Candlelight and Quill

Friday the 13th + fog = no chances taken.

I bring the dogs to check over the orchard for me as I’m heading on down to my writing studio. They chase something in the fog. I hear it crashing around in the woods, snapping branches off of the fallen Maples and rotten Alders. Then the strain of the metal wires along the fence line as whatever it was, forces its way through. Most likely a deer or something along that nature but without being able to see it, I guess I’ll never really know.

I think that’s what scares me the most about the fog. Not the damp cold breath I always envisioned as the kisses of the damned, their frigid lips and tongues hungrily tasting my body. Promising bitter secrets from beyond in exchange for any warmth left in my tender soul. Nor the muted stillness the fog brings. The birds no longer singing. The dogs, besides mine on the scent, no longer barking. The mechanical sounds that always comes from down the road are faint even more distant than before. All noise seems to cower and hide from the fog, a subtle warning I never seem to register.

What scares me the most about the fog is never really knowing what’s there. What’s standing just beyond my sight? Watching. Waiting. What did the dogs chase that broke against the fence wires? A deer? Surely, a deer. Only a deer.

99 times out of a hundred it will be a deer or bunny or raccoon or some other innocent creature of nature. Yet there is always that one time it may be something else. Something that wandered down from the mountains or flowed in on a rising tide. Something I’ve never seen before and pray I never will. Something that threatens to tear a hole in the small part that’s left in my rational mind and leave a blotch of crimson behind. A stubborn stain in my memory remaining no matter how hard I try to scrub and cleanse and rid it from my thoughts.

It’s Friday the 13th. The tides high. There’s a fog down there. I’m not taking any chances today. So I sent out the dogs.