Urban Legends
Christina Olson
If you pick up a hitchhiker, they will stab you to death and you will die. If you go camping when it’s your time of the month bears will smell it and come eat you while you sleep. If you pick up a pretty girl in a party dress and take her to her house, the house will be abandoned because she died thirty years ago. When you get home, you will discover the hook hanging from the driver’s-side door.
Catherine the Great died fucking a horse. Richard Gere had to get a gerbil pulled out of his butt. Clara Bow blew the entire USC football team. Elton John had to get his stomach pumped and all that came out was semen. Rod Stewart got his stomach pumped once. All that came out was semen.
If you are a woman driving along at night and a car behind you flashes its brights, it is because a man is hiding in the back seat with a knife. If you are a woman and you walk to your car alone at night in a parking garage, check under the car. Someone is under it. He will cut your Achilles tendon, he will hobble you. He will take you to a bunker and make you his sex slave. Don’t flash your headlights at a car. It’s filled with gang members who will pull a U-turn. They will take you to a warehouse and make you their sex slave.
If you die in a dream, you will never wake up because you will have died. In real life, I mean. Haven’t you heard this one? If you live, you will die. You will die, you will die.
CHRISTINA OLSON is the author of a book of poems, Before I Came Home Naked. Recent writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Southern Review, Quarterly West, River Styx, Nimrod, CutBank, and Salamander. She is the poetry editor of Midwestern Gothic, and lives both in Georgia and online at <www.thedrevlow-olsonshow.com>.