Jonathan McCloud
Stories (3/0)
ALDEN THE CURSED
The wind bit at his flesh, each gust tearing the rest of his rags from a nearly naked body. It shoved icicles into his tight goose bumped pores. Shards of ice crystallized in the innards of his jungled, thickened beard, his brown nose swelled to the stain of a blueberry, his cracked lips a perfect match. The man looked to the sky, a blackened blue. His eyes urged to leak, yet the reservoir was emptied, his body was no more or less than a raisin left in orbit of the hottest sun. The stars mocked him, the moon being the prime instigator. He let out a wail that clawed his throat. He wanted to ram his bare first into the layers of white below, they’d lost feeling some time ago, when was irrelevant. His toes too had been conquered a while back, when his walk became a crawl. The man shuffled his body in the blanket of snow. Another wail stained the air, he could feel the crumbled ribs stabbing at his internal organs, for a moment he’d thought a shard had javelined his heart. Then, silence once more.
By Jonathan McCloudabout a year ago in Fiction
The Search
The Search I burst through the door in a feverish craze, my German-shepherd-husky-mixed companion champion—champ for short—trotting behind me. Where is it? Those three words pinballed around my developing cranium. I was exhausted, deflated, and dangerously teetering between a faulty seesaw of a great flood of tears and a 9.5 magnitude temper tantrum. I nearly stumbled down several concrete steps that placed me in the backyard. I scanned the Amazonian terrain: The sea of leafy blades stretching for miles until it reached a blockade at another chain-linked fence and the ancient, wise tree whose roots held it in place for millennia. Its age was said to have stretched back to times when even my ancestors ceased to exist--I suspected it was only a mere fable, but grandmother always sprinkled in sand specs of truth in her sayings.
By Jonathan McCloudabout a year ago in Families