Free He Runs (Part One) by Owen Seth Page A

suffering. He reaches into his waistband for the karambit, crouches over the animal and cuts its throat, the artery spurting out liquid the colour of pinot noir in rapid, heartbeat rhythms. Thirty seconds is all it takes. Thirty seconds for a confused and scared beast to slip off into another realm, to cease to exist in any other form that sustenance.
    He butchers the carcass quickly, his belly's rumbles dictating the speed. He guts the beast, opening the stomach to release the steaming mass of half-digested grass. The heart and liver; he'll eat them now. He knows they taste the best when they're fresh. 
    It takes a few minutes but he gathers dried wood and grass, the desiccated ground follicles crisply ruffled in his clumsy grip. A lighter starts the fire and he watches, mesmerised by flames that flutter in the day wind, staring at a tiny bundle of heat, a scorching recreation of his former home. Of Emma's home. 
    Man shakes his head, rids his mind of the thoughts that plague him.  He pierces the goat innards with a stick and holds them over the fire to blacken and burn. A couple of minutes on each side and he can wait no longer, tears the heart from the stick and bites into it. The outer layer is blackened, pulmonary veins and arteries shrunken into crispy squid rings of gristle. A blood clot is squeezed from one of the chambers like a congealing red snot. Blood spatters his chin as he tears left to right like a bull shark, the irony taste overwhelming the taste buds. Now, he has to chew. 
    It's an old trick he taught himself, when he was first cast out into the shadows. A trick that taught him to survive with little food for many days. To make the most of every meal; of every opportunity. He grew soft at the farmhouse, became sloppy and lazy and that's why they caught up with him and why he feels so hungry. The lesson lies within eating the half cooked offal: compared to the tins of soup that he so brazenly squandered, this heart tastes like shit. In eating the goat's organs he is reminding himself to make the most of any good meal he can. The goat meat, if his stomach and weakened mind had anything to do with it, would be consumed within a day. If he can be patient, a skill that he's had to teach himself, he can make it last two weeks.
    Man consumes the heart and the liver but throws the burned and putrid stomach to one side. His shrunken belly struggles to contain the innards so he lies back, takes deep breaths. He turns his head on the cooling grass and sees the animal’s head, still attached to its body. The eyes are open, gleaming in the sun like black blood diamonds. 
    'I'm sorry,' he says. 'But it was necessary. You aren't worth a cut. I haven't let you down.' He sighs. 'Thank you.'
    Man closes his eyes again and all he can see is a baby's head with curly hair, tiny black eyes and a very cute smile. 
     
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    Man wakes, groggy and stiff and full of a fiery rage. His dreams took him to places that he's tried to forget, the recesses of his sensory existence where life is as it was and not how it is. Man is a throwback, a survivor of the old ways but he exists in the New World. Even back then, the time that his dreams transported him to, he felt primed for something bigger, readied for a life full of heartache and violence and struggle. He feels, no, he knows that he was born like this. 
    His eyes open to the sight of the butchered goat, a dim blue glaze having set over the beast's black eyes. With a powerful hand he pushes its head away, forcing the hardened tendons to crack. He gets to his feet, lifts his arms and stretches. Grabs one hand with the other, bends it back to relieve the tendonitis in his elbow. Repeats on the other side. 
    He looks on the grass and sees the blackened fire site covered in twigs, the thin wooden fingers pointing in every direction but his, splayed like a cartoon bomb site. He sees the mountain of goat limbs, a squadron of flies buzzing over it like tiny