Page 21 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

“But Slaney,” his father said.

“I’m not hungry,” the boy lied.

The day after that he was, though. It was the day the storm broke. The woods were perfectly still. Birds were even moving from tree to tree again, talking to each other.

In his head, the boy told Slaney to be closer, to not keep being on the other side of the creek, but the boy’s father came back wet to the hip again. His whole frontside was bloodstained now, from hunting, and eating.

The boy scooped the meat into his mouth, watched his father try to sit in one place. Finally he couldn’t, fell over on his side. The boy finished eating and curled up against him, only woke when he heard voices, scratchy like on a radio.

He sat up and the voices went away.

On the crust of snow, now, since no more had fallen, was Slaney’s skin. The boy crawled out to it, studied it, wasn’t sure how Slaney could be out there already, reforming, all its muscle growing back, and be here too. But maybe it only worked if you didn’t watch.

The boy scooped snow onto the blood-matted coat, curled up by his father again. All that day, his father didn’t wake, but he wasn’t really sleeping either.

That night, when the snow was melting more, running into their dry spot under the tree, the boy saw little pads of ice out past Slaney. They were footprints, places where the snow had packed down under a boot, into a column. Now that column wasn’t melting as fast as the rest.

Instead of going in a line to the creek, these tracks cut straight across.

The boy squatted over them, looked the direction they were maybe going.

When he stood, there was a tearing sound. The seat of his pants had stuck to his calf while he’d been squatting. It was blood. The boy fell back, pulled his pants down to see if it had come from him.

When it hadn’t, he looked back to his father, then just sat in the snow again, his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth.

“Slaney, Slaney,” he chanted. Not to eat him again, but just to hold him.

Sometime that night—it was clear, soundless—a flashlight found him, pinned him to the ground.

“Slaney?” he said, looking up into the yellow beam.

The man in the flannel was breathing too hard to talk into his radio the right way. He lifted the boy up, and the boy said it again: “Slaney.”

“What?” the man asked.

The boy didn’t say anything then.

The other men found the boy’s father curled under the tree. When they cut his pants away to understand where the blood was coming from, the boy looked away, the lower lids of his eyes pushing up into his field of vision. Over the years it would come to be one of his mannerisms, a stare that might suggest thoughtfulness to a potential employer, but right then, sitting with a blanket and his first cup of coffee, waiting for a helicopter, it had just been a way of blurring the tree his father was still sleeping under.

Watching like that—both holding his breath and trying not to focus—when the boy’s father finally stood, he was an unsteady smear against the evergreen. And then the boy had to look.

Somehow, using his poles as crutches, the boy’s father was walking, his head slung low between his shoulders, his poles reaching out before him like feelers.

When he lurched out from the under the tree, the boy drew his breath in.

The father’s pants were tatters now, and his legs too, where he’d been carving off the rabbit meat, stuffing it into the same skin again and again. The father pulled his lower lip into his mouth, nodded once to the boy, then stuck one of his poles into the ground before him, pulled himself towards it, then repeated the complicated process, pulling himself deeper into the woods.

“Where’s he going?” one of the men asked.

The boy nodded, understood, his father retreating into the trees for the last time, having to move his legs from the hip now, like things, and the boy answered—Hunting—then ran back from the helicopter they were dragging him into, to dig in the snow just past their tree, but there was nothing there. Just coldness. His own numb fingers.

“What’s he saying?” one of the men asked.

The boy stopped, closed his eyes, tried to hear it too, his own voice, then let the men pull him out of the snow, into the world of houses and bank loans and, finally, job interviews. Because they were wearing gloves, though, or because it was cold and their fingers were numb too, they weren’t able to pull all of him from the woods that day. They couldn’t tell that an important part of him was still there, sitting under a blanket, watching his father move across the snow, the poles just extensions of his arms, the boy holding his lips tight against each other. Because it would have been a betrayal, he hadn’t let himself throw up what his father had given him, not then, and not years later, when the man across the desk palms a handful of sunflower seeds into his mouth all at once, then holds his hand there to make sure none get away, leans forward a bit for the boy to explain what he’s written for a name here on this application.

Slade?

Slake?