The Thing

The Thing

This is a 500 word flash.
Featured in the short story newsletter of 9/14/06

I swear this is the truth. When I was eight I had my first campout in our new house in Washington. I was very excited. My parents were overprotective and this was a rare strike at independence.

My dad and I put up the tent about a half an acre away from the house. To me this was a hundred miles from my bed. My mother stocked my backpack as if I were on a trip to the heart of Africa.

Action Dan and I snuggled in my Superman sleeping bag. With flashlight in hand, I found my way into sleep. Sometime before the sun rose, I woke up.

A large shadow lurked on the skin of the tent. It swayed back and forth and staggered closer to my thin shelter. I thought it must have been Mike, my older and sometimes butthead brother. I called out,

“Mike, that’s not funny. I’m going to tell Mom.”

That’s when I first smelled it. It was a terrible odor. The only way I know how to describe it is it smelled like a dead animal that had been set on fire. This mixture of rotting flesh and soot began to make me sick to my stomach.

This was answered by a low hoarse growl.

I screamed for my folks, wanting them to swoop out of the sky like Superman and place me safe in my bed. No help arrived.

Slowly, the front opening began to be unzipped. The Thing was as tall as a door and looked like a muddy shadow with sharp burning eyes.

Then another dark figure unzipped the opening I was closest to. I thought every nightmare I’d ever experienced had come to life and was now going to drag me back to the hell they came from.

Two hands reached in and ripped me out as I screamed from the bottom of my feet to top of my red hair. Mike pulled me out and tucked me under his arm like I was nothing more than a sack of potatoes.

By then our parents had stumbled downstairs. Dad with a baseball bat in hand. Mom white with fear.

Out of breath both of us spoke on top of each other, “In… the… backyard.”

Dad rushed out, swinging like a mad man.

Mom held me in her arms as we told her what had happened through hysterical sobbing, gasping for air.

Dad came in a moment later and said, “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.”

The four of us stayed close that night, finding safety in the kitchen with cups of hot cocoa.

The next morning Mom opened the door, screamed, and fell back from it. Her wide eyes staring at a sooty handprint on the white door.

The print never went away and we never went in the backyard at night again. Two months we’d moved out and into my grandmother’s house until we found somewhere else to live faraway from The Thing in the backyard.

Word count 498