Eyes full of ashes,
tomorrow stumbles on ice
and empires weep Blues.
Horror is coming
to die. I hear the wailing,
and echo the chant
of chances waiting
to be
taken.
I will turn my heart
towards the brightest and darkest
bits of the dwarfed dawn.
- for Poets and Storytellers United--Weekly Scribblings #71: Waiting.
Tara wasn’t dead and
she didn’t know why. Her body felt uncannily rigid. She tried flexing her legs,
but nothing happened. She wanted to look down at her paws, but her face refused
to turn away from the sky. She wiggled her paws and tasted something rich and
delicious. With her paws. She tried making sense of paws that could taste, but
kept getting distracted by the sun. She just couldn’t turn away from it. The
bright and warmth tasted so good on her skin.
After following the
ups and downs of the sun for many dawns and dusks, Tara’s head turned to fluff.
She liked the fluffy feeling. It was light and freeing and promising.
“Mommy look, a
dandelion!”
The sound of the two-legged
young pulled Tara out of her latest sun trance. She readied herself for the screaming
and the stench of fear to overwhelm her senses. But nothing happened.
“It’s so pretty. Can
I make a wish, Mommy? Please!”
“Sure,” the
two-legged mother said. “Just don’t rip the poor thing out of the ground. Get
on your knees to make your wish.”
The two-legged young
wrapped a not so gentle paw around Tara’s body, and said, “I wish all the big
kitties grow fat and happy, and that my Mommy finds the bad man who hurt their
mommy, and that my Mommy can put the bad man in a cage forever and ever. I
wish, I wish, I wish.”
With eyes closed and heart open, the child blew her belief-full breath into Tara. And every seed, of the flower that had once been a lioness, soared into the wind, roaring: So be it!
- this concludes (and perhaps also begins) Tara’s story.
- the title echoes a favorite quote from
Firefly: “No power in the ‘verse can stop me!”
- for Poets and
Storytellers United--Writers’ Pantry #72: Oh, I Will Walk 500 Miles…
“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.
- 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.
