MicroHorror

Mark Maldonado had always been able to see the creatures. When he was a boy, his father would spend hours beating him with a wooden switch.

“Tell me what you see riding on my back now!” He annunciated each word in tandem with the attack. “I won’t hear another word of demons in this house! You hear me?”

Mark had just about given up trying to convince his father, and the rest of his family, that monsters were eating them alive. Lying there, bleeding on the filthy carpet of his bedroom, he watched the sharp, black talons carve a wet pit into his father’s skull. The creature pulled pieces of brain matter from the ruined hole and began filling its mouth with gray pulp. It rolled back its crusted eyes in apparent ecstasy.

“So sweet,” its craggy voice cooed. It paused for a moment and shifted its weight. His father visibly shuddered and quickly grasped his lower back.

“Dammit! Now you’ve gone and made me pull a muscle,” he groaned. “Jesus! What the hell am I going to do with you, Mark?”

“I’m sorry,” Mark cried. “Please. I’m so sorry.”

“Oh my God, Paul,” Mark’s mother interrupted. She stood at the threshold with her hands covering her open mouth. “What are you doing? He’s your son.” She stepped into the room and roughly spun her husband around by his shoulders. “You son of a bitch,” she hissed.

Mark’s father clenched his fists. “I’m not dealing with this anymore. He’s your problem now.” He pushed past her and slammed the door shut behind him.

Mark’s mother bent down to the floor where her son lay bruised and bloody.

“It’s okay now, honey.” She drew his small, battered body up over her outstretched legs and pressed him to her chest. “I’m going to get you the help you need.”

Mark let his myriad of tears be absorbed into the collar of her nightshirt. Sliding his head up at an angle against her warm skin, he watched his mother’s lips moving to some unknown lullaby. She rocked him lovingly in her arms. “Momma loves you very much. You know that?” She said through tears.

Mark tried really hard to avoid looking at the clumps of clotted blood matted in her long blond hair.

“I love you too, Momma.”

“I love you too, Mark,” the creature cackled. It was pressed up behind her, licking gore from two long gashes in her neck. The coarse, black hairs on its chin trembled when it spoke. “I can’t wait to taste the lining of her stomach.”

Mark closed his eyes and let his own screams become the only comforting sound.

Thirty years later, Mark was sitting in the back row of his six-year-old daughter’s first grade classroom. She was a beautiful girl with strawberry-blond hair and a nose full of freckles. It was show-and-tell day, and Cassie had wanted to bring her father.

“Remember, daddy,” she said brightly. “I’m going to introduce you.”

“Of course, sweetie,” Mark chimed. He carefully examined his only child. Cassie was wearing a white, cotton dress spotted with blood spatter. “You’re going to do a great job.”

Cassie wrapped her arms around her father. “I love you, daddy.”

Mark stretched his arms around his daughter. He could feel the creature slithering along her spine, digging its claws just a little bit deeper.

“I love you too, Cassie.”