Meekrat's Emporium of Nonsensery

This story was originally a submission to the Ligonier Valley Writers 2011 Flash Fiction Contest. It lost:

There’s a graveyard behind the local gas station. I must have driven by it at least twenty-five times before I realized that fact, but now that I know it’s there I can’t stop thinking about it. All those people stopping to fill up their cars and probably not realizing that less than a hundred yards away there’s rotting bodies buried beneath the ground. There’s a school on the other side, I think, which is just equally terrible. Imagine being some little kid trying to learn how to add fractions and looking out the window to see a bunch of tombstones jutting out of the ground and knowing that the newest one was there years before you were even a twinkle in your father’s eye. None of this is even the worst thing, though. The worst thing is that, after I realized there was a graveyard there, I found out that someone I knew had spent the night there.

It was on the anniversary of their great-grandfather’s death, or so they said. There was no way I was going to go check up on their story. I haven’t even gotten gas at the gas station since I realized what was behind it. Anyway, the man had been dead for decades by that point. The person, a classmate whose name was Jake or something, decided that it would be a fantastic idea to take some slut there and do a live webcam where guys could tell her to take off her clothes and touch herself for money. He found a girl whose name had an X in it, it might have been Lix, and they went to the graveyard and set-up. Now, I would be worried about so many things. The logistics of establishing a good connection, the cops showing up and arresting everyone for a lot of crimes, and getting good lighting. In my mind’s eye, I just assume that everything went off without a hitch, that the cops were elsewhere that night and they had good lighting. I know for a fact that the connection thing was an insurmountable obstacle, because I couldn’t find a single thing about their little escapade after Jake told me about it. This could just mean he was lying to me, but it could be something more sinister.

According to Jake, the night started off all right. They snuck back there a little before dusk and found Jake’s great-grandfather’s grave. Jake set up the webcam, Lix began primping herself for her adoring hormonal public. It was far enough from the street that there wouldn’t be interference from traffic, but close enough so that if anything went wrong they could make a run for it. They each finished their chores and Jake had Lix start practicing for the night, which I took to mean he told her to get naked and touch herself. By the time it got dark, Lix was all set to please her adoring public and Jake was all set to film her and make some money off other’s indiscretions. This was when the first thing went wrong: they couldn’t connect to the Internet.

“The guy said I could just hook up my laptop to my phone and that would get us enough speed to do this,” Jake told Lix, “He even said he would be sure to stop by to see how things went.”

Lix smiled at him, the sort of sinister smile a woman will use when she knows someone wants her, the kind of smile that exudes control, “See my tits, is more like it.”

Jake shrugged, “So what? If he’s willing to pay, that’s what you’re here for.”

According to Jake, it wasn’t like she was hiding them. She was all Gothed up: corset, leather skirt, fishnets, thigh-high boots, lipstick and eye-shadow, all black, with silver jewelry. She had made her face as pale as possible, and her hair was bright red. I don’t think any actual Goth kids dress like that, but for a woman taking her clothes off in a graveyard, it was close enough. Jake continued to try to get the connection started, but Lix wasn’t going to make things very easy for him. After half an hour, she decided that Jake had an ulterior motive for bringing her out there.

“You’re a sneaky one,” she said, sidling up to him and whispering in his ear, “You came up with this whole plan just to get me alone and hot, didn’t you?”

“Of course not,” said Jake, showing more professionalism than he ever had or would, “Just some techincal difficulties. Keep your shirt on.”

The exhibitionist pouted, but the pout broke into a smile and she licked Jake’s neck, “Sure about that?”

Jake’s concentration was shot and it was obvious to him that if he was going to get any work done, he would have to do something to get her to live him alone. This part of Jake’s story rang false: there was no way he would have let it get this far without at least copping a feel. He was about to rectify this when they heard a noise, a stick breaking. Since they weren’t exactly in a private place, this was bad news.

“I’ll go see what it is,” said Jake, his hand hovering over Lix’s breast, “Stay here.”

“Fuck that,” Lix followed him deeper into the graveyard, “I’m not sitting around a graveyard alone.”

The two of them headed deeper, though it was clear that Lix still had something other than noises on her mind. At least, not that kind of noise. She was more interested in panting and moaning than sticks breaking, and her wandering hands emphasized her desires. Jake calmly removed her hand from its place on his crotch and turned to her when she screamed.

Jake grimaced, “What is it?”

“I saw someone back there!”

Fear had filled her eyes, and since this version of Jake was far more brave and altruistic than the one telling me the story, he set off to investigate, finding nothing but more graves overgrown with moss.

