Stranger Realms by Jarred Martin

Author:Jarred Martin [Martin, Jarred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-10-24T04:30:00+00:00

It Speaks to Me

In the evenings the valley was stained crimson. The sky hung low over the ridged mountains to the North opening a bleeding wound that dripped down and tinted the dust. Dark rows of agave sprang sharp and alien from the harsh soil. They were the only reprieve from the constant red. Somewhere a fox, the twin of the scarlet dawn, ran by with the limp form of a rabbit dangling from its jaws.

Jacinto Sosa watched the fox with half-lidded eyes. Its muzzle was caked in mud made of blood and earth, and the gray of its chest was stained a deep red. The fox clocked him with its black unknowable stare and disappeared in the crimson haze. Jacinto spat into the dust and felt his pocket for the half stub of cigarillo he'd been saving. He'd like to kill the fox, he thought, for no other reason than to see what a shotgun blast would do to it.

He poured a shallow glass of mescal and drank and lit the cigarillo, staring at where the fox had passed by. Drops of blood from the rabbit turned black and disappeared into the dirt. He thought about the fox lying on its side, its tongue lolling over its white teeth as it struggled to breathe with a bloody hole in its chest. It died in his mind and there was no accompanying thought, only that image and the vague wish that he'd been holding a gun when it passed by. He kept the fox in the prison of his mind, a place where its life was over because he decided it should be so.

The sky grew black and he pitched the cigar stub away, following the arc of its burning coal through the darkness. It hit the ground in a burst of sparks.

Suddenly the sky over him was split in two by a low streak of blinding white, so bright it left a sizzling imprint when Sosa closed his eyes. The streak dissolved to dull orange and finally gray-black as whatever had been trailing it alighted far off in the agave. There was a blunt concussion that made Sosa think of a penny dropped to the bottom of a plastic cup of water, followed by a single flash of dim light before the night resumed its quiet. There was a burnt smell in the air, like he'd been too close to lightning when it struck, as if the atmosphere had been scorched.

He stood and looked out over the field to where the thing had fallen, but there was only darkness. He had the instinct to go off looking for it, but to do so he would have to go out into the agave, whose leaves were tipped with sharp spines that would have him bleeding from a thousand cuts before he'd gone ten yards. He continued watching, but could only see so far before the horizon curled back like a wave cresting in lightlessness. There was agave, he could see, dimly, in rows of pointed leaves.

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