vulcanjackass

[vulcanjackass]

The Ice Cream Man Chronicles

Stan the Ice Cream Man has been at it for decades, slinging ice cream in small towns across America, but he doesn't just bring bomb pops and eclairs...with Stan comes the Red Summer, when children viciously assault the ones who paid for their ice cream and the Yellow-Eyed stalk the sultry summer streets.

At 15,707 words, The Ice Cream Man Chronicles will take about an hour for you to read, with each individual story taking ten minutes or less...the first one will barely take you five minutes. Take a nibble and see if you like it. On the house, as Stan would say, and please do feel free to share with your friends.

If you enjoy this tale, I love constructive feedback so I know what's working and what's not.

Part 1 - Stan The Ice Cream Man

Part 2 - A Debt Paid

Part 3 - Red Summer

Part 4 - Too Cold For Ice Cream

Part 5 - Summer Runs Red

Part 6 - Ice Cream Days Are Over

[vulcanjackass]

The conclusion. An amateur Internet sleuth chases the mystery of Stan, who seems to have gone out of business. But the ice cream man hasn’t left much of a trail and nobody seems to care save for Hugo, leaving him with a mystery he can’t solve. But answers have an odd way of showing up when you least expect them…

Part 6: Ice Cream Days Are Over

“…and I didn’t see him again for twenty-one years. I didn’t think about him for twenty-one years. Can you believe that? He had his yellow-eyed bastards kill Jimena not five feet from me, and then I killed those sorry motherfuckers with a steak-hammer, and then I forgot all about it. I thought Jimena died of a heart attack and I’d gone off on a wine bender and fallen asleep on a park bench. I threw my bloody clothes away when I got home then took a shower, no big deal. Like, seriously? How fucked is that?”

Hugo paced the length of his apartment, passing back and forth through the golden squares of fading sunlight cast upon his well-trodden carpet by windows that had been in need of a good washing for at least a month. He took a turn through his kitchen and peered into the fridge for the sixth time in the last three hours, and then sighed: his hope of spontaneous manifestation of something delicious—and preferably Mexican in origin—had yet to come true.

Stepping out of his kitchen, he crossed the two steps to his computer desk and tapped a few keys. The recording he’d tagged “Leilani, Rio Verde, NM, 1991” closed out and was replaced by “Rinku, Milton, SD, 1991.”

“The other kids, my fucking friends, beat the living shit out of me down at the lake, threw me in, and told me some shit about ‘sometimes it’s better to owe than to pay.’ Then they just walked off and that was that. I could barely see straight while I was walking home, and then that ice cream man, that, that Stan motherfucker. He tried to give me a crunchy cone, just like the one I’d paid for, telling me that everything had just been a misunderstanding. Misunderstanding? What kind of asshole has the kid who actually paid beat up? I spit blood at him and told him to fuck off.”

Hugo did another pass through the sun as his own voice came from the computer speakers.

“But that wasn’t the end of it, was it?”

A groan and a sigh, followed by something unintelligible. “I have two sets of memories of that summer. In one, I got into a bad accident on my bike down by the lake, while a couple dozen people died from accidents and natural causes or moved away, and a bunch of other people got hurt in all kinds of ways. Everybody chalked it up to a bad-luck summer, and it became a thing when shit would go wrong, somebody would inevitably say, ‘let’s hope this doesn’t go summer of ‘91, huh?’ But in those other memories, the ice cream man came around again and again, kids were turning on each other, and people’s eyes were turning yellow and they were running around killing other people.”

“Red Summer. El Verano Rojo, as someone else called it. Do you think the ice cream man—do you think Stan had something to do with it?”

“Stan had everything to do with it.”

“How?”

Something else unintelligible. “I…I don’t…I don’t fucking know. I don’t know what he did. But it was him.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t care. I know what I know.”

“Would you believe that I’ve talked to a woman who lived in a small town in New Mexico during the summer of 1991 who also experienced events very similar to the ones you did? During the same time-frame, even?”

Muttered profanity. “I’ve seen a few posts about there being others. Other Stans. But nobody ever wants to talk further. I mean, I don’t blame them. I don’t like talking about this, but…it’s also kind of a relief to talk to somebody about it.”

“In the last two years, I’ve talked to 17 other people like yourself, who’ve got a story to tell about Stan, the ice cream man. Sometimes Stan-Stan, the ripoff man. I’ve even heard a few Stan the cocaine man, and one of those even had a song attached to it. You’re not alone in what you experienced, and I’ve talked to people who encountered Stan as far back as 1937 and as recently as 2012.”

“No shit. That many.”

The conversation paused as a garbage truck rumbled by in the background, a consequence of holding the interview with Rinku in downtown Sioux Falls. Almost everybody who remembered their experiences with Stan the ice cream man had moved to the city, some of them still in the city their parents had fled to during a Red Summer.

“An ice cream truck comes to town, children are given free ice cream by the owner of the truck, and then all hell breaks loose, like what happened to you. But nobody remembers it, not even for decades. But sometimes they’d cross paths with Stan again, and would remember…until it was over, and they’d forget all over again. This had been going on since the Great Depression, but it seemed to stop after 2012. Or at least, that’s the latest Stan encounter I’ve heard, and it leads me to believe that Stan might be out of business.”

Another conversational pause, and he stopped by the window to look out onto the square, wondering what he should do for dinner. While living in this little berg was cheap, it also didn’t give him a whole lot of food choices. It was likely either gonna be one of the three “family restaurants” in town, or McDonald’s. “FML,” he muttered.

“What do you mean, ‘out of—‘ Wait, wait…is that…is that why I’ve been remembering?”

“I think so. Nobody even knew about Stan at all until four years ago, when a handful of posts popped up on Reddit. Over the course of a month, there were seven posts from people who’d experienced vivid nightmares about an ice cream man and summers of horror. But those nightmares—“

“—were memories. That’s how I…that’s what happened to me. It’s like discovering you’d lived through a horror movie, and…it makes real life feel really fucked sometimes. And you told me there was 17 more like me, right? Stan survivors?”

“Yeah. You’re the last one I’ve been able to find who wanted to talk. Hell, you’re the last one I can find anything on, period.”

“I knew there were a few others…or maybe there were a few others. I’d read their posts, and while what they wrote jibed with what I remembered, they never responded back, either. I tried to strike up a few conversations, but none of them wanted to talk further.”

“Did you? I found your post like I did everybody else’s, and I noticed you never responded to the few comments that were left.”

“I…well, I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

“It took me six weeks of emails before you finally answered back.”

A sigh and then a long pause. “Talking about it makes it real. It feels good, because it means I’m not crazy and obsessing over nightmares, but…if I’m not crazy, then all of…that…happened. The more I think about it, the more I don’t like it.”

“This…disquiet…happens to everybody. Did you feel like this after you made your post?”

“…yeah. But not…I’m kinda starting to freak out a little. Like, this isn’t a post. I’m sitting here talking to another person about Stan the ice cream man, and he’s telling me that he’s talked to 17 others like me, and…oh shit.”

“I know, I’m sorry this happened to you, and—“

“I lived through a fucking horror movie, man. You’ve just confirmed it for me.”

“I know, I’m sorry, but…”

“You knew this was gonna fuck with me.”

“I was pretty sure, but there’s been degrees of—“

“I really am not…motherfucker, Stan is real.”

“Was real, Rinku. Was real. I think that’s why everybody’s remembering now, because he’s well and truly gone, and whatever hold he had is slipping away forever.”

Unintelligible muttering and several barks of profanity. The waiter at the sidewalk cafe coming over to ask Rinku to settle down. Rinku telling him to fuck off. Then Rinku turning back to him.

“If Stan’s out there, what the fuck else is out there?”

He clicked off the recording and contemplated the interview folder on his computer, reading through the bland file names that hid stories of terror, pain, suffering, death, forgetfulness, fear, and ultimately, anger. This had been his outside-of-work life for the last two years, the thing that had given him a reason to get out of bed every day.

Not that his life was horrible, but there was only so much you could do with yourself when you were a speech teacher at a high school in a small town in Missouri. So when he’d fallen down a late-night internet rabbit-hole about an ice cream man who’d terrorized small towns and rural communities throughout the US and parts of Canada and Mexico for approximately eighty years, he’d been hooked. Even more so because while he found the sparse details fascinating, nobody else really cared.

He was the only one chasing down the story of Stan the ice cream man, and he’d unfortunately alienated every single one of his sources by letting them know they weren’t alone. But he hadn’t been able to stop, and he’d kept interviewing them until they’d all more or less done what Rinku had done.

Hugo didn’t even know if he was doing this because he wanted to turn this into a book or documentary or something else. He knew for sure that he wanted to know. Maybe he wanted to know because nobody else did, not even the ones who’d lived through it.

But he only knew about Stan secondhand, and from the sounds of it, he probably wouldn’t experience him firsthand. This could all be a hoax or a mass delusion, but he just couldn’t figure it out.

Hugo rattled his fingers on his desktop, and then went to check the fridge again, before heading over to his pantry closet. No better fare in there.

Back to his desk. He reopened “Leilani, Rio Verde, NM, 1991.”

“When I saw him again, I was out for a walk and I heard that music.”

“The siren song of ice cream.”

“What?”

“That’s what some of the other survivors called it.”

“The other…it’s ‘The Sting.’ But I heard that, and I tripped and fell and scraped the shit out of my knee, but I remembered it all. I remembered what actually happened to Jimena, I remembered what I’d done, and I remembered Stan. I ran for blocks until I found him on a corner, chatting up a few kids and doing his shit, and I pulled out my pepper spray and screamed for the kids to get the fuck outta there. I went all crazy-lady on them, and they took off running, and I hit that son of a bitch with my spray. It didn’t do anything, but I’d kept the kids away from him, at least. I told him I knew him and knew what he did and I pulled out my little Nokia and told him that I was gonna call 911 on him before he could make me forget.”

“Oh…damn. That’s like…nobody ever goes on the offensive like that.”

