the destroyer > cheap papers > Maureen McHugh

NOTES TOWARD FREDDY KRUEGER

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don't fall asleep in the bathtub. watching television. eating cereal. in school. you'll walk halls in a body bag. or a quiet street at night. you'll steal your mother's car to drive to an empty supermarket. you'll be wearing a nightgown you forgot you had, the one you keep in the lowest drawer of your dresser, the floral one. you will be very calm, confused about how you got there, unable to recognize tranquility as a darker sibling of danger. you will know less about yourself than the people watching you. it will be a death contract forged in flourescence. the artificial. the unreal

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nightmare: what gets caused out of anxiety in waking life, how the kids get killed knowing they should feel sorry for something but never sure what it is. the manifest of the unspoken. what goes back down into the dark recesses of shame; freddy the mother who hid vodka between the mattress and the wall, the boyfriend who slit his wrists in a bathtub, curious to see how long death would take. frailty gets fetishized in the art of the overkill. we ache for cruelty. we praise small deaths, pain here & there / praise for freddy who kills for frame of reference

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[trope / trope / trope / trope] empty parking lot, vengeful killer wielding weapon, an inordinate amount of blood, more blood than seems prudent or necessary, fear of god, fear of dark places, fear of violence ending, the latent need for god, for belief, for faith, the exploitation of the emotions of children, an overwhelming sense of restlessness, emphasis placed on proper & exact timing, on the distinction between surprise and suspense. each death is eventual; it's the waiting that kills]

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brain smarter than body, body betraying brain. the dead kids are blameless. unlike the dumb ones who run out of gas. unlike the ones who pick up hitchhikers in texas. unlike a bloody sheet terse beneath a turquoise sky, the limbs henceforth sawed off in a dungeon in a basement. instead it's a house in the suburbs with barred windows. it's the house of the body, inescapable, it's sleep the house we enter and are changed upon our waking. it isn't about knives or saws. our terror is insular. it's about belief

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nightmare: when the mind gets good and hazy between waking and dreaming, the ego resting. a distortion of the capabilities of the self dreaming: less logical. more brave. here lies horror, the nightmare of waking. the month spent dreaming about a lover who doesn't love you anymore, who never did. the stuff real dreams are made of, an alluring helplessness. the surge of subtle nostalgia. the nightmare that fills an absence out of anxiety or simple boredom. how the word "dream" is technical and means nothing. what's real gets lost in the moments before sleeping




[ trope / trope / trope / trope / trope ] knives as sex-objects, stabbing. knives as sex-desire, shame & punishment, knives as post-virginal boyfriends, knives poised for coital disemboweling. sex in parking lots. sex in parent's beds, in cars, behind bowling alleys. young girls in tight clothes, young girls exposing breasts, screaming, young girls covered in corn syrup, whose hair smells of lavendar & bleach. freddy as larger cultural fears, horror as in, a collective unconscious as in, the space between what we see & what we believe]

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pain is god. a body beaten to filth. a girl lifted to the ceiling, her head slammed hard into a television, the heart still beating. the familiar entanglement of sex and death. the way an opening body pulls you closer to it / as all opening demands. everything painful can seem alluring if the lighting is right, if the music hits the inner-ear bone with the right veracity. desire, fear, a shame for the unspeakable, for what we can never do but wish we could. we dream of an impossible violence. we get choked by lovers who hardly know us. freddy, fucking eternal, sick of all that good-girl shit, yea, freddy, the god of broken things