A Crimson Puddle

O.K. Mantz

His chin tilted back and he gazed past the wispy clouds, staring intently at the weakly scintillating stars behind them. A sigh issued from his lips—his body slumped to the floor—the Shadow trapped within his heart seeped out through his pores.

Darkness consumed Henry and he fell asleep.

The sunlight melted through his eyelids and thrust the world around him in a crimson hue. Biting his lip, Henry touched the grass; he sighed again, the feeling of the blades brushing against his fingertips overwhelming him with euphoria.

“I’m going to change the world,” he whispered beneath his breath. The thought squeezed into his heart and filled him with confidence and pride. “I am destined…”

This was much more than a mere thought—Henry sensed this truth with a blazing passion that nearly overtook him completely. He was manifesting a god-like hero within himself, waiting impatiently to break free.

Footsteps tore his mind back to the grass, to the hill he lay on…to the man rushing towards him. Long, dark hair fell from his head in confused and twisting elegance. As Henry peered at the strange figure, the man’s eyes glistened with a light produced from somewhere within his soul; a crooked smile had plastered itself beneath his nose.

A gunshot resounded over the hill.

The man screeched with hideous humor at Henry’s crimson body. The pistol smoked in his hand, wafting up—with the same velocity as Henry’s soul—to the heavens. There was no reason, no purpose that had swayed the man to kill the boy—only chance that placed the two figures together.

Henry’s conviction, the hero he had sensed within himself, was gone. His lifeless body lay in that puddle on the hill—slowly rotting away, forgotten, and utterly alone. No one came looking for him, no one missed him, no one ever noticed his body.

With all of his ambition, all of his hope, he could not change the world.

It was the world that changed him.