The Natural

The light is wrong. It is up over the trees, done rising, but it is not a morning light. It is pale and level, and it lies across the camp, and the ground is soaked, and nothing moves.

No birds. The wind is gone. The camp is a hole cut in the woods under a flat lamp.

The buses are days out. The road is one lane and empty. No one is coming.

He walks it.

The mess hall door hangs wide and the one they found first is in the doorway, an arm out across the boards. He steps over the arm. The service window is dark and the counter behind it is clean of everything but a cup. The smell is old now, gone dull, and he has stopped carrying it with him. He keeps walking.

He crosses to the range. The bales stand in a row, the targets down the line, and the body is set against the middle one where the shot was meant to land, the ground arranged and still arranged. The stance is the one Caleb taught, the feet set, the line clean. He steps past it. The quiver by the bale is missing its arrows. Caleb’s voice, once: loose the breath first. He never had time for the breath. He had time for the edge.

A staff cabin hangs open, a dark room beyond. He leaves the door to it. Dana’s voice, once: I see you, kiddo. She saw him and it was a fact, and he is past caring whether it was. There is nothing in the room he needs.

The director’s quarters is dark behind its window. The dial tone is dead. The radio hisses. Whitfield would have called it a liability. No one calls it anything now. The desk drawer is empty.

The bodies are too old to be fresh and too new to be nothing. He steps over them. No flinch.

The axe sits in his grip. It is his. The handle is warm where he has held it. He checks the haft, the head, then the edge. The reflection in the edge is something that likes the weight. It takes his face and holds it, and he reads it a second, and he lets it look back. He resettles the grip and it is a thing his hands do without being told.

The fight is over. The shape is gone from the frame in the dark, and what he wanted when the edge went through he wants again. That is all.

The treeline. The trees close the camp in a wall. He walks to where the ground gives out and looks in. The dark between the trunks sits level with the light. The grass is wet at his feet. The shape is there, one step back from the light, and it does not move. Or it is not there at all. Either way it is the same question: what he does now.

The choice is which way the foot goes. He feels the fear, and under it the thrill, and the two are the same need now, and it pulls him. He takes a step. Toward the treeline.

The morning was clean and the boy was gone, and the last counselor walked toward the treeline with the blade in his hand and no way to tell — he was going to the thing, or away from it, and the two had the same pull.