BADBLOOD

Dothan Meeks' feet fell through heavy sharp snow as he walked the woods. Dawn sun lit the drifts white and shadows cast blue about the ground. Black birds fluttered in mass through sky washed white and settled and startled again. Snow came still from the sky. Snow crusted to Dothan's hands and beard and he felt cold in his knees and shoulders. Dothan long since lost feeling in his feet and hands. Dothan knew this wasn't good. He kept going. Feet crunched heavy through ice capped snow, silence about him heavy and overbearing in his ears. Trees bare and black like wrought iron amongst snow bluewhite and rolling. Snow fell wetly and heavy about his coat, now salted and icing and stiffening. Dothan wiped his face with his arm and snow fell cold and stinging into his eyes. He thought of the turkey hanging there outside Owalis' cabin, its brown purple feet bound with twine and suspended there above the snow, blood dotting snow below in black pinpricks like coalchips. He touched the bird, there frozen through, its head hard and as horn, face and beak fused one and lifeless. A thing, he thought.

Owalis had already cleaned him a whitetail. When Dothan kicked the door to, he saw him standing shocked hands stained purple as if soaked weeklong in wine. His face drawn and heavy and white, blue eyes screaming in cabin's dark. He'd taken a fir inside and tied tiny white candles to its boughs. They were lit. Flames quivered in the draft. Owalis screamed. If you're gone do it, do it you sonofabitch. Spit shot from his mouth as he screamed and his drool rolled and shook down his chin as he shivered there knowing death had come.

Your own brother, Owalis said. And Dothan echoed him and spat and hooked his finger about both trigger and the twin barrels boomed and there Owalis blown back as if by great gust to the wall set there smiling his chest now open, weeping blood. An on Chrimus even, Owalis said, blood bright red and then so red as if to be black there gurgling about his mouth and then pouring from his mouth. You aint gone make it back, Owalis creaked. Not in this storm you sonofabitch. He groaned. Dothan broke the gun and tossed the hulls and loaded it again and snapped it shut. Even if I do make it I reckon I weren't but wishin to be dead soon enough, Dothan said. Owalis spat blood and smiled and then Dothan fired again. The cabin walls shook and the fir fell to, lit candles catching croakersack and lighting up yellow and then red and rolling about the walls and up into the ceiling's beams and then consuming the cabin wholly.

He listened to the cabin burn behind him a ways. Wood creaking and shattering in fire and crows there calling in fury. He felt the flames at his back and turned only once to see it there burnt down to quarter of its size, now just a slack heap of flame with shape constantly fluxed thereabout, falling into nothing. A hare leapt here and there and was gone. He held Owalis' face in his head and thought about him. He killed him. He killed his brother. You aint gone make it back, he thought. He thought he might not. Never felt cold such as this. Crows called still.

Dothan made it. He saw Chuckles and Apple Baby standing out front of the cabin looking his way, waving their arms as if to stop. They were screaming. Dothan smiled through the ice mask of his face and felt the cold within him hardening as if he'd freeze through fused in ice, lifeless, a thing, he thought.