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dVerse — prosery 5 — All Hallow’s Eve

msjadeli

Skeleton hand coming out of the ground — Stock Photo

On one of the few warm and sunny days left of autumn, we decided to ride our bikes along the new stretch of bike trail. The land had been donated by the local chemical company. Where yellow “no trespassing” signs proliferated before was now accessible by all.

The woodland trail was full of gentle slopes and curves. Desicated leaves rustled and sizzled as we traveled among them. Coming around a curve we were struck by a stretch of land forty acres or more where nothing but blow-sand rested.

“This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence,” I said, “but we know farmers never used this land.”

Few remembered that before it was the site of a chemical plant, it had been a cemetery. On All Hallows Eve desecrated bones clawed their ways to the surface, looking for revenge. They would have it.

The End.

Bjorn is today’s host of dVerse.  Bjorn says:
Of course you are free to write your prose about any subject and the line [from poet, Louise Gluck] I have chosen for you to integrate into your prose is:

This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence

Your prose shall not exceed 144 words and tell a story with a beginning, middle and end. You are free to write either fiction or biographical.

image link here

Published by msjadeli

mother, gardener, retired government worker, observer, reader, learner, bicyclist, woman who runs with the wolves, lover of music!

35 thoughts on “dVerse — prosery 5 — All Hallow’s Eve”

    1. Indeed, Bjorn! This story is part fiction, part fact. The part about the chemical factory donating land to build a section of bike trail through it is true. There are structures seen from it that get the imagination going…

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  5. Building anything atop a cemetery is folly. Your piece is layered double, with the restless angry dead amidst the dead soil, the sands of commercial death; nice spooky job.

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  8. This was wonderfully creepy Lisa. My father having been the maintenance supervisor of a chemical factory, i remember visiting the place as a child. The buildings were so strange and otherworldly with all the pipes and vats and exposed superstructure. These images came back to me as I read your piece here. Not sure I would bike across land reclaimed from a chemical factory.

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    1. I know what you mean, Rob. I’ve gone that way a few times, but those empty buildings creep me out. It’s not very well-traveled and that safety factor in the back of my mind there could be people waiting to jump out, not to mention going off of the track to rest for a moment. I bet that would be memorable for a child, to see all of that stuff.

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  11. I enjoyed your tale, Jade, and imagined it being told to a group around a fire, in the dark at Halloween. I like that it has a modern setting on ‘one of the few warm and sunny days left of autumn’, and the description of the woodland trail ‘full. Od gentle slopes and curves’ gives us a false sense of security. However, the chemical company and the yellow signs alerted me to something going amiss.

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  15. The use of chemical wasteland and desecrated bones works very well to to flesh out the prompt! I found Gluck’s line difficult to work with. Here you make me think of barrenness as the harvest of pestilence – which hadn’t occurred to me till now. There’s something about that combination of ordinary life combined with the unexpectedly horrific that is particularly spooky.

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