01-17-2017, 08:05 PM
Love,
Deceitful and destructive.
How it savaged him!
Mandan’s heart had shrunk, shrivelled up. Or the part of it that could know love and hate so intimately that it could pine or ache for either. Hate, he thinks, is more preferable but he doesn’t even have that left in him. Every emotion had been gobbled up by nothingness and he felt blank, hard like stone and bone, and raw like a scab picked at one too many times.
Life kept picking at him, would not leave him be to scar over too much.
No, it said breathe and keep the dumb muscle in your chest beating, feed your stomach and slake your thirst and Mandan, slave-animal, could not ignore it.
His eyes follow the sudden flight of a few birds that clatter and caw their own displeasure from on high as they fly away from the shriek that came from within the forest. He does not look to the source of it, bending his too-light head back to the snow to lip distractedly at the pale particles that have built up layer upon layer of cold on the ground. (Built up, like him, layer upon layer.) More noise makes him lift his head again, still far too light to ever be comfortable as he suffers the loss of his addax horns more acutely than a lover, and his face falls back into a familiar scowl, lips naturally set in a sneer.
Great, a mare.
How they plague him!
(Granted, he has little in the way of good interactions with his own sex, let alone the opposite!)
She is snowy and damp; he can tell even that from this distance, or more so from the way she picks at her wings, determined to groom the feathers back into formation. The sneer starts to fall away from his mouth, matched by hers or perhaps undone by it because she looks so ferocious, or could be if she wasn’t awash in clumps of snow (just like he is, though it has formed to his back, smoothed itself over like a blanket he has forgotten about) and he is tickled by the garish sight of her. So much so, that all he feels like doing is laughing! It comes out in a short, sharp bark and then he shuts up, back to silence as he thinks about how to answer her.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
He was either too honest or never honest enough, either way - it came out rude and brutish, like he always is nowadays.
Deceitful and destructive.
How it savaged him!
Mandan’s heart had shrunk, shrivelled up. Or the part of it that could know love and hate so intimately that it could pine or ache for either. Hate, he thinks, is more preferable but he doesn’t even have that left in him. Every emotion had been gobbled up by nothingness and he felt blank, hard like stone and bone, and raw like a scab picked at one too many times.
Life kept picking at him, would not leave him be to scar over too much.
No, it said breathe and keep the dumb muscle in your chest beating, feed your stomach and slake your thirst and Mandan, slave-animal, could not ignore it.
His eyes follow the sudden flight of a few birds that clatter and caw their own displeasure from on high as they fly away from the shriek that came from within the forest. He does not look to the source of it, bending his too-light head back to the snow to lip distractedly at the pale particles that have built up layer upon layer of cold on the ground. (Built up, like him, layer upon layer.) More noise makes him lift his head again, still far too light to ever be comfortable as he suffers the loss of his addax horns more acutely than a lover, and his face falls back into a familiar scowl, lips naturally set in a sneer.
Great, a mare.
How they plague him!
(Granted, he has little in the way of good interactions with his own sex, let alone the opposite!)
She is snowy and damp; he can tell even that from this distance, or more so from the way she picks at her wings, determined to groom the feathers back into formation. The sneer starts to fall away from his mouth, matched by hers or perhaps undone by it because she looks so ferocious, or could be if she wasn’t awash in clumps of snow (just like he is, though it has formed to his back, smoothed itself over like a blanket he has forgotten about) and he is tickled by the garish sight of her. So much so, that all he feels like doing is laughing! It comes out in a short, sharp bark and then he shuts up, back to silence as he thinks about how to answer her.
“I haven’t figured that out yet.”
He was either too honest or never honest enough, either way - it came out rude and brutish, like he always is nowadays.