Why Didn't You Just Leave

Copyright © 2024 by Cursed Morsels Press.

Edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact cursedmorsels@gmail.com.

The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Book Cover by The Cover Collection.

Edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin

WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST LEAVE

EDITED BY

NADIA BULKIN

AND

JULIA RIOS

Cursed Morsels Cursed Morsels

CONTENTS

Notice of Content Warnings

Introduction

No Joy Exists Anywhere Beyond Your Front Door: The Street

Corey Farrenkopf

No Joy Exists Anywhere Beyond Your Front Door: The Haunted Attic

Corey Farrenkopf

The World Ended There

Alberto Chimal

Exposure

E.M. Linden

Spend-A-Penny

Die Booth

Kin

Raquel Castro

Your Application to Vacate 372 Wicker Avenue is Still Pending

Steve Loiaconi

No Joy Exists Anywhere Beyond Your Front Door: The Questionable Basement

Corey Farrenkopf

Lamai

J.A.W. McCarthy

The Spirit Bed

Eden Royce

She Has Me, She Holds Me, She Shows Me the Emptiness

R. Diego Martinez

Unread Messages

Gabe Converse

Because It Was Worse Outside

Victoria Dalpe

Wolves in the Little Pig’s House

Shauntae Ball

No Joy Exists Anywhere Beyond Your Front Door: Serial Killer Floorboards

Corey Farrenkopf

Mother Nature Knows Best

Tonia Ransom

To the Moon and Back

Christa Carmen

Good Company

Suzan Palumbo

The Walls in This House

Lyndsey Croal

Tell Me Your Sins and I'll Tell You Mine

Cassandra Khaw

No Joy Exists Anywhere Beyond Your Front Door: Skin House

Corey Farrenkopf

Where There’s Smoke

Alexis DuBon

Anagen

Rhiannon Rasmussen

The Head Harvest

Joe Koch

Teeth

I.S. Belle

AITA for setting my dad’s trailer on fire?

Max Booth III

Content Warnings

About The Contributors

Other Books From Cursed Morsels Press

NOTICE OF CONTENT WARNINGS

Content warnings for each story are available in the back of the book.

INTRODUCTION

This book came together by total happenstance. Nadia was watching a horror movie (aptly titled You Should Have Left) and knew even without checking Letterboxd that the reviews would fixate on that perennial question: why didn’t they just leave? On social media, she suggested that someone ought to make an anthology answering that question, and Julia happened to see it. As a lifelong ghost story enthusiast who is also a short fiction editor, this concept sounded exactly like the project for Julia. They left a comment on Nadia’s post, and now here we are! We weren’t actually connected on social media at all at that point, and the platform this all happened on collapsed shortly thereafter, so we like to say that Hive was alive just long enough to allow this anthology to come together.

Why Didn’t You Just Leave is a horror anthology about peo­ple trapped in haunted locations. It was important to us that the locations in this book included places beyond the typical Gothic manor; in these pages you’ll find apartments, trailers, prisons, hiking shelters, and more. We also wanted to collect stories that directly explore the social traumas that trap people in situations most people would seek to leave. Whether due to economic hardship, mental illness, immigration status, or something else, the characters in all of these stories face a difficult reality no matter what choice they make. While this isn’t a domestic violence anthology, a few of the stories do feature abusive family dynamics. A full list of content warnings is included in the back of the book.

This book would not be possible without our Kickstarter backers (all 474 of you), our brilliant authors and artists, our formatter Sam Cowan, and our publisher, Eric Raglin at Cursed Morsels Press—and you! Thank you for reading this book.

Julia Rios & Nadia Bulkin

January 2024

NO JOY EXISTS ANYWHERE BEYOND YOUR FRONT DOOR: THE STREET

COREY FARRENKOPF

You stand at the edge of the new, but not so new, development.

The asphalt is still smooth, the granite sidewalk curbs unchip­ped. Hedgerows divide the four houses ringing the cul-de-sac.

You know the myths behind each house, why they’ve re­mained vacant so long, but you need housing and the market is terrible and the mortgage that the sketchy bank has offered you only applies to one of these four homes. This might be your only chance to ever afford a house, so you have to make a decision. Is it going to be the house with the haunted attic, or the house with the unnamable thing in the basement? The house where the serial killer buried his victims beneath the floorboards, or the house made of skin?

(You aren’t sure you believe the stories surrounding the first three, but there’s no denying the last. You see the skin, all of the pale white glistening skin.)

Which house do you choose?

To choose the haunted attic, click here.

To choose the questionable basement, click here.

To choose serial killer floorboards, click here.

To choose Skin House, click here.

NO JOY EXISTS ANYWHERE BEYOND YOUR FRONT DOOR: THE HAUNTED ATTIC

COREY FARRENKOPF

You have chosen the haunted attic. If you wish to return to the street, click here.

