Horror - Flash

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. The Floor is Lava Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

THE FLOOR IS LAVA

Eric Cashman steps from the lit back lot and through the gate of the chain-link fence, into the shadows beyond. He pulls a pack of du Maurier Distinct cigarettes from his pocket and a pink Bic lighter.

“Ever play the floor is lava?” he says.

He’d been off tobacco for three weeks until purchasing this pack before the shift started. The cigarette fits between his dry and cracking lips like the tongue of an ex-girlfriend. Wonderful. Wrong. He inhales and blows the smoke free.

“Well, did ya?”

There’s no tobacco use on municipal property, a new mandate to make schools and hospitals smoke free. The scent of cigarette smoke mingles with the gentle hints of manure and autumn permeating the world around them. Standing a few feet from Eric Cashman is Wendy Wise. She’s the most mannish woman they’d ever had on the force: rough as sandpaper and friendly as a recently ridden bull. She’s odd and quiet, doesn’t exactly play nice with her co-workers. But she’s present and Cashman has to talk.

Wise spits tobacco and saliva into the dusty shoulder of the farm-use road before them.

Cashman takes her reaction to his question as a confirmation; he assumes everybody played the floor is lava. He inhales. Exhales. Gazes out into the calm night. There’s a field just beyond the road. Tall grass waves a reedy whisper, but otherwise it’s silent. No crickets. No animals. No nothing.

Cashman says, “My folks took me and my brother to Hawaii once. Back in sixty-seven, I think. We played the floor is lava in our room. Outside, the volcanos were blowing their tops. I don’t remember them, but I kind of remember playing the floor is lava, and I remember the dream I had.”

Wise spits another gob into the shadows. The moon is hiding behind clouds. It’s full dark where they are. An old stone and cement wall from a barn foundation blocks the last bit of reach the shine cast off by the rear parking lot yard light—that lot being thirty meters behind them, the station twenty more on top of that.

Cashman laughs. It’s not a nice laugh. It’s strained. A painful memory. “See, I dreamed my brother and my parents were on my brother’s bed in our room and the lava came in through the door. The lava came up through the floor. The lava broke down a wall. My brother screamed and my mother screamed, my dad was crying and the tears steamed off his cheeks. Then they went up, like whoosh, and they were shaking all over and trying to wave the fire off them, but that doesn’t work. That’s why you do stop, drop, and roll. Waving flames gives them more oxygen, makes them burn better.”

The night is slow, like most weeknights in Greyland County. Wise pulls the little, gooey, brown wad from her lip, tosses it into the gravel, and reaches into the breast pocket of her uniform shirt for a Redman pouch.

That she’s refilling, Cashman takes it as interest in what he’s saying, takes it like she told him to go on with his story. So, he does.

“After I got home this morning, I had a whole pizza, the wife ordered it and left it in the fridge. Just for me. Banana peppers and pineapples and chicken. Nobody else likes the spice or the sweet.” Cashman pauses and takes a long drag. “Think maybe I ate too much and it fucked up my sleep. See, I dreamed that same dream; I’m on the bed and I look over, but this time, there’s my wife and the girls burning up on the other bed while the lava’s pouring, only now I’m brave and I jump across, how you do when the floor is lava, and I tried to put them out, they were screaming and Janey’s braces were glowing orange and smoke came off the little plastic bits where the glue goes, and my wife, my wife, she don’t like aging, sleeps with cream all over her face, the stuff was spraying out of her pores, thinned by the heat, Tamara was already down on the bed and her stupid gimp bracelets, they call this plastic stuff to braid gimp, she wears like a dozen of these bracelets, they’re all melting into her, the skin’s all puffy and white and bursting, and I can’t do nothing, so I start screaming, holding them to my chest, then I get further in the dream than the first time, stuff I didn’t see in Hawaii, and look out through the broken down wall, and there’s this guy and his wife, farmers or shepherds, standing there with big knives and these two sheep, they look almost bored, no expressions, the sheep are chewing grass, and the sun overhead is gone and it’s just a big mouth with a million teeth and a fucking endless void throat.” He inhales and laughs as he exhales. It sounds worse than his first laugh. Sounds like he wants to cry on Wise’s shoulder.

Wise spits a good one. She turns her head to Cashman. “Sacrifice.”

“What?” Cashman is frazzled and shaking. “What?”

“The sheep.” Wise continues looking at Cashman. The breeze has picked up a few notches and a cloud slides enough out of the way to glint moonshine off her eyes. She’s teary.

“The sheep? They sacrifice the sheep you mean?”

Wise points out to the field, still looking at Cashman. She spits a thick brown gob onto his uniform an inch left of his nameplate. “The sheep. The sheep. The sheep, the sheep, the sheepthesheepthesheep,” her voice rising higher and higher, “thesheepthesheepthesheep!”

The clouds continue their exodus as the breeze becomes a wind, and then the scent changes. The manure smell is gone. Now it smells like metal. The moon is shining pale on the field like stadium lighting. The sheep, Cashman had forgotten about them because he hasn’t come out for a cigarette in three weeks. The ones that should’ve been in the field, they’re all silent. Though not gone. Worse. They are mounds, glinting, sopping, and hacked, fur matted and dripping. Cashman sees them clear enough that he has to know if his dream was prophetic.

“Thesheepthesheepthesheepthesheepthesheep!”

“Shut up!” Cashman runs toward the station, cigarette still burning between his fingers.

“Thesheepthesheepthe…!”

There’s a phone on the back wall that connects to the switchboard and to outer lines. He dials home. The phone rings and rings. It’s five minutes to midnight, so ringing is normal even if his calling home is not.

“…thesheepthesheepthesheepthesheep…!” Wise is screaming this endlessly.

The line rings and rings and Cashman’s eyes scan frantic waves over the field. There are two people out there. Instinctively, he touches his pistol. Expressionless. Those faces act like a challenge, not to his weapon, but to his sanity.

“…thesheepthesheep! The! Sheep!” Wise swallows her tobacco and puts her hand down.

Clouds cover the moon for sixteen erratic heartbeats while the wind slows to crawling. The air seems less dense. It smells like cigarette smoke and autumn and shit.

The line continues ringing.

Wise leans toward the road, hands on knees, and begins gagging. She vomits near her scuffed black boots. A brown deluge of lumpy tobacco and bile now hides in the shadows.

The clouds depart and the line connects. “Eric? Eric? What is it?” The voice is alarmed.

Across the road in the field, a herd of sheep stand, as is their way. There are no farmers around.

“Sorry…meant to dial someone else…habit. Go back to bed.” Cashman is staring so hard he almost wants the vision to return. He hangs up, and starts back toward Wise.

Wise straightens her back. Stretches. She walks around Cashman. “I thought you quit smoking.” Her voice is glass in a cement mixer, more so than normal. Two tears spill over her cheeks.

Cashman looks at the ashy butt between the index and middle fingers of his left hand. He has matching burn blisters forming a circle. “I did…but the dream.”

Wise stops. Listens to the night in a way that is visible from behind.

Cashman is about to speak further, but in the field, a sheep brays agony. Wise turns to the sound, seeking the source. Another sheep wails. And another. And another.

Cashman looks at his feet, expecting cracks in the bedrock, expecting rivers of lava.

XX