This is one of my creepier stories, which actually happened last week.
I am a head editorial member for a volunteer magazine which raises awareness about mental/physical disabilities. We hold meetings for it at its headquarters in a nearby city, which is two hours away from I live. Unfortunately we had to be at the headquarters first thing on Saturday morning, so I had to go a day early and stay in a hotel overnight so I could be at the meeting on time.
Another editorial member named Katie, who is the head over the art for the magazine also lived too far away to be at the meeting first thing in the morning, so she had to stay at the hotel too. To save money, the people running the magazine bunked both of us in the same room instead of having to pay for two separate rooms. (She and I are total opposites: she dresses in skin-tight black shirts and mini skirts with black boots, wears a ton of makeup, does all sorts of stuff to her hair with things which look like medieval torture devices, and brought about 8 suitcases full of...I dunno,
stuff...for a single hotel night; whereas I just stuffed what things I needed into a single bookbag, wore a simple hoodie, jeans and sneakers, don't wear makeup, and just let my hair do whatever it wants to do.)
I was on my bed (the room had two separate beds, thank goodness; if not, I would have just slept on the floor
) reading a book, and she was on her bed using the remote control to flip through a gazillion T.V. channels which literally had nothing on worth watching. I had just gotten to a really good paragraph in the book when suddenly she said, "I hope you're not creeped out by that."
I glanced up at the T.V. screen, but it was just a laundry detergent commercial; except for the insane-looking grin on the lady's face (she must have been so overwhelmed with joy by the fact the detergent managed to successfully remove the fake-looking stains from her little boy's shirt, that she went over the edge into extreme Happy Land), there was nothing disturbing about the commercial. I looked at Katie on her bed, and she stared right back at me with heavily blue-and-grey makeuped eyes which made it look like someone had punched her in both eyeballs. After an awkward silence, I asked carefully, "Creeped out by what?"
She blinked, and twisted around on her bed to point at a table which was heavily-laden with several pounds of her...once again, I dunno;
Stuff...and exclaimed, "
That!" I followed the line of her pointing finger and squinted at the table, but there were so many heaps of unidentifiable things I could not tell what a single thing was. After some hesitation, I answered, "I don't have my glasses on-" (Yes, I wear glasses for seeing stuff farther off) "-So I can't see what's there." She blinked at me, and I blinked back, and suddenly she grinned ear-to-ear. It was even more frightening than the grin of the lady on the laundry detergent commercial, because unlike the commercial, I had no idea what Katie was talking about. The unknown is much more worrisome than laundry detergent, you see.
"The horse head!" she exclaimed.
I stared at her. Then my eyes flicked to the table; and then back at her.
"My horse head usually creeps all my friends out," she explained, sitting up straight on her bed. " 'Specially 'cause I'm painting it. I just want to make sure you aren't creeped out by it." Noting my expression, her already-round eyes became even rounder. "I bleached it myself to get all the skin off so I can paint it. Don't worry, there's no hair left on it or anything. I want to sell it, maybe for a hundred dollars. People like that kind of stuff, y'know?"
I, a Southern girl forcibly turned Northern about twelve years ago, come from a family who had a few horses. I also worked on a horse farm in New York for a few years. In other words, I love horses. Having a painted horse skull staring sightlessly at me from a tabletop from among the folds of
stuff made me upset, although I bit back any cries of protest or infuriated raving. I did, however, ask warily, "But...
how did you get a horse head...?"
She, apparently relieved by my lack of shrieking or fainting or diving out the fourth-four window to escape her, seemed heartened. Beaming at me with a large smile, she explained, "It was my friend's. She was a Paint. She was sick, and a bunch of coyotes-" (Yes, we have coyotes in New York) "-got her. And nature took its course, y'know? So one day, we were out walking in her field, and her dogs ran toward a patch of grass and started pulling out all these huge bones. So we went over to see what it was, and we found ourselves standing on her horse's bones." She giggled. I silently stared. "The worse part was, it wasn't totally decomposed and there was still some stuff on some of the bones. And we were wearing flip-flops. It was reaaaallllly gross. But I found the horse head and picked it up and told my friend I was taking it home, and she let me."
She continued to smile at me, and I nodded ever so slowly. "I...see," I muttered, and retreated back behind the safety of my book's pages. (It was
Artemis Fowl: The Arctic Incident, just to add that in. I love that book. Something about mean teenage masterminds and grumpy fairies being attacked by insane pixies just steals my heart.) So, the night was spent with a horse's skull staring at me.
The next day at the meeting, I got a better view of the skull. It had purple swirls and red stripes painted on it. A ton of pictures were taken of it, and since Katie is the head over the art of the magazine, photos of the horse skull will be appearing in the magazine. I find that totally wrong. I mean, who in their right mind would use a painted horse skull to represent disabilities? But since I am in the Writing/Editing section of the magazine board, and not art, I had to hold my tongue.
And that is the end of my creepy, disturbing true story. When I get my hands on a copy of the magazine edition, I might scan a page with a picture of the skull and load it onto Facebook.