Be Prepared Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Robert Moore.

Return to essays.

Published in Black Static #72, Nov-Dec 2019

You've received this latest issue of Black Static, found a time that's perfect to sit down with a lit lamp to the left of your shoulders, relax with the issue, open its cover, like unenveloping a long blue-inked letter from a friend, the day's work done, start enjoying another excellent issue. At some point you're reading this Into the Woods column by me and you hear a noise coming from your closet. Stand up, put the issue's wingspread of text down on your side table, paragraphs above wood grain, walk over to the closet door, twist the brass knob, and a jabbering thing with two heads stumbles out.

You're reading this Into the Woods column by me, absent-mindedly scratching the side of your neck, and your fingertips feel a lump. Under your jaw. Stop reading, because you shouldn't have a lump there, so you're trying to figure out with your probing fingertips what that lump might be.

Which scenario is scarier?

I'm not too concerned Godzilla is going to crush our house with its gigantic hind paws while Mary and I are inside, standing in our pajamas, flipping eggs, frying bacon. Godzilla is not something I wake up worrying about. It's not like I'm listening for thunderous thumps approaching from miles away.

But I do have some back of the brain worry burglars might break into our home, with bad intentions.

Because that's more likely to occur.

Things that could happen are scarier than things that are unlikely to happen.

If I die because I was crushed by Godzilla's feet, I really have no control over that. It's an act of nature, like being one of hundreds drowning, arms waving above their heads, mouths opening, during a flood. But to die during a home invasion? I should have been better prepared. Set up an alarm system. Bought a gun. Learned martial arts instead of binging episodes of The Office on Netflix.

And that's a dividing line in genre fiction. There's horror as nostalgia, where we read a story, watch a movie, that evokes tropes we enjoyed as a child, first exploring mainstream horror. Frankenstein, Dracula, the gothic castle high on a hill. Or contemporized, the young family moving into a new home, all those smiling white teeth, the family almost always including a small child and a teenage girl, the child acquires an imaginary friend who seems okay at first, but soon it's urging the child to do terrible things, there's often a corner of the white ceiling, or the meshed screen of a second-story window, covered with flies, I have no idea why, maybe flies are considered to be fear-evoking in Hollywood, and we usually get a few shots of the teenage daughter taking a shower with a soapy pink or yellow sponge. It is horror, it's within that genre, and I don't disagree, but it isn't really that scary. It's evoking nostalgia rather than dread.

True horror isn't a corpse rising out of its grave. True horror is your partner of twelve years sucking in their breath for courage, lifting their shoulders, lowering their coffee cup back down onto its white saucer, looking into your eyes, and with a sadness they've come to terms with saying, 'I don't love you anymore'.

The greatest horror of Night of the Living Dead was that a middle-aged, overweight, balding, cowardly white man was arguing the group should barricade themselves in the farmhouse's basement, and the young, brave, courageous black man was saying No, we should battle to remain on the first floor, where we have a choice of exits if we need them, which makes perfect sense to me, but then it turned out the heroic black guy was wrong, dead wrong, and the cowardly white guy was right. The young brave black guy eventually chooses the white guy's cowardly option, and is saved from being eaten by the dead as a result, but then in a twist he's killed by a sheriff's posse, mistaken for a zombie. Our hero was wrong. The villain had a better grasp of the situation, but even hadn't anticipated posses that no longer took the time to vet who they were shooting. Sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you struggle, you still die.

When I was a boy, one Sunday while I was walking the mile down the business district of Greenwich Avenue to my grandparents' home on Steamboat Road, I saw that the large black parking lot across the street from the Greenwich train station was filled with metallic, above-ground models of fall-out shelters. This was back in the early Sixties, when burying a fall-out shelter in your backyard was a popular preparation in case the Soviet Union dropped an atomic bomb on us (much like Godzilla's paw).

Because it was Sunday, the shelters were empty. No salesman anywhere.

I spent a couple of hours lowering myself down through the top circular openings of the dozens of different shelters, clambering around inside the different ovoid interiors, bed bunks on either side of the shadowy interior space, long, long wooden shelves where canned provisions would be stacked. Thinking to myself, Is this where I'd want to wait out a nuclear holocaust? Or is that green-metal shelter a few rows over still my first choice?

Because that's what it was like growing up as a kid in the Sixties. You could be crisped at any moment by an atomic bomb. We had classroom drills where the teacher blew a whistle, and we'd scuttle under our desks, interlace our two small hands over the tops of our heads, as if that alignment of knuckles could ever truly protect us from an atomic bomb.

I was a boy scout. I learned all the different knots. I still often use the square knot, and take pride in knowing that knot.

The greatest lesson of the boy scouts was, Be prepared.

But being attacked by a two-headed thing coming out of your closet? Being crushed under Godzilla's foot? How do you prepare for that? And even more importantly, do you even need to? It's never going to happen.

Finding out you have cancer? Hearing the one person you love in this wide, wide world tell you they're leaving? They've found someone else who means more to them than you do, that they want to now share their lives with, investigate a strange noise in the living room with, decide what to make for dinner with, go to the dentist with? How can you ever prepare for that?

Ultimately, the only thing you can prepare for is how you'll be remembered.

Mary and I were lying in bed one morning, drinking coffee from our tall mugs, still thirty minutes away from having to shower, get dressed for work, drive our long commute over different highways to our jobs in north Dallas, when a story came on the local news, dedicated like all local news in America is to death and weather, about a woman who died during an overnight traffic accident.

Whenever someone dies on local news, they always show a picture of them. Why wouldn't they? It's TV. But in this case, the family of the woman who died had only one picture available to show: Her wearing a soiled t-shirt; thumb, index finger, middle finger in a triangulation cramming popcorn into her mouth.

She was dead, how awful, how absolutely awful, but she looked like a fucking slob.

Always have a decent-looking photograph of yourself ready for when you die. Because you are going to die, and they are going to show a photograph of you.