That reminds me: you owe me the cost of a plane ticket.”

I scowled and opened my mouth to protest but got startled out of it when she whacked me on the arm and said, “Hey, I’m hungry. Do you have eggs at your place? You make the best omelets and I can’t make omelets to save my life and I looove your omelets! Please?” She gave me an exaggerated puppy face.

I rolled my eyes and began agreeing to my best friend’s demands – well, maybe not the ticket, I’m still not sure how that one is my fault, despite how she claims I Called her.

If I did, I’m sure glad I did. I’m even more glad she showed up.

We got home just as the sunlight cleared the tops of the buildings.

I once met him,

The Snake,

Sly, subtle, cunning,

Eater of gods,

The Snake,

Smart and seeing,

Eater of gods,

Upon its own tail,

Smart and seeing,

A Serpent,

Upon its own tail,

Sweetest smile,

A Serpent,

Slip-shape,

Sweetest smile,

Fateful fang,

Slip-shape,

Poison breath,

Fateful fang,

Shroud-skin,

Poison breath,

Rebel against Lord,

Shroud-skin,

Guide of The Garden,

Rebel against Lord,

I once met him,

Guide of The Garden,

Sly, subtle, cunning

I am convinced the world is run by ghouls. Ghouls are dead things, reanimated through nefarious means, who poach from the living to sustain their existence. More and more I find that people in power fit this description, with their glassy eyes and false toothy grins, flesh sagging with the burden of inhumanity. These creatures warp policy and moral law at will, utterly detached from the suffering they inflict. They’re even worse than ghouls – they refuse to admit they’re dead.

The only solution is to put a stake through its heart, seal its mouth with garlic and behead it. Throw the body in a river for good measure. You can’t be too careful.

Let me make myself clear: I don’t wish actual harm on anyone. I’m engaging in a rhetorical coping mechanism. Collective ignorance has made me desperate for a way to make people aware, to rip open their eyes and conjure a giant cosmic slap upside the skull; anything to remind these ghouls that we’re all the same inside, just as vulnerable, bloody and potentially monstrous.

Of course, calling them ghouls is an oversimplification. They’re human beings too, police officers and lawyers and executives, teachers and administrators and parents. What makes them ghoulish to me is their selfishness, their use of exclusionary ideals to elevate their status at everyone’s expense. Labeling them helps me feel more in control, more protected from their vampiric ways; because once ghouls label someone as an Other, they can exploit that person as they please.

Growing up in middle-class America, these ideals were coded into me from every source. In school, at home, through advertising and media, I learned to separate the world into aesthetic categories – good-bad, pretty-ugly, rich-poor, white-black. I learned that one’s worth could be judged by their circumstances alone, that anyone who suffered brought it on themselves, and doing well in school, finding a respectable job, creating a model family were the only ways to show value. Most importantly, I trusted authority without question, fearful that doubt would consign me to a lowly status, where the ghouls could feast on me unchallenged.

Horror remains my greatest comfort against the ideals. The rhetoric of horror embodies how I feel living in this world, amongst these people: a chaos of projections, suspicion, inverted morals and identities. Fictional ghouls make more sense to me, too. Frankenstein’s Monster is different from your senator or CEO – he has an emotional core, for one; he wants, yearns, desires, follows a gut instinct to seek care and acceptance. His resentment for mankind is earned after he endures so much rejection. Ushered into the world by a selfish mortal, discarded and abused, who wouldn’t react with rage?

I don’t come to horror for rage, though. I come for catharsis, to purge my negative emotions and find relief. A well-choreographed murder, a fruiting corpse or anatomical oddity, anything uncanny invokes both revulsion and awe in me, not only wringing out stress, but bringing me closer to myself. When contained in an image or series of words, I know the horror won’t hurt anyone; liberated from fear of harm, I can open doors within myself, and unabashedly face the things that crawl forth.

But we are not supposed to open those doors. Our ideals tell us to avoid the strange and horrific at all costs, to follow the defined norm and never look to the shadows. Since childhood I’ve felt pressured to embody that binary Goodness, to be obedient and restrained, loyal to power and prescribed consumption. Even then, the ideals repulsed me more than the monsters that threatened them. I was not drawn to the nuclear family, the hierarchical social group, the allegiance to some higher power; I wanted to explore the underbelly of things, to revel in the monstrous and its beauty. I could only do this through horror fiction.

For me, the draw of horror is erotic – not sexy, but deeply felt in the core of my being.In Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, George Bataille writes, “Eroticism springs from an alternation of fascination and horror, of affirmation and denial” (211). It isn’t just a cheap rush, a roller-coaster leap; it’s the sublime, fearsome sensation of confronting dichotomies that can never be resolved, only witnessed.

