Michael Myers, My Dream Boyfriend
Or that one dream where Michael Myers happened to be my boyfriend.
It is the middle of the day, and I am out shopping at Costco with my boyfriend. I’m in my early twenties so my boyfriend is both the worst and the best. We are here shopping for peanut butter or Oreos or hot dogs or something that doesn’t actually matter because we’re not really shopping. Like with many dysfunctional relationships, shopping like any task isn’t the real thing we are doing here. What we are doing is testing the bonds of our attachment. If I go down this aisle without telling you, will you follow? Wait patiently for my return? Will we meet up surprised and grinning in the frozen food aisle? Or will you say you’ve had it and leave me for good?
While contemplating the price point of pads over tampons, my boyfriend does something odd. He takes the woman standing close beside me and rams her body on a small end shelf hook. She kicks and screams and so do I. Michael knows that I don’t like to be rushed out of the store by the police and an angry mob before we have checked out. Today, though, Michael is in a mood. It’s dark and has a body count.
I push our cart away from the screaming woman just as Michael silences her with a carving knife on sale he picked up in the houseware department. I can tell he really likes it because instead of leaving it sticking out of her skull or gut like he sometimes is wont to do, he carries it with him as he lumbers beside me toward the macaroni samples lady.
“Two please,” I tell her.
She is frozen in horror at my boyfriend, towering above us.
“Don’t worry, he won’t hurt you,” I say as I take three small cups of macaroni and a couple tiny wooden spoons.
The woman eeks out a complaint that Michael cuts short with his new favorite blade.
I hand him a cup of mac n cheese once the samples lady has dropped to the floor. My clean Black hands graze his blood-caked dirty, thick fingers. He grunts a thanks and my heart flutters. There’s some carnage in our wake, but I’m not alone here with Michael, and despite everything he does, the one thing he never does is leave me.
I keep pushing our cart, tossing items in that don’t make sense. Diapers from the fridge. A jar of best friends’ feet. A carton of testicles. I don’t know what list I am using, but Michael doesn’t seem to mind as he slaughters his way down every aisle. If anyone so much as casts a shadow on me, he brings them to ruin. One man who called me sir gets pressed through the metal grates of the aisles into bloody, meaty cubes.
Everything is going perfect. It’s the best shopping day we’ve had in a while. No cops come, probably cause they’re too busy drinking or fucking or being assholes somewhere else in town, and the angry mob is too afraid to take the slaughter seriously. Most try to run, the ones who don’t are either struck down or left cowering in the wake of me, my shopping cart, and my boyfriend, Michael Myers.
Then at some point, I leave Michael to check out the electronics section. There’s a sale on TVs that will eat you in your sleep.
The sales man comes over, grin loaded with teeth like knives. “Looking for the fright of your life?”
“No thanks, I already have a boyfriend.” I try to ignore the way his teeth glint, shiny white razors, or how his eyes are pools I want to drown people in.
“A boyfriend? Ma’am, I’m talking about enter-tain-ment. Capital E! Can a boyfriend give you that?”
I smile. “Oh, my boyfriend can. Ten whole movies worth of entertainment.”
He shakes his shaved head. There’s a spider web tattoo on it. “What you’re talking about is love. What I got to offer is eternity. An eternity of television action with you at the center. Every day a wonder. Every night a feast.”
The man talks on and on, his spider web tattoo growing until his whole body is encased in an inky black web. Hours pass, listening to this man talk of TVs that could swallow me whole. I like the way he talked of annihilation. It reminds me of my boyfriend and the quietness that lingers around him like flies.
I turn to look for Michael. He is not in the electronics section or the houseware section, trying on a worksuit. He’s not in the aisle with all the cleaning supplies, their bottles glowing radiant and toxic. Or with the out of season jack-o'-lantern, flickering by the checkouts.
I search and search for Michael, but all I can find is the carnage he has left behind. Where is my boy? My big bloody boy? Had the angry mob amassing in the baby aisle gotten to him? Where had he gone and why had he left?
That is when the fear came in. Micheal was there, here with me, and then he wasn’t. Then he was back again at the end of a long, long aisle of empty shelves. Through his white mask, I could tell his eyes burned for me.
“Michael!” I called and ran to him, pushing my shopping cart in his direction, a bullet of love. “Michael!”
No matter how fast I ran to him, I could not reach him. Not until he wanted me to. Then as if I breathed him in, he rushed toward, face blank and knife extended.
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I had that dream, not in such vivid television-eating detail but with the same dream quality when I was 19, around the time Halloween II (2009) was coming out. I was at Costco with my boyfriend who was Michael Myers. I loved him, but I knew who he was and what he did because he was doing it right there in my dream in front of me. I didn’t mind, though, because in the dream, Michael’s presence felt dark and ominous but that wasn’t directed at me. It was like a shield.
Then I drifted off and began talking to some other guy who I remember being like Michael but more human, mid, and regular. Then the dream shifted, and I couldn’t find Michael. Dread and fear filled me because I was no longer behind the wall of Michael’s violent protections but outside of it.
I remember when I woke up from that dream, I thought it was kinda scary. I had that lingering feeling that Michael was still there but mad at me for abandoning him. I think I even considered ways I could convince Michael that I was still his special final girl.
This dream was the product of my anxious feelings around romantic relationships at the time. I did see relationships and romantic partners as an absolute lose-lose horrorshow, like a good old horror movie. In slashers, there is no escape from the killer and the romance of being totally obliterated by a force outside of your control a-la Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. You are in their sights and you are dead unless you fight or kill your way out, but either way, you are going to be scarred in ways unmeasurable.
And maybe not everyone’s romantic lives in their late teens and early twenties felt like this. Kill or be killed. Date or be alone. Fuck or be fucked up. For me, it did, except for those moments walking with Michael down the aisles of Costco shopping for the banal weirdness only found in dreams.
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