There’s a fire in the cattails and there’s nothing he can do about it.
The smell of smoke and muddy water mingles with the sickening scent of singed flesh. Everywhere is somehow both light and darkness. Someone is screaming in the distance.
There’s a fire in the cattails and his gangly foal’s legs won’t carry him fast enough. His child’s lungs can’t handle all this smoke. If he could move, the terror would keep him frozen in place, wide-eyed.
Plain, cremello Litotes. Helpless and tiny.
He tries to bleat but nothing comes out. Blackness is encroaching on his vision as he collapses further into the dirt. He doesn’t understand dying so there is a sort of peace he feels as he slips away, his months old mind finding oblivion too soon. It’s as he’s giving up everything to the smoke that a much larger body hurtles into his body.
“Up, NOW!” it screams. The boy feels a rush of fresh adrenaline as he lurches upward, too blinded by smoke and panic to realize it’s his father harshly nipping his back to keep him moving.
This is some kind of new nightmare, so very different to the peace of giving up.
—
Litotes feels the peace of giving up as an adult, the gentle slip into a quiet nap. One that he lurches from with a gasp, eyes losing their bleeriness to a childlike panic. He launches upward, barely registering that the sun that was out earlier is now hidden by a bleak, overcast sky.
He shivers.
He takes a deep breath.
He’s losing some part of himself.
as it softly glides across your back
and i hope you leave right before the sun comes up
so i can watch it alone
