Short Hallowe'en Story: Murder

There are torches and blue lights in the woods tonight. And two men. Tall men. Official men. It is November cold and rain has begun to run down the black trees that tilted and hissed with the wind, until a stillness flowed through everything, leaving only those quiet, graveside tears to patter from the branches.

A gentle, coffee-mug warm hand passes across a face to close the eyes, one last time. All this night and the last, the reflections of the shadows of branches and all the stars of the universe have moved with the moon across those eyes, hours before, the morning dew had glistened on them like sadness, but no more now, and never again.

On a crisp, January night, no longer in anyone’s memory, a child dances in the snow, her body whirling and stamping and falling, her mother laughing from the window.

The world turns

A young woman lies on a blanket, on a hillside, on a bed of flowers, under the hot sun, hot blood and mischief in her veins.

More officials, more lights; white hoods, blue gloves, snatched from their beds to scratch and bob for twigs, like spring birds in happier months.

The body of a woman. No life now, all poured into the ground and the grass with no mother to see and no flowers for a bed, as her heart slowed and stopped and the blood thickened and cooled in her veins, in the hard, November dark.

Eventually the wood is emptied of strangeness. The sun is showing above the trees; silver shadows, new to the world stretch across the green. Death melts away like fairies, the dream of the dawn mist, gone in the light. All is new and the innocence of man (myth) is born for the first time, all over again. Another day, another chance to do no evil.

                                    AA