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The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

-Jeremiah 8:20

The staid sun rose over the horizon.  Sunlight broaching fissures and gaps of the cabin in which the man laboured from bed. He was no less than five decades, all which weighed on him as he went outside and around to crouch by the water pump and drink.

He had a wife who he hadn’t seen in years.  A son, whose heart had borne familial contempt after his mother’s passing.   

 The man hadn’t seen him since yesterday. He rose and went up crossing over the bluff to the tree line. Eyes fixed watching  the horizon where a stoic glow christened the green spine of treetops ranging toward the distance and disappearing. Red, yellow, orange were paling in the distance. When he turned and left.  Till evening he cut wood, stopping occasionally to drink from the pump. Occasionally stopping to go inside and rummage for a can which he pried open with a dull paring knife. Afterward, when night ascended with grim swiftness, he returned to his cabin to fix a fire in the crumbling hearth  from the old logs and broken clay inside. He sat watching  the coals grow red and fierce beneath the ribbons of flames licking at the chimney. Tenderly ash was peeling off and scattered about on the smoke rising out. Then he rose and went over to the cabinets. Checking them, he found there was nothing to eat. He went to bed. On his back he was lying there staring at the ceiling. He eventually fell asleep

When he awoke it was still dark. He moved like a bent wraith in the darkness and went outside and across the clearing. At the forests edge he stopped. Underneath an array of seething constellations peeking from behind the gently stirring limbs of trees where owls were perched. Heads swinging back and forth. They hooted at each other. One was taking up into the air and crossing  to the other side of the clearing. But plummeted out of the sky. The man walked over to where it was laying in the grass. Blood trickled on the soil while it screeched, its talons groping at the ground and trying to lift its broken body. It then grew stiff as wood dead. The man turned back to the amassed owls but they were gone. In their place a tree stood longer and thicker with branches reaching out like congregants’ arms. The man was stepping closer when a stooped figure peered from the darkness. It stepped further out. Talons steadying  itself against the trees’ trunk. A brocaded chasuble limping across the grass. Creeping behind as it tottered out on stout legs and stopped and the silks rumpled at its bending legs forming weirs, mutant and canting like an extension of the creature’s vast shadow. It  towered over the man. There was a beak like an owl and two pinpricks for eyes under a crown of wire crosses. 

The man stumbled backward and was scrambling away on his elbows  while the beast approached. 

From under silks a curving talon pointing at the man. 

Be not afraid, child. The beast Cooed 

Its eyes  were burntlooking and weary. The man didn’t reply.

I Am. The beast fording the grass dropped its arm to the side where it dangled there ponderously, head cocking, it looked at the man bemused. It’s beak parting slightly and the eyes narrowing as if pondering something.

Demon. The man blurted

Nay. I Am. But now for my transgressions, He deemed it fit to lock me in this permanence and brand me with a name.I do not recollect it. But I do re, as the Shepherd once did, and the slave once heeded the word, You too arrive lost and do not know yet. 

The man clambers to stand staring up at this beast, fingers entwining at his groin..

Where is your son?  

He’s gone. The man said 

Gone where? 

I don’ know. 

The creature stooped further. Wings hunkering out and eyes leveling with the man’s. Find him.

It straightened and turned, shuffling back toward the tree. When it reached the prodigious bole it turned back for one final look at the man. I have not seen Man since the sun was bound in his allegiances. I do not remember much, not the least of my father. Let’s not let yours forget you. Seek him out. 

The man didn’t say anything. In the grass he crouched and was picking strands and pulling them apart between his fingers. After assembling a small load of bisected greenery he looked at the beast.

Where is he? 

A few towns to the east of here. It said, a smile seemingly bending its beak. Talon pointing in the direction of trees and the mountains capped with snow further out to the east. His eyes followed the direction where the beast pointed. But when he looked back the beast and the tree had vanished. In their place owls were roosting and whistling.

The man turned back toward the cabin. Inside he laid on the bed and not long after  fell asleep trying to interpret what he saw.

Blace Alcock is a talented writer and author of ‘Small Talk’ (click the image to be taken to Amazon).