The Last Horror Novel in the History of the World by Brian Allen Carr Page A

America said, in its school-mannered way, “If you stay where you come from, you’re doomed to repeat yourself.”
    What we sadly witnessed, what fate befell us, never happened to anyone in this whole world’s history.
    But, tragically, will never happen again.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    The black magic of bad living only looks hideous to honest eyes.
    These few streets at dusk, still except for tarrying dogs, their milk-heavy tits swaying.
    Rob Cooder breaks a banjo string, clears his throat, smokes cloves.
    Mindy Stuart has herpes.
    Tim Bittles has a cell phone and is on it, texting a girl named Meredith two towns over, and every time she obliges with a picture, he shows us her faceless nudity on the screen.
    Scarlett and Teddy are in love, say: we’ll quit Scrape, Texas when we can. Put everything of worth into a U-Haul, drive to Austin and get schooling in us and not look back ever.
    “Good. Good. Do it. You should.”

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Scrape lies between two legitimate cities.
    Corpus Christi and Houston.
    There are saltwater puddles the whole way between them.
    There’s the constant smell of turning fish.
    On the water, boats with filled sails slow their patterns eternal.
    We pull crab traps from the shallows, cast dead shrimp at unseen trout, gig flounder in the nighttime, shoot Redhead drake from bleak-winter skies.
    We invent a game to anger the city folk.
    Rob and Tim go to the highway and drive thirty-five miles an hour side by side.
    There’s no way to pass, so the cars clump up in their commuting.
    A line of them stretches back through the night like a string of honking Christmas lights.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Fridays we fry fish in the front yard, the smell of cornmeal caramelizing in the grease.
    The mothers make mayonnaise from scratch, mince home-pickled cucumbers for the tartar sauce.
    We sing these old songs in the sweater-heavy nighttime air. The glow of streetlights soft in the salt stench.
    If I could live my life all over .  .  .
    And Mindy Stuart stares out at nothing over that line, and we all know someone will love her no matter what because the way she looks, and we all know that it won’t be the love she craves, because Mindy never likes what she has.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    We overdo it, drink until our blood is rust and the prickly sun pinks the sky to dawn.
    No one’s ready for sleep. We take the john boat down to the laguna and row out to the duck blinds where we hide in the humid morning with shotguns between our legs.
    We pass out before the ducks show, wake swollen with mosquito stings.
    “What now?” someone asks.
    “Let’s get drunk again.”
    We have whiskey and we work on it, toss out decoys and wade the water, dragging our feet to scare away stingrays.
    Someone shoots at the sky and we wait a moment.
    After a while, birdshot rains down.
    “There’s so many ripples,” someone says. “So many ripples,” as the shots land, dimpling the water’s surface.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    Mindy keeps her herpes secret, crawls in and out of apartments that smell of new carpet and microwaved soup.
    She knows the boys of high school intimate.
    They are shark-skin smooth and firecracker quick.
    They whip in and out of her like snake tongues tasting air.
    She examines their tightness, the curls in their hair.
    Gives them more than they want of her.
    Makes them say her name.

  
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
      
     
       
     
     
     
     
     
     

    First we saw birds and rabbits, squirrels and frogs, raccoons and possums, crossing through the daytime streets.
    “Something’s off,” Old Burt says. He’s racist toward blacks and hates the internet. “It just makes