Short Story – Fact & Fiction

A Time to Dance

The “Queer as Hell” horror anthology from Haunted MTL includes my story “Transmigration of a Serial Killer,” my first short story in print. There were some things I didn’t like about the story after it was published – “A Time to Dance” is the revised version. I’m still tinkering with it, to be honest. You can read it below the embed and purchase the anthology from Amazon:

A Time to Dance

My feet ached and my legs burned like fire. Hanging over the edge of a thousand foot drop really fucked with my senses. I suppose I should explain how I ended up hanging by my wrists so high up. If I’m being honest, it had to do with all the people I killed. They deserved it, but not everyone saw it that way. I don’t give a damn. Everywhere I went, somebody managed to get on my list.

The voices started out as just voices. Then they showed up in my apartment. Thin fuzzy gray things that oozed out of the walls and did this funky dance, all twisty and gray-black foamy puffs of nothing gyrating away in front of me until I sat up and took notice. After that, every time they showed up I knew what they wanted. More people dead.

I fought like hell the first few times, I think. I don’t remember. I know one night, it was morning actually, but still night, I just accepted they owned me. There was no reasoning with them. Then I killed whoever they told me to kill. That’s what they wanted me to do, so I did it.

One day it was a crotchety old man who drove too slow and flipped off everyone who honked at him, including me. Big mistake. Another time, it was this suburban douchebag with his fat ass wrapped in skinny jeans he stole from his gay brother-in-law while they vacationed at their lake house. He couldn’t be bothered to make his kids shut up and settle down at the burger joint. He just let ‘em raise holy hell and drive everybody nuts. Those little turds sealed his fate when one of ‘em crashed into my table and spilled my beer.

Then there was this cute young princess who wouldn’t stop yammering away on their phone in the checkout line at the grocery store, so damn rude. They never held up a line again.

My favorite was the snot-nosed punk from the private school down the street. That dumbass took a job at my neighborhood liquor store and couldn’t be bothered to say ‘thank you’ when I paid for my case of vodka. I taught him some lessons. He reminded me of Tommy, if Tommy had clear skin and a pretty haircut.

It went on like that for years, maybe months. Time wasn’t much to me, just a slow drag from point a to point b with a bunch of shit to do in-between. I think they thought I could get rid of all the rude, mean, nasty, condescending, dismissive, arrogant people in the world. That’s a tall order for one guy. If Tommy hadn’t left he could have helped. Or maybe he would have ended up on the list. Hard to say.

They didn’t like it if I let anyone get away, so I got better at it and eventually the TV was talking about a serial killer, one of the worst ever, but the TV didn’t know it was me, it just knew it was somebody. Every channel had their own name for me, each of them tried to corner the market on the story. It was on all the time until I got sick of hearing it.

I killed the TV, problem solved.

Then the cadre started to pay me visits. I knew what they were because they looked like those asshats from the military school the judge sent me to when I was a kid. Jail would have been better, at least there you can hit back. Want to make a horror movie? Follow a 12 year old around a military academy filled with psychopaths and pedophiles for a year, that shit will keep you up at night.

The cadre didn’t ooze out of the walls like the fuzzy gray things and they damn sure didn’t dance. I’d go to sleep and they would show up, all of them together, wearing their black and red regalia with their shiny gold faceplates. They looked liked Hell’s Best Marching Band and when I said so they laughed and told me they didn’t have anything to do with the music, that was a different department. I never did see their faces. I could hear them just fine, even through all that metal, which was weird at first but like everything else I got used to it.

They claimed me as their hero, said I had passed all the tests but one. I didn’t know I was taking tests but I was sure happy to learn I’d been passing them. Hadn’t passed a test since college, as far as I knew, not until the cadre showed up and told me I was their star pupil.

I liked college. Drink, smoke dope, have sex, me and Tommy never got tired of it. Guess that’s why we dropped out, or they kicked us out, or maybe we just stopped going, I don’t know. That was a long time ago.

Finding a job was a hell of a reality check. Tommy worked days, I worked nights, we never saw each other. I’m not even sure when he left. I came home after my overnight shift cleaning taxis and he was gone, along with almost everything in the apartment. Could have been a day, could have been a year, who gives a fuck? He was gone.

Cleaning taxis was a shit job, the lost wallets barely made up for the giz and bubblegum people smeared all over the back seat. You wouldn’t believe what people get up to in those cars. It would make your skin crawl, if you had to clean it up. I got used to it.

