As you may know, I don’t do horror. I find it too scary. Keeps me awake at night revisiting it. There was a short story in a collection of Amazing Stories* once, called “You’ll wonder where the yellow went…” which was the first half of a slogan for a brand of toothpaste. I still remember the story and it still gives me the creeps, 40 years on!
So when Chuck Wendig asked us to do a three sentence horror story for this week’s flash fiction, my first reaction was a straight “No!”
Then I thought of my worst nightmares….
The garden at dusk
She finished planting the lettuce, ruby chard and radicchio seedlings, and spread a nice thick slug bait barrier around them. Pleased with her afternoon’s work, she turned, checked the rat trap, and caught her foot, falling headlong onto the rain-parched grass.
As dusk fell and the dew collected, she lay, body paralysed, watching the slugs avoid the bait and head instead towards her nice, warm, moist orifices.
—
*days later, I think this was in a Harlan Ellison collection called “I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream”. But it’s association rather than memory.