Page 85 of Hunted By Fae

Canned is all I know, now.

Once, I was vegan. A good one, too. Not healthy, never healthy, but I didn’t cheat—not ever.

Now, it’s either eat what I can get, or starve.

I’m sick of it all.

Fruit slices, peeled tomatoes, baby carrots, greyed asparagus, corned beef—yack—and once, dog food. That wasn’t canned. It was kibble, the hard stuff. Still didn’t go down easy.

The remnants of that memory shudder my shoulders, or maybe that’s the chill in the wind.

The tarp flaps around me.

I don’t even think about it, I just start digging through my backpack until I find my cigs, instinct and boredom motivating me.

I smoke. One, two, three.

The nicotine is starting to stir nausea through me, so I chuck the third cigarette at the snow and watch the red ember die, sizzle out.

I’m not a smoker, exactly. I mean, obviously I am, but not quite. It used to be an alcohol-exclusive thing.

Now, it’s the boredom that gets me.

That’s something I never would have considered about the end of days.

The fucking boredom.

The absolute silence of nothing to do.

Such little light to read for more than a few moments before headaches start to settle in; hiding in whispers and subdued conversation; goodbye vinyl collection, I will forever yearn for you; no more insect pinning, no more collecting butterflies and grasshoppers and crickets, taxidermizing them, then framing their preserved beauty; and no more television.

Oh god, how I miss Real Housewives. Beverly Hills, not the other ones.

But that’s all gone.

The overstimulation was suddenly cut down to nothingness.

Even before civilisation, society as we knew it, tribes of people lived wild, harsh lives. And even they fought boredom in creating the written word, or drawing and painting on stone walls, carving weapons, signing songs, making flutes and drums, telling stories and dancing.

We don’t have that.

We must be quiet.

All the time, quiet.

If we aren’t…

Well, it could another group that comes. Wants what we have. Wants to use us for their own boredom cure. Or it’s a stray. Or maybe at the wrong moment, a unit is marching upon us to burn us down, and we are in their section; all of a sudden they know exactly where we are, where to flush us out from.

They like that.

The fight, the chase, the thrill.

I’ve seen it.

At the edge of a section, through binoculars, some miles out of San Francisco, a couple of blocks away from where their flames travelled.

The faint ebb of that memory is knocking at my mind’s door, and maybe I don’t want to let it in.