A b e l
I WILL OFFER UP A BRICK
TO THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD, BOY
As she turns to face him Abel comes to a stop like a toy wound down, slow slower slowest until he is not moving at all, only observing. She stands above him on a shelf of red rock and her horns are thick limbs silhouetted against the canyon walls, a warning that does not need spoken.
From his place he cannot tell how young she is, only how tall. Only how well-made for the desert, striped like him but not like him at all. For not the first time (and never the last) he thinks how small I am, how bare of weapons and when he sighs is it swept away like a handful of dust.
She raises her chin and he dips his, like a see-saw, like a mismatched mirror.
Hadn’t he had friends once? Hadn’t he been a boy, spindle-legged on the shoreline, making monsters of the waves that he might outrun? Now he only feels like a shadow, or maybe a golem, some thing fashioned of dust and made to obey with no thoughts of its own beneath the clay skin. In a way he was made by god.
“Hi,” he says, and pitches his voice loud enough to echo against the sun-warmed rock. For a moment more he only stands, watchful, wondering if she is one of the Davke he has heard about or whether she might have some other reason to wear his blood on her horns. It does not seem like a terrible stretch.
In the end he decides it is unlikely; too much trouble. Blood is difficult to wash off here, he knows; not only the lack of water but how fast it dries, how iron it smells, how it draws scavengers.
Abel begins to walk again, following her trail still, picking his way up toward her between the rocks and the alien-looking plants he has no name for. “Where are you heading?” he asks, genial enough, and tries to remember what it was like, having an interest in strangers that was other than calculating.
Now the only thing he ever wonders is will you hurt me? or will I hurt you?
@Angharad
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