[451] Untitled

Hell descended in the evening. Little dark shapes grew larger and hazier as the red of the flame licked up logs sawed over a century ago and ate cabins and homes and families and memories; they moved in concert, shadows seen through smoke, fire, and ash, and made quick motions, and new embers were birthed and grew old and died but not before everything died with them. I saw them from afar and crept away and hid in a barrel soaked in riverspray and tangy with saltfish smell in an alcove on the lee side of a hill where we stored such things. In time they came, and I heard them sniffing and grunting and babbling in their language, but the fish covered the scent of my urine and they left. 

After two hours I clambered from the barrel and climbed the hillside to look at my village. It was smoldering ruins now. Somewhere, in the wreckage, was my father and mother, one of the many bodies stacked on a funeral pyre. I had five or seven summers, or maybe nine, I did not remember, but I decided I was old enough not to cry for them.

I saw shadows still swarming through the wreckage like ants on a mound of dirt, and then heard a shout and looked up to see the pale light of the moon that touched my face and mixed with the red light of the fire into a dancing beacon. They moved fast on all fours and as they came closer I saw their tongues lolling and spittle flying like dogs on the hunt. They were hairy all over and had fangs for teeth and snouts and wide, yellow eyes and I hated them, but I smelled my own urine again and remembered my fear and ran. My bare feet cut on rocks that the soft grass soothed and I came to my hiding barrel and looked to the fast-moving Traitor’s River, blue water and white rapids against black sky and the grey-brown earthen shore. Then I dragged another, emptier barrel to the water’s edge and removed the lid and glanced back.

They leapt through the air giddy and gleeful with curved swords draw and death painted on their face and they screamed at me. I reneged on my earlier decision and began to cry but took off the lid and climbed in the barrel and refastened it and pushed and tumbled into the water. And soon, I was bobbing through rapids, huddled against myself in the darker darkness, and shaking and crying for my parents.

Later, I fell asleep, sinking into another kind of night, and when I awoke, I was ten years older.

Critique: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/1ext7ry/comment/ljl42lw/