The Bestiary Of You - Friday Flash

What’s your favourite colour? – Death – Do you mean black? – No, Death. Any colour represents the runt of the litter, those wavelengths not absorbed by host objects but spat back out into our beggarly, misappropriating eyes. But Death, Death is incontrovertible. There are no shades. Not a jot of any filtering out. Death is the absence of everything, not least all colour.

What’s your lucky number? – Don’t have one. Human behaviour on one mundane level is highly predictable, but as to its minutiae utterly inconstant. Beyond algorithm and stochastically unpermutational. Like infinity itself.

It was only when interrogated on your favourite fauna that you entered the game, if not entirely engaged in its whimsical spirit. You offered five specimens, uncountable on the missing fingers of your right hand, unable to fix upon an apex animal. The full quartet were untamed, non-caged. Predators, most beasts are one supposes, but typically none of your selections were so classically trite as the leonine.

Your first was the shark. You liked that it lidded its eyes when executing its attack. Like lovers who close their eyes when kissing, for what is a kiss but near kin of a bite? Consanguine kithing cousins. Also possessed of the best immune system in Nature. Sharks never get ill, they just get hunted by man deludedly seeking the elixir recessed deep in its cells.

Your second, not truly a predator it ought to be pointed out, the vulture. You were taken with its functionally ugly evolutionary determination, for glabrous pate and featherless scruff. Can’t reach its own bonce to preen the blood transfer off see. Which given that it cleans its legs by pissing on them, just means the bird is not a fan of golden showers. The vulture’s stomach acids resist all proxy chemical warfare that god throws their way with his pestilential carrion.

Your third meditative identification was the jellyfish. Serenely floating wherever the pull of the tides took it, a passive predator much like yourself you claim. Indolent energy saver, doesn’t breathe for itself and even its food is swept up for it in the dragnet of its filaments. It also offers the key to immortality, since it can regress from its diving bell mature form to the fully sedentary polyp and preserve itself intact.

Your fourth was the Biblical locus of evil. The snake with its panoply of adaptations. Snakes that spit, engorge, sidewind, play dead. The constrictors that squeeze and suffocate the very air. The sporting rattlesnake which gives you fair warning. The black mamba which uniquely of serpents will not duck a fight with humans, but turn and pursue at pace. The Taipan whose single bite contains enough venom to smite a hundred humans, but with only a single mouth containing just two fangs, it remains moot as to how it could bring about such a decimation squared, but you appreciate its commitment to overkill all the same. You married your own Medusa and quickly devoured her whole and took on her ophidian attributes. She had an Ouroborus tattoo across her spine. You have your fingers crossed that it proves prognostically auspicious. The fingers of one hand that is. 

Your fifth was the one that accounted for your fingers. The only creature you have actually met in the flesh, fur, scales, plumes, mesoglea. The tarantula also has an impressive array of weapons. You ignored its cascade of propelled hairs launched towards your eyes, brought tears to them. And while you floundered around temporarily denied of sight, overbalancing and unseeing of forest floor hazards, you toppled and fell. That human reflex derived from the apes of putting out a limb to break the fall, threw your hand back within the bailiwick of the tarantula who upgraded from its arsenal and sank its fangs into a couple of your fingers. You could have sought help, but you had been introduced to prodrome  Death. You were keen to watch its unfurling. The swelling, discolouration and blistering. The gaseous pressure from within the vesicles. The gangrene and putrefaction. Only when the fingers couldn't be saved did you go in for treatment to preserve the rest of you. You were grateful to the arachnid for smoothing your fears for Death lest the other four fail to deliver you perpetuity. 

Lull-a-by-Baby

Nursey Nursey bring me your boxy teat

For I crave a proxy milk treat

Of course my surrogate little one

And then off to sleep with you and all done

Oh no Nursey for I like to watch and see

The light come together in embrace over me

I am afeared of the solid shadows of some

Who would eclipse me, unless one be my mum

Your mamma is like you confined abed

Unlike yours we have a name for her dread

Beware no monsters coming in the night

For you arrived during the day full bright

Having eaten her out as full blight

When she popped you into the light

You swallowed the key to lock her caramel brown

Swiped the bung to tamp her blood back down

Is that why her soft pillows cannot give suck?

They smelled divine when I was first laid there

Not like the brack brew from your slack old sacs

How do you lactate when you lack for an heir?

Oh sweet child for someone so choosy

You surely fierce sup me bluesy

You really must lay back your head

I’ll lullaby you full comforted

Sing you a song to row you safely across

Morpheus’ fosse until we recover Helios

Your rhythms cert seem soothing

But your cadence I glean to be reproving

Besides I’ll do no such thing as yield

The dying of the light and my mother unhealed

It will take more reassurance

Than the filched milk of a fireside milch

Such as a nanny goat can provide

My nostrils filled with the reek of sulphide 

Your rotten eggs and brimstone sap

I yearn only to nestle in my mother’s lap

I’ll fire you a tallow to calm your forebodings

Though a flickering wick brings qualms anew

No more nocturnal comings and goings

Goodnight my sweetpea, adieu

Ha the candle affords me still sight

A shaft of flame peeling back the night

No terrors can remain concealed

I espy Nursey yonder in our field

What could she be doing the old witch?

