Blood Moon 3 (Haunted)

Musical Chairs

To some, a single insignificant occurrence can be devastating and life altering. This was the case with Anthony. To everyone else involved, it was nothing more than a silly game from childhood. A game in which no one really remembers who won or who lost. Just a game. Musical Chairs.

Anthony tried his best. He didn't really care about the chocolate velvet cake that was decorated with a sugary pink rose only the victor would savor. What he really cared about was winning. Correction. He didn't truly care about that neither.

It was his father that cared. Anthony Roger Smith Senior. You see, Anthony was a reflection of him and as his father always said "I didn't raise no loser!" He put actual sweat and tears into this silly little contest. The music would play and the children would laugh and slowly revolve around the chairs completely unconcerned. Oh how he wished he could have been them.

Not Anthony though, his face was stern. His eyes never leaving sight of the reflective metal chair legs for even a moment. His father called it "Keeping your eyes on the prize."

So this was it, down to the final two contestants. He KNEW he would win. His competitor was none other than Kevin O'Neal. A little meaty around the waistline and slow, Anthony remembers him running laps in Gym class and stopping to spew the contents of his lunch all over the slick surface of the basketball court. He was slow, he had no endurance. This was it he was going to make his old man proud!

A sucker punch of horror came when the music stopped and they fought for the very last chair. Their butts collided in an epic battle for the right to sit in the throne, to become the all-time McDonald County Musical Chair Champion.

Anthony felt his body jar and his legs crumble as Kevin's more than robust waist pushed against him. The extra weight slammed into him like a ton of bricks and his body simply could not retaliate. As his body hit the floor and he was declared the loser, large sobs escaped his lips followed closely by large salty stinging tears. "Loser tears" his father had called them.

He was ridiculed all the way home by his father. Once in the privacy of their living room, Anthony Roger Smith Junior endured the worst beating of his childhood. Fifteen hard lashes with his father's belt dotted his skin. A few of the welt's started to ooze a small trickle of blood and as his father had claimed. "You are too lazy to bleed to win then you deserve to bleed when you lose. Those are loser marks. They will remind you to try harder next time!"

That was the very last time he had lost at anything. That silly little game had taught him a very valuable lesson and he coasted through his childhood only playing games he knew he could win. That was fifteen years ago. Since then, his growth from childhood to adulthood was as thin sheet of glass. Now he sits in his beat up Mobile Home. Alone. He never dated nor attempted to make friends. Why would he? What if they were better at something than he was? What then?

*~*~*

Kevin felt as if his head was filled with thick green Jell-O. His vision was dim. Partly from the foggy response his sight gave to the drugs that coursed through his blood stream, but mostly because of the single dying light bulb that now swayed back and forth above his head in the empty room.

He struggled to move but something heavy restrained his arms behind his back. His butt was numb from the uncomfortable rubber chair he was forced to sit on. In the dimly illuminated room he could see four other people struggling with their own personal hell in the seats next to him. Panic and anger verbalized from the captive strangers and echoed in the small isolated chamber. Kevin sat frozen in fear. No words. No questions. He just sat very still like a starry eyed doe caught in the headlights of a tractor trailer.

To his right, He watched one of the larger men attempt stand and break the rubberized seat just fall back in place and pant from exhaustion. The horrible sounds of terror become a mumbled enraged hornet's nest of noise in his eardrums.