Thanks for stopping by! Below you’ll find “The Gardener”, a fantasy flash fiction written for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest. You can find more information about the contest and the prompts at the bottom of the post.
Note to readers: This story contains some descriptions of violence that might be upsetting for more sensitive readers.
The yarn was forbidden. Unspooling, its spidery fibers shimmered faintly in the moonlight, catching in the thick needles of the yew hedges. Hester was permitted only the pruning shears and the small, sharp spade that she clutched in her hand. But she was willing to accept the weighty risk of punishment if it meant she, unlike the others, would return.
She, the Gardener, freshly anointed, would tend the Labyrinth under the cover of darkness, then follow her yarn home.
There were whispers in the village, rumors that something stirred within the Labyrinth’s close-growing trees. Yet the Council continued to anoint Gardeners who increasingly did not return.
Shivering, Hester clutched her yarn tighter. She was the Gardener. The keeper of the Labyrinth, her responsibility.
Hester’s foot nudged something in the path. She glanced down at a stick, dull white against the dark path and long as her forearm.
Hester knelt in the dirt and reached down. Her fingers found a cord of braided leather, snapped and frayed, snagged on the jagged end not of a stick –
But a broken bone.
Splinters of ice rolled down her spine. Hester scrambled to her feet with a strangled shriek.
Realization, like water draining from a basin to reveal treacherous rocks, rushed upon Hester. This was no Labyrinth, no winding path for penitent pilgrims.
And she was never meant to be a Gardener.
She was a sacrifice.
Hester turned and ran, chasing the faint shimmer of yarn she’d left behind. Around corners, past dead ends, over and back and around.
Then, suddenly, the yarn was gone.
Hester stopped, her body trembling. Paths forked all around her, disguising her one route to safety.
The yarn must have snapped.
Dropping to her knees, Hester ran her hands through the dirt, feeling for the other end of the yarn. If she could find it – if she could escape –
A thick, heavy breath sounded behind her.
The scratch of hooves in the dirt –
Once, Hester had seen Brother Lazarus’ great white bull. The pride of his herd, with its massive, rippling shoulders and its horns that stabbed upward toward the sun. No more than a child, she’d watched from the bushes as it scraped its hooves and lowered its dagger-horns and rushed at a man who’d taken a foolish shortcut through the meadow. The memory still made her shiver, the man’s body limp as a bundle of rags as the bull whipped him through the air, gored on the tip of its horns.
That same pawing of dirt beneath heavy hooves – it was behind her now.
Hester’s heart clenched as she turned.
At the end of a lane of trees stood a towering creature. Its horns jabbed toward the black sky, two heavy hooves thudded on the ground, but its torso –
A thick, gruesome coalescence of human and bovine. An abomination.
A scream clawed from Hester’s throat.
With a deep-throated roar, the creature’s hooves pounded forward.
Her veins burning with a rush of terror, Hester hurtled through the darkness as yew branches snagged her skin.
Hooves thundered behind her.
Hester surged around a corner and collided with a wall of sharp-needled yew.
Dead end.
She whirled around.
The creature turned the corner, stopped. It stepped forward, twitching its tufted bull’s tail.
Smooth wood beneath her fingers – there was something in her hand. Hester’s eyes darted to the small, sharp spade that she still clutched in her fist.
The creature shook its horned head and champed its sharp teeth – a wolf’s teeth in a bull’s mouth, made for chewing not grass but flesh.
The creature charged.
Hester dodged, rolling out of the way.
The creature spun to face her, steam rising from its muzzle, its enormous, human hands curling into fists.
Again, it threw its giant body forward.
Hester hurled herself out of the creature’s path a moment too late.
A sudden pain stabbed at her side, and her body rose, flailing through the air as she catapulted over the trees.
She tumbled through scratching branches of yew, and the ground met her too fast, too hard. She slammed to the dirt with a bone-shattering thud.
Hester lay still, her body pulsing with pain.
On the other side of the yew hedge, the creature’s footsteps pounded through the maze, searching for her.
Legs shaking, the hole in her side seeping scarlet, Hester hauled herself to her feet. The wound wouldn’t kill her, not yet. Not if she could escape.
The spade. Somehow, she still clutched the spade.
Hester hoisted herself into the thick foliage of the maze. Hooves rumbled closer, but she kept climbing. Planting her feet on the strongest of the uppermost branches, she crouched, trying to quiet her rasping breaths.
The creature rounded the corner and stormed forward, the sinews of its shoulders bulging like ropes.
When it passed below her, Hester leapt.
Clutching the spade with both hands, she couldn’t aim, could only hurtle through the air at the monster, narrowly missing the dagger tips of its horns as she fell upon its shoulders.
The creature reared its head in agony.
In the tender spot where neck meets shoulder, the handle of her spade poked out from where it had pierced the creature’s hide.
The monster threw itself backward into the hedge, which tore at Hester’s skin and clothes, but she clung to its foul, earthy-smelling body. She grasped the spade handle and pulled, cleaving the blade from the creature’s flesh.
It screeched, a wet, keening sound.
With a last burst of strength, Hester thrust the spade into the monster’s neck.
Its cry cut short, the creature’s powerful body spasmed, flinging Hester into the bramble of yew trees.
When Hester dragged herself from the spiny hedge and collapsed, panting, in the dirt, the creature lay still, a gurgle bubbling from its throat.
Gasping in pain and clutching her slashed side, Hester yanked the blood-slick spade from the monster’s neck and staggered to her feet.
She wiped the blade on the thick yew needles, staining them, marking them.
She, the true Gardener.
Thank you so much for reading! “The Gardener” was written for the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction Contest, a prompt-based competition in which writers are assigned a genre, location, and object and have 24-48 hours (depending on the round of the competition) to create an original story of 1000 words or fewer. For this round, my assigned genre was Action/Adventure, and the story had to take place in a maze and include a bone.
While researching and brainstorming, I definitely went down a rabbit hole about the history of mazes and minotaur mythology!
If you enjoyed this story and would like to read more of my fantasy fiction, here are a few that might be up your alley:
Oh, very nice, very nice. I figured she would keep climbing or running; I did not expect that! That ending was so cool.
Oh, that was a great story, or should I say: A-may-zing! Great tension, and build up. I loved it!