content warnings
death, graphic wounds
[997 words]
“Scream right into the hole. It feels great.” Kathie puts a light, practiced hand on my shoulder, something I’d watched her do over and over with each of the seventeen other retreat attendees who had stepped up before me. Her nails were the color they call seafoam, though I could never understand why nail salons thought soft green-blue was the color of the thing that mermaids dissolved into after never being kissed, after having their hearts broken, the color of disappearance, of nothingness, of a watery void of non-being.
“I’m trying,” I say, but I’m not screaming, the screaming is not coming.
Today, Kathie and Spencer, the enlightened gurus of the Heal-By-Scream intensive, had hammered out a hole in the brick of an old warehouse wall, a warehouse that they claimed used to be a coffin factory before it was abandoned, but I was skeptical, what with the convenient symbolism. Death = the void. Etc.
“We are all here with you,” says Spencer, whose clammy, thick fingers land with a thud on my other shoulder, the weight of their encouragement threatening to push me into the wall where I’d lodge, for sure, forever. These hips were not getting out of this wall.
“Give me a second,” I say.
They must have made that part up about the coffins. Doctored the Wikipedia page, adjusted microfiche, blacked out the real story in the town’s official records. You can do that, just change the history of a place if you know the right people, follow the right steps, have enough money, erase anything you want.
It’s been almost ten minutes now, probably, I don’t know, and I can feel the rest of that week’s cohort shuffling with impatience, ready to go to dinner as soon as this was over, as soon as I would just scream into the goddamn hole, hurry UP.
“Maybe tomorrow,” I say.
Kathie squeezes my shoulder and Spencer claps me on the back. “There will be other holes. So much potential,” they say in unison. “We are here for each other. That’s what this week is about.”
I would never willingly give money to Kathie or Spencer for anything vaguely like this but my Aunt Janice had gifted this to me on my fortieth birthday. She said screaming in a structured environment had done her good, had really prepared her for the second half of life.
The next day’s hole is in the ground, wide enough for the entire cohort to stand around at once and scream together like some kind of symphony, me playing the silence at the end of a song, the quiet as an echo recedes.
The next day there are these little mice holes in the dormitories, cut out like they look in cartoons, perfect little arches, and we lay on our bellies and let the floor squeeze our screams out of us, my stomach rumbling as if to help me, as if urging my voice to imitate.
There are holes in Swiss cheese that demand small, delicate screams. Poise, control. There are bullet holes in tin cans and car hoods and some mannequins Katie and Spencer placed in a field that require rattling, chaotic screams that can spray like machine guns or summer sprinklers to hit them all at once. There are holes in the elbows of jackets and the knees of jeans that inspire the slicing, sharp kind of screams that trim excess threads in your spine.
I do try, though everyone thinks I’m just being obstinate, thinks she’s too good for the process. And I’m not invited to the sing-a-longs after dinner or late night gossip sessions and I sit apart from the group each afternoon as Kathie and Spencer read from their self-published Heal-By-Scream Guide and I swear can feel something crawling in my lungs, growing larger, something hot and bright and painful, but they never say a damn thing about something like that in their little sermons.
On the last day, Kathie and Spencer bring us into the basement of the warehouse where there’s a woman sitting on a crumbling wood bench who has a hole carved out of her middle.
She’s alive, by the way. Blinking at us as we crowd around, no one getting too close, because is that really her liver poking out there? Is that half her lung? Why is the blood pooling beneath her so thick, so black, and why is it bubbling?
“We know you have a lot of questions,” says Kathie. “But Bernice here has somewhere to be, so we need to be considerate and put aside all those uncomfy feelings and do what we are here to do.” Kathie grabs me and pulls me up to Bernice. “You go first.”
A bit of Bernice’s blood squirts onto my shirt and she smiles. “Go ahead darling,” she says.
I take a breath.
“When we said she had somewhere to be we meant she’s dying for fuck’s sake,” says Spencer.
“Just let it out, sweetheart,” says Bernice. She takes my hand and touches my fingers to the gooey flesh around the wound.
So I open my mouth. For Bernice.
And there’s no scream as per usual, but something slithers out, boiling, soft blue-green, like seafoam, down my chin to my shoulder and across my arm, pouring itself over and filling the hole, garbling in this way that sounds like something without a mouth screaming, the sound the void screams into us, and I close my eyes and let whatever it is pour out of me and when I open them again I think that maybe Bernice could be healed, maybe this thing that has been sitting in me patched up the hole.
But no. The hole is filled with seafoam but it has done fuck all and Bernice has stopped breathing, a little smile at the corner of her dead, silent mouth, and Spencer claps me on the back, hard this time and says maybe its time to go and I agree.
Chelsea Sutton is a writer and theatre maker of what she likes to call gothic whimsy. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, CRAFT Literary, and Bourbon Penn, among others. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing, and her first novella is forthcoming February 2026 from Split/Lip Press. Find out more about her work at Chelseasutton.com
