Avan woke up hungry. Well, he was feeling dry in the mouth, he badly needed a change off clothes, but if he felt anything it would have to be hunger.

He stood up. Some creature ran from its sleeping place by his bag into the forest. Sighing, he brushed himself down.

A glance at his classmates.

Their minds were sleeping, but their stomachs were not. They grinded and twisted in every way possible, producing a sound that could only be placed between agony and hunger.

Avan glanced at his watch.

How many days has it been? One? Two?

The group of four have searched, for both Alice and a way into the village, but they were lost. Very very lost.

In the end, they traced their steps, with great difficulty, back to the trickling stream.

They could last a few weeks without food, but they couldn’t survive without water.

Avan glanced around at his surroundings in the darkness that perpetuated the forest at this hour. Ever since he had cracked his watch hunting a rabbit (still not caught), he had lost track of time. Time seemed like a scroll, never stopping, always continuous. And as he waded through this never-ending text called time, he found hope.

It laid close to the riverbank, close to where they slept, limp, twisted, but very much dead.

Avan inched closer towards it.

In the darkness that night offered, Avan could not really distinguish what it was. Was it a prey left dead after a predator had finished eating? Was it a predator that starved to death? The answer to those questions were left clothed in the blackness of the forest night. The thick canopy blocked any faint trickle of moonlight from reaching where it was. It was so dark that Avan had to touch the lump of something before he could confirm its existence and not just some sick joke on his eye’s part.

Flesh, cold but edible, came into contact with his fingers.

“Guys!”

Avan went on to shake awake his three other classmates.

“How are we going to start a fire?”

A babble of hygiene questions tumbled out of Lindsey’s mouth.

The others just stared at Avan, too hungry to even react.

A look of irritation crossed Avan’s face:

“It’s night time. It’s too late to even go out to find wood to start a fire. Isn’t meat good enough to fill our stomachs?”

Finally, Eleanor snapped out of her trance and stared at the lump on the ground:

“Won’t it be unhygienic to eat something off the ground? Besides, we don’t even know if it carries any diseases.”

Avan tore a strip of it from the big pile on the ground and stared at Eleanor:

“Well, I’ve eaten it. Nothing’s happening to me.” He gestured at it and continued biting into the meat.

“Well? Aren’t you guys gonna eat?”

And they dived into it.

.

Was she truly satisfied?

Well, she was full.

But that didn’t mean she didn’t want more.

Eleanor opened her eyes.

Sunlight barely made it into the forest through the cracks the canopy offered.

She got up. The others were still sleeping, blood staining their clothes.

Looking around, Eleanor can’t help but regret how she hadn’t ate more last night.

Sure, she was already full, but she could already feel the grinding of her stomach faintly resonate inside of her. They had went three days without food, after all.

Then, out of nowhere, she saw it.

It was by no means fresh- after all, the meat they had eaten yesterday wasn’t that fresh, but it was by no means uneatable.

Eleanor rounded the corner, where the lump of meat came from.

Twisted, undistinguishable chunks of meat.

A hand.

A watch.

The mangled remains of her.

A head.

A scream.

The scream rang throughout the forest. It was filled with shock, with agony, with pure terror. No one could blame her though. For at her feet lay something torn apart, clawed apart, ripped apart-

What used to be Alice.

.

Who was she again?

Her severed hand lay on the floor, the remains of her torso lying a few feet away from it.

A few days ago she was a bespectacled girl who worried too much about things.

Did they like her?

Did they dislike her?

It was hard not to be friends with someone who has spent the last 13 years of her life in the same classroom as them.

Then why weren’t they crying?

The scary silence hung in the air, heavy with fear and terror.

Maybe Lindsey cried out of obligation, but she was the first one to crack.

She buried her head in her hands as she cried her hearts out, kneeling down to the remains of her classmate.

Castasia patted her back, but that little to stop the flow of tears.

Eleanor cried too, in her weird, hiccupy way.

Avan just gawked at the scene laid out in front of him:

“If part of her torso is missing, wouldn’t that made the lump of meat we ate last night…”

He never got to finish his sentence when another healthy torrent of cries came out of Lindsey’s mouth.

“Well, at least we don’t have to worry about where Alice went.”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!”

They stood there like that for a while, crying into the silent forest.

“This is all your fault!”

That was what broke the silence.

“It wasn’t my fault where she had ran.”

Avan argued back in a hushed voice

“It is!

It was your idea to go into the forest!”

“And it was you who agreed to it first.”

“This all-”

Her hand flailed around

“All started because of your stupid idea!”

“And if you weren’t so eager to go, we wouldn’t have been eating her meat last night!”

“Could you both,”

They directed their gaze downwards, towards Lindsey’s crouched back:

“Just stop talking?”

She got up, still sniffling, and turned around-

“Weren’t we here to watch fireflies?”

.

Periodic memory loss, amnesia, whatever it is.

August turned the corner, flipping another page. His subject had fainted for the second- no, third time.

In that time, he had already remembered the route to the coffee machine. He glanced ahead. This made it his third coffee for the day. He continued reading the scrawls on his little notebook:

Suspect flips in and out of timelines; every time she faints from shock signals another different memory.

Gotta find a psychologist.

As he thumbed his notebook, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, an idea flashing across his head.

Producing his pen from his back pocket, August jotted down the newest edition into his notebook:

Maybe the same thing happened to me.

If I was found unconscious in my seat when the train had derailed, that probably meant that I had fainted due to shock.

What then, could’ve triggered such a shock to my brain that made me forgot who I am?

He closed his hardcover notebook, tucked it in his breast pocket, and promptly walked off, wondering if he should give the hot chocolate at the police station a try instead of coffee.