The Night Before The Kill

The night before the kill they would gather together in the long house the one with the hole in its roof and the sides covered in swatches of thick cedar bark until the building can barely breathe. And there wasn’t much room for breath because they wanted it hot lot of wood on the fire smoke would have defeated the purpose so it rose in thick ropes from the big a*s hole in the middle of the house and they breathed it in and they thought about what it would be like to find a body warm in the woods find flesh and rend it like a m**********r make the holes that would let the life leak out. The agony and ecstasy of that final gasp. Its not like they were murderers in the classical sense but their life was murder in the literal sense and they sat in the heat and their stink and they sweat sweat sweated out everything they’d held inside because an animal can smell our stink an animal can smell the little death we store inside ourselves like a secret they are very sensitive. Animals. So they would sit and let their stink out the full reek of it everything we hold inside like a sickness our reek our smell our foulness that we hide like a secret. Then at a word they would spill yelling like devils to jump in the river where their pores so very open and straining would let in the freeze of the water to carry away their stink their sweat their foul man-ness and float it away. And their pores would pucker like a million tiny a******s and trap in their stink their sweat their smell so the next morning they would be like ghosts between the trees. Specters with stone tipped teeth and claws. Vapor that stalks the living like a murderer like a shadow and it’s amazing I tell you it’s f*****g amazing what a man will get up to the ritual the vapor when he’s planning something. A murder. A religion. A bathroom cabinet. A banana republic. We roil in our stink our sweat our awful black rot until it’s time to act then we get clean to not f**k it all up.