The Sunday Scaries
Volume I, Number 2
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

The Spat

Of course teenagers were always trouble. Hadn’t she been a terror to her sainted mother? Your sainted mother, repeated Noah, endorsing the irony.
          She raised my brothers and me all by herself, no man around to help, she said. This was the sort of conversation she had with her son these days: half-serious, half a shared joke, constructed out of years of earlier conversations. The meaning didn’t lie in the words, but in the tone, the inflections, the calibration of impatience. She never would have let you stay out till one am without calling, she said.
          I told you my phone died, said Noah.
          Died. And here in this year of our Lord 2024, with nothing like a phone charger, a friend with a phone to borrow, an electrical grid too—
          I fell asleep. The movie was boring. How could I call you if I was asleep?
It was—what was it?
          What was what?
          The movie.
          It was called Eraserhead.
          You fell asleep during Eraserhead? When she was Noah’s age, she’d watched Blue Velvet twice in a row, hiding in the basement with the sound as low as she could manage, praying her mother didn’t wake up and come ask her what she was doing.
          It was in black and white, said the kid. This seemed to be the summation of Noah’s argument. And honestly she wasn’t sure where else to take this talk.
          Just do better next time, she told him. This broke the tone, for sure. Prissy, moralistic, too serious. But wasn’t she being serious? She did want him to do better. She knew he was smoking pot (how much pot did you smoke, back in the day?), she supposed he was smart enough to use a rubber with that weird little girl he brought over that one time. And hadn’t she been risky at his age?
          She could keep avoiding the issues, or she could call his father and—and what? Tom was likely to make it all worse. Or she could—
          What’s for dinner? Noah asked. He saw the look on her face. Never mind, never mind. He went back to his phone.
          To get away from him she stepped into the bathroom and locked the door. She looked at herself in the mirror. From behind her left ear, the small thin spiderish creature that lived in her hair poked its mandibled head out. She watched it as it delicately crawled across her earlobe, feeling that familiar old childhood sensation, its tiny jointed legs as soft as cotton threads.
          Say it again like you did that one time, it whispered, and I can help. Say, I wish you were dead.
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