RETURN

Flash | 250 words

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RETURN | by Dylan Bosworth

Flash Fiction | 250 words | Dark Fantasy

The pilgrims shuffle out of drowned cities where stone monuments erode. They move over petrified dead giants whose flesh stretches black and crisp, where twisted kudzu burrows through the bones of ancient homes mottled with dead cypress algae, brittle and burned.

Their paws are cold in the night when they stop to stake camp and their damp clothes reek of petrichor and cadaver-lye. The littlest unroll their beddings and cough into peppermint rags tied around their heads. They look to the ones whispering across the cookfire flames, and their wide eyes glisten like Coregonus roe, sapphire and trembling.

“Is it really gone?”

Words heard endless in nights of wandering. Caged hidden behind milk teeth white and thin as eel bones during day.

When they think the young cannot hear, though their clothes will never dry enough for sleep, they question elders with rasping breath.

All look to the nebulous sky and remember. The meek, with their wretched curved backs and hairless tails, they look over the ruined plains and oceans froth in their bottomless eyes.

“We’ve no way of knowing.”

The elders flick their ears, snapping away swarms of Cuterebra flies.

“The mountains were safe. The mountains were dry.”

The young watch and they listen, the strange and foreign purple flames flitting over their parents like vibrant burial masks, and the salts smolder and crackle, snapping embered driftwood.

“This is for them,” say the old. They point clawed fingers across the flame. “Theirs, to inherit.”

And they hang their heads.

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Thanks for reading.