1. The Hunter

 1. The Hunter

A dark stain on the anichromatic hills. Closer, closer. The stain blooms into a burnt barn, creaking gray planks of dry, dead wood. Lightning flashes white and the barn grows darker. The tall grass at its base is whipped into a violent celebration by the wind. A harsh groan of splinters sliding against splinters as the double doors open slowly, so slowly, and the wind howls the piercing cry of a wintry train, and inside is a blackness that makes the dark silhouette of the barn pale against the storming sky. He backs away, the building retreating once more into the hills, the doors closing, slamming, and lightning flashes so brightly that the dimness cannot return. 

The Hunter sits up out of bed. There’s a clock on the wall that is silent in its brokenness. The house he’s in is a brick one painted over quickly in white. His bed is quite plain. A nightstand of vibrant orange wood with a mason jar atop it. No windows in his bedroom. And a scratched hardwood floor that wheezes under every pressure the pads of his feet relinquish. Inside, it is always very quiet.

In the yard is a man bent over on his hands and knees. Naked, his ribs press through his thin veined skin, and his spine forms a ridge down his back like some prehistoric predator. Like a man made into dog. A rabbit twitches as the man rips into its belly with his teeth. The man makes a soft grunting noise as he pulls against the beast's skin. A squeaking whistling call rises in the man’s throat. Bees buzz in the garden, the buzzing growing louder, incessant. The rabbit's white coat has turned fully red in its blood, pumping out of human-sized teeth holes to a musical rhythm, and the only white remaining is the creature’s eyes as its frightened pupils roll back to gaze at its own dying brain. In a fluid, uninterrupted movement the Hunter opens his front door and grabs a  softball-sized rock from the garden and dashes it across the back of the man’s head. His hair and skull crumple inward as if being flushed into a drain. The man’s body flattens to the yard, over the rabbit, and it is disappeared.

The Hunter looks back and in the doorway stands a three-foot-tall man-thing, a dark stain of sickly thin limbs dark and viscous in tar. Patches and pieces of loose hair stick to the surface. The Sun above reflects and creates the illusion of twinkling bodies of light across the thing’s dripping obsidian flesh. The whites of the thing’s eyes shine so brightly. It closes the door to the Hunter’s house. The rumble of a distant thunder shakes through the yard. What is Death afraid of?