Solitude is Carnivorous

The leaves change, and the light of day weighs a little more than in the winter. And the prospect of chilly relief starts easing its way into the brain. Like a nest, the hot months prepare her for a long, cold winter. One that would scar her and bruise her and lacerate her heart to its bloody core. A season of change that would instill in her a bravery and a fear that commingled in dark intercourse. Something inside ravaged with fury, with a lethal angst that corroded her capacity to smile. Ah to smile...to glow with the fleeting warmth of even a droplet of affection, of love, of passion! To radiate with the Autumn sun, with the earthly rustle of red-orange leaves. The leaves! More beautiful when their death arrives. The colors fade to black and are swallowed by the earth, digested and excreted into another life...like a globule of mortality morphing into shape. Mother nature may bang her gavel at her own discretion, but may she convalesce the crippling cancer of winter, the riotous rot of autumn, the saddening shimmer of spring, and the sickly scorch of summer. White is the snow that lays upon the ground, to melt and run frothy along the thawing forest floor, bustling with the life of Mother. Steamy is the land, and steamy is her soul- begging to burst from her and screech at the top of her lungs: “Take me! Rip me from this carcass! Wrap your distant arms around my mapless soul!”
She can not speak, only can she stare- upwards through the broken canopy- where a white hot, cloudy winter sky shines through. Not a twig breaks in the forest here, nor does the dying animal screech, being dragged without mercy into the hole of a predator, stabbing its claws into the soil to stay above. Through fur and bone and gristle do the jaws of the predator penetrate, moving side to side, shredding and ripping and draining the blood of the weak. The bark of the pines, rough with ridges and grooves, brown with the protection of an army, seem to fall silently from the hundred year old statues around her. The meat of the pines, so smooth and salmon, or tan, exposed. A single drop of rain falls from the sky and lands crucially on the patch of skin above her right thumb- she trembled with the shock of the cold pin prick. A ripple of tingling, like the tingling of a sleeping limb, shoots up her arm and waves through her numb body. And so descended a tear that fell to the pitch of the forest floor and froze the life around her. Bang! The silence shattered and the rush of the wind spindling throughout the lifeless giants. To her knees she falls, a burst of feeling panning throughout her. She thrusts her fingers into the cold soil and grasps it like the hands of a lover. Angelina pulls the soil from the earth and upwards does she lift it, like an offering, towards the canopy.

She feels it trickle through the cracks in her fingers, the falling trails curving in the wind, scattering back to the ground. She bellows “Oh Love! Fleeing love! Stay for a night! Grow from the escaping soil in my calloused hands! I shall drink from your Chalice! The blood of passion, I must intake, before it dwindles away! Overturn the hourglass! Oh...the pains of my soul quiver me!”

Around and around the pitter patter of pillowed paws trot with the feel of a hunt. A howl to a hiding moon haunts her... cracking the chaos in her mind. Wolf after wolf encircles her angled body, arching towards the sky. The beasts know not human emotion, but only human form. Feeding they must success, and they will feed. “Devour the pain! DEVOUR IT!” She deplores. A growl from the dogged hunters bounces off the bareness of the trees. Her left arm is snatched by a beast, and she is jerked to the ground. Angelina’s face is lost from breathe in the sloshy river of melted snow that runs amongst the feet of the plants. Soil still drains from her left hand, but jaws enclose around it, pulling her along sideways. Angelina can feel her spine splinter. Her legs and her waist are consumed, her skull dragged off to feed the pups. Through her outer torso they chew- a supplement of red added to the clear streams of melted ice. Her entire body taken...all that remained was her heart and the sound of it beating on the forest floor, connected to nothing, pumping blood onto a fruitless patch of four-leaved clovers, as full of life as the city outside her window.

She stares at the dark screen of her phone from her lonely bed, and out the window to the city at night, shimmering with the lights of a billion people. Angelina closes her eyes, and allows the despondent lullaby of the ticking clock resting on the mantle to carry her body away from the city, and her heart away from the cold, forest floor.

-- Nathan Noyes