It's Only the Rain

When I was sixteen years old I packed my bag. It wasn’t much of a pack, just a burlap sack crammed with a few rabbit traps, a knife that had been given to me by John when his baby son died of the sickness, my only change of holey clothes and the few items of food I thought I could take without it amounting to theft. I didn’t need a beekeeping suit as well. I was born after the comet, so close to its passage that Mama worried what kind of creature I would be.

I had a plan. I would feign illness at night so as not to sleep in the same straw as the others. Then, as soon as Amy and Jen were asleep, I would gather my belongings and sneak out after Taylor. It was the best scheme I could come up with, but it quickly went astray. Outside, the night was chilled like the grave that waited for me, or the great, silent lake to the south of the house, bottomless and dark. An icemoon shone in the sky, unblinking in the surface of that lake and bright as the glaciers in summertime. The wind bit my skin and clutched my bared neck with sharp fingers that made me gasp. Serrated branches scraped the sky, so that even the faraway stars were caught in the jaws of the canopy.

The night was a trap.

I was painfully aware of the pine needles that crunched beneath my every step. I wasn’t sly or quiet like Taylor, and so perhaps I could not expect to survive like him? In the distance, I also heard a persistent howling that echoed in my belly. I was hungry like the wolves. Like those predators, I kept my nose to the ground, and sometimes in the air.

I didn’t even see the shadow that came from above, flattening the sparser darkness with its solid shape.