Anime piece

Hugo told me once that fall was his favorite time of the year. Told me to hold leaves as delicate as you would a pretty girl’s hand. His teeth would then spread wide across his face. Pallid and flaked with brown. Rows of sweet tooth that hadn’t been cleared of duff.

On his days off we’d go hunting for mushrooms in the forest behind our house. “It’s hard to tell which mushrooms are edible,” Hugo would say. Always said, giddy over the possibility of the inedible as he led me through the forest. My studies turned to what you can eat. It didn't matter if it were safe or not.

That day, Hugo pulled me along— his meaty fingers pressed white hot divots into my skin. I followed as quickly as I could, but Hugo was excited, alcohol and smoke wafting off him in ribbons. My shoes filled with filth.

Mycology was his most recent hobby. An acquisition from an old friend he said.

Hugo's hobbies often skipped from one gruesome hobby to another. From taxidermy to collecting dead things in jars; these activities though innocuous in some hands, turned sinister in his. A field mouse captured in our backyard was less a friend and more an exercise in how long he could extend its suffering, how well he could preserve those little moments of despair, driving a needle in, then capturing the moment in frame by frame photographs. To pinpoint the exact moment, the most miniscule of details. Measured them in the span of flesh stretched to its limit, twisted in abject horror. It was a different kind of science. One that I likened to a kind of dark magic; powerful and detrimental to its user and the people around him. Wrapped up like something beautiful and awful, sequined and glittering, but dripping in oil slick, rainbow sheets of sludge.

Hugo yanked me forward, grip turning tighter. I tripped and he laughed, still dragging me along over root and rock until we hit a clearing with one solitary tree sitting in its center. Its trunk was devoid of a small swath of bark, smooth even at a distance.