Lament

The hole was dug

in the rain,

the specimen removed, black dirt brushed gently off its smooth red skin⁠: skin we all shall live and die in:

You touch it tenderly, like a mother. “I’m…

sorry,” the doctor said.

Our daughter grew in your womb, only to be born dead⁠.

sorry,” you say, brushing dirt from her wings, her face, her bulbous eyes which lightning, flashing in the diagonally falling rain,

open

Shovels stabbed the ground.

Shovels⁠ stabbed.

“No!”

Raindrops fall upon the illuminated phone screen displaying the map showing the site where the professor hypothesised the specimen would be

buried,

the phone lies in the black dirt ground⁠, held still by my severed hand⁠—

Teardrops fell upon the illuminated phone screen displaying all the calls you did not take from all the people who would not understand the grief of

(“I’m going,” you say.)

finality.

Drops of blood⁠ on the phone scre

—am.

You: held by me in the hospital room; yet even I could not stop the world from spinning; yet even I could not

understand. The professor’s not mad. They existed,” you said.

The professor in gloved hands opened tenderly the leatherbound bestiary; turned page after yellowed page until you⁠—gasping: “Beautiful.”⁠⁠—beheld, illustrated:

thunder

is her heart, beating once and never to be stilled,

is her beating heart,

is her beating

wings, as open-eyed she rises into the storm-grey / diagonally dissected / sky / the indigenous workmen swinging their shovels /

fleeing they / fall dead.

It was your touch, your maternal touch. The way you stroked that numb extinct cheek; with love… with life….

“...a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind,” the professor recited from a deep collective memory.

—beheld, illustrated:

She is:

Alive and by humanity instinctually reviled, in the maelstrom, around whose reanimating form all but you are falling back.

She swoops—slashing—

killing—

she grows, and the professor was right, I understand, blood trickling from my emptied wrist into the black dirt beside the hole in which our ancestors had interned the creature's once-suspended body, buried it with fear after banishing its mother to a long-forgotten ancient nether-realm. I can nearly hear their drumming, their chant, see their painted caves adorned with hand carved idols, of which the professor possessed the sole surviving one…

You held it up to the light. "The mother is a fearsome beast," he said, "but the child—the child would have surpassed her in malignity."

What unfathomed wickedness.

Above

the grave, I grasped your frigid hand, during the funeral, I could not grasp your winged heart, already upon its final cosmic voyage.

Across the ocean, you and I, to the hypothesised burial site.

I am. Among the dying and the dead descending. The air. Saltwater. I cannot breathe. I cannot see your face. The setting sun I see. Dulled, distorted—through the hateful and translucent wings flesh of the beast becoming. Anti Creation. Antedark in-rhythm with the diminished beating of my drumheart I gaze panting upon the paintings on the cave walls. Prophecy: “She’ll grow,” you say, until she is not of the Earth but the Earth of her, embracing us completely; her translucent skin of youth darkening into a future opaqueness…

The sun will burn.

But no light will penetrate to us.

Night, which will have been falling for generations, is—

A guillotine—

I am. Among the dying and the dead descending into a personal darkness presaging the total darkness to come. I do not recognise you. I am. Praying, silently lamenting the fate of our stillborn

I wiped tears from the phone screen.

“She was,” you say.

“I was.”

“She’s gone.”

“I’m gone.”

At the funeral her skin is hazy and unclear and pain precipitates

a world-enveloping demon

planet.