Flash Fiction 1st Place Winner!
We’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.
The line, this spur, he’d been walking hasn’t been used in… He looks. Well, not for a long time. Grass, small trees and brush grows between the ties, up from the rails; and the rails, they’re rusty, like nothing had rolled over them in months, years.
So the guy, call him what he is, the kid is not scared. Not right away. Not of being run down and shoved to furious pieces by a train. Only thing worries him is how the hell is he going to get out? How’s to get home? To eat? The more he twists his foot, the stucker he is. He laughs at that. “The stucker.” And the switch, that’s not moving, not opening. It’s holding him like a retriever, holds a duck: soft but that’s one duck that is not getting away.
Takes him most of the afternoon to realize that, unless someone comes, unless the switch opens, he is part of that track for the duration.
Now the fact that this is most likely an abandoned spur of some out of use line is starting to scare the hell out of him. He could die there a really dull, pointless death.
By the time it starts being dark, he is halfway convinced this is a dream. He hopes it is, anyway; one of those things that, once you realize you’re just in bed, safe and stupid, you’re going to wake up, go down and get you a sandwich and a beer from the PX.
He starts to believe the day, the place, the rails, the switch, his foot, really are pieces of a dream. He imagines a rabbit.
Doesn’t a damn rabbit run across the track in the moonlight!
He imagines a howling wolf. Yep. And a pack beyond the trees, to take up the cry… That too…
He looks into the now-night sky. He just KNOWS a meteor will flash. And one tears a bright silent asshole right across the dipper.
He plays with the night, adjusting it.
Then, he imagines a dinosaur, nearby.
Nearby, the woods start to creak, to crash, to thunder. Trees groan, then explode. A hundred feet down the line a shadow like the world lumbers from the woods, crosses the track as flesh-wrapped pile driver might and slip-slides the gravel down into the darkness, the trees and exploding water below. The dream shakes as it passes.
“Wow,” the guy says, thinking of what he’d brought to the world, this dream. The damn rails still shivered. With the shiver, without wanting to, he imagines a train, a metal and fire thing, abroad on this abandoned, this unused spur line. Can’t help that. In the distance, the dinosaur slides into the water and bubbles away, forever. Into its place slides the sorrow of a steam whistle. In a few moments, pitifully few, the puff and chug of an engine rides the curve of rails. It’s coming from ahead. The steel races toward him, the rails that hold him quiver, they breathe against his leg, tightening, loosening but never giving up on him.
He pictures the train. It is an old friend, the train, black, a steam giant at full blaze, shadow and fire in night. He sees the length of it, the cars run bright with people, eating, dozing, talking, planning, dreaming. A hundred of them at least, a hundred people, all with places to go, promises to keep, business, things they’ll do and undo at the end of the line.
And the boy? He’s still stuck. He imagines the switch opening, releasing him.
It does not. He comes, quickly now, to realize that in this dream, this world, you can’t unmake the life you made. You can’t take back the dinosaur, can’t rezip the sky, unhop the bunny, unhowl the wolf.
And the train is near…
He thinks, maybe ahead there is a bridge. There is a bridge. Yes, he remembers bridge. And he dreams it out. Dreams the gorge and the bridge across it a sliver of broken wood, down-bending steel, hanging empty space between the train and his trapped self! Then…
Then, he thinks, maybe. Maybe this dream is only the dream of someone. Someone on the train, the train heading his way is dreaming this. Maybe he’s on board, home from the war, safe, and waking…
…and the world is soft and too small, a compartment of a train, the train. It’s night, his leg is asleep, the world is a window, a black mirror with only him and this little rushing room in it. Ahead, the engine whistle blows. They’re going so fast, that his compartment catches the shriek, devours it, spits it pastward. The whistle blows again. His body presses into the seat at his back. The train screams with stopping, trying to at least, the whistle rushes on, 80, 90 miles per hour, all the steel and flesh around him strains toward zero. Working for stillness in a length of track too small to catch that much quiet.
Christ, what the hell? The young man looks out the window. He wonders. Is the bridge out? Ahead? Is there a bridge. A bridge, or something else, something on the track? And without thinking, he knows there is. He knows for sure, there is a bridge but doe not want to think about it. He knows for sure something else is there. The bridge and something. How high, how long, how deep, how rocky, how intact! And has he left the war, that place…is THIS the dream… Could this be THE dream. Could this be where he’s not! Could THIS be something he should wake from. Or not! What the hell would happen if…if this is still not home, not a ride, not…
Then he wakes. And it was a dream, a Goddamn…!
END
You can visit Larry at: http://larrysantoro.com/
