The unnamed Tartarus of early morning haunted Tim like an embarrassing memory. The farm appeared leaden and wasted and beyond salvation with bountiful harvests of fruit and grain rotting on the ground like an offering to a malignant celestial. His walk was Sisyphean in nature, as no being appeared despite his pleas and threats and summonings. He screamed into the yawning abyss to warn the transient of cold and death and received blinding silence in return.

The sun completed its grey rotation and was preparing to rise when Tim passed by Alex's area for the fourth time. He dropped his flashlight in the saturated leavings of graminoids and his thoughts in that moment were known only to him.

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The bodies of chickens and guinea fowls greeted Kendall and Alex when they arose and went to Alex's enclosure. All their heads were ordered in a rude pile resembling a pyramid of Tamerlane and what remained of them were pinned to trees and fence posts and tied around the poles of Alex's tent, the wings of most of them spread and rudimentary picks forced into what would be their hands. White and brown and muddled and brilliantly green feathers were embedded in the valley clay, the weak sunlight of mid fall creating depressing rainbows when refracted off of the barbules and hooklets that were too minute to focus on. Blood was coagulated on Alex's tarp in a gelatinous puddle that resisted separation. Footprints of red brown bare feet led from it towards the burn pile.

Kendall had brought Alex from his state of half sleep when Tim hadn't returned for three hours. They donned what clothes they had and went searching for him. Alex asked why he didn't go looking for Tim sooner and Kendall didn't have a response. Instead he looked at the dusty floorboards.

He wasn't scared to search for an old, debilitated crackhead. He thought Tim had done the right thing by trying to find him. At the same time, how much did Tim pay him? How much did Tim pay him to stay up all night, with a shotgun in his lap, eighteen feet away from an attempted murderer? Kendall wasn't sure he would do that for a friend, much less for an employer. He hadn't told Kendall how long he would be gone, or when Kendall should start searching for him, so Kendall did what was within his pay grade, and waited, and watched videos dissecting media on his phone until the amount of time that had passed had become undeniable.

He looked at the bodies of the fowl and didn't know how to feel. Saw the button eyes in the pyramid of heads and noticed almost all of the eyelids were half shut. Alex stood beside it and, to Kendall, it looked like he was about to smile.

" Give me back my gun". Kendall shook his head.

" It's my property. Do you even know how to use it?" Kendall's eyes didn't leave the heads.

" I'm not playin' this game no more". Alex stepped closer.

" Give me back my gun Kendall". Kendall had always been mostly in control of his emotions. He had learned to suppress his anger and to not show how much insults affected him, but now he couldn't. He turned abruptly to Alex, and his eyes were wide and his tone was the same his father used to use with his mother.

" Homie I don't trust you with it! " Alex stepped back, and he looked at the shotgun. He dropped his head and thought of how much disrespect he faced, day to day, from everyone. How Tim wouldn't let him in the house, how Corella wouldn't let him talk to her, how Kendall wouldn't even allow him to carry his own gun. Kendall turned his eyes away from Alex and looked back at the pile. He was too tired and stressed to feel any shame for yelling at Alex.

"Now, let's stop fucking around and find Tim". They searched the farm, calling his name, and heard no response. Neither would acknowledge that they thought he was dead. After two hours they went back to the house. On the cedar wood of the porch were the same bloody footprints that had led to the burnpile. Kendall cocked his shotgun.

" Stay behind me". Alex didn't. He went in front of Kendall and opened the door. The footprints led from the porch, to the kitchen, up the stairs to Tim and Corella's bedroom. The door was ajar. Alex grabbed a knife stained with onion juice from a cutting board on the kitchen counter.

" Stay behind me". Kendall didn't argue. If he wanted to be attacked first, that was his decision. Alex climbed the stairs, then Kendall, the shotgun raised. Alex kicked open the door and, lying on the bed, with a short wooden spear embedded in his thigh, was Tim.

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" Shit, Tim, you need to go to a hospital". Tim's face was ashen and blue and green. His pale skin was grey, and his blankets were stained with coagulated hemoglobin. He was naked save for white briefs that had become red and green and yellow and brown. The point of the spear was a third of the way in his thigh. Kendall set the shotgun by Tim's night stand. Alex's feet shuffled towards it. When he was beside it he set his kitchen knife on the night stand and grabbed the gun, sneakily, then stared at Tim's thigh.

" What happened?" Tim was perspiring, but still conscious and aware.

" I saw-he killed all your birds and he was wrapped in your sleeping bag and he was drinking their blood and staining his chest with it. So I tapped him on the shoulder and then he stabbed me, then beat me with his peg arm and took my clothes". Tim looked down at his leg.

" I need help getting it out". Kendall saw that Alex was holding the shotgun. Alex stared at Tim's leg, then stared at Kendall.

