Aurora Magazine 2019

rested in her fiendish joy.

The man forgot his thirst, and the shadows of the syca - more, once protective, were rabidly embracing the approaching woman. Her staunch gait would have frustrated a son or daugh - ter waiting for her to enter a vehicle to go home from shopping or the doctor, but for the man it seduced his hate. Every lift of a leg tested the strength of his clenched fist; every shuffle through fallen leaves bristled the hair on his arms, though the night was temperate. In the partial moonlight her face bore contentment, the ease of pace meaning to guide her home to a dinner of boiled potatoes and leftover meatloaf, bagged tea (that loose-leaf busi - ness was nonsense), and finally, sleep without dreams. She arrived at the sycamore and stopped, five feet from where he hid on the other side. A current of mint and faintly, lavender, wafted around the sinews of bark to his face, and he breathed her in, waiting to see what she would do and whether she knew he was there. He thought she’d heard his drumming heart or rasping lungs, but she was savoring the remnants of weeping from the woods. The sirens no longer blared, and the sycamore reflected the red and white lights of the ambulance in a festive concert for the deaf. She ambled on, following the incline of Leedy Street toward the artless Victorian home left to her by her late husband. He’d passed on willingly, relieved of her gaunt love, his only regret that he’d had too many years to wither in it. The man eased around the tree and watched the de - ceptively frail woman retreat. He glanced up at the streetlights and estimated fifty feet between them, offering him a generous berth of darkness with which to creep out of the park unseen. The woman was too involved in trekking up the paved incline to notice the figure incrementally darting from post to shrub, along the block wall, in the umbra of ditches. She reached the edge of the park at Leedy and Columbia and turned left to go home. Sec - onds later, the man stood at the conjunction of park and town; he turned and contemplated the sycamore, then followed her. 55