It doesn’t take long to discern that there is, in fact, a ghost in the attic. The spirit wails through the night, more curses than you knew existed. They monologue about all the horrible things that happened to them during life. The divorce and the illness and the disinheritance and the lost love and the lost cat and the obsessions and the hunger.

Your first night there, standing beneath the pulldown staircase,

you practically memorize the spiel. You’ve felt similar emotions at various times during your life, so you understand ... at least to a point.

Maybe they’ll relax once they realize there’s a sympathetic

presence in the house?

Maybe you can befriend the revenant lurking beneath your

eaves?

It’s worth a try.

If you choose to stay, read on. If you choose to leave and accept a life of constant rentals, be our guest; you are free.

If you choose to leave and try the questionable basement, click here.

To try serial killer floorboards, click here.

To try Skin House, click here.

The mortgage applies to all.

When you realize your presence in the house is in no way calming, you bring in a priest.

The priest makes the ghost mad.

When you sage the dropdown staircase that rises into the attic, the ghost grows enraged.

When you finally circle your bed with the holy water that the priest left behind, the ghost never stops howling. It’s as if their translucent lips press against the central air vent above your mattress.

Where there were once breaks in the dialogue, there is now a never-ending stream of conscious babble.

Unfortunately, they are no longer talking about themselves.

No, they are now talking about you.

All your shortcomings. How you failed to rise in your chosen occupation. How your father was never proud of you. How your last sexual partner ghosted you after the fifth date. How even the puppy you brought home from the Animal Rescue League didn’t love you, never licked your hand or snuggled you on the couch, and you had to return it two months later.

Who returns a puppy?

You’ll ask yourself how the ghost knows all this, how you could have been so careless with your life, but you’ll know that getting the answers to these questions won’t solve anything.

You can’t take it much longer, so you Google potential exor­cism options you hadn’t considered. It seems like you have tried every single variation on the classics, until Google serves you up one final, potentially perfect, result. But you don’t know if you can go through with it.

If you choose to stay, read on. If you choose to leave and accept a life of constant rentals, be our guest; it’s probably a better idea than what’s to come. The movies make it clear: exorcisms rarely end in your favor.

If you can invite the ghost into your body, you can cage it. Your will is stronger than theirs. You’ll devour the spirit, smother it under your own desires, your own will to live. The ghost is only a flickering memory, after all, and they never knew what it was like to struggle through late-stage capitalism. A house could be bought with a single year’s salary during the Great Depression, or so you’ve been told. Now, who even knows what the statistics look like.

So you drag a dining room chair up the attic’s drop­down staircase, careful not to scuff the ceiling paint. You place the chair under the vent that peers out onto your street-facing gable.

Of course you brought candles. It’s dark in the attic and the electricity has always been spotty. You arrange them in a circle around your seat and light the wicks, bringing the ghost into clear focus right before your face. Their hair streams. Their eyes are wide. Their mouth uncurls around the memory of when your mother tried to explain to you exactly why your lovers all left, how you could fix everything by just being a little less anxious and asking the right questions and going to the gym more and not being so clingy, so palpably desperate.

You’ll tell the ghost that your mother never used the words palpably desperate, but this only elicits a laugh. The ghost’s toothless mouth opens into a perfect black void. You bring up the script on your phone and begin to read, praying these new words will silence the old.

If you choose to continue reading the Google instructions for this exorcism, read on. If you decide to throw your phone at the ghost and scamper back down the ladder, no one will fault you for it.

The words are read, and the mouth that had once been a gap­ing void has grown silent, as if zipped shut, thread pulled through its lips. The ghost cocks their head at you as you sit in the dining room chair, all the candles having flickered out except one. This one candle’s light licks over the ephemeral hem of the ghost’s gown, casting them in shadow. You scroll through the Google results one last time, searching for a missed word, a section cut off by a row of strobing advertisements. But there is nothing.

The ghost nods their head, eyes wide, as both of you come to the same realization. Once a house is haunted, it will never not be haunted. Ghosts are like anchors tossed in the sucking sludge of the bay, all lines cut, all hope of retrieval lost. The ghost begins to laugh, and you begin to laugh too.

Your laughs are identical.

You are unable to separate where your breath begins and their (nonexistent) breath ends. Have you always been haunting yourself? It’s hard to know, but you can’t stop laughing, louder and louder, until your exhalations blow out the last candle and you are left alone in utter darkness.

End.

THE WORLD ENDED THERE

ALBERTO CHIMAL

Translated by Julia Rios

If Erika hadn’t disappeared—if she hadn’t been kidnapped, murdered, thrown into the sewage canal where she lay for who knows how long—the lives of everyone in the family would have gone differently. Not just for the time between then and now. Not just for me, alone in this house. Would we have been together until the end? I don’t know. Maybe not. But surely, we would have parted differently. At different times, under different circumstances.

