Writer's Journal

(For some reason I feel that this one, out of all my flash fiction, has the potential to be expanded into a longer story.)

The sheriff tossed his chewed gum out the car window, and pulled up at the tiny roadside chapel.  It was built next to a closed highway, but the presence of two of the sherrif’s department squad cars and a hearse.  An ambulance was pulling away, going in the opposite direction, back towards civilization.

The old man got out of the car, leaning on his cane and ambling up to the door.

Deputy Connors sat by the outside door, smoking his cigarette.  The young man had blood covering his face, but his manner suggested that it wasn’t his own, or at least that he no longer cared where it had come from.

“T’ others?” the Sheriff asked.

Connors pointed inside with the lit cigarette.

The sheriff stepped inside and was assaulted by a horrific smell.

The coroner was taking photographs, examining a trough at the front of the chapel.  The building was ancient, possibly built back in the mid-1800s, and having lain abandoned for almost a century, maybe more, until its recent tenents moved in.

Two deputies stood conferring in the back–Marcus and Gibson–casting about the building with an evil look on their faces.

The sheriff stepped up to them, and took off his sunglasses.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“Only Connors really knows, Sheriff,” Gibson said, his eyebrows forming a straight line across the middle of his head.

“So far as we can tell,” Marcus said, “we had ourselves something…kind of like those Snake-Handlers you hear about, sometimes.”

“Snakes?”

“They didn’t have no snakes.  What I mean is they were weird and I don’t know where they got their idea.  Go look up there, Sheriff.”

“What?  Why?” The Sheriff asked.

“Just go look,” Gibson said.  The old man gave him a solid thwack across the back with his cane, producing a curse from the younger man.

“No, Lewis…Sheriff Mayer…we really don’t know what to tell you.  These people did something terrible, here.  Go…go look for yourself.”

Turning his back on them and striking up a litany of curses, the Sheriff approached the trough at the front, where the coroner was examining something.

“What is this?” he asked.

The coroner, a woman in her thirties, turned and gave him a mournful look.

“Now…that’s not a look I expect someone who works with corpses to have.  What happened here, Mary?”

She looked into the trough, and he followed suit.

The trough was filled halfway up with a dark, red wine, but there was a small corpse floating in it, face-down.

“Infanticide?” the Sheriff asked.

“Drowned in a mixture of wine and urine containing psychoactive compounds,” she said, “there’ve been too many cases like this, lately, Sheriff Mayer.”

“What happened here?” he asked, ignoring her accusation.

“Can’t really say.  You’d have to ask Connors.”

The Sheriff nodded, having expected this answer.

“You give your ma my best, now,” he said, heading out of the chapel.”

Connors was rocking back and forth.  There was an empty pack of cigarettes next to him, and the wreckage, extinguished and smoldering, sat in an arc in front of him.

The Sheriff sat on the stoop next to him, looking at his youngest deputy.

Connors looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks, bags of hanging flesh under his eyes had darkened almost to the point of looking bruised.

“What happened here, Connors?” the Sheriff asked.

The young man sniffed.

“I killed them.  When I found out what they were doing…I came in, and began shooting.  I got them all.  They deserved it, and it’s not my place to judge, but I could hear it, Sheriff.  I could hear the…”

He broke off.

“Gibson and Marcus might try to tell you that they were Christians, snake-handlers or something.  Try to whitewash whatever this is, in their eyes.  They’re wrong…these people kill children.  Killed.  They worship a god of murder, Sheriff, and I murdered them.”

He looked into the pack of cigarettes, tossed it aside, and pulled out a new one.

“I can’t do this, Sheriff.  I offered to play detective for you, but I wasn’t expecting this.  I expected shootings, theft, that sort of things.  If I could go back in time and tell myself about what this job entails…I’d prob’ly still take it, but that’s because I wouldn’t believe some of the things I told myself.  Last week, I shot a man who had been buried the day before.  The worms were already eating his flesh.”

He lit a cigarette, casting his face in an orange witchlight.

The coroner stepped outside.

“Can I borrow one of those?” she asked Connors, and he tossed her the pack, “I don’t know if they’ve done this more than once.  I can only find the two bodies in the wine-trough.”

The Sheriff sucked his teeth for a moment, thinking.

“Out back,” Connors began, “there’s an oil drum filled with lye and tiny, tiny bones.”

“I’ll send the other two to check it out.  Connors, I’ll see you tomorrow morning, you can tell me all of the story after you’ve had a night’s sleep.”