jamie
09-06-2021, 06:42 PM
jamie
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
He feels her before he sees her.
The only living thing for miles in any direction.
The pair of elk see her before he does, turning their great heads in her direction, leveling her with lethal stares. And then he, too, shackles his stare to her form there as it comes swimming out of the darkness.
(How it makes him long for the crushing blackness! How vicious the yearning in his gut for the strangeness, the violence the eclipse had wrought. How he despises the sun.)
He expects her to skitter out of their path as the strangers so often do. (Will he send the dogs after her if she runs? Will he swallow down the soul when it leaves her?) But she does not flee. No, she stands there and the three of them (the Darkness and the pair of elk that flank him) stop, though they could easily pass right through her.
Is it boredom that has him stopping?
Or something more sinister?
She speaks before he gets a chance and the shark-tooth smile deepens, the freakish eyes flashing with something wicked as he takes a step closer. The elk stay behind. The fog comes for them then, slithering thick along the forest floor to curl sweetly around his legs and then hers.
“Why don’t you come closer and find out?” he suggests, the voice breathy, every bit as raspy as the breathing. And the fog tugs just barely at her ankles, beckoning. Come, it says, come see.
He had wondered as a child if he was hollow, if there were bones beneath the darkness only to find out on the battlefield that he was as real as the rest of them. The bones broke and the skin bled. But that had been before.
What is he now?
The only living thing for miles in any direction.
The pair of elk see her before he does, turning their great heads in her direction, leveling her with lethal stares. And then he, too, shackles his stare to her form there as it comes swimming out of the darkness.
(How it makes him long for the crushing blackness! How vicious the yearning in his gut for the strangeness, the violence the eclipse had wrought. How he despises the sun.)
He expects her to skitter out of their path as the strangers so often do. (Will he send the dogs after her if she runs? Will he swallow down the soul when it leaves her?) But she does not flee. No, she stands there and the three of them (the Darkness and the pair of elk that flank him) stop, though they could easily pass right through her.
Is it boredom that has him stopping?
Or something more sinister?
She speaks before he gets a chance and the shark-tooth smile deepens, the freakish eyes flashing with something wicked as he takes a step closer. The elk stay behind. The fog comes for them then, slithering thick along the forest floor to curl sweetly around his legs and then hers.
“Why don’t you come closer and find out?” he suggests, the voice breathy, every bit as raspy as the breathing. And the fog tugs just barely at her ankles, beckoning. Come, it says, come see.
He had wondered as a child if he was hollow, if there were bones beneath the darkness only to find out on the battlefield that he was as real as the rest of them. The bones broke and the skin bled. But that had been before.
What is he now?
AND IT LEAVES ME COLD
@Dretch