Perhaps Ernesto, my husband, would not have left. Or he would have left for other reasons. He would have gotten himself a younger girlfriend, as many men do, and he would have abandoned our children and me. Things like that happen all the time, everywhere. He would have moved to another house in the subdivision, perhaps further from the canal and the garbage dumps.

Maybe Manuel, my son, would have joined the Calambres gang, or whatever they call those bastards, later: at 17, instead of 14. And he would have joined just for what it could get him, to have money and drugs and something to do. He would not have joined out of anguish, as I know he did—to feel like he had someone, anyone, because we were dead inside.

Do these thoughts seem bitter to you? I no longer have any others. My husband and I are dead inside. Erika, our daughter, Manuel’s sister, is dead for real. And I can’t leave this house, even though my husband and son aren’t here anymore.

How could I leave this house?

The town we live in is called San Luis Tejos, but everyone calls it San Luis Lejos, because lejos means far, and that’s how it feels to be here. It’s what they call a bedroom town: almost all the adults here get up at dawn and take public transportation to the capital, where their jobs are, and make the return trip at night. In general, it takes about two hours to get there and the same amount of time to get back home. For some people, it takes even longer. Children learn from an early age to walk to and from school on their own, and to look after themselves during the day. We came here because it was cheaper to find a place to live. We were able to pay the down payment on a house in a subdivision. A house! Seventy square meters. Two bedrooms, small but with doors and everything. There was a stone walkway leading up to the door and a little patch of grass. The front of the house was even painted white, with no gray brick exposed. We were going to have something in our name that we could leave to our kids.

Then we discovered that there wasn’t really any work here. What little we found wasn’t even enough to make the house payments. That’s why they call this place a bedroom town. Ernesto was able to keep his job at the factory, near the capital. I had to look for a new one, also in the capital, which we had just left. On TV, they always say that poor people are to blame for being poor because we don’t try hard enough. But the truth is that as much as we want to try harder—and we do—we never have the time. We are always busy, full blast, just trying to survive.

Erika was 14 years old. In a magazine article—one of those published about people who disappear here in San Luis Lejos—I read that she would always be 14 years old now. Supposedly it sounds nice. It seems horrible to me. The dead are turned into words.

Not that there are better options. At best, those who die become photos, audio or video clips, memories of those who loved them. Pieces of ephemera that aren’t their bodies or their lives, and that never change anymore, except to degrade and eventually disappear. The photo in that article shows Erika standing in her school­yard. She is wearing the uniform, a white blouse and blue skirt, her socks pulled up like she always liked them, and her braids crooked. The last part is very sad to me because she almost always made them perfect, with a neat part right down the middle. She could practically do it with her eyes closed. She was better than me at it.

You can’t tell that she was taller than me either. Skinny, a lit­tle gangly, but taller. She seemed shy because she didn’t always stand up straight (what a pain I was about that), but she always looked people in the eye. She didn’t walk with her eyes glued to the ground or anything like that. She had her bad moments, like anyone, but she could also be cheerful. She wanted to get a life. That’s what she said. She wanted to leave here, study something at a university. A lot of kids around here have that fantasy.

The last time I saw her alive was in the morning: she was standing up, still half-asleep, dressed in her green pajamas and starting to make her brother’s breakfast. Ernesto had already left. I told them both to take care of themselves and stay out of trouble. Neither of them turned to look at me but I said bye to both of them and they answered, Bye, Mom, in chorus, like when they were very little.

It was Wednesday. I left home, caught the first bus, then the second, and then the subway to get to my day job: cleaning and cooking for a retired lady. I still do that, cleaning houses in the capital from Monday to Saturday. I have to keep paying for this house. I can never leave.

I came back that night and found my son alone, sitting in the chair that we have next to the kitchen table, which we call our living room. He told me that his father had gone out into the street. At first I didn’t understand. Then he explained that Ernesto had gone out looking for Erika. That my daughter had gone out to see a friend a few hours before and had not returned. It was weird, he told me. Manuel was 13 years old and you could tell, you could tell that he was really worried.

I told Manuel that nothing bad was going to happen, but he didn’t believe it. He already feared the worst. Erika’s case wasn’t the first in San Luis Lejos. It wasn’t the tenth; it wasn’t even the hundredth. I learned a lot during the year that I spent searching for my daughter’s body, from the lawyers, the activists, the other mothers. But on the day that Erika disappeared, I already knew that girls here got picked up, young ones and adolescents. It’s a common story. She doesn’t make it to school. Or she doesn’t come home—from school, or from some other place. She never comes back.

