Saturday, July 21, 2012

Return

You may be wondering where I've been the past two weeks.  To be perfectly honest, I wish I could tell you.  Precious time has been wasted, slipping out of my hands into oblivion.  Simply put, I seem to be suffering a mild but of amnesia.

The last thing I remember is stalking the Target in a large city.  Her parents were talking animatedly about visiting the paternal grandparents, and she was walking between them, holding tightly onto both of their hands.  I couldn't help but think at that moment how safe she must feel, surrounded by her parents, unaware that the Hunter was stalking her.

...or so I thought.  As I began to quicken my approach, she suddenly stopped, whirled around, and glared at me.  I was overcome with grief in that moment; I felt as though I'd been punched in the heart (symbollically speaking, of course), and was forced to my knees even as I began to weep openly.  At this point, I was still roughly fifty feet from her, further than I'd been in our first encounter.

Everything else had stopped.  Completely.  Birds were suspended in mid-flight.  People had stopped in mid-step.  A ball was in the process of bouncing out in front of a car, a little boy chasing it into the street.  The car coming would never see the child around the large van that was parked along the side of the road.  In the opposite direction, a kid wearing a hooded sweatshirts had been paused mid-drag on a cigarette.

In the middle of all this, the Target approached me slowly.  My body was still convulsing with sobs, so great was the grief pounding down on every fiber of my being.  She crouched down to look me in the face, her head cocked.  She, too, looked as though she were going to cry.

"This is how She feels for all those people you killed."

She shook her head.  "You're only fueling the Knight's fire."

I'll be burned away like my victims, I finished in my head; I'd heard this speech before.

But she simply patted me on the head, murmured something unintelligible, and skipped back to her parents.  As soon as she grabbed their hands, time resumed:  the birds flew on, the kid in the hoodie continued smoking, and the driver clipped the poor child as he ran out to grab his ball.

I should have called it a day, but I didn't.  I was angry.  How dare she make me weep?  So I rushed her and grabbed ahold of her arm.

Then I blacked out.

I woke up several hours ago.  My head has been throbbing off and on, and I can't flex the fingers of my right hand without feeling pins and needles of pain all the way up my arm.

I believe I may be way over my head.

2 comments:

  1. Well hey. I thought your goose had been cooked. I was a little pissed. I haven't broken your nose yet.

    Look on the bright side, bird boy. At least you're alive-- in deep shit or not.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm still around. You may continue to dream of breaking my nose.

      Delete