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The Wing Huffer

 
 

The Wing Huffer

This blackly comic nightmare by Ty Landers explores the dark side of stumbling across the miraculous.

“Owen flipped the light switch and for a brief moment caught a glimpse of the horrifying Rube Goldberg machine his kitchen had been transformed into. The apparatus was already winding and spinning into action: cordage, mechanisms, counterweights, and tripwires crisscrossed every surface. A bowling ball fell into a clothesbasket. A pulley system was engaged. A cinderblock fell on the tines of a garden rake. Something snapped across the room and a claw hammer whipped through the air, striking him above the right eye and pealing his eyebrow back from his forehead in three wet pieces like the skin of a banana.

Black stars exploded in his field of vision. The grocery bag he was holding dropped to the floor and he staggered in a drunk circle as blood poured down his face in hot globs. He was tipping at the edge of consciousness, sure he would pass out, when an odd shape scuttled across the kitchen floor and jolted his scrambled brain into focus: The spider was in the house...

Illustrated by the amazing Kiki Ljung

"The Wing Huffer"appeared in In Shades Magazine and was published on October 4, 2016.