Random Rantings of Jordan Drew

The back deck was rather large for the size of the house. She called it her ‘party deck’ in jest, strictly because it was so large. It stretched from one end of the house to the other, and was almost as wide. There was a built in bench that lined both sides, and she’d bought an iron table complete with umbrella so she could watch the sunset over the mountains… something she’d done maybe twice in the year and half she’d lived there. She stood at the railing, smoking her stress-rette, as she referred to them, just looking at her back yard, although yard wasn’t really an accurate term. She lived in the Appalachians. Her ‘yard’ was huge pine trees, bushes and undergrowth that were so interconnected you couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. It was a mess, but it was the most perfect mess, and now that it was fall and the leaves were changing colors, it was the most awesome mess a person could ever hope to see in a lifetime.

The wind began to pick up slightly, forcing the leaves into a swaying unchoreographed dance as the temperature dropped quickly with the setting sun. She watched as the taller trees cast shadows on the brush beneath it and wished she’d had a talent for painting or photography, anything that would capture this moment. Something moved slightly off to the left of the trees, back behind some of the shorter bushes, and she smiled thinking of all the deer and other animals that her woods housed. She looked closer, trying to see if maybe she could catch a glimpse of which animal it could be, but the woods were quite a bit darker than her deck due to the thickness of the trees. The cloud covering wasn’t helping much either. The woods just seemed so much darker all of a sudden. The trees and bushes became secondary to the darker negative space around them. All that negative space can make a mind play tricks on itself, and the shadows suddenly seemed to move – slowly, but move nonetheless. She stared in shock as the shadow began to take shape, but it wasn’t the shape of an animal. It was human. A loud beeping noise sounded from somewhere to her right, and then a crow cawed. She forced herself to look away from the imaginary shadow to find the source of the beep. There was nothing that could have made that noise anywhere around her that she saw in her precursory glance, only a matching set of large black birds sitting on the ledge of her deck. She quickly moved to look back at the shadow. It had grown in size and was now creeping along the ground towards her. She couldn’t stop the scream that escaped her lips. She ran towards the sliding glass door across the deck, still trying to keep an eye on the movement of the shadow. As she reached to door, she grabbed the handle to rip it open. The birds flew away, making a loud fuss, and her heart rate reached what she knew had to be dangerous. She turned towards her house and screamed again at an unexpected face looking back at her from inside, and her world went dark as her legs collapsed beneath her.