Now that we’re about midway through Horror Month (the most wonderful time of the year!), I thought I’d spend the rest of the month on-theme. Saige had this nuts idea to spin a wheel for a dual-genre piece, and I thought this would be a great way to show the versatility of the horror genre (and hopefully, my writing skills). So, I created a wheel with a ton of genres on it. Some of these were very scary to me- dystopian, crime, and comedy are something I’ve never worked in before. I set a soft limit of 1,000 words in the interest of time.
With bated breath, I spun the wheel, hoping for an easy ticket.
Aaaaand I got one I was hoping I wouldn’t get. Romance.
Not that I haven’t written some romance before, but it’s intimidating to put it in with horror in a flash setting. Romance is incredibly hard to sell on short notice- the concept of love and a relationship usually takes a full story arc to develop. So, this was very intimidating.
At first.
Then it all came to me at once, and I knew what I was going to do.
The result was my flash fiction story Babydoll, which turned out actually pretty good, so I’m submitting it for magazine publication instead. Sorry. But you can read it if it gets published!
Sooo, I tried again a few days later, and spun “dystopian.” Thus ensued a directionless dump of nothingness that I realized was no good, like, 1000 words in. For the sake of transparency and “keepin’ it real”, here are the first few hundred words. You don’t have to pretend to like it; I know you’re just being nice.
Victor and the Wolverine
“Are you shorting me, you little dickweed?” Johnny “Wolverine” Tran asked, his brow furrowed in irritation.
Victor had been shaking in his tattered boots from the moment he walked into Johnny’s place, and now the shakes became violent tremors.
“It’s all I had, sir,” Victor squeaks out. He begins to cry, a development that might’ve brought him feelings of shame if he’d been thirteen instead of twelve. “I swear it.”
Johnny leaned forward in his chair, the scuffed leather creaking under him. Victor shrank back, looking desperately to the windows for some sort of help. They would do nothing for his situation; the two windows in Johnny’s “office” were shut tight and painted black. Victor scanned the rest of the office for some sort of comfort, but found none. The items that lined the sagging shelves on cracking walls appeared useless to Victor, as most of them were broken knick-knacks that didn’t even have a proper use before the Invasion.
“It’s all you have now, I’m guessing,” snarled Johnny with a canine smile. “Where’s the rest of it?”
Victor’s tears flowed freely down his filthy cheeks. His face hadn’t been washed in days. Clean water was carefully hoarded in the Free Zone. “I gave it away,” Victor whispered. “To someone who needed it.”
Without warning or even a single sound, Johnny’s right hand was up from under his scuffed desk, and his tekkō-kagi was resting against the underside of Victor’s chin, the cold steel triggering goosebumps across the thin skin. Victor had never seen the weapon in person before; he knew most of the Free Zone kids thought it was a myth.
Victor’s breath caught and he went deathly still. Johnny began to chuckle, his hand steady as a surgeon’s under Victor’s chin. “Didn’t think they called me Wolverine for nothing, did you?”
Victor could feel the four deadly sharp blades resting against his skin just enough to sting, and he wondered if the place where the steel touched was already bleeding.
“Answer me!” Johnny suddenly barked, and Victor jumped like a gun had been shot next to his head. The deadly bear-like claw weapon clenched in his hand did not move.
Victor whimpered and forced words through his shaking mouth. “No, sir.”
Johnny smiled, an image terrifying enough to give Victor nightmares that night, if he was able to sleep at all. “You like the way that steel feels against your throat, dickweed?”
“No, sir.”
“Then come back at dusk tonight with more. Or you’ll find out what these claws feel like jammed up inside your mouth.”
Before he could process Johnny’s words, Victor was lifted painfully under his armpits by Johnny’s door guard, the same lump of a man who had escorted Victor into the office what felt like a lifetime ago.
Then Victor was falling and crashing, literally tossed out onto the street the way people used to throw their refuse out, back when sanitation was still an expected part of life. Victor had hazy memories of waving to a garbage man from his mother’s arms. That was before the Invasion.
He laid there for a long time, crying and shaking as he recovered from his brush with death at the hands of the Wolverine. Then he remembered he’d been given an order: return by dusk with more, or die for real.
Victor had found enough to fill his week’s quota, but the woman had undone him. She’d been on the street corner, just outside a hardware store on the edge of the Free Zone that Victor had just finished combing through.
Her cries were what drew him, but the blood and the thing cradled in her arms were what made Victor give away part of his quota.
“Please,” the woman pled as Victor approached warily. She sat in a pool of blood, but Victor didn’t see any wounds. “Please help him.” Then the woman had lifted the bundle for Victor to see. Swaddled in a filthy T-shirt was the tiny form of a newborn baby. It was blue and did not stir or cry.
I wrote a little more after this, but it wasn’t long before I realized I had no idea where I was going. So, in the interest of getting you guys an actually readable piece of flash, I gave up on the dystopian spin.
I know it’s cheating, but I can do whatever I want on here.
Time to spin again, and hopefully get something I can actually do!
For some reason my screenshot won’t upload, but I spun “historical”! I promise I’m not lying.
This should be fun. I did kind of have an idea recently for a gore-fest slasher scene in a pioneer settlement…
Uh oh, the gears are turning. Hope this one turns out okay.
The Guardian
The Guardian was there when the land was formed.
She was there when the Earth turned cold and the people came across the great land bridge to the north. She saw them move across the continent, searching for warmth, for plants and game. She opened her arms to these cold, curious people and found that she loved them. More than the trees and the lakes and the fish and deer and hedgehogs.
