“Pied Piper” [a short story]

My tiny dark story “Pied Piper” won first place in the most recent Reedsy Short Story Contest. :) This one’s definitely going in the anthology. ;)

“The boy should have known something was wrong the moment he glanced back over his shoulder, but he was too tired and wary and afraid to register the truth. He followed the sound of the keening pipe. Its unfamiliar melody, absurdly cheerful, jarred him from the carnage. It filtered through the pores of his skin and infused him with the strength and warmth he needed to run through the icy clutches of winter.

The forest muffled the sounds within and beyond it as if the trees themselves swallowed noise—all but the tune of the unseen piper. Time stood still, cradled between the labyrinth of jutting roots and a cotton-cloud sky that was falling apart. Tufts of snow floated down through naked branches as if massive pillowcases had exploded during a massive pillow fight between massive gods who did not care that far below them the falling snow sizzled against flames that devoured a village.

Once she’d been beautiful—the belle of the village, people said. Then the red blotches appeared, lesions that began on her arms and spread across her chest and throat, an army of ants beneath her skin that disfigured her face and body. She did not cry out when she cut a finger or burnt her hands in the kitchen. Her once-lush hair fell from her scalp like shorn wheat, littering the floor in clumps. Yet her eyes were always his mother’s eyes, calm and blue and cool like a damp cloth against a fevered brow, radiating such love that he felt she embraced him even when she avoided touching him. She was all he had left, the only person who cared enough to weep and caress his face when lesions spread across his own back and grew thick like the pedicles of a second spine.

When he crept back into the house, keeping to the shadows, the boy found nothing left of his mother but a dark stain on the floorboards that streaked from the kitchen to the bedroom. A man appeared in that doorway, his body and face sheathed in fabrics and spells that would not let the infection touch him, gripping a sword that wept red tears from its edge. The boy hid until the man turned away, and then sprinted back out into the night. He ran through the streets, dodging the hooves of horses and the torched firewood that the yelling soldiers threw his way.

Run, his mother had rasped, pushing him through the back door of their home, the door that led to the chickens and pigs, and he’d run until he’d fallen, slipping in the snow and in the refuse of the squealing animals, his vision fractured by his tears. He turned back then, ashamed to have run, ashamed to have left her, even though she no longer quite looked like his mother.”

Read more at:

https://blog.reedsy.com/creative-writing-prompts/contests/23/submissions/6305/

“Red” [a short story]

They say the wolf ate the magician.

They find the man lying on the stone floor, chunks of his flesh unfurled around him like oversized rose petals, torn apart by thorny fangs. Broken bottles litter the shelves of his home, caught in liquid pools of strange colors that hiss and spread like angry tears. Tattered black books pattern the floor, spines up and pages squashed, sprawled open like dead crows.

Early this morning, I hear the trumpeting of that faction of the King’s Guard that deals with our realm’s mysteries and murders. I notice the townsfolk striding through the streets towards the forest, summoned by the sound. I follow them, cradling a loaf of bread against my breast to muffle the pounding of my heart. I’ve heard that trumpet only once before; it had been in warning then, a winter’s night when wolves attacked our town and slaughtered the rest of my family, our home at the outskirts an easy target. This time the trumpeting is less urgent, more doleful. They’ve found something.

The townsmen and I accompany the King’s Guard through the dark forest. They say a wolf prowls in these shadows. They say it’s a bristling black nightmare that gorges itself on human flesh. They say it’s unlike any other wolf they’ve encountered in these parts. Its paw prints are thrice the size of any dog’s. Its howl pricks your skin like sleet, sounding so human, wordlessly sad, almost intelligible, never familiar.

“Red,” murmurs a voice beside me. I jump. It’s only Francine, looking up at me with doe-brown eyes in her freckled face. She slips her tiny hand through mine before I can resist. I give her my bread as usual, knowing I won’t eat it. “Are you scared?”

The people walk unafraid, more curious than cautious. We are many. We have the Guards. The wolf has attacked someone this month already and the moon is no longer full. Nobody really fears it right now.

Except for me.

“No,” I say. “You shouldn’t be, either.”

When I was Francine’s age, Madam took me in. She lived in a house that she shared with six younger women. Many of them were foreign, most of them were kind, and all of them were pretty. Sometimes men came to visit, but none stayed longer than a few hours. I wasn’t allowed to speak to them. At night, I slept in a cot in Madam’s room. In the day, I ran errands for her or helped the maid in the kitchen. Once a week, Madam packed a basket of provisions and sent me to a house in the woods where her brother lived.

I was frightened in the beginning. I told Madam that I could hear the wolf’s panting when I walked among the trees, but the wood looked empty whenever I looked over my shoulder. Sometimes I thought I heard a footfall or a crackling twig. No matter how quickly I whirled around, I never saw the wolf. It was a strange game: I lost because I could not see it and won because I did not die. Sometimes, if it had rained and the ground was moist, I would turn to see huge pawprints along the path behind me. Occasionally I would find tufts of black fur on the ground, as soft and inky as silk. Once I brought some home for Madam to see, for her to believe me. She laughed and said that I couldn’t trick her. That it was a lock of my own hair which I had trimmed and brought to show her.

“What if the wolf eats me?” I retorted. “Who will run your errands then?”

She slapped me and sent me to bed without a meal. In the morning she brought me a chocolate scone and untangled my hair with her own ivory brush. “Wolves do not eat children,” she said. “Especially not orphans. You are too small to fill its belly.”

Madam’s brother was more than a hermit. He was a magician. He did not like the town and apparently the town didn’t care for him. I never could understand why Madam didn’t go herself, or why she didn’t send one of the older girls. It struck me, much later, that she feared him.

Read the rest here: https://literallystories2014.com/2019/11/18/red-by-angela-panayotopulos/?fbclid=IwAR20pxCzqKh0NiaAxRYBxR2QqsHvFsT2-CyeV1uCkVZBbj3qLUwIMzKSjy4

Also featured in my upcoming anthology of fairy tale retellings.