#corey marks

Lark, by Corey Marks

And then I wasn’t myself anymore. A heaviness branched from my head, not like thought, or worry, but solid, forcing upward, pressing against my brow, wedging itself between me and the world. The weight swung with me when I shook my head, clattered against a limb above. Nothing could dislodge it. And the woods thrummed as though a skin had broken from over my ears to let in what had always been muffled. Wind wrestling through the pines. Branches mourning against each other. The skirring slang of birdsong. Everything thrilled and fretted into new sound. Even the dogs rushing through the far trees, I heard it all— footfalls, twigs snapping their faces, one dog breaking into a bay, then another. My dogs. I knew them. Loved them. And I knew they would know me, dogs I once stroked mindlessly next to the fire, though now I had no hands. Dogs that tilted their ears when I spoke their names, that came to me when I called, that recognized me even when I stumbled against them in the night. But now those names I’d once slant easily into rhyme, into song, into endearment, slipped sideways, beyond me, shadows flitting illegibly through the woods. And a scent ached the air, honing itself, sharpening. They were coming. I meant something else to them— flesh straining against teeth, a hot wealth of blood pouring free. A drive to please the men who hounded them to the hunt, calling and calling their names. A hive broke inside me, its panic spilling, clouding through me until there was nothing I could say, and I tilted the points racked above against every name I once had known.

I see them when they slip from the trees at the field's far edge to gaze back on the estranged human world. Something wild tumbles in the dogs now, if wild is the word for a trust broken like a key in its lock. They have their own affections, these animals that once made their way across a yard at the call of a name, a sharp tone hooked in the ear. What happened to the words that no longer snag and worry, the names no longer theirs?  Now, when a gate lolls open, its invitation cross-hatched against snow, the dogs question distant forms bleating unsheltered in the pasture, question doors shut against the evening, coils of smoke unraveling like attention from black-shingled houses. They read the back of a human head for distraction the way they once watched a face for other signs, read neglect as opportunity, a question answered in blood smirched across snow. How cruel. How resilient. In the dusk, the scattered houses gutter like coals the dogs once learned to skirt around. Which door was theirs? How can it matter; their world is untranslatable now. If I crossed the field, would they recognize my palm held out as an offering, a threat? I don't even feel human looking at them settled now in the curve of a toppled trunk, three lashes pierced into an eye.