Rejection Letters (Flash Fiction)

Indelible red digits reached out to claw at his eyes. He shook the gauzy haze from them, to better confront that which he sought. The LED display blinked and then devoured the custodian numbers. A Cerberus of three zeroes licked themselves over with gleeful satisfaction. Midnight. No longer a mere immanence. The witching hour's scythe had transcribed its arc once again.

They were all at large tonight. Vampires, werewolves, ghouls and zombies. Nightmare afflatus, borne upon the keening wind stalking his eaves. Or perhaps it was the cunning legion of undead who had summoned up the wind from hell. In order to cushion the howls of their predatory approach. Wolfsbane, garlic, silver and icons. All were at their appointed stations up and down his house this night.

He gazed up at the moon. Dead satellite to us, yet war standard and pendulum pacemaker to the heartless host yonder. Strange how we look to it for our dreams. Yet it can only ever time us out. Send us scuttling like rats back to our cloistered redoubts. Making each of us in our isolation feel like we are the last mortal on earth. At least for as long as we wrestle with loquacious phantasms in our visions, while the outside world is given over to these wordless fiends. The host forms a corps of sorts, in that they occupy swathes of land. But what could be more illogical than to hold that they follow rules or maintain discipline? They are singular silent assassins, feeding on gutted human husks. Else they starve for nourishment, yet still uncomplaining in their taciturnity.

With only the fragile vinculum of fibre optics now linking him to the rest of humanity, he turned back to address his computer keyboard. He padded the dabs of his fingers against his words hanging in the plasmatic blue void of the monitor. Unloved words. Unheeded words that elicited no response from the destination of beyond. The plasma receded from his touch. Bucking and warping, spiralling his words away and out of his grasp. He jerked his fingers away but the plasmatic sluice remained in place. Siphoning the rest of his word trail along after their predecessors. Lost to the world now. The wind piped a particularly goading lament. He peered in towards the hole in the screen. The plasma appeared to have spun some virtual cobwebs where its surface twisted inwards. Mocking the self-repair of clotting human skin. Suddenly he lurched back, as the hole disgorged a vermillion sputum back in his direction. It appeared to be his own letters. Ripped from their original orderings. Smeared in blood red coagulate. Even the ether could not stand to have his words in its midsts.

The bloodsuckers had claimed his soul after all. They were communicating with him in kind.