© wildverbs
“Come, my friends. I’ve got more food for you.”
Lorenzo Thornton had been friends with the gulls for decades, but then he was as good a murderer as they were scavengers. He’d found easy prey in hitchhikers and runaways along the coast highway near his cabin behind the white dunes, and his private graveyard was only a few hundred yards away. No one would miss his victims.
But he never buried the bodies before the gulls came and picked them clean. He knew they loved him, and he loved the gulls. They were the only thing he did love.
At seventy-eight, he sat in a lounge chair, drank a bourdon, pondered his disability income from wounds suffered in war, and his successful kill rating in the decades since. It was in the afternoon sun of July when he dozed off and his black heart finally stopped.
Then the gulls gathered, hundreds of them, and they watched and waited. As the sun began to set, they allowed Lorenzo to provide them one last meal.
I wrote this for the 173rd FFfAW Challenge hosted by Priceless Joy. The idea is to use the image above as the prompt for crafting a piece of flash fiction between 100 and 175 words long. My word count is 173.
Of course I looked up Gulls and discovered that they’ll eat just about anything, living and dead, and sometimes will “feed in association with other animals, where marine hunters drive prey to the surface when hunting.”
It wasn’t hard to write my wee tale after reading that.
To discover other stories based on the prompt, visit InLinkz.com.
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Feeling a bit dark, today, are we?
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First thing that popped into my head. Sort of an Alfred Hitchcock “The Birds” vibe.
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Grisly, I like that the gulls make the best of the situation.
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They can be fairly intelligent birds, but that doesn’t mean they’ll pass up a free meal. Thanks, Iain.
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Karma?
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You could call it that.
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Hahaha! Loved the twist at the end! I want to say he got what he deserved but he really didn’t. He deserved much worse. LOL! Great story!
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My point wasn’t so much that he got his just desserts, because he died of old age, but that the birds he though loved him so much, in the end, just saw him as another meal. Thanks.
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Hahaha! That is true! I understand.
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Loved this one, especially because it was complete in itself despite the limitations of the word count.
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Thanks. I try my best.
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Stunning and startling and screepy! (Super creepy)
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Serial killers usually are. Thanks, Kris.
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Poetic justice? That was chilling and gruesome. Loved the ending.
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In the end, the birds who he thought loved him just saw him as another meal. Thanks.
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Ohh. I love the creepy wicked twist!
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Thanks, Nona.
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