The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Hollowed Out
by Amanda Worthington

They hollowed out our bones

And taught us flight

But knew we couldn’t resist the wire

And its illusion of power

And when we’d alight on the thin filament

After hours spent scouring the skies for peace

They would count us like soldiers and ask us to sing

Measuring the span of both song and wing

.

And as if on cue we issued forth our birdspeak

Wishing to fade into the nothing promised us

When the count was done

.

And twice it was seen that the fine specimens they captured and recalled

Were rendered smudges. Indistinct things with no beaks

A shadow cast on their nefarious design

Less dead than faded like ink left to dry

.

And I wished my feathers into mosaic

My beak into slightly upturned silence

An artwork to be admired by the unsuspecting

In some as yet undreamt of age

.

Mistakes had been made before

And if they served me

Why should I not let them?

I never asked to be made avian

Aware corvid with the stain of creation

In my keratin

The ones and zeros stood in single file

And I felt quantum among them

Hummed myself into an obsidian pool

Of reverie

.

Became the third mishap

Waited for what came

When one was not retained

Within the ranks of damned women.

.

Waited for the day

When birds became night

And the abandoned feminine encompassing the dark

Swallowed the sun forever

And burned at long last

With energy owed it

Since the dawn of time

.

Waited for the moment

When the scales were balanced

And all was made right with the universe

.

Waited for the moment that would bring

The quenching of my thirst

And a reversal of the hell

We’d been made to endure

On unwilling wings

.

And when it arrived, I derived satisfaction in the notion

That I would never wait complacently on the wire again.

.

.

Fiction © Copyright Amanda Worthington.
Image courtesy of Pixabay