Status: this is an INCOMPLETE FIRST DRAFT, and has only undergone minor edits. if something seems weird just leave it be

Groundlings

In the Shadows

The dead man was still alive. How he’d made it this far, he could not possibly guess. He had endured many hardships over this year, many of them ones he had never thought he would encounter. And he had overcome. His future, however, looked bleak. He was still starving. The days grew colder one by one, and he would soon die if he could not find food.
And food would be scarcer than ever in the winter.
Something about that thought stirred warm memories of home, of a time where winter was cozy and comfortably cold, not death’s personal harbinger come to take him away.
He wondered if he would go gently. He wanted to fight and kick and scream against it all the way, until it dragged him by his ratty hair to the very gates of hell itself.
He doubted he had the energy in him to even say one word.
But maybe if he got pushed too hard, something would snap in him and he would live up to his own expectations for once. He had heard stories, stories of the old days in which people deprived of food for two weeks went stark raving mad.
The thought was amusing to him. People in the old days, he decided, had been really weak. He’d been really weak himself.
He’d been a fool. He had thought his safe and leisurely life had been so risky, so dangerous. He’d been a giant goddamned fool. He chastised himself for it every day.
Every day, when he managed to get his bony carcass up and moving and searching for food, he simply thought about how good it had been.
But some memories were so comfortable, so warm they burned him when he approached. Most of them seemed to do that lately. He’d had it so good.
He’d been a fool.
He still was, apparently. The dead man started as he realized he had wandered deep in thought, into territory he had not marked. The trees were untouched and unfriendly, looming over him like great disapproving sentinels. He panicked. This was the worst thing that could have happened.
The dead man spun in wild circles, looking about himself but no path he could take looked familiar. He wanted to scream, but screaming meant death.
Well, if he was going to die tomorrow, or the next day, or the next anyway, what would cutting his time down do, really? It certainly wouldn’t matter, after all. But something kept his voice down in his throat, some desperate little shred of hope he had been clinging on to so hard his nails had scratched its surface beyond recognition.
No, it told him. No screaming. Not today, dead man.
He was dead either way, he supposed. No harm in trying for just a little longer.
He wouldn’t even be less dead if he wasn’t lost.
But lost he was, and his chances had slimmed down dramatically, just like he had that first month or so.
He had to sit down to think about what to do next.