#flashfriday: Ice Armor

Ice Armor
by Louise Dragon


The cabin squatted against the hillside like a camouflaged toad.


Terry was ever so glad to see a sign of civilization blooming in this Godforsaken forest.


“Look,” she shouted to her three hiking companions. “There’s a little cabin over there.”


Gordon shielded his eyes against the afternoon sun and quickly scanned the horizon. “Wow, babe, how’d you spot that? It looks like a relic from another generation.”


“Who cares how she saw it,” Ollie snorted. “All I know is . . . I’m friggin exhausted and if that cabin spells R-E-S-T, then I’m all for it.”


“Lightweight!” her main squeeze Wes retorted as he mopped at his red sweaty face with a jaunty blue bandana.


“I’m with you, Ollie,” Terry said sprinting toward the little hut.


“Wait, maybe someone lives here,” Gordon said quickening his pace to try and head off Terry’s arrival at the little door.


“Naw,” Terry said creaking open the heavy wooden door on its rusty hinges. She paused a moment to spit on the top hinge. “You said yourself it looks like something from another generation.”


“You unlock this door with the key of imagination,” Gordon said solemnly in his best Rod Serling voice. “Do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do,” he went on imitating the sounds of the old sixties Twilight Zone music.


“Can it!” Terry said. “You’re giving Ollie the creeps.”


Petite, blond, Olivette’s eyes had widened considerably at the strains of that old sixties television show, but now they narrowed in Gordon’s direction.


“You cut it out. I need to rest and I need to rest right now. My calves are killing me!” She brushed past Terry and Gordon into the cabin but stopped short just inside the door.


“What the . . .” Ollie’s words trailed off as the door swung inward revealing a clean modern interior that looked a million miles away from the exterior squalidness of this little structure.


“Oh shit, someone does live here!” Terry said.


“How do you know?” Ollie whined. “I just need to sit down for a few minutes. We won’t disturb anything.” She plopped into an armchair and glared at her three companions standing uneasily just inside the open door.


Plink, plink, plink came an unusual sound from the next room – everyone froze.


“Hello,” shouted Terry, “anyone home?”


More plinking sounds . . .


Terry cautiously crept around the corner to the next room. The plinking sound turned out to be a small refrigerator making moon shaped ice cubes, which plinked into a small tray in the freezer.


“Just the ice machine making ice.”


“Ice machine?” Gordon frowned. “Where is the power coming from way out here?”


“Like I said, who cares?” Ollie answered. “Terry will you bring me a giant glass of ice water, Hon?”


“Already done, Hon!” Terry emerged from the tiny kitchen with four large glasses filled to the brim with ice and water.


After passing out the glasses, Terry took a large swig from the remaining glass.


“EEW!”


It was the only sound Terry could make. The strange shaped ice cubes fastened around her tongue and she felt coldness traveling down her throat. She shuddered as frosty tentacles of ice branched out into all of the appendages and organs of her body. As the numbing arctic fingers pried into her brain, Terry began to relax. The coldness became a welcoming coolness on this ridiculously arid planet. Internal icy armor to protect delicate new brain cells from the scorching temperatures outside of this haven.


Terry opened cool ice-blue eyes and gazed into three sets of identical peepers from around the room. She cleared her frosty vocal cords and spoke in a cool throaty alien voice.


“What a beautiful little hideaway,” she snarled. “So cool and inviting -- I’ll bet all of our friends would like to visit.”
end

#flashfriday: Ice Armor

#fridayflash: Undercover Garden

Undercover Garden
By
Louise Dragon


She bent, peering at the odd bloom that had appeared overnight in her prized garden. It burst open expelling its venom.


Sally, stunned, carefully extracted the dozen or so tiny dart-like seeds from her neck and right cheek. She collected them gingerly in her palm, careful not to lose any of the precious pods.


She felt really strange. Routine carried her from task to task, but her mind was literally miles away. Her thoughts seemed to tick inside her brain like check marks on a to-do list.


A soothing soft voice droned in Sally’s mind. The voice called her simply “Gardener.”


She received instructions from the voice. Her mind dubbed the voice as “Maraud” for some unknown reason.


Maraud directed the Gardener to plant the unique seeds in special little pots of soil obtained from the belly of a cave, which branched into Sally’s prized back yard garden.


Sally had always feared the dark recesses of that cave, but that day she entered without alarm and placed her small pots of soil onto thirteen natural looking little alcoves jutting from the walls of the cave.


As the last pot sank onto its resting place, a blue light shot from the rocky wall beneath it and struck another pot on the opposite wall. The blue light zigzagged back and forth between the pots until a cobweb of filmy blue strands hung across the cave walls. The light blinked out from the strands leaving iridescent filament crisscrossed over the interior surfaces of the cave.


Sally watched without fear as a bat woke from its ceiling resting spot and attempted to swoop through the cave filaments. It stuck to the thin pearly fibers and struggled to get free.


