Hawthorn & Ash #127

Welcome to this week’s installment of many micro stories, ranging in length from 100 words to 500 words.

With each story we hope to deliver a little whimsy into the lives of our readers.

THE FIRE BURNING BRIGHT

Another burned down house — piles of ash, deformed steel bars protruding from the walls like mocking ghosts.  The people who lived were dead — asphyxiated while asleep, charred, baring half-cooked flesh and bone.  Five of them there were — three adults, a boy and a girl — all disfigured, asymmetric, as though eaten up by a monster and then discarded.

“Back soon,” Constable Lara Smith conveyed to her deputy and walked out, vomited by the soot-filled wall.  Even the grass was black.  The tree by the window was a half-burned post pointing right to hell. 

Lara had seen corpses before.  For twenty years she had been in the business.  But that girl’s body — the only finger covered with skin, the pink nail, and the one eye exposed into a ball with an azure circle of the sky — made her feel sick in her bones.

Lara felt dizzy and slowly walked along the periphery of the house.  The backyard opened into a wild area where tall trees still stood, and she needed to see the greens, eye a living bird perched upon a bough.

The sky, though, was gloomy, as if the smoke had painted it with obscurity.  The shadowy trees looked more like a world now shrouded.  “Why’s smoke still lingering?” she felt angry.  “Smells of death.” 

“This place is bad!” She whispered. Could she not just get sick? Take off? Just once in her life?  She inhaled the pungent air slowly and sat down at a corner.  Bricks marked flower beds nearby, but only heaves of ash lay strewn across the soil.  “Maybe I will call sick,” she pushed upon the ground, attempting to get back up. 

That’s when she saw the rose.  Deep red, velvety, emanating a subtle aroma of sweetness.  A single plant, green, healthy — proclaiming life.

She brought the rose back to her apartment and put it in a crystal vase.  At night, she stared at it as she forked in pasta that still smelled of death.  Maybe she was getting a fever too.  The room felt hot, and she saw tiny flashes of light — red, blue, gold.

The doctor’s appointment was at nine AM.  It was at one AM, that the little creatures crawled out from the depths of the flower where the petals curled in.  They were a few inches tall, deep blue and with dazzling eyes burning with the fire of ancient sins.  They danced about the room and painted it with light as Lara saw glowing trees in her fevered trance.

At two AM, the creatures circled her and sang, and then they shot up to the curtains, buzzing, heating up the room with incandescent rhythms.

The curtains burned first, and then the papers, and then there was an explosion.  The rose stood still, unharmed, but stuck between two beams.

The eighth unsolved arson!  This one took down the entire apartment building.

If you enjoyed this story you can find it and more in the Hawthorn & Ash 2023 anthology.

AVAILABLE HERE!