Gravity

In the dark of an unremarkable Wednesday night with an absent moon the sound of several car doors were heard to shut at the same moment when the sounds of a plastic garbage receptacle's wheels stopped on the curb and the protagonist moved back up the trek just traveled with the weight of his week's refuse pulling him along. Considering the weight, his thoughts were somewhere between living greener and not caring, musings really about the pointlessness of the debate. As he approached the honeysuckle thicket's shadow he was overwhelmed with the thought, "When the earth is done with us as a species, we'll just be gone." Part irony, part self reassurance - when the mother doesn't want us we will just be out. His thoughts were neither arrogant nor demanding, just passing through when it happened.

Something took his left leg and threw it into his right leg. Something touched his shoulder. The wind gusted for a minute. Looking over his shoulder as he leaned into the trunk of a parked car he yelled out, "Who are you?" His voice was so demanding and purposeful even the crickets stopped. Silence was a constant refrain for several seconds as he repositioned himself and looked back to see his attacker. It wasn't human, he knew that when it stopped. It wasn't an animal that was truly hungry either for the same reason.

He turned further to face the attacker and confront death. "What do you want?" he said to the night, "I'm not into fucking games."

From the shadow of the honeysuckle thicket he caught a glimpse of a pair of red eyes. The hair on his neck raised as his shoulders began to go cold. The eyes were more than three feet off the ground, but were they real?

After a few minutes of staring and questions running through his mind unsaid he turned to walk back into the door he had left to begin this saga, but discovered that gravity had affected his left knee at the time the red eyes first struck: walking was painful; his knee had hit both the concrete and the thing in the honeysuckle shadow. It would be a lifetime of hurt.