The Feeling of Falling Down

“Sometimes I feel bad, man. I mean, this was a sleepy town before I showed up.”

Quinn popped a shell into the chamber and ran the action forward with a click.

“White churches, brick sidewalks—the foliage is beautiful, man. I mean, just look at it.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

Quinn gestured to the body under the tree—what had been a man—and shrugged.

“I already done it,” he said. “So it’s nothing to me. But you may be right.”

“You can stop.”

Quinn nodded as if he believed.

“I hear that a lot,” he said. “People wonder how I got started down this path, when I turned bad, as if another path had been open to me.”

The woods seemed loud—with anticipation, Quinn thought—with birds and wind and the rushing of water. Or maybe that was his own blood, charging in his ears.

“I tell ‘em, ‘Frost got it wrong, man.’ We’re not walkers in the woods; we’re water on the hillside, following the trench dug out by our fathers and mothers who went that way before. We’re all just tumbling downhill.”

“That’s no excuse.”

Quinn leveled the shotgun and the man froze.

“Didn’t say it was,” Quinn said. “I just like the feeling of falling down.”

Photo by Yooperann

This is my response to this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge: Path. Being from New England, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to draw on Robert Frost. Being a terrible person, I couldn’t miss the opportunity to turn his nice thought into something creepy.

Leave your comments and criticism below, and, of course, head over to Trifecta to see what other stories came out of this week’s prompt!

Related (but not creepy): Words For Things // Al In Wonderland // Idle Hands