From the blackness, a figure stepped into the triangular glow pouring from the floodlight at the peak of the gray, wooden barn. Spotlighted like the rag-wearing Shakespearian narrator in an opening scene, and all the house lights snuffed, he worked a section of twig - a makeshift toothpick of sorts - along his top row of teeth, and he spat that which he dug out.
He tossed the stick aside and fetched a pipe and a small pouch from his coat pocket. The sharp cold from the darkened hours caused him to wrench his hands before he open the pouch and removed a pinch of tobacco. He stuffed the wad into the pipe's bowl and stowed the pouch. He pressed the mouthpiece of the pipe into his lips and fished-out a small, wooden match from an opposite pocket. Without warning, a brush shifted in the distance; he paused and squinted into the tarish night with all its ghouls and spirits of old, and he made efforts to peer into the unseeable.
"Opossums." He though. Lifting his foot to his shin, he ran the tip of the match along his heel. A bright, orange and red firelight broke the yellow, flying bug-laced glow from the barn. Smoke bellowed and plumed into the cold air as he lit his pipe and snuffed his match. He leaned against the unbleached boards of the barns wall, and he smoked quietly and near motionlessly.
Another brush loosened and announced movement, and a branch snapped no doubt under the footfall of a nearby watcher.
A single gunshot shattered the night; the flying gnats in the floodlight's warmth dashed from sight; and, legions of birds asleep in trees above fled with great flight.
Oh, the last moments of a living soul? ...one who unsuccessfully perished in the northern divide, one who once slipped unharmed from a poorly fell'd redwood, one who escaped scurvy and dysentery in the Great War. He dreamed of the boy on the mountaintop and of fire-lit evenings with warm foods steaming from cans opened next the endless railway lines that once nurtured his very existence.
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