" I think you should go get some disinfectant". Kendall wasn't sure if he should run, or call the police, or try to take the gun from Alex. He didn't trust him with it. He didn't trust how much Alex wanted it. He thought of the police. Who they would blame along with Tim for the coca bushes growing in the basement, who they would blame if the gun discharged and killed someone. He left and went to the bathroom and grabbed hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet. When he came back Tim was biting on a rag.

" Okay Tim, this is gonna hurt". Tim nodded, and Kendall pulled the spear, and Tim flinched, and bit the rag, but didn't show any pain otherwise. Kendall poured hydrogen peroxide over the wound and Tim gripped the blankets but still didn't scream. Once Kendall was done he gingerly stepped out of bed and put weight on his wounded leg.

" I'll go to the restroom to irrigate it". He left and Kendall was alone with Alex and his shotgun. Alex looked somewhat abashed.

" You know, I wasn't going to use this thing, I just wanted my property back". Kendall nodded, but didn't smile. Thought of the barely above minimum Tim paid him, how easy it would be to hop in his Kia and leave these three crackers to wallow in their chaos and violence. Who were they to him besides employers, annoyances, and dangers? He grabbed the knife that Alex had brought upstairs.

" When Tim comes back from the restroom, tell him that I'm in my room, packing. If he doesn't see me before I leave, tell him that he can meet me at the Starbucks on 2nd street to give me my last paycheck". Alex watched Kendall's head disappear below the stairs and felt the solitude of the abandoned.

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The floor creaked as Tim came limping back from the restroom. His thigh was as mottled as his face. He saw the despondent look in Alex's eyes and the gun his fingers were scratching, stimming, and thought of what Corella had told him, how he couldn't be controlled because his spiriti famili wouldn't allow it, but Kendall's would. How she needed to banish those spirits otherwise they would attract the appalling. He sat down and adjusted the bandage over his abrasion, then put his head in his hands. All he wanted was sleep, to forget this horrible night, then horrible day. Sleep and maybe see a projection of his only love. Alex sat beside him, keeping the gun in his hands.

" Kendall's leaving". Tim was surprised, but too tired to feel any despondence or rage or closure.

" Oh". He thought of the doll he had found yesterday. How Kendall was limping yesterday as much or more than Tim was currently, but then when he removed the doll from the ashen water he was as healthy as a bullfrog in summer. How convinced Corella was in her stregoneria. Tim had seen enough abnormalities and so-called unexplainable events to dismiss ghosts and magic and religion and spirituality as, at best, unprovable, and, more practically, coping mechanisms for the more narcissistic and superstitiously inclined to explain and survive in a world they didn't understand. However, he was limping. Tim cleared his throat.

" Have you felt strange recently?" Alex nodded.

" I've felt strange this whole night. I've felt paranoid, depressed, stimulated. I feel like I've failed myself too. I assumed myself to be more prepared for an event such as this, but alas" Alex sighed, " apparently I'm not". Tim had to keep himself from rolling his eyes.

" Did you feel strange before that?"

" Well, on a deep, subconscious level I suppose so". Alex kept scratching his gun. " You know, my mom got arrested, and my other one didn't take me in, and even not counting that", he gripped its neck like a BDSM amateur, " a lot of the time I don't feel there's a place in this day and age for a man like me. I feel like the modern world has isolated all of us, but me especially. You ever heard The Blacker the Berry, by Kendrick Lamar? That's what I feel like most of the time". Tim, much like Kendall before him, was too tired and stressed to fake sympathy.

" But you haven't felt possessed?" Alex waggled his head back and forth.

" Perhaps".

" In what way?"

" I don't really know what possession feels like, so". Tim looked out the window, and the sun was strong, and the farm looked so vibrant and lovely and meritorious in strong juxtaposition to the barrenness of early morning. From his bedroom he could see the utility disposal area, and his apple orchards, and glimpse a section of river. The sun shifted west and it was resting on his body, and he was oh so tired....

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Alex didn't know what possession felt like. As Tim slept he looked up the symptoms and determined he wasn't afflicted by them. He didn't hallucinate, hadn't displayed any extreme strength or aggression or spoken in any language he had not learned previous. However, there were the dreams.

Occasionally when he slept, especially after a bleak and depressing day, he would dream of hearing a digestive tract. He would hear the food being cut by teeth or cracked by a beak or ground by small pebbles in an organ, hear the slimy waves of gummed fruit or meat or bread or nuts be forced down an esophagus, hear the ripples as it plopped in the shallow pond housed in the stomach. He had other dreams as well. Dreams and visions of the west, of hangings, of fences being laid and cows being branded then their heads collapsing in on themselves after a blow from a mallet in subjective parody of unprovable gravitational phenomena. Those dreams were vivid, but not remarkably so. He dreamed of flying, of his teeth falling from his gums, of him appearing naked on the streets, of him yelling at his moms, at Luke, unlimited rage at the disrespect he felt from their projections, and Alex was not one to say if those dreams were more significant or unique than those of digest or those of an epoch now lost.