Stella's Graduation
Graham Swanson
Written in 2020
On the night of Stella’s graduation she rented a room in the big fancy hotel to spend a night with her boyfriend before they moved away to the bright hanging cities over the river. She went there alone with a basket of perfumes and a change of outfits, checking her phone in anticipation of her lover arriving. He texted her in the morning, so she left him another message reminding him and tempting him to come to the hotel that night. She provided a template of her figure in an accompanying photo taken by the bench among the trees. He didn’t text back right away.
From outside she looked to the top of the hotel, saw the clouds swirling across the stars and the moonlight, and the spires over the highest windows. Lights filled the rooms above except for two windows. Against the sharpest edges of the roof, a hooded figure loomed down from between two broken chimneys. Even as Stella saw the glimmer of its eyes met with hers, it did not retreat, but offered a gentle wave. The cold blew freezing gusts of frozen mist into the streets and against Stella’s bare legs.
Stella figured her boyfriend might be stuck at work or at practice, so she went inside to avoid the cold. She couldn’t wait and looked again at her phone on the elevator. The message was sent. The doors blew open and she hurried to hide her phone as she pulled luggage onto the orange carpet. The maid pushed a cart into the hall with her mouth unsmiling mouth hanging open, her spinal cord twisted into a large knot at the base of her neck, and missing teeth that she tried to hide from the young pretty girl swinging her hips down the hall. She went into the red door by herself. The maid lifted her head into the light, her yellow eyes dull and sunken, her balding head losing strands of hair, and when she thought the young girl was gone into her room, the maid went into the cleaning closet and lifted the back of the cabinet.
A short opening fell open, too short to stand up in, but just snug for the hunchback. It led her down narrow gaps in the walls to small lenses which revealed the interior of each room. She went to the room the young girl just checked in, and she watched her undress, put on silky underwear, and checked her makeup. She constantly looked at her phone, each time with heavier disappointment. An hour passed, so she sent a long grueling voicemail pebbled with angry insults and threats.
Stella paced around and looked out the window down at the empty parking lot. A few lonely cars sat still. A group of vandals lurked from the darkness of the park and smashed a car window, smashed the tail lights, and smashed the windshield. They left a note on the steering wheel and lit a fire in the back seat. The hooded figure watched from the bench, but did not notice the vandals, but instead kept searching for something in the windows. She closed the blinds as the vandals scampered back off into the dark in the direction of the old factory.
The maid scratched the fine hairs on her chin. Never had she seen a young girl so upset and it
made her feel depressed, but also less lonely. Just then a knock came at the door, the girl gasped and dropped her phone to the floor.
In the bygone times of broken wheels and violent street whipping there loomed a huge smoking factory under where the viaduct is today. Thirty buildings all boarded up and stacked full of belts sculpted from the scales of endangered animals crossed the middle of the village. This place used to be busy and flowed train carts of soup and pudding to cities all over the country. families built mansions around the outskirts of the factory and one thousand other people got jobs working there. It did not last, as the village elders agreed in a secret meeting to sell the factory to a shadow who came at sunset and left at sunrise.
No one knew of the secret meeting or the plans the elders made. They took the money, stored it in a castle of a bank, returning only to rob the bank and go back to their golf courses on the sweltering coast of alligators and tree snakes as the village fell to squalor and ignorance.
The once glorious mansions remained devoted castles to the families, but not the kind that brings up children to do great things. They became hoarded with garbage, packed full of strange folk, doors always locked and curtains always drawn to keep the fumes from escaping. The sons and daughters of the elders live in these places to this day, all D students who live in the lap of never ending gold, and each one in the pocket of drug gangs from other states. They live alone for the reason of cooking strange potions with gems, propane and chemicals, selling the refined experiments to the enforcers, and selling the bottom of the barrel to the peasants across town.
The old factory itself became a gruesome outlet for gas squeezed from the cracks of the earth, and for strange creatures who followed the escaping rats up onto the factory floor. These things did not look like you or I. They had the form of a human, but they did not evolve from the apes that climbed down from trees and walked everywhere to hunt their food like us. They evolved from poisonous frogs that lived in pools underground. They can't turn their heads because they have no neck, their eyes are yellow, and they eat molten coals and bathe in hot paint.
No one came near the factory. Those few crackheads who sought shelter from winter found themselves dragged through grain chutes, then clamped by the head in the clasp of bow hooks, and carried into the air as the rail delivered them to the otherside of the factory. They hung like angels going to heaven, blood gushing from their temples and mouths and soaking their shoulders and feet. Rats followed the trail of blood droplets. The frogmen tore the clothes apart and devoured them for the mites living inside.
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