It's weird how snow makes everything quiet, the way it absorbs every sound and makes the world feel like an abandoned home, decrepit and cold. I followed the prints ahead of me, boot tracks with deep treads.
I couldn't help but hear Gran’s voice in my ear, “Only fools follow strange tracks in fresh snow. You'll only find death at the end of that trail.”
Still, I walked on, maybe it was morbid curiosity. What really lay at the end of the tracks in fresh snow that Gran had feared so much that she locked doors the minute dusk fell over the prairie in winter?
The tracks became erratic, moving this way and that. Swaths of snow revealed dirt where the track-maker had fallen. I froze at one such swath, in the dimming light it was hard to tell, something dark left dyed stipples spread out across the snow. Was that…? It was. The sheen of red caught the last glimmers of light and turning back occurred to me as I looked ahead and saw that the tracks changed. A line carved a path along side one boot print going off into a gully.
I swallowed hard and slowly approached the edge of the ditch. The crumpled mutilated form that greeted my gaze brought horror to the very core of my. From under the fur lined hood of a shredded and bloodied coat, my own face gazed back at me.
“I tried to warn you,” Gran said from behind me.
About the Creator
C. Lea Roufley
I'm a 27 year old wife and mom of three. Engaged. Born and raised in Montana. I've been writing since I was a kid and published a book at 17. Haven't written much in recent years, hoping to get back into it through this forum.
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First of Her Kind Part 9
Adam took the next day to recover. Her body was still incredibly sore. Lucian had brought her plenty of food, so she remained secluded in her room, eatting, resting and researching on her computer. She researched topics such as memory retrieval, hormonal differences between men and women, nanite technology which it seemed most of the world believed to be the stuff of science fiction. She also took a new approach to researching emotions after finding a scene in a sci-fi that described a person's fearful reaction to being infected with a malicious nanite technology. The scene had been so well written, so visceral that Adam was almost able to summon the feeling within herself. This inspired her to search for creative writing describing emotional states. She began to see that she was indeed far more emotionally equipped than she had previously believed. Mistrust, betrayal, suspicion, anger, sadness, worry, concern. She couldn’t help but notice a lot of negative emotions.
By C. Lea Roufley4 months ago in Fiction
A Real, Honest to Goodness, Tree
It was grey for a long time. All my life. All da's life. And then, out of the blue, or grey, or whatever, came green. Like in the old stories. We oohed and ahhed over it. Took the kids along of it. And Gramma, too. Wheeled her down there, watched her old face crack and brighten.
By L.C. Schäferabout 16 hours ago in Fiction
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