my neck is open wide begging for a fist around it; charnel

[extinct]

faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of
everything that melts and fades and dies about us.

Sinew-mother beckoned it forth;

Offered it, as the lamb to the slaughter and oh, how it had hurt!

The star-swirls of his fur had been rich and lovely to look at, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of space that dazed and confused it. It thought him beautiful until he mounted it in his space-shape, and it hurt hurt hurt! He climbed off it’s humped back and Sinew-mother crept out of the dark to nuzzle her little pet, saying “There, there.” and it smiled happily (and stupidly!) up at her, though they were almost of a size now. It had no idea that it months from now, it would give birth to twins - time was far too tender for it to know that, egg and sperm had only moments ago, met.

But time, as it pleases, also passes;

It - she; is growing fatter than usual. Memory tells it Sinew-mother looked like this just before Burnt-sister came into being from slick straining thighs and a gush of birth fluid and sludge that had once been embers and ash having since lost their heat, thus cooled. Her appetite has increased; all it does is graze with its tusked head low and barreling through the grass. Sometimes, Burnt-sister comes to read the thoughts in her bulging belly. Burnt-sister tells her it is two things that each have their own thoughts of sleep, eat, and grow. Mother and sister have given up on trying to convince it of the impending pregnancy - it fails to comprehend that inside it are two things made like it and not, made of magic, stars, and mammoth.

It has to get away from them; they poke and poke at it until it swings its stupid tusked head at them and says one of the only words it knows, “Shoo!” Then it goes to the only place that it knows - the Meadow, and it stomps about happily. Quite frankly, it is an eyesore on the landscape: hairy and humpbacked, bearing strong resemblance to a diminutive draft-mustang hybrid, and the tusks that emerge from the cheeks of a face painfully equine in shape, are ivory-sharp and just as hard (it has yet to use them cruelly against another). It stomps about, oblivious and stupid in its happiness until it stops hard in its tracks and stares at the other it - shiny, armored, alien. Strange! It is black in its menace, but the trilling language that comes from its beaked mouth beckons the mammoth-horse closer, makes it almost curious as it starts to sniff at the other it, but it has almost no scent, too alien for it to be recognized in its small dim brain.

“Diff-er-ent,” it says.

“Like me,” and a grin splits its face from tusk to tusk, happy and dumb.

Extinct

equus mammuthus

[charnel]

I’ll eat you up, I love you so

She has watched mother grow fat again, watched Violence roll her wild eyes and make comments in a low (yet loud, obvious) voice that she hopes she can just destroy this one. Mother says Violence is jealous, but Charnel doesn’t know why, not when Violence is whip-smart and beautiful; and powerful, so powerful, a bone-goddess. Violence does not share her desire to be a monster with Charnel, when Violence wants to be a monster she simply slips into Charnel, and Charnel is her monster.
She’s good, really. Good for her. Ready to make her happy, to elicit the dulcet praise of her sister.
(Even if she hurts Charnel, sometimes. A lot of times. She loves her.)

She watches the thing approach, notes a similar roundness to her belly. She is curious; this creature, humpbacked and larger, wooly fur. Her reptile brain surges forth, hungry, thinks meat, so much meat, but she quiets it. She is good at quieting it, even if a hunger persists constantly in her belly, low and never sated.
She speaks, and it’s slow and slurred (like me, Charnel thinks, almost gleeful). She appreciates the slow speech, it gives her longer to listen, to translate the words into something she can understand.
“Yes,” she says, and she grins, too, though you can barely tell, given her odd and beaklike mouth.
“I’m Char…nel,” she says. So slow to say the name. She looks at the creature, curious and eager.
Monster, meet monster.

Charnel