Frozen Action's

The rain was cascading hard that night. A tall figure stood peering over a girl’s lifeless body, lying in a shallow dug grave. In their hand was what only it could assume to be the poor girl’s heart. As the figure looks closer at the heart, it appeared to be cold to the touch, almost frozen. In some areas of said heart, there were dark spots that looked as though it was slowly decaying within their palm.

A voice comes from the figure and says, “my mom used to say to me a person doesn’t know love, till someone comes along into their life and breaks their heart for the first time.” He pauses for a moment. “Man, I wish she would have warned me that the kind ones are the people who can hurt you most of all.”

The figure leans closer towards the grave, angrily shouting, “I trusted you most and you betrayed that trust. Now your cold, lifeless body will match the heart you had when it was still beating.” The figure gently leans even closer towards to the girl’s corpse, and rests the heart in between her stiff hands, leaving them positioned on her chest and begins filling the shallow grave. As they fill the grave at a quickened pace, it becomes a more troublesome task as time goes by, as what was just a sprinkling cloudy night had become taken by a raging storm.

The morning of that week was like every other morning in the small town of Sterri Creek. There was always something strange in that small town, like how the weather was always gloomy, and that the only way out of town was through death. People were born and moved there, but no one has witnessed anyone leave the town before. The people of Sterri Creek have a running joke that the town had been cursed, and there’s darkness that remains rooted in the grounds of the town.

River awoke that same morning, breathing as their life depended on it, as beads of sweat cascade from the forehead to their cheek. Their mind was just provoked by another horrifyingly real night terror. This one differed from the others, more compelling than the previous ones they experienced. It was dark out and they were in the middle of the woods; they parked their car off to the side of a trail that lead back the way they drove in from. River was shaking, looking down at a young girl’s corps, with tears streaming down their face and a small knife in hand and as they plunge the knife towards the corpse, that’s when River’s eyes shot open, awake scanning their environment around them in haste found to still be in their bed. Letting out an enormous sigh of relief river pushed off the silk sheets that had clung tightly to them. River’s room was unlike any regular teenager in Sterri Creek. It was neatly organized, almost too organized for an average teen. They had peculiar talesmen and wood carvings of animals. There were drawings scattered on the walls and the ceiling of folktale creatures like willow-of-the-wisps and wendigos. the hobby they took up was unusual for an average teen as well.

River found joy in taxidermy and loved to make wet specimens and keep them in small jars in a box under his bed, yet only those closest to him would come to find that out. Rivers’ strange interest in studying dead animals could be an affect of their terrible upbringing and the abuse they endured, after all their father was a convicted serial killer, their mother being his fathers last victim, of whom River found at 13 after saving a baby frog from their house cat…

To Be Continued…