Hunt

Written By: Ashley Sgro

The wolves are after me. I can hear them through the charcoal night. No wind moves through leafy bushes. The air is still. The sky at 3 A.M. is quiet.

It is them.

They cannot shed their fur. It coats them as they move through shrubs while sounding-off alarms. Their toenails click through grass. Their paws pat closer toward their target: me. My sweat-soaked flesh. I move away as their panting amplifies. I look back to see a pack of eyes: bad beacons gaining speed. Enormous lightening bugs that hop and jump.

Please, I think. Keep them away. I feel as if I am flying past trees. I’m stamping leaves.

I’m running blind.

But I keep on and so do they.

They follow my scent with starving nostrils. Their mouths are foaming for my bones. I know they’re close. They’d run and jump and burst through trees to get to me.

“No,” I pant. They’re closing in. I can feel their burning breath. I can touch their tongues that hang from hollow caves: a blur of lengthy strings. A line of swine-pink ribbons floating.

Ashley Sgro wrote her first poem at age thirteen and never stopped. Running the gamut from poetry to flash and flash fiction to short stories, she finally entered the realm of novels to fulfill her writing journey. She focuses her time on literary fiction describing her works as strangely sad and always unusual. Ashley earned her B.A. in English/Writing from Kean University and currently lives in New Jersey. Feel free to visit her at ashleysgro.com. She would love to hear from you.