Flash Fiction Fridays - March 2025

Towns Like Ours

I remember my high school history teacher trying to explain the scale of World War II to the class. It’s a hard thing to do. The human brain doesn’t do well with big numbers, especially when those big numbers are far away. Telling an American teenager that twenty million civilians died in the Soviet Union doesn’t have the impact it should. It’s a big number, sure, but not a meaningful one.

It never really clicked for me until I saw the World War II marker in Lastours, France. My wife and I had rented a car for two weeks, and we’d exhausted all the nearby museums and markets, so we started combing through some of the smaller tourist stops. Lastours isn’t a very busy destination, but it did have some 11th century castle ruins where you could climb and walk around, so we decided to make the trip.

I did some digging, and I managed to find the Google Maps street view of our exact parking space. You can see the entire town from the main street, castles and all. Click the link and pan around for a bit. Then turn around and read the names on the monument behind you.

That was the moment when it finally hit me. Everyone in this town lost someone they knew.

That feeling is the inspiration for this month’s flash fiction. I hope you enjoy it.

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Towns Like Ours

Drive down Leesville’s main street on a sunny afternoon and you can practically see the opening credits roll. It’s the quintessential American nowhere, with its pristine lawns and tree-lined streets.

Coming in southbound off the interstate is like driving into ten square miles of heaven. In your mind, picture the camera as it pans across a row of white houses. Now a close-up of a stop sign at the corner of a busy playground. Cue the audio track of kids playing tag. A wide shot again as the main character drives into town.

And somewhere in the shadows, off-camera but implied, a creature waiting to strike.

When I was a kid, the made-for-TV film studios always seemed to have it in for towns like Leesville. I never understood why. Was it the familiarity of it? The sense of ‘it could happen anywhere’ that oozed out of paved driveways and cookie cutter mailboxes? Or was it the small town tropes: the mischievous kid who’s always running off where he shouldn’t be; the friendly, skeptical police officer in his corner booth at the diner; the average Joe, so perfectly oblivious that he’s almost custom-built to die off screen?

The way I figure it now, maybe those old B-movie producers knew what they were doing. If you’re going for impact, nothing beats a town like Leesville. Small towns like ours, everybody loses somebody they know.

***

The funeral’s on a Saturday, so the whole town’s closed down by Friday night. We show up at the funeral home early and mill about, all of us, unsure what to do with ourselves. Nobody knows who should be comforting who, so we all just make small talk. If you’ve read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” it’s almost like that, only we already know which names have been called. If you haven’t read it, picture the scene from Twin Peaks where the whole town is at Laura Palmer’s funeral. If you haven’t seen it, don’t worry. Just understand that there’s precedent for this kind of thing.

The way the monster killed, there’s no chance of an open casket, so we just lower the boxes into the ground one after another. Most of the headstones belong to kids, with two for police officers killed in the line of duty. Next to one of these, Mrs. Shahy is crying so loud it’s almost obscene to watch.

Beside her, there’s a long row of fathers with their fists clenched, eyes staring off at nothing. Dad and I are at the end of this line, his hand on my shoulder.

After the funeral, we drive the pickup to the hardware store to buy supplies. We did the same thing when Mom died six years ago. We spent a month adding onto the garage, setting frames, hanging drywall. Killing time until we were ready to put down the tools and talk about it. Chris was with us the whole time, handing us screwdrivers when we needed them, moping around underfoot.

Now that he’s gone, there’s no telling how long we’ll need.

***

In some small way, I’m proud Chris got to be the hero of the story. While the police were chasing down serial killers and finding worse; while the adults were all too preoccupied to pay attention; while his stupid older brother was back from college, chasing skirts and scoring weed – Chris was down in the sewers, ending it.

We found Chris and his friends two days after they disappeared, once the rain cleared and the police dogs could track them by smell. There were four of them down in that pit. The thing they surrounded had never been human, and was even less so when we dug it up. Chest high on a grown man and made of wood all the way through. Clawed arms as long as it was tall. It had a piece of rusted swingset iron lodged in its chest, buried three inches deep.

A child’s hand gripped the other end of the spike. Chris.

We still don’t understand what Chris did to it, or how he knew to do it. But whatever it was, it must have been the right thing.

What it did to Chris, I don’t like to think about.

***

In the weeks and months after the funeral, there’s one thing we’re all wondering. If we are that hapless B-movie town, then what comes next? Is the nightmare over? Do we move on and try to heal?

Or will there be a sequel?

When we get to the hardware store, we see Mike Broom’s red pickup pulling out of the lot. His daughter was the first to go. He’d been awful to her mother, and then to her, and when she finally disappeared we all just assumed she’d skipped town. Mike had a barbecue last weekend at his place by the lake, and nobody talked about how the charcoal burned longer than it should’ve, or how the pieces squirmed and twisted in the heat.

Back at our place, we’ve got the creature’s torso out in the wood shed. For a while, Dad just whittled away at it, piece by piece. When that stopped getting a rise out of it, we started drilling holes, but we stopped when a nest of wasps moved into the hollows. When the wasps die out, we might move on to termites, but until then we have enough to keep us busy.

We still don’t know whether or not we’ll get a sequel. Maybe we’ll always wonder. But for now, the question on everyone’s mind is:

Is it still alive?

Despite everything we’ve done to it? Despite everything we’re still doing to it?

Is it still alive?

***

Wordless, Dad passes me the belt sander. God, we hope so.

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