New Short Fiction Coming

My newest short fiction piece is in the works. Below is the beginning to "Dusty's Trail," which is supposed to act as a bit of a teaser for you, though it actually may have the opposite effect.

Dusty's Trail

"Up ahead is the trail Dusty told me about. I don’t think I ever would have seen it without his help. When you’re not looking for it, it blends in with the rest of the woods, but looking at it straight on it’s obvious. The new and old oaks rise and bend over it making the whole entrance look like a tall cathedral window so Dusty calls it Cathedral Trail. It’s religious for him, and it’s becoming that way for me.

I’ve been here to this field a hundred times. It never gets old because the seasons are always changing. Sometimes my feet drag the green grass and leave a light slug trail that’s visible when the sun is out. Other times the leaves crunch under my shoes and the sound of the rustle echoes for what feels like a thousand miles. I hate making noise out here. I feel like I’m disturbing all of nature, like laughing in church.

The air is a bit cleaner right here and it’s always windy. I have a theory about that. The trees trap this field on every side. The only breaks are the path I took to get here and the trail Dusty told me about. Sometimes it feels like protection and sometimes it feels like a lynching, but either way I think the breeze finds its way here because the trees open up like they do and allow the wind to fall to the ground pretty hard. I don’t really know that for truth, but I feel like it makes sense. But, I don’t guess nature makes a lot of sense. Like the trees – they’re here, I always see them, but for most of the year they’re dead, and I walk on the drippings of their death making all kinds of embarrassing noise.

There’s no time to be studying this place right now. I’ll be back soon enough. For now, I’ve got to find that stone-slab table he was talking about. Once I get to the trail it won’t be so loud and I think I can be to the table in about twenty minutes.

That table, according to him, either was or is a horrible place. Dusty said that a local Satan worshipping group used it to sacrifice their animals and do all their little rituals. Maybe I’m sadistic for wanting to go see it, but the thought of something like that being in these very woods is just haunting enough to be tempting.

I’ve never admitted this kind of thing to anyone, but I’m a little freakish like that. I love death and funerals and crime scenes. When I go to a place where I know someone has died, it feels holy, like a portal. All the seconds of someone’s life were counting down to this very place and maybe they, the seconds themselves, even knew it, watching sadly, or not, this human or animal do everything for the very last time. Maybe I am the only person in my life that doesn’t know when and where I’ll die, or how."