07-12-2020, 12:02 PM
Golden eyes open on a field of color and bright light that makes them blink shut again. Her chest heaves with the effort of breathing, burns with the strange sensation of air, and she bleats strangely, a sound not entirely equine, but not quite anything else, either. Despite the sun, the air feels cold to damp skin and down-feathers, and the ground feels strange and hard under the feet she struggles to place beneath her in an order that she cannot quite fathom. Her short brush of tail slaps wetly against shaking, scrawny, haunches, trembling beneath the pressure of gravity, as she stands at last on hooves still slippered and soft, and paws – paws! - with careless claws that scrape the earth. The girl thinks nothing of this strangeness, but her mother shoves rudely at her, scraping hard teeth against fat forelegs, then burying her black-velvet nose in the grey-brown threads plastered to the child’s neck and shoulders.
There is a beak too, and the daughter chews the air in protest against this rough handling with a small click-click-click, but to no avail. She is pushed and prodded by the dark blur of her dam whose breath rattles noisily in her nostrils, half spooked, half delighted, by the strange child she has birthed - a fantastic, chimeric, beast, already steady on mismatched feet while her minutes-older brother weaves and wobbles still on long, fragile, equine bones. The speckled bay colt moves in a careful, stilted, fashion, like a long-legged shorebird, and the mare breathes an easy name into his wet ears, "Avocet," and to the filly, something with stranger edges to it, "Manikin." The names fall against the girl's ears without meaning.
She pads to her dam's side, pressing the slick shell of beak against the russet brown belly and flanks, hunting intuitively, and, finding a swollen teat, nurses noisily. The jab of her beak elicits a squeal, the mare lifts a hind leg to kick out at the girl, sidesteps angrily, her haunches swinging away and toward the colt instead. Manikin trills an objection, still hungry, but a red-banded wing drops low, barring her return, so she bites at the stiff feathers with a growl, instead.
There is a beak too, and the daughter chews the air in protest against this rough handling with a small click-click-click, but to no avail. She is pushed and prodded by the dark blur of her dam whose breath rattles noisily in her nostrils, half spooked, half delighted, by the strange child she has birthed - a fantastic, chimeric, beast, already steady on mismatched feet while her minutes-older brother weaves and wobbles still on long, fragile, equine bones. The speckled bay colt moves in a careful, stilted, fashion, like a long-legged shorebird, and the mare breathes an easy name into his wet ears, "Avocet," and to the filly, something with stranger edges to it, "Manikin." The names fall against the girl's ears without meaning.
She pads to her dam's side, pressing the slick shell of beak against the russet brown belly and flanks, hunting intuitively, and, finding a swollen teat, nurses noisily. The jab of her beak elicits a squeal, the mare lifts a hind leg to kick out at the girl, sidesteps angrily, her haunches swinging away and toward the colt instead. Manikin trills an objection, still hungry, but a red-banded wing drops low, barring her return, so she bites at the stiff feathers with a growl, instead.
Manikin
What immortal eye, or hand, weaves beasts from dreams, sews sky to land?
@[Star]