His skin seemed to be scarred red with burns. A tangle of short black hairs carpeted his brow. His scarred scalp was bald, except for the occasional stray hair. Between his small but piercing eyes protruded a hard, hooked beak. His eyes were not blue, green, or brown, but an orange-red, like his skin, but brighter—luminescent, as though burning inside. His long neck was wrapped in a furry, black scarf. Most of his form was wrapped in a cloak of black feathers, with two rows of white feathers on the inside, as though he might have once been white, but charred black in a fire.
As he swept downward in tight circles from on high, his great cloak filled more and more of the sky. He looked down upon her, waiting for a sign of life. Cindy lay transfixed, motionless, not able to move or perhaps not willing to move. She heard a voice calling her. “Cindy?” She knew the voice. “Cindy. Breakfast!” She heard pounding.
She broke out of the spell, and opened her eyes to see her bedroom. She was covered in sweat. She turned to see the wall of whiteness outside her bedroom window. Her black, curly hair nearly sprang into place as she sat up. She reached down over the edge of her bed, lifted her robe off the floor, sat up, and slid the robe over her shoulders. She wiped the cold sweat off her face with the robe’s collar.
The scrolling text on the TV screen announced yet another closure for their school.
After breakfast, Cindy returned to her room and grabbed her bow and quiver. She waded quickly through the fog to the back lot, and stepped and stumbled across the lumps and furrows of the recently ploughed soil. Once she’d arrived at the far back of the lot, she turned to face the fence that enclosed the family lot. She couldn’t see the fence, but she had seen enough of it before to know it was there, and she knew exactly where ‘there’ was. She began pulling arrows from her quiver, setting them, and releasing them into the fog, one after another in rhythmic succession. She heard her brother shout “coming through!” for his own safety as he cut blindly across the lot. Collecting her arrows, she turned back into the fog to repeat her assault on the dissolving board, over and over, as the fog began to burn off, and the target emerged from the milky veil.
She wondered about her visions of that undertaker, reaper, pallbearer—whatever it was. She wondered whether there was a way for her to summon him.