Free Scowler by Daniel Kraus

Moments later a leap over a small creek released the last of the toys he had shoved into his underwear and they splashed down like turds. His toys, the future merriment he was owed, all of it would dissolve like shit in water. He gasped for breath with his hands on his thighs, and wondered if this was what it had felt like for his mother to be hounded day after day and year after year.
    Living was a burdensome impulse. He kept moving for one incredible hour, then a fantastic second. Then three, then four, or more, he lost track—his body was a miserable machine and time passed like a slowly breaking bone. To throw off his father, he made every unpredictable turn that he could, but Marvin always came roaring back. Sunlight dove away and still neither father nor son slowed his pace. Beneath the braided and purpled canopy, sharp things ripped at Ry’s ears, obstructions cracked his kneecaps, and barriers sent him clawing for alternate avenues. After stuffing a gritty handful of snow into his mouth in place of water, he used his coldfingers to probe, just for a moment, the site of his wound. His forehead was spongy and swollen. A concussion, was that what he had? Or was it something worse? His thoughts were unclear; they were just clear enough to know this.
    More than anything he was freezing. Both shoulders, his back, and his legs ached from shivering and his exposed skin was inelastic and numb. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he couldn’t keep up this evasive effort. Full darkness had fallen, and there was no way he’d survive an entire night so inadequately clothed against subzero temperatures. He knelt alongside a hill and watched each joint of his body quiver with the promise of surrender and the welcome onset of hypothermia. He lowered his butt to the bank and enjoyed the comforting hitch of relieved sobs—it felt so good to give up. The birds of nightfall wailed a lullaby. He couldn’t remember them ever sounding like that before.
    Patting at his empty coat pockets led to a crushing realization. It was his toys that had given him away—dozens of them, their chilly little corpses creating a trail far better than breadcrumbs. Ry laid his head down in the cold twilight, set his arms at his sides, and gazed up at the branches that made cracks in the smoked glass of the sky. If he removed all suggestion of rebellion, perhaps his father would kill him quickly.
    There was something in his left pants pocket. Forcing in his knuckles and fingers was like stuffing in rocks and twigs, but after some fumbling he withdrew not one object but two. No—even farther down, a tiny third object as well. This was curious. He debated tossing the traitorous toys into the snow. On the other hand, he felt an idle interest in the identity of these survivors. After all, it still might be a couple of minutes before he was overtaken.
    He laughed at the motley sight. A gathering of odder bedfellows would have been difficult to produce. The first one was Mr. Furrington, a portly turquoise teddy bear with a sewed-on bow tie and bowler hat. He had been a baby gift, and Ry had warm memories of taking him along to the bath and potty and dropping him into both when Furrington asked to approve the contents. This cheap wad of cloth and stuffing had guided him through scary bedtimes, ominous mealtimes, and episodes of sickness and worry. Marvin had implemented a zero-tolerance policy on stuffed animals a few years back, and Ry had placed each offender in a garbage sack with eyes clear and dry, though his mother, for some reason, had cried. That night, Furrington reappeared in Ry’s sock drawer, and though Ry knew it was his mother who had salvaged the toy, he preferred to imagine Furrington himself scaling the trash can and brushing off the filth in regal distaste before readjusting his hat and strolling back into the house. To keep him hidden, Ry put him in the cardboard toy box, where men with guns and mutant villains soon overwhelmed him.
    Jesus Christ