Private take this pink ribbon off my eyes

REFLECTIONS MAY CHISEL ITS STRANGE SONG / BUT THINK OG SKIN / WORN DOWN UNDER / THE MASS OF / ITS PANIC (OR PURPOSE)
☼

When I pry my eyes open from an afternoon nap, the sky is hazy and lurid red from a sunset that is like blood. I shake a rattlesnake from where it lies crooked between the curve of my thigh and my stomach, ignoring its dull and sleep-mussed hissing, and I slowly stumble until I am standing on unsteady hooves, staring out at the low hang of the sun as it slips from the horizon like a drop of blood from the tip of a blade. The dunes ripple beneath it, tense with heat; their edges melt into the sky, as though there is no distinction between the two at all.

I dreamed, I think, of monsters beyond imagining. I can still see them dancing behind the dark of my eyelids, worse than anything Mother could dream up in her folktales or fairy stories – but kinder by measures and measures than the stories she tells of men. I yawn, my tongue sliding serpentine across the ridges of my teeth, and I draw myself out of the darkness of the den I’d crept into to sleep, stretching out the wide expanse of my wings. (The gold tips of my feathers seem to dance in the light; they seem to reflect, and then to stain.) I study the sky for a moment, arching my neck to meet a gust of passing, dry wind, and I decide that, sure as the clip of a rattlesnake’s tail, this will be an angry night. One with teeth.

Maybe it will storm – one of those flash floods. Wash families away from each other, lose them to the dunes. Maybe a caravan will be eaten whole by teryrs in the Elatus. Maybe one of the tribes will burn the city to the ground again. (The sky already looks like fire.) I don’t know; it’s not up to me to know. Still, I can feel the tension like a livewire in the air, like the moment before lightning strikes, but always and everywhere.

I settle up onto the dunes with a clink of gold and the slow sift of silk. Ereshkigal hasn’t found me yet, or I haven’t strayed far enough from home to warrant Mother sending her after me; that means she might show lenience if I sneak out for just a while longer. The tension in the desert runs my spine like a shiver, and it makes me want to run – it makes me want to drown in the dunes until I become them and never come out, but I can’t do that.

I’ll settle for jackals.

I like jackals. They sing with me, with their mourning, war-cry barks and wails; I can nearly mimic them, now. I stride off across the dunes, barely even kicking up sand in my passing, and it is not so long until I find what I am looking for. (It never is.) There is a dark den worn into the sand, sheltered beneath a rough outcrop of rocks, and, when I lower my muzzle to stare into it, small faces with marble-dark and glossy eyes stare back. Pups. A few of them, by the look of it – I’m sure that their parents will return soon.

I settle near the entrance to the den, and the pups pay me little mind, and I have nearly drifted back into my thoughts of monsters with No Name when a cacophony of agitated, panicked yelps breaks out from the den. I blink back to myself, and I slowly turn to stare at what has so troubled the jackals-

I tilt my head, nearly like a jackal myself, and I watch him in silence for what might be a very long time.

@El Toro || she's goddamned weird I don't even know what to say || "the terror of flight," adam clay
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