Nightmare Fuel, Day the Fifth - In the Southwest Room

For day five we get a skull! Since this is a typical horror trope, I stepped away from the supernatural for a scene of interior decoration.

What? Interior decorating can be horror, right? But before we get to that, let's check in on the usual suspects, shall we?

Kary Gaul took this in more the expected direction, with a thing of power behind a Forbidden Door. Really, who doesn't love a Forbidden Door? Meanwhile Charles Moore continues his long tale, adding a surprisingly flash of action and violence.

I'm not sure if Jenny Perrson gave us an actual story, but I don't know if I ever do either. What I do know is that she gave us something lovely and evocative. Finally, we get some lovely details and a great closing paragraph from Samantha Dunaway Bryant.


And now it's my turn. Let's redecorate the den, shall we?

In the Southwest Room

"I've always wanted a Southwest room. You know that."

I shook my head. "No. That's silly. Besides, we live on Long Island. It's about as far from the southwest as you can get. Besides, it doesn't go with the rug."

The fact is that southwest decor probably would go with the carpet; the deep orange shag we were standing on, the kind of thing that was really popular around here four decades ago. Even the faux-wood paneling wouldn't be too out of place, at least in color. But no. I felt heat rising, my ears burning.

"Besides, isn't it cultural appropriation? To use Indian stuff as decoration?"

Her nostrils flared and her eyes got wider. That was a wrong thing to say. "First, anything Native we buy would come from actual native artists. Second, nobody who gives a fuck about 'cultural appropriation' would say 'Indian'. Sometimes I don't even know who I married."

"sometimes me neither," I muttered, low enough so she'd not have to answer. Then, louder, "You always want to control everything."

"And you want to change nothing," she snapped back. "If it were up to you, we'd keep this ugly shag carpet and be living in the nineteen-fucking-seventies. What next? Are we going to start hosting key parties? Is that what you want?"

She was holding a bleached cow skull of the kind that people think makes nice desert-type art. The kind of thing you'd see in a desert painting. I couldn't even see her anymore. Just the room, and the thing in her hands.

Not even her face, or the shag carpet.

Just the skull and the stuff I'd read in that journal I'd found in the shoebox in the back of her closet, about her life before me and her days in Arizona.

I shook my head, muttered, "No. I don't want to live in the 70s".

Even if you don't really know the person you're married to, you know when you've lost an argument.

I let out a long, slow breath and nodded. "Where do you want to put it?"