“There’s nothing over here,” said Jake, whose mind had turned to thoughts of going home and forgetting about the whole graveyard thing. The night could be salvaged, after all. The graveyard was only an interesting backdrop: people would pay for cyber-time with Lix no matter where she was.

“Maybe you should check in here,” Lix’s fingers were on the zipper on the front of her corset, all fear forgetten and replaced with lust.

Jake smiled, for once acting like the real Jake, and was about to search this new area when he saw the old man standing almost out of sight. Rage filled his eyes and he stormed towards the mood-killer, something trying to worm its way into his mind. He ignored all but the rage, determined to make the old man pay. Lix grabbed his wrist as he left.

“Forget her,” she said, “Not like I’ve never had an audience before.”

Jake froze in place, his scowl of rage replaced with an expression of something resembling fear, “Her?”

“That old woman,” Lix nodded towards the old man who had so recently killed Jake’s mood, “Besides, I doubt she’s never seen sex before.”

“That’s not an old woman. It’s an old man.”

Jake and Lix looked into each other’s eyes, understanding descending upon both of them.

“We have to get out of here,” Lix hopped off the tombstone she had perched upon, “Now.”

Jake agreed silently, pulling her in a wide circle around the old person who turned to watch them. The thing that had been trying to worm it’s way into Jake’s mind finally burrowed through, “That’s my great-grandfather. I saw pictures.”

“I don’t care if it’s Vincent Price, keep going,” hissed Lix.

They kept walking, and Jake kept thinking, “Is it a ghost or something?”

“Don’t care,” replied Lix, wishing Jake would shut up and hurry.

They made their way back to their equipment, which had been smashed, various electronic components were scattered about the ground. This was the last straw, according to Jake: they could cock-block him, they could drive him deep into a graveyard, but if they messed with his computer than that was the last straw.

“I’m going back in,” said Jake, “I don’t care if it’s a ghost, it can’t get away with this.”

Lix’s eyes grew wide and she bit her lip, trying desperately to think of a way to keep Jake from going back. Her instincts kicked in and she threw her arms around him and stuck her tongue down his throat. Jake tried to get away, but the allure of casual sex kept him from going far, and soon the only exploring being done was his hands up her shirt. Before they had gone much farther, though, Lix pushed him away and screamed, her finger shooting up towards the much closer figure of Jake’s great-grandfather.

“Get out of here,” demanded Jake, “You keep ruining things!”

The old man came closer, and Jake noted that he could see through him to an extent.

“No hanky-panky,” growled the ghost, “No hanky-panky in the graveyard.”

Jake swung his arm, dissipating the etheral entity before him, “Shut up, old man.”

“You tell him,” Lix’s hand went back to her zipper, “Press start to continue.”

“Where’s start,” asked Jake, fondling Lix’s butt, “Never mind, it’s more fun to find out on my own.”

Jake never did find out where start was, as the dissipated moral energy of the graveyard had descended into the ground to rally its troops. Hands covered with the remains of clothing and flesh shot from the ground around the pair, groping for hand-holds. They all found what they were looking for, in one case grabbing Lix’s ankles and using her as an anchor to rise from the earth. ALl thoughts of sex erased from his mind, Jake narrowly evaded another pair of questing hands, his feet treading heavily on another. This didn’t stop the owner of the hands from making landfall, and soon the graveyard behind the gas station was filled with a legion of the undead chanting not for brains and the flesh of the living but for some moral strength from the youth of today.

“No hanky-panky in the graveyard,” they moaned as one, groping far more of Lix than Jake had managed to, “No hanky-panky in the graveyard!”

Jake ran towards the street, trying to ignore Lix’s screams as the moral zombies tore her clothes, and then her flesh, off. Or, at least, that’s what I’m assuming since Jake had run off by this point and had only her pained screams to go by. With his outlandish story over, I asked him for proof, since none could be found. In response, he held up his hand with a single white ring upon it.

“What’s that?”

“Promise ring,” he said, “I went to church the next day and told my pastor about it, and he was sure I just had a dream brought on by overactive hormones. We talked about it, and decided the best thing to do would be to save myself for marriage.”

I haven’t talked to Jake since then, since all he ever talks about is how great it is to be celibate. As for the graveyard, every so often I sneak a peek behind it when I’m driving by the gas station, and sometimes I’m almost sure I catch a glimpse of some morally outraged elderly people determined to make sure that there’s no hanky-panky in the graveyard.