The Silent Meadow / The Gasworks / The Cliff

Three extra-short pieces for the price of one.

The Silent Meadow

The children of the town went to the silent meadow. No crickets chirped. No birds called. The children joined hands and made a circle. In the middle of the circle, lying in the shimmering grass, was their friend. He was dead, and his body cold and still and bent. Last night a man with a camera had strangled him under a rusting bridge and left him jammed in a drainage pipe. Now he was here, in the silent meadow. The children had snuck away from their slumbering homes to see him, gone across the cold railroad tracks and around the quarry’s crumbling edges in the wavering moonlight. Now one knelt down and touched him, and her hand slipped into his chest like light into water. Another knelt down, and then another. Slowly, quietly, they all fell into him, little threads knitting together, and the meadow was silent again.