Weight (Flash Fiction)

I wanted to share some of my flash fiction with you. I tend to write horror, or haunting pieces with imagery. I also use personification a lot. Here is a piece called “Weight.” 

Creaking under the weight of the house, our branches ached. No one warned us of the metal bolts and nails that would be pounded into our veins. The wind used to come as cooling, breezes, a relief to us. Now every gust made only the ends of our limbs tingle, as our bodies were stuck still under this new responsibility.

We felt the heaviness, but we did our best not to fall.

We had heard the children talking under us, and we remembered their father’s promises. Then the metal ladders came, and the truck bed filled with pieces of our fallen brothers. We wanted to cry for them, even topple over and crush their murderers, but it was not our place.

They smiled, and pointed, commanding their father’s on what they wanted. We felt the warm bodies in our lower limbs, calloused flesh running down our sides. They jumped on us and climbed like primates through the mazes of our bodies. We shook only in the wind, we never shook on our own.

The hammering and the pounding would last from morning till dusk, and when it was over and the last of the nails had been shoved through our bodies, we felt the burden on our shoulders. The children would climb up their dingy little ladder, and look down through the windows of the small hut in our arms. They would scream and laugh and we heard every sound.

One afternoon, when the sun was its hottest, the children talked about the end of the world. They talked about how if anything awful were to happen, they would be safe in the house in our arms.

They didn’t know we would collapse under their weight in two weeks.

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