Burrunjor

The world does not tolerate stillness

Never has.

Life is a soundscape

vibrant in its chaos.

The wind runs its fingers

through the trees

until ever leaf rests

in its preferred place

the cicadas drone a lullabye

evolution names safety

and I don’t argue

with centuries of experience.

You don’t always know how much your eyes ache

until they willingly close.

Silence is a noise unto itself

loud enough to wake me.

Instinct whispers

Do not move

do not open your eyes.

What you don’t see

cannot hurt.

Silence is the language

of prey animals

it’s why humanity

makes so much noise.

Even inhalation

can be a threat

and the sound is softness

made violent by context.

Soft

and loooooong

slow

and unhurried

unbothered by the sound

of infinity holding its breath.

Tangled together in the driver’s seat

infinity and I hold our breaths

scrunch eyes closed

pray to gods we never believed in

debate the merit of scrabbling

for keys

and do not dare move.

Nothing moves.

The moon, too

is hiding

but even in the dark

there’s a sense of movement

ahead

enough to freeze me in place

eyes straining

against inevitability.

Screaming

movement

like a mob’s escape

like a boxing day sale

in a power outage.

But with zombies

because it’s not just chaos

it’s the tearing of flesh

the crunch of bones

death rattle screams

the realisation

you don’t need to see

to know the wreckage

of a body.

Smaller blurs of constant motion

dance through the shadows

their high squeaks

like snarls in potentia.

A part of me imagines

a pride of lions

but the rest knows

lions are too small.

For a while

there is nothing

but the invisible feast

and I can breathe

(softly. Carefully. So quiet

my chest aches from lack of oxygen.)

Claws screech against metal

the car dips, shudders

at the movement of something.

Something.

I imagine something

staring through the windscreen

straining to hear the heart I beg to quieten

something scamper-screeches

from one side to the next

over and over while

metal groans and

everything shakes.

You can cry in perfect silence

with enough fear.

The moon peeks through the clouds

checks for danger and runs away again.

The creature lunges back towards the feast

a sense of movement

nothing more.

The sun is already rising

when the cicadas return.