I am patient.
I have been here since the beginning, I have experienced many things, many different states of being, I know many secrets. I exist while life whirls about and through me. I have been liquid fire, sterile crust, shallow ocean. Now I am a gentle hill, part of a sea of tall prairie grass where wind-blown waves of movement in the stalks chase each other towards a featureless horizon. A landscape of tranquil tedium.
I am lonely.
Recently there has been a time of quiet, a time when nothing happens. The only objects of interest are the tiny creatures that scurry, procreate and die across and just below my surface. Sometimes there is a flurry of excitement when some larger ruminant visits, an even greater frisson if it leaves a pile of steaming turds as a tribute to my uncomplaining hospitality.
When the broken stone ribbon of your highway wound its way past me on the land to the north I was overjoyed, even more so when the spreading stain of your town blotted the horizon. But it was frustrating to watch the rattling sameness of the traffic on the highway and the static boundary of the distant town, both too far away to involve me. I yearned for this change and excitement to come my way.
I welcome.
And then one blessed day you came, kicking at my soil and walking my boundaries. You laboured daily to erect buildings and fences, simple wooden structures made from imported timber a welcome foreign taste. You ploughed away the prairie grass and replaced it with corn. A stand of sugar maple you planted on my western boundary to provide some respite from the monotonous wind gave me new and exotic fauna to observe as they flocked to the sheltering foliage.
I nurture.
In return for the company, the life and the activity, I poured nutrients into your crops, providing sustenance to make you healthy and strong. You brought a female of your kind, and then you produced tiny offspring. I fed and watered them, watched as they grew and left, maybe to start their own farms.
I care.
But the cycle of life is brief and you aged and wizened with incredible speed. I poured more effort in to making sure that that the food I grew was rich and nourishing. But there was nothing I could do, it is in your nature to be ephemeral. I watched you fade with a sense of sorrow both for the brief time you spend alive and for my own loss.
I embrace.
The moment came when the woman you had brought to me died. You scooped out a hollow in my earthy crust and lowered her timber boxed remains into me.
I taste.
It took me a year’s cycle to lever apart the fragile wood, to get inside. To sample the rich organic stew within.
I change.
The animals, plants and insects that had blessed me with their death over the millennia had always been tiny, primitive. I had never experienced the joy of a complicated animal. Oh, the ecstasy! The glorious exploration of the body-machine. I pulled apart each complex fibre, wove threaded roots through the veins and arteries, probed each cavity, drank every sumptuous fluid. I learnt the secrets of her body. It took me another year to devour her flesh. I cradled her bones as a reminder, but even they would be with me for just a fleeting moment in my long existence. I had changed, absorbed, and with the change came a new realisation, an understanding that I no longer have to be passive, I can shape my destiny, I can know new delights…
I wait.
While I consumed her, you continued to work my soil, harvest my crops. But you grew feeble, as if without her you had no enthusiasm for your busy existence. The food gets scarce now, perhaps you were deciding to leave, to find somewhere you could eat without labour, maybe at the hearth of one of your progeny. Eventually you will be replaced by others of your kind, for as long as your species survives, there will be other people to watch, feed and taste. But you are my now.
I cannot let you leave, I will stop you, I have encouraged and nurtured you and now I deserve my reward. Instead of nutrients I plant disease in your crops, I taint the water in the pond. I watch as the poison accumulates, and you grow feeble, wait for the day when you fall, wait for the day I can embrace you too. It is too late for you to escape, too late for you to make the journey down to the road, to summon help.
I cannot be denied.
I am hungry.
© Martin Cummins, 2008
Hunger was read by Clareine Cronin at the Liars' League Jekyll & Hyde event on Tuesday 14th October, 2008.
Martin Cummins is an architect by day, a writer by night. His werewolf existence has currently spawned a reference book, Designing and Building Your Own Home, which has been in print since 2002, a completed novel, currently being edited, and another novel in production. He wonders whether, one full moon, his nocturnal vice will expand to encompass the daylight hours.
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