It was bright when he left. The sun burning the leaves to neon in the morning air. He had packed a bag. An old beater, broken blue and white at the edges where the threads began to wear. Water and a peanut butter sandwich and a few different calibers of shotgun shells. Birdshot and slugs. Turkey season was not for another two weeks and deer season was long past. Yet he had not worked, and he had a hunger. His trailer lay in a depression, a hollow flush against the hill and hidden from the gravel road. He scrambled up a foot path grown thick with branching ivy and came out on the road. His useless truck parked in a pull out next to the path. The quick scramble had wakened him, his blood warming in his veins and his breath coming fast. He began to walk the gravel road, taking an easy pace and holding his hand up to the few neighbors traveling this early morning. The mullein stalks lining the road flared with their yellow crown of flowers, blazing like swung torches in the slight breeze. Dew shined in the tall grass, blades of nephrite sharp and lethal. Home to castaway ticks with their barbed mouths of infection. The road smoked in a haze of burning mist and flung gravel, the dust rising and settling like fog when a car passed. His shotgun banged his side as he walked. Matte black, a cheap box store model. He had pawned the gun which he had kept all his life, walnut stocked with an action worn smooth. This new gun carried with a grudging hatred. He continued to follow the gravel road until it intersected with a logging path. Its long dirt tail snaking off the mountain. Jumping the ditch between the road and fording a patch of nettle. A dark acid brood. His arms held high to avoid their sting. The logging road rutted out but wide and open to the sun. He began to hike up towards the tree line, grasshoppers jumping out in front of him as he walked. The dirt road lined with chicory and wild geranium, their open petals shining and twirling in the breeze. The air filled with their hot flowered scent and his throat clogged with pollen. Spitting a thick yellow stream. The ferns in the roadside blowing like turkey tails, shaking back and forth as if pulled on a string. Cresting the top of the hill, he enters the shadowed woods. The sound is deafening. This was the year of the cicada, seventeen years had passed for them to crawl from their chthonic womb and hang legion in the understory. Blaring a dirge hypnotic, disorienting him in this blurred fluorescence. The birds chattering like chimpanzees and the woods themselves seeming to chant some obscure rite. Initiating him into its mysteries. Branching off the logging road is an old path, not much larger than a game trail. He takes it and it begins to switch back upward before descending in a slight depression. The trail gutting out in a small ravine in which a creek flowed. The creek stones darkened with the sluicing water and dotted with the delicate white flesh of dogwood petals where the wind had blown them down. They lay as if spread by a childs hand, skipping to the sweet music of the creek and emptying their baskets of posies to mask the plague scent of mud. The water lapping the stones and carrying these traces of finery floating in the dark water, eddying and swirling in the shadows of branches like the white satin of a coffin buried in the blackness of a grave. He stops to kneel and palm the cool water over his head. From here, the trail rises. He begins to hike the switchback, his back bent at the waist and his soles digging hard into the soil. He passes seeps in the mountainside where fugitive light sparkles on the wet sheen of the rock. Sweating and breathing hard, he continues his journey up the dark mountain.

