FICTION: Witherproof by Chas Warren

Pretty things he killed by staring. Twelve years old, with Grandma Dee in a pie shop, he withered potted azaleas for pleasure. Dee wouldn’t wither. In his mother’s photo album, Dee was as lovely as Goldilocks.

Now she had a warty nose and a hairy chin.

“Ungrateful turd,” she said. “I pay for your cherry pie, à la mode.

This is the thanks I get? You try to kill me?”

He tasted something rancid in his throat.

“Ungrateful turd,” Dee said again.

His windpipe was blocked, he was gagging. His larynx was pumping up and down, and he felt a surge of foul sludge suddenly flood his esophagus and nasal cavity. It was simultaneously liquid and lumpy, and it came out with such force that the lumpy parts knocked out a tooth.



When he was finished, the tabletop was painted bronze and burgundy and chocolate and tan, and all of it stank.

Sitting on the pie plate was a perfect pile of something that belonged in a pasture.

“Turd,” Dee whispered, leaning towards him.


He heaved one last time, and something shot out of his mouth that was almost certainly a piece of his liver, crowning the pile of odorous excretion like a cherry on a sundae.