Moving to the Country

 This story originally appeared in the zine Something Of A Monster. 

You decide that you want to move out to the country, so you do.

You really aren’t happy in the city. Your job is pointless, if lucrative, but the crowds, the bad air, the endless lanes of cars trapped in their concrete jails - it's just not for you anymore. The city is too close. You want vast tracts of land, someplace you can breathe deeply and shoot large firearms without disturbing your neighbors, as well as ample distance from said neighbors, in case they turn out to be disturbed. That sounds like real, capital-F freedom.

So you sell your condo and your Benz, and find some cheap land in a holler in beautiful, rustic West Virginia. You sign the deed on ten acres of rolling fields, fenced in by hills on all sides. In one corner of the property sits a farmhouse, nestled near a grove of trees that abuts the wilderness behind your lot. The wooden structure is old and weathered, but a knock on any of its beams rewards your knuckles with a stiff, deep reverberation, saying, hey, I once was a big fuckin' tree, so you know, have some respect. It needs painting, and the wiring dates back to around the invention of electricity, but your infatuated eyes detect no faults, only possibilities. Out here there’s no cell reception, no such thing as internet - there aren't even phone lines. It's just what you've been looking for.

In the basement of the house, you discover a furnace, benches, and some strange-looking prongs and clamps that you first guess to be part of some old chemistry set, but which you later realize belong to an amateur glass-blowing rig.  There are at least a dozen antique clocks of various sizes stashed around the upstairs rooms, as if the previous owner was somehow trying to hoard time. You’ll need to get a mattress for the iron-wrought, four-poster frame you find in the upstairs bedroom, and to haul one in from town, you’ll need to buy a truck.

You use some of your leftover cash to secure an old red pickup second-hand. Most of the businesses sit on a ring road near the public square, in the shadow of a water tower whose handpainted lettering proclaims the name of township and county. Between the grocer, the Save-a-Lot, the hardware store, the gun shop, the liquor store, and the 24-hour mart (which closes at 11), you find pretty much everything you need. The people are mostly friendly, if a little tight-lipped, but it's hard to blame them. You're new and very obviously not from around here, so you smile a lot and try to be polite. You ask the guy at the hardware store about the glass blowing setup, to his amusement. You might be an idiot when it comes to working with your hands, but at least you're not afraid to get those hands dirty. You listen to the old lady at the pastry counter tell you about raising her Italian greyhounds, and she slips an extra cinnamon roll into your bag.

At night you get tooled up on cheap beer that you have to drive the better part of an hour to buy, winding your way without hurry along the dirt roads that lead to your new country home. You toss your empties through the cab's sliding window into the bed, saving them as targets for your burgeoning collection of large-caliber firearms. After discovering your ammunition is a little too substantial for beer cans, you move to produce, much preferring its satisfyingly messy reaction to high-velocity rounds. You also find some old wood and scrap metal in the basement, which you fashion into crude but creative sculptures out in the yard. You build them by day, and as night begins to fall, relentlessly demolish them until it gets too dark to see what you’re shooting at. It feels very cyclical and cathartic.

Eventually, though, you get tired of doing all that driving just to get booze, so you decide to start making your own. Not knowing the first thing about building a still, you break down and get a satellite dish installed. The plans aren't very hard to find and the basic idea is easy enough to follow. The guy at the hardware store cottons on to your intentions pretty quickly, and generously offers a few very helpful pointers, which is way better than just fumbling your way through the step-by-step from a Youtube video.

You get the still built and set it to work. One night, sitting on your porch and waiting for the mash to cook down, you notice a shadow among the lower branches of the old tree on your lawn. Something is moving there, tall and imposing, but as soon as you train your eye on it, the thing vanishes in a blur of upward motion. For the briefest moment you could swear you heard the beating of wings. You shrug the feeling off and head back inside to check on your cook.

That night, luminous red eyes stare out at you from inside your dreams, while the soft, feather-light thrum of insect wings vibrates somewhere in the deep, unconscious dark.

