Flesh

On a mossy plane, under a red sky, a bundle of nerves quivered, buried beneath folds of skin and nets of veins and cages of bone, it quivered in a tomb of flesh. Its quiet, electric hum directed the flesh, which gyrated, and wriggled in accordance to that electric warmth.

Sometimes it would push aside some folds of flesh and peak out across the mossy plane.

It saw that red sky and the waste it lit, it saw the spongy black moss on which it sat.

It saw pulsating, quivering mounds of flesh everywhere.

It signaled some, its electric hum directing some breath to exit its flesh, and though the other mounds pulsed differently in response to the differences in that breath, and directed breath of their own, the breath held no electric warmth, only a warmth of flesh. And the breath felt just like that air which diffused a red light.

Breath and sky could be the same.

The bundle of nerves writhed within its ill fitting skin. Its breath had been swallowed in the sky, and the other mounds moved along.

So it reached out a tendril which snaked its way across the ground, and touched the surface of other mounds.

One tendril looped around the other, slipping in and out of the folds of skin, but even though their flesh touched, no electric warmth was carried by the interaction, only a warmth of flesh. And the flesh itself might have been an outgrowth of that mossy plane, the mounds fixtures in a barren landscape.

Encased in a tomb of flesh, a mass of nerves quivered, writhed, and burst.

It tore away its skin and unraveled its veins and splintered its bones, and soon a mass of viscera writhed on a plane of its own shed flesh.

Other mounds followed, bursting in synchronicity, meeting on an expanding plane of flesh. Their nerves intertwined, and as their soft tissues bind an electric warmth flowed from one to the other.

And they folded up their discarded flesh and lifted it until it covered that red sky, and they held it in place by pillars of bone, sewn together with sinew and cartilage, and gave birth to a new flesh, nourished by their electric hearth.