How warm to be held by that same light, barked at and shoved, felt and seen. Their hands tight in each other’s clothes and hair. Drunk, they brandished needle and cat’s tooth, spearing their rivals and dropping them dead as hail. Sky-strutting, they clattered and sneered, shrilled like cicadas. Dew-touched and nectar-lipped, their chitin oiled shining.
Laughter chimed, and berry wine breath spilled down the breeze. They bobbed in clouds of lantern-light, abdomens spilling gold, drawing lines of fire against the black. Hundreds clustering low and high, dressed fine in egg shell and spider silk, tea towel and toad skin. There beyond a ring of magnolia, in a nectar-drunk honeysuckle hollow, she found what she’d been looking for. Abdomen flat, she squeezed up through bramble and thorn thicket, searching the sky. But the tender dark only tightened its lips, withheld its hand, offered nothing.ĭays she followed windswept scent, testing her wings in clumsy crashes through twig and thistle-top, sniped at by swooping birds. “Please,” she said, language rising in her like bile, a call hungry for a response. She reached for that cold glow and felt her lantern pulse warm beneath her. Above, moon belly drifted through the treetops. Some smell far off, under nectar and wood rot: the breath of another. Long, dirty hair falling on her elytra, glassy plates shielding delicate wings.Īntennae extended from her forehead, waving in the wind-damp. Two slender arms, hands with thin fingers. Extending up from her armored scales, a smooth torso and tender skin. Four serrated legs anchoring her to a stem. Body sticky still from the pupa, she studied what she’d become. Then a second birth, splitting free and strange in new skin.īy bloated moon, she clambered a bending stalk and balanced on leaf blade, blinking back larval dreams. Fattened on maggot and grub, she hardened white and lay sarcophagal. Alone and babbling, prowling for worm-meat and snail-slick in the wet ground rot. Burrowing deep where shed buttons and broken boot laces lay. Hatched down in the tannin dark, dead leaf pillowed, gnashing her mouth in the loam.
Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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