“How To Survive Being Brought to Church by Your Grandparents,” Ryan Van Ells
- Amy Lee Lillard
- 24 hours ago
- 6 min read
Today on Midwest Weird: “How To Survive Being Brought to Church by Your Grandparents,” by Ryan Van Ells.
Ryan Van Ells (he/him) is a queer lawyer and author of dark fiction from Milwaukee, WI. His work has appeared in State of Matter, Tiny Terrors and Drabbledark III. He is an affiliate member of the HWA. You can find him at ryanvanellsauthor.wordpress.com.
Midwest Weird is an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions. We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Episode Transcript:
This is Midwest Weird, an audio literary magazine from Broads and Books Productions.
We’re the home of weird fiction and nonfiction by Midwestern writers.
Today’s episode: “How To Survive Being Brought to Church by Your Grandparents,” by Ryan Van Ells. Read by the Midwest Weird team.
Get up early. Church starts earlier than you’d believe and you’re expected to look nice.
Speaking of looking nice, wear something formal. Not nice, formal. Because the dress you bought for Archie Chester’s party last year is nice, but not formal church nice and if you try to wear it you’ll end up in one of your grandmother’s old dresses that looks like it was made from a flour sack.
When you get complimented on said flour sack, smile and say thank you. Do not, I repeat do not, say “thank you I’m looking forward to being baked into a cake,” because your grandfather will hit you upside the head for having a “smart mouth” and the person you’re talking to will walk away open-mouthed and sputtering like a dying fish. Which you don’t know because you go fishing, but because your cat got curious in your brother’s room one afternoon. Was it your fault he left the door and the tank lid open? Are you supposed to keep track of your cat all the time? It’s a cat! And now you have to spend the rest of the summer at your grandparents’.
Don’t scoff every time you’re expected to say “and also with you” even if it’s getting ridiculous.
If you need a break, whisper to your grandmother that you’re going to go to the bathroom. Do this during the latin part because then she won’t feel like she’s missing anything.
When you leave to go to the bathroom and find a strange old door warped into a shape that says open me, I’m full of secrets do not open the door. Do not slip inside and slide it shut behind you without looking where it goes. Do not fumble around in the dark for a lightswitch, especially along the wall, because there isn’t one. There’s one of those old-fashioned strings hanging in the air and if you hadn’t knocked into it and screamed you wouldn’t have found it.
Upon pulling the string, you’ll want to scream. It’s okay if you do, nobody outside the door can you hear you anyway, it’s just that nothing inside the door is worth screaming about. The jumbled mass of corpses is actually a pile of mannequin parts. The chalk pentagram with black candles is, well it’s a chalk pentagram with black candles but it should be harmless. Why a Catholic chuch has a strange room filled with mannequin parts and a pentagram is a good question. I don’t know. The room will be bigger than you thought, with a spooky red lighting that might be scary. But don’t worry, it’s a church. What’s the worst that can happen?
You should definitely not search through the cardboard boxes along the wall, no matter how much it looks like there’s a body in them. There are just wigs. For the mannequins, presumably.
Pay attention to this next part. I know, I know, you’ve been paying attention. Well, seriously, pay attention. And if you have been, good job, but this is the important part. I don’t want to hear any whining about how it’s not fair that everyone else can slack off until this part because you’ve been paying such good attention. You want a gold star? Fine, you can have it. Now seriously. Pay attention.
There’s going to be humming and chanting from outside the door. It will sound more ominous than the singing they were doing before, which is positively cheery by comparison. Seriously, like having been bored to death by the Beach Boys and then falling into the mosh pit at a black metal concert. You might even like black metal, but you have to admit, the change would spook you. When the chanting starts you should not move closer to the door to hear it better. I promise, it’s not that interesting.
Lock the door. If there’s not a lock, barricade it with the mannequins and boxes of wigs. Whatever you do, don’t stand stunned when it swings open and people who look like your grandparents but not, look in on you with old-timey pilgrim clothes, anger plastered over their faces worse than when you took grandpa’s Harley for a joyride at 15. If this happens, don’t call them grandma or grandpa. They won’t know. In fact, they’ll be more scared. Which means it’s more likely that the next part happens.
When more people in pilgrim clothes start to pile into the impossibly large room, which you now realize doesn’t have mannequins or wigs, just the pentagram you’re standing right in the middle of, you need to run. I know, there’s a lot of them and where are you going to run to? But you have to try, because there’s only going to be more and if you don’t, they’re going to catch you and call your “marked skin” satanic as if you weren’t embarrassed enough by Kelly’s first attempt at a stick and poke on your left breast no matter if you acted proud of being an early test subject of a great artist, the skin would be worth something someday. Then they’ll gag your mouth so you can’t explain that your clothes aren’t witch-garb, they’re just from the future.
There’s not much you can do at this point.
You can try and thrash and scream and kick, but the old pilgrims are impressively strong. Probably all that farming and actual hard labor they had to do that you never did. That you were supposed to do on grandpa’s farm this summer.
The sky will be bright and blue and clear when they put you on the pyre. You thought that people would burn witches at night, but maybe that’s a movie thing. Guess it makes sense.
When you’re tied to the stake, you have a lot of options. Cursing. Screaming. Spitting. Making some vague predictions of the future that might come true so they all at least feel scared in their beds for the rest of their lives for what they did to you. You can pray too. I did. First time in my life I actually prayed. Not that it did me much good, I tried the “our father who art in heaven” one but kept forgetting the words. They seem to think this is you repenting. It makes them smile. They still burn you though.
When you wake up passed out in the same pentagram but this time with the mannequins and wigs again, don’t worry. Time hasn’t passed that fast. It’s still believable that you were in the bathroom and it actually looks like you passed a really bad shit so in some ways, score. Hurry out to the pews with your grandparents and spend the rest of the summer with your head low and pretending to like church. Not because you believe in god or you’ve seen the light, if anything it’s the opposite. But because when you leave, the mysterious door is gone and you don’t want to give them a reason to think you’re on drugs. And honestly, they’re not as bad as they could be.
Ryan Van Ells (he/him) is a queer lawyer and author of dark fiction from Milwaukee, WI. His work has appeared in State of Matter, Tiny Terrors and Drabbledark III. He is an affiliate member of the HWA. You can find him at ryanvanellsauthor.wordpress.com.
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