The Sunday Scaries
Volume I, Number 3
Microfiction by Pat Harrigan
Content Warning: Language and Horror

Fee Fi Fo Fum

Now, when it happened, she just walked to a neighbor’s house. Gone were the days of panic and screaming and hiding in the cellar. The cellar was gone anyway, crushed in. Her son was gone too, and both of her daughters. Her husband she had at least been able to bury, along with the pulp and pieces of the other men in the village, after they had bravely sallied forth and died at the base of the mountain.
          These days they built their homes with detachable roofs. It wasn’t as weatherproof, but there was less danger of structural failure in the walls when He lifted them off and tossed them aside. On this occasion she heard Him coming, which wasn’t always the case. Sometimes scouts could see Him walking out from the clouds at the top of the peak, but just as often He simply appeared in the fields, and started foraging before they could prepare.
          What preparation, she thought? as she walked down the road to Sofiya’s house. Some of the mothers still put their children into the underground bunkers, but He always seemed to find them. Smelled them, she supposed. The fields around here were potted with holes, filled with splintered wood and pulverized water jugs. Sometimes a woman forgot herself, and tried to stab Him in the ankle with a kitchen knife. These women He mostly ignored. As long as He plucked one child, screaming, into the sky, He seemed content. He would depart, and not return for a week or a month or an hour.
          When the railroad had been working, the next station had been three days’ travel. Now the tracks were twisted and rusted, stretching as often straight up into the sky as they did along the ground. And anyway she had no confidence that His kin were not everywhere in this country.
          She took the opportunity to pick some wild flowers to decorate her front door. A glance back revealed His curious fingers poking fruitlessly through her home, smashing her last remaining chairs, she supposed, her grass-and-timber roof held carelessly in His left hand. As she watched, He let it fall to earth. Good, she thought, it seemed intact.
💀