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“For my head on a silver plate.1”
They served up my head on a silver plate, steaming, piping hot, eyes gouged open, popping from the heat of the oven, mouth agape, as if the lifeless stump could still feel pain.
They feasted on my head, those creatures, with their long jagged teeth, clacking on bones like knives grinding against stone.
I watched all of this from the vantage point of eternity, eternally distant, eternally close, a paradox whose words are the only way to describe in human terms such a super-human experience.
They had the rest of the villagers’ heads on pikes, lined up around the rim of a crude stone-framed fire. Orange light danced across their fetid bloated features like ghosts, as if their souls had returned to their homes only to find them broken and abandoned for so long that they’d reverted to some alien (?)2 state.
Those creatures gorged on human flesh until their blackened stomachs, pregnant with rotting meat, threatened to explode.
And when they could eat no more, they slept, hibernated in their buried caves for either a hundred or a thousand years.
They were lost to memory, but not to time.
They would feast again.
Footnotes
1. Coldplay’s Viva La Vida was playing on the radio at El Pollo Loco. These were the last lyrics I heard before sitting down to freewrite, and I decided to base my freewriting on them.
2. I wrote down a question mark because at the time of this writing, I was looking for a descriptive word and couldn’t figure out what it was. Since I was freewriting and had to continue on, lest I get trapped in the tedium of language and lose whatever idea was streaming out of my head at the time, I left a marker to remind myself at a later date that this was an idea I wanted to develop a little further.
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