Flash Fiction 2nd Place Winner!
ROADKILL ANGEL
By Mark Zirbel
He will arrive in your town one day.
You will notice him walking along the side of the road, holding a smashed animal carcass in his grimy hands. Perhaps it will be an opossum, the creature curled into a fetal position as though it tried to retreat to some place of comfort in the last horrible moments of its life. Or maybe a cat, a fluffy Maine Coon or a sleek Siamese, its eyes wide open and staring at the heavens, its rigor-mortis limbs pointing skyward.
Hopefully you will not give this man and his roadkill a second thought – just some dirty bum, a derelict, a drifter. Because if you should decide to stop and take a closer look, you are not going to like what you see.
What you will see is this: the man will poke his long, blackened fingernails into the animal’s husk, pull them out coated with blood, and smear the blood across his forehead, cheeks, and lips. Soon you will begin to gag as the man places his mouth upon the animal’s maggot-ridden flesh and takes a huge bite. Blood, skin, and fur will drip from his mouth as he chews, becoming tangled in his filthy gray beard. Finally, after swallowing the last of his gory mouthful, he will toss the animal into the burlap sack slung over his shoulder and continue walking down the road.
At this point, you will likely be tempted to report this man to the police, social services, someone. But this is not advisable. For you see, this man is not a criminal or a lunatic. He is simply performing the duty with which he has been charged: shepherding the souls that are scattered across this land.
The souls he seeks are strewn along highways and back roads, side streets and alleyways. Some lie shattered in the middle of the asphalt, while others were able to make a final death crawl to the side of the road. But whatever the circumstances, this man finds these unfortunate creatures. He performs the necessary blood rituals and consumes their flesh, enabling him to transport them to the lush fields and endless forests that lie beyond.
Now, perhaps you do not believe that animals have souls. But even if this is the case, there is another reason why reporting this man would be a very, very bad idea: there is roadkill out there that he MUST tend to, roadkill that human eyes are not meant to see.
Over the years, motorists have run over all manner of strange creatures – werewolves, aliens, gremlins, to name but a few. These things cannot be permitted to wind up on autopsy tables, their bodies dissected, their organs labeled. Some mysteries must remain mysteries – it is the way the universe keeps itself in balance. And other mysteries are simply too dreadful to be revealed. There are things out there that even the most accursed books of the occult have only hinted at. Ancient beings that defy description. You might encounter one as you drive along a darkened stretch of highway one night – might suddenly see a huge, amorphous mass in your headlights. The impact will be horrific – the car’s airbag hitting you in the chest like a cannonball, glass shattering everywhere. As you pry yourself from your crumpled car, you will stare at the unholy enormity in the road and listen to its water-garbled bleating, as if thousands of goats are trapped beneath its shifting, mud-like flesh.
And that is when the man with the shabby clothes and the burlap sack will arrive. He will dispose of this hideous creature, using a hacksaw to cut it into hundreds and hundreds of pieces. Yet, no matter how many quivering, mewling hunks of meat he shoves into his sack, it will never appear to become any fuller.
Most important of all, the man will help you to forget this incident. He will make you believe that you hit a deer. Or that you lost control of your car and rammed into a tree. Or, if your mind has been too badly traumatized, he may erase the event from your memory altogether. As you stare into the calm waters of his blue, blue eyes, the maddening impossibility of what you witnessed will simply float away, like a sailboat disappearing over the horizon.
Yes, you will meet this strange, wondrous man one day.
Or perhaps you already have.
END
You can visit Mark at: www.myspace.com/markzirbel