If not for this confrontation, I may have never come to terms with my queerness. Now, the fundamentals of queer culture – exploration and acceptance of difference, radical claiming of one’s self – are my personal philosophy. Horror explores a similar territory. The more I delved into horror, the more I suspected that monsters were never a threat; the real malice lurked in our establishments, political, financial, religious or otherwise, where human ghouls exercise the most power.

I soon learned the risk of voicing this opinion. People will defend their ideals violently and thoughtlessly. Young and misguided, terrified of getting in trouble, I thought there was no value in my understanding, no wisdom in my distrust.Maybe I rejected the ideals simply because I couldn’t fit into them.

I was not alone in my frustration, though.A few years ago I came across Harry Benshoff’s Monsters in the Closet. In his analysis, Benshoff locates a direct, even deliberate kinship between iconic monsters and queer creators. Perhaps ironically, many of our beloved horror classics – such as Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray – not only hint at queer themes, but were authored by queer people, seeking a way to depict their truth without being condemned for it.

Cultural narratives have often labeled monsters and queer people alike as unusual and bizarre, objects to be feared and shunned. Depictions of queerness in horror tend to affirm that“homosexuals are violent, degraded monsters and their evil agenda is to destroy the very fabric of American society” (Benshoff, 2). They invoke the Other as an object of intrigue, then destroy it before intrigue turns into compassion; “depict[ing] both a fascination with homosexuality, and, at the same time, a violent reaction against it” (284).Yet when such an aberration crosses our path, we can hardly look away.

Carol Clover describes this attraction at length in Men, Women and Chain Saws. She finds the genre as fertile as I do, “a virtual swamp of… themes and images” (81), identifying a common tension between “White Science and Black Magic,” empirical logic against subversive instinct. Science may represent an ideal authority, but it has little sway over the chaotic, primal subconscious. “The inevitable lesson [of an occult horror film]… is that White Science has its limits, and that if it does not yield, in the extremity, to the wisdom of Black Magic, all is lost” (66).

The racialized divide between White and Black, Sense and Nonsense, Fact and Fantasy, has been employed throughout history to justify violence. In horror, the terms are flipped. Human arrogance can do nothing against the forces of the natural, or unnatural, world. Whether depicted as “impregnation by the ‘pneuma’” or “possession via oral penetration” (79), the genre is full of splitting, opening, transforming bodies; and when those bodies are white and male, the image that we split is that of the oppressor.

As Clover and Benshoff know, horror tales sprout directly from our nervous systems, in response to all manner of societal pressures. “Insofar as the occult film repeatedly elaborates the distinction between White Science and Black Magic in racial, class and gender terms, it traffics in some of the most basic social tensions of our time” (67). For instance, in Poltergeist, Alien and The Prophecy, “as in a great many horror films, capitalist greed is the first cause of horror” (73). Other examples disturb, even dismantle notions of gender, class and race, simply by infusing our “normal” lives with the uncanny.

The fact that horror expresses these rebellions, no matter how clumsily, is radical in itself. Our collective interiority has been simplified, vilified and commodified to the point of subjugation. Therefore the horror story serves a radical purpose: to “externalize [our] inner workings, to speak its secrets, to give a material account of itself – in short, to give literal and visible evidence” (82).

But evidence is often lost, faked or destroyed. Many entities, none satanic, have gotten away with genocide simply by twisting the facts. And even as horror stories challenge the ideals, most offerings just affirm them again. Benshoff agrees that “the films function to encode patterns of ‘normal’ sexuality that are in alignment with the dominant ideology” (10), the ideals that haunt me to this day. This coding suits the ghouls very well. If we dread any deviation from the normal, we are much easier to control; we cannot stand up for a self that we do not know.

When I came out as gay at eighteen, I felt myself caught between two identities: the privileged ideal and the queer monster. Much like a hero bitten and forced to transform, I saw myself as something condemned. I thought that my proclivities, declared base by idealized society, meant that I was cruder, stupider, lesser than average.I could not stop myself from demonizing the Other, even as I became an Other myself.

After high school and college I tried to find community with Others, but kept falling into the cracks, the in-betweens of unreconciled differences. By claiming queerness, I alienated myself from horror fans; by loving horror, I marked myself as too unusual, too niche for my fellow queers. With all my preoccupations, I began to wonder if my outsider status was self-inflicted, if my loneliness stemmed from something fundamentally wrong with me – if I was the nastiness that I saw in the world. My mind was happiest sitting in nightmares, a fact that I either had to keep private, or risk alienating myself further. The balance left me frustrated, unfulfilled and hateful, wishing to be rid of humanity altogether.

