Frightmares: A Fistful of Flash Fiction Horror (6 page)

SEE JACK RUN

L. A. TOBIN

Before Jack can even think about running, it’s already too late.

The Crenshaw boy holds Jack’s scrawny arm in his catcher’s mitt of a hand, pinning him to the wall next to the urinals.

Cars drone past the barred windows of the nondescript brick structure. A distant siren calls out.

The Crenshaw boy—
don’t ever call him Lionel
—holds Jack in place. There was no way in hell Jack could outrun Lionel Crenshaw, anyway. And certainly not Billy Norton, who flies like a fart and runs like a queer dog. Supposedly a vicious, queer dog scared Billy’s mother when she was pregnant with Billy. That’s why he runs like a queer dog.

“School taxes!” yells Lionel behind a malicious, toothy smirk. He pounds his dirty fist against Jack’s chest several times, knocking the wind out of him. “Taxes, buddy. Taxes. You have to pay your dues. Oh, did I mention
TAXES?
” Lionel takes hold of Jack’s spaghetti arm and begins smacking him in his wounded, freckled face. “Quit hitting yourself,” chants Lionel. “Quit hitting yourself, quit hitting yourself.”

Billy Norton spreads a hockey-player’s grin, but falls into a bout of heavy coughing. “Stop hitting yerself, stop hitting (
coughcough
) yerself. Shit (
cough cough
)–smoker’s lung,” he wheezes and grins again.

“Well, maybe, you know, it’s time to quit smoking. Ya think? Maybe?” Jack had the words out of his mouth before he even realized he’d spoken.

“Listen to the dead guy,” hisses Lionel. “Awful brave for a dead guy.”

“Dead guy,” repeats Billy, and then breaks into another fit of coughing.

“What a fuckin’ pisser.”

“What a (
cough
) pisser,” repeats Billy.

A jab to the guts brings bony Jack to his knees gasping, sucking hard to bring air back into his deflated lungs.

Lionel begins searching Jack’s pants and jacket pockets.

Billy slaps Lionel on the back, and Lionel breaks into a fit of laughter, his face turning cherry red. Billy laughs, too, but then starts hacking again.

“I . . . told you . . . you should . . . quit,” Jack said.

His words seep up from the tile floor in a series of short, labored breaths. Dribbling sounds from the urinal; buzzing from overhead lights, muffled traffic passing outside window and . . . freedom.

“You got to be fuckin kiddin’ me!” cries Lionel.

Billy watches Lionel’s face carefully, hoping to glimpse the birth of a sadistic idea. And there it appears in short order.

“There’s something I wanna do,” says Lionel. “Something I wanna try.” He tilts Jack’s bruised and bloody face towards his and grins. The grin blossoms into a cancerous mask of evil. Lionel slips his hand over the smaller boy’s mouth. Jack begins to squeal beneath Lionel’s smothering grip.

Lights.

Oh, the beautiful lights.

It ends.

Jack falls into the black of unconsciousness.

“I got an idea,” repeats Lionel.

Seeing what Lionel does next, Billy wishes Jack had run.

L. A. Tobin
was born in Newfoundland and now lives in Ontario. She loves horror and suspense (who doesn't?). She has been writing stories since childhood and recently finished a suspense thriller/horror novel. Writing a collection of short stories and another novel are her next projects.

80 SQUARE FEET

JASON BURUM

The visceral terror I once felt has long been replaced by anger and aggression. The thoughts of any hope I once had have regressed into anxiety and depression. I’ve lost my other, a best friend, my sister and my nephews along with my only child. All I have left is 80 square feet of cold white tile and Rex. I inherited this palace of porcelain on the sheer luck that they don’t have the motor skills to open anything that requires pulling. They operate only in one gear: forward. Moan and go, groan and get, slow and straight ahead—that’s how them boys roll.

I’ve enjoyed six or seven days in this upscale setting. Romantic candle-lit nights spent listening through the ventilation system to the sweet sounds of hundreds of walking corpses lurking outside at the prospect I might still be in here. I’m down to a half of a package of beef jerky, three juice pouches, eight pieces of that cheap pink gum they stuff into piñatas and a nearly empty bottle of yellow mustard.

It’s hard not to laugh at the situation I’m in, but at the same time it’s hard not to cry over the situations I’ve had to endure getting here. To say that I’ve been to hell and back, hanging on by the seat of my pants is an understatement. I’ve seen things no one should have to witness . . . been forced to do things that no man should ever have to experience. I’ve somehow managed to survive during a time when the odds against survival seemed practically insurmountable.

I somehow managed to survive the onslaught . . . only to box myself into a cold, damp corner with no means of escape. Eighty square feet of hard reality slaps me in the face.

The sound of the door creaking as it strains to hold up against a horde of determined creatures isn’t nearly as unsettling as the sound the creaking hinges make as they slowly give away. The eerie screech of the metal doorjamb twisting against the burgeoning mass on the opposite side makes me squeeze Rex tightly, but it’s the sound of the screws in the hinges grinding against the jamb as the door gives way that makes me whimper and shake.

This is it.

All I can think about is how I’m not ready to go.

I’m just not ready. And in that final moment before the lights go out and I cease to be, it hits me:

“Who’s going to take care of Rex?”

Jason Burum
is a fiction writer who loves giving his readers a thorough creeping with his stories. Since the age of eleven he’s spent his days writing stories of fear and terror for whomever he could convince to read them. He resides in Oakland with his wife and two children.

