Strawberry Moon

"Here Faith Died, Poisoned by This Charnel Air"Dr. Sean MacDonald sat alone in the second-floor kitchen of the aging Victorian farm house, nursing a mug of just-brewed black coffee and watching the thin pink line of the horizon slowly etching itself into the left-over January night. Sean returned to flipping through the pages of The Old Framer's Almanac, which he playfully referred to as his 'Bible'. He abruptly stopped reading, when he was snagged by the filed away memories from a January night sixteen years ago. Unable to stop the recurrent nightmare, he was there again: stumbling out of Merrywood Hall, on the campus of Hart College, into the colorless dark of the New Moon, running, his feet punching through the surface of the frozen snow, his shoes filling up with beads of ice as he ran to her body. He dropped to his knees beside her.Her arms were crossed and folded over her chest, which had been ripped open like a freshly dug grave and just as empty. Her long auburn hair was splayed out as if pulled by vermin, tugging and chewing on the frayed and knotted ends. The earth had begun to reclaim her. Sean cried out, "Damn you to hell! It's me you want. Why did you take her? And our son!" Sean slammed the kitchen window shut, knocking the coffee mug and almanac onto the floor and shattering the window pane. Jagged shards of glass exploded outside and into the kitchen, hitting him, cutting through his shirt. He just sat there, blindly staring outside, blood staining his clothes, tears running down his cheeks.

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