---

Deep in a forest of scarlet leaves,
boys sunken-eyed and white-robed crowned
a headstone with rusted razor wire and
splashed upon its crumbling body
swirling vials of tainted blood.
I asked them what the deceased did
to deserve such grotesque desecration.

“Nothing,”
a pale boy answered.

They simply needed his soul to suffer
eternal pain and humiliation.
A reason behind the suffering
they as individuals and their people endured
in a tumultuous world irrational and cruel,
this ritual was meant to provide.
Angry spirits would serve
as one explanation for their anguish,
a justification both pre and posthoc.

Equally, these boys aimed to break restraints
moral and psychological that 
may stay their trembling hands
when they must inflict cruelty upon others.

“If we can torture a dead man’s soul,
we can torture a man living and breathing,”
spoke the eldest, who may well have been a young man.
“And if we can maim and kill one man,
we can do the same to many others,
one group after another until
nobody is left to hurt us.”

One by one,
the boys vanished among the listless scarlet.
I hope we never meet again.

---

Nate Ritchie is a horror fiction writer, journalist, and poet from Ohio.