So, Aggie threw down a gauntlet to write a short story. I don’t consider this scary, Aggie. :)
The Stockyard Girl
Once upon a time there was a little girl. She was slight and waifish with raggedly cut dark hair that fell in her eyes. The little girl was never seen wearing anything but a man’s suit coat, much out of style and far too large for her, over a filthy white baggy t-shirt and a pair of overalls with the knees wore to threads and the too-long cuffs frayed into trailing fringe. No one knew where the girl lived or even what her name was. She was always seen walking between the double railroad tracks down in the old stockyards, sometimes carrying a ratty looking cloth shopping bag adorned with what had once been brightly stylized flowers.
Like a stray animal, she skittered away whenever anyone approached or spoke to her, her eyes downcast and focused on her escape. Eventually, people quit trying to find out who she was and where her parents were or if she was all alone and needed help. More often than not, though, she simply blended into the background of the stockyards, grey with dust and spotted with dirt, only her flowered bag interrupting her evolution into chameleon.
Until a well meaning social worker ran across an old and incomplete case file concerning the girl.
The social worker put on her most sensible black shoes, her least threatening grey wool skirt and her mildest cream colored cotton shirt. She made her way from her small apartment where she lived with two goldfish named Ernie and Gomez down to the old stockyards.
She waited through the morning. Promptly at noon she took a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper out of her black handbag and ate it in small bites, chewing precisely and carefully as her eyes scanned the graveled lot with its crisscrossing iron rails, rickety with disuse. The only thing that disturbed the desolate scene was a mangy dog, so beaten down by life that it didn’t even attempt to beg for scraps of the social worker’s sandwich. It slowly limped along one of the tracks and into the field beyond.
All through the afternoon the social worker waited patiently. As the stockyards gradually became shrouded in long shadows, her attention was drawn by a furtive movement from just inside a large drain pipe in the embankment on the east side of the rails. The vanishing rays of the sun glinted briefly off of a pair of eyes that peered out from under the scraggly mop of dirty hair. As the social worker rose from her seat on the low concrete wall, the girl drew back into the drainage pipe.
The social worker crossed to the pipe, moving slowly and deliberately so as not to frighten the girl. When she reached the edge of the pipe, there was almost no light remaining in the sky but she could just make out the darker outline of the little girl, crouched along one of the curved sides of the pipe, about ten feet beyond the entrance. Speaking lowly and calmingly to the little girl, she bent her head down to climb up into the pipe.
She raised her gaze from the floor of the pipe after entering. She wondered confusedly where the little girl had gone but then the needle sharp teeth in an impossibly wide mouth fastened around her neck. All thought left her as her life flowed quickly down the throat of the thing with the scraggly mop of dark hair.
Other answers to the Challenge of the Sith:
Aggie with Befitting the Sin
Aewl with Nightmarish Morning
Yabu with Merced Recibida, Libertad Vendida
Guy S with A Recollection of December
Curtal Friar with One Rainy Day
Jay In Ames with an untitled submission
Lemur King with The Starkness of Being
John DuMond with Tight
David with That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It
