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The sound, like breaking, like wet hard-packed earth, a sack of grain thudding to the ground. I watched him be mashed into the soil, in a stain of blood paste and dark mud.
My lungs, pressed flat and collapsed, were like his, and for an instant, I didn't know who had died. An end like that turns the planet up sideways, reeling off-balance into the dark. It hurt like a raw separation of muscle from bone just to hear how he fell. And I saw it, saw the white of his eyes flash huge when he missed the branch. He leaned forward, mouth open, suspended in shock and regret and intensive fear. It settled on him like a shadow, eclipsing the sun, plunging him into cold and fragile quiet.
The moment was stretched, warped. A few seconds elongated over a tooth-grinding eternity. Time bent, for me, for him, and I hope it was long enough for him to see what he needed to see. His hands flailed for a savior, then braced for the ground, and I felt like a mother losing her young. That moment, like screeching brakes, like scraping cutlery, like walls and walls of utter silence, sharp, screaming.
I felt it in my knees, in my gut. My deepest strings were thrumming. I was not enough, never enough. The shadow passed; he was dead.
He didn't die immediately. His body, bent and bleeding, twitched and groaned and gurgled painfully for long seconds after. He would not respond to his name, or to being touched. I did try.
I saw his eye, red as a grape, focus on something—a tree or a rock far away—and never move to find another point. The intimacy of death, seeing its maw split and swallow a grown boy completely, was a forced shedding of skin. It was like being birthed into pain and having the gates shut behind me.
I was left trembling, husked, covered in dread. Dripping in fear, heavy and slick. There was no way to come back from this—for me or for him.
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