On the recording, Leilani’s voice shook but refused to break. “Jimena died because she was trying to protect me, and I forgot her for 21 years. Because of him. Because of Stan. That old wound was brand-new that day, and all I wanted to do was kill that motherfucker.”

“What happened?”

“He just looked at me, and he didn’t look any different than he had the last time. I could see him better because of the daylight. Same messy hair, same messy mustache, same super-neat uniform with his name in red-white-and-blue on it. Skin like an old leather couch. Same sunglasses. I’d gotten him square in those with the spray, but it’s like it…evaporated or something.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Yeah. He called me by name, said it was good to see me, and said it’d been a while.”

“That’s like a stock thing he does.”

“He said that to Jimena.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. But he also wanted to know if I still didn’t like ice cream. I told him I hated it. He asked me if I knew anybody who liked ice cream. I almost laughed. Like, seriously? He said that he hadn’t sold a lot of ice cream that summer and business was very bad.”

“He said that to somebody else in Florida, too, the year before you ran into him again.”

“For real? You’ve talked to…a lot of people about this. How many have—”

“Stan had said the ice cream business was bad?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah. I told him I hoped he went out of business. He said that he might. Then he started to ask me if I’d like to try something, and I cut him off and told him to get the fuck outta town before I called the cops on him. He stared at me for so long I thought things were gonna get bad, but…the doors on the side of the van closed up while he was standing there, and then the truck started up and headed down the road like two seconds later. He was playing his little tune, and I jogged after him the whole way outta town. Last I saw him, he was rolling down Highway 61, and then I turned around and felt very satisfied because I’d jogged all the way to the edge of town, like I’d been planning to that morning.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. I forgot all about him until a decade later when I woke up screaming from a nightmare of Jimena being murdered. Then the next night I woke up screaming from a nightmare of murdering some yellow-eyed bastards who were trying to murder me. So on and so forth. Rough fucking few weeks.”

Hugo clicked Leilani’s interview off. She hadn’t cursed him out like Rinku had, but at the end of it, she’d asked for him, and anybody else who knew about Stan, to never contact her.

He scrolled to the bottom for the folder. He hovered over “Podcast 1 With Daichi.”

Back to the fridge for another look. His interest in Stan had been a solitary one, and he’d been unable to get any of his friends involved, even when he’d gone cross-country on his summer vacation. He hit the sites of as many Red Summers as he could, while also cruising through small and rural towns asking if anybody had seen an ice cream man who matched Stan’s MO. It had been an entirely fruitless pursuit, but the trip had been fun and had given him something to do for the summer.

Last month he’d invited the school’s chemistry teacher, Kimura Daichi, over to hang out for the evening. He and Daichi were the school’s resident pot smokers, so they’d been friendly from the instant they met, and Hugo had thought maybe if they got high and he told Daichi about Stan, he might have somebody else to talk to about him.

Daichi had been fascinated with the Stan story, and had readily consented to recording an impromptu podcast on the subject. It had turned into a three-hour rambling mess, at times brilliant and other times incoherent, and they’d had a great time. But Daichi, as enthused as he’d been, had lost interest in the story when Hugo told him he’d hit a dead-end three months ago and couldn’t find any new information or contacts on it. It hadn’t surprised him: getting anybody interested in Stan was a doomed enterprise.

But, he reflected as he scrubbed through the podcast and found his favorite part, it was a fun little hobby.

“Okay, okay, that’s great,” said Daichi from the speakers, “But do you even know what Stan is?”

“What do you mean, what Stan is?”

“What is he, Hugo? He can’t be human.”

“How can he not be human? He’s most likely a bunch of humans. What else could he be?”

“Stan was in the game of murder and mayhem for fun and profit for 80 years. Everybody gave the same description of him. You’ve got three instances of him being in different towns during the same time-frame. Everywhere he goes, kids beat the shit out of each other and you’ve got yellow-eyed adults killing with abandon. Seriously, Hugo—what the hell is Stan, Stan the ice cream man?”

A pause followed by giggles from the both of them.

“Almost everybody said he looked like a cokehead. Maybe the coke’s kept him going and gave him the energy to be everywhere.”

Daichi snickered. “Wait wait wait, what was the rhyme that one guy told you? About Stan the cocaine man?”

“Oh, oh yeah. That was, ‘I’m Stan the cocaine man, I live in a cocaine van, I sniff all day and barf all night, I’m Stan the cocaine maaaaaan!’”

Hysterical laughter for five minutes. He skipped ahead to where they’d gotten themselves together again.

“—what I’m saying, Hugo. You’ve been operating on this assumption that somehow this is one guy or maybe a group of guys or even some weird secret society, right?”

“I…guess?”

“You figured it was something fucked-up, but in the end, there was some sort of human-adjutant, uh…human-ad-adjacent explanation, right?”

“Well, yeah. In the end, it’s always some guy in a mask or a theatre troupe on acid or a…a…I dunno…some weirdo or something.”

“Right, yes. But what if it isn’t? What if Stan isn’t human ad…connected, after all?”

“What would he be then? A bear with mange?”

“What are you…that’s not…what…”

A click got him past the worst of the laughter, another got him where he wanted to be.

“—another order of life. We know something like one percent of all the species that have ever existed. We only know what managed to get turned into fossils, and fossilization happens a hell of a lot less than you’d think, so there are vast swaths of…of knowledge and biological history lost forever because it didn’t get fossilized. There are entire orders of life we’ll never know about. So who knows what’s really out there? Who really knows what’s been? What life is out there and thriving, but we don’t know it exists because we don’t know how to look for it, because it’s been evolving alongside of us for millions of years and has perfected the art of camouflage to the point it can drive among us and make us forget all about it until we encounter it again?”

“So Stan might not be human at all, but some…other…creature?”

“Something that learned how to mimic things we enjoyed and draw us to it, unsuspected. Maybe Stan was an ice cream man last century, and maybe he was a patent-medicine dealer in the 19th. Or maybe each new form is a new generation. A version of Stan thrives until the camouflage goes out of style, and then it goes somewhere to die, but leaves an…egg or a seedling behind, which will grow into the next generation, better suited for the times. Maybe each generation’s members all look the same, so there were three, four, five, six, more Stans, all exactly the same, out running around over the years. Or maybe they’re all a big hive mind, and each Stan is an extension of one organism, which is how Stan can know everybody.”

“You’re getting deep here.”

“Because this shit is fascinating, Hugo. Look at the octopus. Those guys are incredible. They’re like an actual alien species, but they’ve evolved on the same planet as us. They just split from us on the family tree so long ago that they’ve become something else entirely. What if Stan represents something like that? Not human, not supernatural, but…different. Way different.”

“And predatory. If this is what you say, then Stan feeds on suffering and death. This isn’t sadism, this is…sustenance...Stan gorged himself during his Red Summers…”

“…because he hibernated during the winter. You’ve got that one interview from that lady who said that Stan had told her it was getting too cold for ice cream and it was nearly time to sleep. Maybe Stan wasn’t really a murderer. Maybe Stan’s not even sapient. Maybe Stan’s just like a big bug, or collective of big bugs, who are just doing what they do, infecting other creatures to do their work for them, and feasting on all that sweet suffering before taking a long winter’s nap.”

“My fuck, Daichi, that’s—“

He clicked the podcast off. There was nothing but rambling after that.

Daichi’s theory had blown his mind, and it still did, but…how plausible was it, really, that an Earth life form could do what Stan did? It was much more likely that “Stan” was some weird cult or group of serial killers or…something human-adjacent. But what, he didn’t know. He found he both liked not knowing and that it drove him crazy.

What the hell had happened over the course of so many summers? Why was he the only one who cared? Or, if he wanted to borrow from Daichi, maybe that was part of Stan’s camouflage—people not directly involved with Stan’s activities weren’t even interested in them. If Stan could make everybody forget about him, even the ones he traumatized, couldn’t he also make everybody else not even pay attention to him?

“And maybe while he was at it, he could fly, too,” he said, rolling his eyes. That was the problem with Daichi’s theory—it didn’t take it long to become ridiculous. Besides, if Stan really could deflect peoples’ attention, then why was he, Hugo, so interested in Stan?

See? Ridiculous.

He looked in the fridge again and then slammed the door shut. Where the hell was a good Mexican restaurant when you needed one? Not in this one-horse town.

Hugo flopped into his easy chair and started scrolling through the local restaurants' rudimentary online menus to see who had what, even though he already knew it all too well. But sooner or later he’d settle for something and—

What was that smell? It smelled delicious, whatever it was. And did he hear Mexican music? It had been quiet a minute ago.

But when he looked out the windows, it was dark. He’d been so hungry he’d fallen asleep. Or something. What was more important was outside his apartment.

A trip to the window showed him a dream come true: a taco truck had pulled into one of the spaces on the square, and there was already a crowd of people. Hugo bolted, leaping the last three steps to the sidewalk before he galloped across the street in the warm summer evening.

“Please tell me you’ve got something left,” Hugo said as he finally hit the end of the line and reached the counter. He was the only one left: with his luck, everything was gonna be gone by this point.

“Hugo. Thanks for coming out, man. What can I get you?”

“I hope you’ve got a—wait a second. You know my name?”

The wiry cook with the slicked-back hair and neat mustache grinned at him from behind a pair of shades and pointed at him with a spatula. “You’re the third one I’ve got tonight,” he said. “You throw out enough guesses, you get some of 'em. Three out of a hundred, that’s not bad, right?”

Hugo paused and then laughed as relief flooded through him. “Oh, yeah, right!”

The cook indicated the menus mounted over the counter. “What can I get you, Hugo?”

The menus read Paco’s Tacos & More: The Mobile Mexican Experience, and after a brief perusal, Hugo looked hopefully at who he presumed to be Paco.

“Are you just passing through tonight, or will you be back? There’s so many things on here I want to try.”

Paco grinned. “I think I’ll be around for a little while, man.”

