Roost

Boots sink into the freezing earth, crushing sedges as I traipse through the sleepy muskeg. Chokeberries, black and glistening with frost, burst underfoot.

Dawn creeps in over the treeline, tamaracks glowing with the rising sun, penetrating, deep and lazy, the heavy gray sky.

Come home, come home.

A hawk circles overhead and I hear your call, sharp and wanting. Desperate.

Come home.

I’ll meet you there, in the cottage hidden beneath our ancient pines, where ice encrusts its nestled logs and firewood alike.

I’ll meet you where I miss you most, where the hearth does nothing to warm me, where my bones ache for your return.

Waiting and wet, I lay in our marriage bed, vows long since made before the moss, the peat.

You crack the door like a breeze, the last of the flurries following in your wake. You’re nude aside from the boots you leave in the shed out back for winters like these.

You bring meat, rodents and a broken rabbit, cradled in arms forever tanned from those summer flights, so much closer to the sun than I could ever reach.

You have always been a wild thing, a loud thing, a boisterous, lively thing, and on these quiet winter mornings, when you deliver sustenance to our bed, it's you I wish to devour. The taut musculature of your chest, the heavy breasts that hang there. Thighs like grain silos. And that mouth, your mouth, intent on swallowing me whole, itself a thick, muddy terrain I often find myself traversing.

You smile before tearing into the rabbit. Its blood, chilling rapidly, cools against your chin in a thick, gelatinous mess as you swallow a mouthful of fur.

You present the open wound to me, urging me to eat. And I do, teeth sinking into viscera and organs, sinew. Biting and chewing, bones cracking between my molars, intestines falling from my lips.

You place a mouse in your open mouth, its dusty fur sticking to your tongue. Quit playing with your food, you fool.

You swallow with a lopsided grin.

We could stay here forever, you and me, I say.

And you envelop me with those wings the color of the woods, your face ruddy beneath the gore of our breaking fast.

And winter isn’t far behind.

The blood is cool and slick between our lips as you enter me, and I fear the quickening spring.

© 2025 Bastian Hart

Bastian Hart is a Michigan-based weird fiction author who grew up in a city named after a shopping mall. As such, their work often blends the abject and uncanny with a tv-colored nostalgia. Despite their day job as a librarian keeping them somewhat respectable, they can still be found lurking Michigan’s wetlands or furiously drafting their Monster Fucking Manifesto. Their work appears in Baffling Magazine and Luminescent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention, both published by Neon Hemlock Press. They can be found at graveyardslush.com.