Flash Fiction: Letting go

Climbing on the clouds like floating ladder leveled mattresses trying to catch up with the bastard that stole him from me—I’m holding onto his skull because it’s all I have left, but it’s slipping away fast between my fingers—not slipping down, no, being dragged. Pried from my fingers by the same force that stole him from me to begin with. My biggest concern are the eyes—the windows to his soul. But the shadow bodied thief grabs at them as I climb, pushing off the hard fluff, a layer at a time. The flesh is gone from Scott’s face, and muscles too. It looks nothing like him, and the eyes are terrifying. Bulging from their sockets, staring in every direction at once. But I can’t bear to let go.

                A voice, its pitch both unfathomable and indistinguishable.

I can hear, but not understand, and as I pull myself to the next level of cloud mass, now extended past the boundaries of the earth’s atmospheric protection, the eyes are stolen from me. Their slimy surface wrenched from between my struggling fingers.

Reversal.

I chase the shadow, grabbing at its ends as if they’re coat tails. The clouds are now gone, and I claw at the thinning air. I’m gasping for breath, suffocating in the vacuum that is rapidly taking over the sky. The stars are bright, but not bright enough, and all I can do is keep chasing the eyeballs. Trying to get them back. Trying to hold onto the only real part of him that’s left to me.

Even though I know he’s gone.

I push off of the little air that’s left, like a swimmer pushing off the edge of a lap pool, and make a dash for the eyes. The shadow reels. Showing a terrifying, unexpected face, with gnashing teeth and piercing eyes. Yellow to the depths of my stomach. Grabs the skull from beneath my left arm where it was cradled. The voice again.

It is only bone. Nothing to me. Do you want to lose it too?

                No, I cry. I’ll take it.

                It laughs. Tosses it like a ball to a small child.

                I hold it in my arms. Tears trickle like the last drops after a storm. The shadow is gone in the distance, and all I can do is retreat.

                I awake cradling the pillow.

Pomegranate Seeds

Just something short I put together for a class on Hell narratives, its not polished or really much good now that I re-read it, but I had fun writing it, and I'm experimenting with pictures...so what the hell, here it is. 

Samuel F’s blood bubbled as he stormed out to meet the night sky, and the steam it gave off rose to his sinus cavities, fogging up the lenses of his eyes. He hoped the cool air would help disperse the fumes and allow him to see again.

It had just rained, and the street light’s rippled spumes hovered both above and below him, confining him to the void between. He stumbled through the asphalt’s pockets of liquid tar, mile after mile, his sweat joining the drops on the ground, changing the water from fresh to salt. The streets were deserted, or if they weren’t, he paid no attention.

It was Samuel’s time now. “No more bending around, no more being nice,” he thought. He would spit in their faces, and kick their insides until they came pouring from their mouths. It made him smile to think about the pain they’d feel. Justice, finally.  They’d beg him at his feet, and he’d smash their pathetic noses in. But he couldn’t do it on his own. He knew himself well enough for that. Once he got home, someone would say, Samuel, can you go get me a can of pop from the fridge, and off he would go, as always, without a complaint. No. He wanted to stop caring. He wasn’t a little kid anymore, he was a man.  Old enough to be out of college, old enough to do anything he pleased.

The lights flickered and a shadow darted past his peripherals. He stopped cold in a puddle.

                A second, and then a third, each larger than the rest, scurried behind him. Samuel’s mind returned to the world around him. The buildings seemed to fade as if large sheets of fog had come in front of them; they separated him from the world with rice paper screens. The figures kept swarming. They came in waves, competing with the bursts of the storm: larger each time, surrounding him, claws and mounds of mangy hair hanging off their protruding bones. They danced in circles in the rain, and as the drops hit their bodies, they burst into liquid flames while they cackled against yellow teeth. Against his will he felt fear. The darkness drew closer, blocking the streetlights from reaching his flesh.

                “What do you want?” he yelled.