Ink Blot Flash Fiction

      Many have said they do not exist.  The doctors at this dreadful hospital are, by far, the worst.  They think I’m crazy.  They peddle me medicine every six hours and talk to me like I am a child who does not know what to do with himself.  One day, they will see; I will show them all.

      I know what I saw that final night in the Alps I can remember, hiking through the mountains on my own.  I had sworn to my friends I would not take the trip alone, but I betrayed their trust.  I suppose I have always been a stubborn fool, ever since I was a child.  I inherited that stubbornness from my father, mostly.  He, too, would commit to things that my mother always told him were bad ideas and he should let them go before he got himself hurt.

      His stubbornness is the reason he is no longer with us.

      I hike through the mountains all day, seldom resting and doing everything in my power to get to where I need to be.  At night, I would pitch my tent and stop for the evening, knowing how much more dangerous the mountains get after nightfall. “It is almost like they acquire a mind of their own once the sun goes down,” an old sheepherder told me on the way here.  It was something I would keep in mind for the entire trek.

      Well… most of it.

      Four days into my hike, I ran out of food.  I thought back to when I was packing my rucksack full of supplies, and with horror, I realized that I had taken some of the food out to make room for some other things I believed I would need.  At the time, I hadn’t thought this would be a potentially-fatal mistake.  Perhaps I’d had a stupid notion that this trip would only take a couple of days and I would somehow be out of the mountains in that amount of time.  An ideal situation, but an impossible one.

      I contemplate turning back; climbing higher and frantically waving my arms around for a rescue pick-up; trying my hand at hunting something myself.  The idea of hunting was quickly extinguished.  I had only a pocket-knife on my person, incapable of killing anything larger than a rabbit… and I had scarcely seen any rabbits on my trek.  I would not be fast enough to catch one and kill it, anyway. 

      By the fourth night, I am panicked.  Will I die here?  Will anyone ever find my frozen corpse?  These questions are constantly racing through my head, providing a buzzing background noise louder than the falling snow.  As I am setting up my tent for the night, a huge gust of wind takes it and blows it over the edge, nearly taking me with it as I stumble and fall.  I barely escape falling off the ledge; my heart is racing. 

      Distraught and scared, I decide to just keep walking.  Perhaps I will get lucky and find a cave that can provide some shelter for me until morning.  If I needed to spend the whole night out in the blizzard, I knew I wouldn’t survive until morning.  I would bet my life on it.

      Just when I was beginning to lose all hope of finding some type of shelter, I stumbled upon one—quite literally—by accident.  He had slipped on some ice and tumbled down the rocks, crying out with each impact of my body against the hard surface.  My whole life flashes before me, and then I finally stop rolling.  There, right in front of me, is the mouth of a large cave.  It looks empty, so I hurry in, wincing with each movement of my body.  I am certain I have broken one of my arms, and definitely a few of my ribs.

      I pull out a flashlight and turn it on, relieved that it still works, and make my way deeper into the cavern.  As I go deeper, I start to see more signs that something may have been living here: the skeletal remains of animals, and even a few remains of humans.  It makes me nervous.  Will I die in here just like all the rest? 

      I hear something: a growl, and I can tell it belongs to something big.  I stop walking when I see movement in front of my flashlight beam, my heart racing with fear as I see what it is.  It is larger than any animal I have ever seen, covered in sparkling, white scales that shine silver in the light.  Its long neck, like a snake, rises up off the ground from where it was resting and it turns its head toward me.  Those eyes seem to look right through me, blue and catlike and seeming to glow.  It bears is teeth, as long as swords and white as the purest ivory.  Framing that face that seems like a mix between a dog and some reptile are frills, which expand in warning when I make the slightest movement.  I see a ridge of black spikes lining the length of the beast’s back, starting at its head and going all the way down to the tip of its tail.  The large body shifts toward me, and I notice that it only has a pair of hind legs, a long, black talon attached to each toe.  Its front limbs are something else: wings.  Large, leathery wings.

      It is a dragon.  I scream, but it doesn’t attack me.  It just roars, shaking the walls of the cave and effectively sending me running out of the cave.

      After that, I black out, and the next thing I remember is lying in a hospital bed with doctors tending to me, giving me painkillers for my broken ribs and asking me what happened in the mountains.  I tell them repeatedly of the dragon, but they don’t believe me.

      The cave was searched later, I learned… and no one finds anything; not even old bones.