I Was a Teenage Mothman

my entry to The Lunar Awards, season 5 (serial), part 1

Original digital art by Ashley Hayes.

My kid, a typically struggling twenty-something artist and rapper, drew this slightly psychedelic take on the Mothman, in between cleaning carpets for the good people of Greenville, NC. I love the fuzz effect at the edges. If other people like it, we could figure out some way to sell prints or stickers or something. The youngsters love their stickers.

As to the story itself, it started out as a Valentine’s Day thing, maybe something for ParABnormal Magazine. They published another of my short stories in 2022, called “Slow Justice.” As a kid I loved nature books told from the animal’s point of view, but as an adult I’ve been alternately amused and annoyed by the literary success of animal detectives. My response was to reincarnate 20th century science and nature writer Loren Eiseley as a telepathic snapping turtle who solve crimes with a game warden.

I love this cover. One of my favorites. A previous one, where I had an article about synchronicities, had a turtle on the cover, down in the corner where it was hard to see. I missed it until the editor pointed it out to me, over e-mail.

But this one came out too short for their strict minimum of 3,000 words.

More on inspirations later, but for now — well, I spend a lot of time in coffee shops.

Without further ado, part 1 of . . .

I Was a Teenage Mothman

by Randall Hayes

Well, late 30s. OK, forty-one. But I’m very immature.

I do video production. Spent a lot of years making short films, chasing that dream of being the next Sam Raimi, of financing the next Evil Dead with my dentist’s credit card. I was a linear person, moving from one goal to the next, stacking accomplishments like bricks in a ziggurat of process and rules. I had a lot of anxiety — that’s been a constant factor, for years.

And then the pandemic happened.

I kept working; video production was easy to do remotely. I spent almost two years inside, by myself. Which was fine, really. I cracked open my long boxes and re-read all those Grant Morrison comics from the 90s, which made no sense to me at the time. I tried some self-hypnosis, and some chaos magic, and it worked. I started lucid dreaming on a regular basis. The sense of control was liberating. I was more free inside my little apartment, inside my own head, than I’d ever been “out there.”

And then the pandemic was over. I was supposed to emerge from my drywall cocoon, and that thought terrified me. The idea that I would have to order coffee, and talk to the skinny nose-pierced girl behind the counter, and conversate about her cotton-candy hair.

She was perfectly pleasant; the unusual color was the result of combining the dregs of three different dye bottles. But I didn’t know what to say next, and you can’t edit a real-time conversation the way you can video footage. So I froze, and took a drink to buy time, and choked on my too-hot coffee.

I went home and cast a sigil.

I went back to Witches’ Brew the next day, and the pink-haired girl was working again. Score one for synchronicity. Then on her break, she walked up to me holding her smartphone. “Are you on Flap?” she asked.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a mod of Netizen. Instead of crimes and fires, we report on paranormal activity, real-time.”

I looked down at my t-shirt, which read, I WANT TO BELIEVE, which was a catch-phrase from another 90s show called The X-Files. Score two and three. That was some sigil.

“I am not on Flap,” I replied, “but I would very much like to be. Can I get it on my laptop?”

She made a face. It was very cute. “You don’t have a phone?”

“It broke during quarantine,” I lied, “and I wasn’t going anywhere, so . . .”

She waggled her free hand at me. “Scooch over.” She slid into the booth next to me. She smelled really good. I can’t describe it any more than that, just good. Her hair was a pale gold that glowed through the fading pink wash. She started scrolling and pinching and tapping. It was like she was playing an instrument. “There’s a static map, obviously, with locations pinned. Flap’s big innovation is showing how events cluster in both space and time.”

“A flap, right.” That’s what they call a series of sightings. I read that somewhere.

“That, and letting people vote on which ones to investigate.”

That’s really cool, I started to say, but failed to swallow properly first, and then I was choking again. Literally, this time. The pink-haired girl pounded me on the back with her open hand, really hard, and longer than was strictly necessary. When I could breathe again, she looked at me weirdly and said she had to get back to work.

“Wait,” I said, “What’s your name?”

“Zephyr,” she said. “It means, ‘a gentle breeze’.”

Right.

Next:

I Was a Teenage Mothman, part 2