The Fourth Annual Writer Games: Canon

The Assault | Linwood Walsh

Linwood has spent a very long time learning how to die. To come to terms with it, or understand its effects. He's spent hours just attempting to know it, and to familiarize it, and he's spent most of his life fearing death, as if that could prolong the numbness of the existential, and the dire. It's a kind of fear that doesn't attack, but settles; it gives notice, hanging overhead like a light that'll never cease its flickering.

Night- stars burn into a faded picture. The moon wades unless grotesque with shadow. There's fog, but not enough, and the only constellations that form are the ones poignant to a child's mind. Then comes dawn. Day- clouds sift awash with air, sunlight peering at the ground. Lin knows heat, afternoon, and porches alight with the rocking of a chair. Then comes night.

Perhaps it's a common thing to think death is alive, walking among the land, but he doesn't believe it. Death isn't alive. It's awake.

The late evening drifts in slowly. Linwood has been breathing rather heavily since the morning, his feet dragging more than ever in the softened mud. His toes are blue, skin ravished to a pale white like the shedding skin of reptiles beginning to molt. He doesn't remember the sound of his voice, merely an echo so distant in the past. Stuck, alongside yesterday and the day before.

His knees bear weakly through the thickened branches- they're longer than they were on day one, ingrown, twisting and turning into a labyrinth of patches. They scrape where his clothes have torn, peeling away until crimson, and red, adding to the patterns of scar and scarlet spread lavishly around his body. Each time he's cut, a sting pulses in his head, aching of more than meager pain.

He thinks, loudly over these other damaged thoughts, I should've gone to the feast. He regrets not going, as one regrets their words, his bones frail, the boy emaciated beyond his own skeleton. Perhaps he believes he'd be stronger if he'd gone, whatever supplies that were there a key to give him the remaining strength he needs in these last few days, or maybe he knows he could've died. There, in the clearing, his eyes dimming to the sight of a timeless horizon line, something awake stirring at the edges of his vision.

Then, he shakes his head. And like that, the cycle repeats, and he visualizes and repaints the same hieroglyphic- of him, laying in the dirt, dying as he's decided to die.

All he wants, really, is to know when he's about to go. To see the reaper standing sullenly at the gates, a tower of obsidian leading him elsewhere, somewhere not here, a certain shade of blackness like a silhouette on his cheeks. He'll take its hand. He'll leave. And use all he's learned to sleep peacefully in a place where, truthfully, all he's learned doesn't matter.

Nothing matters. Like he's done for many days, Lin finds a tree and hovers around it. The soles of his feet, his heels, his ankles- they hurt. His lips are cracked and bleed the driest of pink pools, fingernails digging in and cracked like a ruin. There's not a single part of him that's okay, and the will within him feels as far away as space, coated in a vastness he can only begin to comprehend.

He shuts his eyes. A snapshot in the wilderness, an orange-haired minstrel lost in the woods, a stiffen show for the world to see. A shiver in what stays still, Linwood's chest beating on and on inside the forest that cannot breathe. And a wish set free in his mind, for the misery to end in any way it can.

Everything matters. Lin opens his eyes, and like a bullet the wind hits him. An epiphany courses, as thick as salt in his opened veins, and he realizes without subtlety what he really wants, not-so deep down. While he'd like the pain to go away, death, it seems, is the easy option, and Lin would prefer to see more of the outside before seeing death face to face.