End

🦴

My corpse belongs to the earth.

Or, rather, this one I'm wearing belongs to the earth.

I am the earth.

I am the things that grow from it, I am the things that die in it. I am the things that then grow from them.

I am creation, I am instinct. I am the urges that plague their minds.

That which belongs to me morphs until it cannot remember who they are.

Until they forget of the god that awaits in the forest, where I’ll care for my bones until the cycles stop.

Those who belong to me will never truly die. The belief is enough to bring them to life again; deformed, and changed.

🦴

I'd be ashamed to admit how long I observed that time.

It finally fell at the end of autumn.

At first, nothing happens. It lays there, shining, fresh. The smell is so good that I vaguely wish I could taste it, that fruit I have seen develop for generations. Seed, sprout, plant, tree, flower, fruit, rot. Only for it to start again.

Insects are usually the first to find the fallen, munching on the bits that touch the ground, the white flesh exposed to air and turning much more yellow by the minute, the edges dry out with every day. They leave their eggs in it, carve tunnels through it, and make it lived in, somehow. It stops feeling like fruit and seems more like sand, losing any appeal it held before I got to it. But creatures still do not mind feeding from it.

Next come birds of all types. Small and fast ones feast on its sweetness, and bigger ones feast on the grown bugs. Feed, feed. Consume. For a few days, I observe the frenzy in this one spot of the garden, creatures fighting for bits of the apple before it becomes irrecognizable.

The vibrant red of the peel and the now completely yellow meat grow brown spots on them when I touch it at last, now that the traffic has lessened. When no one wants it, I do. And so the brown tendrils spread through the exposed places, covering every nook and cranny of the distorted thing, once so pristine, only a patch of waste. No one wants it. I do. I so badly do. I yearn to taste.

It suffers.

Why do you suffer, little one?

I make white spots grow from it again. It's fuzzy, the smell is damp and dizzying, and it's nothing like it was before, not even I could bring it to its former glory. The seeds in it will be well nourished in this fertile ground. Nothing will ever make it as beautiful as it was just a month ago.

Its peel is black, disappears in the night, and seems to hide in the day. The mold turns green; light, dark, somehow the funghi has more movement than the animals when they had it. I yearn to taste.

This is normal. From the moment you grew, this was meant to happen. There was nothing you could do to stop me.

Months go by as I speak to it, time blurring as I work through the forest, always stopping by here, as I do at so many other points, as the leaves start falling and the wind blows on. I yearn to taste.

You are mine now. As I spread through you there's nothing I have not touched. Mine.

It turns to dust slowly, its melody seems to end as the seeds are released to the cold, to the winter. The stillness covers it all, a white layer over the poor, shrunken thing. I hate winter, hate the snow that keeps me from getting it back. I yearn to taste.

I wish I could have had you ripe, young, prime for eating. You were delicious while you lasted.

When everything melts, the seeds sprout. Years go by. I yearn to taste.

Seeds, sprout, tree, flower, fruit.

This time, when it falls, I morph myself a hand and bite it. It turns to dust before it even touches my tongue.

Rotten. This one was not good enough either.

It'll be another time.

I can wait.

🦴

A forgotten god lurks in the woods, in the form of a rotting deer engulfed by shadow. It's stopped planning for the garden and now watches it grow.

The night after a big commotion, its curiosity to observe the town grew enough to go inside.

Manmade structures no longer ward it off.

A beautiful stranger who looks wrong enters the village with every sunrise. It seems infatuated with that stranger.

He looked dead long before perishing.

He belongs to it long before his time.

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