Theme Songs for Favourite Things – Stories #2

 

Lions and Hyenas

They called to me. They said it was time I came to visit. They used my voice to speak to me, laughed, and said it’d be good to see me, after all this time.

I went and sat until the trees became ghosts, peeling themselves out of their hard skins and walking across the earth like ships. They gathered around me, and their hands made quiet noise as their fingers stretched out, reaching to tuck strands of my hair behind my ears.

The pagoda above me became a spider. She was a mother, a keeper of tales, her body wide and with mast-like legs capable of gathering us all. She watched us with weary eyes, and smiled softly when my hair wouldn’t stay in place. She said “You have a lion’s mane, wild and stray. If you wait, you will lose your prey.”

I sat until all the birds were crows and cats smiled in the sky. I waited until, finally, the lions climbed down to ask me how I’ve been. I said I’ve been forgotten and held them close to me while I tried to gather memories that weren’t mine, but I became one of the other, the old ones. I was a fairy tale for new brides, held somewhere between a spider’s rhyme and the hands of trees.

I watched my own hands curl and let them become leaves. They fell and scattered, the wind sweeping them across the ground and into water. I let them get carried away, wondering who would discover them now.

Though we followed them, the lions and I. We stalked my hands through the grass, our eyes bright and flickering with warning for one another. They laughed at me again, and told me I was a lioness hunting to be hunted, but if I wasn’t careful the hyenas would come. That’s just an old wives tale to make me behave, I said, and stuck out my tongue. The lions started to look hungry then, and I thought I could really use my hands to sate the things they made me crave.

I sank in the grass as they circled me, my hands forgotten but missing their place in this. I did not want their protection, I wanted them to take from my body first.

But nothing happened. The crows were still pigeons and parrots. The ghosts were trees and there were cities, houses and paths built where I’d watched my hands float away. If just my thoughts can cause this, I guess my words need to find their home some place else.

She moved into the darkness with me at that moment, her voice liquid and ravenous.

You’re our girl, now, the matriarch said. And I knew I wanted to be.

 

 

S4E