TW: Snakes, Famine, The Reader-Insert is Blind but Had Sight at One Point in Their Life, Child Abandonment, Blood, Violence, Implied Suffocation, Mention of Worms, Hypnosis, Mention of Religion (Prayers), Animal Death, Emotional Manipulation, Toxic Mindsets.
A.N. - There is quite a bit of symbolism in this, and it is very much an interpretive piece.
The stalks of maize that had once swayed in the breeze and glistened in the morning sun like towers of pearls were, after a period of insect domination, reduced to brown stubs. Mouths devoured the sour produce of the jungle with famished enthusiasm, only to gag when writhing worms, drenched in the humid glaze of rot, crawled from the hollow core of the fruit. Hungry villagers wailed for a solution to their empty stomachs, and as the sick and old fell before the healthy, those with enough strength to protest turned their desperation onto the vulnerable.
From the day the sharp stones, as jagged and unforgiving as the cliff from which they had tumbled, pierced your eyes and imprisoned your battered body in a cot for much of the earlier year's harvest season, the spear and dagger were no longer yours to wield. Gathering water from the river that flowed where the safety of the village ended and the danger of the jungle began had become your singular duty, for the elders thought it too simple to be ruined. The trough that held the entire village's supply of drinking water had resided in the same plot of grass beside the crops until the night it was found overturned, its contents missing and termites gnawing the wood.
Struggling with the clumsiness that came from learning to experience the world through alternative senses, you were then the subject of great suspicion and disdain. "A curse has befallen our land," declared the chieftain, standing above his people on a day when three fresh graves had been dug. His voice boomed with a strength much clearer than the parched grumbles of the villagers, and his face sported a youthful fullness rather than the cracks of dehydration.
"We must ration our numbers," was his solution. After the chieftain returned to his hut, a group of your neighbours escorted you to the river to replenish the trough. Weeping followed you to the edge of the village before the buzzes of mosquitos and the peeps of birds muddied it, yet your chaperones chatted as loudly as their dry throats would allow as if seeking to obscure the growing presence of nature. The trek lasted much longer than those in the past had, tiring your body and depleting what puny energy still clung to it.
When your legs could carry you no further, you collapsed against a tree stump. "Please forgive us," begged the voice of a hunter, one who had accompanied you on numerous missions. A pair of footsteps approached from the opposite direction, and the bucket was snatched from your grasp. The reality of the chieftain's decision crashed upon you in a storm of helpless terror and fury.
"Don't apologize to them," snapped the voice of a farmer. "That water would've saved my wife." Frantic grunts and wheezing strained your lungs as you fought to stand, limbs quivering like twigs and sending you tumbling across the grass. The neighbours fled to a home that was no longer yours, and the cold aura of the jungle seemed darker than any night in the village.
* * *
"Ooh," muttered Kaa, his head quivering in mock umbrage. The snake narrowed his eyes as if expressing your inner bitterness and puckered his lower lip like a child pouting after their ice cream cone splattered on a slab of hot concrete. "Man sure plays a dirty trick, doesn't he?"
The snap of a twig crushed by an immense weight broke the unusual silence of the jungle like a firecracker, and the serpent retreated to the limbs as if banished from the ground. Claiming a low-hanging branch as his refuge, Kaa spotted a lean quadruped standing at the edge of the clearing. The blue-grey aura of the moonlight cascaded down the sides of the animal, outlining the long whiskers and shaggy mane of a feline.
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