Tangled
2025-Aug-26 • Chris Carrel
We gathered in a congress of animals and ran up and down the tree of life, dancing upon the branches. We pressed the world between our bodies and played with viscosity and form, in search of the perfect embrace.
You crept across the bed, a lurid lioness purring with heat and pleasure. I bowed my neck to receive your jaws. The crunch of bones flushed me from my den, and I scampered away, just ahead of your claws. When I reached the safety of the tree, I hooted and howled at you until we both grew wings and took to the sky. There we circled high above the Earth in aerial display, aligning our wingbeats with baser desires. We harried and parried through the air, teasing who would become predator and who the prey. Neither would yield. Our talons locked and we formed a plummeting stone swallowed by gravity. The impact sent us shattered and scurrying like a plague of rodents across Medieval Europe. We scattered to all corners, eating the grain and shitting on the floor until the whole building was infected with us.
Keening with hunger, you fixed me in a stare and made of your sharp, feral face an axe for the slaughter. My head broke in two, releasing a gray-green thallus that erected itself toward the ceiling. From its crown my bright red apothecia burst upward, straining full with fungal seed. You shaded yourself into submission and formed a thousand fertile cups left open to the air. I emptied until you were full. You consumed and I was spent.
Feeling ourselves enriched and depleted in equal measure, we abandoned the product of our union and broke open the walls of our cells, screaming in pleasure and pain as we shattered. Though we tried to fuse, our bodies refused and left us in decay. Microbes consumed us. Our skin and bones melted to a slurry and drained to the soil, carrying our souls slowly to the sea.
Just off the coast of Scotland, the sting of cold saltwater brought us back again. You and I, we made the sign of the humpback, the blue and the Orca. We broke into schools of fish and tickled each other’s barnacles. We were a pod of dolphins sliding amongst each other, furious and joyful in our play. You broke into a thousand different fins and I charged in snapping at your translucent bones. You caught me in tentacle arms and dragged us to the depths where only dead whales and squid can go. I formed a swarm of biting midges and fled the crushing fathoms, but foolishly followed the wafting trail of your scent. Caught in your web, you turned my insides to slush, slurping me into your stomach. I did the same and swallowed until there was nothing left of either of us.
We lay there shattered in the fruits of our exhaustion, two fallen trees, caught in the soil bed of our own depleted flesh, slowly being consumed by the Earth and its horde of hungry things. Unable to remain, we cycled back through the tree of life, carding and discarding this creature and that until our human forms trapped us again.
We awoke to find ourselves two naked and treeless apes lost in the savanna of this ugly, unyielding city, plastered among the bed sheets and body fluids, waiting for the sun.
Chris Carrel
Chris Carrel writes speculative fiction and other odd things from somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. He has been published at Literally Stories, JAKE, and others, has work forthcoming at Does It Have Pockets?, Dark Winter Lit and Skeleton Flowers, and posts occasionally at ccarrel.bsky.social.