The child
blinked her large eyes. Not green now. Not
glowing.
He’d been cursed on every hunt. Others landed fat
deer,
numerous quail, fat rabbits and even the old men came
upon a lost
buffalo bull. He came home with a thin halfstarved
squirrel, if
luck favored him at all.
His wife
cowered in the snow; her silent sobs made her
shoulders
shake. Her fault. How else could this have
happened?
She never wanted the others in their home. The
mid-wife had
never come to see them, and his wife never
went into
the village center. She always stayed out here, away
from
everyone else.
He knew what
he had to do. He couldn’t lose what little
he had. When
he started towards the circle of lodges and the
bright
central fire of the meeting circle, his wife scrambled to
her feet and
started to follow him, making noises that echoed
in his head,
but didn’t form words. She became an annoying
insect swarm
of sound, and he smacked that sound away,
taking step
after step through the blowing snow. He’d leave
the child.
He couldn’t kill it. No, that would only make
whatever
evil had spawned it angrier. If he took his wife and
his
belongings and left, the blizzard would hide them, no one
would even
miss them if they ever realized they were there to
start with.
And the evil
grasped in his hand would be someone else’s
problem.
1 comment:
Thanks so much for introducing me to this book through some intriguing excerpt.
debby236 at gmail dot com
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