Fiction: In Which Michael Myers’ Remains Are Distributed Across The U.S. In Neatly Wrapped Parcels Of Ground Meat
By Sarp Sozdinler
And for a good cause.
For everyone wants a taste of the legend. Of what it is like being a
larger-than-life television persona. It’s thanks to the good folk of
Haddonfield, Illinois that this initiative takes place, that what has remained
of Michael Myers after being pushed to a big garbage grinder by Jamie Lee
Curtis at the end of the last film is collected piece by piece with a pickstick
to be hauled away in municipality trucks to a nearby recycling facility. You
see, everything needs to be salvaged these days. The planet needs to be saved.
The franchises, revamped. No taxpayer’s buck to waste for naught. A fair-haired
boy from Akron, Ohio, chomps down a piece of fried currywurst that used to be
Michael Myers’ ring finger. Another kid nibbles at his curly fries in an
Arby’s store just south of Kansas City, the stewed clumps of ground meat on the
side bearing the impressions of a bloodthirsty eye. A small piece of Myers’
fibula gets stuck between the teeth of the boy’s father, which he plonks out
with a toothpick. Myers is being Myers the whole time, a pain in the ass both
in life and death, again and again. He haunts, he hunts. He knows what it feels
like to be on the wrong end of the stick, figuratively or otherwise. And now,
it seems, to be on the wrong end of America, too. Day by day, everyone pukes
out the pieces of Michael Myers they inadvertently swallowed. Organ after
chewed organ, limb after pasty limb. The cartilage, the nails. The thrown-up
pieces of Michael Myers slime down on the ground and find each other in the
same scrapyard up in Central Illinois where they were disassembled in the first
place. They fuse back together. They howl in joy. An indistinct male voice
sizzles out of what could reasonably be called the mouth of this newly forming
body, which doesn’t sound any more or less comprehensible than a baby’s cooing.
The diehard fans of the series know that it can only mean one thing: Trick
or treatin’! Coming for you, Jamie Lee! Coming for you, America, the
kids, the nannies, the parents, the fans, the viewers, this holiday season in
4K, in all theaters near you. The trailer ends. Inaudible gasps.
Sarp Sozdinler is an Amsterdam-based writer.
His work has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Wigleaf,
HAD, Hobart, X-R-A-Y, Burial, and Pithead Chapel, among other
journals. He serves as the editor of The Bulb Region.