The Last

12

Fields roll under me. Summer dry grass and the fruit-sour of cowshit. Daisies and buttercups frail lights in the land's umber. Cattle and sheep fled, shrank, huddled at the hedgerows. Not these. All right, but the air was plump and beating with bodywarm life and its stink of fear and the moon was a woman whose smile and wide-openness seared with generous demand. My long jaws and hybrid hands ached with what they could do. Orion swung up over the woods and the question how far back do we ...? Greeks? Egyptians? The myth of Lycaon. And hadn't I read somewhere that the American tribes-but the trees closed over me and soon too soon the pork-sweet and ironish odour of human flesh and blood stunned me into a swooning halt.

Bragg was Charles's gamekeeper.

This was his cottage.

Bragg was out hunting poachers.

This was Bragg's wife.

This was no. This was yes. This was him. This was me.

Nature doesn't judge. An earthworm curled and uncurled under my foot. The air gave its odours-sage, sawdust, wet wood, compost, lavender, charcoal-as I crept towards her. Fifteen paces. Ten. Five. Close enough to see through the window. She was standing in profile at a tin sink scouring a skillet with soot. The scrubbed table showed the remnants of supper: a torn white loaf, steamed onions, a muslined cheese, yellow butter, a pewter tankard flecked with suds. A bright fire burned in the limewashed hearth, livened the room's half dozen bits of copper and brass. A dark-haired child of two or three years sat on the floor playing with a box of empty cotton reels.

The woman was barely out of girlhood, pallid, mouse-faced, with greasy hair pinned up under a mobcap. Thin hands raw from too much cold water. I wanted her name. Sally? Sara? I'd spoken to her once, when-

It was as if he'd been holding in check the force of what we were to maximise its impact when he let it go. Not that he fully let it go. Instead he kept just enough back so I could feel my own helplessness in the torrent of our will. Do you see? Yes, I did. A rush of appetite skewered my salivary glands and like a single stroke of expert lewdness raised my lupine cock into hitherto unknown hardness-but within seconds I was soft again. No, not that. Only if she were to become. You think-but it's not. It doesn't-

I could feel my it's irritation, as if I fit it like a too-tight collar. My ignorance was a maddening labour to be got through with gritted teeth. If you tried that it wouldn't work-This is not what we-

My cock stiffened again as she blew her fringe off her moist face-but a second time softened. A moment of complete inner silence, then sudden loud Hunger, the other Hunger, booming like a kettledrum. Understanding went in: Lust was a mistaken reflex, an adjustment phase, soon burned through. The new desire made the old seem a whim. Only if she were to become. Only if she. To fuck to kill to eat. Fuck kill eat. There was a Trinity mystery, but only if... but only if-

It upped the drum's rhythm. Thinking slid and fell like snow thawing from a roof. Her thin arms were bare from the elbows down. Collar open. Neck tendons rose when she scrubbed. White negligible girlish legs floating either side of rutting Bragg like the antennae of a confused insect. Forlorn pale toes. A shallow whorl of a navel. A quiet girl. Humans wear their histories like microclimates. She'd never shone among her eight siblings, had been vaguely loved only when noticed, had remained unformed until Bragg then seen her chance for a single leap into identity. And still her centre didn't hold. Even giving birth hadn't established her; it had gone through her like a fire through a field, a random agony that had left her hurt and curled around herself. She spent hours unanchored, drifted through by what felt like other people's daydreams, though she washed and cleaned and looked after the child and opened her legs for the man.

You don't just get the body. You get the life. Take a life. Into yourself. The deepest nourishment. Something like love. You'll see. The space between you swells with untenable potential. Her little breasts the size of apples and her thin-skinned throat with its pounding jugular were already in my hands, between my teeth, taut and turgid, ripe for rupture. I stood outside. I saw how it would be. Nothing but my it's grip on the rein kept me back.

Not her.

He let the thought stand alone, unembellished.

Not her.