Devin Teevee

fiction best read by blue light

Welcome to Season Three of Beach Reads for Goth Kids, the original Substack summer horror extravaganza. All season long, I’m delivering spooky stories with summery themes. So turn down your a/c and join me for those long days spent in front of the TV, monsters that stalk from the shore, and things that go bump in the backyard. Oh, and they aren’t really for kids, just the misunderstood goth teen who lives inside us all.

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This week, we meet Devin on the cusp of manhood and his best friend, just as they take the next step in their relationship. But one should always be careful when sparks fly…

xx

ej

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Devin Teevee

Photo by Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash

On the first day of summer break, Devin and his television became more than friends.

It took only one day in each other’s relaxed and slow company, with the invisible thread between them warm and thrumming. Eight uninterrupted hours did more than the hundreds they spent together during the school year, time brutally hacked into half hour segments and multi-tasking glances.

Devin made sure the TV knew how much he adored her by never turning her off, never muting her siren song, even on the commercials; the TV in turn gave Devin ever more of a good thing, never pausing for rest, never running dry. They never broke eye contact, these two lovers, even when his parched throat yelped for water, even when the space behind his eyes hummed with a strange blurring heat.

And then Devin’s mom came home, her keys jangling in the door like a jailer’s.

As the front door creaked open, Devin scrambled to make himself decent, straightening his clothes and pawing errant Cheeto dust off his face. He tried in vain to fluff the plaid couch cushions. His heart pattered. How bad would this be? How bad did it look?

TV was nonplussed, she kept right on with what she was doing. She didn’t care who caught them together.

When Mother finally came into the room, heavily armored in tight chignon, control-top pantyhose and commuting sneakers, she gave himthe look that said turn the TV off, a look pregnant with authority on school nights, and he felt his arm automatically twitch towards the remote. But then he stopped.

It wasn’t a school night. It was summer. TV blared at him don’t let go and he felt suddenly brave and defiant.

He stilled his hand and glared at Mother.

Self doubt emanated from his pores—powdered cheese and sweat, teenage fury and slimy fear—but he faced his captor courageously.

This moment hung in the air, engorged and filthy. A perversion of norms, right out there in the open, a gluey, fetid act of resistance and decisiveness that would veer Devin’s life and his mom’s life and TV’s life into unmapped worlds.

Mother’s mouth hung open a bit and her eyes darted from Devin to TV. She wrinkled her nose as if about to comment on his eminent teenage bouquet, a frequent target of her bullying. But then, detecting instead the whiff of a battle she was uninterested in waging, she took a clipped breath and shut her mouth. She rolled her eyes at Devin and walked away.

When she retreated, Devin’s body flushed with hot victory and newborn masculinity. He looked at TV and slow blinked, as confident and romantic a gaze as he could muster. She screamed out the theme song of a show he had never seen before but already lusted after.

Shortly, Mother appeared with a sandwich and a Gatorade, setting it on the coffee table next to him. She turned the volume down low, giving implicit permission for TV to stay on, then said goodnight. TV purred. The couch, slightly damp and concave, softened.

*

They were deep into the infomercial hours when everything changed. The occasional sound from the street had faded to total emptiness, cocooning Devin and his paramour in cozy seclusion. She hummed into his downy ear set it and forget it, and he dozed a syrupy sleep, his desire occasionally stirring him to open one eye for The Psychic Hotline, to trail a lazy finger across the remote.

Hypnotic commercials bloated into shows that themselves bore commercials. A loop of beginningless, endless symmetry, free gifts with purchase, hand models waving kitchen gadgets, and cash on delivery. It was a liminal time when the familiar features of entertainment warped into a particleboard of commercialism, a senseless, droning stretch when TV’s candy veneer came off, revealing her naked desire.

It was exciting to know TV this way, unadorned and off-kilter in her most private hours.

And then there came an electric pop, a sound that cracked the air between them. Devin’s eyes flew open in time to see a white line streak across TV, then everything blinked out. A tiny trail of smoke emerged from the scorched wall socket and TV went black, a fishbowl mirror in which Devin saw a dark, distorted vision of himself on the couch. His breath caught oh god, oh god and he leapt to his feet.

When he got close he realized she was still warm. She smelled of hot dust and ozone. A static charge reached out from her shiny black faceand connected with his chest, stinging him. He gasped, pupils opening like whirlpools, and pressed his palms to her smooth skin.

Devin’s feet seemed to float out from under him. His eyes rolled back in his head and TV entered his mind, moving like liquid metal, coating the inside of his skull. This TV was for him alone.

Gone were the cartoon brightness, the tinny theme music, the strobing lights and booming voices. Gone were the stars and the studio audiences.

In their place came a whirling, frothing galaxy of pure stimulus. Every channel was a universe of its own— instantaneous, all-consuming, personal and sacred. Some of it he understood immediately, reassuring him of his place here, and some he couldn’t parse yet. Terrifying images and sensations whispered to him there was a journey yet to unfold. Every electron found a hole in Devin’s mind and filled it, until he and TV were one.

Gatorade drool gathered on Devin’s chin. Somewhere in the house he heard Mother stirring. Mother, she of the grocery bags and cupboards, paperwork and hairpins and rules. Mother, who never allowed TV to blossom, but always tried to box her in.

TV turned the volume down on Mother, bringing Devin back to her electron cloud. She patiently caulked all his weak spots, coating them in slick mercury waves, and promised him he could be more. More than the child of a mother.

Her electronic love made his muscles twitch, and he writhed on the living room floor. Mother’s wall-to-wall carpet scratched at his arms and legs, a sensation that came to him like a signal from a distant antenna. But TV’s sweet nothings flushed all doubt from his mind.

He was more, he decided. More than teenage B.O. and ennui. More than a lonely boy on the couch resisting his mother’s rule.

And with that, Devin’s human body started to fizz—slow at first, a tingle in his arms and legs, then his skin began to bubble, a vibrating, shimmering cloud of foam. For a moment there twitched a static shape where a boy had been, and finally he drifted apart. Billions of tiny dots—green, blue, and red—floated up from the floor, steady marching into the screen. Devin transmuted into his lover’s language.

Soon, nothing remained of Mother’s sweaty son but an indented couch cushion and some Cheeto dust on the remote. The broken TV hinted to her at something off, and she could never bring herself to dump it, even years later, though she didn’t know why. Sometimes she stared at its bubble glass and wondered if his beloved TV had stolen him away, if he had run to Hollywood or New York City to chase his wild dreams.

She never guessed that hers was a child of magnets and coaxials, that her Devin had found true love in the tubes.