My grandad finally died and left me a little something. That wheezy old fart never liked me and I don’t know why he left me his money. Guess it was pity, or maybe I was the only one who would sit in a room with him. He stank of cheap cigars and piss and dirty diapers and never opened a window, not even on nice days. Maybe he wanted me to take care of all those cats he kept locked up with him. That was easy, I just left the door open. One more problem solved. I didn’t give a shit they ate his face off, but the EMTs didn’t take it well.

Anyway, I quit that job and focused on the task at hand. Guess that’s why I started passing the tests, all but the last one. I got real busy after that, my list grew like the trash piles in the alley between my building and the burned out warehouse next door.

The last test was the best test, the cadre said, and if I could pass it I could take things to the next level, wherever that was. They told me I’d be happy there, could live like a king or even a god, and I guess that was good enough for me. If I could pass this last one, they told me, I could be rid of their fuzzy gray intermediaries. That sounded nice too.

All the killing was wearing me out, I almost never slept, which is why the cadre showed up whenever I did mange to catch some shuteye. They said they had to strike while the iron was hot, which made sense to me.

We went together up to the roof of my building. I didn’t know where the roof was before then, I thought it was a lot lower. My building must have kept growing after I moved in, which is an odd thing to consider but it must have happened because it took a long time to get there and it was a long way down when I stepped to the edge.

“This is it,” all of them said, “third time’s the charm.” I didn’t recall a first or second time, but that didn’t surprise me. My head was filled with gaps and dark spaces I’d given up trying to fathom. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time, and I didn’t much care. All of them laughed together when I had that thought. I sometimes forgot they could read my mind. I didn’t think it was funny, but that didn’t stop them from laughing.

I looked down and my city street had turned into a canyon, a dark black ribbon of river flowing through the middle and a big patch of sandy shore directly below me. Strange I could see so clearly so far down, but there it was.

Then they hung me out over the edge.

My feet ached and my legs burned. I never liked heights because my body didn’t like heights. I couldn’t even look at a picture of a height without that throbbing pain and burning sensation clawing at me, pulsing up through the soles of my feet and wrapping itself around my calves, squeezing and squeezing like it was trying to push my legs away from danger, all the blood jamming up at me all at once, burning all the way. People sitting on ledges, construction workers on skyscrapers, some dude about to jump out of an airplane. I couldn’t look at any of it without that pain, that burning.

If you said height was the only thing I was afraid of you’d be spot on. I guess that’s why they chose the roof for the final test.

I was dangling over a canyon 1000 feet deep. How it got there, I’ll never know. The street was gone, the buildings were gone, everything was grey stone cliffs, burnt umber sky, yellow sand, black river.

My feet ached and my legs burned and I knew this was my last chance to pass the test.

“I can do it,” I said, not entirely certain I could.

They laughed together again, and how they managed to all laugh the exact same way at the exact same time, well that’s yet another mystery I’m not gonna solve, “You say that every time,” all of them replied.

“I can do it, I swear!”

“You better hope so, this is your last chance.”

Last chance. Last chance or what?

Then it hit me.

I had to pass this test or things were never gonna change. I would go on forever, a ghost haunting the city. I would have to keep killing until I died of old age. It wasn’t an entirely unappealing option. I was good at it. But I was getting tired of the fuzzy gray things always showing up like that, giving me orders, and the cadre, never letting me sleep.

This was my chance. I could move on, start some new phase of this little operation they’d spun up for me. I knew what had to happen next. I knew how to pass the test. The cadre always loved it when I swore at them, so I tried that little trick again.

“Fuck you, let me go!”

“Look at your hands. You’re holding onto us.”

They were right.

That was the trick. They didn’t have to let go, I did. I could feel their flesh beneath mine, like rough stone scraping at my skin. I could see my fingernails bleeding from the white-knuckle grip, my palms shredding against their rough stony bones. Behind those shiny metal masks I was sure they were all smiling at me, certain I was about to fail again.

Not this time.

I smiled back at them.

“Fuck you,” I said again, just for fun, then I let go.

My feet ached and my legs burned and my heart pounded like one of those drums they use in an orchestra, the one that sounds like thunder, or bombs, or a cannon.

