A Good Run

A snail crawled along a leaf of the bush. It was calm. Tom didn’t notice it. His breathing
was heavy, his heart thumping loudly. He listened to his surroundings: raindrops lazily falling
and splashing on the ground rhythmically, a crow taking flight and an alien screech that
pierced Tom’s ears which were tragically too familiar with the noise.

He' d been running for almost a minute straight, sprinting. Finally, that… woman, that
demon was out of sight as he hid behind a bush. But Tom could hear her, her freakish
screech. She was coming. He looked around knowing not what he was looking for. He found
nothing. He thought of running but where would he go? There was nowhere to run.
He shouldn’t have come to the forest as Eliza shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have sought
out the witch and… What had he been thinking? How stupid was he? So many people lose
their wives, how many of them try to take… revenge?

The screech sounded again. That was it. He was dead. He’d stopped being mad at
himself. Though, he was still regretful. He regretted every little thing, every mistake, he
looked back at on them all. He had been a fool and an idiot, he concluded.
But there was some good too, right? Despite the circumstances, an optimistic voice came
from deep in somewhere. He’d married Eliza: that was one thing. He’d worked to win her
over, hadn’t he? And he’d made her happy. He’d shared many drinks with friends, told some
pretty funny jokes with them.

There were tons of things he hadn’t done. Things he’d wanted to do. But he’d been
happy. Up until the day Eliza decided to walk into the forbidden forest and be taken by the
witch. At least, he’d got to live, right? Some don’t get that opportunity.
Really, by the end, he’d had a good run.