Part 1
“Tara?”
She heard the old
pride mistress call her name. But when she searched for the lioness, her eyes
only found an intensely bright light. “They’ve killed me.”
“No, Tara, this
isn’t the end of your hunt. Just an in-between moment. You can choose to go
back. Or you can choose differently.”
“Your voice,
Mistress,” Tara said, wondering why she couldn’t figure out where the old pride
mistress’s voice was coming from. “Your voice is—”
“My voice sounds different,
distant, disembodied. You see, Tara, survival—true survival—often requires
sacrifice and change.”
“We are dying out,
Mistress, the land too. I don’t know if we can survive for much longer. Not all of us.”
Tara told the old pride mistress of the shortage of food and water, of cubs that
weren’t more than pelt and bone, of their growling guts, of the two-legged
taking and taking while giving back nothing but pain. Everyone said that the
old pride mistress let herself die, so that her cubs could eat. “If I could
change like you did, Mistress, I would do it. I want to do it. For them.”
“So be it,” the old pride
mistress said, the power of her pronouncement lingering, even after the light began
to wane.
“So be it,” Tara echoed,
closing her eyes slowly, slipping willingly into the dark, hoping her flesh
would nourish cubs, and her bones would enrich soil.
Part 3
detail from a photo by David Law, on Unsplash
- the title echoes a favorite quote from
Firefly: “No power in the ‘verse can stop me!”
-
for Poets and Storytellers United--Weekly Scribblings #70: Listmania and Writers’ Pantry #71: The Turtle
Moves.