lacking across the shale jutting from the mossy façade of the stream-swept hillside are hind’s hooves, a cadence intimating that barren souls ought not fashion a pursuit, nor the selfish, nor the shallow, nor the inept.* A crescendo of cloven limbs dashes through a pool ahead, accentuating the rubato and pulling the ardent nearer, but the flickering afternoon light and a grainy, gray ledge obscure the scene. The clamor of hooves diminishes.

Intermission; horsetails flick overhead and toy with merciless bands of bright, translucent gold.

Laying print to rest, I ponder the meaning of that fleeting image, which had cut a path through to my consciousness. What was I feeling at the time? I wonder, reflecting back on the nonthreatening chirping and calming trappings of nature, and then swiftly realizing that I had been feeling a bit adventurous and at peace with myself. My mouth curves into a grin, my eyelids touch, and instead of darkness, as one might expect, there is the confluence of emotion and fantasy.*

Write what you feel, I think to myself and anyone who happens to be listening. Then, furtively, as a warning, lest this take on too great a life, Figuratively, of course.

Rustling, originating in the brush and scrub higher up the hillside, disturbs the stillness of the setting that had slumbered for a handful of moments. Again, the clack of hooves, dislodging pebbles and scattering them so they tumble violently downward and into the short grass growing sparsely along a narrow plateau between two slopes. Hunter is there, listening and waiting, allowing the air to billow through his patchwork hood and his cloak. Hunter, not his name, but what those who see him call him by, much like the titles Father, Lord, and Murderer. All are familiar monikers.

__________
* Applicable to those contemplating joining Almost an Allegory
* How one should approach writing in this story.
Visit our OOC Thread for more info!

Thickening clouds melt the sky into a bronze basin, the molten fumes lapping tumultuously along the edges and daring light to break beyond the turgid brim. Sporadic, lucent breakthroughs ebb away within the hour, and tiny orbs of rain cast long, thin tethers from vault to vale, as through in a sort of melancholic proxy to the bright bands that did dominate the landscape beforehand.

Beneath all this sits Hunter, still bewildered and transfixed by the sheer audacity and falsity of his title; after all, he does not track beasts, nor slay nor skin them, nor anything even remotely similar. The fact he had, an hour hence, been curiously pursuing the click-clack of hind’s feet was merely a coincidence. One he had put behind him the moment of his failure in executing even that menial task. Now his cloak, already burdened with the sweat of the hunt, is further laden with precipitation. Still, the evening is warm, young, and the rain is not wearisome, nor the blinding shards of plasma exploding to leave vaporous pillars in their wake. He lies on his back in the wet grass and lets the now-heavy globules strike his face.

Disgruntled with the name Hunter, he casts it aside, and elects instead to call himself Sod, for he is sodden and, in his own hazy mind, fits the innumerable meanings that word presents.

At first nature had been welcoming. The open grassy plains, the blossom covered hills, the dew tipped grasses; all had conspired to instill in me a sense of otherness, of freedom.

"This is not a city life of human confines," I had thought as myrtle eyes surveyed the lighter green of nature.

Indeed, how could one feel imprisoned when so far away from looming walls of ancient brick and rules more archaic than the stones that cobbled the streets? Life away from the city was free. Open. The explosion of colour that the natural world provided had been such a contrast to the greys of my masonry-filled town that I could only barely restrain my excitement when leather sole first met vibrant plain.

And it was with a similar sense of wonderment that I had first approached the forest. So many trees and so much greenery--seemingly untouched by human hands. It begged to be explored and I had blithely assented; the trees seemed only too happy to direct me onwards.
Gracious hosts indeed.

However, as the days had worn on, the trees and their knitted branches had begun to choke my sense of liberation as much as the bastille that was my home town. What little food I had packed was already dwindling and the life of an idle city girl had not schooled me in the methods of hunting. Indeed each plotted, each advancing, each labored footfall had slowly chipped away at my resolve that now, now I was free.

Then the rain had started.

Oh, to others it may have been a refreshing pitter of raindrops, but, to me, in that moment it was an abrupt deluge into the clear skies of my mind. The sudden chill that it brought had halted my movement, bringing me an understanding of sorts. As my cloak hugged closer to my body, the encroaching droplets impinged upon me the realisation that despite my swift departure, I had not, in fact, managed to outrun my problems.

