Jump Scare

by Nathaniel Williams

The Exorcist didn’t scare me even one bit. Probably because I didn’t grow up Catholic like mom and dad did. I bet doing that sort of thing with a crucifix is only scary to you if a nun threatened to smack you with a ruler if you talked about it. Also, it’s old. It looks old, too, and so do all the people in it. Old things aren’t scary. And old people especially aren’t scary. Plus, it’s long as hell. Like, longer than two hours, even. But I wasn’t going to complain. I was just glad they were letting me watch R. It was a no to Superbad, but a yes to this. I’d take whatever I could get. Last week it was Alien. Dad’s pick. Exorcist was mom. Week before that it was The Blair Witch Project. Another mom pick. Also not scary. This was something we’d started doing a couple months ago, once I decided I actually liked scary movies. Danny had this movie Rest Stop from Family Video that we watched after his parents went to bed. I didn’t want to watch it, I wanted to watch Vantage Point, which looked way more awesome, but it was Danny’s house, and Danny’s PS3, so Danny got to pick. I was scared at first, but it ended up being more funny than anything. Same thing I felt watching The Exorcist. And Blair Witch the other week. Not Alien, though. That was actually cool. But anyway. I came home from Danny’s and told mom and dad that I saw my first horror. They asked what I thought and I told them it mostly kind of sucked and that I wanted to see something actually scary. So, every Friday, after my little brother and little sister went to bed, we started watching movies they swore would actually scare the crap out of me. So far, the only thing that even came close was probably Alien, to be honest. Everything else, corny. Honestly, the only thing that really made me feel terrified, like, tightness in my chest and heart beating in my ears and my stomach feeling like it was trying to come up and out my throat, was when dad would try and scare me after. Once the credits started rolling, first thing he would do was go smoke. He had to be using that time to think of how to jump scare me. Because every time, without fail, every Friday since we started this, he would get me with something before bed. One night he flipped the breaker to the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth. Another night he found one of those popper things you throw at the ground on Fourth of July and chucked it at my feet while I was grabbing a snack. But tonight, I was going to get him. Mom was in on it. I told her earlier, before he had gotten home from work. She needed to know so she wouldn’t accidentally move my stuff. My costume. It was part of the plan. As soon as he went out to smoke, it was go time. I grabbed my black windbreaker, a black beanie, and my black sweatpants out from their hiding spot, underneath the pile of clean laundry on the living room chair, and got them on as fast as I could. Dad always went out to smoke through the garage. He’d wander down to the end of the driveway as he worked on his cig. My plan was to run out through the front door and straight at him, full speed, and give him a scare big enough to get him back for all the little ones he’d given me these last couple months. We lived in the suburbs, a cul-de-sac, I figured he’d know in a split second it was me. Who else would be up that late? The only other time he’d ever seen anybody out during one of his late-night smokes was when he saw the neighbor across the street go out and grab a beer from the outside fridge, full-on naked, not realizing his garage door was still open. I really thought he’d catch on, that he’d know in a heartbeat it had to be me messing with him. I flung open the door, sprinted across the yard, spotted him right where I knew he would be. He caught me in his peripheral, turned fully around to face me, scrambled back, real true fear in his eyes. “OH, HOLY FUCK,” he choked out, throwing his cigarette down into the street, and tripping over his feet right as he broke into a sprint. I tried to tell him it was me, but down he went, like something up from below got a hold on his ankles. He face-planted onto the concrete, the full force of him, all that inertia slamming his nose into the pavement extra hard. And that’s where he died, probably instantly, they said, right there in the road. Fuck Danny.

Nate Williams is a Missouri writer with an MFA from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. His work deals with the stranger side of life in the Midwest. He has previously been published in Sheepshead Review, Barnstorm Journal, Pacific Review.