Before We Die Alone by Ike Hamill

Author:Ike Hamill [Hamill, Ike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: www.ikehamill.com
Published: 2016-08-13T23:00:00+00:00

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My breath burns in my throat as I wait.

I can see my mark—I’ve marked where my trail leads up to my fire. I’m not going to go that direction until I’ve decided that the bugs are definitely not following.

After ten minutes, I’m sure.

I take a drink from the stream and then trudge back to my campsite.

My embers are out. There are no other kids to help me this time, so I walk around alone, collecting rocks to make a proper fire pit. If I’m going to spend time making another fire, I want to be sure I have a proper place to contain it. And I don’t want to try to sleep all night without a fire now that I know what kind of things lurk in these woods. To be fair, I wasn’t hurt by the bug. Those teeth, though. Teeth like that don’t belong to an herbivore. They’re meant to bite and tear at flesh. I would rather that the flesh not be mine.

I collect rocks and firewood. I go back to the fruit tree and eat more fruit.

My visitor was right—the fruit did make me shit my brains out. Still, it’s all I have.

By the time darkness falls, I have the knife in my hands at all times. I jump at every sound. It’s impossible to believe that we used to love sleeping outside as kids. It’s an impossibly lonely and unprotected feeling.

There’s a hole in the trunk of one of the trees. It’s deep enough to appear black inside. I keep thinking that it would be a good place for an owl to live. The idea must be leftover from some cartoon I saw as a kid. I didn’t think much of the hole until the sun went down. Now, lit by my fire, the hole seems to dance at its edges. Something is going to come out of that hole, I’m sure of it.

I imagine Adam’s voice.

“How are you going to get out of this place?” Adam asks. Coming from the hole, his voice has more of an echo.

“I don’t know,” I say. I put another piece of rotting wood onto my fire. Having a big fire seemed like a good idea at sunset. It would ward off animals. Now, I’m starting to think that it might just draw in animals. It’s like a big sign that points to my location. But if fire were such a terrible idea, the chimp probably would have warned me. Probably.

“The bears got you here, right? Don’t you think you might need a bear to get away?” Adam asks.

“They want to lock me up. Or worse. I can’t let the bears get ahold of me again.”

“You can’t learn their technology if you’re hiding out here in the woods.”

“The bears around here don’t seem to have much technology. I haven’t seen an airplane or a helicopter. The cars and trucks all look like they’re from the fifties. Back in town I didn’t see a TV, a computer, or even a cell phone.

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