The next feature composition from The Shalom College Literary Competition: Literary Wonders, is the winner from the year 11-12 short story; Lexi B.

The Wind Will Be My Hands

He doesn't know what he expected, venturing into the woods within the witching hours in nothing except an old flannel and jeans, but he also didn’t know what he expected when she’d shown up at his door with sad eyes and a night dress. Now he's cold, confused, and frankly, a little pissed off.

If he knew, probably would’ve brought more with him than a coat of indignation and a perpetual squint. They’ve worn off now, leaving him all the more open to the seething frost and the realisation that he’s been bested by the world.

"I found it like this. I just-" Her tone is rushed, like she might run out of time. Raspy whispers that always seem to accompany talks in the night. Scared of getting caught by the moon, or something. "I don't know. I feel bad."

Orange, white and black were all tinged yellow, soaking up the light of her old torch as she swings it to make her point. It’s the only thing in this forest with any colour. Something inside him wants to reach out and run its fingers through fur.

That thought quelled when the wind numbing his own calms. He can hear it now; wet and cracked wheezes, clawing their way out.

The fox was just lying there, on the grass. If it wasn’t for the echoing gurgles pounding in his ears and the forced rise of an erratic ribbed chest, he might’ve mistaken it as sleeping.

"Damn. What happened to it?"

"I don't know. It looks fine enough." No bullets, no bites, no broken bones or bear traps. A better man would think it boring. "Maybe a snake got ‘im. Or some bad berries."

"Damn." He rubs his eyes. Thinks about pushing them so far back he could pretend to be gone.

"Yeah, damn."

When he could the frost sink down to his chest, he sighed, grabbing his own light and turning the fox’s head with an unlaced boot. Teeth exposed, tongue out, it didn’t even flinch. Sicker than he thought. He’s never kicked around an animal as proud as this without leaving with a few more holes in his leg. Then, he saw its eyes, and the feeling of tooth on bone made him wince.

They were very wide and very beautiful, and very distant.

He swallowed a bit of himself down and it scratched his dry throat the whole way. When he walked back to her side, a little closer, he did it again.

She was biting her lips, and had been for quite some time if the deepening indents were anything to go by.

Seems they both had their masochistic side.

Pain makes up the air in the forest for a while, everything trying to wait everything else out. He’s watched animals die before - sure she has too. There’s a distinct taste in your mouth when they go, dirt and contrition. Your breathing gets heavier and you can feel the static behind your eyes, like it was a sin. Never a fox though. He’s only ever heard their cackles from behind crosshairs and curses. A better man wouldn’t feel so ill at the sight. But something’s wrong, and he knows they’re not out here to watch this thing die.

It’s the eyes he tells himself. He’s seen them before and his heart aches. For the fox. For her. Finally, for him.

Eventually, the hot iron of morality cleanses his rotten pallet and melts the frost holding his feet to the ground. He’d rather wash his hands then his tongue, after all.

28 The Wind Will Be My Hands Also, he's tired. And cold.

"Well," She breaths a sigh out of her nose in relief, like she was anticipating his judgement as much as he was. “Are you gonna do it, or am I?” That breath goes right back in and he bites himself.

God, he might be worse than her, he thinks, when her eyes go wide and a knife is drawn, dripping with mist and anticipation.

“I will.” Her palms are already pink with the cinching cold and he doesn’t know if he could forgive himself if he let the girl who ‘feels bad’ hack through a neck and get warmed to the core with another’s life.

“No. I will.” So he follows after, knees wet, crawling.

“Gimme that. Why’d you even have this?” Her bony hands were holding it like it was home.

His question is ignored, as expected, but the hum of her breath in tune with the fox’s hisses makes him forget all about it when he pushes her shoulder with gentle callousness.

It’s so much softer than he thought – the fox, that is. Even as his rigid knuckles annul the rest of his energy to raise the knife to its rippling neck, he can’t help but imagine if there’s any meaning. If it’ll leave a stain or a dent in the middle of this godforsaken forest. If it’ll matter at all if they keep it a secret and let the memory fade into the blackness of the night. If any of it matters, a knife, a throat, his hands, her torch. Something will get stained, he knows that, for sure.

He looks into its paling eyes again. They’re surrounded by a film that twinges his bones when he turns the knife and pours himself into them.

Thick and hot, blood cascades down his arm, wetting fur and flannel and for a second it feels so nice that he lets himself sink alongside the blade.

The girl traces the goosebumps on her arm as she stares at the siphoning blood, dripping onto his jeans and pooling at his knees. Most of it seeps into the very earth that dirties her palm.

The fox is a perfect image of barbaric serenity. Head half off, a display of creating only faux-repulse and the alive, real kind of fear. One you can’t look away from, even though the unforgiving wind cools the transitory saviour that settles between the grooves of bloodied fingertips.

