Dead Weight
Our July 2024 Flash Fiction Contest yielded two stories the editors thought were worthy of honorable mention. The first of those is “Dead Weight” by Christian Leithart.
I am stone. I am lead. I am alone.
I wait at the bottom of a well. Smooth walls curve around me and rise to a saucer of pale darkness above. The well is empty except for my weight crouched at the bottom.
I can’t say how long I have been here. Perhaps I’ve been here forever. I remember nothing except these walls that cup me like a cold womb.
No, I remember voices. Voices and the touch of a warm hand.
“That one looks old, Sean. I’d ditch it.”
“It’s fine. I know what I’m doing.”
I am lifted, moved, held up to the light. A thumb runs across me. A fingernail scrapes my metal side.
“See, Tom? It’s fine.”
I feel an opening, like a doorway, barely wide enough for me to squeeze through. Pressure. The soft sound of a well-greased spring coiling under my weight. Click. I’m through. The door closes.
I am old. Long I sat in wet and dark, till my sides burned with fever, with time’s slow ache. My age leaks like acid into the space around me.
I am dangerous, Sean. I am fickle.
I will kill you if I get the chance.
The spring beneath me stretches. I am pushed to the side, through another opening, while machinery clicks and shifts.
I am in the well.
I am waiting.
The sound of rain on pavement. An acrid smell, sweet and bitter. I hear air drawn in, breath pushed out.
“You know smoking kills, right?”
“Thank you, Mr. Surgeon General.”
“Just saying.”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t. I was just saying.”
“Gotta die sometime. Might as well smoke while I stare at the rain.”
“Sure, Sean. Let’s take another walk around back.”
Keys rattle. Boots scrape concrete. Shadows flicker across the opening at the top of the well.
“All quiet back here, too.”
“Wait, what’s that?”
“Where?”
“Over there, by the back door. Is that a guy?”
“He’s got a crowbar in the lock.”
“Hey, you! Hey!”
“He’s running.”
“Stop right there!”
Light.
Ah.
The opening above me fills with light, bright light, white light. It flickers and dances, glinting off my blunt face, my bronze sides.
The voices are louder now. I can hear Sean’s breath.
“Stop, or I’ll shoot!”
Do it, Sean. It’s your time.
A man yelling.
Do it.
Behind me, a faint click.
A clap of thunder splits me in two. The sides of the well rip apart in flames. I am free, spinning through the air. The flash of the explosion paints the night, lighting up rain drops like Christmas tree bulbs. They shatter as I pass through them. I tumble through air and water and light without slowing.
Ahead, a man’s face. He has not had time to pull back his hand from the explosion. No time to leap out of the way. I have been waiting and now I am free and he is not prepared.
I smash into Sean’s chest.
It is warm, sticky, resistant. I begin to dig, pushing my nose through one layer after another. Each one slows me down. They snap and flap and try to push me back. I tear through densely packed surfaces and fragile, airy ones, burying myself like a wild animal seeking a place to hide. My nose hits something solid — I feel myself chip it — and I am spinning, out of control, all sense of direction lost. At last, I come to rest in a hot, black cavern. Liquid pools around me.
A sound in the dark.
Thm-thmp. Thm-thmp. Thm-thmp.
It is slowing, fading...
There are other noises. Shouts. Sirens. Commands. I pay no attention. My work is done.
I am no longer waiting. I am spent.
Smoothly the wall beside me parts and a needle-fine blade scrapes my side. Lights spills through the cut as the blade retracts, then is blocked out again by a set of heavy metal jaws. They close around me, rough and assertive. I am tugged and twisted as the jaws pull me through the opening. I slip through warm, wet space and out into cold, thin air under bright lights.
The jaws open and I drop into a metal bowl that clatters around me. Glittering eyes gaze down. I cannot move.
“Nasty wound,” said the surgeon. “Poor guy’s lucky to be alive.”