Nature
By Casey Douglass
as part of #fridayflash
Some people are just
gloomy. This is only an issue to the eternal optimists amongst the
general population; people who are so afraid of feeling blue, that
they force their false smiles and manic happy thoughts onto others
whether they like it or not. This was Oliver Smith’s opinion
anyway. He stared at his muddy
trainers as he traipsed across the meadows, the broiling clouds above
casting the rises and falls of the landscape around him in hues of
dark and darker. Where the sun did manage to punch through the
clouds, the light was weak and sickly, like a flashlight in which the
batteries are about to die.
He liked this time of
day, the quasi-twilight that always felt so surreal and grim. Oliver
was a creature of dark tastes. The bookshelves in his bedroom full of
the classics of horror, from Lovecraft to Poe, King to Lumley
to...anything he liked basically. He had just finished a particularly
good book about creatures that stole the dead from the midst of a
battlefield. He was about to crack on with the next book on his “To
Read” pile when his Mother had put her head around his bedroom door
and suggested that he take a walk or he would get scurvy. His fear of
scurvy was small, but his fear of his Mother was great.
He fished in his pocket
for his smartphone and took a hasty snap of some “God Rays”
lancing down from the clouds. Smiling to himself, he shared it to his
Tumblr followers. They were mainly Goths if he was honest. He didn’t
share their dress sense but he felt a kind of kinship with them. The wind was really
whipping up around him now, the chill felt like fingers trying to
prod their way into the little places on his jacket that would just
not zip up any tighter.
The phone stowed once
more, he pushed on, the ground sucking at the soles of his shoes. It
was boggy here, large puddles and pools of stagnant water reflecting
the grey clouds. He neared a particularly large one, his mind warning
him of the probable depth. He was familiar with this field and knew
there was quite a dip here. Something protruded from the surface of
the pool. It looked like a bundle of white sticks. Oliver stood on
tip-toe but the extra few inches in height did little for his view.
He decided to walk around the pool, the disturbance looked a little
nearer to the other side.
Taking his time, he
edged around the body of water, wary of sliding in. The reflected
light shifted as he changed his angle. Retrieving his phone once
more, he took a few snaps of the murky water, quite fancying some
spawn of Cthulhu could reasoably live there. He smiled to himself as
his phone whizzed the data to his followers.
He achieved his goal of
reaching the other side of the pool and stood as near to the water as
possible, his neck straining to see. As in all moments of unfortunate
clarity, the clouds shifted above, allowing the bottom of the pool to
become visible.
Oliver felt a lump rise
into his throat as he gazed down into the tea coloured water. The
enormous bulk of a large bull hung a few inches below the surface,
the hooves barely off the bottom. Its skin was a whitish pink and
covered with small green veins. The large horned head was low, as if
the great creature was looking down below himself. The only part of
the beast that broke the surface was an area of its back about half
way along its length. Here Oliver could see properly what was so
indistinct before. A large swathe of skin and fat was gone, leaving
only a massive open wound, picked and washed clean by carrion and the
elements to reveal a curved spinal chord and a handful of bleached
white ribs. Oliver couldn’t shake the phrase “Skeleton’s
Lunchbox” from his mind as he looked on, the acid in his stomach
threatening to burst from his mouth. He put his phone back
inside his pocket.
‘Sorry,’ he said to
the body. ‘I’m really sorry.’
He started to cry.
--THE END--