To Appease You, My Students...

Okay.  I've given in.  I'm posting a journal entry (Joseph - you're welcome).

The boy could smell the rain coming.  The smell of wet ash.  Night would soon fall.  Darkness would come and the phantom sun would hide her face once again.  Images seared in his mind.  They will stay there forever.  He had grown accustomed to such sights.  The dead. Their withered bodies.

He thought of his father.  His decaying body on the beach where the boy had left him years ago.  A faint memory.

I'm still a good guy, he thought.  He thumbed the revolver on the pistol.  No bullets left.  The cold metal tarnished in his calloused hand.  Calloused at thirteen.

This things his eyes had seen since that day on the beach.  The day innocence was ripped away from him like the ripping of flesh.  His hands.  He pushed down the thoughts of what he had seen since his father's breath had stopped in the night.  The pain was gone.  What his hands had done.  Would his father be proud?

The boy trudged through the forest amongst the crumbling bracken before him.  His feet were swaddled in rags.  He looked into the sky.  The first drop of rain.  The drop hit his face, stinging his taut opaque skin.

Those that had let him come along with them were now gone.  All that remained was his memory of them.  The man and his wife.  Their children.  The boy survived alone in the world.  He pondered all that his father had taught him, had shown him in their short existence together.  Aliens living in the same world.  He had forgotten his father's face.

He swung his tattered knapsack off of his back.  Protruding bones and cold, taut skin.  Perpetual cold.  He prepared for another night in the woods alone.