By Evan James Sheldon
The boy is in a wide field, so large he can’t see beyond the yellow grass that rises to his waist and ripples like the sea. He is trying to make a bow and arrow with a stick and some twine but he’s struggling because his fingers have turned into claws. They look like bear claws but he’s no claw expert. He’s just a boy lost in a wide field and he misses the soft padding and dexterity he used to possess.
He doesn’t remember growing claws, only that he didn’t have them before when he was sitting in the trees with his father, then he did after his father grew hungry and sent him into the wide field to hunt for their dinner; his fingernails now sharp and strong, digits shortened and thick. It’s as if entering the field caused the claws to grow. The boy’s father said he would prepare a fire and that the boy should return with fresh meat before it burnt out. Once it burnt out, his father would move on, needing to find his own food, and the boy would be alone.
But now, the boy can’t get the bow and arrow to work, and he isn’t even sure he could kill something if the bow was properly strung. He imagines shooting an animal and then chasing it while it bleeds, what he must do if he is to eat it. But he doesn’t want to be alone in the trees so he sits down and lays the bow across his lap, the tips of the grass wavering above his head, and he takes his time. If he focuses, breathes slow and deep, he can almost do it.
Once, his mother took him to climb a tall tree. She made it to the top with ease, but the boy had struggled, slipping and beginning again over and over. She didn’t laugh when he fell, only cocked her head to the side, a sad half-smile on her face; a look that suggested to the boy she knew he wouldn’t be able to make it to the top but had hoped. His mother had strong wings, and sharp talons, but the boy had never noticed them until she leaped into the sky and flew away. After, the boy attempted to keep climbing—focused, breathing slow and deep—and he had made it to the top only to discover he was too afraid to leap as she had.
So now in the tall grass, he keeps on trying again and again, moving slower and slower until the sun sinks low on the horizon and he is barely moving. He hears a gentle rustling nearby, not like the wind, too localised and rhythmic, and finds another boy sitting, hidden by the tall grass, trying to sharpen a spear. The other boy has claw-hands too and can’t control his knife, fumbling it and swearing, spear tip still blunt.
The boy with the almost-bow scans the wide field and what he had first taken for rustling wind, he now understands is many sitting boys, though none sit together.
Is your father hungry too? the boy with the almost-bow asks.
The boy with the almost-spear nods. I don’t want to go back to the trees without something. He looks down. My father is not kind when he is hungry.
The boy with the almost-bow nearly comforts the other boy—he too knows how hunger manifests itself in an already harsh man—but his claws aren’t built for consolation, only for violence. As he tries to find words to give instead, a prong-horned antelope struts by, eyes glossy and unaware. The sun sets and though light still floods the field, it is a different light; one that shows the outlines of things, highlighting where one thing ends and another begins, and the boys with claws stare at the prong-horned antelope’s edges, a moving suggestion of itself, a cutout against the horizon.
The boy with the almost-bow shakes his head in dismay, wishing he had more time, more ability to craft a weapon, and then jumps as behind him something roars. It’s not a proper roar, like a lion or leopard or hippo, but an imitation. One boy, claws shining in the fading light, has begun to yell and chase the prong-horned antelope. It isn’t a strong yell, or regal, but it is wild—a feral sound—and something stirs in the boy with the almost-bow. The boy with the almost-spear rises.
All around them boys with claws stand, yell out their version of the roar and drop their poorly made weapons. They give chase and the boy with the almost-bow joins them, casting aside his stick and twine. He doesn’t notice that his face has turned into a muzzle, that his bones are restructuring, that patches of dark hair now cover his once smooth skin. He is too invested in the chase to notice.
And he doesn’t see the fires blink out among the far trees, doesn’t care that come morning he will be alone again, despite what it feels like now, in the heat of the hunt. He doesn’t wonder what would have happened if he had leaped from the tree with his mother, if he would have grown wings as she did, or if he had entered a stream or waterfall instead of the wide field. He doesn’t wonder what his father will become once he walks away from their fire. He doesn’t wonder why all he could see was the field once he entered it. He only has eyes for the prong-horned antelope, leaping ahead.
Quickly, there is no more light left in the wide field and the once-boys-now-animals chase something they will never catch, roaring into the dark.
About the Author
Even James Sheldon
Evan James Sheldon’s work has appeared recently in American Literary Review, the Cincinnati Review, and New Flash Fiction Review.
He is a senior editor for F(r)iction and the Editorial Director for Brink Literacy Project.
You can find him online at <https://evanjamessheldon.com>.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Natsumi Tanaka is a writer living in Kyoto, Japan. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous Japanese magazines such as Anima Solaris, Kotori no kyuden, and Tanpen.
Jake Dean is a writer and waverider living on Kaurna land in South Australia.
Matthew R. Doherty currently resides in Leeds, England, where he spends most of his free time writing about military history, but his other consuming passion is for science fiction.
Joanna is a writer who lives in the bush near the Glasshouse Mountains in Queensland.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Andrew writes science-fiction and fantasy from the state of Maryland on the eastern coast of the United States, often drawing ideas from jogs through forest trails at sunrise or a tasty beer at sunset. 
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Simon Petrie, born and educated in New Zealand, now lives in the Australian Capital Territory, where he is paid to be careful with words.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
