The Great Fantasizer

Out on the edge of a field in another world, perhaps his fantasy world, a young man slowly walked through knee high grass. It was dead, brown, and thin, easy to move through. The moon cast a gray and blue color on the land, and the young man stood tall at one end of the field, the wind whipping his hair back. He was looking out at the other end of the field, up the small hill in the shadow of a gargantuan black mountain. His ears pricked up at the sound of something along the air, and an arrow landed at his feet, to the side of him. Kneeling in the distance, he saw the shooter getting up, retrieving another arrow from her quiver.

She was his enemy. Both stared at each other, their faces stern, not noticing the patterns playing on the blue and gray field from a torrent of clouds passing in front of the moon. Even though he couldn’t see from the distance, he imagined he was staring into her eyes. She stared down at him and could actually make out his almost smiling expression, his teeth exposed and the side of his mouth stretched up toward one cheek. She narrowed her eyes and raised her bow and arrow. He moved forward.

Moving in an arch, the close the distance between them was covered quickly. An arrow wisped over his back as he ducked down and unhooked his hatchet. They moved fast, but he was quick enough to dodge every arrow. He stopped several meters from her, a spear suddenly pointed down at him. He took the small pause as a chance to stare up at her, observing how much she’d changed. Her hair was longer now, and she seemed to have a harder face than before. There were faint circles under her eyes. She shoved her spear forward, letting out a grunt as she did, and he slid back. Something in her seemed like stone, like she’d suddenly turned hard and cold. All he could do was hold his hatchet up to his shoulder. She thrust toward him again, moving into a fighting stance.

She was his enemy, and they had fought before, their own private battles. This one was different, though. They had grown older. They weren’t children anymore fighting, and they weren’t adults either. She hated him, he thought. One day he had stolen something from her when she was just outside her village, and she chased him for a long time until it grew dark and he left it beside a tree hanging over a stream. She never found him though, or the little object. He’d wondered what happened, maybe imagined that she’d been called home by her parents. She wouldn’t have given up, she had been chasing him all day. From then on, they would catch each other in the forest and give each other scowling faces, and often that led to a skirmish. But they were never able to hit each other with their weapons. He never fought too hard against her, and he imagined she was doing the same.

Then he was struck in the leg, and she swept it out from under him as his eyes grew at the pain. He quickly jumped up to his good leg, but she had already swung the spear around in an arch and hit his shoulder with the broad side of the blade. He grabbed it by the long handle and wrestled with her for it, and managed to pull it away. He threw it back behind him, and she unsheathed a knife from her side, looking up at him from underneath her eyebrows. They wrestled on the ground, and she eventually had the knife just over him as he lost his hatchet in the grass and was holding her away by both wrists. Now she definitely wanted to kill him, and he felt weak realizing she actually could do it. In her brown eyes, the black hair coming down the sides of her face, her white skin and the way her pink lips were pulled tight and whitened, he knew she really did hate him now. They’d never even spoken a word to one another, ever.

When he was staring up at her, into her eyes, there was something in his look that made her stop for a moment. He suddenly looked scared, unlike his teasing grin he always used. Then she noticed she was right on top of him, like lovers, and she hated him. She quickly pulled back and off of him. She looked back and he sitting up and staring at her, wiping a cold sweat from his face. She left her spear because it was back behind him, and she picked up her bow and arrow and walked back off toward the tall trees.

He sat there for a while, staring at the ground, then at where she’d walked off into the woods, then to the gash in his leg. He suddenly had a lump in his throat, and felt choked up like he wanted to cry. Between some heavy, wet breathing he got up and limped back in the opposite direction she had gone in.