His bandages were ripped up all across his arms and legs. That was the first thing that waved over his mind when he woke up. The cigarette from his cousin now burned a little in the mud before sinking deep below. He watched it go until the smoke itself around the area faded. Then the pain registered, flowing like tiny waves at his fingertips and ankles.

Mom was going to kill him, but he could probably make up a pretty convincing lie by the time he got back. I was playing with friends! I wanted to stay the night! I thought you wouldn’t be awake when I got home! I felt lonely so I stayed at his house!

Yeah, she’d buy it. He could see her start breaking down now. That would work. That would definitely work. He’d get home free for maybe a few weeks before he had to make the waterworks move again. Then he could get his stupid cousin to hand over contraband more often and not have to worry about any prying, watery eyes. Spending some time away from home would only make her cave a little more and more in the coming weeks to his demands.

Now, the major concern was getting home. The view he had from his muddy seat on the forest floor was dark and blanketed in a blue hue. He didn’t recognize anything within view, not even the noises of the area.

Night was coming quickly. “If I’m lucky maybe I’ll catch her when she’s awake. I hate trying to do this shit in the morning.”

Yet again, in the morning, she was much more pliable. Maybe this would work out for him after all. He began to trudge through the thick bushes that protected the bases of trees, sticking out like bolstered tails. Avoiding them may have been easier, if not for white cloth socks and new, slippery tennis shoes.

He walked on.

The trees grew taller, deeper in the woods as matured, hardened stalks. Avoiding them, if tumbling occasionally into beds of bushels could be considered avoidance, only attached burrs and ferns to his hockey jacket, which he eventually tossed aside. To his betterment, it didn’t feel cold. Warmness in fact, cloaked his skin and face as if the immediate air around him had gained the ability to meld and absorb his heat around him. As he moved forward further and further, his eyes felt the slightest resistance to this now dark night air. Hands now adorned with scratches and cracking leaves, he felt as if there was slime melting, growing and melting away again between his palms. He shook and rubbed them every so often.

He walked on.

Animals never encountered him in the woods before. Even dogs, cats, little mindless rats and pigs knew not to pay him mind or give him attention, since it wouldn’t be long until his curiosity got the better of him with a rock in hand or a stone on the edge of his foot. But animals seemed

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Very unafraid here. A squirrel stared at him while he leaned against a tree to rest. It met his eyes with the similar glow and squint of looking into the darkness, his blearing eyes meeting the wide, unflinching empty peers of the other. When he went to grab a piece of bark as replacement for a rock, the tree surface mushed together in his hand as if made from pliable putty. Looking again, the squirrel had gone. Not in a rush out of fear, but in a scurry off, somehow with purpose.

He walked on.

His breaths became pulling, pushing efforts as the darkness that surrounded him gradually transformed into a bluish, full hue. He tread more reliably, now holding a piece of the melting bark in his hands as a tentative weapon. And when he saw the beading eyes of his squirrel mate again, he threw it without hesitation. Landing, just as expected, but the mush landed quite unexpectedly as if it were a water balloon in slow motion. It fell into a sludge across the barely perceptible rodent’s face, without it so much as blinking in recovery. It bared its fangs, before swifting a tail and climbing up the blue tree. It’s ears flapped flat against its back, and he noticed that the tail swifting was not a fluffy little twitch. It too had spears, pointed, ready, and red on the ends. From the side of its mouth were not furry cheeks, but elongated flapping gills, that vibrated as it screeched.

He walked on.

He coughed, then inhaled as sharply as he could. Even leaning against yet another tree didn’t give him enough to catch his breath. He didn’t notice, as if he could pull them forward now, that his shoes were sinking almost halfway into the cold molten earth. His eyes had taken to mesmerizing beyond his blue and black swirl of trees and bushes, sometimes seeing eyes where there had been surely none, breaths of air that only disappeared with each blink. He took another step. COugh. Inhale. Another step. COUgh. Inhale. And another pair of eyes, small, bright, blue, and beaming, blinked up at him from his crouched place on the ground. They peeled backwards to reveal a scale-covered blue face, incisors of a rabbit, and ears that fell back onto a wet, skinny body. Crouched, just as he was. Shaking, but not for fear or exhaustion. It leaped.

He walked on.

His neck was sore from pressing and pressing and pressing until finally he let whatever may fall have its way. It drenched his shirt. It missed his jacket. It ruined his shoes. He couldn’t see trees anymore, lost in the night, and when he finally sought the energy that would have loved one, he fell into the collapsing bushes that, at his impact, melted away as if made of icy sludge. He struggled, even in his rest, to stay afloat.

He looked ahead of himself. Standing tall above him, soaked to bones and thinly veiled flesh, stood a deer no bigger than a baby fawn. Eyes stared down at him, long unaccustomed to seeing, black pitches of marble nothing that watered, blinked blearily, yet focused, on the infantile being in front of him. 

When it snorted, the boy saw bubbles rise steadily from its nostrils and into the black sky above. 

When it opened its jaws, he let the last bit of air escape from his mouth.

He was gone.