Liminal creatures, we call them. Half-formed and desperate to be whole but unable to be anything more than, well...less. Nobody knows what they used to be, what made them want to change and when it all began but the shadows and formerly inhabited areas of society are teeming with them.
They try to live as normally as possible, as normally as their full-formed counterparts do. Have you ever seen a parrot try to fly with wings that look like they're made of pure bone and all the gristley parts of cheap meat? It sounds as unpleasant as it looks but that hardly stops them from trying and sending little shards of wing-meat in every damned direction.
The one that got me the most knows how much my heart aches at the sight of it and it won't leave me alone. Whatever it was must have been something lonely, something that aw or heard about 'man's best friend' and decided that being that was better than anything it had once been.
It's almost a puppy. It's almost cute if you look past the way it writhes beneath the lightly-rotting skin it stole. There's something in those pitch black eyes that almost makes me want to open my heart and home to the poor little thing... almost.
The thing about these liminal creatures is how quickly their goals can shift.
One day a parrot, the next day a dog.
The next day a man.
No comments:
Post a Comment