Two Tales from the Darker Side of Americana

We're back in North America today with two tales of urban gothic/horror that reflect the surreal and darker side of Americana. By accident or coincidence, both our authors are from the State of Texas. Up first is Andrew Kozma from Houston and he is followed by Dallas-based Robert Stahl.


The Revolt of the Arms
by Andrew Kozma

At first it was just the arms of those in power that fell to the ground like suitcases from a tired salesman’s hands. More than one politician died of a heart attack, especially after the EMTs who arrived on the scene lost their arms as well. Everywhere, arms slipped from shoulders like butcher shop sausages.

And it wasn’t as though the arms just stayed there, as sausages would have. No, they scurried and slithered and crawled their way out of the buildings and into the streets and out into the wilderness and out of our lives. What could we do? We were higher than the animals because we could use tools, but now all those glorious tools were useless. When we screamed at our arms to come back and carry our weight like they were designed to do, they flicked us off. They removed our class rings and flung them in our faces. We spit our disdain back at them, but they were already gone.

Oh, society collapsed, certainly. A man was found in a nest of water bottles, madly gnashing at the twist-off tops with his teeth. Mothers struggled to get infants to their swollen breasts. Phones went unanswered.

Those without shoes on learned to survive, stubbornly teaching their feet to do everything their hands had once done. But by the time enough people had adapted, most of the Earth’s population had starved to death, trapped in their homes, cocooned in their clothes, buried in their unmanageable waste.

What of the arms? We found them in the woods in a scratch-built city amazingly complex for what little time they had to build it. Though they were free, they had no mouths. They died thin as sticks. They lay in pairs with their brittle fingers intertwined.

And if you ask me, they died happy.



Mumbo Jumbo
by Robert Stahl


The last place he thought he’d meet the Devil was in Arkansas, with its silver lakes and vigorous hills, the land itself like a blessing from God. But she smiled like a Buddhist, and love took root despite the peculiar things he soon discovered. Like the dolls in her closet with pins in their eyes, and how she collected spider webs, rolling them into a ball the way his grandmother kept rubber bands. Then the night he found her in the backyard with lightning flickering in her hair and bats circling her head like harpies, and chanting in a strange language, some mumbo jumbo. And her passion then! She was a terrorist with his flesh, raking his back with her fingernails, the fury of her love like lasers on his skin, forcing him to bleed into the bedclothes – red everywhere, the color of danger, of warning lights and emergency exits. He tried to escape, but she called out in that mumbo jumbo and she was coming like rockets in a voice that wasn’t hers, a tarantula wasp stinging him over and over with bliss.

In the days after, she clung to him like a remora, he was unable to scrape her from the underbelly of his life. At night he often watched her creep out of the bedroom window. She returned before dawn, naked with mud in her toes and panting like a dog, her soft skin shivering like milk against his. Once, he tried to calm her, but the fetor on her breath – of carrion and animal faeces –repulsed him. In horror, he flung her across the room. Then that strange mumbo jumbo and she became his queen again, her pink flesh chanting his name like a psalm. Obediently he knelt for communion, her voice sedating him while he probed her tender folds. And finding maggots there, suckling. He screamed as they squirmed against his tongue, black eyes twitching, bodies pulsing with her wrath. Running for the door, her siren voice droned in his ears and suddenly he was mounting her like a lion, her teeth tearing him open and blood falling like rain on his chest. What powers did she possess? he wondered in the palpitating light, as her shadow took the form of a dragon on the wall and thunder shook the house.

The next day he woke with wounds in his skin. Scars like a message. But when he tried to read them the mumbo jumbo in his head pounded his thoughts to gristle.

One afternoon she lay down for a nap. In his despair, he knew what he had to do. Knife flashing at his side, he slipped into her room. An inkblot of doubt plagued him for a moment when he saw her sleeping face. Then quickly, his shaking hands covered her face with a sheet. The knife jerked up for its fatal swing but stopped suddenly at the sound of her laughter, that hideous mumbo jumbo. His will draining like bathwater, he fell beneath her and his weapon clattered to the floor, impotent. She coiled around him like a python, her ancient eyes gleaming. With the slash of a razor talon, she opened him up, the sheets darkening like chum clouds in shark-infested waters. Screaming and laughing, her claws savaged him; bits of tissue raining upon the lampshade, his blood splattering the ceiling. 

“Flesh is the devil,” he sobbed as leathery wings enclosed him.