It's not long before you have produced a substantial quality of harsh but drinkable moonshine. The first glass tastes like liquid pride, and for a time, things are very nice. At night, you drag a kitchen chair out onto your porch and prop your feet up on a couple of old crates. You breathe deep and smell the woods that encircle your property. Each inhalation brings the scent of a different, nameless plant, each tree and flower adding its own mysterious note, and you wrap those strange new smells around you like a blanket. You roll up cigarettes and smoke them while you sip your bathtub gin and stare at the moon, listening to the crickets and the nighttime animals.

However, the novelty of getting drunk on the porch eventually fades. You need another hobby, and so you decide to take up glass-blowing, which you turn out to be singularly bad at. You do get a couple of misshapen vases out of the exercise, as well as an equal number of nasty burns, but also manage to start a fire that nearly burns your house down. From this you conclude that day drinking and furnace work don't mix, and the choice of which to give priority to is an easy one.

If you're honest, though, there are other aspects of this life which have begung to wear a little thin. When you moved out here in early May, the weather was gorgeous, but by late June it's gotten hotter than hell. The nights are sticky and humid, and your house was built long before air conditioning was even a fanciful dream. These fucking crickets are loud enough to wake the dead and, frankly, some of these trees and plants, you're not sure which ones, but some of them smell almost exactly like cum. You're not that good at rolling cigarettes, either - somehow they always peter out, leaving a wad of damp paper and tobacco dangling from your mouth. And this damn chair is hurting your back.

As time goes on, you begin to notice things that are...amiss around your property. Items get moved out of place, windows are left open where you know they were closed. Late at night you hear noises, feel the shadow of some unseen presence in your peripheral vision, and you catch more fleeting glimpses of something moving among the trees.

One night, while sitting on your porch and staring into space, you see a figure gliding out of the woods. Its two glowing red eyes seem to hover above the ground; you can tell they're eyes because they blink. You jump to your feet, grabbing the back of the chair for balance, and steady yourself to run for the door.  You try keep your eyes locked on the thing while you grope for the shotgun you left leaning against the jamb. With trembling hands you open the breech and realize it's not loaded, and where are the shells? Did you even buy new shells since you ran out last week plugging pumpkins and paint cans? You clutch the gun to your chest, inching your way cautiously back onto the porch.

When you get back out there it's standing in the clear, a tall, dark, sloping form tinged with silver moonlight. The eyes, which seem suspended in the middle of what look like great, folded black wings, blink at you inquisitively. You know you ought to be pointing the gun, even though it's not loaded, but you are transfixed. 

From somewhere inside the walking shadow, you hear a voice, a cold and coppery whisper, like the sound of metal shavings being drawn up to a magnet. 

"Hey. Got a cigarette?" 

Whatever it is moves closer to the porch, out of the moonlight, crossing under the shadow of the eaves. Somehow it sheds the darkness around it like a cape; the dark humps fall away, and beneath their folds a pair of luminous, bifurcated wings unfurls. The creature stands like a man, but has a segmented, almost insectile body covered in fine silver fur, with a smooth oval head framing those bulbous red eyes. In shock, you collapse back into the chair.  The thing glides up to lean on the porch railing, propping itself on two elbows, long thin arms the color of cold-rolled steel. 

With wide eyes, you reach for your tobacco pouch and the sheaf of papers, and nervously roll a smoke. It stares at you while it puts the cigarette in what you guess is its mouth. When it talks, the voice seems to arrive in your ears without having crossed any intervening space, like a transceiver switching on inside your brain. The face is totally without expression, and yet, under the light of its expectant gaze, you realize what it wants. You fumble around for your zippo and spark the end of the cigarette. The creature takes a long drag, and sighs, exhaling blue smoke into the humid night air.

"Thanks, man," it says. "Holy shit. I haven't had a smoke in forever!" 

I think I know you, you stammer.  You're...are you the mothman?

After a moment, the creature responds, "Is that what I look like to you? A moth man?"

I mean, sort of, you say. But, well, there are stories - people talk about seeing something like you. Usually before something very bad happens. Kind of a harbinger of doom.

