The Wanting Omen

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. At least, that was his initial perception. The distant quiver of seductive amber could be nothing but flame, tiny, inviting, and conniving.

“...the fuck?”

Tanner finished his business and shook it off absent mindedly, tucking it back through his pajama pant fly, the last dribble of course ending up dampening himself anyways. He didn’t know what time it was outside his tent, but he knew that he often got up to go to the bathroom around four and five AM, so that was his guess. Early enough for the black star scape to emanate an enigmatic navy violet, casting faint light through the firs and pines, just enough warmth to give him hope that he might be imagining the fiery flicker further away from the trail.

Though as his concentration awakened his mind to the point of irritating sharpness, he realized that ignoring his curiosity and going back to bed would never be an option anymore, and Tanner crunched his way through the dewy grass as far as his slippers could safely carry him, getting a good, closer look at the cabin. The structure itself was a clump of shadows, all of them squat and dilapidated. The glimmer of grass dew sparkled across his vision about two feet high. The few standing beams of the collapsed stable had their paint scratched off in the middle, presumably by antlers. The glass of the leaning homestead was missing in several places, with the sparsely remaining crystalline shards reflecting a fractured image of darting fairy fire.

The candle burned ahead, transparent as the wind, elusive as its maker.

Tanner slunk back, his armpits sweaty and mind racing.

"Who the hell is in there?

Probably just a squatter.

Isn’t that illegal?

Yes, but that might not be my business.

What if it’s unattended and sets fire to that dried up old house, then to the forest?

Now that, ultimately, might very well be my business."

He fumbled with the loud zipper, piercing the silent mystery, and ducked back into the shadowy tent. A lovely shrouded shape slept peacefully in the bed roll, shuffling only slightly at the sound of her man. Tanner sat down beside her, discreetly illuminating the bulb of an electric lamp. It filled the space with an eerie artificial glow, as if it were bottled up moonlight. Under the iridescent tent canvas, Tanner dressed himself in an awkward shuffle. His dark, freckled fiancée balled up away from the noise, her frenzy of hair trailing in electric disobedience.

After lacing up his leather Timberlands, he uncovered his Ruger carbine and fumbled four rounds up into its tube magazine contemplatively. He didn’t know what he was expecting, but a yard length rifle seems to be a good persuasion tool, for both animals and men. At least, the reasonable kind. Tanner leaned over to kiss his fiancée, but decided against it. He didn’t want to wake her to any concern, especially with his gun in hand.

“Be back in a bit,” he whispered instead, before once again facing the small hours of the morning.

“Who, who?....Whooo?” queried a great horned owl. Tanner had the same question posted in his mind and on his trigger finger.

---

Amanda woke in a frenzy to the piercing echo of a gunshot. She lurched upwards, instantly aware, immediately perceptive. Her pupils reflected light like a hellcat and her ears pricked up like a fawn’s. Not a noise followed. Not even birds could be heard fleeing the noise overhead - they were either not concerned, or had left the scene long ago in prior anticipation. Only the tenebrous breeze accompanied her panting.

“...Tanner?!” she whispered in exasperation, realizing he, and his blasted gun, were absent.

“Shit!”

She perched alongside the arched canvas and held her ear up to the world beyond the veil. Again, silence. No shouts, no calls, no footsteps. Only the irritating disturbances of her body rubbing up against the harsh synthetic material made a damned sound. Maybe that was a good thing, she thought, no signs of struggle. Though her caution did not wane.

Amanda held her breath and unzipped the tent at what felt like an inch a minute. She poked her head out to the early morning, scanning the hostile tree line with her midnight eyes. With her head now fully out of the flap, she called, now more angry than frightened:

“Tanner?! The hell are you doing?!” she paused, gauging the meaning of the nonexistent response.

“...fucker…I swear to god if you’re hunting this early, without the thought to wake me up, and like, tell me….Jesus Christ….”

Amanda panted and pulled herself up onto her feet. She stood in the camp barefoot with only pajama pants and a spaghetti strap shirt on, being too pissed to care about anyone seeing her. Who would anyway? She was in the middle of dumbfuck nowhere. Thanks again, asshole.

Her hair tousled about back and forth to the swift darts of her head. She almost looked over it once or twice in the growing light, but eventually her eyes locked onto flame. A small dancing jag of gradient fire off between the trees, showering the derelict property away in the clearing with dribbles of an alluring glow.

She almost called his name again, but thought against it. Instead, shivering at the touch of the wet wilderness, she quietly poised herself for a better view. The structure met her skeptical stare with a yawning dread. After a minute or two, Amanda took a step forward into the tree line and peeked behind a conifer, the rugged bark scraping her bare skin through her camisole.

Then, accompanied with a punctual adrenaline supply, Amanda’s attention tunneled around life within the fractured cabin. The darkness shifted position and a shape animated into motion, ambling past the window and moving for the rotted entrance. The candlelight followed its gait. Her words returned when she was certain it was a man.

“Tanner! What the hell were you doing in there? You worried me, you son of a bitch!”

The man stepped into the umbra of the waxing morning, and Amanda’s spine tensed with a trembling tingle that ushered in nausea.

A dozen dead eyes observed her terror. Boiled black feet carried a bloodied torso forward, and hands of stripped animal bone reached to fondle her face. Amanda couldn’t even resist the approach. As it beckoned, the curious candlelight shone about its being. She croaked an incomprehensible question, unable to retreat. The being undulated and trembled, the candle fire expanding to a crying sun that revealed all.

Its eyes gained color and the once intangible became infallible. Before Amanda stood history, as the darting features of the anomaly gracefully contorted into a yawning maw of bubbling blood. In it stood the masses which a promise of justice failed, and suffering revealed itself to be inclusive. Men, women, children, hung numb in shackles made of bullet casings. Amanda’s bare consciousness saw it all: the vast trading and taking of human life - slaves on crimson tall ships, tribes in snowy graves. There were the long dead women in prisons of silence, the recently dead men in pits they dug themselves. Millions of bones in tattered uniforms, the swirling ashes of souls demonized as unfit, lost skulls in scorched jungles and shadows of children burned into radioactive concrete. To what end? She couldn’t even process a response of reason.

As quickly as it began, she was brought back to the witless woods, staggering in her vomit and everything else.

“Who are you?” was all that her words could manifest.

“The wanting omen. I show the compromise that your ancestors have chosen. The compromise of prosperity, of reason, of faithlessness. See what this nascent wanting brings!”

“....are you the devil?” she sobbed weakly.

“No. I speak for the devil, and even it is afraid.”

Suddenly Amanda understood Tanner’s fate, and she longed for his rifle.

“What do I do?” she mumbled through cold tears. “What can I do?”

“Little.” it paused, as if thinking. “Little.”

After a while of silence, Amanda simply laughed a hoarse plea. She sobbed, and laughed at the same time, her body rising and falling. Weakly. Erratically. The omen reciprocated, and their cacophony of laughter turned chaotic. Along the gradual rising of the sun, the bellowing continued, and even the stoic animals of Appalachia joined the ruse, till the forest was alive with morbid indifference. When the exhaustion was too much to bear, Amanda fell on her back and slept instantly, her whole body terribly dreamy, not even waking as the spiders and beetles crawled across her open eyes in the towering grass. Candlelight shimmered over her glassy body, until it eventually faded into the mourning day.