Earworm by Nicholas Kellogg

Six months, a blissful six months. 

The end of the school year, into summer break before senior year. 

Windows open, driving down the back roads of our hometown. 

Blonde. Trilogy. Ducktails, Don’t Go Killing the Vibe. The Bends. There isn’t a world I’d rather live in or a life I’d rather live. 

I love you, Gwen, I love you. 

“There’s a song I want to listen to,” she says, looking at me with the wind blowing through her hair like she’s some ebullient child. “I can’t get it out of my head, Baby.” I smile when she calls me baby … I love it when my baby calls me Baby. 

“How’s it go?” 

“I don’t know … the words, they change in my head whenever I try to remember. They are always changing.”

“Where’d you hear it, Love?” The pet names are thrown like we don’t have real ones. 

“Um,” she pauses, and I keep my eyes on the road, but something shifts in the car. The atmosphere. The aura. The ambiance. “I heard it when I got up to pee the other night.” 

“Huh?” 

“You know … I was getting up to pee, then, I noticed the window was open. And there was this song emitting.” 

“Emitting?” 

“Reverberating. It was bellowing from the forest. A little jingle.” 

“A jingle?” 

“Yes. Like Christmas. You know, when there are all those songs on radio that we listen to but don’t really like unless it’s Christmas time.”

“Sure. What was this song about?” 

“Nature.”

“Nature?”

“Yes … like how the world is beautiful. That we should be with it.”

“Be with nature?” Those variegated clouds above finally started to cry down on us. My windshield wipers need to be fixed— but who has time for that. “Like we should go on hikes this summer or something?”

  “NO. Not like that.” 

Suddenly, she starts humming. It’s nice … nothing like I’ve ever heard before. But that song … it’s preternatural. 

Bump.

Hmm.

A clicking of the throat but somehow catchy all the same. 

“Honey?” I ask, because my skin feels goose bitten, quite literally hurting my flesh and sending shivers down the bottom of my spine like ungrounded electricity. It hurts. Her humming hurts. But it’s somehow good, suffusing the wind as it whirls around my head and I find it even harder to concentrate on the road.

“That little man was out there.” She says it suddenly, those needles of chill and microscopic centipede legs continue but turn more frigid. Little bug bites slipping under the skin and injecting their poison as I hold my breath and think about a little man singing out from the woods. “He kept singing his song … he sung it, and I listened, Elijah, baby, I listened.” 

I don’t know why she didn’t say anything to me earlier. She’s been drinking and smoking a little bit more than usual, but besides that I thought everything was ok. 

“What did he do? Did he do anything else besides sing to you?” 

“No. He sang. And when he was done with his song … he left. He just left. And now, all I can do is think about his song. It’s like it won’t leave me alone. But I can’t remember the words. I can’t remember the words and I need them! I need them, Elijah! I need those words more than anything else.” Gwen begins to cry and I turn down the music. “They’re out there, I know they are.” She grabs my radio and turns it off Bluetooth and onto the FM/AM dial, looking for that song that she can’t seem to let go of. Or perhaps, a song that can’t let go of her. 

It’s old.

Most of the music is old. 

Rock that my father and mother will sometimes play while we head for our vacation spot. 

The station will stop in between, and there will be static and someone singing that can barely be heard … like their broadcast is just too far away to be heard by us. 

“Wait! There! Listen!” It’s a staticky channel, one with a manlike voice singing from the depths of the fuzz. The rain is falling harder. It’s getting slick out here on the backroads and I’ve been forced to slow my speed. The beach, which is where I was hoping this journey would end so I could get naked in the back of my car with Gwen doesn’t seem like a plausible possibility anymore. “Do you hear it?” 

There’s a faint … trickle of the voice coming through the speaker. She’s right, an old man, an ancient man, there isn’t music there is only melody. 

“This house,” there’s breaks … “Is not a home, your home is with me.” 

She’s vibing. My Gwen is crying as the words pour out of her mouth. 

“I want to go where the trees grow … where the blood flows like water in the perfect system of the—”

I turned the radio off without warning. I couldn’t take it anymore … that voice, unworldly, an acrimonious attack on its listener’s ears as though he were trying to take your heart with his maniacal song and never give it back. 

“Why!” Gwen screamed, her lips quivered, she reached for the radio once more, desperately trying to find the song on the radio once more but it was gone. She looked at me, her fists clenched. Her teeth chattering as though she’d been left out in the cold during a wickedly alabaster winter. “You fucker!” 

She turns the wheel. 

We slip off the road.

A large conifer cuts my car nearly in half. 

Glass pours through the windshield and enters my wounds. 

The momentum stops— I look at my lovely Gwen, her eyes are open, glossed, and they are looking down at the tree branch that has penetrated her heart. 

I don’t say anything at first, I simply listen— wait— I can hear that old man’s voice, but the radio is broken. 

Nicholas Kellogg weaves chilling tales from his home in Connecticut, where he lives with his partner and balances fatherhood, with two toddlers under five and a full-time job. Early morning prior to work, he creates nightmares while many are still having them. Drawing inspiration from the eerie realities of everyday life while exploring the darkness beneath the ordinary. He's also recently published several shorts with Sinister Minutes, Tales to Terrify, Close to the Bone, Piker Press, Strange Vibes Anthology Issue 1, Stygian Lepus Magazine Edition #33, Black Petals, Literally Journal, theFreak Magazine, Trembling with Fear, Exquisite Death, Ravista Vepula, Cloud, Clad, and Sunflowers, and Slash Magazine. He’s also been offered publishing contracts for his Novella’s Redman and Daisy, but aims to sell them as a 50k collection with other work. He has recently signed a traditional publishing contract for his debut novel Green, with Wicked Tales, an Imprint of DAOwen Publications. Nicholas Starr Kellogg - Author Website.