WRITING CONTEST

Hey fellow writer's. There is a flash fiction writing contest offered by WRITE TO DONE. You can find it here:

WRITE TO DONE

I have entered, and here is what I wrote:

MOTH MAN

I had fallen asleep.

Cowboy comes in, after drinking until he’s ready to pass out, crams wood in the potbelly stove in the shack until there’s no room for anymore. I wake up sweating like a pig.

I step out on the porch, stumble over Dog, light a cigarette, squat down staring out into the black night, smoking my smoke.

Across the creek, where Cowboy had gathered a pile of trash to burn in the morning, is an iridescent red glow. Three inches in diameter, just like the hypnotizing eyes of a Moth Man described in “Moth Man Prophecies”, the book I had just been reading that night. I know it’s just a story, but...they love to hangout at landfills. ‘Don't look in their eyes or you will lose days of your life with no explanation of what happens to you during that time.’

I wouldn't let myself look directly at the red glow. I scanned to the left, scanned to the right, only allowing myself a peripheral peek. It’s just a book!

However, they are voyeurs of human sex, and there are no curtains on the shack windows.

If my radio doesn't work tomorrow, and if I get visited by a person with thyroid eyes, someone who looks like Marty Feldman, THEN I'll freak.

As I crawled back in bed I woke Cowboy up to tell him not to burn that pile of trash before I was able to check it out. I was cursing John Keel as I fell back asleep.

Next morning I couldn't find a spec of anything red in the trash pile. I was hoping to find something like a big red Folger's coffee can. There wasn't any light to shine on it last night even if there had been one in there; but it would have given me an excuse to blow off my Moth Man heebie-jeebies.

Back at the shack I poured a cup of coffee from the pot on top of the wood burner. Cowboy coffee. Turned on my radio on the porch rail. Static!

I saw a truck coming down the dusty road headed our way. Strange. We live on a ranch 30 miles from nowhere. People don't just drive in, they call first so we'd have the gate open, otherwise, Cowboy would shoot at them.

“Cowboy!”

“I saw ‘em.”

“Where’s Dog?” He wasn't at my heels barking. Weird.

Cowboy took up with the couple in the truck like they were old friends. He gave the guy a tour of the ranch, while I gave the gal a tour of the boss’s ranch house.

On the walk back to the shack she told me she'd brought a treat for Dog. She slipped a doggie bone out of her pocket. Dog suddenly appeared to accept it.

The little hairs on my neck tickled. Then she took off her dark glasses.

Thyroid eyes!