Hunting for Breath

Aim across the brow, Louis reminded himself. The tip of his rifle stalked the deer amongst the golden autumn trees. Its sights lined up perfectly with the intricate black lines around the magical creature’s eyes and running down his snout. Even from his hiding spot fifty yards out Louis could tell the buck’s runes were fully formed, meaning he was mature enough. He waited for the perfect moment to put a bullet through his brain. 

His pop taught him one usually aims for the heart. That it’s a clean kill. 

“But we needin’ the lungs now an’ they’s too close together. We aimin’ for their bellies now.” The old man’s voice rattled from one too many cigarettes in his lifetime. Louis thought he’d quit when learning his daughter had caught the cough, yet he continued to lick the rolling paper for another smoke.

Louis gasped. “Don’t that hurt them the most?”

“We ain’t got the luxury to give ‘em clean kills no more. Yer sister’s illness made that nice an’ clear.”

“W-well what about the brain?”

His father shook his head. “Whatchu think is gonna keep us safe from the Fog?”

The remainder of that day Louis followed his father—queasy and quiet—as they shot and trailed the limping, half-dead deer, watching every second of its final agonizing moments in this world. Strewn on the ground it looked into his soul, pleading for a mercy shot. No matter how hard he cried, his pop stood firm, refusing his son’s gaze. 

Once the deer took its final breath, something broke in the older man, and he brought his son into a tight hug. While running a hand through the boy’s hair, he muttered, “I know. Yuh shouldn’ have ta shoot like that.” Once Louis’s sobs died to whimpers, his father struck a match for another cigarette. The flicker of the flame illuminated a sorrow deep within his own eyes.

After that hunting trip he internalized the mantra: Aim across the brow, right above the eyes. But as the buck settled and began grazing, Louis’s sights lowered to point at the creature’s stomach cavity. His lips thinned, mentally preparing for the horrid chase ahead of him. He didn’t think he’d ever grow used to the bleats and screams.

As he wrapped his index finger around the trigger, he inhaled deeply. A branch cracked in the distance, and the buck’s head snapped up. He bolted brighter than a streak of lightning as he teleported from the copse of trees to somewhere deep in the forest and out of sight. Louis let out his breath in a stream of curses.

It had taken three full days to track him. Pop woulda done it in a few hours. The man could simply follow his prey by the needle of his compass. He’d sneak up on them in boots that didn’t touch the ground and shoot them with a rifle that never missed. Each piece of gear was inscribed with runes similar to the ones on the deer. They cost a small fortune by the standards of their rundown town. But he took them all when he left.

Louis ran a hand across his rifle, fingertips catching on the indents in the metal that formed an intricate formula of runes. They didn’t glisten like the ones on his father’s gun, lacking the Essence to power them. No Essence meant lining up his shots the old-fashioned way. If he wanted the power of a crack shot aim, he’d need Essence from ingredients harvested from more dangerous game, like bear bones and moose blood. As beneficial as Essence would be to improve the hunt, it was deer lung he sought.

Louis didn’t need the luxury of a fancy compass to follow the buck’s teleporting tracks. A blind man could see the scarred bark of the trees the deer grazed as well as the singed leaves where his hooves had touched the forest floor. With such obvious markings it wouldn’t take another three days to pin it down. A good thing for him as his sister and her failing lungs didn’t have three days to spare. 

A week after their horrid hunting trip, the apothecary came around the family shack looking to trade. Pop and the man clad in black robes exchanged wrapped parcels of harvested parts for inky black vials of medicines. The apothecary shifted in place and cleared his throat. 

“Deer season is closin’ up soon.”

Pop’s jaw tightened as he ground his teeth. “I know.”

“I don’t got a full stock o’ lungs to hold yo’ daughter ova’.”

“I know that, dammit!” It was one of the rare times he ever yelled at somebody. But the apothecary stood his ground, face resolute. With a schooled calm, he turned to Louis who was watching their exchange from the front porch.

