The Scavenger: A disaffected art school dropout returns to their impoverished rural homestead. But nothing good comes from a life of scrounging for scrap metal and ruminating on everything that has failed you. One must find new hobbies.
Dramatized in August 2024 on Creepy Podcast. Narrated by Michelle Kain.
Direct link to the audio (Patreon only release.)
How about a taste?
I watched a wake of turkey vultures slurp up bits of cow. Bald, ball sack looking heads dipped up and down into the carcass buffet, ripping off meat in sinewy strings. Bloody beaks gleamed wet-hot-red under a disinterested Florida sun. I will paint their portrait. Abstract expressionist, I think. Thick black lines like Franz Kline. I will sketch their withered faces. I will sculpt and mold the heads in plastic and screw them on top of comically large bodies wearing ballooning cloaks of dark feathers, with wingspans longer than a man’s height. You will not believe it when the piece is unveiled. You will laugh. And while you laugh, I will lift up a bucket and douse them in blood. You will be horrified. You will run me out of town.
The full story will be available in print as soon as my exclusivity contract is up.
For this tale, I drew from real experiences during my time at The Art Institute of Chicago where, spoiler alert, I constantly felt like if I were but a different person, I might be able to kill someone. For example:
I quit art school the day a student, some trust fund piece of shit, tacked a piece of blank notebook paper to the wall. Everyone was silent until I spoke up and said “this is a fallacious pathetic fallacy.” The student, unfamiliar with these words, heard “fellatio” and “phallus” and agreed with me. He would have agreed with anything. This was a drowning man. Complete salvation came swiftly as his fellow students mused on how his blank piece of paper might symbolize the emptiness of casual sex. How a one-night stand is, so very frequently, nothing to “write home about” – an empty page in the book of life. The fact it was a single sheet, torn from a notebook of many, was a symbol of the shame of feeling “loose,” of finding oneself alone in the bed linens the next morning. I couldn’t believe how quickly his misunderstanding had morphed into metaphor. I was a passenger on a runaway train full of fools.
The rest of the tale is pure fabrication.
Or is it?
P.S. Photo above, entitled “View from my grandparent’s homestead in Arcadia, FL, who put the crosses there and why,” by me.
Kelli Dianne Rule: Author 