The falling water had become another layer of bars sealing me into the past: transient bars, perhaps, but through weary eyes the rain seemed all the more damning for it. The rain would leave. It would be forgotten, replaced by the warming sol, and discarded from thought. For a day, or a week, or a month... but then it would would return just as abruptly to remind me of troubles past, stirring memories that I had deemed better left untouched.

Damn it so! I was not in the mood for an epiphany, not when so far from home, from friends and from shelter. These sorts of stark realisations were best revealed huddle under comfortable delusions in warm beds, not in weathered forests shrouded in precipitation. My footsteps needed to be measured with a serene sense of unquestionable purpose; doubt was a weakness, a flaw, a sin and one in which I did not wish to bemire myself. Stopping now would be tantamount to giving up, to acknowledging defeat but I possessed a raw form of stubbornness; the sort that only a youth of fifteen years can possess. So, forced out from between blue-tinted lips were well reasoned words, if not wholly insincere ones:

"I am sure there will be some place to stay up ahead." A slight pause in voice, though not in movement, before:

"It's cold and I shall become ill if I stop," to punctuate the sentence and give credence to words devoid of true affirmation, I nodded.

The reverberating of thunder pulled me from my thoughts and, after raising my head, I realised that thick trees had given way to shrubbery and hill. Yet my first feeling was not one of relief at having escaped the forest nor fear at the sound of rolling thunder; it was mere confusion.

"Why is that man laying in the rain?"

At the foothills of midsummer evening, Sod, as he, through a whim, has taken to calling himself, awakens to his foolhardiness. There he lies, amongst wet spines of grass, cold seeping into his bones with each chilly orb of moisture wept by the shimmering white eye rising into the mesh of an encroaching night. Worse yet, those miniscule droplets mix quietly with his own tears of self-pity - not for the present strait he has placed himself in, or even for the inward emptiness of life, but for the merciless axis of physical and emotional turmoil besieging him.

Such a predicament is not lethal, but, as one given to creature comforts, the trembles racking his body are increasingly unacceptable, and irrational, morbid fancies become the locus of his thoughts. As the benefits of death over life weigh in his analytical mind, an exertion of common sense eventually pushes them aside, but his feelings of sadness do not subside so easily. He realizes he is more fool than adventurer, enslaved and enervated by the frailty of his own mind. So he cries, perhaps for the worst but most sincere reason anyone can. He cries for himself.

He is in that pathetic condition when the loneliness of dusk is broken by another figure striding up the hillside.

Distracted from his self-immersion by the sound of water drumming against another person’s clothes, he inclines his head in their direction and efforts to espy them through the fog and the rain. Yet, blurry-eyed as he is, there is little he is able to define. Then, for reasons he is unwilling to dissect, the burning rash of embarrassment creeps into his face as it occurs to him the shadowy form is that of a woman. Thank God for the rain he thinks, recalling his tears. He then props himself up on his elbow to get a clearer view of the woman and, after choking down his first attempt, hails them with the words: “A pleasant evening, is it not?”

The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had come, the dark thunderheads rumbling into the distance. She stood there, her clothes clinging to her like a second skin, dripping, as she watched the woman's hair dance solemn nocturnes in the current.

She was thankful for the rain, for moments before, she had killed someone. There was no blood to wash off, no weapon to cast off, instead, the drenching storm disguised the river water that sopped her clothes where she plunged the woman's head beneath the turbulent current.

It was foolish to do so in savage daylight, under the flickering cover of bending horsetails, whose shadows were like black tributaries, spreading out into the true tributary where the woman's hair exploded underwater like a macabre Medusa under my straining arms. Broad daylight, an act of desperation. I clutch the weapon to my breast, my handprints on her throat. I'm soaked. She drifts. I run.

I am fleeing from it, this gauzy doppleganger come to visit my fantasy. I ponder this act of murder safely hidden in the ether of imagination, this clarity that comes with crises of the existential kind, with sharp desires to rid yourself of the old. This is the point of one's life, balanced on the edge of a knife, at once looking forward and back, Janus-faced.

A tapping, like horse hooves.

"Hello? Mel?"

I open my eyes to find him tapping a pencil against the glass desk. Their eyes are on me.

"Do the human-interest story. The local one about the dog driving a car?"

