“The Sky, Imperceptibly Darker” by Michael Kellichner

One night, your partner forgets and asks you how, after killing a godbeast, you get it out of the forest. Though you long to never talk about that time, their comforting hand on your arm, the softness of the blankets, and the gentle murmurings of the night coming in through the open window make you feel safe enough to say, You field dress it and tie ropes around its feet. Drag it out.

They don’t know about field dressing, so you explain. You take your sharpest knife and cut open the belly, careful to make the slice a shallow one. Only through skin. It lets you pull out the stomach and entrails in one ropey, slippery cascade. You leave them steaming in the snow. Without their coiled insides, the godbeasts are much lighter. And even if the offal still possesses their burning divinity, almost no one wants that, and therefore it isn’t worth the effort to try and keep it. They want the hide. The meat. The films from their eyes.

How wasteful, now, it sounds to you, so far away. Come to this land where even the guts would be fried and eaten with salt. Boiled in soup. Waste nothing, even from the mangiest squirrel or rabbit. If anyone here ever had even a single bone from a godbeast, they would boil it for stock over and over until the last batch was scarcely more than water, and then the barren remains would be given to the dogs.

Caught up in the memory, you mention how some of the hunters would just lift the carcass onto their shoulders and walk it out. Your partner recoils and asks, But isn’t there a lot of blood?

You remember the sloshing in the body’s new emptiness, rhythmic with your steps. The coppery smell. How blood soaked into the fur collars of coats, dampened neck and shoulders the same as morning dew when walking into the woods in the dark. Even without the heart, safe in a cloth pouch at your belt, blood slowly seeped from all the places it had pooled. How the dead blood tried to fuse with flesh, burn skin, and burrow into pores. One last defiance the creatures possessed. The only way to rid the smell was to soak in the salt springs for hours, the water so hot it felt like you were cooking, your insides softening and diffusing, the salt stinging every cut, scrape, burst blister. A time to inventory the trials and wounds acquired in the work.

Instead, you say that it is easier with the smaller godbeasts. Most forest gods, without their insides, are not much heavier than a human. Some even lighter.

They ask, Is it dangerous?

To ask that question, they must only be imagining their elegance. Fur of moss and leaves, antlers twisting up like cradles for the stars. Their lithe movements and effortless leaps. But if they were harmless, hunters wouldn’t be the ones sent to bring back their meat.

You say, Some will gore you if they realize why you are there, if you try and kill them and it isn’t clean. If you go near one of the young ones, the mother will try to break your skull with her hooves. Pin you to a tree with her antlers and twist, ripping your middle open.

Realizing what you’ve said, so nonchalantly, you add, But they’re mostly passive. More likely to run away if they realize you are there than they are to approach you.

Your partner stares off into the darkness, and you begin wondering if they will be another who scorns you for abandoning the life, or if they will be one of the ones who cannot forgive your past. You search for any hint to their thoughts. Is that tightness in their jaw or only the shadows balancing moonlight?

Your partner rolls and nestles into the space between neck and shoulder. I’m glad that never happened to you, they say.

Long after their breathing evens into the languid tides of sleep, you lie awake and stare out the window, unable to shake the feeling that you’re exposed, caught out in the open. An old instinct from before, but one that seizes you like a trap around your ankle and won’t let go.

A few uneventful days pass, and then, when you have a knife in your hand, cutting vegetables for lunch, you notice them eyeing the blade’s edge, the way your fingers curl around the handle.

How do you make sure you don’t get hurt? they ask. When hunting the forest gods. How do you make sure that they don’t know why you’re there?

Your hands slow, but you know, now that you’ve begun, that trying to back out of answering their questions will seem like you are hiding something. It is an innocent question, after what you have said before. But after years of your life cracking apart beneath you as the past tries to pull you back, even innocent questions feel like tremors.

You clear your throat and say, You take precautions. You bury your clothes in dirt and pine branches for a few days so that they can’t smell you. You hide in trees with a bow and wait. The forest gods make their rounds to check that the forest is safe, to tend to injured plants and animals. If you wait long enough, they’ll come around without suspicion. As long as you aim true and are a good shot, you can kill them with one arrow. They’re a lot easier to hunt than something like a celestial bear.

You don’t mention how, when the need arose, you could catch a smaller animal from the forest, slash its back legs, and leave it in a clearing crying in pain. Rabbits were easy for this, though a bird with two broken wings would work in a pinch. A benevolent forest god would come to the creature’s aid, and you’d have a clear shot right as it lowered its head in comfort.

You don’t mention that as the years went by, as fewer and fewer forest gods remained, they grew wise to the hunters’ hiding, and this tactic became increasingly necessary.

It sounds so lonely, your partner says, and then lapses into silence. Though there have been times of silence before, this one seems to hang more poignantly in the air. You fill it with the sound of knife going through carrot, striking cutting board. A crisp sound, one that is more satisfying now than the tearing of flesh you spent years with.

The two conversations hang throughout your home, snagging at you as you move about your days. Even if those were all that was ever said about the past, they have colored the sun slanting through the windows and tinged the crisp morning air. The mist shrouding the distant mountains does not envelop the peaks in the same way, and the world itself seems to be trying to bring back the feelings you had in the trees, smelling of sap and soil, waiting for a god to walk into the clearing to tend to the animal you’ve set out as bait. Remembering the hours sitting watching a fox chained to a metal spike, how it tramped down a circle trying to limp away, unable to, unwilling to lie down and accept its fate. Its cries a metronome proving time passed.

Of course now that you’ve begun there is more to say, and later as you build a fire in the fireplace, your partner asks if you ever hunted the celestial bears.

Your shoulders still remember the ropes digging in as you tried to pull their weight, as heavy as stars. How no one ever went alone, and how never as many came back. It took everyone to pull them down the mountains.

