Graymare settled down with a book, as he always did on Sundays since retiring, next to the babbling brook in the back of his house. The wife and kids were at the farmers market, and they promised to bring him back some of Mother North’s famous chili.
It wasn’t always this way. He remembered the day he came home from the Wars and he told his wife “Things are going to be different, I promise.” He dropped to his knees and kissed her belly as she coddled him. And things were different. It had been 4 years. He kept his promise.
He sipped his jasmine tea while admiring a ladybug that had landed on his forearm. As it flew off, he smiled, adjusted his reading glasses and began to read aloud to himself,
“Ahem, ‘Think you’re escaping and ru-’” BAM!
“What’d you do?!” Yelled a man coming out of the brush.
“I… I… I didn’t know what to do. I panicked!” Said another, younger, man coming from the brush brandishing a rifle.
“What the hell?! You killed it!”
“It was coming right at me! I had to shoot it. Look at that thing! It’s ferocious! It’s a God damned beast! I had to do it. It was kill or be killed, you saw it! You saw it coming at me!”
"Well we can’t just leave it here… Let’s just get this thing out of here before more of 'em come. Vicious little buggers, I bet… now listen… I don’t know what I saw, but I believe you. You’re a good man, and you did right.
“How’re we gonna carry, Doc?”
“I’ve got some shackles in the truck, well use 'em to drag it back. Taxidermists a coming by later anyhow, we’ll stuff 'em right up for ya.”
Now residing in a nearby hunter’s lodge in Ohio:
RIP Graymare…