They're watching me, sepulchral, blood-sucking, but I say, Damn it. Damn the human-interest story. My life is suddenly balanced on the edge of a divine blade, so damn these cramped cubicles, smell of toner, eyes reflecting the non-photo blue of computer monitors, "... please accept my resignation," my indignation, my refusal to write lines to spin lies on the human condition.

I, Janus-faced look back with eyes of flint and look ahead with clear-eyed excitement of adventure and quest and journey, the clarity of untethered imagination. I, fleet-footed, pass through the glass doors into the Elysian fields of fantasy. I, lynx-eyed never look back.

I clutch the weapon to my breast. My handprints are on her throat. She drifts. I run. Reborn in the river, every act of creation is, at first an act of destruction.

She hadn't noticed her hair clinging to her skin in dark rivulets. Her breathing harsh. But when she rose, lightning illuminated her surroundings, casting her eyes eternity-blue, eyes that could see forever, for she had changed her destiny. Where it would take her, she did not know.

With each unfolding step, she leaves it all behind her: the river runs, the horsetails bend, and a woman's hair dances solemn nocturnes in the current, her eyes non-photo blue.

A more simple part of me wanted to run forth and embrace this man; this anchor to civilisation. Another wisely noted that I was a lone, scrawny teen, shaking from hunger and dancing droplets doing their best impression of icicles, as well as not being very well equipped to fight off a mad man. For surely this man was mad, I reasoned. After all, what sort of person would lie in the midst of a thunderstorm, apparently unperturbed by the piercing cold and the arrows of incandescent light that carved their way through the firmament?

"One that was either in the midst of dying, already dead or insane," I replied to my unspoken thought; I wasn't entirely sure which I would prefer to deal with.

It took a few moments for me to realise I was moving towards the recumbent figure. This comprehension trickled up to the mind that was only now acquiescing to my bodies demands. Trapped inside my head, time had simply continued it's incessant march without me and I was certainly suprised to discover my legs had strode forwards to greet the stranger, seemingly of their own volition. Oh well, when in roam-I was about to offer a greeting when it occurred to me that the man had propped himself up on his elbow. Well at least he's not dead.

“A pleasant evening, is it not?”

Insane. The man was definitely insane then. Soggy, auburn hair clings unyieldingly to my neck and rain trickles down from my brow. It stops but for a moment, as if preparing for it's journey down my gaunt cheeks, before it continues onward to join it's comrades in my top. Or possibly my boots. Lightning crashes in the distance, illuminating the sky for a moment, before darkness rushes back into the hole created by it's absence. An empty stomach is a stark contrast to my overcrowded head and it's all I can do to keep my trembling body in check and my tears at bay. To say nothing for the biting cold that now pierced my scrawny frame. How could anyone call this pleasant?

A thought drifted up from the base of my mind to the ethereal string of consciousness: Reply, it's only polite. Which, if I had been in a more stable frame of mind, would have surely begged the question; why, of all things, is politeness more important than my own safety? I was getting lost among my thoughts again. If I kept this up no doubt the man would infer that I was mute. So strained upwards through my throat, out along the conveyor that was my tongue and onward through chattering teeth, was a sentence that had barely survived the gauntlet of my mouth:

"Uh... um... no?"

Oh, typical; my lips had failed me yet again. Mentally I cursed, and tried vainly to regain what little composure my currently disheveled state afforded me. As I inched closer towards him, I hastily offered the man another half-thought sentence;

"Well, I mean it's rather..." I stumbled around my own tongue, searching for the word that would succinctly explain my predicament.

"...wet." Well, that went well, I snidely thought, before wondering why on earth the opinion of a man I had just met would mean more to me, right now, than shelter and a hot bath.

A vivid, sawtooth strobe illuminated to Sod a creature shivering in the torrent, her pallid skin streaked by a blood-like weave of dank, copper ropes from her crown to her neck. The fractal radiance dissipated back into the deep gloam, but gears of judgment whirled in his mind as he evaluated her façade via the external fragments he had gleaned during that brief moment of luminescence. Would I marry her? he thought, along with such doubts as Is she beyond me? and She seems so frail...

Sod truly hated himself for the patterns of analysis that plagued his consciousness, but his efforts to stop them had failed ever since his exodus from the cocoon of child-like innocence. He hardly knew her, and already his mind sought to discredit the woman as a potential mate. Absurd! He was not so base as to consider a woman only for the sake of ... he was not even sure of what. However, those gears came grinding to an abrupt halt at the sound of her voice.

