[P] nainsook

[Sabine]

The darkness, gaping and hopeful, pants like a ravenous hound. It waits with baited breath for a sliver, a scrap, a mere morsel to dampen that too-loud hunger. She knows she would be not its first meal, nor its last, but perhaps for a short while the flesh on her thin chalk bones might serve a purpose greater than elemental motion.  She thinks of what her body would look like 100 metres down. Would it be ugly, or beautiful? Would gravity paint her black or red or nothing at all? Would the dust bloom in alarm at the violent disruption of its repose? Sabine wonders -- no, hopes, that her burst and cloven skeleton might never be found. Like a lightbulb dropped over gravel, she would never cast shadows again. She dreams of the rats that would dance across her rotting skin, weaving through her ribs as though they were tassels at a fair. She thinks of the coyotes that would snap and yip and swallow her intestines whole, free to roll the dice one more time. Her flesh would give, give, give and the world would spin five times over before her bones would begin to show. She knows her grave would not be as miraculous as Acton's, nor as hallowed as her mother's, but if life might flourish still from her broken weight, she could be willing to make a deal with the Gods.  But she knows the Gods don't make deals.  Not with the daughter of a butcher.  "Hey," Undiluted shock.  She yelps, "oh!" and tries to turn toward the voice that is reaching out like a lighthouse at sea. But the surprise is still shooting through her skull, radiating like nuclear fission out and up and out again. Her feet are moving, slipping, too fast for her to catch the rest of the stranger's words and her heart is mauling its way through her larynx as the alpine-air shrinks beneath the weight of her falling hips. Sabine cannot even grab a glimpse of the man for the scree beneath her feet, already worn loose by hopeless wayfarers, is beginning to crumble completely and involuntarily her muscles are screaming in a terrible primitive tongue that tells her to keep that darkness at bay. Sabine thought she knew what it would feel like to fall to her death. She thought it would feel like relief.  But as her shoulders lurch forward into the void, her hindquarters searching for grip and finding only sinking rubble, she realises falling does not feel like relief at all.  It feels like terror. ♣ -

art by rallidae | table by kezz

@caine