They Call It Donner Still
⛰️ For a recent horror short story competition
Assigned character: Pioneer
Assigned scare: Avalanche
Assigned action: Whining
Silas Harrington sits down to supper with his great-grandson, Jacob, in November 1891. Nearly fifty years after being rescued from starvation during his family’s journey westward, the winter of 1846 still haunts him.
The boy was sculpting peaks on his supper plate again.
With the back of his spoon, he packed the mashed turnips high until they stood like snowbanks on a barren hillside. He gave the mound one last pat, then dragged his spoon down the center, sending a pale avalanche tumbling over a line of bright green peas.
Silas’s fork hovered in the air.
“Jacob.” His voice came out rougher than he meant.
The boy paused. “Yes, sir?”
“Don’t let it go to waste.”
“I hate turnips.”
Silas’s jaw tightened. “You’ll eat your turnips.”
“I want to go sledding.”
“It is the Lord’s Day, boy. Not for sport.”
“Ma would let me–” The spoon clattered to the floor.
Silas’s chair scraped back. He seized the boy’s wrist. “No more of this. Go to your room and pray for a better spirit.”
In the silence after Jacob fled, Silas could hear the wind howling outside. Out of the corner of his eye, Silas thought he saw the shadow of a woman, hunched and staring from the darkened corner of the room. He quickly turned his head, and his aging eyes adjusted, revealing nothing but the high-backed rocking chair and quilt draped over its wooden frame.
In the quiet of the Sabbath, Silas did not pray. He knew his prayers would have been snuffed out by a snowslide of memories, by the feeling of frigid breath on his neck.
He had gone west in ’46, trusting a guidebook and God’s own providence. A shortcut through the Sierra Nevada with eighty-six other souls.
But God had not been in those mountains. He’d watched mothers boil leather belts, praying the children could chew it soft. Seen food become holier than scripture. And when the leather was gone, the cattle gone, the hope gone…
God forgive me.
He had denied it for years. To neighbors. To God. To himself.
I did not eat her. I did not prise open her frozen hands. I did not…
But the lie tasted like raw iron on his tongue.
He looked back to his plate. For a sickening breath, he saw not turnips and peas, but gristle, bone, and gray matter glazed with ice.
Silas shoved the plate away and stood, trembling.
I did not…
The fire in the stove snapped, and its glow cast a hepatitic yellow over the abandoned peas, half-buried like little tombstones in the turnips.
Got 10th place:)
🌿🖤
Cap’n