The smell hits me first—a thick, sweet-rotten vapour that coats the back of my throat. It's the smell of a gutpile left to bloat in high summer, but underneath it… is my mother's perfume. Snow drifts, white and gentle, a cruel joke against the violent splash of crimson melting through it. The sound is what freezes me. A wet, rhythmic gump… gump… gump, like a heart beating outside a body. Horror pins my feet to the earth. My blood isn't ice; it's lead. There they are. My father. My mother. My sister. Their mouths are not black holes—they are working, grinding, smiling with red-stained teeth as they chew. Big Mouth and his mother are on their knees, not like predators, but like devotees at a sacrament. They tear into the dead dog with a reverence that is worse than hunger. Organs, slick and blue, are not just eaten; they are shared, passed between them with a tender familiarity that makes my soul curdle. They stop. As one, their heads turn. Their eyes are not empty. They are full—full of knowing, a welcome. An invitation. They rise. They are coming. They are coming for me. THEY ARE COMING FOR ME— I jerk awake, a silent scream sandpapering my throat. The sheets are a damp noose. For one… two… three heartbeats, the sweet-rotten stench of dream-death lingers in the cold air of my room. It was just a dream. The words are a hollow chant. A lie. My hands are trembling. A faint, coppery taste—like blood—is on my tongue. I scrub my mouth until it burns, but the phantom taste remains. The water from the basin is a shock, a brief, painful anchor to reality. I move by rote: silent, efficient, a ghost performing the rituals of the living. A pantomime of normalcy for an audience of one. But the dream doesn't fade. It plays on a loop behind my eyes, each time more vivid, more real than the cold room around me. The gump, gump, gump syncs with the frantic hammering of my heart. "Is it possible?" The whisper is a traitor's breath in the silent room. It doesn't wake my mother. In the other bed, my sister sleeps on, her breathing deep and untroubled. She slept through the village's panic; she sleeps through my internal collapse. They both still breathe like the world is ordinary. They can still believe that. I am starting to believe something else entirely. My notebook remains untouched. A small, pathetic victory. I've become a curator of secrets, an archivist of my own rotting mind. This page is its latest exhibit. A rough sketch stares back, lines dug into the paper with a frantic hand. It's a pathetic attempt to cage the madness—the splayed ribs, the garland of intestines, the precise punctures that spoke of a terrible, intelligent cruelty. It's useless. The paper doesn't smell. It doesn't capture the grammar of the violence. It was a sentence written in a language of pure hate, and I am only now learning how to read it. Beneath it, I've scrawled the priest's words like an accusation: "Monster?" Monster? A creature of hate and hunger. A thing that devours. But whose hunger are we talking about? The boy who burned a village? The mob that raped and murdered his parents? Or the familiar faces in my dream, sharing a bloody communion in the snow? Or. Is it the hunger in me?The cold, empty need to dissect, to understand, to prove that I am above it all? What is that need if not a form of consumption? We don't hunt monsters because they exist. We invent them because we need to. We need a mirror to hold up so we can pretend the face looking back isn't our own. Maybe a monster is just a truth that's been starved of lies long enough to show its teeth. And maybe I am the one who is starving. —a line of ink, pressed too hard, has torn through the paper, a black scar across the page— No. This is their poison. Their circular, self-consuming logic designed to make everyone guilty. To make everyone small. I am not small. I am not guilty. I am awake. According to the pathetic scripture of this place, that makes me the monster. So be it. If a monster is what they need, a monster is what I will become. Not a beast from the forest. I will become the mirror. I will hold up their truth until they are forced to see it. I will tear down every pretty lie, every performance of virtue, every mask of faith until nothing is left but the raw, pulsing, ugly nerve of what they truly are. I will not kill them with claws. I will gut them with the truth. And when they stand amidst the wreckage of their own illusions, they will finally understand. The monster was never in the woods. It was the face of the person standing next to them. It was the face they saw in the mirror every day. And I will be the one who made them see it. The cold is sharper now. My breath freezes in a pale ribbon before me, and my legs grow heavy with each step into the dawn. I slip out of the house without a sound—not for drama, but because silence is the only