Flash Fiction Carnival III - LYCAN

This month I'm joining in with the Flash Fiction Carnival - were entrants have to post a short story to their blog to do with a specific theme... The theme this month is Transform and here is my entry...


LYCAN...

Lincoln Taylor was not afraid of the electric chair, knew it for what it was –a release. There had been no appeal, no offer of it and no want of it. His skin itched for the current to seek out his veins and blow this world apart. He needed her image washed from his brain – Madalina Szekeley with the red hair. He had been found with her blood on his lips and her hide at his feet. They had believed him mad – oh, if only madness had been the cure.

The sign had read ‘Sanitarium’. Mentally he had erased it and replaced it with the words ‘Slaughter-House’. No medication or baseball bat to the back of his skull would subdue him. Seven dead men and he had been labeled with clinical lycanthropy. They thought he wanted to be a werewolf just because he howled at the moon and tore at men’s throats. And he followed their course, so much more interesting to be named lycanthrope than plain old psychotic – newspaper reports of his crimes would shine, gleam like Madalina’s gipsy smile.

Oh he had been cursed indeed, but here was his end. Curtains drawn, concealing the chairs behind as they swelled with the ranks of the just. He heard their scrape against tiles, his stomach swelled with their disgust.

Prepped and ready to go. Ironic, considering his supposed condition, that all hair had been shaved from his body. He looked less like a wolf than any in the room. Would he smoke? Would his skin burn into the chair and leave its mark as Madalina had left hers on him. As the curtains opened he gnashed his teeth and lurched forward as if he had the strength to break his bonds and eat them all.

Defense and Prosecution, the Prison Warden, and the relatives of the men and women he had eaten, gathered; all sat somber as if they could gain no enjoyment at watching a man die. And there she stood, in scarlet amongst them, Madalina Szekeley. She would not sit for he had torn the flesh from her behind, and left his bite marks on her thighs. She alone did not inch back as he gnashed against his restraints, as heart beat visible and current shivered through skin. There seemed only promise on her lips.

That this was not the end.

*

In the village they called him Pricolici, but she called him Lincoln, knew exactly what skeleton he had been torn from. Madalina’s skirt brushed against the cage as she limped around it. Her fingers played with the lock drawing hunger from the wolf’s eyes. She knelt close to the bars, lock still caught between fingers.

“Do you recognize me?” she asked the animal.

Knew her answer as it retreated back into the dark of the cage. She laughed as he had laughed as he feasted on her flesh. This time, Little Red had won...

copyright Catherine J Gardner 2007