Flip Book

The Flip Book is a creepy story about a boy who loves to draw animated stick figures on the pages of his school books.

As a kid, I loved making flip books. During class, I would while away the time by drawing stick figures on the corner of each page in my copy books. When you flipped through the pages, the animated stick figures moved around, waving their arms, jumping or doing somersaults.

There was one flip book in particular that I spent a lot of time and effort on. It was very long and I drew a little stick man walking into the page, waving at me, and then walking off. I would look at it at least a dozen times the day that I made it, but after a while, it got boring. Kids are rarely entertained by one thing for very long. I tossed it over my shoulder and never gave it a second thought.

Years later, I was cleaning out my bedroom closet, when I came across the old flip book. I could barely remember making it and, for old times sake, I flipped through it once more. The pages hadn’t aged at all. I flipped through a second time. The little stick man walked onto the page and waved at me, but he didn’t walk off.

Instead, a second stick man joined him.

As the second stick figure walked across the page, I noticed he was carrying something in its hand. It looked like an iron bar or a baseball bat. He stood next to the first stick man for a moment, then whacked the poor fellow across the head with the bat. The stick man fell to the ground, and the second stick figure began beating his head again and again and again until it was a bloody pulp.

Bloody red ink ran from the stick man’s broken body and flowed across the page. The killer stick figure proceeded to bend down, and tear the first stick man’s body apart, limb by limb. Once he was done, he bent the arms and legs and turned them into letters. Then, he arranged them on the page to form a single word.

He grabbed the base of his own round head and ripped it off his shoulders. Then he tore off his legs and one of his arms. His twisted body parts formed a second word. When I read it, I immediately tossed the flip book into the fireplace and burned it.

It read: “You’re next.”