Creatures do not listen to things with flowers in their eyes or caught between their teeth when they smile. Monsters do not come to heel at the sight of a bowl filled with food (they are too wanting for the meat around a spine to crave a bowl). And I am as much a creature, as much a monster, as much a thing craving that flicker of blood at her throat.
I do not listen. I cannot.
But what I can do that I do not is turn and lay my teeth against her throat. There are constellations flickering in her pulse with a hundred stories that I could pull loose. Mother taught me enough about stories (almost as much as she taught me about blood) and I know that I could take them from this golden mare. There is in her mother, mother, mother looks a glimmer that tells me she might not have the skill to deny her constellation from the tip of my teeth and the hunger snarling in my belly.
Does she know enough to feel endangered when I waiver in my flight uncertain which hunger I will soothe? Does she know enough to feel uncertain when I start to herd the stag into deeper and deeper mire that no water-horse can survive?
Does she know?
Had I been another creature, another monster, or the unicorn that I was before I was this I might have stopped to consider her. But a wolf does not stop at the belly of the lamb, a lion does not falter at the neck of a gazelle, the hurricane does not turn from the forest. Just like all the predators, and all the storms, I only gather my weight into my haunches as the stag stumbles through the muck and mire.
I do stop, or falter, or turn away, when my jaw hinges and I leap to wrap it around his throat. I consume. It is all I know how to do now.
But I wonder, as I drag him deep into the water where it starts to run out to sea, if the golden mare knows enough to feel endangered now. I wonder if she feels uncertain about all the things living beneath the water that are not as precious and sacred as a garden.
I wonder. I feast and I wonder.
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