Cutting Edge

The early morning brought a dull wind to Ahmagad, a city with all the personality of a wet paper napkin, famed for its lack of beautiful mornings. It was beige city. Full of beige people with beige heads and beige hearts. Beige. Beige. Beige. The whole city was nothing but beige and the Beigests loved it.

Regular readers of the Daily Dump knew that no decent individual had the audacity to claim that even modestly pleasant mornings were possible. A single glance at any headline would fill your heart with anger. Bold text bemoaned a litany of doom: young people smile at inappropriate moments, criminals judged too slowly, food eaten by the wrong kinds of people. The malevolent list went on and on and on.

But today was a different day.

Different in a way that should have been a siren call for all.

This day was suspiciously agreeable.

Birds sang sweet odes to mother nature as they flew about merrily from tree to tree. The sun smiled down from a canvas of blue sky upon flowers that danced in the limelight. Even passers-by in the street were compelled to utter the strange old saying of ‘good morning.’

For today was indeed a ‘good’ morning. At least it would be for a time, because like all good things, they must come to an early end. On days like these, the most terrible of happenings tended to happen.

Taking in this glorious morning only a stone’s throw away, Bud Quinn, a legend at his school for having the most sliced bread stuck to the roof of his classroom at any one time, played a game of kick the ball and see how far it goes with his younger brother, Gareth.

“Come on, Gareth, kick it slower. I wanna boot it,” said Bud. “I wanna get it over the mountains.”

His brother obliged and despite a mighty good booting and sending the ball sailing over his brother’s head, the ball did not reach the mountains and instead rolled down a slope into the nearby woods.

“Really? Gareth, you’re supposed to catch it!” said Bud.

“I can’t jump that high!” Gareth shouted back. He ran up to the edge of the tree line and peered in. “I can’t see it.”

“Go in and get it,” said Bud, joining his brother.

“Nah ah.”

“You have to, you’re the youngest.”

Gareth shook his head. “Nah ah. Aunty Pat says you should never go into the woods looking for things cause you’ll find something you don’t want.”

“When did she say that?”

“Last Winter’s Day, remember. She was telling that story about how she went looking for Uncle Dan, but instead she found a Dam Floozy.”

“What’s a Dam Floozy?”

“Dunno, but Mum said it’s a monster that preys on unfaithful husbands.”

“You’re making stuff up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Then how come my teachers never said anything about it. Plus, there’s no dams around here and Uncle Dan is pretty religious.”

“Oh yeah, then how come Uncle Dan never comes round anymore?”

“I dunno, but I heard Mum tell Dad that Uncle Dan was a creep. You’re just too scared to go into the woods.”

“No, I’m not. I ate that spider last time, remember.”

“But then you cried.”

“Because you dobbed me into Mum and she made me wash my mouth out with soap.”

“Whatever. Look, I’ll go and get the ball, just stay here if you’re too scared.”

“Nah, I’m coming. Mum said never to stand near a road alone because there’s too many solicitors and I don’t want to get solicited.”

The two boys made their way down the slope and walked deep into the woods.

“You go look that way and yell out if you find it,” said Bud, walking off alone.

The world seemed darker to Gareth all of a sudden, like someone was walking away with the candlelight. He looked around, pushing aside the low hanging brush. After a few steps he saw something that didn’t blend with the greenery. There was the ball, up against a tree. He picked it up and was about to call out to Bud when he spotted something else.

Someone lay face down in the leaves. If that wasn’t strange enough, the person seemed to be covered in red paint which confused Gareth because there weren’t any of the usual things used for painting around, like buckets, brushes or those three-legged things with a name that sounded like measles.

He had never seen someone sleep in a weird place like the woods before. Actually, that wasn’t true. There was that one time when his father came home after a night out with his friends and Gareth had found him sleeping face down in the kitchen. He had told his friends at school, and they said that people found lying in strange places are probably dead.

“Bud!” called Gareth running.

Unnoticed among the trees, a woman in a long sky-blue dress decorated with white skulls smiled.