Free Bible Camp Bloodbath by Joey Comeau

1.
    “I got the job!” Martin’s mother announced. She tossed her bag on the pile of shoes by the front door and came into the living room, scooping Martin up in her arms. “I’m going to be spending three weeks making flaps of wet torn skin, jutting white broken bones, and drooling chunks of flesh for Blood Socket 2. Blood Socket 2, Martin! Pus! Spleens! Teeth! I’ll be spreading fake guts all over the walls. They said they loved my work in particular on Undead Hungry Grandmother Birthday Party. I didn’t think anyone even saw that movie.”
    Martin squeezed his mother while she spun him around the room. He kissed her neck. She was so happy. This would be good for them. She was always happiest when she was working on the movies. She was too good for the makeup counter at the mall. She was too smart.
    “You may have to go and stay with your aunt and uncle for a few weeks,” she said. “A lot of the filming is going to be in Toronto, so I’ll have to stay in a hotel. Those filthy big city streets will run with blood. They’ll have to install blood gutters.”
    For dinner they had an ice cream cake. Vanilla with a chocolate crumble centre, and on the top of it, in pink glossy icing, it read, “Happy Birthday Lucifer, Our Sugary Dark Lord.” A celebration! Tonight she would have her friends over and Martin would be sent to bed while they partied late, but right now it was just the two of them. They sat at the kitchen table eating ice cream cake while Martin’s mother sketched ideas for gore effects. Martin rested his head on her shoulder and together they planned the perfect dangling kitten eyeballs.
    * * *
    Martin had a picture he’d clipped from a magazine of a goat standing on the back of a cow. It seemed otherworldly to him, but neither the goat nor the cow looked concerned. They didn’t care that the goats in picture books never stood on cows. They pulled this shit all the time. This was just how it was. His mother had that same look on her face, up on the kitchen table with someone else’s bottle of wine in her hand, head tilted to avoid the light fixture. Martin could see mud caked around the edges of her boots, smeared on the tabletop.
    He stayed quiet, out of sight. He knew how this worked. It was against the rules for her to wear her boots in the house, but if he spoke up the response would be, “Bed time, kiddo.” Forget that. He liked to watch his mother when she was around her friends. As long as the table didn’t break again, it was okay. Mud was easy to clean up.
    * * *
    With his baggy shirts and wire rim glasses, Martin looked like he’d been picked too soon. He was eleven years old, and he wore button-up shirts that were always too big on him. He looked like the kind of kid who cut pictures of goats standing on cows out of magazines, like the kind of kid who was proud when people called him a nerd. And he was proud. His mother was a nerd. Sure she was a violent and unpredictable nerd who dressed like a panhandling teen, but she was a nerd. She knew more about chemistry than any of his teachers. Sometimes, just for fun, she made the strangest things broil and ooze for Martin. For his last birthday, she set a Halloween mask over a shot glass full of mystery sludge, so that sickly foam drooled and spat from the mouth. Martin made her repeat the trick again and again, watching the foaming grin in horror.
    * * *
    Up on the table, Martin’s mother cleared her throat to quiet the room. When that didn’t work, she stomped her boot. Everyone turned to look, and she gave a small curtsy. She took a drink from the bottle of wine, an empty glass in her other hand, then she raised both over the whole room.
    “To the Royal goddamned Bank of Canada, and their kindhearted vat-grown employees,” she said, “for being so understanding of the plight of a young single mother. God bless their tiny little hearts and may none of them be out sick or on vacation when I go down there to burn their building to the