Grand Prize Winner Halloween Contest 2018 – Flash Fiction
The children are running, away, away, And he hears them, skittering like beetles
down the hall, past the lamp that glows across the surface of his brain. He raises
in the doorway, across the floor, behind the knife like a lantern. It guides him up
the locked door. Laurie hears him coming up the stairs. He sees her run into a room,
behind her like the stir and roil toward some faint safety, but only the blade
of some stumbling darkness, so she runs can keep her safe. It points its way
to the closet, sliding the door closed, to her skin and he follows. The blade slips into
the light through the slats leaving a mark the sliver of space in the closet slat,
that tells the blade where to go. She grabs a knife between a rib. It’s still so far away.
a hanger like women always have, to protect the crack of the slat as it gives way,
themselves from the things that will wreck a rotten tooth, and the light, the light,
their bodies, their lives, and she reaches it out the light swings like a circling sun
and presses it in to his cheek, feels it give over the blank white planet of his face, and
like soil under her fingers. It thrills her, the pop and flare of pain, the gush of blood
and then the knife is at her feet, in her hands like the venting of some geyser that fills up
and centers her rage and she thrusts it dark with noise and heat and he feels the itch
deep into his chest, into what she hopes is at the center of him, the scratch of
his heart, and then he disappears. Only the fury now leaching into his veins. How could she blade
now keeps her company. To betray him, how could she deliver the itch,
the door, the blade before her like a shield, when she knows that is his to gift her, his to
still the air sucks around her with his circle around her throat like a chain, like his
absence. She drops the knife, stumbles to hands when his hands won’t do. The floor is
the hall, and the children, the children are beneath him. He takes that itch and uses it to
still there somehow, and she tells them to rise, to pull his leaking body to its feet, to
run again. She gets to her feet. She can walk across the room with plodding steps
feel him in the air behind her and then behind her, each one the twitch of the blade
his hands are wrapping around her neck, and his hands are not as sharp but they are
and she can feel it, death, like a collar, stronger. And he can feel her fluttering beneath
but there is a thundering on the stairs his hands like a sparrow, and he will down her,
and a great bang as Loomis fires the gun but then the dart and sting in his chest and
once, and Michael is downed like a great ocean of pain rises in him, but he will
a wide-winged hawk shot from the sky. not fall, he will not break his focus, and so
Laurie grips her head as if he ripped it he retreats to the dark of a room, and he waits,
from her. Loomis runs to see, but Michael sees Loomis enter, then the rattle of
is still alive, and so Loomis shoots again metal again filling his chest and he falls back
and again and again and again again through the door the porch the rail the air and
until Michael finally falls to the ground. the earth claims him like he’s planted there.
Laurie is crying. She wants it to be over But he will not stay. He uproots himself. He is
but she knows the boogeyman will come again rising, again on the move, again looking
back to find her because they always do, for the way he can come around to
because monsters like this one, once they see her, feel her, be close to her somehow,
have the scent of your blood in their nose, because she doesn’t understand yet, but he
will never stop until they taste it, will show her that this is how he loves her,
will never stop until the blood runs out. this is how he always will love her.
Megan Pillow Davis is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and is currently a doctoral candidate in the University of Kentucky’s English Department. Her work has appeared recently in Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, Mutha Magazine, Memoir Mixtapes, and Coffin Bell Journal and is forthcoming in Moonchild Magazine, Collective Unrest, and Jellyfish Review. She has received fellowships from Pen Parentis and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a residency from the Ragdale Foundation. She is currently writing her dissertation and a novel. You can find her on Twitter at @megpillow
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