Rot Beneath the Needle
Flash Fiction
Creative Writing Assignment: Fractured Fairy Tale
01/06/25
The boy woke under a wall of pines during the fair of night in an encompassing plain of tall grass and small boulders of which no bird nor wind nor water sang. In the needle he piled his bedroll of dried leaf and twig and tried to sleep. In the stillness, remembering what he lost, he grew restless. He thought of what he missed. His life, his parents, his things. He carved stones, his father's shadow heavy upon him, the weight of his absence in his hands. The mother dead these seventeen years did incubate in her bosom the very creature who would carry her off. Already has he felt the weight of the world and for a boy whose heart bears the manner of nameless suffering, it is but the swinging of the pendulum that marks his calling. He isn’t much of a talker—friends of necessity, of pity. One night he went drinking with a dozen or so and made a drunken fool of himself. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. Life was indeed easier with his old man and his wife whose cooking was, through subtle glances, never that good to begin with. They eat their meals one dish at a time by scarfing it down while she watches them eat silently on the stove. In the morning he wakes and through the fence of needle his silent world beckons a placid sequestration where no soul save him stirs and the gleaming heaven’s silver lining veil his eyes so that for a moment he lies contemplating if the adventure of men are destined by lost wanderers or if a goal without plan is but a fleeting wish. He turned, and there it was—eyes too small, face too strange, crouching and carrying on its head the drooping ears of a beagle and the morose face of a bloodhound, all spine-chillingly plastered on the body of a child standing three-foot something wearing filthy shredded garnets or perhaps the rags of fallen drifters of the plain. The small eyes of this much too human thing shot a hair-raising impulse within and immediately he pivoted twice scanning for any other signs of life but it was all as he’d seen it before plus this now perplexed long-toed creature sat in Padmasana before him.
Whatcha think yer doin' 'round these here parts?
The boy didn’t answer. He didn’t know what compelled him to abide by the pine.
Ya got coin? I got somethin’ for ya—if yer willin' to pay, o' course.
What've you got
Real fine work…not sellin’ junk y’see. Right ‘ere. Ain’t it purty?
The thing turned and with child-like hands reached for a bulky hunting boot knife fashioned for the American frontier that the chips and nicks on its breadth spoke a generational tale passed down by everymen whose very bones were dust. The handle was corroding. He regarded the blade habitually and with awe, as though he’d been waiting for a deal as good as this came—for it was much too common that in his world grimy deals went hand in hand with deceiving one's intuition. He began to move his way slowly through the needles in a shuffling motion with slightly hunched shoulders and tilting his head like a reluctant ape, pausing frequently, one foot lingering in the air before committing to placing it down.
Hah! Look at ya tremblin’!
It led out the laugh of a smoker who preferred cheap cigars over to fine conversation and wiped a tear from its stretched cheek.
Big oaf like you, scared o’ lil’ ol’ me? It kept laughing at him.
Topside in the bitter river wind, wearing a ornately decorated robe with a thick fur fringe and standing six-foot two, an old man makes his way and perches onto the first stone that catches his fancy, makes a kind of nest in the leeward side of grass and, with his book, cigarette and pocket-sized telescope he watches the plain under a high morning sky. The silver lining has the clouds’ points looking extra sharp today.
The boy, moving like a knuckle-dragging gait froze and, at once, in an unpredictable and rhythmic fashion, kicked the creature in its jaw with his boot . Its vitreally inflated balloon-eyed face flapped wildly on its neck and turned the color of bruised fruit. As it flew he seized the knife and smiled from ear to ear like somebody who cheated death. The abomination was screaming and crying, holding its chin.
Why... why do that to me? I-I didn’t mean no harm… Yer mucked in the head. No better than the rest. What’s wrong with you is wrong all the way through. Don’t think it won't come back to you. A fuckin’ thousand times through.
Now, with his fingers laced behind his head, reclined and gazing upward, listening, the old man hears the hankering of someone on the cusp of catastrophe, shuffling thereto, his head cocked dog-like, listening, curious. The screaming ceased by the time he saw the wall of pines and shortly thereafter, using deductive reasoning, saw the boy, the knife, and the dead-cut corpse of the haggler beneath the tree, ragless, bleeding, dead. The boy cut off its pointy ears and he seized a fur hide sack fashioned around its genitals full of shiny rock by the time the old man saw him in the process of removing its fingers. The old man was wide-eyed.
Come all ye hateful. Blessed are the poor in body, for they…
The boy charged at the man with the dull knife and instantaneously began reading feverishly from his scripture in an unrecognizable tongue. In an instant, the boy was carried off. He’d not been where he was, not for a second. The sky was inky black and the world beyond wrapped in gray mist. He felt the presence of something terrible. The land was a wasteland that seemed to stretch on forever. The dismal situation now had every feature of hell, a burning lake, the heat of the fire like that of a furnace, souls withiring and contorting in agony within. The heat is such that no mortal man could withstand it and the souls they shrieked; and the stench it was overpowering, like rotting flesh mixed with acrid smoke of a thousand fires. The ground was thick with tar and sticky, a dungeon of horribles all sides around. The souls were thin and insubstantial, their forms barely holding together like mere shadows. I have no name here. No past, no future. Only this endless scream. This fire, this weight… I can never leave. I can never escape.
