A Flash Story

Since it's October and Halloween is fast approaching, I thought I'd post a flash story I wrote many years ago for a Sister's in Crime challenge. I hope you find it as spooky as I did writing it.

Note: Flash Fiction is a complete story told with a small number of words (typically 100 to 750 words). Beloved Daughter is an example, complete at 493 words. Despite its brevity, the story still has the essential elements of fiction -- a character, a conflict or tension, and some form of resolution.

Beloved Daughter

Seventeen-year-old Serena Delaney was afraid to go into the cemetery, even though there wasn't anything particularly spooky about it. It was just old. We called it the pioneer cemetery because no one had been buried in it since the 1800s. It was filled with weeds and the tombstones were falling down, cracked or had just plain disappeared. The black, wrought iron fence that bordered the half-acre was rusted, bent and covered in bird dung. Not that I'd made a study of the place. But I wasn't chicken about it like Serena. In fact, I'll even admit that I found the cemetery interesting, especially the flowery inscriptions on some of the grave markers. "Gone but forever in our hearts." Corny stuff like that.

Anyway, like I said, Serena Delaney wouldn't have anything to do with the place. She had her reasons, I suppose, and I let it go. But the rest of the kids made fun of her. Called her Sissy Delaney. The teasing got sorta nasty, but she still wouldn't take the shortcut through the graveyard to the high school like everybody else. Wouldn't hang out there to smoke or drink beer after Friday night football, either. No, Serena flat out refused to set even one foot inside the old burial ground. That's why no one believed me when I said I'd seen her in the cemetery. That foggy October night in 1978. The night she disappeared.

Despite an extensive search, she was never found. A runaway was the official verdict. By 1998, the same year I was elected sheriff, everybody had forgotten about Serena Delaney--until Cotton Creek flooded. One of the graves was completely washed out, spilling its bony contents across the muddy ground like pick-up sticks. The odd part was that the bones we recovered didn't look all that ancient. It bothered me so much that I had Doc Bodine send the remains out for forensic testing. The results were startling. As I suspected, the bones had been in the ground only twenty years or so. The deceased was a young woman, about sixteen or seventeen years old. Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the heart.

I contacted Serena Delaney's parents even though I had no proof yet that the skeletal remains were their daughter's. I just thought they should know. Right off, Delaney confessed. "I shot her, Sheriff," he said. "But you have to believe me, it was an accident. I was cleaning my gun, you see." He shook his head. "I could've sworn it wasn't loaded." Scared, he'd buried his daughter in the old pioneer cemetery. "I put her in the first grave I came to," he said.

After, Delaney's trial, I went to the cemetery just to poke around. Found Serena's grave and turned over the old tombstone that the flood had uprooted. The inscription was faint but still legible. "Beloved daughter, Serena," it read. "Born 1861. Died 1878 by her father's own hand."