“Boy, yuh mind leavin’ me with yo’ pa fo’ a second?” 

Louis looked to his pop, who returned a hollow stare. The rest of his face struggled to convince his son things would be okay; his sister would live to see the bloom of next spring. If Louis knew it was the last time he’d look his father so intimately in the eyes, he would have held on for longer. He’d never seen the sea but imagined it was the same color as his pop’s deep blue irises. 

Behind the screen door, the boy caught the words “new medicine” and “a cure for the cough”. He strained to piece together a gruesome ingredients list from their hushed tones. Pop swayed back and forth while listening to the growing list: boar liver, mountain lion heart, snake venom. The Fog was mentioned more times than Louis cared to hear.

“Glad I been savin’ up deer brain,” his father muttered. The apothecary grimaced and placed a hand on the hunter’s shoulder.

Pop’s swaying stilled as soon as the words “ghoul lungs” entered the conversation. The two men huddled closer, leaving Louis to discern Pop’s grim countenance. Whatever the robed man said, it changed his father. With the approach of the year’s darkest days, Pop’s eyes drained of their former sorrow, leaving them hollow and vacant. Every time Louis’s sister coughed red splotches onto her handkerchief, he’d ball his fists and set out on another hunt. He grew more quiet and reserved. Dinners were a tense affair as he sat stoic and statuesque, never addressing his two kids when they asked him about his day. When neighbors attempted friendly chit chat, he’d shut them down with a single grumble. Louis offered to join him on his hunting trips, but Pop waved him off.

“Never yuh mind. Yuh’ll do plenty huntin’ soon.”

He timed his departure with the appearance of the Fog in the pitch black of a new moon. No one heard him leave on his gliding boots. Not even the usually-creaky screen door gave away his exit. Louis and his sister arose to their little shack of a home wrapped in a mist that suffocated all noise. Louis immediately noticed Pop’s rifle missing from its home over the fireplace mantle. The spot on the bookshelf where his compass lay was bare, but the vial of Essence for deterrent runes was still filled to the brim.

“The Fog is strong today,” his sister commented, her entire disposition deflated with defeat. Louis followed her gaze and hated how the soupy grayness consumed the world mere feet beyond the kitchen windows. 

It took every ounce of reason not to chase after the madman. Instead, he growled in frustration. That his pop chose to hunt without deterrent runes in the middle of a Fog that thick was arrogant and asinine. He’d go insane in less than a day out in the heavy haze. It’d turn him and eventually claim him as its own. No sense for Louis to meet the same fate. When the Fog dissipated and his sister’s cough turned to a rattling wheeze, he abandoned his hopes of Pop’s return.

Time didn’t allow him to mourn as he skipped from one burn mark to the next, following the skittish buck. His skin itched, and he tuned his ears to the sounds of bird tweets and wind in the branches above. Upon hearing the eerily human cries of a mockingbird, he rested easy. He continued on, attention glued to the ground. The lines of charred earth stopped abruptly, leaving the forest floor blanketed with vibrant reddish-gold leaves and a cold trail. He sighed and raised his head to investigate other signs of the deer.  

His throat shut on the gasp shoving its way down his windpipe. Not even thirty feet out, the buck lay sprawled over a bed of leaves. He twitched what few ligaments were left of him, straining with broken and bloody vocal chords to let out a bleat. Despite his body freezing, his wild bulging eyes reeled with fear. Louis would panic if he too were being eaten alive by a ghoul.

It hunched over the buck like a vulture. Pale, almost translucent skin stretched taut over its skeletal frame. Curtains of thin ragged hair covered its face along with viscera smeared across its mouth. The chittering and cracking of bones with bare teeth ripped a shudder from Louis’s body. It was clear no organs would be intact enough to bring back to the apothecary once the ghoul sated its hunger and moved on. The boy tiptoed backward on anxious legs, ready to sprint back to town, but he remembered the state of his sister before he left the house three days prior. The inky medication runesmithed onto her skin had faded to a gray as light as the Fog, leaving her to hack up more crimson onto her clothes. As he recalled the apothecary's words to his pop, “ghoul lungs” echoed the loudest.

