Today’s
Prompt:
You and your three closest friends decide to
go camping. You arrive and set up camp nearly three miles away from where you
left your car. Late that evening, as you sit around the campfire roasting
marshmallows, one of your friends reveals a deep dark secret that turns what
was to be a fun weekend into one of the scariest weekends of your life.
“So tell me Ubon (/you bone/),
what inspired your choice of place for our camping site?”
“Came out here one afternoon and
had a look around and it felt right.” I gave a the-rest-is-just-details shrug. “Why do you ask?”
“Dunno, just a hunch, I guess.
Besides, deep scar over there on that old trunk joggles my memory; my first
trip through these woods.” Inyang (sounds like /yin yang/) Crenshaw said. He lay
on his back while a paperback snuggled face down on his chest. His eyelids
though shut, as that of a man in deep thought did not stymie his precision when
he pointed out which scar and which of the tree trunks he implied. “A scar like
that can’t not have a place in the annals of a town’s history.”
“I saw several on our trip down
here. Whoever did those must have been amassing graffiti and making a bad job
of it.” Reuben said as he gutted the rabbit.
“Some old townsfolk say they
still hear strange noises in the deep of night when the reaping hook moon comes out. But who knows for sure, might as well
be old wives’ fables. You’d be amazed the length folks go to preserve myth and legend.”
Inyang
propped himself up on his elbows. When he did, the paperback on his chest
tumbled to the grass revealing the picture of a young woman. Mark made a grab
for the picture and was rather disappointed when he observed it was a postcard.
“Thought it was your latest
chick, dude,” he teased.
“Sorry, but I’m not into that.” Inyang snatched at the postcard,
which doubled as his bookmark, to wrench it from Mark’s grip and Mark willingly
gave it over.
The
wind was cool and soft. The campfire was strong, thanks to big chunks of dry wood
that I’d set aside close by on my previous tour of the woods. We’d traded
marshmallows for rabbits which Reuben had gutted, salted, oiled and placed on
the fire to roast. It was a fine night for a campfire story but none of us was
really prepared for the kind of gore Inyang narrated. I can’t say for certain
who among the three of us urged him on. Let this word suffice that with Inyang
persuasion was not a problem. The man was persuaded.
Inyang
plucked his paperback off the grass, dusted it and marked his place with the
postcard.
“I recall my dad telling me once
when we came by these woods and my curiosity was jazzed up by the sight of the scars…” I think Reuben’s word for the scars flared up in Inyang’s mind. “Graffiti is an apt word,” He said. “A
family that practiced a form of black magic owned a large portion of these
woods, at a point in time. They lived in a cabin in the deep of the wild.”
“Oh, it’s a Cabin in the Woods tale. Ought to be as interesting as the rabbits
look but I doubt it will taste better.” Mark’s eyes guarded the rabbits as if
he expected the animals to come back to life and hop off into the high grass.
Inyang
totally ignored Mark’s comment. “Dad told me the wife and daughter of the
family caught a bug. The disease was fatal and the two women, the daughter was
in her twenties, came down with a bad case of dead. Obviously, their black
magic could not save them. The stench of two corpses filled the whole town and
corrupted the air.
“The folks in town got whiff of
the mysterious deaths collected anything that could be used as a weapon and a
mob surrounded the cabin in the woods. When they came up to where the cabin
stood, they ordered the father and son, the surviving members of the family to step
outside.”
“Inyang can you get the plates,
please.”
I
left the trio out there and sauntered off into the tent we’d erected for the
really cold nights to collect the plates and paper cups we brought along for meals.
I heard laughter while I searched. I didn’t like being left out of the fun but
what needed to be done must be done. I took four plates and some napkins and
came back outside to witness Reuben and Mark disintegrate into fits of laughter.
Inyang
was as motionless as still life.
I
sensed the wrongness in the affair before I downloaded the details of the event,
which fell out while I was away. First, I tried to get a fly or bug off the
meat. How do these puny things endure all that heat when we have to use prongs
and forks? I reached for the insect to whack it off the roasted rabbit, a hand
grab my wrist and I might add with calculated fierceness. I almost keeled over
into the flames. Inyang stared into my eyes with eyes haunted by a level of
dread that before that time I never knew existed.
“For your sake and for the sake
of all of us, don’t touch it?”
“Come on, Inyang. I just want to
scare it off. I don’t want to kill it.”
“Don’t you dare, Ubon.” He
swallowed spit and I could see he was priming himself to say something
unconventional—something that might justify giggles. “It’s cursed.”
And
Mark guffawed and rolled off his blanket to the grass. Reuben tried to hold it
in and swelled up I feared he would explode.
If this was a joke, I
thought. I’m yet to find the punch line.
“You recall my yarn about the
graffiti. The one I spun while you got the dishes?”
“The story about the family in
the cabin in the woods, what has that got to do with a fly on my dinner?”
“It happened for real, Ubon.
That’s what my dad said, anyway. I never really believed it until now. Look at
that fly.”
I
did. We all did. Even Mark put his howler on pause and looked. We saw… a
housefly perched on roasted rabbit meat—our dinner—and nothing besides that.
“That’s what came out when the
man of the house opened that cabin door. It is believed it came off the flesh
of his wife and daughter. “Flies” he turned and gestured with his chin at the
trunk with the scar. “Did that. They came out of the cabin and hunted down
every man and boy that dared to match up against the cabin. None of them made
back to town. Flies that stung and killed. Flies that grew teeth. They must
have marked the trunks to define their territory like a No Trespassing sign placed on private property.”
The
last of the cackle died off Mark’s face. We watched the fly. Nothing happened;
it just sat on our meal and probably dozed.
We
watched the fly. Reuben was the first to notice maybe, he did all the work,
dressing up the rabbit.
“Look,” he said. “The fly’s
chewing into the meat.”
That
was our cue. The myth was true indeed. Here was proof. There was a tiny hole where
the fly settled. It had indeed chewed into the meat, a fly that grew teeth.
We
withdrew into our tent with the greatest caution, touching nothing. We didn’t
even take our blankets.
We
kept vigil on hungry stomachs but that was a little price to pay compared to
getting another shot at life.
Eneh Akpan
June
17, 2013
