What Nightmares Fear

Blackness filled the skies, a choking acidic haze. The ground quivered with each step the Thing took, the jumbled monstrosity of angles and shadows heaving its way across the town. Its tendrils snaked in every direction.

Wendy lay below the window, heart pounding, terrified but unable to look away.

“Almost too late,” a voice said – soft, ancient, whispering.

Wendy spun around. There was a man standing in her house, a straw hat on his head and his hand on the handle of a question mark umbrella.

“How–”

“How did I get in?” The man shook his head. “Not the most interesting of questions.”

Behind him, she could see the corner of a battered blue box.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Wendy,” she replied. “Wendy Marsh.”

“Stay here, Wendy Marsh.” He opened the door. “I’m going to have a word with our friend out there.”

“You can’t!” she squeaked. “It’ll kill you. Like everyone else. Turned them inside out.”

The man smiled, tipped his hat, and went out.

He stood before the thing, this tiny little man with his umbrella against a thing vast as the night.

And from where Wendy was watching, it looked like the monster was trembling.

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Word Count: 199

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction. Thanks to A Mixed Bag for the photo prompt!

Property Damage

Dust trickled down the unsteady brickwork, landing like dry raindrops on the shattered sidewalk. Shards of glass sparkled under empty window frames. Right across the third floor, three deep gashes cut through brick and wood.

“Claws,” the foreman muttered. “Play havoc on the structure.”

Charlie tucked a blond lock under his hardhat.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “you ever find any… souvenirs?”

“Souvenirs?” The foreman rolled his eyes. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? Probably have all the posters on your wall and everything.”

Charlie shifted. “Well…”

“First time these things showed up,” the foreman said, “they were impressive. Terrifying, but impressive. And when the other lot started, I was cheering them on like everyone else.” He wiped sweat from his forehead. “But the property damage, road closures…”

“Good for business, though,” Charlie replied.

The foreman grinned. “That it is.”

Sirens rang out and he sighed.

“Get to a shelter,” he told Charlie. “We don’t want to be in the open when they come.”

As they walked away, Charlie glanced back.  Black against the horizon, he saw the rearing shape of the dragon, wings spread, and the gleaming blade of the battle suit rising up to meet it.

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Word Count: 198

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction. Thanks to J Hardy Carrol for the prompt photo!

Party Above the Clouds

Laughter echoed through the dirigible. Wine corks popped, letting foam splash into thin glasses. The band played on and the party swayed with the music.

Anna pressed her nose up against the glass, looking at the ground far below, almost lost in the wreath of clouds. She remembered looking down before, when the cityscape had spread out in a mosaic. Bright lights had shimmered amongst mile-high skyscrapers. Other dirigibles had drifted in the wind, like floating lanterns burning bright. When the third moon had risen, everything had lit up in waves of blue.

There was no light below now, only a marbled darkness beneath the churning clouds. Lightning flashed and she could almost hear the crack of thunder through the soundproofed glass.

“A toast!” her father cried, her hair hanging in disarray, his tie undone.

He climbed onto a table, tapping his glass. The dancing stopped and the music slowed as every head turned to look at him.

“A toast to our home!” He raised his glass and the blue wine shifted like an ocean tide. “To Beovorn!”

“To Beovorn!” the others echoed.

Anna watched a cascading orange cloud, moving slowly towards them, reaching out with tendrils of fire.

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Word Count: 199

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction. Photo credit to A Mixed Bag.

The Crew Comes on Monday

Demolition started Monday. The crew would come in with their wrecking ball, smashing through brick and wood, reducing it all to pebbles and matchsticks. The dust would rise like a great mist and then there would only be silence.

The building stood and remembered the things that would soon be lost.

Memories were etched into wood and stone, drifting like ghosts in the stillness.

If you listened closely, you could hear them.

The laugh of a young child, one of seven, fighting to survive in a room made for two.

The tears of a new widow that had stained deep into the crumpled letter in her hands, making the words run in black rivers.

The slamming of a door by hands that never opened it again.

The clapping of proud parents, eyes glistening and smiles broad.

The patter of first footsteps, wobbling but determined.

A thousand stories hung in the air, so many people remembered in fragments of old memory, fading like photographs in a scrapbook.

Demolition started Monday.

But today was Sunday.

And it was a Sunday for remembering.

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Word Count: 180

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction. Thanks to Mike Vore for providing the prompt photo!

A Place of Rest

The White Horse was a pub like any other, full of good ale, better people, and the roar of laughter. The fire in the hearth burnt like a sunset behind mountains of black charcoal and the dartboard was peppered with the stab marks of near-perfect games. Old friends talked long into the hours of the night, unwilling to leave.

Once you left The White Horse, you never came back.

The White Horse sat at the world’s end, beyond the horizon, perched above an expanse of twilight and mist, where echoes of distant songs carried from unseen valleys. It was where heroes came when their stories were done, a place to rest, to laugh, to tell their stories, before the time came to move on.

Some of them stayed an hour. Some stayed for decades, greeting future generations as they walked through the door to tell of their changed world.

All moved on in the end. Their hunger sated, their hearts rested, they set out along the last road and walked into the swirling curtain.

All save one.

An old man sat behind the bar, pouring drinks and hearing stories.

He remembered them all.

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Word Count: 193

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction. Thanks to A Mixed Bag for the photo prompt!

Another Tale of Dragons

Every child knows the story of the Black Dragon, whose body was as a mile-long serpent, whose wings were as sun-blocking clouds, whose fire laid waste to the lands. This is the dragon that people think of, the shadow that still hangs over their dreams a thousand years after his fall.

But there is another story of a dragon that they tell in the valleys of Canderas, where the grass rolls like ocean waves beneath the blue skies.

Fair Elowen was a farmer’s daughter, her hair like copper, her skin like milk, her freckles constellations. Long hours she danced in the valleys.

One day, she found the bones of a cow, still dangling with red meat and fresh-hatched from the carnage, a writhing, winged dragon.

It snarled, but Elowen feared it not. She sung the hymn of Mother Macca and the fire fled from the dragon’s eyes. Its horned head nestled against her knee.

So Elowen raised her dragon amidst fields and flowers, till it grew long as a river and she old as a willow tree.

They say it guards the valleys still, a winding shape in the dark, still loyal to its long-dead mistress’s love.

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Word Count: 197

This is for Sunday Photo Fiction! Photo credit to A Mixed Bag.

Sparrow

She floats like a feather on the breeze. The bite of her arrows is the scorpion’s sting. Her laugh is birdsong.

All the land tells tales of her, the wild outlaw in the forest, roaming the branches with a bow of yew and a tigress’s smile.

They talk of the Sparrow.

Everyone has their own story.

A butcher tells how a friend wandering in the woods was suddenly beset by Sparrow’s strung bow. She demanded of him his purse, his boots, his clothes, and his horse. Laughing she left him, frozen and half-naked in the forests, flitting into the branches like a fay of song.

A farmer tells how a tax collector was strung up from a branch, her mouth stuffed with an apple like a hog laid upon a lord’s table. For two days and a night she hung there, till she was cut down by a passing woodsman. She swore never to take an honest farmer’s coin again.

But there is a story nobody tells of Sparrow.

Each night she lies in the shadow of the trees and weeps for her loneliness, her cries soft amidst the rustling leaves.

There are none to hear her save the beasts.

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Word Count: 200

For Sunday Photo Fiction. Thanks to Eric Wicklund for the photo prompt!