Of Meat and Sugar

Of Meat and Sugar
By Rino Palmani



I am in a dark place and these bones are singing for the fight. Or
flight. Or fornication.
Anything but this stationary life, in a dark place with the odour of
cheese and death.


For somewhere in the speckled gray expanse of space is the
enemy, dark and strong and swift. My shoulder is still sore from where
he raked his fangs into me the last time I crossed his way. He has me
outsized, so a full frontal fight was not an option.


And out where the sunlight creeps slowly with the passing
hours, in the fields of elephant grass, bricks and moist soil the
colour of chocolate, waits my beloved.


Oh, to lay with her again, moistened with the sweat of
copulation, my seed spent in her womb, our bodies interlocked in
slumber.


What is it that drew me to this place? Was it the promise of
meat and sugar? An instinct in the bones that propels the limbs to
leave the territory of the known?


Whatever it was, I will not die here. I shook the cobwebs
from my brain, readied my muscles and I began to run??.



It was a quick kill. Jake the fox terrier saw the mouse scurrying on
the gray linoleum floor of the kitchen and he chased it and crushed its
ribs between its jaws. It didn't even have the time to squeak.