Misanthropy is a common enough defense tactic. Many horror stories are misanthropic by nature, displaying its characters as stupid and sinful, and punishing them for it. In identifying with horror so closely, I feared inviting that punishment on myself. By rebelling against one ideal, did I sell myself to another? Was I the shambling, oozing nether-thing that I both dreaded and desired – or just a lost boy, desperate to survive in a world full of ghouls?

I could not, and still cannot know for sure. I can only sink into the dark and hope its tendrils will reach out to guide me.

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I remember being taught that I was the sum of my thoughts. As a child, this was easier to accept. I had no understanding of the world’s complexity, and could live undisturbed in my innocent daydreams, a privilege not afforded to most. I assumed that I was safe simply because I was “good.”

Entering puberty, however, my thoughts turned on me. The ideals tell us that depressed, angry thoughts make a depressed, angry person; the person who finds the monstrous fascinating is also a monster. With no knowledge or experience with mental illness, let alone queerness, I adopted this belief readily. I was depressed and angry, dealing with immense shame – I assumed that meant that I was also dark, violent, shameful. I believed that I was so aberrant, I had nothing to offer anyone. I was a negation, just like the stories I loved.

I’ve long been afraid of the things that define my inner life. Queer, kinky and morbid, I cannot accept the terms of society’s ideals; nor, for a long time, could I accept myself. I kept trying to overcome my contradictions, to unify them in some acceptable way, to reduce my humanity to terms that I and others could accept.

Our ideals demand this reductive effort. Those who are the least “human” are honored and celebrated, while Others are consigned to monstrous status for being too human, too complex and self-defined. The interior that Carol Clover wrote about, that horror films display without really exploring, has no place in these ideals. We are not supposed to acknowledge the fleshy, shadowy wonders that we hold inside.

Why are we so repulsed by our bodies and selves? Horror fiction does not contain a straightforward answer. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva centers this fear on the Abject – fluids like blood, shit and phlegm, shameful excretions from the body that remind us of its eventual state of decay. “There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being… ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself” (The Portable Kristeva, 229).

To be confronted with the body’s grotesque fragility, to face the end of one’s individual self, is the ultimate existential crisis. We do not want to be placed outside of ourselves; we want to hold tight to our categories, surrounded and protected by definitions like fences of barbed wire. Assigned and contained, we can ignore those ugly, self-destroying truths, at least for a while.

In common understanding, the Abject is synonymous with Abnormal. So is the Other. We categorize bodily fluids and foreign identities in the same negative group. Simply because things are unfamiliar, we think they must be unpleasant and dangerous as well. But we all shit, bleed and age, and manage to survive regardless. As Kristeva says, “The potency of pollution is… not an inherent one; it is proportional to the potency of the prohibition that founds it” (259).Benshoff agrees – “the idea of homosexuality being perverse or monstrous is clearly the construction of historical and social ideas” (22). These botched cause-and-effect judgments are artificial – that means they can be deconstructed.

Even as authority tells us to shun difference and Otherness, we find ways to safely explore them. Through ceremonies like Carnival and Halloween, “the conventions of normality are ritualistically overturned within a prescribed period of time in order to celebrate the lure of the deviant” (Benshoff, 13). Horror and queerness alike have many underground movements, niche subsets of community, where any identity can find validation. We must have variants and deviations; we must experience the spectrum to see where we stand. If we reduce our terms to something easy and controllable, we will never know ourselves.

The best horror stories portray the consequences of this denial. As Dr. Markway says in the 1963 adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House, “A closed mind is the worst defense against the supernatural… If it happens to you, you’re liable to have that shut door in your mind ripped right off its hinges.” Clover knows this, too – “In the world of satanic or spirit films, the horror of being too open is matched only by the horror of being too closed… to deny interiority… is to commit spiritual or literal suicide” (90-97).

Many works of horror take this theme to its utmost length, with the goal of liberation rather than condemnation. The stories frighten and disturb us, but only because they reflect our deepest selves. They change the landscape of our imagination by showing us our forbidden interiors.

In “The Company of Wolves,” a revision of “Little Red Riding Hood,” Angela Carter twists the source tale’s menstrual shame into triumphant self-discovery. When Red meets the wolf in her grandmother’s house, she does not cower with fear: “She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forest’s Liebestod, but the wise child never flinched, even when he answered: ‘All the better to eat you with.’

“The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat.”

