The Stifle Shed

The thought you didn't dare to speak: Where did it go?  After you denied it a place in the world, refused to add it to the discourse of the living, where did it go?  It came to this place.  Out past the furthest edges of the city, in a bleak landscape that no longer knows whose it is or what it's for, in gray out-lands that have been sold and resold so many times no one remembers.  It came here.  

You stifled it.  You smothered it.  You strangled it in the dark, worked like hell to keep it from the light.  But you can't kill it.  The best you can do is banish it to this place, where it will live out its days in the darkling silence of a roadside shed--which it shares with a band of raccoons.  It will pass its days here, where a sad, watery light sifts through square holes in the roof, and old straw litters the broken boards of the floor, where long-forgotten storm window panes are stacked high, never to be reclaimed.

Oh, but you better hope it never catches you strolling past its shed of a winter afternoon.  If it does, it will accost you like a Hessian mercenary.  Though you forced it past the frontiers of silence, it will rush from its shed, raccoons in tow.  It will repossess you with vengeance.