It didn't make me feel as lonely then as it does now. He didn't. Whatever it is. It didn't have the same effect that it does now. It was actually kind of the opposite in most ways. Buggahead was a friend to me when I was young and needed companionship . Growing up in a small town, it wasn't weird or creepy to crave a kinship with someone, or something, and I felt lucky to have it provided to me so easily but also so unexpectedly. My friends and family just wrote him off in the simplest way possible: an imaginary friend.
"This is normal for her age," people would say while my parents looked down at me with looks that I can now identify as embarrassed concern. "She'll grow out of it."
"Is our daughter a sociopath?," I once heard my mom ask my father.
"No. I don't think so. I think she's lonely and this is some help to her for now." This was another way of parroting what their friends said to make them feel better. It's normal for her age. She'll grow out of it. Neither of these things were true, but if normalizing the abnormal was a coping mechanism for them I surely didn't care. I barely noticed. Buggahead and I were busy learning about each other. We had a lot to learn coming from such different times and places.
Buggahead came to me by way of an old chest that my dad and I found at a flea market. Dad and those god damn flea markets. The coast of Maine is dotted with them and there was literally no chance in hell we could just drive by one. My dad wasn't a gambling man. He never so much as bought a scratch ticket that I can recall. But there was something in that brain of his that was convinced he would someday find some sort of holy grail at a roadside junk emporium. It probably happens from time to time. He never got so lucky.
I hated them. There was rarely anything there of interest to me and besides, I wasn't even tall enough to see what was perched upon the plywood slabs, usually laid across some makeshift sawhorse; two by fours scavenged and haphazardly joined to support rotting tables loaded down with useless trinkets long stuck in a material purgatory between retail and a landfill.
Mostly I just followed my dad around through dusty dirt lots, clinging to his leg whenever he stopped to negotiate a transaction. On this day he was haggling over fifty cents for some rusty old drill bits. The chest sat under the table, clearly too heavy to be trusted on top of it. It looked like something that treasure would be buried inside of, or even something that would get hoisted from the bottom of the sea - a relic from an unknown shipwreck. I was tracing the outline of a tarnished metal clasp on its lid when I saw an old, grizzled man peering at me over the top of it.
"You like this." It wasn't a question. And he wasn't wrong. There was something I did like about it, but I just stared back at him, awkwardly cowed. His head disappeared back above the moldy plywood. "Tell you what," he was now back to conducting business with my dad again in the same way they all did, using the same words and turns of phrase. "I'll give you the drill bits if you take that chest off my hands. If I don't have to lift that thing back into my truck again, I can consider it a profitable day. I'm too old and my back hurts every time I look at the damn thing." My dad crouched beside me.
"You want this old thing, Elle?" I did. I didn't know why but I wanted it badly. I looked at him and nodded. He stood up. "Alright, mister. You've got yourself a deal." More tired verbiage of the flea market underworld. He reached under the table and grabbed a hold of an old, crusty leather handle affixed to the side of the chest and shifted his weight back, trying to drag it out from beneath the table unsuccessfully. "Jesus Christ, is this thing full of bricks?"
"I told you," the old man said, a smile breaking to reveal corn-colored teeth outlined in black. "It makes no goddamn sense for that thing to weigh as much as it does."
But it did. Buggahead lived inside.
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Buggahead
Horror#1 IN FRIGHT!!! A girl happens upon an old chest while at a flea market with her father. What she doesn't know is that the chest is home to something that will attach itself to her forever.
