Steven Marshall Horror

- Eve of Autumn -
Featured in The Dark Art of Wonder
by Steven Marshall

When the tree's leaves begin to wilt and the landscape is brittle and barren, we take notice. From our windows, we can see the savage grace of nature's metamorphosis unfolding before our eyes. Our next door neighbors, otherwise distant beings throughout the year, slowly gather outside and reacquaint with familiar strangers. We stand together in sullen melancholy at the graveside of nature, silently pondering our tasks ahead, all the while remembering everything still neglected.

The once supple swish of summer trees has now become a dry death rattle in the cooling winds. Locusts lie crumpled in their shells, while scraps of bird's nests still linger in the branches. In the wind, crinkled leaves scratch against our doors, drawing us from the sanctuary of our homes. More neighbors now groggily emerge from shadows, all comfortably rooted in their own oblivion. As good neighbors, we greet them and keep them company for a while. Their withered faces are clenched in the burning cold as they recite their stories of hardship and woe.

We see our task before us and wonder what remains of our months ahead and together we smile. We gaze beyond and see our once abundant lawns now empty and abandoned, save for a few straggly stalks, yellowed and dulled, uprooted in their own oblivion. As autumn sheds its vast cocoon upon the earth, this is Nature's time to be reborn…and this is our season in which to rejuvenate ourselves and prepare for the inevitable.

When nightfall comes, we lay dark and deep in our lofty little beds. In the sheltering blackness, when icy rain is dripping from our eaves and the wind is howling feverishly at our windows, we slip inside our own world. Now the entire block is devoid of light, but for a soft icy hue of moonlight above. The mind becomes all too sensitive to dark imaginings and, as certain images loom past windows across the street they have a way of haunting and lingering about in one's mind.

Seemingly, once friendly neighbors now appear as ghostly strangers, apparitions of their former selves, fluttering about in their own private purgatories as if sleepwalking in some entranced insomniac's delirium: crumpled up figures lurking behind glass panes of wooden doorways. Streaks of shadows whisper through hallways, spilling into crumpled heaps in dark corners. Dark silhouettes intertwine and congregate through a clear open portrait of a window. Hunched over, emaciated shapes creep past in dank cellars and starless attics. Occasionally, a passing candle illuminates a shadow behind a curtain, while the figure ambling past remains masqueraded in blackness; their shapes amplified in size and magnitude in the swift cover of night. Occasionally, a flash of lightning emanates a radiance of their varying shapes of decrepitude and captures them in a portrait of time, forever frozen in the still of the moment, even if only for a split second, like some phantom in the night.

Unfortunately, the sad truth is we are merely witnesses to a rather ordinary event inspired by our own insane imagination; echoed by a world that thrives on daydreams via the extraordinary. It's just a mental tactic we employ to fulfill our own alter egos of expression. In the neighbor's cozy confines just across the way, there is no shock or surprise, just another night of routine practices in preparation for a busy day ahead. Only the dread of our own imagination in “what lies beyond the darkness” is present here tonight.

In life there comes a moment when there are no more surprises. It happens slowly over time, when the mind starts to become dull and complacent in its redundant reality. In doing so, it becomes an abyss of bliss in its own ignorance. Nothing new to establish, nothing new to think about, as life is on autopilot now. Where once everything was so crystal clear in the form of black and white now is just a dulling of both, fading into gray.

Just as the world turns gray on its way to white, so does the human condition. And as each elderly person feels some kind of quiet fluttering in their hearts, like a coming of seasons within themselves, they greet it simply as another chore that still needs doing. If the situation permits, we will answer them by doing their chore for them because that is our task now. One day it will be our burden. Our own cycle of sense and senseless is derived from acts of nature. Just as tomorrow, we will go our own way from our neighbors who revert back into faceless people with distant nods, all of which silently hoping to bring an end to the charade of all seasons, both natural and supernatural.

And strangely enough, we are all forever daydreaming of a day when all the bonfires of summer are reduced to smells of fried maple ash. When everyone, like shriveled leaves, sinks into the cooling ground of a sunless earth. When at last the colors of autumn have rusted with decay for the very last time, now withering into the grayish whiteness of an eternal winter. So our personal horror is an expected one, given the unpredictable propensities of human nature -- and that of our seasons; both are forever changing, shifting…becoming…something else.

"We know the tasks you face ahead, for we create the chores that are a part of life; just like the chore of dying. We know, as we are going through the same metamorphosis. You only faintly acknowledge us without realizing it simply because we are a burden to you. We feel it every time we are trampled underfoot or scattered randomly across the harsh winds. We make our vast cocoon upon the earth in preparation for becoming the very dirt of our graves. We see more than you realize from both the perspective of life and death in the changing of our seasons. We are those dead, rusted fallen leaves in your yard that shed like human flesh off bones, just as we shed off the trees, leaving behind only a skeleton of life on the winds of dreams."

© Copyright Steven Marshall 2007.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or republished by any means without the prior permission of the author. This is an original work protected under U.S. law.