03-17-2017, 10:53 PM
AN INNER WHINE LIKE A MAD MACHINE
He is.
Flattened on his side, ribs all a-poking, flexing up and down in ragged, fast, shallow respire, his eye staring blankly up at the layered, gritty sandstone roof (the other is fixed closed, tightly, lid pressed against the dusty floor)—he is in his cave. He is predictably in his cave, feeling the dark, clawing creep of his own mortality gnaw at his gutty works. Self pity once mired the dank, echoey placidity of this mausoleum—the muffled, harrowing moans for a belly that would not fill! The groans of pain, kept quiet enough for father not to hear from his fearful, stone precipice.
He has abandoned that, having no more energy to uphold the mighty weight of such a taxing burden. It is better to submit, he supposes, to the reaper. And it comes fast! Recently, he has been knocked wide awake from fast sleep by the strangest images—of hooded skeletons touching his shoulder and neck and grinning (toothy, bony grins that they are) as the skin slides off the muscle and thuds onto the grey, sandy ground; a darkness that leaks through his nostrils and mouth like noxious, thick smoke and settles on his body, sinking deep into his flesh.
He is dying.
He tries to do it peacefully, out of sight of his mother, who would surely be upset. Out of sight of his father, who would surely tell her he told her so; and out of sight of Feast, who would find it such a shame. Today offers him so such quiet. Today, he woke up here, having spent the prior day and night in just this position. Normally, he might have stalked out, pressing across the wasteland to take a futile sip of water. He might find mother, offer her some few last words with him, so that they might console her when he is gone. He might find Feast, even, to offer him the same final memories.
But not today. Yesterday he had staggered here and crashed down in some unceremonious corner of his cave, his stomach in a terrible howl, and has not left since. He felt strange—still feels strange, like something has begun to roar in him. A ghastly, aching beast. It rumbles and twists.
‘Come Famine,’ he blinks, listening to his stomach grumble and complain.
He can hear Feast’s voice and Burnt’s joins in, breaking the silence with sharp curiousness, and against his body’s will, he shakes up, commanding his hooves to plant and support him. He burps as he rocks up in a bow, his back legs stretched tall and front legs still curled, it echoes and smells of death escaping his mouth—rot and meat and blood. It takes a moment for his glued eye to open, his lids prying away from each other to invite in sand and unaccustomed darkness.
“Hmm?” he grunts, rambling slowly and stupidly to their side, his wing sliding uselessly at his shoulder, tracing a path in the giving dirt. His flat, filmy black eyes find the egg in the dark, decrepit roost; ears tilting forward, dully, Famine watches with some vague curiosity as it rattles and spreads with a spider’s web of cracks. “What if it’s just a hundred baby vultures in one egg, instead of a hundred eggs with just one baby?” He shakes his head, “the mother must be dead, whatever laid it.” Famine blinks, imagining what that must have looked like. He burps again, taking care not to let the force shake his feeble body into Burnt’s vicious wings. “Bloody,” he concludes, blandly, unwilling to envision something big contained and something even bigger making it.
Without feeling and without knowing—all eyes being so fully commanded by Feast’s strange treasure—a small piece of skin begins to peel away behind Famine’s ear. “Probably turn a vulture inside out, actually...”