Meet Our New Intern: K Slade

I spent the first half of my life outside of my body. Buried within pages of sprawling text, I found myself clutching to worlds that didn’t exist outside of carefully bonded paper. Instead of a child, grown long and lanky, with big eyes and crooked teeth, I led my friends into battle against immortal titans. When the burden of fashioning an entire army became too much weight for my tiny shoulders, I became a scythe wielder who stood between humanity and the world’s descent into chaos. And, in another life, I remained trapped in a cycle of death and life in the body of a seventeen-year-old cadaver.

The macabre fascinated me until it consumed me. I dreamed of haunted mansions and tormented ghouls. At night, I would stare into the hollowness around me and think of them, these fictional characters who carried the grief of a thousand lifetimes. I did not weep for them (I could not. I knew people would call me weird if I cried over words. It didn’t matter what it meant to me). But, I shouldered their pain.

Just as I felt too big and monstrous for my world, their loneliness threatened to swallow them whole. I couldn’t allow that. These characters raised me. They taught me to laugh, dance, and reject the isolation I forced myself into. I could no longer run from myself. I couldn’t escape the hurt I felt, the pain I didn’t understand, the memories my brain forced me to keep at bay.

I cradled their pain close to my chest, as they have done for me. When I buried my sorrow in their pages, they held me like a mother.

My growth as a person is memorialized in those pages. The Virgin Suicides exposed me to the scabbed-over gloom I’ve harbored since I was eight. The Haunting of Hill House allowed me to waltz through the meaning of fear, longing, and desperation. Frankenstein inspired creation.

I no longer felt the need to hide myself in someone else’s life. For as long as I could remember, I inhabited other people’s bodies without care. I took their struggles upon myself and close their book when I was finished playing out a fantasy. I looked around me and found myself surrounded by people who saw me for me.

I could find solace in the present instead of escaping. I could build a life with my own two hands. Notebooks filled with smudge graphite and solemn black ink. I pulled my friends into first, second, and third drafts and they stayed there until their souls sunk into the tattered, lined pages.

And now, when I stare at my blinking cursor in a document I have mulled over for what feels like a lifetime, I can’t help but see the outline of my younger self in my computer screen. Her eyes cast downward at a book I can’t see but know like the back of my hand. I see who I once was and what it represents.

Who I write for are all the children who are lost within themselves. They called upon novels detailing carnage and anguish as a distraction. I write for everyone with that lonely child inside of them, who also carried the agony of a thousand worlds on their shoulders at the tender age of eight.

K Slade (she/her) is a Black gothic and speculative fiction writer pursuing a BS in Digital Journalism and a Japanese minor at Appalachian State University. She currently serves as Visual Managing Editor for The Appalachian, her collegiate newspaper, and specializes in multimedia journalism. Horror media deeply inspired her love for the craft and in the future, K wants to write a script for a horror game. After undergrad, she hopes to move to New York and pursue an MFA in Creative Writing.