honest thing left. I tell myself I am going to find the truth. As I move toward the clearing, the world insists on its own stupid beauty: a thin, gray light; the faint, brittle song of birds; snow slipping from branches like tired secrets. The village dogs are curled in their favoured, stubborn places. Otherwise, there is nothing—no animal, no human. Only the hush. But before I reach the spot, I see him: a man moving toward the temple. A blurred shape at this distance—a thick beard, a slow, purposeful gait. He is nothing remarkable. He looks neither hurried nor broken. Just a shadow with intent. I ignore him. My focus is the truth. And as I thought—the body is gone. Only the marks remain, staining the snow like a Rorschach test of violence. This place now feels like my dream: awful, absurd, and illogical. A page torn from the same cursed book. If the body had been here, my brain already paints the scene: a skull crushed by a rock — blunt, efficient, ugly. It's easy to imagine a strong, healthy man doing it. A fist or a foot. A heavy swing. But where is the stone? My eyes search the rim of the clearing for the perfect rock, the one that did the work, and find nothing. The killer took it. Of course he took it. Claw marks — that was the impossible part. I squat, scanning bark, the roots, the low branches. The trees are clean. No gouges. No drag lines. Someone has gone through this place with a careful hand and wiped it neat. Someone who knows what to hide. And then the snow: the soft traitor that swallows footprints, erases the small grammar of movement. It ruins everything. I pull my notebook from my pocket. There is nothing useful to write — only a tiny smear of dried blood crusted under the snow's lip. A punctuation mark. A lie. I press my thumb to it and taste copper; the cold steals the sensation before I can think of why that should matter. Then a voice rips the morning like a blade. A scream from the forest — sharp and animal and raw enough to wake the dead. It's one of the temple men. He is stumbling out of the trees, sweating as if he has run a fever for days, his face a map of panic. His mouth moves without sense. He points, a trembling finger aimed at the deeper woods. Near villagers clutch at doors and shawls. A man half-dressed bolts his way into the line and says, "We go deeper." The small group forms — five of us: a woman wrapped in wool, three men with sleep still in their eyes, and me. We move as if pulled by a string. As we go in, the air thickens. The trees lean, roots knotting under the snow like fingers. My heart is traitorous; it hammers for no good reason. Circles inside the ribs. Terror, yes — but curiosity too, that hungry animal that lights when others run. What sight could have torn that priest's throat open into a howl? What could make a man sweat like he has seen the end of something alive? We step deeper, the forest closing around our small, foolish convoy. I watch the others' faces and try to read the shape of their fear. My mouth is dry. My brain keeps drafting images: rock, claws, ritual. None fit. And all the while a quieter thought moves behind them like a shadow: someone cleared the evidence on purpose. Someone wanted us to find nothing — or to find only the thing they wanted us to find. I keep walking, because the question is louder than the cold. What was it that made his scream so terrible? Everyone stops. Sound collapses into a single cold absence. My head goes empty, like a room whose lights someone has finally pulled. My breath freezes into a thin, stupid ribbon; my eyes go wider than they should. There—swinging slow from a low branch, a head. A crow kneads at it, and for a moment the bird's beak catches where an eye ought to be and pulls. The movement is obscene and precise; my stomach goes all wrong. It's the father of Big Mouth. My father's companion. Then I see more—too many—faces hung like trophies in the trees. No. No. No. The word scrapes in my throat uselessly. My body begins to tremble as if someone has started it up and forgotten to stop it. My eyes seek the one face that matters and find him at the rim of the small valley that cleaves the forest in two. Time does something crooked: the sky seems to tilt, the river's silver goes the wrong color. The world is a smear of darkening light and the air tastes like rust and old promises. Every step toward him unspools a memory—his rough palm scooping me up when I cried, the candy he'd hide in his pocket, the way he'd let me ride on his back until I fell asleep. His smile, thin and permanent in my head, arrives late and wrong. My legs fold under the weight of the place. Sight narrows. Smell dies. Sound leaks out. There he is—my father—hanging like something the forest put on display. He is dead. The syllables fracture and scatter inside me until only one thing leaves the cage of my chest. "Papa!"
