Day 406

When the child was carried out from the woods, the nightmares stopped.
They had no legs, their entire lower half looked to have been hacked off.
That's how they were stopped.
It had to be done.

When the child grew after the hottest day of the year, nobody knew about them.
The next day they were just there, buried up to the waist in dirt and crying.
Soon after the nightmares came, horrible, terrible things.
People stopped sleeping when the first one died.

Found in her bed, poor thing she'd torn off her ears.
They were in her stiff, pale blue hands when her son went to visit her that morning.
The wind picked up as they brought her out and into the ambulance.
I'll never forget the look on her face as the sheet blew away.

Her entire jaw was heavily distended and partially torn, eyes bulging and glazed over.
She marked the start of a series of gruesome deaths, all thanks to that child.
We all knew it was the child, they drew the faces of the dead in the dirt around them.
Some of the others tried to dig the child out, found it weren't human and lost it.

Instead of legs they had thick grey roots with pulsating red splotches.
It bled so much when the others took an axe to its middle.
At least there haven't been any nightmares since, no more deaths too.
Nobody dies now, nobody ages neither... we just are.

Long skirts are in too, covering the legs is modest you see.
Even the men are wearing long skirts, they say its good for the circulation.
Nobody talks about the skittering, dragging noises we make instead of footsteps.
We'll all be leaving soon though, too stagnant here.

Even the air feels as lifeless as the ground beneath our - beneath us.
We move slower but we never tire, always walking, always to new ground.
Can't stay anywhere too long, people start thinking bad about us.
Then the deaths come... death follows us and its all that child's fault.