#nyfwf17

Model: Julia Nobis

He woke slowly and his eyes adjusted to the dark. She perched above him like a gargoyle or some midnight vision, unmoving and silent only her eyes looking him over. She leaned in to him and placed her cheek against his and as she spoke her lips brushed against his ear. “Tomorrow they will have already forgotten you.” Pressure against his gut, and then pain. The knife slid slowly into his liver and bile mixed with blood, stained his shirt, her blouse, the sheets, and the floorboards.

Everyone knows it takes a strong yank to skin a rabbit, but it’s the gutting and cleaning that takes real work. Those small muscular connection that keep on the skin are weak things en masse creating some modicum of resistance, but the viscera is slick with blood and fluid resisting grip and purchase. To eat in the mountains is to teach your hands to dig and your nails to cut, to tear, to pierce, and destroy.

Pallid forms skittered across the frost-bitten dirt, the crunching beneath them like bones underfoot to some horrid behemoth. This frozen patch unremarkable from such a vantage as a man might have but down between the stones and under the snow there was a cornucopia of horrors; blackened necrotic flesh left uneaten in their unmarked graves, hair and fingernails equally dark growing into the ground as though the corpses had metamorphosed to trees which would, in an era, grow to some bucolic copse of flesh-coated oaks.

The thing most terrifying about children, especially in a group, is that they think they will never die and thus have nothing to fear.