Some midnight herbs to treat her twitch?

Good morning Nursey what a fine dawn

Your look tired, your face all drawn

What were you up to after last vespers?

Saints preserve me with continued willpower

Forever putting me through the wringer with your pesters

So I’ll tell you my little bloomer

For just why I was out under the lunar

With pruning knife I threshed fresh flowers

Are they to adorn my mother’s grave?

Why would you say that you rave? 

Let me feel your head for a fever

Can’t permit another to fall to the reaper

Then take me to drink in their pretty colours

Affirm giddily to possess fitting lustres

To lift the spirits of my ailing mother

Belladonna and poisonous milkweed I’ll wager

The only venomous thing is your lips

Clamped on my bruised and bloodied breast

Squeezing for dear life until the squeak of pips

I don’t believe you, for all the blood and the rest

I venture you infused her with tainted tincture

Under the cloak of her childbirth strictures

Just long enough for her to linger 

Before you apply the fatal cincture

Are your mammaries laced with bane?

Also to carry me off mad with pain?

So you can have my father all alone

Blind with grief stumbling into the arms of a crone

Nursey Nursey wants to play housey housey

Her plan all sown to acquire the throne
Now I know how a never gravid makes milk
My father all trussed up in your spider's silk
Strokes and dandles your udders rancid
Fomenting just like an ant palpates the aphid

Bittersweet - Fridayflash

The soft-centred moo has just presented me with some chocolates. Well I 'spose you can't give a fellah flowers now can you? And she bought me a drill last Christmas, but that was a thinly veiled hint. I mean, I don't buy her darning thread and needles do I? Besides, if my heart has hardened, she's the sclerotic

"What have I done to deserve these?"

These in particular? A whole confection of sins for which I seek your absolution

"Mmm, these are good. I do love a good fondant"

Fond rather than fondant. Or fondle even. Melt me please. Melt my soft centre once again

"Umm, I love the way the two tastes and textures constantly swirl around the old tastebuds"

Like we used to do round one another

"No, don't tell me, let me work it out"

So you're prepared to work that out, but not the mystery ingredients in our marriage? You'll never guess it in a thousand years. Stake your life on it

"Okay, definitely something nutty there. Slightly bitter, would I be right in saying almonds?"

My almond eyes were one of the things you fell deeply in love with. You used to say you could stare into them forever, but I've twigged you were looking at the homunculus reflection of yourself

"And what's that subtle sweet undertaste? Vying hard not to be overwhelmed by the bitterness"

Not the taste of my skin that's for sure

"It's on the tip of my tongue. Peaches? Could that be it?"

My peachy complexion. Only darkening at cheeks, chin and nipples at your touch. When we made love

"Thanks love. These are divine. Are they Belgian?"

Yeah, I'm Lady Godiva and I am undressed for you

"Where did you buy them?"

The naive, the innocent, the unwary buy lies, but these choccies have taken in something equally toxic

*

"Another box of chocolates? I'll be piling on the calories!"

Your body has fully held its shape from our courtship days. Mine however, having produced our own soft centres with hard heads, has lost its chewy elasticity. I have become your vanilla wife. You have become saturated with me, yet I have not nearly had my fill of you

"No, thanks. I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. Just, what's the occasion?"

Whatever you select it to be. Three months since you last made me a cup of tea, having boiled the kettle for your own coffee. Nine months since you put the children to bed or read them a story. Fifteen months since you last filled my hollow centre with your nozzle. I've got as many anniversaries as it's going to take boxes of chocolates to make you come round to appreciating

"Are they the same as the last lot? They were so very moreish"

More, more, always wanting more. Whore, whore, whore, always wanting whore

"Yummy, thanks. Gotta be careful, last time I must have really pigged out cos I found some melted chocolate fused with my sock. Ruined it was, had to chuck the pair away"

Life's truffle hunter that you are, that would have been down to me. Need to be more careful with the darning needles then. After I've finished injecting my homemade fondant fancy inside, I have to ensure I've removed every last trace

"Wow, these have got a real bitter kick on them? Did you change the recipe?"

Last time you retired to bed and I watched you in your sleep. In the twilight, your skin had a pink tinge to it, like a salmon. But that was the extent of it. I realised you needed a bigger dose. I had originally considered using arsenic. I know it accretes in the hair and fingernails. It must also be excreted through the body's fluids. I did wonder if we chanced make love again, whether you would be reinjecting the arsenic back into me. So we could succumb together. A fanciful notion of course, since you'd never unpack that flesh drill of yours and bore deep into me. So I plumped for potassium cyanide. Did you know butterfly collectors use it to kill their prey in such a way so as to preserve their beauty? So the needle pinning them to the cork doesn't despoil them

"Ooh, I feel a bit light headed. Suddenly my breathing seems very... rapid?

Yes, my research reported that to be a symptom. But it's actually only the perception of your breath quickening. See the delight with this venom, is that it embodies a certain piquancy

"I'm chilled to the bone. I can't feel-"

The cold-blooded reptile. Again a mere sensation, but an apt one. Dentists are always saying too much chocolate is bad for your teeth. That's why they have to drill and fill. Just desserts.