Bloodlines (Flash Fiction)

Bleak portraits of his ancestors hung, adorned on the walls of the mansion William inherited, every piece of furniture that surrounded him was purchased with glorified blood money. When the lawyer came and delivered him the will, not knowing then, that he agreed to an eternal burden, he came to realize it soon. All those years spent meandering away from his family history simply led him back cyclically, the money had run dry, and a million-dollar property would do. What he didn’t consider, was the debilitating town around him, and his father’s mills, his farms that had been shut down after his suicide. He had only been there for two days, but eyes would linger on the industrialist's son, and his corpse would bless them for many moons.

There were stories, tall tales, and even bygone religious texts that spoke of human sacrifice to bring fertility to the land, harvest, and commerce where there was none. The death of the baron was no tragedy, but the plague of poverty that had stricken them after was an inadvertent effect, pennies on the dollar turned into dollops worth killing thy neighbor for. When the men came to town, they preached their hedonistic gospel in the town square, and their words seemed to captivate the destitute audience. William wondered what doctrine preached that of human sacrifice when he’d hear them scream from their cardboard pedestals. He was an oblivious boy, and only eighteen years old, which made it all the more peculiar when he had seen them congregating around the mansion grounds, torches and all. 

William was utterly unaware of what was to befall him at midnight, he was to be stripped, flogged, and his head torn from his neck, a signal. Then, his soul would serve as a message to the ones above. Crops would be reborn, and the world around them would rejuvenate itself once the blood had been spilled in ritual. He had never performed coitus with a woman, he had never gotten to fly aboard the new machines that would eventually take people all across the world, only the occasional luxury cruise ship. None of that would concern him when the glass began to shatter and the rocks were thrown. The boy was dragged by his fight, but not before he suffered a blunt blow to his temple, the people of the town acted in autonomy, but the spell of destitution had cast indifference, and heads would roll.  

A place forsaken by the heavens and written by man, a small town forgotten by churches whose pews remained empty. Was being a child of the sun not enough? The cosmos, that once upon a time, simply came to be. Was there no sanctity in that? It didn’t matter, even the druids spoke in twisted tongues when they tied the innocent man to a post, the sins of his ancestors would be a generational punishment, and his head would be a gift that bears the fruits. With a jagged set of shears, the brutal decapitation captured his wide-eyed visage well, and the town screamed with joy, expecting some great flood to wash them away, or an instant transmission of fertile soil. Expecting the immediate satisfaction of rebirth, a vagrant held the head, salivating its blood upon the ground to no avail. What mounted was a mixture of doubt and bewilderment. Mutiny had begun, and pitchforks impaled upon brother and sister alike, there was no morsel of food to be had, and many mouths to be fed as the boy's head ran dry.