“Humanity is dead, lay their souls like the windblown grasses of winter buried beneath the feet of fresh fallen snow, for the suffering which hath been wrought is at long last cast behind us through the shared misery of their loss.”

Seemed like nonsense the first few times he read it. Only made sense when he cast aside the metaphors, needless verbosity, and archaic sentence structure. Gus downed another shot of whiskey and winced. That one didn’t go down too smooth. He looked back out the window. The anti-human graffiti covered the entire north wall of town hall. A brown cat he didn’t recognize was just beginning to scrub the facade, and he no doubt had his work cut out for him.

“Fuuuuck me.” he said. He slapped a five down on the counter. “Must’ve took some time to spray all that bullshit.” The stool creaked as he pushed himself back from the bar and straightened his denim overalls.

“It wasn’t there last night when I left.” Grillby’s fiery lips crackled and sputtered. “Strange ideas in the kids’ heads these days. Only one human kid in town. He’s never done us any harm.”

“Yeah…” Gus began to swagger over to the entrance of the bar to try and cut the conversation he started short before it entered into territory he didn’t want to explore, but Grillby called after him again before he even had a chance to touch the door.

“You found a buyer for the old ranch yet?”

Gus tensed up. He huffed and turned around, cracking a forced smile at the fire elemental.

“No.” He said. “I’m still looking for someone willing to pay the fifty thousand.” Gus turned around again and straightened his cap, tugging at some of the grey hairs on his head, brushing them back under his cap so that they didn’t get in the way of his eyes.

“I’m tellin’ ya, Gus- the thirty-five thousand I’m offering is the best you’re bound to get in this town.”

It was a familiar voice. A regular at the bar, like Gus. Arnie. That purple, one-armed bastard.

Gus tried ignoring Arnie at first, instead grumbling and trying to move to the front door of the bar. He had opened the door a crack, but froze in place anyway when he heard Arnie poke at the subject again.

“I’m just sayin’ man…”

He looked out the front door when he froze. The red sunlight of the afternoon painted the forested peaks in the distance, the trees cascading down their slopes mostly naked and bare, while those nestled in town and the valley were still a dazzling array of colors. Bright yellows, reds, oranges, golds, a few deep purples. It was a sight he had become more familiar with from this angle recently. For some reason Arnie loved to pester Gus about his offer every day right as his hand was at the door or just before. But today, the foreground was a little different.

For one, there was the eyesore. The graffiti. Soon to be washed away. But even closer was the sight of that human kid that Gus saw every now and then around town. The boy was staring right out at the graffiti. He looked uncomfortable. Accompanying him was a tall reptilian monster that Gus did not recognize. She wore ripped blue jeans and a purple jacket. Must’ve been a friend of his or something. She ushered him along down the street and encouraged him to ignore the unauthorized mural.

It was only when Gus heard Arnie snap at him for what very well may have been the fifth time in a row that he realized he had been staring blankly into space for around fifty seconds.

Gus turned back to Arnie. “My 35k,” he said.

Gus stared at him, slack-jawed for a moment.

“Yeah. Yeah I’ll think about it.”

But he wouldn’t.

Gus pulled into his steep driveway after the long trip around the traffic barrier. They said it’d be out of the way by tomorrow morning, and he hoped that was true. It had been a right pain in the ass to take an extra few minutes every day to get home when he was just so close. The sun was less than half an hour from dipping behind the mountains now. His truck door creaked as he got out of the old pickup. That creak. God that fucking creak. He hated it. Cut right through the still autumn air, carving away at the peace and quiet. It was worse in the winter when the snow made everything come to a near silence. Then it really irritated him.

Not as much as that insane woman across the street irritated him, though. Always shrieking and screaming about something. It was never coherent, always drunken, and accompanied by another voice. Also female, but higher pitched, not raspy like her either, didn’t sound as damaged by screams. Definitely younger.

The screams were bound to come sooner or later, but for the moment they weren’t present. Just the door. The god damned door.

The moment he got inside he threw his truck keys on the hook and lumbered over to the fridge, swinging it open. Cold pizza. He couldn’t give enough of a fuck to even throw it in the microwave. He was just looking to stuff his face with something. Grillby charged way too high for his dishes but his booze was oddly affordable, so it was almost always Ice E’s. Maybe the diner every now and then. Didn’t make a difference, so long as it didn’t carve a hole in his bank account. Tasted okay, didn’t make him sick, and sent him to bed with a full belly.

He woke up sweating. The springs in his mattress creaked under his weight as he shot up, and his pawpads were soaked. He couldn’t stop panting, every breath drew in a few strands of his messy greying locks.

An intense nightmare. Nothing special. Just. Being crushed. He was driving in the mountains and a massive earthquake knocked him into a ditch, and soon after a rockslide trapped him. He watched as the body of his pickup buckled under the weight of the stones, the metal screeching and bellowing as the rocks pressed down to kill him. It was right as they really clamped down on him that he shot awake.

He sluggishly hobbled downstairs to the fridge and reached in for a beer. No sleeping like this. He sat down in the shitty, creaky rocking chair on his front porch, under a dim porch light. He sipped at his beer and watched the bug zapper as what little insects remained this time of year met their untimely demise. True hillbilly entertainment.

That was when the screaming started across the street. It was completely incoherent, but constantly growing in intensity. The sounds of bumps and bangs, the shattering of glass.

The door exploded.

“-AND DON’T COME BACK TIL YOU SORTED YER SHIT! AIN’T NO FUCKIN’ DAUGHTER OF MINE GON’ BE A SKANK!”

The figure who exited the front door slammed it furiously behind her, the sound echoed through the trees like a gunshot. Silently, she crossed the mossy front lawn across the street and steadily became more visible as she approached the street light.

Gus recognized her.

It was the lizard whose existence he had been unaware of mere hours earlier. The one with the human kid outside the bar. Good God, had she lived here this whole time? He had been here for a year now, and never noticed. She stopped moving once she reached the other side of the street. She was looking right at him.

Why was she looking at him?

Gus realized he had been staring this entire time. Some fat, shirtless, middle-aged bastard with a bottle of beer in his left hand, sitting up on his front porch in the infant hours of the morning, was staring at a teenage girl crossing the street. He felt very exposed. God damn he must have looked like a creep. Or at the least he looked very, very awkward.

“The hell are you staring at?” She shouted at him.

“Uh…” What was he even supposed to say in this situation?

“Nevermind, old fart.” She scoffed and started marching down the road toward town.

With that situation so swiftly resolving itself, Gus turned back to his bottle of beer, and slowly finished it. When he was done, he leaned back, closed his eyes for just a second, and drifted off to sleep.