Obsidian Shards: Afro-Horror Tales

Memories of My College Days

Author's Note: What you are about to read is a wholly non-traditional piece. It doesn't fit any of the requirements I set myself up with when I write a story, so I'm not certain if I could even consider it that. Originally, this was a short scene that I wrote for a creative writing class, and that version didn't have an ending as...spectacular as this story does. But I liked the idea that I had initially of the quiet girl having a single moment of ravenous hunger, and I rewrote the whole thing from memory so I could set up a similar ending. The spectacular element I added was, I think, my attempt at horror or surrealism. Overall, this piece is essentially an inside joke with myself, and for that I am sorry.

My Freshman year of college, I didn't really have that many friends. I was on my shit, trying to be a studious ass nigga. It worked for the most part, and I wound up finishing both semesters with a 4.0. In that time, I managed to meet Yusef, who would become my roommate and impromptu best friend in Sophomore year, and his then-lab partner, Tiana. Yusef wasn't the popular dude, but he was pretty well known throughout campus, and during our sophomore year, he introduced me to a lot of his friends. 

First there was Mike, the classical pianist and male stripper who lived in the adjoining suite to ours. Mike looked like an angry mountain but the dude was the Jolly Black Giant once you got to know him. His roommate was this fast-talking dude named Tyrel, who was trying to create his own major, Confidence Studies, through combining Philosophy, Communications, and Psychology. Now, Tyrel had somehow managed to snag these two fine-ass chicks into a polyamorous relationship. Their names were Kenya, who was this calm and collected Africana Studies and Gender Studies double major, and Diana, who was a party-girl math prodigy that got famous at fifteen for doing something I could never understand. We were a pretty odd, mix-matched group, and I think we all knew that our friendship was largely based on the small number of Black students in our year and proximity to each other. But we were tight no matter what. Me, Tyrel, Yusef, Kenya, Diana, Mike, and Tiana were inseparable all throughout undergrad.

That said, I could never really shake the feeling that me and Tiana stood out in the group. I'm an introvert for the most part, and so is Tiana, but Yusef wasn't. He was the biggest extrovert anyone had ever met. The dude radiated some special energy that vibed with everyone and lifted them up, Tiana and I reacted to the vibe differently. We liked him, sure, but we could never get up to the level he seemed permanently set to. When Yusef was dancing around and singing and being the life of the party, Tiana and I would share a telepathic conversation about how annoying he could be sometimes. Everyone else would dance with him or laugh or film him for the gram while me and Tiana would sit in the back and maybe occasionally glance at each other. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't completely antisocial, I knew how to join in the fun every once in a while, and I had many spirited conversations with my crew about whether Kim Possible could beat up Sakura Haruno (my friends wrongly said that she could). But the high-energy party thing wasn't me, and it definitely wasn't Tiana either.

The strangest thing about Tiana was that the chick almost never talked. I'd never heard her say more than two words at a time, and no one else really had either (Diana claimed she had, but no one believed her). Her responses to anything were either one-worded or non-verbal entirely. You'd think that would make communication with her impossible, but that was the other weird thing about Tiana. No matter what the context, she could always manage to condense as much nuance and information as necessary in a single word. Or two.

One time, Yusef and Tyrel had the brilliant idea to see how many questions they could ask her before she'd have to say more than two words. They went on for nearly an hour until eventually she just looked at them and said, "Stop." There was almost no emotion in her voice, and she wasn't obviously angry or sad or anything. Despite that, they felt immediately guilty after she said it and promised never to do it again. I kind of hated them at that moment, because Tiana was the nicest girl in the world and here they were having fun with her. It wasn't right.