/lit/ - Literature

(1/2)
They walked along the trail together, father and son, until the sun hung low and red in the western sky and the evening was lavender and the faint breath of the night was cool. The peepers and crickets and cicadas sang around them. The trail was crude, lined with weeds and prickers and branches and bushes. The man walked in front with a machete, hacking at the growth in front of him, and the boy followed, a machete in his hand but not put to use.
The boy was called Josiah and he was skinny and tall for his teenage years. His matted brown hair fell in twisted curls and tufts to his shoulders. His face was like a waning moon; it was thin and pale despite the sun beating down on it for hours.
The man was taller than the boy and wider, his broad muscles stretching the old cotton of his tight shirt. He had a scraggly beard that he liked to braid and his hair was short and black. His face was square and red.
They were both sweaty and dirty and they looked at the ground as they walked.
“Hey Dad?” Josiah called to the dim, grainy outline of a man in front of him.
Dad always seemed to ruminate on words, letting them hang in the air for a time long enough to be slightly uncomfortable. But eventually he would speak.
“Yeah?” he said quickly and unremarkably. He coughed.
Songs of the forest hung in the humid air.
“When do you think we’re gonna be finished up here?” Josiah asked softly.
Dad grunted. “Well, we’re tryna go all the way down the floodplain to the crick, so I’d say we’re bout halfway.”
And so they whacked with their machetes and thorns slashed their skin and nettle nipped their exposed ankle and Josiah wished Dad had died instead of Mom. The sun had set and the murky blue waters of the night sky could just barely be seen above the cover of the trees. The forest was black.
“Hey, uh, I think I’m gonna go back up to the house,” Josiah said.
The seconds passed and each one mounted unseen pressure. He had to explain himself to the darkness, bargain with it.
“It’s just getting a little dark, ya know?” he tried again.
Then the silence came again, the screams of the night, and it was choking him.
“Okay,” Dad said. “I thought we agreed we were gonna finish tonight, but okay.”
“Okay,” Josiah said and turned around and ran up the hill through the bastard trail in the black of night.