Rabbitfeet

Crow Daughter

Crow Daughter is a good girl. Crow Daughter drinks minimally and smokes rarely. Crow Daughter doesn’t fuck girls (anymore); she only fucks boys (for now) - only fucks one boy, in fact (don’t read the fine print). Crow Daughter is shaggy-headed and hazy-brained. Crow Daughter wishes to be a horse, a wolf, a woman; wishes to be a stag, a man, a human. It isn’t her fault she is none of these things; will never be any of these things; can never be any of these things. Crow Daughter dreams in relational aesthetics and hellfire and the biggest werewolf cock you could imagine (bigger, even, most likely - Crow Daughter has a very active imagination).

It is winter after the drought when Crow Daughter walks on the moor. She has missed the stones, missed the feeling of brushing hands with ghosts, missed the feeling of wind tearing hair and curling up at the base of your throat, so cosy it punishes her with each breath taken to expel it. Crow Daughter holds a staff - it is a walking stick, sturdy and dark wood, but she thinks of it as a staff. She thinks of it as a vessel for her thoughts, a focus for her dreams. She imagines herself as she must look to other eyes; a dark smudge among moonbright heather, Calluna vulgaris, short and steady, feathered and glowing with determination, common as the ling she sneaks among, soft-footed. She broods on the vulgaris part; she is common as they come, one in a million in the way people never mean, and she resents the idea that roots make her vulgar, whether hers or the word’s. Branching bifurcations of a butterfly’s ripple, turning erica and syringa to downtrodden and rusted coins with nought but the soft touch of a few hundred years.

Crow Daughter muses on this as she goes, and soon the sky begins to break apart, holes in the indigo torn open by cornflower and periwinkle. Lost in her considerations of class and her place beneath the quickening heavens, she puts a foot wrong, almost stepping on an adder. She pulls the foot back quickly, her heart a sighthound in her chest, turning ever-tighter circles around her lungs as she backs up into shorter grass. Scanning the sedge, she breathes through her mouth, searching for other dangers, afraid for the first time of another living non-human. She hears rustling behind her, whips around, staff flailing, and finds comfort in the soft breaths and sibilant swishing of hooves. She edges closer, looking into the dark and earthy eyes of the nearest one, white and brown and only small; she is overjoyed. Ponies, their fathomless eyes shining back at her, filled with the reflections of the spilled ink.

Crow Daughter watches the herd mill in the spongy, night-damp grass. A bird-boned foal is teetering in their midst, making the mothers snort and stamp. She watches the bloodless little creature stumble pinkly along in their shadows, and snorts herself. She thinks of her own mother, and reflects that when she tries to imagine a maternal face she sees her own. Beneath the sleeping stars she is surprised. But the harder she grips the thread, the more the trail shows itself to be true. She has held her own feathered hand; has taught herself to walk again on new and muscle-weak legs; has raised herself, loved herself; enough even for night hikes and ponies.

Crow Mother starts off home in the rising light, her mind tumbling over itself like a singing stream over smooth rocks. Her stomach snarls, and she wonders about the state of the cupboards she’s stocked for herself. She thinks she will go home and lie in an over-full bath, lukewarm and prune-wrinkled, until the sun sinks again. She will, at that time, disregard its winter prematurity, and dress with alacrity in the most disgraceful clothes she can find, to go out drunk in. Crow Mother thinks she will fuck a girl, antlered and with sticky honey dripping from lupine teeth, and stop caring about human. She thinks she will hold her own feathered hand and honour the inhibitions that are hers, just once.