the boys who kiss and bite
they are the brilliant ones
who speak and write;
She left Coszcotl in the middle of the night, surrendering the familiar scenery to the kind-hearted male as he slept. She’d go back soon, but he’d have plenty of time to journey out and away from her home until then. And she’d make sure that it was a long time before he saw her again. She wasn’t ready to repay him, and the further apart they were the less her sense of honor tugged at her conscience. But she wasn’t ready to leave the forest, either. It was close and safe. She hid well in the trees’ secret shadows, navigated easily through the tall roots of the swamp nearby. Now she would live on the opposite side of the swamp, a few days’ walk from her cozy thicket.
It was strange to her, this place; the forest was different down to the dirt under her feet. She had never lived here, only passed through, but she recognized the large body of water. Instead of a flighty, chattering creek, she was greeted through the foliage by the face of a yawning lake, stubborn in its stillness. A meal on the shore of the lake was easier to catch and unlikely to get carried away by a current, so she wouldn’t go hungry. For this much she was grateful.
She arrived in the early hours of the morning, the sky still gray across the surface of the lake. The trees’ shadows hung heavy in the spaces between lake and forest, but she stood in the half dawn light, ankle-deep in the liquid silver. Her ears twitched forward, nose quivering, and she stared intently into the water. It would be nice to eat fish while she was here. Frog was no delicacy.
A swish at her feet. She dove nimbly forward, snapping at the ripple in the water. The fish flailed violently between her teeth but she dragged it firmly to land. Having succeeded in that, she stuck a paw against the belly and promptly bit its head off – she hated for it to suffer. As the first hints of true sunlight beckoned morning to the east, she moved the fish to a dry spot on the shoreline and gave her ginger pelt a shake, then sat down in the grass to watch the sun rise.
they sing in clever tongues
oh, how my knees go weak
to be the one;
H U S H
five ** soul ** home ** |