The crane lifted off into the air and left the two feathered girls to be poked and prodded by my many fingered colleagues. They investigated the pitifully cheeping children, bending their arms and fingers to find how far they would go. Once bored of their exploration, they bit down on the girls’ necks and started to eat them.
My body trembled at the violence, half terrified, half thrilled.
This was how most animals go. Eaten alive. I’d always been convinced that we, humanity, were little better. That this was what was hiding underneath all of our civility. That’s why I never trusted it. I knew that under all of the forms and the processes and the laws was that quiet pressure to be productive.
Produce or be the product.
Be the food.
Eat each other alive.
The shadow on the edge of the clearing cackled. Cackled with a too-wide grin.
Fergus cracked open the teenager’s ribcage and reached his hand into the meat inside, while the teen gnawed at his attacker’s exposed calf, tearing mouthfuls of bloody flesh that would appear again in Fergus’s hands, gathered from the boy’s stomach.
My scrambling thoughts snagged on the sight.
Wait, Fergus wouldn’t actually eat someone alive.
Rowan pulled the head off one of my colleagues, bloody froth around his mouth.
I’m not sure I want to be out here.
The deer-legged woman placed her painted hoof into the split of a splintered tree.
I don’t want this.
I backed away, out of my hiding place, picking up speed.
I don’t want this!
I ran, chill forgotten, hoping beyond hope that the bloodthirsty creatures wearing the faces of the people I knew wouldn’t come chasing after me. My heaving breaths echoed in the darkness. I didn’t dare look back. My route was scattershot through the trees. But whatever direction I went, it wasn’t long before I was back at the clearing again.
Only now the forest floor was an open grave filled with skeletons and rotting corpses. At the top of the heap, on the hill of bones, sat that shadow.
It perched on its haunches, mouth wide, feeding off something from the pile.
I cast my gaze about, desperate. Where could I run to?
I couldn’t be in the city. I couldn’t be in the countryside. I couldn’t be someone new. I couldn’t be human. I couldn’t even be animal. Everywhere I was, so was this. Gnawing away in my guts. There was no escape.
You know who you are, don’t you?
I was the disappointing progeny nudged from the nest. I’d been cast out from the tribe at the office. I had lost the competition for the Sgàthan Sìth cottage. The cuckoo removes the warbler’s egg, the crow pecks out the lamb’s eyes, the runt is left behind.
A crack of bone. A neon pink fingernail.
You know who you are, don’t you?
Yes. I knew what I was. I was a fucking monster.
And I belonged here.
I clambered onto the hill of corpses and lay down among the bodies. The air was still and cold, but the hairs on my arms fell flat. Up above me was the wet click and suck of the creature feasting on those who had come before. Death crept up my toes into my feet and my legs. My arms went slack and numb. My sphincters loosened, my bowels emptied, my stomach acid started to dissolve my organs. My eyeballs shrivelled up into their sockets, my gums receded back from my teeth, my brain slowly turned into a brown soup, all the connections that held my thoughts and memories and fears and hopes lost to rot, a jigsaw puzzle never to be put back together. The rot crawled up my limbs and soon I was covered in moss.
All the while the shadow slurped and crunched and smacked its lips.
At least she would not eat me alive.
