Flash Fiction
Striving to keep my writing on an upward spiral, I’ve found that writing ‘flash fiction’ is an excellent exercise. I describe it as a story in half a nutshell. My flash fiction stories tend to be no more than 1,500 words which some pundits classify as a ‘micro-story’ (if you’re into labels). The story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, not just a rambling conglomeration of thoughts or emotions. Anything goes and to me their value is in helping learn how to more effectively use words by carving away the extraneous. It’s also a lot of fun! Here’s one of my stories called Dust Bunny.
Dust Bunny
(Flash Fiction by Will Ottinger)
The real estate agent, a tall Pilates blond in a tailored navy suit, unlocks the front door in the fading light and steps inside the foyer. Calculating I’m dressed well enough to buy, she’s gushed about the house since we stepped from her car. She has to see I’m perspiring heavily but keeps the smile in place, most likely suppressing her fear my trendy neighbors won’t appreciate me as an addition to weekend cocktail parties.
“I normally wouldn’t allow this,” she sighs benevolently, “but since you lived here as a boy, I understand.” Tolerance bestowed on me she taps a manicured fingernail on the entry table. “Leave the key here in the morning. And remake the bed. It’s a model home and we prefer everything to be… you know, neat.” She means the sheets will have to be changed, but forces a smile and closes the door, sealing me inside.
Childhood, they say, is the cradle of all terror. I don’t mean being frightened by dogs or bullies. Terror is the fear of things you can’t touch.
I’m thirty-nine years old and was seven when we moved into the house. Funny how the years diminish most memories and deny the past. But something made me the exception. After we moved away, I smelled my nightmares on my worst nights.
They say you can’t go home, but I’ve done it. I’ve come back to hell.
Like the entire transitional neighborhood, the house’s exterior is gentrified, a cutesy starter for newlyweds and downsizers. Several surrounding houses disappeared, but this one survived. Not that carpenters or painters would have disturbed the boarder. Hell, they never heard it scuttle across wooden floors, or listened to the wetness seep from ancient nostrils. How could they? They were gone when night descended.
My mother didn’t want the house with its hundred years of peeling wood, musty carpet and dark corners, but the house was cheap, abandoned, the previous owner’s furniture still in place for reasons I never understood until it was too late. My mother knew better than to argue with my father and we moved in, commandeering ruined furniture complete with deep gouges, peculiar odors and soiled fabric rotting from the inside.
As a boy the first thing I’d noticed were the faded walls, scabbed and patched, the plaster drinking up an odd color of paint that reminded me of crushed toadstools. Did former families huddle in the wounded room waiting for daylight, venting their terror on the ruined furniture and walls? Or did they finally just sit numbly in chairs like my mother and father, far from my bedroom, filling ashtrays with guilt and bent cigarettes, trying to fathom what shared the house with their son.
I glance at the key on the table and suppress the urge to bolt after the woman. Instead, I look at the smooth new drywall, smelling varnish and fresh plaster. The late afternoon sunlight appears lethargic, piped through a leaded window at the top of the wooden stairs as though the sun itself was anxious to flee the night.
I am mad to come back, I think, my awareness mounting as my ears endure the high-pitched wail of silence. But if I’m honest, I have to do this. My last company walked away from me the previous week. Like the others, management didn’t value catatonic states and late arrivals, attributing them to alcohol or a mental flaw that embarrassed the suits and clients. My last two wives eventually agreed and discovered other diversions.
But tonight, I will sleep in the belly of my madness and defeat it. A child cannot live forever in an adult, and therapists claim confrontation is good for the soul, a therapeutic bandage for the past.
I gaze up the stairs toward the second floor. Will the fourth step still protest my weight after all the renovation? I climb, relieved when the board is solid, mute. The stairwell reeks of paint and sawn wood. At the top the new window of yellows and greens tolerates the fading sunlight as dusk surrenders to the approaching night. I flip the light switch. Nothing. Not surprising, I think. Houses aren’t shown at night.
I’d always counted the steps from the top of the stairs to my bedroom. Fifteen steps, maybe twelve on adult legs. My old bedroom waits behind a new bone-white door. The door grates open with a metallic squeal and I stop, hemmed in by the molding. Why would a new door protest my entry?
A child’s furniture clutters the small room, shiny additions for innocent lookers. Faint moonlight illuminates a narrow bed covered by a suffocating duvet that beckons from the center of the room. Feeling slightly ridiculous, I quickly undress and slip beneath the thick coverlet, pulling it to my chin as the ceiling slides from gray to black like a heavy lid being closed.
I will mend my broken world and cast off a boy’s memories. Warm and contented, I allow the room’s silence to mock my nightmares. An old house made new with nothing…
The first sound is a leathery rustling. I squeeze my eyes shut. The noise stops and I laugh uneasily. The oldest infantile cliché – monsters under the bed. More likely renovation and new structural supports, or a self-fulfilling imagination. There are no —
The next sound is moist as something primal shifts on the hardwood floor. The dank breath is rotten, ancient with decay and malice. Unable to stop myself, I do something I never dared as a child: I lean over the bedside, place my hand on the floor and peer beneath the bed.
Two malevolent golden eyes stare at me. Squatting close to the floor on clawed appendages, the bloated flesh heaves and grunts, and I scream as a scaly tentacle sinks its talons into my wrist. My grip on the wooden bedframe fails and I slide onto the cold floor, screaming. No one hears my choked cry of surrender as the oily feeler drags me beneath the bed.
***
The blond real estate agent unlocks the front door and smugly ushers the family into the house. “Best buy on the block,” she gushes.
Her high heel steps on something. Annoyed, she stoops and picks up the door key, then cocks her head, listening. No noise, no note, nothing to indicate the sweaty man’s presence or gratitude. She gathers herself and rearranges her smile.
“It’s a charmer,” she coos to the husband and wife and little boy. “Clean and safe.” She smiles down at the seven-year old.
“Not even a dust bunny under the bed.”
