What Victims Watch - #fridayflash

Every week, everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie gathers at The Killer’s house. The Killer is never home, though they do often see his shadow in the hall by the bathroom, or his silhouette against the refrigerator, and if any of them take a shower, they’ll feel his presence on the other side of the curtain. Everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie has grown used to this. Nowadays, they giggle at it.

They come for the relief from their work weeks. Drunken jocks sit in open windows, for all the sofas are piled with nubile teen girls who are showing neck wounds and too much cleavage. Nerds pass bongs and bags of Fritos, though they try to keep the coughing and crinkling down so everyone can hear the show.

They watch you pre-ordering a television instead of buying health insurance. They watch couples spend everything on houses in flood zones they haven’t researched enough to know even get rain. They watch countries vote on politicians who support women’s rights and healthcare, and ignore those same politicians will eradicate forests and drone-bomb foreign innocents.

They watch you forget to thank your mother for that trivial thing she did, that thing you’ll always remember after her car accident tomorrow. They watch, and they laugh their heads off. Even the characters who didn’t die from decapitation laugh their heads off at you.

The show is so funny that everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie always packs the house. They don’t care that they don’t get cell service, and no one tells their parents where they’re going for the weekend. They come with little gas, in used clunkers that rattle and practically fall apart before they groan into their parking places. If their clunkers are overheating, the victims prop open the hoods while joking about how stupid real people are to spend so much time arguing on the internet.

They need the release. They work hard, they play hard, and they die unfairly; you’d need ridiculous context to avoid how most of them were hacked to oblivion. Much more context, they figure, than all the real people they watch getting hooked on drugs or forgetting to pay the rent.

Everyone who’s ever died in a Horror movie needs the real world to take their minds off of fiction.