No Hunting After Dusk

There was only one rule: don’t open the door.

It appears with a whisper of wind and the brrp brrp of crickets on a night much like any other, when the full moon’s glare cuts through high canopies as the glowing eyes of a barn owl, residing within the skeletal remains of a gnarled sycamore tree, pierces through your night goggles.

Everything stills, save for crisp breaths curling into steam. At once, your jeans are soaked with more than sweat and melted snowflakes.

Fifteen paces from your makeshift barricade–a young juniper bush nestled between willow that wept its last some decades ago and a slushied creek barreling downhill past the malt shop’s gated parking lot–crickety hums harmonize with the ba-booms of heartbeat against bone.

Please work.

It has to. It was sworn underneath the schoolyard’s lone picnic table during the tail-end of a recess immortalized by cicada cries and wafts of caramel popcorn, as Anais took her last sips of pop and you took your turn dismembering a dead dragonfly. She was better at it.

“Why pine, though?”

Anais shrugs. “Just does. Justin told Riley and she told me.” The bell rings. Anais jerks to a stand and, in her haste, an eye grinds to paste beneath her sneaker. She stares at it, blank, before leading the trek back to the building. Sometimes, you’re that dragonfly. “C’mon. Can’t afford another tardy.” With an abrupt turn back, she smiles, knowing and bright. “Not even for you.”

Sometimes, you’re luckier.

Images flash across your mind’s eye, past the chill, past the dead silence of the forest. Photocopies of a grinning blonde girl, one front incisor missing, her right eye a dazzling spectacle of brown flecked with green and its twin hidden behind overgrown bangs. You found that eye here two weeks ago.