My husband returned at midnight without having found Erika. We put Manuel to bed, we told him to try to sleep, and we both left. We locked the front door from the outside and took the keys with us. Apparently, Erika had gone to do her homework at a friend’s house. My husband had already gone to the friend’s house, but we went again so that she and her mother could tell us what they knew. It wasn’t much. We checked the area around the school, and Erika’s other friends’ houses, and then we walked randomly through the streets of the subdivision. There are very dark places here. Streets without streetlights, or ones that do have them, but they’ve never worked. People knock down poles, steal light bulbs and cables. More than once I worried that someone was watching, waiting to attack us.

Ernesto, my husband, had the same fear. Luckily, he didn’t tell me until much later. I remember that we came to a very, very dark street, at the edge of the garbage dump. Beyond the ditch you could no longer see anything. Everything was a black stain. It seemed like the world ended there.

We heard noises coming from further off. We didn’t under­stand what they were. A broken engine, dogs growling, screams. We didn’t dare take another step.

The next morning, we went to the police to make a report, but no one paid any attention to us. They told us that Erika must have left of her own free will. She must have gone with her boyfriend, they told us. She was probably pregnant, they said. I confess that I did have doubts. For a few seconds. It’s just that I didn’t know if it would be better that my daughter had run away, gotten pregnant by who knows who, and left, or that she was dead. It took us six months to get someone to listen to us and accept our kidnapping report. It was something, although by then we already knew that the police don’t prosecute most cases, don’t look at many leads, and always start from the idea that the girls who disappear somehow deserved it. For not being careful. For walking alone. For going around provoking men.

Nothing happened for a long time. Or everything happened. I stopped working to look for my daughter. My husband would have done the same, but we had to eat and keep paying for the house. Manuel, my son, became more and more isolated without us noticing. Other women who were in the same situation began to help me. Something else I must confess is that before Erika went missing, when I saw other women who were looking for their missing children, who spent years searching, asking for help, demanding justice, it didn’t seem right to me. They should move on to something else, I thought. Accept that your loved ones were dead, even if you didn’t know where. How could they go on living like that?

I was so naive. The truth is that no, you can’t keep living like this, but you can’t do anything else either. The anguish of not knowing cannot be endured and cannot be left behind. In other countries, they tell us, the authorities look for and find people who disappear. Here, we have to do it ourselves. Regularly checking the places everyone knows dead bodies turn up. Insisting that autopsies be done. Trying to tell the stories of our daughters, because here it is always girls, always young women who disappear. Some are taken elsewhere, sold. Others are killed. The gangs around here use it as a test of loyalty for their new members, they say: kill one so that they can prove they’re real men. And they can’t back down.

A few months after Erika disappeared, the noises began in the house. Squeaks, raps, sometimes a small whisper. It didn’t stop, and it was similar to what Ernesto and I heard that first night in the darkest place. It wouldn’t let us sleep.

And then there was the smell. The house is near a garbage

dump and that smell is already there all the time: rotten stuff, chemicals, smoke. But now there was something else: something sweet but heavy, like blood, but there was no blood anywhere. It came suddenly, appearing and disappearing, like the sounds. At first, we wanted to find out what was causing it. Then we just kept wishing it would disappear, that it would stop taking away what little time we had for rest.

Someone put a spell on you, one of the women from the

search group told us. They call me from my daughter’s phone, but I know it’s them, doing it to make me suffer, and I don’t pick up anymore.

Or maybe the house is infested, said another of the women.

What do you mean infested? I asked.

Cursed.

They say that’s why these things happen to us. That the dump is where a cemetery used to be, that San Luis Lejos should never have existed.

Four months after our complaint was accepted, ten months after Erika disappeared, Manuel, my son, newly turned 14, left home. He did say goodbye: he told his dad that he was leaving with some friends. My husband was like me on Erika’s last morning, assuming this goodbye would be no big deal, normal. He told Manuel not to stay out too late, and then Manuel never came back. But sometimes we’ll see him suddenly, in the street, standing on a corner with people we don’t know, and once or twice he has even come home to ask us for money.

Two months after Manuel left, a whole year after the disappearance of his sister, an activist called and asked Ernesto and me to go to the coroner in the capital. There was a body they wanted us to see. They’d had it for almost a year already, but as a Jane Doe. It was a woman, supposedly 20 years old, who had been found in a sewage canal. But she wasn’t 20 years old, she was younger, maybe 14 or 15, and they had finally done a DNA test on her.

Erika had a crooked tooth: an upper left incisor, which we could never straighten. Maybe that’s where she got the idea that she wanted to be a dentist. That was the career she almost always mentioned. When she got excited, she said she’d do her degree and set up her own practice here, or even in some other city, a better place. From the tooth we could identify her.

Sometimes, in the most horrible moments, I think Erika was picked up and killed for wanting to get out of here, to get