On the Other Side of the Glass

Flash Fiction

Editor’s Note:

P3 is back!

Start (or end) your Monday with some flash fiction by Zack Grafman. Personally, I love this one. Zack pens a bone-chilling mood with this story, layered with a rich setting and curiosity just in time for the spooky season.

Enjoy,

- Frank Theodat

He had no idea why that backyard terrified him, but that certainly didn’t make him feel any better. The ten-year-old boy tugged his lawnmower laboriously through Miss Sandfield’s side yard gate, the first trickles of sweat already descending his neck.

Just get it done and leave. There’s nobody here, and you’re being a baby.

He pushed the rubber priming bulb and yanked the pullcord frantically until the engine flooded. He had already begun compulsively glancing over his shoulder every few minutes, waiting in the agonizing silence of that backyard. The high walls of cinderblock framed in his mental crucible, made him feel like a trapped animal being observed by someone. People think ten-year-olds don’t think like this, and of course people are wrong. The very preteen melodrama of his gestating adult brain allowed the boy to teeter on the point of hyperventilation as soon as he crossed over into that yard. If you had asked him what frightened him, why this particularly bland suburban home with its tiny patch of lawn and crushed rock landscaping and faux-stone garden benches made for nobody in particular to contemplate themselves next to a cluster of small statuary filled him with unreasoning horror, he would have probably laughed in the clear fresh air of day, far away from the place.

But he couldn’t shake the nausea-cramp of logic-free anxiety that started from the moment he unlatched the gate and only let go when he latched it behind him. Every time he went and mowed Miss Sandfield’s lawn, he told himself it was the last. The feeling of doing a kind deed for the widowed lady and the five dollar bill she insisted on leaving him in an envelope under the back doormat was not enough anymore. He had to stop. It was getting worse, each time building on the last with terrible anticipation. He started to realize his fascination centered on the glared reflection of the sliding glass back door of the house looking out on the small yard. He could never see inside, and although a strange part of his brain demanded he stop the lawnmower and peer inside, he had never dared. What if Miss Sandfield was inside, watching him? What if she wasn’t?

All of these thoughts echoed in his mind as he made each pass up and down the lawn. The roar of the two-stroke meant that he really couldn’t have heard if anyone entered the gate or made a noise inside the house. He always forced himself to start the mowing at a normal, measured pace, but by the end of his sickening twenty minutes he was jouncing around the corners, leaving ragged lines and clumps of cuttings in his wake. Once he miscalculated how much grass the small bag could hold and choked the mower, trapping him in mess of sodden clumps of grass to be bagged by hand as he nearly wept in frustration and fear. By the time he was finished, constantly glancing over his shoulder at the gate and the sliding glass door as they seemed to recede tauntingly through the fading tunnel vision of panic, he had spent almost twice the needed time in the yard. He rattled out onto the front sidewalk, the gate slapping to behind him with a metallic snick.

As he trundled his way down the street back home, he started to chuckle at himself after the first block.

You’re so stupid. What do you think is going to happen? She’s always out of the house when you’re there, she told you. What’s supposed to be sneaking up behind you through the gate while you mow?

He was still laughing at himself when he suddenly realized he had left the envelope under the doormat in his hurry. Even out there in the safety of the street, there was a brief moment of contemplation. Did he really want to go back for the money, through the gate and within inches of the blank face of the sliding glass door? It only lasted for a moment. The boy laughed at himself again as he jogged back towards the house, allowing recklessness to stifle the fear. He would be back out in the warm, pleasant publicity of the street in just a minute.

---

Inside the house, the thing shifted uneasily, the violently borrowed clothes it had donned five weeks ago not yet filled out by its growing form. It munched comfortingly on a ragged piece of gristle and planned the next few days as best it could.

Soon enough the metamorphosis would be complete. Perhaps before the next time the roaring machine and its small driver returned. The thing could not locate within its mind reasons for the strange fear it had of that craft and pilot. But this would be the last time if all went well. Soon it would be ready. And for now, it would be alone for at least another week. It rested just inside the glass door, looking out on the backyard.

The gate latch clicked and the wooden door slapped against the cinderblock wall with a sound like a cracking bone.