Inhaling Faded Smiles
Ficlets and Ficly survivor, FicMom, and Mistress of Well-Intentioned Indecision and Goddess of Unrequited Love. @ElshaHawk @HawkandYoung
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Their little faces crumbled from surprise and delight to tearful and shock. This large thing crashed their party, stealing their gifts and eating their cake.
He sat back, grinning maliciously over his multiple chins. The children's large eyes swam with tears a moment before their mouths opened in wails of pure anguish.
He inhaled. There was something salty and bittersweet in the air now vibrating with howls. It filled his soul with its fragrance, lifted his heavy and dark heart, and increased his girth. He needed their sadness, their anguish was best. He consumed it like living bread and built his very visage from its palpable tension. He was gluttonous for others' pain and suffering. It completed him.
The children soon exhausted from their crying, so the manifestation of greed and villainy was forced to lumber on. He spotted a young tot with a bag full of candy. Too easy. He felt the gnaw of hunger begin deep in his pit of a stomach. He needed something large to sustain him; a bus load of grief.
Prequels
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Comments (6 so far!)
Average reader rating 5.00/5
ethelthefrog
Something happens to the human mind when it becomes a parent. The capacity for love multiplies beyond imagining. It has to. Something has to hold back the desire for revenge...
Nicely imagined and nicely delivered. I'd push the apostrophe back by a single letter, though, as "others" is plural.
Now, will the monuments give us a sequel? Time will tell.
- #985 Posted 9 years ago
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0
Storykeeper
Love this concept; it is artful and creepy on the level of Neil Gaiman.
I was jolted a couple times by parallelism issues, though. In the first sentence, "surprise and delight," isn't parallel to "tearful and shocked." Would it work to change the latter phrase to "tears and shock"?
In the third paragraph, "consumed" and "build" are also not parallel.
- #1773 Posted 8 years ago
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0
- 5 out of 5
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slapdashmonuments
The story to come is apparently forming mistlike in the air in front of me. The villain here feels familiar to me, either because of some thought of my own from before, or some other story, maybe. I'm very intrigued.