The sun went down slowly.
The way it does when it has nowhere urgent to be.
Pink first.
Then peach.
Then gold spreading flat across what remained of the sky.
A low band of light blue holding at the horizon.
Thin.
Staying as long as it could.
---
Then the dark came.
Patient.
Eating what the light left behind.
Starting at the edges.
Moving inward.
Until the forest below had no color left in it.
Just shapes.
Just the suggestion of trees in the dark.
---
Ha Joon and Eun Byol close together on the ground.
Not planned.
Just where the cold had moved them.
---
Ha Joon held a thin stick.
Moving it up and down against a larger log.
Dry grass gathered around the contact point.
His hands working the motion.
Finding the rhythm of it.
Maintaining it.
---
Their eyes on the stick.
Both of them.
Watching for the thing that hadn't happened yet.
---
Their faces in the low remaining light.
Swollen.
Red in patches.
The skin still holding the shape of what had been done to it.
---
Around them the forest settled into its nighttime self.
Low sounds appearing from places that had been quiet during the day.
Something jumping in the undergrowth nearby.
Something else answering it from further away.
The dark full of small presences that had been waiting for the light to leave.
---
The stick moved.
Up and down.
Up and down.
---
A flash.
---
Chi-Long's fist finding Ha Joon's face.
The skin of his cheek making waves from the impact.
Holding the shape of it for a moment.
Then releasing.
Then holding it again.
The blood coming after.
Slow at first.
Then certain.
---
The stick moved.
---
A flash.
---
The kick to Eun Byol's chest.
The memory of it living in the muscle there.
Not thought.
Just body remembering.
The weight of it still pressing.
Her eyes in the aftermath feeling like they wanted to leave her face.
The ground receiving her.
The heavy breathing after.
The specific exhaustion that came from the body using everything it had and being asked for more.
---
The stick moved.
---
Then it broke.
---
They looked at each other.
---
Eun Byol reached beside her.
Found another stick.
Held it out.
---
Ha Joon took it.
Started again.
---
Time passed the way time passes when you are doing something that requires everything and producing nothing.
More sticks.
Each one breaking or wearing down before the thing they needed arrived.
---
Then the stomachs.
---
First one.
Then the other answering it.
A sound that had no dignity to it.
Just honest need making itself heard in the silence.
---
They looked at each other again.
Something in the look that was almost a laugh.
Almost.
---
The sound grew with their hunger.
The forest indifferent to it.
The small creatures in the undergrowth continuing their own business.
The trees standing in the dark the way they always stood.
---
Above them.
The stars.
Coming through the gaps in the canopy one by one.
Then more.
Then all of them.
Shining the way they shine when the world below has gone fully dark and there is nothing left to compete with them.
---
The heavens looking down at two people on the ground.
Hungry.
Swollen.
Stickless.
Still trying.