It said only one thing, over and over, a repetition of inescapable anguish
Blood, and meat, and marrow, tastes different than they remember it tasting. Each swallow is filled with as much gore as it is marrow. Their teeth do not worry at the bones as they once did an eon ago when the gods walked on young and childish legs. Instead they tear through the mountain lion with an ease that bone teeth could not. Each thorn in their jaw, each vine woven together to make their tongue, each carnivorous plant hanging down from the roof of their mouth consumes the predator like she had been nothing but a copse of newborn oak instead of a corpse gone cold.
We do not notice when the singing of the trees turns loud enough to deafen. Our entire being, down to the sun-hot spore in our chest, only hears the serenade of death, of rejoice, of each fox and vole and hare as they sing hallelujah for the culmination of our violence. All we can hear as the lion turns to nothing more than shreds of live strewn in the autumn leaves and chewed up rot, is how the singing turns to a hum.
All we can hear is how it echoes in our hearts. And echoes, and echoes, until even that sound turns dull as the hallelujah of the animals turned to slumber. We had forgotten the silence of the aftermath, the quiet part of war, the way even our stomach makes no sound as the hollies and evergreens turn marrow to water.
In that silent aftermath we sleep.
And with the bramblebear return to seed, and a vine belly full of blood that sinks back into the earth, Danaë curls up with her sister in the middle of the gore and sleeps.
We do not notice when the singing of the trees turns loud enough to deafen. Our entire being, down to the sun-hot spore in our chest, only hears the serenade of death, of rejoice, of each fox and vole and hare as they sing hallelujah for the culmination of our violence. All we can hear as the lion turns to nothing more than shreds of live strewn in the autumn leaves and chewed up rot, is how the singing turns to a hum.
All we can hear is how it echoes in our hearts. And echoes, and echoes, until even that sound turns dull as the hallelujah of the animals turned to slumber. We had forgotten the silence of the aftermath, the quiet part of war, the way even our stomach makes no sound as the hollies and evergreens turn marrow to water.
In that silent aftermath we sleep.
And with the bramblebear return to seed, and a vine belly full of blood that sinks back into the earth, Danaë curls up with her sister in the middle of the gore and sleeps.
