Jeremiah was constructing a fence of sapling branches when he first saw the boy from the woods. He had been weaving the thin branches in and out, hunched over to create tension. Sometimes they would spring free and strike his face, and he would fall back, clutching his head.
The fence was to be a pigpen for the homestead, and he was to be the keeper of the swine. Towards the end of the day’s work, he noticed a thin, naked boy sitting at an awkward angle on top of his own legs, partly obscured by the tall grass. His hair was long and unkempt, and the soles of his feet were blackened with soil.
It seemed to Jeremiah that the boy was feral, though he did not know how. He acknowledged the boy only once, by spitting loudly to his side as he finished up his labor. The boy appeared to be watching Jeremiah himself rather than the work. No words were exchanged, and Jeremiah wondered whether the boy even knew any.
The second encounter between them occurred several months later. The pigpen had been completed, and the fattened hogs waddled about, snorting. Jeremiah scattered handfuls of his own rationed oats, and the pigs jumped and squealed as they rushed to snuffle them up.
He was smiling at the noises they made when he felt the boy from the woods watching him, closer this time, and hunched beneath a bush. The boy sniffed the air, as though he too wished to be fed.
Jeremiah considered offering him oats from his hand to catch the boy. As he watched him, the boy’s sniffing intensified, then the boy tilted his face towards the sky and made a low, moaning sound.
The third encounter occurred over a year later, shortly after Jeremiah had hung a pig for slaughter. The beast dangled by its legs from the tree furthest from the homestead, thrashing and screaming. Jeremiah had struggled to hoist it high enough to set the blood bucket beneath.
The boy from the woods appeared, no bigger than before, only dirtier. He watched the hanging hog with widened black eyes, then met Jeremiah’s gaze. Jeremiah took his knife and plunged it into the pig’s throat, striking the aorta. A thick, syrupy stream of blood spilled wide of the bucket at first, then narrowed and began to trickle into it.
The boy began to bark like a dog. He continued, louder and louder, with brief pauses in which he stared vacantly through Jeremiah.
Jeremiah lunged to startle the boy, who immediately turned and barreled away on all fours. His pale skin flashed as he sank into the foliage beyond the homestead.
Jeremiah stood and stared at the gently swaying conifers, framed against the white sky. Birds scattered from the treetops, cawing.
-- Oliver Land is an English writer whose work has appeared in Hobart Pulp, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Expat Press, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, Burial Magazine, Spectra Poets and elsewhere. He is the author of the novella-in-flash Dissolve and the poetry collection White Light Fades.
