ferus rex

Three black men stood around a small fire in the center of a field of tall grass. The orange flames challenged the brightness of the moon, and cast dancing shadows on a crescent-shaped outcrop of pale rock beyond, and nearer on the three brown bellies. Cinched tight under each distended abdomen, a greasy leather ligature held in place a small drape of animal hide, and a pouch. They were otherwise naked.

The three stared intently toward some latent image in the darkness, beyond the light of the fire. The sound of labored and methodical plodding through tall grass reached their ears, and their faces wizened expectantly. A bobbing black movement became visible. It eclipsed the deep blue of the night sky, like a tiny, opaque flame at the horizon, lapping at the star-peppered heavens. The flame of shadow swelled, and took on the rough silhouette of a man. Then a fourth man emerged from the darkness into the circle of fire-light. He cradled a large burlap sack in his arms. His size was small, and he had the same skinny legs, and taut balloon stomach as the other three. The deepness of the furrows in his face, and the exigency of his expression, bespoke his greater years and titular importance among the people of his tribe.

Somewhere, out beyond the range of the light, something distracted Oshosi from his work. The pause gave him a new and sudden understanding. He walked again to edge of the light ring with the warm, wet blob of flesh still held in the one travailed hand. He scratched his chin with the other hand. Oshosi turned his closed-eyelid gaze to the place in the darkness from where he now realized he was being watched. And at the same time, the one who had been watching secretly in the dark knew himself to be discovered. There was terror in the realization, and a certainty of outcome as inevitable as the falling of a heavy stone from a cliff.

Oshosi moved out of the light and deeper into the black shadows. He began to search for the hidden Watcher. The head, which rose like a wrinkled mushroom from the shoulders of the old man, was tilted left, then right, then left again, in a series of jerky twitches. The movement seemed more normal to the effort of listening than to that of seeing. The old man moved deeper into the darkness, jerkily, methodically, as if his limbs were strung up to some unseen control above. Oshosi moved the old man like a puppet toward the hidden Watcher, and the old man’s arm in turn wielded the torn-out knob of flesh ahead of him, like an eye.