The Werewolf [COMPLETE]

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I didn't sleep that night.

I did sleep that night.

Did I? Didn't I?

I couldn't tell anymore. I closed my eyes tired. I opened my eyes tired. It would exhaust me to lie down on a bed. It would exhaust me even more to sit up and to stand up. It wasn't that my mind was drained, my whole body was drained. I could hardly lift myself up; I didn't know how I managed to drag one leg after the other, or one foot after the other, or one toe after the other. I had no muscles left in my arms, I could hardly grip anything in my left hand anymore, I couldn't keep my fingers stiff, the glass would always slip, and half-full or half-empty, it would always crash to the floor. My right hand, my right palm and my right fingers, I had given up on. I couldn't move the tips of my fingers anymore, I couldn't feel the slash in my palm or the stitches straining my skin. It hurt. I guessed it hurt. But I wouldn't feel it anymore, I wouldn't have the strength to feel it anymore. Because I was tired.

How was I to describe it? Was I to make a report? Or was I to write a poem? A poem in an iambic pentameter or in free verse, with a free rhythm and free rhymes? A prose with metaphors and similes? Or a prose with metonymies and synecdoches? Or an oxymoron. Was I to make something beautiful? But there was no more beauty. Metaphors didn't belong here, no similes, nor sentences, nor words. Nothing belonged here. And no one. No one.

The sun had risen, the clouds had faded and the world had stilled. The Village Square was frozen into beauty. Drops of the morning mist had crystallised over the petals of the flowers out in the cold, glittering and glimmering diamonds on the red, orange and yellow silks. The water flowing from the fountain had become ice, carving the statues of three women, one on the left, one on the right and one in the middle. Forms and shapes with feminine features, motionless in the midst of a motion; hips swayed and arms curved above one's head, neck bowed and hair cascading over another's head, and the last one's chest drawn up, forehead and head turned up and hands reaching up to the sky. And there, just there, arising and rising atop the church's belfry, the sun haloed the three figures, transcending them, deifying them.

The Mother. The Daughter. And the Holy Spirit.

And Louis Hawkins. His body? His corpse? His lungs weren't oxygenating his brain. His heart wasn't pumping blood into his arteries and veins. His organs were dead. His neurones, his brain and his mind were dead. But this couldn't be death, this couldn't be the end. This couldn't be it. There had to be something more. What about the Reincarnation of the flesh and the blood? What about Hell and Heaven? Or something simpler. Something not about faith or belief, something without distinctions, names and sub-names. What about his family's life? What about his life? What about life.

This game was death, and only death. But this game ended, today, or tomorrow, or in weeks, or in months. But it would end. And with the end of death, there would only be life. There had to. There had to be life. Life in the hands of a seamstress and the hands of a woodcutter, life in the voice of a boy, life in the heart of a man, a woman, an inhabitant of the Village, life in the Village. Life.

Marcus Shelton

William Garner

Kathleen Sculley

Raleigh Britton

Ivy Conner

Gregory McKenzie

Mary Howell

Helen Winfield

Aaron Petersen