Death itself can offer its own liberation. “To the treasures and the pleasures of the grave,” begins Poppy Z. Brite’s masterpiece “His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood.” Brite’s decadent queer protagonists, viciously bored with a life of leisure, pick up grave-robbing to soothe their ennui. This indulgence brings horrid consequences, but they do not cower from their fate. Says the narrator in his final moments, “Dying: the final shock of pain or nothingness that is the price we pay for everything. Could it not be the sweetest thrill, the only salvation we can attain… the only true moment of self-knowledge?”

Horror also reminds us that, no matter how dark and nasty the truth may be, it must be told – simply so it is not forgotten. Isabel Yap’s “Have You Heard the One about Annamaria Marquez?” contains varying accounts of a girl’s murder, and her undead curse upon the school where it happened. No matter how frightening the rumors become, Yap reminds us that “Annamaria Marquez was a student at St. Breberf’s, just like you and me… She is happy we are talking about her, even if some of our stories are stupid, even if some of them have got it all wrong. At least we know her name. At least sometimes we think of her.”

I see these final lines as a declaration of horror’s staying power. For all their fantasy and wildness, these stories never lose sense of their origin: our neuroses, our need to be heard, to engage with and escape from our truths. These monsters speak to the very pillars of existence, Sex, Death, Loneliness and Rage. They look unflinchingly into our Id and ask, what is there to really be afraid of?

We are far from this collective understanding. As I write this, trans people are under attack from the media, elected officials and neighbors. With the repeal of Row v. Wade, child-bearing bodies have been legislated into a commodity. Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill and its hateful siblings have demonized the very mention of queerness. Black and brown individuals are hunted by the police, anti-Asian violence is on the rise, and the courts fail to punish those responsible.

It isn’t just extremists that perpetuate this behavior. Just last year a loud portion of queer people, backed by decades of alarmist Christian rhetoric, declared sex and nudity a harmful presence at Pride. They would rather march with homophobic corporations that feign solidarity for profit, than the kinky, genderfluid revolutionaries who gave us rights in the first place.

This conservative rhetoric might sound backwards and silly, but it has real effects.The rising fear of the Other, no matter how casual and Internet-driven it seems, leads to actual violence; not for those who fear the monster, but the so-called monsters themselves. Discriminatory ideals continue to infect our laws, customs and expectations; a flippant meme or stereotyping phrase can lead to genodical violence.

Demons and ghosts may be fictional, but Others are not. Our supremacist rhetoric can do nothing but reject them, like white blood cells attacking a transplanted organ. We cling to our binaries and ask fearfully, if we do away with Gay and Straight, Black and White, Rich and Poor, do we lose Good and Evil too? At this point I answer, why the fuck not? Have they caused anything but confusion and grief?

Faced with this very real nightmare, the mind-expanding powers of horror feel more necessary than ever. To imagine new ways of existence, we need to familiarize ourselves with all aspects of it, no matter how unsavory. That familiarity is a great strength. The fascination with death is not in itself a death-wish, it is an embrace of the terms of life. This may seem non-intuitive, but existence is full of paradoxes. If we can face them without seeking to solve, cure or defeat, we might find alternatives.

It doesn’t always have to be life-or-death, either. Horror embraces a sense of play and adventure, free of cloying sentiments or false values; it is exciting, sexy, mysterious and wise, an escape from moral banality into the realm of extreme wonders. I relish the idea of this world run by monsters – not crusty ghouls with no style, but wild, shifting, impossible creatures whose violence is indistinguishable from eroticism. I don’t need to shun these monsters to do good in the world. I can progress and evolve without demonizing my Otherness. My thoughts are not my being; my love of the macabre is not a perversion, but a tool of acceptance.

These affirmations may not fully release me from constricting ideals. Even now I rely on binary rhetoric to make sense of queerness and horror. But as I celebrate fictional monsters in all their beauty and transgression, I learn deep wisdom from them; lessons that petty human ghouls could not begin to fathom.

When you build the dance hall, now,

don’t forget the skulls.

They’re from the girls’ old ponies;

we’ve three or four or five.

They’re what sets the floor to ringing,

when we have a céilidhe.

Pretty Dolly’s clean bleached skull,

filled with copper coins and buttons,

makes the floor itself a drum 

come the time for dancing.

And once the dance hall’s framed and done,

keep moving through the streets.

We’ll put the horse skulls everywhere

someone needs to hear.

Down the road and in the church

the altar’s got the echo:

twenty horse skulls in the floor,

so all will hear the preaching.

Below the tavern, that’s a place,

to put a horse head in.

Clean it up and keep the jawbone,

tuck it in with care.

There’s the skull of sweet old Bess

ringing ’neath your feet,

in Blackbird dance or sean-nós dance,

and memories of your riding.