"Good morning Tina! How are you today?" Asked Oswald, with a fake smile.
Her mouth agape, she needed time to ask. "Where's the wheelbarrow you usually come with?"
"I caught this one near the village. So I dragged it all the way down to your shop. Isn't it beautiful? It had a long life before encountering my knife." He rebuked, patting the animal's rigid belly.
Tina looked behind Oswald, the deer's antlers had racked the mud in a deep trail behind him. "Come in before you catch a cold, we have a lot of work to do."
The rain started to accumulate in small puddles outside. The foul and heavy smell it lifted from the soil around the village made Oswald a little dizzy. The stench was once more hard to ignore. "Will you have enough space to store it? I've never seen where it all goes when it's unsold, I rarely come here in the evening." He said.
"Actually, we have an underground floor to keep the cold cuts and big chunks cool. Follow me." Tina invited Oswald to a private room. It was another level of achievements in terms of social interaction. "Be careful to not trip, it's a little dark and we've stored plenty of furnitures on your right." When he looked at her face, he couldn't help but imagine how good of a wife she would soon be.
"Do you want to keep the head as a trophy?" She asked, popping out Oswald's dream bubble.
"What? The deer's? No I just need few kilos of its meat and some salt. You know, my mother started feeding a family of crows, which brought another family, and another. Now we have a ton of them around, they don't feed on the local crops anymore. We do need the great amount I'm taking away every time I come."
Tina nodded and cut a piece of hanging meat, a chop of pork she kindly decided to add to Oswald's next meal. "You're doing a great job hunting all of this." She said while offering the boy a well garnished trotter.
'Is she being romantic? Fantastic. She's gorgeous.' He thought. The many emotions he wanted to display were consumed away by the gory bits that often popped out of nowhere in his mind. His interest and serenity were not important enough to erase the overwhelming resentment he had for the beast lurking inside.
Maddie, Ugo's little sister cried upstairs.
"If you may excuse me..." Rolling her eyes, Tina rushed upstairs to notice the water dripping from the ceiling that woke both her children up.
Adelmo, now awake, was to repair the roof.
The man let a grin adorn his jaw. He had killed one of Oswald's lambs recently, the boy was probably furious.
'At last! What I've been waiting for. Soon. Soon.' Oswald grew excited.
When he had his two hands in the deer's guts, as well as Tina for whom it was a heavy task, Adelmo came down the roof, he was as pale as a ghost. His face made his wife chuckle. "Did you miss the ladder on your way down, my dear?"
Drenched in a mix of rain and sweat, he couldn't believe the reason why rain poured into his house.
There. It was the first true smile Oswald made after the full moon. "Do you need something? A glass of water perhaps?" The boy said jokingly. Behind Tina, he put his hand into his mouth, licking all of the deer's blood away for the second time without letting a drop stain his lips.
This was mistaken for another of the boy's behavioural deficiencies. The wolfish smile that irritated Adelmo still had a little bit of red on the teeth.
Adelmo's traps were on his roof. Nonsense! Absurd! The man's first reflex wasn't to chase away Oswald but to go check where he had set his traps. He was on his way back two hours later, empty handed, while Oswald was gone with his share of meat and the deer's skin.
"What a grotesque joke he pulled on me. How the heck could he find all of them?" Adelmo mumbled to himself. Until the question 'since when' stroke him. He never went to check if his traps had caught something. He could've seen it miles away. That's when he saw one upside down. Then two. Every trap he found had been either taken away or activated.
"That bastard!" The outraged Adelmo said, kicking at the nearest tree. His hard work had been ruined long ago. Each time Adelmo re-armed a trap, he had a slight odour of urine perfuming his hands.
He couldn't tell Tina. He had already crossed the limit he could taunt the boy on her viewpoint. Paranoia dug through his thoughts as he came back home.
As for Oswald, he was happily sharing a bit of venison with Simon.
He had nothing interesting to say besides his flirting exploits. Yet company was much welcomed. Simon and his well-groomed beard overshadowed Oswald's unkept pilosity. Because they had time to spare, the boy had his first shaving lesson. He had his hair trimmed as well, revealing two ears with a sort of pinch at their top, making them pointy.
After refusing Simon's proposal to take care of his lice issue, he came back home.
Victor was still here, asleep. The many drops of sweat he spread in the whole house told a lot about the time he spent with Meryl. No wonders he was tired.
His horse was like a new sheep in the herd, eating all day and looking at the landscape from time to time.
Nothing much happened until the evening. While Oswald circled the land, to check for Adelmo's next revenge, thunderous clouds soaked the valley with a torrential rain.
Oswald noticed the more rain there was, the less scent tracks he could see outside. On his favorite spot, where he trained his knife-throwing skills behind the house, he saw a strange mark on his targets. Nothing he remembered of.
So carefully, he inspected the thing.
That's when, two hundred and fifty meters away, hidden in the forest, Adelmo let go of the cord of his bow, propelling an iron-headed arrow that, three seconds later pierced through Oswald's skull and popped his left eye out.
Thud.
Oswald's body fell in the mud, lifeless.