Beyond the noises of the feasting ghoul, the forest halted all sounds of life. His deterrent runes itched more fiercely under his shirt. The Fog demanded he decide whether to fight or flee sooner than later.

He unslung the rifle from his shoulder and took aim. Down its sights, he tried peering through the ropes of hair and wondered how long it would take before his father grew gangly and feral like the animal in front of him. He wrapped his finger around the trigger and brought a quaking breath into his lungs. The ghoul must have heard the shaking of his gun for how the monster craned its neck and looked directly at him. He didn’t recognize the grassy green of her eyes, but his mind strung together a life for her before the Fog.

The ghoul’s knowing observance of him grew too familiar, too human. “Aim across the brow, right above the eyes.” He repeated over and over, his mantra tasting so foul.

—

That night the lamplight of the town square poured across the burlap sack he carried across his shoulders. As swiftly as his fourteen-year-old legs could take him, he marched straight to the back of the apothecary’s gloomy building. The bell jingled in greeting as he stepped through the back door, knowing better than to drag a fresh kill through the front entrance. He waited with his rank-smelling kill next to butcher’s tables and sharp refining tools used to extract Essence from organs. The apothecary finally lifted the curtain separating the front of his shop from the butcher’s room and looked down to see his young client.

“I heard yuh talk to Pop about ghoul lungs.” Louis cut to the chase and dropped the sack onto the butcher’s table with a loud ‘thunk’. The older man looked over his small rounded spectacles with a mouth shaped in an ‘oh’, impressed with the boy’s catch. 

“I s’pose I did.” He pulled open the string at the top of the bag and peeked in, exhaling a forlorn sigh with what he saw. “An’ I s’pose he didn’ elaborate on that at all, did he?”

Louis’s lip quivered, and he shook his head. He wasn’t a stupid boy, but he held out hope that he had misheard the conversation that day the light left his father’s eyes. But It’s any old ghoul he needs. Don’t matter who they were before, he willed himself to believe. 

“Can yuh fix my sister?” he whispered. 

“No, Louis.” The older man’s voice deepened with regret. “I can’t fix yo’ sister with these ghoul lungs.” He walked back through the curtain and returned minutes later with a long canvas bundle of his own and a box with several vials of inky Essence. He tapped on the box and continued, “This is all the game yo’ father harvested. Got all the ingredients fo’ yo’ sister’s remedy ‘cept one.”

Unwrapping the folds of the canvas revealed the glimmer of Essence-filled runes familiar to the boy. The compass, boots, and rifle looked so surreal in a neat clean pile, separated from his pop. He picked up the compass and swiped his thumb over the runes indicating the intended creature to track. He’d never seen his father’s name written out like that before.

“He tol’ me to wait’n give you these the next time you came ‘round with game.” 

The boy choked on his words, “W-why didn’ he leave them with me? Why didn’ he tell me?” 

“He knew you’d try trackin’ him befo’ he turned.”

Doing his best to ignore the apothecary’s words, he studied the wear and tear of each piece trying to recall his father’s once cheerful face. He slid out of his muddy boots and slipped on the larger pair. Wiggling his toes, he wondered when his feet would grow into them. His pop promised to buy him his own pair when he turned sixteen. They would’ve glided along the leafy forest floor like ghosts. He felt a tear warm his cheek and sniffled.

“Louis.” The apothecary’s voice shook the boy back to reality. His expression mirrored that of Pop’s when they last exchanged thoughtful glances. “He also wanted me to tell you. You don’t gotta aim fo’ the belly no mo’.” 

His mind envisioned a compass needle and the barrel of a gun pointing at ropey curtains of hair. They parted to reveal sorrowful eyes of the deepest seas. 

“I know,” said Louis. “But it still ain’t a luxury.”