that monster there...

           Fidget and Cramp had packed up their belongings and swept out their huts before making sure that the small mountain ledge that they had called home since the terrible crash was as neat and clean for the next disaster victims as it had been for them. "Are we ready?" asked Fidget. "I believe so," replied Cramp. The early morning wind was up. Cramp eyed the solid, grey expanse of sky above them.               "Gale up. Maybe worse."             "Got everything?"               "Enough."             "I'll need a hand with something."             Fidget ducked into his hut. A moment later Cramp heard Fidget laboring and the sound of something heavy hitting the packed earth within the hut. Fidget came backside-first out of the hut, dragging what looked like a small metal trunk into the clearing.               "What's that?" asked Cramp, rubbing one elbow like an alarm.             "Nothing," re

A story originally created as a submission to "The Big Ugly Review", for which I never received a receipt notification. It seems my little story might have simply been the last ugly straw for a seven-issue flash. Here it is so I don't feel like I totally wasted a handful of small words. “We were robbed.”  She pushed the words forward against the carpet as she crawled. “We what?” “Robbed.” Rusty wiggled around on hands and knees, nicked his chin on the edge of a side table and hissed, “This is what I’m talking about, Mare. This kind of thing, it’ll ruin us!” He pulled the black mask up to his nose, felt the damage and eyed his wife angrily.  In the unfamiliar room, soft moonlight crisscrossed with sharp shadows over her black bodysuit. Her full, pouting lips struck through the hole in her mask – those bright blue eyes - Mary filled the image of everything he loved about her in that very moment: the daring, the sexy innocence, the romantic thrill-seeke

That guy, crooked with simple hatred and half blind with a new found passion for life (in the shape of Babe), raged behind the gimpy pair on the stairs, tangled himself in the procession and was stunned when the bloody body of Gus smashed headlong into the cheap pine box.     When Crawly squealed it was Crimp who let go of his end of the crushed pine box first. Swine let go when the weight if the load snapped his index finger. Crimp tumbled onto Gus and Swine skid into the heap and the busted box gave way and caught hat poor guy Right in the forehead . He stuttered and burbled as the world spun. A word came out of him and Babe leaned into the coffin at the top of the stairs to get a better angle on the sound. The pressure it put on Crawly there, still bleeding beneath that filled box, was enough to crush the last few intact ribs on the little fellow. "What was it?" asked Babe over Crawly's wails.     "Babe," said that guy. A trickle of blood ran down his

      It was crawly screaming as the door came off the hinges, battered down by the weighted coffin but buffered slightly by the wedge of the scrawny boy stuck half beneath it. "Gettim off me! Gettim! Off!" he squeezed it out, flailing, eyes bulging, blood seeping from a gap in his teeth, through one shredded lip, spattering the filthy landing. Gus staggered over the coffin and into the hallway.  "My own son! Hell! How's about that!" Old Gus, he looked both pleased and sickened as he climbed up on he coffin to get real close to his boy, sweetly riddled as drew the long, bloody, stainless steel blade from a sliced organ deep inside of him, just to the belly-roll side. His spleen he thought, maybe a kidney. "I was going to show you," he slurred, "show you some magic!"      Gus hiccuped blood, smiled into his palm and wondered what he was looking for, but before he had an idea Babe gave him a shove from behind and fell over the pile of