WPCA - Hung

The track twisted through the darkness, turning back on itself again and again in a strange switchback pattern. A full moon, partly obscured by picturesque clouds lit the way. Leaves skittered and branches cackled in the hot, humid breeze. It had been storming only hours before, thunder and lightning both unleashing their pent fury before absconding. But the night wasn't young and full of vigor anymore. She was aging fast, and with her anger spent, the air palpitated with her one-thirty-in-the-morning stroke. The face of the night buzzed with flies that consumed the flesh. The trunks of trees looked like spun-dried bones, pinnacles rising into the sky, clawing away at the trail that cut a swath through its skin. Blackness oozed at the edges. A series of creaking noises escaped now and again, drowned by a whisper.

Framed in silhouette against a star-filled backdrop was a figure, bent, kneeling, uttering prayers and sobbing gently. Prayers to a deity of unnamed origin and nameless itself. Just a continuous repetition. She was saying please again and again, croaking out "no" and "stop" again and again. Cool and clammy her skin was to the touch, as the braided rope began to twist its way around her neck.

"Don't do this," she breathed for a moment, a last breath.

The cord tightened, her frame rising as if by magic off the ground. Her feet dangled, the flies buzzed, her eyes bulged and her face turned a grim shade of blue-white. A ghastly glow illuminated by an impartial moon above that lay witness to this. Shaking, her hands clawed at her face, drawing deep gashes, but the mutilation she made to herself didn't work against the rope snug against her adams apple. She swung, and as she stilled, a quietness came over the clearing. Looking closely, there were three others beside her, all drifting in the breeze and the flutter of flies. Three women, sisters, all taken from a nearby town--all hung.

---

The morning mists coughed up the three women strung like blackened pearls. They floated in space, looking like reeds waving above a rippling lake surface in a breeze. The crows had already come, a murder and more, stripping flesh and turning the once lovely faces to ashen ruin. Eyes were missing and the skin had turned grey and pallid and the scent was overpowering. The smallest of the three was no longer holding together, either. Entrails spewed onto the ground in a ragged trail, falling into the mist like a fishing like that was being tugged at by unseen forces.

"My God!" a woman cried, turned with teary eyes and beginning to fight back her gag-reflex. She lost, puking and dry heaving away even after a man had hauled her to her feet and bound her within arms in an attempt at comfort.

"Who coo'dove done this?"

Nobody had an answer. The mist began to retreat slowly with quiet animosity as a woman wept for her dead children and men looked into each others eyes with grim determination. Someone would die for this atrocity, they seemed to say to one another.