Bogleech.com's 2018 Horror Write-off:
Menagerie
Submitted by D-Pad
Aquarium
By then I already hated the zoo, but after visiting its aquarium I was actually ready to set the whole thing on fire. The sharks were quite predictable. Boring, even. It was the whale, Leviathan. What an original name, yessir. Anyway, they hadn’t even bothered with the water for that one. There it was, just flopping around in an ornate but empty pool, guts all hanging out. “It exploded one day,” a zookeeper told me. “That’s how whale carcasses do, even half-living ones. The warden prefers it that way, I reckon. Makes an impression.”
An impression, indeed. But I don’t think it was the guts, just the smell. God dammit, it refuses to leave my nose.
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Laconism
I feel bad for Dr. Hoffmann, and I don’t blame her for trying. After all, she spent so many years of her life teaching sign language to her beloved gorilla, only for it to die in such tragic circumstances… The irony is that Samson had learned signs for over two thousand words, but after the ritual he only uses “brains.”
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Fangs
The sabretooth tiger resurrection project was proceeding exceedingly well, until the fateful day when the scientists finally decided to reveal their specimen to the public. It had been kept under complete seclusion for most of its life without problems, who would have thought that it would turn to dust when exposed to direct sunlight?
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Watcher
The owl is looking at me. It has been doing it for the past forty minutes. I think it knows.
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Imprudence
But the boy didn’t listen, as he was too busy hurrying towards the largest tide pool. He carried handfuls of the shrimp that his father used as bait in order to feed the anemones, which was his favorite activity at the beach. He was fascinated by those plant-like animals and the way they slowly closed their petals/tentacles over the free food. Sometimes he would tease them with his own finger instead, just to feel their soft and slightly sticky embrace.
In previous years he would always cross the rocky intertidal zone in the company of one of his parents, but that year he had been deemed old enough to go on his own, and his enthusiasm was palpable. Unfortunately, just as his mother had predicted, in his rush the child carelessly stepped on one of the several black mantles of bivalves and hurt his right sole with the shell of a particularly large mussel. The shock made him trip; he broke the fall with his hands and in the process hurt his palms with the shells as well.
The next morning, Roberto told his parents that the itch around his wounds had intensified. They decided to take him directly to the hospital rather than remove the bandages all by themselves, just in case. What the nurses found below scared them enough to call the hospital’s head physician and surgeon: growing out of each cut in Roberto’s hands there was a tiny mussel with a deep red shell. He had similar mussels on his feet, though much larger; they had cut their way through the stitches.
“I wonder if anemones can eat these,” he thought.
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