the woman who followed touched me into orphaned pieces. i lifted my falcon mask in surrender and she waved me off with sprinkles from her bony hand.
said she with arms akimbo: what an immense circularity here, what a feeling of a pit and an audience, of being both the center and the end?
feathers fell from her tattered coat, black bird eyes unblinking on her mottled skin. i laid my wings beneath her feet and chattered unnerved by her sophistication. the echoes of her words softened sweetly as tainted honey.
the birds scattered, blackening the plain. she beckoned them to her breast. let your flights be of dream smoke, said she, and you will see the human a monster held in imprinted houses hiding uncertain beasts.
by nightshade i delighted in the howls of predator hunts, urging them on her traces with laments from my broken habitation. the woman who followed was undaunted. the pups and cubs she crooned with the hide of her face, feeling her hand across their rough tongues. you can peck me blind with your cruel beaks, said she, yet i will be a phoenix from the embers and feed you feather paste.
the woman who followed led me to despair among savage flocks. alongside crows and starlings, i sucked the sulfur yolks of stolen eggs. the woman who followed was a trail of bloodspots in the snow, the stain, the marking and the designation. she remained the rara avis, the preening peacock. in my peripheral vision she followed relentless, wisplike as ink in water, turning when i turned and fitting my spindle toes with her eyes.
she dogged my forays forward to where birds lay rampant in the auburn brush. squatting exposed in the scrubland i howled for the glass of the sky to splinter with the weight of judgment. the woman who followed merely lifted her mantle and the sky cracked along snowflake plates, sketching fresh owls and gulls with fine chalk.
the woman who followed barters my shattered bones, strumming her fingers against my horseshoe jaw. birds nest in my ragged hair and my cruel mother’s blood squirts from the stabs of their claws. birds pile with deathlust in my throat, listening with hidden ears for the worms that pluck me from the earth’s swallow.
Louise Norlie's publications have appeared in Mad Hatter's Review, Sein und Werden, Unlikely Stories, Behind the Wainscot, and more. Her writing has also been anthologized by Dead Letter Press and Bettany Press.