“Uh… um… no?”

His unmasked disingenuousness stabbed back through his own heart at her candid words. Her honesty was beautiful and brutal. Of course it wasn’t a pleasant evening. It was a ghastly, wet, stormy maelstrom of an encroaching night. Yet, that wasn’t the point, was it? The weather was completely unrelated to how he felt, or so it should have been; yet, it seemed to more accurately reflect his soul than the duplicitous words cast off his tongue. He had masqueraded as man content with himself when, inwardly, he was in agony.

His blush had subsided during his self-condemnation, and he had completely missed the last few things she had said.

“You are right,” he quickly admitted, pulling his miserable flesh to its feet.

Lightning revealed her shivering form again, arms wrapped around her to no effect. A reminder of how cold he, too, was. For as much his own as her benefit, he said, “Come, let us take shelter.” It was several steps later that it occurred to him that he should take her arm and help her up the hill toward a small overhang he had seen before dusk where, if nothing else, they would be out of the rain.

“You are right,”

I was? Well yes, I suppose I was. Still, I had expected his words to be more heavily laced with bewilderment at my intellectual faux pas. Maybe he had not heard? Ahh... one could hope, though maybe he was simply used to people saying odd things. I suppose, if he is mad, then he would hear a myriad of strange things quite often and be rather accustomed to them by now.

The man drew himself rather wearily to his feet. The slight strain with which he did so was not that odd considering current circumstances and yet I felt as if his limbs moved with more fatigue than tiredness or rain alone ought to induce.

Perhaps he carries some ponderous burden with him- No sooner than that thought had finished meandering across my frontal cortex, lightning bore through the stratosphere once again.

The way in which it lit up the man was rather jarring, yet it was this that galvanised my mind; it reminded me of the crudeness of such mawkish thoughts. To think that I could infer such things from subtle body language when all was so lowery? That such a nascent bond would ripen so, when the mans name was not even known to me?

In truth this was simply just what I wished for; to pretend he was someone with whom I could share my pains and my worries, regardless of my problems actual worth. To pretend that he was a brother or a friend, instead of the unknown quantity that he was. It was comforting to see him in this fashion. Yet any such thoughts were soon suppressed when the man spoke thusly;

“Come, let us take shelter.”

An idea I could certainly get behind. Yet I stayed still, unsure what to do; both this mans motives and actions were terribly abstruse to me. He, however, seemed to have no such qualms about walking through the rain with a stranger--he had begun his ascent up the hill. A few dozen thoughts clouded my mind once again, the foremost of them harping on about the importance of not following strangers at night, but the lethargy that attacked my limbs and the barrage of raindrops that pelted my clothes forced one thought forward:

Honestly, what is the likelihood of meeting anyone more desirable out here?

My reasoning was sound enough and so the line of consciousness continued: I should follow him. This thought earned plaudits from my limbs as they began their oddly alacritous ascent upward with a steady march. It seemed company and respite from the rain were more important to me than I had realised. Certainly more than my own safety at least.

After several steps I realised that the distance between us had receded partially. It was certainly not due to any haste on my part: my movement, although steady, was slow and lethargic. In fact, it was because the man had stopped. Maybe in thought?

My actions were once again cast into doubt, though I daren't stop moving lest I become unable to start again; I merely slowed down as the distance receded more and more. After a quick internal monologue I decided that simply passing him would be foolish when I had no idea where this shelter was, so instead I would stride beside him--at a safe distance of course--and suggest we not stop.

Although first I decided that offering my name would be the polite thing to do. So, rapidly approaching his side, I did just that:

"Charlotte..." hesitation caused partially by doubt and partially by the realisation that such a sentence would only force more clarity to be sought, I added:

"...my name." I quickly decided that the completed sentence I had cobbled together was rather confusing, so I rushed out another:

"I mean: that is... my name."

"Charlotte," I affirmed again due to the fear that originally my voice not been heard. Although, oddly enough, I neglected to speak louder the second time.

Once adrift in the bewildering currents of social norms, he had not realized that the woman was struggling to his side until she had nearly passed him. And, as absurd as it may seem, the fact he had taken time to consider whether or not he should perform the gentlemanly act of assisting her somehow made it solicited and, therefore, unbearably awkward. He decided instead to walk wordlessly alongside her, and quietly cursed himself for his hapless pause and odious moment of perplexing consideration of what should have been an effortless gesture.

