trip home but also get me home fast enough. The back roads were also sheltered by overgrowth and trees, more darkness that I could disappear in. I was a werewolf now, a vampire, a creature of the night that I once read about. The rain was beginning to let up and the cold began to take its place. I would jog in spurts, half to get home as quickly as possible but avoid suspicion, half just to keep warm. My hands were beginning to become numb, the only thing I could feel were the throbbing cuts on my knuckles and the occasional sticking of my fingers from the drying blood. It was beginning to hit me, the night, how I had ended up here, walking home on this cold, wet night, the black blood in the moonlight, and the screams of pain whispering in the wind. The wind howled tonight. More than it has howled in a long time, I'm sure the wind shrieked and screamed outside the window of my house. She probably came to the window, to watch the night winds scream across the trees, the listen to the final breaths of a dead man. The wind howled now. I tried to remember the times when I was a child walking down these streets. I had a friend who lived on the corner house. His name was David, we went to the same school to which he was in walking distance of so we would often go to his house afterwards. It's a big house, the biggest house I had ever been to as a child, and beside it was a big lot, enough room to fit another house, except it was covered with long grass, overgrown plants, and over hanging trees. It was our jungle, our own adventure, the only place in this whole world where we could go where ever we wanted. I began to pass the house and something inside me spoke, I didn't even think about it.

"We used to pretend we were in the Amazon," I said, clouds of breath tracing my words. "We had read books about the animals of the Amazon. How it was the only place in the world that still hadn't been fully discovered yet. The only place in the world where monsters and sea serpents still lived and there was no one to say they didn't. It was the one thing no one knew, the one unanswered thing that everyone simply excepted, and I guess...to us that made it a mystical place. A place where the fairy tales were real, because no one said they weren't there." I saw the black areas where we would set up camp on some summer nights. snap of a twig