Pink Kaksteist
A hamster consumes her master (her higher power) and lies back, picking her teeth, contemplating her evolution into a carnivore.
One think I forgot to mention about Shambal’s squalid abode is the smallish recess in the wall to the right of one of two portals. It is here that he performs his experiments. These strange dealings are confined solely to rodents. Well, so far, he always thinks.
The hamster’s name is Pleurisy and she recently returned from her morning hunt. Small carnivores prefer hunting in the morning, you see. Shambal always knew this and further encourages the practise. He was a small carnivore during his stint on Neo’odiaba and rose every morning before what his compatriots called the split of nightlessness.
Neo’odiaba was lush at the time. The forest streamed with brooks, leafdrifts, and rivers of herbivorous hominids. Shambal always tried to take a portion of a hominid back with him.
A kill was never absolutely necessary. Wounding a hominid only took a bite to the back of the ankle. Shambal loved the feeling in his teeth as they sunk into calloused flesh. The popping as the scabby covering broke and juice flowed over his tongue and wetted his palate justified any amount of trek uphill, downhill, across empty fields patrolled by owls, or solitary waiting for the hordes to flow past.
When a hominid collapsed, Shambal always went for the upper thigh and groin. He tore flesh and stuffed it unerringly into his pack. One in three, he’d finish off simply because he couldn’t stand its pitiful sagging expression. Exasperation sucks.
Pleurisy left her pack in front of the recess and now naps, curled into a shape Shambal was surprised hamsters could achieve. He lifts the pack and grey meat slops onto the floor. Moving it to the table, he sits still with his nose centimetres above it for upwards of ten minutes. Then he begins licking the juices.
Of course, Shambal, too, is a hominid. He devolved from rodent form soon after arriving here. I’d like to say that he still has a portion of that rodent spirit in his blood, or in his soul, or in his satchel. Maybe I am exasperated and should be put away. No, even old Shambal seems to have succumbed to the red drift. As knowledge of the outside recedes from our moon, our beings become more and more diffuse.
It’s as if the wavelengths of our particles themselves have stretched.
One day, he’ll not be loitering in his park on that bench - or even on the opposite one. No, he’ll be consumed.
And I’ll be next.
By then, however, my greatest achievement, a monument to the order of Rodentia, will be complete. Made of grease, semen, glass, sod and fruit pits, it will be the last idle beast standing on our moon. We, the hominid lethargics, will be a fading memory.