"Oh yeah," the mothman says. "That's me all right. Fuck, that's actually pretty depressing. I'll be straight with you, I don't really remember what I look like, but I never thought of myself as a 'moth-man' before." The mothman's tone forms a grimace at that name, in lieu of any change in facial expression. "Moths are like...all drab and shit." The mothman extends two glimmering arms and inspects them. "I don't really think that's me, to be honest."

Luna months are colorful, you offer. Pretty, even.

"Huh? What's that?" asks the mothman. Since you have wifi now, you can pull out your phone and look up a picture. You hold up the screen, and the mothman leans forward to peer at it with those giant, globular, compound rubies. 

"Oh yeah," says the mothman, "I remember about these guys. They die after like, a week. They can't even eat, they don't have a digestive system when they come out of the cocoon. Then they get a couple days to fuck like crazy before they wither up and die. Anyway, definitely not me either." When the mothman says "fuck" you involuntarily glance down at - well, let's just say that the mothman doesn't seem to have human genetalia. You aren't sure if the mothman has a gender at all - I mean people always say moth "man," don't they? You wonder obliquely if you fucked up this batch of moonshine somehow, and are in the middle of one incredibly vivid hallucination as a prelude to death by accidental poisoning. You had thought bad moonshine just made people go blind. This is some whole other shit.

"Mind if I cop a squat there?" asks the mothman. "I’ve been standing in those trees for quite a while."

You motion apologetically towards the porch steps, and pour the mothman a glass of your moonshine, which he - for now it causes the least syntactic dissonance just to think of the mothman as a 'he' - gratefully accepts. "Dayum! That's some real firewater you got there, bubba."

Thanks, you reply. I uh, made it myself.

"Really? Pretty good stuff. Keep it coming, please. I don't exactly get to party that often." Your disbelief crumbling minute by minute, an idea strikes you. 

Hey, um, do you want to see what you look like? you ask, holding up your phone. Because I could  -

The mothman laughs. "No, that shit won't work, believe me. Might break your phone though. I wouldn't even try it."

Oh, you say, nevermind then. You hesitate a moment before asking him: So, you really do foretell disasters?

"Yeah," he replies, "that's pretty much my deal. Haven't been around here in a while, since the whole Silver Bridge thing. Bad vibes, I dunno."

But is that why you came back? you press. Something else is going to happen? All of a sudden you feel very isolated, out here in the woods.

"No, no," he says, "I try to steer clear of that as best I can. It's a real drag. If I get the notion about a place these days I just try to make my exit, but you know, it doesn't always work out. I mean, pick a random direction and I'll probably end up walking towards some fuckin' dam that's about to burst, or an airplane that's going to eat a bird, blow itself up, and crash on a church. Guess I'm just drawn to it. Like a - "

He looks at you with that deadpan stare. You take out your lighter, flick it open, and wave the little flame around. Then you both crack up. 

You pass the rest of the evening that way, killing the rest of the moonshine, just chatting about nothing, until the sun begins to rise over the hills. 

"Welp, guess I better be on my way," he says.

Oh, you say. Is it, like, the daylight?

"No," he says, "I'm not a fuckin' vampire, man! I just have manners. Plus people don't seem to see me so well during the day."

Oh yeah? you ask.

"I have to say, this is kind of unique," he says, motioning to the space between you. "Most of the time when I try to talk to people they can't understand what I'm saying, even if they can see me and don't just immediately lose their minds. But it's really rare that I can actually have a conversation. I gotta warn you though, it's not gonna last. If I come back here tomorrow you probably won't even notice me. I don't know, that's just how it works."

Well, that sucks, you say. I mean, I guess it was nice to meet you?

"Yeah, same." the mothman says. "Think I can get one more ciggy for the road?"

You fall asleep just as the dawn is cresting the holler, wondering if you're going to wake up thinking about what a really fucked up dream you just had. You sleep until late afternoon, and when you open your eyes and sit up in bed, there he is, just kind of hovering outside your bedroom window. You bunch the covers up around your chest and give a tentative wave. The mothman waves back.

