Pink Destruction

by Liz Fyne

Deputy Jordan didn’t know what to think when his sister’s kid found a pink squirrel in the woods, dead and mangled. Jordan brought it to the local vet, and if those were teeth marks, said the vet, he’d never seen anything like it. Not possible to do a real necropsy. The insides were pink slime and red blood, swirled like rainbow ice cream.

***

A stag with unseeing pink orbs for eyeballs crashed into the Deputy’s vehicle. It was still alive when he pulled to the side of the road and shot it through the head. Then, rainbow goo melted from the sockets. No more rise and fall of ribs stretched beneath tight skin, body wasted and rough fur. Not possible to do a real necropsy.

***

When Little Lisa drew a monstrous pink bag of skin consuming a horse, her mom thought it was time to knock off the TikTok. Until later, she found the door open to the back yard. No sign of Lisa, but acid-burned grass bound by fuchsia goo. Now Deputy Jordan stood in Lisa’s empty bedroom, holding the picture drawn bright in crayon Technicolor, and what the fuck?

***

Woods went silent overnight, songbirds pink and spongy, hanging upside-down with toes still locked to branches. Legs stretched like taffy. A curfew meant no human eyes had witnessed the carnage. The foxes, though, the rabbits, the deer, they’d been seen fleeing through the neighborhood’s abandoned streets.

***

Three miles outside city limits, a discovery of metal wreckage. Deputy Jordan walked a wide circle, considering news from far away: Soviet-era space station, Putnik, recently collided with orbiting rubble. Near total destruction, though small debris might survive re-entry. He stepped closer, leaned in to flip the twisted panel. On the underside, a long pink smear that ran off the edge.

***

Big as a house, that’s what Farmer Smith said. They’d need fighter jets, a full aerial assault, but Deputy Jordan had had enough of the pink destruction, fucking with his home town, making off with the children. Commie shit from outer space. With a crew of ten local officers and five army reservists in Kevlar vests and tactical helmets painted glorious red white and blue, he rounded the bend of Smith’s two-mile unpaved driveway toward the barn.

***

It loomed up before them, pulsing pink flesh. The incisors protruded buck-toothed from a red sphincter mouth when it blew bubbles. Pink membranous stomachs that devoured, sucking everything from inside, ejecting a spongy corpse remnant. A sort of external digestion.

No match, it turned out, for fifteen Magnum pump action shotguns, 12-gauge Terminator Slug full metal jacket, one shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. Burning lead, red-hot searing tunnels bored the tender pulp, a chain reaction of melting. Imploding inward from the weight too great to bear.

Confusion, in whatever brain matter the thing possessed. No understanding of anything but bliss of consumption. No memory, prior to its birth: improbable, miraculous life from Glee Gum Bubblegum. Filched from clueless American station mate, spit from mouth of glorious Russian cosmonaut moments before fatal collision with glorious Russian space trash. Fortified with special Russian digestive juices, the expectoration had shot newborn and sentient from womb of atomic crucible.

Summarily executed mere weeks postnatal.

***

As Deputy Jordan examined the explosion zone, Little Lisa burst from the barn doors, running with all her might. Hiding, that’s what she’d been doing, after the thing had rolled over her favorite doll, in its ignorance mistaking it for a living meal. Expelling the plastic with a great retch of disgust, it had pursued her instead, projecting pink bubble stomachs on red slimy ropes of twisted gut. Thwarted by the concept of door, the thing had left off, but returned at irregular intervals.

He was an ugly monster, said Little Lisa. But up close, she was absolutely sure of it, he’d smelled like fruit-flavored bubblegum.

Deputy Jordan didn’t know what to think of that. He never would. The origin story would remain forever obscure, but the explosion zone regrew with pink grass, a waft of cherry. Farmer Smith posted photos on TikTok. Tourists swarmed from all corners of the earth, eager to see it, the remnants: epic battle of pink destruction.