O \(ˈ)ō\. A sound appeared . It was a loud and sustained buzzing like an idling jet plane that continued without reprieve. It arrived one morning like a break in the clouds and replaced the silence. Over time silence came to mean that sound and the silence penetrated cities, towns, homes and walls with equal force and equal timbre, traveling efficiently over miles like a whale call.
About three weeks had passed when I noticed my lover’s soft and scaly tummy begin to bump and I knew it was a child. I knew it was because I had dreamed of it and because I wanted it to be. Inside her scaled skeletal leather exterior frame a child was growing. This wasn’t mentioned except through the attention we gave her soft belly and the focus which shifted from our external ferocity and meaty diet to the bump and the possibility of repeating her fallow eyes and slender hips in a new being. We didn’t speak over the silence but a joy crept in which cloaked our movements and slowed our anger and stilled my questions and tamped her sadness. As days passed to weeks we behaved more like the creatures we ate than dutifully private reptilian citizens. The neighbors knew our joy because we danced it over the bone dry chill and spied their movements for signs of the little one and bated our desire to scoop it up and study its behaviors and consume it whole for the knowledge it sustained. And still we didn’t speak of it and made love in the night when it was coldest, exchanging all our hapless bodies would allow.
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