Then, of course, she opened her mouth and spoke.

In the lady’s parade of syllables, he had gleaned a useful parcel. Charlotte. Yes, her name. Something that paled in comparison to how she uttered it in unsure, fractured half-sentences. Every tumultuous, harmonious stumble of her tongue caused Sod to feel veritably elated and his own unease melted away. There was more than one gauche vagabond who splashed up the loathsome hillside, and a peculiar comfort dwelt in that sentiment, however maleficent. So, while his conceptual embrace was momentarily jarred with guilt, he nevertheless chose to succor confidence from Charlotte’s insecurity. After all, who can resist the lure of false strength?

At any rate, morality be damned, and may she never know! whispered his mind to his soul.

So, for a few moments, his steps felt lighter, despite the ruggedness of the slope, breathing came easier, despite the stuffiness of the evening air, and then … then he realized it was his turn to offer up a name on the altar of politeness. Unprepared, he chose not to say anything at all, lest he lose his tentative self-confidence.

It was at the end of that undulation of dark emotion that the rain stopped falling on them, as they were beneath the ledge.

“We are here,” he said, as if such a thing were not obvious. Then, to somehow assuage her of his poor manners, he mumbled, “I am sorry.” His spirit, encouraged by the admission, assailed him with a condemning deluge: I am sorry for my selfishness, for my lack of history, honesty, integrity, or anything that makes one relish life. Were more than a single moment given to how you came to this point, you may realize it has more to do with being lonely and crying in the rain.

His back was to her, as he had turned to gaze out over the faintly glowing valley.

For a moment I stand there with my back toward the building and look unseeingly out onto the parking lot where the cars glitter with raindrops from the passing storm. My toes hang over the edge of the curb and my bag thumps dumbly against my thigh as I hesitate and wonder, What have I done?

The back of my neck tingles, half-expecting a blast of air-conditioning as he rushes after me. He would touch my shoulder and turn me around with those fingers always stained with ink from writing memos on the back of his hand. He would be too close, smelling of coffee and cigarette smoke. He would ask, "Mel, what the hell happened back there? What do you think you're doing?"

Nothing of the sort happens, of course, and I am suddenly hyper-aware of the silence, the vacuum of sound sectioned off by a pair of glass doors, behind which clatter keyboards and voices chatter over the drone of printing and xeroxing and faxing and the white noise of humming computers and rustling papers. I have to consciously stop myself from looking back, almost yearning for the familiar monotony, but my pride saves me from the chagrin.

She pulled herself away from the river, where the body had already drifted away. The mire sucked at her feet, and the bracken clawed at her clothes and hair, but she made her way steadily onto the river's bank. There was no rush in her actions, each motion spare and unwasted, but the fluorescent glow of rabid emotion and adrenaline was already fading from her limbs. Stumbling into a clearing, with a trembling arm, she released a fist of snow-white salt onto the ground and let it fall around her in an arc wide enough to encircle her body. She curled up in its center, but it remained unfinished, another handful of salt lying inert in her still palm.

I close the car door, hermetically sealing myself off from the mute indifference of the parking lot. I catch my reflection in the rear view mirror and notice my hair frizzing from the dampness of the weather and futilely try to smooth it down. My eyes lock onto their reflections for longer than they should, long enough to assess the following: my roots are showing, my lips are chapped, my skin wane, dark shadows under by eyes. I reach out to flick on some tripe on the radio and find that my nail polish has chipped, and make a note to myself to patch those up as well as redo my roots, do something about my skin and the dark under-eye circles. Suddenly I feel so tired. The thought of these acts of vain self-preservation tax me, all of these insignificant details adding up--and adding up to what? I lean my head back and close my eyes.

She let herself fall asleep. After one commits a crime, one ought to run, ought to cut one's hair, change one's clothes, ought to slip into another identity, but these worries are tranquilized by velvet somnia, for, as her yawning consciousness rationalized, in the middle of nowhere there was nothing she could do, no one from whom to run, no where to which to go. After all, what dominion does one's identity have in the wilderness? She might as well have been the grass or the rock or the brook. She was nothing but a strange animal here.