Hugo placed his order for an al pastor burrito, and when he went to use his phone to pay, the charge was declined. “What the hell? This stupid hillbilly bank, it’s always something.” He looked at Paco, his heart sinking. “Can I run back to my apartment and see if I’ve got any cash, I can—“

Paco held up his spatula and shook his head. “I can see the look in your eye—you’re gonna come back. You can just owe me.”

“Yeah, yeah—I’m totally good for it.”

“People in towns like this always are, man,” said Paco. “Sometimes it’s better to owe than to pay, anyway.”

The back of Hugo’s brain sat bolt upright and began whispering many things, very fast, and Hugo felt himself turning pale. “I…I don’t like to owe. I can go get…”

“No, it’s cool,” Paco said, casually lifting up his sunglasses and giving Hugo a wink.

Hugo felt the six pupils fix on him and he felt the world going dark around him until the glowing yellow irises were the only thing he could see.

“When the time comes, you’ll figure out what you owe.”

[vulcanjackass]

Red Summer comes again, this time to a little town in New Mexico, but what happens when somebody doesn’t like ice cream?

Part 5: Summer Runs Red

Leilani stood motionless in the scrubby dirt of her backyard, staring at nothing. Her eyes were fixed on the top of the Rangoors’ desert willow slowly swaying in the languid breeze, but she wasn’t seeing it in any meaningful way. Fifty three minutes and twelve seconds before, she’d stepped out into her backyard because she thought she’d heard the ice cream truck, but after thinking I really ought to go check it out sometime just for kitsch, even if I don’t even like— her thought processes had come to a complete halt.

She breathed, her blood pumped, sweat ran and dripped in the dry furnace heat, but there was no awareness. Leilani took up space, nothing more. For all practical purposes, Leilani didn’t exist.

Somewhere, in one of the streets beyond hers, “The Sting” filled the scorched early-evening air with its calliope song, beckoning with a heady cocktail of nostalgia and concentrated sugar, slowly moving as the ice cream man cruised the neighborhoods. The evening was silent beneath the jaunty tune, save for the insistent buzzing of the cicadas. The streets and sidewalks were empty. No sounds of laughter or music came from the neighborhoods.

Nothing to indicate it was a Friday night in mid-summer.

But in between the houses, beneath the scattered trees, and out of the corner of the eye, there was furtive movement in the fading, golden light. Shapes darted underneath the seared, blackening azure vault overhead, the darkness swiftly congealing as the sun moved behind the mountains.

In the deepening shadows, sickly yellow eyes gleamed.

Footsteps crunched down the alley beyond the picket privacy fence at the back of Leilani’s yard and her eyes caught the movement of the dark head of hair along the top of the fence, but the information remained unprocessed when given to her brain. The footsteps stopped and there was a shuffling sound, the hair visible over the top of the fence slowly rotating like a spiky satellite dish. Shoes lightly scritched in the grit of the alley.

Leilani noticed none of it, not even when a pair of glowing yellow eyes peeked over the top of the fence for a few seconds and then disappeared, followed by rapid, uneven footsteps moving down the alley.

As soon as the footsteps had receded, shoes scuffed across the brick of Leilani’s back porch, and a gnarled hand clamped onto her shoulder, digging its nails in as it gave her a shake.

“Vamanos, chica.”

Another hand grabbed her wrist and squeezed with enough strength to make her nervous system stir, and Leilani’s brain vaguely registered the change of scenery as she was slowly but urgently walked across the yard and out the side-gate. She moved easily through three more backyards and across the street, her brain murky but suggestible.

When her consciousness finally broke surface, Leilani found herself sitting in an old chrome and vinyl chair at Jimena Perez’s kitchen table. The kitchen was dark, the blinds pulled on the windows and a drape pulled across the sliding glass back door. The old woman sitting across from her was a dim shadow with face riven by a roadmap of deeper shadows hard-earned from life itself.

“W-wh—“

Jimena put a finger to her lips with the slightest “shh” and Leilani, her brain still highly pliable, instantly shut her mouth.

Now the old woman’s finger moved from her lips to point up at the ceiling and beyond, and Leilani understood: she could still hear the ice cream truck. She frowned and held up a hand in question. What about the ice cream truck?

Jimena leaned forward, her brown eyes gleaming in the warm dimness of the kitchen. Leilani followed suit, until their heads were almost together.

“Look at your watch.”

When Leilani did, she silently cursed, and then looked at the blinds, where the dying of the day’s light was barely noticeable. She’d lost almost an hour. But what did that have to—

“I was a little girl when the Depression started,” murmured Jimena. “We lived in a little town in California, down south. It wasn’t bad. We didn’t have much. But we weren’t unhappy. Until el verano rojo.”

“The red summer?” Leilani whispered, frowning.

Jimena nodded. “Stan, el gringo del helado, as mi abuelito called him.” The old woman shook her head once, sharply. “No, not him. Not really. There’s nothing born of woman in there.”

“Jimena,” Leilani softly snapped. “You gotta work with me here. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Because you’ve never gone to see Stan…Stan the ice cream man,” said the old woman. “Not everybody answers his siren song of ice cream. I was like you, even as a little girl. I didn’t like cold and sweet, you know? I like smoky, savory. It’s always been my favorite. Sweet, meh.”

In all the time Leilani had known her, Jimena had never shown a liking for sweets of any sort. The old woman also made the best salsa she’d ever had, and it defined both “smoky” and “savory.”

“But I still went with the others when that jangling truck came up the hill and parked under the old tree. It was so hot that day, just like today…not a cloud in the sky, a perfect day for ice cream. If you had money. None of us did, but we went to look anyway. We watched the few kids from the other side of town buy their ice cream and go, and then we started to leave, and Stan called to us,” Jimena said, slowly dragging a thick fingernail across the scarred formica tabletop. “He said…if we didn’t have any money for ice cream, he’d be happy to spot us. Everybody got ice cream except for three of us. I didn’t want any, and Lorenzo and Sofia’s parents would’ve beaten them if they’d taken anything for free.”

Jimena’s eyes tracked upward, looking at the clock hanging over the back door. “He tried. He knew all our names, and told us it would be okay, and we could simply owe him like the other kids. He said he knew we were good for it, and that…sometimes it was better to owe than to pay.”

Outside, the cicadas warred for dominance over the “The Sting,” but no matter how heavy their chorus, the siren song of ice cream wouldn’t be denied. Leilani shivered, even in the kitchen where it was so warm the table itself was room-temperature.

“The other kids knocked out two teeth and broke my leg three days later, then beat Sofia so badly she was unconscious for days, and Lorenzo…he lived, but…he wasn’t Lorenzo anymore,” Jimena said, a single tear slowly tracing the years etched into her flesh. “Everybody thought there’d been a horrible accident where we’d all gotten hurt, even the kids who hurt us thought that was so. Even Sofia thought it was so. But it wasn’t. I don’t know why I remembered.” She slowly shook her head.

“The years passed, and we forgot el gringo del helado, even me, finally, and the year I turned twenty, Stan came back. He didn’t look any different—skin like leather, hair a mess, but he always had a nice clean uniform, and always wore sunglasses. I saw why, when he showed little Benito Gutierrez and he didn’t know I saw. In each eye, he has two of these,” Jimena said, pointing to her pupil, “and all around them, yellow. Glowing yellow. Like the eyes of his…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what they are.”

Leilani took the old woman’s wrinkled, arthritic-knuckled hand in her own and said, “Jimena. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jimena yanked her hand back and rose to her feet, quietly pacing across the worn linoleum, moving with a slight limp. She pointed to the outside. “Stan. This is the fourth time I’ve seen him. Twice in my hometown, then again in Arizona in the 60’s, and now here, in New Mexico. He’s the same man, Leilani. He hasn’t aged in sixty years. The second time he came, the children hurt the ones who paid for their ice cream or didn’t want any, but also, those who’d gotten ice cream from him in the years before, they became…his. They stalked the night, their eyes glowing yellow, killing for him or for themselves, I don’t know. Both.”

Leilani stared at the old woman, fear gently gnawing at the back of her brain. “I lost an hour. I heard the ice cream truck and went outside and then I was here. What happened to me, Jimena?”

Jimena stopped pacing and faced Leilani, folding her thin arms to her body. “El verano rojo. The red summer. The children who owe Stan punish those who paid. The adults who owe Stan…they fade away from us and their eyes turn yellow with Stan’s light, and they kill for him. It happens night after night, for weeks sometimes, and we all sleep, unless the Yellow-Eyed come to us, and then we awaken to suffer and die at their hands. Then when Stan’s had his fill, he moves on, and we forget. The deaths are accidents, natural causes, there was no red summer where you beat one of your friends nearly to death or saw your aunt murder your uncle and…tu primo. But when Stan comes back, you remember. Some of us don’t sleep, like you were. Some people run away. Some people escape with their kids and never come back. I ran away when the Yellow-Eyed came to my town the summer that Stan came back. I didn’t remember until he came to Arizona, and I hid in my cellar. I don’t want to run or hide anymore.”

Leilani picked at the hem of her shorts with her long nails, trying to parse what Jimena was saying. She’d lost an hour, so she knew something was out of the ordinary, and Jimena had never been one to bullshit in the decade that Leilani had lived in the neighborhood. Outside, the ice cream truck’s song drew closer as Stan crisscrossed the streets.

“So you’re saying an ageless ice cream man drives around to different towns, turns people against each other, having a reign of terror every summer?” Leilani asked, and Jimena scowled as her eyes angrily sparked.

“You say it like that, you reduce it. You make the truth behind the words seem small. Would you say a failed painter gave a few wild speeches and then made life difficult for Jewish people?” Jimena snapped.

Leilani held up her hands. “No, I’m not trying to…to minimize this, I’m just—“

A hand smacked against the glass of the sliding door so hard both women could hear it crack. Another smack, another crack.

“Los ojos de amarillos,” Jimena hissed, grabbing at Leilani’s wrist and trying to pull her out of the chair. “¡Vamanos, chica!”

