As I cut the tattooed map from his back I remembered all the times he made me skin deer in preparation for this exact moment. Honestly no amount of dead deer could have prepared me to flip over his dying body, tear the back of his shirt and begin the first incision as he tried to muffle the agony in his final minutes.
Nobody could get their hands on the map, he used to say to me - well, lecture me from each and every safe house we travelled to over the several years since the map's existence was revealed to the world. I only got a good look at it as I was cutting it from him and even now I don't really know where it leads, only that it's a better place than here.
Do you know much easier it is to preserve an animal's hide over a person's? I thought I knew but his skin is growing black around the edges and feels as damp as it did when I first removed it from him. All our hard work and I still managed to ruin it.
The only map to paradise is rotting and it's all my fault.
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