write a short story in the style of stephen king a...

The heat came early to Brookside that year, thick as gravy and just as suffocating. By noon the sidewalks shimmered, and the air tasted like pennies left too long in a sweaty palm. That was when Tommy Jenks pedaled downtown, a dollar of lawn‑mowing money burning a hole through his cut‑off shorts.

He found old Mr. Briar’s ice‑cream cart parked where Elm Street bent toward the river—same as always, red umbrella fluttering like a wounded bat. But the cart’s bell, usually cheerful, sounded off: a lopsided ding, ding that hung in the air like a warning.

Tommy ordered a single scoop of mint‑chocolate chip. Mr. Briar’s hand trembled as he passed the cone over, his knuckles pale as bone.

“Eat quick,” the old man rasped. “It’s melting faster today.”

Tommy nodded, though he didn’t understand until he turned away. Sunshine blasted the green scoop, and it slumped almost instantly, dribbling down the waffle ridges. He licked a trail but tasted something metallic beneath the mint—coppery, rusty. A drop the color of dried blood splashed onto his wrist.

He stared, confused. The melted streak kept darkening, thickening, until it looked like the runoff from a butcher’s drain. Across the street the stoplight flickered from red to an impossible black before flaming out entirely. Windows in the hardware store clouded with condensation—on the outside.

Tommy spun back to the cart. Mr. Briar was gone. In his place stood the cart itself, sinking as though into wet sand, wheels vanishing beneath tar‑bubbled asphalt. The umbrella wilted, fabric sagging like hot flesh. The world smelled of scorched sugar and open graves.

Panicked, Tommy hurled the cone—but gravity forgot to catch it. The ice‑cream hovered mid‑air, its melting flesh unraveling into ribbons that wrote words no one should ever read. They told Tommy where the river really went, what lived under its hungry current, why the summer heat had come so early.

Those ribbons bleached his mind white.

When the police found him hours later, he was sitting cross‑legged in the middle of Elm Street. His hands were empty, but his tongue worked silently at the memory of a taste that could never be washed away—a taste of mint, chocolate, and something so much older.

They said the heat must have gotten to him. Heat, or sunstroke, or maybe the grief of losing both parents last winter. They never checked the asphalt where the cart had stood. If they had, they might have found the faint impression of waffle ridges seared into the tar, leading straight down, as if something—someone—had been swallowed whole.

Summer cooled eventually. Kids rode their bikes again, and new ice‑cream trucks rolled through town with jingles too loud, too bright. But Tommy never touched another cone. He knew the truth:

Some things don’t melt. They bleed.