Elementary

She was running. The earbuds were blaring Miley Cyrus into her head. If she weren't so out of breath from the last three miles, she'd be screaming the words out.

So I put my hands up.

They're playin' my song; the butterflies fly away.

I'm noddin' my head like, yeah.

Movin' my hips like, yeah.

 The sun was trying its best to get through the canopy of trees to the forest floor, creating a kaleidoscope of brilliant light over the myriad of decaying leaves and bark.

Her hairband was doing its job, keeping the sweat from her eyes, but her back was soaking, her t-shirt sticking to her. She felt the cold dampness as the sun would disappear for moments and the pleasant sensation of a ray catching her while she ran.

She started seeking out the sunspots along the trail. In a game to make the last two miles seem more entertaining. She was jutting left and right to catch a nanosecond of sunlight on her skin. While she ran and jumped into the puddles of sunshine, she smiled as she thought about Claude.

The muscles, she'd never felt abs like them, the tattoos that adorned both arms and most of their back. She'd met Claude randomly in the bar of The Manchester Hotel in Boston about two months ago. A Saturday night hook-up, she smirked. Quite a hook-up. They were obviously older than she was, maybe even in their 30s, but she'd convinced them she was older too. She could quite easily pass for 25. Anyway, she liked the experience age brought, and Claude really knew how to touch all the right buttons.

It wasn't until she randomly ran into them again one Friday, about a month later. She realized then this was a pickup bar for both of them where they'd assess options for no-strings fun.

And then, for the last few weeks, some unspoken agreement existed where they'd meet at the bar at 8 pm on Fridays. Have a drink, check in with each other's week without any meaningful detail, and retire to a room for the rest of the night. The sex was amazing, worth the hour trip each way to Boston.

She was smiling as she thought about Claude's ocean-blue eyes staring up from between her thighs. Then she stopped smiling. There was something on the path ahead. 

It was difficult to tell straight off; she had learned about top-down perception in psychology, so although her body's instant release of cortisol in reaction to it being something horrible like a body, it happened in its prehistoric and predictable way. She convinced herself that it would quite quickly become apparent that it was just a plastic bag or something. 

But the shape didn't change. It just becomes more defined. She slowed up; people had always warned her about running in the woods. She lived just outside Danvers, Massachusetts; there was an urban legend and a ghost story around every corner, and until now, she'd never paid any attention to any of them.

But as she looked at the wrapped charred body, it seemed like Salem had started burning witches again.

In the absence of anything sensible to do, Abigail Ward screamed.