The two of you spend the next couple days hanging out together, drinking, smoking, shooting the shit, sometimes quite literally: the mothman lounging on your back lawn in a chair, whiskey in hand, cheering as you plink paint cans with a hunting rifle. At night you cruise around the back country roads, tossing out empties and hollering into the woods.

"I don't really know what I'm doing anymore," he confides in you one night, lost on some dark road with the forest canopy hanging close around your cab. "It gets old, you know, wandering from place to place, just knowing all this bad shit. It's very destructive to my ability to chart a positive path forward for myself." The mothman leans back into the seat cushion, crumpling his wings, and puts his feet up on the dash as he cracks open a new can.

You start to tell him you can identify, feeling lost and all, pointless. I mean, shit, how you came to be out here in the first place - but then he sort of leans forward, like he sees something out there in the dark. "Whoa whoa whoa," he says. "We shouldn't be on this road. Can you turn off?"

Um, you say, taking your foot off the gas and letting the truck coast in neutral. I don't even know where we are. I mean there's not even really a shoulder or anything...

"Shit," he says. "OK, just - go slow, up here. You're gonna come to an intersection in about a quarter mile, past this next curve. Just ease on up to it."

You creep up to the crossroads, and immediately you hear the mothman suck some air sharply through his - teeth? His mandibles? You're not really sure, but the emotion is unmistakable. "Hold up," he says, and you tap the brakes, coming to a stop.

From the opposite side of the junction, a pair of headlights appears. A car pulls up, slows, then begins to accelerate through the intersection. You can see the driver's face in the glow cast by the single yellow traffic light, which blinks as it sways idly in the cool night breeze. Out of nowhere, a dump truck comes screaming around a blind curve to your left. The driver doesn't have time to react as the truck smashes into her car, instantly caving in one whole side like a divot driven into a beer can. The car flips over twice as the dump truck pushes it down the road before skidding to a halt. You hear the big engine choke with an angry stutter, see the brake lights winking, and then whoever is at the wheel guns it into gear and speeds off down the road into the night. An eerie quiet returns.

"Fuck," says the mothman. "What'd I tell you."

You set the parking brake and reach for the door handle. "It's no use," the mothman warns. But you have to get out anyway. 

You walk, dreamlike, through a fine mist made from wisps of smoke and pulverized aluminum. A strange smell is burnt into the air, hot carbon, like chaff from an angle grinder. The two of you stand over the wreck. The car rests where it rolled, at the edge of the streetlamp's small, dim circle of light.  One half is crumpled, folded in on itself; the driver, a young woman, lies halfway out of the side window, her left arm pinned under the chassis. Her neck is very obviously broken. Her face is blank, nonchalant, as if caught in the middle of an unrelated thought. The mothman shakes his head, then drifts back over to your truck.

You try to call 911 but there's no reception out here. It takes another fifteen minutes of driving before you finally find your way to the bridge, which spans the little creek surrounding the town. Just on the opposite side is the little not-really-all-night convenience store, which has a payphone in the parking lot. After hanging up, you walk back to join the mothman, who is sitting on the edge of the railing, smoking a cigarette.

Has it always been like this? you ask. The mothman shakes his head.

"I don't know," he says, staring out at the water. "I don't even remember, you know, coming into being. All I know is it just gets worse, every year it's worse. At least there used to be escape, to a certain extent. You can do things to distance yourself. Although to some degree I get it no matter what, even if I'm in the middle of the woods. Anytime there's a natural disaster, or like an epidemic of disease is fucking...ordained for a particular area, I get that knowledge. So it's either, just, always be leaving, or stay around and watch the show."

Can't you stop it, though? I mean, that's probably a dumb question, I'm sure you thought of that, right, but why can't you? 

