Plague

Toril Fisher

For Margarets prompt at the Imaginary Garden With Real Toads

     Just last year the lake swallowed Mary Givney’s son whole. That damnable oil slick surface not giving up a single ripple as he slipped silently from sight. Two feet from shore and two feet from a boat, five people gawked on, not one moving an inch to try and save the boy.

     “It was his lot,” they said.

     “Who am I to interfere with God’s will,” they said.

    “The fates are not to be trifled with,” they said.

     When that boy came back to life in the fall, walking straight out of that water like the second coming, you should have seen the faces of the towns folk. As they watched him shamble through the main street, skin purple with the cold and eyes red rimmed and milky, he touched each one in the middle of the forehead.  In a voice choked with water and decaying vegetation he repeated the same word over and over.

     “Wish. Wish. Wish.”

     He headed for his mother’s house and the people followed, keeping a distance, not wanting him to touch them again, but amazed at the walking dead and scared of what he might do. 

As he approached the house his mother came out and embraced him, tears in her eyes.

    “Wish. Wish. Wish.”  He repeated and then collapsed in a gelatinous heap, dead once again at her feet.

     She stared out at the people and shook her head at them in disgust.

    “What kind of evil are you casting on us woman,” one of them shouted.

    “What is this Wish he spoke of,” another asked.

    “We should burn him so that he stays dead,” one man spat.

She stared at them, not in horror or anger, but in pity and frustration.

    “You created him,” she said.

    “He only wanted to fit in,” she said.

    “You have killed he only thing I have ever loved,” she said.

     That is when the fist stone hit her in the leg. That was when the boy became a King.  That was when the die was cast.