I fell some more until I wasn’t falling, then stopped so quick I hardly noticed. Everything was quiet and dark for a while. Then it wasn’t. Someone was laughing. Not the cadre’s laughter, this was different. A softer sound, with the hint of a hiss and a bit of crackle, with a resonant rumble running beneath it.

I didn’t open my eyes right away. I felt the gritty grains beneath my back, a hot breeze wafted over my face. I gripped the sandy soil with my fists, like a toddler squeezing a big fat finger just for the feel of it.

The laughter again, closer, not approaching but drifting somewhere behind me, pulling me into the place I’d landed. I sat up. I opened my eyes.

The canyon walls were gone. The fuzzy grays were gone. The cadre were gone. Everything was burnt umber sky boiling over the horizon and rolling above the sand and the river and me, so close I tried to touch it.

I felt a rapturous blast of heat at my back, turned to look and saw the black ribbon of river carrying a tall spinning spire of fire twisting away over the middle of the current. The fire danced and twirled and laughed, maybe at me, maybe not. Maybe it liked being fire and laughed at everything.

My head itched and my feet tingled and my legs began to twist and crack and shape into something bizarre yet familiar, like something from a book I’d read back when I still cared about books. It was a thick one bound in leather and one time my mother slammed it against my wrist to crush what she called a preacher’s wart. I think it worked, the lump went away and my hand still managed to do what it was meant to do.

I smiled when I felt the horns growing from my skull, then marveled at their beauty and symmetry as they curved and twisted up and the pointy tips curled in toward each other. I couldn’t help but laugh.

The fire heard me. It reached out a flickering red-orange appendage and whipped its tip a few times, seducing me with light and heat and motion, a tongue begging for a kiss, or possibly something else.

I rose and stood on black cloven hooves where once my feet had been. Ankles, knees and hips clad in oily fur and bending in directions I didn’t know they could go, all opposite of where they’d once been.

I stumbled at first, then found my balance and stepped onto the river, walked over the flow, and danced with the fire, laughing and laughing and laughing, until all the world was fire and motion and deep rumbling throat noises wrapped up in crackles and hisses and pops.

I’d never danced before, but now found I couldn’t stop, not if I wanted to. But my feet didn’t ache and my legs didn’t burn.

It was time to dance, and from then on, always would be.

Fitting In

Fiction published by The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. This goes to a dark place, it is not for the faint of heart. If you can make it through to the end, you’ll see that the story is really about owning your truth, no matter the cost, because the lies will eat you alive. This story received an Honorable Mention from Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2022, a Winning Writers competition.

Enjoy it here, or visit Dead Mule for some truly extraordinary writing (and some fascinating “Southern Legitimacy Statements”).

Trigger Warnings: Violence and offensive language.

Ronald McGuire : Fiction : Sept. 2021

Fitting In

As a boy, I longed to speak like the other boys I met when we moved to Georgia.

My parents divorced when I was 4, and my earliest memories are blissful and dreamlike days and nights on my grandparent’s farm in Iowa, early dawn hours of sweet air laced with dew, drifting in with the birdsong through the open window by the bed I shared with my uncle. He was eight, and my moon and stars. I was parked there for a year while my mother went out of state to work and figure out how to make a new life as a single mother.

She married a man in Texas, and his job took us from Houston to New Orleans, then landed us in Georgia, just outside Atlanta.

We got to Georgia as I was starting third grade. A teacher decided there was something wrong with the way I talked, so they set me up with a speech therapist. I don’t know what they set out to fix, but I could take a guess.

All I know is I wanted to sound like all the other kids.

The boys in Georgia would say things like “ain’t” or “dang-it” or “fixin-to” or “crik” and I soaked it up like the earth soaks up the sun.

My mother had no intention of raising what she called “a redneck kid.”

“You won’t go anywhere in life if you don’t speak proper English,” she would say. I never dared ask her what that said about her new husband, the man I called “dad,” and his Texas drawl.

I secretly cataloged the Southern-isms I heard and by high-school I could pass as a native, at least among those who didn’t know the truth.

It felt good, those times I was anonymous, and could drop into the drawl and twang at will and be accepted like any other kid.

It had other uses too, like the time a cop pulled me over for speeding. “Awright young man, I’m gonna write you a warnin’ this time, but I ketch you drivin’ hell-bent for leather agin an’ I’m writing’ ya for real, ya unnerstan’?”

“Yessir, I do, you ain’t never gonna see my face agin, offsir, I swear.”

