I saw a silhouette in the woods behind my house tonight. It looked like a short, slender man with some sort of long stick in his hands. I just stood there watching him, unseen, as he circled around the base of a tree in absolute silence--not so much as a crunching leaf. Not even a disturbed shadow behind him.
Then he raised the long stick to his lips. He breathed deep. The air in the woods pulled in toward him and I almost lost my own breath. His cheeks puffed up and then the whole scene--all the rustling leaves, fluttering wings of bats, whining, distant highway songs, buzzing insect riots and too loud neighbor televisions--went quiet for an elastic instant and--
*FWIP*
--the Full Moon twitched and ran and stumbled and started to slide down the sky. It sung like a giant whale.
My skin went red and my eyes went white and I roared a ball of flame that rolled off my tongue and onto the grass and into the brush and through the trees toward the silhouetted hunter. But he was already sprinting for the faltering Moon, and my fire splashed against the tree he was circling only seconds before.
I turned into a magnet and summoned metal and willed myself a running demon of spikes coming fast and wild toward the sprinting and still silent figure now closing on the dimming satellite. There was no seeing his expression, but I knew that it was joyous. Jubilant. Insulting.
Seraphs, catching sight of the conflict, rallied stars and sent them streaming down. Celestial fellowship aroused a sense of vengeance in them and they fell like burning phosphorous birds of prey. I felt the figure's demeanor shift as the world lit up around him. No longer a silhouette but now a pale, exposed skeleton clutching a hollow tube and a few long, thin, black darts jutting out between his bony fingers.
Terror rippled across his face and ruined the smile in his mouth and eyes. The ripples slowed and hardened to anger and then cured to ferocity. His stride broke and he flinched at the hissing and pounding of attacking stars. He took on the countenance of someone ready to die in a whirlwind.
Then he turned to me.
By then I was covered head to toe in metal pulled from everywhere. Covered in nails, screws, keys, buckets, street lights, bicycles, a fire hydrant, barrels, gates, chainlink fence, mailboxes, cans and anything else you could imagine--even a neighbor's car-- and I was still running and still gaining speed. Shaking the ground with my sinking footsteps.
Over his bony, white shoulder, the Moon's slow crash into the tops of the pine trees.