Leilani’s heart thundered as she let herself be pulled to her feet, and Jimena was leading her across her living room as the sliding door shattered and crashed to the linoleum behind them. Jimena threw open her front door, leading them into the night of insectile buzzing and ice cream song, and they’d barely made it down the old woman’s steps when the ice cream truck pulled up to the curb.

Stan's Ice Cream & Frozen Treats was emblazoned on the side of the truck in lettering made to look like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. The double-doors on the side of the truck opened up to the ice cream counter where Stan himself sat, flanked by colorful menus mounted on the inside of the double-doors.

The women froze in place halfway down Jimena’s front walk.

“Jimena. Good to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

The interior of the ice cream truck was unlit, but in the fading daylight and ascendant streetlights, reflected off jet-black sunglasses, Leilani could see a bright white uniform, a bushy mustache, and an unkempt head of hair. She looked back at the house and gasped.

In Jimena’s front doorway stood a shadow holding a large kitchen knife, its features indistinct save for a pair of eyes glowing with a sickly yellow light. But the shadow merely stood in the doorway, unmoving, the knife held slack at its side. Jimena squeezed her wrist so tightly she could almost feel her bones grinding together.

Jimena glared at Stan, her features set in a defiant scowl. “I don’t like ice cream, gringo. I told you that sixty years ago and I’m telling you right now.”

The ice cream man silently considered the old woman. “You’re missing out, Jimena. A lot of people like ice cream.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Leilani saw another yellow-eyed shadow creeping around the corner of the Bellamys’ little stucco house, a claw hammer in hand. Another one was moving between two of the houses across the street.

Leilani could feel her skin crawl as Stan turned to her. “Leilani. We haven’t met. Do you have money for ice cream?”

Her mouth was bone-dry, even as she broke out in a cold sweat. Stan’s voice was reasonable enough, even friendly, but there was something under it that was like a legion of insect legs on her bare flesh.

“I…I don’t like ice cream,” she said, and Jimena gave her wrist a supportive squeeze.

“Are you sure?” asked Stan. “Anything you want to try, you can have on the house. I think you’ll be surprised.”

Leilani slowly shook her head. “No thank you.”

Then she was at the ice cream counter, looking up at Stan’s leathery face. He peered down at her, a crooked smile creasing his flesh, and she felt the concrete beneath her feet softening, turning to melting ice cream.

Behind her, she heard Jimena being murdered. The old woman refused to make a sound, but the claw hammer and kitchen knife made plenty of their own as they took her apart. Leilani wanted to scream, but only faintly. She wanted to run, but only a little.

The street was empty save for them. Normally there would’ve been people out despite the heat, and everybody would’ve witnessed the block’s best salsa maker and adopted abuelita being dismembered on her front walk. But nothing, nobody.

Leilani’s hand clenched, her nails digging in her flesh as she struggled to remember what Jimena had told her. She didn’t want to forget. She didn’t want to die.

“Show me…show me your eyes,” she murmured, each word an effort, but growing easier with each one.

The ice cream man’s head tilted as he considered her. On the breast of his uniform, she could make out the name “Stan” written in Bomb-Pop-colored script.

“Show me your eyes,” Leilani said, her voice stronger.

“Wouldn’t you rather have some ice cream, Leilani?”

“Show. Me. Your. Eyes.”

Stan’s crooked smile grew unnaturally wide, and he flipped up his sunglasses, focusing the four pupils upon her, their blackness made all the deeper by the writhing fields of glowing yellow around them. “Would you like a Dreamsicle, Leilani? Even people who don’t like ice cream like Dreamsicles.”

Leilani turned and ran down the sidewalk, back in the direction of her house. The Yellow-Eyed ran after her. When they caught up to her, Leilani produced the steak-hammer Jimena had shoved into her hand while dragging her out of the house, and she fought like a cornered wildcat, shredding flesh and splintering bone. She got free and ran down empty streets and across silent yards, the siren song of ice cream following along in the distance.

When the Yellow-Eyed caught her again, she fought even harder, screaming bloody murder, her rage-and-fear-fueled violence the equal of her attackers’.

Leilani woke up the next morning, sitting on a bench at Townsend Park, five blocks over from her home, and everything hurt. She leaned forward, groaning at muscles grown stiff in the post-dawn chill, and she felt a stab of sorrow in her heart. That was right…Jimena was dead.

The old woman had died of a heart attack the day before, and when she’d gotten the phone call from Jen about it, she’d gone out for a walk. She’d heard the ice cream truck and had followed it. She frowned as she flexed her aching shoulders. Why’d she follow the ice cream truck?

Her mind cast about for an answer, and then it seized on one: of course. She’d been drinking, hadn’t she? Just a few glasses of wine. That’s what had happened, after she’d gotten the call about Jimena…a few glasses of wine, a walk, and then she’d followed an ice cream truck.

She painfully got to her feet, her eyes blind to the bloodstains on her hands and arms. Later, she’d absently toss her scarlet-spattered clothes into the trash and forget they ever existed.

Leilani walked past the swing set, too preoccupied to notice the bloody, hair-encrusted steak-hammer half-buried in the sand.

[vulcanjackass]

Scenes from a long walk on a hot July afternoon.

[vulcanjackass]

What’s an ice cream man to do when the Red Summer’s over and October’s chill fills the air? There’s not a whole lot to do when it’s too cold for ice cream, but somehow, Stan gets by.

Part 4: Too Cold For Ice Cream

“Look, I don’t care how much money it made—the designs are fugly, dude.”

“Get with the program, old man,” Aldo said after a final slug of his beer. “Bay’s designs are the future. That’s just what Transformers are gonna look like now.”

“I don’t fucking care. Fugly is fugly. I also don’t understand why Frank Welker couldn’t have voiced Megatron,” grumped Manu, taking a deep swallow of his own beer as he leaned back in the camp chair.

“Star power, that’s why,” Aldo informed him, pulling a beer from the cooler and passing one over to Jay, who was feeding a fresh log into the fire pit. “Nobody knows who Frank Welker is—“

“Excuse me?”

“—except for people like us. But Hugo Weaving, people know that guy.”

“It’s bullshit is what it is.”

Jay sighed as he cracked his beer and took a swallow. These two idiots. The more they drank, the more they argued. They should’ve been happy their favorite franchise even got a new movie at all, much less a successful one. He was a diehard He-Man guy, and that was a doomed existence compared to what Transformers fans got.

Bitchy Transformers fans, at that.

“Starscream looks like a walking Dorito! You call that an improvement over his original design, or anything from the Unicron Trilogy?”

“They’re alien robots! These weird designs make them look like actual aliens!”

Jay fingered the joint in the baggie in his jacket pocket, then drained his beer in one long pull, tossing the empty into the fire pit.

He stood up, wavered for just a moment, and said, “I’m gonna take a walk around the block. I’ll be back.”

Aldo and Manu were so busy arguing over whether or not Starscream actually did look like a Dorito that they didn’t even notice.

Five minutes later, Jay was headed for the ball diamond at the end of the street, his jacket wrapped tightly around him, warding off the mid-October chill. The clouds hung low tonight, faintly under-lit by the lights of town, and the shadows were deep as he stepped off the sidewalk into the grass, heading for the three rows of weathered wooden bleachers that stood behind the backstop.

It was a decent walk across the damp grass of the field and his shoes were wet, but it was worth it to get away into this island of darkness amidst the rest of the neighborhood. He lit up as he walked, taking a series of short, rapid puffs, loading himself up, and the world began to pleasantly sway around him.

“Yeeeaaah.”

The beer and weed harmonized in his system, pushing away his irritation at his friends and leaving him a mellow half-step behind himself as he shambled across the outfield, veering toward the bleachers. Several more puffs and he was floating across the infield and drifting around the backstop with the lazy grace of a ghost.

He comfortably melted onto the third row, puffing away his thought processes, and for a time, Jay simply existed. The rough, deeply-textured seat in front of him was fascinating, and he traced every intricate line of the heavily-weathered wood with his eyes. It was easily the most fun he’d had all night.

He really did like sitting out in Aldo’s backyard around the fire pit, but he’d only moved here to the boonies from Chicago a couple of years ago—he didn’t have nearly the history Aldo and Manu had, having grown up in this little town together. Which meant that they could get going on anything for hours, drawing on their shared history and interests, and that sometimes left him out in the cold.

When he finally looked up from the most interesting seat he’d ever seen, he squinted in the direction of the parking lot, off to his left. Nearly lost in the shadows of the trees in the corner of the lot sat an ice cream truck.

Jay slid his way down the bleachers and walked to the edge of the parking lot, looking at the ice cream truck as he swayed on the curb. Had that been there when he’d gotten here? His recollection of the walk to the bleachers was hazy and half-gone as it was, so he genuinely wasn’t sure.

He walked along the parking lot curb, trying to get a better look at the truck. It sat dark and silent, its boxy shape instantly familiar, even if he’d never seen one in person. He’d seen enough in TV shows, movies, and comics and everything else that he knew an ice cream truck when he saw one.

Stan's Ice Cream & Frozen Treats was emblazoned on the side of the truck in lettering made to look like vanilla and chocolate ice cream.

“Wild,” he mumbled, chuckling and shaking my head. “Too bad it’s too cold.”

“It is too cold for ice cream, Jay,” said the man behind the counter of the ice cream truck. He blinked. Double-doors on the side of the truck were open, menus displayed on the inside of the doors. When had they opened?

“How do you know my name?” Jay asked, trying to get a better look inside the dark interior of the ice cream truck. He could make out the shape of a man with unkempt hair, a bushy mustache, and sunglasses of all things, but everything else was hazy, lost in the shadows. To Jay’s cannabis-bleared eyes, the ice cream man looked…unfinished.

“It’s easier to sell ice cream when you know names,” he said, his voice soft.

“Are you Stan?”

“Yes. I’m Stan.”

“So this is your truck?”

“Yes. This is my truck.”

“Like, you’re actually Stan and you’re not just some guy selling a brand-name?”

