I have no real experience with wolves or wild dogs devouring dead among slender tree trunks in moonlight. I have never actually seen those slinking black forms move against blue snow. Only one wolf once, blue-eyed and familiar, and now this weird half-dream. Thick writhing tails curled like oil tracks in water, they scattered like rats into cracks in the moonlight when I clapped my hands. Leaving the bodies still and charcoal-black against blue snow in moonlight. Why would I have this dream. Because I watched a war movie in black and white. Because those old photographs, bodies dropped or tossed like toys, limbs akimbo asunder in ditches and fields, wool uniforms blackened eyes open or closed demanding dignity denied to them by the lens. We call those photographs old but no photographs are old. Just yesterday I saw a sepia face smiling on a beach, a face soon after famous for hiding and dying and hoping. I turn my body over on the bed.
It’s not any of those things, the reason for this dream. I don’t know those lives, only look at them, read the books. It’s not the dead bodies, it’s the monsters, right? Those canine shadow-silhouettes are anxiety personified. My inner demons come to feast on memory lying face-down in the snow. Or perhaps they are the ones Out There, the rapacious and the ravenous. A red shirt turned to shadow, circling carnivores, omnivorous narcissists, my own blood. Is it the monsters that repel me or their meal, the mothers’ children now haphazard and inert, the horror of namelessness of abandonment of limbs bent and twisted with disregard. What would they have dreamed, these children now reduced to meat, in moonlight? Red bleeds to black against blue. Blue snow. Black blood. I’m afraid to see red. Red reads as black with the removal of sunlight, or the addition of time.
This liminal space between sleep and morning, between beauty and horror, between blue and black or red, between life and death, feeding and bleeding, this space where detritus bumps into itself to form pictures on this screen in the back of my head. That place should have fences and moats. A big sign that says Why go here Why go there Why? Leave well enough alone. Let the dead sleep without dreams and Let the dogs feed Let the flesh be devoured in secret, leaving tossed bones to find later, licked clean.
In the dry garish sunlight of Utah I found such remains, of deer and unfortunate antelopes, turtles and unlucky rabbits. Only the rocky parts left, the yellow-white-grey curves of calcium, last lingering memorial of a short life. Scattered vertebrae were spiny beads of bone. Skull no longer home for eyes or tongue is now collectible to grace a shelf among other texts. Sometimes tufts of fur still clung to a tail or to a femur. That would be the only movement in these skeletal dioramas, tawny scraps of hair touched by a stray breeze.
I dreamt monsters in moonlight. I dreamt full-sized ragdolls still wrapped in their woolens, combat boots crusty with blood that bleeds black against snow. Bare-headed. Winter’s hand brushes through hair. Spirits blink and hesitate then rise to dance and feast upon their own former bodies, dance for a night in the form of shadow scavengers before not plotting revenge in the morning. No retribution, no vengeance. Only still shapes in blue snow in blue moonlight, senseless. I go back to sleep, this will fade.
Wren Donovan Published in Hecate Anthology DECAY, October 2021 (print & digital)