Needles (Sandcastle 3.09)

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My cramped fingers finally lose their hold on the porous rock. My heart hurdles into my throat. I gasp, arms pin-wheeling, flailing, searching for something, anything but air — there! A pine bough. Needles slip through my grip in little bursts of sticky sap that pierce the arctic air with a spicy fragrance.

I’m falling.

I grasp at the empty sky. A startled flock flies above me, taunting me with their wings like angels leering down at the damned soul that was pushed over the Pit’s edge. The water catches me like a sheet of pristine glass shattering with my body. The cold. It steals what little breath I’d gasped, stabs me like a thousand needles — not the bits of pine I’d taken with me, but the glass shards driving deep into my bones, the slivers that paralyze my muscles instantly.

I clutch for the rocks, the pines, even the air this time. Only water. I wish I’d known to gasp harder, deeper, to fill my lungs before the plunge.

The bubbles trickle out from my nose. My lungs are stretching, tearing; they finally break in a rush of bubbles racing each other to the top, laughing all the way to the surface, just beyond the reach of my frozen fingertips.

I know I shouldn’t. I know what it will mean. But I can’t help it; I breathe in the needles. My body seizes in rejection, coughs the last of the bubbles, gasps again. The cold fills me inside and out, so numbing I feel as if I’ve been wrapped in a blanket. My muscles jerk, one final effort to keep living, but my heart has been slowly dying ever since it started beating, anyway.

I still.

Above me, the bubbles break across the kaleidoscope of clouds and blue sky framed by the watching pines.

I was scared. Now, I’m just sleepy. Calm. Death welcomes me to its bed. Dying, I don’t regret. We all have to do it. What I do regret is dying with untold stories.

 

*** All works are fiction. The events, characters, and narrator(s) in flash fiction pieces are not intended to accurately portray any real persons, living or dead. ***

 

 

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I'm an award-winning fantasy author, artist, and photographer from La Porte, Indiana. My poetry, short fiction, and memoir works have been featured in various anthologies and journals since 2005, and several of my poems are available in the Indiana Poetry Archives. The first three novels in my Chronicles of Avilésor: War of the Realms series have received awards from Literary Titan.

After some time working as a freelance writer, I was shocked by how many website articles are actually written by paid "ghost writers" but published under the byline of a different author. It was a jolt seeing my articles presented as if they were written by a high-profile CEO or an industry expert with decades of experience. I'll be honest; it felt slimy and dishonest. I had none of the credentials readers assumed the author of the article actually had. Ghost writing is a perfectly legal, astonishingly common practice, and now, AI has entered the playing field to further muddy the waters. It's hard to trust who (or what) actually wrote the content you'll read online these days.

That's not the case here at On The Cobblestone Road. I do not and never will pay a ghost writer, then slap my name on their work as if I'd written it. This website is 100% authentic. No outsourcing. No ghost writing. No AI-generated content. It's just me... as it should be.

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3 thoughts on “Needles (Sandcastle 3.09)

  1. I remember almost drowning at the Camp Ondessonk swimming hole in 8th grade. I was swimming with a bunch of kids at the camp. I’d fallen off of a “big” floating wooden board that everyone was playing around. I went under the water surface and was desperately trying to get back to the top. There were so many kids swimming that I kept swimming into all the legs dangling in the water. Finally with one last kick I got up and out. I sometimes think of that episode in my life. I could have easily died. I am so glad that I didn’t because I now know of all of the things that I would have missed if I had drown that day.

    1. Oh, wow! I’ve never really come close to drowning, but I often relate the sensation of a panic attack to what I think drowning might feel like.

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