He found himself in a sort of nave where the mountain laurel grew with its twisted bones entwined and the land ahead in shadow. The suns light exterminated in the massed leaves and an early dusk fallen. A catholic wilderness where the wind whispered in the snaking branches hymns of doom and the earth slept in churchly darkness. As he walked, he passed areas where the land had fallen sheer and extreme and ancient stones held the trail sovereign over the open air. He continued to walk through this enshadowed coolness and in his walking came upon the full skeleton of a deer. Where pestilence or predation had felled this creature of God. The bones covered in dirt and the algae green of decay, replete with the silent holiness of a saints bones laid in state beneath the dampness of a cathedral. The dark green of the laurel leaves glossy as stained glass and his hair static with fear. Ghosts prowled here and the air ripe with the rank breath of the cemetery. A festering rot of molding leaves and black soil. This cloister rare in these lands so ravaged by weather. Years before, a hurricane had come and the steep forests had been shorn cleanly from the earth. The land still carried scars. Trees ripped from the soil and mangled in huge drifts. Whole families swept away and buried in these deadfall tombs. In the eaves he heard them speaking, calling names lost and muffled in the wind. The roots of the trees reaching out like arthritic fingers knotted and pleading mercy. The sun beat the earth and the downed trees dried and bleached to perfect tinder. Soon after the fires came. They screamed in the canopy with ember jaws popping. Everywhere the evidence of their passing. The ridged and grey bark of the trees blackened with char where elder flames had marked them. Burnt tailings and bits of coal where fire had staked its claim. A land besieged and apocalyptic, a charnel house where the burnt bones of animals and husks of trees lie in silence under the fired sky. The clouds above tinged with the blood of sun and its stuttering light. This reverie ended. On the trail he is brought up short. A snake had gathered itself out of the gloom of the rhododendrons and dragged itself slowly across the packed dirt. Its body coiling. Uncoiling. Atavistic avatar of mans true fear. Moving in the paltry sun with its mitered scales black and glistening as scorched glass. Tongue forked in evil wantings. A satans trident tasting the terror on the air. Seeking the furred death waiting in the hidden warrens of some small beating heart. He watched it pass with eyes of stone. Veering off the trail he shuffles through the dense brush. Climbing upwards, his ragged breathing coming loud into his ears and blotting out all other sound. He stops halfway up a small ridge and eases himself into a thick brace of laurel. Overlooking the path and a stand of browse. The woods quieted. The birds have ceased to call and the cicadas have stopped their droning. The only sound the slight wind at his face and his pulsing blood. He makes his home in patience, the silence enveloping him and setting his senses on edge. He sits and he waits. Watching the light play on the fine threads of a spider web. Ants moving in the leaf bracken. A slight rain comes pattering the forest floor and soon he is wet. The sun grows old in the sky and the day darkens. Eternity seems to live here. Nothing comes and nothing. The day grows older still and he grows restless. And then, a deer. It is a small thing, not quite a fawn but not much older. It comes to tease the browse, to eat its fill. Unaware of the death hidden in the brush. A carnivorous nature seizes him. He slowly lifts his gun and places the bead below the shoulder blade. He fires and the sound brutalizes the air. The deer drops where it stands and he slides down the ridge after it. Already his knife out. The deers eyes beginning to glaze. Reaching the deer he opens the belly with the thin tip of his blade. A knowledge terrible and occult buried in the warm body. He pulls out the entrails and lays them on the ground and he takes out the heart and bites and swallows the life therein. Bitter, this war of mourning.

The trail narrow. He labors heavily under the weight of the deer, shoulders aching with the strain. The deers neck lolling. Its dead legs folded over his back, he carries the animal down. Hoping to make the logging road before full night. The sun plummeting, and the land pocked in darkness. The light tannin colored, spectral and hazy in the dying cinder of the sun. Fog drifts off the distant hills like spires of smoke and he is covered in blood and wet to his bones. On the trail ahead, a figure comes walking. A warden, possibly, a rare thing to see hikers on this ridge. A hunter maybe, scouting future spots. This too unlikely. The land falls away from the side of the trail in a deep cliff and there is nowhere for him to hide. Refusing to turn back, he grits his teeth and they grind in his skull. He continues. The figure closer. He cannot make out much in the meagre light. The figure closer now and he can see that the man wears no uniform. Clothed in ragged flannel and outsized work boots and carrying a shotgun much like his own. Relief floods him. His arms tingling, he begins to shift the deer to one shoulder. Smiling easily now and raising his free hand in hello. The clouds pass the sun and the last of the days light drains out. Framing the strangers face in a perfect halo. The mans mouth torn by a mirrored smile and seeming the very glyph of death. His brows knot tightly. Confused, he does not understand why the stranger is raising his gun. The stranger fires, the sound rolling through the hills like thunder. He never hears it. Silence. Silence the predators natural home.

Sean’s zine Manifesto is available directly from us, as are distribution copies of his poetry book Hecatombs.