It was dark out when they came.
The swamp was huge and old, secretive and unpredictable. Navigating it meant always being on the lookout, carefully balancing between the bushes grasping at his clothes and the duckweed over everything, never knowing if his next step would be a safe one or his last into the muddy depths. He splashed between silent cypress trees covered in vines, listened to the low hum of the mosquitoes. He’d lost more blood to them and to the fat, shiny leeches hiding in the water than to anyone, or anything, else.
Swimming across the collapsed bridge to the other bank with an axe in his clothes had been hell. The bodies, so it seemed, had been giving him accusing glances as he’d hoisted them into the swamp and prepared to dip himself into it, too. They had bobbed on top of the red-tinged water, their stained dresses puffed up with air, and he’d had to turn away even as he was forcing them down with a huge, desiccated branch. He’d hoped he was getting used this part; but no getting used to this, not at all.
At last they’d sunk and he had walked away from them, tiptoeing across the rotting remains of the bridge that swayed under his weight. And then it had been his turn to dive into the stinking mire. He’d tried not to think of lowering himself into a grave as he’d done it.
The axe had been dragging him deeper, each stroke in the syrupy water a struggle; every time his clothes had snagged on a root, he’d had to force himself not to imagine fingers grasping at him. He’d screamed when he’d climbed out onto dry land and seen all the leeches clinging to his skin.
The old house on the other side wasn’t in as bad a state as it had looked from afar. The top floor had collapsed in a long-ago fire, the jagged walls like the edges of a wound; but the base was still intact, and mostly dry. He made his shelter in the huge, dusty fireplace in what must have been a living room once, now hollowed out and home only to animals. He’d found a copperhead and a dead rabbit in one corner and frozen, trying to remember just how venomous these snakes were, but the thing had given him a long look and slithered out of its nest of leaves before he had been able to make up his mind to move.
He had looked at the cooling body of the rabbit it had left behind and wanted to cry.
As far as hiding places went, the fire-scarred building wasn’t the worst he’d ever had. He went out to scavenge some roots and berries and bird’s eggs to eat twice a day, blessing his mother for buying him all those camping and survival guides when he’d still been a boy. He’d even managed to catch a few fish once, thinking that he was going to eat like a king that day… and then he’d doubled over with wheezing laughter that would have terrified anyone close enough to hear it. Some king he was – king of an empty marsh, of a ruined house, of bad dreams and two dead teenage girls.
The place was mostly silent around him, all animals except the ever-hungry bloodsuckers avoiding him like the snake had. He huddled between the cobwebs in the fireplace, eating whatever he could gather, waiting for… he didn’t even know what. Salvation, maybe.
And then on the third night, they came out of the water, their clothes dripping and dirty but not a mark on their skin, not even wrinkles from soaking for so long. And he had to run again.
One day, maybe, he would manage to lay his sisters to rest, extinguish the spark that kept them going, smother it for good. A spark still as bright and vicious as on the day he had flipped the switch, and brought them back from that murky land only the dead go to.
He had meant well that time, and he still meant well now. Sometimes love was easy, sometimes love was righting something that had gone wrong. And sometimes love was trying to right that wrong and failing horribly, trying again and again and again.
Sometimes… love was the stroke of an axe.
This is not a good place 