"I told you, most people don't even see me. When I can talk to someone at all they never seem to get what I'm saying. It doesn't come out right, somehow. And even if it did, so what? Like I'm going to turn some random plumber into an oracle? What's that person gonna do when I tell them a building is going to collapse? Call the cops? They'll probably just arrest the poor fucker, and the damn building will come down anyway. It's no use. I mean, what the fuck was I supposed to do back there? Fly out the window and fuckin goose that woman into hitting a tree instead? Maybe I should have told you to block the intersection and let that truck nail the two of us, huh? What do you think about that? You wanna take that bullet?"

All right, man, you say. Calm down. The mothman flicks his butt into the creek, then hangs his head in his hands, cradling it between spindly silver fingers.

"I tried, you know, I really tried back in Point Pleasant. I wanted to tell those people so fuckin' bad, but I couldn't make it stick." 

That...sucks, you say. I mean that sounds like a hard life. He shrugs. 

"I used to get by okay just sticking to the margins, you know, just try to be someplace where there isn't enough population for a massive catastrophe to begin with. But these days, if you want to find people in small groups you gotta really go someplace that nobody wants to be. I mean I'm not trying to hang out in, like, Alaska, or some fuckin' fracking encampment." He shudders. "That's bad news. You don't even want to know what kinds of horrific industrial accidents I've had to dream up being anywhere near a place like that. No thank you."

In the distance, you hear sirens winding their way through the wooded roads. The mothman sighs. "Can we get the fuck out of here, please?" he asks.

The road to your farm is on the other side of the town, so you drive slowly through the empty streets, looking out at the still little village. You wonder how long it's been exactly like this - not exactly, maybe, but it seems like a place where the passage of years might run slow, like molasses, congealed, so that things can grow without hurry and die in their own sweet time. 

On your way out of town you pass by a formerly vacant lot that has been turned, almost overnight it seems, into a big chain pharmacy. You stop the truck outside the entrance, eyeing it with dismay. You can see red, white and blue "GRAND OPENING" decorations hanging from the closed-up doors, bright colors cast dim in the streetlamp's cold light.

Damn, you say. Look at that. Can't stay hid forever, huh?

The mothman looks at the pharmacy, then turns back to you.

"I've got a really bad idea," he says.

A few minutes later you're backing the truck up to the rear entrance. You crane your head around to see out the back window. The double doors open and the mothman emerges from the store.

How the hell did you get in there? you ask.

"I'm a supernatural being of mystery," the mothman replies. "I can do whatever the fuck I want. Get out here and help me carry this shit, huh?"

You nearly stumble over a bumper block in the dark, swaying unsteadily with a half-dozen crates of Sudafed balanced precariously in your arms. Glancing up, you catch sight of a pair of grey electronic boxes bolted to the lintel, black lenses staring down at you like corpse eyes.

Shit, you say. We forgot about the security cameras.

"Don't worry about that," says the mothman, tossing a box of miscellaneous chemical products into the cab. "Trust me. I can stand in front of one of those things all day waving at it, it won't see shit." You heave your haul into the bed of the pickup and jump in the cab, whipping the truck around and speeding out of the parking lot.

The second-floor bathroom has a claw-foot porcelain bathtub, which you never use because the water pressure upstairs is terrible, so you reallocate that space for the purpose of "peanut butter" production. You let the internet be your guide, heedless of any digital word-scrapers that may be sifting search results for people who look up things like "how to make amphetamine DIY." A couple days and a whole lot of noxious fumes later, you have produced a substantial amount of thick, brown, psychoactive batter. Its purity may be questionable, but its potency is certainly appreciable.

Smoking bathtub meth on your porch isn’t all that more stimulating an activity than getting stone drunk on your porch, but it does leave you feeling considerably more...stimulated. The bad vibes of a couple nights ago seem to evaporate, now that you possess a huge surplus of directionless energy. Plus the mothman's here. You try to work with what’s around you, which is mostly land, and trees: splitting logs, running laps around the property, yelling in ecstasy at the full, golden moon. Your house becomes remarkably clean in an impressively short span of time. The mothman buzzes over the fields, swan-diving and pulling up at the last minute, pushing off from the ground with his hands and hovering over you upside-down, arms akimbo, laughing like a maniac.

