Joshua’s Ruins- FB- FWG 300 word flash fiction based on the picture below. Drama/Horror Trigger:Death/Murder – The first story of 2024!

I find it hard to believe that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, yet here I was considering the hike back across Joshua’s ruins – a discreet New Hampshire architectural fail, left abandoned before completion. I heard stories about its existence and even managed to locate it when my circumstances became dire.

I stood on a rugged ridge nearly five hundred feet from the brush covered hilltop, the sun putting a tremendous burden on my already failing eyesight, genetically destined for blindness before age forty.

I rummaged through my backpack, feeling for the hard lumpy outer shell of my binoculars. Once in hand, I scanned the land for a sign, a clue that I needn’t journey back through the wild. A group of large buzzards circled over the ground tempted of the now rotting flesh I placed there during my mission to dispose of a flagrant female, a wife by name, jezebel by standards.

My mind’s eye wouldn’t clear itself of the truths revealed to me by an early arrival home from a business trip. She and he, him and her, betrayal cast upon my faithful heart.

I kept fit, ate healthy, and brought her flowers in the name of love. I was the best husband a woman could ask for, atoning for my vision loss, that now stood at only thirty percent. Yet, she placed herself in another man’s arms, drunkenly laughing and cursing, making verbal her doubt that I couldn’t have seen them in their intwined frenzy of fornication.

I had to go back to my dump site, I needed confirmation that she was still deceased.

I find it hard to believe that a criminal always returns to the scene of the crime, yet here I was considering another hike back across Joshua’s ruins.