“My ice cream is all from me.”

“No shit.”

“Do you have money for ice cream, Jay?”

“I don’t. Would you believe I spent it all on beer for me and my dumb little friends?”

“That’s okay, I can spot you. You like ice cream sandwiches, don’t you, Jay?”

Jay’s stomach gurgled.

“Oh yeah, I do,” he said, “I love ‘em. But the last time I was drunk and high and had ice cream, I puked so much. Dairy and alcohol don’t mix. So thank you, but no thank you, man.”

Stan was silent.

Jay squinted into the truck, taking a couple of steps closer, but not getting any more detail. It was like there was no more detail to be had. Or were the shadows just that deep? It was dark under the trees in the corner, but the streetlights beyond the lot lit it up some.

He took another step closer. “You still there?”

Stan seemed to fade into the shadows for a few moments. “It’s too cold for ice cream, Jay. It’s almost time to sleep.”

Jay looked at his watch. Then looked at it again. Then looked at it one more time before he remembered what it said. “Well, yeah…it is almost eleven, I guess.”

Stan was silent again.

Jay wished he had one of those new cell phones that had a camera in them so he could take a picture, just to show the guys he’d seen an actual ice cream truck. A weird shiver passed through him as he thought of Manu and Aldo, and inside the ice cream truck, Stan stirred, just a little.

After another half-minute of silence, Jay nodded. “All right. I’m gonna let you get to sleep, and I’m gonna get back to the guys. I think I’ve been gone an hour. I don’t really know. Good talk.”

Jay turned and started to head back.

“Jay. Are you friends with Aldo?”

He stopped and slowly turned toward Stan. Had he told Stan Aldo’s name?

“Uh…yeah?”

“Aldo likes chipwiches. Once, after some other kids beat him up, I gave him one to make him feel better,” Stan murmured.

“Oh, okay,” Jay said, pointing at Stan and grinning in relief. “I get it. You knew I was friends with Aldo because you know him because you’re from here.”

Stan was silent almost long enough that it was awkward, but then said, “No, I am not from here. Yes. I know Aldo from his hometown. When Aldo was younger. I remember him being beaten.”

“Makes sense,” said Jay, his eyes growing unfocused as he relaxed, slightly swaying on his feet. He thought about asking Stan how he knew Aldo had moved here from somewhere else when he was a kid, when Stan himself wasn’t even from here, but the thought couldn’t sustain itself in his THC-addled consciousness, and disintegrated back to ether. “You…staying here, or just passing through?”

“I was only passing through on the way to sleep. I didn’t sell much ice cream this summer and I got tired on the way, so I stopped here. I may have to sleep here, even if it’s not…ideal,” said Stan, “But I remember Aldo. Will you do me a favor, Jay?”

“Sure, man. I’m not sucking your dick or anything.”

A frigid, wax-paper-wrapped circle was pressed into Jay’s hands, and he almost dropped it in surprise. He caught movement from the corners of his eyes, up on the ice cream counter, but it was gone by the time he focused. Had Stan given this to him? Stan hadn’t moved.

Had he moved?

“Jay, give this chipwich to Aldo. Tell him it’s from Stan.”

“All right. That’s cool.”

“Are you sure you don’t want any ice cream, Jay?”

“Thanks, man, but you wouldn’t believe how much I puked the last time I had ice cream when I was done up good like this. Ruined my whole buzz,” said Jay, passing the chipwich back and forth between his already-cold hands. “I gotta pass. Besides, I’d feel like I owed you.”

“Sometimes it’s better to owe than to pay,” Stan said, and fell silent again.

“Uh…sure? Maybe?” Jay waited a few beats, then gave an awkward wave and loped off across the ball diamond, heading back toward Aldo’s.

When he came around the corner of Aldo’s garage, he found the two sitting around the blazing fire pit, now arguing about Star Wars.

“I can’t even make it through Attack Of The Clones because of how stiff the dialogue is,” Manu grumbled from his lawn chair, knocking back yet another beer.

“Lucas wrote the dialogue like that because they’re from another galaxy and people talk differently there. It’s to remind you that—“

“They’re aliens, yeah, yeah, yeah. About time you got back, Jay.”

“We thought you got so high you got lost,” Aldo said, automatically handing Jay a beer. He looked down at the chipwich in surprise when Jay handed it to him. “The hell’s this?”

“It’s from Stan,” said Jay.

Aldo grew very still as he looked down at the thick circle wrapped in plain white wax paper.

“I ran into him and his ice cream truck in the ball diamond’s parking lot. It was so weird, man.”

“An ice cream truck?” Manu asked. “Why didn’t you bring back anything else?”

Aldo unwrapped the chipwich, gazed at it for a several seconds, and then took a bite.

“I spent all my cash on beer. The beer you’re drinking,” said Jay, opening his own beer. “And the beer I’m drinking.”

“He gave Aldo something, but not us? Why did he give Aldo something?”

Aldo took another bite, closing his eyes and chewing with gusto. It was clearly delicious.

“He said he knew Aldo from his hometown, from before he moved here,” said Jay, settling into his chair and taking a swig of beer. “He was passing through town on the way to…sleep is what he said. I dunno.”

“But he knew you were Aldo’s friend? Aldo moved here when he was nine, dude. How would this…this Stan guy know where Aldo lives now?” Once Manu got set on a line of questioning, he was relentless, no matter how much he’d been drinking. “Over twenty years later, I’ll add.”

Aldo popped the last bite of chipwich into his mouth and chewed slowly and languidly, his eyes still closed.

Jay shrugged. “He said he gave Aldo a chipwich after some kids beat him up. Something like that leaves an impression, I guess.”

“You’re useless when you’re high, dude.”

“What do you want from me? I’m not on the clock.”

Aldo rose from his seat and headed over to the woodpile.

“Even if he remembered the kid who got beat up, what did he do? Give Aldo a chipwich and then write down his address, and then keep track of him for twenty-plus years? At the very least, you gotta admit that’s weird.”

“People are weird. You’re weird. Aldo’s weird. Stan’s weird. He’s probably got some weird brain for keeping track of shit like that. Goes with the business,” Jay said, chugging his beer. His buzz was wearing off, and he was going to have shore it up if he was going to deal with these idiots again.

“Like, this isn’t just weird, it’s kind creepy. Hey, Aldo? Do you remem—“

The axe cleaved through Manu’s head, swung with such force that it nearly sliced the other man’s head in two.

Jay gawped as Aldo yanked the axe out of Manu’s head, the big man tipping forward in his chair, tumbling into the fire pit like a broken doll. Aldo fixed his gaze upon Jay, his eyes glowing a sickly yellow.

Flailing, Jay flipped backwards in his chair, and as he rolled over and tried to get back to his feet, the axe blade powered through his ribs and literally rent his heart asunder as it drove him to the ground. Jay thrashed once, twice, and before he could even understand what had just happened, the axe came down upon his forehead and didn’t stop until it was four inches deep into the cold soil.

The ice cream truck pulled up in front of Aldo’s house a few minutes later. Aldo was standing in the front yard, a burly shadow hefting an axe.

“Aldo. Good to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

The shadow’s eyes gleamed softly in the darkness.

“I hadn’t expected to stop here. This is a nice surprise. Remember when I gave you that chipwich after those kids beat you up? Would you do me a favor in return, Aldo?”

The shadow looked back at the house.

“That would be enough to get me to where I sleep. Remember what you owe, Aldo.”

Aldo hefted the axe and strode toward the house, where his wife and children slept.

Five minutes later, the house was silent again.

“The Sting” played by a calliope quietly rode on the chill air as the ice cream truck left the town, traveling down the county highway into the black country beneath the dead October sky.

[vulcanjackass]

So we’ve met Stan and seen some of the aftermath of his visits, but haven’t seen what it’s really like when Stan’s in town. Today, Katie finds out what happens when summer turns red and the Yellow-Eyed roam the streets…

(Constructed from bits and pieces of summer evenings growing up, this was one of my favorite pieces to write.)

Part 3: Red Summer

The relentless susurrus of cicadas mingled with the digital space battle of Cosmic Avenger, wrapping Katie in the bathwater-warm cocoon of an early mid-summer evening. She had the house to herself for a little while: Mom had ran out after she’d heard the ice cream truck a few streets over. Soon Katie was going to have ice cream, and Mom was letting her stay up late to watch the old Mummy on TBS. It didn’t get much better when you were ten.

On the massive console TV’s screen, her little ship dodged rockets and enemy fighters, her total attention locked on the action, the sturdy ColecoVision controller madly clacking away in her white-knuckled grip. Each time her little ship was destroyed, she gave it another go, determined to get past the crystal caverns and wreck as many enemy bases as possible. The sands of time rushed steadily and silently, eroding one minute after another, unseen behind the ever-shifting dance of pixels upon the aged cathode ray tube.

The sun descended as Katie laid waste to her adversaries, disappearing behind the trees in the Patels’ backyard, the shadows deepening and thickening until they began to run together in the dwindling daylight.

After the game’s assault had finally outpaced her rapid-fire reflexes and she’d racked up the highest score of her life, Katie realized that the living room was way darker than she’d realized: the TV was the only light, casting the rest of the room in flickering shadow. She left the game on the title screen and rose from where she’d sat cross-legged for at least a couple of hours. A couple of hours?

“Mom?”

The sun had only begun to set when Mom had left. Katie didn’t hear the ice cream truck’s jaunty little tune anymore, and if Mom had been home, she would’ve had all the lights on by now. There was only a band of pink along the treetops, the first stars glittering in the stellar vastness above. “Mom?”

Katie wandered across the living room, slipped on her sneakers and stepped out onto the concrete front walk, instantly breaking into a sweat. She scanned up and down the street and saw nothing. Maybe Mom had stopped to talk to somebody—that was the kind of thing she did a lot. But it was thick and hot out, and if Mom had ice cream, she would’ve had to hurry back.

