Love Curse — Part VIII: The Conclusion
Fast & Short is a flash fiction collaboration between eight Literate Ape writers. Each was tasked with authoring one piece of flash fiction that would be combined to create a single short story. The writers’ flash fiction needed to serve two purposes: 1. Stand alone as a unique piece of flash fiction and 2. Serve as a vehicle for building a larger story and driving that story forward. Over the next two weeks, Literate Ape will publish all eight flash fiction stories individually with a link to the growing compilation. We hope you enjoy this literary experiment.
—DH2 , co-editors
LEN AWOKE HANGING UPSIDE DOWN FROM THE CEILING IN SOME TYPE OF SMALL, DARK, BROKEN DOWN SHACK. An old hag was below him chewing off his fingernails. He tried to scream but realized that his tongue had been ripped from his mouth. The hag began to tear narrow strips of his flesh off of his back one by one. She suckled the blood and sweat from them before tying them around her fingers. When his back was nothing more than fleshless exposed musculature, the hag spit out the fingernails and used them to slice Len’s eyelids until they were shreds. The hag laughed and danced nude around the shack and then brought out a goat. The goat was put underneath Len and the hag began clawing at her own cheeks tearing out chunks of flesh. As the pieces of flesh fell to the ground the goat ate them. The hag looked up to Len, and he saw through the shreds of meat that were once his eyelids, that she no longer had any flesh covering her chattering teeth and lashing tongue. The goat then took the form of a man and twisted the hag’s head off. The hag laughed throughout the ordeal until her throat tore from her body. The goat stood in front of the upside down Len and looked deep into his eyes and said, “You shouldn’t have come here.”
Len was found the next day, alive, lying in the graveyard beside his friends. They had all been turned inside out flopping and twitching on the ground unable to fully breathe or stand.
Sara was never seen again.