Microfiction Roundup
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(CW: Horror, mentions of death, monsters, blood)
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Shallow
He nudged the bundle into the river with the tip of his foot. No need to ruin his sneakers, not that it mattered. Not that he couldn't get new ones, go on playing house and pretending that they hadn't ruined a lot more than a pair of shoes.
Well, the less there was to remember the better, he supposed.
The river was shallow but it swallowed her body up with little more than a ripple.
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Emerald
They had dressed the valley in the night, dyed the emerald hills a sickly purple-black, dimmed the sky and filled the streets with a thousand sparkling eyes pointed to the station in silent reverence, at the man tied to the tower mast, bare feet grazing the roof.
A full house then, for the little spectacle they would make of him.
In the distance, the repeater walls shimmered their warning, dazzling and terrible. The end of the world, at least for him.—
Warm
The lights flickered once, twice.
It was getting worse.
He pressed his face to the console, warm, almost hot to the touch and listened for a while to its rhythmic thrumming.
How many were still running the machines down there, toiling away with their minds blown out and their bodies soon to follow?
He let his thoughts pour through the metal, pushed down through the dirt and the miles and miles of cable.
Thirty-seven left. It wouldn't be enough.
—
Bone
The thing was leaking something on the floor, dark and tacky like molasses.
A sight he would always remember, broken legs curled around itself like a wounded spider, no flesh, no bone inside, merely endless black pitch bubbling from its mouth, its nose, its empty chest.
When it looked up at them from the table, its eyes were filled with such burning hatred that their bodies should immolate on the spot.
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Radiation
From its hill, the tower sprayed a grand radiation into the night, a signal flare that hit in waves so dense that even the trees glittered and crackled with its passing.
Where once concrete laced the town with dull gray ribbons, rivers of quicksilver ran into the storm drains, trickled into the cairns and sewers, bringing the tower's mind electric message like an ignition sequence to the roots below.—
Chimera
The effect was nauseating, like an infinity mirror in his head. He saw himself from two sets of eyes, disheveled, half-mad, gaping at the chimera of wires and legs and everything he was terrified of becoming.
He raised his arm and watched his flickering twin do the same, felt the confusion and fear swirling in its mind as it struggled to disobey.
“What are you?” It murmured, terror flashing across its stolen face.
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Radio
He never listened to the broadcast. The headphones lay discarded under piles of ruined papers where the last of the radio operators left them decades before.
Why listen, when its poisonous flux flooded his mind, when he could feel the trees crack and the hills shudder with the passing of the carrier wave.
Why bother, when the very air came alive with a hundred minds sparkling through the static, a hundred voices screaming out as they bent to the tyranny of his words.
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Nightmare
Some houses bled, some writhed, some twitched, straining against metal spires pinning them to the ground like insects on a board. Some wandered along the hills, pecking at the ground like top heavy chickens, while a great waterfall spilled from the windows of an office building and crashed silently into the snapping pavement.
Too incomprehensible to be real, too real to be a nightmare.
Over it all, half a cow floated placidly through the sky.—
Blind
Three days it went on. Three days the woman dragged herself through the town, mind blown out, wailing and tearing pieces from herself like a ghost trying to escape its skin.
And when he couldn't take it anymore, when he was on the edge of doing something unforgivable, she looked up at him from blind, empty eye sockets and begged him to make it stop.
Well, he'd always been a coward.
It was a mercy when they finally found her face down in the reeds—
Snow
Blood on the snow was a sure sign of trouble.
This, though? This grey ooze, sizzling and spitting and crawling its way across the patio…
When he burst into the kitchen, wild-eyed and raving, he caught Rita with a bottle of ketchup half raised to her mouth, red staining the jagged maw in her chest. For a brief moment, they locked eyes in startled terror.
“Oh, you met Carl?” she said casually, shoving the bottle behind the stove. “Yeah, we mostly ignore Carl.”
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Beast
Glass rained to the floor in the hallway.
The house made a strange noise then, a low, guttural grinding from deep in it's walls.
A warning.
What lurked outside was forbidden to enter, made to wait at the doors, never cross the threshold.
But the rules that bound them were broken now, their overseer laid out on the dining room table. The house railed against the transgression, growling like a beast as intruders echoed down its halls.
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Incarnate
The picture of misery, piteous incarnate. The man was talented at feeling sorry for himself, if nothing else.
His eyes were glassy, fixed, his face wearing a strange expression as if straining to hear murmurs from another room.
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Fall
She found him with the ashes of his latest failure fluttering around his shoulders, lost in misery, three delicate finger bones clutched in his hand.
“No finesse, no control,” she sighed, brushing ash from the console and watching it fall to the scorched tiles. “Now look what you've done.”
She knows he’s heard her, can tell by the almost imperceptible flinch. A phrase that cuts to the core of his trouble, she's afraid. They'll try again once he's forgotten.
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Lace
The kettle is whistling along with the noise in his head. A major third, his brain supplies helplessly. Ding dong, Beethoven’s 5th. He considers throwing it through the kitchen window, fills his chipped blue mug instead.
And truly, he doesn't even like tea, but it’s something to look at besides the blood on the counters, the cupboards, the lace curtains that used to be eggshell 45 minutes ago. Something to think about other than whatever the hell just happened
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Timber
It was a sad stand of timber, a half mile sliver of old growth spared by some quirk of suburban churn.
And yet there was a strange sort of aura about those woods.
At night, the superstore parking lots frosted its edges in an amber glow. No more than that. The heart of it stood like a wall, a strange, defiant sort of gloom that didn't suffer trespassers.
It was well known back then that a fair few who went poking around never did seem to come back out.
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Chop
We swung our axes neatly at their bases, a ring of righteous saints in our sullied Sunday best, too drunk on blood and luck and victory to see how sharp our teeth had grown.
One by one, we culled those hulking beasts our fathers nurtured in their ignorance, winnowed down their numbers until the least and lowliest remained.
And when the last chop hit the marrow, our axes rang out a strange question.
One soon to be answered by the homesteads and the hollows.
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Faint
They never did fix the roof.
Every night, she listened to the faint pitter patter from the ceiling and thought about the night the sky opened up. Ten dazzling minutes it lasted, people flying to the heavens with their arms outstretched, with that look on their face.
And when they came crashing back down, they made such an awful mess.
It was strange how nobody seemed to remember that. All those people, all that mess.
And they never did fix the roof.
—Never
After a few moments, he crawls to his feet. He looks a wax man, or what she thinks a wax man must look like, having never had such a thing in the valley. His eyes are glassy, movements stiff, his face wearing a strange expression as if straining to hear murmurs from another room.
"Very good. We must persevere in the face of such weaknesses," she says, in a singsong way. "For the soul is weak, and easily parted from its vessel."
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Trail
They march in a solemn parade, lines of blank-faced men and women trudging to some far-off place.
When they pass, a trail of glimmering ashes follows in their wake. The swaths they cut through the fields can be seen for miles and miles like a bright wound in the night.
No hill or river sways their course. No town or farmstead stands at sunrise.
Ripple (Original short)
I was sewn from the scraps they left behind.
In the quiet hours, I can feel their restless shifting in the dust, the ebb and flow of their memories rippling behind my eyes.
I whisper their names like a secret litany, words sharp and foreign on my tongue as I imagine living in a time long before the sky went dark and the halls were infested with things like me.
