He tried to scream again but couldn’t. He screamed for his mother, his father, for Stacey and Andrea. They would not hear him, could not hear him. He’d chose this remote place, this so called home. His next series of thoughts were that he was dying. That was all he could assume, because he’d never been near death. These symptoms, this affliction was also foreign to him. A match. A pair. It all made sense now, maybe a heart attack.

His thoughts were cut short as a head-rocking force yanked him off the road.

The deer carcass grew smaller and smaller.

Branches and leaves whipped against his body, making little tears in his shirt and slapping his face. The deer carcass disappeared behind cracking branches and ferns as he was pulled uphill. In a moment of clarity he realized he was in the woods northeast of the shack, traveling through the air backwards and towards the orchard. Something ripped in his left arm as burning pain flared. He looked down amidst the commotion and saw a maple branch protruding from his flannel like an arrow that had met its mark.

The turbidity in his stomach correlated with the velocity at which he was hurled, and he realized he was flying into the orchard through tree line. As he passed through the last row of trees, expectant silence overcame him, the kind you hear when an ice skater is up in their air on a triple twist, or a ski jumper vaults off the ramp, waiting for impact. A second later, Matt Kearns came down hard onto the orchard, next to one of the faded game trails.

All the air from his lungs expunged as the soil ate his scream. Rolling on his side, he gasped again and again. The squeezing and needle sensations had at last disappeared, and he sucked for air as spittle peppered from his lips. When at last he took in a reasonable gulp of air, his eyes darted to the edge of the forest, then around the orchard.

He tried to make sense of what had just happened, tried to apply some sort of logic or reasoning. Mr. Gallant, his high school chemistry teacher had called it “cause and effect.” But all there was here was effect. He searched for potential causes, but familiarity never entered his thoughts.

Something grabbed you, the little anxiety voice said. I don’t like it when things grab you, Matthew. Should have followed your friend.

Matt laid there, taking rich breaths and scrutinizing the orchard. “Should have followed my friend? There was no friend to follow,” he said. Unless the voice was talking about Elmo. But anyone who was sane knew that wasn’t Elmo last night. Matt looked down at his mangled arm and spat. Then he glanced to the tree line to make sure nothing was coming for him.

Nothing there.