Fiction: Face in a Jar

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creative writing, edinburgh, fiction, flash fiction, surgeons hall museum

A little fiction inspired by the weird and wonderful exhibits of Edinburgh’s Surgeon’s Hall Museum…

Amongst the many strange items in my Auntie Meg’s house, by far the strangest was a face in a jar. In her younger years, my aunt had taken her manic grin and unsettling squint across the globe to collect trinkets; scorpions set in glass poised to sting, black shrunken heads that dangled on string, grimacing puppets with ghoulish wide grins from places like Sri Lanka and Nepal. Upon her return she crammed the objects into the shelves of her tiny home, and over the years they had grown as old and as forgotten as Auntie Meg herself. As a child I believed that if you stayed inside the house for too long you might one day find yourself sitting on one of those creaking shelves, or tucked away in a dark bedroom corner gathering dust, find that you too had become one of the trinkets.

The face sat on the mantelpiece suspended in a jar of yellowed water, quite still and appeared to be asleep. One day when she left the room I found myself creeping closer to get a better look. There was a small sticker on the side with 1917 written on it and I remembered she told me it was a solider who had died in the First World War. Pale and red haired like me, his eyelashes looked so very delicate, preserved and softened by time, pressed against the wrinkled skin under his eyes. Those were the lines of a man who cried, there was no doubt those eyes had known tears. I wondered if they had known love too. Perhaps that was why he cried. His cheeks were bristled with stubble that had stopped growing almost a century ago. Twisted nostrils, skewed and black from the bullet hole that killed him through the left side of his nose, thick old fashioned sutures pointlessly held the wound closed. Shutting my eyes, I inhaled; the smells of burning, gun powder, dusty roads, hot dinners, hot sweats, bodies, then in the end the smell of fear. When I looked again two brown eyes, black as the barrel of a gun, stared back at me and I jumped before I realised it was only my own reflection in the glass.

Still he slept, another century of dreams from his jar to come. Curious I reached for it, tentatively feeling the smooth glass against my fingertips, knowing I shouldn’t but I wanted a closer look. I wanted to know all of this man, to see what happened where his forehead stopped, where his skull should have been.

Lifting him toward me I could feel the slip before it happened. The jar out of my hands smashed across the hard wooden floor. The silence that followed seemed to stretch for ninety four long years. Liquid and shards and a lump of soggy flaccid flesh lay sadly at my feet face down, the gristle behind the face now on show. Auntie Meg appeared in the doorway, she looked down and sighed.

“That was your great-grandfather.”

 

 

 

 

A flash fiction horror story

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creative writing, flash fiction, horror, story, writing

First draft of a little horror flash fiction snippet…it’s been a long time since I’ve written any fiction and I’ve only recently merged my writing blog with this here food blog. 

 

The ink black waters of the loch lashed violently at its bank on that bleak October night. The sharp air stung with cold and the teeth of freezing children chattered in their mothers’ arms. Yet not one fire was lit in the village that night, not one candle burned. No one wanted him to come thundering at their door. The village stood in a dark, sombre silence, as if it might almost disappear completely.

They’d snatched the young boy, on the orders of the wicked one. A bastard, an orphan, a lost soul, they were all the same; the children no one would miss. They’d have befriended him and made him feel safe, laughed and joked all the way there. Until they reached the cottage, where they’d turn on him like a pack of rabid dogs. Who knew what terrible things had happened to that boy, you’d try to stop your mind from thinking about it too hard, but the things you heard whispered on the wind in the village were impossible to forget.

I’d imagine the boy screaming, begging for mercy, until I’d pull my youngest close and pray for God to forgive all our damned souls. They would have offered him a chance, a glimmer of hope, by opening the door and exposing the blackness of night. He’d stand there blinking, naked and bleeding, disbelieving that they might actually let him live. They’d give him a head start. Off he’d run like a wild thing, running through the dark as the silent hills of the valley watched. The wicked one would never be far behind.

He liked the chase almost as much as he liked the kill. And the village held its collective breath, waiting for the distant cries to crack the silence. When they came we covered our wee ones’ ears.

When the stillness returned, we crawled into our icy beds, assuring ourselves that for another evening the wicked one was satisfied. That the unspeakable evil that lurked in the cottage was satiated. And, for now, our own were safe.