The Final Girl Wolfs Down Red Lobster by Chelsea Stickle
Editor-in-chief Jennifer A. Howard on today’s short: Ever wonder where the Final Girl goes after the credits roll, after she’s released from the hospital, her body hurt and all her friends gone? Ever wonder how her life built her to survive the massacre? Chelsea Stickle knows, and deep down you probably know too. The answers aren’t particularly pretty, but the story Stickle builds around the moment of relief and hunger is gorgeous.
the final girl wolfs down red lobster
No one passing by would see the recently sewn up hot pink bullet hole that just missed the Final Girl’s clavicle. The dissolving stitches that joined her skin back together after knife wounds. The cuts from broken glass. The internal bleeding. What they’d see is the Final Girl, arm in a navy sling against her chest, perching on the edge of the Red Lobster parking lot, eating for the first time since the nightmare out at the lake and subsequent surgeries. The hospital gown she snuck out in allows a sunburn triangle to emerge on her back that stops at her hot pink Victoria’s Secret boyshorts. She’d chosen them to match the Manic Panic she slathered into her blond hair for the weekend. Meant to be a little secret of her own. The rest of her clothes were taken as evidence. They stank of blood and sweat, so she wasn’t sorry to see them go. She knows what she looks like using her good arm to fill her mouth with Cheddar Bay Biscuits and huge globs of popcorn shrimp dripping in cocktail sauce. The excess of it in her reduced state. If you survive a massacre, you can eat whatever the fuck you want. The size ten frame that got her teased also kept her marginally safer when some deranged man decided she and her friends were worth murdering. According to the police, the motive is unclear. But the Final Girl replays her friends enjoying themselves in the sunshine, in the water, in the moonlight. They were happy. Screaming with joy, splashing each other, and savoring what was left of this husk of a planet. There’s a kind of man who sees that and wants nothing more than to take it away. The Final Girl knows this. Has seen sparks in ex-boyfriends, brothers, her father. Perhaps this is why she survived. All her friends came from happy families. They didn’t know how to handle some motherfucker coming at them. But the Final Girl knows when to run, when to hide, and when to plant her feet shoulder width apart, grab an everyday object-turned-weapon and end it right there. Or at least be willing to. That night wasn’t the first where she’d summoned the shard buried inside her that told men they might kill her, but she’d take them down too, and it would fucking hurt. She’d flashed it at gas stations, in grocery stores, in pharmacies, in doctor’s offices, in English class with Mr. Rittenhouse, and at a cop in the hospital. Mounds and mounds of men she promised death if they didn’t leave her alone. The last guy who didn’t take a hint had a chef’s knife through his heart when she left in an ambulance. Now that there’s the beginning of a body count they might finally back off, she considers as her teeth rip into buttered lobster tail. If not, she knows now she can follow through.
Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything’s Changing (Thirty West Publishing 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press 2021). Her stories appear in The Citron Review, Peatsmoke Journal, 100 Word Story, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021, the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022 and the Wigleaf Longlist in 2023. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants. Read more at chelseastickle.com.
