Hot Dog and Marshmallows —By Lamont A. Turner

Doug’s decision to go hiking had been a response to Marsha’s complaints about his expanding paunch. Like the time he’d purposefully shrunk her favorite sweater after she complained about being the only one doing laundry, dragging her around the tick and mosquito-infested woods for a few hours was meant to forestall future nagging. Now, after hours of passing the same trees over and over, the sun was sinking, and Doug was getting worried. Marsha’s incessant harping added to the tension.

“We’re going in circles,” she exclaimed, pointing to the empty pack of cigarettes Doug had thrown down three hours before.

“What the hell do you want me to do?” Doug snapped back, hating her for reminding him of his nicotine addiction.

“I want you to come up with a plan,” she shouted, swatting the termites away from her face.

“Maybe if we go that way,” Doug said, nodding toward an overgrown path, previously scorned due to the thorns and brambles.

“Are you nuts? I’m not wading through that,” she said. “Those vines look like poison oak!”

“Then maybe we should sit here and wait for help,” he said, testing the sturdiness of a log with the toe of his boot before plopping down.

“Help from whom?” she demanded, glaring down at him. “You think Smokey the Bear is going to come traipsing through the woods to lead us back to civilization?”

Marsha folded her arms across her chest and glowered at the line of trees that had become their prison while Doug sat on the log, flicking the wheel of his lighter until it stopped making flames and ended up on the ground next to the empty pack of cigarettes. They stayed there until the sun went down, both unwilling to break the silence. Doug sat watching his breath form clouds while Marsha hugged herself and paced at the edge of the clearing. As the night choked out the last rays of the sun, Martha sniffed the cold air.

“Do you smell that?” she asked. “Something’s burning.”

“It’s probably just a campfire,” Doug grumbled, getting up to stumble over on stiff legs. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”

She squinted at the darkness and then pointed to a faint glow in the distance. Doug wiped off his glasses and looked for himself, seeing nothing.

“I guess we better have a look,” he said, taking out his phone to light the way before remembering it was dead.

“You should have turned your phone off instead of playing on it,” Martha said, pushing past him to light up the trail. Doug fell back, letting her lead the way.

“It’s not like we can get a signal out here anyway,” Doug muttered, stepping back to avoid the branches snapping back in Martha’s wake.

The glow grew brighter as they progressed, and Martha put her phone away. As they rounded a bend in the path, they could hear the crackling of fire and the sound of someone grunting. Peering past the trees, they saw a man seated on an overturned bucket, holding a stick over a campfire. The hood of his tattered coat concealed his features, but he seemed to be a man of impressive height and girth, looming high over the flames even in his seated position. He grunted and mumbled to himself while swaying back and forth atop the bucket like a drunk trying to keep his balance.

“He looks homeless,” Doug whispered. “Maybe we should just go.”

“I’m not spending the rest of the night in these woods,” Marsha snapped. “Homeless or not, he has to know the way out of here.”

Without giving Doug time to respond, she stepped out from behind the trees and hailed the stranger. The man didn’t return her greeting or even look up. He took his stick out of the fire, blew out the flames on the end, and stuffed it into his mouth without waiting for it to cool. Martha could hear bones crunching as he chewed.

“Oh my God!” Martha whispered. “Go back!”

“What’s wrong?” Doug asked. “I thought you wanted to get out of here.”

“That’s not marshmallows or hot dogs he’s roasting,” she said, pushing Doug back toward the trees.

“He just ate a whole rat in one bite.”

Doug was about to tell her she was seeing things when he saw the man reach into a cardboard box at his feet and take out something pale and rubbery. He impaled it on the stick and held it up to the flames. Marsha tugged on Doug’s sleeve, trying to drag him away from the fire, but Doug couldn’t make himself move. He stared at the tiny hand on the end of the stick, unable to process it. It wasn’t until Marsha screamed that he became aware the stranger had turned toward them. The face under the hood was a pale pulpy mass. The eyes glistened like black marbles stuck in a pile of yellowish dough, and the lipless mouth extended around the sides of the shapeless face, disappearing under the edges of the hood. A black tongue slipped out to lick the space where its upper lip should have been, and it rose, stretching upward until its head was level with the lower branches of the tree behind it, branches Doug would have needed a ladder to reach. Staring down at Doug, it stuffed the still flaming hand into its mouth and dropped the stick. Its slimy flesh, glistening in the light of the fire, quivered as it chewed.

A warm wet sensation running down Doug’s legs broke his paralysis. He turned to Marsha, hoping she would tell him what to do, but she was already gone, her screams trailing behind her as she raced blindly through the forest. Doug barely had time to notice the stench of rotted meat and the hot breath on his neck before two slimy hands wrapped around his head and twisted it off.

AUTHORS BIO

Lamont A. Turner is a New Orleans area writer whose work has appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly, Lovecraftiana, Dark Dossier, and other print and online venues. 

  Twitter: @LamontATurner1