It was dawn when he came across the carcass, and the sound of the buzzing had overwhelmed the hum. A curious despair fell over him at the realization that the hum had diminished slowly, gradually, a small fear curdling at his core for what would follow the encroaching silence – though what he found did not deepen or disgruntle that fear by any means. A simple mishap, so seeming, the way the leg was split and twisted in a way that it should not have been. The bone was sharp white, a gleaming white, a licked clean white; it struck out from the knitted fibers of flesh like an arrowhead, jutted eerily from the disfigured anatomy far too unnaturally to be of any coincidence. For a moment he assumed that the helpless thing had collapsed, after misfortune had so seen it through, having a broken ligament that warranted full game to those who loomed as predators. The ribs were bent and some broken, tissue receded back against the ivory, earthy brown a filthy, tattered leather that complemented the pink fingers of skeletal bars – slashed across, so that the innards (or what was left of them) had been provided as a feast for the flies, for the worms, for the teeth and the eyes and tongues of those who cared for decay.
But he didn't care to pay particular attention to the sheen of the ribs that curved like a cold embrace, like a coffin lid. The pallor of the leg bone – where it jut out just above the hock, sharp and thick – was what kept his attention. It was the sheer white of it that drew him, that kept him perplexed, that possessed him with a hunger to know, to understand. It was not coincidence, the longer he observed it, so he resolved in musing the coldness of its appearance and the immaculacy of the way in which it shone, mercilessly, so much so that it almost glowed in the peering light of dawn. The skin around it had peeled back – artfully, not with rot but as though it was intentional, like rolled up clay – to reveal the bone. The flies, too greedy, too bloated, too careless, sought his live flesh with a grieving hunger that could not be sated on the dead. Their gluttonous mouths turned to his warmth, suckling on the perspiration that beaded, biting when it was not enough. Each he flicked or nipped from his flesh when their famished mouths were too exploratory – but the buzzing droned on, and where one was felled another two reclaimed its place.
Though the nuisance of the flies seemed to grow by the ticking second, his observations uncoiled with each wonder in discovery. The blood was cold, the muscles laxed, and most its insides removed like sacrificial rite. It was clean, cleaner than a massacre should be, if a massacre was what it was. A poor funeral deserving of a better eulogy, if even by an enemy's means – there was no pool of deep red, no spindling fibers of sinew that came unraveled from the body like an unfinished kill. The heart, the stomach, the lungs, and the liver had been removed – and he wondered if it had been by choice of appetite. What was left was something that only the insects could indulge themselves on, and even that was sparing. The body was celestial, if only in death, and the events that took place afterward defined that too well: buds had formed where he initially thought had writhed the pulsing bodies of maggots, black and bulbous. Now pulsed instead small, beady sarcophagi like swollen ticks, rounder and rounder until they formed a seam like a frowning mouth. His brow furrowed, and he took a step back as that mouth unfurled – spread wide to reveal within itself a display of blooms that quite resembled african violets – but instead grand shades of vermillion and some glowing hue between orange and yellow that he hadn't seen in nature before except in glimpses of the sun on the edge of the dusky horizon. Their opening petals edged with needles like teeth – pins, golden and hair-thin, stretched themselves like a tired lion's maw beneath the shadow of the flowers.
And then - snap.
Three of the many that bloomed had cracked their jaws around the curious kneading of flies and bees and beetles, suspended in fluttering wings until they succumbed to nothing. Four others followed suit in consecutive order, while the rest sprouted between rib and intestine and dirt and maggotry, until the corpse slowly brimmed with the sun-drop flowers that all but replaced the organs that had been removed. The buzzing of the flies increased – too much despite their imminent deaths, they were swooned to the flowery corpse, quickly forgetting the warmth of the stallion and his salt-licked flesh, until their drone was almost unbearable and the flowers seemed to grow in hundreds, nurtured by the writhing bodies.
Erasmus took a step back to allow the final flies that clung to his shadow to discover their new fate, and returned his fixations to that gleaming white bone. It pointed like a finger, sharp and direct, an arrowhead on the face of a map. And beyond it lined a trail of similar flowers, not made of sunlight but deep, deep red – and about them a faint pungence of death. Obeying some sense of deliverance, he discarded the carcass behind him and took to the path that unraveled ahead, unaware of the shifting lights that warred overhead, cast out by the looming foliage. Each bud bloomed with the urgency and haste that looked too much like drops of blood hitting the ground, but instead pulled from the earth in the movement. Too enthused with their nature, he hadn't immediately noticed the change that had unfolded over the island until he realized the hum – the thing of epiphany that became something terrible, pestering – had ceased entirely. No longer did it pulse in his ears, an enigmatic sound that droned like white noise.
He looked back to where the carcass lay. The buzzing had stopped. The clasping jaws of the flowers were suspended – either shut or open, but none given to any motion even so much as bouncing in the breeze. The breeze by note had gone out, all that remained was a stagnant air that grew with humidity, swelling and sweating and choking out his sensibilities. The birds, where once they had flung from branch to branch, watchful and aggressively conspiring, had all turned to silence and gone. Even beyond the forest he could no longer hear the roaring of the waves.
And in the emptiness looming and lonely, the silence sounded something like fear.
STAFF EDIT***
@erasmus has rolled a 3! He has been awarded +150 signos.
