the cave that forgets: an excerpt

One of the first weird things I wrote that turned into many weird things I wrote that made it into the manuscript. Like I said, still writing poetry but with fight scenes!

Don’t worry, it still reads like fiction for most of it. But there are weird parts that I really love and had fun with. Guess you’ll just have to wait and see!

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Wetness shimmered in the dark.

Walls of black glass curved like a throat.

Light flickered from an unknown source.

The steady dripping of memory echoed, not from anywhere. But from the very fabric of creation. All around.

Something sweet and rotten curled through the air–a scent at once old and new.

Wind moved through the cave, stirring leaves and slime

It touched stone. The stones sighed.

A low keening began. Like a song sung backwards. Grief singing itself awake.

Then: movement.

A jerking figure entered the cave–viscous, staccato.

Its movement was halting and wrong. As though it were learning to exist.

Limbs formed, pulsed, dissolved, and reformed. Over and over again.

It is trying to become.

Sometimes it had a face. Sometimes too many.

Legs bent in the wrong direction. Then corrected. Then wrong again. Then became a face. Then became a torso. An almost-human shape flickering in and out.

Its hands dripped with waste and starlight.

Now, its whole figure was covered in it–sacred and profane. Creation and waste. Flowing back and forth. Like breath.

It had been moving backward. Not fluidly. Jagged. As though the thread of time were dragging it step by step. Stop-motion. Unnatural and natural at once.

Each backward step made a cracking sound as if the figure stepped on bones. Each step unmade something.

A dark pool opened in its chest–black as the deepest night, shimmering.

Filaments floated within. Pulsed like fish.

Then a ripple. A light went out in that black pool.

It began to understand.

It wept.

Not from eyes, but from seams the entire length of its body.

Thick droplets that smelled like metal and honey.