11-05-2016, 12:54 AM
It doesn’t occur to Bruise to be afraid—to feel anything but interest, curiosity, hunger.
(Perhaps, in the future, he would learn the danger of inducing fear but never feeling it.
Perhaps it would be his greatest weakness. Perhaps. Perhaps.)
When the older stallion snaps at him, lifts his chin, Bruise allows it, but the defiant spark in his eyes does not dim and he does not cow to the other’s demands. Instead, he simply just nods because he made sense. After all, he had no great need for the mare, ugly and simple. She had been weak and he had dismissed her. She had not provided—he had provided for himself. She had been but a vessel to carry him into this world and if the storms were to shake the planks loose, then he would not mourn her sinking.
She was but a vessel and he had already been delivered.
“Pollock,” he repeats the name—wonders if he too should have had a more elegant name and then disregards the thought. He liked his name. He liked that he had given it to himself. He liked the way that it sounded on his tongue, a warning, a promise. Simple—a contusion that ached. Deceiving when the blood blossomed outward and inward, when the bruise hit the skull and billowed outward on delicate brain matter like constellations. Fatal then. A simple kiss of death. Yes. His name would suit him just fine.
Still, he appreciated the gild of his father’s name, appreciated the paternal, even territorial, reaction. He did not mind being claimed in this way. There was much to learn. “Indeed,” he responded, because he was not yet a man of many words. “I am.”
He tilted his head back again, studious in his approach.
“Where do we go now?”
Because boys, men, like them always had somewhere to go—something to do.
The world was too large, too empty, for them to sit and slumber.
Bruise
head like a hole; as black as your soul.