A JURY OF HIS PEERS

ANDREW ALFORD

The snap that fried him was not that of Exhibit A: the tracks he’d chained her to, smeared with the crimson path of her body.

Nor was it B, that looked like a mannequin’s arm draped over an iron rail, as over a porcelain tub.

Exhibit C was her bra, strapped to a torso half-blackened at impact.

Exhibit D showed her head and face: sculpture out of not-enough clay.

Neither of these did him in.

It was not even the passengers’ accompanying testimony about the rumbling underfoot of someone becoming something, “like basketballs trapped beneath the rail-car floors.”

The photograph that doomed him he’d taken himself. As it passed among the jurors hand to hand, a woman vomited, a man swooned. Twelve times his trophy photo brought the girl together again for them in her last moment alive. Her face still whole, her eyes still focused—looking right at them but recognizing only him.

It made murderers of them all.

Andrew Alford
was born and raised in Elizabeth, New Jersey. You can find more of his short fiction in
Space and Time Magazine
and
Supernatural Tales
, and hopefully digging their way up out of several other slush piles.

I LIVE IN YOUR CUPBOARD

SANTIAGO EXIMENO

I live in your cupboard, hidden among your clothes. I sleep during daytime, one of my heads leaning onto your old slippers, my body draped over a plastic hanger. At night I wake up and spy on you from the inside, through the crack of the door your mother leaves open. I know you know I live here, I know you’ve told your parents a lot of times.

I hate you just for that.

For you discovered me.

I’d like to go out and tear you to pieces with my teeth, to make you pay what you owe me for your betrayal.

But I won’t do it. I hide among your clothes and wait, as I always did, suffering my fear in silence.

Because I’m not lurking; I’m skulking.

I’m skulking from the monster that lives under your bed.

Santiago Eximeno
(Spain, 1973) has published (in Spanish) several horror/dark fantasy books like
Bebés Jugando con Cuchillos
(Grupo AJEC, 2008) or
Capriccio
(23 Escalones, 2010). He has received four Ignotus Award (a national sci-fi/horror/fantasy award in Spain) for Best Short Story and Best Anthology.

THE CHILDREN OF FAITH

SEAN TEMPLETON

The council had deliberated; its verdict was clear. Two bearded men, pulled by a single black horse, now depart westward under a bent white canvas and a fuliginous fog. At least before there were bodies, there was something to blame.

Now, just the returning blacksmith’s din and no laughter from children. Not since ‘06 had such a colony sent out for help; but five years isn’t long for the servants of God.

It’s obvious what the pair will tell the Columbus police. They’ll start with the blackbirds–say they’d come in like always, searching for grain in the village square. But this time, they’ll say, there was something in their eyes: something hellish. They’ll explain three children dropping dead near the schoolhouse, and that the primitive colony prayed in a circle.

The pair will report that a stranger then approached wearing outsiders’ garb, a tan sack over his shoulder. That he asked why they prayed. And when they’d told him, he’d spoken:

“And your god doesn’t care? That your children, that
his
children die?” They’ll remember him asking. “
Hell
in birds’ eyes? Can’t he redeem them? Prophets before
your
prophets, they wrote of a god called Hades. He damned another
deity
with nothing but pomegranate seeds! You think he can’t condemn
blackbirds
? Your god refuses you; but Hades speaks. He is real. If I bring him your grain, he’ll accept it as pomegranate seeds.”

The pair will recall that the village fell silent when “Hades’ messenger” demanded its oldest text, a calligraphic
Ausbund
, in return. The hush careered into fury, they’ll say, and the stranger left carrying grain.

But, the messengers will explain, he returned with red seeds on the night two more children died, and the sobbing Reverend reluctantly accepted his demands. The stranger flung the seeds about the square before departing again.

The men will tell how the colony woke among bird carcasses, but that the reverend hid the
Ausbund
nonetheless. Then, they’ll claim a plow-man crossed town at noon to find the schoolteacher dead, his schoolchildren missing. The authorities will hear about the council, about its verdict. They’ll hear that . . .

But my daydream dissipates.

. . . I
hope
they’ll call me Hades’ son, something divine. But in truth, I just couldn’t help myself.

I saw the colony’s sign from a Corvette’s backseat and took foot after I poisoned the driver. The birds were a beautiful coincidence, the town’s prayers pristine irony. All it took was pomegranate seeds, some liquid strychnine in the seeds and a meal, and I got what I wanted.

Not their
Ausbund
, of course. My bag carries folklore, not
fantasy.

No, I craved their uncertainty. I want their doubt. I want to brandish my knife at their young as we trudge up this hillside, to look in their timorous eyes and tell them “there is no God,” and “relax, I won’t hurt you . . . but I’m your god now.”

Sean Templeton
grew up in Dickinson, North Dakota. He currently attends Minnesota State University in Moorhead, MN, for English Writing and Business Administration. While he has had several poems published, Sean is just beginning to write prose. His first few pieces have been in his long-time favorite horror genre.

SALLY’S DREAM

GARY R. HOFFMAN

The person standing over her bed had a very large knife in their hand. The knife had a shiny silver blade and red handle.

“What do you want?” Sally asked with a shaky voice.

“Do you not remember me?”

“No. I have no idea who you are.”

“Think hard, and I’ll return when you remember. It will mean nothing if you don’t know who I am.”

Sally woke with a jolt. Her gown was wet with sweat and her heart pounded. She glanced around the empty room. Her bladder ached. She threw the blanket back and heard something clatter to the floor. When she turned on the light, she saw a large, silver-bladed knife with a red handle on the floor by her bed.