text: We were never wealthy. My family and I lived in a small village near the northern border of Romania, and we had nothing. 1852 was not a good year, as the crops were naught but dust in the wind of the coming Autumn change. Not only were we miserable, we were hungry. There was my father, mother, younger sister, and I, a tender youth of eight. The cold of that Autumn was like nothing I had ever experienced before, and my father became a brash man. An angry man. A... failed man. As any other time, our days were spent working in the field, trying our best to save each grain of wheat we could, hoping that Mother could produce a single loaf for the week, but the loaf never came. I had dreams of Bucharest butter and cream, visions of meat, the fat and all those wonderful things that other children could enjoy but us. The toil of an empty stomach wears heavy on the mind, this I know well. The pinnacle of desperation came when a traveling merchant made his way to our rat’s nest in the woods and my father murdered him to take his goods, but it was in vain. It was a con man, of Moldova, who thought to purloin what he could after gaining trust from a hungry family. As he pulled back the blanket from the merchant’s cart, Father dropped his bloody axe to the ground and followed it, falling to his knees and screaming. His screams were those of a child, a child wanting something it cannot have, and screaming the walls of the house down. Nothing quite shakes your view of the world as a young man as seeing your father falling apart in front of you. He told us to get back into the shack while he buried the slender man in the woods, where he would not be found. I watched through the window as Father slung him into his cart and took him deep into the woods. I heard nothing. He was gone for a long time, too long of a time to bury someone, and Mother was chewing her lips with worry, but she dared not disobey his command. Before long, as the sun was setting, Father came back into the shack, clothes bloody and grim, but he was back. As he stood at the threshold of our shack, he looked at us and, for the first time in months, he smiled. He smiled as he pulled out a blood-soaked sack from behind his back and exclaimed that he had killed a fox that smelled the dead man’s blood. He did not have the sack when he left. He did not have anything to hunt the fox with, only a shovel, and foxes are too quick for that. There was too much meat in the sack to come from a fox. Nevertheless, he tossed the sack to mother and told her to cook. “But it-” “Damn it woman! Cook!” She obeyed him and we had the first glimpse of a whole meal in weeks. Sitting at the table, we dined and ate the fox, lips smacking as toothless hounds, but it was wrong. We had had fox meat once before, and it was tough, difficult to chew, and tasted awful. Eating fox made us want to never eat fox again, but this fox was sweet, tender, almost like the pork we had one rare Christmas night. The idea of my father lying about the meat was a figment in my mind as its delectable taste overwhelmed my hungry self, and I gorged, consumed, even cried from happiness. Before long, the idea was completely gone as I sunk into a deep sleep by the fire, curled with my sister, whom I had loved with every fiber of my being. The Autumn night was freezing and our dire situation was halted for a single night. Until I felt the warm, soft feeling of my sister’s body against mine get ripped away from me. Her screams were piercing, as she struggled against my father’s grasp. Urged by a primal need to defend what is closest to me, I surged from the floor and lunged toward my father, but his other hand was promptly over my mouth and he was telling me to be silent. “They are outside.” Muffled screams died down into soft wallows as I realized he was not assaulting my sister, but keeping her quiet. We were huddled down in a corner of the room directly under the window, through which moonlight reared to reveal his face. He was stricken by a mortal fear, one of a man who had seen either a devil or something much worse. It was the latter. As he gently moved his hand from my mouth, I whispered the only thing on my mind: “Who is outside?” “Th... them, I am not sure. Be quiet and sit down. Do not make a sound.” He released my sister as well, threatening her with a high fist if she were to say anything, something I had grown to hate about him ever since the first time he had done it. Slowly, he crept toward the window to look outside. It was half-barred with wooden planks that we made the previous winter, so he could just peer outside without being seen. As his head came above the windowsill and he closed a single eye, and a breath escaped him. A shaky breath of a dying man, he was petrified. I could not help but satisfy my curiosity, and seeing that he was not moving out of fear, I dared to creep closer and reveal what they were. I wish I had never looked out of that window. There are things in this world that are better left for the mind to imagine, never behold. Outside our shack in the middle of nowhere, illuminated by the full moon above, stood a troop of men, all nearing the image of the wandering “fox” we had eaten for dinner. As my young eyes adjusted to the light and my mind processed the horror, the full gravity of our situation was made clear. Those were not men in our garden. They were corpses. Rotting, putrid icons of people the Reaper either did not care to take or was not allowed to take by something, they were animated, standing in our garden, seemingly pointing their eyeless skulls toward our small measure of safety - the broken and patched window. I was six years old. I was naive to the world, both the goodness of it and the horrors that resided in the recesses of the deep dark woods. I could not help it. I screamed. I screamed as those satanic amalgams burned themselves into my mind as I clawed at my eyes to make them leave. The sanctity of my own mind was raped by things that I could not fathom, things that any god would condemn and keep away from us. I sometimes wondered if whatever god there is was also afraid of what those men were... As soon as the terror escaped my mouth with my breath, the dead men sprung into erratic movements toward the house, as marionettes controlled by a cruel and twisted puppeteer. More came from the woods, but I dared not count them. My father was shaken awake by my screams and took my sister and I by the collars of our worn shirts and flung us into the miniscule cellar where we kept the spare nails and hammers. He flipped the table over and slid it over the door, so we could not get out. “Do not make a sound.” We heard the thumping sound of his footsteps getting further and further away as he took up arms, his axe, and opened the door of the shack. I’d rather not describe his screams or my mother’s wails as they had their way with her... The thing I remember most vividly is muffling my sister’s mouth and smelling iron in the air as it leaked through the floorboards, and remaining like that until the hazy light of the morning shined through the broken and bloody window. The men disappeared along with the night, and we were, at first, too afraid to move. Before long, the feeling of dread was back and we began screaming for help, for anyone to come and rescue us. Even though a god had not thought it merciful to spare my parents’ lives, it did think it wise to send us a smith, Florin, to save us. Florin was stunned by the scene in the house and did not allow us to look, and took us away to his home, where we remained, until my sister died from pneumonia seven years later. I, finding no joy in smithing and no purpose with my sister in the grave, left for a boarding school in Bucharest where I lived, until I established a family of my own. I was at peace until this night. I am writing this to express how thankful I am, truly, that my sister did die when she did. It would have been unfortunate for her to be here now. It is Autumn, a very cold night in Autumn and my wife and daughter are asleep in the bedroom. I have locked and barred the door. My inkwell is almost empty, and as I look out from my study window to the outside, I can see the same strange movements emerging from the wooded area in front of our house. I can see my father’s dead eyes looking up at me, bathed in moonlight. I have made peace with my fate. Irina, Iulia, I love you with all my heart, but I must go. There are foxes in the garden.