Three Riveting Flash Fiction Stories (by: Dlsiluk)

Three Riveting Flash Fiction Stories

1
The Monster Hog
2
Blood Death of the Grey Wolf
3
The Cigar


The Monster Hog
((…of the Wallace Plantation) (August, 1964/and conclusion))



It was a bad summer, 1964, bad because the Wallace Plantation had buried, Charlie Codden, a relative of Abby Wallace, bad because she did not have the help she needed to take care of the place, Langdon Abernathy was told not to return to work for them anymore, it was all too much: first Burgundy, and the slaying of her child, and then the mysterious hanging of Old Whisky Charlie, and before that the deaths of Frank and Wally, although that was now a little over three years in the past since Wally had died. Even old Amos avoided the plantation as if it was plagued by God and Satan or both; Burgundy was still in the hospital in the Midwest, close to two years now. So, what next could happen, or go wrong, no one knew, and no one wanted to be acquainted with it, whatever it was going to be—meaning that plantation. The Ritt family, was making money off the land they bought, and although that did not worry Abby for the most part, she heard the ghosts—as she referred to them—talking at night how they hated Abby for selling the land to the Ritt Bank. Evidently, Wally and Frank hadn’t gotten over it yet, hadn’t gotten enough revenge, because he fought over who got to tie the hands of Whisky Charlie, and who got to swing the chandelier with Charlie hanging from it, that is what Abby told Amos anyhow.
But what was really on her mind, Abby’s mind, now was to sell the plantation, and so she had put it in the paper up for sale, and Frank, the mean one, the suggestive one, angry and more hateful than a horde of rattle snakes and more stubborn than a herd of mules, the more aggressive one of the two brothers, read the three line ad in the paper: “Lovely four acre plantation (or, hobby farm, because that was all that was left of it) outside of Fayetteville, for sale, any reasonable price.”
Frank and Wally knew there was no other plantations for sale, this was it, Abby was selling their souls now, so the brothers grimly said.

It was a warm August evening, in the year 1964, the end of August, Abby heard the hogs squealing, fighting with one another, biting at their tails, at their feet, the big one, the one they called “Big Wally the Hog,” the nine-hundred pound hog, the one that won a Blue Ribbon at the County Fair, was becoming nasty to one of the smaller hogs, the very small one, the smallest of the lot in the enclosure—or pigpen—and took a nibble out of its leg, it was a week since Amos had came around to feed the hogs, and she was always scared to get too close to the hog pen herself, although it was fenced in, with four by four poles, and two by four cross beams, to make a sturdy fence. Actually there were several hogs in the pigpen, nearly all over 400-pounds except a few smaller ones, and that one little one that got a bite taken out of its leg that had been yelping to get fed, and instead became in part, part of the Blue Ribbon hog’s meal. Abby at this point was quite frustrated, hearing those hogs yelping like wild dogs night and day, endlessly yelping, and so she called up the Stanley House for Amos to come on over and feed them—nearly begging him this time, but Amos refused to work for her, his mind unchanged, it was out of sympathy he had came the few times he did after her brothers had died, because of her constant mumbling about her seeing and hearing the brothers walking about the house and yard—especially by that old car of theirs that they worked on for ten-years straight, it was all too creepy for him, all too much, way too much for Amos to take, so he refused to come for the last time—with a straight emphatic and final: “NO!”