I could start a new job and slip into a conversation with the other employees without anyone asking me “Where you from boy?”

Living this dual-dialect life also came in handy as training for how to deal with bigger problems.

Like being gay at a time and in a place where such a thing could get a person killed, without much consequence.

I had to talk a certain way, walk a certain way, be a certain way. I had to fit in.

I perfected the act, until one day in Texas, senior year in college, when the lie was ripped away and the truth spilled out like the bloody entrails of a butchered animal.

I had to face a new reality. I had to deal with it. I had to survive those walks across campus where it seemed everyone found joy in shouting out words like “faggot” and “cocksucker” and “queer,” perverting the beauty of their colloquial speech. It was a small school in a small town and everyone was in on the game.

Then one Friday night, I had to fight it.

A fraternity brother, Greg, came to my apartment half drunk and full of rage. He pounded on my door, screaming those words I heard every day. I could hear some of the other guys at the bottom of the stairs. “Damn, boy, give it a rest” or “you’re gonna have the cops here, let’s git outta here” and “what the hell’s wrong with you, man, the girls are waitin’ fir us.”

I’d had enough. I was cornered, there was no other door. I couldn’t run if I wanted to, but I didn’t want to, not this time, not ever again.

I opened the door, and he rushed in. He must have thought being gay made me smaller or weaker. It made me scared, yes, but that night, scared made me dangerous.

He came at me, eyes bloodshot from chugging cheap beer. Greg always drank before he drank. I fell back to buy some space, then grabbed his shirt and swung him around, intent on shoving him back out the front door, ready to throw punches.

He was heavier than I expected. Instead of flinging him back the way he came, I sent him through the bank of windows set low in the wall next to the door.

He crashed through and landed on the porch. I heard a familiar voice shout “Holy shit!”

I stepped onto the front porch, looked down to the parking lot, glaring at the three below me. All of them dropped their “shit eatin’ grins” in a hurry.

I looked back at my former friend, trying to extract himself from a glittering field of shattered glass, blood already flowing down his face in black-red rivers.

My first impulse was to tell him I was sorry, to rush inside and grab a towel to staunch the bleeding, find some way to roll back the clock, try somehow to make things right.

When he looked up at me I could see the force of his hatred rising, the pale blotches of his face turning red, framed by ribbons of blood.

“You fuckin’ faggot!” he screamed, and started to rise.

His scream purged that place in me that housed my empathy.

I was six foot two, and two hundred pounds of well honed muscle, with adrenalin and sobriety on my side.

I grabbed him by his shirt again, pulled him the rest of the way to his feet, and flung him down the stairs.

I hadn’t noticed the two guys rushing up, almost at my landing, until I released Greg to the open air. The ascending and descending forces collided, neutralizing one other. They fell back, none the worse for wear.

It could have ended there. They tried to pull Greg away, to end the mayhem. The neighbors would put up with a lot, especially when it came to me, but screams and shattering glass crossed the line.

Greg shook them off, shoved them away, then turned to look up at me. Before he could speak, I started down the stairs.

All my life, even before that night and ever since, I have experienced profound states of calm in the most dire of circumstances. A car accident, a boat sinking beneath me, a gun pointed at my face, all of these things, and more, had already happened to me before that Friday night. Such situations, when most panic, bring me to an intense mental focus and physical calm. Some special cells in my brain take over and say, “You got this, let’s go.”

When this has happened, people have said I looked different, like another person, like no one they’ve ever seen before, someone that frightened them. Only years later did I learn it had a name – dissociation.

In the case of Greg, my first two steps toward him brought him to a halt and silenced his voice.

I didn’t stop.

He step backwards and slipped on his own blood. He stumbled down to the shared landing between the two second-floor apartments, and fell to his knees, leaving another puddle of himself on the concrete surface.

I kept going.

He couldn’t get to his feet, instead grabbing the next step below him and dragging himself lower. The two who had abandoned him on the staircase came back. They grabbed him by the armpits and dragged him the rest of the way to the parking lot.

I maintained my deliberate pace.

The four of them backed away, all now speechless, until finally the one who I knew wanted least of all to be there said “awright, dammit, awright, it’s a ‘nuff already.”

Then I stopped. His voice grabbed my attention, then his eyes held it.

