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The road seemed to tease you, the dark tarmac glittering softly in the dying light of the moon. It had been like this for as long as you could remember, and it would be like that for as long as you could remember and would have remembered.
In the back of your head somewhere, you were vaguely aware you were being followed; by what, you weren’t certain.
A stag?
A raven?
It was all the same to you.
A chill breezed past you, tickling the exposed skin of your thighs and biting at the scar left over from the time you had a skin graft. You thought you were wearing trousers, but somewhere in your mind you weren’t sure you hadn’t known you weren’t wearing trousers.
Or maybe you had known. But like so many other things, it didn’t seem to matter.
Absently, you thought that maybe it had rained, because you were wet; but the road was dry and cool beneath your feet. Or maybe it hadn’t rained, and maybe you weren’t wet, and maybe you weren’t on the road. So many things were unclear to you. In all honesty, you weren’t certain of anything. You definitely weren’t certain of yourself. The only thing you could really be sure of was the road.
The night was clear and crisp. You could have seen for miles if you looked, but you wouldn’t have looked even if you could: too preoccupied with -tormented by- thoughts of The Man.
And the stag.
You were not the man you used to be, and maybe that would have bothered you if you had liked the man you’d been before, or if you hated the one you were becoming. You were blurring at the edges. Not quite yourself, not yet wholly The Man.
in some perverse corner of your heart, you took pleasure in knowing that he was blurring at the edges, too.
Or you would have, if you could recall why it pleased you to know that.
Whatever had been following you was closer now, its animal-hot breath curling around your wrist, warming the blood that was turning to ice in your veins.
Maybe, you would have kept on walking and walking if not for the harsh beams of red and blue that woke you from your trance.
“You lost?” a hard question to answer. Yes. No?
Instead, you settled on a dazed “uh, what?”
They asked for your name, and if you knew where you were, and where you lived. To which you replied with all the decorum of a man who had previously been asleep, or something close to it. Goosebumps prickled up your arm and you felt the cold more than you had before.
“Is that yours?” the police officer inquired, and you turned to see that what you had taken to be a stag, or a raven, was a dog.
Your dog.