#FFF220 Blood Is Thicker Than Water | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

frankensteinshimbo · 8 months

Text

Rotten Work

For @flashfictionfridayofficial using a character from @medusainthemarble.

“Y’need what?”

The younger man stared at the pale stomach rising and falling on the metal table in front of them. The wall behind it was a brighter green in the daytime. On it, a painted cartoon sow portrayed a mural of a mother suckling babies with a simple black line smile. They didn’t look like pigs. The middle aged gambler spread like Jesus on the table didn’t really look like a body that someone inhabited anymore. Just the swell of some guy with an unpaid tab and a beer belly moving to the draw of his breath. And the hunger that squirmed to the bottomlessness inside his own.

Franklin answered by pressing the thick block of a butcher’s blade into the crook of his nephew’s palm.

“I need you to do what you do with the hogs, Elly,” Frank answered in his rasp of a voice.

Elly could feel the lusterless eyes watching him from off to the side. People who stood to the side had always judged. Teachers, mothers, God. Just this one time, though, he couldn’t lift his head to face the bench.

“That’s pigs, Frankie. I’ve only ever divined shit offa pig guts. Maybe like a squirrel or a raccoon or two.”

“Look at me, Kid.”

Elly’s head didn’t move.

“You look at me now or this will get a lot worse for you.”

Elly’s chin raised.

Frank looked about a disheveled forty. He dressed well, but his face was as weathered as a cliff's and about as smooth under his ginger stubble, which spoke to a working man’s disposition belying the compulsion of appearances. Young blond Elly had been something of a pretty boy until he’d taken that crowbar to the face and woken up with his bones rearranged, but what spoke to their shared blood were the same washed out blues fixed on one another. One set wide. The other empty.

“One of these days I will do something horrible - no question - for you. Today, I expect you to tell me this future by whatever horrible means you need to. No question. That’s what it is to be Family.” Franklin wet the rough of his lips with a tongue that had been dry since ‘26. “You understand?”

Elly nodded with the mute submissiveness of a little brother. (Perhaps the way Abel had once to Cain. He wouldn’t know; the Bible wasn’t very elaborative.)

“Good. Good,” Frank mumbled as he glanced down at the man on the table in front of the mural. “You’ll want to cut deep enough to sever an artery or something when you start opening him up.”

He scratched at his stubble consideringly. Frank knew how to make a body hurt, but there were intricacies deeper than skin and the submersion of bone that he couldn’t precise. Elly could.

“Pain’ll almost certainly rouse him from what he’s on, and there’s no use in dragging this out more than it needs.”

“The guts gotta be warm for it to work. If there’s no blood flowin’ it goes bunk.” The connection of large animal entrails to the touch of the universe was something like dial-up. Easily interrupted when death and, oddly, phone calls gummed up the lines. Elly had never cared to know much for Necromancy until he’d shown an unusual knack for it, but he was willing to bet that the ancient art of picking through intestines to try and read bloodsoaked truths had not been properly attuned for the advent of radio waves.

“Then work quick, Elly.”

The flicker of praise licking his name sent a lick of warmth down Elly’s spine.

“Turn off your phone? And uh- I need a bucket.”

Frank grunted, but he turned to scour around for the requested items with the enthusiasm of a rock. But. He did nonetheless.

“Gloves?”

Elly pushed up the sleeve of his jacket.

“Nawh.”

It was traditional to start at the ass to split the guts stem to stern, but Elly granted the guy the courtesy of a vivisection. Listening to the slowing gush of liquid hitting metal, he parted the musculature of the chest the way he had more comfortably touched other men before. Even the blood-tainted hunger hollowed into deeper recesses of Elly’s body in a way he could pretend was base and mundane.

Lean in.

Split the rib cage.

Grit your jaw when it cracks into splitters and jagged shards under your bare hands.

Elly grunted in surprise as his fingers pushed through fragile connective tissue under the heart.

“What?”

“Nothin’. Just–” he paused as palpated, forcing stilled blood back through collapsing veins, “--It’s heavier than I expected. Not physical like...” Elly’s other hand moved down into the slithering warmth of guts. Perks of ambidexterity. “...Just that–” how did he explain the intrinsic numerical value of individual sins any more than he could the name of dread?

“A lot of these guys are worth their weight in vice,” Frank said as he tussled Elly’s hair, thus absolving him of having to stumble into an answer on esoterica.

Elly disassembles around the rare comfort of approval from a discomforting man’s paternal touch. He acutely feels the growth of lack, of never again, of simple need turning savage in his stomach. Running his fingers through gore, he can channel that revelation through the voice of the gambler’s organs. His tongue is talkative, but it’s somehow the cirrhosed liver that’s the most concerned with fact.

He prised the organ from its alcove with trembling palms, then with surer hands he tilted his head back, lifted the bounty to his lips, and let the meat slide down.

#FFF220 Blood Is Thicker Than Water #flashfictionfridayofficial #Flash Fiction Friday #writeblr community #Writeblr #creative writing #short story #fiction #horror #cw body horror #cw written (mild) gore #a lot of my writing surrounding Fryer (Elly) is expeirmental #so i'm a bit 50/50 on this one #either way #i sleep now #my works #cookie to anyone who finds the Sopranos reference btw

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ngkiscool · 8 months

Text

Chosen families

For @flashfictionfridayofficial - FFF220 Blood Is Thicker Than Water

Good Omens fandom, rated G, 220 words

"You came back here, Greasy, do you hear me?"

Yes, he heard him all right. In fact, the whole neighborhood heard when his father shouted at him to return home. They probably also heard what he shouted before. How unacceptable his behavior was, what a failure he was at school, how much of a disappointment he is.

His father stood at the entrance, his bulky body framed by the door. "If you leave now, you will not have a family to come back to!"

Well, it's not like they were much of a family to begin with, Oliver thought bitterly. A father who was barely home, a mother who was better when she wasn't around, and a bigger brother who did nothing but to bully him. The only thing he will miss from that house will be his tropical fish, and even them probably didn't care much about him.

"Are you coming, Oliver? The rest of The Them are already at the quarry, there is a new game we want to play and they are waiting just for you". The voice was just as loud as his father's, but the opposite in every other way. The speaker was young, a female, and most importantly – a person who cared about him.

The boy smiled gratefully. "Yes, Pepper, I am."

#good omens #flash fiction friday #good omens fanfiction #my fanfiction #greasy johnson

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