Long Horn, Big Shaggy

A chapbook.

"LONG HORN, BIG SHAGGY is absolutely brilliant. A wonderful, twisted tale that's perfect for campfires and stormy nights. Steve Vernon has excelled as a writer and is one of the finest new talents of horror and dark fiction." – Owl Goingback, Bram Stoker Award Winning author of Crota

NIGHT OF THE LIVING HEAD...

The blasted-off crawler head, laying in the tangle of jumping chollo cactus, wasn't thinking too much about the cactus thorns spitted through the right side of its face. The head wasn't thinking about the dangly bits hanging from out of its neck. It wasn't thinking about the shattered ruin of its left eye, pulped into a jelly of blood and viscuous goo. Its cheekbone beneath the eye, sunken like a forgotten prairie grave. Nor its nose, a grotesque splash of flesh spread across the center of its face, with tiny white shards of bone glinting from the raspberryish mess.

It wasn't thinking about much at all, but hunger. A deep empty hunger. The kind of hunger that all the frypans in the world couldn't fix nor fill.

There was blood on the chollo. His blood, but it didn't matter to the head. He took a biteful, chewing on the chollo as the thorns tore hell out of his tongue and mouth. The bitter juices of the chollo burned and mingled with the head's black watery blood and the runnels of torn up tongue meat.

He was mostly eating himself, but he told himself it didn't matter. Sometimes that was all there was left to do...