My sister Emma and I write short horror stories which we've turned into a podcast. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSPEnIAveheHkLWadjznPsw
Here's a very rough draft of the beginning of a new one I'm working on ... DON'T READ if you don't like scary stuff.
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When I was young—oh about nine or ten—my little sister Sandra, who had recently died in a farming accident, fell out of the sky. We’d just buried her earlier that morning. But a few hours later, there she was. She’d fallen from God-knows-how-high and smashed right into the little table we’d set up in our backyard with cakes and coffee for her funeral reception. Our relatives and friends were absolutely beside themselves. Screaming and crying. Some were looking up into the cloudy sky to see where she might have fallen from. The one thing no one doubted was that it was Sandra.
My Dad and I, and a few of his friends, rolled Sandra’s broken body up in a table cloth, laid her in the bed of his truck and drove back down to the cemetery. The mound that had been patted down with shovels that very morning seemed to have exploded. We soon discovered, after some digging, that the lid of the coffin she had been buried in had shattered and splintered into thousands of pieces. Dad said it looked as if they buried dynamite and then, after burying it, set it off. We buried Sandra right then and there in that table cloth. I don’t remember much else. Just that no one was really speaking, as if it would be disrespectful or irreverent, and so I didn’t either.
The next morning Sandra fell out of the sky again. This time hitting our mailman, John Adams, who was on his morning rounds. She hit him at such a speed that he died, too. A few of us got together and buried both Sandra and John and then, no more than a few hours later, they both started falling out of the sky. Sometimes together, sometimes separately and at different times.
Hundreds of people died in the coming weeks. About the fourth day we’d stopped burying them; it made no difference anyway. At first, there was a mad rush to fix the damage the falling bodies caused to our houses and buildings, but, eventually, as more and more people died from the impact of the dead bodies, people gave up and either left town altogether or took up residents in their basements. People, it’s been said, can get used to anything, and I suppose that’s true. The falling of the bodies, thumping into the earth, crashing through the ceilings, smashing into cars and setting off car alarms, none of it really bothered me after a while.
One day, my Dad told me he was going to the surface for supplies. He never came back. I remember that night crying for the first time in months. I was saying to myself, “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone.” That’s when I heard something. Not an exterior sound, you understand, but a voice in my head. A voice that wasn’t my own. I lifted my head and saw six grey little creatures standing still and watching me. I asked where they came from. One of the little creatures walked gently towards me, put his long, gangly arm over my shoulder and said, “If we cannot plant them we cannot grow them. Will you Will you help us plant them?" What could I say but yes. And so I did. And I have never seen them again. Not once in over ten years.
But this is why our town is an underground one. It has nothing to do with the scorching heat. It was the falling bodies that stopped almost immediately after I told them yes. Not only has no one fallen in the past ten years, lots of new people have come to town too, as if from nowhere. But we don't complain. It's just what this dying town needs.
