Kristen Grace
Last Girl Standing
I thought at first
my daughter liked scary movies
for the same reasons I did.
Horror films are my Cliff’s Notes
for a terrifying world.
I want to see every bad thing--
have every worst case scenario,
every nightmare, thrown at me.
I won’t flinch or look away.
I’ll not jump or cry or scream.
And I will never run into the basement.
But I was wrong.
My girl had a different motive.
She wasn’t trying to outsmart
or withstand Evil--
my girl was taking notes
on how to become Evil.
Five-years-old on Saturday mornings,
watching Goosebumps and trailers
for every horror film on YouTube,
and she would ask me:
“I know I’m too young to watch it, mom,
but tell me the whole movie!
Can you just tell me the story?”
Well, honey, The Exorcist is an allegory
about the overwhelming male leadership
of the Catholic church being terrified
by the burgeoning sexual power
of young teenage women
and doing everything possible
to extinguish it,
and in the end--
they fail.
No matter how the movie ends, sweetheart,
I want you to remember that they will fail.
She caught it. She caught it--
scary little girls always win.
Scary little ghost girls always beat out
even big ol’ powerful men.
One weekend morning, over my coffee,
I noticed the words she had graffitied
in white paint on our home’s red brick.
One, two, I’m coming for you.
Three, four, better shut the door.
Click, clack, watch your back
I was furious,
but I’ve never tried to remove it.
Sometimes I stand alone
on my porch at midnight
with all the black holes in the universe
colliding in the night sky before me.
I stand alone and face
what is nightmarish
and I think about Samara,
crawling out of the well,
crawling out of our screens.
I think about Eleven,
nose always bleeding.
I think about the twin girls
down the hallway in The Shining.
All those sisters in The Conjuring.
Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.
And I whisper, All right, all of you--
and one you haven’t even met yet.
I smile and tell the disasters
waiting for us: One, two, we’re coming for you.
I thought at first
my daughter liked scary movies
for the same reasons I did.
Horror films are my Cliff’s Notes
for a terrifying world.
I want to see every bad thing--
have every worst case scenario,
every nightmare, thrown at me.
I won’t flinch or look away.
I’ll not jump or cry or scream.
And I will never run into the basement.
But I was wrong.
My girl had a different motive.
She wasn’t trying to outsmart
or withstand Evil--
my girl was taking notes
on how to become Evil.
Five-years-old on Saturday mornings,
watching Goosebumps and trailers
for every horror film on YouTube,
and she would ask me:
“I know I’m too young to watch it, mom,
but tell me the whole movie!
Can you just tell me the story?”
Well, honey, The Exorcist is an allegory
about the overwhelming male leadership
of the Catholic church being terrified
by the burgeoning sexual power
of young teenage women
and doing everything possible
to extinguish it,
and in the end--
they fail.
No matter how the movie ends, sweetheart,
I want you to remember that they will fail.
She caught it. She caught it--
scary little girls always win.
Scary little ghost girls always beat out
even big ol’ powerful men.
One weekend morning, over my coffee,
I noticed the words she had graffitied
in white paint on our home’s red brick.
One, two, I’m coming for you.
Three, four, better shut the door.
Click, clack, watch your back
I was furious,
but I’ve never tried to remove it.
Sometimes I stand alone
on my porch at midnight
with all the black holes in the universe
colliding in the night sky before me.
I stand alone and face
what is nightmarish
and I think about Samara,
crawling out of the well,
crawling out of our screens.
I think about Eleven,
nose always bleeding.
I think about the twin girls
down the hallway in The Shining.
All those sisters in The Conjuring.
Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween.
And I whisper, All right, all of you--
and one you haven’t even met yet.
I smile and tell the disasters
waiting for us: One, two, we’re coming for you.
Kristen Grace was a preacher’s kid who credits Song of Songs with inspiring her to become a queer rebel poet in unloving spaces. Grace is a journalist for 405 Magazine, a freelance copyeditor for Callisto Media, and a graduate student at Oklahoma City University’s Red Earth MFA program. She has authored a children’s book and short story collection with Literati Press in Oklahoma City and has recently published poems in Focus Magazine and Mid/South. In her downtime, she reads. And reads. And reads.