Before long, though, even this aimless release of supernatural vigor begins to lose its luster. What you’re really missing, you find, is human contact. You never intended to totally secede from the world, you just wanted to keep it at arm’s length. Hiding out in the woods and getting high all the time is not much of a life, even if you did get to meet the mothman. It's time to rejoin society, at least to some extent. Become once again part of something greater. The city was overkill, but a small town, maybe that you can handle. (Another thing is, you're starting to run out of money.) Maybe this will even be good for the both of you. The mothman clearly enjoys the pleasures of life and the company of others. He's just forgotten that pain is a part of it all, which has to be compensated for with relationships, community, and connections. And the people around here seem nice! I mean it's going to be a bit of a weird introduction, but right now, you feel like anything is possible.

You decide to take a ride into town and maybe stop by the grocer's for lunch. There's a pub across the street from the town square's little municipal park, and you've been meaning to check it out ever since you moved here. You go to pick up your keys, but they aren't on the table by the front door. Also missing, apparently, is your truck.

For a few seconds, you stand on the porch in total confusion. You obviously drove your truck back home the last time you were in town. It should be right there on the lawn. Slowly, the only remaining possibility dawns on you. Fuck. Did the mothman just steal your ride? 

Unwilling to be deterred, you throw a couple bottles of water into a backpack, intending to walk into town. It'll take you the better part of the day, but fuck it, right? Maybe you'll make a new friend and get a ride back. You grab the last little bag of sticky PB - remembering, grimly, that the rest of that batch is in the truck - and pick up the little glass pipe you made, shoving it in your pocket. (Despite the rough start, your glass blowing is actually coming along these days.)

By the time you make it into town, it's already dark out, and your spirits have soured considerably. You're hot, tired, and your boots are chafing something fierce. Night has descended bringing no real relief from the daytime temperature; the hot, sun-scorched afternoon has settled into a muggy, syrupy dusk full of bugs and mosquitoes. You're sweating so much that wiping your forehead with the hem of your shirt just kind of spreads the moisture around. You've spent the past hour or two imagining some very harsh conversations between yourself and that damned mothman.

Finally, you make it to the center of town. The pub's little neon sign flickers at you invitingly. At this point you'd like nothing more than to sit the fuck down somewhere, especially somewhere with beer. Just then, you hear an engine revving behind you. Turning around, you spot a familiar-looking red truck rounding the bend. It screeches to a halt right in front of you, the rear axle facing the water tower that stands next to the park. The window rolls down and the fucking mothman leans his head out.

What's good, my man!" Your hands involuntarily curl into fists.

You fucking asshole, you say. I had to walk here! Why'd you take my truck?

"Sorry, sorry," he says, but no real remorse comes through in that cold, metallic voice. "You were all passed out and I was just bored. I haven't driven a car in...man, I don't even remember the last time! So fucking fun. Hop in and I'll give you a lift back to the house."

Hell no, you say. Get out of my truck. The mothman laughs.

"Aw, don't be such a sourpuss. Here, let me - hang on." His attention goes momentarily to the gearshift, which is obviously giving him difficulty. "I'm gonna - how do you put this thing in park?"

There's no park, you idiot! It's a stick shift! 

"Wait, wait I got it. Um. No, it's - wait, hang on." You can see him furiously jerking the shifter back and forth, accompanied by an awful scraping, grinding noise.

Fucking asshole! you yell. You're gonna strip my transmission! You start moving towards the truck.

"Fine!" he shouts, kicking the door open and leaping out of the cab. "You fuckin' do it then!" The patch of road where the truck is sitting rests on a slight incline. Evidently, the mothman managed to put the truck in neutral, because you can see it start to slowly roll backwards towards the entrance to the park.

You sprint for the cab, hoisting yourself into the seat, trying to get control of the truck before it backs into the fence. You glance up and see the mothman standing there, giving you the finger. A white hot rage takes over your reflexes. You half-stand so you can lean fully out of the window and yell "FUCK YOU!" as loud as you can, stomping the brake with your foot.  A small group of people have begun to file out of the pub, looking very perplexed. 

