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It's no secret that people read less today. It's a slow process, and we live in a fast world. There might be, however, a growing appetite for shorter readings. The following is an example of the genre called flash fiction -- stories of less than a thousand words. It's a parody of a classic children's story.
Location is everything, and the troll who lived under the wooden footbridge was shrewdly aware of that fact. On hot days, fish lollygagged there in the shaded waters, easy prey for his quick, thorny hands. At night, he slithered up the creek banks where he hunched in the shadows, waiting for a racoon or possum or weasel to pass. He would pounce upon them and, despite their nasty hissing and gnashing of teeth, squeeze them to death with his great, hairy arms. As for dessert, there was always the cornucopia of partially eaten trash floating down the creek from the towns.
Troll was largely nocturnal, a creature of the night who had the kind of face only a mother could love. His nose was twisted like a root, his teeth were sharp as stilettos, and his eyes were dead knotholes. Anyway, night was his preferred milieu, and so long as there were fish in the creek, vulnerable critters traveling under the cloak of darkness above, and a steady stream of human trash, Troll was neither lonely nor hungry.
He slept during the day, immersed in the muddy waters under the bridge. This was Troll's home, and it was all the world he had ever known. Whether or not he was happy, who could tell? Yet it is clear that Troll was a free spirit.
But now, times were changing. There was more and more traffic crossing the footbridge during the day, making it harder for Troll to sleep. One day, he was awakened from his murky sleep by the sound of hooves on the wooden planks above - Trip trap, trip trap! Looking up, he saw three little lambs dancing upon the bridge. And though it was not dinner time for Troll, he felt a powerful urge. So, in broad daylight, Troll slithered up the bank, seized one of the lambs, and devoured it on the spot!
A few days later he heard it again. Trip trap, trip trap. Three deer - a doe and two little fawns - were crossing the bridge. Troll slinked up the hill. When he got to the top, the mother deer saw him and bolted, followed by one of the fawns. The littlest one was too slow. Troll seized it, right there in broad daylight, and ate half of it on the spot. The rest he took down below and stored it in a cave along the creekbank.
Another time, he heard the bridge planks straining under a heavy weight. Clomp clump, clomp clump, was the sound of a cow and her calves. Troll was brazen now. Racing up the bank, he let out a primal yawp. The mother cow, crazed with terror, fled into the woods. Troll promptly killed one of the calves, but he was not all that hungry at the moment. After a few bites, he dragged it down and shoved it in a cave.
Apparently, Troll had bitten off more than he could chew, and it wasn't long before the creekbed began to stink terribly from the animals rotting in the caves. But that didn't stop him from carrying on his ambushes on the bridge. Anything remotely edible was now fair game. Life had provided him with this windfall, and Troll had transformed himself from a shadowy slinker into a barbarian.
One day, Troll heard a familiar old sound: Trip, trap, Trip trap. This time it was a trio of goats, one of them a very large and gruff old billygoat who was undaunted by Troll (despite the fact that Troll had gotten very fat and even uglier than before). Standing his ground in front of the smaller goats, old Billy lowered his head, his great rounded horns ready for action. Troll charged, looking absolutely horrid in his present state of rapture. Billy easily sidestepped him and, as Troll's momentum carried him forward, the great goat butted him in the butt, sending him head over heels into the creek below.
But that is not the end of the story. As Troll struggled to recover from his broken bones and bruises, he began to think things over. It occurred to him that life had been more pleasant before all this. He longed to go back to the simple times, capturing small critters up on the bridge. As Troll reflected, the putrid air lifted slowly away from the creekbed.
One gray morning he was awakened by a small sound on the bridge above -- clickity clack, clickity clack. It was accompanied by the sound of a child's voice singing "London Bridge is falling, falling down..." Trying to ignore the noise, Troll buried his head in the mud, with only his twisted nose above water.
He was startled awake when water suddenly splashed up his nostrils. Sitting in the creek just a few feet away from him was a little girl in a muddy pink dress. She had slipped on a rock and slid down the bank, and now she was crying. This was something quite new and strange to Troll, and he didn't know what to make of it. Yet something in his troll soul told him that he should try to help.
As Troll rose from his mud bed and reached over toward the little girl, he heard wild shouts coming from above. "Shoot the thing! Now! Before it gets too close". Troll was afraid, and so he ran as fast as his treestump legs would carry him. The sound of gunshots split the air behind him as he fled into the woods.
Troll never returned to that bridge. But he lives under other bridges to this day, fishing, hunting, and dreaming of the little girl and her sweet song.
Pete Howard, author of “Rosebud Dreamworld,” lives in Dunkirk.