deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: When the changing started, mothers decided to love their strange, beas
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: When the changing started, mothers decided to love their strange, beastlike children. Those who infected us had not seen this coming. Fathers meanwhile furrowed their brows and raised their voices, harangued, pleaded, convened in town halls and outside of earshot of the mothers. That the mothers loved us so was taken as a sign that they too had in their own way been infected; that the plague had been seeded early, possibly even back before gestation, only coming to fruition now. We children paid little attention to these discussions, being wild and carefree and still enraptured with our new teeth and claws, and how easily flesh and bone came apart between them. The Wilds called to us - a song, a scent, a trick of light, the natural inclination of our limbs to bound through root and grass, like a puzzle piece falling into a misshapen empty space. Mothers were institutionalized, imprisoned, reasoned with and reduced to tears, kept watch over for their own good until the fever passed them. The cannier among them escaped, or avoided capture, whispered to us their plans as we squirmed and struggled in their arms, impatient to be free. They feigned compliance, snuck out in the middle of the night or unbolted the doors and made a sudden dash for freedom, ran away with us. We ran faster, so they put together makeshift leashes, tethers, dragged stumbling along behind us or unreeling us by inches, as we greedily tore up every new inch of ground we were given, digging in deep. They ate from their provisions at first, and then when those ran out scavenged from the carcasses we left, sucking down blood raw like we did. The mothers learned wilderness, slept beneath overhangs and in hollows, limbs curled up tight around us so we would wake them if we grew eager to set forth again. They were a weight clinging to us, a burden, a familiar scent, a suffocation, a blurred and persistent memory of a life that we had left behind. Our plaguemothers were baffled. They had infected us out of the same instinct of all mothers, so as to bear children, but now a crucial part of their reproductive cycle had gone awry, the surrogates having inexplicably tagged along. They did their best to scare off the mothers, howling and bristling their spines and extending their claws to their fullest, but the mothers clung even more firmly to us and were unmoved. They cleared out spaces for themselves in our dens and moved in, neatly piling up the bones and combing strands of gore out of our fur. Our plaguemothers, ill-suited for socializing, skulked insouciantly in the background, having fulfilled their duty to reproduce and now faintly off-put by the concept of mothering altogether.It was the fathers who finally resolved the matter, marching into the Wilds gripping guns and torches, desperate to reclaim their wives. We spent weeks being driven deeper into the woods. Shots rang out, blood was shed. Until it became clear to the mothers that if they wanted us to live on safely, they were going to have to let us go. We watched them reluctantly forsake us, casting eyes backwards as they walked through the trees towards the torchlight. We were children, and knew little of the depths of their love, knew mainly the thrill of rediscovering the world as a thing we could explore and clamp down on with our gleaming teeth and tear apart. Perhaps the fathers believed that they had loved us just as well, or better, having known from the start what must be done, and done so dutifully. But when they heard our howls drifting on the wind they would not look out wistfully at the hollow moonlight feeling that maddening, exhilarating call, promising a world that no one had foreseen. -- source link
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