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A father and his son walked through a dark wood of tall and winding trees, long arms reaching towards an afternoon sky and aflame with the vibrancies of fall. The boy was rosy-cheeked, with a round face framed shining brown locks that fell to past his ears in a faint curl - a smaller, softer version of his patriarch. Fallen leaves crunched under the soles of steel-toed boots as they stalked through the thicket, the older of the two armed with a sleek Browning Semi-Automatic, the scene suspended in a thick must.
In another time in another world, a man walks through the same wilderness. It is unchanged, even all these years later, the colours and birdsong suspended in a reality independent from his own. But today he comes alone and sunken-eyed. His shaggy hair has been cropped to a buzz cut, and the stench that could only be a result of several showerless months mingled with the natural scent of decay in a nauseating cocktail.
A bush rustles to his left, and he pauses at the sound.
The father placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder, raising a finger to his lips before gesturing to the depths of the clearing ahead. A doe stood in a beam of sunlight; her brown eyes wide and glittering, her head tilted in curiosity as she peered at a patch of clovers in the dirt. The creature’s hazelnut fur was marked with scattered ivory speckles along her back to match her slender legs and delicate hooves. She bowed her head into the thicket of green below, ears twitching and tail bobbing, before scrunching her nose to inhale the aroma.
The child turned back to his father, eyes widened and pleading as the elder man extended the gun towards him, barrel tilted into the duff.
“Shoot it, James.”
The man slings the hunting rifle over his shoulder, aiming firmly at the deer. His hands are callused with time, shaking as they finger the trigger, and his breath is uneven at best as he lowers his gaze to the sight. Sweat drips down his temple despite the cool breeze, and a familiar voice echos through the apertures of his mind.
" Shoot it, James."
A young James gripped the barrel of his weapon, aimed at the animal. His heart threatened to sear through his ribs as he held the instrument - too cold, too lethal, a soul dancing in the palm of his hand.
It may look like a gun, but it’s so much more than that.
No.
With a wave of overwhelming compulsion, James let it slip from his hands. The rifle clattered to the forest floor in a racket, startling the doe and sending her flying into the trees beyond. In a hazy corner of his consciousness he thought he could hear his father shouting at him. He didn’t mind.
But an older, withered James cannot afford the same luxury. Instead he stares blankly ahead as a tear escapes his eye, blurring his vision as he fires.
He does not see the bullet land in the animal’s neck, a sharp wail echoing across the clearing. He does not see the flex of the animal’s spine as she convulses in foreign pain. He does not see her collapse in a pile of glossy eyes and hollow bone.
James shuffles closer to his prey, a stream of blood steadily flowing from the wound, and kneels to hold her as she flinches and struggles and exhales. Once. Twice.
He waits for another breath. It does not come.
Instead, he erupts into a scream of his own. Instead, the this string of his sanity untethered and unravels, the remaining scraps drifting down through the cavity in his chest that his heart used to fill. Even in the open space of the clearing he feels claustrophobic, as if the air he breathes is trying to suffocate him, and his entire body tenses and releases in the light of the setting sun.
His voice breaks as he shouts and sobs, not just for the doe, but for everyone else that has lost. Because of the orphaned child, and the widowed spouse, and the mother burying the bones of her first born under the backyard porch. Because survival is a myth, and they are all just as dead as the plagued.
So he fires a second shot. And he’s dead before he hits the ground.