As your foot jams down on the pedal, you hear the surprising sound of the engine roaring to life, and are jerked back into the seat by the even more jarring sensation of your truck rocketing backwards. Evidently the mothman left the truck in reverse, and in your haste, from this awkward half-standing position, you just stood on the gas.

You see the townsfolk gaping and pointing as the truck surges back. They don't seem to be pointing at you, though, but rather, towards the pissed-off, silvery figure bathed in moonlight, red eyes aflame, wings unfurled wide and menacing. They only notice you when your truck goes over the fence and crashes right into the water tower. You're slammed against the steering wheel, knocking the wind out of you, and the next thing you hear is a terrific, guttural groan as the old wooden beams holding the tower up begin to splinter.

The people across the road scream and start to run away from the bar as the old tower tips over, robbed of one very necessary pillar of support. More people are just making their way outside to see what all the commotion is about when the giant metal bolus bearing the town's name smashes down right on top of the bar, caving in the roof and disgorging its contents into the street. A massive wave of water sweeps down the block, smashing in windows and demolishing yards. In the rubble of the ruined bar you can see the remains of at least a few people splayed motionless amidst the debris.

Dazed, you climb out of the cab and walk around to the front of the truck. You survey the destruction in total shock, then turn to the mothman, who in turn looks at you.

"Fuck," he says, then vanishes into the sky.

You turn back to your truck, the rear end buckled and wrapped around the shorn pillar. You look over at the bar, and the houses behind it, now visible through shards of wood and metal. You see the nice old woman from the pastry counter run screaming out of her front door towards the ruins of a dog kennel. Lights in windows begin to come on. More shouts and screams fill the air. The water flooding the street laps at your shoes. In the distance, you can hear sirens.

Without much thought, and in just a few short steps, you've walked to the bridge and thrown yourself into the river.

Unfortunately, you had forgotten that it's more of a creek than a river, not really deep or fast enough to effectively drown yourself in. So you just sort of float there, going insane, letting the current take you downstream as the cries and pandemonium from the town fade into the distance.

Eventually, the creek peters out in a small pond. You drag yourself through the muck onto the shore. You have no idea where you are, but you just start walking into the woods. You walk all night. Wherever you are, you're not really there - the last few minutes of that scene in the town keep replaying in your head. I killed them, you keep saying. Fuck. I fucking killed those people!

Around the break of day you walk down a hill into a clearing, and are amazed to find yourself back at your farm. Standing on the lawn in front of your house is the mothman. You want to yell, charge him, something, but by this point, all of your anger is a knife pointing inwards. You can't stop remembering jamming your foot on that pedal. Why didn't you check the gears? Why the fuck didn't you set the parking brake?

What the fuck, you say, trying to be loud, but the sound passes your lips as a whisper. The mothman looks at you forlornly, in his blank, expressionless way. Tell me how you didn't see that coming!

"Fuck, man," he says, with a shrug. "I don't know. I - I was really fuckin' high."

You walk past him, collapsing into your chair on the porch. You can tell he's still there but his voice is starting to fade out, bleeding into the last few night sounds ready to give way to the dawn, like a radio station on the frayed edge of its range.

He's mumbling some kind of apology, saying something about taking off. Go somewhere else. You just sit there, letting your head drop into your hands, until he finally fades away for good. Fuck. You really, truly have no idea what you are going to do. 

Some part of you is aware that you should drink some water, take a shower, maybe lie down. Some part of you knows that your truck is still wrecked back there, and you're going to get a visit about that pretty soon. But almost none of you cares. You don't feel thirsty. You don't feel scared. You just feel sad, and even more so, restless. You want to walk ten thousand miles until you leave this memory behind. You feel like you want to cry but you can't. Your boots feel heavy, but inside your clothes, your body begins to feel light, transparent, like you're no longer made of anything real. You just sit there, head in your hands, hunched over on the porch, as a thin pair of luminous wings sprouts silently from your back, and the darkness that is not night gathers in lapping pools around your feet.

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