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. Burden of Breath Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026
BURDEN OF BREATH
Laps around the evergreens and the Douglas firs, pattering sneakers dance over the browned needles and fallen limbs. Chuckles ride the air like birdsong, suddenly natural as the flies, the breeze, the river rushing a half-mile away. Squeaks and shouts, smiles are wide on candy red lips. Kids being kids with the woods as a backdrop.
This energy seems inexhaustible. The rareness of the world outside the concrete and steel is suddenly everything. It’s one of very few places a class outing has designs for such exhaustive action.
These descendants of ape show their roots in a foreign embrace uncannily like home. Arms swinging, stubby legs kicking, students of Ms. First-Year-of-Teaching-I’m-Going-to-Make-a-Difference’s class hang from the park signs.
BEAR COUNTY
IF YOU SEE SMOKE CALL…
REDSKY PROVINCIAL PARK
It is a day excursion away from class, away from the scents and the traffic, away from the convenience shops and the high-rising glass towers. A day to visit the slow rocketing browns and greens rising from a floor alive with minute lives.
Drink it in, kids! Doesn’t it smell wonderful?
The class answered the teacher’s call with the grouped din of freed leaves dancing dryly on the wind, of unshackled beasts finding their congenital state of grace, of digital children discovering a world beyond Wi-Fi.
Don’t go far! Stay close to the bus! Remember the buddy system!
Frenzied heartbeats pound quiet rhythms in juvenile chests.
Please, Jessica, don’t throw that! Darren, do I have to put you in time out?
Underfoot, the twigs, gravel, grass, and dirt rumbles, breaking and crumbling. A fetid rot odor blooms and sours the sensation of perfection. The woods make no promises.
The students continue their motion, though slowing. Curiosity demanding eyes. The dirt breaks and the trees split and disintegrate while stones rise and reshape. The first tears fall and the most boisterous of the children make demands.
What? No? No!
The flesh animals have turned silent, even the river’s rush is dampened as the world cracks and the rocky grind of mystery breaks apart the happy moment.
Don’t! Don’t hurt her! You can’t!
Pants darken with liquid and screams rain horizontal showers of terror. It is in the air, the universally understood wailing of horror.
The crimson seepage from the teacher’s throat is a reminder of the safety in the city, of mommy and daddy, of the notion that scary things lurk in the unknown.
This, of the collapsed trees, the cracked dirt, and the liquefied stone, the slender, long-armed forms rise, cast shadows that stretch unholy figures over the forest. There are so many. The long limbs swish and cut the atmosphere upon aerodynamic rhythms.
Too fast for hope.
Hacked, the children topple like felled lumber.
Those surviving the first strikes screech. Those fallen are quickly to discover that life is not all. Slices and toppling. More children fall until the bawling shrinks to a pair of whimpers.
Free of fleshy reins, the fallen overcome the fear and the pain. Aimlessly through the flora and around the long yellow bus, the fleshless students parade.
Tag! You’re it!
Nuh-uh, no touchbacks!
Not all see, not yet.
Twins kneel, heads together, squatting below the bus bumper, cradling one another for a modicum of comfort in the presence of violent endings. Janey. Jilly. Two tear smeared faces beneath frizzy black braids peer with great brown bulbs.
What is it?
Classmates’ corpses litter the landscape. And these horrible things…wispy green spider web hair, skin of dried tree bark, eyes black as space, and mouths two feet wide with stalagmite bottoms and stalactite tops. Long sharpened stone fingers drip hot agony like paint tipped from a can.
Scary thing, this, said one of the beings from the woods, waving an arm-like appendage over the carnage like a Vaudevillian crier standing before a tent of oddities. One of you, happy soon.
This voice is gruff like chainsaw teeth against asphalt, but the mention of happiness is a slaking friend in dry times.
Janey watches the stone arm set upon an arch of destruction. She squints against the truth. The peaked edge places new weight in Jilly’s arms following a warm splash of familial plasma.
Hush, the thing coos. Don’t cry. Save those tears, infect the world with possibilities, tell them of the wild things they ought to avoid.
Sticky fluid cascades over Jilly as the heft of sisterly skin and bones made inanimate topples her. From beneath the sudden weight, Jilly watches the things return to the wooded shadows, to the stony outcroppings, beneath the crust, pouring as if fluid back into the greys, browns, and greens of the forest.
The student ghosts keep at the dance, no cares for the living, disinterested in a sad girl clinging to a corpse. Not even Janey minds Jilly any longer. This freedom is infinite.
Alone, gathering memories that she will keep forever, that will mar and determine the path of her existence, Jilly’s solitary sobs pervade the quiet wilderness while timid critters eye a lifetime of meals awaiting their visit.
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