This challenge is produced by GirlieOnTheEdge with the following simple rules:
Write 6 Sentences. No more. No less.
Use the current week’s prompt word – TREE
Click here to hear the author read his words:
I hear
I hear them clamber over my high wall and move quietly under the weeping fronds of the pepper tree towards the back door.
I hear the younger boy’s tremulous voice ask his brother if there might be any truth in the rumour that the old man – he means me – was in the army, or even Special Forces, way back in olden times.
I hear the scornful reply that the decrepit old relic can’t hardly tie his bootlaces these days, so whatever he might have been doesn’t matter, does it.
I hear the oof of his last breath leaving his body as my double-edged Fairbairn–Sykes slides into his heart.
I hear the screams of his younger brother as he stumbles over the body in the dark, and growing even louder when I switch on a light.
I hear myself chuckle as I realise that for the next few weeks I’ll be dining like a king.
Thoroughly enjoyed this – it’s like O. Henry on acid!
Just a reminder CE, this is supposed to be fiction, not something you did the other day!
Good lord! Well, that’ll teach him to respect his elders…
Oh right. He’s dead meat. Lol.
Well, CE, that’s my horror cravings satisfied for this week. Yum! A gruesome tale indeed, and one which has you switching sympathies with the robbers and the old man.
Scary, it makes me glad i know my neighbors better than that. The one who is a grumpy older man, we just avoid.
Yikes!
I was going to say that’ll teach ‘im… but I suppose it wouldn’t!
I’m joining EM in the expellation of an ‘oof’ at that last line!
(pepper trees are a pain here too)
Dude!
On behalf of my relatively-recent qualification for inclusion in, if I may, ‘The Grand Old Army’, it serves the whipper-snappers right!
For an even more obscure cultural reference* “It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old…It’s no world for an old man anymore”
*reward for getting it, sans googleation… a free drinks token to the SSC&B
Scary! Especially the way you bring in cannibalism in the end.
Oof! Brutal goodness, if that makes sense 🙂 Great horrifying six!
Bravo, great suspense filled six. You had me hanging on the edge right up until dinner time!!!
Er, something bothering you CE? Need to get something off your chest? LOL
Perfectly frightening tale for around the campfire at kids’ summer camp! Or not 🙂
Pepper trees are the scourge of my part of the world. Would that they were as easily disposed of as insolent young lads planning to roll decrepit old relics. A wonderfully gruesome laugh, CE.
Moral of the story – don’t trespass on the neighbor’s property.
Ooh, this is deliciously gruesome.
You enter right into the character. both in the writing and the reading, risking to go where (almost) no man has gone before.
Add in the discordant image and you’ve given us a complete picture of horror.
Excellent.
This is too much for me, Mr Ayr. However, I love some of the language – the weeping finds of the pepper tree and the young boy’s tremulous voice and the reference to the old relic hardly being able to tie his bootlaces.
Thanks, Lindsey. If I can provoke a reaction as extreme as yours in such a short piece then I feel that the effort was worthwhile!
But I’m also sorry you found it too much.