"Right then."

It's a useless call for action. Nobody moves until the weight of silence gets too heavy to breath in.

"Can I have the tail?"

He's so taken aback he laughs. She used to cry when he bragged about his catches, bringing home limbs and teeth, memorabilia, proof. He supposes he hasn’t seen her for a while. Supposes he hasn’t done this in a while either. A better man would sling it over his shoulder and warm himself with a grin.

“Nah.” His voice is airier than usual. The moon’s light gets so strong they barely need the torch anymore. “We have t’deal with the body. Can’t leave it here, it’ll get eaten up.” Maybe that’s a bit selfish, he thinks, keeping it all to themselves. He can’t bring himself to care.

"Alright."

Leaves slide wetly against each other when she sways into dark with a torch and a knife like a spectral tree.

""Get some wood! We're gonna burn it!"

Leering at the fox now, he feels every remaining drip of blood fizzle out in his aching soul, a hollowness left by something he can’t even remember anymore. Maybe it was always there.

His daddy used to preach to him how good Christians never burn, but he never understood that. A sedated chuckle creeps out when he remembers the time, he stuck his hand over a fire as a boy, to see if it would turn to dust. To return.

An armful of sticks being dumped unceremoniously into his lap cuts his ruminations short, the culprit already busy carving into one crudely shaped like an elongated cross.

He’s still rubbing sticks together when she stabs it in the ground.

"Fox?" It makes him smile.

Obviously, her carving skills weren’t practiced.

His eyes wander over the cross a little longer, leaving it be when it began to tilt.

"Naw, Fox is fine."

Nothing is said or done about the way they sit too close and the flames burn their cheeks and their eyes once they’ve dragged the body over, or how the wind blaring against their backs creep into their skin, a blanket of blades that’s comforting in its familiarity.

The flame dances seductively and kisses his lips when he blows, reminding him to get a cigarette when he’s home again. Whenever that might be.

In his head, there are a million voices that scrape searing lines down his throat in their failed attempts to escape. He doesn’t know what they’re saying. He doesn’t know much of anything anymore. No matter how many animals he bleeds or how many fires he starts, there’s always something missing, something that he’s spent his whole life trying to find. Sometimes, he thinks he might’ve been born broken. Sometimes, he welcomes the gnawing like an old friend. He doesn’t know what he’d do if he found it. Doesn’t know what his purpose would be.

He suddenly gets the urge to reach for the flames.

Distractions come easy when the aches always there, so he watches the bugs, black and small, settle themselves on the girl’s white dress. In the harsh shadows of the moon it looks like cracked marble. She doesn’t feel them, of course not, but he doesn’t think she’d shake them off even if she did. The stoicism of it all reminds him of youth’s fallacy. And how good she is at ignoring him.

“Why’re you out here anyway?”

There’s a little pause as she flutters her eyelids, ridding herself of the fog glazing over them.

“Searchin’.”

He thinks he understands her, and the wave of choleric melancholy that washes over him makes him want to scream.

"Searching? For what? It's pitch black and cold as hell. And you're practically wearin’ nothin’.”

Hands run over exposed knees before they get tucked backed into her chest the same way she tucks her bottom lip back under her teeth. She’s not shaking anymore. Her shrug holds all the certainty in the world.

It’s enough to shake him from the inside out and finally feel the top layer of his skin turning raw under the heat.

“Alright. That’s it.” His legs are brittle and barky when he pushes himself up. A few moments of vertigo and he yearns for a cigarette, even more so when he sees her hugging her torch. “I’ll walk you home.”

. . .

Leaving the world behind is hard, especially when it’s still burning, and everything is so loud despite nothing being said. The grinding of the dirt under their heels is enough to keep his ringing head at bay until she does.

“In France they have this term: L'appel du vide. It means –” her voice is thick with whimsy and she spreads her fingers like its magic. “ – ‘the call of the void.’”

A better man would think it stupid. To his mind, as ripped and torn as the flesh his hands have intimately known, it sounds familiar. Heat and ash. Red and black. Malice and metal.

"Maybe that's why Fox was out there. He heard the call."

She smiles when she speaks, weariness clinging to her cheeks.

There now, he stares at the door behind her. Worried that his eyes might say what his mouth cannot.

“You’re a good man. Thank you.”

He gives her a modest nod, one she wouldn’t see if she wasn’t looking so damn hard. It’ll have to do. It’s the only thing he can do when he’s scared that if he spoke nothing’d come out but smoke and charcoal.

The taste follows him home, hands intertwined.

Waiting for him is a cigarette that smells like everything wrong with the world. A better man wouldn’t indulge. But maybe a good man needs to.

When he closes his eyes, there’s fur between his fingers, and blood on his tongue.
He lights another, and the burn is so so cold. Just how he likes it.