Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends.
Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?
I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.
The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.
Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.
Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was.
I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.
Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.
“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”
I answer you.
“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”
Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?
I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?
The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.
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Image © Kathrin Swoboda