Bill Engleson is the Readers’ Choice in this week’s Indies Unlimited Flash Fiction Challenge. The winning entry is decided by the popular vote and rewarded with a special feature here today. (In case of a tie, the writer who submitted an entry first is the winner per our rules.) Without further ado, here’s the winning story:
Sand
by Bill Engleson
We’d heard about them, of course. Can’t rightly remember when it first happened, but it was quite a few years ago. And when I say when it first happened, it’s possible that it’d been going on for years. We just didn’t know. More than that, we didn’t want to know. I sure didn’t.
I’m speaking about a foot. The foot, at the time. The foot in the running shoe. Well, most people figured, I figured, industrial accident. Some fool was ding-a-linging with his outboard motor, got all higgledy-piggledy twisted around and his foot got too close to the propeller.
How you’d even do that was a mite vague but we supposed it could be done. Especially if you were three sheets to the wind.
Washed up on a beach to the south.
Thank the Lord it wasn’t my beach.
Then the second one appeared. A man and his mutt found it. Well, the dog, really. Had it in his doggy mouth, tongue dangling on the awful thing. The same tongue I bet that guy allowed HIS face to be licked by.
After the second one, it seemed one was found every couple of weeks. It almost became not news, if you get my drift.
So, the day I found the severed hand in my crab trap was, to say the least, a gruesome change of pace.
Put me off seafood for a spell.
The body parts kept a coming.
Proves you can get use to almost anything, I guess.
