Horror - Short
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs. No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
All rights reserved. July 14 Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026
JULY 14
“Damn you, God!” Jamie Nixon shouted from her knees beneath the shoots of moonlight piercing the mossy curtain of Fisherman’s Grove. “How could you do this to me! Please, God, please! I can’t live without him!”
—
Jamie had it real’ bad.
Her father was Buford Nixon and her mother was Beatrice Nixon, and together they made up the head and shoulders of the Rupert Baptist Church. Gerald, Ronald, Harold, and David Nixon used to be in the equation too, but were now only names on Western Union telegrams and bodies resting under foreign soil. Grief had a way of changing people and often brought families in tight together, but after losing four boys, Buford and Beatrice ratcheted their grips on a daughter who might be apt to go wayward without the strong influence of older brothers…in fact, some of the locals were already whispering how they’d seen Jamie conversing with that good-for-nothing, half-breed Teddy Bulpitt.
“I forbid you from seeing that boy or any other boy!” her father had shouted.
“We’ll not lose you, too, especially not to the likes of him!” her mother screeched, the word HIM dripping the kind of venom that ran from the serpent’s mouth in the Garden of Eden.
Jamie had never admitted her love until Teddy finally received his draft ticket and was about to be shipped out via bus on July 15th of 1916—the following morning. “But I love him!” she wailed and beat upon her chest hard enough to leave bruises.
“That does it!” her father said. “If I so much as hear of you touching that boy, I’ll cut off your hands and won’t nobody ever see Teddy Bulpitt again!”
Jamie sobbed as she broke away from her parents and ran to her room. Little did they know, she was engaged to Teddy and she and Teddy had already consummated their engagement more than a dozen times—part of her hoped she’d get pregnant, then her parents couldn’t say anything about Teddy because a baby needed a father.
—
“Tell me you love me,” she’d said as she and Teddy lay in the grass only hours before he had to hop on the bus heading far, far southeast and then straight west, around the mountains and rainforests.
“I love you,” Teddy said. He played with her hair as the pale sky reflected diamonds upon the droplets of sweat freckling her bare chest. The atmosphere at the grove smelled of ozone and mud. “I promise I’ll be back. I promise it with all my heart.”
“But my daddy—”
“We’re going to have to avoid him. You just come here, July the fourteenth, next year, and I’ll be waiting, so long as the war’s over by then. If it ain’t, you be here July the fourteenth every year until it is and I’ll come find you.”
“Oh, Teddy,” she’d whined into his lips.
The year was so long, and when July 14, 1917 rolled around, Jamie went to the grove and sat, this despite that the war continued to rage. She’d prayed to God and she wished upon the stars. Hours passed and her sweat had run cold, but still, she waited well into the wee hours of the morning.
When the marked day came along in 1918, and the war was still going, she did much of the same. She felt very old and very tired. She’d just turned twenty and her parents had her on a leash so short she’d had to climb out her bedroom window just to keep her date in the grove a mile from the house. Once there, she again begged all the powers of the universe, but Teddy couldn’t come home, and she knew that, because the Germans were still causing a menace and he was being a hero overseas. Though, surely, they’d all soon quit with this godawful war business.
On July 14, 1919, she’d cursed all that she’d prayed to. Teddy hadn’t come home and she was alone, and she knew what it meant because the war was over.
Teddy had died over there, about a million miles away.
“May Satan reign upon Your throne!” she shouted to the night sky and then ran home. In her room, burying her face in the soapy-smelling bedsheets, she began the grieving process in a way she hadn’t dared face until then. Though she could’ve started almost right after Teddy got out of basic training—the Battle of Flers, September 16, 1916, Theodore Bulpitt had been slain in a creek by a shot to the back of his neck.
—
“Going out to your little love nest?” her father asked from the shadowy porch where he sipped iced tea and smoked his pipe.
Jamie jumped and spun, sending her light dress spiralling out around her knees. It was July 14, 1920 and her love nest was not the right word for it, not anymore. Den of depression, perhaps. Hovel of agony, maybe. She watched the slight glow of the semi-hidden embers within the pipe as it shined upon the man’s cold expression.
“I laughed and laughed when I heard that half-breed sonofabitch bit it. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bastard.”
Jamie clenched from her teeth to her toes. “You knew?”
“Of course, folks trust me with all their information, because I know what is right and what is just.”
Jamie wanted to scream, wanted to grab the axe from the woodhouse, wanted to douse his pipe in gasoline, but instead, she sprinted through the humidity dewy grass, all the way to the grove.
“Damn you, God! How could you do this to me! Please, God, please! I can’t live without him!”
