Friday, November 1, 2013

There Is No Greater Context to this Story

The chirping washes over Leroy as soon as he opens the front door. He wishes his family a goodnight against the steady intrusive noise from outside, kissing his grandmother on the top of her silver curls and waving to his sisters. He doesn't want them to have to come out, so the goodbye is brisk before he jogs off into the sweltering humidity of night’s hello.

Every little house along the road is a faint yellow dot in a cloying mist he can scarcely see through. He fans his fingers over his eyes just in case. The boundaries of his vision are the tall reeds, brown in the pale yellow cast by the houses.

The chirping only grows as he approaches the road, roaring up into a cacophony he’s too ill-studied to recognize. Are they crickets, cicadas, or toads? He can see tall reeds, but nothing else in the fog, and so can’t tell what environment they’d live in. Whatever they are, wherever they are, he can’t hear the jingling of his keys over their din, much less can he hear anything following behind him.

Leroy flips from the aquamarine key to the lipstick red key - that's the one for the car, he thinks, not thinking of anything else. It's another few long seconds of pavement before the mist yields his rusted Ford, resting on an angle against the slope leading into the roadside gutter. He can't see the bottom of that gutter, though there's obvious and erratic motion down there. Maybe water run-off, maybe fauna swarming.

He feels something stirring behind him and the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. He scratches the hairs, then unlocks the Ford and climbs into the cab, not checking behind himself, as people check on their irrational senses far less than they think. The seat groans beneath him, the first sound he's heard since leaving his grandmother’s house, beside all those bugs, or toads, out there. He lingers at the cab door, not shutting it just yet, squinting into the black-on-black night for a glimpse of what army is making that sound. He leans his head out through the frame, and something definitely stirs in the gutter.

He uses a rough palm to flatten the hairs on the back of his neck, eying the dim gutter until he remembers pre-season football is on tonight. He shuts the cab and drives off. Nothing happens to him. Nothing lurks watching him leave, except the mosquitoes that missed the opportunity to nibble on him. We promise there’s no greater context to this story. We would know; we were there watching.

17 comments:

  1. Shades of the monsters under the bed promising they are harmless. And lying.
    Brilliant - and thank you.

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  2. Cool. Yes, indeed, we were watching.

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  3. Ah, but you were there watching. The creep factor is present. People shouldn't ignore their instincts.

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  4. Ooh creepy - who's watching - now I have to check under everything - yes I do ;)

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  5. Oh, this was nice. Great atmosphere, great ending. Well done!

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  6. Ahhhh! I was going to mention the monsters under the bed lying about their presence as well, but Elephant's Child beat me to it. :) (it was fresh on my mind, as I was reading lots of Calvin and Hobbes "monsters under the bed" comics yesterday in an attempt to find an appropriate one to post on my site).

    Super creepy, and yet not all at the same time. Of course, now I'm getting flashbacks of Observers standing around jotting down notes in Fringe... and they weren't as harmless as they appeared at first, either.

    Loved this.

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  7. He got away this time. Next time he won't be so lucky...

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  8. Creepy in a meta-creepy way. I like this a lot.

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  9. Hi John. The best part of this story was the atmosphere. It immediately took me back to a night in Georgia when I was a kid. The heavy miasma, the chirping racket...I eventually became convinced that there was something lurking in the nearby cotton field and ended up putting myself to bed at 8 because I was afraid to be outside with everyone else. (And everyone knows the bedsheets keep the monsters at bay.) Any writing which can evoke such a strong memory in me is a rare treat!

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  10. Ohhh, nice creepy ending. I love the title too.

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  11. Well, he got away, and I felt for sure that something was going to get him, I hope he doesn't drive his car into a tree in that thick fog. :)

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  12. Super suspense John! There is a "King-esque" feel about this one, one of your best I believe.

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  13. That ending gave me chills. Well played John. Well played.

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  14. I gave an evil laugh at the end of this -- it seemed like it deserved one. I guess Leroy didn't grow up in the kind of countryside I did, or else he would have most definitely checked behind him!

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  15. I definitely laughed out loud at the end of this. Love the descriptions and fog. Sounds like the weather we had a few weeks ago. It is definitely creepy.

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