On this episode of Smirk, June The 13th, Aaron’s short story takes us back to the morning of June 13th, 1977, as Laurie ventures down a trail of horror that leads into our discussion of slasher movie culture and why such death and despair appeals to so many people.
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Want to read Aaron’s story “June The 13th” in full? Think you can identify the moral or theme for this episode? Read it below, and then take a listen to the podcast.
June The 13th
“We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one.”
That was all the random note left inside a discarded donut box said when they received it a month prior, and it was all the camp counselors could think about now. Despite this obvious distraction, things had relegated back to a basic level of normalcy at the camp.
It was 6am on June 13th, and Laurie was exhausted.
Her duties at the Broken Arrow Summer Camp were soon to commence, with a full group of young campers, and she had yet to even hit the showers. She reflected back on her choices from the previous night, specifically the drinking and sexy over-the-clothes romp with fellow counselor Brian, and now she realized it was time to pay her dues.
Thankfully, there are few cures for a hangover better than a good ole’ fashioned glass of water and a shower, so Laurie chugged a bottle of aqua down and left her tent to head toward the showers.
The trail to the showers was long and desolate. No one was up just yet and the sun had barely risen. In fact, it was that slight moment of the morning where dawn is cresting the landscape, slightly dark but the day was vastly approaching. The trail was easy to traverse in broad daylight, but Laurie found it a bit more difficult with such dimness.
As Laurie wound the final bend to the shower house, she noticed something laying off to the side of the trail. At first she thought it to be an animal or a discarded backpack, but it was far too long to be either of those things. She approached the object, cautiously as she was trained, and as she grew closer she realized it was a sleeping bag.
“How odd”, she thought. “Who the hell would leave their sleeping bag lying in the middle of the trail?”
Now only an arm’s length away, Laurie noticed that the sleeping bag wasn’t discarded…it was occupied. She leapt back, terrified that this was an elaborate trap some serial killer had designed to lure in teenage counselors to dire fates. Yet as Laurie stared on, the bag was perfectly still.
Finally, Laurie overcame her fears and sheer common sense, and decided to look inside the bag. She reached for the zipper, eyes closed, and slowly began to pull the zipper down. She could hear each eyelet releasing as she pulled, continuing until she reached the bottom of the bag. With her eyes still closed, Laurie grabbed hold of the bag and pulled it open. Nothing moved, perfect quiet.
Laurie opened her eyes, and immediately leapt back at least five full yards. The horror left her mouth widely gaped yet unable to utter a sound. It wasn’t simply the one body of a young girl from her camp, Lori Lee from tent one to be exact, it was the two OTHER bodies lying underneath her. Three little girls, all dead, all stuffed into the same sleeping bag and discarded as though their lives meant nothing to the monster who did this. And make no mistake, Laurie thought, only a monster could do this.
Laurie’s eyes darted around the area, noticing a shoeprint next to the bag, and a red flashlight, discarded directly on top of the bodies. Almost as if the killer was taunting the eventual investigators. Laurie knew she needed to summon help, but first, she needed to catch her breath, and to do so she again closed her eyes.
Laurie’s eyes finally opened, as she finished recounting to the police the events of that morning on June 13th, 1977. Forty-three years had gone by, and it still felt like today for her. She wiped a tear from her cheek, probably the thousandth tear she’d shed for those girls over the years, all the while eternally looking over her own shoulder for the killer that remained on the loose.
Laurie looked up to the police office leading the interrogation and softly asked, “Officer, why did I need to relive this yet again?”
The officer firmly and happily replied, “Laurie, that flashlight had a fingerprint, and yesterday, we finally got a match.”
The news hit Laurie like a punch to the gut, it took a minute to register with her exactly what that meant. And once it finally sank in, Laurie rose her head, and for the first time since the 13th of June, 1977, she smiled thinking of those beautiful little girls in tent one.