Classic Slasher
by Marne Litfin
Berk explained it—no girl liked camping—and Lizzie didn’t correct him. But he wasn’t right. Take the quiet; that was nice. Berk was sleeping now, twenty feet from her and Kenzie’s tent, in the one-man mummy thing he’d shown off in the van. It had a lime-green fly, for rain and visibility, and a waterproof tarp for underneath.
I like your tarp, she’d said.
It’s actually called a footprint, Berk told her. It weighs less than two pounds. I’m thru-hiking the AT with it next year. Berk was the only senior still in Youth Ministry.
Cool, Lizzie nodded. She blinked, and silently counted the seconds. One. Two.
The AT is the Appalachian Trail, he clarified.
And the air—that was good. It cut her face and hands, but the chill smelled like Christmas and made her feel clean. She unzipped the tent and crawled into her sneakers. The dark was nice, too. There was maybe an hour before the sun came up, and the sky’s wash was pure and blank, like goth eyeliner. Moving around, she felt purposeful, like a cat. A big cat. A lynx? She jogged past Pastor Cal’s tent and grabbed the keys to Youth Ministry’s van. Definitely a lynx.
Would they interview her later? Would the adults talk it over, their swollen, uniformed bodies just out of reach, in front of her, around her, behind her, murmuring like in the movies? Would anyone ask what she thought? Or would they blame it on her parents, Pastor Cal, competition, girl-on-girl shame-culture something, hormones? On Berk? He hadn’t even done anything.
In the movies she and Kenzie binged, there were reasons, always reasons. Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Carrie: sprinting girl soaked in blood, sprinting girl soaked in blood, sprinting girl soaked in blood. Sex, virginity, psychopaths, abuse, retribution, revenge, roll credits. The plots were compelling because they were so clear. But who the heaven knew why they did anything? Couldn’t you just be bored or dumb, fontanels barely closed, an adult body held on a leash by baby brains?
You could. Nature was beautiful and violent. Pastor Cal made them keep their food in the van. He showed them how to tie bear bells to each other’s backpacks. It felt good praying with him out here, raising their hands to life. To God’s creatures: adorable, abundant, unknowable. The fat, searching squirrels, the twitching rabbits, the indifferent snakes. All God’s creatures fighting to stay alive. The crickets chirped because they were so horny, if they didn’t do it, they’d die.
In the van, Lizzie unzipped the group duffle and took out a dull knife, the peanut butter and the family-size white bread. She grabbed the bag of turkey jerky and slapped the contents together into quick sandwiches. She placed the first one at the edge of Berk’s neon tarp—whoops, the footprint—then dotted the perimeter of his tent with the others. Before putting the last sandwich down, she reached her hand into her running tights and gave her DivaCup a quarter turn, until she heard the soft pop. Then, like a reflex, she recited:
Look at the birds of the air: they do not sow or reap or gather into barns—and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
She wiped her hands on her pants. Matthew 6:26, you fucking fuck, she added, pouring the contents of her cup onto the bread. The f word felt tight and new, like a sweater that hadn’t begun to pill. She dropped the bait at the foot of Berk’s tent and sprinted back to her own, roused Kenzie, and defused the bear bells from their bags.
When they got in the van and locked the doors, Lizzie licked the last of the peanut butter off the knife and buckled in. She was giddy and nervous, like the time she and Kenzie tried snorting cans of Reddi-Wip. Laughing until they were weightless, each pretending they were higher than the other, knowing and not knowing what came next. A red sun appeared at the edge of the camp and Lizzie whispered it’s the blood moon though it was 6 AM and it made no sense. Kenzie giggled in the cold, dark quiet, and Lizzie joined in. Camping: she liked it. See? Some girls did. She exhaled and sat back in the driver’s seat, folded her DivaCup back in her pants, and pushed it inside where it opened like a flower at the base of her cervix.
Marne Litfin (they/them) is a writer, comedian, and MFA student in fiction at the University of Michigan. Their essays and short stories are published and forthcoming in Passages North, SmokeLong Quarterly, Phoebe, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Marne tweets @JetpackMarne.
