Scary Monsters
...and Super Creeps. One Meditation, One New-ish Story.
Good Day to you Night Hawks,
Today’s little story is not a horror story. So I thought I should say something about horror, it and I.
Someone asked in an interview why I write. Because I have to, is the real reason. Also. I’m trying to inform. Inspire? Scare. I’d rather scare when I’m sharing; horror is the best antidote for society’s ills. It helps us contextualize, determine whether mankind has been worth it our final, most desperate hours. These hours have surely begun now, near the midnight of our story, as humans. We don’t know what’s next, out in the dark.
Can we get out? Escape the evil, the killers, the zombies, the monster? Or should we.
As Kurt Russell devised in the final line of John Carpenter’s THE THING: Maybe we should just wait here for a while. See what happens. The end of the monster is a pair of defeated humans who cannot trust one another, who wait together to freeze to death. Or one human. Or maybe, less than one.
My worldview is heavily informed by this work, and is that the message I mean to deliver? It isn’t not that.
Maybe I want to help my descendants. Maybe I realize they’re better off without that help, that descendants are merely endings, just ants going down. My help both unnecessary and irrelevant.
There’s a part of me that knows that isn’t true. But is afraid that it is.
I’m writing for that part of me. Not everything I write is horror, but all of it carries that shadow, of mortality, loss. I write love stories, is what I think. I almost always give a story some hope, too.
Here at Trunk Stories, you’ll find some of my unpublished (now published here) work. You’ll find reprints of odds and ends that I’ve published too, some of them having disappeared with their publications. You’ll find meandering thoughts like this one. You will not be spammed, and I don’t ever intend to charge for Trunk Stories.
A new work shows up here when I toss it in the ‘trunk’; every writer has one. The box of stories that, for whatever reasons, didn’t make it. The misfits and mayhem are in there, the dreams and night terrors and almosts. The ones that we decide to just put away are often the ones we can’t bear to.
I’ll share mine with you here.
Keep an eye out, Night Hawks.
Today’s tidbit is a little story about a young man, a boy on the verge of being a man perhaps, influenced by my time in Paris, films like The Bicycle Thief, a little of this, a dash of that, a photograph I found. Think of it, like all of my tales, what you will.
I’m not an encyclopedia. I’m just the tour guide, you have to see and make your own mind up for yourself.
This way, Night Hawks.
Street Photography
First appearing in Eunoia Review, January 2026
I might never get away from Gemeinier and his disease. I smell it on him, like a skin on top of milk that has been heated then stood for too long.
On the street in the 4e, far from my aunt’s tiny apartment, I wait for him to set up the transaction. I’ll receive ten percent. It’s not a real job, but it’s better than nothing. The money helps at home. It’s not safe, but I am never harmed.
Gemeinier shuffles idly at the corner near the lamppost, daylight fading around us as the lights of the City take over. Further up the street, a young woman is taking pictures of everything with her cell phone. She is American, her red hair pulled back in an elastic tie. A cab shushes past, then a police van turns the corner, appears to slow, and all of my muscles react, pull away, like hairs on my arm shrinking darkened from a lighter flame.
“C’est bon?” Gemeinier grunts at me. You good? I wonder if he thinks I will betray him, or if he worries I will bolt, leaving him with no cover. No one to call his son today.
No safety net.
The police van cruises on, then turns up Rue des Chantres and is disappears.
I flick the plastic lighter in my jeans pocket. Click. Click. Gemeinier doesn’t care so much about the answer to his question, only that he’s asked it.
Click.
The American redhead steps around Gemeinier, ignoring him. He stares at her behind as she approaches me. I pull into my sweatshirt, try to disappear. “Puis-je prendre votre photo?” she asks, dividing the syllables awkwardly in her stubby diction.
“Sure,” I answer in English, although I shake my head in negation, betraying my true response. It will attract more attention if I refuse; never tell them no. In allowing the picture then I am unmemorable, a set piece for her tour. Anonymous.
I drop my hood so she can see my face and avert my eyes, slouch against the wall behind me. Teenage voyou,Paris.
“Beau garçon,” she murmurs, lines up her phone. She snaps the photo, and takes a second candid after I’ve broken my pose.
Then she steps into me, a waft of floral soap and cinnamon. “Adrien,” she whispers. “This is for your aunt. Tell her it’s paid. Ok?” Her hand is warm against mine. She places a thick envelope into my fingers, clasps them closed.
I inhale her through my nose, emerald eyes meeting my own and with that she’s gone, already steps up the street and capturing pictures of a shopfront on the opposite row, its aqua paint a breath between the buildings clustered sienna and bluff beside it.
The envelope is thick and worn, soft like her fingers in my hands. It has been used to hold documents before, has been wound and unwound with its twine before me. I stuff it into my front jeans pocket with the lighter. I know what it contains. If my time is done, then this is for us, for my aunt, and for me. She’s free of it now and so I can be too.
Gemeinier has already vanished, either knowing the outcome of the tourist’s appearance, or afraid that he could be found out. Not a hint of his stale-milk odor left behind, only the exhaust of the traffic passing.
Another cab purrs through the intersection while I wait at the corner, then I hustle across the road in the direction of the Saint-Paul station, toward the trains that will take me back home.