Goad

On that day I abandoned you beside a flower-laden pathway that led to nowhere, where only the sky and the sun witnessed my afternoon despair.

I ran away without looking back, fearing that my heart would fail me like it once did… when one fine morning I found you in my backyard, trembling amidst the last dried leaves of the departing season. You were back then such a tiny, strange inoffensive, and cute looking creature, that fitted perfectly in the palm of my hand. You had colourful wings, and your skin… oh your soft baby skin, it was silver glitter.

You were my secret, my, forever secret.

And that’s when, after that I left you there, I decided to keep a diary so as to drown my sadness in words. Yes, I was sad, for I had myself broken a link that had left a hole in me; the type of chasm that I would have never thought could suddenly be dug in one’s own heart and life.

… You should have seen me, I was so pitiful to look at… and still is. I know! I should have returned right away to the place where I abandoned you to find again my joy of living, I should have, but I didn’t, because I think that my dreams have betrayed me. I still don’t know if you were a chimera, or real… oh! What these hands did? What did I do?

Days after that I committed this atrocious deed I was suddenly awaken in the middle of the night by a noise in the backyard, immediately I ran outside with a lantern thinking that you had found your way back home, to me; but it was only our sleepwalking neighbour, who was then affectionately waltzing with her goose, perhaps thinking that it was someone in her dreamscape… poor little animal, poor our neighbour.

Since my last explosion of anger I haven’t repaired the enclosure; anyway, I don’t have the money, I don’t know where he went with my money, I don’t know if he has given it away to somebody else, I’ll never know. None of them will ever know. Oh! if only I could turn back time; if only I could.

Thus that’s how our neighbour almost every night walk, waltz, hop, and even creep till our home, whose doors and windows I don’t lock anymore, so that I can silently witness her actions during her somnambulism walk. Then after she goes away, I immediately sit down to write a new horror story for the magazine.

No! Don’t worry, they don’t write, they don’t read, they’re always eclipsed behind their tucked away tiny home, same as us all in this remote and wooden area of this region. I’m sure of that, because some time ago I purposefully made three of my famous banana pie, before going to visit each one of them, like that, if they would have caught me spying, I would have lied with my get to know each other pie as offering.

And you know what? I’m happy that none of them caught me red handed spying on them, because by what I’ve discovered, you can be sure that it would have been the end of me.

Do you realise that I screamed while he screamed, and nobody around heard our violence in that tranquil night. Perhaps it’s his ghost that possess our dishevelled neighbour every night to seek revenge; perhaps after that his ghost would have learned how to effectively control her body he’ll kill me, and I’ll become a ghost too, forever haunting the living.

I’m seriously considering buying a ouija board during my next trip to town, where I’ll be handing my new short story to the publisher of the magazine. When the publisher met me for the first time, instead of him, he had a look of great surprise on his face.

“You look familiar! Have we already met somewhere?” He had then asked me, seemingly very intrigued.

“No, I don’t think so, I’m not even a native of this region,” I then lied.

“The plot twists and scenes in your mystery novels are so vivid that one can almost think that they are real stories, actually, there were many cases of unresolved murders in the region, so many unidentified skeletons were deterred here and there.”

“Oh really! How horrible! I never knew that such a quiet place could hide such dark and horrid stories,” I again lied.

“Perhaps that’s why your short stories get so much success, because readers get the sense that they are reading the stories of these dead people; reading the dénouements as if they were extracts from real archives,” he had then replied to me.

Each time I go to town I buy newspapers with hope of finding articles about a horrid monster that leaves countless victims in its wake; I imagine that you are now a big and tall ferocious frightening beast, with large black wings, silver skin, dark eyes, sharp claws and fangs that you use to tear and devour skins and flesh, until what’s left of them are only bones. But none of these newspaper talk about you, and my fear sprung forth, I’m crushing under these inevitable legacies, I should have never come back here.

But they’ll find you, and even though they still don’t know that you exist, they’ll find you in my writings, in my stories, under this mask, and then, when they’ll know you, they’ll all be afraid of you, and that’s when, your story shall begin.

I don’t have enough time to write longer stories right now, thus I’m practicing writing micro-fiction — a writing style where you have to tell a whole story in a brief way, which I found is not as easy as writing longer stories.

I decided to tell this story in a narrative voice, where I give away bits of thoughts from the character’s fictional diary.

While writing Goad, I didn’t think that the story would unravel in this way… but I like that it did, because now I can develop the story more to make it longer for a book of short stories; I just hope that the story doesn’t sound like a summary or like story lines, some fragments from my imagination.

As for the title of this story, it came only to me yesterday, right after that I finished writing it.

I also started the story with the one word prompt ‘abandoned’.