Mr. Ritt, the owner of the bank who purchased the land from Abby, through Burgundy, and in earlier times bought land from Frank and Wally Wallace, stopped by to see Abby, he did now and then, a kind gesture if anything, he knew she liked company; he figured he’d say hello, and she’d offer him coffee as usual and he’d have a little break, and be on his way. But she didn’t answer the door when he came, and the hogs were going wild in the back area, where the pig enclosure was. And he went back to see what was going on.
The evening by itself was most pleasant with its starry sky and gibbous moon, overlooking the Wallace Plantation, had not the hogs been yelping, moreover giving it an uneasy kind of eerie touch within its atmosphere it would have been a perfect end to a long day.
As he, Mr. Ritt walked slowly back to the pigpen, it seemed as if everything was unattended, he even got a cramp in his stomach, a nervous cramp, as if something strange had taken place, or was taking place, you get such feelings when something is wrong, deadly wrong—death reeks, and your body does something like a turnabout, a knotting up of muscles to protect you, to guard you from heart attacks and strokes and all those impending doom related occurrences that take a person by surprise, it signals the brain, beware…! And it was doing just that.
The hogs were fighting mad, squealing mad, jerking this and that way everywhichway, bumping everything, pulling with their teeth, bits and pieces of the wooden fence, gnawing on the thinner parts of the fence like rats, to free themselves: he got closer, they were limbs he was seeing, limbs his eyes scanned, indeed he confirmed they were limbs, red like roots hanging out of the limbs, muscles tissue, read knotted fleshly muscles hanging out like threads from a limp limb; hair hanging out of the pigs mouth—Big Wally’s mouth, and his associates, they were chewing Abby Wallace up, like pulp, as if she was in a wheat grinder, a saw mill, she evidently was trying to feed the hogs, fell in, or got pushed in, through the fence (because it would have been pretty hard to fall through those two-foot openings between the two wooden flat pieces of timber, one above the other, crossovers, and foolish to have gone to the top of the fence of the pen it would not have been necessary) and before she could get up, she was pined down by the monster hog—all nine-hundred pounds of pork. Her head was balled, they had ripped the hair out from its roots, and her torso was the main thing now the hogs were fighting over….
Her shawl lay over one of the fence two-by-fours wooden cross beams, and many of her bones—splintered—laid about, and the hogs licking the marrow out of them; everything was being caked with mud, as it surfaced here and there, as the livestock moved about, then sunk into the mud again, as if the hogs themselves were trying to hide the flesh from the other predators; Mr. Ritt had to turn about, look deep into the sky, hold his stomach, catch his breath and grab his heart, as it started to leap.

Note: “The Monster Hog” chapter 14 written 6-2008; reedited, 10.-2009, and reedited 5-2010. From the unpublished work “The Last Plantation”




Blood Death of the Grey Wild





It was a week later when Langdon had another dream, he was in the arctic circle deep near Barrow, Alaska, a place he had hear about, perhaps read about along with the Thule from Greenland, it was a hundred years ago, maybe more, Eskimos were all about, living in the wild and he was with a group of nomads, and they killed wolves, and seals for food, and polar bears, and he got thinking, and thinking, and woke up: ‘blood’ he said, ‘excessive blood’ he mumbled, ‘it is the blood that the wolf craves, like a man craves alcohol, or the fat man food, or the drug addict, dope, or the gambler, the compulsion to chase his loss and gamble more, and the man-whore chasing women; therefore, it is the wolf who craves blood. And he remembered his dream, it was a bloody dream.
He looked out his window, there was the lone wolf again, as huge as ever, he looked at the clock, it was 2:15 a.m., he knew, or was compelled to think so—that he knew, business with him would not be over until one—he or the wolf were dead—there was no other way, the wolf was not going to stop, he had put him in the corner. And so he devised his plan:
He went out that morning, 8:00 a.m., and with his 22-caliber rifle, shot him a rabbit, it was a cold, cold day, for North Carolina, it was abnormally bitter, it was five above, with two inches of snow—and a layer of ice on the branches of the trees. For Langdon, it was near perfect weather for his plan. He went into the kitchen, got out a slim butcher’s knife, cut the rabbit open, drained his blood into a container, put it into the freezer to chill, poured blood over the blade of the knife, took the handle off, broke that part of the stainless steel knife, and let the blood freeze on the knife, then, in another hour, he dipped the razor-sharp blade into the blood again, freezing another layer of blood onto the razor-sharp blade, it froze in a matter of minutes, and he dip it again and again and again, until he had an eight inch knife, frozen like a popsicle stick, similar to a popsicle with that thin razor-sharp blade in its center, and the smell of blood reeked from the popsicle to kingdomcome. There must had been twenty-five layers of blood over that knife-cutting edge, and it took all morning to freeze it, all the way into the afternoon, but the blade was hidden well within the bloodsicle.
That night, Langdon hid the bloodsicle out near a tree under an inch of snow by the house. The wolf came that night, Langdon never went to sleep, he waited for the wolf—like one waits for his deer, and he came at 2:10 a.m., but his sense of smell took his mind away from Langdon, and found the bloodsicle, and licking it, he found it profoundly appealing, the taste of blood was more powerful than the taste for the game of the hunt—his self-interest his addiction was in full swing, Langdon had found his weakness, his Achilles Heel, his euphoria; Langdon noticed he enjoyed every second, every lick of the bloodsicle, he couldn’t get enough, and the weather was numbing to his tongue, he couldn’t really feel his tongue after a while because it was exposed for such a long time in the process of licking—and his mind wasn’t registering what was really taking place, blood on blood, he was sucking his own blood, that he thought was the bloodsickle alone: he was like vampire sucking himself dry.
In outcome, the frozen bloodsicle was slow in melting on his tongue, and then the knife became exposed, but he kept licking, unknowing the sharpness that penetrated his numb tongue, and he started bleeding from his own tongue, and tasting his own warm blood upon the cold blood—all being blended into one, and it all was so enticing the brain did not decipher what was happening, he was getting an endorphin rush, better than morphine; consequently, it cut and cut and cut into his tongue, until blood flowed freely, yet the wolf did not move, thrilled he had found such a magical unending pleasure, natural sense of well being; now the knife was fully exposed, but it was too late, the beast collapsed on top of the knife. And there he would lay for all to see in the morning, and no one lost anymore sleep in the fields of the three plantations, and Langdon, went into the Army, to find his war, and that is another story.


