Meghan Phillips
In the Town Where the Final Girl Lives (Interlude)
Someone has put up roadside memorials anywhere a deer was struck and killed. Signs with grainy, flip phone pictures of the carcasses, broke-necked and bloody. Someone must be printing them out at home. Maybe driving over to the Staples out by the mall. Shoving that flimsy printer paper into plastic sleeves, like an elementary school book report. Sometimes the photos are glossy and defined, pages from Field & Stream or from one of the wildlife calendars they give out for free over at the True Value. But usually, they are blurry dead deer. Mostly does, every so often a buck, nobly pronged, preserved in sweaty plastic, ringed by fake carnations from the Dollar Tree. Everyone wonders who is putting up the memorials, but nobody wonders why.
The Final Girl Looks Up "Survivor Guilt" in the Dictionary
She uses the big one on the podium in the middle school library. Walks over across the field hockey fields and tells the secretary that she is waiting for her a ride from her neighbor, the 8th grade history teacher Mr. Martin. She tells Ms. Crabtree, the librarian, she is looking up a list of SAT words. Never too early to start studying, she says. It's much quieter over here.
The middle school is long and narrow with two main corridors that run its length. Classrooms are bundled off on little side halls that bloom off the main hallways like mushrooms on a log. Instead of stairs, there are ramps, gently sloping up or down. The library is in the center of the school, right at the heart of it. It only has half walls, just about chest high, so the rows of books and the study tables and the microfiche reading machine and the giant leather dictionary on its podium are all just there for anyone walking by to see.
She turns the onion skin pages gently, one by one. She pauses. Furrows her brow. Writes down words in her spiral notebook. Deference. Enumerate. Invoke. Omnipotent. She has grown skilled at making her actions appear normal. She wants to wedge her hand between the slabs, scrape the skin of her knuckles on those weighty pages. Turn a chunk of paper thickly with the back of her hand. Hear the muffled thunk of hundreds of sheets of paper slamming down.
She makes it to the S-es, risking two or three pages at a time. Saturate. Selection. Serpent. Silence. Sorcerer. Survival. Survivalist. Survive. Survivor. She stops scanning and reads.
Oh yes. Yes. That's exactly what it feels like.
In the Town Where the Final Girl Lives (Interlude)
The schools close for the first days of deer hunting season, bow hunting in September and rifle hunting in November. Lots of businesses close too— the coffee shop and the sit-down pizza place. The barber shop on Main Street, but not the one out on Doe Run by the elementary school. The computer repair place crammed in between the laundromat and consignment shop with windows so dirty the only way anyone knows that it's open is when the wooden sandwich board that says "let us fix your PC" is out on the sidewalk.
In the town where the final girl lives, the schools close for Thanksgiving and Black Friday and that listless week between Christmas and New Year. They close for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and President's Day and Good Friday and Easter Monday, and some of the parents have complained about all these days off falling on Mondays because the little bakery and the library are closed on Mondays and what are they supposed to do with these kids? The schools close for two days in early May for parent teacher conferences and that's even worse than all those holiday Mondays because the parents are at school and the kids are at home or at their old daycare just for the day or over at the grandparents' or all huddled on the play structure at the playground passing around cigarettes.
The schools close for Memorial Day and then, it’s summer again in the town where the final girl lives.
The kids are out on bikes and skateboards and scooters. Out walking barefoot through people's yards. They're at the pool checking pool passes. Perched on lifeguard chairs. Sprawled on towels. The kids are perched on the picnic tables at the Twin Kiss, sharing orders of fries. They're at the park, making out during the 4th of July fireworks display.
They're at soccer day camp and theater day camp and just regular day camp at the rec center the next town over. They're at Vacation Bible School. They have babysitters. They are babysitters.
In the town where the final girl lives, none of the kids go to sleepaway camp anymore. None of them are camp counselors. And no one says it, but everyone is thankful that what happened to those kids happened during the summer, so there's no need to cancel school or make a fuss, and when that terrible day is done, they can kiss their kids goodnight or look at the lump of them in their bed or crack the basement door so they can hear them down there watching MTV and know that at least for now, all of them are safe.
Meghan Phillips wrote the flash fiction chapbook Abstinence Only. She wrote some other things too, which you can find at meghan-phillips.com.