Friday, October 28, 2011



...The Hallows Presents...


Hollow Barn



The time was still. There was no movement. Just a picture painted into a frame of real life. Starting from the corners it was cumbersome darkness. Storm clouds both exposing and reinforcing the black night sky. And yet, there is one break in the night and it is the thin crescent moon. The lunar squint presses the moment in so it cannot go on.
The ridge was the property of a family farm. The gate was busted. The crops were dead. And there, in the center, right under the slightest moonlight, was the old barn. The roof was broken in long ago. The wood it was built with was rotted out. The doors unhinged but still serving a purpose.

Before the barn, after the darkest hour of the night, knelt two young children. The girl held her little brother in her arms. They were both so young and so unsure. After a night of things too horrible to believe, they now were placed outside this wretched barn with that god forsaken atrocity inside.
The poor girl wanted to go inside. She wanted to say good-bye to her. But it was just too upsetting to even imagine, let alone see for yourself. Now Oscar was all she had. Their parents were dead.

Their father had fought gallantly against the intruders. But they were too many and too powerful; and Cynthia had to watch her father get killed in her mother's arms. How she regrets to envy that moment.
She knew she had to go in the barn. They did not show the poor children what they did to the mother, but they did light her on fire before sending her back out to them. Cynthia's mother ran to the barn.

How could she go in there? When really she knew exactly what she was going to see. There were so many reasons not to go in. But what if she was still alive? Somebody had to look for themselves, until then it was still not real. Their father was dead. This was the time in between her parents dying, and Cynthia wanted to make it last forever.

The barn door swung ever slightly in the moonlight. Oscar clung to Cynthia's side, it did not matter to her for she would never let go of him. Her little brother was just coming into awareness. He had learned to speak a couple years ago and was learning to read now, but right now she could have been cradling him like a baby in her arms.

The barn door opened.

Footsteps brought it outside. Cynthia's face went pale and Oscar ran from her arms.

Cynthia knew she had to be dead. The cold touch of his mother proved that notion to be true for young Oscar.

Cynthia now had to choose. . .

Alive and alone..

or

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