“Mom!” she called up one side of the street and down the other, but nothing. Other than the cicadas, it was silent. Usually there were kids out playing and people talking on their porches, no matter how hot it got, but it was a ghost town.

Katie bit her lip, a tickle of fear crawling through her stomach. She turned on her heel and went back inside to call her aunt Lola.

She strode through the TV-lit living room, headed for the kitchen, and she looked out the big window into the darkness of the backyard. Katie’s breath hitched and she froze in place.

Two eyes, glowing a sickly yellow, stared at her from the window.

“Mom!” she cried out.

The eyes disappeared.

Katie bolted for the shadow-wreathed kitchen, sneakers pounding from carpet to linoleum as she launched herself at the yellow phone on the wall next to the fridge. The back door on the other side of the kitchen exploded inward, its splintered glass flying in all directions as it slammed into the wall. With a low growl, Mom charged into the kitchen, her eyes glowing with just enough light to outline her features in the darkness.

“Mom?” Katie whimpered, the phone receiver in her hand forgotten, its droning buzz mixed with that of the cicadas.

Mom lunged for her, slicing the air with a big kitchen knife, its gleaming blade already marred with shiny dark stains. The reflexes and hand-eye coordination Katie had honed through two years of steady ColecoVision domination served her well as she instinctively blocked the blade with the phone receiver. But the inhuman strength behind the swing still slammed Katie into the wood paneling, which was pierced by the stained knife a half-second after she fell to the floor.

She scurried past her mom on all fours, gaining precious seconds as the yellow-eyed woman wrestled the blade from the paneling, and ran out the back door, screaming for help. Just the way the woman currently trying to kill her had taught her to do, in case this kind of situation ever came up.

Katie kicked the back gate open and galloped out on to the sidewalk, running across the street to the Rodriguez house. She pounded on their front door, screaming at the top of her lungs, desperately hoping for the door to open and Mr. Rodriguez to poke his broad, cheerful face out. Nothing. Katie yanked on the screen door, but it was locked. She pounded on the glass some more and pleaded for somebody, anybody to come out and help her.

Then Katie saw the reflection in the glass…

…which shattered a second later as Mom crashed into the door, furiously panting and wildly slashing the air with the knife, her eyes glowing even brighter than before. Katie leaped off the porch and sprinted across the grass, picking up speed on the sidewalk. She glanced back and saw Mom chasing after her, her stride low and uneven but her longer legs making up the difference as she started closing the gap between herself and her daughter.

“Mom! Stop! Please!” cried Katie, tears streaming down her cheeks as she ran even harder. But deep down, on an ancient, instinctive level, she knew something was deeply, fundamentally wrong with her mother. There was no reasoning here, only running, that same as her ancestors had.

The girl cut across the Adebayos’ front yard and between their house and the Nimoys’. The lights were on, but nobody came to the windows when she screamed for help, and she ran through the Nimoys’ empty backyard, going through their back gate and across the alley into the Melokuhles’ backyard.

When she emerged onto Oak Street, she saw her mother’s glowing eyes come around the back corner of the Melokuhles’ two-story clapboard house. Katie turned and fled across the street into Arbor Park, pelting down the sidewalk toward the expansive playground. There were so many twists, turns, tunnels, and chambers in the vast playhouse alone that maybe she could hide from Mom until people came back outside again.

Where was everybody?

Katie had transitioned from concrete to grass to pea gravel by the time Mom scuttled up the sidewalk, and the girl disappeared beneath a low arch under the brightly-painted wood playhouse, her progress through the gravel silent thanks to a lifetime of playing hide and seek here.

Two arches and a ladder later, Katie was up in one of the playhouse’s rooms, peering between the thick wall beams, trying to spot her mother. She heard Mom before she saw her, the woman’s slow, deliberate footsteps softly shifting the gravel. Katie slid through a tunnel into another room and between the beams, she saw her mother hunting for her, crouched low as she moved, her knife glittering with reflected streetlights.

The playground itself was blessedly dark: the teenagers always smashed out the lights so they could come up here and smoke and make out at night, and the park had mostly given up on replacing them. Katie was hoping some teenagers would be up here, at least, but the park was as empty as everywhere else. Except for Mom.

“Kay…tee?”

Mom’s voice was rough, stripped of its usual warmth, sounding more like a recording than an actual person. Katie’s blood ran thick and icy.

“Kay…tee?”

Katie crouched in the far corner of the playhouse room, her sweat running cold as her mother slowly stalked the playground, the approach and recession of her footsteps threatening to shred the girl’s already-ragged nerves. Katie wished she had her baseball bat. If it had been in its usual place by the back door, she could’ve grabbed it on the way, or maybe even knocked Mom out in the kitchen, tied her up and gotten help. But she hadn’t seen it in almost a week.

“Kay…tee?”

Somewhere in the distance, Katie heard the familiar jingle of Stan's Ice Cream & Frozen Treats. The same siren song of ice cream that had called her mother away hours before. What had happened in that time? What had happened to Mom?

Katie clenched her fists, shivering, trying not to cry out as Mom slowly cruised the gravel directly beneath her. In the gaps beneath the floor beams, she could see Mom, those glowing eyes scant inches beneath her sneakers. If Mom looked up…

“Kay…tee?”

The sickening perversion of her mother’s voice, rising in a question at the end, made her want to scream. It made her need to scream. Katie squeezed her eyes shut, pleading for the ice cream truck to come closer. Stan was weird, but he’d given her a free drumstick when she’d forgotten her money, and if he got close enough, she could run to him for help.

Mom hissed somewhere beneath and ahead of Katie. Then it felt like her heart had fallen off a building as she heard the scrape of Mom’s shoe on wood, followed by footsteps as she climbed the stairs. It was a fairly tight fit, but the playhouse was made so adults could come inside, in case anybody needed help.

She had to move.

Katie took a ladder up into one of the towers and climbed down the other side, ran across the room, and came to a halt. The bridge out of this room was made of wooden slats on a chain frame, making for a low-hanging bridge that rattled and squeaked when you ran or even walked across it. She’d loved this bridge as a little kid because of how much noise it made. Now she hated it for that.

“Kay…tee?”

The girl gasped: the voice had come from above and behind her. Mom was already in the tower. She clapped her hands over her mouth: how loud had she been?

“Kay…tee.”

Rapid footsteps, each one closer than the last.

Katie rattled across the bridge, which hung in the open air, and then across another playhouse room, grabbing the overhead bar and swinging herself down the twisting tornado slide. She nimbly landed in the gravel as Mom made a terrible racket crossing the bridge.

“Kay…tee.”

She turned, and in the shadows of the playhouse, her mother’s yellow gaze tracked her. Then the glowing eyes sprang into the air and came down to ground level as Mom leaped from the bridge.

Mom was less than twenty feet from her.

Katie’s muscles were painfully tense, ready to run, and she wondered how far she’d get before Mom caught her. Her mother was low to the ground, brandishing the knife and watching Katie with a predator’s focus. For a moment, all was silent save for the cicadas…and Stan’s ice cream truck, so close now that Katie was sure he had to be just on the other side of the park. But that was past her mother.

She tried to maintain eye-contact with Mom, but even a few seconds made her feel like she was falling, her stomach twisting. Her mother shifted, moving a few feet closer.

“Mom?”

“Kay…tee?”

“Mom, remember when you played Cosmic Avenger with me earlier? I totally smashed your high score, and I made my best high score ever.”

“Kay…tee.”

“Yes, it’s me, Katie. Mom? Are you in there? Please be in there.”

Mom shifted closer. In the dimness of the distant streetlights, the stains on the knife were black.

Behind Mom, the music shifted. Stan was rounding the corner of the park.

Katie took a step back. Then two. Mom scuttled, closing the gap. Stan got closer.

The girl took a deep breath, waiting for Stan to get parallel with her. If she could run that direction, Mom would have to run around or jump the end of the tornado slide, which might give Katie a few seconds’ lead on her.

As the music drew closer, Mom straightened up, cocking her head, turning toward the siren song of ice cream, her glowing gaze falling away from her daughter. Just like she did during gravel fights with her friends, Katie dropped, grabbed two handfuls of gravel, and flung them at Mom’s face as hard as she could.

Katie ran before the gravel even hit Mom, but when she heard the furious hiss, she figured she got her. Arms and legs pumping, the girl fled the playground, scrambled around a bench, and charged across a vast expanse of green grass, toward Maple Street where Stan’s ice cream truck rolled, playing its tune to an empty world.

“Stan!” Katie screamed. “Stan!”

The truck’s brake-lights lit up and Katie’s heart leaped as it came to a stop. “Stan! Help!”

She spared a glance back. Mom was almost on her.

Making an incoherent sound of desperation, Katie poured on the speed. The double-doors in the truck’s side opened, revealing Stan’s ice cream counter, the menu on the insides of the double-doors, and the man himself behind the counter. The interior of the truck was dark, but the streetlights cast enough illumination that Katie could see Stan’s crooked smile and bird’s nest hair, his starched white uniform so pressed and clean that it almost glowed in the dim light.

Even in the dark, he still wore his sunglasses.

“Katie. Good to see you. Got any money for ice cream?” Stan asked, the way he’d done every single time she’d seen him this summer.

“Help! Katie cried as she leaped the curb. “Mom’s trying to kill me!”

She slammed into the side of the ice cream truck and spun around, her back against the warm metal as she faced her mother. But Mom wasn’t chasing her anymore. She was standing a few feet away, knife at her side, and she was looking over the ice cream menu, her yellow gaze moving from one item to the next.

“W-what…Mom?”

“It’s just been a misunderstanding, Katie. Your mom here forgot to get ice cream for you. She’s getting it now.”

Katie stared at her mother, speaking in random syllables as her brain grappled with the sudden situational shift. What was Stan saying? Could he be…right?

But…

Her mother’s eyes were still glowing a sickly yellow. She was still holding a stained knife. They were still on the other side of Arbor Park because Mom had chased her across it while trying to kill her.

“M-mom?”

If Mom heard her, she gave no indication.

“What can I get you, Jojo?”

