Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
Astronomical Dusk - 1. The Unburied Fossils
The Unburied Fossils
The forest air swells as the heat of the sun slips
through the chapped wings of the trees, down the scraggly fingers of the ferns,
slipping away down the quiet cracks of the earth.
Silently, the animals tread.
Footfalls of leather against root; leaden flesh and cold dust
moving forwards with calcified minds and hearts filled with neither
beating cells, nor rotting worms
but angry sparks manifesting the hollows of their chests,
For they are moving to transcend the nicks in their paths
to win a war against time.
In the light of the cold moon, their fur shines like silvery fire,
eyes brimming with so much starlight, teeth so keen and sharp that they fade into shadows
And they are ghosts, cantering through the night.
But their walks drag on
longer than the expected hours,
longer than days and fortnights; than years and centuries,
so by the time they've reached the edge of their forest, they lost the flames caged inside their hearts,
worn out the stink of resolve and death which encompassed them,
forgotten their names, their feathers and talons and whiskers,
their piercing howls, their chirps,
So that, soulless and bodiless, they were no longer ghost or animal but
echoes
which were, with a blast of heat from the welts between the roots,
swept away in the wind,
gliding away through the sleeping flowers and shivering mushrooms
to be breathed in by the shaking ferns and the rustling trees
as sunlight breaks again
through the fringe of the awakened horizon.
April 4th, 2010
- 2
Note: While authors are asked to place warnings on their stories for some moderated content, everyone has different thresholds, and it is your responsibility as a reader to avoid stories or stop reading if something bothers you.
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