I stalk the velvet shadows once again and wince as the
witches reach their claws out from within the branches of the trees and the
wind howls with laughter when I flinch away. Something twinkles in the eyes of
the puddles in the gutter and something tinkles in the bushes, a bell, one akin
to those the witches pin to their companions to signify where their loyalty
lies or perhaps whose orders they follow when it’s time again to watch street
wanderers and claw out eyes.
The animals don’t realise I’m from their world. My body is
confused too, as it startles at every patch of gloom or foggy figure, sending a
tremor through my empty heart. Perhaps it has merely forgotten how to ignore
the looming swaths of black, like babies swaddled in death, how to quell the
uneasiness, the discomfort, of this world, how to keep it all at bay. Only
light does that and I am not allowed it anymore, no glimmer to cast a shadow of
a doubt on reality for the brightness will cast a shadow of its own and the
darkness does not like that.
Things can only get worse. The animals can tell, as they
peer with little sparks of electricity, the very same that jumps through their
veins and that jumps through my sense of yearning when we spot each other. They
can smell that I’m not right and scatter, like so many leaves that try even to
avoid my boot. It’s as though I’m contagious.
I stop and listen. A titter, like the bells, and I glance
around to try and spy their hiding place, as though I can leap up after them
into the sky when they do, and follow them somewhere where I ca taste the
sunlight again, or even something more than the juice in their veins. I hate
birds, for they embody all I love and had to leave, and all that I have lost as
it sank into the ground with the last sunset.
And so they leave me, knowing if they stayed, their time
here would be as short as mine is long. IT feels as though only I pass slowly
through this world, in desperate unaging, and terrible lust. There must be
others, but they do not show themselves, as though they too fear what I might
do. Unless that is our curse, to never see another but to know they must be
there, and to wander searching for what we have lost and what we could have.
I’m sure we cannot know, just as we cannot return to the day, nor curb this insatiability.
And so, on we stalk the velvet shadows until the beautiful gold of dawn one day
takes us.
