Be sure to replace
your hiking boots
every 300 miles or so
for optimal comfort
huffs Gary, your trusty guide.
It’s cold comfort
to your swollen, aching feet,
but next time you won’t skip
the New Balance sale at Kohl’s,
will you?
After all, it’s not your first time
hiking Velmar Ridge with Gary;
you should’ve known better.
Should’ve remembered
he’s merciless.
Chris, your
tomato-faced,
sweat-soaked new hiking buddy
brays
about how his dogs are barkin’.
You assure him
the descent will be much easier,
but he doesn’t seem convinced.
Gary reminds Chris that wellness
is about pushing through obstacles.
And lo, before long,
the forest parts, revealing
a real dagger of a cliff
jutting
over the verdant valley.
A funeral pyre sunset
outlines distant, jagged-tooth
crags. Chris mumbles how
it’s so beautiful, but you’re
already standing at the edge
with Gary, adding another stone
to the neat little pile
from all your visits together.
You beckon Chris forth,
just a little closer now,
and as he obliges,
Gary, your experienced guide,
dissipates into so many dried
pine needles and wriggling
worms and buzzing, stinging
wasps, and Chris is dancing
on the precipice, swatting and
crying out. He does not notice
how the wasps
ignore you.
Nor will he ever know,
for now, tomato-faced Chris tumbles
end over end, screaming, toward
the foggy, bramble-choked
undergrowth.
He crunches
to a halt.
A guttural lowing
from deep within the woods
drowns out his bellowing moans.
She
emerges before long,
shambling forth on four thick
legs like tree trunks thudding
into the sodden earth. Her countless
rotten,
distended udders sway
with every lurching step,
red and bulbous with
stagnant, pooled blood.
And as she lowers her ragged
torso-mouth over your
gibbering hiking buddy
and begins to feast, you look
at your little pile of rocks
and wonder
if this is really who you are.
Once she has finished,
she calls her children,
and the forest teems
with translucent spiderlings
rushing forth to cover
twitching,
tomato-faced
Chris.
Then sunset’s last blood-orange rays
alight upon you,
filling you with optimal comfort,
and you realize you will need new boots
before your next hike.
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