Katie frowned in spite of herself: Mom was very particular about her name. “My mom’s name is Joanne, not Joan, not Joanie, not Jojo.”

“Your mom and I go way back, Katie. When I first met her, she was about your age, and everybody called her Jojo. She didn’t have any money for ice cream one time, so I spotted her an eskimo pie,” Stan said, his leathery skin creasing in a thousand places as he gave her a grin full of teeth as stained as Mom’s knife.

Katie’s frown deepened, her staggering mind grasping onto a smaller detail like a lifeline. “But you’re not any older than Mom.”

“I’m older than I look, Katie.”

Stan looked to her mother, leaning forward as he always did when listening.

“What’s that, Jojo? Oh, sure.”

Katie turned to Mom, and slammed back against the side of Stan’s truck. Mom was looking directly at her, that sickly yellow stare making her stomach boil. In Mom’s hand was a conical package wrapped in plain white wax paper. She held it out to Katie, her eyes bright and unblinking.

“She got you your favorite, Katie. A drumstick.”

The girl couldn’t move. All she could do was breathe as her mother held out the ice cream to her.

“Kay…tee?”

Katie broke down in tears, and she sobbed against the side of Stan’s truck for several minutes, wishing she could go to Mom for comfort, but too terrified to get near her. Stan didn’t say a word, and Mom never moved a muscle.

She finally forced herself to stop crying, and straightened up and turned back to Mom. The woman’s hand was empty and at her side again, but her yellow gaze was still focused upon her daughter, making the girl’s guts squirm.

“Mom?”

“Here you go, Katie. I know you don’t have money for ice cream, but this one’s from your mom here.” The wax paper-wrapped drumstick was pressed into Katie’s hands.

She jolted, almost dropping the frozen package, then whipped around just in time to see Stan’s serpentine arms slithering back behind the counter.

The world staggered, and then everything was distant, muffled, and she barely noticed, barely cared.

“Go on home now, Katie,” said Stan, grinning beneath his bushy mustache. “Your mom and I need to catch up for a while. She’s still on my tab for that eskimo pie, but that’s okay. We’ll figure out what she owes.”

Mom continued to stare at Katie, her eyes and face expressionless, her body language silent, and even the knife was slack. Her yellow gaze no longer made Katie nauseous. She didn’t feel anything.

“Will…she be…coming home?”

“You’re forgetting, Katie,” said Stan. “This was the summer your mom went out for ice cream and never came back.”

Katie nodded. That was right. She’d forgotten. She turned and walked away from her mother and Stan. She’d never see the former again, but would see the latter one last time, on a night similar to this one.

Katie silently walked down the sidewalk as the neighborhood collectively enjoyed the warm night. Kids played in many of the yards lining the street, some racing up and and down sidewalks while their mothers yelled at them from the porches where they sat chatting with their neighbors.

The drumstick was delicious. The peanuts were crunchy and the fudge was perfect. It was easily the best one Katie had ever had, even better than the one Stan had first given her. She distantly wished this wasn’t the summer where her mom had gone out for ice cream and never come back, but that was something for tomorrow.

She nibbled on the drumstick, and for just a moment, she remembered where her baseball bat was. She’d left it out in the woods behind Grover’s Groceries, where she and a few of the other kids who’d gotten free ice cream from Stan had beaten the shit out of Shen WIlliams, who’d paid for his ice cream. Shen hadn’t known that sometimes it was better to owe than to pay, and they’d taught him a lesson. She hadn’t known why Shen needed to be taught that lesson, but she’d broken his arm with a swing of her bat nonetheless.

As she forgot about her baseball bat for the second and final time, she supposed she was going to live with Aunt Lola now. Aunt Lola would know for sure. She’d care about that tomorrow.

What a strange summer it had been. But the ice cream was good and the Mummy was on tonight.

[vulcanjackass]

Part 2 of the Ice Cream Man Chronicles! After finishing the initial short story (chapter 1), I was so enamored of the concept and idea that I HAD to keep going. So I wrote another Stan story, this time drawing upon memories of college for a backdrop.

In today’s chapter, a former customer of Stan’s finds the debts of summers past slithering into a spring evening many years later. Jacob’s moved on with his life, but he’s still got a debt to pay…but that’s okay with Stan, because sometimes it’s better to owe than to pay.

Part 2: A Debt Paid

I was sitting next to the open window, idly smoking and watching my roommate play Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast when I heard the faint calliope notes of "The Sting" drifting in on the damp late-March air. A flood of memories inundated my brain as my hand moved of its own accord to trace the faded memory of scars across my forehead and left cheek. They weren't visible any longer, but they were still there.

My roommate barked at me to get my cigarette back out the hole we'd torn in the screen: if the RA caught us, we were hosed.

"Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"The music. It sounds like an old ice cream truck."

He paused the game. "Yeah, actually. Damn, I haven't heard that in years. Stan, Stan, the Ripoff Man."

My nine-year-old face was being scraped across the chain-link of the baseball backstop behind my elementary school. The other kids were silent as they went to work on me, not making a sound, not even when I started screaming. Not even when I started bleeding. Sutter was the only one who'd said anything, blankly staring down at me as I lay gasping and sobbing in the grass.

"Sometimes it's better to owe than to pay," he'd said.

I hesitated as a chill that had nothing to do with the night air shivered through my skeleton. "Your ice cream man was Stan, too?"

"Yeah. Probably a company thing. Had to be, with those prices."

"You never bought from him?"

"Nope. He only came around a few times and didn't sell shit. We had ice cream at home and my parents always said those trucks were a ripoff, anyway. Plus, my mom thought he looked like a coke addict and didn't want us near him."

I took a slow drag, and then blew it out the screen. "A coke addict?" I asked, trying to sound casual. "What did he look like?"

He shrugged. "Skinny. Raggedy. Hair like a bird's nest. Always wore sunglasses. My mom said that was the giveaway, 'cuz coke blows your pupils way out."

I remembered his pupils, but pushed that away, instead remembering the skinny, raggedy man with the bird's nest hair grinning at me with his stained and crooked teeth, asking if I had money for ice cream. The other kids hadn't, and Stan had given them some for free. But I gave him a buck ten for my chocolate eclair. That was the first time I saw him.

I flicked ash out the window. "His…teeth. They were...fucked up, weren't they?"

He cursed at the game and I thought he hadn't heard me. But he finally said, "I dunno. Maybe? I only saw him the one time. Who cares, anyway?"

Another drag. I could smell exhaust and chocolate on the thick air as the music faintly continued in the distance.

"It's just funny you said he looked like a coke addict. My...friend's dad had said the same thing about our Stan, and...well, from the sounds of it, our Stan was the same as yours."

"It was the 80's, Jacob. There were tons of raggedy-ass cokeheads wandering around, and I bet 'ice cream truck driver' was an easy gig for them. Sling ice cream, do a line or two, and then head to the next block."

"But I ran into Stan in Illinois. You're from here, from Oregon, and what was this, '85, '86?"

"'85, I guess. Something like that. I was nine," he replied, his words coming slowly as he chased after the high score I'd set a half-hour before.

I took a final drag and flicked the cigarette out the hole. "I saw him when I was nine, in '85. Same as you. You don't think it's the same Stan, do you?"

My roommate snorted. "Beats me. Maybe he fucked up in Illinois and ended up in Oregon."

"In the same summer? You said it was '85."

"I dunno, man," he replied after a long hesitation, his attention fully on the game. "Who cares? Stan was just the company name. Probably lots of cokeheads happy to be a Stan for an easy paycheck."

I started to say something about how I saw Stan again the next summer, when I was ten and Mom and I were living in a little town in Nebraska, after we'd moved away from Illinois the previous summer. But the sentence died aborning on my tongue. Just another cokehead happy to be a Stan for an easy paycheck, right?

Except on that day in Nebraska, when I'd reluctantly followed the siren song of ice cream with my new friends, Stan had known me.

"Jacob," he'd said with his crooked smile after he'd noticed me hanging back. "Good to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it?"
 I hadn't replied. I'd wanted to run. I should've run. But I hadn't.

"You got any money for ice cream, Jacob?" Stan had softly asked.

I had five dollars in birthday money in the plastic Batman wallet tucked in my back pocket. But I'd shaken my head.

The ice cream man's crooked smile cranked up a notch. "I can spot you. You like chocolate eclairs, right?"

I'd nodded, looking at the other kids chowing down on their ice cream. The kids in my neighborhood didn't have much money, so Stan had hooked everybody up, except for Aldo and Hermes, who'd managed to produce a few handfuls of lint-encrusted change.

A chocolate eclair wrapped in frigid, plain white wax paper had been shoved into my hands, Stan never leaving his spot from behind the truck's counter, but somehow reaching me down on the street. "Here you go, Jacob."

I'd squeaked that I didn't have any money and had tried to give it back, but Stan's hand had already slithered back up behind the counter.

"That's okay," Stan had said soothingly, his leathery face creased in a thousand places from that crooked smile. He'd flipped up his sunglasses, showing me his eyes for the first and only time, and given me a wink. "You'll figure out what you owe when the time comes."

I'd nodded. I could still taste that eclair. It had been the best I'd ever eaten.

A few days later we beat the shit out of Aldo so badly we left him unconscious inside the tire-house at the schoolyard playground. I had no idea why. We’d just…done it. That was the last I ever saw of Aldo. Hermes' little sister stabbed him 17 times with a pair of scissors while he was sleeping before their mom had stopped her. Hermes didn't die, but I never saw him again, either.

Less than a week later, Mom had woken me up in the middle of the night and dragged me out to the car, telling me we were moving again. We'd ended up in an apartment in downtown Portland, and I'd never seen or heard an ice cream truck again. I’d forgotten all about that summer.

Until tonight.

“Do you remember anything…I dunno, weird about the summer you saw Stan?”

He gave me a sideways glance. “Weird? What do you mean ‘weird?’”