No: 557: Part three to “Bloodsicle,” a chapter story in the book (MS): “The Last Plantation” subchapter named: “Blood Death of the Wild”; written: 12-23-2009 in Huancayo, Peru.




The Cigar

Mississippi Shantytown!
The Great Flood of ’51




For some odd reason Günter Gunderson’s mind started shifting into a different mode, he was at an old friend’s work place, at a party [dreaming]; he always liked a good cigar now and then, on special occasions that is, —and Molly, the secretary, asked him if he wanted one. He looked at her, said “Yes” in an inquisitive way, and to his misfortune, it was quite small. Bewildered he gave no response except, a shallow: “…thanks,” and went about and lit it. Then the old friend the one that mysteriously appeared, appeared one might say—out of nowhere, was sitting by him, he wanted to try the cigar, check it out, and smoke it a bit. But there wasn’t much, especially for both of them, and only nearly enough for him. Plus, there didn’t seem to be enough air in the room, and of course, you cannot share what you do not possess (he confessed to himself), and if there is a want or need, it is on the beholders side. Nonetheless, he hesitated, and looked stern into his face, his youthful face, a face that didn’t age like his, “I have an idea,” he comments to the old friend, “put the end of this cigar into your pipe, and then you’ll have enough to enjoy, and share.”
The mystic friend looked at him pleased, and just happened to have a pipe on hand, and pulled it out while Günter put the cigar—what was left of it anyways—into the barrel of the pipe, and gave it to his stranger-friend. As the friend smoked from the pipe he started to choke—Günter, started to choke, as if he was spitting up tobacco—yet it was his friend doing the smoking—and it was him spitting up the pieces of the cigar, or blood, something; his throat was choking on it anyhow, and it was burning—a raw like burning, a fatal burning sensation. His friend didn’t know what to do for him, so he told him, “...here, here take some water, swallow it quick, it’ll cool the throat, it’ll put out the flame,” and Günter did just that, and all was well for the moment—a very slight moment in fact.
Now, Günter walked away from the table, and its festivities, finding himself by the store next to the office party. He noticed cigars for sale, big cigars—, now he thinks: ‘Why didn’t Molly tell me they had big cigars here, instead of having me smoke this little one?’ thinking of course, it would have possibly solved the problem with him sharing his cigar and not causing the coughing. ‘Peculiar,’ he tells himself, ‘very odd indeed,’ yet it is left at that. Then the old man shook his head, told himself to stop daydreaming, rescue Jean-lee, his daughter. As he found himself opening up his eyelids, he was also spitting out water (he had already saved Jean-lee from her potential drowning, and had been drowning himself—matter-of-fact, he had been sinking deeper and deeper into the torrent waters of the Mississippi River, and had mentally let go for a moment, now with his head above water, his mind was reactivated to sensibility).


The Local Newspaper reads the follow day:

“Günter Gunderson, nearer to sixty now (born 1894); —a widower and friend to half the Irish, German and Italians in the city (WWII, Veteran), landowner with several rental properties in his name, along with some thirty-tenants, and father to only one daughter, Jean-lee Haigh, former—
has saved his daughter from the Levee flood of 1951, in the process he slipped on theroof of a shanty, and fell in himself, in the process, drowned.”

Notes: “The Cigar,” originally written 11-10-2003; revised, 8-6-2005, reedited 5/2007; reedited 10-2008: a chapter story from the writings: “Look at Me!” which was originally “Mississippi Shantytown” reedited 12-2009; reedited and revised, 7-14-2010.