Enter again the sweet forest - any

[Pollock]

Enter again the sweet forest
     Enter the hot dream
       Come with us

‘You don’t look too good, boy.’

Her eyes are cold, dead bone. Sockets—empty but for the grave worms that tunnel their way in and out. Her voice is drawl and repulsive lust and she is the skin and come-hither hips of mother; the demented and viper-minded second coming of mother, damp with saltwater and rancid with necrosis. It is because she is mother that she lords over him, now, like an idol goddess of annihilation, boring into him with cold, dead bone.

He does not look back or sideways, he blinks his eyes, clearing his vision. 

(He does not look at her. She’s dead, come to ferry his wasteland to the afterlife. But not him.

Not just yet.)

He hangs onto the briny edge of the world, the roar of destruction popping his eardrums, watching the water smash the rocks below, rushing up to kiss his split feet and spit spray in his face. The earth shakes below, throwing him sideways against grey-toothed stone, blood gushing from a cut deep between his eyes. He grunts and takes his feet again, the clouds above—black and putrid with storm—roil like a hungry belly, spreading wide over his doomsday. 

Over his kingdom. 

Like a jaw, it all begins to hinge shut.

“But at least I was a king,” he yells, cackles madly, over the din at nothing and nobody, into the endtimes, spitting blood from his busted mouth.

Water, thick with foam and poisoned with salt, washes over him, slicking the rocks just so and drags him into its wanting mouth. He gasps in air, when he can, kicking against the ungiving heave of the undertow.

It takes him under.

Under. Down—like falling, but with the friction of a hundred leagues of sea, so he sinks slowly until the depth eats the light and the wild way his body tosses rends sense from his brain. Dark. Black—like space, but here it is starless and bleak and so, very wet. 

---

He picks up his crown—leaves catching in the salt-stiffened messes of white hair and feathers; dust looses from his golden pelt, supplanted by rich, muddy earth. He makes his way, slow and stunted by aches, through the hall of nude and partially-dressed trees, becoming more and more shapely with each passing day.

He had missed her. 
It is a shame, of course, that he has lost his repugnant, barren demesne—he had just begun to make her, his; only just sunk his hooks... Ah well. One day he could gather his grandkids up onto his knees and tell them tale of how he, and he alone, had made Pangea wet.

He supposes she had not enjoyed herself.

He had, and is that not what matters?

the gift-giver