I almost said something about the other kids beating the shit out of me, or even Aldo or Hermes, but I ultimately shrugged. “Anything out of the ordinary. It…rained…a shit-ton the summer Stan came to my town, and…like a lot of people moved away, too. Just out of the blue.”

“A lot of people moved…” He hesitated for a half-second, then leaned toward the TV, intent on the game. “No. Nothing like that.”

I watched him play for a while longer, mildly taunting him when he fell short of my score and had to start over amidst a slew of muttered profanity. Then I hopped off the desk we used as a window seat and shrugged into my jacket. "I'll be back."

My roommate grunted, so angrily focused I doubt he noticed me leave.

The campus was silent, the damp sidewalks empty. The air was heavy from last week's rains, the lights from the parking lots offering faint little islands of illumination amidst an ocean of mist. I glanced at my watch: just past 1am.

The siren song of ice cream cheerfully played on, muffled by fog and distance. I followed it.

I ended up in a little field just off-campus, where the lights were distant and an enormous old tree loomed in the fog. There was an ice cream truck parked near the tree, just visible in the low ambient light. "The Sting" continued to play.

"Jacob. Good to see you. It's been a while, hasn't it?"

My feet moved of their own accord through the shaggy, wet grass, and then I was standing at the counter of Stan's Ice Cream & Frozen Treats like no time had passed. I was far taller than I'd been back then, but somehow I was still looking way up at the ice cream man, whose face creased in a thousand places as he graced me with his crooked smile. His starched white uniform was pressed and clean, with "Stan" embroidered on the breast in Bomb-Pop-colored script.

"Remember that time I spotted you for an eclair, Jacob? I'm afraid I'm gonna need to collect on that."

I heard shuffling in the grass behind me. When I looked back, five sets of eyes, glowing a sickly yellow, gazed back at me through the rolling mist.

I sighed softly. "Can...can I have another?"

"Got any money for ice cream, Jacob?"
 I had fifty-three dollars in the leather wallet tucked into my back pocket. I shook my head.

"That's okay. Sometimes it's better to owe than to pay."

The freezing-cold wax paper package was pressed into my hands a moment later.

"Enjoy, Jacob, but...you probably better eat it quick."

I felt the five shadows forming a semi-circle behind me. I unwrapped the eclair and bit into it, and for just a moment, I was ten years old again, it was summer, and life was simple. It was the best eclair I'd ever had, even better than the first one Stan had given me.

Stan took off his sunglasses and set them on the counter, watching me through the sickly yellow irises of his double-pupilled eyes as the shadows descended upon me. Dropping the rest of the eclair and not being able to finish it hurt more than their nails ripping ragged furrows deep into my flesh. My mouth tasted of chocolate and iron.

[vulcanjackass]

I take a lot of pictures, too. This is my daughter, Sasha Two, sitting sentinel in our yard, just waiting for something to yell at.

[vulcanjackass]

It all came from a prompt I saw on Reddit: things that are fine during the day, but are creepy AF at 3am. Someone said “ice cream truck,” and I was off and running, thinking of the ice cream trucks that used to roll through my neighborhood during the 80’s.

This first part is the initial story I wrote immediately after reading the prompt. It grew from there, as subsequent chapters will show, but this is ground zero.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to Stan.

Part 1: Stan The Ice Cream Man

I rolled over and blearily woke up to the sound of the "The Sting" cheerfully playing on a calliope, and I grinned at the old siren song of ice cream. Pulling my covers more tightly around myself, I mentally drifted, trying to remember the last time I'd heard that jaunty little tune.

So many summers ago.

Half-asleep, I floated within my memories, wading backwards through time's river, seeking the memory of that particular tune played that particular way. The itchy, twitchy mental gymnastics your brain goes through when it's searching for a memory that it knows is there, but can't find, are maddening.

I shifted around as the calliope drew closer, barely paying attention to it now as I sought out the one in my memories. When? When?

Summer's heat beating down on me, playing in the yard. The smell of sweat and dirt, the thump of my beat-up soccer ball. When? That ball was long gone, and I wasn't even sure what happened to it, but it was a constant feature in my oldest memories. I never once played a game of soccer with it, but my friends and I sure kicked the hell out of it just for the hell of it.

The ball forgotten, left on the front lawn as we ran down the street toward the siren song of ice cream, our sneakers pounding the asphalt softened by summer's relentless glare. We were so excited--we'd seen ice cream trucks on TV and in the movies, but never in real life.

Stan's Ice Cream & Frozen Treats was emblazoned on the side of the truck in lettering made to look like vanilla and chocolate ice cream. Stan himself was a lean, ragged-looking guy with unkempt hair and mustache, skin so leathery it was probably waterproof, and he always wore sunglasses. My father thought he looked like a coke addict. But his starch-white uniform was always pressed and clean, with "Stan" embroidered on the breast in script with colors echoing a Bomb Pop's.

Wait...my father?

Stan was patient: he couldn't just give us the ice cream. That wasn't how it worked, he said. He needed some money first, and we could go ask our parents for that. What nine-year-old carried money around? Jingly pockets were for adults.

But we were so excited, we didn't want to run back home. Most of our parents were at work--it was the 80's, after all. The rest of us were afraid we'd take too long, and what if Stan got impatient and left?

We begged, we pleaded, we cajoled, and Stan finally relented, grinning and raising his sunglasses for the first and only time. The memory here was hazy, but I remembered how, with a gleam in his eyes, Stan said that he could front us for the ice cream, but it would cost us. When we asked him what the cost was, Stan only smiled and said we'd figure what we owed when the time came.

Stan came around a lot that summer.

I didn't have to search for the memories anymore--they flooded back into my brain like I'd mainlined them.

Stan handing us our frozen treats again and again, somehow reaching us from back within his truck without ever leaning over.

The time when Damon and Aaron had just gotten their ice cream and their mom beat the shit out of them right in the street, Aaron's fudgy bar reduced to a sugar slick on the blazing asphalt as Aaron himself was rushed to the hospital.

The ripped-meat sound of Jacob Potts' face as we ground it on the chain-link baseball backstop at the schoolyard, our hands sticky with ice cream, and then sticky with blood.

My father's eyes glowing a diseased yellow as he stalked me through that same schoolyard, holding my breath as I hid in the groundskeeper's shed, desperately trying to stay quiet. Hearing “The Sting” in the distance, approaching.

My father...

My father went out for cigarettes mid-summer and never came back.

No, no. He never left us. He...

In the now, "The Sting" cheerily piped out, closer. My street.

My mother throwing a bloody hatchet onto the kitchen table and sobbing so violently I couldn't even comfort her. I ran away, almost dropping my swirl cone in the backyard as I jumped over the corpse of the man Mom had left behind.

(Dad?)

The summer I turned nine had been uneventful, except for my father leaving, and my mom was never the same. But…

That same summer, Damon and Aaron's mom killed herself after her sons’ accident had left Aaron brain-damaged and Damon blind. I don't know what happened to Jacob Potts...he was one of several kids that abruptly moved away that summer, and we never gave him much thought afterwards. My mother, she took a hatchet, and…

Hell, I hadn't thought of that summer in almost forty years.

But which summer?

The quiet summer where Dad went out for cigarettes, or the red summer where Stan gave us free ice cream for the first and only time?

Outside, "The Sting" was so close. I bet Stan was waiting for me at the curb.

But Stan was dead, wasn't he? All of our parents were going to...

They didn't, did they?

I looked at my bedside clock. It was 3am.

The grass was wet with dew as I drifted through the cooling summer night toward the curb, my stomach growling. I wondered if Stan still had those Dreamsicle push-pops.

"I do," Stan said, and a Dreamsicle pop was pushed into my hands, though Stan never left his spot behind the ice cream truck's counter. As he withdrew his impossibly long arms, which he'd always kept hidden when there'd been adults around, he lifted his sunglasses and grinned at me.

Four diseased yellow pupils, two in each eye, focused on mine and I felt the world slipping away beneath me.

"Remember that time I spotted you a cone, Sutter? I'm afraid I'm gonna need to collect on that."

My mouth tasted of iron and orange Dreamsicle.

All writing and images by me, a regular human. No AI was used for anything here, because AI can suck it.

[vulcanjackass]

I honestly don’t really know what I’m gonna do with this thing.

Over the past half-year I’ve moved back towards writing after largely stepping away for the better part of a decade, and I’ve been doing it to focus myself, cope with the nonstop idiocy of today’s world, and basically give my brain laps to run. I’ve recently figured out that I’m AuADHD (self-diagnosed, because who’s got the time and money to get formally diagnosed in this day and age?), and have been in the process of determining what that means for…well, everything.

Writing is something that I’ve always loved and have always had a knack for. Or at least, I’m not terrible at it. After trying (and ultimately failing) to make a career or even part-time job of it, I walked away for a while, though I never totally stopped.

But over Christmas break last year, I wrote my first new story in a couple of years and had such a good time, I’ve written a bunch more since then, and it’s the happiest I’ve been with my writing in a long time. I feel as though I’ve gotten back to what I loved about writing in the first place…getting lost in your worlds, watching your tales unfold, and simply enjoying the process without any expectations or end-point in mind.

But I’m also very happy with my current writing and thought I’d share. The readers were easily the best part of my first go-round, and if I can entertain a few folks with some stories, I’m down.

I write mostly horror and sci-fi, often with a humorous bent, and I tend to build stories from bits and pieces of a mid-western small-town GenX childhood, steeped in everything from cosmic horror to anthropology to Kevin Smith…my interests are all over the place, man.

If you like what I do, I welcome thoughtful, constructive feedback—I like to know what I’m doing well and what can be improved. I have a perpetual student mindset about my writing and am always happy to up my game. If you’re a troll, don’t even bother. I worked retail for over a decade and front-desk during COVID—my soul is functionally dead at this point.

Well, let’s post some shit and see where this goes. 🤘

DISCLAIMER: I’m aggressively left-leaning, am a LGBTQIA+ safe space, and I despise bigots. I’m an aging white guy, but I’m not one of THOSE aging white guys.