Tonight i fed

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The last thing the town of Hollow Creek ever agreed on was that the new pastor was a godsend.

Reverend Elias Crowe arrived on a Tuesday with a soft voice, soft hands, and a smile that never quite reached the eyes. He took the empty church on the hill, the one with the blackened steeple and the stained-glass window that showed a lamb that looked more like it was being skinned than blessed. Within a month the pews were full again. People said his sermons made them feel clean. They didn’t notice that after every service the dirt under their fingernails was a little darker, or that the mirrors in their homes began reflecting them half a second too late.

Elias kept a private journal bound in something that had once been a face. Every night he wrote the same entry in different handwriting:

“Tonight I fed.”

He did not eat the living. That was too ordinary. He ate the future.

He would sit with a dying man and whisper the exact date and manner of the man’s granddaughter’s death thirty years from now. The man would die smiling, grateful for the “comfort.” Elias would walk home lighter, and somewhere in the future a little girl who had not yet been born would wake up missing a piece of herself she never knew she had.

The town grew quieter. Children stopped laughing in the schoolyard. Dogs refused to bark. The river ran backward for three minutes every dusk and no one mentioned it.

One night a widow named Martha came to confession. She had killed her husband with rat poison because he snored. Elias listened, absolved her, then leaned close and said, “Your husband is still snoring. He is snoring inside the walls of your house. He will keep snoring until you dig him up and put the rest of the poison in your own mouth.”

Martha went home and listened. The walls were loud. She did as she was told. When they found her body the next morning, her mouth was full of dirt and her husband’s wedding ring was clenched in her teeth.

Elias wrote in the journal: “Tonight I fed. She tasted like regret and cheap wine.”

The town council finally grew suspicious when the church bells started ringing the names of the dead in reverse. They came for him with ropes and shotguns. Elias met them on the steps, still smiling.

“I never needed the church,” he said. “I needed the congregation.”

Then he opened his mouth wider than any human mouth should open and the entire population of Hollow Creek walked into it, single file, smiling the same soft smile, while the river ran red and the steeple collapsed inward like a throat swallowing itself.

When the last person stepped through, Elias closed his mouth, wiped his lips with a napkin that had once been a baptismal cloth, and walked down the empty road toward the next town.

In his journal that night he wrote only three words:

“Still hungry.”