by Jack Lennon
The girls in cabin 8 are doing it again. I’ve been listening in on their conversations. They say things, slang words and questions with implied answers. Words like heated and sliced and gotten. Like, man wasn’t she gotten yesterday? I do not know what this means. I’m going to try to find out, and I will NOT be googling it!!! I’m not old enough to start relying on google. The girls in cabin 8 never google. The girls in cabin 8 only know how to do one thing.
I watch the girls every day. I see their cruelty. But it is nothing compared to what my girls did to me. If the girls of today had to go through what I went through… they simply would not survive. I want to take one of the less pretty ones on my back and run into the woods with her and leave her there. I had to learn it on my own, I’d say to her as I sprinted away, her round face shining with tears in the dark. Her stupid round fucking face. Once you lose that baby fat, girl, it’s over for them. Well, not really.
Sometimes the girls are doing archery and sometimes they are doing telling stories round the campfire and sometimes they are reading each other’s diaries. No matter what they do I have to watch them and make sure they don’t shoot each other in the eye with an arrow or give themselves sugar burns or develop trust issues. When the night hills look like far off slurry the girls breathing becomes near silent. I have to sneak out of the adult cabin to hold my hand in front of their gently opened mouths to check if they breathe still.
Each year they get older and so do I, I suppose. My ageing isn’t apparent to me because I no longer look into mirrors. The closest I get is the twisting reflections on the lake water while the girls are swimming or drowning, and I always get so excited thinking about Jason Voorhees that I forget to recognise my monster face floating disparately above my monster body.
When I do take the girl out to the woods, she doesn’t fight it. I’m disappointed when her eyes do not swell with tears when I get back in my car and slowly pull away. Just before I get out of earshot, I lean out the window and shout “You’re totally sliced right now, do you know that?” My car flips three times and I am killed instantly when a tree branch impales me through the neck. The girl does not reply.
Jack Lennon is a writer from Scotland. You can find their work published by Always Crashing, Night Shades, Extra Teeth and X-R-A-Y, among others. Their short fiction has been nominated for Best Small Fictions 2026 and won the Scottish Mental Heath Arts Festival’s fiction prize in 2024. Contact them or read more at jacklennon.com.