They Came

In the middle of the night, they came. Bearing torches and self-appointed righteousness, they came. Murmuring in silence they encircled a lonely cabin on a full moon night. Inside the cabin the object of their hatred, the focus of their fear: the abomination whose god given right was theirs to destroy.

Inside the house, the man noticed the night had become suddenly quiet. He looked at his wife, and then cautiously to the window. Behind the glass he saw the flickering lights, illuminating covered faces.

He looked back at his wife, this time with a more ominous expression on his face and gestured for her to get on the floor. They thought they had moved far enough to where would be forgotten, but they were wrong. The man ducked, and crawled on all fours to his bedside table and opened the drawer. Inside it, the gun is father had used when his country had called him to defend it, in the last war. He reached it just before a homemade incendiary bomb crashed through the window, setting the curtains on fire.

His wife screamed as booted feet kicked in the door, revealing the rabble behind it. The man got up and pointed the gun in their direction, trying not to tremble. Trying to look braver than he felt, he demanded that they leave. Leave them alone; leave them in peace.

The ringleader of the mob returned his his request with a barrage of slurs, taunts and accusations. How dare he move into their community, work their jobs, and bed one their own? Did he not understand his place in creation? In life?

The man tried to fire, but a shred of humanity made him hesitate at the thought of harming another human being. That was just time enough for his adversaries, who held no such civilized thoughts, to take advantage and move in for the kill.

The mob moved in like a cloud of locusts, savagely beating the man as his screaming wife tried to run away. They tied a rope around his neck and dragged him to to the majestic oak that grew in his backyard. There, they hung him, but not before making him watch as they took turns violating his wife, who they later hung beside him.

The mob then faded in the night, to awaken the next day as god-fearing, tax-paying citizens that the fancied themselves to be. Insultingly thinking that by their actions they had contributed something to the advancement and safety of their bigoted peers. With no remorse, with no consequences for their actions.

Not far from the city limits, by a burned out shack, two bodies swung from a majestic oak. And there they stayed, swaying as the crows pecked their eyes and the ants feasted on their skin. They stayed there until they decomposed enough that their heads separated from their bodies, which fell on the forest’s floor. There they laid until the vultures and scavengers made it look as if they had never even existed.

However, if you wonder in the woods on a full moon night, you might still get to hear the ghostly screams that haunt that place. And if you are good and harbor no ill-will or hatred in your heart, you might even get to live to talk about it.