Flash Fiction First Friday is an effort to publish something small on the First Friday of every month. The goal is simply to write more and to share more, and not get completely bogged down in huge projects. These pieces can spawn from writing exercises, prompts, or just freewriting. The point is that they're low-commitment and just for fun.
I'd love to see your flash fictions pieces if you participate, too! Either use the tag #flashfictionfirstfriday or comment below with a link to your blog.
This was another one written for my writing group. We had to include a creepy forest and 3 words out of this list: Chandelier, Wish, Beam, Miniature, and Fester.
EarthRot
It had started as little more than a sinkhole—the kind that develops above underground rivers or caves. But every year, the gouge in the forest floor grew. The trees around the great scar became sick, graying, and tilting towards the depression until one day, shriveled root systems finally gave way and the trees fell into the morass. Over days, the trees sank, root to bough. Animals got mired in the roiling earth at first, until they too, learned to avoid the pit. The animals learned faster than the people, who could not fight their compulsion to approach the edge of what was becoming a canyon.
After years of the gouge growing, deepening, widening, black sludge broke through the earth and bubbled up at the bottom of the scar. Like a festering wound that had been hiding its infection beneath scabs, once the sludge surfaced, the putrid smell belied the depth of rot.
And then creatures emerged from that inky tar. Trapped forest animals clawed their way back to solid ground, but they were changed. Too many limbs, too few eyes, or spines as gnarled as branches. Everywhere they stepped, vitriol dripped from their spined feet, corrupting what few plants remained. Sludge oozed between the gray, twisted trees, withering them with corruption until there was little left that could be described as a forest.
The worst were the people that had been engulfed. When they reemerged from the bowels of the earth, something of intelligence remained in their eyes. Tar poured from their mouths and noses, dripped from their too-long fingers. These husks sought out nearby villages, driven by some primal instinct to multiply. And thus, the infection spread.
All the while the scar in the earth deepened, widened. Eventually, it bisected the forest, the country, the whole continent. When it breached the mountains, blackness poured forth into the sea beyond and then there was no land left unsullied. Nowhere green.
The only bastions of untainted life were high in the mountains. People looked down upon the slopes of their homes with dread as they watched the corruption ascend. They were trapped.
There was a story among those people—as there was among most people—about the end of the world. In their version, a growing darkness, spawned by human greed and malice, consumed the planet and destroyed everything it touched. No one had thought the story was going to be literal, but watching the sludge spread up their mountain, they knew there was only one hope remaining.
Hope is sometimes a delicate thing, fleeing if you dare make eye contact. Other times, hope is gnarled and made tough through tragedy—tempered like steel. Hope can be spite. Hope can be destruction.
A clean slate implies a purge.
With bitter belief in their hearts, the people on the mountain called forth storms from the heavens. They called forth fire from the earth. They called forth annihilation.
Clouds roiled overhead, as black as the waters in the sea. The air became charged, brimming with energy, until all at once, it gathered and coalesced into star fire. Beams of light pierced through the storms like great lances, and impacted the black sludge with a force that shook the mountain. The smell of ozone arrived first, followed by the scent of charring rot.
Strike after strike, the beams of light set the black corruption ablaze until the whole world was one great inferno.
With their dying wish, the people on the mountain buried a seed. The heat of the flames would wake it from dormancy. The tree would burst forth from the crust of the earth into a new world, simple and clean.
Copyright KR Holton, 2024
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