[open] am i dying..? [any]

[Scalped]

It had been too late;
Too late to avoid the horn of the old bull that hooked her breast and ripped it up.
Too late to avoid the way her boy slid off her back as she stumbled, eventually rolling end over end.

She, as a horse, was too big to trample under the multitude of their hooves.
He, as a human, was not.
They leapt over her, and others ran to either side as her flesh parted the sea of them. But him, they did not spare and their hooves trampled bow, arrow, and boy all at the same time. As the life bled out of her, she saw only his mangled flesh feet from her but her legs stopped answering her brain’s demands to move. Her stare became one of death, looking out beyond his body and far out over the endless grass and sky.

Scalped still does not know why she woke up days’ later, sucking in a breath and stuck to the earth in a crust of her own blood in a marriage of dirt and dryness. The gaping flesh of her breast had healed up, puckered and pink across the splotch of red fur and on up into the white of her throat. But she blames Coyote for it, that trickster god that has a paw in everything and since that awful day when she woke up, more alive than ever, she’s never aged or changed.

(The brown and black of him reminds her of brown boys and shaggy buffalo skins.)
(The sorrow in him, reminds her of her own.)

He sighs; an ear twitches, hears it.
She makes the assumption that is he gradually coming to terms with her barrel against his back in small waves of acceptance. Reluctance still stiffens his spine, she can feel it though it is not altogether too uncomfortable; she understands, had refused the touch and look of all else but the wind for many years after, until she came upon her own kind again - horses, like him and her. She fell back into the old ways, moved with the herd and bore foals.

They lived;
They died;
Scalped did not.

It was this that drove her away.
Coyote had tricked her off the road to the stars and chased her back down to the earth, driving her right back into the same house of flesh that had failed her. (That old trickster dog might have had a paw in that too! What else could have turned that buffalo bull into her, hooking his horn in her breast, but fear and a slavering jaw in the flying dirt and dust behind him?)

“I don’t know if it gets any easier,” she tells him, coming back to him from deep in a pit of memory that was dark and terrible. “Maybe we lose them over and over so we can never forget what it is that we lost.” She cannot be sure if she is talking from experience or not. The memory of that day comes around every few years and she feels like she lives it over again; even dies all over again but it feels too real and how can a memory feel like that?

Her nose finds the top of his head between his ears, and she buries it there, breathing him in.
She had yet to shed a tear but it slips down the roman length of her face, circles the curve of a nostril and falls onto his poll; apparently she is still capable of crying too.