TBPA summer edition gold medalist 2016.
Alistair Flynn is a walking anxiety attack/accident waiting to happen.
Ridden by nightmares and peer pressure of being the jock of the block, his life takes a confusing turn when a hazel-eyed boy invites him...
His body is engulfed in a glassy layer of dew and maggots, sucking dry his bones. He's hardly hidden behind the plants and moss growing over his carcass, but he's meshing into the ground.
Fading into nothing but what he was once made of.
His skin braids with dirt particles, absorbing him into his own land. You will built your fortress, but it'll only fall down on you. Nothing you built will ever survive after you, not your empire, not your legacy. Everything crumbles once you do.
A glimmer of thin threat awakens an eerie curiosity within my head. It's connected to my dad's chest, protruding deep beneath the surface of his sternum. The string must be the link to his heart.
I touch the string and it dissolves at my touch into a gazillion small pixels before rejoining as a threat again. Maybe it's a laser beam.
I raise my to my feet slowly, touching the translucent string connecting my dead father to something. I don't know what.
I follow the trail of crumbs, the electronic trail, leading me down the fields, down the rocky footpath, past my house.
The glimmering string, unaffected by the soft dew of rain drizzling over the farm, leads me up to the scathed front door of the cottage. It's an ugly building as old as the farm is big.
I smell the deaf scent of death, cascading up and down the atmosphere like a charged electron. It's as if it's muted before it's loud again. I hesitate to knock, but even before my knuckles could touch the splintered slab of wood, in clicks open.
The door creaks open softly into a wide abyss, no furniture, no sign of life. No windows are open to invite some sort of goodness—no wonder it smells like decay and bile.
A paper thin pair of fingers hook into the door, nails hammering straight through. I gulp, stepping back so my toes balances in the step and my heel hovers. The door rips from its hinges and the thin woman appears in my dreams once more.
She grins at me malevolently, her eyes sparkling with the utmost of disrespect.
But she doesn't bother me, her nails for fingers doesn't bother me and her beryl green eyes sucking me up like a portal doesn't bother me.
What bothers me, is the beating heart she holds in her palm. It's not my heart, I feel it beating in my throat.
She killed my father.
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