A LONELY WORLD OF WONDER: An Anthology ✓

The Reign of a Crocodile

Night was falling across the roadless countryside of an African wonderland, and all across its ancient earth, a humid recognizable darkness coated the flesh and bones of every creature and plant that buzzed through the ambient silence. A strange rolling grey wave rapidly became as invisible as the stars it soon concealed, swallowing the heavens that once shimmered above and caressing the trees with low howling winds that fluttered its entrapped wings. The low sky imparted a claustrophobic tension, floating like a silent murderer awaiting to stain its first victim, and when the fierce sinister clouds finally froze in its destructive wake, it released its hidden rage to the silent world beneath its very claws.

It only took one violent flash of white to make the first torrid rains fall.

From Makota's own neptune eyes and curious brain, that's all the female crocodile imagined brought the crisp wet rain into the dark and quiet skies that burned the clouds above. She believed the cottons above were indeed punished during the wet season, whipped by the lashes of lightning, burned by the sun for blocking its path, and forced to shed tears to benefit the corrupted life that splayed out like an endless sea below the heavens.

It was a wild thought to Makota, and while it didn't seem fair to enslave the skies, the rain was essential. The heavens had decreed such vicious folly to save her float, so if this was the way of the world, or the ways of the skies above, so be it.

Upon her green aging scales the freshwater droplets lightly drummed against her pelt, soaking her dry muddy skin with the protruding scent of dirt and mixed odors. She was conscious that her scent would die out due to her odd choices to wander in the downpour, but no matter, she enjoyed it. The cow didn't quite understand the concept of the rains quite clearly, and because so she felt rather embarrassed-- being an adult and a leader of a tribe. She was often ridiculed for being unable to know the truth of the world, or what it hid from her sake, and perhaps the only way to gain other's trust was to make it up into stories that her mother had spoken of in her past. But even so, it didn't seem right, and being a female, or what the ancestors called 'cows', she had no space to make mistakes.

Another blast of thunder shook the skies as Makota's jaws flinched and clenched, fidgeting while the soft tears stumbled into her reptilian eyes, almost as if it retraced it steps into her body. But, despite the 'glory' of the stormy skies above, still did the crocodile retract from the vast vacuum of the violent visage and visit the void of her ticking mind.

Perhaps, Makota wondered, the storm is why the scaleless wear those strange colorful plants on their bodies; they hate rain. They hate to feel the tears or relinquish the sorrows of the world, and only worry for themselves. She couldn't say the same for the heavy balloon-like muckers however. Besides being the exact opposite of those hairy two-legged monsters, they supposingly 'danced' like insects on a puddle when the rain would worsened. Often snorts, growls, bellows, and roars would protrude from their sacred place not far from the banks her tribe rested in, and oh how they would bring such misery at night!

She was glad though, to escape the confinements of their annoying sounds, and the crazed complaints of her tribe members, and simply wanted to stroll alongside a soft pathway of muck and earth through the Nile couriers and banks-- just to take her mind off the tribe for once in her life.

There was a moment of longing and peace within each step Makota took as she strolled through the flaming forest of brown on all fours, recoiling her rocky tail in the drizzling night, and indeed; Makota felt overwhelmed with a sense of glee. Her float hasn't had a good rain in awhile, so the ground was finally gifted with its intended wishes after a season of dry and lifeless days. In due time perhaps, more tasty fish would swim over to their hunting grounds in the twisted river of the Nile, carried by the currents of the current rainstorm.