Animal

We barricade the doors to keep the animal outside. Inside, we shake. 

We tremble; like the wobbly legs of a giraffe mother’s first born, two hours into life-

But it tore through the wood with serrated teeth, clawing holes into the walls, burrowing within the woodwork - wailing with misery, paws bloody, clambering to get to us. 

From beneath us. From below us. It seems to be everywhere at once. 

The fringes of our physical boundaries are nearly thrashed away, and we can see each other now, man and beast, for the first time, giving a face to the fear that beats violently in each of our breasts.

Desperation is rising in its eyes; pinned needle-tight and narrowed, shooting daggers it takes us in. The two-legged. The monsters, bringers of war and disease, cowering and red with shame in their cages. 

There is only one thing it wants. There is only one thing that a frightened beast needs.

And there is a moment of faltering hope, as we stare into each others eyes; mine, with fear and submission; its own, scathed in raw desire: a long-starved prisoner at last offered nutriment.

It’s in this next moment I can see the bubbling, green and yellow specks in its eyes, like the print of a leopard’s skin, giving it even more animalistic perturbation, its vision dilating and bloating into amorphous fingers grasping for anything within its claws.

Caught in that moment of madness, we know we will die. 

Die at the hands of a monster.

An animal before us. We measure its bravery by the weight of its howls; its persistence, by the frustration alive in its nature. We shyly ignore our own throes, taking no measurement of human greatness in these final moments, afraid of what may be revealed then, focusing always and always on the approaching beast.

For reasons unknown to us, we need to know just this one thing. Just one thing.

Why did we do it.

But we cannot answer, because we are too afraid, and the world around us, blurring into ethereal shades of dark and light, mixing together in an eternal grey, is as unforgiving as the attacking animal,

Holding us in this mystifying in-between; we are now unaware of the fear in the other, orbiting only our own primal noises of digestion and hunger, driving us towards each other. Space is evaporating before us, as claws and teeth ascend to skin.

Then my heart shatters as our screams blend, becoming a pitiful, disharmonious ringing,

like that of an approaching siren, a reproduction of musical terror that freezes bone, muscle, nerve.

We plunge forward, into the heat of our own breath, bitter and rancid, 

hailed by bullets and bodies; and the beast pushes forward, through the stone gates of our cages,

shrieking on and on, undying.