I'm a flasher

Of fiction. Are you kidding me? Ripped Matthew McConaughey I ain't, plus there's that whole indecent exposure misdemeanor. But I gots me some smrts and that's always extra sexy. Anyway, get your mind out of the gutter and listen up. Übermilf has kindly demanded that we write -- well, just click over there for the rules if so inclined to pen your own masterpiece. Gather 'round and I shall tell you a tale spun in the grand tradition of beloved Halloween blankets of yore, except that this one is ratty and full of holes, causing you to die an icy death from extreme boredom and -- wait, let's let The Man read it, he can make anything sound spooky.














She was suddenly gripped by an invisible yet manifestly clammy hand. Reason, in violent spasm, struggled against the onset of debilitating catatonia -- no, dearest baby Jesus, the hand wasn't -- human. Frightened far beyond the inability to think and with her mental faculties on summer vacation even though it was autumn, her motor skills rapidly shut down. The brakes were out as her mind crossed multiple lanes of sanity and crashed into abject, primal horror, every defense mechanism shattered, white-hot shrapnel flying away from her gentle soul with prodigious, sinister speed, illuminating the scene that circumscribed her fragile psyche.

She was surrounded.

North. South. East, and all the compass points between, past the gnarled trees and the old yellow house, the last one on the left; framed by the tenebrous night they were. Rivulets of sweat cascading off her trembling brow somehow turned a putrescent shade of red -- the moon? No, the sky was clear, the stars mocking her with each pulse of light -- she spun around, dizzy, looking for the faintest break in the wall of them, the smallest crack that would carry her frame past the hell of no-man's land that lay twixt her final breaths and perhaps, if she was lucky -- or cursed -- one more hour on the good earth.

Screaming for help was over the horizon of impossible, for the simplest, monosyllabic noise she was unable to summon from her throat, from the depths of her weakened body that knew only the erratic thump of her heaving, straining heart.

The wind, or what her agitated mind had thought was the wind, grew louder, opaque, oppressive. A solitary voice coiled around another; a third, a fourth, hundreds, thousands rocketing up from the blackest pit, an abyss so vile, so venomous, a cacophony split apart, giving birth to a second pandemonium that made the premier cower before this fresh, rotten evil. Wave after wave of aural terror shredded the dying air around her. A scream, oh god, a scream at last! instantaneously lost within the harrowing, deafening din that echoed until nothing was left but silence, and the end.

"Doggone it, darn right, you betcha...doggone it, darn right, you betcha...doggone it, darn right, you betcha...doggone it, darn right, you betcha..."