Pondering Death

I'm fairly sure that I've mentioned here in the past that I read the obits from the London Free Press, the daily where we used to live (yep...morbid, but a hobby nonetheless). I discovered yesterday that another person I knew years ago has passed away. We weren't close. He was an ex-cop who was a supervisor for a security company I worked for 18 years ago. As a matter of fact, he hired me on. There was an 'economic downturn' back then and I was very grateful for the job as my unemployment money (aka pogey, or the dole) was nearly used up.

Of course dying is a part of the life-cycle. We all do it at least once. As we get older we discover that friends and relatives are dying all about us and we ponder our own mortality. Or something like that. Isn't the old saying that these things happen in threes? AVD was the third man that I used to work with that has died since Mid-March. Same with celebrities...Gary Coleman, Dennis Hopper and Rue McClanahan all died within 6 days of one another. Anyway...enough of old wives's tales. This has put me in the mood for a horror story.

I have unearthed a micro-flash story for your reading enjoyment. It was my first story to appear online in the spring of last year. FlashShot has a 100 word guideline but I have added a few words and reworked the story to change a couple of things giving it more symbolism (I hope). It's amazing how better something flows with an additional 16 words.

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The Dream

I have the dream nightly. It has been so since my mother’s death four days ago.

I lie sleepless on the floor of a dark cave. I hear a shout of pain and jump to my feet. As I move to the entrance a small mound rises beneath the stone floor. I approach it but the slate turns to grass and the lump becomes a pile of soft earth.

Today is mother’s funeral. I drag my damp body from the sweat-soaked sheets of my bed. As I walk towards the bedroom door I stumble and fall to my knees. There is a mound beneath the shag carpet. I gently touch it with trembling fingers. It moves.

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OK, moving on to a more upbeat topic....I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but I'd like to remind everyone the deadline to enter a story into the Land's Edge flash fiction contest is only two weeks away. If you're going to enter a story, you'd better get cracking. All you #FridayFlash people! Get to work on a flash story...or I'll have Cathy Olliffe do some creative photo shopping to one of your pictures. You just never know what you'll find on the Internet...

You can link to Contest information here.

You can link to a description of the ever-popular Newfoundland fiction prizes here.