Day 302 - Roast Story

Roast Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Telling ghost stories around the bonfire at night was a time-honored tradition at camp. Almost as common and endearing as roasting marshmallows and making s’mores. Countless boys and girls had spent countless warm summer nights at Camp Stony Rivers telling tall tales and exchanging humorous anecdotes while gorging themselves on junk foods.

Clichés about camp always took a similar turn – there were the horror stories and then there were the love stories. Boys became men and girls became women. New arrivals always had the hope that theirs too would be the classic tale of youthful indiscretions that surrounded the summer camp mythos and inundated the dreams and expectations of adolescents everywhere.

There were many typical types at the camp. There were the misguided youth. There were the dangerous types. There were the mischief makers and troubled teens and everything in between.

Like all summer camps, there were the arts and crafts projects, along with physical challenges and the opportunity to handle violent weaponry and act like it was educational. Target practice with BB guns. Bow and arrow marksmanship tournaments. During the day they swam in Lake Handsome, but never at night. No, never at night. At night it was something else altogether.

At night there were the bonfires. There were songs and dance. They learned to cook over an open flame. They told their stories. There was comradery. There was the group. The bonding and togetherness of the unit. Camp was never an individual event.

They told ghost stories at night and tried to scare each other. They told them all and they smiled and laughed. They poked fun at those that jumped, at those that were scared. They did all this, with outward bravado and false swagger, if only to cover their own true fears.

There were so many tales – rumors and urban legends of terrible terrible things that had been done. There was a crazed loner in the woods who wanted to punish children because of their innocence. There was a hunter who hungered for human flesh. There were ancient and evil spirits, awakened by the campfire songs they sang, that wanted to possess the bodies of the young. There was a beast, a mammoth creature, half Sasquatch and half man, trapped as one because of an ancient curse. There were witches that used children’s souls for their spells.

They told stories, and by telling their stories the spirits came true. The wicked and wild energies swirled around and infected everything within its grasp. Their fears fed the furies. Their anxieties became bloodlust. They looked into each other’s eyes and the wicked was where there had been innocence before. The darkness rose up inside them all and transformed the night. They danced the Dances of Dreams. They performed the Ceremonies of the Ghosts. They called to the underworld and the underworld answered.

Horror stories always told the tale of corruption and evil deeds, and that was what they had become. They had become the living embodiment of those stories. They embraced it and gave in to it and transformed fully. The others, those that did not, would soon become sacrifice and pay the price.

It was camp. They had a bonfire. They did what people did at camp. They whispered into the night. They embraced that which would be fright. They sat around and had a roast. They roasted their friends, quite literally. They cooked fingers instead of hotdogs, baked organs instead of tin foil wrapped potatoes, and looked their former friends in their eyes and ended up toasting those instead of the marshmallows. In one night, they became the very stories they had previously so gleefully mocked.