Jeremy Was Changing (250 word Flash! Friday Fiction)

Jeremy was changing.

The lights of a behemoth barrelling down the nearby highway flashed, startling him into movement. He blinked, hunkered down in the backseat. As his lids lifted, illumination slithered across the ruts and rivulets of the back of his hand.

He frowned. These were not his hands.

The meat truck disappeared, a horn blasting in the distance. As the silence poured in, up rose the whispering of the waving weeds. That susserrance blotted at the trip-trip-tripping of his conscious thought.

Every night, for weeks, he’d woke to find himself lying in the backseat of the old wreck. The main house was three miles from the fence line, far from the old Chevy’s musty interior. It was rough country, and the first few times he’d risen bloody.

Why Does My Head Hurt?

'Why, oh why, does my head hurt?'

These headaches 
are getting far too intense.
The pain is a warning
I heed for the moment,
then I pop a pill,
and the moment is gone.

'I mean, I just don't understand.'

I sit 
at a computer
on the couch
on the train
on a bus
on a plane
head down
thumbs blurring
hunched over
descending
devolving
revolving
around a sun
that will one day go out. 
 

Whips ‘n Chains

‘I found you lying by the side of road. From the moment I saw you, I was in love.’
I looked down at the huddled form. Held her there with my eyes.

Please, she seemed to say, I’m so hungry.

She could not speak. Circumstances dictated she would not.

‘I brought you home. Kept you warm. Made this your home.’
I gestured at the dank crawlspace.

You’re cruel. So cruel. Someone will find me.

No one would find us here.

She shivered, slowly crawling back against the stone wall.

A dripping of water.

My voice changed:

‘You had an … accident. I got you fixed. You ran away.’

In my hands, the length of chain tightened.

Falling To Pieces: A Parable for Wooden Ears

One day, as Thomas was getting up, he stepped out of bed, and his foot fell off.

He stared down in horror at the perfectly smooth, almost ivory-like space at the bottom of his ankle.  With considerate symmetry, his former appendage had parted cleanly from his body. Thomas could at least be thankful for that.

The foot had fallen flat on top of the deep shag rug surrounding the bed, with all the seeming weight that his body had usually put behind it. When he was walking. When he’d used it to walk with.

Thomas’s brain started doing backflips: this would take some getting used to.

‘Is this shock?’ Thomas thought, trying to balance but eventually falling back onto the edge of the bed. ‘Am I in shock?’

He grabbed a pillow and held it to his face, burying his nose in its marshmallowy comfort.

Review: ‘Black House’ by Stephen King & Peter Straub

King and Straub once again combine literary forces to write a sequel to 1984’s ‘The Talisman’.

In The Talisman, 12 year old Jack Sawyer ventures out from Arcadia Beach, New Hampshire on a quest to find a magical crystal known as The Talisman. It contains the power to save his mother, who is dying of cancer. Taught by a mysterious figure known as Speedy Parker to ‘flip’ between Earth and another world referred to as ‘The Territories’, Jack encounters his mother’s ‘twinner’, Queen Laura DeLoessian.

The ‘twinner’, a person’s identical self in parallel world, is also dying, meaning that Jack’s quest is also important to the future of ‘The Territories’. During his travels and up to the ultimate ending in the multi-dimension Agincourt Hotel, Jack realises there are not just two worlds but many.

This theme carries through to other of King and Straub’s novels and continues with Black House.