An eerie short tale of misguided intention and result.
The lonely night caught William in state of melancholy. He wasn’t sure why but he felt his whole life wandering aimlessly.
Creaking abandoned docks in the heavily wooded patch of forest were rotting. The lake the docks led to, long dried up, used to be a recreational playground on the outside of town.
In high school, William and his friends made the docks their spot for drinking and partying. William kept coming here after all his friends left town to go to college.
All left here in memory of Lake Jefferson was trash. Beer bottles, torn clothing, decomposing sneakers, and empty plastic potato chip bags.
William wondered if he and the litter were one and the same. No purpose but to exist and defile. Waste.
The Waxing Gibbous Moon gave William a sense of belonging and connection. He stood in a maddening trance on the dock’s desiccated planks and felt on the fringe of being whole but lacking the piece needed to give him completion.
A magic spell or incantation might change his path, his fate. The Coding Bootcamp he attended promised a high paying job but the guarantee seemed leading and less than a sure thing.
Masturbating to the moon, he pledged an oath to whatever spirit was listening. William spilled himself in supplication, a dizzy offering gesture to satisfy whichever wildness would venture.
Standing on the edge of the dock he teetered and stumbled catching his shoe by the heel on an old rusty nail protruding at the dock’s end.
The spear of wood spiking up from the dock’s old broken support post impaled William. He gasped his last breath with a smile as he felt the moon inhale his being.
