I was a talisman around her neck.
On warm, low nights, we would strip naked and dance, sometimes salsa, flamenco, and a spasmodic ballet of our taste and creation. The blaze we had started from the friction of our thighs growled, and the fireflies that we conjured from the tips of our fingers descended and hissed, trailing vapor and rhapsodic lines of threadlike light. Our shadows kept stirring as we lay spent.
We pursued frantic chickens and disemboweled them on a flat, cold stone, our Mesozoic altar. We drove bones through our cheeks, stuffed spiny feathers into our nostrils, and quilted them, too, covering our bulging, rotating eyes. We ground beaks, clawed feet, whooped, hollered, and dropped dried powder into an intoxicating tea, an elixir boiled of moon water, tongue, liver, and wild sage.
We made our own clay and sprawled in it. We spread it thick on our glistening skin—slathered it beneath our skin. We flung and slung fat gobs of the profane clay against the smirking trees, and we streaked through the valley, played hide, and seek, spooked the milk cows and a few sheep, and they chased us, sang to us, on the ruddy and red skied evenings. Usually, one would jump on our pearl-handled knife. Cow or sheep, it mattered not. We were dwindling and needed to eat.
Our horns were top-shelf scotch bottles. I was often the bull, and she was the toreador, and then we would swap places, roles, and an ancient wolf pelt our festooned cape. We took its teeth to make a lovely necklace and bracelet, and the rib cage a leaking tent at nightfall. We welcomed the braying rain and the illicit wind. We kept a broiling fire inside—us.
Eventually, the authorities began to investigate—too much blood and bile in the meadows. Our skeletons were breaking, fractures everywhere. We became larcenous with our words. And the farmers wanted their fields returned to ordinary.
So, she beat a hasty retreat, ragged.
To St. Louis, I think.
She took the fairy-tale with her.
I now hunt for a fresh creature.
A new neck to adorn.
I am so ordinary, bored.