The earliest of my drawings that live in my mother’s mental Proof of Nicole’s Childhood Brilliance collection include crooked crayon stick figures depicting my mom (with a long Raw Umber-colored hair flip), my brother (short Maize fringe), me (Lemon Yellow shoulder-length bob), my cat Caesar (Peach fur)—and my imaginary friend Mona (Violet-Red corkscrew curls with metallic Silver fingers). Those silver fingers? Knives. Yes, I palled around with an invisible girl with knives for fingers when I was five years old. And one of my earliest memories of my father—perhaps the only good memory of him that I possess—is him bundling my mother, brother, and I into the back of his black van and taking us to see The Exorcist when I was around the same age.

So perhaps I was destined for horror. We few, we happy few—we horror writers. Are we born and not bred? Or is it a case of nurture versus nature? Experts say it’s about the lack of true evil in the modern world and that our curious minds want to understand, or it’s about wanting an adrenaline rush in a safe, controlled environment. What little kid thinks like that? I never remember embracing horror at that age for any other reason than that it seemed natural.

Some researchers theorize that we are by nature beasts, and we secretly enjoy stories about monsters wreaking havoc because we do not have that freedom ourselves. That is a much freakier idea. Was I psychopath as a child, albeit a well-behaved one? Am I still a psychopath as an adult? Do I just not recognize it?

Whether I am born or bred, it is my grandmother, Phyllis, who comes to mind—Grammy P and the enormous, cabochon-cut amethyst that had been my Great-Grandma Kathy’s, and which Grammy always wore on her right hand. The hand that weighed perhaps more than any other on my proclivities.

Grammy was a soft, pillowy woman who smelled of baby powder at all times. Her short, curly-permed hair was always expertly dyed Truest Black. She would set me on the wooden chair in her sewing room—she worked in a sewing factory by day and took in clothing repairs and other seamstress work after hours. Then she would squish herself onto the stool at her machine. The room was small, cramped, lined with windows that overlooked the only occasionally busy Orange Street.

“What story do you want to hear?” she’d ask, threading the needle, and setting up the bobbin. The sunlight would glance off the amethyst ring on her finger, setting it on fire. While I thought about my preferred story—a serious decision for a child, especially one of just three years old, four at the oldest—she’d take up the top item of clothing on top of her pile of mending.

“Dunno,” I’d always reply. “Something new.”

Grammy would yell over the stitch-stitch-stitch of her sewing machine, starting every story with “Once upon a time.” She lived alone—my father had a lot in common with my grandfather: the propensity to leave his family suddenly and without warning—so there was no one to mind the noise. And I liked it that way. I’d watch the cars zoom past outside and listen sleepily until either I fell asleep or Grammy finished her sewing, and then it was time for chicken roll sandwiches on cheap hamburger rolls and maybe an Alfred Hitchcock film on the television. Alfred Hitchcock was Grammy’s favorite.

Then one day when I was four Grammy said the magic first words of a new story and followed them up with, “there was a sorcerer who disguised himself as a poor man, went begging from house to house, and captured beautiful girls. No one knew where he took them, for none of them ever returned.” I sat up straight in the hard chair and focused on Grammy’s face. Her forehead was wrinkled, and she stared into the fabric under her needle. Her voice rose over the noise of her machine, telling me about the beautiful stolen daughter exploring the rich home of the man who’d taken her, an egg in one hand, the house keys in the other. My chubby fingers clung to the edge of the seat when she said, “What did she see when she stepped inside? A large bloody basin stood in the middle, inside which there lay the cut-up parts of dead girls. Nearby there was a wooden block with a glistening ax lying on it.”

I made her tell the story of “Fitcher’s Bird” every single time I stayed over from then on. I insisted on it. For years.

And not only while she sewed. Before walks to the corner store, Grammy would tie my sneakers or bundle me into my plaid coat. I would position myself to her right side, glance up at her and her Truest Black hair, and say, “I’ll take the hand with the ring.” But after “Fitcher’s Bird” came into the picture it, it would be, “I’ll take the hand with the ring—now tell me about the dead girls.”

It wasn’t just the image of the ax murders, you understand—it was about the hero arranging her dead sisters’ parts and the reanimation, and about how all three of them got their revenge on the murderer. It was never about wanting to understand evil or wanting an adrenaline rush or wanting the monster to win. It was about wanting bad people to get their rightful comeuppance. It seems I had an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong even then.

Grammy liked to proudly say that she knew I was going to be a “mouthy piece of work” because of how the story appealed to me; it wasn’t until after she died when I was late twenties, shortly after she gifted me her infamous amethyst ring, that I started writing horror for publication. I often wonder what she’d think of my work. As happy as she was about me being “mouthy,” she didn’t understand why I always wanted to see a woman saving the day. She had a particular fondness for Psycho, but I argued—many times—that it should have been Lila who subdues Norman Bates-dressed-as-Mother in the end, not Sam.

A few months before the COVID-19 pandemic started, I had an opportunity to see the film Alien in the theater. I’ve seen that film a million times—watched Ripley fight to protect her crew, watched her be the smart one, the strong one—but seeing it on a big screen was something special. Grammy had been dead for eighteen years at that point. To my knowledge, she’d never seen Alien, not even playing on her tiny sewing room television as a Saturday matinee. Oddly, though, I could almost feel her next to me in the theater, smell her baby powder scent, reading “Fitcher’s Bird” over the sound of the film. Maybe it was the presence of her amethyst ring on my finger. Or maybe I was just missing Grammy more than usual that day. After Ripley dispatches the monster and tucks her cat and herself into the stasis chamber, I swear Grammy’s voice overwrote the film’s soundtrack with the final words from “Fitcher’s Bird”: “After closing up all the doors of the house so that no one could escape, they set it afire, and the sorcerer— together with his gang—all burned to death.”

I let out a loud cheer for Ripley that day—and for the sisters in “Fitcher’s Bird.” For all the women in horror who dispatch the bad guy. For Grammy, who inadvertently taught me to love a happy ending, to love horror, and to always root for women against evil.

I looked at the empty seat next to me and imagined her there. I knew just what would happen—I’d take her hand, the hand with the ring, and she’d smile and proudly say, even though she didn’t always understand me, “You’re a mouthy piece of work, aren’t you?”

– Nicole Wolverton

Author’s Note: For more on Mona, my childhood imaginary friend with fingers for knives, please check out “Imaginary Friends,” a short story in which she appears that is published in The Half That You See anthology (Dark Ink Books, March 2021). I was wearing my Grammy P’s amethyst ring when I first drafted the story.