Do you tell them, patient behind you—waiting for an answer and for fire, deceptively close but already the distance across the room seems to be expanding—about the infinite darkness woven beneath their shining fur? How the unprepared would lose themselves staring into that darkness, and sit in the snow and freeze if no one was there to drag them away? Or should you only share the cold? The thin air. The feeling that even if you survived, made it back down the mountain, you’d never feel warm again.

You start the fire, coaxing flames with small twigs. As the heat grows on your face, you remember the crunch of snow, the crystalline breath fogging out of the other hunters. In your memory, their breath steams from slants of shadow with only glints for eyes, and you realize it has been so long now that you can’t remember their faces. But their voices cut through time. After years of trying to forget, too many details are too clear.

Your silence tells more than you intended. Weren’t you scared? your partner asks.

No, you say.

Even though they were massive creatures, lumbering about the mountain tops high above the treeline, even though it was easy to see how a paw could crush a hunter, how its claws could rend you in two, you had time to prepare. The danger was clear, present, and gave way to exhilaration. There was rarely fear among the hunters, even when planting a spear in the ground as a creature of darkness and stars reared up in front of you.

And if there was fear, that was the first thing to be removed from you.

You possess no fear of the tangible, but the intangible still possesses power and danger. The silence behind you is more terrifying than shoulder muscles preparing to swat aside one of your comrades. You understand what it must feel like to be that fox, trapped in a circle and trying to escape, while something much greater than you watches and waits.

The fire curls along a log, turns the tips of bark to glowing embers.

It was just cold, you tell your partner.

But the cold would eventually thaw, either with fire once you were farther down the mountain or in the hot springs. The fire in the hearth has the strength to consume the log, so you step back. Your partner hands you a mug of tea, but your fingers only touch the hot ceramic without the usual brush against flesh. Impossible to tell if this is intentional or accidental.

That night, your partner keeps to the edge of the bed. Their back is to you when they ask, Is it true what they say?

About killing godbeasts?

About what happens to the forests. The mountains.

Yes.

Without their gods, the forests decay. This was what people heard, though they could not imagine it truly. Your partner probably imagines forests receding, the land slowly turning to desert. But it is much different to walk in a silent forest where trees stand as ashen monoliths to what had been there before. Seeing plants crumbling to dust, the soil purging up dead worms and insects that had been burrowed beneath the surface. Birds dropping out of trees and shattering bushes.

You stopped believing in the power of permanence after you watched a mountain crumble.

Hunters rarely revisited the places where they were successful.

Why did you do it?

It was what we did, you say.

It was never something that was thought about; it was what your parents had done and their parents before that. Traditions handed down over the years until they arrived at you, and you were expected to follow as all had done before. When you only know one world, you don’t think about changing it.

The godbeasts were there, and there was money to be made. You knew some of what happened—how the meat was taken to the finest noble houses and served at elaborate banquets that you and your fellow hunters would never glimpse. How the pelts were used to make cloaks for kings and queens, the bones carved into spearheads to fight the great monsters still living in darkness.

The world needs what we do, the hunters were fond of telling anyone who questioned them, and you had said as much yourself, before.

Only later, when you saw the forests reduced to silhouettes, when you saw a mountain vanished into a desert plain, did you begin to feel the weight of what you’d done.

Sacrifices must be made, you were told.

If we don’t hunt them, the slow advance of civilization will strangle them as their domains are cut and cultivated, you were told. This is a faster, more humane death.

Your partner, still facing away, asks in a small voice, Is that why you left?

No, you tell them.

After you knew that, they say, after you saw, you still stayed?

You know the conversation is already lost. That to explain how hard it is to walk away from all that you’ve known, even after you realize what you’re doing, even after you see that the world is so much bigger than what raised you, is impossibly difficult. Like a fox chewing off its own leg to escape a trap. And now all that you’ve said hangs over the bed, infuses the room, bleeds out into the kitchen, gathers in the darkness beneath the cold ashes in the hearth. You can feel the wedge of the past driving into the present, splitting apart what you’ve built. Perhaps there will be a chance to mend the split, but the seam will always be there, something that you might be able to ignore eventually but will never be able to forget. The way a mended cup might appear flawless to someone who has never handled it, but the old owner knows that it slowly drips when tilted just so.

It was the stars, you say.

You get out of bed and walk to the window, but the room is stifling. You walk through the dark house, out onto the porch, where the icy wind instantly chills skin and you can see the sky full of spiraling stars unobstructed.

Your partner is beside you, and they follow your gaze toward the cosmos. You point out the empty streaks cutting through all the sparkling glass. The places where stars used to be, but are now gone. Where the night sky was made imperceptibly darker.

One by one, snuffed out as the hearts of the celestial bears were pulled from their chests and ceremoniously eaten. The taste of blood, jaw aching from the stiff sinews.

Your partner’s hand is on your arm, fingers tight, though a grasp to keep you close or to keep from falling and drifting away you cannot be sure. You only feel their warmth, hear their breathing.

Even now, there are fewer than when you left. You point to those spaces, show your partner how what looks like a populated sky is in fact decaying. There are still thousands, the hunters would say. There are still thousands, the nobles chewing the godbeasts’ savory meat and wearing their hides would say. But you know some day you might go out in the early morning light and see only darkness before the sunrise. You will go out at night and find only the moon.


Michael Kellichner is a writer and poet originally from Pennsylvania, but has been calling South Korea home for quite a while. Other short fiction of his has appeared in online journals such as Marrow Magazine, The Colored Lens, Toronto Journal, Aurealis, and Three Crows Magazine. He can be found on Facebook at authormichaelkellichner or on Twitter @Mithalanis. art insert

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