Hey! I publish horror shorts about fictional Valmar here on Threads because my lovely author fam is nice enough not to toss me out yet. My latest one Monday involved a teenage boy and a machine, and a search for the Unknown. It goes wrong, though. It’s horror. Sorry. it’s how the machine works. I would love for you to read it, but writing this one gave me a lot of emotional outrage I hadn’t planned on. Writing is like that sometimes, as much therapy as it is imagination and fun. So how’s about a bit of real-life horror that inspired a glimmer of the fictional?

If you haven’t read ‘A Scent Of Magnetophon,’ please do! Then come back here. For those who have, carry on. CONTENT WARNING: graphic descriptions, trauma ahead.

This tale is much more than about a small town scarily close to where I came from, and even the small town in South Jersey I spent much of my life. Our protagonist gets accosted by an older woman who is his boss. As I wrote this, I flashed back to sixth grade and something I hadn’t thought of in decades. When we first moved to Jersey it was to an upper middle-class town. Money. Nice clothes. Kids with allowances and education. We were poor and barley could afford the apartment rent (that lasted six months, then off to another town), but while there the weird, uncomfortable cosmic horrors from real people kicked in. In my youth I’m told (very coldly by a cold mother) I was violated by my grandmother. I don’t mentally recall it, but I do recall being terrified of her staring, eternal smile and the way she said my name, never hugged me, only stared but was seemingly close to my sisters. I wouldn’t get near her and kept asking why. the answer came from my parent when I was in my forties, assuming she told the truth. Felt right, but without the actual memories, who can say?

Her tainted smile hit me out of nowhere in sixth grade. My English teacher was in her thirties, beautiful, soft spoken, very nice and loved books. She loved the Fifties and old movies. Sure I noticed she was the only teacher I had who separated girls one side, boys the other, and mainly looked at us boys, but it was an observation from a kid’s limited view. The boys loved ogling her. Everyday she wore tight white clothes with bright undergarments. Admittedly she was gorgeous, but I saw it from a divergent lens I didn’t get at the time. they whispered about sex and stupid things. I wondered how someone so lovely and swell could ever have been recently divorced and why she dressed, though beautifully, unlike other teachers.

One day we had some lessons and I was struggling with the work so she was more than happy to offer me to stay after class. I didn’t think anything about it other than maybe I’ll finally catch on. She helped me with my homework. Good half hour. Then when I went to leave to get in the car with my Mom, she got ahead of me, and stood, in the doorway, arms up, legs wide, and just…stared into me until I got awkward.

She asked if I liked her outfit. I nodded. She asked if I liked the way the pants fit her hips and how nice I was, so polite, so submissive. It’s rare to find a submissive male, is that because your people were used to being subservient in the House during slavery? She thought I was thus ‘born with it’.

I said I didn’t know. Her words were so soothing but I kept getting complimented while feeling tense, shuffling, looking at her when told to, dropping eyes to the floor, wondering why this soft conversation was so off.

Now, as a mixed race kid growing up, I had lots of elders who warned me about the sinister ways of white colonial thinking, the System they called it as a whole back in the day. Some warned you had to watch out because some white people had heard of times when they could do whatever they wanted to us sans consequences, and a few of them heard it ‘marked’ us as freaks or ‘wild’. This is supposedly what happened to Black, biracial, and multiracial enslaved ancestors who were assaulted or forced into perverse behaviors.

But little me couldn’t imagine this woman was like that. Maybe she was lonely. Wouldn’t she be… evil sounding? Cruel? Devilish? Other than the weird questions and her stance, she seemed relatively normal. So why was I so uncomfortable?

My usual sense of rushing from Point A to Point B kicked in overdrive. I said, “My Mom’s waiting,” and that made her lift one arm away so that I had to walk close by her to get out. She stare-smiled. I saw my grandmother in a flash of anxiety.

My mother’s reaction once she found out was to get all in this lady’s face but she barely blinked and was calm as a cucumber. I don’t know all of what was said. I just saw her eye my mother as the sole person to ever not back down from her rage and do it with an unequivocal, eerie peace of mind.

Then a male teacher came out. They could hear my mother yelling. He got between them. My mom got back in the car and we sped off, her cussing up a storm. We moved from there about a month later.

I’ve rarely thought about it since. this latest story revivified it, but now as something I can recount through someone else’s eyes and see what it was.

Another mother I had years ago was right in how she defined it. Submissive personas have to be careful in life. Not because a submissive nature is inherently bad. Everything comes with pros and cons. But in this world, there are unnamable hungers lurking in some peoples, predators who can smell a single drop of submission in a million parts of water. Men commit much of the atrocities. I’ve seen them. I haven’t felt it but I have witnessed it and seen the aftereffects too many times to count, but I’m the wrong person to describe those horrors.

Most of the time it’s men. Once in a while, they’re not. Because a piece of Valmar lurks in certain corners of humanity.

And speaking of moving to another town, it was Carneys Point, NJ, just over the Delaware Memorial Bridge’s lovely Twin Spans. As a kid and teen, I wandered its streets a lot. Wherever you went in CP, you eventually met an old lady folks called Crazy Anna. She rode a tricycle with a basket in the back. Any person she saw she would stop the trike and ask, “Are you sure of Heaven?” My friends would say mean things to her, but I would just observe. how did she get to be so starey, so addicted to only ever saying one thing. Legend had it she was beaten in the head by her husband back when, that she did drugs, or was always crazy.

Last time I saw her I was twenty, it was a dark, sleepless night number whatever and I was wandering out around 1AM. And, there she was, biking ever so slow. She saw me and asked the famous question.

That time, though, I said, ‘Yes.”

And, she smiled. “Thank you. I’ve been waiting. you have a good night.”

She was nice. I thought of these two things plus more while chronicling poor Cyrus’ adventure in misery, and how we tend to shun the fallen. Maybe even some of them are closet heroes, or guides. Or protectors of the realm for those of us not on the watch.

You never know.