Week 513 of #ThursThreads had many fantastic tales. What an amazing feat we’ve pulled off. Nine years! If you’ve been doing it a while, thank you for coming back each week. If you’ve just found us, welcome! You’re in good company. May you come back again and write more great flash. A thousand thanks to Nicola Cameron for judging this week. Check out the #ThursThreads #flashfiction group on Facebook or the #ThursThreads Group on MeWe to keep up with news, etc.
Entries:
- Bill Engleson | @billmelaterplea
- Eric Martell | @drmag00
- Silver James | @SilverJames_
- Siobhan Muir | @SiobhanMuir
- Mark A. Morris
- Sheilagh Lee | @SweetSheil
- Kelly Heinen | @Aightball
- M.T. Decker | @mishmhem
Honorable Mention
Eric Martell | @drmag00
Nicola says: Excellent scene setting and gave me a feel for both the characters and the plot. And hey, sometimes, you just have to go into danger with your ex.
winner announcement
Week 513 Winner
Nicola says: Beautifully descriptive passage, really put me in the scene and told me a lot about the characters (and I love the nod to Sweeney Todd).
Barnaby’s head rose from the grave. His hat was smeared chalky-white from the alum in the soil. He looked like the shade of a mole dressed in a suit it’d recovered from one of their exhumations.
“I prefer doing this in summer,” he grumbled. “The earth’s softer. You get fewer hours of undisturbed darkness, but the digging’s easier. In the August of ’83, I managed to liberate a dozen folk in one night. And the anatomists paid me a full florin for each one.”
“But you were still down to your last farthing by the end of the week.”
“Excavating’s strenuous work. You get powerful thirsty.” Barnaby clambered onto the tarpaulin beside the hole, shook out his trousers’ turnups and then dragged his hands across his face. His eyes reappeared from the grime; his cheeks as grey as many of the corpses they recovered. He had a similar odour of rot about him too.
Sometimes Rudge wondered whether his companion had been pulled out from a grave himself or if he’d managed to dig himself out after he’d woken up in one.
He’d heard stories about men like that. Superstitious nonsense. But sometimes, there was an element of truth in the tales.
He rapped on the lid of the casket. It rang dull, as though filled with concrete. That could be bad if the grave had been flooded and filled with water. A saturated decomposing corpse wasn’t any good to anyone. Even Sweeney, the Pie-maker, turned down carcasses like that.
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Congratulations TWENTY-NINE TIME WINNER Mark, and Honorable Mention Eric! Don’t forget to claim your badges and display them with pride. You certainly earned it!
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