A Winter Night

Her mouth, a inverted black rainbow that smiled at him as if she wanted to see her grandson die slowly for her own sick amusement.

With a blink it disappeared and he fell to his knees as his mind reeled in confusion.

Life was becoming a carnival of repressed fears and unexplainable lunacy.

He forced himself to continue on and not to look back at the house.

He trudged through the snow as his skin blued from exposure. His shirt was drenched and his life was beginning to distort.

He kept moving towards the barn, and the light ahead.

Inch by inch he neared the end of his journey.

"Almost....there," he spat as his body staggered forward.

He wasn’t sure if he was hallucinating or focusing, but a figure could be seen in front of the barn. Fragments of his childhood replayed in his frosted eyes. Memories that seemed to have been forgotten surfaced. Birthday parties, ghost stories, and the good times he had fishing with his Grandpa. His mind would blank out infrequently yet he forced himself forward. Time passed in darkness. He felt his face slowly envelope in the fuzzy light that had brought him hope and he fell, his body sinking into a depths of a white death.

A inaudible human voice pierced the winter silence.

Someone was here with him. Who was there? He couldn’t be sure.

His eyes were closed and his body was failing, but he felt secure. Surely freezing to death could not be as bad as what his parents had suffered. His eyes opened briefly and his ears strained to the sound of crunching footsteps approach his head. The sound stopped and he collected the last bit of strength to turn his head to the side.

They were boots.

Dark brown boots with yellow lacing.

A blaze of pain met his cold carcass as his eyes rolled to the back of his head.

He tried screaming again for the last time but he could not move his mouth.

In his last moment on earth he realized, he wasn’t secure at all.