this is the day the lord has given; any

[Chemdog]

The familiar creaks and groans of his aging bones changes with the weather and the seasons. He may have the surge of immortality webbing under his skin, in his blood, in his veins and pumping through his ever-young heart – but his body, his body is not protected from pain or the sting of aging. It does fade, seems to go with his mentality – depressions make everything hurt, but they will never stop. It is the curse of a real thinker, the dreaded parasite that lives in the mind that will not, cannot, sit still for even a second. Depression, it comes in crashing waves, kicked up from a storm that birthed itself with its own agenda. Ride it through, his mind will soothe itself with this, and so he will hide for months and enjoy the miserable solitude and silence because for some reason he finds comfort in the isolation. Winter is always the worst.

Snow was falling when he crawled out of the deep cave carved in the side of one of the many mountains in the northern part of the Meadow. He avoids the open hills of that place, though, skirting it through the forest. He follows an already trodden path, a brown slushy streak through the pristine blanket of bleach white lying across the forest floor. He walks ever calmly, almost as if he is tired but he has had plenty of rest. His ears tweak and twist, his breathing methodical and automatic, he listens to the forest as he strolls through and onto the River.

Even in the bitter cold, the water flows, chiming through the leafless trees. It was a different sound in the colder months then in the warm, humidity muffled seasons. Out of curiosity, maybe in trying to wake his old mischievous self, he follows the prints of a stranger to the river’s edge. He could not see, upon his slow approach, what she was looking down at – but he could feel the madness in the air. He can recognize that sort of twinge in the atmosphere easily. He moves to present himself from the side, down river, just briefly catching the tumbling piece of horn clink by on the ice and rocks. His teal eyes draw up to her face, not being surprised or otherwise bewildered by the girl’s odd sense of calmness about her broken horn. He has no real way to know she was standing there so coolly because she just did it to herself, but he can taste the madness in the air. His ears twitch and he sucks in a breath through his inky black lips, letting it roll out in white plumes through his nostrils. He cannot think anything to say beyond ‘you lost a bit of your horn there, girl.’ or ‘whoops.’ Nothing really viable, he guesses, and likely to get him lashed at one way or another. So he just kind of looks at her, observing the woman with her ankles in the icy water, the tip of her horn clinking down river to rest forever on some pebble bed or dam of debris.

CHEMDOG
to the window, to the wall

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