Jamie buried her face in her hands and dropped to her knees. The world was an unfair and an unjust and an unbelievable and a truly unhappy place. The reality of what was best hit her then under those long black shadows and swishy green needles, and she rose, slipped her feet out of her shoes, and began walking toward the swamp. The water was warm, but the mud was cool. The air smelled different from normal, it had hints of dead fish and soot. Only ten steps out, she was in over her head, fighting to keep from rising, fighting to keep her natural urge to swim buried deep beneath her will to die. Bubbles danced from her lips until no air remained and she ached to breathe…she finally did. It hurt and her mind swam and it was so much more awful than she anticipated; suddenly she knew what Anna Karenina felt in that moment when she’d succumb to her depression. The blackness consumed her and cradled her, carting her away…
A mouth was upon her mouth, sucking. Water rose from her lungs and poured up her throat. She jerked forward, gasping, her heart pounding. She was as alive as she’d ever been.
“There you are.” The voice vibrated with moisture. “My love.”
Jamie fell back and hissed, “Teddy.”
The dead fish and soot smells were very heavy then.
Teddy leaned into the moonlight and she saw the puffy blue of his skin and the milky-ness of his eyes. “I’ve swum thousands of miles, through the Arctic and down the coast, but I promised—”
Jamie’s scream cut off his words.
“Hush, I may look different, but I’m still me,” he said, as if gargling the words, while he pawed at her sopping dress, lifting it just far enough. “I’ve missed you so, my love.” The ballooning thighs of her underwear wrinkled and slipped over the curves of her hips and ass.
“No, I…Teddy,” she whispered, something deep in her mind had cracked.
The underwear came down and her legs spread. Teddy slipped his waterlogged penis inside her and pumped, pushing deeper and deeper. He was going hard and grunting like a boar. Jamie moaned, so Teddy pushed deeper, so deep his rotten flesh and bones contorted and streamlined. Everything in his body shifted, trailing in after his penis. Bones and muscles and tendons bent and morphed into an elongated bullet shape.
“Fuck me, Teddy, fuck me,” Jamie whispered, hardly herself at all.
The backs of Teddy’s knees pressed against his ass cheeks as he folded like laundry.
“Go deeper,” Jamie said.
Teddy moaned and dug his fingers into the grass along the bank. After his hips slipped in, insertion was smooth until reaching his armpits.
“Feels so good,” Jamie said, eyes shut tight, hands gripping the jutting root of a spruce tree.
Teddy’s arms went up to his spongey cheeks and the last of him began slipping inside his fiancé with a wet plth plth plth plth.
—
“The Lord is my witness! You all saw her last Sunday! Was there a baby in her womb then?” Reverend Buford Nixon shouted to his audience—much more than only his flock: there were reporters, looky-loos, and even Catholics in the Rupert Baptist Church that morning. The temperature was high and smelled of expelled breath and cheap cologne.
“No!” the parishioners shouted in utter glee.
“It’s immaculate conception, and by God, we’re witnessing a miracle! The second coming is upon us! We have been chosen to receive the greatest gift!”
Jamie lay in a theatrical manger of hay at the front of the church. She wore a billowy night gown and had sweat right through it—nearly every boy and man in attendance took mental photographs of the womanly bits on display.
“God is giving us His son again and the end is—!”
Jamie screamed and cut off her father. An overpowering stink of rot and tang filled the room in an invisible plume. Jamie’s mother rushed to her side and held her hand, cooing promises.
The congregation rumbled in profound awe.
“It’ll be okay, it’s the Lord’s do—” Beatrice said.
An intense crack rang out and interrupted Beatrice.
“Dear Lord!” Beatrice shrieked as the blood splashed out of her daughter’s nether region. “That can’t be right!”
Jamie’s pelvis had broken in two and her legs jutted sideways, tearing her flesh up the middle. The crowd grew hushed and Buford shouted, “Sacrifices must be made for the Lord to—!”
A little girl wailed, “Something’s coming outta her busted rosebud!”
Folded and reformed, gooey as dog slobber, moldy green and black beneath all the blood, the corpse of Teddy Bulpitt slipped free. He was naked and hugging his knees tight to his chest. A fully grown man!
His eyes were wide and colourless.
Everyone was silent for three seconds.
Teddy winked.
The congregation, the reporters, the looky-loos, and the Catholics—especially the Catholics—went a little crazy then. Roaring and running and screaming and forcing their way through the doors and windows. Candles fell and Bibles lit, spreading flames to the drapes and clothes accenting the space. Within three minutes the church was empty, but for Jamie and Teddy. Flames raged through the windows and licked up the walls. Within an hour, the Nixon’s were packing their most important belongings and counting out dollars for a bus ticket.
—
Moonlight shined over the charred and smoldering church. The rubble shifted and tumbled upon itself while the two corpses crawled free and kept crawling until they reached the grove. They slipped into the swamp and down beneath the mud; hand-in-hand, together forever.
XX