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Chins up.

3.3.18 – Be-speckled

We’re scraping our shoulders, pulling down the clavicles to stretch our necks for the noose. We’d already rung our throats with gold and sought to reach the tips of trees with our teeth. Some young cut theirs eager and early, leaving the legs and making ready to be prey for the pyramid’s top, but most of us were content to be simple gatherers with berries in our mouths instead of blood. Maybe it all appeared the same when the juice ran sour but even the skittish few wouldn’t beat hooves to the dirt at a single sight of sharpness. Our marks were made on the tall trunks from such sidestepping and to some it may have appeared as initials carved in for where we’d met and parted.

There were beasts that ran the range, stalking and sinewy so that they might have cold advantage over our slow stilts. They were often ignored by the tribe and made meals of those who strayed into their features and ultimately, fangs. Harmony wasn’t a part of our veldt but there were boundaries enough without borders plainly drawn. We’d made families, not packs, and sought to keep the line between stepping past the horizon. A hard red edge sat there at day‘s discretion and we used it as a measure to keep moving on. Without its hum the shadows set upon us with a will that would inspire fear and frankness.

We gambled and stampeded to make our move more like a raging force. It was better built to face the challenges that inspired us so, random and rampaging as though the river had run with wild abandon after a flood. We took ourselves out and into it with neighbor and rival rolling alongside. Clacks came with knees knocking and the trampling of bone over the broken and fallen. Ears upon the ground caught the rhythm at a mile and separated course beneath our towers of eyes and teeth. No one had the trust to let the languid beings to be settled and generous, and we descended like locusts coming to harvest, in vast form and without mercy of what was behind.

-VGB-