Robert and Emma lie undetected in the shed beside the town’s garbage dump. Dead for centuries, their spirits are still quite lively. Their love, strong as the day they wed in 1801. They find the stench of garbage more pleasing than their decomposition all those years ago.
Their skeletal rattlings have always scared away the curious. But the night of October 31st 2026, something was different. Hundreds of critters who tunneled into their space as frost took hold, suddenly breathed their last. The dead were settling in under their mud roof and something was shuffling overhead as the wind began to howl. Bats swooped nearby. Children screamed. Witches from the local coven flew overhead, cackling, screaming their names.
Energized, they stood up. Stretched tall. Their phalenges reached out and entwined. They’d waited centuries for the night of the waking dead. Surely this was it.
Written for Prosery Monday on dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe.
Today Kim gives us the line “The dead were settling in under their mud roof and something was shuffling overhead” from Alice Oswald’s poem Body. We’re to use that line, word for word, within a piece of prose or flash fiction that is a maximum of 144 words in length. Extra credit if the story is exactly 144 words in length. Mine is!
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