Memories are made of this
When wandering along a path with flickering starlight above, in which the man on the moon has left me, nothing
scares me anymore. Not the creaking old branches shifting in the nearby foliage, not the silently watching followers, not the shades who dance in the corner of your eye. Being alone in the dark is nowhere as frightening as
before, when a flickering streetlight illuminates the silhouettes of those who hunted me many moons ago...
My breath is ragged from a quick burst of what I hope was quiet running. The hunters that slinkin the shadows must
be getting even closer. I can hear growling. I need to keep moving. I need somewhere to hide but to my left though
the younger elms and small shrubbery stands a fence. Tall, imposing like the walls of Babylon, hewn with what I
hope is merely barbed wire nothing more sinister. Trapped and hunted, I am, like a fox. I must hide but the potholed
earth, ravaged by previous hunts can’t hide me. Where! Where! Where! Twisting, searching. The trees! Scrabbling under the canopy of what must be an olive tree because the fallen olives squelch beneath my bare feet. The
gnarled trunk had many footholds for climbing. Perched in a nest of branches, leaves and some twigs, I “quickly”
slow my breath and the sound of breaking sticks and the guttural speech of the hunters filled my ears.
“Close...” “another...” “found...” a garbled voice reached my ears. Someone must have been caught, poor soul,
who knows what the hunters will do? An eternity must have passed waiting in that tree. Then a vague shape entered the vicinity, shadow-like, inconsistent except for the clinical, sweeping beam of light. Which was searching
the potholed ground to the left of the tree I hide in before swooping over to “my” tree. The hunter continues forward
scanning for hiders like me. As it passes below me my breath hitches and a putrid smell wafts into my nasal cavity.
I flinch and tried to remain silent, whilst praying that the hunter would leave quickly. Eventually after the foul smelling
hunter left I explosively exhaled, my lungs burning, screaming for air. Hidden in the tree hunched over and constantly watching, I was the ever vigilant gargoyle. Taking another scan for any nearby hunters by their lights. Not
finding any I let my guard slip down.
Suddenly my eyes were searing and there was a loud shout of,‘SPOTLIGHT!’
I was caught! Scout camps always were a thrill.
Nathan Welch