Saturday, March 24, 2007

Corpse On The Wall

Author Christopher Hawkins brings my Three for Free series to a close with his story Corpse On The Wall. This short story is available at his website www.christopher-hawkins.com and is a great read. You can find it and other selections in the Writing section of his website. I love it when authors share previously published work with those of us that might have missed it before.

Finding a strange corpse hanging in your home town is enough to give anybody the creeps. What I found creepy about this story was the way it shows the real horrors of society. As an individual a person can be very rational. As a member of society an individual can easily become just another mindless member of the herd. Individuals don't scare me, society scares me. How often have you done/bought/tried/watched/experience something because "everybody else is?"

Not everybody will take the same ideas from the story I did and that is a good thing. It shows were not mindless members of the herd.

Go read the story and enjoy it. Be sure to read Carpenter's Thumb while you're there.

Big "Thank You!" to Christopher for allowing me to quote the following from Corpse On The Wall.

The wall was there. The wall had always been there.

For as long as anyone could remember, it had stood at the edge of their little town, towering high above the rooftops, surrounding it the way a mother’s arms surround a child. The circle of its sure, steady timbers was thought to be a good thing, when people stopped to think about it at all. "Keeps the bad folks out and the good folks right here where they belong," the old farmers were often heard to say, and when they said it, everyone agreed. Still, no crops were grown in its shadow, and no one in the town would walk too near it after the sun went down.

And so it was until the day that someone chanced to glance at the wall and saw a shape hanging dark and heavy against it. It had appeared in the middle of the night, or so it was thought since no one could recall ever seeing it there before. But, every last person in the town who looked up at it knew in an instant what it was, for there was no mistaking its shape, or the shadow that it cast.

It was a corpse, suspended high against the weathered wood.

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