Beach Reads #3: The Summer Camp Slasher

what I know about bodies

Welcome to Beach Reads for Goth Kids. All summer long, I’m sending out short stories that pack a haunting punch: creatures-of-the-week, heatwave madness, and things that go bump in the cul-de-sac. These will be sticky stories with summery themes, best consumed with a tiny paper umbrella.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to camp, we present The Summer Camp Slasher.

Content warning: The summer camp slasher is a murderer. You might not like what he does.

Photo by Marcus Urbenz on Unsplash

“What I know about boys,” Kristen said, craning her neck and thrusting her chest into the crowd of girls, “is they love the smell of vanilla.”

Little Addison Samuels held the plastic bottle of vanilla body splash in both hands and squirted clouds of it at Kristen’s sternum. The Bunk 7 girls screeched with delight.

“Also,” Kristen continued, the girls hushing to hear. “Boys are visual.” She hooked a thumb under her sleeve and tugged out a bright red bra strap. Her audience screamed.

“Ok, ok, shush,” Kristen widened her eyes. “Shhhhhh, ohmygod you’re going to get me in so much trouble! You guys have to go to bed and you have to be good or we’re all going to get caught.”

She hustled her herd of twelve-year-olds into their bunks. At seventeen, Kristen was only a junior counselor, but this was the one magical night of the summer when the real counselors went out to get drunk in town, leaving the teenagers to run the place.

Only one adult was on the property that night: the camp’s ancient, half-deaf nurse Lorraine. Kristen thought it was almost impossible that Lorraine would hear anything at all, but she needn’t take chances. She turned out the lights in the cabin, dousing herself and all the girls in the red glow of the exit sign.

She swiped a thick stripe of strawberry lip gloss across her mouth and made a kissing face. Everyone giggled, but Kristen’s heart beat like it was trying to escape.

Jason was a townie, the kind of hard-edged country boy she knew best from TV. He was a couple years older, rode a dirt bike, and had been hanging around Camp Keystone since they were kids. Meeting him on the dock after lights out was something someone else would do, something Kristen was used to hearing about later. She wasn’t sure she was main character material.

what I know about boys

is they come apart more easily

their bodies are looser

joints roomy enough to let things in

sharp objects and bad ideas

The moon was a tiny slice of itself. Kristen’s phone flashlight spat out a dim yellow circle on the ground and she kept her eyes on the path to avoid turning her ankle. She took a long walk to the dock, going out of her way past the boys side, maybe hoping someone would stop her. But her body knew the way. She had walked around this camp every summer since she was seven. She reached the top of the stairs that led to the lake almost without realizing it.

She took the stairs slowly, her eyes fixed on the step ahead in its tiny puddle of light. Looking down like that, she didn’t see Jason standing on the dock until she was close enough to touch him. The lake made tiny wet sounds against the floating dock and the planks creaked under her footsteps.

Jason smelled like sunshine. Like hot skin, grass, and lake water. She breathed him in and her stomach fizzed. But he cut a black silhouette, his perfect face obscured by a hoodie, and she hesitated. In the dark, in the hood, he looked bigger, older. A voice inside her said turn around.

With one step, Jason closed the gap between them. He put his arms around her waist. She lifted her own arms out of his way but couldn’t quite bring herself to wrap them around his neck, like she knew she was supposed to. Instead she bent her elbows and tucked them into her chest, hands under her chin like praying. But it didn’t do much. He squeezed, and then her arms were pinned. She wasn’t protected, she was captive. She balled her hands into fists, straining against his chest, but just barely.

girls are different

they hold tight to their shape

everything meant to be exactly how it is

girl bodies prefer to stay membered

When he kissed her she felt herself go liquid. Jason’s body was hard and unfamiliar in the places hers was soft and boring. In all the times she had dreamed of kissing him, she never imagined how different his body would feel than her own. How there were no squishy parts. That he would angle himself, so subtly, so that one thigh found its way between her legs. She guessed the magazines had been right about the vanilla. She could hear him breathing it in as he tried to consume her.

She worried he wouldn’t be able to see her red bra because the night was so dark. What a disappointment.

it’s pretty

pretzeling bodies, blood hot rushing

the total annihilation of being held

The floating dock rocked and Kristen felt like she was going to fall, but Jason held her tightly and didn’t even flinch. The wood creaked, not underneath but behind her. Someone new had stepped onto the float.

She tried to break Jason’s kiss but he wouldn’t let her go. She knew it was Lorraine standing behind them, her wrinkled arms folded in disappointment.

the opposite of remembering

is dismembering

forgetting where everything goes

Jason was oblivious, drunk on vanilla body spray and the hint of dark-colored bra that, yes, he had glimpsed under Kristen’s white shirt. She tasted like pancakes. He was so intent on tasting her that when the axe blade came tearing through her chest, a tiny corner of bloody metal peeking through her folded-up arms, he noticed only that she had pressed against him, sighed a puff of air into his mouth.

in life they go down so easy

but bodies put up a fight

with gore and smells and slippery splashy messes

they fight you with what they have left

Jason’s mouth filled with liquid and he pulled away. A piece of Kristen’s hair had come loose from her ponytail and stood straight up. He looked at the hair defying gravity, hoping not to see the rest. He tried to commit the little escaped hair to memory, to let it be the last thing he saw.

But of course there was the dark shape of a man, standing behind Kristen, towering above them both, his head covered with a burlap sack. Kristen’s eyes were glass beads now, her chest a wet void. From her strawberry lips a river flowed. Jason made a gurgling sound.

He let go but Kristen didn’t fall. The axe through her back held her up, a puppet on a stick. At the sight of her limp arms and legs Jason’s own legs turned soft and he fell to the dock, scrambling backwards for the water. Tasting her blood in his mouth, he retched.

with tough stretchy tendons and

thick ropy muscles and

bones that fit together like they were designed that way

bodies fight

The man shook the axe once and Kristen’s body crumpled to the dock with a soft sound like an exhale. In a smooth arc, the blade came down in the center of Jason’s face just before he screamed. He saw black droplets of blood flying into the sky. He closed his eyes and thought of that hair standing up, anything but this.

The dock groaned as the towering figure dragged his quarry onto dry land, to a waiting tarp he used as a sled to drag them into the woods.

arms and legs are heavy

even the skinny ones

i love how heavy they are

like real things

The tarp slid over leaves and rocks surprsingly smoothly, its light payload of teenagers mostly bones. All the way through the woods it slid to the wide, shallow grave that was waiting for the three of them. He turned on the spotlights, rolled in his prizes, and lowered himself down to get to work.

A little later Lorraine actually made the rounds, her knees feeling up to the task, to her surprise. Still, she wasn’t going down all 38 stairs to the dock. From the top of the hill she noticed only a puddle of dark water on the planks in the dim moonlight. Someone had been swimming after lights out, probably that slut Stephanie and one of the kitchen staff. Lorraine shuffled back to the cabins. That Stephanie was trouble.

what I know about bodies is

skin feels like skin

when there’s not a person inside

the sensation of touching persists

no matter how hard you work to separate the two