Flash fiction #1

The stolen finger

A young farmer was tending to his field one sunny afternoon in June when he saw a curious mound of earth not quite in keeping with the rest of his land. Placing his tools beside the paint chipped barn he ventured towards the curious mound. And there, poking through the earth, was a single stubby finger.

He reached out and touched it carelessly but the digit simply would not move. So he pulled it and twisted and wiggled it some more until the finger finally gave way an audible snap. The broken digit rocked and rolled in his palm. Then he heard a noise; distant yet growing infinitely near, and scampered away.

The young farmer took the broken finger back home and set it in the middle of the dining table where he stared at it helplessly with his wife.

“Who do you think it belonged to?” She asked simply enough, poking it with a knife. “Maybe we should take it to the police, perhaps they could tell us.”

“Maybe we should. There’s always someone interested when a child’s finger is found.”

That evening, with the finger placed in a dusty old jar upon the kitchen table, the young farmer and his wife thought nothing more about the digit. But in the middle of the night, between the whistle of the wind and the rustle of the cornfield, a sound brought the young farmer out of his sound sleep.

A sound, he knew, of unbridled pain.

“Wake up, do you hear that?” He said to his wife. “Do you hear that sound?”

Before she could answer, the sound grew near.

The young man groaned and grumbled and lied with delight as he saw a shadow in the pale moonlight.

“Go to sleep,” he said as bravely as he could. “When you wake up it will all be good.”

But the knocking had stopped and the kitchen door was pushed wide; the hinges letting out a horrible sigh. And when he looked again the shadow was no longer outside. 

And the child wailed on.

Soon there were footsteps and the groan of a board, as little feet padded down the darkened hall.

The young farmer’s heart jumped and stalled, kick starting again with a thunderous roar.

And the child wailed no more.

The young farmer moved to his bedroom door and held it shut tight, his ear attuned to the still of the night. It was there, he knew, beyond his door, waiting for the moment it could begin to claw.

“Who are you? What do you want?” He asked.

And the silence crept on.

The young farmer trembled and shook with the door pushed tight, and he stared at his wife with an awful fright.

For a while nothing happened, it had gone, it was fine ... but then the door banged and the child raged on.

The young man screamed as his wife turned white, as long dark shadows twisted through the soundless night.

And the thing knocked on.

(Note: I have no idea why the final quarter of this story seemed to take a on a rhyming kind of quality. It was certainly not intentional. I could have changed it, but I quite liked it, so I left it in.)