Just a weird piece of flash fiction this week. Partly inspired by Danger Beagling (as ever) in pissing-down rain and the DB herself taking us on a very odd route with a few patches of very insistent mud. Also, I suppose, a sort of sideways fulfillment of this Poets & Writers prompt (not poetry, though, obviously).
Title: Fingers
WC: 600
The fingers that wrapped around her ankle were just that: Fingers. Unambiguously. There was no moment of reprieve—not a second where thoughts of buried wires or gnarled tree roots, half-liberated by the heavy rain flitted through her mind as a possible alternative.
Fingers.
They closed tight just above the wide opening of her rain boot, finding flesh despite the sodden fabric of her jeans dragging ever downward. She couldn’t remember when last she had shaved. That thought would flit, of course, striking fear into heart that the fingers closed around her ankle might encounter unfeminine stubble.
She went down. Hard, her mind was eager to add, but it wasn’t so. Her arms shot out, ready to break a fall that never came. She went straight down.The sensation of earth—mud, really—pressing in on her was, at first, a kind of odd relief from the constant ping of rain against her skin.She felt her glasses slide away, tugged upward and off her ears.
The pull of her jacket at the armpits as she traveled one way and the fabric traveled the other jolted her out of whatever strange complacency had settled in her mind, in the moment.. Her own fingers thought at last to claw at the sky—at where the sky should be. There was only grey–black now, of course, only the clogging scent of rotting green.
Help, she thought, more out of the sense that it was the thing to do than any belief that help would come. She was going down, still. Two sets of fingers now, one around each ankle as every inch of exposed skin—hands, throat, chest, midriff, embarrassingly exposed—grew slick, easing the way.
Things were going faster now. Or she was going faster. Who was slithering rapidly past what was a question for the surface—for the rainy day and the cemetery fence and the huge yellow earth mover not quite hidden behind the black mountain of its own making. Things were going and so was she.
Her feet emerged. There was some kind of dramatic pause as they broke through the last of the heavy, sopping mud into whatever lay below. She found herself suspended, hands overhead, chin tipped upward and her feet dangling free. Not quite free. There were, of course, the fingers.
They tugged just then—the fingers—as though to underscore the unambiguous fact of their existence. She slid free, the rest of her body, undulating slightly along an S-curve as the earth found of her the path of least resistance.
She landed. Hard, her mind supplied, not so wrong this time. Some kind of natural slab floor made itself known to the soles of her feet through the shitty rain boots. It made itself known to legs, knees, thighs, hips, spine, and she went down, her hands shooting out behind her this time, jarred by abrasions and expected cold.
The space was dim. Not the black of the journey downward, but a place that light must have visited before.Light every now and then. Light from time to time. Not now, though, not especially. She looked around, or tried to. She scrabbled backward in the way of horror movie idiots, but nothing grabbed her from behind.
Fingers.
Nothing was grabbing her. She reached down and snatched at the hem of her jeans. Stupid, really. What was she hoping to see?
Fingers.
They emerged from the dimness. Skeletal, their nails ringed with ancient filth. They came together, tip to tip, steepled and inquisitive, followed by nothing except a voice.
“So. What brings you here?”
MTZQ Telecommuniculturates 