A small multi-legged creature about the size of a golf ball scuttled from one of Sally’s flowerpots. It grasped the struggling bat with powerful looking tweezer-like claws and inserted a thick gray straw-like appendage into the struggling animal’s chest. The bat gave one final high-pitched chitter then fell limply against the weird beast from the pot. The voice of Maraud called the creature Guardian as soft tones soothed the fear centers of Sally’s brain until she was able to watch the Guardian suck all life from the bat turning its small body into a dried black husk that wafted silently to the cave floor.

~*~

Sally’s back yard garden of beautiful and unusual plants is a unique showplace in the Arkansas foothills.


Sally works her garden with the abandonment of a gardening fanatic careful that not one weed should mar her treasured showplace.


The cave opening is camouflaged with colorful flowering shrubs and vines that carry with them a haunting fragrance like peppermint and cherries.


Sometimes, when dogs or children approach the cave opening wanting more of the delicious fragrance, Sally rubs the right side of her face trying to remember why she should shoo the visitors away. At times like this, Maraud’s voice intercedes and sooths away her worries.


Sally’s the Gardener. Her job is to keep her garden a perfect showplace and attract visitors (food?).


It is not her job to wonder how big the Guardians have grown with all of the food they’ve consumed recently.


At night when she’s asleep, however, she dreams that Maraud visits and plants more seeds. He looks like a smiling Greek god with curly hair and beautiful white teeth, but sometimes the mask slips a little during his efforts.


Sally’s mind tries to grasp the look of the hideous being know as Maraud but the insectile alien contours of the face above her softens into its smiling human version before she can fully grasp the concept of what’s happening. Soothing tones then smooth away her terror. The soothing tones that lately seem to end in an almost angry insectile buzz.


Somewhere, deep in the cortex of Sally’s mind, a tiny nugget of her former self wonders if the new buzzing voice belongs to Maraud or the fetus she’s carrying.


A numbing trill kicks away that little nugget and reminds her that Gardeners were put on the earth to garden and nurture. She must leave the thinking and wondering to the Marauders.

End

Note from the Author: The first paragraph of this story is courtesy of #storystarters, a Twitter Application.

Related in Time: Secrets of an Ozark Cave

#fridayflash: Undercover Garden

Eyeland

Eyeland
By
Louise Dragon

With mounting sensations of dread I watched the spring rains gush over the Maine countryside—cropping the banks of the Rainbow River with each surge. Flooding became more eminent as the minutes ticked by.


Returning to my desk, I forced myself to concentrate on the briefs before me. My wife Marilyn had left for work an hour ago.


“Children have to learn, Gary, even if it’s raining.”


Worrying was my bag. I worried about Marilyn out during the flood watch, I worried about the river overstepping its banks and flowing into our living room.


I’d be worried about selling another house, or people watching me if it wasn’t raining.


Marilyn, forever scientific, never worried about anything.


“Nobody’s watching you,” she’d admonished me often, “why would anyone be watching you? Do you think you’re the center of everyone’s universe? Or possibly you’re slated to become the next alien abductee?”


Sarcasm was another of Marilyn’s traits.


As I glanced out at the turbulent waters, for about the tenth time, I felt familiar stress building behind my eyes.


What if our house washed away?


Where would we go? People would come and look. Complete strangers looking, watching.


It’s happened before, why back in ‘eighty-seven . . .


As if to punctuate my thoughts, an island drifted down the Rainbow River headed for shore at breakneck speed.


Islands don’t float, do they?


This one hovered about thirty feet offshore. It was quite large, about the size of a baseball diamond, and sported spindly growth, like pins and needles, over its surface.


I tried to go back to work, but the island drew me to the back door repeatedly. Against my better judgment, I walked along the Rainbow’s shore in my yellow slicker trying to get a better look at the island. As the rain turned to a drizzling patter on my face, I decided that with the flooding possibilities dropping: I could probably row over and check it out.


But what if . . .


The “Tom Sawyer” hidden inside me took over, shoving Gary Denton—shy, mild mannered Real Estate Agent, to the back of the boat.


I should be working, but the island loomed before me.


Like an amusement park waiting for patrons, it was silent and ominous with little tendrils of ground fog rising toward the swollen sky. Not an expert rower, I counted on the current to help with the work and wasn’t disappointed.


Oh, hell, I’ll just explore it quickly and then go back to work.


I knew the rain could pick up anytime and wash the island away, so I wasn’t planning to stay long.


A ribbon of sand, three feet wide, circled the island. Fifty yards along, I picked up a path leading into tangles of brush in the island’s center. A nugget of worry slid down my spine like an ice cube. Where were the animals and birds? Not a twitter of sound could be heard. The island seemed clean, no dried leaves, no insects; the branches and brambles had a waxy feel, almost synthetic.


When I reached the center I was surprised by a cabin, tucked neatly away in the brush. It held an air of newness as if it had grown there: not your everyday Maine shack.


Could someone live here?
Continued in my next post

Eyeland