K. C. Mead-Brewer
Managing Editor Lisa Ampleman: This story opens with teen girls being teen girls together. The added twist? The mother of one girl is a real-life witch, with tarot cards and all. Mead-Brewer has crafted well-wrought scenes in which the teens try to scare each other, but there’s a turn late in the piece to a deeper, darker point, one that makes us realize that there really are some things that should frighten us. The impetus behind “The Hunted” feeds into a lot of current cultural discussions, including #MeToo, online bullying, and the shaming culture. It’ll make the hairs on your arms stand up on end.
To hear this story read by Dr. Haylie Swenson, click below:
The Hunted
The whole point was to scare each other, but nothing was working. “If we were in a horror movie,” Harriet said, “then our streaming would be stuck buffering at 25 fucking percent.”
The H’s were staying the night at Helen’s house (that’s how they were known at school, the Hs: Helen, Harriet, Holly, and Huntress) because Helen’s mother was a witch, and witches can be scary. Or, they should be. But every time they tried to be freaked out by her witchy stuff—tarot cards, smudge sticks, pentacles, cloudy things in murky jars, one-eyed cats, frogs, her pet lizard named Wizard—it all fell back into the same reality: Oh, right. We’ve seen this before. This is Helen’s house. We come here all the time. We swim in the lake outside. We play in the woods. We know her mother doesn’t put anything funny in the spaghetti sauce.
They tried scary stories and wandering around in the green-dark trees and jumping out at each other, and they all screamed good-naturedly except for Huntress. The H’s were getting tired of this. The H’s were getting tired of Huntress feeling special because she had a weird-cool name and because her parents let her put a purple streak in her mink-brown hair and because she’d already graduated out of trainer bras.
More bored than tired, they ended up down at the lake around midnight with a pilfered six-pack of hard lemonades. It could’ve been eerie, but instead it all felt irritably reassuring. The moon with its gown trailing across the water, the night animals crackling their twigs, the breeze warm and soft as breath. They chucked rocks into the black water, feigning the occasional chill. They whispered What was that? as if they’d heard something. Their thoughts slithered as they looked for ways to frighten each other, so many glinting silverfish wriggling around the dark folds of their brains. It was Huntress who spoke up first:
You ever think about how people used to burn witches?
They all pictured the same thing at the same time: Helen’s mom tied up somewhere, writhing and screaming through her gag while grinning people in black hats and buckled shoes pressed torches to her feet.
She isn’t really a witch, Helen said, squeezing her knees up to her still-flat chest. She could see Huntress’s boobs lolling free inside her nightshirt, her nipples sticking up like they were trying to point something out.
Their neighbors did that to them, Huntress continued. She stared out at the lake as if she couldn’t care less whether the other H’s were listening. Their neighbors burned them alive. Their friends and family. I mean, that’s messed up, right? Strangers—okay. Strangers hate strangers. The fear of the unknown. Okay. But their friends and family and neighbors. She let out a breath, shaking her head, that purple streak shining in her hair. You ever think about that? About how everyone wants girls dead? I mean. Everyone. Even other girls.
K. C. Mead-Brewer lives in Baltimore, Maryland. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Electric Literature, Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. She’s currently at work on a horror novel and was a proud participant in this year’s Clarion Workshop. For more information, visit kcmeadbrewer.com and follow her @meadwriter.
Haylie Swenson lives in Austin, Texas. She recently received a PhD in English from George Washington University, a supposedly rewarding thing she’ll never do again. She is currently working on the first season of Creature, a podcast about how animals shape culture. Follow her @hayliebswenson.
For more miCRo pieces, CLICK HERE.
