CHILDHOOD FEARS BY LOREN RHOADS

After the visit to her grave, I became obsessed with Karen's death. She'd been born in the year between me and my brother, but she hadn't lived much more than twelve months. If she'd lived, we would have been the closest cousins in age.

When I was a toddler, my infant cousin was killed in a car crash. I've never gotten the whole story about what happened. My mom said that, since the accident took place in the days before car seat laws, the baby was flung from her mother's arms. Somehow, I got the idea that she was thrown through a window.  My mother's aunt told me that the firemen who responded to the accident didn't know the baby was in the car and crushed her.

My dad's youngest sister, the baby's mother, was so badly injured in the crash that she lay in a coma for weeks afterward. When my aunt woke, her child had already been buried. If she remembered what happened, she wouldn't discuss it with me. Still, she never got over the loss.

Years later, when my mom was trying to entertain my brother and me on a summer day, she took us down the road to the little country graveyard. We'd passed it every day going to and from town, but I'd never been inside before. I was eight, I think. My brother was two years younger.

The cemetery was full of lovely old monuments: from a blue metal obelisk made of zinc to a six-foot-tall limestone tree trunk adorned with calla lilies. There were lambs marking the graves of children and cryptic symbols to identify the Masons and members of the Order of the Eastern Star. There were crosses and roses and cherubs on the stones.

The graves that fascinated me the most belonged to family members. The grandfather who'd died before my parents married was buried there, beneath a stone already engraved with my grandmother's name and birthdate. The vacant grave beside him awaited her.

On Grandpa's other side stood a little gray headstone in memory of my cousin Karen. A bird flying upward decorated her stone. Her epitaph read, "Think of her as still the same and say that she is not dead, she is just away."
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It's a line from a poem by James Whitcomb Riley that begins, "I cannot say and I will not say that she is dead, she is just away. With a cheery smile and a wave of hand, she has wandered into an unknown land."

After the visit to her grave, I became obsessed with Karen's death. She'd been born in the year between me and my brother, but she hadn't lived much more than twelve months. If she'd lived, we would have been the closest cousins in age. I imagined we would have been friends. I envisioned sneaking off with a girl almost my age, instead of being the eldest, tasked with watching over a pack of cousins who looked to me to suggest games while the adults let us run wild.

I was friends at that time with a fire-and-brimstone Baptist girl who knew how to hold seances and contact spirits. We tried to reach my cousin Karen. My Baptist friend assured me that since Karen died before she could be baptized, she was in Hell.  I had nightmares about a tiny girl engulfed in flames. When I confessed to my mom, sobbing over the injustice of it all, she was horrified. Seances -- and friends -- were banned from the house for a while.

This was the point I began to understand that there were different churches with different beliefs. The more I learned, the more I understood that life was arbitrary and cruel, that innocents died, that faith might be a crutch but it was no shield.  All my horror stories proceed from that understanding.

Loren Rhoads is the author of a new collection of short stories called Unsafe Words. Her stories have appeared in Best New Horror, Cemetery Dance, Space & Time, Weirdbook, and Occult Detectives Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her novels include a space opera trilogy about a galaxy where humans are the minority and a pair of novels about a succubus who falls in love with an angel.

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In the first full-length collection of her edgy, award-winning short stories, Loren Rhoads punctures the boundaries between horror, dark fantasy, and science fiction in a maelstrom of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Ghosts, succubi, naiads, vampires, the Wild Hunt, and the worst predator in the woods stalk these pages, alongside human monsters who follow their cravings past sanity or sense.
Unsafe Words has an introduction by six-time Bram Stoker Award-winner Lisa Morton and a cover by Lynne Hansen.
Unsafe Words home page: https://lorenrhoads.com/writing/unsafe-words/

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