Author: Susannah Ritchey
The steaming ground soothes and agitates me. Breathing in its stench, my body trembles in anticipation. The air is wet and thick and all around me I hear the unified echo- the caw of thousands all around me, in the same torment, in the same delightful anticipation. My jowls ache with the need to cry out, but I am no jungle bird. I do not get to cry out. They mock me, their beating wings motivation to keep going, creeping along the jungle floor, their waste and filth my Damascene path.
The echo halts, and so do I. It has started. The hunters come, tromping through the Jungle disrupting the natural order. The all-consuming echo turns into a silence that is no more than a vacuum. The hunters come, and we listen. They preach with their guns, firing knowledge out of barrels pointed at our minds.
BAM!
Their bullets hit my ears, and I fall. I fall into the kneeling position for I am nothing but a supplicant for their wrath. They impart their wisdom, and I bleed. They gather around, one at a time, sticking their fingers into my wound, spelling evermore lessons with my blood. They teach me how to live, they teach me how to die.
Not satisfied, one throws a rope around my flank and pulls it taught. Now I am wounded before their feet, tied to their punishments; I cannot escape. Another rope around my front paw, then another, then another. Even my head is the noose of their lecturing. The jeering that never stops. From one gaping maw to another I hear their voices. The wretched voices in so many languages, they make me understand. For the bullet is already in my ear, it has already torn through my brain. I have been ripped open, laid as an offering to their wisdom.
Finally, my instincts prevail, and I cry out. The jungle has become my pain roaring out at the sky. Why? Why must this be my pain? The hunters laugh and as one sycophantic voice of reason say, “This is how you survive.”
As one they come to me, I prostrate on the ground. They hold knives and I fear them. They tear into me chanting as they do, seven voices that sound like trumpets in my ears. Seven horns they call learning. I bow and I am disemboweled. I give them my kidneys and my liver and my spleen. My stomach is gone and now I have no courage. My heart is gone and now I have no spirit. I give them the rest freely as to make it stop, but it will not stop until they have the ultimate prize. They want more, those greedy mouths, to partake of what I can give them. So I do. I lean forward as if I were being pulled by a devilish force and bow my head to them. What they see as a respectful offering I know is my last breath. With clawed hands they break my skull, and my brain is gone, into their mouths.
The sweet tigress droops to the ground, nothing but an empty vessel. They fill this vessel with their regurgitated thoughts, spitting into me the vanquished dreams, they call correctness. Sowing me back up, my dismembered flesh closing, changing shape until the tigress is unrecognizable from a bird. I open my mouth to wail, but I hear no growl of anguish and pain, merely a caw. The voices have started again, that endless drone of the echo. My body does not feel, just rises taking flight in the wind, leaving the path of filth and decay. No longer do I walk a path to somewhere, now I fly in a circling arc, adding filth to the path, excreting the words that have filled me up, sewn in tight where they cannot escape.
Glancing down we see a tiger. We quiet signaling the hunters to their prey. They will not escape.