Flash Fiction 1st Place Winner!
Monday, June 25th, 2007We’re happy to present you with the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners in this year’s Flash Fiction Contest held at World Horror.
The rules for the contest are simple - stories must be read in five minutes or less, and they must have a beginning, middle, and end. A panel of celebrity judges choose the winners. Read all three stories in the posts below.
A kid walks. Late afternoon. All alone, he walks along rail lines. He’s walked for miles; for as long as he can remember the day, he’s walked it. Trees push close to the tracks, one side; the other, a graveled drop-off leads to more trees. Pine covers the hillside down to water, maybe a river, a lake, but something watery is off that side of the tracks and down there. He can smell it, the water; mud, fish, mosquito eggs, that kind of smell rises from that side. It’s summer afternoon, late summer, not hot, but warm. Nice. No place to go from here but home. The smells, the feel of the gravel way underfoot, the scent of creosote bubbled from the ties, it smells, yes, like home. Like near-home.
He walks easily, not thinking, not looking, then, a soft click, a sound that would be metallic if it weren’t smothered by leather and the softness of his foot, and he isn’t walking. Now, he looks. The boot, his ankle in it, is caught in a switch. Jesus Christ. Along some track, middle of nowhere, a guy’s walking along, alone, and the thing just closes, thump, like that. It doesn’t hurt, it simply holds him. Fact is, he couldn’t tell if it closed on him, or if he just stepped in it and got wedged there. Doesn’t matter. Point is, he cannot get out.
