The Laws of the Skies

for the rescue team to find Hugo, hidden under thick ferns, in the ditch where he fell. But the child had died long before, and, with him, our hope

Who is to say whether you deserve what is happening to you? Whether you were asking for it? Who is to say that caterpillars deserve to be thrown to the voracious larvae of the potter wasp? The only truth that exists now is that the boar is still hungry, and that there is still something left to eat.

The boar gets agitated; it strikes you with its head and hooves, to shut you up, and because that terrifies you even more and you scream even louder, it lunges at your face and bites your mouth. You choke and heave as the boar rubs its snout and tongue on your open mouth, licks you, maybe swallows the blood dripping from your mouth

Enzo was so badly hurt, his skull cracked open on the log, plunged by trauma into a state that was not exactly unconsciousness but not wakefulness either, that he didn’t even understand that this searing pain that gripped his thigh came from the repeated bites of an animal that was devouring him

The wild boar had spent the day sleeping in his wallow. He hadn’t noticed that all around him children were dying. Then, at the end of the afternoon, he rolled around some more and stretched until he found his legs and was fully awake, then started to trot as he dragged his snout along the ground in search of food

Enzo removed his knife from Sandra’s split eyeball and reached his fingers toward it to spread open the wound

Your story sucks,’ and Raphael bid a guttural goodbye to what remained of his memories, and Jade noticed with astonishment that she had tears left to spill over the body of Lilou, and back to Sandra seeing the shadow of the little Enzo rise up before her, still clutching in his hand the bloody knife that he had just planted in her throat

Then an evergreen branch stopped Nathan’s litany and his running in their tracks, ripping part of the skin from his face. Thrown off balance, propelled by his momentum, he couldn’t prevent his fall and tumbled to the ground, landing on his shoulder

the impact with the root had essentially split open the back of his skull

He yelled so loud that he didn’t hear the dull thud Yasmine’s and Emma’s bodies made when the semi-trailer hit them, sending them flying onto the roadside, one of them landing in a large thicket of ferns and the other in a field of nettles.