This Is How You Die | Don’t Listen, Change the Channel! - Part One
By Amanda Cecelia Lang
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! This week, we have a fantastic… I feel like “story” doesn't quite describe it. This week, please enjoy a few thousand words of the most energetic writing I've seen in a long time. I don't think you'll be of two minds about it. - The Editor
This Is How You Die | Don’t Listen, Change the Channel!
By Amanda Cecelia Lang
It’s late inside the TV glow, those slantwise infomercial hours in the void beyond midnight, when your little neon world goes berserk. One second, some sales clown is on there, hypnotizing you, chopping away with the latest crap-o-matic gizmo—then BAM!
TV dude’s spray-on hair hard-cuts to static, the glass screen of your 19” Sony pulses and bulges, and with a sound like sanity cracking, a smoky lightning-bolt fissure splits the TV.
Blood red static on the left, flame blue static on the right.
What the actual hellfire? You blink against the murky two-toned broadcast and rise from your couch slump, an empty Doritos bag sliding off your belly. The TV speakers snap-crackle-and-pop and electric comet-throated voices hiss your name, hiss hello.
Two voices, separate but fizzing and garbling overtop each other.
The hell kind of outer limits bullshit is this? You swear you see shapes in both sides of the red-and-blue static. Eyes, lots of eyes, an abnormal spidery myriad of eyes. And two jagged mouths. Even the smokiest of logic suggests this is some kind of trippy TV show. And frankly, my dear, if it is, the cable company’s gonna owe you big time for that busted screen. You lean over the coffee table to finger the cracked TV glass and—ZAP! Freaking ouch! It’s like the thing bit you or electrocuted you or brain-buzzed you all at once.
You stagger back. Blood sags from your buggered finger, and suddenly you don’t feel so hot, like sideways woozy, in fact. For several drunken heartbeats, swirling blue-and-red static seeps from the TV, and everything, the couch, the coffee table, the whole soupy dizzy world shines in super-mega technicolor. Those dueling voices ooze from the speakers and clog your head, mucking around your ear canals, sticking to your jawbone.
“Whoa, one at a time, you weirdos, my brain’s all squeezed up!” You suck your bloody finger and glance at the empty Doritos bag, buzzing with double-vision, but this feels freakier than any junk food hangover. Processed cheese and bizzarro ghost aliens. You grope for the remote control, but to button-smash the volume or the channel—that is the question.
Amanda Cecelia Lang is a horror author and aspiring monster-slayer from Colorado. As a diehard scary movie nerd, her favorite things are meta-slashers, ‘80s nostalgia, and the rise of a fierce final girl. Her scary stories haunt the dark corners of many popular podcasts, magazines, and anthologies, including The Deadlands, Ghoulish Tales, Uncharted, Gamut, Cast of Wonders, and Darkness Beckons. Her debut short story collection Saturday Fright at the Movies: 13 Tales from the Multiplex (Dark Matter INK) is now playing. You can stalk her work at amandacecelialang.com—just don’t be surprised if she leaps out at you from the shadows.
Copyright © 2025 Amanda Cecelia Lang