The sun let the last of its feeble rays slowly bleed out and soak the world in muted red.

Only once color had dissolved into nothingness did something stir. In the murk, a woman emerged from the wood.

She traversed the meadow that lay before her, drawn to that lonely house, a distant glow in an otherwise inky land.

Eventually, she waded across her penultimate obstacle, the familiar river meandering through the darkness, a hushed trickle the sole sign of its existence.

At the house, all seemed unchanged. The windows, to her chagrin, remained boarded up from the inside.

But that night, the back door had finally been left unlocked.

 

His eyes were bloodshot when she found him. The man hardly noticed as she entered the room, his gaze stuck on a photograph he held.

A bespectacled woman with freckles streaking between dimpled cheeks smiled from within the black and white picture, frozen in a moment that was never coming back. She soon began to quiver in his grasp.

He set the frame face-down on the sheets beside him.

“Game over, huh?” he sighed. “You win.”

He’d grown up hearing them, tales that were somehow more than hearsay. People weren’t supposed to linger near the forest past sundown, for there it dwelled, then it preyed, a parasitic spirit that cowered in burrows while the sun shone.

She’d gone out for some air. It was a pastime of hers, roaming the woods. Perhaps she never would’ve gotten lost had he accompanied her that fateful afternoon.

Nights were longer now, the memories taunting.

He willed his mind off the thought, digging into his pocket and producing from it both cigarette and lighter. Bringing them to his lips, he took a drag.

“You mustn’t feel much through those decaying cadavers of yours, the temporary vessels that sustain you… Know what’s funny?” he said flatly, pausing to gander at the thing.

He instantly regretted doing so.

There she stood, his once-wife, a remnant of her former self.

Vacant pupils, glazed over, rested below drooping eyelids. They were still, as she was. A pallid complexion jarred with clumpy black locks, the ensemble enrobed in a sickly sheen.

The man turned the bedside lamp off and looked away, rendering her but a shadow in his peripheral vision.

He knew the thing took pleasure seeing him this way, that making him wait was its way of toying with him.

He exhaled once more, staring into the void waiting outside. “Well… This room is bathed in gasoline.”

He felt the entity start to shift, but wasn’t granting it any time.

“Her name was Tessa,” he whispered softly, letting the burning cigarette fall to the floorboards.

 

While flames engulfed the wooden structure of what once was a home, the river ran.

It ran until nothing remained.

As the first trace of light began seeping into a new sky, two misshapen figures surfaced from the water.

Hurriedly, they made their way towards the trees, hobbling, hand in hand as one.