Calling out for a creative filmmaker! This Barry Yourgrau flash fiction would make an ideal story for a short horror film. I dare anybody to read this scary snapper and not have their skin crawl.
HORROR MOVIE
A man is lying in bed. A young woman comes in and begins briskly attaching him to various machines and performing various physical procedures. At first he's confused, then realizes he must be in a hospital, the girl is a nurse. But then he realizes she's not in white. She's in black: like a mortician. "My God, I've died in my sleep," he thinks. but then he decides there's been a terrible mistake, he can feel his heart hammering, he's not a corpse, he's alive. "I'm alive! he cries in an emotion-strangled voice. The girl smiles back at him from a counter piled with instruments and plastic containers. "Sure you are," she whispers. "But you won't be after I'm finished with you." The man stares at her, stupefied. The girl holds up an enormous hypodermic needle and squirts out a jet of fluid. Then in one frighteningly swift, almost ritualistic motion she whirls around and plunges the needle through the sheet into the man's leg. The spasm of pain jerks the man screaming into the sitting position. His hands flounder in the air. Then a switch goes and the machines tear him to pieces. The girl backs into a corner and sinks down, giggling and drooling.
Two more people die in this gruesome fashion. Then a kind uncle writes a letter. "My dear favorite niece," it begins. "I'm afraid I've recently become an honest-to-god invalid . . . " And the girl moves out to his isolated cottage in the country, to take care of him.
Horror Movie is among many short fiction collected in Barry's book, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane
Author Barry Yourgrau, born 1949
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