Ice Cream Bucket
For today’s prompt, I used “Three Random Nouns” which where ice-cream, bucket, curiosity. As I wrote the story, I sort of lost the curiosity bit but this is what I came up with.
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“Damn it, Julie, slow down!”
This was not what Steve had in mind when they had made the date to spend a relaxing Sunday morning in the woods. He was hoping for something more along the lines of lying naked on a blanket on a secluded river bank. There weren’t many opportunities for them to get together and he hated to waste it trudging through the forest in search of a geocache. But if they found it soon, there’d still be time before he had to go home to be the responsible father and husband.
Julie was crouched next to a huge boulder about a hundred feet ahead of him and he jogged up next to her. On the ground was a plastic ice-cream bucket, the markings had been worn away. Julie looked up at him, a grin spreading across her face. There was something about the look she gave him that made him a little uneasy.
“Come here,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him down beside her. “Open the bucket. I’ll get a pencil for the log.”
“Oh my god!” The shock of finding several severed hands inside flung him backward and he landed on his back. One of the hands had come to rest in the grass near his shoulder. It was missing a finger. He raised himself up on his elbows and looked around at the other hands. They were all missing a finger – the ring finger. The cuts were all rough and jagged; they were all left hands.
Julie appeared above him, a large hunting knife in her left hand and a pistol in her right. Her grin was gone, replaced by a sneer.
“Wha-what’s going on? What are you doing?”
“I’m breaking up with you, Steve. I’ve only ever had a small part of you; that’s all you’ve been willing to give. Well, now I’m going to pick the part I want. I pick that. Using the knife, she pointed to his left hand. “You’re going to give me your finger – and ring. If you do it yourself, you can keep the hand. If I have to do it, the hand is mine. Raising the gun to aim at his face, she said “Don’t fuck with me or I’ll blow your head off.”
She walked over and thrust the blade into the dirt next to his head. “Do it. Now!”
Steve sat up, confused and afraid, and grasped the smooth wooden handle. Julie had stepped back a few yards, the gun still trained on him. Pulling the knife from the ground, he lurched forward and dove for her. His body hit the ground a split second after the shot rang out.
“Damn. I thought he’d be one of the tough ones,” Julie said as she stooped over to pick the knife up from where it had fallen. After putting both weapons into her bag, she grabbed Steve’s feet and dragged him to a hidden pit. “Steve, meet the guys.”