"Before": a Halloween special

Before

by Leon Wing

Before the rats picked at the blood and flesh on the fragments of her skull dotted all over the rails, before her head got crushed and brain matter splattered all over, and shattered bones, still with some flesh around them, flung everywhere on the rails, before some passengers in the LRT were jerked off their seats when the LRT hit something solid and nearly derailed, before the people waiting to get on screamed and some turned their heads away, before the LRT couldn’t stop from running over her, before she fell off the edge onto the rails below, before she looked out at the buildings beyond, where a little boy would witness from his bedroom window a horrific sight that would traumatise him for days on end, before she trudged up the stairways to the rail platform, before she got up the first landing, before going up the dirty stairs, she slipped and fell, the bottom of her slipper catching onto some rotting piece of fruit someone had spit out because he was duped into buying some old mushy piece of produce, slipping and falling headlong onto the stairs, killing herself.

© Leon Wing 2008

Leon Wing: I've been reading a lot of Samuel Beckett lately, his short prose, mostly.  I wrote this short short a day before Halloween.  I wanted it to have ... well, more gore than normally found in most of my writings (actually the last one has quite a bit of blood), but without those cheesy short sentences, sometimes with screaming exclamations. I wanted a short short with a long long sentence - on a long long grammatical track, waiting to see if I get syntactically derailed - and, in the bargain, happening in reverse order.  Something experimental, something unusual.

Something macabre?

Leon Wing writes poems, mostly. He “sees” shapes, colours, objects, structures, when reading them; like some people do when listening to sounds or music. Woo woo hooo! Macabre? Especially when he likes to kill off some of his characters. Gorily.