have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
He is a rusted, quiet thing.
Dusk has already settled over his shoulders, the blurring of light and shadow melding into his wide shoulders and dragging the corner of his thick lip down in the corner. He doesn’t move as the sun moves across the sky. He doesn’t move as the shadows make their long play, stretching outward with spindly fingers and then dragging backward, casting their form along the expanse of his back and out into the forest floor.
He remains still, unmoving—nothing but a stone pressed into the floor, as surely rooted as the trees that curve up and around him. If it were not the cracking of a branch, the sound as abrupt and violent as the fracturing of a spine, he may not have moved at all. Instead, the sound sends one dark ear toward it, the motion slight and muffled by the thick, tangled wire of his forelock. His head angles with it, the motion inquisitive before he shakes that from him, the curiosity dropping from him and finding a home amongst the moss underneath.
It had been a long time since he had found himself back here, and in a lot of ways, he no longer feels the young man he had once been. There is no longer the buoyancy of youth, the elasticity of naive hope. He is rigid now, stern, bruises barely hidden behind the grey mist of his guarded eyes. It’s not difficult to imagine the man he might have become had things gone differently. It is not difficult to think of the carefree boy that he had been—the joy that has blossomed so assuredly in his chest, blooming roses of innocence wrapping around each rib and up his throat. Instead, such beauty had been ripped from him, hallowed him out.
And during the in-between, those formative moments where he might have found and clung to a driftwood life raft, he had instead let go. He had dropped into the ether of his own thoughts, retreating further and further away into the sullen, bitter silence. He had let rust climb up his limbs and rot begin to seep through his veins. Now, there is little of that laughing young boy. In his stead is a rusted, quiet thing. This man who stands in the darkness, peering into this land that is not home but is also not completely alien. He snorts, the sudden exhale of air disturbing the lightest of leaves beneath him, and shakes, letting the dust lift off his spotted hide and then slowly fall down, settling back into the familiar curves and straightaways.
Beneath his mane, the summer afternoon heat produces just the slightest hint of a sheen, dampening the flesh and providing the barest reminder that he was alive at all. He almost settles back into the stillness. He almost drops back into the cradle of it, but he hears another crack—loud and echoing. This time, he doesn’t move his head. He doesn’t flick an ear. Instead, he just lifts his solemn, stormy eyes, sharpening against the areas where the shadows have already obscured his vision. His voice is strong and clear, a surprising sound when considering the quietness of the rest of him, and it rings unmistakably through the hushed forest air: “Yes?”
and to stop the muscle that makes us confess
