(All right, back into the darkness. This is a bizarre and horrific tale that just occurred to me one day. I wrote it very quickly and made few adjustments. If you don’t like your stories weird, stop now; otherwise, enjoy.)
Melissa Perkinns flung her latest outfit against the wall in a fit of rage.
“Fuck!” she yelled. It was the strongest word she knew; still, it was far weaker than what she felt.
A pile of unpicked clothing lay discarded in the corner, a victim of her picky taste. I should draw a chalk line around it, Melissa thought spitefully.
Her closet was small, typical for a dorm room, and picked clean of every stitch except for a dirty pair of sweat pants and pyjama top. Melissa’s anger simmered, unwilling to boil off into the karmic void. It was too much to deal with and find something to wear at the same time.
Melissa hated her wardrobe. Sure, it was fashionable enough and new enough to be nice, but it had lost something along the way. It was not quite right; and that intangible loss ruined the entire value. She knew she looked good and worked hard to stay fit for the kind of clothes she liked. But she had reached a lull in her finances.
School ate money faster than she could ever have imagined; and it also meant little opportunity to work for more money. The clothing budget was slashed to nearly nothing. The last thing she had added was over a month ago; a simple, grey sweater that would work with several other pieces she owned. Her credit cards were maxed out, another issue, and family had been bled dry for clothing gifts.
In the end, she made do with a pair of jeans, a white shirt and the grey sweater. It was as close to what she wanted as she could manage. Melissa was so outraged that the clothes seemed to burn on her body in rebellion.
When her day ended, she pulled off her clothes and felt relieved to be free of them. A quick exchange of texts with her closest friends gave no relief; none of them had anything new, either. Even a couple of old boyfriends spurned her with short, dismissive messages, meaning they had new girlfriends. She would have put out for a chance at a new clothing option. Instead, she stood alone and naked, seething with anger that would not stop.
“There has to be something I can do,” Melissa said to the mirror before her, not noticing her gritted teeth.
No new ideas came to her. She kicked and stomped the pile of clothes for several minutes, finally spitting on it. Her eyes were wet from the frustration but no sobs came through.
Exhausted from her fit and mentally strained day, she went to bed. Sleep wear usually escaped her fashion standards, yet she could not bear to wear anything at all that night. She hated all her clothes.
Nightmares wracked her mind. She dreamed of her clothes, and how she hated them. They were so much worse in her nightmare, uglier and uglier each time she looked at them, desperately trying to find something nice. In the end, she had her familiar pile of clothes on the floor, only different. This pile had eyes and a mouth. It was an evil thing, somehow, and it spoke in a crackly, static sounding voice. The voice was hard to understand at first, as though it were speaking for the first time, however the tone was unmistakable. Whatever she had felt in term of rage was amplified many times over in the voice of the clothes.
“Bitch,” the clothes spat the first intelligible word. “You fucking bitch. You snotty, spoiled whore. Think you hate us? Hate us bad? Well, do we have a nice, bitchy surprise for you, princess? Fucking right. Wakey, wakey. Think you know how to hate…”
Whether it was the power from the clothes’ voice or just the extreme fear she felt at the moment, Melissa woke intensely from her nightmare. She was too startled to scream, though she wanted to. Her room was dark but she could feel the presence of something else; something familiar from the malicious feeling it gave off. She found her phone on the nightstand and lit it up. She looked into the corner in the dim light of her phone. The clothes pile was gone. I must still be dreaming, Melissa thought.
Then the terror returned.
If I am still dreaming, she wondered, what will happen next?
As if in answer, her cell phone slipped from her hand, extinguishing itself as it struck the floor. Her night vision had faded slightly from the phone’s light, and she could not see where it had fallen. Instinctively, she reached for it, pawing at the floor below. Her fingers brushed the rough surface of the cheap carpet before contacting something soft, and she froze in panic. The pile of clothes!
The soft thing on the floor twisted around her hand before Melissa could recoil. She frantically pulled back, unable to break the grasp of the clothes, for she knew it could only be that. She began to scream as more of the clothing lashed further up her wrist and forearm, furthering the hold on her. Seconds later, the cell phone light came on, illuminating the clothes as they gave a sudden tug, bringing Melissa to the floor. She started to strike the pile of clothes with her free arm until it, too, was caught. Pain surged as the bones in her hands began to crack and break under the pressure of the twisting fabric. Melissa cursed and sobbed, anger and fear dominating her in equal measure. The clothes latched around her waist.
“I hate you. I really hate you.” It was all she could think to say, as her forearms snapped. A moment later, she could not even breathe; the clothes were wound tight around her midsection.
“We’re the last thing you’ll ever wear, bitch,” the clothes whispered in the static crackle of a voice. “We hate you back.”
Melissa Perkins blacked out as her clothes pile crushed her into a dead, hateful pulp.
John Settger 