Apex

Without you, I am still something. Surely I am here existing even if you see me as nothing more than your next meal. Those below me are nothing. The sound of his voice echoed throughout his hollow chamber of sticks and mud; each individual part of the mold was a part of a greater ornately laid design which if examined long enough appeared to be collapsing and expanding simultaneously in a dizzying, dancing, embrace. This house of sticks and mud had been built by the strength of his parents and their parents before them. This was his home and no one was going to take it from him. As he perched in his stately roost he listened closely for the sounds of movement on the forest floor below. 

What he heard instead, for not the first time, was faint singing and guttural chirping of his children; a distant memory replaced by icy frigid winters which took everything regardless of price. 

He had his favorites. No parent will ever tell them but every parent does. The burden of winter and enemies unknown took them all. It didn't stop to consider his point of view. It just took; with the parsimonious lack of guilt and unfeeling equity that only death can. 

The trees were dark tonight. As dark as his anger, which circulated in a swirling myre of positive feedback throughout his brain; each thought of malice encouraging the next. His eyes glimmered blood orange as the moonlight leaked into his hollow chamber, a constant skylight illuminated. From his roost, he could see the entire world and he could ask it questions. Why have you been so thoughtlessly cruel he would ask. 

No reply. There was never any real reply. It only ever responded with silence. Eerie, blanketing, covetous silence. The kind of silence where you feel like it is being greedy and it should share. In the silence of his nightly pattern of rhetorical questioning, he could hear the beating of his heart, a war drum signaling a coming battle. He could synchronize his breath with the rhythmic clock-like sound of the cicadas. Sometimes when they were loud enough he could drown out the faint cries of his children lost to time, or he could synchronize the cicadas' low monotone drone with a new individual memory, a momentary nostalgic plea to make him forget about the here and now. 

Tonight was one of those. He could taste each new memory in his mouth it was so sweet. The moonlight spread like a silent killer across the ground, making clear everything in its wake. The king, a shadow of his prime, swooped downward as if egged on by the moon's gaze. The cicadas were booming in his ears as he arched gracefully toward unaffectionate eyes.

You are nothing, he thought. You are nothing but my next meal. 

The snake jumped back from its position, its steely demeanor shifting to that of rapturous terror.

What's happening- her husband yelled in momentary horror as her wirey frame catapulted in the doorway. 

I was nearly snatched up by the King himself! 

Are you sure it wasn't some other eagle?

No one has seen the king in quite some time. Perched up three all by his lonesome. Impossible.

It was him.

Well, you best not go back out again tonight if he's out there.

She looked at her children each one of them writhing for a meal. The three of them looked up at her with longing and her passion for them made her decision easy. 

There had been ten new babies at the start of the summer. The others have been taken from her and she harbored her lack of forgiveness for the world in silence. It was the only way to cope; each summer the same loss; each winter harder than the one that came before it. She slithered to her nightly post to lie in wait for a passerby. Each night without food gutted her. Another night her babies would not eat.

Please, she pleaded, I can't deal with another endless childless winter.

I can't deal with the pain of loss to enemies unknown. Her perch on slate rock had lost much of the sun's warmth. Now it was growing cold and she knew she would have to return to her children soon. The moon blanketed the ground so beautifully. She stayed a moment longer in contemplation.

One whose eyes glinted in the moon's chilling gaze appeared in the clearing. Its pupils danced under the protection of a muddy brown iris. Without thinking she struck. You are nothing. Her mouth was tightly wound and fixated on her prey. You are nothing but my next meal. 

I’m not your next meal- the little wriggling mass said defiantly as its body joined its head underground. 

He could still hear the forked tongue of the beady-eyed empress just above him cursing herself for letting her thoughts of longing for better days get in the way of such an easy kill. 

“Not a rabbit”. 

“Not a fox”

“Not even a grasshopper” 

“A stupid earthworm.” 

“I let a goddamn earthworm escape!”

He stopped in his place just below the surface of the earth and breathed a sigh of relief. Soon the snake began to wail so powerfully that he might have even felt a bit bad that he hadn't been eaten alive.

But it was not time for sympathy. It had been a long cold winter and another one was sure to come filled with enemies unknown. The only thing there was time for was food. With each gentle and methodical swish of his body, his mouth conveniently opened as if he were constantly groveling while the rest of his body was seizing. Another piece of microscopic dead fungi fell readily into his gaping smooth tunnel he called a mouth. He reached downward toward the earth's core and with each new wriggle of his body a tiny burrow formed. His tunnel lattice network extended like a labyrinth made larger by his own loneliness.

With the lackadaisical ability of a narcissistic child given a one-liner in a school play, a colonial deserter wandered into the earthworm's lazy-eyed view. He looked at it like a senseless middle-school bully might examine a grade report, unaffected and disengaged.

You are nothing. You are nothing but my next meal. 

I looked up at him as much as any bacteria could choose to look at anyone. 

You are the meal. Your kind has been nearly wiped clean. 

As I slid down the gullet of the great beast, his body undulated as it moved to suck up more of my colony and my words could be heard echoing through his digestive hallway. Even as you digest me I am winning.

I am not nothing.

I have killed your brothers and sisters and children.

I have ended your generational beneficence. You no longer have the luxury of caring about your future. For you must care instead about the life that is so easy for me to take away.

I have taken your earth. Did you hear me?

Did you hear that?

Your earth.

And I might have shared it with you if you only acknowledged me as something more than your next meal; your next gut feeling to quench.

If you listened to me as you listened to that rumbling stomach you would still have others to share your tunnels with.

But you didn't did you?

You made us killers.

I am not nothing.

I am steel boot of earthworms and the venom in the snake pit.

I am a King Killer.