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Saturday, February 25, 2017

Scrawls

By Jem Morgenstern

The Beast is terrifying. A giant head that sits in our town square. It has no lips, so the rotting gums and gnarled teeth are always exposed. It has no eyelids, so its green eyes are locked into an intense glare. They follow passers. It knows them. We don’t know why it chooses the people it watches. Sometimes, it begins to open its mouth and it lets out a gruesome breath, as if it’s about to say something to us. The breath that smells like dying trees. It sounds like wind rolling through a narrow canyon. When the jaws slowly part, it sounds like a creaking mill. The leathery, rotten loose skin on its face stretches and you can see all the marks that were carved into its face by the old settlers. The settlers before us that we know so little about. The ones who left, went deep in the forest, and disappeared. Who might be the ones who haunt us. Who might be the ones who creep out from the shadows with boney fingers that feel like claws. With arms that look like nothing but charred bone. With the same teeth as The Beast, the missing lips, and missing eyelids, too. Some of them have strands of hair hanging from their smooth, speckled scalps. When they stray from the dark, we light our torches and burn them. It’s the only thing that gets them to leave. We have to burn them. We’ve stopped trying to find the connection between them and The Beast. We tried for hundreds of years, but we never found anything. We never learned anything about The Beast or the ones from the shadows. So we let it all continue. We live with The Beast’s stares and groans. We live with creatures reaching out at us from the dark. We all feel the dread. The dread that clouds our sky. It feels like we’re reaching the end. An end that we don’t know. We didn’t find it in time. We don’t know what to look for. We didn’t know what we were trying to find. So the end will come and we’ll wait for it. We’ll see what will come.

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