sometimes I think about the ones that we’ve replaced
all the millions underneath the burnt and waste
He is unphased by the dark, unphased by a sky he cannot recognize without constellations strewn across it like distant gems. He doesn't care that the sun has grown tired of shining and now hides beside the moon. It makes no difference whether it is day or night or something mangled in between, or that this winter is the most brutal he’s ever known. He does care that the monsters are made not of flesh but of darkness, though, because even the sharpened edges of his dark beak cannot tear shadow from itself, and he is hungry.
His bones are a map of inelegant lines beneath his bay skin, leaving hollows along his spine and behind his hips where snow has fallen and frozen leaving him as whitecapped as any distant mountain. But easy prey has gone from here, fled the dark and the shadow and gone into hiding or hibernation for too long, and he is far too wasted to hunt larger game. Besides, what little was left of his morality objected to hunting anything larger than the chittering squirrels that used to fill these trees.
Though it wanes now, as his ribs spring wider and the sound of his stomach wakes him from sleep, his humanity wanes.
He hunts, but he has long since lost the expectation of finding anything. All the smaller animals know better than to be near the ground now, and those that remain are picked off by stronger beasts than he. So he finds nuts where he can, cracking them open with a furious kind of frustration to pick at the meat inside, but it is never enough, never, and he can feel himself disappearing.
Where once he had been withdrawn by choice, by his inability to speak words with a beak too slippery for language, it is a growing madness that alienates him now, a fevered brightness in his pale brown eyes as his dark, horned head turns hungrily towards every sound. He is calculating, deciding, but it is almost always a horse with wide, terrified eyes stumbling through the dark and he is not yet that desperate.
So he starves, and he is not the only one. He starves and he hunts and unravels into madness. He thinks of his mother and his father, and he is sure he knew their names once, but they are gone from him now. He can only remember their faces, though neither had been muzzled by a beak as he had been, so he pushes those memories away too because it is easier than trying to face the poisonous jealousy that creeps up through the cracks to try and stain him.
and I get sad because, of course, we’ll be the same
