The Becoming #1 by Heather Knox

Author:Heather Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABDO
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

NIGHTTIME BEHIND A DONUT SHOP AND SOME seedy dive bar. The alley smells like dough and the stink of garbage baked to the bottom of a dumpster by summer. A few backs of heads bob along in the distance towards a car. Three or four or two or eight, the uncertainty one feels in a hall of mirrors. As they start the engine of a black car, dark liquid—the kind of inky dark that makes the shadows themselves—drips into what first resembles a pool of shadow underneath where the engine roars to life, then coagulates and morphs into the shape of a large, dark bird, as if the bird itself melts from underneath the body of the vehicle, a bird cast of molten metal and shadow. I blink and it lands on the dumpster a few feet away.

I turn to go to my car and someone stands in front of the dumpster, cloaked in shadow. They speak but the black bird starts cawing so I cannot hear. I see the glimmer of metal in their hand. It drips light. Everything drips, but drips as if time has slowed, each drop peeling off the source and hovering just too long before plinking below.

I speak but not words, just voice. Zeke’s voice.

The figure steps forward but shadow seems to follow and obscure their features—no, not obscure: the figure is shadow, either born of it or built of it. One moment they tower over me, the next I could crouch to be at their height. How shadows grow and shrink as the sun moves across the sky. The metal in their hand seems almost alive, flickering as if reflecting phantom candlelight. The figure raises the metal which is now wood. More speaking, drowned out by the bird, but with the cadence of a prayer.

My eyes widen as I step outside myself. Zeke falls to his knees, gasping, before slumping to the ground, a hole in his chest where his heart, in life, once beat. The figure erupts into hundreds of black birds, all cawing, cawing, and the cawing is my screaming. The moon, now red, resembles a heart. My screams settle into silence.

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