For they could love in the way that she could love.
The people loved her land, loved her trees and lakes and fish and deer and hedgehogs. They cared for the land, only taking what they had to to survive, leaving enough for the land and lakes to recover each time.
The Guardian kissed each of these people on the brow when they came into the world and in return they gave her worship and respected her land.
It was this way for centuries, and the Guardian was happy and her people were happy.
Then came the others.
#
The Guardian was there when the others came. Not by the land bridge; it had long since vanished. They came across the ocean, ferried by other forces with whom she did not associate.
She was there when the others found her land and decided to stay, decided to bring more of their people to her land.
The Guardian found that these others could love, but not in the way that her people loved.
The others loved power, loved domination, loved stepping on one another to rise. After centuries among her people, she had learned to see into the hearts of men.
What she saw in the hearts of the others was not love for her trees and lakes and fish and deer and hedgehogs. The others loved her land for what it could do for their power, their domination, their race to rise above others.
The Guardian saw the others, saw into their hearts, and understood that they would only bring suffering, imbalance, and pain. Pain to her people, who would fall to their strange diseases like rotting tree roots.
The Guardian decided, after long months of thought and meditation, that she must drive the others away. She would not use her people to do so; she understood the stain it might leave on their souls.
She would use her creatures, the ones who dwelled in her forest.
#
Richard hauled his kill toward the wooden palisade that marked the edges of the settlement.
The deer, which had been alive and pumping blood less than two hours before, now hung limp and cooling from Richard’s shoulders.
“Richard!” cried his wife, spotting his approach. “Your hunt was bountiful?”
He nodded, slinging the carcass down onto the cold, dying grass. Soon the ground would be too hard to dig in. He hoped they didn’t lose anyone to the frost in the winter: none of them had much knowledge of the climate here. It was a new world, after all.
Richard stepped toward his wife and kissed her quickly on the cheek in greeting. When he pulled away and looked at her face, he saw a strange expression take it over.
“Richard?” she said, voice thin and trembling. “What…”
His wife cut off, eyes wide and staring behind him.
Richard turned around, hand going for the hunting rifle slung across his back. But when he saw what his wife had seen, his entire body froze.
The deer, which Richard had shot dead less than two hours before, now stood on its feet, bloodied but fully alive, the fatal gunshot still shining like a star from its forehead.
Richard could not speak, only made a choked sound of surprise and disbelief.
Then the deer darted forward, straight for Richard.
Richard screamed as the deer smashed its thick skull into his hips, the impact so strong with unnatural force that his internal organs burst like overfilled sacks and his pelvic bone cracked in three places.
Richard crumpled to the cold ground, the dying grass scratching his face as he screamed until his throat bled, writhing and pissing and wishing for his mother.
His wife was paralyzed, not believing or even understanding what she had just seen.
When the deer charged again, she only stood, unmoving, too deep in the shock and madness in which her mind sheltered her. One ram from the deer’s head destroyed her womb, her uterus, her liver and kidneys.
Richard and his wife laid on the hard ground and died slowly and very painfully beside each other, too deep in their own agonies to realize the other was right there beside them.
While Richard and his wife died, an eagle dropped down from the sky over the settlement. It angled toward Henry, who was gutting a rabbit by torchlight with a dull knife. They were supposed to get fresh supplies soon, so Henry had to make do with the nearly-useless tool.
Henry screamed as the eagle descended, digging its deadly-sharp talons into the slippery skin that covered Henry’s skull, then took to the skies with great force and swiftness, taking most of the skin from Henry’s head with it. It dripped blood down to the earth as the eagle flew away, screeching with the rapture of a good hunt.
Henry died from the shock, as his heart was already defective and sensitive to stress.
Margaret saw the skin yanked from Henry’s head like a fur cap from her seat by the cookfire. She sprang to her feet and turned to run, though where she planned to run she did not know, but as she reached the trees lining one side of the settlement, she literally ran headfirst into a bear, who was already up on hind legs.
The bear roared, and when it snapped its deadly jaws shut, it did so over the face of Margaret, who struggled for a few moments, then stilled, hanging limply from the bear’s jaws.
The rest of the settlement was destroyed in a similar manner as the creatures of the forest and plains converged on them, guided by orders from the Guardian.
The Guardian spared only the eleven children of the settlement, using wolves to chase them away from the massacre and guide them toward her own people, who would take them in and raise them to love the land and not use it for their own selfish gain.
When the massacre was finished, the Guardian ordered her creatures to take the bodies with them, back to their burrows and nests and caves, where they could make use of their bones and tissue. Her land was safe once again, and the Guardian came down to the Earth.
She walked the settlement, inspecting the way these others had tried to live. A barrier of trees cut from her forests guarded its borders on three sides. She raised one hand and sharpened it to a point, then leaned down and carved a word into one of the posts.
It was a single word, one that meant ‘guardian of balance’ in a tongue that none but her people would understand. When she finished, she smiled and ascended back to her place in the sky.
The word was CROATOAN.
Alright, I’m satisfied with that. I’ve always been fascinated by the Roanoke mystery, and it’s also my favorite season of American Horror Story– it scared the crap out of me. I love how they posit that the disappearance of the settlers was a protective measure by a nature goddess (our mother Lady Gaga), so I explored that angle here. I know it’s nothing groundbreaking, but I had fun with it.
Enjoy your spooky reads and watches this Horror Month- I’m right there with you! Stay tuned for my wrap-up post at the end of the month. Maybe we’ve read or watched some of the same things!
Stay spooky!
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