Have you seen the child by the torn down house, it’s the child who sits by the rose that grows between the cracks of the roads. He lives in the ruins of a small village, far as I know he is the only person that lives there. You know he’s got his little fingers clutching a spear by his right hand, and his left hand balled up as tense as a bulls temper.

The child doesn’t move, he doesn’t eat, and they say he doesn’t even blink. He just sits there, staring off into space, with the only sound that swims through the wind is the sound of his breathing. He’s as thin as a twig, and his clothes are torn and dirty.

I know, I’ve been there, just about two years ago. It was me and my best friend named sselepoh. We were going to the small village for research, we wanted to find out if the soil was good enough to grow plants with. 

All we had was our shorts, our t-shirts, and our backpacks filled with our tools. You know back then there was a border keeping us separated from the village, there was a guard who let us through, knowing what our intentions were.

But the trip through the border was a child’s crawl compared to the journey we had to take to make it to the village. We didn’t have a car, just our two feet struggling through the thorns of the bushes, and spiked branches of the trees.

Day one, our feet were tired, sweat slowly slid down our back and head, and bugs swarmed us like hyenas. 

Day two, our skin’s smoothness was destroyed by the fluid filled pimples, and the painful cuts of thorns. We have walked far too much for our legs. The air was hard to swallow, and we could feel our stomachs slowly growl louder and louder by each passing hour.

Day three, we were no longer walking, we were limping to the torn buildings in the horizon. Our lungs worked extra hard when we breathed in and out through our mouths, and mosquito bites grew on our faces like plants. 

When we entered the small village, a different vibe was sensed by my body, it was something so mysterious to me, I never have felt it before, so weird, yet it still seduced me to walk even further. “Can you smell that, it reeks,” said sselepoh. It did reek, the smell of animal corpses walked through the ruins like an everyday person walking through a big city. 

We had taken a short break for a couple of minutes, then decided to keep going and examine the soil. As we walked, the vibe I felt grew stronger and stronger, like I was walking closer and closer to the sun. From what our eyes could tell us, we spotted no good soil, just zombie soil.

But as we walked further, we saw a small figure sitting by a small, light brown, broken down house. And I said to Sselepoh, “Is he lost?” 

We started walking towards the small child not knowing if he was dead or alive. When we reached the boy, we got to witness his scrawny legs shivering as they cross eachother, and his his clothes that looked like they were about to fall to the ground.

“Is he alive?” Whispered my friend as I deeply looked at his chest to see if it was moving with every exhale. I didn’t answer Sselepoh, because I myself did not know, he looked like he has given up to me, like he has given up being alive, but didn’t know how to end it. 

“Excuse me, are you ok? Are you lost?” I had said. But the boy did not speak, he didn’t even look at me. Sselepoh soon slowly walked to touch the child, his hand shivered a little as it got closer to the child’s chest. But right when Sselepoh was about to touch him, just centimeters away, the little boy grabbed Sselepoh by his wrist. His head slowly rose up so that he could meet Sselepoh’s eyes.

And slowly, he shook his head. I could see his needle thin fingers shivering from strain as they wrapped around Sselepoh’s wrist. “If you’re lost, we could take you back home with us, give you a home,” I muttered. The boy ignored me, his eyes stayed locked on Sselepoh, neither said a word, and Sselepoh did not even try to break loose from the child’s grip.

Soon the boy let him go, and by my friend’s face, something went down that I didn’t know. “Let’s go, said Sselepoh. I said, “What, why.” But he was already walking, no I shouldn’t say walking, he was speed walking away, out of these ruins.

When I looked back at the child, he was staring back at me, and in my mind’s ear, I heard a voice, not a voice I was familiar with, a strange voice. It was real rusty, like it’s voice box was stabbed multiple times, “Go, leave, you will regret it if you decide to ignore me.”

I did ignore the voice, at least for a little while, until the world around me started fading away until it was complete darkness. Only the child was still there, only he was standing, and he had the face of a demon. In a loud, booming voice, he screamed,  “Leave!”

I blinked, and the world was back, the child was sitting by the house like he had not moved an inch, his head was down. I ran as fast as I could, I did not look back, I just ran.

I ran all the way to the woods, and made my way back to my home. But to this day, I have not seen my friend, Sselepoh. Why they took down the border I have no idea, but what I do know is that whatever war or disaster happened to that village, it had no survivors. That kid is dead, and something evil dwells in him