HOWL!

environmental horror flash fiction contest

Winner 2019

grover’s corner washout blues

by Patrick Rexroat

last week the rains came and wouldn’t stop until they slid the cemetery on kimberly hill down highway 25 and into the flood and slough to be raked across the county by a broad network of irrigation canals.

this may be how mr. turner’s boy micah throwing rocks off the footbridge saw a face like mold on leather gasp up in an eddy and disappear, or how the mayor’s wife eilene found her toilet overflowing gray with crawling black hair, or — oh christ — how jim callen found his mother, just a month or so gone, all fingernails and peel, lipless, crawling waist-deep from the ruined mud of his alfalfa field, oh christ —

At this moment, Patrick is likely in rural Idaho directing a high school musical and thinking of new scary stories to write.

Runner Up

Loggers

By James Cato

If you’d heard the gate banging, if you’d heard the storm tapping on the glass, if you’d been up late waiting for her to come home, if you’d heard footsteps punching up to the door, but the stoop was empty, and the rain was not falling, and the gate was locked, if someone was tapping your bright windows like a drumroll, if your bright windows beckoned the woods, if you turned out the lights, if she still wasn’t home, if you saw that the forest out back was shorter than you remembered, if you saw the trees on two legs, if you saw them gathering darkness in their limbs, if you saw the trees wearing her face and running, if she never came home, if the fusillade amplified and trunks of tissue called the house phone you might — might —grab your axe and start logging until the land was bald.

James Cato writes in the dirt by arranging worms into letters, and his compositions can be found in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Penultimate Peanut, and Coffin Bell Journal, amongst others.

Honorable Mention

Black Soil

By Clint White

EPA said it was carbon dumping years ago that turned her soil strangely black. Deborah disagreed. Some nights she’d hear low moans from the woods, volatizing from the ground itself.

Lawyers declared the soil safe. Deborah knew better. It stole her husband. Once a witty, beautiful man, he became a forest dweller; his nails grew long and if she got close he’d scratch at her, grinning.

The police left open a missing person case for him. They didn’t believe her. She’d watched from the window that night. Inside a band of rawboned trees, black streaks fingering up their hides, he screamed and sank, struggling, into the soil.

The government abandoned cleanup plans. So, she dug for him. In autumn sunlight she gutted the black moaning earth where he disappeared. She found him after night fell. Cradling his skull and sobbing, she welcomed the soil as it moaned closed around her.

Clint White is an environmental attorney living and working in Columbus, Ohio.