WANDERING WATERS

    Under the canopy of green vegetation ran a rill with its Prussian blue waters. Sometimes, through its purlieus emerges a beast from the unearthly darkness to slake itself with its muzzle caked with blood. As the animal produces its tongue to lick the waters, the sanguine that had remained dried overlong washes off into the rill. The lapping of waters as the tongue strokes it sends ripples across the waters and dies in the cascading shadows of the leaves and boughs. After it has satiated itself, the beast looks up to behold the passing clouds and the lifeless white sky through the thick roof of boughs and then, lowering its head, trots back into the trees. Of what remains is the blood.

   But the thing that had penetrated the great trees and the creepy understory was unworldly. Although it had an unbeknownst shape with which it had wandered the landscape perusing its life still in its yesteryears, later it had morphed into the semblance of a river, becoming aware of its necessity and, now it lays dormant, gathering strength. The beasts' perennial arrival feeds the stream with plentiful blood. The gore descends on the carcasses of dead fish and weed in cloaks of crimson.

   The birds that bechanced upon this brook, perching on the overhanging boughs often divined to fish from the rill, and after diving straight into the macabre waters, had never risen again. When an entire frame of a creature enters the rill, then the fluid offers such resistance against the body that the animal eventually loses its breath and gives in. Then the carcass descends quickly and settles above the dead fishes forever. Once a fennec, trotting along the slippery rocks had slipped into the nebulous rill, only to be enveloped by the waters. Another time, an ape lost its grip, a crocodile slid into it mistakenly from a nearby river and a foal trying to cross it on a few pebble stones tripped and fell.

   As the coating becomes thicker over the decades, something will change. The blood, the bones, the weed, and the vegetation will amass into a titan of ghastly essence that will harbour the beginnings of consciousness. It will then shift westwards sedately, coaxed by the shrieks that echo in the night from somewhere distant. To those hushed voices soughing through the arrant darkness when the forest sleeps. To those entities that croon in nasal tones. To those lights that flicker in the blackness. To that place from whence comes the smoke, to that onyx shaft that peeps through the virescent sea.

But until then, it must wait.