River Through the Spruce

Sky met earth. Shades of a rising sun took up the shelves of heaven like the latest of mornings. The dark mouth parted its lips and drank up all the color. Taking the horizon and all of its daylight down its throat. The stomach of the storm gurgled and belching; vomiting flashes of lightening and rolling thunder atop it. Like a locomotive rolling down the hillside, iron nostrils screamed while ripping its path through the green. Trees moaned in the effort; twitching and groaning while gnarled roots tore from ancient dirt.

A howl went up into the air. Foreign and distressed. A cry of all the terrors seen from their very conception to now. It followed the cacophony of the world snapping to pieces around her. The tales of the end of days that she’d once heard rattling scarred pews seemed nothing by ways of comparison. Merely a child whimpering in the corner in both awe and fear of what it may someday become. How much she wished to become that same child once again. Scratching her jagged, tooth-worn fingernails into her seat and scraping away at the stain only to see what the pew was made up of. Now she couldn’t help but to know how it felt when a larger, altogether stronger force scratched into you to see what one was made of. For her? Blood, gristle, meat and the skin that held it altogether with the distinct stained shade of mind altering fear.

Her bare feet sank like leaden boots into the earth. Piercing, stinging rain swept sideways. Hale like shards of glass like bee stings across her wind-lashed cheeks. By the time her mind could procure the idea to run, her toes were already clinging to the mud like talons to produce a safe place to push forward. She was running, galloping. The wind made up a wall that slowed each ounce of forward progress. Widening her gait, she bound forward down the slipping slope of earth that was threatening to flatten and slide in an avalanche of dirt and tree roots. The gravel path she tread upon grew thinner out of the clearing. Her shirt snagged and snapped against the black, wrought-iron gate and slammed shut behind her. The bristle of trees provided but the briefest of shelters but at what cost?

Splinters joined the rainy assault as the vein of a mighty oak sprung free from its socket. All she could do was watch as the last fibers of wood gave way. The howl dissolved into sounds of that armageddon-like storm. Chapped lips sealing only to realize that the cry had been hers all the while…