HONORABLE MENTION, Winter 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY ASH KENNEDY
I sleep above Lila Veitch, Loving Daughter, Dependable Friend, 1963-1996. I don’t know much else about her except that no one visits her. She enjoys my company.
There’s not much shelter beyond a thick branch extending over her plot, doing its best to protect me from the rain that otherwise seeps through my large, black cloak. However, once I started sleeping here, I couldn’t go back under the bridge. Here, nobody tries to steal your stuff because no one’s around most of the time; gangs of lost teens never kick you awake, and your friends are never killed because you can’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time in a graveyard. Anyone visiting their own always assumes you’re just broken, sleeping next to your wife or mother or what have you for the last time. They never call the cops.
All that made the cemetery a good place to sleep for a while.
Soon I’ll have my own home, though. I got a job flipping burgers at a White Castle a couple miles away. I’ll finally get to eat three squares a day. I better make it two, actually. That way I can move sooner.
My stomach rumbles. Tonight, dinner is the same thing it’s been for the last five months: sleep.
“Goodnight,” I whisper to Lila.
“Goodnight,” she whispers back.
I don’t tell her that once I have a roof over my head, I’m never coming back.
I thought I was going crazy the first time she spoke to me. Even if the dead can talk, she shouldn’t be loud enough to cast her voice above a casket and six feet of dirt. There were never any other voices, though, not from another grave or anywhere else.
There’s not much detail to my dream this night. I don’t see or hear anything, but I know that it’s warm. When a cavalry of thunder wakes me up, I can’t remember where I am for a second. Over the pouring rain, Lila whispers, “Someone is coming. I can hear it.”
I listen and the sound of footsteps slowly slapping through the mud reaches me over the growl of the storm. I sit up, look around through the darkness. Over rows of graves, a human shape trudges toward me.
Once he’s closer, I can make him out. He’s rugged, an unkempt beard falling in front of his tattered black suit. He smells as if he’s just crawled from one of the graves. I’m locked in his wide, unrelenting stare for a long silence before he speaks. “I’ve seen you sleeping here,” he says. “I know what you are.”
I shake my head. “Please.”
“Must be a necromancer,” he croaks. “Bet you pulled those clothes off ol’ Lila there.”
My hands start to tremble. This is going much worse than I expected. All I can manage to say is, “What?”
“Relax, where do you think I got these threads? We’re kindred. You’re clearly starved. Closest you can get to death.” His gaze stays locked on me, unblinking as he slaps his belly. “Only wish I had the will to join you.”
Still facing him, I inch backward along the ground. My mouth falls open with disgust—and this degenerate twitches with realization.
“Unless you’re not,” he says. “In which case what are you?” My back hits Lila’s headstone just as he says, “Sacrifice, then. Dead for dead.”
He reaches into his suit, pulls out a hunting knife. I’m about to plead for my life, to scream, when he collapses to his knees. The knife lands on the ground as the stranger topples to his side and starts writhing. His agonized expressions are accompanied only by the sound of mud squishing beneath him as he rolls back and forth, clawing at his throat.
Finally, he is done. A rattle escapes him, and the hairs all over my body shoot up.
“Sacrifice,” Lila whispers. “Dead for dead.”
I feel arms wrap around me, gently guiding me toward the ground like a lover’s embrace inviting me back to bed. It’s freezing, though, and all I can see is the silhouette of the cadaver before me.
It takes the whole night for me to fall back to sleep. When I wake up, he’s gone. Even his knife has disappeared. The only thing that remains is rain and the stench of death.
“Good morning,” Lila whispers.
Eventually, this graveyard will be nothing more than a nightmare, I tell myself. Soon, I’ll never have to come back.
Ash Kennedy was born to be a pipe smoker, inhaling sweet grass and other vices around a campfire while shocking children and adults alike with myths revealed to him by some wicked spirit. But no one’s ever offered him money to do that so he writes in his free time to avoid the crushing weight of a horrible job he hopes not to die at. His work has been published in Esoterica Magazine‘s inaugural short story contest as well as in Chariot Press. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and enjoys worker’s rights, fighting hunger, and telling jokes.