In a flash I relived all the times we’d spent together, Mark and I. The football games, the parties, the booze, and of course that one particular night, after the party died down, our lives coming together in a fearful embrace that grew into something more. Something I thought would last forever.

Until I walked into his room one afternoon, using the front door key he’d given me almost as an afterthought. I knew the man he was with that day, but even if I hadn’t, my heart would still have broken. The image of the two of them together, burned into my memory.

I made my threats, and he made his, though mine were empty and his became my new reality, placing us on the path we were all now walking.

I suppose there’s a fine line between powerful love and raging hate, and I’d found the way to push him, and everyone else it seemed, across that line. He told a few friends, and in a few day’s time my secret life became an open book, a story to be told and spread with whispered voices in the halls and courtyards and ballfields of higher education.

I didn’t know it then, but though he seemed safe behind his accusations and condemnations, his world was growing smaller and darker than it had ever been. Hindsight educates my understanding of him in a way the experience couldn’t. All I knew then was betrayal and the pain that came with it.

I looked into those pricing blue eyes, and felt it all again. I had to look away from him, to hold back my tears.

I scanned their faces, took note of Greg’s fear, then returned to the source of my suffering. When I saw the look on Mark’s face, with no hint of sadness or regret, I didn’t feel like crying after all.

“Forget I exist,” I said, choking out all the disgust my throat could carry, “I’ve already forgotten you.”

I turned away and headed back up the stairs as the wailing sirens grew closer. I climbed up to my porch and sat on the edge, my legs draped over the top steps.

They piled Greg into the backseat of Mark’s car and before he got in, Mark looked up at me. His face never changed, even as he raised his right hand and shoved his middle finger into the air, a performative act for everyone peeking out through their curtains to witness. I laughed at the impotence of it. He responded by getting in the driver’s seat and slamming the door behind him.

I watched the life I’d known drive away, taillights rushing into the darkness, until the space around me filled with flashing blues and reds, sounds of brakes screeching to a sudden halt.

Four cars, eight officers in all. I guess someone convinced them it was necessary, or maybe they were just bored cops working in a small town.

They held a little confab below me, then one of them made his way up the steps, scanning with his flashlight, trying not to step in any evidence.

I knew him and he knew me. I’d done a month of nightly ride-alongs with him as part of my criminal justice curriculum.

“Hello Tom,” I said. It’d been a while, but I knew we were still on a first-name basis, “how ya doin’?”

“I might ask you the same question,” he said, “you wanna tell me what happened?”

“Not really.”

“Any of this blood belong to you?”

“Nope.”

“You wanna file a report?”

He was standing with his eyes level to mine, just a few feet away. I looked down at the gaggle of officers in the parking lot, all of them with a hand on a hip.

“No,” I said. My voice was calm, my heart beat slow and steady, I felt lighter than I had in years.

“This gonna be a regular thing, ya think?”

“That’s not up to me.”

“No, I guess not,” he said.

With a look down and a nod of his head, everyone but his partner returned to their cars and drove away, lights blinking out as they went.

When they were gone, he leaned in and stared into my eyes. I returned his stare.

“Buddy,” he said, knowing I liked it when he called me that, “you know we can’t protect you. There’s just not…”

“Did I ask you to?”

“It’s my job…”

“And you can’t do it.”

“I’m not your enemy…”

“Yes,” I replied, cool as a Hill Country winter, “you are.”

He pulled back and his voice rose an octave when he asked “How so?”

“The truth used to be my enemy. Now it’s the lie. You’re part of the lie.”

He raised his palms up, “Whatdya want me to do?”

“Nothing.”

We looked at each other until he shook his head and let out a sharp exhale that sounded like defeat.

“You sure you wanna stick it out here?”

“I’ve got three months, then I’m done, nobody’s taking that from me.”

“Might be easier for ya back in Georgia.”

“Here, there, what’s the difference?”

I looked over my shoulder at my ruined window, then down the stairs at the blood already drying on the steps.

“Besides,” I said, “I think I made my point.”

“You think this is gonna quiet things down a bit?”

“Yes,” I said, and believed it, “it’s a small town, news travels fast.”

After that night, I moved through the world like a boulder in a stream, life rushing around me as I waited out the weeks. Some still shouted their hate when I walked across campus, while a few made attempts at eye contact, flashing fervent smiles filled with sadness.

None of it mattered.

I was alone, an outcast in a world filled with lies.

But I wasn’t afraid anymore.